Doesn't Pastor Manning Realize That He's A Huge Target?
With all of the enemies that he has created with his fiery rhetoric spoken from the pulpit and from his former YouTube platform, one would think that Pastor Manning would have better sense than to leave himself as vulnerable as he has by speaking to this young girl when it is so easy to be recorded with the gadgetry and technology that is available today for everyone if they so choose. It will very interesting to see how this plays out even though his vaudeville act of a pastor is truly no threat to the powers that be, it's just that his words most likely reached the "high places" that felt it was time to shut down such an annoying voice that simply just wouldn't shut up!
twitchy | Seems Democrats are coming out of the woodwork to say and write
positive things about the late Senator John McCain, which would be so
nice if they didn’t contradict the way most of them spoke about the good
senator while he was still alive.
Take for example Rep. John Lewis:
Senator John McCain was a warrior for peace. He will be deeply missed by people all around the world.
It's almost as though we've so devalued the
charge of racism and bigotry that people can no longer recognize it even
when it's legitimate. đŸ¤” https://t.co/8FYPEuUL6W
It’s almost as though Democrats call anyone and everyone they see
as a threat a racist and then when they become a convenient ally in any
way they’re magically not racist anymore.
rte | Pope Francis has said he will not respond to accusations by a former
top Vatican official that the Pontiff had covered up sexual abuse,
saying that the document containing the allegations "speaks for itself".
The Pope told reporters he had read the document but that he "will not say a single word on this".
He said: "I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and
all those who are interested, read the statement carefully and make
your own judgement."
He added: "I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have
the journalistic capacity to draw your conclusions. It's an act of
faith. When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may
speak."
Without going into specifics, the Pope also said: "I would like your
professional maturity to do the work for you. It will be good for you."
In a wide-ranging news conference on board the Aer Lingus flight,
Pope Francis addressed issues ranging from clerical abuse to
homosexuality and migration.
WaPo | In the wake of a summer of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, topped this weekend with an explosive letter
alleging that Pope Francis himself covered for an abusive cardinal,
American Catholics are agitating for major changes in their church.
Perhaps
for the first time, Catholics of all political stripes who protected
their hierarchy through what had once seemed the worst of the sexual
abuse crisis are training their ire on it. They are calling publicly for
bishop resignations, Robert S. Mueller-like investigations, and
boycotts of Mass and donations. Even the biggest fans of Francis and his
reformist agenda are now questioning whether he is actually part of the
problem.
“This is a different reaction from the
laity than I’ve ever seen before,” said Adrienne Alexander, the founder
of a nascent national movement called Catholics for Action that has
staged protests in seven cities in the past two weeks, with more planned
in the coming days. “Regular old church folks in the pews are saying:
This bishop has to go. Or: All bishops have to go. That’s just something
I’ve never seen from the laity.”
And
with the biting 11-page letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria ViganĂ² on
Saturday, in which the former Vatican diplomat to Washington called for
Francis’s resignation, some Catholics are voicing despair about the path
forward.
“The hope of reform on this issue: If it can’t be
achieved under Pope Francis, who can it be achieved under?” asked
Christopher Jolly Hale, who helped lead Catholic outreach for President
Obama and has until recently been a prominent supporter of Francis. He
added: “No one with good conscience can really defend him with his
record on sexual abuse. It’s been an absolute disappointment.”
ViganĂ²’s
inflammatory yet unverified letter alleges that Francis’s predecessor
Pope Benedict XVI secretly sanctioned former cardinal Theodore E.
McCarrick for sexually harassing young priests and seminarians, but
Francis let the sanctions slide. He also obliquely implicated D.C.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl in covering up the behavior of McCarrick, who last
month became the first cardinal in history to resign as a result of
sexual abuse allegations.
The
letter “shoots the lack of trust right up the ladder,” said Joseph
Capizzi, a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of
America. “As a lay person, and I think I speak for a lot of people, we
no longer trust these men anymore.”
Intersectionality, the “buzzword” taken up so faithfully by mainstream Democrats
in 2016, requires an acknowledgment that like race and sexual identity,
class is a dimension that mediates one’s perspective. That means the hashtag #trustblackwomen shouldn’t collapse the interests of Oprah, a billionaire, with, well, anyone else’s.
Similarly, not all blacks or latinos should be presumed to speak
equally to the interests of poor and working class people of color. This
is a truth easily internalized when Democrats consider figures like Ben Carson or Ted Cruz. It’s a more difficult reality to swallow when considering one of our own.
None of this is to say that in every scenario, race, gender, sexuality, and class are equal inputs. Affluent black athletes are still tackled by cops despite their wealth, and black Harvard professors are arrested
trying to unlock their own front doors. But the fact that racism hurts
even those with economic privilege is not “proof” that class doesn’t
matter, as some race reductionists have claimed. It’s simply affirmation
that racism matters too.
Consider, for instance, my colleague Zaid Jilani’s review of comprehensive police shooting data in 2015, in which he found
that 95 percent of police shootings had occurred in neighborhoods where
the household income averaged below $100,000 a year. Remember that
Philando Castile was pulled over, in part, because he was flagged for
dozens of driving offenses described as “crimes of poverty”
by local public defender Erik Sandvick. Failure to show proof of
insurance, driving with a broken taillight — these are hardly patrician
slip ups. If anything is privileged, it’s the fiction that there’s no
difference between the abuses suffered by wealthy black athletes and
working class blacks like Philando Castile. Race can increase your odds
of being targeted and abused. Money can help you survive abuse and secure justice — something which sadly eluded Castile.
“There is a tendency to reduce issues
that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to
all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances
overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who
is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race
reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well
as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those
instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent,
or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully
high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something
systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”
NPR | What is an "Asian face"? Because when you go to China and you look at
people from province to province, I mean, the vast array of facial
structures and the size of your eyes or the size of your nose. ... I
think it's a very limited view to think that there's only one
representation of an Asian face, and it should be a Han Chinese
descendant type person with a nose that is this many millimeters broad,
or whatever it is.
On eyelid plastic surgery
Korea
has become the plastic surgery capital of the world where all these
young men especially are transforming their faces into that ... very
plastic-looking K-pop singer look. I also I have been through my own
journey of acceptance of how I look. ... I mean, several people in my
family had suggested that I should get the double eyelid surgery. ...
And I said, "Why would I do that? I like my eyes. I don't feel like I
need to have more Western-looking eyes, or what's perceived as Western."
npr | CHANG: Well, when you asked non-white people why they dyed their hair blond, what did they say to you?
RANKINE: I did hear a lot that it made my skin look lighter.
CHANG: Oh, interesting.
RANKINE: And probably the most sad and moving report I had was a
young woman in a shop who said, I - when I went blonde, I found myself.
It was really me. My skin was lighter. Even my mother said so. And that -
I found that a little tragic.
CHANG: I read that some people got kind of defensive when you
brought up the issue of whiteness. Why do you think people got
defensive?
RANKINE: Mostly it was white people who got defensive.
RANKINE: Mostly young white women - they felt that the choice to
go blonde was a personal choice. And they felt they looked better. They
felt better. They were treated better. And...
CHANG: Treated better by men, by women, by everybody?
RANKINE: By everyone. When I asked them if they thought that was
tied somehow to the expectations of whiteness, they got defensive around
that. And, you know, a few of them said, can you erase the interview
or...
CHANG: Wow.
RANKINE: ...I don't want to talk about this anymore. So, you know
- and I think that's tied to the fact that talking about race is taboo
among white people. And so to say that you have invested in a thing -
and it is an investment. You know, it costs sometimes $400, $200 for
touch-ups. So, you know, that line of investigation and inquiry was not
acceptable to them.
CHANG: Well, could an argument be made that the decision didn't
go that deep, that you're assuming there is some deeper attachment or
non-attachment to whiteness? But maybe the decision to go blond was just
a fun, kind of care-free thing the way some people dye their hair blue
or purple. And why interrogate them about it?
RANKINE: Exactly. It - I mean, it could be that. And often I
would say, do you dye your hair other colors? And some women said, no,
it's always blond. You know, so if it's really about the funness (ph) of
dying your hair, then perhaps you would do blue or green or whatever.
But for them, it was a commitment to blondness.
WaPo |About US is
a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in
the United States. Look for the About US newsletter launching this fall.
A decade after the Cherokee Nation voted overwhelmingly
to deny citizenship for descendants of the people it enslaved, a
district court judge has invalidated the tribe’s decision. The Cherokee
Nation has long argued that only those with Cherokee blood should be
citizens — excluding the descendants of its black slaves — and a legal
ruling otherwise would be an affront to its sovereignty and self-determination. Journalist Kenneth J. Cooper disagrees and is gathering evidence to show he and his relatives are among the estimated 3,000 living descendants of Cherokee Freedmen
and deserve citizenship. (Leaders of the freedmen’s group have said as
many as 25,000 descendants could be eligible to apply for citizenship.)
Cooper explains why this part of his family’s identity deserves formal
recognition:
I’m preparing to order
certified copies of birth certificates: seven of my grandmother’s from
Oklahoma, seven of my mother’s from Kansas, and 10 from Colorado, where I
was born.
I’m
getting them to enroll myself, my siblings and our nieces as citizens
of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. My birth certificate and my
siblings’ identify both our parents, in the language of that bygone era,
as “Negro.”
So why are we, African Americans, seeking citizenship in a Native American nation?
Two weeks ago, Thomas F. Hogan, a senior U.S. district court judge in D.C., ruled that
descendants of the former slaves of the Cherokee — yes, the Cherokee
had black slaves, an unusual bit of American history most people don’t
know — were entitled to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation under a treaty signed in 1866.
On
my mother’s side, some of our ancestors were enslaved by prosperous
Cherokee. Our family’s history with the Cherokee Nation goes back at
least 200 years, to the early 1800s, in Georgia and North Carolina. The
history of the Cherokee Freedmen and the Cherokee Nation are
intertwined, a point Hogan makes in his opinion.
The lawsuit that led to Hogan’s ruling was prompted
by a 2007 referendum that kicked the freedmen out of the tribe, a move
supported by the great majority of Cherokee who voted. That summer, I
confronted then-Chief Chad Smith, who orchestrated the referendum, at a
panel discussion on the issue at the Unity: Journalists of Color
convention in Chicago. I spoke angrily because of a comment Smith made to The Washington Post:
“A lot of Cherokees don’t know who the freedmen are.” I read that as
trying to erase slave-holding and my family from the tribe’s history.
Through
a decade of genealogical research, I have identified my enslaved
ancestors and most of their Cherokee slaveholders. One of those
ancestors for sure, and likely two, Thomas Still and Malinda Thompson,
separately trekked with the Cherokee on the “Trail of Tears.” Under the
Indian Removal Act of 1830, Army soldiers forced that tribe and others
from the southeast to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, so white settlers
could take over their lands.
newyorker | This is academics doing their job: engaging with things in great
complexity. Discussions of #MeToo cases in other areas haven’t been up
to this task. We certainly can’t expect it from Hollywood, whose job is
to make stories palatable and simple. Writers, who on the subject of
#MeToo have often practiced either avoidance or positional warfare, have
been able to advance the conversation only so far. But this rare
moment, when a wider audience is briefly interested in what academics
have to say for and about themselves, might give us a chance for
complicating the conversation. They can bring us back to some
under-deliberated questions. In the #MeToo revolution, does the focus on
identifying bad actors distract us from breaking down the structures
that enable them? What is justice in terms of #MeToo, if not merely
public disgrace and professional exile for the perpetrators? And how can
justice be achieved?
As it happens, many of the scholars
apparently most invested in the Ronell case have spent their
professional lives studying power. That may give us a chance to finally
acknowledge that there are power imbalances in all relationships, and
that both parties in two-person interactions exercise some sort of
power. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is firmly convinced of Ronell’s
innocence, argues that it was Reitman who was using Ronell.
This sort of assertion is perhaps easier to make because the accuser
is, in this case, a man, but also because Žižek has made a career of
making shocking arguments.
What Žižek’s take does not acknowledge,
however, is that even when it seems that everyone has behaved badly, it
doesn’t mean that everyone has behaved equally badly, or is
equally responsible for the bad relationships that have been created.
This is where Duggan’s question, about the boundaries in the
relationships between graduate students and their advisers, becomes
crucial. The same blog on which Žižek’s post appeared, Theory
Illuminati, posted a video
of Jeremy Fernando, now a fellow at the European Graduate School (where
Ronell is a professor), delivering a talk called “On Walking With My
Teacher.” In the video, from 2015, Fernando, seated in front of a large
projected photograph of him and Ronell, says, among other things, “My
dear teacher Avital always reminded me that movement of thought and our
bodies are potentially entwined.” For nearly forty minutes, he talks
about love as a precondition for teaching and learning and bodies as the
location of both knowledge and love. The talk is, clearly, full of
love.
Ronell employs the psychoanalytic term “transference” to
describe intense relationships with her students. She is not the first
feminist postructuralist scholar to have done so, nor is she the first
to get in trouble for it—or to take it too far. Twenty-six years ago,
two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee filed
sexual-harassment complaints against the scholar Jane Gallop, who was
eventually found to have violated a rule against consensual amorous
relationships, though the university found no evidence to support other
claims . (A contemporary account of the case, by Margaret Talbot, is eerily relevant.)
A different take on Ronell’s pedagogy came in an anonymous quote that circulated on Facebook.
(I don’t know the name of the author, who declined to communicate with
me, citing, through an intermediary, the fear of retaliation.)
We
don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should
instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’
and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual
harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration,
body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all
about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and
young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to
humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself
and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used
by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so
incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely
and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her
to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to
talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not
about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic
manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each
other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of
“Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a
smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!
Duggan
calls for looking at harassment as an issue that is neither limited to
sex nor rooted in “bad apple” individuals—rather, it is a function of
power structures. Closed Title IX investigations are not a good way to
address harassment, she suggests. “Perhaps we should begin to think
about a restorative justice process that would center in departments, be
transparent, hold faculty responsible, and assess the question of
boundaries in local context?” she writes. “Perhaps impose
confidentiality as the exception, not the rule—to be invoked when a need
is demonstrated.”
Counterpunch | So, Paul Manafort, described by the New York Times as “a longtime
lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican
candidates and presidents,” was convicted of bank fraud, tax fraud and
failure to report a foreign bank account. And Michael Cohen, Donald
Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud
(making false statements to obtain loans), and breaking campaign finance
laws by paying off two women who claimed to have had sexual affairs
with Trump. Because Cohen says those payoffs were made at Trump’s
direction, that is the one charge that directly implicates Trump.
On the basis of the these results, the NYT editorial board insists:
“Only a complete fantasist … could continue to claim that this
investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has
already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is
a ‘hoax’ or ‘scam’ or ‘rigged witch hunt.’” Democrats concur, saying the results “put the lie to Mr. Trump’s argument that Mr. Mueller was engaged in a political investigation.”
But these crimes are tax fraud, money laundering, and credit app
padding that have nothing to do with Donald Trump, and campaign-finance
violations related to what a critic of Trump aptly describes
as “a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up
mistresses.” I question the level of word play, if not fantasizing,
necessary to claim that these crimes validate “this investigation of foreign subversion.” None of them has anything to do with that. The perils of this, that, these, and those.
Do these results disprove that the Mueller probe is “a political
investigation”? I think they imply quite the opposite, and quite
obviously so.
Why? Because these convictions would not have occurred if Hillary
Clinton had been elected president. There would be no convictions
because there would have been no investigation.
thenation | Leaving aside the missed occasion to discuss the “revolving door”
involving former US security officials using their permanent clearances
to enhance their lucrative positions outside government, Cohen thinks
the subsequent political-media furor obscures what is truly important
and perhaps ominous:
Brennan’s allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level
intelligence official had ever before accused a sitting president of
treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment
discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton, to take recent examples,
did not include allegations involving Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge:
“Treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and to aid and abet the
enemy.” Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of
related dark secrets, as he strongly hinted,
the charge was fraught with alarming implications. Brennan made clear
he hoped for Trump’s impeachment, but in another time, and in many other
countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed from
the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has
even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to
American democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against
Trump has been customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became
president, when an array of influential publications and writers—among
them a former acting CIA director—began branding him Putin’s “puppet,”
“agent,” “client,” and “Manchurian candidate.” The Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that the militarymight have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)
Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge,
which might reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible
explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role
as the “Godfather” of the entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued
back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan’s unvarnished views on
Russia.
They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in a New York Times op-ed of
August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in
their prime. Western “politicians, political parties, media outlets,
think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and
unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives…not only to
collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and
disinformation.… I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work
surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships
with individuals who wield actual or potential power.… These Russian
agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political,
business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled
individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet
masters. Too often, those puppets are found.” All this, Brennan assures
readers, is based on his “deep insight.” All the rest of us, it seems,
are constantly susceptible to “Russian puppet masters” under our beds,
at work, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no “cooperation” with
the Kremlin’s grand “Puppet Master,” as Trump said he wanted early on.
(People who wonder what and when Obama knew about the unfolding
Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so close for
so long.)
And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials
rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said,
they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They
did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate
identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by
challenging the intelligences agencies’ (implicitly including his own)
Russiagate allegations against him. It’s a misnomer to term these people
representatives of a hidden “deep state.” In recent years, they have
been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead,
they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and
essential fourth branch of government. This too has gone largely
undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch—such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post—have been in full voice.
bloomberg | The U.S.’s sanctions policy against Russia is evolving from trying to
nudge the Kremlin in a desired direction to inflicting maximum pain.
This is a slippery slope, and it’s time to consider the most extreme
consequences for Russia, as well as the U.S. and its allies.
During a Senate Banking Committee hearing
this week, a telling exchange took place between Republican Senator
John Kennedy and the Trump administration’s senior sanctions officials.
Kennedy demanded to know what they would do if the president
ordered them to bring the Russian economy "to its knees.” They wouldn’t
give a straight answer, saying instead that the ramifications of such a
goal would need to be assessed and that current sanctions were already
aggressive. Irritated, Kennedy insisted: “But the economy hasn’t been
brought to its knees!”
His frustration is understandable. The U.S. has levied
sanctions, or said it will, in response to a series of Russian actions:
the annexation of Crimea, the fomenting of a pro-Russian rebellion in
eastern Ukraine, the attempted poisoning of an ex-spy in the U.K. and a
string of cyberattacks. The list could go on — but President Vladimir
Putin’s Russia has gone on doing all those things.
Treasury Undersecretary Sigal Mandelker said in her testimony that she believes Russia’s “adventurism” has indeed been checked by the economic pain the sanctions have inflicted.
That,
however, looks like a statement of faith rather than fact. There is no
evidence the sanctions have affected Putin’s thinking or plans. That he
might like them to be lifted isn’t such proof.
newyorker | The application process for schools, fellowships, and jobs always came
with a ritual: a person who had a role in choosing me—an admissions
officer, an interviewer—would mention in his congratulations that I was
“different” from the other Asians. When I won a scholarship that paid
for part of my education, a selection panelist told me that I got it
because I had moving qualities of heart and originality that Asian
applicants generally lacked. Asian applicants were all so alike, and I
stood out. In truth, I wasn’t much different from other Asians I knew. I
was shy and reticent, played a musical instrument, spent summers
drilling math, and had strict parents to whom I was dutiful. But I got
the message: to be allowed through a narrow door, an Asian should
cultivate not just a sense of individuality but also ways to project
“Not like other Asians!”
In a federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts in 2014, a group
representing Asian-Americans is claiming that Harvard University’s
undergraduate-admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against
Asians. (Disclosure: Harvard is my employer, and I attended and teach at
the university’s law school.) The suit poses questions about what a
truly diverse college class might look like, spotlighting a group that
is often perceived as lacking internal diversity. The court complaint
quotes a college counsellor at the highly selective Hunter College High
School (which I happened to attend), who was reporting a
Harvard admissions officer’s feedback to the school: certain of its
Asian students weren’t admitted, the officer said, because “so many” of
them “looked just like” each other on paper.
The lawsuit alleges that Harvard effectively employs quotas on the
number of Asians admitted and holds them to a higher standard than
whites. At selective colleges, Asians are demographically
overrepresented minorities, but they are underrepresented relative to
the applicant pool. Since the nineteen-nineties, the share of Asians in
Harvard’s freshman class has remained stable, at between sixteen and
nineteen per cent, while the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population
more than doubled. A 2009 Princeton study showed that Asians had to
score a hundred and forty points higher on the S.A.T. than whites to
have the same chance of admission to top universities. The
discrimination suit survived Harvard’s motion to dismiss last month and
is currently pending.
When the New York Times reported, last week, that the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights Division was internally seeking lawyers to
investigate or litigate “intentional race-based discrimination in
college and university admissions,” many people immediately assumed that
the Trump Administration was hoping to benefit whites by assailing
affirmative action. The Department soon insisted that it specifically
intends to revive a 2015 complaint against Harvard filed with the
Education and Justice Departments by sixty-four Asian-American groups,
making the same claim as the current court case: that Harvard
intentionally discriminates against Asians in admissions, giving whites
an advantage. (The complaint had previously been dismissed in light of
the already-pending lawsuit.) The combination of the lawsuit and the
potential federal civil-rights inquiry signals that the treatment of
Asians will frame the next phase of the legal debate over race-conscious
admissions programs.
The U.T. affirmative-action case was brought by a white student and
financed by Edward Blum, a white Jewish conservative who is also
financing the lawsuit against Harvard. Justice Alito’s dissent in the
U.T. case said that, in failing to note that U.T.’s admissions practices
discriminated against Asians, the Court’s majority acted “almost as if
Asian-American students do not exist.” For Asian-Americans—the majority
of whom support affirmative action—being cast in the foreground of the
affirmative-action debate can be awkward and painful. Affirmative action
has consistently been a “wedge” issue, and groups such as Asian
Americans Advancing Justice have opposed attempts to use Asian students
as the wedge in conservative attacks on affirmative action that may harm
black and Latino students. Some simply deny that race-conscious
admissions procedures are disadvantaging Asians at all, which avoids
confronting a complicated dilemma.
WaPo | In March 2012, Heather McMillan Nakai wrote a
letter to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs asking the agency to
verify that she was Indian. She was seeking a job at the Indian Health
Service and wanted to apply with “Indian preference.” Nakai knew this
might be difficult: As far as she was aware, no one from her North
Carolina tribe — the Lumbee — had ever been granted such preference.
Her
birth certificate says she’s Indian, as did her first driver’s license.
Both of her parents were required to attend segregated tribal schools
in the 1950s and ’60s. In Nakai’s hometown in Robeson County, N.C.,
strangers can look at the dark ringlets in her hair, hear her speak and
watch her eyes widen when she’s indignant, and know exactly who her
mother and father are. “Who’s your people?” is a common question in
Robeson, allowing locals to pinpoint their place among the generations
of Lumbee who have lived in the area for nearly 300 years.
Yet in
the eyes of the BIA, the Lumbee have never been Indian enough.
Responding to Nakai the following month, tribal government specialist
Chandra Joseph informed her that the Lumbee were not a federally
recognized tribe and therefore couldn’t receive any federal benefits,
including “Indian preference.” Invoking a 1956 law concerning the status
of the Lumbee, Joseph wrote: “The Lumbee Act precludes the Bureau from
extending any benefits to the Indians of Robeson and adjoining
counties.” She enclosed a pamphlet titled “Guide to Tracing Indian
Ancestry.”
As
a staff attorney for the National Indian Gaming Commission, Nakai
understands the intricacies of documenting native bloodlines. In fact,
she had submitted 80 pages of evidence to support her case. The Lumbee
are descended from several Carolina tribes, including the Cheraw, who
intermarried with whites and free African Americans in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Nakai, 38, can trace her family tree back to at least 1900,
when her great-grandfather was listed as Indian on the federal census.
“That’s a terrible feeling,” she says, “to have somebody say to you,
‘You’re so not Indian that you need somebody to send you a pamphlet.’ ”
Lumbees
rely on historic census documents listing the “Indian Population” of
specific counties to enroll members in their tribe. In researching her
response, Nakai realized the same documents could be used to argue that
Lumbees were eligible for federal benefits. She thought hers was a
powerful legal argument. If she could receive Indian preference, then so
could other members of her tribe. “When I’m pushed, I don’t run,” Nakai
says. “I want to push back.” And so she appealed the bureau’s decision —
and kept appealing until her case landed in federal court.
Her
battle would force the Department of the Interior to reexamine its
policy toward the more than 55,000 Lumbee who make up the largest tribe
east of the Mississippi. For more than 60 years, the government has
acknowledged that they are Indians, yet denied them the sovereignty,
land and benefits it grants to other tribes. It’s a situation that
raises fundamental questions about identity: What makes someone Native
American? Is it a matter of race, or culture, or some combination of
both? The Lumbee don’t fit neatly into any racial categories, but they
have long been living as Indians, cultivating unique traditions and
community. Can a country divided by race ever accept them?
opendemocracy | ‘Social
prescribing,’ where patients with depression join in community activities as a
part of their treatment, is moving from the fringe of medical practice to the
mainstream. Matt Hancock, the new British Minister for Health and Social Care, has
pledged £4.5m to promote it, but we should stop to think before we take this
medicine: linking patients to their communities is a positive step, but a better
move would be for people to get involved in social activism.
The Minister probably
has one eye on his budget, since social prescribing is
thought to stop patients coming back to doctor’s surgeries—so saving the
state money in the National Health Service (NHS). But this scheme, which
normally involves referring the patient to a link worker who then recommends different
types of community activity for them, is about more than balancing the books: in
fact the NHS is administering a large dose of social theory.
Almost 20 years
ago, the American Political Scientist Robert
Putnam published Bowling Alone. Since
then there has been a groundswell of interest in its central concept of ‘social
capital’—the idea that community bonds such as those developed in bowling
leagues in the USA make both individuals and societies happier and healthier.
Putnam is a
nuanced writer, but the core focus of Bowling
Alone is on community participation not social activism. He wants to unify
us not cause political fights, and hopes to develop a country of association-joiners:
religious service attenders, sports club players, park gardeners, members of knitting
circles and school governors. In one interview he
analogises this to a honeycomb, a social system of welcoming and interlocking
groups, each empowered as a part of a greater civic whole.
Charismatic, and
with the enigmatic appearance of a nineteenth century preacher, Putnam has
become an academic celebrity. His ideas on social capital have been met with
great enthusiasm by policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic. One
British policy group working right at the heart of the Cabinet Office has
called him the most influential political scientist alive. Before his promotion,
Hancock held the British Government’s brief for civil society, and the
influence of Bowling Alone can be clearly
felt in his new policy on social prescribing. Linking individual depression to
a lack of community activity takes a leaf straight out of Putnam’s book.
TechnologyReview | This spring there was a widespread outcry when American Facebook
users found out that information they had posted on the social
network—including their likes, interests, and political preferences—had
been mined by the voter-targeting firm Cambridge Analytica. While it’s
not clear how effective they were, the company’s algorithms may have
helped fuel Donald Trump’s come-from-behind victory in 2016.
But to ambitious data scientists like Pocovi, who has worked with
major political parties in Latin America in recent elections, Cambridge
Analytica, which shut down in May, was behind the curve. Where it gauged
people’s receptiveness to campaign messages by analyzing data they
typed into Facebook, today’s “neuropolitical” consultants say they can
peg voters’ feelings by observing their spontaneous responses: an
electrical impulse from a key brain region, a split-second grimace, or a
moment’s hesitation as they ponder a question. The experts aim to
divine voters’ intent from signals they’re not aware they’re producing. A
candidate’s advisors can then attempt to use that biological data to
influence voting decisions.
Political insiders say campaigns are buying into this prospect in
increasing numbers, even if they’re reluctant to acknowledge it. “It’s
rare that a campaign would admit to using neuromarketing
techniques—though it’s quite likely the well-funded campaigns are,” says
Roger Dooley, a consultant and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing.
While it’s not certain the Trump or Clinton campaigns used
neuromarketing in 2016, SCL—the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica,
which worked for Trump—has reportedly used facial analysis to assess
whether what voters said they felt about candidates was genuine.
But even if US campaigns won’t admit to using neuromarketing, “they
should be interested in it, because politics is a blood sport,” says
Dan Hill, an American expert in facial-expression coding who advised
Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012 election campaign. Fred
Davis, a Republican strategist whose clients have included George W.
Bush, John McCain, and Elizabeth Dole, says that while uptake of these
technologies is somewhat limited in the US, campaigns would use
neuromarketing if they thought it would give them an edge. “There’s
nothing more important to a politician than winning,” he says.
The trend raises a torrent of questions in the run-up to the 2018
midterms. How well can consultants like these use neurological data to
target or sway voters? And if they are as good at it as they claim, can
we trust that our political decisions are truly our own? Will democracy
itself start to feel the squeeze?
activistpost | Big Tech has gathered unprecedented amounts of personal data from
millions of people. At the same time, a system of total surveillance has
been constructed: Facial recognition, biometric scanning, cell phone
surveillance and more have amassed a huge amount of information.
We see the stories about the growing surveillance state, but we don’t
hear about the gigantic multinational corporation that is helping to
build the physical infrastructure supporting it.
Idemia (formerly Morpho), is a billion dollar multinational
corporation. It is responsible for building a significant portion of the
world’s biometric surveillance and security systems, operating in about
70 countries. Some American clients of the company include the
Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the FBI.
The company website says that Morpho has been “…building and managing databases of entire populations…” for many years.
Morpho has been building and managing databases of entire
populations for governments, law enforcement agencies and other
government bodies around the world, whether for national ID, health
cards, bank cards or even driver license programs.
The company is now pushing digital license trials in the U.S. Delaware and Iowa
are among five states involved in the trials this year. With the mobile
license, law enforcement will be able to wirelessly “ping” a drivers
smartphone for their license. The move is part of a wider trend toward
cashless payment.
Police in California are being sued for using excessive force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was allegedly jaywalking and
failed to halt when police yelled at her. According to the lawsuit,
police searched the woman and her grocery bags. She was then slammed to
the ground, had a foot or knee placed behind her neck or back,
handcuffed, arrested and cited for jaywalking and resisting arrest.
In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for subjecting female travelers (including minors) to random body searches that
include strip searches while menstruating, genital probing, and forced
pelvic exams, X-rays and intravenous drugs at area hospitals.
At a California gas station, ICE agents surrounded a man who was taking his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their baby,
demanding that he show identification. Having forgotten his documents
at home in the rush to get to the hospital, the husband offered to go
get them. Refusing to allow him to do so, ICE agents handcuffed and
arrested the man for not having an ID with him, leaving his wife to find
her way alone to the hospital. The father of five, including the
newborn, has lived and worked in the U.S. for 12 years with his wife.
These are not isolated incidents.
These cases are legion.
This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you
can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed
merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not
complying fast enough.
This isn’t just happening in crime-ridden inner cities.
And the “upgrade” – as that is styled – is trackable biometric tagging, just the right word. Like the ear tags ranchers use to keep track of their cattle.
Without which they aren’t allowed beyond the barbed wire. Just like us.
The REAL ID will also plug the cow – whoops, person – into “ . . .national linked databases allowing millions of employees at all levels of government around the national to access personal data.”
That data being … everything.
Not just your DMV record, date of birth, sex and the usual data pertaining to driving.
The REAL ID will tie everything about you that’s been uploaded to
government/corporate data bases into one easily accessible (by the
government and corporations) place. When an armed government worker
pulls you over, he’ll be able to know you better than your spouse does
just by scanning your card. Also your bank, employer and everyone else
you’re forced to ID yourself to.
And if you don’t get the REAL ID? It’s the reservation for you.
How did this happen?
The REAL ID Act was imposed upon Americans back in 2005 by
the enemies of freedom – that is, by George W. Bush, his puppet master,
Dick Cheney and the politicians of both the Democrat and Republican
persuasion – who voted to rescind the freedoms of Americans in the aftermath of the (ahem) terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the name of “fighting terror,” Americans would
be terrorized – forced to submit to fingerprinting, retinal-scanning
and other such biometric cattle tagging in order to travel . . .
anywhere.
tomluongo | Do you remember the Zune? I barely do.
Do you remember the iPod? Silly question.
The iPod changed everything.
While the Zune was technically superior in nearly every way to the iPod, the iPod became a phenomenon.
Why? Because Apple focused on how the iPod made your life better.
In marketing there is something called “The Chasm.” It’s an idea put
forth by Geoffrey Moore in the early 90’s. Getting 16% market share is
easy. There are nearly always one in six people who are willing to
adopt the new or different thing.
But, to become a social phenomenon that ‘new thing’ has to ‘cross the
chasm’ by shifting the marketing message from its newness superiority
to why this ‘new thing’ will make your life better.
The message has to appeal to people’s sense of shared experience and
community. And if that shift is successful your product or message will
‘cross the chasm’ and begin to see mass adoption.
For that shift to win out conditions have to be right and the message aligned perfectly with it.
If you do your new thing will explode in the public consciousness literally overnight.
Look at how quickly Jordan Peterson has blown up.
Conditions were right for people to receive his message. And all it
took was for the right moment him to stand up to a virulent ideologue
like Kathy Newman of the BBC to become a hero to millions.
The First Black President
So, what does all this 16% Chasm stuff have to do with Donald Trump?
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
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This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
