"City leaders did everything in their power to keep the homicide from the public as long as possible," former University of Chicago law and political science professor (and current Columbia University professor) Bernard Harcourt wrote in anNew York Times op-edcalling for the resignation of Emanuel, McCarthy and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.
Reporters peppered Emanuel with questions about calls for him to step down and whether or not he's a become "distraction" during an extremely rare news conference Tuesday morning announcing anew police accountability task force. He deflected the questions before abruptly walking out of the conference:
nbcchicago | Now NBC 5 News has obtained screen grabs of what appears to be at least one police officer in the Burger King at what appears to be a computer terminal that night.
What happened to the video is disputed. Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said testing showed the computer files had not been tampered with.
But as we first reported last May, a Burger King district manager said police deleted the security footage after spending more than three hours in the restaurant.
NBC 5 has been told four to five officers were inside the Burger King after the shooting of McDonald who had run through the restaurant parking lot and onto Pulaski Road where, approximately 11 seconds later, he was shot.
In May, Jay Darshane, a district manager for Burger King, said both cameras and video recorder were all on and working properly the night of the shooting.
“We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete files. I mean we were just trying to help the police officers,” Darshane said.
When asked if he was sure they deleted the files, he said, “yes.
The time gap in the footage, Darshane said, ran from 9:13 to 10:39. Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke fired his first shot at 9:57, according to charges.
Alvarez said at a press conference last week no one tampered with the Burger King video.
NYTimes | City leaders did everything in their power to keep the homicide from
the public as long as possible. Indeed, Mr. Van Dyke was indicted only
after the forced release of the videos.
We can surmise that each had particular reasons. Mayor Emanuel was
fighting for re-election in a tight race. Superintendent McCarthy
wanted to keep his job. Ms. Alvarez needed the good will of the police
union for her coming re-election campaign and probably wished to shield
the police officers who bring her cases and testify in court.
None of that alters the fact that these actions have impeded the
criminal justice system and, in the process, Chicago’s leaders allowed
a first-degree murder suspect, now incarcerated pending bail, to remain
free for over a year on the city’s payroll.
There is good reason to appoint an independent commission to
investigate the conduct of these public servants. But frankly, at this
point, who would trust Chicago’s political institutions or criminal
justice system?
An investigation would create further delay in justice and distract our
attention from the real issues at hand: the senseless death of a
17-year-old, and the systemic problems of excessive police violence and
lack of accountability.
Rather than hold hearings, investigate and perhaps prosecute its
leaders, the city of Chicago needs to restore trust. These officials no
longer have the public’s confidence. They should resign.
NYTimes | Truly, there are many troubling aspects to this case. But having covered so many of these cases in the last couple years, it strikes me that we may need to push back and widen the lens so that we can fully appreciate and understand the systemic sociological and historical significance of this moment in our country’s development.
While police departments definitely have distinct cultures, in a way they are simple instruments that articulate and enforce our laws and mores, which are reflections of our values.
The only reason that these killings keep happening is because most of American society tacitly approves or willfully tolerates it. There is no other explanation. If America wanted this to end, it would end.
The exceeding sad and dreadfully profound truth is that America — the majority of America, and that generally means much of white America — has turned away, averted its gaze and refused to take a strong moral stance in opposition. That’s the same as granting silent approval.
People try to pitch this as some sort of ideological argument, as an issue of blacks against the police or vice versa, but that is simply an evasion, a way of refusing societal blame for a societal defect: We view crime and punishment with an ethnocentric sensibility that has a distinct and endemic anti-black bias.
theatlantic | Football can be a force for good. The University of Missouri’s football team proved it earlier this month when student athletes used a facet of campus life many often decry—the cultural and economic dominance of college football—to help force a national debate about the persistence of racism on American campuses. Football can build a sense of community for players and fans alike, and serve as a welcome escape from the pressures of ordinary life.
The sport cuts across distinctions of race, class, geography, and religion in a way few other U.S. institutions do, and everyone who participates reaps the benefits.
But not everyone—particularly at the amateur level—takes on an equal share of the risk. College football in particular seems headed toward a future in which it’s consumed by people born into privilege while the sport consumes people born without it. In a 2010 piece inThe Awl,Cord Jefferson wrote, “Where some see the Super Bowl, I see young black men risking their bodies, minds, and futures for the joy and wealth of old white men.” This vision sounds dystopian but is quickly becoming an undeniable reality, given new statistics about how education affects awareness about brain-injury risk, as well as the racial makeup of Division I rosters and coaching staffs. The future of college football indeed looks a lot like what Jefferson called “glorified servitude,” and even as information comes to light about the dangers and injustices of football, nothing is currently being done to steer the sport away from that path.
The football-consuming public has only recently started to grapple with
the magnitude of the dangers inherent in playing football—traumatic
brain injury and painkiller addiction chief among them—and to
understand that you don’t need to play 10 years in the NFL to suffer
permanent physical, psychological, or neurological damage. Though
football’s dangers compound over time, they manifest right away, even
at the lowest levels. Therefore, as more information comes out, more
and more parents are hesitating to let their sons play organized
football. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from January found that 37
percent of respondents would prefer that their children play any other
sport, which seems understandable—what parent wouldn’t protect his or
her children from unnecessary risk?
Unfortunately, the degree to which children are protected from the
risks of playing football is very much related to the level of
privilege—racial, economic, and social—the child experiences while
growing up. That same NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that while 50
percent of respondents with postgraduate degrees would prefer their
children not play football, only 31 percent of people with a
high-school education or less would say the same.
There’s a good reason for that disparity—better-educated and wealthier
people have more access to information about football’s concussion
crisis. A 2013 poll conducted by HBO and Marist found that 63 percent
of college graduates and 66 percent of people making more than $50,000
per year said they’d heard “a good amount” about football causing
concussions, compared to 47 percent of those who made less than $50,000
per year and half of those without a college degree.
In other words, children are being put in danger not because of their
own carelessness, or a difference in parenting style, or even because
poorer, less privileged kids have fewer ways to climb the class ladder.
It’s because many of their parents—especially those who earn less or
who haven’t attained as much education—aren’t getting the information
they need to make the best decisions for their families.
WaPo | At Texas A&M University, the president’s proposal to charge all 50,000 students $72 per year to help pay for a $450 million football stadium renovation brought protests.
At Clemson University, the athletic director’s idea to charge all 17,000 students $350 per year to help him keep up with competition brought pushback from student government.
At the University of Kansas, a walk-on golfer’s push to eliminate a $50 fee all 17,000 students paid the increasingly wealthy athletic department brought a strong — and to some students, vindictive — response from administrators.
And at many of America’s largest public universities, athletic departments making millions more every year from surging television contracts, luxury suite sales and endorsements continue to take money from tens of thousands of students who will never set foot in stadiums or arenas.
Mandatory student fees for college athletic departments are common across the country. Often small line items of a couple hundred dollars on long, complex tuition bills, these fees make millions for athletic departments at larger colleges.
In 2014, students at 32 schools paid a combined $125.5 million in athletic fees, according to a Washington Post examination of financial records at 53 public universities in the “Power Five,” the five wealthiest conferences in college sports.
To rich athletic departments, these fees represent guaranteed revenue streams that, unlike ticket sales or booster donations, are unaffected by on-field success. To less flush departments, increasing student fees is one way to keep up.
Athletic directors defend fees as well worth what their programs give back to schools.
“Athletics is a common good, bringing people together, developing relationships, unifying the institution, bringing fantastic exposure,” said Virginia Athletic Director Craig Littlepage, whose department charges undergraduates $657 annually.
reason | “The NFL is good at fleecing taxpayers,” says ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook, author of The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America. “It’s about a billion dollars a year I’ve calculated in public subsidies to NFL owners and this is a group that consists almost entirely of billionaires and yet receiving significant public subsidies every year.”
The NFL raked in over $9 billion in revenues last season and the league is pushing team owners to triple that mark over the next decade.
With the league’s overwhelming success, many cities are eager to get a piece of the action, often offering billions in public subsidies to attract (or keep) football in their localities.
But with the NFL making record profits, is it right for cities to spend public money on these type of projects? Especially when over half of NFL team owners are ranked on the Forbes billionaire list?
No where is this illustrated more than in Los Angeles, which has been trying to lure the league back to the area ever since the Raiders and Rams left town 20 years ago. And though numerous economists have demonstrated that sports stadia don’t increase local economic activity, it hasn’t stopped debt-ridden cities like L.A. from approving a $1.2 billion dollar stadium deal that would be financed with nearly $350 million in taxpayer-backed bonds.
Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge has been an advocate of bringing the NFL back to Los Angeles and voted along with the rest of his colleagues to approve the stadium deal (whether it ever gets built is remained to be seen). “There’s a beauty to the game and I’d like to see the beauty in Los Angeles. I like what it does for a city when their team wins,” says LaBonge.
tikkun | There is no such thing as “international terrorism”.
To declare war on “international terrorism” is nonsense. Politicians who do so are either fools or cynics, and probably both.
Terrorism is a weapon. Like cannon. We would laugh at somebody who declares war on “international artillery”. A cannon belongs to an army, and serves the aims of that army. The cannon of one side fire against the cannon of the other.
Terrorism is a method of operation. It is often used by oppressed peoples, including the French Resistance to the Nazis in WW II. We would laugh at anyone who declared war on “international resistance”.
Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military thinker, famously said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. If he had lived with us today, he might have said: “Terrorism is a continuation of policy by other means.”
Terrorism means, literally, to frighten the victims into surrendering to the will of the terrorist.
Terrorism is a weapon. Generally it is the weapon of the weak. Of those who have no atom bombs, like the ones which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which terrorized the Japanese into surrender. Or the aircraft which destroyed Dresden in the (vain) attempt to frighten the Germans into giving up.
Since most of the groups and countries using terrorism have different aims, often contradicting each other, there is nothing “international” about it. Each terrorist campaign has a character of its own. Not to mention the fact that nobody considers himself (or herself) a terrorist, but rather a fighter for God, Freedom or Whatever.
(I cannot restrain myself from boasting that long ago I invented the formula: “One man’s terrorist is the other man’s freedom fighter”.)
MANY ORDINARY Israelis felt deep satisfaction after the Paris events. “Now those bloody Europeans feel for once what we feel all the time!”
Binyamin Netanyahu, a diminutive thinker but a brilliant salesman, has hit on the idea of inventing a direct link between jihadist terrorism in Europe and Palestinian terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories.
It is a stroke of genius: if they are one and the same, knife-wielding Palestinian teenagers and Belgian devotees of ISIS, then there is no Israeli-Palestinian problem, no occupation, no settlements. Just Muslim fanaticism. (Ignoring, by the way, the many Christian Arabs in the secular Palestinian “terrorist” organizations.)
This has nothing to do with reality. Palestinians who want to fight and die for Allah go to Syria. Palestinians – both religious and secular – who shoot, knife or run over Israeli soldiers and civilians these days want freedom from the occupation and a state of their own.
This is such an obvious fact that even a person with the limited IQ of our present cabinet ministers could grasp it. But if they did, they would have to face very unpleasant choices concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So let’s stick to the comfortable conclusion: they kill us because they are born terrorists, because they want to meet the promised 72 virgins in paradise, because they are anti-Semites. So, as Netanyahu happily forecasts, we shall “live forever by our sword”.
slate |There isan astonishing story in Sunday’sNew York Timesabout Rojava, a Kurdish region in Northern Syria that’s ruled by militant feminist anarchists. Rojava’s constitution enshrines gender equality and religious freedom. An official tells journalist Wes Enzina that every position at every level of government includes a female equivalent of equal power. Recruits to Rojava’s 6,000-strong police force receive their weapons only after two weeks of feminist instruction. Reading Enzina’s piece, it’s hard to understand how this radical experiment in democracy in one of the bloodiest corners of the world isn’t better known internationally, particularly on the left.
At the start of piece, Enzina himself isn’t quite sure Rojava is real. It sounds too fantastical:
The regime of President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t officially recognize Rojava’s autonomous status, nor does the United Nations or NATO — it is, in this way, just as illicit as the Islamic State. But if the reports I heard from the region were to be believed, within its borders the rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate had been inverted. In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets.
The reports, Enzina eventually finds, are largely true. In Rojava’s three Kurdish cantons, together comprising an area about the size of Connecticut, society is being organized according to the principles of an American anarchist-ecologist philosopher named Murray Bookchin. (Bookchin’s most famous work isThe Ecology of Freedom.) This unlikely turn of events springs from the ideological conversion of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., which was once a Marxist Leninist terrorist group in Turkey—and in fact, the P.K.K. is still designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the E.U., and NATO.* With America’s help, Turkey captured Ocalan in 1999, and he was imprisoned alone—surrounded by over 1,000 soldiers—on an island near Istanbul. There he discovered Bookchin, who inspired a manifesto he issued in 2005. Enzina writes:
dezeen | Governments should stop thinking about refugee camps as temporary places, says Kilian Kleinschmidt, one of the world's leading authorities onhumanitarianaid (+ interview).
"These are the cities of tomorrow," said Kleinschmidt of Europe's rapidly expanding refugee camps. "The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That's a generation."
"In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city," he told Dezeen.
Kleinschmidt said a lack of willingness to recognise that camps had become a permanent fixture around the world and a failure to provide proper infrastructure was leading to unnecessarily poor conditions and leaving residents vulnerable to "crooks".
"I think we have reached the dead end almost where the humanitarian agencies cannot cope with the crisis," he said. "We're doing humanitarian aid as we did 70 years ago after the second world war. Nothing has changed."
Kleinschmidt, 53, worked for 25 years for the United Nations and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in various camps and operations worldwide. He was most recently stationed in Zaatari in Jordan, the world's second largest refugee camp – before leaving to start his own aid consultancy, Switxboard.
He believes that migrants coming into Europe could help repopulate parts of Spain and Italy that have been abandoned as people gravitate increasingly towards major cities.
"Many places in Europe are totally deserted because the people have moved to other places," he said. "You could put in a new population, set up opportunities to develop and trade and work. You could see them as special development zones which are actually used as a trigger for an otherwise impoverished neglected area."
theblaze | Pearson attributed his decision, at least in part, to seeing the video of a Chicago police officer fatally shooting LaQuan McDonald.
“I’m not interested in being a champion of a cause that turns a blind eye to racial discrimination and police brutality in America,” Pearson, 13, said in a statement. “I also don’t want to be the ‘anti-Obama kid.’ I want to be the kid who fought for real change and worked with both sides to achieve a better America.”
In an interview with TheBlaze Friday evening, Pearson said he was still fiscally conservative but socially liberal except when it comes to the issue of abortion.
“I’m tired of labels. I’m ready for solutions to the issues facing the American people,” Pearson continued.
From endorsing Republican Sen. Rand Paul for president to working on fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign to disavowing conservatism — Pearson told TheBlaze Friday evening that it just might be Sen. Marco Rubio who the viral teenager finally throws his support behind.
“Right now, the best candidate tackling race relations that I, with my beliefs could get behind, is [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio,” Pearson told TheBlaze, adding that he doesn’t see himself working for any other campaigns this presidential cycle.
Pearson said that working for Cruz’s campaign had nothing to do with his decision to distance himself from the conservative label and admonished that he is “no Jonathan Krohn” — the 13-year-old who spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2009 butdenounced conservatism just a few years later while attributing his previous views to his “naivety.”
pnas |In most ecosystems, microbes are the dominant consumers, commandeering much of the heterotrophic biomass circulating through food webs. Characterizing functional diversity within the microbiome, therefore, is critical to understanding ecosystem functioning, particularly in an era of global biodiversity loss. Using isotopic fingerprinting, we investigated the trophic positions of a broad diversity of heterotrophic organisms. Specifically, we examined the naturally occurring stable isotopes of nitrogen (15N:14N) within amino acids extracted from proteobacteria, actinomycetes, ascomycetes, and basidiomycetes, as well as from vertebrate and invertebrate macrofauna (crustaceans, fish, insects, and mammals). Here, we report that patterns of intertrophic15N-discrimination were remarkably similar among bacteria, fungi, and animals, which permitted unambiguous measurement of consumer trophic position, independent of phylogeny or ecosystem type. The observed similarities among bacterial, fungal, and animal consumers suggest that within a trophic hierarchy, microbiota are equivalent to, and can be interdigitated with, macrobiota. To further test the universality of this finding, we examined Neotropical fungus gardens, communities in which bacteria, fungi, and animals are entwined in an ancient, quadripartite symbiosis. We reveal that this symbiosis is a discrete four-level food chain, wherein bacteria function as the apex carnivores, animals and fungi are meso-consumers, and the sole herbivores are fungi. Together, our findings demonstrate that bacteria, fungi, and animals can be integrated within a food chain, effectively uniting the macro- and microbiome in food web ecology and facilitating greater inclusion of the microbiome in studies of functional diversity.
buchanan | Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act.
That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space,
crashed and burned — in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed
while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed
by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A Russian marine was killed.
“A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists,” said Vladimir
Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in
half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels
in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.
As it is impossible to believe Turkish F-16 pilots would fire missiles
at a Russian plane without authorization from President Tayyip Recep
Erdogan, we must ask: Why did the Turkish autocrat do it?
Why is he risking a clash with Russia?
Answer: Erdogan is probably less outraged by intrusions into his air
space than by Putin’s success in securing the Syrian regime of Bashar
Assad, whom Erdogan detests, and by relentless Russian air strikes on
Turkmen rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.
Imperiled strategic goals and ethnicity may explain Erdogan. But what
does the Turkish president see down at the end of this road?
And what about us? Was the U.S. government aware Turkey might attack
Russian planes? Did we give Erdogan a green light to shoot them down?
zerohedge | Six months later, it looks like those plans are on track. AsWSJ reports on Friday,"China plans to build its first overseas naval installation in the East African nation of Djibouti,expanding the geographical reach of its armed forces as Beijing seeks to protect its growing economic and security interests around the globe."
True to form, China is attempting to downplay the effort, calling the installation a "support facility." "This facility will better ensure that the Chinese military can carry out responsibilities such as international peacekeeping, naval escorts in the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters, and humanitarian assistance,” a defense ministry spokesman said.
As WSJ goes on to note, "China has often cited its lack of foreign bases as evidence of peaceful intentions, but has been rapidly expanding its military capabilities in recent years to defend its regional territorial claims and project power far into the Pacific and Indian oceans and the Mediterranean."
The US - which also has a base in Djibouti - is adopting Washington's trademark condescending paternalism in discussions with the country's government. "We definitely have concerns and parameters that were communicated in terms of how we think they should manage Chinese or anyone else entering into what is already a fairly congested space."
China announced on Thursday that it would establish its first overseas military outpost and unveiled a sweeping plan to reorganize its military into a more agile force capable of projecting power abroad.
The outpost, in the East African nation of Djibouti, breaks with Beijing’s longstanding policy against emulating the United States in building military facilities abroad.
By establishing an outpost in the Horn of Africa — more than 4,800 miles away from Beijing and near some of the world’s most volatile regions — President Xi Jinping is leading the military beyond its historical focus on protecting the nation’s borders.
Together with the plan for new command systems to integrate and rebalance the armed forces, the two announcements highlight the breadth of change that Mr. Xi is pushing on the People’s Liberation Army, which for decades has served primarily as a lumbering guardian of Communist Party rule.
A presence in Djibouti would be China’s first overseas logistics facility to service its military vessels since the Communists took power,said David Finkelstein, director of China studies at CNA, an independent research institute in Arlington, Va.
“In the grand sweep of post-1949 Chinese history, this announcement is yet another indicator that Chinese policy is trying to catch up with national interests that have expanded faster than the capacity of the People’s Republic of China to service them,” Mr. Finkelstein said.
The new facility would enable the navy to live up to a strategy laid down this year by the Communist Party in a major defense document, known as a white paper, that outlined its ambitions to become a global maritime power.
China has invested heavily in Djibouti’s infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent upgrading the country’s undersize port. It has also financed a railroad extending from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Djibouti, a project that cost billions of dollars. The country has a population of about 900,000, many of whom live in poverty.
Strategically, Djibouti offers an excellent place from which to protect oil imports from the Middle East that traverse the Indian Ocean on their way to China, military experts say. From Djibouti, China gains greater access to the Arabian Peninsula.
Indeed they do, and that means not only will Beijing be able to keep a close eye on seaborne crude, they'll also be better prepared to intervene in Mid-East affairs should the situation call for it.
Body and Mature Behavior | In all neurotic states we find anxiety, nausea, giddiness, museular
tension, digestive and breathing troubles and sexual disorders
of some sort. So long as there is no improvement in these troubles
there is no improvement in the general state and vice-versa.
Muscular tension and anxiety are invariably so closely interwoven
in all states of emotional disorder that it is difficult to'see how any
real advancement towards clearer understanding of the nature of
cures is possible without greater knowledge of the phenomenon of
anxiety.
A number of facts must be brought together to give at least a
direction for constructive thought. Lesions destroying exactly the
same areas in two adult brains do not cause the same symptoms.
The life experience of the brain is in some way written in
the cortex. "Even in the excitable motor cortex (Sir Charles P •
.symonds, President of the Royal Society of Psychiatry), where
functional patterns are relatively stable, it is evident that response
depends on individual experience. Whether extension or flexion
will take place in a digit depends on what has just happened, not
only at this point of the cortex but in the sensory cortex behind it."
Emotional tensions affect the cortex via the vegetative nervous
system. All neurotic symptoms are intimately connected with and
express themselves by affecting the relationship of the person to
other persons or society in general.
It is of the greatest importance to be quite clear on what is amenable
to human influence. If behaviour means all response
to stimulus, we must distinguish between reflex responses which
are by definition outside human influence, and those, formed
under the influence of environment after birth, which are likely to
be influenced by change of environment a priori.
A reflex activity is a biological inheritance generally common to
a whole group of animals and it is essentially immaterial whether
the individual has had any previous experience or not, since the
first stimulus will elicit the same response as the second. Subject
to the laws governing fatigue of the nervous cell and some other
laws, the response is elicited every time the irritation occurs.
Such inheritance is genetic, i.e., handed down to each individual
through the genes of the species, and we can do little to alter it
unless we can modify the genes of the species. If we could modify
the genes we would obtain a new species in which the modified
genes would be perpetuated in all subsequent generations.
Any behaviour that is not handed down to subsequent generations
in accordance with the general laws of inheritance is not ofa
genetic character, and is therefore an acquired response or an
acquired behaviour. It follows that human behaviour is so
essentially acquired that some of our most cherished beliefs
unquestionably
need revision.
Acquired behaviour is the result of interaction of the genetic
entity with its environment. Thus it seems legitimate to assert that,
provided the environment can be altered, the acquired behaviour
would undergo change. In other words, all characteristic be ..
haviour that does not obey the laws of inheritance is amenable to
environmental influence.
The conclusion just reached is rich in consequences, especially
if we consider genetic inheritance to embrace complex as well as
simple reflexes. For complex sequences or a simultaneous combi ..
nation of simple reflexes is the physiologist'S definition of an
instinct.
This important conclusion results then, that true instinctive
behaviour alone is impervious to experience and environment.
More precisely, only those responses that cannot be elicited after
an alteration in the nervous paths concerned are instinctive; all
other behaviour is acquired and has nothing permanent about it
but our belief that it is so.
It is in this connection that the study offunction and structure
relations appears in its full significance. In every case where the
actual use made of the body can be shown to account for the physical structure, it becomes certain that the particular shape of
the structure, though it may be similar to that of the parent, is still
amenable to human influence.
This approach makes it imperative that answers to many problems
will have to be revised in the light of better knowledge of
the functioning of the nervous system.
The revision of all human behaviour in the light of our conclusions
is beyond the scope of this book, or anyone book for that
matter. We will, however, treat some important particular instances
fairly exhaustively.
Modern psychology is well aware of the importance of environment
in the final make-up or personality, but its approach is
timid and piecemeal. Some workers stress the importance of one
group of conditions, some of another. Thus the Freudian school
established that neuroses and psychoses are due to conflicts
arising in the mind in the process of adjustment; but psychoanalysis
accepted implicitly the existing laws of society, religion and
family as sacrosanct. Every individual must accept these whether
he wants to or not, ifhe is to be normal.
The possibility of the fault being in the very conditions to which
the individual is called to adjust himself might have been faintly
understood but was never expressed. It was, and with many
analysts still is, the rule that the patient's marital and other
relations of social origin are not to be manipulated by the therapist.
His job was to make the patient accept what Tom, Dick and Harry
do.
However, the rapid development of analysis showed that Tom,
Dick and Harry do not accept, what the patient is induced to
accept, with such unreserved completeness as the layman thinks ;
that neuroses of all degrees of gravity are, in fact, widespread in
all layers of society; it thus became more and more difficult to
expect the patient to succeed where so many fail.
The obvious way out was to attack the immutability of the
social laws, habits and traditions themselves. The attack shifted
from sexual conflicts to those arising from family conditions, and
at present the full weight of attack is thrown against the beliefs,
traditions and economic conditions which are the foundation of
our society.
Every such attack has met great antagonism, the bitterest fight
being put up by the protagonists of the established school who
cling to their teachings with the same tenacity as the public to
their traditions.
It is hard to deny that the traditional foundations of our social
structure need thorough revision. No objective observer, free of
prejudice, will argue against the necessity of radical changes.
Some will prefer gradual adjustment, some drastic change, but
change there will be. Indeed change is 'already being effected.
In such changes lies hope for a better future. A social structure
in which economic and marital conditions are devised to mini~
mise and perhaps eliminate the greater difficulties of adjustments,
should in time reduce the present increasing number of malad~
justments and mental conflicts.
Yet there is no room for complacency. The fact that antagonism
to revision of old notions is as strong among analysts as among
laymen shows that either the analysis they undergo is not carried
far enough, or that analysis cannot completely eradicate bad
habits.
While expecting hopefully that the environment will be changed
by our collective efforts, we must also make sure that everything
amenable to human influence in each individual is used to
facilitate adaptation. This will not only eliminate much misery
in the present generation but will also give a better chance to the
next.
In anticipation of our conclusions it may be said at once that
we do tolerate certain limitations, physical and mental, just
because we do not know that they are amenable to our influence.
The results of faulty habits are called character or chronic diseases
which, as their name suggests, are incurable. And improper use
of oneself is explained as unfortunate inheritance or permanent
deformation. Degeneration of the human species is so often in~
voked as confirmation of the futility of all endeavour to improve,
that it seems proper to see what truth there is in it.
WaPo | Over the past four decades, whenever universities have faced complaints
about exclusion or racism — often real — the solution proposed and
usually accepted has been to create more programs, associations and
courses for minority students. This is understandable, because these
groups have been historically ignored, slighted and demeaned. But is
this solution working, or is it making things worse?
A 2004 empirical study led by Harvard University psychologist James
Sidanius (who is African American) concluded that “there was no
indication that the experiences in these ethnically oriented . . .
organizations increased the students’ sense of common identity with
members of other groups or their sense of belonging to the wider
university community. Furthermore . . . the evidence suggested that
membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually
increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum
competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue
of one’s ethnicity.”
The academic programs that have been created and expanded also
reinforce feelings of separateness. Again, there was a need for greater
attention to many of the areas of study, and some extraordinary
scholarship has been produced in these fields. But the cumulative
effect is one that distinguished scholar Tony Judt wrote about in an
essay for the New York Review of Books in 2010. “Undergraduates today
can select from a swathe of identity studies: ‘gender studies,’
‘women’s studies,’ ‘Asian-Pacific-American studies,’ and dozens of
others,” he noted. “The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs
is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical
minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study
themselves — thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal
education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they
purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are
job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is
actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so
forth.”
ethdev | To research, design and build software that, as best as possible,
facilitates, in a secure, decentralised and fair manner, the
communication and automatically-enforced agreement between parties.
The facilitation will necessitate the building of tools to aid users
and developers alike to utilise the back-end systems and make them as
effective as possible in their facilities. It is anticipated that these
tools will include the development of consumer-grade end-user
components (the so-called Ethereum Browser) together with IDE-like
components and associated tools. It will also mean the provision of
certain high-level (on-the-system) functions, modules, examples,
templates, standards and live services without which development and
interoperation would suffer.
Security will likely entail use of strong cryptographic technologies,
but could also use various other technologies including, but not
limited to verifiable computation, computational steganography,
complex-systems modelling and formal proof systems.
Fairness must be absolutely guaranteed throughout. We agree that this
is pure technology and must make no affordances to the beliefs of any
single actor against any other. The system must never even have the
possibility of disadvantaging a single user or organisation over any
other. We accept that full decentralisation is pivotal in accomplishing
this.
Forward-enforceable agreement between arbitrary sets of parties is a
core goal, however to achieve this goal, parties must be able to
determine the existence and volition of the other. Communication
methods must be provided, on the same technological basis, to
facilitate this.
It is anticipated that the use of consensus-based blockchain technology
using a Turing-complete VM within its transaction resolver and an
arbitrarily large state space, such as that first proposed by Buterin
(2013) and an evolution of which was formalised by Wood (2014) will be
pivotal in the initial delivery.
It is also anticipated that additional research will need to be
conducted, both internally and externally in order to deliver solutions
of increasing concordance with these broad goals.
wikipedia |Purpose
The stated purpose of the Ethereum project is to "decentralize the
web" by introducing four components as part of its roadmap: static
content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an
integrated user-interface.[6]
Each of these services is designed to replace some aspect of the
systems currently used in the modern web, but to do so in a fully
decentralised and pseudonymous manner.[7]
Ethereum is an open source project. Development began in December 2013, with the first Go and C++proof of concept builds (PoC1) being released in early February 2014.[8]
Since then, several further PoC builds have been released, culminating
with the public launch of the Ethereum blockchain on 30 July 2015.
Ether
The currency unit of Ethereum is the Ether, used to pay for computational services on the network.
To finance development, Ethereum distributed the initial allocation of Ethers via a 42-day public crowdsale, netting 31,591 bitcoins, worth $18,439,086 at that time, in exchange for about 60,102,216 Ethers.[12][citation needed]
Ether is divided into smaller units of currency called finney, szabo, shannon, babbage, lovelace, and wei (named after Wei Dai, the creator of b-money). Each larger unit is equal to 1000 of the next lower unit.[13]
In practice, however, the developers encourage the use of ether and
wei. Wei is the base unit of implementation and cannot be further
divided.
Smart contracts on Ethereum
Smart contracts
are computer protocols which verify or enforce the performance of a
contractual agreement. On Ethereum, contracts can be written in one of
the following four languages: Solidity (a JavaScript-like language), Serpent (a Python-like language), Mutan (C-like) and LLL (Lisp-like). They are compiled into bytecode before being deployed to the blockchain.
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4/3
43
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