bibliotecapleyades |Although people long ago began to wonder
whether the "canals" on Mars were the creation of cosmic engineers, for
some odd reason it
has not occurred to look with the same eyes upon the peculiarities
of the lunar landscape much closer at hand.
And all the arguments
about the possibilities of intelligent life existing on other
celestial bodies have been confined to the idea that other
civilizations must necessarily live on the surface of a planet, and
that the interior as a habitat is out of the question.
Abandoning the traditional paths of "common sense", we have plunged
into what may at first sight seem to be unbridled and irresponsible
fantasy. But the more minutely we go into all the information
gathered by man about the Moon, the more we are convinced that there
is not a single fact to rule out our supposition.
Not only that, but
many things so far considered to be lunar enigmas are explainable in
the light of this new hypothesis.
wikipedia | In 1970, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, of what was then the Soviet Academy of Sciences, advanced an hypothesis that the Moon is a spaceship created by unknown beings.[2] The article was entitled "Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?", and was published in Sputnik,[10] the Soviet equivalent of Reader's Digest.[1][14]
Their hypothesis relies heavily on the suggestion that large lunar craters,
generally assumed to be formed from meteor impact, are generally too
shallow and have flat or even convex bottoms. They hypothesized that
small meteors are making a cup-shaped depression in the rocky surface of
the moon while the larger meteors are drilling through a rocky layer
and hitting an armoured hull underneath.[15]
telegraph | This is the Tower of the Winds, built by Ottavinao Mascherino
between 1578 and 1580, a place to which mere members of the public are
never normally admitted.
Here in the Hall of the Meridian, a
room covered in frescoes depicting the four winds, is a tiny hole high
up in one of the walls.
At midday, the sun, shining through the
hole, falls along a white marble line set into the floor. On either side
of this meridian line are various astrological and astronomical
symbols, once used to try to calculate the effect of the wind upon the
stars.
But this is not the real reason why this man with the
shabby trousers, the oddly distinguished-looking grey hair and the
abundance of irrelevant detail has come to the Vatican.
No, the
real reason for this lies elsewhere in the Tower of Winds, in rooms
lined with miles and miles of dark wooden shelves – more than 50 miles
of them in fact.
Here, bound in cream vellum, are thousands upon thousands of volumes, some more than a foot thick.
This is the Vatican secret archive, possibly the most mysterious collection of documents in the world.
Here you can find accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at
Chinon in August 1308; a threatening note from 1246 in which Ghengis
Khan’s grandson demands that Pope Innocent IV travel to Asia to ‘pay
service and homage; a letter from Lucretia Borgia to Pope Alexander VI;
Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther; correspondence between the
Court of Henry VIII and Clement VII; and an exchange of letters between
Michelangelo and Paul III.
There are also letters from Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, St Bernadette, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln.
And here too – depending on how much faith you have in the novels of
Dan Brown – lies proof that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and continued
their own earthly line.
Once, Napoleon had the whole of the secret archive transported to Paris.
It was brought back, albeit with some key documents missing, in 1817
and has remained in the Vatican ever since – a constant source of myth
and fascination.
But now the Vatican Secret Archive is secret no more.
wikipedia | The Vatican Secret Archives (Latin: Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum; Italian: Archivio Segreto Vaticano) is the central repository in the Vatican City for all of the acts promulgated by the Holy See. The Pope, as Sovereign of Vatican City and having primal incumbency, owns the archives until his death or resignation, with ownership passing to his successor. The archives also contain the state papers, correspondence, papal account books,[1] and many other documents which the church has accumulated over the centuries. In the 17th century, under the orders of Pope Paul V, the Secret Archives were separated from the Vatican Library, where scholars had some very limited access to them, and remained closed to outsiders until 1881, when Pope Leo XIII opened them to researchers, more than a thousand of whom now examine some of its documents each year.[2]
The use of the word "secret" in the title "Vatican Secret Archives"
does not denote the modern meaning of confidentiality. A fuller and
perhaps better translation of the Latin may be the "private Vatican
Apostolic archives". Its meaning is closer to that of the word
"private", indicating that the archives are the Pope's personal
property, not belonging to those of any particular department of the Roman Curia or the Holy See.
The word "secret" was generally used in this sense as also reflected in
phrases such as "secret servants", "secret cupbearer", "secret carver"
or "secretary", much like an esteemed position of honour and regard
comparable to a VIP.[3]
Parts of the Secret Archives remain truly secret, however: some
materials are still prohibited for outside viewing, including everything
dated after 1939.[4]
WaPo | Is this the woman that Michelle Obama sees when she looks in the
mirror now, free of the White House and the media scrutiny of
presidential politics? After more than a decade in public life, can she
freely shed the sheath dress and pearls for a wide brim black hat and dookie braids?
The
image, in case you haven’t seen it, is part of a birthday tribute to
the singer who posted portraits of black women — some famous, others not
— dressed in one of her iconic looks from the “Formation” video.
Counterpunch | Can’t empathize? Show this article to a friend; he or she likely can. One-third of Americans of working age have a criminal record. Obama smoked pot and snorted cocaine. George W. Bush had a DUI; Dick Cheney had two. Roughly 17% of all Americans (including children and other non-drivers) have a DUI conviction.
Let he who is without self-righteous BS Christian sanctimony cast the first deportation.
Trump and his fellow Republicans’ repugnant decision to expose
DREAMers — who, by definition, have clean criminal records — to
deportation is a classic example of the peril of the slippery slope.
This is what happens when the Left goes to sleep because a Democrat is
in the White House.
First Obama came to deport the children who knew no home other than
the United States, but we said nothing because they had criminal records
(even if they weren’t a big deal and/or referred to crimes that
occurred ages ago). Then Trump came for the kids with no criminal record
at all, but we said jack because they didn’t happen to have the right
immigration documents.
nakedcapitalism | Hookworm, a disease of extreme poverty thought largely to have been
eradicated in the United States, persists as a public health problem in
some populations, according to a peer-reviewed paper, Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama, published yesterday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The disease affects 430 million people worldwide, largely in Africa
and Asia, causing iron deficiency, impaired cognitive development, and
stunting in children, and is considered a neglected tropical disease
(NTD).
The study, the first of its kind in modern times, was
carried out by the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
College of Medicine in conjunction with Alabama Center for Rural
Enterprise (ACRE), a nonprofit group seeking to address the root causes
of poverty. In a survey of people living in Lowndes County, an area with
a long history of racial discrimination and inequality, it found that
34% tested positive for genetic traces of Necator americanus.
As recently as the 1930s, the southern United States had a high
prevalence of hookworm infections, which affected intellectual
performance and caused lethargy, according to How a Worm Gave the South a Bad Name.
Initial surveys of populations at that time found that as much as
three-quarters of the populations of certain areas were infected.
“Hookworm is a 19th century disease that should by now have been
addressed, yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in
the 21st century,” said Catherine Flowers, ACRE’s founder, as quoted in
The Guardian.
New Deal Eradication Efforts
During the New Deal, the federal government launched a public health initiative to control hookworm infections:
To control the disease, thousands of individuals were
treated, decreasing prevalence to 39%. After these interventions, there
were increases in school enrolment, attendance, and literacy, and those
within the treated cohort had substantial gains in long-term incomes.
However, because of posttreatment reinfection and widespread
transmission, hookworm infection and disease continued to persist in the
southern United States, especially in areas of extreme poverty.
According to a study in the 1950s, rural Alabama still suffered from a
high prevalence of hookworm infection in schoolchildren, with some
counties having 60% infection. With improved sanitation and waste
disposal infrastructure, in association with aggressive economic
development in the southern United States, the prevalence of hookworm
infection decreased (paper, p. 2, citations omitted).
The conditions that cause hookworm infections have not vanished, yet
contemporary researchers have largely failed to investigate how
prevalent they may remain:
WaPo | The end of summer is an exciting time for millions of
children, parents, teachers and administrators who embark on a new
academic year. And yet the turbulent debates about race, civil rights,
immigration, science and American identity — which have played out
violently from the streets of Charlottesville to the corridors of the
West Wing and across the country — will continue to rile American
schools.
Just last year, a Morton, Ill. school board member protested the purchase of a science textbook that favored an "Old Earth" origin story. Conservative parents in suburban Chicago opposed a day-long seminar intended to foster discussion about the persistence of racial division in American life. And a Republican lawmaker in Arkansas proposed a ban
on teaching the late Howard Zinn's popular left-leaning interpretation
of American history, "A People's History of the United States," in
public classrooms.
These curriculum controversies
are not new. At their core is a debate over power and hierarchy in
American society. Those individuals and viewpoints that are valued in
school curriculums have a decided advantage when it comes to making
claims of moral authority. If American children, for example, grow up
learning that evolutionary biology is the key to understanding human
origins, creationist Americans will have a much more difficult time
getting a hearing for their views and will thus lack moral authority in
the important realm of science. Yet while curriculum battles shape and
are shaped by the nation's larger cultural wars, they also threaten to
undermine a pillar of American democracy that should concern both sides:
public education.
Early challenges to public
schools came from economic and religious concerns. The Protestant elite
who set up the common school system in the 19th century believed schools
provided training and acculturation for the poor and working class. The
working class decried the invasiveness of compulsory education, and in
manufacturing towns like Beverly, Mass., voted to discontinue the high
school in 1860. Catholics also saw schools as an attempt to indoctrinate
children with Protestant beliefs. They began to build their own network
of parochial schools — building institutions to challenge the cultural
authority of Protestantism.
theatlantic |Public schools have always
occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For
decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed
failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s
secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a
“terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in
2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are
unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools
crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”
President
Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the
way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our
nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the
Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in
education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly
poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for
school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of
education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school
choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools,
describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers
“care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they
care about individual students.”
fee | Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modem public school is
seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors
are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that
schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing
with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the
solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on
education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all
participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the
original reformers; in their view, the “good intentions” of such school
champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to “unintended
consequences.”
Such admiration is misplaced. As historian Michael Katz writes, “The
crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann . . . was not the
simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim
of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social
control, and its chief legacy was the principle that ‘education was
something the better part of the community did to the others to make
them orderly, moral, and tractable.’ ”1
motherboard.vice | It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new
mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of
talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel
civic ecosystem.
What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship
seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of
Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt
of our civic failings? For many, the answer is to continue the hard work
of engaging within the system—voting, working for better candidates,
donating time and money to the organizations that do what they can to
prevent things from deteriorating even further. This is entirely
appropriate. But even the reformers are likely to recognize, now, that
this may not be sufficient in the face of the political conditions we
face—and that the consequences of a morally failed American republic,
continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be
irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today
disregard this scenario, or others far worse.
That this problem is now widely recognized is the first of two reasons why a solution is now in reach.
Here we have the second reason why a solution is now within reach. The
most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now
collaborate with any other individual on the planet. This has happened
with extraordinary suddenness, in historical terms; by the same
accounting, it has also happened quite recently, and so remains largely
unexplored. We cannot hope to know what this means as of yet, then, any
more than someone who observed the advent of the printing press or
gunpowder could have predicted, respectively, the Reformation or
Europe's eventual seizure of much of the world. Nonetheless, the
implications are becoming clearer as the years proceed; the internet
itself has quickened the pace of our history, even as it makes the
future more unpredictable.
pursuanceproject | For the first time in history, any individual may now collaborate with
any other individual. One may get a sense of the implications of this by
considering how different human history would have been had early man
possessed some psychic ability to find and communicate with anyone else
across the world. We now have something very similar, and in some ways
more powerful.
It's easy to underestimate the significance of this in part because it's
also easy to overestimate it and, worse, to romanticize it. The advent
of the internet was immediately followed by triumphalist manifestos
setting out the great and positive changes that were now afoot. That
much of what was predicted didn't immediately come to pass has led some
to challenge the entire premise of the internet as a potentially
revolutionary force for good.
Certainly the utopian predictions of the early ‘90s were off the mark;
indeed the clearest picture we have today contains seeds of actual
dystopia. Meanwhile, the trivial uses to which the internet is commonly
put can make it difficult to take seriously as a transcendental factor
in our civilization. But then gunpowder was originally used to make
fireworks. And a technology that may be used to oppress may also be used
to liberate. Again, gunpowder comes to mind.
The way in which events have proceeded in our society since the advent
of the internet tells us less about the internet than it does about our
society. There are a few lessons we can glean, though. In the large, we
know that mass connectivity does not automatically lead to mass
enlightenment. We know that states will sometimes seek to use the
internet to further their control over information, and that they will
sometimes be successful in this. We know many things of this sort. But
none of this tells us what the internet will ultimately mean for human
civilization. That will be determined on the ground, in the years to
follow.
salon |Identity politics was conceived and
executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism
has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part
it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like
to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics
of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or
if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that
must not invalidate the American version of identity politics.
For
example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not
critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his
own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the
“alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives
some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous
assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity
after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But
it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to
fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the
constraints of identity politics.
To
conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from
various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its
adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic,
primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity
politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing
rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity
politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of
community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable
result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman
abstraction.
This
depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking
out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer
accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity
politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests,
for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) —
seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations
divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The
situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so
that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything,
resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam.
Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity
politics for the duration of the imperial game.
collective-evolution | The agency had definite plans to infiltrate academia and change/influence the curriculum, specifically journalism.
As Emma Best from Muckrock reports, recently Tweeted by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,
memos from the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) office reveal the agencies
perspective on the press and how to handle them. It’s from 1984,
approximately three decades prior to when the Agency declared Wikileaks a
hostile non-state intelligence service. It shows how the CIA viewed the
media the same way.
Are organizations like Wikileaks really a
threat to National Security? Or are they simply a threat to a small
group of powerful people who make millions, billions, or even trillions
of dollars via government secrecy? Are they a threat to the global
national security agenda that is taking place, disguised under the guise
of globalisation? Was president Vladimir Putin right when he said
“imaginary” and “mythical” threats are being used to impose the Deep
State’s way on the entire world? Perhaps truth and transparency are a
threat yes, but not to national security. If we continue to ignore these
questions, the national security state will continue to be heightened,
one in which our rights are constantly violated, with our right to
privacy being one of many great examples.
Several weeks prior, CIA Director Casey had asked the IG to weigh in on officer Eloise Page’s paper
on unauthorized disclosure. The IG passed the task onto someone on his
staff, who produced a four page SECRET memo for IG James Taylor, who
passed it on to Director Casey. The IG specifically endorsed the
proposal for a program where the Agency would intervene with journalism
schools.
See for yourself - you can view the full document here.
In the document, the press are also viewed as “principal villains:”
“To the Inspector General’s
office, the reason that the press were the “principal villains” was
simple: “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “the power of the media
to publish in this country is nearly absolute.” As a result of the
media’s “absolute power,’ argued the Agency that had been involved in mind control attempts, illegal surveillance, tampering in foreign elections and dozens of assassinations, assassination attempts and coups,
they had been corrupted absolutely. The member of the IG’s staff then
suggested that they compare the media to the “opposition,” a reference
to hostile intelligence services. This could be backed up by citing
“precise parallels in methods and results, if not in motivations,
between the media’s attempts to penetrate us and the opposition’s
attempts to do the same.” – Emma Best
The document then goes on to list some
proposed “do’s and don’ts,” as well as expresses the belief that “a
sanitized list of foolish media disclosures that have cost the country
or individuals substantially.” But again, as discussed above, have they
really cost the citizenry, or have they simply cost some powerful
interests?
The document also urges the Director to “remember” that “the
organization has official contacts with influential people outside the
Community – people in leadership posts in this society; academia and
the media concluded; and remember that we undoubtedly have in the
organization many who know such people unofficially and who could help
provide access if needed.”
wolfstreet | Under the US Patriot Act, handling money from marijuana is illegal
and violates measures to control money laundering and terrorist acts.
However, US regulators have made it clear that banks will not be
prosecuted for providing services to businesses that are lawfully
selling cannabis in states where pot has been legalized for recreational
use. Some cannabis businesses have been able to set up accounts at
credit unions, but major banks have shied away from the expanding
industry, deciding that the burdens and risks of doing business with
marijuana sellers are not worth the bother.
But that may not be their only motive. There are also the huge
profits that can be reaped from laundering the proceeds of the global
narcotics trade. According to
Antonio MarĂa Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime, over $350 billion of funds from organized
crime were processed by European and US banks in the wake of the global
financial crisis.
“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs
trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks
were rescued that way,” Costa said.
To date, no European government or bank has publicly denied Costa’s
charges. Meanwhile, numerous big banks on both sides of the Atlantic
have been caught and fined, some repeatedly, for laundering billions of
dollars of illicit drugs money — in direct contravention of the US
anti-drugs legislation.
Whatever the banks’ real motives in denying funds to the Uruguayan pharmacies, the perverse irony, as the NY Times points out, is that applying US regulations intended to crack down on banks laundering the proceeds from the illegal sale of drugs to the current context in Uruguay is likely to encourage, not prevent, illicit drug sales:
Fighting drug trafficking was one of the main reasons the
Uruguayan government gave for legalizing recreational marijuana.
Officials spent years developing a complex regulatory framework that
permits people to grow a limited supply of cannabis themselves or buy it
at pharmacies for less than the black market rate. Lawmakers hoped that
these legal structures would undercut illicit marijuana cultivation and
sales.
“There probably isn’t a trade in Uruguay today that is more
controlled than cannabis sale,” said Pablo Durán (a legal expert at the
Center of Pharmacies in Uruguay, a trade group).
Despite that fact, the pressure continues to be brought to bear on
Uruguay’s legal cannabis businesses. Banco RepĂşblica has already
announced that it will close the accounts of the pharmacies that sell
cannabis in order to safeguard its much more valuable dollar operations.
aljazeera |The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has keenly observed:
"All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want
to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to
their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order
to emphasize their whiteness."
But the question is not fealty to any "native
country". The question is rather the systematic subordination of all
immigrants, regardless of how they have been colour-coded, to the myth
of the "white people" and the violent fantasies of their civilizing
missions. No brown, black, or any other thus coloured person can ever be
completely "white". But their trying to pass as white is a mechanism of
humiliation and denigration they willingly play to presume they are
part of the power structure and a more "normal" human being.
In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in
America (1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to
how since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform
themselves as "white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of
course. Upon their arrivals and one generation into a successful
economic status, other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have
also sought to posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.
Becoming white has always been the most potent way
for racialised "minorities" to overcome their violently alienated
personhood in order to become something they could (and should) never
be.
By replicating and reenacting the racial politics
of their European origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in
general and the Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living
testimonials as to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as
means of political domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by
Zionists for Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of
European racism carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions.
Struggle for racial justice must commence and
continue with the full knowledge of how racial divides were socially
manufactured and politically sustained before we can learn how to
overcome them. The full acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism
in the US and Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No
postmodern or poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the
sustained history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It
must acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.
Counterpunch | Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race,
republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a
full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White
Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the
‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural
attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and
nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical
approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives
taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With
its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to
people today who strive for change worldwide.
Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a
“classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell
Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based
on his twenty-plus years of primary source research.The
November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded
indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and
study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical
understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be
expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619,
there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial
records, would there be for another sixty years.”
That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first
(1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885
county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of
the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior
to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the
colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left
England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were
English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully
taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial
decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for
European-American.”
Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing
research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience
and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and
European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial
intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate”
status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could
not have been, functioning in early Virginia.
It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis
— the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control
formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later,
civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two
important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest,
deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and
maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous
to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for
European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally
from those of the ruling elite. The Invention of the White Race Volume II
npr | The event is often referred to as a "boiling point" of racial and
economic inequality in the city. And at its center was tension between
the police and black Detroiters.
"There was an undeniable sense
that the police were there to protect some, and to contain and
intimidate others," says Scott Kurashige, who teaches American and
ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He notes in his book The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit that in 1967, 95 percent of the Detroit police department was white.
While
many of the facts of that week have long been documented by historians,
one big question remains: What should the chaos of that summer be
called?
"Everybody who saw this, everybody who heard these
stories has a different take on exactly what happened," says Joel Stone,
senior curator at the Detroit Historical Society. "Drawing all these different perspectives together, we realized everybody had a different term for it, too."
Last month, the museum opened an exhibit
titled "Detroit '67: Perspectives," part of a massive community
engagement project that's gathered over 400 oral histories of people who
were there or have been living in the city since 1967.
Part of
the exhibit explores the tension around what to call the July '67
events. Before they walk in, visitors are asked: "What do you call it?"
Responses range from riot to revolution.
"If you use the word
'riot,' you're really putting the onus for whatever bad happened on the
people who were looting, the people who were lighting the fires, the
people doing the vandalism ..." Stone explains. "Whereas, if you turn to
the word 'rebellion,' there's a sense that the people who are doing
that stuff are pushing back against some force. In this case it was a
government force, a police force and that they had a good reason for
pushing back against that."
The most common term to describe what happened is "riot." On July 24, 1967, the lead headline in the Free Press declared: Mobs Burn and Loot 800 Stores; Troops Move In; Emergency Is On.
Counterpunch | Much of this turn toward no authority beyond one’s own opinion, truth
as a narrative, alternative facts, and reality and reason as
self-designed came to fruition cataclysmically with Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign and his election, most stupefying for some and
exhilarating for others. I refer to a cataclysm because regardless of
what Trump narrative you are in, his election is an event both
surprising and momentous. The narrative divide here is not over policy
but personality as those on both the Democrat and Republican side wonder
how such a man can be president and what kind of people would vote for
him as president. Although there have been countless armchair
psychiatric exams of Trump, he yet remains outside an established
political frame of understanding. You have to switch jump into another
story frame to make him real, a jump to the spinscape of Reality TV and
the hyperreal of celebrity and enormous wealth that infects the American
cultural imaginary.
This is a jump every Trump supporter made; into a world narrated in
the same way they narrate the world. It is not a jump that all those who
voted for Hillary were able to make, not by choice but because they
were already living elsewhere. Both narrative realms are variously
plotted and valued but the grounding force separating them seems clearly
to be an enormous wealth divide and the long term consequences of that.
In a simplified and also over generalized way, we have a meritocratic,
professionalized, dividend recipient story/reality frame over here and
over there we have a narrative world we’ve not been inclined to narrate
until Trump won the election.
The disinclination or disinterest has of course been on the side of
those who have been before the advent of The Web in a gatekeeper
position to narrate the world we are all in from their perspective. What
that has meant in terms of the politics of narrative is that a good
deal of frustration was built up in those whose stories of the world
were impeded by not being disseminated. At the same time it meant that
the Impeding Gatekeepers had encased themselves in a bubble of their own
selective narrating, confining themselves to a selective vision of
things which excluded, as we now know, those 78% who live on wages that
have remained flat forever.
The fact that Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States
is astounding and troubling to this rarefied zone faction unacquainted
with the lines of the story he seems to be following. They are, however,
more unacquainted with those who are loyal to Trump and remain so.
These Trumpians live in a life-world that remains opaque and unknown to
those whose own life-world distinguishes itself by excluding such
recognition and such knowledge.
Those who are not drawn to the slogan “Make America Great Again” are
already enjoying the present America. And if they live in gated
communities, one of the reasons they do so is avoid contact with those
unhappy, disgruntled by their present status in America. In a politics
of narrative world, this unacquaintance signals surprise if this unhappy
faction reaches visibility on the national stage. More accurately, they
have reached that visibility via both Trump and The Web of cyberspace.
Trump continues to communicate with his followers on Twitter because he
did not reach the presidency and they did not reach visibility by the
paths of “governing principles” already cordoned off to them.
truthdig | What took place in Charlottesville, like what took place in February when antifa and Black Bloc protesters thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt
to host the crypto-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It
was about giving self-styled radicals a stage. It was about elevating
their self-image. It was about appearing heroic. It was about replacing
personal alienation with comradeship and solidarity. Most important, it
was about the ability to project fear. This newfound power is exciting
and intoxicating. It is also very dangerous. Many of those in
Charlottesville on the left and the right were carrying weapons. A
neo-Nazi fired a round
from a pistol in the direction of a counterprotester. The neo-Nazis
often carried AR-15 rifles and wore quasi-military uniforms and helmets
that made them blend in with police and state security. There could
easily have been a bloodbath. A march held in Sacramento, Calif., in
June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks
at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed. Police accused
counterprotesters of initiating the violence. It is a short series of
steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns.
The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and
the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we
are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and
this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form
of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment
expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and
support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have
been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect
their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.
The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries
alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it
succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat.
Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels
the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted
and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.
Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in
the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of
identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the
violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard,
for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer
getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if
we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be
anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of
polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but
direct, aggressive confrontation.”
This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It
saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs,
including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It
dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who
speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to
explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society
into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence
to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and
self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death.
And that, I fear, is where we are headed.
theroot | My interest in tackling this all started with this post Jessica Chastain retweeted, which talked about the so-called alt-left “being a problem.”
My annoyance at yet another visible white celebrity acting all fake
deep about a concept she or he clearly doesn’t have the juice or
credentials to discuss (i.e., anti-fascists are in no way the same as
actual Nazis, and to portray them as such is sympathizing with fascists)
aside, I was once again bombarded with the fake word “alt-left.”
I’m
not sure how the word even came to be (but I’m pretty sure the New York
Times had something to do with it, since they’ve been back on their bullshit for the last couple of weeks with these terrible hot takes), but the irony of it popping up right
as anti-fascist groups (antifa) have become more visible recently, and
are putting themselves on the line to defend people from white
supremacists, does not escape me.
Confused? You shouldn’t be. And here’s why:
1. White media branding antifa (and other resistance groups) “the alt left” changes the conversation.
In
the case of “alt-left,” there’s a lot to unpack in it. As it stands,
white media named it such to stand as the opposite of “alt-right.” It’s
supposed to exist as a dichotomy. Two extremes that exist in this world.
One apparently cannot exist without the other. One’s ying and one’s
yang. Destined to fight each other until the end of all time ...
...
except that’s bullshit, insidiously brilliant bullshit. You know why?
Because “alt-right” itself originally emerged as a baby-soft, Johnson
& Johnson-approved synonym for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Add that to Mother Jones’ and the Los Angeles Times’ humanizing
these assholes by pointing out how “dapper” they are and how they are
just like us, and it obviously gave way to the vast resurgence of white
supremacists ... just by a different name in order to make them more
palatable.
Interestingly enough, however, that actually didn’t
work for long. “Alt-right”—as a term, that is—is something black people
and other people of color were privy to from jump street, which made
anyone using the term “alt-right” seriously look like an insufferable
limp goat.
So.
It wasn’t too long before “alt-right” meant something negative again
(as it should). Which is why calling antifa its antithesis, “alt-left,”
is notable. Without the racially critical lens that white supremacy
tries to avoid, “alt-right” can be reduced to meaning that one is way too conservative,
to the point that it is impolite and problematic. And because white
people have shown historically that they are bad with definitions
(coincidence? unlikely), most would opt to assume that “alt-left” simply
means being way too liberal.
And that’s how antifa goes
from fighting Nazis to having to waste time and precious energy
distinguishing themselves from them. It’s a similar case with Black
Lives Matter and black resistance groups, too. They get lumped in with
the Ku Klux Klan, even though that logically makes no sense. These are
false equivalencies, of course, but that’s the point. These erroneous
comparisons exist for the sole purpose of derailment from taking the
fight to white supremacy. Distraction. And also?
bbvaopenmind | Nature has always
found ways to exploit and adapt to differences in environmental
conditions. Through evolutionary adaptation a myriad of organisms has
developed that operate and thrive in diverse and often extreme
conditions. For example, the tardigrade (Schokraie et al., 2012) is able
to survive pressures greater than those found in the deepest oceans and
in space, can withstand temperatures from 1K (-272 °C) to 420K (150
°C), and can go without food for thirty years. Organisms often operate
in symbiosis with others. The average human, for example, has about 30
trillion cells, but contains about 40 trillion bacteria (Sender et al.,
2016). They cover scales from the smallest free-living bacteria,
pelagibacter ubique, at around 0.5µm long to the blue whale at around
thirty meters long. That is a length range of 7 orders of magnitude and
approximately 15 orders of magnitude in volume! What these astonishing
facts show is that if nature can use the same biological building blocks
(DNA, amino acids, etc.) for such an amazing range of organisms, we too
can use our robotic building blocks to cover a much wider range of
environments and applications than we currently do. In this way we may
be able to match the ubiquity of natural organisms.
To achieve robotic
ubiquity requires us not only to study and replicate the feats of
nature but to go beyond them with faster (certainly faster than
evolutionary timescales!) development and more general and adaptable
technologies. Another way to think of future robots is as artificial
organisms. Instead of a conventional robot which can be decomposed into
mechanical, electrical, and computational domains, we can think of a
robot in terms of its biological counterpart and having three core
components: a body, a brain, and a stomach. In biological organisms,
energy is converted in the stomach and distributed around the body to
feed the muscles and the brain, which in turn controls the organisms.
There is thus a functional equivalence between the robot organism and
the natural organism: the brain is equivalent to the computer or control
system; the body is equivalent to the mechanical structure of the
robot; and the stomach is equivalent to the power source of the robot,
be it battery, solar cell, or any other power source. The benefit of the
artificial organism paradigm is that we are encouraged to exploit, and
go beyond, all the characteristics of biological organisms. These
embrace qualities largely unaddressed by current robotics research,
including operation in varied and harsh conditions, benign environmental
integration, reproduction, death, and decomposition. All of these are
essential to the development of ubiquitous robotic organisms.
The realization of this
goal is only achievable by concerted research in the areas of smart
materials, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and adaptation.
Here we will focus on the development of novel smart materials for
robotics, but we will also see how materials development cannot occur in
isolation of the other much-needed research areas.
bbvaopenmind | In George Orwell’s
1984,(39) it was the totalitarian Big Brother government who put the
surveillance cameras on every television—but in the reality of 2016, it
is consumer electronics companies who build cameras into the common
set-top box and every mobile handheld. Indeed, cameras are becoming
commodity, and as video feature extraction gets to lower power levels
via dedicated hardware, and other micropower sensors determine the
necessity of grabbing an image frame, cameras will become even more
common as generically embedded sensors. The first commercial, fully
integrated CMOS camera chips came from VVL in Edinburgh (now part of ST
Microelectronics) back in the early 1990s.(40) At the time, pixel
density was low (e.g., the VVL “Peach” with 312 x 287 pixels), and the
main commercial application of their devices was the “BarbieCam,” a toy
video camera sold by Mattel. I was an early adopter of these digital
cameras myself, using them in 1994 for a multi-camera precision
alignment system at the Superconducting Supercollider(41) that evolved
into the hardware used to continually align the forty-meter muon system
at micron-level precision for the ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron
Collider. This technology was poised for rapid growth: now, integrated
cameras peek at us everywhere, from laptops to cellphones, with typical
resolutions of scores of megapixels and bringing computational
photography increasingly to the masses. ASICs for basic image processing
are commonly embedded with or integrated into cameras, giving
increasing video processing capability for ever-decreasing power. The
mobile phone market has been driving this effort, but increasingly
static situated installations (e.g., video-driven motion/context/gesture
sensors in smart homes) and augmented reality will be an important
consumer application, and the requisite on-device image processing will
drop in power and become more agile. We already see this happening at
extreme levels, such as with the recently released Microsoft HoloLens,
which features six cameras, most of which are used for rapid environment
mapping, position tracking, and image registration in a lightweight,
battery-powered, head-mounted, self-contained AR unit. 3D cameras are
also becoming ubiquitous, breaking into the mass market via the original
structured-light-based Microsoft Kinect a half-decade ago.
Time-of-flight 3D cameras (pioneered in CMOS in the early 2000s by
researchers at Canesta(42) have evolved to recently displace structured
light approaches, and developers worldwide race to bring the power and
footprint of these devices down sufficiently to integrate into common
mobile devices (a very small version of such a device is already
embedded in the HoloLens). As pixel timing measurements become more
precise, photon-counting applications in computational photography, as
pursued by my Media Lab colleague Ramesh Raskar, promise to usher in
revolutionary new applications that can do things like reduce diffusion
and see around corners.(43)
My research group began exploring
this penetration of ubiquitous cameras over a decade ago, especially
applications that ground the video information with simultaneous data
from wearable sensors. Our early studies were based around a platform
called the “Portals”:(44) using an embedded camera feeding a TI DaVinci
DSP/ARM hybrid processor, surrounded by a core of basic sensors (motion,
audio, temperature/humidity, IR proximity) and coupled with a Zigbee RF
transceiver, we scattered forty-five of these devices all over the
Media Lab complex, interconnected through the wired building network.
One application that we built atop them was “SPINNER,”(45) which
labelled video from each camera with data from any wearable sensors in
the vicinity. The SPINNER framework was based on the idea of being able
to query the video database with higher-level parameters, lifting sensor
data up into a social/affective space,(46) then trying to effectively
script a sequential query as a simple narrative involving human subjects
adorned with the wearables. Video clips from large databases sporting
hundreds of hours of video would then be automatically selected to best
fit given timeslots in the query, producing edited videos that observers
deemed coherent.(47) Naively pointing to the future of reality
television, this work aims further, looking to enable people to engage
sensor systems via human-relevant query and interaction.
Rather than try to extract stories
from passive ambient activity, a related project from our team devised
an interactive camera with a goal of extracting structured stories from
people.(48) Taking the form factor of a small mobile robot, “Boxie”
featured an HD camera in one of its eyes: it would rove our building and
get stuck, then plea for help when people came nearby. It would then
ask people successive questions and request that they fulfill various
tasks (e.g., bring it to another part of the building, or show it what
they do in the area where it was found), making an indexed video that
can be easily edited to produce something of a documentary about the
people in the robot’s abode.
In the next years,
as large video surfaces cost less (potentially being roll-roll printed)
and are better integrated with responsive networks, we will see the
common deployment of pervasive interactive displays. Information coming
to us will manifest in the most appropriate fashion (e.g., in your smart
eyeglasses or on a nearby display)—the days of pulling your phone out
of your pocket and running an app are severely limited. To explore this,
we ran a project in my team called “Gestures Everywhere”(49) that
exploited the large monitors placed all over the public areas of our
building complex.(50) Already equipped with RFID to identify people
wearing tagged badges, we added a sensor suite and a Kinect 3D camera to
each display site. As an occupant approached a display and were
identified via RFID or video recognition, information most relevant to
them would appear on the display. We developed a recognition framework
for the Kinect that parsed a small set of generic hand gestures (e.g.,
signifying “next,” “more detail,” “go-away,” etc.), allowing users to
interact with their own data at a basic level without touching the
screen or pulling out a mobile device. Indeed, proxemic interactions(51)
around ubiquitous smart displays will be common within the next decade.
The plethora of cameras
that we sprinkled throughout our building during our SPINNER project
produced concerns about privacy (interestingly enough, the Kinects for
Gestures Everywhere did not evoke the same response—occupants either did
not see them as “cameras” or were becoming used to the idea of
ubiquitous vision). Accordingly, we put an obvious power switch on each
portal that enabled them to be easily switched off. This is a very
artificial solution, however—in the near future, there will just be too
many cameras and other invasive sensors in the environment to switch
off. These devices must answer verifiable and secure protocols to
dynamically and appropriately throttle streaming sensor data to answer
user privacy demands. We have designed a small, wireless token that
controlled our portals in order to study solutions to such concerns.(52)
It broadcast a beacon to the vicinity that dynamically deactivates the
transmission of proximate audio, video, and other derived features
according to the user’s stated privacy preferences—this device also
featured a large “panic” button that can be pushed at any time when
immediate privacy is desired, blocking audio and video from emanating
from nearby Portals.
Rather than block
the video stream entirely, we have explored just removing the
privacy-desiring person from the video image. By using information from
wearable sensors, we can more easily identify the appropriate person in
the image,(53) and blend them into the background. We are also looking
at the opposite issue—using wearable sensors to detect environmental
parameters that hint at potentially hazardous conditions for
construction workers and rendering that data in different ways atop
real-time video, highlighting workers in situations of particular
concern.(54)
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4/3
43
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