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antoine-roquentin · 7 years ago

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In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey. That fact is increasingly clear, even though the rains are still falling and the water levels in Houston are still rising.

But there’s an uncomfortable point that, so far, everyone is skating around: We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.

Houston has been sprawling out into the swamp for decades, largely unplanned and unzoned. Now, all that pavement has transformed the bayous into surging torrents and shunted Harvey’s floodwaters toward homes and businesses. Individually, each of these subdivisions or strip malls might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in aggregate, they’ve converted the metro area into a flood factory. Houston, as it was before Harvey, will never be the same again.

Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself. By the time the storm leaves the region on Wednesday, an estimated 40 to 60 inches of rain will have fallen on parts of Houston. So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals.

Harvey is infusing new meaning into meteorologists’ favorite superlatives: There are simply no words to describe what has happened in the past few days. In just the first three days since landfall, Harvey has already doubled Houston’s previous record for the wettest month in city history, set during the previous benchmark flood, Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. For most of the Houston area, in a stable climate, a rainstorm like Harvey is not expected to happen more than once in a millennium.

In fact, Harvey is likely already the worst rainstorm in U.S. history. An initial analysis by John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist, compared Harvey’s rainfall intensity to the worst storms in the most downpour-prone region of the United States, the Gulf Coast. Harvey ranks at the top of the list, with a total rainwater output equivalent to 3.6 times the flow of the Mississippi River. (And this is likely an underestimate, because there are still two days of rains left.) That much water—20 trillion gallons over five days—is about one-sixth the volume of Lake Erie. According to a preliminary and informal estimate by disaster economist Kevin Simmons of Austin College, Harvey’s economic toll “will likely exceed Katrina”—the most expensive disaster in U.S. history. Harvey is now the benchmark disaster of record in the United States.

As with Katrina, Harvey gives us an opportunity for an inflection point as a society. The people of Houston didn’t choose this to happen to them, but what happens next is critically important for all of us.

Climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth thinks that as much as 30 percent of the rainfall from Harvey is attributable to human-caused global warming. That means Harvey is a storm decades in the making.

While Harvey’s rains are unique in U.S. history, heavy rainstorms are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide. One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn’t just a Houston problem. This is happening all over.

A warmer atmosphere enhances evaporation rates and increases the carrying capacity of rainstorms. Harvey drew its energy from a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, which will only grow warmer in the decades to come. At its peak, on Saturday night, Harvey produced rainfall rates exceeding six inches per hour in Houston, and its multiday rainfall total is close to the theoretical maximum expected for anywhere in the United States.

Weather patterns are also getting “stuck” more often, boosting the chances that a storm like Harvey would stall out. Some scientists have linked this to melting Arctic sea ice, which reduces the strength of the polar jet stream and weakens atmospheric steering currents that can otherwise dip down and kick a storm like Harvey on its way. To be sure, a storm like Harvey might have been possible in the absence of climate change, but there are many factors at play that almost assuredly made it more likely.

Adapting to a future in which a millennium-scale flood can wipe out a major city is much harder than preventing that flood in the first place. By and large, the built world we have right now wasn’t constructed with climate change in mind. By continuing to pretend that we can engineer our way out of the worsening flooding problem with bigger dams, more levees and higher-powered pumping equipment, we’re fooling ourselves into a more dangerous future.

It’s possible to imagine something else: a hopeful future that diverges from climate dystopia and embraces the scenario in which our culture inevitably shifts toward building cities that work with the storms that are coming, instead of Sisyphean efforts to hold them back. That will require abandoning buildings and concepts we currently hold dear, but we’ll be rewarded with a safer, richer, more enduring world in the end. There were many people in Houston already working on making that world a realityeven before Harvey came.

If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future. Those of us who know this need to say it loudly. As long as our leaders, in words, and the rest of us, in actions, are OK with incremental solutions to a civilization-defining, global-scale problem, we will continue to stumble toward future catastrophes. Climate change requires us to rethink old systems that we’ve assumed will last forever. Putting off radical change—what futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay”—just adds inevitable risk to the system. It’s up to the rest of us to identify this behavior and make it morally repugnant.

Insisting on a world that doesn’t knowingly condemn entire cities to a watery, terrifying future isn’t “politicizing” a tragedy—it’s our moral duty. The weather has always been political. If random whims of atmospheric turbulence devastate one neighborhood and spare another, it’s our job as a civilized society to equalize that burden. The choices of how to do that, by definition, are political ones.

Climate change hits the vulnerable in a community hardest. It is no different in Houston with Hurricane Harvey, where even if an evacuation would have been ordered, countless thousands of people wouldn’t have had the means or ability to act. There is simply no way to safely evacuate a metro area the size of Houston—6.5 million people spread across an area roughly the size of Massachusetts.

The symbolism of the worst flooding disaster in U.S. history hitting the sprawled-out capital city of America’s oil industry is likely not lost on many. Institutionalized climate denial in our political system and climate denial by inaction by the rest of us have real consequences. They look like Houston.

Once Harvey’s floodwaters recede, the process will begin to imagine a New Houston, and that city will inevitably endure future mega-rainstorms as the world warms. The rebuilding process provides an opportunity to chart a new path. The choice isn’t between left and right, or denier and believer. The choice is between success and failure.

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skiptomy · 7 years ago

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So here’s a cake I made for a mod at Dystopia Rising: Massachusetts. It’s 100% vegetarian and in the future, if I make another, I might even make it vegan, so anyone can gnaw on that irony. It’s even got bones inside. Anatomically (mostly) correct bones!

#cw gore #cw severed arm #Dystopia Rising #Dystopia Rising Mass #DRMA

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the-clansman · 7 years ago

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posting this on here - cross post from facebook

[Mental Health - very long] probably shocking to a lot

I've never really posted about my own before because most of the time I felt like I didn't want to feel like I was drawing attention to myself.

Six years ago today I wanted to kill myself. I'll never forget that August 18th, 2011. Roughly around 5:15 pm at the 68th street Hunter College subway stop. I wanted to walk in front of the subway and end everything. That summer was a pretty crazy one for me filled with lots of ups and downs.

Most of the people that know me today, didn't know me six years ago. All of this news is probably coming as a shock to many people. I suffer from depression on a daily basis and have since i was starting college back in 2008. I don't remember exactly when it hit me but as I look back on those days today, the depression definitely started in the 08/09 freshman year. I don't even remember most of 2010 because it was really bad for me.

I'm the type of person who never asks for help but always offers my help to anyone at anytime. It took a few years before I was on the right medication to handle it. It was my stubbornness because I would always think to myself "why do I need pills to be happy". It took a lot of doctors appointments to realize that it was more than just being happy.

The depression has definitely fucked over many things in my life but I also accept the blame for stuff. I would create excuses to not go out with friends or do things right away because it was hard for me to even get myself moving without breaking down. But also sometimes I would force myself to do something because in the moment I hated life but I knew that in an hour I would be having a lot of fun.

Every day is a constant struggle for me. Some are worse than others but I keep chugging along in life. Some days the suicidal thoughts come up but I've never physically harmed myself which for me is a positive at the end of the day. 6 years later I'm still here and alive. Even this year I had suicidal thoughts but I would think to myself "Angus's story isn't complete. He needs to keep fighting" and then I would keep fighting through it.

As I look back on everything that's happened to me I'm happy that I didn't kill myself. There has been a lot of negative events and situations but the positives definitely outweigh them. Seeing Rush and Iron Maiden in concert, discovering folk and power metal, moving to Massachusetts, the different jobs I've had, mother fucking Dystopia Rising, tabletop wargaming, and fucking hundreds more.

People see me today as a very positive person and always happy. Most people see me at folk metal shows or at DR so in those areas, yes I am very happy but during everyday life it's much harder for me to be positive all the time which is why I can easily put on the disguise. I know I'm not the only one who struggles everyday but people don't really expect me to have depression. I've seen a lot of friends that post about their own mental health and I thought it was time to post about mine

I really want to thank the hundreds of people who have been there and have known me over the past 6 years. The DR community and NY/MA metal community are both fucking amazing. Also I need to thank the one person who has always been by my side and best friend for 21+ years. He knows who he is.

It feels really good to finally get all of this off my chest and to not see it as some personal weakness in me. It's only made me stronger to continue on

#me

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quinnarts · 8 years ago

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check it oooouuuuut i got to make the poster for this month’s event at dystopia rising: massachusetts!!

#dystopia rising #dr #my art #digital

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sableaire · 8 years ago

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So, I see in your tags that you're Canadian. You wouldn't happen to be looking for a cute American wife and her adorable blonde toddler to save from the Trump administration would you? Cause if so I've got an awesome surprise for you.

Hello, hello, ahaha - flattered as I am, I don’t know where you got that I am Canadian, as I am a US citizen attending university in Massachusetts. So, alas, I cannot save you, as I too am living the dystopia.

All we can do is hope for a white, teenage girl to rise to the occasion, agonizing over a love triangle, to save us all.

#our dystopia #about me #sableask #aha #spencespin #ya fiction

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dystopialiving · 8 years ago

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Case Study #9: President-Elect Donald Trump

Welcome back, readers! The next subject on my list of topics was supposed to be the “Let’s Play” genre of YouTube videos, but I felt that the spirit of this blog mandated that I address this subject first.

Some Background

Throughout the course of the 2016, I toyed around with how I would approach this subject if it ever came to pass. But, like most people, I didn’t take the possibility seriously.

I didn’t honestly think that American voters would choose to be their president a man who has no military or political experience, has a spectacular record of failure and fraud in the one area of experience he did campaign on, seems to have little idea what the President actually does, is notoriously thin-skinned and petty, and has been dogged by substantial accusations of racism and sexual assault not just during his campaign, but for decades prior.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious:

However, it’s important to note that the American public didn’t actually choose Trump for president. As of this writing, Donald Trump received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and will be the first President in US history to enter the office with a negative approval rating. That’s a big part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is that there’s not much to write about Donald Trump that hasn’t already been written. His flaws and failures received no shortage of coverage during the election cycle. Trump himself calls this ‘unfair.’ A rational person calls it ‘accurate,’ particularly when all that most sources have to do is quote the man verbatim to paint him in a negative light. Americans who voted for Trump saw this coverage and thought one of two equally troubling things:

It couldn’t possibly be true, because the media is a horrible bias machine that makes up lies to discredit a man who just wants to Make America Great Again

All of this was probably true to some degree, but it didn’t matter enough to disqualify Trump as a candidate, because he’s going to Make America Great Again

The reality, of course, is that sometimes a person is awful enough that unbiased coverage of that person will portray him negatively. Donald Trump is one such kind of awful.

While defenders and apologists of Trump have been quick to point out that economic anxiety was the primary determinant of votes in this election, the numbers say otherwise. Per a recent study from political scientists at the University of Massachusetts, racism and sexism were far better predictors of one’s proclivity to vote for Trump than economic dissatisfaction was. In other words, a big part of what’s going on is a white, male America gasping against a world in which they have to share their prosperity with people who are fundamentally unlike them.

And now, a man who spent his entire campaign alienating most Americans who don’t look or think like him is charged with leading our country.

So, rather than reiterate work that’s already been done by better writers—again, most of what there is to say about Donald Trump has already been said, and there’s not space here to touch on even half the shit that’s wrong with him—let’s look at the surrounding circumstances that led to his presidency, and how they align with the tropes we know from dystopian fiction. Given the circumstances outlined below, I’m certain that nobody who voted for Donald Trump will have their mind changed by this post. Still, it’s worth trying to understand how we got here.

The Dystopia

What’s amazing about Donald Trump’s dystopian rise is the sheer number of things that had to go wrong for him to get elected—like a goddamn Rube Goldberg machine designed by H.R. Giger.

Artist’s rendering

Practically every dystopian trope was on full display during the 2016 election. Let’s look at them one by one, and assess how each trope contributed to what, in four years, we’ll be calling “Our Second Long National Nightmare.” In isolation, any one of these tropes probably wouldn’t have resulted in a Trump presidency. Together, however, they resulted in what may end up being the most dangerous election outcome in American history.

Misinformation/post-truth

In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian regime of Oceania depicted therein is engaged in a perpetual propaganda campaign against truth. Readers of the book likely recall the iconic line, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” In the context of the novel, the line is disseminated as propaganda by Big Brother, the shadowy head of the totalitarian state. Midway through the novel, the state is engaged in Hate Week, an event designed to drum up patriotic fervor. Prior to this point, Oceania has been engaged in a perpetual war with Eurasia, but midway through a Hate Week speech, the target changes to Eastasia. The population buys into it immediately. In the totalitarian regime of Oceania, the facts don’t matter—only the galvanizing effects they have against an external enemy.

That is Donald Trump’s campaign to a T.

Fact-checking Donald Trump is a bit like banging your head against a wall. To date, Politifact has ranked nearly 70% of his statements as somewhere between “mostly false” and “pants on fire.” For reference, that number is 26% for Barack Obama. But again, that doesn’t seem to matter, because a large part of the conservative electorate seems convinced that facts are biased against them. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence from multiple sources that their party members are less honest, the broad conclusion that Republicans draw is not that they need to try harder to back up their statements with facts, it’s that the fact-checkers are secret liberals trying to ruin their reputations—see accusations about PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.Org for example.

(As an aside, engaging in mental gymnastics to avoid drawing the most likely conclusion is certainly not new or unique to Republicans in 2016. If you’re interested in a similar rabbit hole on the fallibility of the human mind and the unwillingness to admit it, I’d recommend reading up the recent Shazaam spat that has swept across sections of the internet.)

Beyond the outright fabrications, everything about Donald Trump’s broader popularity among a conservative base is backwards. From a party that until very recently championed moral absolutes and raged against concepts like cultural relativism, we now have pundit after pundit claiming that facts don’t matter. Hell, here’s Newt Gingrich, a Republican stalwart, openly stating at the RNC that it doesn’t matter that violent crime is down, because what matters more is that people feel unsafe:

“We care the most about feelings. We have always cared the most about feelings.”

This pattern of blatantly dumping facts (but still kicking and screaming when being called out on it) carries over into another truth-related issue that has sprung up in 2016 and is poised to become an even bigger problem in the future: Fake news. Fake news (more accurately called hoax news) is, very specifically, news that has been deliberately fabricated to generate clicks, usually in pursuit of ad revenue. It is not a small problem. On Facebook, where somewhere between 20% and 50% of Americans get news regularly, fake news articles actually outperformed real news articles leading up to the election. Those fake stories overwhelmingly skewed in favor of Trump, and included such obvious falsehoods as Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS. This conservative bent to hoax news stories led Facebook to pull back from plans to develop an algorithm to weed out these stories from users’ news feeds, for fear of a backlash from conservative users.

Not that long ago, this would be taken, as would the aforementioned fact checking, as clear evidence that the right has a truth problem. But again—all of this has been said already, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Instead, as a whole other layer to the shit sandwich that is our post-truth dystopia, the idea of fake news itself has now been appropriated as an attack against legitimate media. Case in point, Sean Hannity of Fox News (a person either duped by or deliberately spreading fake news) has taken to labeling stories he doesn’t care for as “liberal fake news,” such as the recent (bipartisan, verified) reports that Russian hacking was directed at swinging the 2016 election. And he’s not alone—You can read more on the phenomenon here. Given this reality, the introduction of the terminology of fake news seems to have backfired. It’s become ammunition for the very people spreading it to fight back.

What makes the specter of fake news ultimately more frightening than a totalitarian anti-truth propaganda campaign is how decentralized it is. While some fake news clearly has an ideological bent (and director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggests that Russian interference played a role in its dissemination), the reality is that much of it was created simply, as is becoming a common theme on this blog, to turn a profit. This interview in the Washington Post with perennial hoaxer Paul Horner illustrates the fact that because incendiary fake news stories are clicked and shared far more often than the real thing, there’s a genuine living to me made from AdSense and Facebook traffic—On the order of $10,000 per month, in Horner’s case. Horner insists what he’s doing is satire (a dubious claim at best), but seems to be beginning to understand the negative consequences of his actions. Coupled with the fact that young people seem increasingly unable to distinguish real news from fake news, the post-truth reality is poised to become far worse before it gets better.

While a disregard for traditional media and the dissemination of falsehoods were part of the problem, much of the blame rests on traditional media outlets themselves, in particular network newscasts, for a failure to report substantially on policy during the election. Leading up to the election, evening network newscasts had dedicated just 32 minutes of coverage to policy—That’s not an average. That’s a total. This lack of policy coverage almost certainly contributed to the trend among voters to vote against the candidate they disliked rather than for the candidate they liked. They were voting for a person, not a set of policies.

Of course, media is a market. This change in coverage was ultimately brought on by the public’s thirst for entertainment over education. Regardless, it’s only in an environment that so substantially devalues facts and evidence that a candidate like Donald Trump can succeed. Only in this environment can voters seeking to push back against the liberal coastal elite take a look at this asshole and think he’s on their side:

A working man’s man if ever I did see one.

Beyond the problem of active disinformation, comparing rhetoric around Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 to Trump's campaign in 2016 yields so much cognitive dissonance that it’s a wonder more Republicans’ heads haven’t exploded. Republicans went from insisting that Obama was unqualified to be President due to a lack of experience to lauding a man who has never held any political or military position. They went from throwing a shit fit about Obama (a man who by all accounts is a practicing, if liberal Christian with a substantial understanding of scripture) not being Christian enough to hold the Presidency to supporting a man who transparently only cares about Christianity to the extent to which it earned him votes. Seriously—In his speech at Liberty University, he referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians, and at the Family Leadership Summit, he stated that he’s never bothered asking God for forgiveness. The right raged against the moral bankruptcy of Obama, a family man apparently absent of any personal scandal, then threw their weight behind a thrice-married unrepentant adulterer, philanderer, braggart, and supporter of the pornography industry.

Any case that the Republican party is one of values, morals, or principles has gone out the window with their support of Trump, and it’s seemingly no big deal. None of it matters as long as their team wins. Yet again, this has been covered widely, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

The caste system

The problem of fake news and the distrust of media would certainly be less severe were it not for another dystopian reality we now face: our increasing division and segmentation. There are a number of ways to frame this: echo chambers, cyberbalkanization, the splinternet, or even a new caste system. This level of division is present in many dystopian works, including 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Iron Heel, and others. However, while most dystopian fiction sees populations divided into castes based on power, the divisions we see now are based on ideology. Furthermore, rather than being enforced top-down by some totalitarian regime, these divisions have been self-driven through recent advances in technology.

The promise of the internet was that it would connect us like never before. Divisions of geography, race, class, and even language would melt away. What’s happened instead is that we’ve mostly chosen to interact and organize with people who think the way that we do. Conspiracy theories, hate groups, and other fringe movements have seen their popularity explode in the age of the internet. People who hold absurd or reprehensible ideas that would have been normalized out in polite society can now opt to find kindred spirits across the globe. This is how we end up with Neo-Nazi groups like the “Alt Right” holding openly racist victory rallies rife with the type of language and imagery this country fought a war against just a few generations back.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that ideological divisions have been reinforced by the tech companies who run our social networks. Facebook in particular is an egregious offender, though it’s hard to argue with their actions given their endgame of generating advertising revenue. In short, because Facebook’s business model is based on time spent on the site and pay-per-click advertising, its News Feed algorithm is designed to show you the kind of content you’re most likely to engage with. Invariably, that’s content that you’re already inclined to agree with. Coupled with the fact that Facebook’s massive data machine probably has your political views nailed based on your behavior, you’re likely to only see your side of the political debate. It’s essentially a tech-enhanced form of confirmation bias, and its presence is obvious as soon as you consider the alternative would look like:

In this divided environment, fake news and misinformation thrives. If you only encounter one set of news sources or one ideological perspective, you’ll never naturally come upon any information that contradicts the what you’ve been fed by unscrupulous sources. These divisions, by the way, also played a substantial role in why journalists were unable to predict Trump’s victory: They simply lived their online lives in a different ideological sphere than his most ardent supporters.

The central problem is that humans have never really overcome our evolutionary proclivity for tribalism. Fundamentally, we don’t like dealing with people who are different from us. It takes significant effort and discomfort to expose ourselves to and tolerate those outside our established tribe, however we define that. Advertisers and tech companies know this, and they are exploiting it for profit.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies turn up in a number of dystopian works, often the product of totalitarian regimes. However, the best example of this type of dystopia in isolation is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In Brazil, there’s no Big Brother figure—The entire dystopia stems from a reliance on bureaucracy and overly-complex, poorly-maintained machines. The characters in the film see their lives irreparably destroyed as the bureaucratic inertia of the state machine, spurred a clerical error, employs catastrophic means to reach its built-in ends.

It’s a real laugh-riot.

In the 2016 election, two equally harmful pieces of bureaucracy came together to pave the way for President Trump.

The Electoral College is one such piece of dystopian bureaucracy, and to understand why, we need to explore its origins. Electoral College was, in part, designed to mitigate fears that the founders had about direct democracy—i.e. a system in which every citizen has direct input in the government’s actions. Electoral College votes are allocated based on a state’s total population, rather than its population of eligible or registered voters. While may seem like a middling distinction, it’s anything but. Consider the historical context of the Constitutional Convention, when the Electoral College was established. You likely learned about the Three-Fifths Compromise at one point or another in your educational history—and I can find few more egregious examples in history of a dehumanizing bureaucracy than an agreement to assign fractional personhood to an entire category of human beings. For the Electoral College, it’s important to understand what effect the Three-Fifths Compromise actually had. Because slaves were fractionally counted toward a state’s total population even though they were without franchise, slave-holding states ended up with disproportionately more representation in the Federal Government relative to their population of eligible voters.

Without the Electoral College, the candidate who received the most votes would be elected President—which is absolutely how Presidential elections should work, particularly in a country that loves to toot its own horn over how great freedom and democracy supposedly are. Instead, we have a heavily bureaucratized system that doesn’t actually incentivize voting—i.e. it doesn’t matter how many people in a given state are registered to vote or choose to vote in a given election; that state receives the same number of electoral votes regardless. The powers that be know this, and those interested in preserving the status quo have taken concrete measures to exploit it in the form of a second piece of bureaucracy.

Since the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 17 Republican-led state legislatures moved to implement measures deliberately designed to suppress voter turnout among poor and minority populations—In particular, voter identification laws, restricting polling locations and hours, and limits on early voting. Ostensibly, these laws require voters to jump through additional hoops to mitigate the problem of voter fraud. However, all evidence suggests that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and for a good reason—It’s an extremely ineffective way to swing the vote.

In reality, these bureaucratic hurdles are disproportionately difficult and expensive to navigate for the poor, the elderly, and people of color, and deliberately so. This isn’t some wild conspiracy theory, by the way. Republicans have openly admitted that voter suppression among likely Democratic voters is the ultimate aim of voter ID laws.

It’s the Three Fifths Compromise all over again: States get to continue to pull representative power at the federal level from their sizable populations, even in the face of actively restricting the franchise of many within their borders.

Fortunately, some of these restrictions have recently been struck down by courts at various levels, but much of the harm has already been done.

The vilification of the other

A recurring theme in dystopias is the creation and vilification of an enemy from outside. 1984 has both the aforementioned Hate Week and the Two-Minutes Hate, a daily period of propaganda spewing vitriol at the enemies of the party. The Black Mirror Episode “Men Against Fire” provides a more recent example of this trope.

Donald Trump’s campaign was built on the vilification of many groups, including Muslims, journalists, Hollywood, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and other racial minorities. Hate groups latched onto this, leading to Trump’s unprecedented level of support among white supremacists.

During his presidency, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed will be his Two-Minutes Hate. Here’s just the most recent example in a long line of insults against those who disagree with Trump:

(full story here)

Disregarding the fact that Trump may just have spent so much time around washed-up has beens while hosting Celebrity Apprentice that he doesn’t recognize talent when it slaps him in the face, this is the tone that we can expect from him. If someone speaks out against him in the slightest, it doesn’t matter how well-respected or successful that person is—He’ll call them sad, a failure, a loser, or some other (often laughably incorrect) insult.

This goes beyond propaganda. Trump’s tweets have actually mobilized direct threats and action among his followers against his selected targets, such as in the case of United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones. Jones, a man otherwise entirely outside of the public spotlight, was interviewed on CNN following Trump’s claims that he’d personally kept more than 1,000 jobs at Indiana’s Carrier Corporation from being outsourced to Mexico. Jones, as a source close to the situation, explained that Trump’s claims were an exaggeration, as 350 of those jobs were already staying in the US before Trump got involved. In response, Trump lashed out on Twitter, and Jones received a deluge of threatening calls and messages from Trump’s supporters.

It’s not an overstatement to say that this level of harassment will have a chilling effect on individuals’ willingness to exercise their right to free speech. Beyond that, Donald Trump’s equal willingness to make enemies from within and without will have a genuine impact on our unity as a country. Following 9/11, then-president George W. Bush famously drew a line in the sand: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Trump is poised to take things one step further—There’s no “us” in a Trump presidency, only “me.” Donald Trump is so petty and so thin-skinned, so absolutely thirsty for praise and approval, that we can expect lines to be drawn based not on principle, but personal allegiance to Trump himself.

More broadly, the tone Donald Trump has set in his campaign spells disaster for many minority groups in this country. In the wake of his election, reports of hate crimes in the US skyrocketed—higher even than they were in the wake of 9/11.

Authoritarianism/totalitarianism

Let’s just run down a quick list of the un-democratic, hyper-authoritarian, borderline fascist shit that Donald Trump said or promised to do in recent months:

Advocated violence against protestors at his rallies

Advocated for jailing his political opponents

Promised to build a giant, high-tech security wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border we share with a friendly country

Threatened to crush freedom of the press for those who cover him unfavorably

Threatened to reject the results of the election if he lost

Supported a complete ban on all Muslim immigration

Demanded every Obama appointee vacate their office by inauguration day, even absent a Senate-confirmed replacement

Moved to purge civil servants from the Department of Energy who worked on climate-related initiatives

Against two Supreme Court rulings protecting the act as free speech, advocated for jail time for those who burn the American flag in protest

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and the man’s not even in office yet.

Redeeming Qualities

In the immediate aftermath of the election, some people took on the “wait and see” perspective on a Trump presidency, cautioning that it might not be all bad—absent any evidence to support that position, and disregarding the real harm his candidacy had already done. Well, we’ve waited a few weeks, and if Donald Trump will have redeeming qualities as a President, we haven’t seen them. The decisions he’s made since his election have been so colossally bad that you couldn’t make them up if you tried. He’s been skipping intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person” (reminder: smart people don’t feel the need to regularly tell people they’re smart), and he’s stacked his cabinet and administration with picks so extraordinarily awful that many of them stand for the exact opposite of what their positions are supposed to accomplish. Let’s look at just a few:

Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy—When Rick Perry was running for the Republican Nomination in 2012, he explained that he wanted to eliminate three departments on day one: Education, Commerce, and, uh... a third that he forgot. That blunder more or less killed his chances at the presidency, but had he been diligent enough to remember this very basic policy point of his own campaign, he was supposed to name the Department of Energy. Now, he’ll be leading it. Awesome. Oh, and don’t forget that the Department of Energy is responsible for the design, testing and production of all nuclear weapons.

Jeff Sessions for Attorney General—Jeff Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s for being too racist. If you’re too racist for 1986, you’re way too fucking racist for 2017. Oh, and if you live in one of the states that has legalized recreational or medical marijuana, be ready to kiss that goodbye, because Sessions loathes the stuff. If there’s one idea that summarizes Sessions, it’s this, straight from his mouth, regarding the KKK: "[they] were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

Scott Pruitt for head of the EPA—As Attorney General in Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt has sued the EPA over and over in attempts to block the safeguards that limit air and water pollution, i.e. the main thing the EPA does. Pruitt has taken nearly a quarter of a million dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry over the years, and co-authored an op-ed in which he claimed that “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” which they absolutely do not—it’s pretty much a 100% consensus among those with the most knowledge of climate science. But again, who gives a shit about facts anymore? Pruitt is not the only climate change denier in the cabinet.

Andy Puzder for Secretary of Labor—I’d be remiss not to address this one, because (and I’m not making this up) readers of this blog already know this dickhead from Case Study #7. He’s the asshole CEO of Carls Jr. and Hardees who wants to replace his workers with robots because he hates the idea of paying them a living wage. That’s definitely a man we want in charge of federal wages and hour standards.

Some of these picks must still be confirmed by the (Republican-controlled) senate, though in a troubling development, many of them have failed to complete the ethics reviews typically required to tease out conflicts of interest. This is particularly important given that Trump has assembled the richest cabinet in US history, many with substantial foreign business ties. I’d like to think that the working class folks who voted for Trump are mildly peeved about this, but, to beat a dead horse, none of this is new information. Yet, people are carrying on like this administration won’t be the Michael Jordan of fuck-ups and disappointments.

Just kidding, that title is already held by Darko Milicic [note: I don’t know shit about sports and I have no idea if this joke lands].

If there’s a single silver lining about Trump himself, it’s that he is in no way a man of his word (see, again, his consistent record of dishonesty), so he may decide not to pursue many of the horrible causes he’s championed in his candidacy. Most recently, he ditched both formally and practically the “drain the swamp” concept that characterized the latter part of his campaign—all it takes is a quick look at his picks to see that he probably never cared about it in the first place beyond its value as a tagline to bring in votes.

If there’s a silver lining about Trump’s election, it’s that it’s a wakeup call. Progress is not inevitable. The government will not always have your best interests at heart. The US is not immune from the tide of authoritarianism, and only direct action will stop it.

Can We Fix It?

Donald Trump will be President. There’s no changing that, though we shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t complete a full four-year term, for any number of reasons including impeachment or simply giving up. What we can change is the tide that swept him into office, because absent serious action, Trump will not be the last of his kind. Change starts with education in four crucial areas: Civics, history, pluralism, and critical thinking. By education, I don’t mean formal training in an academic environment (though it certainly wouldn’t hurt)—I mean direct, personal interaction with the kinds of people and experiences that create personal growth.

I have to believe that if we as citizens had a better understanding of what the President does (and, perhaps more critically, can’t do), we wouldn’t be stuck with Trump. Hell, if Trump had a better understanding of what the President actually has to do on a daily basis, he probably would have dropped out before the election. Democracy needs to be more than just background noise—it needs to be an active pursuit. It’s not something you engage with every four years (or even every two). Healthy democracy requires regular involvement at local, state and national levels. Know your representatives and communicate with them. Volunteer for or donate to worthy organizations. Get involved in a campaign for a candidate that you believe in. Sign petitions. Protest.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that as the generation that fought against fascism in World War II has started to shuffle off this mortal coil, we as a country have renewed our own flirtation with authoritarianism. Absent that direct link to warn us off this path, we have moved down it yet again, and a poor education in history is partially to blame. It’s not enough to know about the historical reality of the rise of fascism in Europe—we need to know why it happened in order to stem its tide here and now. America also seems reluctant to revisit its own historical failures: slavery, internment, racism and segregation come to mind as topics that we need to be reminded of to understand why we need to continue to actively reject policies that limit the rights and freedoms of others. America is by no means perfect, and it is only by reminding ourselves of that fact that we can turn away from our darker instincts.

An education in pluralism is actually quite simple to accomplish, if uncomfortable to experience for some. It boils down to this: Talk with people who do not share your beliefs or background. Meet your neighbors. Read news sources that you violently disagree with. Visit parts of your town that you don’t normally venture into. At the same time, be vigilant: While it’s always worth hearing another side of the story, it’s important to remember that not all viewpoints are equally valid, and not every idea deserves a platform. That kind of false equivalency is part of what got us here in the first place.

This is where critical thinking comes in. I can’t believe that we need to keep revisiting the old adage of “you can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” but here we are. We as a country need to do a much better job of understanding how to properly evaluate the strength of our sources. Healthy skepticism is essential, and we can’t be shy about fact-checking claims—especially those that would confirm our existing biases. The C.R.A.P. test is a good place to start when evaluating sources, and it never hurts to find a secondary or tertiary source that backs up your findings. However, I’m not optimistic that we can ultimately overcome the stronger forces at play here. Confirmation bias has been a problem as long as humans have had access to external information, and we continue to organize ourselves into tribes regardless of the level of interconnectivity available to us. Can we really expect people to voluntarily confront uncomfortable truths in order to move towards a more objective picture of reality? Furthermore, given the profit motive that drives social media’s segmentation of its users, I’m not sure if there’s any way to break out of an ideological echo chamber besides entirely disengaging from Facebook and Twitter. At minimum, if those platforms are our primary means of social contact, that needs to change.

Aside from the issue of education, there are plenty of fixes we should work towards, though it’s unclear how easy any of them would be to accomplish. Ideally, the Electoral College should be done away with entirely, but a similarly amenable solution exists in allocating electors based on total votes cast, rather than total population. That change would have the effect of disincentivizing the kind of voter suppression efforts that have become increasingly common in recent years—making it harder for residents to register as voters means your state loses electoral power (For the record, I’ve run the numbers on this scenario, and it looks like Trump would still have come out on top).

Perhaps the most important things we can do, however, is stand up for one another and push back against the tone that Trump has set. If you’re fortunate enough not to belong to one of the groups that Trump and his followers have targeted, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the kinds of attacks many people are already facing. As this kind of oppression and intimidation grows, it’s up to everyone who witnesses it to speak out against it, firmly and directly. Be prepared for direct confrontation, and be prepared to push back against the tide of post-truth nonsense. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and unsubstantiated bullshit deserve to be called out.

Finally, if you support a progressive cause, don’t count on the government to have your back. Individual behavior will become increasingly important as the regulatory ground gained in recent years begins to roll back. In other words, it’s time to put your money (literally and metaphorically) where your mouth is.

Here’s a quick exercise—whether you’re liberal or conservative, take a moment to reflect on your values (political and otherwise) and write them down. I’m guessing most of us have a pretty similar list: Freedom, limited government, justice, equality, family, truth, faith, peace. We may have different ideas of how each of those values looks in execution, but we can probably all recognize that, based on everything he’s said and done, Donald Trump’s list of values does not align with our own:

And so, the time comes for us to live out our values, openly and aggressively. Want to stop climate change? Better start driving less and eating less meat. Can’t stand big banks? Better move your money to a local credit union. Want to push back against racial injustice? Join one of the many social movements working to keep those in power accountable. Give of your time and of your resources to those causes that align with your values.

The road ahead will not be an easy one, but what we do in the next four years will be critical in determining our future as a country. Donald Trump would have you believe that he has a mandate, when in reality, he won the election on a bureaucratic technicality. The same people who have spent years blocking Barack Obama at every turn will now pivot and try to appeal to unity.

Don’t buy it for a minute. Trump’s ideas are un-American, and they are beneath the ideals that this country was founded on—even if we’ve failed many times to live up to those ideals throughout our history. It’s up to every citizen to push back against fear and ignorance. This is not a question of right versus left. It’s a question of right versus wrong.

America will likely never be a utopia—We are only as good as our worst instincts. But if we recommit ourselves to our living our common values, and stand firm against the authoritarian, spiteful, dishonest and divisive tide of Trump, we can return to a path that leads us toward the pursuit of our ideals.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars: Midterm elections are November 6th, 2018.

Up next: The “Let’s Play” YouTube genre

#DystopiaLiving #dystopia #politics #donald trump #hillary clinton #election 2016 #orwell 1984 #brazil

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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There’s a plan for that: 2020 field bombards voters with big ideas

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/theres-a-plan-for-that-2020-field-bombards-voters-with-big-ideas/

There’s a plan for that: 2020 field bombards voters with big ideas

Sen. Elizabeth Warren‘s proposals have led to a rush of policy proposals from other Democratic candidates. Warren’s popularity has inched up alongside her focus on churning out detailed policy plans. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo

In the last week alone, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren released trillion dollar-plus climate change plans, while Jay Inslee added to his voluminous set of tracts on the issue.

Julián Castro unveiled a wide-ranging proposal to address “overaggressive” policing, Beto O’Rourke produced a raft of government and electoral reforms and Cory Booker unfurled a housing plan heavy on land use, estate tax and federal grant rules.

Story Continued Below

In a presidential primary system that doesn’t always reward substantive policy debates, the 2020 contest is beginning to stand out for featuringan unlikely renaissance of ideas. Twelve hours rarely passes without a candidate offering some new plan.

“Right now, the primary is an ideas contest,” R.L. Miller, founder of the super PAC Climate Hawks Vote, said. “Jay Inslee’s policies are getting talked about, even if he himself is not rising much in the polls. Kamala Harris is putting out some very bread and butter, kitchen table policies. One of the ways in which candidates stand out right now … is to write smart, compelling policies. And that’s why every day or so it seems like another candidate has released another policy.”

One reason for the rush of policy proposals is Warren, the Massachusetts senator whose popularity has inched up alongside her focus on churning out detailed policy plans. It’s even created a fundraising opportunity for her campaign: the sale of “Warren Has a Plan for That” T-shirts.

“Now the others are saying, ‘I’ve got to get me some positions, too,’” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

But broader forces are at work, as well. Never before has a presidential primary opened with an incumbent president who is as loathed by Democrats as is Donald Trump — or who has so dramatically altered the policy landscape on issues ranging from climate change and health care to immigration and trade. At the same time, the president is famously disinterested in policy details.

For brooding Democrats, the primary field’s position papers are an emotional refuge — this summer’s dreamy must reads.

“I think that what is happening is the voters are taking the policy proposals as visions of hope after the 2½ years of Trump, where everything has been so negative, so horrific,” Ray Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said. “Voters are starving for some positive, hopeful, aspirational things to look forward to.”

as Doug Herman, a California-based Democratic strategist, put it this way: “If you’re looking at the plans as a solution, then today is dystopia and tomorrow is utopia.”

The yearning for changed policies in the White House — regardless of the Democrat shouldering them — is so acute that when 14 presidential contenders traveled to Herman’s state recently for the California Democratic Party convention, supporters of Bernie Sanders and Warren temporarily suspended rival demonstrations to join together in a chant for Medicare for all.

For candidates who are still introducing themselves to voters, the substance of a plan can carry significant political weight. Biden’s $1.7 trillion climate proposal served to blunt some criticism from the party’s left flank, though it inadvertently drew unfavorable attentionwhen it appeared to include passages copied from existing documents.

Harris (D-Calif.) has used policy proposals involving teacher pay and maternal mortality to reinforce her credentials as an advocate for working people and women — especially women of color. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) put infrastructure investment at the center of her campaign with her first major policy proposal. And even longshot candidates can rely on policy proposals to generate some media attention — as John Delaney received for his own climate change proposal and his plan to create a national service program for young people.

The sheer multitude of plans is staggering, reflecting both the breadth of the 24-candidate Democratic field and the lack of any one dominant issue within it.

“Obviously the economy’s important,” Miringoff said. “But I don’t think there’s one thing that’s driving the electorate, other than Donald Trump, and there are a lot of things Democrats are interested in.”

How closely most voters are scrutinizing the policy proposals they come across is unclear. There is also some risk to laying out detailed proposals since it offers a fixed target in the general election — particularly if it contains controversial elements.

Following the midterm elections last year, only 9 percent of Democrats listed policy reasons for votes they cast that cycle, with a majority of voters citing partisan concerns instead, according to a Pew Research Center survey in November.

But Democratic voters do appear to want their candidates to have plans. And they have frowned on those who are slow to introduce them. O’Rourke, despite once writing a book about legalizing marijuana and espousing specific positions on any number of issues early in his campaign, was widely perceived as light on policy before releasing a robust climate plan in April. He has now released plans, as well, on immigration, reproductive rights and government and electoral reform — a plan that is divided into three parts with footnotes and nearly 30 bullet points.

“The one thing you’ll always hear in focus group research is, ‘I want to see the plan,’” Herman said. “But what that translates to in real life is that they want to see you hold up a stack of papers and say, ‘This is my plan.’ Most voters don’t really care what’s in it. They just want to know you have a plan.”

That is a departure from the last presidential election, which was defined less by policy than by Trump’s bombast and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist who worked for Clinton’s campaign in 2016, said “policy got lost in the conversation because the current president … wanted to have personality conversations instead of policy conversations.”

Now, Seawright said, “I think the American people are so hungry and thirsty for [policy] that I think it’s the candidate’s job to really feed the electorate’s thirst for a real policy agenda that will have an impact.”

That is, if the interest holds.

Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster, said it is possible that voters next year will be exceptionally interested in policy. But it is also possible the interest is temporary, the function of a “monster of content that has to be filled somehow.”

“There’s so many things spinning around that are part of the game that you have to fill them, and it’s sort of like, let’s do policy now, because there’s only so much viral campaigning or town halls on CNN or door to door in Iowa or New Hampshire or driving in the country,” Maslin said. “I don’t know that the policy push means that’s going to be a crucial criterion that’s going to determine people’s votes next January or February, or whether it will just be one building block on a very complex road.”

#Foreign #ideas #Politics #voters

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revpauljbern · 6 years ago

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The toolbox for the Beast of Revelation is being revealed!

Nine Unnerving New Technologies That

Big Brother Wants to Implant Inside You

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

For better viewing on portable devices or my website, click here :-)

The world we live in is finally starting to catch up with the book of Revelation in the back of the Bible. That would also include the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah, among others. Thousands of years ago, God declared through his prophets that in the last days there would be an explosion of knowledge, and that the sealed books given to the prophet Daniel at the conclusion of his writings would be opened. "But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many shall go here and there to increase knowledge." Daniel 12:4 He also said that as this was happening, a man of dark countenance would rise and deceive the whole world. That would include the Antichrist, who has not yet come to power.

As you read this, we stand poised on the razor's edge of prophetical history. One group, the blood-bought redeemed of the Lord Jesus Christ, wait in anticipation of the Blessed Hope found in Titus 2:13, as it is written: "... while we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ." Everyone else is unwittingly waiting for the Man of Sin, the Antichrist in the flesh, to step out of the shadows and onto the world stage. Our question to you is this – which group are you in? "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16,17. If I were you, I'd place myself squarely into the former.

Wearable technology is right around the corner, there is no stopping it. Now don't get me wrong – I'm all in favor of technology. My consistent use of the internet is indicative of that fact. I'm a retired IT guy, I was in that business for 21 years, so I'm quite comfortable with technology. What makes me uncomfortable is the huge potential for abuse if what I'm about to describe were to get into the wrong hands. “Wearables” will have their moment in the sun, but they're simply a transition technology. This technology will move from existing outside our bodies to residing inside us. That's the next big frontier. Here are nine signs that implantable tech is here now, growing rapidly, and that it will be part of your life (and your body) in the near future. Unless, of course, you choose to resist as I do.

1. Implantable smartphones

Sure, we're virtually connected to our phones 24/7 now, but what if we were actually connected to our phones? That's already starting to happen. Last year, for instance, artist Anthony Antonellis had an RFID chip embedded in his arm that could store and transfer art to his handheld smartphone. But what takes the place of the screen if the phone is inside you? Techs at Auto-desk are experimenting with a system that can display images through artificial skin. Or the images may appear in your eye implants. So these scientists and engineers want to turn your eyeballs into a screen. Nice! Researchers are also experimenting with embedded sensors that turn human bone into living speakers. Other scientists are working on eye implants that let an image be captured with a blink and transmitted to any local storage (such as that arm-borne RFID chip).

2. Healing chips

Right now, patients are using cyber-implants that tie directly to smartphone apps to monitor and treat diseases. A new bionic pancreas being tested at Boston University, for instance, has a tiny sensor on an implantable needle that talks directly to a smartphone app to monitor blood-sugar levels for diabetics. Scientists in London are developing swallow-able capsule-sized circuits that monitor fat levels in obese patients and generate genetic material that makes them feel "full". It has potential as an alternative to current surgery or other invasive ways to handle gross obesity. Dozens of other medical issues from heart murmurs to anxiety have implant/phone initiatives under way.

3. Cyber pills that talk to your doctor

“Implantables” won’t just communicate with your phone; they’ll email your doctor, too. In a project named Proteus, after the tiny body-navigating vessel in the film Fantastic Voyage, a British research team is developing cyber-pills with microprocessors in them that can text doctors directly from inside your body. The pills can share (literally) inside info to help doctors know if you are taking your medication properly and if it is having the desired effect.

4. Bill Gates' implantable birth control

The Gates Foundation is supporting an MIT project to create an implantable female compu-contraceptive controlled by an external remote control. The tiny chip generates small amounts of contraceptive hormone from within the woman's body for up to 16 years. Implantation is no more invasive than a tattoo. And, "The ability to turn the device on and off provides a certain convenience factor for those who are planning their family.", said Dr Robert Farra of MIT. This is sure to give losing the remote a whole new meaning.

5. Smart tattoos

Tattoos are hip and seemingly ubiquitous, so why not smart, digital tattoos that not only look cool, but can also perform useful tasks, like unlocking your car or entering mobile phone codes with a finger-point? Researchers at the University of Illinois have crafted an implantable skin mesh of computer fibers thinner than a human hair that can monitor your body's inner workings from the surface. A company called Dangerous Things has an NFC chip that can be embedded in a finger through a tattoo-like process, letting you unlock things or enter codes simply by pointing. A Texas research group has developed micro-particles that can be injected just under the skin, like tattoo ink, and can track body processes.

6. Brain-computer interface

Having the human brain linked directly to computers is the dream (or nightmare) of sci-fi. But now, a team at Brown University called Brain Gate is at the forefront of the real-world movement to link human brains directly to computers for a host of uses. As the Brain Gate website says, "using a baby aspirin-sized array of electrodes implanted into the brain, early research from the Brain Gate team has shown that the neural signals can be ‘decoded' by a computer in real-time and used to operate external devices." Chip maker Intel predicts practical computer-brain interfaces by 2020. Intel scientist Dean Pomerleau said in a recent article, "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts." OK, but what if the user's brain gets a computer virus? What will we do then, wipe their memories??

7. Melt-able bio-batteries

One of the challenges for implantable tech has been how to get power to devices tethered inside or floating around in human bodies. You can't plug them in. You can't easily take them out to replace a battery. A team at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working on biodegradable batteries. They generate power inside the body, transmit it wirelessly where it's needed, and then simply melt away. Another project is looking at how to use the body’s own glucose to generate power for implantables. Think the potato battery of grammar school science, but smaller and much more advanced.

8. Smart dust

Perhaps the most startling of current implantable innovations is smart dust, arrays of full computers with antennas, each much smaller than a grain of sand, that can organize themselves inside the body into as-needed networks to power a whole range of complex internal processes. Imagine swarms of these nano-devices, called motes, attacking early cancer or bringing pain relief to a wound or even storing critical personal information in a manner that is deeply encrypted and hard to hack. But not impossible. With smart dust, doctors will be able to act inside your body without opening you up, and information could be stored inside you, deeply encrypted, until you unlocked it from your very personal nano-network.

9. The verified self

Implantables hammer against social norms. They raise privacy issues and even point to a larger potential dystopia. Already, the US military has serious programs afoot to equip soldiers with implanted RFID chips, so keeping track of troops becomes automatic and worldwide. Many social critics believe the expansion of this kind of ID is inevitable. Some see it as a positive: improved crime fighting, universal secure elections, a positive revolution in medical information and response, and never a lost child again. Others see the perfect Orwellian society: a Big Brother who, knowing all and seeing all, can control all. And some see the first big, fatal step toward the Singularity, that moment when humanity turns its future over to software.

I don't know about you, but to me that is unacceptable for the reasons I've already stated. Plus, I have another reason for never being willing to surrender my future to software. My future is spending an eternity with the Man who saved my very soul. I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who carried a 150-pound wooden cross about a half-mile or so – uphill! I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who hung on a cross for me for three agonizing, excruciating hours before finally dying of blood loss and shock.

And, I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who, after lying in a borrowed grave for three days while the whole world despaired and the demons rejoiced, rose again to live forever, much to the absolute horror of those demons and to the eternal benefit of humankind. All we have to do is (1) believe it sincerely and wholeheartedly, and (2) make it our business to lives our lives as if we do believe. We do that by serving others first, understanding that when we do so, all will be served including ourselves. How about yourselves? Have you embraced Jesus yet? If not, don't you think it's time you did? Place your unconditional faith and trust in Him today!

#End of Days #Book of Revelation #mark of the beast #the antichrist #wearables

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how2to18 · 7 years ago

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ON SEPTEMBER 12, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced what amounted to a plan to dismantle the public education system. American schools, she explained, suffer from a “mundane malaise” that denies children a future and leaves them “stuck in the 1800s using a model courtesy of Prussia,” but the days of students sitting in desks, in brick and mortar schools, with school boards and the like, are coming to an end, shortly to be replaced by market-based solutions such as vouchers and charter schools.

In Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, Johann N. Neem defends the American public school system by recovering the ideals of its founders. The book provides a compelling account of how Horace Mann, Reverend William Ellery Channing, Catharine Beecher, and other antebellum advocates of the United States’s common schools brought what amounts to a liberal arts education to the nation’s children. In the face of widespread cynicism about public education, Neem reminds us that public schools can liberate children’s minds from prejudice or vocational preoccupations.

But this book may be too late. The federal government has increased its power over local schools in the last 50 years and pushed a “college and career ready” agenda that is at odds with the liberal arts. Democrats may be the last, best friend of “the system,” but they must confront the fact that it is hard to defend public education in its current configuration.

Neem is himself a product of a public school education. His family emigrated from Mumbai, India, to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was a child, and he recalls warmly the day that the teacher and students handed him a signed card after his swearing in ceremony to become a US citizen. Public schools, Neem affirms, “prepare all young people to take part in the shared life of our democracy” and “democratize access to the kind of liberal education that was once reserved for the few.”

The hero of his book is arguably the Whig politician Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and so-called father of the Common Schools movement. Mann traveled to Prussia in 1843, and in 1852 he helped Massachusetts adopt the principles of the Prussian education system.

On Neem’s account, Mann was a tireless advocate for democratizing the liberal arts and making it possible for most children to have the kind of education that was traditionally offered only to children of the elites. Mann and other reformers wanted public schools to “develop the potential of each human being” and “orient young people to higher purposes.” A society that trains children strictly for “the workshop or the field,” Mann believed, “will be disrobed of many of its choicest beauties.”

Ordinary citizens sometimes opposed education reform on the grounds that common sense and real-world experience would prepare most children for life’s challenges. Others, however, argued that reformers had an agenda that would destroy the democratic tenor of American life. Mann’s critic Orestes Brownson observed that nearly everyone on the Massachusetts Board of Education was a Whig and a Unitarian. For Brownson, Democrats and Baptists were right to be wary of a public education system that emanated from “despotic Prussia” rather than the democratic United States. Brownson was following in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson and other early small-d democrats who wanted families and ordinary citizens, rather than bureaucrats, to control the local schools.

To his credit, Neem refuses to take sides in these early conflicts between systemic reformers and participatory democrats. On the one hand, Neem sympathizes with the reformers who thought that all American public schools should provide an education for democracy — that is, that schools should impart the skills and content necessary for children to eventually perform their role as citizens. For these top-down reformers, the state has the power and the responsibility to make democratic citizens.

But Neem gives a fair hearing to the democrats who maintain that schools should provide children an education in democracy — that is, raise them in an environment where parents, neighbors, and local educators make crucial decisions about how to raise the next generation. For these democrats, public schools must transform our country from the bottom-up, infusing democratic norms in the schools and then the rest of society.

Neem argues that the tension between the two sides — reflected in today’s argument — made education a “central issue in American politics,” and that is how it should be in a democracy.

Like Neem, I had, on the whole, a positive experience in public school. I still think often of a fourth grade teacher who asked me to play the role of Doctor Dolittle in the school play, as well as a high school librarian who often recommended the right books for me to read at the right time. If I have become an education activist in the past few years, it is mostly to protect children, but also to protect the kinds of teachers who inspire children to be their best.

But my enthusiasm for public education has waned. The Every Student Succeeds Act requires annual testing of students in grades three through eight and once in high school in English Language Arts and mathematics, and states around the country have or are planning to administer these tests on computers. Though the Every Student Succeeds Act does not specify what standards qualify as “college and career standards,” most states use some version of the Common Core. Public education around the country now means preparing for or taking online Common Core tests. This seems like a dystopia to my wife and me.

Our family has begun to home school this year so that our children can grow and learn at their own pace and so that they may do many hands on activities. In teaching our children, we follow Jean Piaget’s theory of childhood development, Maria Montessori’s pedagogy of placing children in situations where they can concentrate on completing a task, and John Dewey’s principle that education should harness a child’s interest to motivate intense study. We teach our children to read, write, and do math, of course, but we tailor the curriculum to each child in a way that is contrary to the Common Core’s expectations that all children should meet the same performance expectations at the same time.

I believe Neem and I want the same general kind of education for our children. I will continue to fight for sensible education policies and against the school choice agenda advanced by Republicans and Democrats alike. But I do not have much energy to defend the public education system as it currently exists. By entrusting distant professionals rather than local citizens to run the schools, Mann and subsequent reformers must take some responsibility for weakening popular support for public education.

Democracy’s Schools ends with a benign-sounding call to defend American public schools in whatever form they take: “We should watch over them, and reform them when they fail us. But we also depend on them. We cannot evade our responsibilities to and for them and, by extension, each other.”

The problem with this conclusion, however, is that much has transpired in public education since its formation in the antebellum period. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act assigning the federal government a larger role in public education. Each subsequent reauthorization of the law, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, has ramped up federal intervention in the school system, and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires that “all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers.” Betsy DeVos, notably, has less interest in challenging standards-based education reform than she does in changing how public education is delivered.

Education reformers such as DeVos aren’t much different from their 19th-century counterparts — they still claim to have a plan to give all children a liberal arts education that has hitherto only been available at the finest private schools. One such reformer is David Coleman, the lead writer of the Common Core English Language Arts standards and presently the head of the College Board. According to a portrait in The Atlantic, he is “an utterly romantic believer in the power of the traditional liberal arts.” On this account, the Common Core will revolutionize education by making it possible for all children to read humanity’s greatest works of literature and nonfiction.

But the bloom is off the Common Core rose. Few people of any party actually believe that it has democratized a liberal arts education. According to one critic, it is “whittling away the democratic and human purposes of education,” claiming to prepare children for college and career, but failing to promote citizenship or learning as a good for its own sake. The Common Core has confirmed democrats’ fear that the state is primarily interested in training workers and subjects, not energetic citizens.

The critic in the above paragraph is Johann Neem. He knows that economic and political elites are transforming public education to serve their own needs. According to Neem, democrats need to defend public education at the same time as they seek to revive its founding ideals. He makes this clear in a recent op-ed: “The Founding Fathers saw freedom as the cornerstone of the nation and public schools as essential vehicles to secure it. Guided by their vision, we should work to fix America’s public schools, not abandon them.”

Nicholas Tampio is associate professor of political science at Fordham University.

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