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lucalicatteart · 7 years ago

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Notes on latent magical ability

Just a small bit of info on on latent magic (magical abilities that have generally gone undiscovered by the individual that possesses them). Which is actually extremely rare for people to have magic and not know about it, but it is possible in some cases, generally only in very particular scenarios like if someone of a rare species was separated from their family/culture at an age young enough that they wouldn’t have been taught, etc. Especially in rural areas where blood testing and species recognition isn’t super common so they could go undetected (at least until it starts causing obvious problems) and etc. Also I ramble a lot about organizations that exist to help people in this situation and how that functions lol ... hbhb

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!! (NOTE: for some bastard reason this ‘read more’ sometimes doesn’t work when viewing the blog in the sidebar and it just shows up as a full long post?? Sorry if it shows up super long for you, I promise there is a ‘read more’ here, and it’s supposed to keep most of the text of the post hidden unless you click on it, but for some reason sometimes it glitches or something and it just shows up on my blog full length. If you’re having this problem just view my blog in a new tab on it’s own or etc. instead of in the sidebar way. Sorry about that, I still have no idea what’s causing this glitch (which only started recently I think) and i don’t know why the read more works on some posts but not others. If you have any info about how to fix it let me know lol hhh) !!

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Most species who posses inherent magical abilities host that as a major part of their culture and their child rearing process, especially given how catastrophic magic can be if the person doesn’t know what they’re doing, so for most cultures it’s seen as absolutely vital to educate children from a young age about any abilities they might have (of course this only applies to inherently magic capable species, since for non-magical species doing magic is something that has to be directly sought out or learned intentionally, unlike people who are simply born with the ability and just have to carefully learn how to utilize it). But, it is possible for individuals to slip through the cracks.

Basically in any scenario where the species or lineage of someone has been unknown, there can be a situation of latent magical abilities being unrecognized. Especially with the majority of the realm being rural or isolated areas, where blood/genetic testing and knowledge of all different types of species (outside of those the small area frequently interacts with) may be mostly unknown, leading them to be less able to recognize the heritage of a person, or more likely to misidentify it (which is mostly important since your species is generally the primary factor that determines both whether you’re inherently capable of magic or not, and also indicates information about the magic, such as what sorts of magic you’ll be naturally inclined towards, how ‘’strong’’ your base magic will initially be without any training, etc. etc.).

It’s usually also exclusively a problem for children.

Firstly, because if you were around your native culture even to the age of like 3-4 years old, you’d probably at least have some knowledge of whether you’re magical or not or have been exposed to it, since magical education is done fairly young in pretty much any magic capable culture of people. Meaning this usually occurs only for individuals who lost their primary guardians in some way or another as very very young children, and were also under the coincidental circumstance to have been raised far enough away from their native culture or similar cultures that they remain entirely unaware of their background (such as a very young child/baby who’s parents die whilst in the middle of a vacation where they’ve traveled 500 miles away from their home and they’re then left to be raised by the locals, a baby who is separated from their family during a war and then for whatever reason ends up being brought onto a boat that takes them to a place so far away nobody would recognize their species, etc.).

And secondly, because by the time you’re like 8 - 10 years old the latent magic has probably already begun causing increasingly significant problems for you, so it usually can only go unknown about for so long, something ends up being done about it well before they’re full adults or even teens.

Though there can be the rare case of an adult living their entire life and still being unaware of their magic, it would be incredibly difficult for them to not at least realize that something is different about them. Usually if you’re past childhood, you’ve either died as a result of fatally misusing untrained magic by accident, or you’ve had someone intervene in your situation already to help train you in controlling it. So though older people can have been latent magic individuals in the past, pretty much anyone with currently undiscovered magic is likely a child.

Due to all these conditions, this rare issue is generally seen most often in orphanages or similar areas, sometimes children’s hospitals, or small towns who have just had an influx of unknown children due to some sort of displacing even occurring nearby.

(It’s also a rare situation to be in since unfortunately many end up killing themselves by accident or being killed by others for crimes they didn’t mean to commit, so many individuals with latent magic also just die before they realize anything about what’s going on with them. Magic done wrong without a level of knowledge and control can be much more deadly than usual magic (which is saying a lot), unintentional self injury and injury to others only get more and more common the older the latent magic user becomes. Especially in an isolated area where magic is not used or understood, nobody is going to believe some random kid who hasn’t been part of the village that long when they say it’s totally an accident that they burned down a house or killed another child they were playing with, and in more superstitious or harsh cultures they’d just kill the child that’s seemingly brought all these problems with them, if the kid doesn’t accidentally blow themselves up first or something. So like a good 45% - 60% of individuals with latent magic never live long enough to find out about it anyway.)

Usually latent magic expresses itself during times of stress or excitement, or sometimes randomly, typically through unexpected bursts of disorganized energy, or accidental use of abilities (accidentally lighting something on fire, having a burst of energy break a window next to you without you really understanding how you did it since you didn’t touch it, throwing yourself or someone across the room, etc. Though it can be more specific, such as someone with primarily plant magic skills accidentally growing or affecting the nature around them, or someone with inherent soul magic ability accidentally shifting their soul outside of their body or entering someone’s dreams.. But like 90% of the time any form of magic when entirely untrained is just going to present as nothing but random bursts of pure energy. It’s really unlikely they’d be able to do anything specific, since even the most basic thing like growing a flower or something still requires you to at least know what you’re aiming to do first and the essentials of how to divert that energy in the first place. Which is part of why misunderstood/untrained magic is so much more hazardous in general, since all the energy is so disorganized and undirected.)

Sometimes various physical pains and aches are also present in the latent magic individual, due to the host not really knowing how to control their abilities enough to realize they’re emitting low levels of magic energy directed internally, since they don’t know how to utilize any external expressions. It can be possible they’re “using ” their magic and expelling the energy, but only in unnoticeable bursts around their own body, so this constant exposure can harm their physical form eventually (like mentioned before in other posts about magic that discussed physical pain from magic and the factors that play into how physically harmful magic can be to a person, etc.)

Though, these small aches would only be present in the case of an innately high energy magics user, like in a species that naturally has a great amount of inherent energy (such as some types of Jhevona or the verrucalt) , since even if you’re accidentally emitting energy around yourself and etc. , if it’s very very low level minuscule bursts then it likely wouldn’t have a long lasting effect on you. Similar to how common low level internally directed magics (like hiding your presence in public, or basic single trait shape shifting) rarely ever harm the users, since it’s too little energy to really do much damage. So, for it to be physically harmful, you’d have to have pretty strong magical force even in an untrained state as a child.

How much trouble this causes will depend a lot on the inherent abilities and “strength” of the species they belong to. Someone who is some sort of elf with fairly weak magic that has a mild predisposition towards elemental plant magics, may not cause that much issue (lightly injuring themselves or breaking apart trees every once in a while)..

Someone with inclination towards healing magic may heal themselves without even trying to, or more likely, harm themselves, since if magical energy isn’t tightly controlled it can have unpredictable effects, like aiming healing energy towards an arm intending to heal a bone back together and instead you blow up the arm from the inside out, etc. (why people are notoriously afraid of using internally directed magics, even in minor ways lol. Any time you’re directing the energy at yourself it’s potentially dangerous, regardless of your intention (to heal, to harm, etc.))

Though more difficult magics like soul, illusion, and reality magics rarely ever occur as innate skills in anyone*(1) (and if they do, the species is usually hunted to extinction or in such a situation that they’d never have a stray children from their culture running around anyways, such as the Verrucalt), in those cases it’d probably be the most dangerous latent magic to posses, due to the energy level being so high and also due to the subject matter. Imagine being like, 5 years old and trapping yourself in an alternate realm/pocket of reality that you don’t know how to get out of which eventually collapses in on itself and kills you but the whole time you just have no idea what’s going on or how you got there, or like, randomly removing your soul from your body by accident, etc.. So whether the magic is unfocused (just random energy being emitted) or focused (actually accidentally performing something specific like growing a plant or conjuring something), it’s awful either way in the case of a latent magic individual with a powerful magic type inclination.

[* side note 1: And here I mean specifically, being able to use minor forms of the skills without training first, not just having an inclination. Plenty of species do indeed have an innate inclination towards certain types of magic, even difficult ones, that make them easier to grasp and master with less training than usual, or grant ability to access rare skills in that branch of magic that wouldn't normally be accessible. BUT that still doesn't mean they can just use the skills innately without any training whatsoever, an inclination towards a skill doesn't = being able to automatically use said skill. Like the difference between a young child with a species-given natural inclination towards soul magics being able to become much more proficient in them, after training, when compared to outsiders without the same inclination VS. a young child on day one with literally 0 training being able to just pull off a low level feat of soul magic out of nowhere. The former is common, the latter is the one that I mean rarely ever occurs. I just wanted to clarify since the wording may be a bit weird (saying types of magic don't occur as an innate skill very often could be confused for saying people don't have innate inclinations towards magic, which I've mentioned in the past as a thing that does happen, so it may have seemed contradictory lol). ]

Probably the biggest factor in how extensively this could affect someone is the magical literacy of the people they’re around, or their general knowledge of magic within the group. If people know enough to recognize this early and help the person find out their heritage and what sort of magic the’re manifesting and find someone who can train them how to utilize that, then it usually goes quite well. But in the case where like, a magical species child is abandoned and adopted by a non-magical group who knows nothing about the signs or mechanics of magic, and the child just kind of lives in an isolated area never aware of their heritage, that can cause a lot of issues (accidentally hurting self and others, causing unintentional destruction, etc). And like mentioned, usually in this case the child ends up killing themselves accidentally or being killed by the group, or in I guess, still bad but kind of less bad cases, being exiled from their adoptive home (or running away on their own, like if they keep killing people and destroying things and don’t know why, they may decide they’re horrible and just cause trouble everywhere they go and decide to leave, even if the people in their home aren’t upset with them, since they feel like they’d be protecting others by isolating themselves,, though this is usually only older children since like a 4 year old probably wouldn’t have the self concept to think about that sort of dilemma lol)

This only increases in danger with age. Magical energy usually gets stronger as a person grows, up until a particular age, which depends entirely on the species. Though it’s an inborn property for the most part, the development of it still varies from species to species.

Some groups have magical energy increasing until around 50 years of age where you’re full strength *(2), for some by the time you’re 10 years old you’re at your peak ability, some magics grow in energy totally dependent on how developed they are (so someone with little pursuit of training may peak around 30, but someone who trained everyday could reach full natural ability at 15).

And in some rarer groups you can even lose use of magic, like where if you haven’t started training it and using it by around age 8 or so, it gradually suppresses and you function basically as a non magical being, unless sometime later in life you’ve realized what’s happened and find an expert to help you work on uncovering your inherent abilities that have been suppressed (however this is like THE most dangerous and unpredictable situation, you’re better off just accepting non-magicality rather than attempting to access magic that has faded away , since generally people who are attempting to revitalize old lost magic within themselves have the most unstable magic. It’s a bad mix of very high stored energy + complete lack of skill (since you’ve never even used it before). It’s like unleashing a large amount of power out of nowhere with no idea how to control it or what effects it could have and etc. etc. This is rare anyway since again, a majority of species don’t work like this at all (the existence of the few groups who have this type of magic that fades without use is one of the major difficulties in modern scholars’ attempts to form a comprehensive understanding of magic, since it doesn’t follow typical rules of how other species’ magic works lol), but if you are one of those species and you don’t end up honing your magic from a young age and ignore it long enough for it to hide away then its best.. just .. not to mess with it in the future lol)

[* side note 2: Here by ‘full strength’ I mean your full strength of natural abilities,, which is reliant only on inherent power. You can always become stronger than your natural strength through training, up to a point of course (power doesn’t always increase with training, you can’t become infinitely powerful,,, unless of course you’re an ancient demon absorbing the souls of others lmao, but,, through regular and un-complicated means, a person can usually train to increase their inherent abilities maybe up to double or so and then they kind of are just naturally as strong as they possibly could be. Like speaking in video game terms or something (which are not accurate but I keep using them in certain comparisons since it’s just easier to visualize bhbbg): If your complete maximum natural strength is about 200 points or something. As a child you may have like 50 points, and on your own as you grow without any training at all, it could naturally get up to about 150 - 200 or so. You could probably train to get it to about 400 points or so, but couldn’t get it much higher than that without resorting to wild, dangerous, or impossibly tedious things. If you’re especially adept you could maybe raise your limit of 200 to 550 - 600 or something but, it would still take years and years and years of constant training (people usually die before reaching their maximum level of strength, their lifespans usually aren’t long enough even if they train all the time), most people don’t feel like doing All That lol.. and after that you’d either just have to be happy with your honestly earned 600 points or start a murder cult or something to begin leeching power from others. ]

But anyway, generally as someone gets older, their likelihood of harming people or themselves very seriously increases as their power grows (specifics of this depending on how that works in their particular species), so as a child just occasionally levitating or breaking an object around you or bruising your arms with energy, can at age 18 turn from harmless quirks into like, you accidentally picking up an entire cart full of people and slamming it into the ground, completely disintegrating your own insides ,,or crushing the bones of your loved one by blasting energy at them , etc.

There are even organizations and groups that exist solely to be called for these sorts of people, usually specific off-branches of regular magic task force workers*(3). If a kid one day randomly blows up their adopted family with a burst of magic, people would obviously take notice and may end up reporting them and etc. etc. The organizations aren’t usually going to punish them, it’s more about noticing these people ahead of time so you can get them sorted out and everything before they’re able to cause any sort of damage. If anything, they exist more to protect the child from punishment, and occasionally have to step in to help them legally (like if a child kills someone with accidental magic in an area where magic isn't well known, the locals will likely be hostile over it and try to punish the kid and harm them or send them to whatever their local version of a prison system is (if the culture has one), so these people would come in and try to educate the locals about magic and argue that the child shouldn't be punished since it's a complete accident etc. (which sometimes the locals still don't listen and then the representative of the organization usually just helps the kid flee or breaks them out of prison in the middle of the night lmao). If a kid is identified, they don’t arrest them over whatever they did that made them get noticed, these groups pretty much just exist to talk with them and inform their guardians of the situation, set them up with magical training courses so they can hone their magic and not have any more big accidents, connect the child to any resources they may need, etc.

[ side note 3: There are numerous groups around the supernatural realm that kind of exist to subdue people with magic that are causing harm, usually just made up of random powerful mages and etc. (they have to be well above average skill level so they can be effective against most magic users they receive calls about and etc., but it’s not like they’re all insanely powerful ancient demons or anything, just groups of fairly strong multi-skilled mages that have a lot of connections and training in communicating with and helping communities.) They’re reasonably common in areas populated by inherently magical species, but tend to be more of a minor presence considering that if most of the population is magical anyways, they can probably handle magical conflict themselves. So these groups tend to be the most prevalent in non-magical areas, as groups who can’t use magic and have little knowledge of it are highly susceptible to magic crime, or even just non-malicious yet still unmanageable magic users (like individuals with latent magic) that the community doesn’t have the resources to handle. But some of these magical task forces or whatever can also specialize entirely in handling cases like these, usually working with children who have latent magic ]

These organizations also serve to protect the latent magic individual from external forces, since there are certain groups who want to study the nature of magic, and especially doing experiments on people with unknown or latent magic they feel can help fill certain gaps in their research.. Which leads to the occasional shady scientific organizations doing a lot of rounds, posing as fake staff in local orphanages and subtly testing the kids, hoping to take them away and use them in experiments. (since again, this is pretty much exclusive to either orphans or people who were taken away from their families at a young age and adopted into families outside of their common culture, since anyone who is AWARE that their parents can do magic and was raised in a magical culture isn’t going to have this problem, so really the only areas that these scientists target is like, adoption centers, orphanages, occasionally boarding schools that are in areas of war or etc. or are known to take in a lot of lost children.)

This is especially needed if their species is unidentifiable or rare. Similar to how rare species are targeted for stuff like blood harvesting, or other random things, they can also be sought for scientific study, especially studying magic. And just like there are organizations to protect likely targets of the blood trade or groups who are commonly sold for the harvest of souls, there are also people who protect those who would be prime targets for unlawful scientific study (usually rare species that data hasn’t been gathered about, latent magic individuals, other groups with rare or uncommon quirks in their magic usage, etc.). And those organizations kind of intersect a lot with these latent magic task forces (usually the protection groups and the group that are initially called to handle latent magic cases are the same organization, but sometimes they’re separate and just work closely with one another ).

So additionally, as soon as an individual is identified as someone with latent magic, the organization folks usually get involved in the form of setting them up with protections, privately guarding them in certain areas where big bad sciencey activity is high, background checking their guardians and the workers at whatever facility they’re staying at to make sure that none of them are actually kidnapping scientists in disguise, etc.

These organizations also generally focus on getting them training and genetic testing and stuff to better explore their origins and learn about their own magic and how to properly use it.

Many magic scholars and tutors decline to work with people who have latent magical abilities, especially older teens or full adults, since by that point the untamed magic is very very strong yet the user still has completely no grasp of it, so trying to teach them can be deadly if you’re not extremely skilled in defense or deflecting magic, as they could easily posses the power to kill you without any knowledge on how to restrain themselves.

Especially in latent magic users where their species and the type of magic they’re inherently skilled at is entirely unknown (even with species databases and stuff, there are still plenty of unknown groups or groups that are so minor they’d be hard to identify. In like 90% of cases you could probably find out someone’s species with just a little testing, if you weren’t already able to tell by their physical characteristics, though coming across someone totally unidentifiable can happen) , since like… that has a huge effect on how powerful their magic is , and if you cant estimate what you’ll be dealing with you have no way to know if you can handle it or not.

So, latent magic individuals are already often denied training, but especially if they’re very old or if their species is unknown (or both) it’d be a really hard time trying to find someone willing to work on training them, but the organization would still find a way. Sometimes even just higher ups in the organization itself can tend to be members of really powerful species or people with a lot of skill, so they may not even need to turn to outside teachers to help the person with their magic. In really rare cases they’ve had to seek out extremely powerful people to train the latent magic individual, like, ancient demons or more commonly, people who are merely attempting to work their way up to the level of ancient demon, just because the person seemed so powerful everyone else was afraid to offer them training lol*(4).

[*side note 4: though this is morally ambiguous since, while magic growth beyond a normal level is still not fully understood, generally if you’re that powerful you probably have done some dubious things… While you can grow your power over time by collecting millions of tiny micro fragments of souls whilst running a morally fine and legal enchantment shop or something, many of the most powerful people around clearly took shortcuts (just straight up killing people to take their souls or etc.) lol

So sometimes it’s like:

“Well, we really want this latent magic individual to be able to function well and they have to get their magic under control for the sake of their own health and everyone around them… They REALLY desperately need someone who can train them to control their abilities… And none of us can, because from what we’ve seen of this person we’re afraid they could kill any one of us, even the strongest organization members and teachers we’ve reached out to are afraid to try training them due to the risk to their own lives brought by the uncontrollable magic of this person.. so like.. we .. CAN … have this really strong person over here in these isolated mountains train them… But also, should we…. as a moral and helpful organization… leave someone who is officially under our protection… with a person who we’re like.. 70% sure has probably done a lot of uh…. murdering? And crimes?? And is also likely power hungry?? Probably has a big ego, don’t most of them? And what if they’re mean?? You don’t live 3,000 years isolated at the top of a mountain constantly murdering people and harvesting their souls without developing some sort of attitude problem… ....

BUT… it WOULD really help this person and fix all of the issues in their life if they could just have some training.. Really any training… M-maybe we can go with them?? Yeah! We can..uhh.. send a few agents to go with them into the mountains.. Make sure that really powerful person isn’t like mean to them or anything.. They’ll just stay for maybe a few weeks.. Do the bare minimum training in order for the latent magic individual to be safe to be around and then we’ll get them out of there immediately! ……………. Hmm… What if this person in the mountains….this.. very strong.. likely immoral and murderous individual…. just…. kills all of us upon arrival????… Is it really a good choice to bring them to this person?? …It is our only real option though…. aaaaAAAAAAAAAAA” ]

Anyway, the goal for these groups is usually just to educate and better adjust the person, they usually don’t take them away from their situation or anything*(5). They may leave for training for a little while or be taken like to the nearest blood testing place for help finding their species but, usually the organization only intervenes long enough to ensure the person’s magic has stabilized and their lack of knowledge/control over it no longer poses a threat to themselves and their community, then they’ll leave and usually don’t ever come into contact with the people they help ever again (though they can always be called on again is any new problems arise).

[*Side note 5: Though of course they’ll remove a child/teen/etc. from their situation if the people (usually two workers, sometimes three if they need to bring a specialist) initially sent to evaluate the case feel that the latent magic individual is unsafe. There are multiple cases of like, them getting a call from an orphanage about a kid who accidentally hurt themselves or someone else or destroyed property with formerly unknown magic or something and then a few of the agents get there and realize the kid is in an abusive environment or something. They try their best not to displace the person they’re coming to help, but if they arrive and the village is threatening to kill the kid for accidentally burning something, or the parents are hostile, or there’s obvious illegal experimentation plots going on at the local orphanage or etc, sometimes they have to remove the latent magic child from their situation.

Sometimes it becomes even more complicated like, they get to an orphanage to investigate the complaint and upon getting there they realize something is off and try to take the kid out of the situation and despite the owners of the place seeming abusive and careless ONE OF THEM for some ~odd reason~ doesn’t want the kid to be taken away, and then of course this person turns out to be undercover scientist who was only working at the orphanage to scout for latent magic children to use in experiments so now they’re like

“Okay, so first we have to take and protect this kid while not accidentally getting killed by their magic (again, latent magic can be triggered more during periods of stress or excitement so stuff like having an organization show up to help you , even if you’re happy about it, can make you more dangerous), AND we have to deal with this one asshole and somehow explain to the people at the orphanage that their Loyal Staff Member is actually just a spy wanting to kidnap vulnerable kids and they definitely wont believe us because they don’t care, AND that very staff member will probably get violent with us the second they recognize that we know their plan, AND this place is mismanaged and abusive anyways so we ALSO have to report it to the local people who take care of that and try to shut it down, AND if its in a particularly rural area where nobody takes care of that sort of thing then we may have to actually shut the entire orphanage down OURSELVES, which means we have to relocate ALL 135 of the children on our own, on TOP of managing this one child, who again, is dangerous and we need to help them first and foremost, AND the rest of the staff could get violent as well since we already know they abuse children, AND we cant have any more violence around these children…. So maybe we’ve got to..uh….. get them in the middle of the night??? or something???" And it ends up being like, a massive workload for the mere group of five local agents who traveled to the area just expecting to pick up a single kid and leave lol]

Usually after being informed of their background and being helped in training with managing and adapting to their newly realized magic, the person continues on perfectly fine with their lives with no issue.

The training itself can take anywhere from like, only a few months to years and years depending on the person’s situation, the skill of who’s teaching them, whether they stay with one teacher or have to cycle through multiple due to being stronger than expected or etc , how cooperative they are, etc. Some kids understandably don’t see the point in this or don’t get what it means that they could hurt someone, they just see it as like “Hey this random group of people are coming in and disturbing my way of life and trying to take me to some people to do some stupid training I don’t care about , I don’t think I have any problem and want to just be left alone.. I don’t even know these people, how do they know whats best for me?” etc. But after coming into contact, the organization can’t just like, let them go, knowing they’re literally potentially a huge danger to themselves and anyone around them, part of their responsibility is to make sure this person doesn’t accidentally kill someone, especially older more powerful latent magic users,, So sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error until the person actually warms up to them, and lots of finding multiple ways to explain the situation and finally convince the person like “Look, I know you don’t think this is a problem now, but literally if this is left alone , like 4 years from now when you’re stronger you could legit just up and accidentally kill someone and it’s best to help you work on this sooner rather than later” etc. Or bribery.. Bribing people with rewards (especially younger children) to go through training for their magic usually works as well, as a last resort lol.

In some really rare cases, finding out they are capable of magic or finding out details about their heritage can end up changing things a lot in a person’s life, (like a young teen who already has criminal intentions discovering they can now use magic to do bad things, or Someone discovering their original family is actually elven royalty or etc. so they leave their old life to seek that out, or Someone formerly relentlessly bullied by people in the village now being able to take comfort in knowing that nobody will mess with them anymore because they’re more than capable to kill anyone at whim, etc.), though 90% of the time it’s simply mundane.

A majority of the time it's just like: - the local magic task force organization gets a report of possible latent magic, - they investigate, - they see the kid and are just like ‘Ah, you seem to be a Yavairi elf, they specialize in plant and elemental magic specifically of this kind , so , that’s what we’ll look out for and help you with. We’ll try to find an elf or demon with similar abilities to tutor you.”, - the latent magic person is just like “okay cool” and they learn how to control their abilities and they (and their family or community as well) become a bit more educated about magic, - the person just continues on life as normal except now they know they can like, grow plants faster or something lol.

Many, especially those who were raised in non-magic communities, end up never using their magic at all. They learn the basics of how to harness it so that they don’t accidentally hurt anyone or anything but, after that they never use it for anything, and do things exactly how they used to without any changes or modification over them having magic. Especially if it’s a more obscure type of magic, like some 12 year old in a traditional and strict farming village that is very happy with their lives and the community and their way of life having nothing to do with magic or really anything outside of the village, isn’t going to have any use for it if they find out they’re naturally inclined towards soul magics or something lol. Maybe elemental magic they would use, since that could aid with farming (and even then, probably not if the community has negative views towards magic in general), but they wouldn’t have any reason to pursue learning how to jump bodies or enter people’s minds or absorb souls or anything lol. In a lot of cases, the discovery of latent magic is fairly dull and has little impact on the individual, aside from maybe improving their life a bit since now they’re not accidentally lighting stuff on fire anymore.

So anyway, there’s some random not very well organized info on how undiscovered magic can work.

Usually it's a problem exclusive to children (since by the time you’re older you would have either definitely found out about it by then or probably died somehow), it can make you a target for shady scientists or the wrath of small villages, if you don’t kill yourself accidentally or etc. first you’ll likely just get helped by some of the numerous organizations that exist for this, get trained on how to control your magical energy, and then continue life like usual. In rare cases you may have your orphanage shut down, be sent to untrustworthy mountain demons, or discover you’re secretly royalty, but since latent magic individuals really only exist in isolated non-magical areas (or else this would never be a problem in the first pace), it’s likely you’ll just continue on with little differences other than no longer being considered dangerous.

#i need to be working on posts to finish the info about the avirre'thel !!!!! but instead!!!! i keep finding random other things to #think about !!!! bhbhb #worldbuilding #idk if i really have a tag for stuff like this #in terms of making the information easily findable I mostly just link it in pages rather than having any form of comprehensive tagging #system .. aaa

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booklover4816 · 7 years ago

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Nope. Sounds pretty good if to me so far. What about Florida, Nevada, California, Utah, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Montana, and Washington. Sorry, gotta curious mind.

It’s okay! This is going to be long. One thing that you’ll quickly notice is that pretty much all of the states are tied into agriculture somehow. That’s because every state is part of the agricultural industry in someway and it’s the easiest thing for me to write about and use to tie them all together. Also, rural America doesn’t usually get a whole lot of love in most State fics.

Florida: Florida admittedly is hard for me to write. I have family who lives in Florida and I don’t want her to have any of their personality traits (because they’re awful people). I also need to do a lot more research. So far, Florida is a tough girl who is afraid of practically nothing, except driving in the snow. She loves gator hunting and fishing, but she also loves things like amusement parks, beaches, and politics (again, swing state). She also can’t stand any temperature below 55 degrees. Florida’s favorite hobby is growing oranges and she and California are in the middle of a fruit war with each other (who has the best oranges). She speaks fluent Spanish (mainly Cuban). She has wavy brunette hair (that is extremely frizzy due to the constant humidity) and gray eyes. Like I said, her personality is still under construction.

Nevada: Nevada was is known as the Battle Born State due to joining the Union in the middle of the Civil War, and her personality shows it. She seems cold on the outside mostly because she was brought up in the aftermath of the Civil War and saw first hand, at a very young age, what it had done to her siblings. She seems kind of aloof and has a bit of a pessimistic view on the world. But, once she opens up to someone, you’ll find her to be a very loving and caring person. She’s smart as a whip when it comes to science and gambling (even though she’s not supposed to) and she’s also an excellent shot (always carries a gun, and has named it Las Vegas). She’s chasing New Mexico away from Area 51 (Roswell, so he loves aliens), but she’s also always looking out for him and shares his love of science and aliens.Other than that, I need to do a bit more research on Nevada. This is just the basis of her personality. Appearance wise, she has long black hair as a reference to her Native American heritage and warm brown eyes. She also speaks Spanish and Navajo and always wears a pair of sunglasses that she has affectionately called Carson City.

California: California is a little like America in this story: the way she acts depends on who she’s around. She’s a big sister and kind of motherly to Hawaii, Arizona, and Nevada. She’s rivals with Florida and Texas (though she wouldn’t hesitate to stand up for them if someone was bothering them). She’s agriculturally focused when she’s around the Midwest and Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana (California is the US’s number one producer of agricultural products). She enjoys being a nerd with Washington, especially concerning tech and business, and being an outdoorsy hippy-like person with Oregon. And of course to anyone outside of her family, she’s a complete airhead. She likes portraying herself to strangers as the stuck up, ditzy Hollywood type, but in all actuality is extremely smart, focused, hardworking, and driven. She truly is America’s daughter.She’s extremely beautiful with glossy, wavy brunette hair (she’s lucky and always has a good hair day) and sapphire eyes. She also has a permanent tan and can pass a Mexico’s sister (Mexico is actually her aunt by blood, and they are very close). She’s also one of the only states that has a mother (the Californian Republic was briefly independent). She speaks Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, and a few other languages.

Utah: Utah’s one that I need to do a lot of research on. The extent of my knowledge on Utah currently is Great Salt Lake, Mormons, honeybees, and skiing. It’s pathetic, I know but I’m planning on doing research before I write her chapter. So far, though, she does have a basic personality. Religion is a very important aspect of her life; however she doesn’t really identify with a specific one out of respect to all of the people in her state, so she’s more spiritual. She’s very active and outdoorsy; she enjoys skiing, hiking, and mountain climbing with the other Four Corners States. She also is a huge supporter of the National Parks, and hers are her pride and joy (Utah has a ton of National Parks). And then, Utah is the Beehive State, so I want to incorporate that into her characterization but I’m not quite sure how I want to do that yet. She has brown hair and green eyes.

Mississippi: Once upon a time, America tried to raise Mississippi like a lady (this was back in the early 1800’s), but then Alabama came along and that was the end of that. Mississippi is a tomboy, much like Ohio. She loves football and hunting and doing other stuff that would have been considered “boyish” when she was small. Still, she loves cooking with Georgia and Louisiana and hanging out with Alabama and Florida. She tends to be more conservative; however, she personally prefers making informed decisions and sticking to her morals. Again, I need to do more research on Mississippi, especially before I decide how I want to address the Civil Rights issues with Mississippi’s past.

Oklahoma: Out of all of her siblings, Oklahoma is closest to Texas. They really are two peas in a pod and share a lot of interests: ranching, rodeos, food, religion,(though both, like Utah, are non-denominational out of respect for all of their citizens), music, etc. She is actively involved with her Native American heritage and speaks many native languages as well as Spanish. She’s very sweet and kind and takes everything that America says to heart, always obeying what he tells her to do and taking his words literally. She has shoulder length brunette hair and green eyes. And again, I need to do more research on Oklahoma before I start tying history to her personality.

West Virginia: I get so many reviews about West Virginia and he hasn’t even appeared yet, but I get it. Many people write West Virginia as a stupid hillbilly, which I guess is kind of the stereotype outside of the state, and that’s just offensive. So, West Virginia is outdoorsy. He just loves being outside and being active. He also enjoys doing things with people he’s close to, and he doesn’t really care what it is: playing football with Ohio, spending a day in D.C. with Virginia, hunting with Pennsylvania. As long as he has fun and he’s bonding with one of his siblings, he doesn’t mind.He suffers from slight social anxiety, but once he trusts someone, he’s super friendly. He loves history and his favorite activity is touring abandoned mines (he used to work in them, but America wasn’t too fond of that and child labor laws…) He has light red hair (a nod to his Scottish and Irish heritage) that’s light enough to pass as strawberry blonde in some lighting, and brown eyes. He actually shares these traits with Virginia (as a nod to the fact they used to be the same state), though Virginia’s color is closer to brunette, but he absolutely hates this. He strives to make himself stand out from Virginia so people don’t mistake them for twins (they’re not) and he hates her constant mothering of him. But still, he’s closest to Virginia.

Montana: What can I say about Montana? Well, for one, America is the only one allowed to call her by her human name; everyone else has to call her Montana (her human name’s a secret for now; some of her own siblings don’t even know it). She has brunette hair and violet eyes (same shade as Canada’s). She’s kind of Canada-like in that she’s nice and polite to everyone, but she’s not afraid to stand her ground. She’s hardened due to the weather and terrain, but she loves being outdoors under the big sky. She’s a rancher, one of the few states that keeps the tradition alive. She likes to hunt and fish. Overall, she’s just hardworking and dedicated. I need to do more research on her history.

Washington: Washington’s kind of a nerd, especially when it comes to tech and business. He usually always has his nose stuck in a book and a coffee in hand. But that’s not to say that he’s not willing to get his hands dirty. If he needs to, he’s capable of and more than willing to do hard, physical labor. He and Oregon have this rivalry going on — it’s slightly reminiscent of the Ohio-Michigan rivalry (and those two egg it on; Ohio backs Oregon and Michigan backs Washington). I was actually told by someone from Oregon that their relationship is kind of Ohio-Michigan and it also has something to do with land. He’s also extremely professional. He has icy blue eyes and black hair. Again, I need to do more research on Washington.

Really, I still have a lot of research to do, which is why most of what I’ve given you is very non-specific. I really don’t want to offend anyone, and with some states, you get into some very sensitive topics that can easily and justifiably upset someone when they’re applied incorrectly.

Sorry for taking so long to answer. I meant to finish this earlier in the week, but I got distracted with school work. If you have any suggestions that you’d like to see, please feel free to let me know.

#booklover answers #asks #anon #anonymus #The United States of Chaos #statalia #State OCs #aph California #aph Utah #aph Washington #aph West Virginia #aph Mississippi #aph Florida #aph Oklahoma #aph Nevada #OCs #My OCs

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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Fighting Voter Suppression in Hog Country, North Carolina

A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Elsie Herring spends many days documenting and responding to complaints from her neighbors — about everything from the stench coming off of factory farms to the clearcutting of trees for timber to the emissions from nearby factories. But lately, when Herring, a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (EJN), gets a call, she’s also been making sure the person on the other end of the line has a plan in place to vote.

With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.

But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”

And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”

Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).

In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being — as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.

In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.

“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter — they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”

As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.

Despite the factors stacked against them — made worse by the pandemic — Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision” — and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.

“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State — and nationwide — these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.

This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center — and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.

Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.

White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County — a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example — but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.

Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, protestors pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.

“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”

Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.

Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties — the top two hog-producing counties in the country — produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.

The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release — ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular — have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases — including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia — among communities located near hog CAFOs.

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.

And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen — and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”

In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.

As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.

Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.

In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”

Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations — they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.

In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight” — and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.

While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.

According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American — compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.

Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.

Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.

Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”

The effects of disenfranchisement

The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.

Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.

“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based — they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”

Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.

And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better — they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.

“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls — do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31HCIWv https://ift.tt/3jvz0Fh

A voter waits in line a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina | Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images

In an election like none before it, the residents of North Carolina’s hog- and poultry-intensive eastern counties are fighting to regain the power of their vote

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other.

“The reaction is, ‘My vote won’t matter — corporations control everything, and that won’t change.’”

Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

An employee of the Mecklenburg County Board of Election in Charlotte, North Carolina holds up instructions that are mailed with absentee ballots for the 2020 election.

Suppressing the vote

“It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion.”

“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is — they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.

Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A pig at Silky Pork Farms in Duplin County, North Carolina

Corporations over constituents

The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties produce 4 billion gallons of waste a year. The waste is stored in open-air pits.

John Althouse/AFP via Getty Images

In 1999, floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed a Burgaw, North Carolina hog waste lagoon.

Disproportionately polluting poor and minority communities

In the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color.

The effects of disenfranchisement

It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage.

• Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31HCIWv via Blogger https://ift.tt/3orBhVR

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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humanpursuits · 4 years ago

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Portraits, Dreams, and Me: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Film Photography

VANCOUVER, B.C. – In autumn 1975, Wendy Ewald embarked on a bold photographic experiment.

The Detroit native had recently relocated to rural Kentucky, renting a small house on Ingram’s Creek, in southeastern Letcher County. As Ewald tells it, in PBS’ great new documentary, Portraits and Dreams, she was the first outsider to ever move into the area. That didn’t stop her from quickly establishing ties to the community. Soon, she found herself teaching photography to the community's 4th graders.

Being the 1970’s, the children’s lessons focused solely on film photography. Ewald taught them how to compose and capture an image, but also how to develop and print it. A rare skill set for any 9-year-old, the lessons gave students a chance to express themselves in ways previously unthinkable. The resulting photographs present Ingram’s Creek with a sort of fantastical-realism. Dreams and imagination blend with everyday realities of rural living. Adult issues, such as poverty and substance use, are relegated beyond the frame, giving the students freedom to explore their own thoughts and feelings. As Ewald explains to the audience, “Having a camera gives anyone power, but especially children.”

That's certainly been my finding.

While I would never call myself a photographer, I’ve been shooting pictures on film for over 10 years. In 2009, I purchased my first film camera, the Diana Mini, using my Urban Outfitters staff discount. Essentially a toy, the Mini served as a low-fi, low budget introduction to photography, creating colourful, high contrast images in either a square or rectangle format. The camera’s cheap parts often over-complicated what was supposed to be a simple process. Photos would turn out blurry or muddy, and Edmonton developers would struggle to properly print the unusual square format photos. At times, it felt like I was throwing money into a mini incinerator.

It wasn’t all bad. For every two rolls that didn’t turn out, one would. The more photos I took, the more I came to understand Diana’s quirks. I learned that my best photos tended to be taken in the afternoon with plenty of light. I learned which developers were comfortable processing the camera’s unconventional format. Slowly but surely, the image in my mind’s eye started to appear in the finished product, albeit inconsistently.

In the decade since, film photography has undergone a resurgence, becoming the de facto hobby for society’s cool and cultured. Included in the film pantheon are celebrities like Frank Ocean and Kendall Jenner, the latter of whom single-handedly increased demand for the Contax T2 after showing it off to Jimmy Fallon. While their snaps have certainly helped to cultivate an air of mystique and authenticity, the true-believer in me likes to think that celebrities shoot film for the same reason anyone else would. Because it scratches their creative itch. Because it gives them a chance to make their perceptions permanent.

Ewald’s relationship with her students is at the centre of Portraits and Dreams, but so too is the group’s relationship with the medium. Though life led them in different directions, the former students all share one thing in common: they’re still taking pictures. “Pictures, to me, it helps you hold onto your memories.” says former pupil Delbert Shepard at one point. “You’re able to pull back the good memories and let go of the bad ones.”

With this in mind, here’s a complete beginner’s guide to film photography (with particular advice for people in Vancouver/Canada).

Tools of the Trade

Perhaps the biggest barrier to film photography is knowing which camera to use. Having grown from uninformed novice to imperfect amateur, I can tell you the unvarnished truth: it really doesn’t matter. I shot on a Diana Mini because it was the first film camera I saw that I could afford. Your first camera could (and probably should) be different from that, but don’t let gear distract you.

In his highly encouraging book, Steal Like an Artist, writer/artist Austin Kleon explains that it’s easy to feel like a phony or an imposter when setting out into a new creative field. Learning a new skill is sometimes awkward or uncomfortable. You know what’s not awkward or uncomfortable? Scouring YouTube or Reddit for camera recommendations. But while a good Google search can alleviate discomfort, it will do you a disservice in the long run. Don’t do it. If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: the best camera is one you want to use and is, ideally, right in front of you.

That said, I would encourage complete beginners to start shooting with a disposable camera. The reason for this is three-fold. First, disposable cameras are cheap–for $15 you get everything you need to shoot, including the flash. Second, disposables are idiot proof. You don’t need to worry about loading film, or setting the aperture, or even taking off the lens cap. It’s literally point and shoot. Third, disposable cameras can be given to most box store photo-processing centres for development with no-hiccups or special costs. This includes big box chains like Walmart, or my personal favourite, London Drugs.

If this sounds too easy, that’s because it’s supposed to be. At this point, your only goal should be to take photos. You don’t get bonus points for suffering, or for slamming your head against the wall. Seriously. If disposable cameras are good enough for Dua Lipa, they’re good enough for you. Shoot a couple rolls, then maybe look into buying your own rig (second-hand, of course).

Quality > quantity

Once your camera is locked and loaded, the real fun begins.

In an earlier draft of this essay, I wrote that a benefit of film is that it tends to inject photos with a certain degree of style. I still think that’s true. Film looks different from the majority of what we’re exposed to on a given day, meaning your images will have a natural allure. But with great power comes great responsibility. Film is finite, meaning even novice photographers need to make some tough decisions.

Most crucially, what do you want to photograph? In On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide, David Hurn argues the best photographers are “enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their subject matter” and plan ahead of the actual shooting. This applies to professional photogs, sure. But Hurn’s advice also extends to novices. He gives the example of a mother photographing their child at the beach, writing: “Eighty-five percent of all the ingredients of photography are encompassed by this single act. The mother has an intimate knowledge of her subject… She is enthusiastic in her love of the subject… Her job is simply to record the moment.” In other words, stick to what you know. Take pictures of your friends and family. Maybe try your hand at a cheeky photo-dump. Just make sure whatever you’re shooting sparks genuine interest.

On the matter of composition, I again point to Hurn, who believes photography consists of two fundamental elements: where you stand and when you release the shutter. The former, Hurn writes, can be predetermined, but the latter is largely a matter of chance (e.g., you can stand in front of the ocean, but you can’t control when the wave crashes). Because of this, the complete beginner is better off prioritizing quality over quantity. Focus on a single subject for multiple frames, rather than trying to capture multiple scenes. If you’re really bold, try shooting everything from a single spot, and adjusting the angle of your lens as you go.

When your roll is spent, get it developed. For beginners, that means paying a visit to your local 1-hour photo, such as London Drugs (LD). When you drop off your disposable/film tell them you want to get it processed and scanned. This keeps LD from printing your photos right away. Instead, they’ll send you a link to the scans, which are Instagram-ready. Seems like a small thing, but it will keep your costs low, and get your Likes flowing sooner. You can always print any favourites from the roll using LD’s online software.

Horizon Lines

With your first set of scans back from the shop, it’s time for a cool down period. Start with some self-reflection. Divide your photos into two groups: ones that worked, and ones that didn’t. Focus on the ones that didn’t–what’s off about them? Sometimes the answer is something simple, like you needed to use the flash. In other cases, the issue isn’t immediately clear. No matter. Use this as a reference to improve your work.

youtube

When you’re finished, try to find further sources of inspiration. In particular, bypass Instagram and invest in a high-quality photo book. Classics include Robert Frank’s The Americans, Annie Leibovitz’s Photographs, or Vancouverite Fred Herzog’s Modern Colours (photography, like most creative fields, suffers from a lack of diversity). Take heart that, at one point, these household names were complete beginners. Any notoriety occurred, because they took the first step. It’s like Delbert Shepard tells his former teacher in Portraits and Dreams: “[Photography] taught me the meaning of life and that there were no boundaries to what we could do and couldn’t do. It’s whatever we set our mind to.”

Watch Portraits and Dreams for FREE via PBS (VPN required)

Follow me on Twitter.

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haphapner · 5 years ago

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The Electoral College

Established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College is the formal body which elects the President and Vice President of the United States. Each state has as many "electors" in the Electoral College as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress, and the District of Columbia has three electors. When voters go to the polls in a Presidential election, they actually are voting for the slate of electors vowing to cast their ballots for that ticket in the Electoral College.[1]

Let’s think about one person, one vote and our current constitutional method of electing a president. Most Americans believe in one person, one vote. In fact, virtually all Americans recognize that it was a travesty to consider blacks and women as have less voting value than a white male voter. After the Civil War, black men were considered 3/5 of a vote while women had no vote at all. So, slave ownership was not only power over another individual human being but also in government.

The electoral college system (EC) does not discriminate along ethnic or gender lines. The EC originally sought to support a representative form of government (not every citizen had to show up in DC and vote) while ensuring that distant lower populated states were not under-represented or abused by more populated coastal states. Remember this was devised pre-steam engine, pre-train or car, pre-telegraph or telephone. Communication and travel took long amounts of time with no guarantees of success.

In 1804, Ohio sent one elector to convey the wishes of the 45,000 residents. Ohio also had an elector for each of its Senate seats creating a total of three electors (the minimum for any state). Those representatives got on a horse (or into a stagecoach) and headed east to arrive in DC weeks later just in time to cast Ohio’s vote for the next President. Remember, the total population of the United States was just over 5.2 million people then with 880,021 of those being slaves. Figure 1, illustrates the United States in 1804.

Figure 1 Voting States in 1804

The chart below (figure 2) illustrates the growth of Ohio’s population from 1800. Note before statehood in 1803, Ohio was referred to as the Northwest Territory.

Figure 2 Ohio's Population Growth from 1800

Population distribution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had a major impact on the design of the electoral college system. According to the 1800 US Census, only 6% of the population lived in cities. The remaining 94% of the population lived in rural areas often very far flung from the center of government.

Figure 3 US Census Information 1800

The table above (figure 3) shows how much power voting age (VA) white men exercised over the population. In 1800, just 17% of the population had a say in selecting representatives and the president. By modern terms, does this sound like democracy – even a representative democracy?

An Elegant Solution in its Day

Was the electoral college an effective means of electing a president in its day? Definitely.

Ohio sent one elector to represent its 45,000 living souls plus two for each Senator giving them 3 electoral college votes.

Delaware, population 64,273 also had 3 electoral votes.

The map below (figure 4) shows the number of electoral college votes each of the 15 states had in that election.[2]

Figure 4 1804 Electoral College Map

As you can see, based on overall population numbers, it appears that congress did a good job of not only apportioning representatives but also of apportioning votes for president (the electoral college). Jefferson defeated Pinckney in a landslide.

The practical aspects of the vote are staggering given the lack of industrial travel and communication.

Distance from Cincinnati to Washington DC: 505 miles

Distance from Columbus to Washington DC: 402 miles

Distance from Cleveland to Washington DC: 373 miles

Given these distances, poor roads, wilderness issues, Native American issues and lack of ability to communicate without a messenger or being face to face; the electoral college concept was a very elegant means of communicating the wishes of Ohio voters in 1804. This is especially true when one realizes that Ohio was one of the states where the voters chose the electors, not the state government.

Fast Travel and Comfort

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad incorporated in 1827 and officially opened in 1830. This began to “reduce” the vast distances that America encompassed. By the Civil War, Pullman luxury rail cars were the vogue. Electors could travel in complete comfort. By the end of the 19th Century the transcontinental railroad was a reality connecting the nation from coast to coast.

Dawn of the Communication Age

Fast forward from 1830 to March 3, 1843, The United States Congress appropriates funds for Samuel Morse to lay a telegraph line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. In May of 1844 the words, “What hath God wrought” traveled between Baltimore and Washington DC in mere seconds.

This is when the US Congress should have begun planning for a new electoral system. By 1858, the United States had intercontinental and international telegraph connections. The telegraph could do in seconds what it took an elector weeks to do in 1804. The communication was more secure in every way.

Electors no longer needed to travel long distances to communicate the will of the people of their state. What had been a necessary and elegant solution, now became an artifact, honorary ritual of government.

How could Congress keep the meaningful parts of the electoral system yet move forward utilizing the new technologies available?

The answer, in retrospect is simple of course.

Congress would continue to apportion US House seats to states based on their population. However, Congress no longer needed to have electoral college members travel to DC to communicate the will of the people. State election boards could simply telegraph the result of the popular vote for each candidate on a precinct by precinct basis. Thus, the true will of the people, the result of the popular vote would elect all candidates by a simple majority.

1920 US Census

For the first time in American history, the US Census indicated that more people lived in urban areas than rural.[3] By 1990, a full three quarters of the US population lived in urban areas. In his December 2016 Census update, Census Bureau Director John H. Thompson said, “Rural areas cover 97 percent of the nation’s land area but contain 19.3 percent of the population (about 60 million people).”[4]

We find ourselves living in a country where the 29 least populated states have 58 senators. Those states represent 21% of the US population. Conversely, the 9 most populated states have only 18 senators but have 51% of the total US population. So, 51% of our population holds only 18% of the US Senate seats. The other 13 states hold 26 Senate seats while having 28% of the population. A full 79% of the US population holds 44 seats in the US Senate.

Why does the EC seem like a problem?

It has always been a problem. Since the election of 1824, five presidential elections have been won by the candidate who did not win the popular vote.

Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in 1824 but lost the electoral college vote to John Quincy Adams. Samuel Tilden won in 1876 but the EC elected Rutherford B. Hayes. Grover Cleveland won in 1888 but Benjamin Harrison became president. In 2000, Al Gore lost the EC to George W. Bush. And finally, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes in 2016 and lost to Donald J. Trump.

Some would say, shame on these candidates. They had a poor strategy. But it is the will of the people that is thwarted through the electoral college.

Why is the EC a problem? Because twice this century, a person has become president despite losing the popular vote. The uptick in occurrences may be an anomaly but the issue ties closely with other current issues such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and population counting for the census.

Why deal with the issue? Because it is simple to fix in this communication age. We can continue to have a representative democracy but get rid of the electoral college.

“The closest Congress has come to amending the Electoral College since 1804 was during the 91st Congress (1969–1971). H.J. Res. 681 proposed the direct election of a President and Vice President, requiring a runoff when no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote. The resolution passed the House in 1969 but failed to pass the Senate.”[5]

We’ve seen an example how elegant the electoral college system was in 1804. Now lets take a look at how it works in 2019.

The least populated states, in descending order, are:

Delaware

North Dakota

South Dakota

Alaska

Vermont

Wyoming

In 2019, the total population of these states is a bit less than 4.5 million residents.

The most populated states, in descending order, are:

California

Texas

Florida

New York

Illinois

Pennsylvania

Ohio

Georgia

North Carolina

In 2019, the total population of these states is roughly 164.7 million residents.

27% of the population in the U.S. is in California, Texas & Florida. California has the largest population in the United States followed by Texas and Florida. Wyoming is the least populated state in the United States followed by Vermont & Alaska. California accounts for 12% of the population of the United States. California, Texas & New York account for 27% of the population in the United States.[6]

Let’s use the 6th least populated state, Delaware and compare to the 4th most populated state New York. Everyone is always comparing California and Wyoming, that’s just not fair.

Delaware has a population of 967,171 and 3 electoral college votes.

New York has 19,542,209 residents and 29 electoral college votes.

Math indicates that it takes 322,390 votes to earn 1 electoral college vote in Delaware.

At the same time, it takes 673,870 votes to earn the equivalent 1 electoral college vote in New York state.

This is unfair to the voters of New York state both urban and rural. A New Yorker’s vote is less than half as valuable or meaningful as a voter from Delaware.

It is time we stop seeing this as an urban versus rural issue. We must establish a one person, one vote system. Less populated areas deserve equal representation in the legislative branch of government. However, we cannot afford to let less populated states impede the progress of the whole country.

The table below (figure 5) illustrates the state by state effect of this. In the table, we first grouped the 15 least populated states. All of those states have a population of less than 2 million people. We then averaged the number of votes required to gain one electoral college vote for those 15 states. This gave us a number much higher than the often used 192,579 votes required to gain 1 EV in Wyoming. The average of the 15 least populated states is 305,599 votes are required to capture one electoral college vote.

We then used that number to create a factor which illustrates the magnitude of difference in the value of votes related to the 15 least populated states. For example, in Texas 2.47 votes are required to have the same electoral impact as in any of the 15 least populated states. In the converse, in Wyoming only .63 of a vote is required to have the same electoral impact as in any of the 15 least populated states.

Texas loses twice. It requires 2.47 more votes to get 1 vote and then it faces the fact that votes in the majority of the least populated states are worth more than 1 vote.

Twenty states have a factor of 1.99 or worse. Those twenty states have a combined population of 247.6 million people. This means that the voters in those states have, at best, only half of the voting power of their fellow voters in the 15 least populated states whose population is ~17 million people.

Figure 5 Vote Factors to Achieve 1 RV

The Real Issue

In 2019, less populated states have an outsized influence on our legislative branch of government.

Our apportionment of US House Representatives seems to be working fine and is appropriate. It is the US Senate that does not fairly represent the people within the legislative branch.

I propose the following constitutional amendment to fix the electoral college and US Senate issues:

Discontinue use of electoral college in favor of state by state popular vote results used to elect the US President.

Continue to have 2 senators for every state. States with over 5 million in population should get 1 extra senator. An additional senator should be granted to each state at 10 million population and ab additional at every 10 million after without limit.

The following table (figure 6) indicates the outcome of such a proposal based on updated census information from 2018:

Figure 6 Proposed Senate Accommodations

As can be seen this approach would allow for more equal senate representation of the more populated states, while not denying the less populated states true representation at current levels. This will facilitate negotiation and coalitions within the governing body.

Respectfully,

David Hapner

July 13, 2019

[1] https://history.house.gov/Institution/Electoral-College/Electoral-College/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_United_States_presidential_election

[3] https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf

[4] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210.html

[5] https://history.house.gov/Institution/Electoral-College/Electoral-College/

[6] https://beef2live.com/story-population-state-0-114254 July 2019 Publication

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carolcooks2 · 4 years ago

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Welcome to Saturday Snippets were anything goes…whatever catches my eye or my imagination could be on this post…something for everyone…I hope so…so whatever your timezone grab a coffee or a glass of wine and enjoy!

Everyone knows how I love to cook and I am pretty good now at cooking Asian food I have had a few years practise and practise makes perfect…Fried Rice …all the chefs are making fried rice some better than others…my grandson showed me this video and although there are a few foofs in it it is funny…so just a little warning there are a few profanities personally I am not given to profanities myself but I found this very funny…I give you Uncle Roger reviewing for want of a better word Jamie Olivers Fried Rice…

Personally, I will never eat fried rice for a while without thinking of Uncle Roger…

How many boys ask for a metal detector I know Aston did as did my sons they took them to the beach, the local woods and parks and unearthed a few things but mostly nothing of any worth…This young Irish lad however like my boys started out with a dream and that dream became a reality when he unearthed a Historic Irish Sword as he was prospecting along a local river bank…How often does that happen?

Sadly Johnny Cash passed away on September 12th 2003…he was an American Singer and Songwriter who fired up country and western music…raised in the rural South he grew up listening to songs of work and lament, hymns and folk ballads it wasn’t until he joined the army that he learnt to play the guitar and write songs when he reti=urned from his military service in Germany he settled in Memphis, Tennessee with the aim of pursuing a career in music…He sang at county fairs and local events until he was signed up after auditioning with Sam Phillips of Sun Records, who signed Cash in 1955. Such songs as “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “Hey, Porter,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “I Walk the Line” brought him considerable attention, and by 1957 Cash was the top recording artist in the country and western field. His music was noted for its stripped-down sound and focus on the working poor and social and political issues. Cash, who typically wore black clothes and had a rebellious persona, became known as the “Man in Black.”

Did you know?

Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browing on September 12, 1846.

Barrett was already a respected poet who had published literary criticism and Greek translations in addition to poetry. Her first volume of poetry, The Seraphim and Other Poems appeared in 1838, followed by Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1844). Born in 1806 near Durham, England, at her father’s 20-bedroom mansion, she enjoyed wealth and position, but suffered from weak lungs and tended to be reclusive in her youth. She became even more so after the death of her beloved brother in 1840.

Recycling is high on my agenda and especially circular recycling especially when the artist produces something like these …

I think they are spectacular I just wish I had a talent like that…Awesome use of scraps of wood…

Wellness Corner by Sally Cronin…Liver health and the Milk Thistle.

https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com/2020/09/10/smorgasbord-health-column-the-medicine-womans-treasure-chest-herbal-medicine-liver-health-and-milk-thistle/

This week I have been soup making...Carrot Soup normally I stick to chicken, mushroom or tomato but this week it has been carrot soup..which was really nice very orange but a soup I would make again it needs a few tweaks and then the recipe will be in my cookbook …

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sauteed carrots

Carrot Soup

But I will as I promised to give you the recipe for foraged wild mushroom soup…

Here in the northeast of Thailand, there are various kinds of tasty mushrooms (hed), all filled with nutrition. Three favourites are hed kay, hed tub-tao and hed ra-ngok. In the villages, these mushrooms are often prepared in a soup along with bai yangang juice (Tiliacora Triandra), sweet basil and pla-ra ( fermented) fish which is often added to the soup…

I have adapted the recipe as you would most probably not be able to get some of the ingredients or want to use them like the Pla-ra…

Ingredients:

2 cups various kinds of mushrooms

2 stalks lemongrass, lower tender portions, cut into 2-inch pieces and slightly crushed

5 – 7 each chillies, slightly crushed

3 – 5 each red shallots, slightly crushed

2 stalks spring onion, cut into 1-inch pieces

2 tbsp pla-ra juice (liquid of pickled fish) (optional)

1 tbsp fish sauce

2 cups of water

4 – 5 sprigs Thai basil leaves

Let’s Cook!

Pour the water into a pot over the high heat. When it begins a boil, add lemongrass, chilies and shallots. Then follow by adding the mushrooms. Let simmer briefly until cooked. Season with the fish sauce and pla-ra liquid. Add basil and spring onion. Remove from the heat.

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wild mushrooms

wild mushroom soup

Serve in a bowl.

Thais would also add some local vegetable called Cha-om which is a vegetable native to here… It has a particular fragrance that may seem unpleasant at first to the unaccustomed, but when it’s cooked up, it’s so tasty that most people can’t stop eating it and the aroma is just part of the package and soon becomes quite likeable.

Many Northern Thai dishes use quite sour tasting vegetables and of course Phla the fermented fish…it is a taste our western palates are not used to but if you eat it enough your taste changes and it becomes quite palatable.

Now for some music…I have selected “Million Dollar Quartet” which is a recording of an impromptu jam session with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash …recorded on December 4th 1956 in the Sun Record Studios in Memphis Tennessee…

Impromptu jam sessions are one of my favourite kinds of music…

How young is Elvis there he must have been star struck…

That’s all for today’s Saturday Snippets I hope you have enjoyed it…xx

About Carol Taylor:

Enjoying life in The Land Of Smiles I am having so much fun researching, finding new, authentic recipes both Thai and International to share with you. New recipes gleaned from those who I have met on my travels or are just passing through and stopped for a while. I hope you enjoy them.

I love shopping at the local markets, finding fresh, natural ingredients, new strange fruits and vegetable ones I have never seen or cooked with. I am generally the only European person and attract much attention and I love to try what I am offered and when I smile and say Aroy or Saab as it is here in the north I am met with much smiling.

Some of my recipes may not be in line with traditional ingredients and methods of cooking but are recipes I know and have become to love and maybe if you dare to try you will too. You will always get more than just a recipe from me as I love to research and find out what other properties the ingredients I use contain to improve our health and wellbeing.

Exciting for me hence the title of my blog, Retired No One Told Me! I am having a wonderful ride and don’t want to get off, so if you wish to follow me on my adventures, then welcome! I hope you enjoy the ride also and if it encourages you to take a step into the unknown or untried, you know you want to…….Then, I will be happy!

Thank you once again for reading this post I hope you all have a fabulous week and stay safe these are troubling times xx

Saturday Snippets…12th September 2020…

Saturday Snippets…12th September 2020… Welcome to Saturday Snippets were anything goes...whatever catches my eye or my imagination could be on this post...something for everyone...I hope so...so whatever your timezone grab a coffee or a glass of wine and enjoy!

#blogging #Johnny Cash #Music #Thai wild Mushroom Soup #Uncle Roger and Jamie Oliver

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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California roads not designed to handle wildfire evacuations

PARADISE, Calif. — Californians got a deadly wakeup call when more than 27,000 Paradise residents trying to escape the Camp Fire got caught in a nightmare traffic jam. The 2018 catastrophe illuminated the grim reality that road systems throughout the state are not designed to handle a sudden evacuation.

A new USA TODAY Network-California analysis reveals the extent to which a fundamental problem in Paradise — too few escape lanes for too many people in vehicles — applies to other cities and neighbourhoods at great risk of wildfire across the state.

About 350,000 Californians live in areas that have both the highest wildfire risk designation, and either the same number or fewer exit routes per person as Paradise. From the mountains, lakes and forests of northern California, to the San Diego suburbs, some residents in the most fire-prone areas have far fewer evacuation routes than the vast majority of the state.

The ratio of people to exit routes doesn’t account for all the complexities of an actual evacuation, experts say, but it does serve as a shorthand for evaluating evacuation efficacy.

In the Gold Rush town of Sonora, about three and half hours southeast of the town wasted by the Camp Fire, Karl Rodefer thinks about Paradise. He worries more as the next dry season approaches.

“If that happens here, we’re going to have the same kinds of issues,” said Rodefer, a Tuolumne County supervisor. “There’s a lot of anxiety in the foothills now because of the Camp Fire.”

Both Sonora and Paradise are isolated communities with few roads leading into and out of town.

In Los Angeles County, an area already known for gridlock, the city of Glendale straddles the Verdugo Mountains with neighbourhoods, schools, and hiking trails carved into its base. The city’s 2008 emergency plan identified them as potential brush fire zones.

The roads can be narrow and some communities have only one way in and out. The plan notes that these conditions could make evacuation and emergency response difficult, but years of construction and development have made any kind of road widening “physically impossible” in those areas, city spokesman Dan Bell said.

The city’s police and fire agencies have conducted outreach in these communities and are strict about defensible space around homes. There’s also a new, targeted alert system.

“I think the only concern is people not evacuating when we ask them to evacuate,” he said.

Plus, Bell said, the area hasn’t seen a major wildfire in some time.

But it’s the big one that worries Glendale resident James Ward, 62. For 32 years he’s lived in Chevy Chase Canyon, a community of 1,600 homes in a cleft of the San Rafael Hills, which the city has also identified as a potential brush fire zone.

There are only two-lane roads that run through the canyon, with a single access point for many streets and only a few main arteries that let people out. But some neighbours don’t know all the ways out, Ward said.

“If 80% or 60% of the people thought the only way was Chevy Chase (Drive) and all the emergency vehicles were coming up, yes that’s gonna be an issue,” Ward said.

Evacuation routes came up at an annual community meeting in March with the police and fire departments because residents saw the tragedy in Paradise and had the same fears, Ward said. The co-president of the Chevy Chase Estates Association said the public safety officials acknowledged their fears but “their message was: be aware of your surroundings and if we ask you to leave, leave.”

California officially adopted fire code standards for roads in the 1990s, although they had been used in some areas for decades before that. They set rules for things like grades, road surfaces, passing areas, signage on dead-ends and “critical” secondary access to any subdivision, said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with Cal Fire’s office of the state fire marshal.

But most of the road systems California communities like Glendale rely on were built before the widespread use of the standards.

There are also building codes that regulate room capacity and emergency exits, said wildfire evacuations expert Tom Cova. The same consideration should be applied to road infrastructure in communities, he said.

“We’re gonna see a lot of bad things happen I think … before we do something for communities that we did for buildings,” said Cova, director of the University of Utah’s Center for Natural and Technological Hazards.

Still, Cova and other experts see road capacity as just one element of a healthy evacuation system. Timely evacuation orders, residents’ willingness to obey them, traffic pinch points at intersections beyond the community and many other factors can also be a matter of life and death.

And road capacities can be sufficient, Cova said, if evacuations are gradual or limited. It’s when everyone tries to leave at once that escape routes are quickly overwhelmed.

——

‘THERE WERE JUST SO MANY PEOPLE’

Malibu transplant Kassidy Jones, 40, said that’s exactly what happened when he and his family fled their home in the city’s Corral Canyon neighbourhood the morning of Nov. 9. As the Woolsey Fire bore down, they packed two cars full of belongings and drove south down the windy, two-lane road to scenic Pacific Coast Highway. At the bottom of the canyon, they found bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“I don’t think there’s really another way out, especially because the fire was coming down the mountain,” Jones said. “There were just so many people. PCH can’t handle it.”

Work brought the Texas native to Los Angeles, but he never liked the city much. That’s why he moved his family to the remote neighbourhood where his backyard met the sprawling canyon and gave him a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.

Now there he was stuck in traffic. He couldn’t go north. The flames were coming from that direction — just like in previous fires. Plus, north of Jones, the canyon road eventually empties into a network of hiking trails.

At the bottom of the canyon, it took 20 minutes to even turn onto the highway, Jones said. He parked one of the vehicles along PCH and planned to leave it there, figuring the fire wouldn’t spread that far. There, Jones rejoined his wife and their children, ages 6 and 8.

The kids became restless as the family’s car crept along the highway for two hours to go just two miles. Finally, they stopped at a park to stretch their legs, go to the bathroom and have some snacks.

They watched as the towering smoke plume from the Woolsey Fire changed direction.

“Before it was flowing west then it went south. Our neighbourhood was on the western edge of where the fire went. Unfortunately, it got our house,” Jones said.

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WHERE DRIVERS COULD OVERWHELM EVACUATION ROUTES

For others like Jones, who choose to live in places prone to fire, whether in remote parts of rural California or in the “urban-wildland interface” that buffers California’s rugged wilderness and dense cities, a similar situation could await.

A USA TODAY Network-California analysis of populations, fire risk zones and roadways shows roughly one out of every 100 ZIP codes in California has a population-to-evacuation-route ratio that is near to or worse than that of Paradise and its neighbour Magalia.

Near the top of the list is South Lake Tahoe, a city west of the California-Nevada state line where vacationers come to camp along the lake that straddles both places. The town is relatively isolated, with only a few thoroughfares to facilitate emergency access for firefighting resources.

There, the number of people living in the “very high fire hazard safety zone” per roadway lanes out is almost three times the number for Paradise.

Interim South Lake Tahoe Fire Department Battalion Chief Jim Drennan said he wasn’t surprised to find out his community is in one of the most precarious fire evacuation locations in the state, given the small number of roads in and out of the Tahoe Basin.

Drennan said since Paradise burned, he hears the same question from people on a nearly daily basis: What are they going to do if a major fire breaks out? Evacuation plans fall primarily to police, he said, but his fire department is one of several agencies trying to plan for what feels like a looming threat. His fire department and other public safety agencies in the area are “on super high alert,” he said.

“The mindset here is: There’s no earthly way you’re moving the entire vacation population out of the basin all at once,” Drennan said. “If you have just one quirk, you’re going to end up with a lot of people stuck on the roads.”

The previous fire chief there wrote in a 2018 op-ed that it’s not a question of “if” but “when” a major fire will hit the area, and he pointed out the limited evacuation routes as a major concern.

Police, fire and city officials will hold a public meeting April 25, specifically to discuss fire preparedness and evacuation planning, partly in response to the anxiety many have expressed to him and others, Drennan said.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, densely populated with some of the costliest real estate in the United States, has even more people and fewer lanes leading out, putting it at more than five times the population-to-lane ratio as Paradise.

The western-facing edge of the Sierra Nevada mountain range is full of areas with a low number of evacuation routes for the populations there. Places like Foresthill in Placer County, which has a worse population-to-lane ratio than Paradise, and Nevada City in Nevada County, and Sonora in Tuolumne County, are far worse than average.

The analysis identified some places in California where fires have already combined with jammed roadways, killing drivers attempting to flee. Paradise and its neighbour Magalia were among the areas identified as a populous area with limited routes out, and 2018’s Camp Fire proved the point. There, city and county officials had planned on having motorists evacuate using five two-lane roads and one four-lane road leading out of town. But fire forced officials to close three of those routes, further clogging the remaining roads, Paradise Mayor Jody Jones said.

The Cedar Fire, which burned 273,000 acres across the hills of northeastern San Diego in 2003, claimed 10 people trying to flee the blaze in their cars. The fire lashed the densely populated Scripps Ranch area, which has a limited number of roadways that lead to less fire-prone areas.

——

UNDETERRED

Many Californians clearly understand the risks. They’ve lived through wildfire evacuations, or have watched others. But that’s not enough to pry them from the places they love.

Greg Meneshian, 53, is one. He’s rebuilding the Bell Canyon home destroyed last year by the Woolsey Fire.

Meneshian moved to the gated, equestrian-oriented community just west of the bustling San Fernando Valley about five years ago. The sense of community he felt the night he evacuated, he said, is just more reason for him and his two daughters, 10 and 12, to stay.

There’s only one access point for the neighbourhood of 750.

Looking northwest from his driveway on the night of Nov. 8 he could see flames in the canyon. He and his neighbours met on the street in front of his home trying to figure out what they should do, Meneshian said.

“They were looking to me for answers as if I lived through this before,” Meneshian said. But he was in disbelief.

He woke up the girls and told them to pack a bag for a week. The power had been flickering on and off, and Meneshian knew that meant it was time to go.

Unlike Jones, whose wife had gotten an evacuation alert, Meneshian left before anyone told him to.

It was dark and smoky with nothing but the pockets of fire visible in the canyon, Meneshian said. Vehicles raced down his hilly street.

“It was really a scramble for our lives,” Meneshian said.

He’d find out the next day his home was destroyed.

But the self-proclaimed “nostalgic guy” likes the sense of togetherness in Bell Canyon, where the closest store is 30 minutes away so sometimes borrowing from a neighbour is usually the better bet.

The limited escape routes, he thinks, are just something to be aware of: “It’s probably a deterrent for some people (moving) in,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be.”

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‘YOU HAVE TO MAKE THESE INVESTMENTS’

Before Paradise burned, there were already signs of problems with evacuation routes during major wildfires, said Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, whose district includes Glendale.

The 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, which killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 structures, raised alarms.

Afterward, Friedman and her staff talked with academics about the lessons learned, and she introduced Assembly Bill 2911, which then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in 2018. Among other things, AB 2911 requires that subdivisions with only one exit route, located in very high hazard zones for wildfire, undergo an assessment. The bill calls for developing safety recommendations.

State fire officials should begin the surveys around July 1, 2021, and continue every five years after.

Friedman’s bill is likely to have an impact back in her district. In Glendale’s 2008 emergency plan, bold, capitalized letters call attention to the Oakmont Woods and Whiting Woods communities and their single access roads. Both are within the state’s very high hazard zone.

“Any city that has those conditions could benefit and certainly it could be a legislative wake-up call to not only identify these areas but (to signal that) you have to make these investments to make the cities safer,” Friedman said.

Friedman hopes for more state funding for the assessments. She sees reason for optimism in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s declaration of a state of emergency ahead of the traditional wildfire season.

While there’s no unified approach to dealing with California’s wildfire evacuation problem, Friedman’s bill calling for assessments to begin two years from now is not the only potential improvement underway.

In March, Newsom fast-tracked 35 priority projects to remove years of dry, built-up vegetation and create fuel breaks for emergency routes. Those follow an effort by Caltrans since 2016 to remove dead and dying trees from state roadways.

—-

MORE THAN JUST LANES

Cova, the wildfire evacuations expert, said 25 years ago he became preoccupied with the idea that road congestion was the problem. But through his research he also learned it’s more complicated.

The direction the roads let out is also important. In most fire-prone areas officials know what historically contributes to large wildfires, such as Santa Ana or Diablo winds, and can plan to build roads in a direction those gusts are unlikely to push the fire, Cova said.

During an emergency, Cova said traffic routing and control makes a big difference. That can be especially important at the points where evacuation routes hit other roads. The Malibu example, where so many roads empty onto PCH, is apt.

The road issues are important because so many other human factors may decrease the amount of time people have to evacuate, he said.

“What really causes the problem is when you have too many people leaving in too little a time,” Cova said.

It can take officials a while to order evacuations. And residents often hesitate, contemplating whether they should leave, then take time packing.

Back in Malibu, Jones’ wife got an evacuation alert on her phone at 6 a.m. Sheriff’s officials came around on a loudspeaker at 7 a.m. It was around 8 a.m. when Jones actually left.

To speed things up, Cova encourages residents to have a go bag with medications, important paperwork, photographs and other irreplaceable items. And they should have a plan to round up pets, since critical time can be lost chasing dogs and locating cats.

“Being prepared to leave at a moment’s notice is a good idea,” Cova said.

——

Damon Arthur of the Redding Record Searchlight contributed to this report.

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hangingsunshine · 6 years ago

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Islam dan wanita: memilih untuk jilbab dan paradoks.

NEAR THE VERY heart of a question Americans have been asking themselves since September 11, 2001--"Why do they hate ush"--lies the question of how different societies treat their women. Americans by now seem bored and faintly embarrassed when feminist stories make the headlines. Who wants to hear about chauvinism at a stodgy American golf course when most of the meaningful barriers to female achievement in the United States have already been scaledh Yet as routine as the self-assertion of women is here, in other parts of the world it may be the most contentious issue of all. In Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries--where adherents of extreme variants of Islam try to intimidate peaceful Muslim majorities--antipathy toward the West revolves around sex and gender every bit as much as it revolves around "globalization" or the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or infidel soldiers quartered on sacred lands. The dogma purveyed by the Taliban of Afghanistan, Jemaa Islamiya in Southeast Asia, and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, among others, would encourage polygamy; lower the age of marriage for girls (the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 made girls legally marriageable beginning at age nine); require women to cover themselves in public; deny women marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights equal to those of men; punish females accused of adultery or prostitution with death by stoning; and, most fundamentally, unite church and state (a theocracy being the Islamists' preferred way to impose the aforementioned rules on a society). We must understand radical Islamism if we are ever to counter its malign force. By the term radical Islamism I mean the varieties of political Islam that take their inspiration from the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, from Sunni Wahhabism emanating from Saudi Arabia, or from the Shiite theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All three are radical because they define Islam in opposition to all that is non-Islamic. In other words, these violent strains share in being reactionary. And one of the things about our way of life against which they have reacted most strongly, going back to at least the 1920s, is feminism. This article will examine the radical Islamist reaction to feminism, along with other related matters: the participation of women themselves in radical Islamist thought and political acts; how attempts by governments to secularize their populations actually fed Islamism in the universities; the "Islamic revival" in Egypt; the less than healthy view of sex evinced by Islamists; the treatment of women in Afghanistan and American feminists' role in bringing that treatment to light; and, finally, an emerging "Islamic feminism" (as opposed to Islamist feminism) that I believe deserves support and encouragement. Coeducation and its discontents MEDIA COMMENTATORS have explained to Americans over and over again since the attacks on New York and Washington what scholars have been documenting for decades: Radical Islamism is steeped in resentment. Iranian writer Daryush Shayegan tells us the Islamists' "consciousness is wounded" by Western achievements. They use religion as a political weapon, he says, and their program is twofold: to wound the West in return while at the same time coercing mainstream Muslims into practicing a strange, stripped down version of Islam that will bring back the glorious age of the Prophet Muhammad. Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle East historians, places this resentment in the widest possible context: Islam's fortunes and misfortunes since its advent in the seventh century. Its unimpeded rise, from the time of the victorious and prosperous Prophet Muhammad, lasted a thousand years. The defeat of the Ottoman Turks outside of Vienna in 1683 began a decline that has been just as steady, lasting to our own day. Lewis contrasts this up-down trajectory with the early struggles and checkered history of the Jews and Christians. How galling for Muslim radicals, he says, that the once persecuted Jews and Christians have come to define the world we live in. And, he adds, where Judeo-Christian and Muslim societies contrast most notably is on the woman question. Herein lies the West's greatest vulnerability, or so the adherents of political Islam--the Islamists--believe. In a recent interview, Lewis noted that, unlike Christianity in all its forms, Islam and most of the rest of the world allow and practice polygamy and concubinage. Western visitors to Muslim lands have talk[ed] with horror of the subordination and ill-treatment of Muslim women (and, I might add, with ill-concealed envy of what they imagine to be the privileges of Muslim men). Muslim visitors to the Christian world are shocked and horrified by the loose and promiscuous ways of the West and also the absurd deference, as they see it, given to Western women. (1) One such visitor, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, a founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, spent time in the United States from 1948 to 1950. He observed with disgust that, in the very churches of the Christians, there were dances at which the sexes mingled and touched. Such a sight convinced Qutb that Christianity had lost its way, leaving a society and a way of life that were debauched and ready to be defeated. The Islamist project to attack the West and "purify" the faith began to take root in Egypt in the 1920s. In 1924, a reformist government opened a modern university that permitted women to attend. At the same time Egypt's first feminist, Huda Shaarawi, set aside her veil in public, and photos of her uncovered face made the front pages of Egyptian newspapers. It was also when Sayyid Qutb and others were establishing the first Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But Islamism didn't come to full fruition until the 1970s, starting to win large numbers of adherents at the precise moment that feminism was at the height of its political power in America and Europe and gaining a foothold in the urban centers of the less developed countries. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi draws the connection very directly in Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Indiana University Press, revised edition 1987). Mernissi's book, first published in 1975, addresses the vast changes in Muslim societies as the European powers were relinquishing their colonies. Not only were rural populations migrating to the cities, but the universities in those cities--for centuries the exclusive preserve of local male aristocracies--were being democratized. Those whom Mernissi calls "traditionally marginalized and deprived male rural migrants" were for the first time permitted to seek higher education in Rabat, Lahore, Beirut, Amman, and other centers. So, too, were women. The introduction of ideas of liberty and equality into these societies had effects that were complicated and in many cases subtle. Clearly discernible to Mernissi, however, was an antagonism that arose between nonveiling college women and the males who arrived in the universities along with them. The male parvenus, in the millions, glommed onto violently anti-Western strains of Islam out of a sense of pique. "What dismays the fundamentalists," Mernissi writes, "is that the era of [postcolonial] independence did not create an all-male new class. Women are taking part in the public feast." Newly urbanized and newly educated young men singled out modern women with diplomas and careers as the worst traitors to Islam. These zealots saw offenses against "real" Islam everywhere, but the uncovered women in their own midst were the ultimate heretics. That generation now constitutes the senior echelon of radical clerics issuing interpretations of Islamic law, or sharia, and the top level of terror networks such as al Qaeda and Jemaa Islamiya. Yet the rigidly puritanical and misogynistic character of Islamism has not kept it from attracting female followers. In an interview for Vogue magazine last year, a Saudi extremist in London told journalist Deborah Scroggins that he and his cohorts "have turned the strict sex segregation that keeps even many wealthy, educated Saudi women confined to the home, and the traditions that prevent outsiders from so much as asking their names, into political assets." He said women give his jihad organization money and serve on the review board of its publications. These nonworking women, he added, have a lot of time to devote to the cause, so they make good administrators of the group's websites. In January of 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the recently assassinated head of Hamas, called jihad "an obligation of all Muslims, men and women," and women suicide bombers have been obliging, in Chechnya and elsewhere. In April 2003, a woman who had lived in Boston for several years was detained in her native Pakistan after the FBI put out a global alert saying she may have ties to al Qaeda. It was not in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia, however, that the "feminist wing" of Islamism first developed. It arose in places where government was secular--Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran under the shah--and secularism was imposed on the French model, which is to say, harshly. Their admiration of the French Revolution led these governments to attempt a wholesale removal of faith from the public realm. To stand up against authoritarian secularism, then, many younger women, beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, and particularly in the universities, turned to religion. Especially after the 1979 revolution in Iran succeeded and Islamism gained even greater force, campus activists railed against secular political establishments for slavishly imitating Western ways. The most militant act of rebellion for urban, educated women became wearing the traditional Muslim head coverings banned by their governments. In her portrait of Turkish women, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Nilufer Gole notes that "as Islam politicized itself, it moved women toward the political scene; and the black veil, the symbol of the return to premodern Islamic traditions, acted as an expression of the active participation of women in political demonstrations." Ineffectual attempts by the governments in Ankara and Cairo to stop the rebirth of the veil among their educated elites only fed this protest sentiment. The rising Islamist movements, writes Gole, called for the female to return to her "traditional settings and positions. On the other hand, they replace the traditional portrait of a Muslim woman with ... that of an active, demanding, and, even, militant Muslim woman who is no longer confined to her home." Indeed, Turkey's prohibition against the wearing of headscarves in public offices and universities has been enforced sporadically since the early 1980s, with a tightening of enforcement after 1997 when the secularist army ousted from office the country's first Islamist prime minister. The Egyptian government tried in the mid-1990s to ban the veil, though the matter got tied up in the courts and came to no definitive resolution. And so the irony reappears: Widening access to education strengthened the hand of fundamentalist Islam. A modern university woman asserting her "seclusion rights" is a woman forswearing her rights in the eyes of non-Muslims and of many Muslims as well. Women intellectuals of middle age today, exiled from various Muslim lands, look back nostalgically to a time before Islamism was widespread. Two decades or more ago, in Kabul, Teheran, or Baghdad, they could dress as they pleased and move about as they pleased. These are by and large secularist women whose adoption of Western notions of individual freedom puts them at odds with the "feminist" wing within Islamism. The Islamists' often severe, scarf-plus-robe covering contrasts with the use, especially among older women and women in rural areas, of headscarves that leave the neck and some of the hair uncovered, or the discarding of the veil altogether. Gole's interviews with Islamist women at Turkish universities record their preference for almost total coverage of the body and their disdain for the less strict reading of the Koran and the more modern dress habits of older Muslim women, whether traditionally Muslim or secular. The older women "do not practice true veiling because they are ignorant about Islam," said one of Gole's interviewees. It is a matter of dispute, however, whether the Koran demands that Muslim women cover themselves. One frequently encounters a textual interpretation that is liberal: Modesty is required of Muslims of both sexes, and Koranic references to veiling apply (or, applied) literally only to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. Islamists, on the other hand, and some non-Islamist traditional Muslims as well, argue that the female obligation to cover is clear in the text. We will not settle that question here; the point is that Islamists have taken the practice and elevated it, as Gole says, to be "the symbol of Islamization," the visible assertion of their fundamentalism. The new Humbert Humberts ISLAMISM HAS, according to its practitioners and some of its academic and journalistic promoters, yielded a feminism that is far superior to ours, because Western licentiousness has been removed. "My niqab [body covering] is my freedom, because it lets me choose who does and who doesn't see me," a daughter of Cairo's political elite told the London Guardian's Geneive Abdo. A former fashion model interviewed by Abdo added: "When I put on the veil, I put on my brain as well." Abdo, researching her pre-September 11 book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), donned long garments to penetrate the sexually segregated salons of Cairo's high society. Her subjects had gone against their secularist, cosmopolitan upbringing to embrace the teachings of Egyptian clerics such as Sheikh Omar Abd al-Kafi, who preached Muslim distrust of Christians and endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the life of Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Newly pious Egyptian men and women "spread their own, unorthodox brand of Islam to friends and followers within their elevated social circles," Abdo writes. The Mubarak government's crackdowns on al-Kafi and other Islamist Pied Pipers of the Egyptian leisure class merely enhanced their mystique. Abdo's labeling Islamism an "unorthodox brand" of Islam is telling. The main purpose of her book was to show English-speaking readers a benign or mainstream Islamism that was supplanting the murderous rage of Osama bin Laden (a Saudi of Yemeni extraction), Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), and their like. This was wishful thinking, no doubt born of a belief that non- and anti-Western customs and ideas automatically deserve respect, and supported by the fact that they were catching on like wildfire among influential Egyptians at the time. In fairness, one cannot fault her too much for underestimating the relative strength of the terrorists. That she did not foretell September 11 makes her a lot like the rest of us. Then, too, Abdo's glowing depiction of "the Islamic revival" among Egypt's intelligentsia dimmed considerably when she confronted certain aspects of it, such as clitoridectomy (which, she asserted, apparently on the authority of the Egyptian government, is performed on 97 percent of Egyptian girls). Abdo tried in vain to dissuade one of her Egyptian acquaintances from having his six-year-old daughter undergo the operation. The secularist government banned clitoridectomy in Egypt in 1997, but, as with veiling, the ban is rarely heeded. Clitoridectomy has no precedent in the Koran, Abdo pointed out; it is a pre-Islamic African practice. The objections she raised with an Islamist leader, Sheik Mohammad al-Berri, prompted this explanation: A woman can be aroused at any moment. Even if a woman is riding in a car, if she hits a few bumps, she can become sexually aroused. Once this happens, a man loses control. So you see, this practice certainly is not meant to punish women. But it is necessary. Islamist regulation of women's morality--which is seen as the key to regulating male morality--apparently makes considerable use of the imagination. In fact one senses beneath their primness an unhealthy obsession with sex. This is nowhere more evident than in accounts of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi, a U.S. literary scholar born and raised in Iran, taught comparative literature at universities there during and after the overthrow of the shah. Her autobiograhical Reading Lolita in Teheran (Random House, 2003) describes an Islamist regime that "went so far as to outlaw certain gestures and expressions of emotion, including love" and that levied upon women who did not totally cover their heads, hair, and bodies monetary fines, up to 76 lashes, and jail terms. While love was being ejected from the public sphere (as were other emotions--it was verboten to grieve publicly for relatives killed by Saddam Hussein's bombs in the Iran-Iraq war, for example), in private things were, by government fiat, supposed to get considerably steamier: The mullahs brought back a practice long banned in the Muslim world, "temporary marriage" (concubinage), so that Iranian men "could have four official wives and as many temporary wives as they wished." It was the habit of the bachelor leaders of the Muslim Students' Association on campus to declare that their only beloved was God. The rules imposed on women to aid male chastity could never be strict enough: Nafisi recounts that one of these young men got a female student expelled from the university "because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him." Equally telling in this regard was the professor who became agitated when one of his students chose to write on the novel Lolita. The professor's reaction was not disapproval of a Western novel about pedophilia--his sympathy was entirely with the pedophile. Indeed, if he sympathized more with Humbert Humbert than even Vladimir Nabokov meant readers to do, this was because he "had a thing about young girls spoiling the lives of intellectual men," writes Nafisi. Notwithstanding the professor's censure of "Nabokov's flighty young vixen," when he sought a new wife he insisted she be no older than 23. He found one at least 20 years his junior (and, as Nafisi points out, a child bride exactly Lolita Haze's age would have been acceptable under the regime's revision of marriage law). When the mullahs suddenly revived concubinage in Iran, Wahhabi religious authorities in Saudi Arabia raised objections, saying that it contravened the Koran. But in general, Saudi fundamentalists, no less than Iranian, put the 1950s hall monitors in the shade when it comes to being moralists with sex on the brain. According to Soraya Altorki, a sociologist who has studied women, marriage, and the family in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, the Arabic word fitnah denotes the disorderly behavior of men who have been sexually tempted by women; the word also means "femme fatale, a woman who can drive men to distraction and destruction." This linguistic conflation of cause and effect is one more reason to conclude that Islamism does not remove licentiousness from society but simply wraps it in layers of misogyny. What is peculiar about radical Islamist women--who, perhaps understandably, dislike being leered at or accosted by disorderly men--is their prescription for coping with the problem. Rather than expecting men to exert control over themselves, or asking mothers, as moral guardians, to take charge of their sons early fahruni on and raise them to respect women, they speak of this as if it lies exclusively with the female. Nilufer Gole quotes a passage from a 1987 article in Mektup magazine that spells it out: We can never go into the streets with our house dresses; if we do so, we will expose ourselves to lustful gazes and will become a source of disorder for the Muslim community.... To increase our attraction to our husbands inside the house and to decrease it outside are our fundamental principles. That is to say, we will be appealing in the house and repulsive outside. Of course, what numbers of educated and professional Muslim women chose to do became compulsory for every girl and woman in Afghanistan. One wonders how soi-disant "repulsive" Islamist women think it worked out when female "repulsiveness" was adopted as the law of the land. Before the Islamist takeover in the 1980s, Afghanistan had been working in fits and starts to join the modern world. Over the years its monarchic governments had been rather progressive, including on the treatment of women. Between 1996 and 2001, under Taliban rule (as the world is now well aware), women and girls were not allowed to get medical treatment if there was no female doctor available to administer it; nor could they be educated, hold jobs, walk about unaccompanied by male relatives, or (a late ruling) enter public parks. Here was a subjugation so total that Iranians could adduce it to argue that their Islamic Republic wasn't all that bad for women. As one female government functionary told Azar Nafisi before Nafisi's 1997 exile from Iran: "These [Iranian] young girls are a little spoiled--they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens." Afghan women and their allies IN THE 1990s, after human rights monitors publicized the Serbs' mass rapes of Bosnian women in the Balkans, the international community began to view the treatment of women as a prominent aspect of war and conflict. It became less difficult than it otherwise might have been for human rights groups and feminist groups to draw the world's attention to the cruelty of the Taliban. The plight of Afghan women spurred American feminists--specifically, those from the "equal rights" branch of feminism that we associate with the National Organization for Women or Eleanor Smeal's Feminist Majority--to do good deeds. Feminist Majority led the way, beginning in 1997, in condemning "gender apartheid" in the largely overlooked country of Afghanistan. Equality Now, an international research unit based in New York, also documented the Taliban's practices many years before the United States took action against the regime. Lobbying by American feminists reportedly helped stop the Clinton administration from formally recognizing the Taliban government, which was, at least for a time, attracting positive attention from a U.S. administration keen to foster an Afghan pipeline deal proposed by the oil company Unocal. Some Afghan activists say, on the other hand, that the Americans did not have much of a feel for local conditions or culture. These activists did not consider it helpful, for example, when Feminist Majority sponsored a back-to-school program exclusively for Afghan girls. Afghan girls have suffered terribly, but assisting Afghan boys--who will otherwise be sent to radical Islamist madrassas to become the next generation of terrorists--is also a necessity. Ignoring the boys and men of a deeply patriarchal society does not make sense, Fahima Vorgetts of the Women for Afghan Women's Advisory Committee told me, "because the brothers and the fathers and the husbands, they are the ones who control the families. They are the ones that, if you alienate them, you won't have any success in bringing women to the table." The reflexive hostility to religion exhibited by the "equal rights" feminists also rubs some of their non-American colleagues the wrong way. Riffat Hassan, a Pakistan-born Muslim feminist theologian writing in the collection Women for Afghan Women (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002) edited by Sunita Mehta, said the support of the U.S. women's movement is laudable but it "must be given without the expectation or the demand that Afghan women will follow a donor-driven agenda ... rooted in aversion to Islam and Afghan culture." Afghans and Afghan Americans trying to help rebuild the war-torn country often speak of U.S. feminists with a mixture of awe for their grassroots political skills, gratitude for what they have done for Afghanistan, and unwillingness to adopt their quirks. The Afghans, like people all around the world, embrace the American polity's appeal to inherent rights but resist defining those rights precisely the way Eleanor Smeal or Betty Friedan would. Another essayist in Women for Afghan Women, Zohra Yusuf Daoud, the first (and last) woman to hold the title of Miss Afghanistan, wrote: "Some aspects associated with Western feminism, such as bra-burning, revealing clothing, and sexual promiscuity are not appropriate at this stage for Afghan feminists, if they ever will be." A spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a dissident group that has been active against every Afghan government going back to 1977 when the country was a Soviet satellite, told me that RAWA considers the Americans too wrapped up in issues like abortion and women's salaries compared to men's. She called these "luxury items" for women struggling for the right to move about freely, to educate and support themselves, and to have political representation. Most Americans, if they are older than 35, think of bra-burning as the political symbol of a bygone era; if they are younger, it's a safe bet they have never heard of it. It is important to realize nonetheless that this is the image of us that lives on around the world. To a degree perhaps surprising to us, 1970s feminism's shock to traditional societies--which Fatima Mernissi had singled out as key to Islamism's rise--reverberates today. It isn't only jihadists and Islamists who are capable of comparing the mores of their societies to our liberal and feminist-influenced mores and declining to hold theirs inferior. Many women's advocates in the Muslim world take veiling--politically exploited though it is by their enemies, the radical Islamists--in stride and believe that we should, too. Leila Ahmed, the Egyptian feminist scholar, has noted with chagrin that Westerners who don't know much about Islam seem obsessed by the veiling issue. RAWA, whose members have risked their lives to protest the Taliban's physically beating any Afghan woman seen in public without the all-enveloping burqa, takes no official position on that garment, saying every woman ought to be allowed to decide for herself whether to wear it. As Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and lawyer, told the Irish Times (December 13, 1997): "When my husband can marry three other women, when my husband can take my children, when my husband can kill me, I have more important problems. When I find a solution for these problems, then I will worry about hijab [veiling]." According to many politically active Afghan women, their fundamental rights have not been vindicated despite the dislodging of the Taliban from power. They have a point. The anarchy and insecurity of postwar Afghanistan, particularly outside of Kabul, have made many women keep wearing the burqa to protect themselves. While millions of Afghan girls are now able to go to school, millions more remain confined to their homes because they fear retribution by Taliban or al Qaeda remnants or intimidation by the regional mujahideen, the heavily armed, religiously conservative warlords of the Northern Alliance that helped the U.S.-led coalition topple the Taliban. Several girls' schools in the provinces have been shelled or set afire. Islamist elements within President Hamid Karzai's postwar government have put in place (or in some cases continued) legal restrictions on travel by women and on the education of married women. The U.S. military announced in late 2003 that it was beefing up its security presence in southern Afghanistan, a tacit acknowledgement of the coalition's postwar failure to secure the country and the Bush administration's policy drift on Afghanistan. Female delegates to Afghanistan's postwar constitutional convention (at least those quoted in the press) have sharply criticized their fellow delegates and the final draft of the constitution, which was announced on the last day of 2003. The women numbered 100 or so of 502 delegates. A young, outspoken delegate named Malalai Joya, in a widely reported exchange that nearly got her expelled, rose to condemn the presence and the influence of several delegates, Northern Alliance warlords with blood on their hands and retrograde views of women. She and other members of an emerging female leadership in the country say they resent the compromises President Karzai made with the warlords to produce the final draft. It is true that the constitution (judging from the unofficial English translation that has been made public) declares "the sacred religion of Islam" as the state religion and invokes that phrase constantly. However, the degree to which the document affirms the substance of Islamic law is not clear. It promises a government "based on people's will and democracy" and one that "ensur[es] fundamental rights and freedoms" of "every citizen of Afghanistan." The latter phrase got amended, no doubt in response to the outcry of the women, to read, "every citizen of Afghanistan, woman and man." Two of its articles grant women a quota of political representation in the upper and lower houses of the legislature. (The constitutional scholar Noah Feldman has made the point that the 16.5 percent of the upper house slated to be female tops the 14-member female contingent in today's United States Senate.) Another article requires the promotion of education for women and calls for illiteracy to be eliminated. Whether the pluralistic and democratic aspects of the constitution are honored may depend on the makeup of the new Afghan supreme court vested with the authority to interpret it, as Feldman has noted. The process (the loya jirga) from which the document issued was messy; enforcing it will be no less difficult, particularly in a country struggling to emerge from decades of war, chaos, and tyranny. The achievement of formally bringing women back into politics for the first time in a generation should not be minimized, however. If women successfully go to the polls--and I venture to say any interpretation of the new constitution would support their exercise of their suffrage--sharia and related social regulations unfavorable to women are not likely to fare well in the long run. There is reason to believe the majority of women in Afghanistan--and in Iraq, where an interim constitution has been devised for the postwar transition--will, if they are able to vote, choose candidates and policies promising to modernize the country in ways that improve their position in society. As Fahima Vorgetts of the women's advisory committee, who returns periodically to her native Afghanistan, recently told me: "This war changed a lot of women. People are talking about politics now." Women in rural and highly traditionalist areas of the country have told her, "We may be blind, but I don't want my daughter to be blind. Meaning, I don't have an education but I want my daughter to have an education. That tells me a lot, for [women] to push for a better life." Defenders of tolerance and monogamy A SOBERING REMINDER, however, that elections don't automatically strengthen liberal democracy can be found in the recent history of Iran. Iranian women were granted the right to vote by the shah in 1963. They have been voting ever since, but the mullahs who took power in 1979 are still in power, doing their best to rein in an ever more rebellious populace. Sitting over the country's political institutions is a theocratic judicial panel that stifles the reforms and the reform candidates approved by the Iranian electorate. (Because a too-powerful judiciary in Afghanistan poses just such a danger to that country's fledgling democracy, President Karzai and the United States government pushed for a strong executive in the Afghan constitution.) When the revolution was gathering steam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in an eclectic and pragmatic move--and recall that the entire movement was eclectic, a coalition of Shiites and Marxists out to rid Iran of imperialism, capitalism, monarchy, and the decadent influence of the "Great Satan"--exhorted women to go out in the streets and demonstrate against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. After Pahlavi was forced into exile, the Islamic Republic repealed important laws that protected women's rights. Yet it also expected women (properly veiled, of course) to help the revolution advance and prosper by entering higher education and the work force. Hence the birth of what Azar Nafisi called "the myth of Islamic feminism.... It enabled the rulers to have their cake and eat it too; they could claim to be progressive and Islamic" at one and the same time, even as they indulged in the inveterate Islamist habit of denouncing Nafisi and other "modern women as Westernized, decadent and disloyal. They needed us modern men and women to show them the way, but they also had to keep us in our place." That female reformers are bursting out of their allotted place in Iran became obvious to the world when Shirin Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. The human rights activist and lawyer believes regime change can come to her country through constitutional processes. She told the Weekly Standard (November 3, 2003): "The situation in Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. There were no mechanisms for internal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iran, there are." Ebadi said traditional Shiism--unlike the Islamist variant of Shiism that is wielded as a political weapon by the Teheran government--countenances enough of a separation of religion and state to enable people of different faiths to form a polity together. It is not surprising that the Bush administration's search for Muslim allies in the wake of September 11 has concentrated heavily on Shia believers like Ebadi. (Shiism is branded as heretical by the Wahhabis, the Islamist Sunnis of Saudi Arabia.) Perhaps the two most important matters about which Americans and Shirin Ebadi agree are her championing of religious tolerance and her disapproval of polygamy. She is not alone in holding these particular views, leading one to suspect that Islamic feminism may not be as mythical as Azar Nafisi said. These views are, it seems to me, the markers of an Islamic feminism that the United States should wholeheartedly support as a direct challenge to the "feminist" wing of Islamism. Women authors and political activists of many Muslim and Western nations hold that, while the Koran permits polygamy, it seeks to limit a practice that was widespread at the time of its promulgation in the seventh century. The relevant verse, they point out, is both conditional and stated in the negative: If a man fears he cannot support more than one wife, he should have only one. Nevertheless, there are Muslim men who defend polygamy--strictly speaking, the term is polygyny since the verse refers to men taking multiple wives, not vice versa--as religiously compulsory and a way to fulfill their sexual desires without resorting to adultery. The clash of interests that polygyny touches off has long been evident. The feminist pioneer Huda Shaarawi recounts in her memoirs that, as a 12-year-old bride in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, she was told by her mother shop that her family tried in vain to get the groom (her cousin, with a wife and children all older than Shaarawi) to agree in the marriage contract to give up sexual relations with his first wife. (2) Today one hears of advocacy on behalf of first wives to enhance their legal power to obtain a divorce should they oppose a husband's intention to marry again. Women or their families have, from either vantage point, tried to enforce monogamy. In Iran, a husband's multiple marriage option is sometimes brandished as a threat--a way to assert power over one's wife, according to women interviewed in Haleh Esfandiari's book Reconstructed Lives (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997). There are reports out of Indonesia that, to evade the Indonesian law allowing polygyny only with a first wife's consent, some men take another wife and keep it a secret from their first wife and children. Polygyny was hemmed about with legal restrictions during the dictator Suharto's 32 years of secular rule. In the time since he was forced to step down in 1998, public disapproval of polygyny has eroded and the practice has flourished in Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population. It flourishes also in Malaysia, where current law demands that a husband prove that starting and providing for a new family won't lower the standard of living of the wife and children he already has. Powerful Malaysian clerics are challenging these restrictions. When a regional mufti nullified the requirement of wifely consent, a Malaysian women's group, Sisters in Islam, responded with a controversial public information campaign called "Monogamy Is My Choice." Its aims are strengthening wives' legal options and creation of a national marriage and divorce registry for Muslims so women can find out the status of their husbands or husbands-to-be. (The country's current database lists only the marriages and divorces of non-Muslims.) Polygyny has been banned in the Muslim world only by secularist Turkey and Tunisia. Sisters in Islam cannot afford to be perceived as seeking a ban, given the strong backlash against the group by Malaysia's religious establishment and growing Islamist movement. Sisters in Islam Executive Director Zainah Anwar insists that the goal is not a ban but simply allowing women to choose whether to participate in a polygynous marriage or not. (In comments to the New Straits Times [March 19, 2003], she made clear her belief that few women would choose it.) When Anwar spoke in Washington, D.C. on the status of women under sharia in May of 2003, in the midst of the antipolygyny campaign, her prepared remarks did not touch on polygyny at all. She walks a fine line in confronting the social and legal practices that set men above women in Malaysia. Her reform-from-within approach--she is a believing Sunni Muslim--is comparable to Ebadi's in Iran. Intrepid as lion tamers, these women have a prudence that tells them when and where to confront, when and where to desist. Their work does not receive any backing at all from certain feminists: namely, the multicultural and postmodern ones considered to be at the cutting edge of academic thought in the West. "Polygamy can be liberating and empowering," said one such cutting-edge feminist, Miriam Cooke, head of Middle East Women's Studies at Duke University. If we could just shed our Western predilection for monogamy, Cooke told Kay S. Hymowitz of City Journal (Winter 2003), "we might imagine polygamy working." She speculated to Hymowitz that some wives may be relieved not to have to service a husband so often, while other wives may use the opportunity to take on new sexual partners, too. When Cooke was asked how likely wives would be, in strict Muslim settings, to go on sexual adventures, her reply was the post-modern equivalent of a shrug: "I don't know. I'm interested in discourse." A male social anthropologist at the University of Oslo was described as positively "fundamentalist-friendly" by the literary critic Bruce Bawer, writing in Partisan Review (July 22, 2002): One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims [in Norway], explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Shirin Ebadi's and Zainah Anwar's efforts to defend women ground under the heel of sharia, Afghan women seeking to vote under a new constitution--none of these causes would make even the smallest amount of headway if such ostentatious relativism were the norm in the wider world beyond the elite campuses of the United States and Europe. At least the "equal rights" feminists are animated by a conviction that there are rights everyone shares; having taken leave of that conviction, the academic left is capable of excusing the worst cruelties of our time--as long as the perpetrators are members of "the Other." As Azar Nafisi has said: "In the strange world of Middle Eastern Studies, any attempt to condemn gender apartheid is branded an imposition of Western values." Feminism(s) and freedom HOW DO WESTERN women stack up against the above-outlined standard of Islamic feminism--a feminism that is respectful of religious faith, committed to pluralism, and protective of monogamyh The truth is that Western feminists and liberals of various stripes fall short in different ways and to different degrees. Two liberal journalists, Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Giuliana Chamedes, wrote an article entitled "Europe's New Crusade" in the American Prospect (August 26, 2002). While it dealt with the ill-treatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe in the wake of September 11, the piece was most notable for its critique of European multiculturalists, gays, and feminists for their unhelpful political stances. The authors rightly faulted the multiculturalists for being silent about the threat posed by Islamist sects in Europe that advocate violence. They were far unhappier, though, with the 1970s-vintage feminist Oriana Fallaci, and the late homosexual politician Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands for criticizing Islamic intolerance. After witnessing the Twin Towers' collapse, Fallaci wrote a broadside for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in which she heaped scorn on "the sons of Allah," and the daughters, too, for submitting to polygyny and wearing the veil. Fortuyn, before being assassinated by a left-wing extremist, was gaining a following among Dutch voters in 2002 with his insistence that Muslim immigrants assimilate or be kept out of the Netherlands. According to the authors, Fallaci's and Fortuyn's confrontational defense of Western freedoms was harmful--it would only incite the white, Christian, heterosexual majority in Europe to greater heights of prejudice toward Muslim immigrants. Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes clearly preferred that both the anti-religious bent of "equal rights" feminism and militant homosexuality's anger stay trained on the Christian majority as the real problem (it being the locus, in their view, of most Continental religious, ethnic, and sexual bigotry). Thus, despite their chastisement of the see-no-evil multiculturalists, their article's overriding message was to let Islamism largely off the hook in the name of political correctness. In making their plea for the continued alliance of feminists and gays with multiculturalists under the umbrella of a broad left coalition, they seem to have lost sight of what it is about the West that is most worth defending. Several American feminists have put forward a feminist reading of the Koran, which in itself seems a very healthy development. One of the more prominent efforts in this line is Qu'ran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1999) by Amina Wadud, an African-American convert to Islam. Inasmuch as it is a linguist's highly detailed study of the Arabic text of the Koran, I am not able to judge whether sound reasoning has been used to reach the conclusion that the words of the Prophet Muhammad offer justice to women as well as to men. Certainly Wadud is at one with the Islamic feminists I have been discussing in saying that domineering male interpreters of the text, not the text itself, are responsible for misogynistic practices under the aegis of Islam. Nor do readers of Wadud find a breezy multicultural endorsement of polygyny; she roundly condemns it. The trouble comes when she announces that two of the three "commentators whose exegetical works were consulted" for Qu'ran and Woman were Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abdul Ala Maulana Maudoodi, the two principal Sunni theoreticians of Islamism. The political project of Qutb--inciter of the destruction of infidels and the coercion of nonfundamentalist Muslims--was to cure the Muslim world of the "hideous schizophrenia" caused by separating church and state. Yet to hear Wadud tell it, Qutb, in his writings on the Koran, "discusses the shared benefits and responsibility between men and women in the Islamic social system of justice" and is generally something of a feminist. This is not easy to reconcile with his rabid reaction against the social mixing of the sexes, mentioned above. True, one could argue that Qutb stood for a sexual politics of "separate (very separate) but equal." But Wadud does not so argue. Neither Qutb nor Maudoodi (the foremost jihadi ideologue of the Indian subcontinent) is presented in political context. Filling in that context would have meant defending Qutb's and Maudoodi's fundamentalism or else trying to deny it. In any case, exercises in mainstreaming these ideologists of holy war do not serve the cause of women. The feminist reading of the Koran advanced by Asma Gull Hasan is not that of a scholar but that of a young American giving the illiberal elders in her family a hard time. Apparently building upon schoolwork she did at Wellesley College, Hasan put together American Muslims: The New Generation (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), a book combining the relativism of the multicultural feminists, the policy diktats of the "equal rights" feminists, and hefty doses of complaint about her fellow Americans' stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists. It is also, in some respects, a rather charming work. The cheeriness with which the author scolds her uncle for his "chauvinist beliefs," or the way she doesn't let up on her traditionalist grandfather until he admits that, on Judgment Day, men and women will stand equally before God, are pure American jeune fille. Hasan is a pro-assimilation American Muslim who appreciates the opportunities that the United States has afforded her family, originally from Pakistan. She criticizes her fellow Muslims who display anti-Semitism. Yet the relativism of her outlook--and it, too, is very American--makes a muddle of her thinking. Most disappointingly, the book treats terrorist acts such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center not as an evil to be stopped, but strictly as a painful public relations problem for "Muslims like me, who would never think of hijacking planes." American Muslims was written before September 11; a year after al Qaeda struck, a Hasan op-ed in the New York Times ("Learning a Lesson for Ramadan," November 6, 2002) might have shown an improved understanding. No such luck, though. The op-ed, concerning her newfound reluctance to practice her faith openly during Ramadan for fear of discrimination, amplified the most vapid and bellyaching aspects of the book. Airport security was now a nightmare for her. Giving to charity risked government scrutiny. There was no allusion whatsoever to the event that changed not only her life but the skyline of Manhattan: the attack the year before that killed over 3,000 people. Such stubbornness places Asma Gull Hasan, to this day, in the mushy middle on terrorism--not a good place to be. Betty Friedan published a memoir a few years ago in which she recounted hearing, at international women's conferences, about things that women in faraway countries had to contend with, such as clitoridectomy. Sounding like somebody from Peoria, Illinois--which she is--Friedan wrote in Life So Far (Diane Publishing, 2000): "I thought there were certain absolute things that under no culture would you respect. Would you respect slaveryh Certain things in women's lives have to be absolute and under no culture should you respect the mutilation of young girls." When a woman points a blameful finger--and that has been women's job since time immemorial--her words gain force insofar as they draw upon eternal verities. To be sure, in her newspaper cri de coeur (which she later expanded into a book), Oriana Fallaci went overboard in calling the veil "stupid" and belittling wives willing to participate in polygynous marriages. Likewise, the secularism of feminist thinkers like Friedan can be rigid in a way that recalls not American history, tradition, or constitutional principles, but the Jacobins' extirpation of faith from the public square. Yet for all that, American women would do well to negotiate the tensions now being felt between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East with a moral compass aligned more closely with Fallaci and Friedan than with the multiculturalist or the grievance specialist. September 11 has clarified matters for many. Left-liberal intellectuals are--or at least some of them are--groping their way toward a defense of the West that puts them alongside, if not fervently with, the Bush administration. This is happening even as conservatives make the case that the fight against terrorism is a fight against people who would mistreat women and stone homosexuals. The women writing in the American Prospect, Polakow-Suransky and Chamedes, registered the conservatives' arguments and were not amused. It bothered them when "male politicians ... suddenly began invoking women's emancipation" as if they cared about it. The warning they issued to feminists and homosexual activists was that "their causes have been effectively adopted and appropriated by those who have claimed the mantle of defending [European] tolerance in the face of intolerant Islam." It's a rather petty warning to issue. Why not let anyone who is willing--Westerners and those struggling in the Muslim world to emulate the pluralism and democracy we enjoy--converge on the need to bring about a decent life for women (and men), who deserve to have their fundamental rights respectedh This is, in fact, what the woman question brings out especially well: the rights of human beings that are manifest not in any penumbra of any constitution but in the full light of day. As one of the supporters of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a woman from Denmark, put it: "Once in a while you can have your doubts about whether you are a feminist or not. But you cannot, even for a second, doubt that you are an Afghan feminist." (1) Interview with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal (November/December 2002). (2) See the chapter devoted to Shaarawi in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana University Press, 1990). Lauren Weiner has written about women in politics, history, and

literature for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Weekly Standard and the New Criterion.

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marysmithston90-blog · 7 years ago

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Can teacher housing entice educators to work in expensive cities?

Experiments in making life as a teacher more affordable show how rising real estate costs hurt urban districts

Teaching crises have challenged American education for decades. Increasing enrollment, substandard facilities, and a scramble to find a way to pay for solutions: Today's familiar pressures were making headlines back in 1954. At the time, in another example of same news, different day, the San Francisco superintendent of schools declared that the city's teacher shortage was acute.

While the issue may be the same, today's teaching crises in the Bay Area have taken on dimensions that postwar administrators couldn't have imagined. San Francisco and its surrounding communities offer the most extreme case studies that showcase the challenging math of making it, and making a home, as an urban school teacher.

According to Apartment List data, fifth-year teachers in the city have to spend nearly 70% of their income to rent a one bedroom, and Trulia noted that the city's teachers can only afford .04 percent of the homes in the entire city. A recent profile in the San Francisco Chronicle told the story of a public high school math teacher, Etoria Cheeks, who is homeless, despite carrying a full load of classes as well as coaching and tutoring students after school.

Housing has become such a drain on salaries that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee recently announced the city would build its own rental housing in the Outer Sunset neighborhood specifically for teachers. This is yet another sign, coupled with the prevalence of couchsurfing and long commutes, that its educators are losing the battle against escalating rent.

Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

First grade students from left to right-Andy Ramirez, 7, Nathalie Valeriano, 6, Daisy Gonzales, 6, and Gustavo Gonzalez, 6, go into think time before answering a question by their teacher Samantha Pulliam, center, about what they just read in class at 24th St. Elementary School in Los Angeles on November 22, 2013.

Teachers are often lionized for tackling a difficult job without the salaries and support they deserve. Yet increasingly, they also face affordability challenges outside the classroom. Rising rent and housing costs have made teaching jobs in pricy urban districts increasingly difficult for schools to fill. According to research by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), the United States was short roughly 100,000 teachers last year, with compensation cited as a key reason many have left positions, or the profession altogether.

For many school districts, especially in California, alleviating the real estate squeeze facing teachers is becoming a more prominent part of efforts to retain talent. For school districts, factoring housing into compensation and pay packages, or even becoming landlords themselves, is becoming a new way to offer more than just a salary bump. Teachers get a better quality of life, are able to afford housing closer to their classrooms, cut down on their commute, and retain a connection with the communities they serve. Without radical increases in education budgets, this is an increasingly popular and creative way to make salaries stretch further.

The main thing to realize is there isn't a silver bullet, says Anne Podolsky, a researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. Increasing compensation is good, but teachers also need good administrators, support, and resources to succeed.

Learning Policy Institute

Housing subsidies are one of many incentives that departing teachers say would convince them to stay on the job.

School districts see the advantage of getting involved in real estate because two detrimental trends are unlikely to reverse themselves anytime soon. Urban real estate seems destined to increase in value, putting more pressure on salaries-a 2014 Center for American Progress report found that in many states, mid-career teachers heading families of four or more are so financially strained, their families qualify for reduced-price school lunches, and an Economic Policy Institute study last year found weekly teacher pay had actually decreased between 1996 and 2015.

Unhappy teachers are also very costly. If the U.S attrition rate among educators decreased from its current rate of 8 percent to 4 percent (the rate found in other highly educated countries), the current teacher shortage would disappear, according to the LPI, and a significant chunk of the $2.2 billion the U.S. spends on teacher recruitment and retention efforts could be redirected elsewhere. A recent LPI study, A Coming Crisis in Teaching? lays out some stark figures suggesting the challenge of retaining talent will become even more difficult: between 2009 and 2014, teacher education enrollments dropped from 691,000 to 451,000, a 35% reduction. That's 240,000 fewer professionals on their way to the classroom at a time when retention is already straining school administrators and budgets.

Teacher shortages have hit both urban and rural districts hard, with the latter especially challenged by geographic, social and economic isolation. It seems especially perverse that in the United States, where much of the educational funding comes from property taxes, a successful, highly sought-after and expensive urban district in an expensive coastal area such as Silicon Valley would find itself facing a similar workforce challenge as a poorer rural one, which is given so much less to spend per pupil.

But that's the reality of the crisis, and one reason why housing incentives have arisen as a potential fix. Numerous concepts have taken shape: in addition to Mayor Lee's plan to build housing in San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District has long debated a plan to turn unused buildings into housing for staff. To help with such efforts, California passed a law, the Teacher Housing Act of 2016, that allows school districts to take advantage of state and federal low-income housing tax credits while restricting the buildings to teachers and district employees (under prior law, it would be illegal to discriminate based on profession). It's meant to spur school districts to get into the housing game: sponsor and State Senator Mark Leno, said that, when high-quality teachers can't afford to live where they work, the entire community suffers.

Other districts across the country have offered incentives with varying degrees of success. New York City once offered housing incentives to teachers working in subjects with a shortage of instructors, such as mathematics, a solution which Podolsky found to be well-designed. Texas provides teachers with low, fixed-rate home loans and offers grants for down payment assistance. The Los Angeles Unified School District attempted to develop the Sage Brush Apartment complex as affordable teacher housing, but, due to a misunderstanding of the income requirements that come with using low-income housing credits, created housing that excluded many teachers who made too much to qualify for the benefits. The building has instead been used to house other district employees, such as janitors and cafeteria workers.

While building physical sites for teacher housing is certainly more attention-grabbing than raising salaries, the Teacher Housing Act, which is yet to produce a new facility, raises the question of whether a large urban district can even build enough units to make a significant difference in staffing issues.

Podolsky says residency programs, which provide teachers-in-training with tuition and housing stipends in return for a commitment to teach in a certain district, have shown promise in attracting and keeping teachers in specific communities. She's spoken to educators and administrators in many districts who have just started or are planning to introduce some form of housing assistance, but says not yet enough literature, evidence, or research to determine the effectiveness of many of these ideas. But, along with the expected lifestyle benefits that would come from living closer to work, an LPI survey found that 25 percent of teachers would be more likely to stay at a job in they provided housing assistance.

A unit inside Teacher's Village: developer Ron Beit thought it would be great to tap into these teacher's energy and put them at the center of the community.

But what if it's not about schools getting into the market, but helping the market benefit from schools? One of the more intriguing examples of teacher-focused housing developments came not from a school administrator, but an established real estate pro. Ron Beit, founding partner and CEO of RBH Group, has spent nearly a decade putting together Teacher's Village in Newark, New Jersey, a redevelopment project based on the idea that public and private social impact investors, see the need to help teachers, who as tenants also give back to both the community and the value of the investment.

The genesis of the idea came when Beit met with teachers working in the area, and realized they were traveling from all over the region, often long distances, to work in Newark. It was eye-opening, he said, to come face-to-face with the energy they put into their jobs.

We knew that we needed public investment in downtown Newark, he says. The project was going to be the first ground-up development in Newark in decades. I thought it would be great to tap into these teacher's energy and put them at the center of the community.

The $150 million multi-use development, clustered in a four-block area near Newark's Penn Station, combines three charter schools with retail and residential space, with 70 percent of the project's 204 housing units currently occupied by educators, who receive a discount on market rent (there's a preference for newer teachers, and those who teach in local schools). Rents start at $1,000 for a studio, $1,400 for a one bed, and $1,900 for a two bedroom unit. Beit even got architect and Newark native Richard Meier to design the sleek, gridded white towers in his signature style.

I thought it would be great to tap into these teacher's energy and put them at the center of the community.

Beit says the value of social good is also good for business. Teacher's Village took shape during a time when roughly a billion dollars was flowing into the adjacent neighborhood, part of the New Jersey city's booming real estate market. But his project, which took nine years of wrangling to get funding, is also based around some of the lifestyle improvements Podolsky says teachers want. Beit pushes the idea of clustering as a big advantage of the Teacher's Village concept. Get together a group of teachers, regardless of whether they are public, private, charter teacher, and allow them to socialize and share ideas.

This is absolutely necessary for cities such as San Francisco, Beit said, when asked about the scalability of his idea. For the quality of life of teachers, to have the ability to train and recruit San Francisco probably needs it on an even larger scale than we're thinking.

Beit's idea has already attracted interest in other markets. New Teacher's Villages are in the works in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chicago, and he says he's in talks with a handful of other municipalities. Another somewhat similar project in Washington, D.C., the Charter School Incubator Initiative, spent $14.7 million on a former Catholic college, which its transforming into teacher housing and charter school space.

Beit believes schools will struggle in their efforts to build housing for their teachers because it's analogous to affordable housing development, which as the Los Angeles school district discovered, can be tricky. In San Francisco, for instance, the upper income for qualifying for LITC subsidies is $45,250, while the average teacher's salary is $67,537.

You can only capture a small subsection of the teaching market, since most teachers are making too much money for these kind of units, he says.

With the residential portions of the project having just opened, it's too soon to tell if Beit's concept works as both a real estate development and a tool to recruit and retain teachers.

But it's definitely not too soon to find ways for school districts to stretch their budgets and make it more affordable to live as a teacher. According to Podolsky, surveys by LPI suggest the teacher shortage plaguing schools will get worse; 80 percent of districts in California said they forecast more trouble finding and keeping talent in the future.

Ideally, finding ways to help teachers continue to live in and be valuable members of expensive urban communities creates solutions that can be applied to other public servants and workers. After all, teachers are far from the only ones feeling the squeeze of creeping rent increases, and the stress of having to live in a community different from the one you work in.

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freewhispersmaker · 7 years ago

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College essay writing service Question description Based on your reading in the webtext, select one of the following thesis statements. Your response should be two to three paragraphs long. ANCSA and the Native corporation system have been good for Alaska Natives. OR ANCSA and the Native corporation system have been bad for Alaska Natives. Next, revise the statement you have chosen to reflect the complexity of the historical events surrounding this issue. Provide specific examples of how ANCSA and the Native corporation system have had a positive or negative impact—or perhaps both—on Alaska Natives. Further illustrate the complexity of this issue by showing how the passage of ANCSA was contingent on at least three historical events or forces. ANCSA AND NATIVE CORPORATIONS ALASKA WAS ADMITTED TO THE UNION AS THE 49TH STATE ON JANUARY 3, 1959. UNDER THE TERMS OF THE ALASKA STATEHOOD ACT, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WOULD TRANSFER OWNERSHIP OF UP TO 104.5 MILLION ACRES OF LAND TO THE NEW STATE, BUT NONE OF THIS WOULD BE LAND THAT WAS SUBJECT TO NATIVE CLAIMS. (ALASKA STATEHOOD ACT, 1958. TO READ THE LAW, CLICK HERE. ) FORMER ALASKA GOVERNOR WALTER HICKEL. (CLICK BUTTON FOR CITATION) THE LAW GAVE THE STATE 25 YEARS TO SELECT WHICH TRACTS OF LAND IT WANTED. IN THE 1960S, THE STATE BEGAN TO MAKE ITS SELECTIONS—BUT MUCH OF THE LAND IT WANTED WAS SUBJECT TO NATIVE CLAIMS. SEVERAL NATIVE GROUPS FILED LAWSUITS TO STOP THE LAND SELECTIONS, AND THE ALASKA FEDERATION OF NATIVES* (AFN) WAS FOUNDED TO ADVOCATE FOR A FAIR AND COMPREHENSIVE SETTLEMENT TO THE LAND-CLAIM ISSUE. IN RESPONSE, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN THE SELECTION PROCESS AND TOLD THE STATE TO NEGOTIATE AN AGREEMENT WITH THE NATIVES. (JONES, 1981) THE DISCOVERY OF OIL AT PRUDHOE BAY IN 1968 ADDED URGENCY TO THOSE NEGOTIATIONS. WITHOUT A RESOLUTION OF THE NATIVE CLAIMS, IT WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE TO BUILD THE MASSIVE TRANS-ALASKA PIPELINE THAT THE OIL INDUSTRY SAID WAS NEEDED TO CARRY ALASKAN OIL TO MARKETS IN THE LOWER 48*. (NASKE, 1994) THE PRESSURE TO COME TO A QUICK SETTLEMENT IN THE INTEREST OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT WAS IN FACT REMINISCENT OF THE PRESSURE TO SEIZE NATIVE LANDS FOLLOWING THE GEORGIA GOLD RUSH IN THE 1830S. IN EACH CASE, THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXTRACT A HIGHLY VALUABLE NATURAL RESOURCE SUDDENLY MADE NATIVE LAND EVEN MORE VALUABLE THAN BEFORE. BUT SEVERAL FACTORS HELPED TO PRODUCE A VERY DIFFERENT OUTCOME FOR THE ALASKA NATIVES: THE NATIVES HAD EFFECTIVE POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, THROUGH THE AFN AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS; U.S. COURTS WERE MORE SYMPATHETIC TO THE ALASKA NATIVES’ CLAIMS, RULING IN THEIR FAVOR IN SEVERAL INSTANCES; THE STATE GOVERNMENT WAS WILLING TO SEEK A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT WITH THE NATIVES; THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT—INCLUDING SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR WALTER HICKEL, A FORMER GOVERNOR OF ALASKA—ALSO FAVORED A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT; AND GREATER PUBLIC AWARENESS OF THE INJUSTICES DONE TO NATIVES IN THE PAST INCREASED THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PRESSURE TO FIND AN EQUITABLE SETTLEMENT. (JONES, 1981) AFTER PROTRACTED NEGOTIATIONS, ALASKAN OFFICIALS AND THE AFN REACHED AN AGREEMENT IN PRINCIPLE: NATIVES WOULD RECEIVE LAND THAT THEY HAD HISTORICALLY USED AND DROP THEIR CLAIMS TO ANY OTHER LAND IN THE STATE IN RETURN FOR A CASH SETTLEMENT. THE EXACT TERMS OF THAT AGREEMENT WOULD BE FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DECIDE AND—AFTER INITIALLY OFFERING THE NATIVES FAR LESS THAN THEY WANTED, IN TERMS OF LAND AND CASH—CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON EVENTUALLY AGREED TO A HISTORIC DEAL. A MAP OF THE ORIGINAL 12 ALASKA NATIVE REGIONAL CORPORATIONS. A 13TH REGIONAL CORPORATION WAS ESTABLISHED LATER. (CLICK MAP TO ENLARGE) (CLICK BUTTON FOR CITATION) ON DECEMBER 18, 1971, PRESIDENT NIXON SIGNED INTO LAW THE ALASKA NATIVE CLAIMS SETTLEMENT ACT (ANCSA*), WHICH AT THE TIME WAS THE LARGEST LAND CLAIM SETTLEMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY. IN RETURN FOR LETTING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT “EXTINGUISH” THEIR CLAIMS TO MOST ALASKAN LAND, NATIVES RECEIVED 44 MILLION ACRES AND A CASH PAYMENT OF $962.5 MILLION. THE 44 MILLION ACRES WAS ONE-NINTH OF THE TOTAL AREA OF THE STATE OF ALASKA; THE MONETARY SETTLEMENT REPRESENTED A DIRECT PAYMENT OF $462.5 MILLION FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND ANOTHER $500 MILLION TO BE PAID OVER TIME FROM STATE OIL REVENUES. (ANCSA, 1971) EVEN MORE HISTORIC THAN THE SIZE OF THE ANCSA SETTLEMENT WAS THE WAY IT WAS STRUCTURED—A RADICAL DEPARTURE FROM THE TRADITIONAL MODEL OF NATIVE RESERVATIONS IN THE LOWER 48, IN WHICH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HOLDS NATIVE LANDS IN TRUST. INSTEAD OF ESTABLISHING RESERVATIONS ANCSA SET UP A SYSTEM OF NATIVE CORPORATIONS* TO ADMINISTER THE LAND AND INVEST THE MONETARY SETTLEMENT FOR THE BENEFIT OF NATIVES. (THOMAS, 1986) THE LAW SET UP 12 REGIONAL CORPORATIONS, EACH ASSOCIATED WITH A PARTICULAR PART OF THE STATE AND THE NATIVES WHO TRADITIONALLY LIVED THERE. ALL NATIVES WHO WERE ALIVE IN 1971 COULD ENROLL IN ONE OF THE CORPORATIONS, AND EACH RECEIVED 100 SHARES OF STOCK IN THE CORPORATION IN WHICH THEY ENROLLED. (A 13TH CORPORATION WAS ESTABLISHED LATER, FOR NATIVES WHO WERE NOT LIVING IN ALASKA IN 1971). THE LAW ALSO ESTABLISHED MORE THAN 200 LOCAL OR “VILLAGE” CORPORATIONS, IN WHICH NATIVES COULD ALSO ENROLL AND RECEIVE SHARES OF STOCK. THE CORPORATIONS WERE GIVEN FREE REIN TO USE THE LAND AND ANY MINERAL OR OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES IT MIGHT HOLD TO DEVELOP FOR-PROFIT BUSINESSES AND TO PAY NATIVE SHAREHOLDERS A YEARLY DIVIDEND BASED ON THOSE PROFITS. THE CORPORATION STRUCTURE WAS THE BRAINCHILD OF THE AFN, WHICH SAW THIS PROPOSAL AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXTEND “THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF CAPITALISM…TO ALASKA NATIVES,” WHILE ALSO PRESERVING THE LAND AND CASH SETTLEMENT SO THAT IT COULD BENEFIT FUTURE GENERATIONS. (LINXWILER, 2007) A TLINGIT TOTEM POLE IN SITKA, ALASKA. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE SMITHSONIAN’S ALASKA NATIVE COLLECTIONS. (CLICK BUTTON FOR CITATION) ANCSA WAS GENERALLY WELL-RECEIVED IN ALASKA BY BOTH NATIVES AND NON-NATIVES. AFTER YEARS OF LEGAL WRANGLING OVER EXACTLY WHO WAS ENTITLED TO NATIVE CORPORATION SHARES, MANY OF THOSE CORPORATIONS HAVE GROWN INTO SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES THAT GENERATE SUBSTANTIAL DIVIDENDS AND PROVIDE THOUSANDS OF JOBS FOR NATIVE SHAREHOLDERS. AND, BY REMOVING ONE CRITICAL BARRIER TO CONSTRUCTION OF THE TRANS-ALASKA PIPELINE, ANCSA PAVED THE WAY FOR THE EMERGENCE OF THE STATE’S “OIL ECONOMY,” WHICH HAS GENERATED SUBSTANTIAL ECONOMIC BENEFITS FOR BOTH NATIVES AND NON-NATIVES. (ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM, 2016) ONE UNIQUE ASPECT OF ALASKA’S “OIL ECONOMY” IS THE ALASKA PERMANENT FUND, A STATE FUND THAT COLLECTS 25 PERCENT OF ALL OIL-LAND ROYALTIES AND INVESTS THOSE FUNDS FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL ALASKANS. THE FUND, WHICH IN 2015 AMOUNTED TO MORE THAN $51 BILLION, PAYS A YEARLY DIVIDEND TO EVERY QUALIFIED ALASKAN; IN 2015, THAT MEANT A DIVIDEND CHECK OF $2,072 FOR VIRTUALLY EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD IN THE STATE. (KLINT AND DOOGAN, 2015) BY ENABLING CONSTRUCTION OF THE TRANS-ALASKA PIPELINE, ANCSA IN A VERY REAL SENSE MADE THE PERMANENT FUND, AND ITS YEARLY DIVIDEND CHECKS, POSSIBLE. STILL, THE LAW REMAINS CONTROVERSIAL, ESPECIALLY AMONG NATIVES WHO BELIEVE IT WEAKENS TIES TO NATIVE HERITAGE. (THOMAS, 1985) ALMOST A HALF-CENTURY AFTER ITS PASSAGE, THE JURY IS STILL OUT ON WHETHER ANCSA WAS A “GOOD DEAL” OR A “RAW DEAL” FOR NATIVES. BUT IT IS, IN ALMOST EVERY RESPECT, A VERY DIFFERENT SORT OF DEAL THAN THAT RECEIVED BY ANY OTHER GROUP OF NATIVES IN AMERICAN HISTORY. NATIVE CORPORATIONS : FURTHER READINGS So, what’s the bottom line—has ANCSA been a success or a failure? Have the Native corporations benefited the Native community, or not? If you look only at the bottom line—that is, just at the economic performance of the Native corporations themselves—it’s fair to say that, after a rocky start, many of the regional corporations have done fairly well. In 2004, seven of the top ten Alaska-owned business were Native regional corporations, which distributed $117.5 million in shareholder dividends, employed 3,116 Native shareholders, and paid $5.4 million in scholarships for Native students, (Linxwiler, 2007) Like much of the oil-dependent Alaska economy, the regional corporations are highly sensitive to fluctuations in the price of oil, and their performance in any given year will reflect whether the oil business is doing well or poorly. Nonetheless, many of these corporations have matured as businesses and are providing significant economic benefits for their Native shareholders. The economic performance of the village corporations has been spottier. Many of the village corporations were located in remote rural areas with extremely limited opportunities for economic development. While some village corporations—particularly those in more densely populated areas with easy access to outside markets—have fared well, others have been force to merge or have gone out of business. (Thomas, 1985) But is economic performance all that really matters? While ANCSA was designed only to provide Alaska Natives with opportunities for economic development, many Natives saw the corporation system as a substitute for—or a rival to—the traditional structures of tribal government. Among Alaska Natives, tribes are generally associated with individual villages (American Indian Resource Directory, 2016); many of the successful village corporations have established nonprofit agencies to provide health care and other social services to Native shareholders. At the same time, the pressure to turn a profit led many corporations, both regional and village, to bring in outside executives to run the businesses—bypassing tribal leaders and Elders, who have traditionally had a revered place in Alaska Native society. In recent years, many Natives have questioned the extent to which the corporation system might be supplanting some tribal structures and weakening ties to Native heritage. In some areas, tribal government has seen a resurgence in importance. The readings in this learning block look at two sides of the ANCSA question: the economic performance of the Native corporations and their relationship to the Native heritage and tribal structures. Both articles are taken from the same academic journal: Journal of Land, Resources, and Environmental Law, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2005). Select a list item tab, press enter, then search down for text. When you hear End of tab content, go back to the next list item to access the next list item tab. “Our Lives Are Not Measured in Dollars” Economic Performance of the Regional Corporations ANCSA UNREALIZED: OUR LIVES ARE NOT MEASURED IN DOLLARS The following excerpt is from an article by James Allaway, a professor and expert on sustainable economic development, and Byron Mallett, former president of the Alaska Federation of Natives and former CEO of Sealaska, one of the larger Native regional corporations. You can read it at this link, which will take you to the Journal of Land, Resources, and Environmental Law; you can find this specific article in the Table of Contents on the left side of the page. Click on the title of the article to read, download, and print a copy of the text. These readings are provided by the Shapiro Library. This reading is required. You will have to log into Shapiro Library with your SNHU credentials. One of the legacies of ANCSA’s short history is the confusion it has caused, including confusion over governing structures. Certainly in Southeast Alaska we have known that clans, family, and family relationships were critical in the conduct of our affairs. I think this was the case all across the state. Existing traditional governing groups, with their relationships and structures, did not go away with ANCSA. In fact, especially in the last decade, there has been a resurgence of those institutions. The resurgence has been felt and seen all across the state, particularly because there was a universal sense that ANCSA, and other efforts that deal with our circumstances, were not getting at the core of what we needed. It is crucial that there is a place for traditional tribal governmental structures. I think the emergence of tribes in recent years is not so much about governmental structures, but is a reassertion that we will take hold of our own lives. We will be responsible for our destinies, which is a powerful ideal. It also places a profound obligation on Native people. There is a vital place for Elders here. We cannot know the past and have a sense of values, we cannot have a sense of place or purpose, without Elders. Elders are an important part of the spiritual path. They carry the fire. We do not need to institutionalize the role of Elders, other than to sustain them materially. If we do, they will sustain us spiritually. Do You want us to complete a custom paper for you based on the above instructions? Give us your preferred deadline by clicking on the ORDER NOW button below. Welcome to MyCourseworkHelp – The Home of Homework Help!

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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An interview between Takver and Jack Grancharoff, a Bulgarian anarchist who fled Stalinist repression and moved to Australia, talking about being an activist in Australia in the 1950s.

Jack Grancharoff emigrated to Australia after fleeing Stalinist repression in his native Bulgaria. After a period of rural isolation he began to make contact with a broad range of radicals, bohemians and immigrants along the east coast of Australia. As a newcomer and relative outsider he was able to transcend the boundaries that kept so many others isolated from each other. For many years he was associated with the Sydney Libertarian Push who dubbed him "Jack the Anarchist". Always eager to air his views and engage in debate he has been a life long public speaker and published Black and Red magazine for over 30 years. In the following interview he discusses his experiences of Australia in the 1950s.

How did you come to Australia? It was a real fluke. I had no intention to emigrate to Australia. I turned to anarchism while a member of the Agrarian Party. As a member of the latter I participated in the Popular Front Government representing the youth section of the Party. As an antifascist I closely collaborated with the communists during the war but deep down I harboured certain suspicions of communism and never officially joined the Communist Party. Nonetheless, I was invited to the founding meeting of the Communist Youth organisation. I did not attend. I was reproved in the strongest possible language but to no avail. I wanted to wait and see the course of events.

Not long after that I went to a debating meeting between the Agrarian Party and the Communist Party. The representative of the Agrarian Party, a shepherd by profession, impressed me a lot. His arguments were those of the Social Revolutionaries: land to the peasants and factories to the workers. Not that the communists had not used these slogans but for them it was expediency. I was shocked to realise that the Agrarian Party could not form a Youth movement in my town because they needed two antifascists in the governing body. I volunteered and the group was formed. I was assigned the position of treasurer, secretary and group representative in the Regional Popular Front. The Stalinist manipulation within the Popular Front forced a split six months or more later. A Popular Front in opposition was formed without the communists. I joined the opposition and began agitating against the Official Popular Front and especially against the communists the main culprits in this case. For this action I was declared an enemy of the people, an agent of the Reaction and in service of Turkish conservatism. As a result I was expelled from the local branch of the Agrarian Party still a part of the official Popular Front due to strong communist pressure even if the majority of its members were supportive of me and later on joined the opposition too. The official Popular Front was a front of the Communist hegemony. It existed only in name.

In the end of 1947 the opposition was virtually eliminated, the newspaper banned and its leaders and active members either jailed or sent to concentration camps. I was sent to concentration camp in the beginning of 1947.

So what was life like there? I was pretty lucky because coming from a communist family and having an anti-fascist past, perhaps , they considered me a misguided person and,therefore, my stay in the camp was of short duration. About seven months. The camp was named Camp of Re-education, which in fact was a torture chamber and slave labour. I was working in a mine. Every Wednesday night we were given lectures on Marxism. It was in the camp that I joined the anarchist group. I had been always an anarchist in thinking but I had never met anarchists.

So the anarchist movement was large in Bulgaria? Yes it was pretty large and spread like a fire. Since most bookshops were under control of the Communists, to buy an anarchist newspaper one had to buy four other newspapers, including the communist (laughter). The anarchist publications were not displayed.

Were many killed in the camp? It is difficult to say. Many of them died from overwork. torture, malnutrition etc. How many were killed one has no clue, but the strong oppression got quite a few victims.

So how did you get out? Well, the political commissar called me and said: "There is a request from your town for your release. But you have to sign a declaration that you renege your fascist past." I told him I had no fascist past and, therefore, I was not going to sign it. I was sent back. I had a conversation with an old anarchist comrade nicknamed "Naroda". He said to me: "if you sign, your situation would be worse, because you'd incriminate yourself, if you have intention to escape from Bulgaria, that is a different matter." I chose the second option. Naroda then said: "It is up to you. I have been a political exile during fascism in France and I was treated like a shit. Collecting cigarette butts from the streets. If you want to go, go - but I will die here." Next day I signed and was told by the commissar that I would soon be back in the camp if I upheld anarchist ideas.

Back home I was followed by informers. Informers are usually close friends recruited by being tortured, by threats or otherwise. Two of my friends confessed to me and instead of they infoming about me, it was I who, through them, had been informing about myself. So things worked in my favour.

I and my father were ploughing the fields. One day coming from work I was told by Mum that the cops had been looking for me three times. "You better go to the police station straightaway". I had no choice. I was to be accompanied by my father who was to make sure that I would go to the police headquarters.

Since all given informations were in my favour and I knew more or less their contents I succeeded in convincing the detective in charge to let me go home for the night, on condition that I would report to the police next day. As soon as I was freed from the police clutches I met a friend of mine and told him that I had to leave the country immediately; that 1 would never again go to the police station alive. Better be shot than cripple for life. I knew my torturers prettty well, their sadism, their hate towards me, and it was they who gave the order for my arrest. In fact my thoughts then were how to die rather than runaway. My friend decided to come with me. In vain I tried to argue to the contrary. He knew the border pretty well and the army movements. Early next day I told Mum that I got up earlier to give a hand to a friend of mine. She, somehow, was suspicious and asked me: "What time will you be back?" Late tonight, was my cryptic answer, trying not to show my suppressed tears. With this lie I left my parents never again to see them. We crossed the border to Turkey. This was the beginning of my emigration journey.

So how was Turkey? I spent two years in Turkey. First I was kept six months in police custody and then set free. I then registered with I.R.0. (International Refugees Organisation). I had no intention to stay in Turkey. It was not a heaven for leftists. I was arrested for putting the case of the eight hours day and the need for trade union movement. Workers were really exploited. What saved me was the factthat I discussedthe issue in Bulgarian and my Turkish was virtually non existent. There were informers among the mmigrants. There was even an attempt to be returned to Bulgaria. I was approached by a Bulgarian in service of the Turkish Security Section who tried to persuade me to accompany him to the Instanbul' Vilayet. I refused. This gave me time to contact my friends and tell them, that in case I disappeared, I would be either liquidated or sent back home, which was equally the same thing. Next time when the same person visited me and asked me to accompany him to the police headquarters I bluntly refused, to which he remarked that it is better to go voluntarily rather than be escorted by police. My reply was that my preferences were to be arrested by the police rather than be dealt with stealthily. This was the end of it. I never heard of it again. When I left for Italy I felt a change of air.

So how did you get to Australia? I was staying in a refugee camp near Lesi (Italy). As an ex member of the Agrarian Party I was approached by ex agrarian party parliamentarians in exile who tried to convince me that anarchism was wrong and that there was no historical case of an agrarian turning to anarchism while the opposite had happened, in the context of Bulgarian political history. Happened or not had no bearing to me unless they provided a better argument against anarchism. They told me that unless I changed my views, the way to go to France would be blocked. Faced with this dilemma I decided to apply for Australia. But leftists were not welcome to Australia.

One Friday, thirty of us were on the list to appear before an Australian emigration officer. Since I spoke some Italian I was called first. I told the officer I was an agrarian worker and loved the bush. I also stated that 1 had an elementary education. I signed a contract for two years and he wished me good luck. He asked me if I would like to be an interpreter for the rest on Monday. He was anxious to go somehwere and postponed the interviews of the rest for Monday. The majority of them were upset. They knew that on Monday their chances would be nil because majority were leftists and the informers would inform on them. They were correct. I told some of them that I was accepted but they told me to keep my mouth shut. On the Monday I went as interpreter and none was accepted. It was that Monday that I was my introduction to coca-cola culture.

So you arrived in Australia in the early 1950s... Yes. I arrived barefooted, in shorts and a singlet: all my belongings. From Newcastle we were taken to Greta camp. Not long after I was sent to work in the Forestry in the town of Imbil. The first year I did not learn English but SerboCroation and Polish. They were the official languages of communication. English, I learnt through them. It had had a disastrous effect on me. Even now, after so many years I am still a victim of it.

What was it like doing your stint of enforced migrant labour when you first came here? I liked the work in the forestry but most of the people were so anti-communist and hated the unions. Arguments with a lot were useless but I asserted my leftism trying even to tell them that The Labour Party was reformist and far far away from communism. The work itself was not hard. At the time the Australian society was much more egalitarian as far as wages were concerned. I worked with Polish, Yugoslav and Ukrainian nationals. My attitude to work was long established: no sweat for the bosses. On the other side I had a two year contract so if they sacked me thay had to find me another job.

Nonetheless since I had my own approach to work, I had a lot of trouble and I thought I would be sacked but the bosses put up with me. My worse enemies were the workers. Some of them wanted me sacked, because they envied my rebellious stand, but the decision did not belong to them. One day for some reason they sacked one of the best workers in my gang. Then I told the rest that if they worked hard there was a possibility for them to lose their jobs. Many, especially Poles, called me a Jew because I refused to work overtime while they worked some Saturdays and Sundays. The jew embodied everything that they hated in themselves. After eight months I arranged with an Italian anarchist to formally guarantee me a job so I could go north among comrades. So I left Imbil for Mareeba, North Queensland.

Once you left the camp what work did you next get into? I got a job in dam construction laying down stones in front of the dam to prevent erosion. Somebody made a mistake with the level and we have to move the stones five inches up, a hard task. We would help each other. At one stage I had to move a really big stone -too large for one worker to move. l asked the rest to give me a hand. They refused because they saw the approaching of the big boss. The workers were new comers like me: mostly Italians and Poles. Their servility shocked me: "Hey boss mine is the best, mine is all right etc" as if it was their own property. I looked at them with amazement but said nothing. Then a big stone came and they tried to move it. The big shot turned to me and said with an authoritative voice:"Give them a hand!" I looked at him. "Who are you?" "I am in charge and I am telling you to give them a hand, I am the boss here!" -said he in a commanding voice. "Sorry mate, I have no boss and am not a slave either. No body can order me. You give them a hand!" And I lent him my crowbar. His face turned red and he said:"Go! You are sacked!" "Thanks" said I. (laughter) I went to the Employment Office and told them that 1 was sacked: "What about my contract?" "Bugger that" was the answer and so I was free and this was the end of my contract. It was meant to be for two years, but did not even last a year.

So you think it was because you were a troublemaker? I don't know. I was just happy to get out of it. So then I went and worked on the tobacco, on farms in the North of Queensland.

Was there still a radical community up there? Yes, there were:some Italians, Yugoslavs, Spanish. In Mareeba, where I stayed there was a small community. They had meetings, debates etc. For me it was an excellent intellectual intercourse that I had missed. The influx of new comers had an opposite effect. Their main interest was making money. Radicalism lost impetus and the collapse of fascism contributed to that even if the old people were quite outspoken radicals.

So what kind of activities were happening in the early 1950s? Some anarchist meetings were still going. Then there was the pub where a lot of issues were debated such as religion, socialism, ideologies. My comrades told me that I had to learn the art of drinking since the main debates and actions were in the pub. (laughter).

Well the male action anyway? (laughter). Well there were a few female anarchists. Regina Bertoldi (if the memeory does not betray me) was one. Later in her life she suffered from paranoia. Years after I paid her a visit but she shut the door in my face saying " I know nobody". Learning to drink beer was not a difficult task. (laughter). As I mentioned beforehand the pub was the center of most activity. You were not supposed to talk politics and religion in a pub but it was there where we did it. I left Mareeba, with some sadness, for Sydney. A friend of mine begged me to help them coming to Australia. They had the documents but not money for their tickets. People who had promised money reneged their promises. She wrote to me:"You are the only one who promised nothing and the only one who can do something". So I left for Sydney in search of money.

So what happened there? At first I worked on the railways' extra gangs. The workers really lacked workers consciousness or whatever it is. They were working like mad to prove their machoism and to please the bosses. I isolated myself from the rest and was working alone. I repeatedly told them that by working hard they were driving down the conditions. One day two Italians came to me and one said: "You are not an anarchist by any chance, are you?" "Why " I answered. "The way you talk and behave". I said: "I am an anarchist"! Then he said to the other Italian: "See, I told you" and they told me that they were from Rome's Libertarian movement. Later on our gang moved to Michelago. I was always hustled by the second boss. Once he kept watching me and we were alone. He said: "You work but nothing comes out of it". To which I answered: "And if you keep watching me I will not finish it today. Get out of here! Sack me but don't watch me! And be aware that a stone may fly by chance and hit you on the head and you'll be sent in a coffin as a present to your wife. There is nobody to witness!" Since I constantly quarrelled with the bosses they referred to me as "mad bulgaro", because italians called me bulgaro.

One year before leaving for Xmas holidays we had a party with a keg of beer. Two workers started fighting. I and the first boss tried to stop the fight. One of the workers said to the boss: "Look Tom you better sack Mario because he is a lazy bastard and I work hard. Or you sack Mario or I will transfer to another gang." I was furious and I said to John: "You don't pay Mario's wages! Mario is a worker like you and you should be ashamed of yourself. Tom is your class enemy, and you, John, you are licking the Boss' arse instead of defending your fellow worker." Tom said to John: "Look John some work more, some work less but, nevertheless, everbody works as much as one can do". The fight stopped and we went back to drinking. Later on the first boss, Tom, approached me and said to me:"Listen Jack you don't mind me asking you a question?" I answered: "No, but I would not answer it if I don't like to". "May I ask you what party do you belong to?" Without much thinking I said IWW. I already knew about IWW even if I was not a member and basically I agreed with their preamble. To which Tom answered: "Well I was a member of the IWW and you are the best worker in the gang. You stand for your rights. You fight for workers' conditions. You are a good fighter but you are wasting your time here. Go somewhere else where you will be useful". "But everywhere the situation is the same " I retorted. Then I knew why I was not sacked (laughter). I left the country for the big smoke. It would have been 1954-5.

So how was it there? I was working for the Railways again, and again I was faced with the same problems. One boss called me a bludger and I told him he was a bludger because he watched workers and got pay for doing nothing. He said that he worked forthe Railways and he still could work better than me. I challenged him to remove a sleeper as quickly as me. He tried, but to no avail because I had put a nail in the sleeper. (laughter). Soon after I had an argument with him, I threw my thongs and shovel at him and left. The first boss said :"You are not sacked" "But Frank sacked me". "Frank is not in charge I am in charge." Nonetheless I left. The first boss said to me:"You are a good chap but from the time you become a communist you changed". "What are you talking about I never joined the Communist Party." Ten years later I applied for a job with Railways again and got it. They asked me if I had ever worked for Railways. Unguarded, I said yes. They told me to come back in the afternoon, which 1 did to be told that there was no job for me. I realised they had me down.

Do you think people's lack of fight on the job was because it was easy to leave and find work elsewhere at that time? It was true that it was easy to find jobs but, nonetheless, they accepted the conditions as they were. But one has to consider the fact that many migrants, especially those of the Eastern Block, were anti-communists and they identified the struggle for improvement as a communist tactic and the unions as communist. Also many migrants bought properties as a security and they were afraid of losing their employment. There was action and reaction. While the communists were pretty active, their insistence on the virtue of the Soviet Union weakened their case. Internecine struggles among the union did not help the radical case either. Strikes for improvement of workers' conditions were rare. Later on I worked on the busses.

What were your political activities in Sydney at that time? My activities were to search for an arena to express my views. This I found in the Domain. I also was selling the English anarchist paper Freedom there. Being a Bulgarian I hung out with Bulgarian anarchists but a lot of them were not my cup of tea. The Bulgarians tried to organise among Bulgarians and one may say that we had a group of twenty or so members. I also published a small anarchist magazine in cyclostyle but there was a lack of dynamics, the situation remained static. There were some Russian and Ukrainian anarchists but by the displacement of people on job projects we lost contacts. I managed to keep contacts with Italian anarchists in Melbourne and a few in Sydney. They even established an Italian club in Melbourne but I do not think it lasted for long.

Was there much disagreement amongst the different anarchist factions or did people stick together because of the times? Well, I was a member of the then Sydney Anarchist Group which included three women and four men, not including myself. But I left it because they would not try to work together with the Sydney Libertarians, a kind of pessimist anarchists, who considered anarchism as an ideoology if not a utopia. They insisted on Libertarian aspects of Marxism, involved in Reichian and Freudian psychology.

I thought the Bulgarian anarchists should establish contact as much as possible with Australians because we were settling down here. And then there were not many Bulgarians in Australia. To think that Bulgaria were to be liberated tomorrow was an illusion and the more importanttask was to establish contacts with the locals. This was the reason behind my interest in libertarianism. But even the Sydney Group, where Bulgarians were a minorty, was opposed to Sydney Libertarians.

I remember you saying that other than the Sydney libertarians and a few others you found a lot of fear and paranoia amongst Australians in the 1950s? Selling Freedom at the Domain I was faced with the question:" Aren't you scared of being arrested?" Many would buy Freedom and put it straight in their pockets as if they were pinching something from the shops. The Domain was a very good place. A lot of activities on Sundays. I was speaking from the Rationalist platform. Questioning the communists was one of the greatest fun. I was called a traitor, a fascist and quite often they would call the police and a few times I was removed from the Domain. For the communists anyone who left Eastern Europe was a fascist. Nonetheless I had established a friendship, not without arguments, with a communist, Harry Read, who was expelled from the party because of his criticism of its handling of the Hungarian affairs in 1956. He left for Cuba in 1959 if I am not mistaken. Many of the communists, like Aaron's faction, were Stalinists.

When did you meet the Sydney Libertarians (aka The Sydney Push)? I think around 1956. I asked a Trotskyite about them and he told me where they drank. But he warned me about them as being libidinarians rather than libertarians. They used to give papers in the philosophy room No 1 at the University and later on down town. They were open minded and anything could be debated with them. I used to go to a lot of their parties and to some exent became a part of them. They held the view that personal and sexual liberation were the same as social liberation to which I was not in agreement. Being promiscuous doesn't mean that one is socially liberated. There was also an Italian socialist club in the 1950,s in George Street close to Central Railway Station. Later the Sydney Anarchist Group rented a room adjacent to it referred to as "Liberty Hall". Purpose: papers and discussions.

So there was a lot going on at that time? Yes. One may argue the society was pretty conservative, but is it different today? People prefer security to freedom, T.V. to thinking, ideological correctness to critical examination. There are courses on communication but the art of communication is rather rare. At that time the Domain was a real place of debates and people took notice of it. Surely a lot of people were not at ease with freedom of speech, secret services were not dormant.

In Melbourne you said the Libertarian scene of the 1950s was more artistic? Yes, they had contact with the Sydney Push but on individualistic bases.

So you met IWW people in the 1950s? Yes, one of them was a member of the Sydney Anarchist Group. Armstrong was another regular Domain speaker till his death. Others were members of the unions etc. This was a generation of old timers and they were disappearing. There were no young people to take over their work.

At various points you were active in the Unions. Did you become a delegate at any point? No. A few times the opportunity crossed my road, but I refused to be seduced. I had seen many changes in those who joined union bureaucracies. To be one of them is easy, to be one of us, that is, on the side of the workers is much more difficult. One has to have in mind that union -parties structures were very rigid, and many delegates were to project into the struggle party's policy ratherthan exigencies of the workers qua workers. This certainly is a simplistic overview. Unionism where workes were not directly involved was not for me. I had always been in favour of solidarity strikes but this went against the grain of official unions. The exception here and there proved the rule. They were masters of division and not much interest was shown in rank and file issues.

One example. In the 1960s when I worked for the Water Board there was a general meeting of the Water Board Union in Trades Hall. Instead of trying to establish a common premise of action various sections were fighting for wage increases. The issues the union preferred. I was fed up with these internal useless squabbles and decided to tackle the issue from a different angle. While I was marching towards the loud speaker the workers were screaming at me " You fucken beatnik what do you know about work. You hippy shit". What I said was as follows: "I am a shitty hippy because, like you, l work a shitty job but, unlike you, I know it is a shitty job and I don't ask for six pence increase or six pence decrease. Let us not be divided by union policy of six pence for some or a dollar for others We have to stand together as a body of workers defending our common interests. These people who sit here" pointing to the bunch of union bureaucrats "are part and parcel of the Water Board. They defend the interests of the Water Board not your interests. Do not succumb to their manipulation. Did you elect any of them? I didn't! They are your enemies." There were wild aplauses "Goodonyou Beatnik. You'r right." All ire turned to the bureaucrats. "Who voted for you? Who elected you? On which side you are on" etc. Any questions? Hundreds of hands wanted to ask questions but the bureaucrats closed the meeting by saying: "No questions, the meeting is closed."

Did you have trouble with police in these years? Not really. Many times when appoached I gave them any name and address that first came into my head. I used to sell anarchist papers, talk at the Domain and elsewhere but I never had a lot of trouble. Surely security police always used to take notes on what I was sayng but I was never in real trouble except that I was refused naturalisation and therefore , could not travel or leave the country. I had a dossier.

What were the peace issues like in the 1950s -mainly communist fronts? They were pathetic. To assume that the Soviet Union was for peace and the USA for war was to continue the dualistic theory of good and evil instead of critically examining the issue. The USA used the same appoach to dismantle not only state communism but to destroy all the achievements of the workers. Surely the Vietnam war was one of the best unifying factors, but after that the wave of protest subsided.

Given the laws that were in place until 1967 did you meet many aboriginal people? From my arrival I was interested in aboriginal people. Where I lived in Mareeba I contacted quite a few. Visited some in corrugated iron dwellings. But one had to be very careful because any serious contact was not welcome from authority's point of view and could lead to imprisonment for both aboriginal and me. I was shocked to see the plight of these people, the misery of their existence. I was warned by a black woman who said to me: "Son, don't do this and that or you will go to 6 month jail and so will I." Their movement was pretty limited while I thought that in a democratic country they woud be free to move around. Shit these people were really down.

Was there much you felt you could do about this? I tried to talk to people who knew their plight but there was not much interest, even if people disagreed with the way they were treated by the law. The injustice was there but to crystalise it was not an easy task. And prejudices were pretty strong. In Inisfile I took an aboriginal girl to a cafe and they were reluctant to serve her. It reminded me so much of apartheid in South Africa.

In the early 1960s did things start to open up? I remember an elder aboriginal told me in the 50s. "Son thanks to people like you and influx of migrants our situation will change. Go down there and spread the message". But things started changing generally. The communists began to lose their grip on people. The trade union movement started to go to pieces. The idea of Trades Hall as an unitary idea of the workers gave way to the atomisation of the movement. The radicals of the 50s were displaced and many changed their tune to accommodate themselves to changing conditions. In the 1970s many of the old guard were by passed. The new space that came from the crack of the old ethos was exciting, but evaporated soon after under the pressure of ideological correctness and beligerent concerted attacks of military, economic and political corporate world. Freedom retreated allowing inserting into the political arena of refurbished authoritarian dogmas suitable to the comodification of every day life. Instead of critical thought, mono thought is spreading, strangling and marginalzing any independence. Time and again society continue to function within hierarchical and authoritarian paradigms. The future is not promising.

#soviet union #world history

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workreveal-blog · 8 years ago

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Using computer games to teach your class : Tips

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Using computer games to teach your class : Tips

We communicate to Ollie Bray, the Countrywide Adviser for Emerging Technologies in Getting to know at Education Scotland, about how gaming may be utilised in Training. With a fruitful and varied profession as a trainer, head of branch and college leader, uses computer fun games,to teach her class. Ollie believes that one of the many advantages gaming brings to Education is giving instructors a danger to innovate and do matters in another way. Here, he tells us what he hopes the future holds for video games primarily based Mastering, a way to convince a reluctant head teacher of its potential and recommends a few sources for Learning more. You could observe Ollie on Twitter @olliebray.

How did you get into games primarily based Studying?

Years ago, I used to be teaching public improvement and, frankly, locating it quite dry once I realised we had this thrilling Recreation, Sims Town. The belief Here is that everybody starts at the same point with the equal give up a goal, which is to construct a Metropolis. Anybody takes a unique path to getting there, and that turned into the part of the technique that captures and engages the imagination. This Game has day snapshots, actual stimulation and encourages aggressive Learning.

We would send domestic Learning responsibilities and each week for the duration of an evaluation session the kids might tell me what they’d learnt. This ranged from stepped forward understandings on pollutants and drainage to higher insights into nearby authorities re-elections. The proof of their Mastering wasn’t just in productive dialogue, the class would additionally share screenshots of what they’d constructed, and We would have a top Town of the week.

How can game from the experience of Mastering more widely?

I’ve coined the word ‘contextual hubs’ for Studying. You are taking a Recreation, possibly a commercially available Recreation, and it is up to the instructor to create educational ability around it. The Studying and learningfrom the game itself, however, will become the context for Mastering. If you think about Guitar Hero, it has no educational value in any respect, however in the hands of the proper instructors, it all of sudden becomes an assignment approximately tune, designing CD cases, advertising the band, there are all kinds of links to it. They play zombies games,shooting games , cars games etc.

studying

We did a major challenge in 2010 when the Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympics play Game become released, and we had a video assignment with a college in Canada. The Canadian teacher we spoke with stored her kids in college all night time for a kind of sleepover, and when they related to us at 6 am their time, it changed into three.30 pm, and we had kept our children back after near. The interesting issue approximately this was that our kid’s concept it evolved into a venture about the Olympics, however sincerely it turned into about connecting rural groups internationally, with all sort of classes approximately citizenship. The academics then implemented the enjoy to training on time zones, which is something kids only struggle with. All of this got here from the contextual hub of the laptop Recreation. The Studying had little to do with the Wintry weather Olympics Sport however it furnished a stimulus to get youngsters enthusiastic about Studying and define grasp.

In case you’re a trainer who can see the capability in gaming however you are not confident with the era, what natural recommendations should you provide to assist introduce it into their lecture room?

If a trainer can receive they want the youngsters to set up the console for them, the rest will contend with itself. Games are tremendous due to the fact they produce information; one instance might be Mario and Sonic at the 2012 Olympics for the Wii. After the break, You can get the kids to turn the console on and play the hurdles, which takes mins. You’ve got kids writing down rankings and instances, and that they supply this records to the trainer. What they have got done is create wealthy, accurate statistics inside the context of a numeracy lesson. The instructor at no factor has come into contact with the technology and simply does what they’re excellent at, that educates the learner.

You may feel relaxed within the domain of being a teacher, and the children can sense at ease within the area of computer video games; while these overlap it is while it turns into an undoubtedly thrilling space for Studying. You do not should take a leap out of your comfort region; it is approximately taking a little little bit of a threat and trusting children with the era.

What do you keep in mind the maximum positive result or achievement story to return from games primarily based Getting to know?

It is given hundreds of humans throughout the United Kingdom permission to try to do things a piece differently. If you’re trying to introduce a new subject matter in class, you are searching for aid from another team of workers in a faculty. However, this is a vertical relief, and often it does not produce new ideas. With the use of video games consoles in the closing three years, quite regularly there’ll handiest be one teacher in a college looking to push the limits. They must look horizontally for his or her help and expert development, and attain out to peers throughout us of a and around the sector. They haven’t been offering each other with the solutions due to the fact it is almost impossible, but they have got been sharing ideas, and taking some of these, using them, adapting them or ditching them. It is all approximately effect within the school room, and I think it’s been the maximum fantastic stuff that’s pop out of all of this, is that human beings have permission, to innovate and do matters in a different way.

If you’re raising towards a head who would not assume video games based totally Mastering is appropriate, how may want to you attempt to make them see in any other case?

First of all, we can display them the studies which prove it has a high-quality impact. Secondly, we will place them in contact with different head instructors who’ve it off their schools. In instances of financial drought, why are we continuously investing money into ICT gadget while definitely, we recognise kids have were given matters at domestic they might convey in, and parents are inclined to allow them to.

The 1/3 aspect is to remind head teachers that, apparently, what we’re talking about is not PC video games, it is played. While you get a room full of teachers to play with consoles, they may feel silly at the start, but they get into it! I’d never say, anyone, however with most people; you see this lightbulb moment. In case you’ve forgotten what it is want to play and be a baby, it is hard to speak, and therefore it ‘s hard to improve their Studying. Lots of these teachers are mother and father themselves, but they have not the idea that what they have at domestic might be beneficial in colleges. It’s pretty much drawing up the dots.

teaching

Are there any e-books or assets You could suggest for teachers and heads interested by Gaining knowledge of extra?

• Jesse Schell spent seven years as the innovative director of the Disney digital reality studio and has written an interesting e-book called The Art of Recreation Layout.

• Professor James Paul Gee has a substantial involvement in literacy studies and is a member of the Countrywide Academy of Schooling. His e-book ‘What Video games need to train Us approximately Gaining knowledge of and Literacy’ is worth a read.

• Mark Prensky, has lately released an e-book, ‘Teaching Virtual Natives: Partnering for Real Learning’ which explores how we can engage kids in Gaining knowledge of using the social internet and the net.

• I’ve just finished studying, ‘truth is Damaged’ by way of US social technology researcher, Jane McGonigal who talks approximately how encouraging people to play extra video games, and the right games could remedy some the world’s problems.

game

• Subsequently, I have created and which may be determined on the Dad or mum Trainer Network. This explains more about the contextual hubs I have cited and how to triumph over those first demanding situations involved in getting started.

What do you wish the destiny holds for video games primarily based Studying?

I’ve just been doing this task, and I’ve called it ‘impressive Mastering’ due to the fact I do not assume games based Studying is the be all and give up all. Top teachers use tools correctly, and occasionally that’s a Game, sometimes it’s taking the youngsters outside, and from time to time it’s a test on a piece of paper. What I want to look from this, is that this concept of permission, and that I need to see governments and local government and especially head teachers – because I think it really is wherein a number of the block is – giving instructors permission to do what they assume is best for those kids they’ve got in front of them.

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freewhispersmaker · 7 years ago

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freewhispersmaker · 7 years ago

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freewhispersmaker · 7 years ago

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ANCSA AND NATIVE CORPORATIONS, DIscussion help

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The post ANCSA AND NATIVE CORPORATIONS, DIscussion help appeared first on .

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#Get a 100% Non-Plagiarized Essay For As Low As 9 USD Per Page - 6 Hours Delivery Available - Good Gr

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