soundtravels | We live in a vast ocean of sound, whose infinite waves ripple the
shores of our awareness in myriad patterns of intricate design and
immeasurably complex vibrations … permeating our bodies, our psyches, to
the very core of our being.
So begins the program, Of Sound Mind and Body: Music and Vibrational
Healing and so begins this whirlwind account, unveiling the mysteries of
sound. Perhaps because it is invisible, less attention has been paid to
this sea of sound constantly flowing around and through us than to the
denser objects with which we routinely interact. To those of us for whom
‘seeing is believing’, Cymatics, the science of wave phenomena, can be a
portal into this invisible world and its myriad effects on matter, mind
and emotions.
The long and illustrious lineage of scientific inquiry into the
physics of sound can be traced back to Pythagoras, but this article will
focus on more recent explorations into the effects that sound has upon
matter. However, a brief sum- mary of the last three centuries of
acoustic research will help to highlight a few of the pioneers who
blazed the trail so that Cymatics could emerge as a distinct discipline
in the 1950s.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE (PDF) - click this link (opens new window)
opentheory | I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all
psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever
they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic
wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we
understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where
predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is
to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.
I described CSHW in my last post as:
Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (CSHW) is
a new method for interpreting neuroimaging which (unlike conventional
approaches) may plausibly measure things directly relevant to
phenomenology. Essentially, it’s a method for combining fMRI/DTI/MRI to
calculate a brain’s intrinsic ‘eigenvalues’, or the neural frequencies
which naturally resonate in a given brain, as well as the way the brain
is currently distributing energy (periodic neural activity) between
these eigenvalues.
This post is going to talk a little more about how CSHW
works, why it’s so powerful, and what sorts of things we could use it
for.
CSHW: the basics
All periodic systems have natural modes— frequencies they
‘like’ to resonate at. A tuning fork is a very simple example of this:
regardless of how it’s hit, most of the vibration energy quickly
collapses to one frequency- the natural resonant frequency of the fork.
All musical instruments work on this principle; when you
change the fingering on a trumpet or flute, you’re changing the natural
resonances of the instrument.
CSHW’s big insight is that brains have these natural resonances too,
although they differ slightly from brain to brain. And instead of some
external musician choosing which notes (natural resonances) to play, the
brain sort of ‘tunes itself,’ based on internal dynamics, external
stimuli, and context.
The beauty of CSHW is that it’s a quantitative model, not
just loose metaphor: neural activation and inhibition travel as an
oscillating wave with a characteristic wave propagation pattern, which
we can reasonably estimate, and the substrate in which they propagate is
the the brain’s connectome (map of neural connections), which we can
also reasonably estimate.
scmp | Having obtained a dual bachelor’s degree from a US university and
climbed to a senior software engineer’s position within two and a half
years of working for an American company, Owen Wang was forced to
dramatically scale back his salary expectations when he decided to come
home to China.
Currently working in Kansas City – where the
average annual senior software engineer’s salary is US$100,000,
according to glassdoor.com – the best offer from a Chinese firm he has
received so far is a package from a Shenzhen-based start-up worth around
240,000 yuan (US$35,250).
But while he had expected salaries in the
southern Chinese city to be lower than those on offer in the US – the
per capita income in Kansas City is over four times more than the
average in Shenzhen – he had been hoping someone would offer him a pay
packet worth around 500,000 yuan a year.
“We’re still negotiating. I guess I will finally
accept a compromise if there’s no better choice, but the quality of my
life will drop significantly,” said the 27-year-old.
Wang’s plan to return home is not motivated
purely by financial considerations – he worries that tighter US
immigration policies will make it harder for him to stay and his parents
have been hoping that he will be able to come home and visit them more
often – but his disappointment is mirrored by many of the hundreds of
thousands of Chinese who return home from studying and working overseas
every year.
A recent survey by a Beijing-based think tank of
more than 2,000 Chinese returnees found that about 80 per cent said
their salaries were lower than expected, with around 70 per cent saying
what they were doing did not match their experience and skills.
Doug: Of course “exploit” is a loaded word; it
implies one-sided, unbalanced dealings, and unfair business—although the
word “fair” also has lots of baggage, and politically charged meanings.
But, yes, they’re definitely exploiting Africa. We’re seeing a
veritable re-colonization of Africa. Every time I visit Africa I see
more and more Chinese. It doesn’t matter which country; they’re
everywhere.
It’s important to remember that Africa doesn’t produce anything
besides raw materials. There’s close to zero manufacturing, like 1% of
the world’s total, in sub-Saharan Africa. And almost all of that is in
South Africa. The little there is, is only produced with the help
foreigners—Europeans, but increasingly the Chinese.
The Chinese basically see Africans as no more than a cheap labor
source. That’s at best. Other than that, they’re viewed as a complete
nuisance. Basically an obstacle, a cost, standing in the way of
efficient use of the continent itself.
What do the Chinese people think of Africans? They don’t hold them in
high regard. Of course, you’ve got to remember that China has viewed
itself as the center of the world since Day One. They see all non-Han
peoples as barbarians, as inferiors. That was absolutely true when the
British sent an ambassador, Macartney, to open relations at the very end
of the 18th C. He was treated with borderline
contempt—pretty much the way Europeans and Americans have treated
primitive peoples since the days of Columbus. It’s actually the normal
human attitude, when an advanced culture encounters a backward culture.
The Chinese see their culture as superior to even that of the West, and
believe—probably correctly—that they’ll soon be economically and
technologically superior as well.
Africa doesn’t even enter the equation. The continent has no
civilization, no economy, no technology, no military power. The famed
Zimbabwe ruins are just some semi-finished rocks piled on one
another—and they’re considered iconic. The Chinese see the place the way
the Spanish saw Mexico and Peru in the 16th C. Of course they won’t say that in public. In fact it’s very non-PC for anyone to make that observation…
Nonetheless, Africa is going to be the epicenter of what’s happening
in the world for years to come. It’s gone from being just an empty space
on the map in the 19th C, to a bunch of backwater colonies in the 20th
C, to a bunch of failed states that people are only vaguely aware of
today. Soon, however, it will be frontpage news. And this is both
because Chinese are moving to Africa in record numbers and Africans are
leaving as fast as they can.
Many Africans are now trying to make their way to Europe. Every year
scores of thousands of them—all young men by the way—cross the
Mediterranean on rafts. When they arrive in Europe, they somehow survive
by selling bobbles on the street, dealing dope, or stealing. And
figuring out how to game the welfare system. Now, I realize this doesn’t
sound very promising. But that’s the way things are headed. It’s a
growing trend.
Guardian | Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such
repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also
began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually
harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an
aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar
workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the
end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and
physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and
boxers.
It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and
Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope
that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in
the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports,
which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century,
became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of
mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative
empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the
playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.'
But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more
intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque
economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many
fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into
hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the
calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as
individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be
honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of
physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with
strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of
gender difference reached non-western societies.
European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their
virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and
patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the
west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls
“internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded
guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to
man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon:
how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and
Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th
century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the
creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the
nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda,
Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika
Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly
flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical
imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the
first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”,
as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity,
wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during
fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy
into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,”
declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe
members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against
the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of
mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture
across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and
technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger
number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine
certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and
forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of
neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine
identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of
the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often
futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine
women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to
degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is
supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
theatlantic | This alignment of certain Asians with whites evokes historical instances
of ethnic groups migrating from minority status to becoming part of the
majority racial group. Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon:
“whitening.” It refers to the way the white race has expanded over time
to swallow up those previously considered non-whites, such as people of
Irish, Italian, and Jewish heritage. In the next wave of whitening, somesociologistshavetheorized,
Asians and Latinos could begin to vanish into whiteness, as some
assimilate culturally into white norms and culture, and become treated
and seen by whites as fellow whites. “The idea of who is white and which
groups belong and don’t belong to it has been malleable and has
changed. It is different across place and time,” Jonathan Warren, a
University of Washington sociology professor who has written about
whitening, told me.
The
recent lawsuits echo the process by which whitening previously took
place—in part, with the political and legal alignment of non-white
groups with pro-white interests. While some Irish Americans once
socialized and lived among black Americans and held anti-slavery views,
they were courted by and ultimately joined
the pro-slavery Democratic party, and came to pride themselves on their
newfound whiteness and embrace anti-black stances. Centuries later,
they are considered white people in the United States. Class, too, has
influenced how minority groups have been viewed over time. According to
Matthew Jacobson, a history professor at Yale, the idea of whitening
stems in part from Brazil, where there’s a Portuguese phrase that
translates to “money whitens.” The idea is that “if you move up the
economic ladder you get magically whitened,” Jacobson says. “Some idea
like that has been transposed into the U.S.”
Asians as a whole are not, of course, considered white people: The 2018 census form
allows respondents to select from a number of Asian ethnicities. And
not all academics agree that whitening will take place for Asian and
Latino communities—Warren and Jacobson both say it isn’t happening, at
least not to the degree it did previously. That’s partly because, as
Jacobson notes, Asians and Latinos suffer from racial stereotypes such
as the “model math student,” and the “immigration menace,” as he called it, that mark them as foreigners and non-whites.
NYTimes | A broad range of figures in the
Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most
ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which
Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried
to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders
of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition
and extermination of black and brown brutes.
Not
surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce
cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors who build
platforms where political correctness, Islam and feminism are
excoriated, the facts of injustice and inequality denied, chests thumped
about a superior but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and
fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active
settler-colonialist project.
Emotional
incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of
white power. For the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the
slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today. Whiteness
denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and
ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth find
themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as
overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe increasingly
challenged.
Mr. Trump appears to some of these
powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher
races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says
that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the
British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is
great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson
claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him
to vote for Mr. Trump.
Other panicky
white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political
correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose
norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily
that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case
for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted
and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a
victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western
supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience,
remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce.
The
low comedy of charlatanry, however, should not distract us from the
lethal dangers of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war
on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial
knowledge, according to which the swarthy enemy was subhuman, inviting
extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights
witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican
attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States,
Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political
decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many
long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair.
Affirmative action is based on a view of equal protection that
compensates for historical and present prejudice and lack of
opportunity. It is premised on the notion that some of us start behind
the eight ball and need an extra boost to achieve basic access.
Favorable
treatment for blacks is controversial because it appears to be applied
in zero sum contexts. If
you favor a black person, you have to disfavor a white one and that's
the seasoning upon which Mr. Blum's cases are all based. It is not the
definition of equal that
causes the controversy. it is the adverse effect on whites, or in this
case, proxy white replacement negroes.
In the case of
Harvard University, it would be trivial to favor blacks while protecting
replacement negroes serving as proxies for poor whites. You see,
kibutzim Blum pretends to be unaware of the historic legacy of Blacks in
America - thus his elite racist bootlicking antics. Blum could of
course trivially solve the zero sum angle he seeks to exploit by going
after the 30% + alumni legacy admissions. Blum lacks the historical
perspective, ethical fiber, and testicular fortitude to go after any
elite affirmative action, well, because, these selfsame racist elites
are the folks who pay his bills.
Ivy League "affirmative action" began shortly after World War II. It
was stimulated by the GI Bill, which made college possible for veterans
who never would have dreamed of going to college, let alone to an Ivy
League university. The GI Bill demonstrated there was untapped national
talent out in flyover. They found public high
school students in the South, Midwest, and Far West with school records
rivaling the best of the prep schools. Even when some public high
school scores were slightly lower than preppy competitors, admissions
committees sometimes chose the provincial public high school student
over the privileged alumni legacy. They recognized high achievement in the
face of educational and cultural disadvantage.
As a consequence, Harvard and its Ivy sisters began recruiting a few good men out beyond the inbred Lovecraftian prep schools and elite
academies of New England and the Atlantic Coast. The Ivies understood that there
was more promise in the lesser academic record than in the marginally
better academic record. Moreover, they wanted a more diverse student body.
This was the original affirmative action”. It transformed the Ivies
into truly national and meritocratic institutions instead of elite
regional colleges for those with wealth, privilege, and pedigree.
Only when the same principles of national diversity and meritocratic
selection—based on recognition of high achievement and the overcoming of
disadvantages—came to include black student admissions, did we experience white backlash and resentment.
NYTimes | At the heart of the case
is whether Harvard’s admissions staff hold Asian-Americans to higher
standards than applicants of other racial or ethnic groups, and whether
they use subjective measures, like personal scores, to cap the number of
Asian students accepted to the school.
“Harvard
today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that
it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s,”
Students for Fair Admissions said in a court filing.
Harvard, which admitted less than 5 percent of its applicants this year, said that its own analysis did not find discrimination.
A trial in the case has been scheduled for October.
WaPo | You remember the photo, taken in early August, of two men at an Ohio Trump rally whose matching T-shirts
read, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” (Now you can buy them
online for $14.) It was a gibe that spoke to our moment. The Republican
brand — as with presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney — used
to be pointedly anti-Russian; Romney called Moscow our chief global enemy. In the Trump era, though, you can be a Republican Russophile
for whom Vladimir Putin is a defender of conservative values. American
politics, it has become plain, is driven less by ideological
commitments than by partisan identities — less by what we think than by
what we are. Identity precedes ideology.
“The
Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the
economy or identity,” the veteran strategist and pollster Stanley B.
Greenberg, a man of the economy-first school, has said. But once you come to grips with the potency of partisan-identity
politics, the binary falls away. So does the assumption that the great
majority of Republicans who support Trump are drawn to his noxious
views. (That’s the good news in the bad news.) Among candidates who led
in the Republican primaries, after all, his percentage of the vote was the lowest
in nearly half a century. Identity groups come to rally behind their
leaders, and partisan identification wouldn’t be so stable if it didn’t
allow for a great deal of ideological flexibility. That’s why
rank-and-file Republicans could go from “We need to stand up to Putin!”
to “Why wouldn’t we want to get along with Putin?” in the time it takes to say: Rubio’s out, Trump’s in.
What’s true of partisan allegiance is true of ideological allegiance. In research
published earlier this year, political scientist Lilliana Mason
conducted a national survey that determined where people stood on
various hot-button issues: same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control,
immigration, the Affordable Care Act, the deficit. Then they were asked
how they felt about spending time with liberals or conservatives. About
becoming friends with one. About marrying one.
WaPo | Republicans are in a pickle. The midterms are just
two months away, Democrats seem more excited than ever, and the
president’s approval ratings are anemic. Faced with the possibility of
disaster, what message will they focus on for November? It sure is a
mystery. I’ll let the New York Times reveal the answer:
Democratic
nominees for governor include three African-Americans, two of them in
the old Confederacy, a prospect that not long ago would have been
unthinkable. Record numbers of women are competing in congressional
races. Elsewhere, Muslims, gays, lesbians and transgender people will be
on the ballot for high-profile offices.
That
diverse cast is teeing up a striking contrast for voters in November at a
time when some in the Republican Party, taking their cues from
President Trump, are embracing messages with explicit appeals to racial
anxieties and resentment. The result is making racial and ethnic issues
and conflicts central in the November elections in a way that’s far more
explicit than the recent past.
Who
could have imagined that the GOP would choose to campaign on racial
resentment? Only anyone who has paid attention to Republican politics in
the Trump era.
What’s more, this is the only
kind of campaign it can run as long as Trump is president and dominates
the party. Republicans may take a different path once he’s gone, or they
may not. But any campaign that involves Trump will always be about
race.
The
primary reason, of course, is that Trump makes every campaign about
race because that’s just who he is. There are some positions he adopts
insincerely — I doubt he cares one way or another what his
administration’s policies on health care or education are — but when it
comes to getting rid of immigrants or his belief in the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, he speaks from the heart.
But
it’s also because Trumpism as a political strategy rests on stirring up
racial resentment among white voters. He turned himself from a reality
TV star into a political figure by becoming America’s most prominent
proponent of the racist theory that Barack Obama was not born in
America; he also insisted
that Obama could only have gotten into college and law school because
he was an affirmative-action admission who pushed aside worthier white
applicants.
citizensmedia | Regardless of the situation, “the petrodollar” has no direct bearing on
the ability of the United States, or any other country, to provide for
its people. The only thing that affects this is a country’s supply of
real resources, and the fact that the country’s currency is the only one
accepted for extinguishing tax obligations.
The United States is the “reserve currency” (meaning its currency is
required to purchase oil) and has more resources than most (raw
materials, labor, technology, and time). But neither of these things
have any bearing on how well – as opposed to how “much” – it can provide
for its citizens. All sovereign fiat economies (the U.S., Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and England, among others) can fully
employ all their citizens with the resources at its disposal as best they can.
If a conflict were to arise because of oil or resources, or “the
petrodollar,” that conflict would of course have significant
consequences. Ultimately, however, none of these things have any direct impact on any country’s supply of real resources, and therefore, no direct effect on any country’s domestic economy.
As far as what specifically would happen if the world stopped using the United States dollar for oil? The answer is, “Very little.”
The United States spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined. The U.S. military is one of the largest users of fossil fuels in the world and by far the biggest consumer of energy in the United States. The real problem is that the fossil fuel industry has too much influence
on the United States government. Instead of fulfilling its original and
only purpose – to protect the American People – the United States
Military has now been hijacked to further enrich the very few, and to
impose their power and reach across the globe.
BuzzFeed | In response to a multiyear BuzzFeed News investigation,
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said Monday that he would support the efforts
of victims who suffered abuse as children at a Catholic orphanage in the
state to pursue justice through the courts.
“The allegations
against St. Joseph’s Orphanage are as extremely disturbing, horrific and
deeply troubling today, as they were decades ago,” Scott said in an
emailed statement to BuzzFeed News.
The allegations include
once-parentless children in the care of the Catholic orphanage being
beaten, sexually abused, mutilated, and observing the deaths of other
children at the hands of their protectors.
The former residents of St. Joseph’s told of being subjected to
tortures — from the straightforwardly awful to the downright bizarre —
that were occasionally administered as a special punishment but were
often just a matter of course. Their tales were strikingly similar, each
adding weight and credibility to the others.
“My heart goes out
to the many who were harmed, and I support their continued pursuit of
justice in the courts,” Scott said in his statement to BuzzFeed News.
“As a society, the safety and well-being of our children is one of our
most critical responsibilities and abuse against children cannot be
tolerated under any circumstance. While we’ve made significant gains in
the many years since these incidents occurred, I know that is of little
solace to those who suffered, and I know too many still suffer abuse. We
must continue to shine a light on instances of abuse and advocate for
justice and a system that puts protecting our children above all else.”
Vermont
commissioner for the Department for Children and Families, Ken Schatz,
told BuzzFeed News that he shared the sentiment expressed by the
governor.
wikipedia | In law, standing or locus standi is the term for the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court
sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to
support that party's participation in the case. Standing exists from one
of three causes:
The party is directly subject to an adverse effect by the
statute or action in question, and the harm suffered will continue
unless the court grants relief in the form of damages or a finding that
the law either does not apply to the party or that the law is void or
can be nullified. This is called the "something to lose" doctrine, in
which the party has standing because they will be directly harmed by the
conditions for which they are asking the court for relief.
The party is not directly harmed by the conditions by which they are
petitioning the court for relief but asks for it because the harm
involved has some reasonable relation to their situation, and the
continued existence of the harm may affect others who might not be able
to ask a court for relief. In the United States, this is the grounds for
asking for a law to be struck down as violating the First Amendment,
because while the plaintiff might not be directly affected, the law
might so adversely affect others that one might never know what was not
done or created by those who fear they would become subject to the law –
the so-called "chilling effects" doctrine.
The party is granted automatic standing by act of law.[1]
Under some environmental laws in the United States, a party may sue
someone causing pollution to certain waterways without a federal permit,
even if the party suing is not harmed by the pollution being generated.
The law allows them to receive attorney's fees if they substantially
prevail in the action. In some U.S. states, a person who believes a
book, film or other work of art is obscene may sue in their own name to
have the work banned directly without having to ask a District Attorney
to do so.
In the United States, the current doctrine is that a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless the plaintiff
can demonstrate that he/she/it is or will "imminently" be harmed by the
law. Otherwise, the court will rule that the plaintiff "lacks standing"
to bring the suit, and will dismiss the case without considering the
merits of the claim of unconstitutionality. To have a court declare a
law unconstitutional, there must be a valid reason for the lawsuit. The
party suing must have something to lose in order to sue unless it has
automatic standing by action of law.
theautomaticearth | Let’s try a different angle. How about the world through the eyes of
children’s? I don’t want to dwell on John McCain, too many people
already do today, but I would suggest that your thoughts and prayers are
with the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children that died
because McCain advocated bombing them. Or, indeed, 50-odd years ago,
were bombed by him personally. I wanted to leave him be altogether,
don’t kick a man when he’s down, but I can’t get the image out of my
head of him singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”.
To remember that, perhaps the most vile and infamous thing he’s ever
done (it’s in the top ten), and then see someone like Ocasio-Cortez say
he was an “unparalleled example of human decency”, it’s almost comedy.
But not as funny as when in the 2008 campaign the woman in the red dress
asked him if Obama was an Arab, and he responded: “No, ma’am. No,
ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have
disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign
is all about”.
That is full-blown hilarious. And hardly a soul caught it, which
makes it many times worse. It made him a decent man in the eyes of
Americans to defend Obama by declaring that Arabs are per definition
neither decent nor family men. Yeah, well, you might as well bomb them
all then. But enough about McCain: it’s about the children, and their
souls, not his.
The Pope is visiting Ireland this weekend. There is really just one
subject on people’s minds, even though the ‘leaders’ say this is one of
Ireland’s biggest events in 40 years. What’s on their minds is -child-
sex abuse by Catholic clergy. And it’s been -and probably still is-
rampant in the country. Like it’s been everywhere the Catholic church is
an important force. Which is in many countries, there are 1.2 billion
Catholics worldwide. The man claimed he was begging for God’s
forgiveness. Not sure that will do it, there, Francis.
The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the
world’s biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years
older than the next one, Holland’s VOC -which existed maybe 100 years-.
It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the
world. Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a
country. For that matter, it effectively owns many a country.
There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before
there could ever be an investigation. Multiple popes have promised
exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened. It would upset
the business model too much. And most faithful still believe their
priests are decent men, anyway. Yes, there’s that word again, ‘decent’.
If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because
he’s been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets
transferred to another parish. They’ve been doing this for 1,500 years,
they got it down. And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness.
While the Church gets ever richer.
At a 2% annual growth rate, wealth doubles every 34-35 years. The
Catholic Church has been at it for 1,500. Do your math. Or look at it
this way: real estate prices have been surging over the past few
decades. And that’s the Vatican’s main industry. Anyone want to venture a
guess at how much money they have made?
The Vatican is a facade hiding behind a facade hiding behind… Francis
Ford Coppola tried tackling the topic in The Godfather III, but he was
only mildly successful and not many people believed his portrayal. But,
again, this is not about the Pope playing Kabuki theater like all his
predecessors, it’s about the children.
newyorker | It turns
out that liberal democracy and free trade may actually be rather
fragile achievements. (Consumerism appears safe for now.) There is
something out there that doesn’t like liberalism, and is making trouble
for the survival of its institutions.
Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The demand for recognition, Fukuyama
says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary
dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama
bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, ISIS,
Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political
movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump.
It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the
Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the
women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau,
Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, and the whole
business begins with Plato’s Republic. Fukuyama covers all of this in
less than two hundred pages. How does he do it?
Why is the desire for recognition—or identity politics, as Fukuyama
also calls it—a threat to liberalism? Because it cannot be satisfied by
economic or procedural reforms. Having the same amount of wealth as
everyone else or the same opportunity to acquire it is not a substitute
for respect. Fukuyama thinks that political movements that appear to be
about legal and economic equality—gay marriage, for example, or
#MeToo—are really about recognition and respect. Women who are sexually
harassed in the workplace feel that their dignity has been violated,
that they are being treated as less than fully human.
Fukuyama gives this desire for recognition a Greek name, taken from Plato’s Republic: thymos. He says that thymos is “a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed.” In the Republic, thymos
is distinct from the two other parts of the soul that Socrates names:
reason and appetite. Appetites we share with animals; reason is what
makes us human. Thymos is in between.
The term
has been defined in various ways. “Passion” is one translation;
“spirit,” as in “spiritedness,” is another. Fukuyama defines thymos as “the seat of judgments of worth.” This seems a semantic overreach. In the Republic, Socrates associates thymos with children and dogs, beings whose reactions need to be controlled by reason. The term is
generally taken to refer to our instinctive response when we feel we’re
being disrespected. We bristle. We swell with amour propre. We honk the
horn. We overreact.
Doesn't Pastor Manning Realize That He's A Huge Target?
With all of the enemies that he has created with his fiery rhetoric spoken from the pulpit and from his former YouTube platform, one would think that Pastor Manning would have better sense than to leave himself as vulnerable as he has by speaking to this young girl when it is so easy to be recorded with the gadgetry and technology that is available today for everyone if they so choose. It will very interesting to see how this plays out even though his vaudeville act of a pastor is truly no threat to the powers that be, it's just that his words most likely reached the "high places" that felt it was time to shut down such an annoying voice that simply just wouldn't shut up!
twitchy | Seems Democrats are coming out of the woodwork to say and write
positive things about the late Senator John McCain, which would be so
nice if they didn’t contradict the way most of them spoke about the good
senator while he was still alive.
Take for example Rep. John Lewis:
Senator John McCain was a warrior for peace. He will be deeply missed by people all around the world.
It's almost as though we've so devalued the
charge of racism and bigotry that people can no longer recognize it even
when it's legitimate. 🤔 https://t.co/8FYPEuUL6W
It’s almost as though Democrats call anyone and everyone they see
as a threat a racist and then when they become a convenient ally in any
way they’re magically not racist anymore.
rte | Pope Francis has said he will not respond to accusations by a former
top Vatican official that the Pontiff had covered up sexual abuse,
saying that the document containing the allegations "speaks for itself".
The Pope told reporters he had read the document but that he "will not say a single word on this".
He said: "I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and
all those who are interested, read the statement carefully and make
your own judgement."
He added: "I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have
the journalistic capacity to draw your conclusions. It's an act of
faith. When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may
speak."
Without going into specifics, the Pope also said: "I would like your
professional maturity to do the work for you. It will be good for you."
In a wide-ranging news conference on board the Aer Lingus flight,
Pope Francis addressed issues ranging from clerical abuse to
homosexuality and migration.
WaPo | In the wake of a summer of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, topped this weekend with an explosive letter
alleging that Pope Francis himself covered for an abusive cardinal,
American Catholics are agitating for major changes in their church.
Perhaps
for the first time, Catholics of all political stripes who protected
their hierarchy through what had once seemed the worst of the sexual
abuse crisis are training their ire on it. They are calling publicly for
bishop resignations, Robert S. Mueller-like investigations, and
boycotts of Mass and donations. Even the biggest fans of Francis and his
reformist agenda are now questioning whether he is actually part of the
problem.
“This is a different reaction from the
laity than I’ve ever seen before,” said Adrienne Alexander, the founder
of a nascent national movement called Catholics for Action that has
staged protests in seven cities in the past two weeks, with more planned
in the coming days. “Regular old church folks in the pews are saying:
This bishop has to go. Or: All bishops have to go. That’s just something
I’ve never seen from the laity.”
And
with the biting 11-page letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on
Saturday, in which the former Vatican diplomat to Washington called for
Francis’s resignation, some Catholics are voicing despair about the path
forward.
“The hope of reform on this issue: If it can’t be
achieved under Pope Francis, who can it be achieved under?” asked
Christopher Jolly Hale, who helped lead Catholic outreach for President
Obama and has until recently been a prominent supporter of Francis. He
added: “No one with good conscience can really defend him with his
record on sexual abuse. It’s been an absolute disappointment.”
Viganò’s
inflammatory yet unverified letter alleges that Francis’s predecessor
Pope Benedict XVI secretly sanctioned former cardinal Theodore E.
McCarrick for sexually harassing young priests and seminarians, but
Francis let the sanctions slide. He also obliquely implicated D.C.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl in covering up the behavior of McCarrick, who last
month became the first cardinal in history to resign as a result of
sexual abuse allegations.
The
letter “shoots the lack of trust right up the ladder,” said Joseph
Capizzi, a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of
America. “As a lay person, and I think I speak for a lot of people, we
no longer trust these men anymore.”
theintercept |Dr. Touré
Reed, professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at
Illinois State University, observed that the presumption that black
Americans aren’t equally or more invested in economic interventions as
white Americans is “pregnant, of course, with class presumptions” which
work well for the black and Latinx professional middle class — many of
whom play a significant role in defining public narratives via their
work in politics or media. Since “the principal beneficiaries of
universal policies would be poor and working class people who would
disproportionately be black and brown,” he told me, “dismissing such
policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is
a sleight of hand of sorts.”
Intersectionality, the “buzzword” taken up so faithfully by mainstream Democrats
in 2016, requires an acknowledgment that like race and sexual identity,
class is a dimension that mediates one’s perspective. That means the hashtag #trustblackwomen shouldn’t collapse the interests of Oprah, a billionaire, with, well, anyone else’s.
Similarly, not all blacks or latinos should be presumed to speak
equally to the interests of poor and working class people of color. This
is a truth easily internalized when Democrats consider figures like Ben Carson or Ted Cruz. It’s a more difficult reality to swallow when considering one of our own.
None of this is to say that in every scenario, race, gender, sexuality, and class are equal inputs. Affluent black athletes are still tackled by cops despite their wealth, and black Harvard professors are arrested
trying to unlock their own front doors. But the fact that racism hurts
even those with economic privilege is not “proof” that class doesn’t
matter, as some race reductionists have claimed. It’s simply affirmation
that racism matters too.
Consider, for instance, my colleague Zaid Jilani’s review of comprehensive police shooting data in 2015, in which he found
that 95 percent of police shootings had occurred in neighborhoods where
the household income averaged below $100,000 a year. Remember that
Philando Castile was pulled over, in part, because he was flagged for
dozens of driving offenses described as “crimes of poverty”
by local public defender Erik Sandvick. Failure to show proof of
insurance, driving with a broken taillight — these are hardly patrician
slip ups. If anything is privileged, it’s the fiction that there’s no
difference between the abuses suffered by wealthy black athletes and
working class blacks like Philando Castile. Race can increase your odds
of being targeted and abused. Money can help you survive abuse and secure justice — something which sadly eluded Castile.
“There is a tendency to reduce issues
that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to
all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances
overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who
is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race
reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well
as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those
instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent,
or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully
high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something
systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”
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