Soft White Underbelly: Hidden Realms Of American Squalor

WaPo |  “I’m just one guy with a camera,” Laita said. He monetized his YouTube channels days ago.

Laita will give between $20 and $40 to people who are willing to tell their stories, he said. Those who are more at risk of being exposed, such as pimps, drug dealers or prostitutes, sometimes want more, costing him up to $100.

On any given day, up to eight people line up willing to share a personal history that Laita uses only his gut to check, he said.

“I am certain that not every dollar I’ve given to somebody on the street has been spent on a blanket or a tent or shoes. What I’m doing is not foolproof,” he said, considering his work to be a tool for awareness and education.

Compensating his subjects shows a sign of respect for their time and the intimate details they’re willing to share, said Amy Turk, chief executive for Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, the main service provider for women who live on Skid Row.

The line of exploitation can be a thin one to balance if not done well, and it can be “emotionally dangerous to have someone reveal so much deep complexity about their life and walk away,” she said.

Turk, a licensed clinical social worker, said the best way for someone to get involved is to find an organization that’s aligned with their desire to help and that matches their skills with a need.

“It’s about understanding that something has happened to them,” she said, adding that some people on her staff have heard of Laita’s channel and saw a video of a woman the organization has assisted in the past. “Sounds like [that’s] what Mark is tapping into.”

Stephany Powell, executive director for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based nonprofit Journey Out, which helps women who have survived sexual exploitation, watched Kelly’s story after the video popped up on her Facebook feed. She was instantly concerned for Kelly’s safety because of her identity being known and the amount of money raised for her.

“If she’s vulnerable enough to be trafficked, she might be vulnerable enough for a guy to befriend her,” she said.

People are growing more aware about human trafficking, and Kelly seemed like a likable person whom people perceived as undeserving of what had allegedly happened to her, Powell said, contemplating why Kelly’s story resonated with so many people compared with others on Laita’s channel.

The retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant said she’s heard stories like Kelly’s too often in her years of service and now as leader of Journey Out.

“A lot of times it is not unusual for victims to not depict themselves as victims or how some people think victims should present themselves,” she said.

Money isn’t curative for the type of trauma someone like Kelly experienced, Powell said. She needs assistance with finding housing, securing employment and attending counseling to help her cope with pain. People like Kelly need a community that consists of professionals and former sex-trafficking survivors to pull her forward, she said.

“You can give her that $30,000. If she blows through it, then what?” Powell asked.

Hasidic Jews Are Disproportionately Dying From Coronavirus

NYTimes |  The coronavirus has hit the Hasidic Jewish community in the New York area with devastating force, killing influential religious leaders and tearing through large, tight-knit families at a rate that community leaders and some public health data suggest may exceed that of other ethnic or religious groups.

The city does not track deaths by religion, but Hasidic news media report that roughly 700 members of the community in the New York area have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Borough Park is a leafy neighborhood of low-rise buildings and small businesses like the kosher bakeries and Judaica shops on Raoul Wallenberg Way that cater to the local Hasidic population. More than 6,000 people there have tested positive for the virus, with one of the neighborhood’s ZIP codes being the city’s fifth most heavily affected, according to data released by the city.

Other neighborhoods with large Hasidic populations, like South Williamsburg and Crown Heights, have some of the city’s highest levels of positive Covid-19 test results, the data show.

Hasidic groups say they prepared for the pandemic — for example, making decisions on the closure of schools and events — by taking their cues from the state and federal authorities, whose response to the crisis has been at times halting and inconsistent.

But community leaders say Hasidic enclaves in New York were also left vulnerable to the coronavirus by a range of social factors, including high levels of poverty, a reliance on religious leaders who were in some cases slow to act and the insular nature of Hasidic society, which harbors a distrust of secular authorities that is born of a troubled history.

That distrust has manifested itself in ways that have risked spreading the virus and have drawn the attention of law enforcement, which in recent weeks has been called to disperse crowds at events like weddings and funerals in Hasidic areas of Brooklyn, upstate New York and New Jersey. 

That, in turn, has led to concerns over anti-Semitism in places like Rockland County, which has one of the highest per capita infection rates in the nation and was also the site of an anti-Semitic attack in December that killed one Hasidic Jew and injured four others.

Virtue-Signaling Imbeciles Don't Get A WHOLE LOT Of Things...,

kunstler |  You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now, of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone, the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of your monthly income.

Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this: the 20^th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever. The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period — the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.

That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back — and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have any value.

So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.

What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:

OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US

Silver Rule in #SkinInTheGame

Gabish?

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 30, 2018

 

Still Not Decoded...,

Smithsonian | The Voynich Manuscript has baffled cryptographers ever since the early 15th-century document was rediscovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912. The handwritten, 240-page screed, now housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is written from left to right in an unknown language. On top of that, the text itself is likely to have been scrambled by an unknown code. Despite numerous attempts to crack the code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have long remained a mystery. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The latest to give it a stab? The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Alberta.

Bob Weber at the Canadian Press reports that natural language processing expert Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer have attempted to identify the language the manuscript was written in using AI. According to a press release, the team originally believed that the manuscript was written in Arabic. But after feeding it to an AI trained to recognize 380 languages with 97 percent accuracy, its analysis of the letter frequency suggested the text was likely written in Hebrew. 

“That was surprising,” Kondrak says. They then hypothesized that the words were alphagrams, in which the letters are shuffled and vowels are dropped. When they unscrambled the first line of text using that method they found that 80 percent of the words created were found in the Hebrew dictionary. The research appears in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

Neither of the researchers are schooled in ancient Hebrew, so George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports they took their deciphered first line to computer scientist Moshe Koppel, a colleague and native Hebrew speaker. He said it didn’t form a coherent sentence. After the team fixed some funky spelling errors and ran it through Google Translate, they came up with something readable, even if it doesn’t make much sense: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”

Did Bannon and Mercer Game the Whole System but Finally Play Themselves?

theatlantic |  Taboo and sacredness are among the most important words needed to understand Charlottesville and its aftermath. Taboo refers to things that are forbidden for religious or supernatural reasons. All traditional societies have such prohibitions—things you must not do, touch, or eat, not because they are bad for you directly, but because doing so is an abomination, which may bring divine retribution. But every society also makes some things sacred, rallying around a few deeply revered values, people, or places, which bind all members together and make them willing to sacrifice for the common good. The past week brought violent conflict over symbols and values held sacred—and saw President Trump commit an act of sacrilege by violating one of our society’s strongest taboos.

The “Unite the Right” rally was an effort to mobilize and energize a subset of the far-right around its own sacred symbols—including swastikas and confederate flags—by marching to another symbol that is its members believed was under attack, a statue of Robert E. Lee. The psychological logic of the rally was to bind white people together with shared hatred of Jews, African Americans, and others, under a banner and narrative of racial victimhood and racial purity. Marching and chanting in unison has been shown to intensify feelings of oneness and social cohesion. The psychology of sacredness and its function in binding groups together is essential for understanding the method and the motives of the marchers.

Taboo violations are contagious. They render the transgressor “polluted,” in the language of anthropology, and the moral stain rubs off on those who physically touch the transgressor, as well as on those who fail to distance themselves from the transgressor. When people march with Nazis and Klansmen, even if they keep their mouths closed when others are chanting, and even if they don’t personally carry swastika or Klan flags, they acquire the full moral stain of Nazis and Klansmen. By saying that some of these men were “very fine people,” the president has taken that stain upon himself.

You can’t just apologize for breaking a taboo, especially a taboo as deep as the one on Nazis and the KKK. Many religions offer methods of atonement, sometimes involving fasting, self-flagellation, and temporary separation from the community. But even if an anthropologically sophisticated chief of staff could devise a secular form of atonement, Trump would not undergo it. He does not believe he has done anything wrong.

So the stain, the moral pollution, the taint, will linger on him and his administration for the rest of his term. Business leaders have quit his panels and projects; artists who were due to receive honors from the president have changed their plans. Pollution travels most rapidly by physical touch, so be on the lookout for numerous awkward moments in the coming months when people refuse to shake the president’s hand or stand next to him. It is unclear how far the contagion will spread, but it will surely make it more difficult to attract talented people into government service for as long as Trump is the president.

Feeling Torches and Pitchforks for Dr. Carmen Puliafito and R.Kelly About Now...,

LATimes |  In USC’s lecture halls, labs and executive offices, Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito was a towering figure. The dean of the Keck School of Medicine was a renowned eye surgeon whose skill in the operating room was matched by a gift for attracting money and talent to the university.

There was another side to the Harvard-educated physician.

During his tenure as dean, Puliafito kept company with a circle of criminals and drug users who said he used methamphetamine and other drugs with them, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

Puliafito, 66, and these much younger acquaintances captured their exploits in photos and videos. The Times reviewed dozens of the images.

Shot in 2015 and 2016, they show Puliafito and the others partying in hotel rooms, cars, apartments and the dean’s office at USC.

In one video, a tuxedo-clad Puliafito displays an orange pill on his tongue and says into the camera, “Thought I’d take an ecstasy before the ball.” Then he swallows the pill.

In another, Puliafito uses a butane torch to heat a large glass pipe outfitted for methamphetamine use. He inhales and then unleashes a thick plume of white smoke. Seated next to him on a sofa, a young woman smokes heroin from a piece of heated foil.

As dean, Puliafito oversaw hundreds of medical students, thousands of professors and clinicians, and research grants totaling more than $200 million. He was a key fundraiser for USC, bringing in more than $1 billion in donations, by his estimation.

Quoth Big Don: India Has It Figured Out

trtworld |  As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates three years in power, one story has persisted in making headlines: the project to create “tall and fair customised children” with high IQs. 

It’s a decade-old project and is operated by the health wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization from which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) draws its inspiration, and the project is spreading its wings around the country.

As the country exploded in rage over similarities with the Nazi “Ubermenschen” ideal, which attempted to create a super Aryan race through eugenics funded by Hitler’s regime, many suggested that the RSS’ covert admiration for strong leaders – like US president Donald Trump and Modi –  is directly related to this attempt to create perfect babies.

An abiding theme of Hindu extreme right-wing literature has been the self-loathing associated with the inability to fight off invading armies, mostly Muslim, over the last thousand years. In fact, RSS leaders routinely collaborated with British authorities before independence so that they didn’t have to join hands with who they perceived to be the greater enemy: India’s Muslims.

No wonder RSS leaders are obsessed with the “weak Hindu” and how to overcome his weaknesses. Enter the customised baby project.

The RSS’ ‘Garbh Vigyan Sanskar’ project, loosely translated as ‘Science & Culture of the Womb,’ properly prescribes the norms which go into the making of a custom-perfect baby. The Indian Express, which broke the story last week, outlined the process that involves three months of “purification” of the intended parents which prevents “genetic defects” from being passed on, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived as well as procedural and dietary regulations.  Fist tap Big Don.

Music as a Means of Social Control

PenelopeGouk |  Ancient models: Plato and Aristotle

Anyone thinking about music and social control in the early modern period would tend to look for precedents in antiquity, the most significant authors in this regard being Plato and Aristotle. The two crucial texts by Plato are his Republic and the Laws, both of which are concerned with the nature of the best form of political organisation and the proper kind of education for individuals that lead to a stable and harmonious community.

Education of the republic's citizens includes early training in both gymnastics and mousike, which Andrew Barker defines as 'primarily an exposure to poetry and to the music that is its key vehicle.' (For the rest of this discussion I will simply refer to 'music' but will be using it in the broader sense of poetry set to musical accompaniment.) The crucial point is that within Plato's ideal society the kinds of 'music' that are performed must be firmly controlled by the law givers, the argument being that freedom of choice in music and novelty in its forms will inevitably lead to corruption and a breakdown of society. 

Plato's distrust of musical innovation is made concrete in his Laws where he describes what he thinks actually happened once in Greek society, namely that the masses had the effrontery to suppose they were capable of judging music themselves, the result being that 'from a starting point in music, everyone came to believe in their own wisdom about everything, and to reject the law, and liberty followed immediately'. (To Plato liberty is anathema since some people have much greater understanding and knowledge than others.) 

This close association between the laws of music and laws of the state exists because according to Plato music imitates character, and has a direct effect on the soul which itself is a harmonia, the consequence being that bad music results in bad citizens. To achieve a good state some form of regulation must take place, the assumption being that if the right musical rules are correctly followed this will result in citizens of good character. It is fascinating to discover that Plato looks to Egypt with approval for its drastic control of music in society, claiming that its forms had remained unchanged for ten thousand years because of strict regulation that 'dedicated all dancing and all melodies to religion'. To prescribe melodies that possessed a 'natural correctness' he thinks 'would be a task for a god, or a godlike man, just as in Egypt they say that the melodies that have been preserved for this great period of time were the compositions of Isis.' (In fact as we shall see there were similar arguments made for the divine origins of sacred music in the Hebrew tradition.) 

Perhaps thinking himself to be a 'godlike man', Plato lays down a series of strict rules governing musical composition and performance, a prescription that if correctly followed would ensure the virtue of citizens and the stability of the state, as well as the banishment of most professional musicians from society. First, Plato wants to limit the kind of poetry that is set to music at all because songs have such a direct and powerful effect on people's morals. Thus any poems that portray wickedness, immorality, mourning or weakness of any kind must be banned, leaving only music that encourages good and courageous behaviour among citizens. The next thing to be curtailed is the range of musical styles allowed in the city, which Plato would confine to the Dorian and the Phrygian 'harmoniai', a technical term for organisations of musical pitch that for the purposes of this paper need not be discussed in any more detail. Between them these two 'harmoniai' appropriately 'imitate the sounds of the self-restrained and the brave man, each of them both in good fortune and bad.' Thirdly, as well as controlling the words to be sung and the manner in which they are performed, Plato would also regulate the kinds of instrument used for accompaniment, the two most important being the lyra and the kithara. Those that are forbidden include the aulos as well as a range of multi-stringed instruments capable of playing in a variety of different modes. Finally, Plato is emphatic in stating that the metrical foot and the melody must follow the words properly for the right effect to be achieved, rather than the other way around. 

Of course these rules are intrinsically interesting, since they tell us about what Plato thought was wrong with music of his own time. However, for my purposes they are also interesting because they seem to have had a discernable influence on would-be reformers of music and society in the early modern period (that is, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries) which I will come to further on in my paper.

man-made hell of the nakedly, unequivocally, and medievally left behind...,

antimedia |  A British television crew recently filmed an undercover documentary in Saudi Arabia in an attempt to penetrate the world’s most secretive and murderous regime. Working with a team of undercover Saudi cameramen, the one hour eye-opener, Exposure: Saudi Arabia Uncovered, was broadcast by ITV on March 22. It reveals the hidden side of the regime, which buys billions of pounds worth of British arms, accepts training from British security forces, sells oil back to the U.K., and enjoys nothing less than red carpet treatment from the British royal family.

After setting up a fake company, the crew flew into Riyadh posing as businessmen, wielding carefully concealed hidden cameras. For cover, they said they were in the country to attend a business conference on cyber-security. What they discovered was a state that beheads — and even crucifies — its citizens; where women lack basic human rights and its children are indoctrinated. Patrolled by religious police, citizens are tortured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death for writing blogs and questioning authority. It sounds like the Islamic State, but it’s not — it’s the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it is fully propped up by Europe and the United States.

The mind-boggling documentary reveals how Saudi Arabia’s money and Wahhabi ideology has helped drive terrorism around the world. Shining a light on Britain’s shoulder-rubbing with the ruling royals, the production has pushed the U.K. government to admit they have provided more than 300 Saudi police officers with training since 2012.

“A necessary evil”

In January 2015, the Union Jack flew at half-mast at Westminster as a mark of respect for the death of Saudi ruler, King Abdullah. During the same month, young Saudi blogger Raif Badawi received 50 lashes in public. Convicted of insulting Islam after blogging about his government and religion, quoting Albert Camus, he wrote:

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” 

Comments like this earned the father of three 1,000 total lashes and ten years in prison.

irrational population control by and among ruthless medieval tards sitting adjacent to our oil...,

ncr-iran |  Iran's fundamentalist regime is setting the stage for the mass execution of a large number of Sunni political prisoners in the notorious Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) Prison in Karaj, north-west of Tehran.

In recent days many Sunni prisons in Hall 10 of Ward 4 of the prison have been moved to another hall, according to received reports. The remaining prisoners in Hall 10 all have death sentences.

The segregation of the death-row political prisoners has caused deep anguish and concern among them and their relatives that the regime is preparing to soon carry out their executions.

At least 27 Sunni death-row political prisoners in Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) have had their sentences upheld by the regime's Supreme Court.

They have been charged with a variety of the fundamentalist regime's bogus offences, including "acting against national security," "propaganda against the state," "spreading corruption on earth," and "Moharabeh" (waging war against God).

Guardian |  Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr risks worsening sectarian tensions, the US has warned, joining a chorus of critics from the west and the Middle East who have condemned the killing.

As protesters in Tehran reacted with fury by setting fire to the Saudi embassy, US state department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement that the US was “particularly concerned” that al-Nimr’s execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced.”

He said the US was calling on Saudi Arabia to ensure fair judicial proceedings and permit peaceful expression of dissent while working with all community leaders to defuse tensions after the executions.

The killing of Nimr, a vocal critic of Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family, caused international outrage and a serious escalation of diplomatic tensions in the region, with unrest predicted in Shia-majority areas.

In Tehran, protesters broke into the Saudi embassy in the early hours of Sunday morning and started fires before being dispersed by the police. Iran’s foreign ministry called on protesters to respect the diplomatic premises, according to the Entekhab news website, and called for calm.

British politicians and the leaders of Iraq and Iran were among others who condemned the killing of Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric opposed to the Riyadh regime who was among 47 people executed on Saturday by the Saudi Arabian Sunni authorities.

watching the necropolitical manueverings of so-called western democracies...,

guardian |  Jeremy Corbyn used his Labour conference speech to call for the Ministry of Justice to drop its bid for a Saudi prisons contract, citing the case of pro-democracy protester, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who has been sentenced to crucifixion.

Nimr is facing a death sentence, handed down when he was 17, which is largely based on a “confession” he was forced to sign following what he says were days of torture while in custody.

The sentence will be carried out in jail by the Saudi prison service. Corbyn called on the British government to protest against this sentence by dropping its bid for a £5.9m contract to provide prison expertise to the Saudis.

The bid was put in by Justice Solutions International, the commercial arm of the MoJ that was set up by the last justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to sell its expertise in prisons and probation – including in offender management, payment by results, tagging and privatisation – around the world.

Last month the new justice secretary, Michael Gove announced that he was closing down JSI, telling MPs it was because “of the need to focus departmental resources on domestic priorities”.

the neverending necropolitical fruits of bitter lake...,

guardian |  Riyadh has sanctioned more than a hundred beheadings so far this year – more, it is claimed, than Islamic State.

The Saudi foreign ministry files, passed to Wikileaks in June, refer to talks with British diplomats ahead of the November 2013 vote in New York. The documents have now been been translated by the organisation UN Watch – a Geneva-based non-governmental human rights organisation that scrutinises the world body – and newspaper the Australian.

The classified exchanges, the paper said, suggest that the UK initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support. Both countries were eventually elected to the UNHRC, which has 47 member states.

The Saudi cables, dated January and February 2013, were translated separately by the Australian and UN Watch. One read: “The delegation is honoured to send to the ministry the enclosed memorandum, which the delegation has received from the permanent mission of the United Kingdom asking it for the support and backing of the candidacy of their country to the membership of the human rights council (HRC) for the period 2014-2016, in the elections that will take place in 2013 in the city of New York.

Bitter Lake

girls have no rights medieval livestock managers are bound to acknowledge...,

RT |  Some 92 percent of married women in Egypt underwent female genital mutilation, the country’s health minister said, citing a recent study. He added that the majority of girls face this ordeal when they are only nine to 12 years old.

The results of the Egypt Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) were announced by Health Minister Adel Adawy at a Sunday conference dedicated to the study, Egyptian media reported. The poll was carried out last year and involved women aged 15 to 49.

 

According to the minister, only 31 percent of the operations are carried out by doctors, with most being performed by traditional midwives and “health barbers.”

 

The rate of female circumcision in rural places is extremely high – almost 95 percent while in urban areas it reaches 39.2 percent, the minister said. 

The study claimed that more than half of married women in the country are in favor of genital mutilation. Only 30 percent of women say it should be banned, the study said. 

Egypt’s top Islamic authority has condemned the practice as “un-Islamic” and “barbaric.” Female circumcision was banned in 2008. The offenders may be sentenced to prison (from three months to two years) or fined between 1,000 and 5,000 Egyptian pounds. 

In January, an Egyptian doctor, Raslan Fadl, was sentenced to two years in jail for performing a female genital mutilation procedure which killed a young girl. Thirteen-year-old Sohair al-Bata’a died in June 2013 following the surgery.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a traditional practice to partially or completely remove the outer sexual organs, is mainly practiced in Africa and in a few countries in the Middle East (Yemen, Kurdish communities, Saudi Arabia) and Asia. 

Up to 140 million women and girls worldwide have been subjected to FGM, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

let's get it started in here...

Newsweek | Dozens of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters have infiltrated a Saudi Arabian border town via Iraq before melting away into the general population, according to claims by the terror group’s supporters on social media.

A famous anti-government Saudi tweeter known as ‘mujtahidd’, not known for ISIS sympathies, posted to his 1.2m followers that an attack was carried out on border guards with the help of a cell inside the Kingdom before they reached the town of Rafha, sparking a search by Saudi intelligence services.

ISIS-affiliated social media accounts started circulating a photo of a border checkpoint they claimed had been captured by the terror group’s militants.

“They claim that they control [the border gate],” says Kovan Direj, a Syrian-Kurdish journalist monitoring the Twitter war. “They [claim they] went to the border gate and after that group melted into the city and now the secret service of the Saudi Arabians are looking for them.”

While analysts have cautioned that no official confirmation of the border infiltration has been released by Saudi Arabia or ISIS, there has been a large-scale propaganda war between ISIS supporters and Saudi citizens using the hashtag #Rafha to claim that the raid either did or did not happen.

which cheek did jesus turn?

tandfonline |  In portraiture, subjects are mostly depicted with a greater portion of the left side of their face (left hemiface) facing the viewer. This bias may be induced by the right hemisphere's dominance for emotional expression and agency. Since negative emotions are particularly portrayed by the left hemiface, and since asymmetrical hemispheric activation may induce alterations of spatial attention and action-intention, we posited that paintings of the painful and cruel crucifixion of Jesus would be more likely to show his left hemiface than observed in portraits of other people. By analyzing depictions of Jesus's crucifixion from book and art gallery sources, we determined a significantly greater percent of these crucifixion pictures showed the left hemiface of Jesus facing the viewer than found in other portraits. In addition to the facial expression and hemispatial attention-intention hypotheses, there are other biblical explanations that may account for this strong bias, and these alternatives will have to be explored in future research.

In portraits, most subjects are depicted with their head rotated rightward, with more of the left than right side of the subject's face being shown. For example, in the largest study of facial portraiture, McManus and Humphrey (1973) studied 1474 portraits and found a 60% bias to portray a greater portion of the subjects’ left than right hemiface. Nicholls, Clode, Wood, and Wood (1999) found the same left hemiface bias even when accounting for the handedness of the painter.

Multiple theories have been proposed in an attempt to explain the genesis of this left hemiface bias in portraits. One hypothesis is that the right hemisphere is dominant for mediating facial emotional expressions. In an initial study, Buck and Duffy (1980) reported that patients with right hemisphere damage were less capable of facially expressing emotions than those with left hemisphere damage when viewing slides of familiar people, unpleasant scenes, and unusual pictures. These right-left hemispheric differences in facial expressiveness have been replicated in studies involving the spontaneous and voluntary expression of emotions in stroke patients with focal lesions (Borod, Kent, Koff, Martin, & Alpert, 1988; Borod, Koff, Lorch, & Nicholas, 1985; Borod, Koff, Perlman Lorch, & Nicholas, 1986; Richardson, Bowers, Bauer, Heilman, & Leonard, 2000).

Hemispheric asymmetries are even reported in more “naturalistic” settings outside the laboratory. For example, Blonder, Burns, Bowers, Moore, and Heilman (1993) videotaped interviews with patients and spouses in their homes and found that patients with right hemisphere damage were rated as less facially expressive than left hemisphere-damaged patients and normal control patients. These lesion studies suggest that the right hemisphere has a dominant role in mediating emotional facial expressions. Whereas corticobulbar fibers that innervate the forehead are bilateral, the contralateral hemisphere primarily controls the lower face. Thus, these lesion studies suggest that the left hemiface below the forehead, which is innervated by the right hemisphere, may be more emotionally expressive.

This right hemisphere-left hemiface dominance postulate has been further supported by studies of normal subjects portraying emotional facial expressions. For example, Borod et al. (1988) asked subjects to portray emotions, either by verbal command or visual imitation. The judges who rated these facial expressions ranked the left face as expressing stronger emotions. Sackeim and Gur (1978) showed normal subjects photographs of normal people facially expressing their emotions and asked participants to rate the intensity of the emotion being expressed. However, before showing these pictures of people making emotional faces, Sackeim and Gur altered the photographs. They either paired the left hemiface with a mirror image of this photograph's left hemiface to form a full face made up of two left hemifaces or formed full faces from right hemifaces. Normal participants found that the composite photographs of the left hemiface were more emotionally expressive than the right hemiface. Triggs, Ghacibeh, Springer, and Bowers (2005) administered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the motor cortex of 50 subjects during contraction of bilateral orbicularis oris muscles and analyzed motor evoked potentials (MEPs). They found that the MEPs elicited in the left lower face were larger than the right face, and thus the left face might appear to be more emotionally expressive because it is more richly innervated.

Another reason portraits often have the subjects rotated to the right may be related to the organization of the viewer's brain. Both lesion studies (e.g., Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1996; Bowers, Bauer, Coslett, & Heilman, 1985; DeKosky, Heilman, Bowers, & Valenstein, 1980) and physiological and functional imaging studies (e.g., Davidson & Fox, 1982; Puce, Allison, Asgari, Gore, & McCarthy, 1996; Sergent, Ohta, & Macdonald, 1992) have revealed that the right hemisphere is dominant for the recognition of emotional facial expressions and the recognition of previously viewed faces (Hilliard, 1973; Jones, 1979). In addition, studies of facial recognition and the recognition of facial emotional expressions have demonstrated that facial pictures shown in the left visual field and left hemispace are better recognized than those viewed on the right (Conesa, Brunold-Conesa, & Miron, 1995). Since the right hemisphere is dominant for facial recognition and the perception of facial emotions when viewing faces, the normal viewer of portraits may attend more to the left than right visual hemispace and hemifield. When the head of a portrait is turned to the right and the observer focuses on the middle of the face (midsagittal plane), more of the subject's face would fall in the viewer's left visual hemispace and thus be more likely to project to the right hemisphere.

Agency is another concept that may influence the direction of facial deviation in portraiture. Chatterjee, Maher, Gonzalez Rothi, and Heilman (1995) demonstrated that when right-handed individuals view a scene with more than one figure, they are more likely to see the left figure as being the active agent and the right figure as being the recipient of action or the patient. From this perspective the artist is the agent, and perhaps he or she is more likely to paint the left hemiface of the subject, which from the artist's perspective is more to the right, the position of the patient. Support for this agency hypothesis comes from studies in which individuals rated traits of left- versus right-profiled patients, and found that those with the right cheek exposed were considered more “active” (Chatterjee, 2002).

Taking this background information into account and applying it to depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ highlights the various influences on profile painting in portraiture. Specifically, we confirm the predilection to display the left hemiface in portraiture and predict the same in portraits of Jesus’ crucifixion.

The strongest artistic portrayals of a patient being subject to cruel and painful agents are images of the crucifixion of Jesus. The earliest depiction of Christ on the cross dates back to around 420 AD. As Christianity existed for several centuries before that, this seems to be a late onset for this type of art. Because of the strong focus on Christ's resurrection and the disgrace of his agony and death, art historians postulate that there was a hesitation for early followers to show Christ on the cross. The legalization of Christianity also may have lifted the stigma. Based on the artwork still in existence from that period, Jesus was often pictured alive during the crucifixion scene. Several centuries later, from the end of the seventh century to the beginning of the eighth century, Christ is more often shown dead on the cross (Harries, 2005).

isis could clean up the hood and the trailer park quick, fast, and in a hurry...,

theatlantic |  The best way to get a sense of ISIS’s blueprint for state-building is to look at how it has ruled al-Raqqa governorate and other territory in neighboring Syria. The group’s first move is often to set up billboards around town that emphasize the importance of jihad, sharia, women’s purity, and other pietistic themes. It reaches out to local notables and tribal leaders as well to blunt the kind of backlash that greeted AQI and its harsh interpretation of sharia during the sahwa movement last decade.

The group also has a surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy, which typically includes an Islamic court system and a roving police force. In the Syrian town of Manbij, for example, ISIS officials cut off the hands of four robbers. In Raqqa, they forced shops to close for selling poor products in the suq (market) as well as regular supermarkets and kebab stands—a move that was likely the work of its Consumer Protection Authority office. ISIS has also whipped individuals for insulting their neighbors, confiscated and destroyed counterfeit medicine, and on multiple occasions summarily executed and crucified individuals for apostasy. Members have burned cartons of cigarettes and destroyed shrines and graves, including the famous Uways al-Qarani shrine in Raqqa.

Beyond these judicial measures, ISIS also invests in public works. In April, for instance, it completed a new suq in al-Raqqa for locals to exchange goods. Additionally, the group runs an electricity office that monitors electricity-use levels, installs new power lines, and hosts workshops on how to repair old ones. The militants fix potholes, bus people between the territories they control, rehabilitate blighted medians to make roads more aesthetically pleasing, and operate a post office and zakat (almsgiving) office (which the group claims has helped farmers with their harvests). Most importantly for Syrians and Iraqis downriver, ISIS has continued operating the Tishrin dam (renaming it al-Faruq) on the Euphrates River. Through all of these offices and departments, ISIS is able to offer a semblance of stability in unstable and marginalized areas, even if many locals do not like its ideological program.

That’s not to say this ideological project isn’t an integral part of ISIS’s social services. Its media outlet al-I’tisam sets up stalls to distribute DVDs of the videos it posts online. In a number of ISIS-held locales, a da’wa truck drives around broadcasting information about the group's belief system. Moreover, ISIS has established a number of religious schools for children, including ones for girls where they can memorize the Koran and receive certificates if successful, while also holding “fun days” for kids replete with ice cream and inflatable slides. For their older counterparts, ISIS has established training sessions for new imams and preachers. Schedules for prayers and Koran lessons are posted at mosques. In a more worrisome development, ISIS runs training camps for “cub scouts” and houses these recruits in the group’s facilities.