#both socially and technologically speaking there is little progress over thousands of years

[lemonhemlock]

https://twitter.com/Targ_Nation/status/1611158240359759872?t=bfo77HLITj21KBLCUKx6fA&s=19

Seeing all those likes took years off my life

i don't even know where to begin............

"centrist bs" - the concept of left and right doesn't exist in a medieval setting ...................

where was this energy when cersei was committing abuses left and right and placing her bastard children on the throne? why didn't "the modern audience" "almost unanimously stand by the side of the woman being usurped of her throne" back then? 😵

but this isn't even about one side being more wrong than the other or both sides being awful or war being horrible as a rule or the smallfolk always paying with their lives and livelihoods when the high lords play their game of thrones

that entire tweet is predicated on not grasping the basic principles of the polity they are operating within 😫 you cannot define usurpation based on absolute primogeniture when that society relies on male primogeniture for inheritance, in that context it literally means the opposite

words don't somehow gain whatever meaning you want based on what you think is fair, same how laws don't materialize into existence just because you say so. any kind of law is a social construct, doesn't exist outside the confines of society and requires a certain kind of framework in order to be accepted & enforced. if proposed laws are not accepted by the majority and cannot be enforced, they only exist on the astral plane

there aren't even any proper institutions in westeros. literally the only ones i can identify are the crown and the small council, which serves as a kind of proto-government. there's no parliament, there's no proper justice system, no magna charta. the only courts that seem to operate are Faith-based courts and your liege lord's judgment. medieval-style legal systems and law enforcement are headache-inducing as a rule anyway, but feudal monarchies generally involve constant negotiations and power leverages between kings and their vassals

a more apt characterization of the Dance would be what exactly and how much can the targaryens get away with now that they've decided to impose themselves as rulers of a unified westeros. so far, they had to accept the religion of the land (aegon the conqueror was anointed by the high septon) and were forced to renounce polygamy. they got to keep practicing incest as a result of jaehaerys' successful doctrine of exceptionalism. see? negotiation. now the question remains - are they going to respect succession laws like a normal person (i.e. Andal Law) or are they going to resort to this ridiculous circus every time a targaryen monarch dies? because at the point of the dance, there had hardly been a straightforward transition of power since the conquest

for the internal coherence of this fictional world to be maintained, the nobles should be pushing Andal inheritance rights like crazy, because their own succession is decided on the basis of that and they would be directly interested in not fucking it up for themselves or their descendants by having weird precedents set by the royal family. a lot of these lords, if not most, have bastard siblings/children of their own, as well as elder sisters/daughters. it doesn't make sense for them to threaten their own stability for the sake of rhaenyra of all people, who isn't even good at her job and has done absolutely nothing to endear herself to them. what could they possibly gain by supporting her?

the question of the monarch imposing a law is much more believable in a centralized state, which westeros most definitely is not. imposing laws can also be done via force, of course, as long as """the state""" retains the monopoly on violence. the targaryens' v effective military superiority has so far been conferred by dragons. but rhaenyra's side isn't the only one that has dragons anymore. the opposing faction, i.e. the side who'd perpetuate Andal law, also has them now, as it happens. ergo war.

this situation is absolutely not similar in any way to today's democracies where laws are voted by parliament and the rest of the country have no choice but to abide by them or else the police come knocking on your door and hand you over to the our modern justice system, where your punishment is set by objective specialists & not decided by crazy stunts like trial by ordeal or the whims of your liege lord

tldr: there is no incentive for westerosi nobility to break andal succession law for rhaenyra, since it would be legal self-sabotage by setting a precedent that could come to bite those very same people in the a*se. rhaenyra is NOT an only child - by having trueborn brothers, the only way she can ascend is by breaking the laws & customs of the land. ergo disgruntled lords will inevitably flock to alicent's sons to form covert alliances & subversive power centres that, in time, will erupt in open rebellions. real-world historical examples attest to this happening with or without the consent of their respective figureheads (eg. lady jane grey) - i.e. it doesn't matter if aegon/aemond/daeron play happy families or not. in turn, the only way rhaenyra can prevent this is by executing her brothers/their male descendants. the greens don't want to die => the only way of achieving security for them is by claiming the throne.

alternatively, rhaenyra's life is not in danger as long as she bends the knee, as no-one in-universe would take her claim seriously with 3 living brothers. rhaenys also bent the knee to viserys after losing an election and is still alive. i'll say it again: it is not in the lords' best interest to support rhaenyra in the first place. if we are to go by any logic - what would they gain, should they flock to her? they would destabilize the line of succession for themselves for a (pretty terrible) queen, a reviled king consort and a bastard heir. but, as far as advantages and favours are concerned, what would they be, specifically? in order to outweigh the above-mentioned disadvantages?

you should all blame viserys for getting remarried and fathering sons, because had rhaenyra remained an only child or had only sisters, none of this would be happening & she would have become the first ruling queen of westeros

[marshmallow-phd]

Scarlet Moon

Genre: Scarlet Heart Ryeo!AU, Time Travel!AU, Alternate History, Royalty!AU

Pairing: OC x EXO OT9

Summary:  This isn’t Gwen’s time. She was from the modern era, with technology and electricity. But during a solar eclipse, she’s transported back into a previous life in a time and place she does not know. Now, as the foreign daughter of a merchant living in a prince’s household, she must tread carefully, watch her back, and guard her heart. But with the princes locked in a battle over the throne, the chances of her making it out alive might disappear.

Part: 1 I 2 I 3

                                            ********

The paper sliced across the skin before any action could be taken to avoid it. A high pitched hiss followed by a short whine. The flap of skin that had been separated was being dyed red. 

Gwen stuck her index finger in her mouth to sooth the stinging. It helped a little bit. Still sucking on the appendage, Gwen stumbled over to the supply closet and opened the thin metal doors with the other hand. She kept this feat up as she opened the first aid kit and pushed around the different types of bandages, trying to decide which one to use. The cut was right on the tip, right where you never want it to be. It was hard to get a band aid on that kind of cut. Eventually, she found a smaller version of a standard design and ripped the paper covering opening. She wrapped the band aid around her index finger before heading for her desk. It was back to the files that had injured her in the first place. 

The pile was tall; by her standards, at least. Gwen had been dealing with it for the past hour. The dates on the files needed sorting, separating the ones could be sent to long-term storage. She almost gave out another whine, but she didn’t want the others to hear and start the relentless teasing. Her coworkers were quick and very witty. 

It was a friendly floor. Everyone joked and played around without the fear of feelings being hurt. If Gwen didn’t have to do the actual work that came with the office space, she wouldn’t mind staying here forever. But dealing with these files and demanding customers and meeting quotas was not what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Not that Gwen knew exactly what it was that she did want to do. She’d tried a lot of things over the last few years in her slow going college years. Marketing, history, education - hell, she even took several makeup courses and skincare lessons that focused on natural resources. None of it stuck, none of it held her interest, though the information could be recalled if needed. 

“You alright there, Gwen?”

Drudging up from the bowels of her thoughts, Gwen looked up at Kimberly, who had stopped at her desk on the way back from the printer. 

“Yeah,” Gwen nodded with a sigh. “Just… ready for the week to be over.”

“Ain’t that the consensus,” Kimberly laughed. 

“How are the dogs?” Gwen was seizing the opportunity to distract herself from work. Kimberly owned two dogs with opposite personalities. One was the well-mannered older brother, the other was the skittish, hyper younger brother. She loved to talk about them and there was never a shortage of entertaining stories. 

Kimberly rolled her eyes. “Kurt is back to back to demanding his breakfast at five a.m. Oh, but Kent now does this thing where he walks backwards. Whenever he starts doing that, we’ll beep at him. You know, like the garbage trucks? Then he gets all shy and hides his head.”

Gwen couldn’t stop giggling at the thought. “Oh, the poor thing!”

“You’ll have to see it next time you come over.”

“I can’t wait.”

As Kimberly walked away, Gwen sighed. She didn’t get out too much and the humor that most of her socializing outside of work was with one of her coworkers wasn’t lost on her. Just another dart to throw at the board that was Gwen Sinclair. 

It wasn’t like her life was a complete disaster. Really, it could have been worse. She could imagine a thousand different scenarios that she could be living right now that were worse off then her current situation. Truthfully, if glanced at from the outside, Gwen’s life was simply... mediocre. She was blessed with tolerable roommates, an okay job that provided a nice paycheck for a twenty-three-year-old who had yet to finish college. But… the loneliness was killing her and overall, she was craving for something more. 

She was exhausted from obligation and responsibility. She wished to go back to the days where she read about adventure and intrigue and imagined some day living that out herself. After having those words in her hands, she felt empty in her reality. Somehow, each day felt even more draining. 

With the end of another workday, Gwen packed up the files that still needed to be sorted, locked up her cabinets and tugged on her coat as she waved goodbye to Kimberly and the others. A few other coworkers were chatting excitedly about the solar eclipse happening in a few minutes. Gwen, however, was annoyed. Annoyed at the fact that all anyone - online or in person - could talk about was the solar eclipse, as if it was the only one that had ever been seen in this generation. When one person mentioned the eclipse, it was fine. When it was every post and every comment and every conversation, it felt a little ridiculous. Gwen couldn’t care less about the event. Getting home was her current priority. But escaping wasn’t that easy. 

For the millionth time, Gwen rolled her eyes as she scrolled through the newsfeed, waiting for her car to warm up in the parking garage. The weather was cold and dreary, slowing down her progress on getting home. Puffs of steam escaped her lips in the below freezing temperature. Other employees hurried past the back of her car to get to their own tiny sanctuaries. An alert for a new email popped up at the top of the phone screen. From the quick scan of the notification, she saw that it was from her eastern history professor. He wanted to go over the latest paper from class. Oh, no. That was never a good sign. 

Gwen huffed, threw her car into reverse, and pulled out of the parking space. First the papercut, now this. 

Since all her classes were online, Gwen had the minor luxury to not be forced to talk to her professor face to face, which surely would have been humiliating. But it couldn’t be avoided completely. She’d email him back once she arrived home. Or maybe she’d put it off until tomorrow. Dealing with this was the last thing she wanted to do. Stress was already causing her skin to revert back to puberty, she didn’t need this as well. 

Her phone rang and she struggled to answer it while carefully winding down the levels of the garage. It was Jaynie, the favorite of the roommates.

“Hey, Janie, what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing, I was just wondering if you were coming straight home today.”

Gwen smirked, knowing exactly where this was going. 

Over the past several months, a bit of an obsession had developed with Korean dramas. The shows the two of them consumed were different from the same old, boring American television and there were years worth of stories to choose from. Currently, they were in the middle of another romantic comedy. While Gwen loved the storyline and was in a constant state of swoon, as soon as the credits started rolling, she was reminded how pathetically uninteresting her life was. But those sixty plus minutes of pure escapism made it all worth the crash that came afterwards. 

Gwen tried to wait patiently in the line to leave the parking garage, but her frustration was getting the better of her. It was stop and go, stop and go, stop and go.

“I’m planning on it. That is, if people decide any day now to not drive idiotically.”

“Ugh, I had the same problem on my way home.” 

Curious. Both of them worked in the downtown area. “How did you get home so fast?” Gwen asked.

“I got off a little early today.”

“Lucky.” Her accounting job often led to flexible hours. Gwen was jealous of that level of freedom. 

The road was slick from the freezing rain. Weather like this brought out all the stupid drivers as if this wasn’t a yearly occurrence. She was careful to look both ways before exiting the garage and inching into the street. What she didn’t account for was the other emptying lot across the street. A large black SUV pulled out right at the same time, but went too fast, hitting the water that was slowly turning to ice on the asphalt. 

With no time to react, the SUV slammed into the side of Gwen’s compact car. Glass from the driver’s side window shattered and sprayed her face. Her phone flew out of her hand. The crunch of metal hit her ears before she could fully process what had happened. With the force of the collision, her forehead slammed against the steering wheel before the airbag deployed. The sound of screams echoed around her, but the words were unintelligible. Slumped over in her seat, a shadow creeped over the scene. Through the slits of her barely open eyes, Gwen watched as the sun disappeared behind the moon. Then all went black. 

                                           ********

The water was what brought her back. It filled her lungs and surrounded her on all sides. She flailed her limbs, desperate for traction that couldn’t be found. Her clothing weighed her down, the hems being pulled as if hands had gripped tight on them. She needed a miracle. And a miracle she got. Two hands held onto one of her wrists and pulled her to the surface. 

She gasped for air as her rescuer struggled to bring her to shore. The cloth that covered her felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds, making it nearly impossible to move. Water made its way up her throat, spilling over her lips. Her lungs were finally clear. They took in as much oxygen as they were allowed, burning with each brath. 

“Lady Gwen! Lady Gwen!”

A young girl blocked out the bright sun. She shook Gwen’s shoulders desperately. 

Gwen’s brain processed that the girl was not speaking English, but… she could understand her. The girl’s damp, dark hair was pulled into halves on either side of her face held in place by wide red straps. She looked at Gwen with deep concern, like a lifelong friend. But Gwen was sure she had never seen this girl before in her life. 

“My Lady, can you hear me?” she asked frantically.

“Who are you?” Gwen finally choked out. 

That made the girl pause in her panic. “What?”

Slowly regaining her strength, Gwen pushed herself up to her knees. As her eyesight cleared, she took in her surroundings. Gone were the tall metal and glass buildings, traffic lights, and speeding cars of her modern home. Now all that surrounded her were trees and a sandy beach of a large, calm lake. In the distance, wooden houses with curved rooftops, painted in bright reds and greens dotted the horizon. The heaviness that weighed her down was a dress made of too many layers and of no western fashion that she’d ever experienced before. 

Whispers bounced around the rocky shore. All the faces that were looking on with concern around were unfamiliar. Gwen grabbed the hair cascading down her back, but it was still the red she knew, darker from the dampness of being pulled out of the water but still her hair. 

“Where am I?” she asked in a quiet, gasping voice.

“My Lady, don’t you remember?” The girl panicked. “You’re in Songak. Goryeo.”

“Goryeo?” Gwen screeched. All the minor details she could summon up of the country came rushing to the forefront of her mind. It was information overload and her brain couldn’t handle it. Her lungs tried desperately to keep up, breathing in as much air as they could, but her throat was closing up from the panic. The landscape blurred and she fell to the ground.

                                          ********

She was in a bed this time when she regained consciousness. The room was cold and dimly lit with soft, orange candlelight. A man, Caucasian unlike the others, sat beside the bed on a stool, worry etched into every facet of his face.

“Gwen, sweet, are you all right?”

English. He was speaking English. But that was a footnote of comfort to the bigger problem. She still didn’t know what had happened to her or how she got here or who these people were that seemed to know her. The man, who was about in his mid-forties with salt and pepper hair, smiled down at her, though his eyes were confused. “Gwen, does it hurt anywhere? Can you tell me if you hit your head?”

Gwen took a moment, to calm down and to evaluate what she was feeling physically. Her head didn’t hurt, nor did any other part of her body. Wordlessly, she shook her head. The man seemed relieved. 

“Are you all right?” He asked again, a different meaning under the question this time. “Chae Ryung said you couldn’t remember her or that we were in Goryeo? Do you at least remember your papa?”

Gwen weighed the choices in her mind. There wasn’t a mirror around, but she started to wonder if she had taken the place of someone else. Someone who knew these strangers. She could say that she didn’t know any of them - the truth - but would they think her mad if she spilled too much? Perhaps she could say she remembered a few things. Like him, if he is this poor girl’s father. Why am I here? In this time? 

Choosing to comprise with herself, she gave the smallest of nods. “Papa.” Sitting up, she pulled him into a hug and there was something comforting about his embrace. This body remembered him, at least. 

“What happened?” she asked after she let go. 

“Chae Ryung said that you’d wandered off again and she found you, you’d been the water a long time.” The man, Papa, sucked in a breath, his eyes beginning to water. His genuine concern over her wellbeing made Gwen choke up as well. “The doctor said you stopped breathing. That could explain your lost memories.”

Good. The excuse was already in her hands. That should make it easy enough to play along while being forgiven for any missteps. But they shouldn’t be in Goryeo. That didn’t make any sense, historically. If anything, they might have been in Joseon – late Joseon. Was this some sort of alternate timeline? Or maybe she hit her head really hard in the car crash and this is really all a dream from the stress of her paper and too much K-drama. 

Yes. Too much K-drama.

That had to be the explanation. This was all a strange dream. Which meant, she could play along and not be afraid. She could ask questions and live out the day until she woke back up in her own time, most likely in a hospital with a bandage on her head and her mother fretting over her. 

She glanced around the room, taking in the architecture that she had only ever seen in pictures. In person, it was even more stunning and intricate. This wasn’t an ordinary citizen’s home. Interesting. What else could her brain come up with? “Why are we in Goryeo?”

“Your father’s a merchant, remember?” He spoke slowly. Each word was deliberate, giving Gwen time to process. Good filler for her mind. “I made a large fortune here and planned on taking you back home, but… your mother is buried here. We couldn’t leave her behind.”

A wave of emotion hit out of nowhere. Though her mother was alive and well, it didn’t stop a tear from escaping. “Mama.”

Papa wiped it away with a coarse finger. Gwen gasped back, surprised by the realness of the touch. Her dreams were never this intricate. The blanket strone across her lap scrunched in her fingers. It was cold and soft… and very real. 

She wasn't dreaming, was she?

Confused by her reaction, Papa paused for a moment before continuing his explanation. “The eighth prince is graciously letting us stay with him while we wait on the construction of our home to be complete.”

The eighth prince?

Panic grew tenfold. If this wasn’t a dream, then she was in very big trouble. If history told her one thing, it was that proximity to royalty was the most dangerous place to be. Gwen might possibly have been able to skate by if they were simply staying in some unknown village far from the capital, but they were in a prince’s home. Which meant they were in… Songak, the capital city, just like that girl – Chae Ryung – had said. Right under the King’s nose. Breathing became difficult again. Each one was shallow, barely letting in any oxygen. Gwen could feel her chest tighten and her vision blurred. 

“Gwen!” Papa jumped up and tried to keep her straight to give her lungs as much room as possible. He switched to Korean as he called out over his shoulder, “Someone, get the doctor! Now!” Shuffling sounds echoed off the floor on the other side of the sliding door and then faded away.

A minute later, breathing no better, two men and a woman rushed inside along with Chae Ryung. The older man stepped in front of Papa and took his place. He pushed Gwen’s shoulders gently until she was lying down. Two cold fingers against her wrist checked her pulse. The other, much younger man stepped up to Papa.

“What happened?”

Papa frowned. “It seems she’s lost some of her memories. I was explaining why we were here when suddenly she had trouble breathing.” He stopped, struggling with his own breath. “I’m sorry we’ve become a burden to you, Your Highness.” 

Gwen’s breathing was regaining strength and she was able to concentrate on the conversation. So that was the eighth prince. He was younger than she would have guessed, handsome even, if she had to focus on something other than her lack of breath. 

“Do not think such a thing,” the Eighth Prince replied. “Your presence has greatly improved the household. Lady Gwen will get better with time.”

Papa bowed, obviously grateful at the response. He turned to the woman. “Lady Hae, may I enquire after your own health?”

“Today is a better day,” she smiled, though her pale, drained complexion said otherwise. “Please, don’t worry about me. Keep your thoughts for your daughter.”

The doctor released Gwen’s wrist, satisfied with the improvement of her pulse and breathing. He stood up.

“It was a mild panic attack,” the doctor said calmly to Papa. “If it happens again, she should lie down and focus on her breathing. The incident at the lake seems to have taken a toll on her body. She simply needs rest. In time, her memories and her body will recover.”

Gwen didn’t agree with that statement fully. This body might get better in time, but there was no way memories that didn’t exist would ever return. One by one, the occupants left the room until it was only Gwen and Papa remaining behind. Silence hung in the air. After a moment, Papa sat down on the stool and took Gwen’s hand. 

“I was worried I had lost you,” he whispered. 

Gwen’s eyes fell down to the blanket covering her legs. Things were becoming clearer to her now. This was not a dream and she was no longer Gwen Sinclair from the twenty-first century. Something must have happened. She didn’t know what exactly had occurred or what would happen now, but she was here. And little did this man – known only to her as “Papa” – know that he had indeed lost his daughter. The face may be the same, but the Gwen inside was different. She would try her best to be good to him, at least until she found a way to get back to her own family. She gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.

                                          ********

The next morning, the doctor, along with the Eighth Prince, came back to check on Gwen. The doctor commented that her pulse was stronger and that she seemed well on the road to full health. However, he still insisted on keeping her on bedrest.

Bored with these same walls and too curious about her temporary home, Gwen sat up. If she was going to be here for a while, she might as well get to know it. “I’m fine. Please, don’t make me stay in here all day. The sun and air is good for you, isn’t it?”

The sudden rebelliousness against the doctor’s suggestion did not seem to sit well with any of them. Gwen gave Papa a pleading look. A father couldn’t resist those eyes. He sighed, turning to the doctor. “Perhaps, a little exercise in walking around the grounds would be all right?”

The doctor looked reluctant, but he agreed. “But she shouldn’t overexert herself.”

“Chae Ryung will stay with her,” the Eighth prince ordered. “If you’ll please excuse me, I must meet with my brothers.” He bowed and left, followed by the doctor.

Having heard her name from the hallway, Chae Ryung shuffled quickly inside and over to Gwen, holding out her arms for the latter to balance on as she slid off of the bed. “Are you sure you want to go outside?”

Gwen nodded. “Yes. Perhaps seeing more of this place will help jog my memory.”

Chae Ryung tilted her head. “How can your memory jog?”

Gwen snorted, both at Chae Ryung’s confusion and at herself for the slip of the modern phrase. “Sorry, I just meant, maybe my memories will come back.”

“Oh.” The look on her face was enough to make Gwen laugh again. 

Gwen scolded herself internally. She had to be more careful with her words. Every step was one on thin ice. She couldn’t change who she was, not completely, but she would have to pull back. Chae Ryung, however, felt safe, like a shelter from the rain. With her, Gwen could find answers that might be dangerous to seek elsewhere. Straightening her shoulders, Gwen smiled broadly and took her newest friend’s hand. Chase Ryung grinned brightly at her and guided her out of the room.

[aerial-ace97]

22. Ethergaunts - D&D 3.5

As I’m sure has been made abundantly clear, I am a big fan of any creature that has an unexpected interaction with other lore pieces of the game, but in particular with the different planes.  We’ve seen aberrations that interact with Hell, the Abyss, the Feywild, the Astral Sea, and of course the Far Realm.  Another plane that is touched by aberrations quite a bit actually is the Ethereal Plane, which has interactions from Filchers and Nilshai, the latter of which could not make this list due to it not appearing in the books that were ruled (and admittedly I don’t know enough about them to know if they’d have made the list if they had qualified by the rules).  But an aberration far more intelligent and complex than the filchers can be found in the ethergaunts, which are far deadlier than they seem.

The ethergaunts are essentially terrifying as villains in the same way that Cybermen, zombies, reavers, and werewolves are terrifying.  Because they were once human, with all of both the familiar and alien traits that comes from such a harsh disconnect from this truth.  The ethergaunts were an advanced species of humanoids that abandoned the Material Plane some fifty thousand years ago in order to expand in a new and uninhabited world in the form of the empty Ethereal Plane.  Since their arrival, the ethergaunts have might great strides in technology and philosophy in ways that became vastly distinct from their first world counterparts.  These advances are mysterious to those of our world and the inherent purposes of them are very poorly understand, with an emphasis on alien architecture, bizarre bodily changes that have suited them better to their own world, and a philosophy and culture that has de-emphasized emotion but seemingly elevated even the lowest stations of individuals.  These changes put them in a bizarre and foreign position to most of our world.  To them however, the advancements that they have acquired have excelled them far beyond the civilization of the Material Plane.  They deem the civilization that has come to ‘acquire’ the Material Plane, at least in the areas they once inhabited, as pests that hold little actual dominion there.  They see themselves as beyond the morals of all Material peoples, and only seek to eliminate all those who have taken over their ancestral homelands.

There are a number of interesting facets to ether gaunt identity.  One is the series of stations that they occupy, with even the lowest among them in power, the reds, being revered as scientists and explorers for the greater community, which is certainly far more elite than most cultures one might see.  I like this idea of actually seeing some sort of marked change for the BETTER from a quote-on-quote evil society because it allows for the raising the question of whether they might actually have some of the right idea on things (the answer of course being probably, since in the real world lots of cultures have at least one idea that is socially progressive and their aren’t WHOLE races that exist to just be evil).  White ethergaunts form the governmental portion of their society and the blacks rule over even them.  The interaction level of the ethergaunts even when it does happen is extremely alien as they only have a language interpretable by one another and so they will instead dominate creatures to serve as proxy to speak their will.  Which yeah, like lots of powerful aberrations they can dominate people.  In addition to this, an ether gaunt can jump from Ethereal to Material Plane on a whim, a stupefying gaze which hits mental scores directly, and some pretty deadly spell-casting that advances through the different forms.  They also have complete spell immunity to any spell of a certain level or lower depending on their ranking, and this is a neat device to see them have a distinct separation from the Material Plane’s laws.  Now in the past I’ve said I don’t think a Big Bad should completely negate one character’s usefulness, AKA be entirely immune to magic, but the ether gaunt does this in an interesting way where it is only immune to spells of certain levels or lower which throws in a nice obstacle for players to deal with without entirely flipping them off for the character they chose to play.  And layers should have spells that can deal with them at the times they would encounter them.  Even the lowest of them is a CR 8 (which is not a push over) and is immune to 2nd level spells or lower, which players should have 3rd level spells at the point where they have a major battle with something of this CR.

I do have some qualms with the ethergaunts ethos.  The whole idea of progression to ethergaunts society is centered in the elimination of emotion for a greater focus on rationality.  As I’ve said before, whenever you have villains who don’t really have emotions my brain turns off.  I find the idea of having no emotions for motivation or drive entirely uninspiring and leaving little room for interesting role-play potential.  Fortunately, ethergaunts are, like in previous cases, not completely immune to emotion, however hard they might try to be so.  In fact, the Embri we’ve spoken about before have a lot in common societally with the ethergaunts, with both having a focus in this and also being based in a rigid caste system, though the Embri lose the connection to humanity that ethergaunts have.  The ethergaunts are also irreligious, absent of the devotion that the Embri have to the malebranche.  The history of the ethergaunts dates them as having similar origins to that of Serpentfolk, Aboleth, and other ancient beings that are mostly lost to time, and so their legacy is long and they have yet to relinquish their claim on it.

[necer0s]

So I just reread all of Mother of Learning in preparation for the big finale, and boy do I have a lot of Thoughts.  So I put them all in one post so as not to spam everyone.  

The summer festival planar alignment being an excuse for a huge political/social/academic party makes a lot of sense when you consider that this particular planar alignment is essentially the anniversary of the Ikosian Empire.

Can I just say that the Splinter Wars and everything that goes into them is an absolutely masterful piece of worldbuilding craft? Those combined events set the stage technologically, socially, and politically, at scales large and small.

I really enjoy the Northern Frontier chapters. Whenever I think about an epilogue, I always imagine that eventually Zach and Zorian will move north to settle some patch of land with their incredible skills. I feel that Zach wouldn’t be happy without the adventure, and Zorian would enjoy the relative isolation.

I also really like the mind magic in this series. It has a great set of abilities and limitations. Watching Zorian master those abilities and push those limitations is what makes his progress in the field so enjoyable.

Aranean culture is also fascinating. It’s kind of interesting that we explore a number of different web cultures before we really start exploring the different human cultures.

The foreshadowing in this story really is quite remarkable. Nochka and Raynie, two totally separate people with nothing in common other than being shifters, are both introduced to us in the very first chapter, however passingly. Eventually, Zorian is given completely different reasons to get to know both of them. And by the end, getting their respective stories is not only crucial to understanding the invaders’ plans, but essential to stopping them entirely.

The more I reread, the more I wish I’d read the conversation with the angel a few more times. I still don’t really understand why the angels chose Zach of all people to be at the center of the time loop. If it’s a matter of character, surely his Tragic Backstory should have made him look like a potential danger? With his history, there was always a danger that Zach would decide not to care about Cyoria or something.

You know, during this period where Zach is waiting for Zorian to show up... I wonder what’s going on in his mind? I mean, apparently Zach knows all this time that only one of the two of them can survive. But by the time they meet up again, he seems... antagonistic, maybe, but he’s also determined to get Zorian out of the loop pretty soon after talking to him. Is he hoping that they’ll find a way for both of them to live? Or has he already given up on life at that point?

Seeing the “original” version of the invasion is making me think about how Z&Z will defeat the real invasion. I suspect they might have warded most of the artillery magic targets, for a start... and of course, Zorian’s city-wide mind magic will be devastating.

I really do like Xvim. He’s just such a strong character. And yet we know so little about him! I really hope he doesn’t die at the end of the story.

I have to say, I much prefer when Zorian starts becoming exceptional, rather than merely competent. The basics are fun and all, but it’s undeniably more fun to watch him master more advanced skills like mind magic and dimensionalism.

Zach is such a wonderfully fascinating character. That was true even without the contract reveal, and with that information... he seems so carefree and happy most of the time, but he has such delightful hidden depths. The depression and rage were always sort of there, but it’s only with this new insight that I can see just how good a liar Zach can be. It’s not something you’d expect from him.

Random theory: is the Ghost Serpent a former god? He says that a past Branded One made him “fall”, and if anyone could cause the gods to lose their power and be thus diminished, it would be someone who had been through the full time loop.

I will never stop loving the reveal of how the time loop really works. It’s such a masterful culmination of foreshadowing and worldbuilding. “Time travel is impossible”, “blueprint conjuration”, “Black Room-style time acceleration”... the list goes on. Dozens of little hints and facts and observations all add up to this one revelation.

Zach’s determination to get both of them out of the loop is so bittersweet with the contract revelation. What is he thinking in this moment? Is he resolved to die if it gives them a better chance to save Cyoria? Is he quietly (desperately) hoping that if he saves Zorian, Zorian will somehow save him? It’s honestly heartbreaking.

You know, I’ve thought this before, but I really want Kirielle to end up learning from Silverlake in the epilogue.

Oh yeah, the Sovereign Gate belonged to House Noveda in the past... I wonder if the same is true of the Dagger? Even if it’s only the Gate, it does sort of imply that Zach is a distant descendant of the original Ikosian kings. Which might account for why he was chosen for the time loop...

I know that the story is supposed to be divided to into three Acts, but seeing Act 2 end at chapter 54 when the maybe-final chapter is going to be 101 really makes me think that it’s really a four-act story (partly thanks to later chapters being either longer or more plot-dense than early chapters). Maybe Act 3 should end when Silverlake leaves the time loop? There’s a certain symmetry in having each act end with the revelation that someone has left the loop.

So the gate has sufficient power for a thousand iterations even under the suboptimal conditions of this early activation. That’s... over eighty years. Easily a lifetime. At full power... would you expect to see two lifetimes? Five? Ten? That’s incredible power. And yet, for as relatively little time as they’ve had, Zach and Zorian have sure come a long way. By the end of the time loop, even counting Black Box time, Zach has had just about 40 years, and Zorian has had about... 15? Even with all the advantages of the time loop, it speaks to their talent that they both leave the loop as powerful as they do. For them to be as close behind Quatach-Ichl as they are, when he has almost a thousand years on them... it’s impressive.

I love it when Zach and Zorian start bantering. It’s a lot of fun, of course, but it’s also just... so good for them. It’s the kind of thing that just seems really healthy for both of them after how long they’ve been effectively isolated.

Have I mentioned recently that I love Xvim? He’s so totally down with Zorian being a powerful mind mage.

The reveal that Quatach-Ichl is wearing the Crown is such a delightfully sadistic moment. Like, you knew that gathering the Key was never going to be easy, but they went ahead and put the single greatest possible obstacle right at the start.

The Dragon Cult being worried that QI might try to betray them if he knew they were trying to control the primordial seems a lot like foreshadowing... as does Alanic saying that knowing the simulacrum spell is half of what you need to be a lich.

Daimen and Zorian meeting each other for the first time in so long is another one of those moments that makes me wish we could get Zach’s viewpoint on all this. Partly because I’d love a neutral perspective on their interactions, and partly because... what must he be feeling, as someone who lost all his family so long ago?

The wraith bombs are such a wonderfully horrible development. Not only are they about the most disturbing weapon imaginable, they make horrifically perfect sense in this setting. The perfect fantasy nuke.

The fact that the invasion is actually cancelled after the Ibasan Gate is stolen seems like a fairly significant point to me. (Especially since it happens before Silverlake joined the team, meaning she may not know about it.) If one of the first moves in the counter-assault is to shut down the Gate somehow (a sensible option anyway, as it would cut access to Iasku Mansion), there’s an increased chance of Quatach-Ichl deciding to retreat.

...I wonder if Zorian could dominate a couple soulseizer chrysanthemums and use them to fight Quatach-Ichl? They do seem like kind of the perfect option for something like that... I’m just imagining Zorian luring him into a seemingly undefended Noveda garden and then suddenly half a dozen tiny flowers pop out of the ground and try to eat his soul.

With the knowledge that Jornak is Red Robe, it strikes me as important to wonder who exactly it was that screwed him out of his inheritance.

Zorian is such an annoying little brother. I can’t blame him— it’s obviously self-defense against his asshole older brothers— but it is definitely funny.

Boy, every time Zach talks about his future instantly becomes sad when you consider the contract, huh?

Silverlake’s study of the primordials and their prisons is really worrying now that she’s working for the other side. Does she even need the shifter children to release Panaxeth?

You know, Silverlake suggests tracking Quatach-Ichl’s movements to try and find his phylactery, and Alanic agrees, but I don’t remember them ever actually doing that? That’s going to become extremely important by the end of the story. If they could just place the ring’s tracking marker on him, then send him back to his phylactery...

I really do love that dealing with both Quatach-Ichl and Silverlake has serious consequences. Powerful and ancient mages shouldn’t be completely at the mercy of anyone with a time loop, and these two certainly aren’t.

...so the Sovereign Gate can be used as a replacement for the shifter children, right? But the question is— is that true in the outside world as well, or only while it’s “attached” to him to create the time loop? The answer to that question will have a big effect on the final battle. (Could the angels possibly re-attune the Gate to a different primordial? Can the Guardian of the Threshold push Panaxeth back?)

You know, even having seen most of what’s coming, I can’t keep from imagining foreshadowing in everything that happens in this early part after leaving the loop. Like, is Bryn a spy for Jornak? That kind of thing.

Zorian says he has “that one trump card that no one but him knows about”. Boy, what a tantalizing line. Is he talking about bypassing mind blank? Being a lich? A secret spell formula weapon? We just don’t know.

Okay, here’s a thought: how does the contract kill Zach? Is there any way he could survive, like by becoming a lich? Or would it just... erase his soul?

I love that one of the necessary characteristics for the angels choosing Zach is him being dumb enough to agree to a mysterious contract presented by beings in a dream.  He’s Stupid Good by design.

You know, most of the angels’ concerns and precautions make sense to me.  Zach needs to be good, he needs to be willing (however dubiously), he needs to keep Panaxeth from escaping... but why is it such a big deal to them that no one knows about the time loop?  The Sovereign Gate can realistically only be activated by them, and if I understand its function correctly, once Zach went in, no one else was going to be able to use it for another 400 years.  

...oh shit, Zorian is going to put the grey Hunter in a box and send it at someone. Silverlake, probably— he knows for a fact that she can’t defeat it, after all.

It’s sort of ironic that Zorian is the one who will probably end up using the most monsters in the final battle, given how heavily the invaders rely on the monsters.

Ah, okay. The Sovereign Gate can’t serve as an alternate key to Panaxeth’s prison. That’s made explicitly clear. So no shifter children... no Panaxeth. (Except now that I’m thinking about it... what about Silverlake and Jornak themselves? They have a pact with Panaxeth and he literally created their bodies... that’s the kind of thing that could easily work.

[martinmamangun-blog]

Into the Twittersphere

     As society continues to usher into and embrace the cyber and digital age that has come to  define the past decade, it is no surprise that social media dominates not only our mobile and handheld devices, but also the real world political landscape. My respective generation of millennials and post-millennials has grown up with and transitioned from MySpace to Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter to Instagram to Snapchat and all of which amongst many other platforms have raised the scale, brought upon new ways of expression and posting, and influenced significant events and current reality. Out of all these forms of social media, Twitter has probably evolved the most in terms of how users first used the site and application versus how they use it today. As an avid iPhone user and social media connoisseur, I have plenty of experience with Twitter and the aforementioned apps to which I gained throughout my adolescence. Given that I joined Twitter in 2012, I have witnessed several shifts in the blue bird’s dynamic as content is constantly changing and being generated. In this following piece, I will examine the Twitter of the past and the Twitter of now and look in between the years of how it has impacted consumption of entertainment, news, and politics, and overall, society and the world.

    Before diving into the evolution of Twitter, it is especially important to look at its origins and popularization. Amanda MacArthur details the history of Twitter in her article “The Real History of Twitter, In Brief”, in which she recounts how the social media site first began as a side project  for co-founder Jack Dorsey in the year 2006 (MacArthur 1). Dorsey even intended for Twitter, or “twttr” (what it was commonly referred to in its early days), to be an SMS-based communications platform, so basically a different way of texting friends (MacArthur 1). The concept indeed started off as such until the idea then developed and branched out into a social network as several users hopped aboard the Twitter train, or bird for that matter. As Twitter experienced this explosive growth, it was interesting for the programming team to see how much people were producing with a 140 character limit (now 280 characters). What once started as a vision for a new method of messaging progressed into a user base of millions and an innovation of replies, mentions, @ symbols, retweets, and the famous hashtags. Twitter became its own social media network site, or SNS, and fits all the characteristics that Danah M. Boyd described in  “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”. Boyd defines the term SNS as a “web-based service that allows individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (Boyd 211). That certainly sounds like Twitter as the site progresses even further in developing along with its user base and audience.

    Based on my personal experience of using Twitter ever since 2012, I have kept up with and followed content that has made me laugh, made me smile, made me sad, made me astonished, and made me angry. Through this spectrum of Twitter consisting of so many users of different social and ethical backgrounds, it is arguably poetic that the platform brings people together just as much as it tears people apart. For instance, in “The Power and Political Economy of Social Media”, Christian Fuchs claims a limit on social media in respect to its participation as an ideology. Fuchs argues against social media as participatory as he feels that people are using media to form opinions on entertainment based topics instead of political topics to which he finds more important (Fuchs 98). In many cases Fuch’s statements holds true throughout Twitter’s existence, but I do believe the site has raised more political concerns in the past two years. Yes, Fuchs even specifies the limits of Twitter in regard to how “Obama has a very large number of followers [while] the number is much lower for representatives of alternative politics” (Fuchs 102), but it is imperative to note that despite only being written in 2014, the political landscape has changed so much in heavy part to Donald Trump. Exclude Trump’s presidency and love for tweeting, and there are still many others cases and situations in which Twitter has went beyond talking about the hottest celebrity scandals and stories and instead more about world politics and national crises and issues. Unlike other SNS counterparts such as Facebook, Twitter tends to not get soaked with the whole idea of iCapitalism, or commodification of information, a concept described by Alistair Duff in “Rating the revolution: Silicon Valley in Normative Perspective”. I strongly believe that the Twittersphere primarily revolves around information being produced and shared for that simple matter as it reflects the information society established by Silicon Valley (Duff 1609). However, with all this content and with every popular trend and network of countless users, there exists both goods and bads.

    I stand by the perspective to which Twitter has changed the world, but the platform essentially has changed lives for not just the better, but also for the worst. In her article for The Guardian, Elena Cresci reviews ways in which Twitter has extended its influence to its user base beyond the 140/280 characters. Cresci highlights how the social network media site has helped, but also hurt businesses, changed the way we consume news, but what also makes news, made stars out of politicians and important figures but also out of random teenagers and animals, and brought about the rise of hashtag activism that has widely influenced campaigns and movements (Cresci 1). Many of these negative points draw back to Fuch’s claim that social media is only concerned with entertainment, but how can you blame the user base for expressing what they want to see and generate? To help elaborate, in “Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning”, David Crouteau and William Hoynes discuss roles of the active audience and how they interpret media. This relates to Twitter users in the sense that they are similar to active audiences that engage in media socially (Crouteau and Hoynes 263) and for the simple fact that media is pleasurable and entertaining (Crouteau and Hoynes 287). They also briefly mention how audiences directly share similarities and differences to “users” as traditional media has transitioned into new forms of media (Crouteau and Hoynes 292). Altogether, this shows that those active in the Twitterverse are partaking on the platform on their own regard. The positives generally outweigh the negatives as the modern sphere of Twitter continues to speak on real issues and advocate for change in a world with lingering problems whilst maintaining a sanctuary for memes and popular culture.     

     Overall, Twitter has unleashed a wave of users that continue to express an ideology that grabs the attention of other users and puts them in this cycle of tweeting towards and against a dynamic and landscape of entertainment and politics. In that regard, it leaves me to wonder what Twitter will evolve and progress into next while society and mass media proceed to intertwine. After all, the Twittersphere was only intended to be another texting service just a little over a decade ago.

Media Art Complement

The following collage I photographed and put together represents how Twitter is capable of creating viral sensations and stars. Pictured below is Joshua Malilay, a close friend of mine, who has a passion and incredible talent for music. In the summer of 2016, he tweeted a song cover video of “I Want To Be Your Lady” by INOJ. Given that the song was so popular at the time amongst Twitter and other social media users and because of how gifted Josh’s voice is, his tweet blew up, he gained hundreds of followers, and he instantly became - as many would say - Twitter famous. This example of my good friend exploding onto the scene demonstrates the constant interest in entertainment of Twitter, how it has evolved since its conception, and significantly how this SNS and media form can positively impact its users as Josh has garnered much attention while he looks to pursue music. (35mm film photography and Twitter screenshot courtesy of Martin Mamangun, 2018)

References

Boyd, D.M. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 210-230. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/epdf

Cresci, Elena. “12 Ways Twitter Changed Our Lives.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Mar. 2016, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/21/12-ways-twitter-changed-our-lives-10th-birthday.

Crouteau, David, and William Hoynes. “Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning.” In Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2014. Pp. 260 - 293.

Duff, Alistair S. “Rating the revolution: Silicon Valley in Normative Perspective.” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 11 (2016): 1605-1621.

Fuchs, Christian. “The Power and Political Economy of Social Media.” In Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage Publications, 2014. Pp. 97-122.

MacArthur, Amanda. “The History of Twitter You Didn't Know.” Lifewire, Lifewire, 28 April 2018, www.lifewire.com/history-of-twitter-3288854.

[giancarlonicoli]

President Jimmy Carter's Farewell Address

January 14, 1981

Good evening.  In a few days, I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office -- to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.

Of Vice President Mondale, my Cabinet and the hundreds of others who have served with me during the last four years, I wish to say publicly what I have said in private: I thank them for the dedication and competence they have brought to the service of our country.

But I owe my deepest thanks to you, the American people, because you gave me this extraordinary opportunity to serve.  We have faced great challenges together.  We know that future problems will also be difficult, but I am now more convinced than ever that the United States -- better than any other nation -- can meet successfully whatever the future might bring.

These last four years have made me more certain than ever of the inner strength of our country -- the unchanging value of our principles and ideals, the stability of our political system, the ingenuity and the decency of our people.

Tonight I would like first to say a few words about this most special office, the presidency of the United States.

This is at once the most powerful office in the world -- and among the most severely constrained by law and custom.  The president is given a broad responsibility to lead -- but cannot do so without the support and consent of the people, expressed formally through the Congress and informally in many ways through a whole range of public and private institutions.

This is as it should be.  Within our system of government every American has a right and duty to help shape the future course of the United States.

Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.  Now as in our past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid serious mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the nation.

Today we are asking our political system to do things of which the founding fathers never dreamed.  The government they designed for a few hundred thousand people now serves a nation of almost 230 million people.  Their small coastal republic now spans beyond a continent, and we now have the responsibility to help lead much of the world through difficult times to a secure and prosperous future.

Today, as people have become ever more doubtful of the ability of the government to deal with our problems, we are increasingly drawn to single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.

This is a disturbing factor in American political life.  It tends to distort our purposes because the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests.  We are all Americans together -- and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.

Because of the fragmented pressures of special interests, it's very important that the office of the president be a strong one, and that its constitutional authority be preserved.  The president is the only elected official charged with the primary responsibility of representing all the people.  In the moments of decision, after the different and conflicting views have been aired, it is the president who then must speak to the nation and for the nation.

I understand after four years in office, as few others can, how formidable is the task the president-elect is about to undertake.  To the very limits of conscience and conviction, I pledge to support him in that task.  I wish him success, and Godspeed.

I know from experience that presidents have to face major issues that are controversial, broad in scope, and which do not arouse the natural support of a political majority.

For a few minutes now, I want to lay aside my role as leader of one nation, and speak to you as a fellow citizen of the world about three issues, three difficult issues: The threat of nuclear destruction, our stewardship of the physical resources of our planet, and the pre-eminence of the basic rights of human beings.

It's now been 35 years since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.  The great majority of the world's people cannot remember a time when the nuclear shadow did not hang over the earth.  Our minds have adjusted to it, as after a time our eyes adjust to the dark.

Yet the risk of a nuclear conflagration has not lessened.  It has not happened yet, thank God, but that can give us little comfort -- for it only has to happen once.

The danger is becoming greater.  As the arsenals of the superpowers grow in size and sophistication and as other governments acquire these weapons, it may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force.

In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall.  A World War II every second -- more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together.  The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide.

National weakness -- real or perceived -- can tempt aggression and thus cause war.  That's why the United States cannot neglect its military strength.  We must and we will remain strong.  But with equal determination, the United States and all countries must find ways to control and reduce the horrifying danger that is posed by the world's enormous stockpiles of nuclear arms.

This has been a concern of every American president since the moment we first saw what these weapons could do.  Our leaders will require our understanding and our support as they grapple with this difficult but crucial challenge.   There is no disagreement on the goals or the basic approach to controlling this enormous destructive force.  The answer lies not just in the attitudes or actions of world leaders, but in the concern and demands of all of us as we continue our struggle to preserve the peace.

Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character.  But there is another side.  The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space.  From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is -- a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have.  We see no barriers of race or religion or country.   We see the essential unity of our species and our planet; and with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail.

Another major challenge, therefore, is to protect the quality of this world within which we live.  The shadows that fall across the future are cast not only by the kinds of weapons we have built, but by the kind of world we will either nourish or neglect.

There are real and growing dangers to our simple and most precious possessions: the air we breathe; the water we drink; and the land which sustains us. The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict but difficult to resolve.  If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.

But there is no reason for despair.  Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice.  In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them.  We can meet the resource problems of the world -- water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution -- if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

I have just been talking about forces of potential destruction that mankind has developed, and how we might control them.  It is equally important that we remember the beneficial forces that we have evolved over the ages, and how to hold fast to them.

One of those constructive forces is enhancement of individual human freedoms through the strengthening of democracy, and the fight against deprivation, torture, terrorism and the persecution of people throughout the world.  The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language.

Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity, and who suffer for the sake of justice -- they are the patriots of this cause.

I believe with all my heart that America must always stand for these basic human rights -- at home and abroad.  That is both our history and our destiny.

America did not invent human rights.  In a very real sense, it is the other way round.  Human rights invented America.

Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea.  Our social and political progress has been based on one fundamental principle -- the value and importance of the individual.  The fundamental force that unites us is not kinship or place of origin or religious preference.  The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins.

The battle for human rights -- at home and abroad -- is far from over.  We should never be surprised nor discouraged because the impact of our efforts has had, and will always have, varied results.  Rather, we should take pride that the ideals which gave birth to our nation still inspire the hopes of oppressed people around the world.  We have no cause for self-righteousness or complacency.  But we have every reason to persevere, both within our own country and beyond our borders.

If  we are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values which we espouse around the world: A decent education for our children, adequate medical care for all Americans, an end to discrimination against minorities and women, a job for all those able to work, and freedom from injustice and religious intolerance.

We live in a time of transition, an uneasy era which is likely to endure for the rest of this century.  It will be a period of tensions both within nations and between nations -- of competition for scarce resources, of social political and economic stresses and strains.  During this period we may be tempted to abandon some of the time-honored principles and commitments which have been proven during the difficult times of past generations.

We must never yield to this temptation.  Our American values are not luxuries but necessities -- not the salt in our bread but the bread itself.  Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad -- greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.

Remember these words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that   all men are created equal; that they are endowed     by their creator with certain inalienable rights;   that among these are life liberty and the pursuit     of happiness."

This vision still grips the imagination of the world.  But we know that democracy is always an unfinished creation.  Each generation must renew its foundations.  Each generation must rediscover the meaning of this hallowed vision in the light of its own modern challenges.  For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival; liberty is human rights; the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

During the next few days I will work hard to make sure that the transition from myself to the next president is a good one so that the American people are served well.  And I will continue as I have the last 14 months to work hard and to pray for the lives and the well-being of the American hostages held in Iran.  I can't predict yet what will happen, but I hope you will join me in my constant prayer for their freedom.

As I return home to the South where I was born and raised, I am looking forward to the opportunity to reflect and further to assess -- I hope with accuracy -- the circumstances of our times.  I intend to give our new president my support, and I intend to work as a citizen, as I have worked in this office as president, for the values this nation was founded to secure.

Again, from the bottom of my heart, I want to express to you the gratitude I feel.

Thank you, fellow citizens, and farewell.

[anytutor37-com]

The TDSB’s rollout of online learning was an unmitigated disaster

It’s easy to forget now, but back in early March, before “Covid-19,” “14-day post-travel self-quarantine” and “expanded family bubble” entered the lexicon, the hot topic of discussion among Toronto parents was the ongoing brawl between the teachers’ unions and the education ministry and the likelihood of a complete work stoppage. Teachers, furious over Premier Doug Ford’s attempts to rein in the budget and cut the number of educators by the thousands, had staged province-wide protests, filling the Queen’s Park lawn to the edges with kids, parents and educators toting angry signs and chanting even angrier epithets. On social media, there was an all-out assault on Education Minister Stephen Lecce. Smooth-talking, sharply dressed, private-school educated and with no kids and scant work experience outside of politics, the 33-year-old Lecce became the avatar for everything the unions saw as wrong with the Ford government. For months, protesters had called for Lecce’s resignation (and sometimes his head: at one point, a mob crowded his car menacingly after he’d delivered a speech on anti-bullying).

As Torontonians headed out for March Break, the widespread expectation was that upon return, the strikes would become longer and more frequent. Teachers braced. Kids rejoiced. Parents, who were for the most part sympathetic to teachers, sighed. Then, the unthinkable: school was cancelled for two weeks following March Break due to the pandemic.

To many union members, the smooth-talking Lecce was the avatar of everything that was wrong with the Ford government

If ever there were a time to put aside differences and work together, this was it, but the relationship between the unions and the ministry was so toxic, so consumed with politics and posturing, that there was little chance for constructive collaboration, even with the well-being of kids at stake.

While the pandemic was a logistical nightmare for the ministry, it was a blessing in terms of optics and leverage. There are four teachers’ unions in Ontario—OSSTF (high school), ETFO (elementary), OECTA (Catholic) and AEFO (French)—and in an instant, all of them lost any public relations advantage they held. If teachers no longer had to go to work every day, how could they reasonably demand a pay increase and rally support for their preferred class sizes? To the surprise of no one, and to the delight and relief of Lecce, the unions abandoned their battle-ready postures and settled. The Catholic board announced a tentative agreement on March 12, and the other boards reached agreements in the following weeks.

The agreements were settlements in both senses of the word: teachers took what they could get. “We were prepared to fight on,” says OSSTF president Harvey Bischof, a former high school English teacher known for his blunt, direct manner. “The pandemic took away our ability to do so. Withdrawing service during the pandemic would have been pretty offensive to the public sentiment.”

Members of the Toronto chapter of ETFO were likewise embittered by having their hand forced by the pandemic. Their president at the time, Joy Lachica, is a union heavy, someone who revels in a good, drawn-out fight. Backing down went against her nature. “If Covid hadn’t hit, we would have pressed on,” she told me. She was sickened by what she saw as the ministry’s opportunism, which she likened to disaster capitalism. “Governments can use social situations like the pandemic to their advantage and resume their original intentions,” she said.

Few parents, of course, were interested in the finer points of educational grudges or who held the public-relations high ground. They simply needed to know when their kids were going back to school. The resounding answer from every possible source of authority was: “We don’t know.” For the moment, anyway, it seemed teaching was to be web-based. The ministry provided a paltry webpage with links to a grab bag of ministry and third-party resources: the ROM, the Aga Khan Museum, the National Ballet, Mathify (an online math program created by TVO) and the Toronto Zoo. There were also resources labelled for teachers that included printable handouts that aligned with the curriculum. The ministry’s other major contribution: a video entitled “Learn Like a Champion,” in which Lecce interviews Raptors guard Norm Powell about self-discipline and the need to remain hopeful in the face of adversity, then learns to shoot a basketball backwards.

Parents were bewildered: were they expected to manage their jobs and teach their kids, too? What they wanted was something resembling the classroom but online, a live video feed of teachers teaching students who could interact with each other, which in industry speak is called synchronous learning.

The entire system seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. One middle-school teacher who works in midtown and spoke on condition of anonymity wrote to parents immediately after March Break with a baffling update: “I have lessons at the ready, but I have been directed to hold off.” A supply teacher at a midtown school received the same directive. “We got a notice from both our administrative team and the union that basically said, ‘Don’t do anything,’ ” she said. She’s looking for a permanent job and asked me to withhold her name for fear of retribution from the board.

In late March, as it became clear a return to the classroom wasn’t imminent, the ministry issued guidelines for teachers—they should provide five hours of work a week for K to Grade 6, 10 hours a week for Grades 7 and 8, three hours per week per course for semestered high school students, and one and a half hours a week per course for non-semestered students. It seemed like progress, but no one said anything about synchronous learning. When it came to delivering the assignments and tasks, one union rep for an east-end school told her teachers over Zoom to take special care to avoid anything resembling excellence. “Don’t go above and beyond,” she said. “It could set the bar too high. If you come out with your A game, and later the ministry has its own ideas to add on, it would pile on more work for everyone.”

At the TDSB, officials were dealing with a separate headache: technology, or rather, a lack of it. As a public entity, the TDSB is required to ensure equity—that is, equal access to resources—for all students. As it became clear they would need to transition to remote learning, they had to make sure that all 250,000 students in the TDSB would have a functional and up-to-date computer with Internet access. That massive job fell to Manon Gardner, a 20-year veteran of the TDSB. She was promoted in 2018 to associate director of school operations and service excellence to lead the board’s multi-year strategic plan, which included integrating technology and ensuring digital proficiency. She knew that speed was critical, as kids left out of contact with their teachers would soon tune out altogether.

Among many obstacles, the first was that she had no idea how many kids were already set up with computers. So on March 29, Gardner emailed a short survey to all TDSB families to find out how many needed a computer and how many needed Internet access. For the 10,000 families who had no email listed with the TDSB, Gardner’s team either called or sent the survey by mail. In the end, about half of the board’s families responded—some 177,444—and of those, 60,000 needed a computer and 9,000 needed Wi-Fi. Gardner reviewed the board’s inventory, then the ministry brokered deals with Apple and Google to buy or lease new devices, at a reduced cost, to bridge the gap. Rogers provided free wireless data until the end of June to families who needed it. A handful of school caretakers gathered the devices, and 100 staff volunteers, clad in PPE, collected and shipped them to a central distribution centre, where the computers were wiped and reprogrammed. Finally, they were packaged with an instruction sheet and delivered to households across the city. Staff worked eight-hour days, weekends included. It was a massive undertaking and an impressive outcome. But the entire process stretched into June, and by the time it was done, many kids and parents had given up on school altogether.

The issues with technology didn’t end there. Once the kids were finally set up with computers, it became apparent that a quarter of the board’s teachers didn’t know how to use the TDSB-supplied online teaching software or needed a refresher.

The ministry had for a long time positioned online learning as the way of the future. For many months, Lecce pushed for two online courses as part of a high school student’s graduation requirements. Under Ford’s model, however, that implied fewer teachers, and the union, especially the high school teachers’ union, saw online learning as an existential threat. Before the pandemic, the ministry had spent $18.6 million to license online teaching software called Brightspace to Ontario school boards. But teachers found it difficult to use. Many preferred Google Meet paired with Google Classroom, and it was ultimately up to them to choose. When the pandemic arrived, only a quarter of the board’s teachers participated in the software training courses, although many teachers told me the clinics were consistently full, which suggests the lack of tech know-how was far more widespread than we know. How many of the remaining 75 per cent were already up to date on Brightspace and Google Classroom? The board told me they didn’t have that information at the ready, but one teacher I spoke to estimated that up to 30 per cent of her colleagues were uncomfortable with technology in general.

Laura Friedmann is a filmmaker and producer and a single mother of two kids aged eight and 10. She had one computer in the house and she needed it for work. She applied for two devices and got a TDSB-issued iPad for her son and a laptop for her daughter. It wasn’t until the end of April that she received them and set up Google Classroom. Until then, there was no communication from her kids’ school unless she logged into Google Classroom on her own computer, which she squeezed in between work, preparing meals and getting the kids out for some exercise. The assignments were another headache, since she had to be involved from start to finish for both her kids. She had to find the posted assignment, print it out, explain it—teach it, effectively—then take a picture of the finished assignment and upload it. There was nothing like a class—nothing live, no phone calls. Just a few hours a week of assignments, which is what the ministry prescribed. After that, she’d guiltily plop her kids down in front of Netflix until she could take them out for some fresh air. She felt she wasn’t doing anything well—work, parenting, teaching. One Monday morning, after she’d spent several long days in a row catching up on work while the kids were at her ex-husband’s for the weekend, Friedmann woke up to a house full of laundry, dirty dishes and cleaning that needed to be done. She knew homeschooling would be next. When her kids woke up and turned on the TV, she was overwhelmed with a sense of guilt, frustration and also relief. She thought, Well, I guess they’ll just do that this morning. Then she went into the bathroom, closed the door, lay down on the floor and cried.

John Dewey is considered a founding father of modern education. He was a philosopher and education reformer around the turn of the 20th century, and his ideas about pedagogy are still taught at OISE today. One of his central tenets was that the relationship between the teacher and the student is at the heart of the learning experience, and that a teacher’s job is to engage students as opposed to simply treating them as receptacles of information.

It’s not a revolutionary idea. Today’s teachers know that children do best when kids and teachers interact directly, when there is a two-way flow of information. Were Dewey advising the TDSB during a lockdown, it’s safe to surmise he would have insisted on synchronous learning so kids could see their teachers, ask questions and interact with classmates.

That’s exactly what happened in the private school system, where there was widespread adoption of synchronous learning, and, despite a few reported hiccups, the transition was quick. Of course, that system was working from several advantages: with a higher average household income, private-school kids are often already equipped with home computers and Wi-Fi. The schools have fewer students and smaller classes. They have a more favourable ratio of support staff. That’s not to say online learning went perfectly in the private system. Teachers had to come to terms with having a live feed into their homes. Of course, several hours a day of synchronous classes was too much for some kids, and their parents pulled them out. But the teachers’ focus was on keeping students engaged in learning—real, live learning, face-to-face with their teachers and classmates, right from the start of lockdown. Even if students didn’t show up, their teachers were there. They took attendance, they followed up if a student missed class. School was never treated as optional. In the public system, by contrast, synchronous learning was considered an extreme proposition. One public-school teacher told me he couldn’t be online for synchronous lessons because that would require him to “be at the same place at the same time every day.” When I asked him how that differed from working in a classroom, he said he might have to help his own child with schoolwork or drive his wife to the grocery store.

Privacy was another widely espoused concern. Union leaders claimed their members were worried that having a running camera in their home exposed them to meme-making, ridicule and more. One scenario put forward by a teacher with a toddler at home: “What if my son walked into the frame while I was broadcasting and pulled his pants down?” Bischof, the president of OSSTF, told me about a synchronous high school class being Zoom-bombed with pornographic images and “absolutely vile, racist and misogynistic comments.” As if to drive the point home, one union rep cautioned her members that if they went ahead with synchronous learning and some parent complained to the Ontario College of Teachers, ETFO wouldn’t support them.

Bischof warned against live, online classes because they could be Zoom-bombed with pornographic and racist images

Jill Haythornthwaite is a supply teacher who works part time at several schools during normal times; during the pandemic, she was unemployed, and she got sick of hearing excuses from her full-time colleagues. “I can’t believe the union is screaming about privacy issues in the middle of a pandemic. Teachers are being paid to teach. They need to teach. We’ve got 30 per cent of the general population unemployed.”

A Grade 1 teacher in the east end followed her union’s advice, which was to not do synchronous lessons, because it was the only advice she had from the union regarding live lessons. “Everyone is afraid to take a step forward,” she told me, “because what if it’s the wrong step?” She tried emailing her students homework, recorded lessons and links to web resources. She also tried teaching students some French by conversing with them over the phone. Engagement was a disaster. “They’re six-year-olds,” she said. “They can’t read instructions on a website. They’re not great on the phone.” During that time, only five students submitted work regularly, and they were the kids who were already doing well in her class.

Karen Brackley has two kids, aged six and nine, at an elementary school in midtown. Both are in French immersion. Her daughter’s Grade 1 teacher loaded snippets of PowerPoint presentations, weekly, onto Google Classroom. French immersion is designed for families whose parents don’t necessarily know French. Brackley didn’t read or speak it, and her six-year-old wasn’t reading yet. Neither could understand the presentations. Brackley told the teacher as much and received a curt reply: “We do this type of thing in class, your daughter should be able to do it.” Over the course of two months, Brackley’s son’s teacher called three times for phone conversations.

“John Dewey is rolling in his grave,” says Richard Messina. He is principal of the Lab School, a private school within the University of Toronto that serves as a laboratory for learning about child development. “In our survival mode, many teachers have needed to go backwards. Giving children the opportunity to make discoveries for themselves is so different than just telling them what the right answer is,” says Messina. “I totally understand that unions and teachers are concerned about teacher vulnerability online. But if you’re not engaged in synchronous learning experiences, then you can only be transmitting.”

The TDSB teachers who wanted to start synchronous learning on their own did so at their peril. One French-immersion teacher at an east-end school switched to synchronous right away and made herself available to chat anytime within a 12-hour window via FaceTime. She faced resentment from her colleagues and received a “cool it” message from her school’s administration, who said the teachers needed to establish a norm to avoid having one teacher go all-out when another is doing the bare minimum.

Stephanie Hammond is a teacher at Fraser Mustard Early Learning Academy, an all-kindergarten school of 600 in Thorncliffe Park. The thought of not being able to connect with her students weighed heavily on her. She wanted to create an interactive website full of videos of her reading stories or discussing seasonal plants and animals; to do that, she knew she’d need to collaborate with colleagues and the school’s administration. But union rules stipulated that staff meetings are allowed only once a month and no more, and that all staff must attend. “We couldn’t wait,” says Hammond. So she and her colleagues created what they called “check-ins,” which freed them up to hold more frequent and smaller meetings. Immediately after March Break, and before receiving any direction from the ministry, they learned how to construct a website. The next week, they built it. By April 6, it was up and running. It contains links to Hammond and other teachers leading classes and activities, read-along stories in English and Farsi, and the main page displays information for income assistance and technical support. Hammond tried to make it as user-friendly as possible for five-year-olds: she put up a photo of herself so her students knew where to click without having to read her name, and she made a “Talk to Ms. Hammond” button that a child could click to easily get in touch via email. Students who could access a smartphone or a computer could begin learning right after the break. For those without access to either, Hammond called families on the phone. For families who couldn’t speak English, Hammond and her colleagues used a translation device that’s free to TDSB schools and helped the families navigate the board’s process of getting a computer.

Across the city, other teachers like Hammond developed innovative ways to engage with their students, and eventually, word of that type of behaviour reached the union bosses, two of whom were still hammering out the details of their collective agreements. On March 26, the high school teachers’ union, OSSTF, made a confounding announcement: “The individual measures some of our members have taken over the past few weeks to ensure students have the materials and resources they need is a testament to their commitment to our students. But we have asked in light of developing a province-wide plan…that they be mindful not to implement anything that could run contrary to direction from their school board or forthcoming from our work with the ministry.” When I asked Bischof why they didn’t put politics aside and greenlight synchronous learning as soon as possible, he denied that politics played any role and then blamed the ministry for the delays.

After a month and a half of leaving the teaching mostly to parents, finally, on May 1, the TDSB sought feedback via an online survey to parents. What was working and what wasn’t? What kind of support did parents need? The results were no surprise. Some 53 per cent of the 39,000 respondents expressed a desire for more direct contact or instruction from teachers, either by phone or online.

School trustees then unanimously passed a motion for more synchronous learning. But it would be another three weeks—May 27, a full two months after schools closed—before the TDSB made it official. “Refined Expectations for Remote Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Designated Early Childhood Educators” was a nine-page document that recommended educators meet synchronously with their students online or on the phone for a minimum of two 15-minute periods per week.

Karen Brackley was relieved, happy that her son would be able to engage with his teacher. And that did happen—two 15-minute sessions per week, almost to the second. “The bare minimum,” Brackley said. She and her husband ended up hiring private tutors. The experience made her want to pull her kids out of the TDSB altogether, and it worsened her impression of the education system in general. She says she wasn’t alone. “I spoke to a few parents who came from other countries—Bulgaria, Turkey, Italy, France, Russia, Japan. They said our public schooling is very weak.”

The TDSB is weak, stretched thin after decades of underfunding. Over half its schools are more than 60 years old, with a $4-billion maintenance backlog—roofing issues, heating and cooling problems, foundation problems. Schools are also dealing with an insufficient supply of computers, bathrooms with ancient, unusable soap dispensers, and primary classrooms without sinks. Classrooms are crowded. And the board is constantly pleading for more money. Those problems have existed since at least 1997, when former premier Mike Harris, in an attempt to slay a massive provincial debt, legislated changes that placed education-related revenue under control of the province rather than the individual boards, who can no longer directly levy taxpayers—via property tax—to raise the money they need. As a result, the TDSB is beholden to the ministry for its funding, which it receives in grants, and the ministry leverages that power to extract what it wants from the board. Harris knew there could be an accountability problem with his model, so he pledged a public review of the formula every five years. The last one was 18 years ago. The formula is decades out of date and shortchanges the TDSB by $228 annually per high school student and $174 per elementary student. No government has fixed it. The revenue stream is too good to give up.

One teacher told me he couldn’t teach online because it required him to be at the same place at the same time every day

It took nearly two months for teachers to start synchronous learning en masse. But by that time, many students had given up on school entirely. How many is hard to tell. There was no directive from the ministry or the board or various administrations to keep track of, well, anything: how much time teachers spent teaching, or which kids were participating and for how long.

John Malloy, the TDSB’s outgoing director of education, told me it would be “very inappropriate” to keep track of how much time teachers were spending with students on synchronous learning because it would demonstrate a lack of confidence in them. “I trust our teachers,” Malloy told me. “I believe they care about kids and want to do a good job.” The board expected teachers to connect with students twice a week and respond to parents’ inquiries in a timely way, but Malloy felt it wasn’t the board’s job to enforce those expectations. “Monitoring is more effective when parent, teacher and principal connect and they work through it. Not because we set up a dynamic where we can say, ‘Teacher, you haven’t been online enough this week.’ That’s not what we would do in a classroom.”

The unions did try to figure out engagement rates: at the end of March, during a call between the OSSTF and the ministry, the OSSTF requested data about the number of students who engaged in remote learning versus students who didn’t. Effectively, they wanted the dropout rate. Nancy Naylor, the deputy minister, agreed to “take it back” to Lecce. The ministry claims it did ask school boards to gather information, but as of August, no one seemed to have that information on hand. Harvey Bischof, president of OSSTF, suspects they didn’t gather it. “If true, that’s absolutely negligent,” he says.”

And as kids were opting out, many school boards decreed that any work turned in during the lockdown couldn’t lower a student’s grades, which sapped teachers of much of their authority. One Grade 8 teacher told me that pandemic or not, his students understood their marks “didn’t really count until they were older,” which left room for those who were happy with their marks to essentially tune out. At another midtown school, an eighth-grader said “hardly any” of her classmates were turning in work. By June, in a Grade 1 French-immersion class near the Danforth, only five out of 19 students submitted work. By the end of the semester, five out of 25 Grade 11 kids in one class at an east-end school were handing in half-hearted assignments, and even fewer were attending the 15-minute Google Meet sessions, when the teachers bothered to hold them.

With no accountability to the board for what was the closest thing to attendance during remote learning, with overwhelmed parents unable to effectively monitor their kids’ schoolwork, and students guaranteed to get no worse than their pre–­March Break grades, there was no incentive to do school work. Students could disappear from lessons altogether. Also, teachers lost out on crucial information—which schools had more engagement, and what they did to get it—that could help them develop best practices for the fall. Halfway through July, teachers I spoke to reported no follow-up from the ministry or the TDSB and no opportunity to provide feedback to inform their plans for September.

The response to pandemic schooling was, in a word, disastrous—for kids, for parents, for the thousands of businesses that suffered when parents had to devote their working hours to teaching rather than working. Some families were forced to choose between staying employed and tending to their kids, and many chose the latter. And often, in households with a mom and a dad, the one to stop working was mom. As we head into the fall, many moms are postponing their return to work. According to a study published in July, 32 per cent of Canadian women who lost their jobs between February and June were not actively seeking work.

Kids, of course, were affected most of all, detached from daily interaction, from advancing their skills in reading, writing and math, from developing social skills, and so much more. The impact hurts some kids more than others. Laura Friedmann, the single mom who was reduced to tears when faced with the choice of either teaching her kids or doing her day job, was never contacted by her kids’ teachers to arrange synchronous learning. She marvelled at what some double-income households were doing to fill the education gap. “I was left flying by the seat of my pants and watching what other amazing families were doing on Instagram,” she recalls. When faced with a choice between making the rent or homeschooling, the latter eventually lost out.

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“A lot of families just gave up on online learning,” says Ingrid Palmer, who works at a child development centre. Palmer also co-chairs the Inner City Community Advisory Committee, which advises the TDSB on high-need schools that receive extra funding so they can provide free meals to students, additional staff and training, and on-site medical services. Through work, she meets many families with children who are struggling with some stark realities—including kids with special needs who have lost their school-issued supports. Palmer, a single mother of three, experienced that struggle firsthand. Her 13-year-old son is on the autism spectrum, and during normal times, the TDSB assigns him a Chromebook to facilitate his in-class learning. Early in the lockdown, his teacher called to say the family would receive that computer, but it never arrived. It’s likely it was scooped up when the board collected school computers for redistribution. Palmer’s son normally gets good grades. She gave him the family PC when she wasn’t working remotely, but without his own computer or the routine of school, he lost motivation. He soon disengaged from school completely.

In her professional role, during the height of the lockdown, Palmer advised families who couldn’t juggle it all to opt out of school altogether. It was only a few months of school, and their mental health was more important than the three Rs. But in the event that there’s a second wave in the fall, she doesn’t see opting out as a viable strategy. “We need to have a better plan or these kids will be left behind. We can’t drop the ball again,” she says.

Educating kids during a pandemic—in class or online—is a challenge unlike any other. To make TDSB classrooms safe will require creativity and nimbleness. Sudden outbreaks of Covid-19 or a second wave might force kids back home. If that happens, teachers need to be empowered to teach remotely, supported with the resources to be effective, and the whole thing should be monitored carefully by the board and the ministry. That kind of success is built on trust, goodwill, innovation, flexibility and great communication—none of which were on display during the spring. It will also require increased autonomy for the boards, which remain financially beholden to the ministry. Unfortunately, the squabbling has continued over the return-to-school plan, suggesting that the chaos the TDSB experienced in spring will persist into the fall. For students, that could mean substandard education, or even no education at all.

This story appears in the September 2020 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, for just $29.95 a year, click here.

This content was originally published here.

[armeniaitn]

How Armenia Has Navigated the Coronavirus Pandemic—Despite Azerbaijan

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/economy/how-armenia-has-navigated-the-coronavirus-pandemic-despite-azerbaijan-24794-26-06-2020/

How Armenia Has Navigated the Coronavirus Pandemic—Despite Azerbaijan

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Click here to read the full article.” data-reactid=”19″>Click here to read the full article.

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="The coronavirus has tested the resilience and unity of nations large and small, rich and poor, with wealth and technological advancement providing little if any guarantee of protection. Thousands of miles away from the United States, the small and landlocked Armenia was on a path to solid economic progress fueled by its democratic transition a year and a half ago when the coronavirus struck.” data-reactid=”20″>The coronavirus has tested the resilience and unity of nations large and small, rich and poor, with wealth and technological advancement providing little if any guarantee of protection. Thousands of miles away from the United States, the small and landlocked Armenia was on a path to solid economic progress fueled by its democratic transition a year and a half ago when the coronavirus struck.

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Social-distancing and economic slowdown, followed by the suspension of commercial flights and most cross-border traffic, put a heavy toll on our economy, especially on some of its more rapidly growing sectors⁠—services, tourism, and agricultural exports. Nationwide stay-at-home orders, a mandatory wearing of masks, expanded testing and contact tracing, along with an increased hospital bed capacity and public awareness⁠—all helped fight the pandemic. Armenia is moving slowly toward reopening its economy. Commercial flights will soon resume, and the country looks forward to regaining its economic momentum.  ” data-reactid=”21″>Social-distancing and economic slowdown, followed by the suspension of commercial flights and most cross-border traffic, put a heavy toll on our economy, especially on some of its more rapidly growing sectors⁠—services, tourism, and agricultural exports. Nationwide stay-at-home orders, a mandatory wearing of masks, expanded testing and contact tracing, along with an increased hospital bed capacity and public awareness⁠—all helped fight the pandemic. Armenia is moving slowly toward reopening its economy. Commercial flights will soon resume, and the country looks forward to regaining its economic momentum.  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="But battling the health and economic challenges created by the coronavirus is not the only test our country faces. Armenia is in a region where history, cultural diversity, and modern politics come together to form geopolitical and regional fault lines that can produce conflict if ignored or mishandled.    ” data-reactid=”22″>But battling the health and economic challenges created by the coronavirus is not the only test our country faces. Armenia is in a region where history, cultural diversity, and modern politics come together to form geopolitical and regional fault lines that can produce conflict if ignored or mishandled.    

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="The Caucasus is situated on a geographic crossroads, a nexus where Europe, Asia, and the Middle East come together, a region prone to wider geopolitical competition. Armenia conducts a balanced, multifaceted foreign and security policy to address and mitigate this challenge, to reduce violence and project stability. This inclusive vision allows us to pursue critical partnerships and alliances with the United States, Russia, and the European Union, as well as other regional parties and frameworks.   ” data-reactid=”23″>The Caucasus is situated on a geographic crossroads, a nexus where Europe, Asia, and the Middle East come together, a region prone to wider geopolitical competition. Armenia conducts a balanced, multifaceted foreign and security policy to address and mitigate this challenge, to reduce violence and project stability. This inclusive vision allows us to pursue critical partnerships and alliances with the United States, Russia, and the European Union, as well as other regional parties and frameworks.   

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Maintaining a strong relationship with the United States is particularly important for Armenia, for reasons related both to our security and our values. Armenia and the United States may be continents apart, but what we share in common—in values, ideals, aspirations, and the unique human bond with almost every Armenian citizen having a relative or friend who is American—is many times stronger than our disparate geography. ” data-reactid=”24″>Maintaining a strong relationship with the United States is particularly important for Armenia, for reasons related both to our security and our values. Armenia and the United States may be continents apart, but what we share in common—in values, ideals, aspirations, and the unique human bond with almost every Armenian citizen having a relative or friend who is American—is many times stronger than our disparate geography. 

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="One of my first efforts after arriving in Washington as Armenia’s ambassador, was to work with the U.S. government to launch the U.S.-Armenia strategic dialogue—the framework for our growing relationship that includes policy, trade, energy, technology, defense, civil society, and humanitarian issues. The United States provides critical development aid Armenia that over the quarter of a century has helped us strengthen our economy and build a strong civil society—two key catalysts of the democratic change Armenia underwent recently.   ” data-reactid=”25″>One of my first efforts after arriving in Washington as Armenia’s ambassador, was to work with the U.S. government to launch the U.S.-Armenia strategic dialogue—the framework for our growing relationship that includes policy, trade, energy, technology, defense, civil society, and humanitarian issues. The United States provides critical development aid Armenia that over the quarter of a century has helped us strengthen our economy and build a strong civil society—two key catalysts of the democratic change Armenia underwent recently.   

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="We also face an even more immediate danger: military aggression from our neighbor, Azerbaijan, which sees Armenia’s democratic transformation as a threat rather than a model and has been posturing to wage a war on Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s defense ministry recently threatened to take “measures that will be far more destructive than those taken in 2015, 2016, and 2018” and that “the enemy will suffer extensive losses” because “the only language to speak with the enemy is the language of force.”  ” data-reactid=”26″>We also face an even more immediate danger: military aggression from our neighbor, Azerbaijan, which sees Armenia’s democratic transformation as a threat rather than a model and has been posturing to wage a war on Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s defense ministry recently threatened to take “measures that will be far more destructive than those taken in 2015, 2016, and 2018” and that “the enemy will suffer extensive losses” because “the only language to speak with the enemy is the language of force.”  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Even as the UN secretary-general has pleaded for a global cessation of hostilities amidst this unprecedented health crisis, Azerbaijan has chosen to escalate its war rhetoric against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh, which declared its independence in 1991 amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union and successfully defended it from a military aggression of Azerbaijan.  ” data-reactid=”27″>Even as the UN secretary-general has pleaded for a global cessation of hostilities amidst this unprecedented health crisis, Azerbaijan has chosen to escalate its war rhetoric against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh, which declared its independence in 1991 amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union and successfully defended it from a military aggression of Azerbaijan.  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="In the latest evidence of belligerence, our neighbor held large-scale military exercises just last month in the midst of the pandemic. These actions proved alarming enough to lead a bipartisan group of members of Congress to condemn these actions as “dangerous” and “reckless.” It seems that the Aliyev regime, so used to bullying and menacing its own citizens with no regard to their basic rights, thinks that it can intimidate Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh as well.   ” data-reactid=”28″>In the latest evidence of belligerence, our neighbor held large-scale military exercises just last month in the midst of the pandemic. These actions proved alarming enough to lead a bipartisan group of members of Congress to condemn these actions as “dangerous” and “reckless.” It seems that the Aliyev regime, so used to bullying and menacing its own citizens with no regard to their basic rights, thinks that it can intimidate Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh as well.   

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="By contrast, Armenia remains firmly committed to the peace process even as it engages in an urgent nationwide fight against the pandemic. It has sought to revitalize the process by urging the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table—a role it already once held in the mid-1990s. Nagorno-Karabakh’s presence in negotiations was critical in enabling the ceasefire established in, and held since 1994, and will be critical today in converting it to a lasting peace.  ” data-reactid=”31″>By contrast, Armenia remains firmly committed to the peace process even as it engages in an urgent nationwide fight against the pandemic. It has sought to revitalize the process by urging the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table—a role it already once held in the mid-1990s. Nagorno-Karabakh’s presence in negotiations was critical in enabling the ceasefire established in, and held since 1994, and will be critical today in converting it to a lasting peace.  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Regrettably, anti-Armenian hate speech, coupled with warmongering and military provocations, have become tools in the hands of Azerbaijan’s leadership to distract its own peoples’ attention from worsening domestic problems. Such a position poses a threat not only to Artsakh and Armenia but to regional peace and security.  ” data-reactid=”32″>Regrettably, anti-Armenian hate speech, coupled with warmongering and military provocations, have become tools in the hands of Azerbaijan’s leadership to distract its own peoples’ attention from worsening domestic problems. Such a position poses a threat not only to Artsakh and Armenia but to regional peace and security.  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="For almost three decades, the people of Artsakh have built their own democracy through fair and free elections, and pursued economic, social, and cultural development despite the constant threat of war. They understand that security and democracy are interconnected and that democratic societies are best positioned to peacefully resolve conflicts. Since proclaiming independence Artsakh has conducted six presidential and seven parliamentary elections, including a recent one that produced newly elected president and parliament.  ” data-reactid=”33″>For almost three decades, the people of Artsakh have built their own democracy through fair and free elections, and pursued economic, social, and cultural development despite the constant threat of war. They understand that security and democracy are interconnected and that democratic societies are best positioned to peacefully resolve conflicts. Since proclaiming independence Artsakh has conducted six presidential and seven parliamentary elections, including a recent one that produced newly elected president and parliament.  

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Yet Azerbaijan rejects talking to representatives of Artsakh lest it legitimizes their rights. The international community does not have to be held hostage to one country’s intransigence and should engage with Nagorno-Karabakh, whether by supporting their democracy, providing international assistance to fight the coronavirus, or other challenges. After all, pandemics do not hold political preferences and human rights and democracies are not conditional upon the international status of the entity. ” data-reactid=”34″>Yet Azerbaijan rejects talking to representatives of Artsakh lest it legitimizes their rights. The international community does not have to be held hostage to one country’s intransigence and should engage with Nagorno-Karabakh, whether by supporting their democracy, providing international assistance to fight the coronavirus, or other challenges. After all, pandemics do not hold political preferences and human rights and democracies are not conditional upon the international status of the entity. 

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Our country can navigate through the storm of the coronavirus, protect our democracy, and defend ourselves, as well as the people of Artsakh against Azerbaijan’s threats. The sooner our neighbor realizes that the key to the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict lies in the non-use of force and negotiations with Nagorno-Karabakh, the closer that resolution will be.  As we strive to bring forth that day, we encourage Azerbaijan to focus on the real needs of their people and the common threat that the region faces today—containing the spread of the coronavirus and its negative social and economic impact. ” data-reactid=”35″>Our country can navigate through the storm of the coronavirus, protect our democracy, and defend ourselves, as well as the people of Artsakh against Azerbaijan’s threats. The sooner our neighbor realizes that the key to the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict lies in the non-use of force and negotiations with Nagorno-Karabakh, the closer that resolution will be.  As we strive to bring forth that day, we encourage Azerbaijan to focus on the real needs of their people and the common threat that the region faces today—containing the spread of the coronavirus and its negative social and economic impact. 

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Varuzhan Nersesyan became ambassador of Armenia to the United States on Jan. 11, 2019, having previously served as assistant to the Armenian prime minister since April 2018. ” data-reactid=”36″>Varuzhan Nersesyan became ambassador of Armenia to the United States on Jan. 11, 2019, having previously served as assistant to the Armenian prime minister since April 2018. 

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Image: Reuters” data-reactid=”37″>Image: Reuters

<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="Click here to read the full article.” data-reactid=”38″>Click here to read the full article.

Read original article here.

[xtruss]

Is Bernie Sanders Right About Medicare for All? How Government-Run Health Care Actually Works

Is Bernie Sanders right about Medicare for All? U.S. government-run health care works pretty well:

— By David H. Freedman | 03/16/20 | Newsweek

“Mdicare For All" is probably the best-known plank in Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign platform. He wants the federal government to take over private health care insurance and replace it with a comprehensive, single-payer program. Under this plan, every U.S. resident would automatically be insured for nearly every contingency—hospital stays, dental care, mental health, ambulance services and long-term care, among other things—with nearly no copays or deductibles. Grandma needs a nursing home? That's covered. Your son needs counseling for a drug addiction? Covered. No surprise bills, no copays.

Critics slam the plan as too expensive; Sanders insists it would save money overall. Everyone agrees, however, that Medicare for All would amount to a massive transfer of spending from the private sector to the U.S. government. And there lies the rub. Can the U.S. government be trusted to manage a complex, fast-moving industry in which innovation and efficiency—qualities more often associated with the private sector than a government bureaucracy—are matters of life and death for so many Americans? The question makes many people nervous and puts Sanders' supporters on the defensive.

What goes largely unappreciated in this debate is that the U.S. government already owns and runs one of the most successful health care operations in the world. It's taken on the care of millions of some of America's most challenging patients, including residents of isolated rural communities and older patients who need long-term care. It does so while eliminating many of the racial disparities that haunt American health care. It trains most of America's doctors. It is a leader in telehealth, electronic health care records, precision medicine and many other important, forward-looking technologies. It earns quality-of-care ratings that most hospitals would envy. It keeps costs generally below average and charges most patients little or nothing.

The system is the Veterans Health Administration—commonly referred to as the VA, after the broader agency that runs it, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—along with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, operated by the Defense Department. Walter Reed serves about a million active-duty military personnel, military retirees and others. The VA serves about 9 million patients, the vast majority of whom are U.S. military veterans. It provides government health care on an enormous scale, entirely administered, delivered and paid for by the U.S. government. If that's not socialism, what is?

Senator Bernie Sanders (i-Vermont) speaks during a health care rally at the 2017 Convention of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee on September 22, 2017 in San Francisco, California

The VA is, in fact, more of a socialist enterprise than anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. His Medicare for All would be an insurance program—patients would use private doctors, hospitals and clinics, who would then be reimbursed by Uncle Sam. (Much like Medicare, except Sanders' plan would pay the costs of health care received by nearly all Americans.) The VA, by contrast, directly employs 11,000 doctors and owns its 1,200 hospitals.

The VA has become something of a darling among the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Sanders' plan would not only preserve the VA intact, it would increase funding to fill vacancies left open by the Trump administration. Veterans "know they can get high-quality care at the VA," says his campaign website. "It's our job to make it easier—not harder—for them to get that high-quality care."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive representative from New York, has also vehemently defended the VA against calls for privatization. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," she admonished critics in a town hall in April 2019. "Who are they trying to fix it for is the question we've got to ask. They're trying to fix the VA for pharmaceutical companies, they're trying to fix the VA for insurance corporations, and ultimately, they're trying to fix the VA for a for-profit health care industry that does not put people or veterans first."

Opponents of national health care point to recent scandals that paint the VA as a troubled bureaucracy that fails to serve its constituents adequately. In recent years, there have been stories of fatally long waits for surgeries, filthy facilities, sexual assault and suspicious deaths. That creates an image of the VA as a cold, clueless, lumbering, third-rate bureaucracy—the kind that awaits Americans if plans to increase the government's role in health care are enacted. "Every one of these plans involves rationing care, restricting access, denying coverage, slashing quality and massively raising taxes," said President Donald Trump in October.

To be sure, the VA is neither perfect nor immune from the challenges of providing health care at a time of rising costs and aging populations. But by focusing on the problems, critics ignore the contrary evidence: by most measures, the VA and its DOD counterpart, Walter Reed, make up arguably the best-run health care operation in the United States.

Comparison Tests

Scrutiny can have an upside. As a public institution, the VA has been subject to many in-depth, independent studies that show how well it stacks up against both private and public health care systems in the U.S.

Quality of care, these studies show, is high in VA hospitals and clinics. In 2018, researchers at Dartmouth College's Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice concluded that VA hospitals "outperform private hospitals in most health care markets throughout the country" when it comes to quality of care. The study's lead author, Dartmouth Institute Professor and physician William Weeks, added at the time that "the VA generally provides truly excellent care."

The Rand Corporation, a respected think tank, came to the same conclusion in 2018. And in a second study, Rand analyzed previous studies of the VA and determined that the VA compares favorably with the private sector. "When you see consistent findings like these, it gives us confidence that they're real," says Rebecca Anhang Price, the senior policy researcher at Rand who led the studies.

Perhaps that's why Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell chose a government hospital—the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center, now known as Walter Reed—in which to have a triple-bypass operation in 2003. That hasn't stopped McConnell from referring to government-sponsored care as a "far-left social experiment" and vowing that legislation to enlarge government's role in health care would never pass while he was speaker.

Comparing VA health care directly against Medicare-Medicaid and private insurance is difficult because the systems are so different. Where comparisons can be made, the results usually suggest that the VA is as good or better than private care, private health insurance and Medicare-Medicaid. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 78 percent of those receiving VA care were satisfied with how the health care system worked, compared to 75 percent of those insured by Medicare, and 69 percent of those insured through their employers. Dartmouth's 2018 study concluded that VA hospitals on average performed better than other hospitals in their regions in key measures of care quality. VA hospital patients had lower rates of readmissions within 30 days and suffered fewer complications from infections, falls and blood clots when they were in the hospital, the study found.

America already has government-run health care. Here's how it works.

Perhaps most important, vets themselves tend to speak highly of the system. A 2019 Veterans of Foreign Wars survey of thousands of vets found that 91 percent of respondents recommend VA care to other vets, and most chose the VA for their own health care even though 98 percent of them had other options. One of them is Christine Griffin, a Boston-area army veteran and a lawyer who is partially paralyzed, has top-notch private health care insurance. She also lives within shouting distance of some of America's most revered private hospitals. For her own care, however, she chooses the local VA, including the tests and treatments she needed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "Everything is accessible here, and the women's imaging center is almost like a spa," she says. "They're just so good at so many things."

A common criticism of government-run health care is that wait times can be oppressive. In Australia, for example, wait times are twice as high in public hospitals as in private facilities. In 2016 the GAO found that wait times for a third of the VA's primary-care visits were longer than a month, and last year the agency said some vets who were referred to health care providers outside the VA had to wait as long 70 days for treatment. By most accounts, wait times have improved since then. Studies have shown that the VA's wait times for care turn out to be shorter on average than those in the private sector for all types of treatments, with the one exception of elective orthopedic procedures such as knee surgery, where delays usually pose little risk to the patient. According to that 2019 VFW survey, 84 percent of vets said they were able to get care "in a timely manner."

"Government health care" conjures images of a cumbersome bureaucracy. Compared to the Byzantine rules and requirements of the private health care insurance industry, however, the VA has less bureaucratic overhead, says Neil Evans, a physician who runs the VA's Office of Connected Care. VA doctors don't have to get pre-authorization from insurance companies or anyone else. "I struggle to think of a single time when I felt an intervention was in the best interests of a patient and I couldn't get that done— even if it was expensive," he says. The need for patients in the private health care system to get insurance-company approval can wreak havoc on care.

The result, as too many in the U.S. know all too well, is private-sector care that tends to be fragmented and frequently inadequate. And it's almost always costly, which often translates to no care at all. Studies show that a third of Americans report they avoided getting care within the past year because of costs, more than any other industrialized nation.

A sign marks the entrance to the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital on May 30, 2014 in Hines, Illinois. Hines. A doctor at a VA Florida hospital has been shot by a double amputee in a wheelchair.

An Edge in Innovation

The VA has managed to be at the forefront of virtually every medical trend that experts say is crucial to improving care and reducing costs. For one, it offers an alternative to "fee-for-service" reimbursement, in which hospitals are paid more for providing more treatments, a perverse incentive that contributes to high costs and lack of preventative care. The VA, by contrast, practices value-based care, under which health care providers are financially incentivized to keep patients healthier. The private-health care industry, which has thrived on fee-for-service, is in no hurry to make the switch even while health care costs have soared to more than $11,500 per person, a 30 percent rise in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2003.

Under value-based care, the healthier patients stay, the less the VA has to dig into its budget to provide more treatment. Does this save on costs? It's nearly impossible to compare costs in such health care systems. The VA, for instance, doesn't even bill patients for the care it provides. Its patients tend to have more health challenges than other patients, which include ordinary back injuries as well as exposure to Agent Orange and traumatic brain injury from combat. And they tend to stay with the VA longer because it provides nursing-home and end-of-life care. Studies have shown that many of the VA's patients would be turned away by most private health care insurance companies. "About a third of Americans have chronic, non-cancer pain," says Carolyn Clancy, a physician and the deputy under secretary for discovery, education and affiliate networks at the VA. "For vets it's about 60 percent."

Still, studies suggest that where comparisons can be made, care in the VA costs about 10 percent less than Medicare, even though Medicare pays about half as much as private insurance does for similar treatments, according to another Rand study. That's because the VA is constantly hunting for ways to eliminate inefficiencies, including tests and treatments that don't offer much benefit for patients, says Ryan Vega, a physician who heads the VA's health care innovation efforts. "If we can do something for a vet that will make their lives better, we'll do it, even if it costs more," insists Vega. "But if it doesn't provide better care, we look to reduce it."

Vega says the VA regularly "de-prescribes" medicines that haven't ended up producing the hoped-for benefits, eliminates tests that aren't leading to better outcomes and constantly hunts down cheaper ways to get good results. For example, the VA has pioneered a drive to increase the rate of toothbrushing among patients at its hospitals, after discovering it reduced by 90 percent the number of cases of nonventilator, hospital-acquired pneumonia, an illness that costs the U.S. $35 billion a year. "It's reasonable to expect that an institution that isn't being paid more to do more will avoid unnecessary costs," says Rand's Anhang Price. "You might worry that they have an incentive to undertreat patients, but we can't find evidence of that in the VA."

Another critical area where the VA has leapt far out in front of most of the rest of health care is in addressing the "social determinants of health"—that is, life challenges such as inadequate housing, poverty and joblessness, as well as lifestyle and mental health issues such as poor diet, loneliness, stress and depression, that can have a big impact on health and well-being. Social determinants have about four times the impact on a patient's health as the medical care they receive. Other industrialized nations spend twice as much on such social problems as they do on health care; the U.S. spends half as much, and the U.S. health care system by and large ignores them.

Through the VA, vets have access to professionals who can help them cope with their life challenges, including social workers, counselors, behavioral coaches, acupuncturists and tai chi instructors. In many cases, after meeting with a patient, a VA doctor will simply walk the patient down the hall to meet a counselor or a coach. "We want to offer a big repertoire of tools for dealing with stress, chronic pain and other whole-health problems," says Ben Kliger, a physician who runs the VA's "integrative health" and "cultural transformation" initiatives. "Once a vet gets involved in these other services, their overall costs tend to go down."

"We've changed the conversation here so it's not just about disease," he says.

High-Tech Medicine

The VA frequently jumps ahead of the rest of health care in adopting new technology. Back in 2010, Eric Dusseux, CEO of medical-tech company Bionik, went looking for hospitals willing to experimentally deploy the company's groundbreaking robots, designed to exercise the arms of stroke victims. He soon found a willing partner in the VA. Ultimately, it deployed the robots in 12 of its hospitals, leading to the largest study ever of robotic patient rehabilitation—a study so successful that robots are now part of standard stroke-care guidelines due to the improved outcomes and lowered overall costs from the technology. "They were very receptive and forward-thinking," says Dusseux of the hospital system.

The VA is also pioneering the use of 3D printers to create highly accurate models of the internal organs of individual patients who are scheduled for complex surgeries, so that surgeons can better prepare for the operations by examining the models. In one of the most ambitious health-data projects in the world, it is analyzing the complete service histories and medical records, along with DNA samples, of nearly 800,000 veterans in order to find links between their genes; environments; habits such as diet, medications and diseases, with an eye to spotting new strategies for improving long-term health. And it has launched an institute entirely dedicated to applying artificial intelligence approaches to health care.

The VA has also established a system for automatically analyzing electronic health care records throughout the system in order to spot improvements in patient outcomes at any of its facilities, to see if there are any innovations underlying an improvement that can be quickly shared throughout all VA facilities. "We send teams to learn from those sites that are doing well with outcomes, and then deploy them to any sites that might be having trouble," says Joe Francis, a physician and chief improvement and analytics officer at the VA. "You can't do that sort of thing in the private sector, because there are too many competitive and time pressures." To dig out even more innovation, the VA sponsors a Shark-Tank-style competition for all its employees, the most recent of which inspired some 500 promising ideas aimed at improving care or lowering costs.

The VA's telehealth capabilities, too, are years ahead of most other health care organizations. Some 100,000 vets have logged more than a million videoconference visits with VA clinicians, all of which were entirely free. That's a critical service for the 30 percent of VA patients who live in rural areas. And many of those who can't or don't want to conduct the video visit from their homes, perhaps because of privacy concerns during an exam, will soon be able to do so from one of a network of telehealth exam "pods" the VA is setting up at Walmarts and at American Legion and VFW sites. The first such pod has already opened up in Eureka, Montana, serving some 300 vets.

Tele-visits return large benefits both in reduced costs and patient outcomes for chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, which afflict 60 percent of adult Americans. They require frequent monitoring and check-ins to avoid the sorts of sudden health crises that can send a patient to the emergency room and an in-patient stay, easily costing a health care system tens of thousands of dollars. "Patients who try it, like it," says Leonie Heyworth, the physician who heads the VA's telehealth efforts. "If they have to fight traffic to get here they can be a mess by the time they come into my office." That's why the VA's video patients have 28 percent fewer missed appointments than in-person patients.

The VA's telehealth practices go beyond convenience. Videoconferencing gives both patients and their doctors fast access to advanced specialty consults available in a handful of leading hospitals. "We use virtual care to match patients to the best specialist for their needs across the entire system, wherever they are," says the VA's Evans. "Just because you're at one of our smaller hospitals or clinics doesn't mean you can't benefit from the resources you'd have if you were at a top-notch medical center."

That tele-specialty capability is one way that the VA is moving to the forefront of so-called precision medicine, an effort to develop treatments that are custom-tailored to a patient's genes and other characteristics. Precision medicine is especially promising in cancer, where doctors use it to tell ahead of time whether a patient will respond to a specific treatment.

In the U.S., only a tenth of cancer patients get precision-medicine testing. At the VA, half of lung cancer patients now get it, as do a quarter of those with prostate cancer—the two most common types of cancer among vets. Unlike most rural patients, who don't have access to precision medicine, vets who live in rural areas are getting tested at the same rates as those near cities. The VA "telegenomics" hub in Salt Lake City services the entire VA system; any physician in the VA can access it on behalf of a patient. "Now we're working to provide rural vets with access to experimental cancer drugs, too," says Michael Kelley, a physician who directs the VA's national oncology program. He notes the VA has also been looking at bringing artificial intelligence software to bear on analyzing vets' tumors.

Answering the Critics

To be sure, the VA has had its share of well-publicized problems. In January, the VA demanded a co-pay on replacement prosthetic limbs from a vet when the prostheses were stolen from his room at a VA long-term-care home. VA officials allegedly tried to discredit a legislative aide who reported being groped by another patient at a VA facility. A Federal grand jury is currently looking into whether a former nursing assistant at a VA hospital in West Virginia may have killed 11 patients with insulin overdoses.

In one of the more sensational scandals, in 2014 some VA employees were reportedly falsifying records of how long patients had to wait for appointments and as many as 40 vets died while waiting. Further investigation suggested that the problem wasn't unusually long wait times, but rather that the VA had been given a target by government officials of limiting wait times to under 14 days—a system-wide goal that few private health care systems could meet. A report later that year from the VA inspector general found that six of the deaths might have been related to wait times, and that the other deaths were consistent with the condition of the patients in question, most of whom had complex health challenges.

The VA doesn't offer excuses for the falsifications. The VA's Clancy points out that as a large government agency the VA has to accept a greater level of scrutiny than its counterparts in the private sector. Its flaws are more readily decried in the national press and it is more directly answerable to the public. In the end, she argues, that closer, less-forgiving, more visible oversight ultimately leads to more accountability and improvement. The VA's overall record seems to bear that claim out.

The VA's foibles also become political weapons in the ongoing debate over the virtues of private versus government-run health care. One of the biggest VA-health-care-related complaints coming out of Washington recently doesn't concern the VA's poor performance but rather the push toward privatization. Veterans' advocates complain that the Trump administration seems to be pushing more vets toward private health care, in part by not filling some VA health care positions that are currently open. "The administration is setting us up to fail so they can dismantle veterans' preferred health care provider," Alma Lee, National Veterans Affairs council president for the American Federation of Government Employees, told the Military Times.

If the VA does in fact provide a better health care system than what most Americans have access to, then vets have surely earned that privilege. Nobody is proposing a similar health care system for all Americans. But Sanders' Medicare for All plan would establish universal coverage, and it would almost certainly be a tougher negotiator of prices than private insurers are. It would likely force private hospitals to focus on care that delivers the best health results at the lowest cost, as the VA does today.

In those respects, Medicare for All could remake the U.S. health care system in the VA's image. To hear most vets tell it, that would be an improvement.

[marketing20world-blog]

korean translation services

Language interpretation

Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final translation on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language.

The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interpreting, which is done at the time of the exposure to the source language, and consecutive interpreting, which is done at breaks to this exposure.

Interpreting is an ancient human  activity which     predates the invention of writing. However, the origins of the profession of interpreting date back to less than a century ago.

 Historiography

Research into the various aspects of the history of interpreting is quite new. For as long as most scholarly interest was given to professional   conference interpreting, very little academic work was done on the practice of interpreting in history, and until the  only a few dozen publications were done on it.

 Considering the amount of interpreting activities that is assumed to have occurred for thousands of years, historical records are limited.Moreover, interpreters and their work have usually not found their way into the history books.One of     the reasons   for that is the dominance of the written text over the spoken word (in the sense that those   who have left written texts are more likely to be recorded by historians). Another problem is the tendency to view it as an ordinary support activity which does not require any special attention, and the social status of interpreters, who were sometimes treated unfairly by scribes, chroniclers and historians.

 Our knowledge of the past of interpreting tends to come from letters, chronicles, biographies, diaries and memoirs, along with a variety of other documents and literary works, many of which (and with few exceptions) were only incidentally or marginally related to interpreting.

Etymology

Many Indo-European languages have words for 'interpreting' and 'interpreter'. Expressions in Germanic, Scandinavian and Slavic languages  korean translation services   denoting an   interpreter can be traced back to Akkadian, around 1900 BCE. The Akkadian root targumânu/turgumânu also gave rise to the term dragoman via an etymological sideline from Arabic.

 The English word ‘interpreter’, however, is derived from Latin interpres (meaning ‘expounder’, ‘person explaining what is obscure’), whose semantic roots are not clear. Some scholars take the second part of the word to be derived from partes or pretium (meaning ‘price’, which fits the meaning of a ‘middleman’, ‘intermediary’ or ‘commercial go-between’), but others have suggested a Sanskrit root.

Modes

Consecutive

In consecutive interpreting (CI), the interpreter starts to interpret before the speaker pauses. Therefore, the time needed is much lower (possibly half the time needed). Traditionally, the interpreter will sit or stand near the speaker.

Consecutive interpretation can be conducted in a pattern of short or long segments according to the interpreter's preference. In short CI, the interpreter relies mostly on memory whereas, in long CI, most interpreters will rely on note-taking. The notes must be clear and legible in order to not waste time on reading them. Consecutive interpreting of whole       thoughts, rather than in small pieces, is desirable so that the interpreter has the whole   meaning before rendering it in the target language. This affords a truer, more accurate, and more accessible interpretation than where short CI or simultaneous interpretation is used.

An attempt at consensus about lengths of segments may be reached prior to commencement, depending upon complexity of the subject      matter and purpose of the interpretation, though speakers generally face difficulty adjusting to unnatural speech patterns.

 On occasion, document sight translation is required of the interpreter during consecutive interpretation work. Sight translation combines interpretation and translation; the interpreter must render the source-language document to the target-language as if it were written in the target language. Sight translation occurs usually, but not exclusively, in judicial and medical work.

 Consecutive interpretation may be the chosen mode when bilingual listeners are present who wish to hear both the original and interpreted speech or where, as in a court setting, a record must be kept of both.

 When no interpreter is available to interpret directly from source to target, an intermediate interpreter will be inserted in a relay mode, e.g. a Greek source language could be interpreted into English and then from English to another language. This is also commonly known as double-interpretation. Triple-interpretation may even be needed, particularly where rare languages or dialects are involved. Such interpretation can only be effectively conducted using consecutive interpretation.

 Simultaneous

Simultaneous interpretation (SI) suffers the disadvantage that if a person is performing the service the interpreter must do the best he or she can within the time permitted by the pace of source speech. However they also have the advantages of saving time and not disturbing the natural flow of the speaker. SI can also be accomplished by software where the program can simultaneously listen to incoming speech and speak the associated interpretation. The most common form is extempore SI, where the interpreter does not know the message until he or she hears it.

 Simultaneous interpretation using electronic equipment where the interpreter can hear the speaker's voice as well as the interpreter's own voice was introduced at the Nuremberg trials. The equipment facilitated large numbers of listeners, and interpretation was offered in French, Russian, German and English. The technology arose in the   korean translation services   and when American businessman Edward Filene and British engineer Alan Gordon Finlay developed simultaneous interpretation equipment with IBM. Yvonne Kapp attended a conference with simultaneous translation in 1935 in the Soviet Union.As it proved successful, IBM was able to sell the equipment to the United Nations, where it is now widely used in the United Nations Interpretation Service.

 In the ideal setting for oral language, the interpreter sits in a sound-proof booth and speaks into a microphone, while clearly seeing and hearing the source-language speaker via earphones. The simultaneous interpretation is rendered to the target-language listeners via their earphones.

The progressive shift from consecutive to simultaneous

The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter gives a short history of modern interpretation and of the transition from its consecutive to simultaneous forms. He explains that during the nineteenth century interpreters were rarely needed during European diplomatic      discussions; these were routinely conducted in French, and all government diplomats were required to be fluent in this language. Most European government leaders and heads of state could also speak French. Historian Harold Nicolson attributes the growing need for interpretation after World War I to the fact that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister "were no linguists".  At the time, the concept and special equipment needed for simultaneous interpretation, later      patented by Alan Gordon Finlay, had not been developed, so consecutive interpretation was used.

Consecutive interpreters, in order be accurate, used a specialized system of note-taking which included symbols abbreviations and acronyms. Because      they waited until the speaker was finished to provide translation, the interpreters    then had the difficult task of creating from these notes as much as half an hour of free-flowing sentences closely matching the speaker's meaning as skilled interpreters, and notes one unusual case in which interpreted a speech by a French diplomat who spoke for two and a half hours without stopping.

 After World War II, simultaneous interpretation came into use at the Nuremberg trial, and began to be more accepted. Experienced consecutive interpreters asserted that the difficulties of listening and speaking at the same time, adjusting for differences in sentence structure between languages, and interpreting the beginning of a sentence before hearing its end, would produce an inferior result. As well, these interpreters, who to that point had been      prominent speakers, would now be speaking invisibly from booths.  when the United Nations expanded its number of working languages to five (English, French, Russian, Chinese and Spanish), consecutive translation became impractical in most cases, and simultaneous translation became the most common process for the organization's large meetings.Consecutive interpretation, which provides a more fluent result without the need for specialized equipment, continued to be used for smaller discussions.

 Whispered

Since time immemorial, whispering interpretation has been used, known in the trade by the French term chuchotage. To avoid disturbing the original speaker and those present listening to the original speaker, the interpreter's voice is kept at a low volume. To do this, the interpreter and the person requiring interpretation must sit or stand in close proximity to one another. No actual whispering is involved as this is difficult to decipher as well as being too much of a strain on the voice: the interpreter uses normal 'voiced' speech at a low volume. Only   korean translation services  one or at the most two people in need of interpretation can be accommodated, unless portable electronic equipment is used.This form of interpretation puts a strain on the interpreter who has to sit for long periods leaning towards the person in need of interpretation.

korean translation services

[jbaquerot]

Every face does not tell a story; it tells thousands of them. Over evolutionary time, the human brain has become an exceptional reader of the human face—computerlike, we like to think. A viewer instinctively knows the difference between a real smile and a fake one. In July, a Canadian study reported that college students can reliably tell if people are richer or poorer than average simply by looking at their expressionless faces. Scotland Yard employs a team of “super-recognizers” who can, from a pixelated photo, identify a suspect they may have seen briefly years earlier or come across in a mug shot. But, being human, we are also inventing machines that read faces as well as or better than we can. In the twenty-first century, the face is a database, a dynamic bank of information points—muscle configurations, childhood scars, barely perceptible flares of the nostril—that together speak to what you feel and who you are. Facial-recognition technology is being tested in airports around the world, matching camera footage against visa photos. Churches use it to document worshipper attendance. China has gone all in on the technology, employing it to identify jaywalkers, offer menu suggestions at KFC, and prevent the theft of toilet paper from public restrooms.

“The face is an observable proxy for a wide range of factors, like your life history, your development factors, whether you’re healthy,” Michal Kosinski, an organizational psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the Guardian earlier this week. The photo of Kosinski accompanying the interview showed the face of a man beleaguered. Several days earlier, Kosinski and a colleague, Yilun Wang, had reported the results of a study, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggesting that facial-recognition software could correctly identify an individual’s sexuality with uncanny accuracy. The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent. Human viewers fared substantially worse. They correctly picked the gay man sixty-one per cent of the time and the gay woman fifty-four per cent of the time. “Gaydar,” it appeared, was little better than a random guess.

The study immediately drew fire from two leading L.G.B.T.Q. groups, the Human Rights Campaign and glaad, for “wrongfully suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect sexual orientation.” They offered a list of complaints, which the researchers rebutted point by point. Yes, the study was in fact peer-reviewed. No, contrary to criticism, the study did not assume that there was no difference between a person’s sexual orientation and his or her sexual identity; some people might indeed identify as straight but act on same-sex attraction. “We assumed that there was a correlation . . . in that people who said they were looking for partners of the same gender were homosexual,” Kosinski and Wang wrote. True, the study consisted entirely of white faces, but only because the dating site had served up too few faces of color to provide for meaningful analysis. And that didn’t diminish the point they were making—that existing, easily obtainable technology could effectively out a sizable portion of society. To the extent that Kosinski and Wang had an agenda, it appeared to be on the side of their critics. As they wrote in the paper’s abstract, “Given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.”

The objections didn’t end there. Some scientists criticized the study on methodological grounds. To begin with, they argued, Kosinski and Wang had used a flawed data set. Besides all being white, the users of the dating site may have been telegraphing their sexual proclivities in ways that their peers in the general population did not. (Among the paper’s more pilloried observations were that “heterosexual men and lesbians tended to wear baseball caps” and that “gay men were less likely to wear a beard.”) Was the computer model picking up on facial characteristics that all gay people everywhere shared, or merely ones that a subset of American adults, groomed and dressed a particular way, shared? Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, a pair of professors at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who run the blog Calling Bullshit, also took issue with Kosinski and Wang’s most ambitious conclusion—that their study provides “strong support” for the prenatal-hormone theory of sexuality, which predicts that exposure to testosterone in the womb shapes a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation in later life. In response to Kosinki and Wang’s claim that, in their study, “the faces of gay men were more feminine and the faces of lesbians were more masculine,” Bergstrom and West wrote, “we see little reason to suppose this is due to physiognomy rather than various aspects of self-presentation.” Historically speaking, the hair-trigger response to the study was understandable. Regardless of the accuracy of the method, past schemes to identify gay people have typically ended in cruel fashion—pogroms, imprisonment, conversion therapy. The fact is, though, that nowadays a computer model can probably already do a decent job of ascertaining your sexual orientation, even better than facial-recognition technology can, simply by scraping and analyzing the reams of data that marketing firms are continuously compiling about you. Do gay men buy more broccoli than straight men, or do they buy less of it? Do they rent bigger cars or smaller ones? Who knows? Somewhere, though, a bot is poring over your data points, grasping for ways to connect any two of them.

Therein lies the real worry. Last week, Equifax, the giant credit-reporting agency, disclosed that a security breach had exposed the personal data of more than a hundred and forty-three million Americans; company executives had been aware of the security flaw since late July but had failed to disclose it. (Three of them, however, had off-loaded some of their Equifax stock.) The collection and sale of consumer data and buying patterns has become a vast business of which consumers are largely unaware, although they actively contribute to it by clicking on ads, accepting cookies, and agreeing to be tracked. But each new security breach reveals again that the data-collection farms feel little obligation toward us; their customer is the data buyer, not the data source. The latest version of Apple’s Safari browser features “Intelligent Tracking Prevention,” which makes it harder for advertisers to monitor your online activity; several ad groups wrote the company to complain that the technology would “sabotage the economic model for the internet.” Earlier this week, ProPublica revealed that Facebook’s ad-buying system had enabled advertisers to target their messages at people with such interests as “How to burn jews” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’ ” The categories were created not by Facebook employees but by an algorithm—yet another way in which automated thinking can turn offensive.

Facial-recognition technology makes it harder for individuals to hide, but privacy is already in short supply. “The growing digitalization of our lives and rapid progress in AI continues to erode the privacy of sexual orientation and other intimate traits,” Kosinski and Wang wrote at the end of their paper. They continue, perhaps Pollyannaishly, “The postprivacy world will be a much safer and hospitable place if inhabited by well-educated, tolerant people who are dedicated to equal rights.” A piece of data itself has no positive or negative moral value, but the way we manipulate it does. It’s hard to imagine a more contentious project than programing ethics into our algorithms; to do otherwise, however, and allow algorithms to monitor themselves, is to invite the quicksand of moral equivalence. It’s very nineteenth-century to say so, but our machines still can’t do our hard thinking for us; they’re improving in their ability to read the emotion in a face, but they’re a long way yet from sharing it. A face tells one story or a thousand, all of them human, all still ours to tell.

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet at africa is a country

One of my favorite websites for interrupting assumptions and introducing new music and art into my life is Africa is a Country. The tongue in cheek name already gives a sense of how the site pursues an irreverent and incisive political and cultural coverage of the continent.  

[The Pan African Space Station is a 24-hour “cyber-spatial exploration of pan-African sounds” out of the publication Chimurenga. In November 2015, Africa is a Country stopped by the NYC Pop-Up studio] 

No education crisis wasted: On Bridge’s “business model” in Africa

Shannon May is clearly emotional when she walks onto the stage in early February 2017. The founder and strategist behind the world’s largest chain of kindergarten and primary schools is about to speak to a room full of women. She will talk about education, motherhood and the reasons why she founded her company, Bridge International Academies... “Bridge is different because it exists for only one reason, it’s so that every child, not just the rich kids, not just the kids in the cities, not just the kids who have mothers and fathers who can look after them and teach them at home but every kid no matter what else is going on in their lives can go to a great school.” She is even more positive in an interview: “We fight for social justice, to create opportunities.”

And for profit. According to her husband, the “global education crisis”  is worth about US$51 billion a year. In 2013, Kimmelman explained in a presentation how, for less than US$5 in tuition fees per pupil per month, Bridge could grow “into a billion-dollar company” and “radically change the world.” Earlier he and May promised that they could do this for US$4 per month per pupil.

This rapid growth would be made possible by using Bridge’s second innovative method, namely its very own approach to the role of teachers and their salary scale. May believes that “qualities such as kindness” are more important than diplomas and this allows for significant savings. In Kenya, where the starting salary for qualified teachers is around US$116 dollars a month, Bridge teachers usually earn less than US$100 a month. However, as Kimmelman explains in a presentation, teachers can earn bonuses by recruiting new students themselves. Marketing is a core task for both teachers and school principals.

A third innovative aspect, explains May, is the smart use of technology. It works like this: a team of “master teachers” designs digital “master lessons” that are so detailed that all a teacher needs to do is read them from a special Bridge tablet (known as the Nook).

Leaning how to use the Nook is therefore a key component of the crash course that Bridge teachers must complete. Over three to four weeks, they learn how to download new lesson material, how to present it, and how to record daily scores and progress made with the lessons. This last skill is crucial, says May. It allows Bridge to see “hundreds of thousands of assessment scores” every day and to find out “what works and what doesn’t.” The “extremely robust data” can then be used to “continuously improve the teaching material.”

Why is Liberia’s Government rushing to sell its public schools to U.S. for-profits?

Quickly, Liberia was turned into a battlefield between those who see for-profit “charter” schools as the solution to the problems that plague public education across the world, and those of us who point to underinvestment and poor management as the true culprits.

At first, Minister Werner wanted to outsource all of our public schools to one company – US-based Bridge International Academies, which has come under sustained criticism in Kenya and Uganda for operating substandard schools and flouting government oversight.

Pushback against this plan – which violated our national anti-corruption laws – resulted in the government inviting other companies and providers to take place in what was described as a pilot, which was to be judged independently at the end of the first year.

In all, 93 schools were taken over by foreign providers, with Bridge remaining the largest beneficiary of the pilot, managing 25 of our schools.

Now, the first year has concluded. But instead of waiting for the results of the Randomized Control Trial presently being conducted by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Global Development, the Liberian government is pressing forward with another expansion.

In fall 2017, we are told, an additional 107 public schools will be incorporated into the pilot. Contrary to assurance by the minister that there would not be any significant scale-up in the absence of evidence, that represents more than doubling the so-called pilot.

Investigative reporting has shown evidence that parents in some towns where outsourced schools are located are furious that their children were left without access to educationdue to limits on class sizes in pilot schools, which were hastily implemented without a plan to assist students who were left out.

Parents were also promised that extended school hours would be supported by the implementation of school lunch programs that have failed to materialize, leading to large numbers of dropouts in some schools.

Against the romance of study abroad

Global partnership, as the term is currently used, has become so ubiquitous as to be vacated of meaning. Nearly any kind of agreement or relationship, contractual or informal, is now being described as a partnership, regardless of the degrees of reciprocity involved. We recognize that any formal or informal partnership, or any relationship for that matter, will contain varying degrees of reciprocity or mutual benefit at different times, and rarely is any relationship perfectly reciprocal at any moment, or even over the long term. Yet we hold out the ideal that reciprocity and mutual respect should be at the core of any partnership, and that to achieve these goals, one must keep dynamics of power and privilege at the fore. The discourses of global partnership, however, mask dynamics of power relations in the name of equality. They allow individuals and institutions to reinscribe unequal power relations with so-called partners in Africa while deflecting attention away from claims of reciprocity and histories of accountability.

...

[On the students experience during study abroad in Tanzania] What this experience most profoundly did for our students was disrupted the illusion of an easy, uncomplicated friendship or equality – a true partnership – between them and the guides, and made visible privileges in many forms: of travel, mobility, leisure and comfort. The experience also highlighted the very different approaches to the relationship taken between our students and the guides, wherein the students approached the relationship in a spirit of and desire for friendship, knowledge, and access to an “authentic” Tanzanian experience, whereas the guides approached the relationship as work, as part of their chosen profession and business, and as something in which they took pride but had no illusions of equality or simple reciprocity. In short, this experience reminded the students that the guides were doing a job.

Conceptualizing the guides as “doing a job” provides a very different valence to these relationships than “forming a partnership.” This is not to say that the guides did not enjoy their friendships with our group, or for that matter, that the students (and certainly we as faculty members) did not still see ourselves as doing a job. Our argument is not that these roles or experiences are dichotomous and cannot occur simultaneously. What it does point out, though, is the masking of unequal power relations through the claim of global partnership is not an unintended consequence or an unfortunate side effect of the discourse, but rather its point.

The dark and white side of conservation in Kenya

Conflict between pastoralists and white landowners in recent months has brought the Laikipia region of Kenya to the attention of international audiences. News coverage of these conflicts reached an apex in April with the shooting of renowned landowner and memoirist Kuki Gallmann... Though international media outlets face pressure to make content relatable to Euro-American audiences, the Laikipia crisis has exposed how easily white landowners in Kenya can utilize the trope of the maddened land invader to conjure global support for a land system that deprives millions of pastoralists from accessing vital subsistence resources. 

... New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman penned a feature pinning the Laikipia crisis on the “loss of fertile land” in Kenya, claiming the little rainfall Laikipia now receives is as useless as “a hose spraying a driveway.” Not only does Gettleman withhold the fact that Laikipia has never been auspicious to cultivation, but grants preferential space to white ranchers and foreign conservationists with a vested interest in seeing Kenya’s pastoral lands enclosed.

White Kenyans own a disproportionate amount of land and tourism infrastructure in Laikipia, and are also, says anthropologist Janet McIntosh, “disproportionally symbolic” of the benefits that wildlife conservation can provide. 

[oliverarditi]

Solitary movement through a hauntological palimpsest

Aloy moves alone through her world. Geralt in the Witcher series is constantly bounded and motivated by his social relations and obligations, despite his fundamentally ronin status; in contrast, although the protagonist of Horizon Zero Dawn is provided by her back-story with a social context that explains who she is and why, the earliest stages of the narrative excise her of all social obligations and close relationships. It is to the credit of the writers that they take the time to show how this is socially possible, within the customs of her tribe, but this liberty accorded to Aloy is clearly a pretext for the player’s freedom within the game’s beautifully realised open world. Also in contrast to the Witcher games, side quests lack narrative complexity, and almost every secondary character is lacking in depth. Even the Witcher’s over-sexualised female companions, placed at the erotic convenience of both character and (implicitly male) player, are much more convincingly drawn characters, with the semblance of their own lives and motivations, but in Horizon Zero Dawn the only character that really gets to sing her song is Aloy.

Lucky then, that it is a song worth singing. Her courage, compassion and intelligence will capture the hearts of most players before they’ve known her for an hour, even if, unlike me, they do not have a daughter of roughly Aloy’s age. Although the writers must clearly be given their due for the way in which Aloy responds to her experiences and environment, there is little development in her character from beginning to end of the tale, and the majority of the credit for her striking charisma belongs to the voice acting of Ashly Burch. Burch is known as a specialist in voice acting for games, although I’m only familiar with one of her other roles; in Horizon Zero Dawn she speaks with the same kind of quiet precision deployed by Mark Rylance in his portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall (and memorably satirised by Ben Miller in S3:E3 of Upstart Crow). This proves a very apt match for Aloy’s character traits, which include an unshakeable ability to focus, relentless determination, icy unflappability, and razor-sharp mental and physical capacities. Despite her seeming perfection, or perhaps because of it, the player still feels her vulnerability in the face of circumstances that are both global and apocalyptic in scope, and it is her mourning for the destructive loss of the world that was (our world, that is to say) that gives the game its narrative heart.

Horizon Zero Dawn is set roughly a thousand years in the future, in a world populated by tribal peoples who know nothing of our times. They have some technical capacities, based around the scavenging of ancient or discarded technology, but live for the most part somewhere between the neolithic and the medieval, in terms of both material and social culture. They share the world with a curiously reduced palette of land vertebrates, and a large number of advanced robots of mysterious origin, which fill the ecological niches that, in our age, belong to the larger animals. These robots are routinely hunted for the parts and materials which can be scavenged from them, although some are so large and so well equipped with military equipment that hunting them is rarely practical for those less remarkably skilled than Aloy. Finding out how this state of affairs came about, and preventing it from becoming precipitately worse, becomes Aloy’s goal, by way of investigating her own mysterious origins.

It is this hunting of the machines that gives the game its heart as a game, and which makes it as compelling as the Witcher, which is far more engaging on a narrative level, but which can be played with little more than ham-fisted button-mashing (on the difficulty levels I tend to choose in my dotage, at any rate). Each machine must be hunted in the correct way, with the correct weapons, although it should also be said that there are usually several correct ways to complete any gameplay objective. I have to admit that I usually play for the story, in this kind of visually accomplished AAA game, but with HZD the gameplay grabbed me and didn’t release me until long after I had completed the narrative. That this nuanced and multi-levelled hunting and combat takes place against the backdrop of a beautifully rendered version of what our material culture might look like after a millennium of total neglect gives HZD its peculiar and engaging affective character, a kind of kinetic melancholy.

As the big secrets of the backstory are revealed we are drawn deeper into the narrative, whose most compelling elements turn out to be the fragmentary lives preserved from earlier times in the media snippets that are scattered throughout the world. Aloy has a mission, in terms of responding urgently to events that are emergent in her own time, but her progress through the world is as driven by curiosity as much as anything else, and by a need to recover lost lives from their documentary traces. The past exists liminally in HZD, poised between presence and absence, as in Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’. In fact, it sometimes feels as though W.G. Sebald had written a Tomb Raider game, its protagonist pursuing not treasure or power, but an ineffable palimpsest of forgotten lives. Although HZD does not really stand up to its competition in terms of characterisation and interpersonal drama, this combination of uniquely compelling gameplay, and a pensive, hauntological fascination with the frailty of memory, both crystallised through the person of its precisely delineated protagonist, makes the game, for me, one of the AAA genre’s most complex and moving works of art.

[theatredirectors]

Brandon Woolf

Hometown?

Port Washington, NY

Where are you now?

Long Island City, Queens, NY (I recently moved back after living in Berlin for six years). 

What's your current project?

There are a few things in process:

In 2017-18, I will be a fellow at LABA, the Laboratory for Jewish Culture at the 14th Street Y. The focus of this residency will be to create a new performance inspired by the five pages of the Babylonian Talmud that tackle the “Messiah.” Psychically stunted by the “what the fuck do we do now?” of our current (geo)political situation, it seems that many (or is it just me?) are hoping, waiting for messiah – in some form or other, religious or secular. Messiah, that mystical political force that will, should, must relieve the pressure of our current chaotic calamity. AND/OR: Messiah, that excuse to do (virtually) nothing while we wait. But what are we waiting for? What should we do while we wait? What beauty arises (or not) out of the ashes of destruction? It all sounds a little serious, no? I mean, is Rabbinic exegesis suitable fodder for performance? We’ll have to see; but it is clear that one major formal challenge of this performance-in-progress is to find the associational meeting points of Talmudic hermeneutics and its pop-cultural-analogues, scenic leanings, cartoonish moments, song-and-dance numbers, etc. The Talmudic text-fragment itself is so rich with dialogue, debate, parable, philosophical reflection, social commentary, apocalyptic conspiracy theory, etc. that it can’t help but provide an exceedingly rich archive of stimuli for a new work of devised performance.

For the last two years, I have also been developing The Summer Way, a new play created with my Berlin-based collaborator Maxwell Flaum. Sequestered in a Tony Soprano-style basement, ravaged by binge consumption of contemporary television and under threat of imminent drone strike, Torn (white) and Timbre (black) wrestle with major issues of the day in an attempt to make a broadcast that “speaks to people.” During the course of their mind-bending skirmishes, the two would-be media gurus come face-to-face with the “Golden Age” of TV in the form of a 1967 broadcast-battle-royale between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan, which quantumly entangles itself into the fabric of their flagging podcast. Torn and Timbre must therefore reckon with a bygone era in the American media when public intellectuals, rock 'n' roll stars, and politicians were all go-go dancing in the same corporate miniskirt; a brazen and audacious time when white people could say just about anything, as long as it was entertaining. This descent into an older, black-and-white America on the brink of a personality crisis, leads to a host of questions Torn and Timbre must face up to: What is the role of the public intellectual in contemporary mainstream culture? And how do we effectively speak to each other without getting bowled over by technological feats of restive schizoid chatter at a Trumped-up time when people will say just about anything? We were Next Stage artists-in-residence at the Drama League with this piece in March 2017, and are currently in workshop to continue developing and refining both the text and the piece’s directorial vision.

A few other things are at the very beginning stages as well: a song-cycle about Black + Jewish relations (in collaboration with Stew) and an olfactory piece of “Culinary Theater” in the “outer” boroughs (in collaboration with Ben Gassman).

Why and how did you get into theatre?

Not sure I can precisely pinpoint one “how” or “why.” It is some mercurial admixture of that first role in the elementary school musical, working on weekends as a cashier at my stepdad’s record store smack in the middle of the theater district, high school and college theater-club-like-activities, and that stumble and fall head-over-heels into the theater and theory of Bertolt Brecht. It was with Brecht that all-things-theater first “really” clicked, and my life took a pretty dramatic turn. Fascinated by the power and the faith he found in the theater as a social practice, I co-founded two performance ensembles – first in Berkeley and then in Berlin. Between 2010 and 2014, Shake im Park Berlin, our playfully (ir)reverent take on the Papp model, created site-specific performances that drew thousands of audience members to Berlin’s Görlitzer Park in order to rethink its dynamic spaces as sites of multi-lingual and inter-cultural performance, (post)dramatic experimentation, and participatory art. Between 2009 and 2011, UCMeP engaged performance as a tactical means of “creative protest” and mobilization against the austerity measures that beset public education in California.  

What is your directing dream project?

My mother served four years in federal prison between 2010 and 2014. During that time, we corresponded mainly by handwritten letter. During that time, we also lost our family home. I dream of (and hope I find the guts) to explore these writings as investigative fodder for a not-yet-existing performance work. I want to put these texts in conversation with related legal documents as well as Brecht’s classic Mother Courage. I want to (re)read his play with my own mother and other mothers I have met whose lives and homes have been (re)shaped by the prison-system and by various financial and housing “crises.” Together we would begin with the question: How might we collaboratively reconstruct tales of Mother Courage, who worked relentlessly to provide for her children by “living off” yet another 30 Years War – for American prosperity, which came to an abrupt close with the housing crisis of 2007?

What kind of theatre excites you?

I say something else about “excitement” and political/civic/social investment below, but from the perspective of the types of theater aesthetics that most excite me, I am drawn to theater practices and artists that/who embrace theater’s fundamental interdisciplinarity. I am deeply invested in modes of performance that de-hierarchize “the story” as the only mode of story-telling. Instead, I understand performance as a productive meeting point of multiple intelligences and media. Performance (through a park, within a protest, at a rehearsal, on a stage) provides an explosive site of parataxis: text and body and environment and music and… Of: simultaneity, dream-image, spectacle, hallucination, intimacy, immediacy, and collage. Of: pop-culture and obsolescence, real and play, aesthetics and ethics. The kinds of work(s) I am most excited about are those which strive to challenge our inherited assumptions: about agency, spectatorship, identity, and community. I am inspired by a theater of big ideas: curious, probing, intransigent (when necessary). I think the great power of performance lies in its capacity to promote and provoke controversy, critique, even discomfort and antagonism, just as much as it promotes and provokes exuberance, laughter, amusement, and joy. And I am deeply invested in the power of irreverence; but an irreverence that serves reverence in an effort to tease out – aesthetically and politically – intangible truths about belonging, collaboration, and civic responsibility. 

What do you want to change about theatre today?

I don’t dare offer prescriptions because, after all, who am I? But here are a few hopes for and dreams about theater as a social practice that are important to me and which I am trying my best to make manifest in my own little way:

As a public laboratory of existential experiments, I believe theater is one of the most vital civic institutions we have. It helps us to reckon with the state of things as they’ve been, but also as they could be. Theater helps us – or even forces us – also to reckon with each other, in our similarity and difference, as a citizenry, and as a public.

I believe that theater makers have a unique opportunity to provoke us all – sometimes gently and sometimes not so gently – to reimagine just what “public” means.

I believe in theater as workshop, as process: never (quite) finished, always fleeting, exploratory, and improvisatory – and yet always also striving for formal precision.

I believe in the power of collaborative ensemble, of the embodied practices of mutual exploration, interdependence, and critical generosity that performance demands and facilitates.

I believe in a theater of desperation – a theater that demands we ask “why are we at the theater?” every time we walk through its doors.

I believe in a theater that demands we reckon with the question: what is essential about live performance – and what does it do that TV or cinema cannot?

What is your opinion on getting a directing MFA?

Since I don’t have an MFA, again, I won’t dare to offer an opinion. Instead of the MFA, I pursued a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley. While this was a rather (or radically) different path, Performance Studies has helped me in so many ways to understand, clarify, and even experiment with the kind of theater maker I want to be. As an interdisciplinary field, Performance Studies has supported my diverse explorations into both the practice and theory of “performance” in its many incarnations. Performance Studies has also afforded me incredible opportunities to work across languages, cultures, and continents, across different communities of artists and thinkers, across different theater worlds and economies of art.

Who are your theatrical heroes?

An obviously impossible question. But I am teaching a course at NYU this semester on “Experiments in 20th Century Performance,” and here are some of the artists we’ll be spending time with: M. Duchamp, G. Stein, A. Artaud, J. Cage, M. Cunningham, A. Kaprow, Y. Ono, Y. Rainer, C. Schneemann, J. Malina & J. Beck, R. Schechner, S. Sanchez, E. Bullins, J. Grotowski, P. Bausch, T. Kantor, H. Müller, R. Wilson, E. LeCompte & S. Gray, and F. Castorf.

Any advice for directors just starting out?

Since I feel like I am still “starting out” in many ways, I can only say that, for me, to continue to believe in theater is to believe in the enduring persistence of radical possibility.

Plugs!

I’m teaching another course this term that takes us to see theater across NYC every Thursday evening. Here are some of the pieces we’ll be checking out. Maybe we’ll see you at the theater?!

A Doll’s House, Part 2, Groundhog Day, Hear Their There Here, 7 Pleasures, Sam’s Tea Shack, BLACKOUTS, The Siege, The Treasurer, Bronx Gothic, Miracle, Measure for Measure, 17c, The Fountainhead, Home, and Race Card.

There are more words, pictures, music, and video from me at: www.brandonwoolfperformance.com.

And if any of the above resonates with you, and you’re interested in talking further or collaborating on something, please do be in touch.

[amargarone772]

           This short film about Rokhaya Diallo was filmed by Aljazeera, a Qatari television news channel. The video is done in an interview style, allowing Diallo to fully express and explain her views on pressing issues in France today. Diallo has an impressive resume, as she is a French activist, feminist, filmmaker, and writer, and identifies herself as French and Muslim (Aljazeera). She claims she is lucky to be in the position to be so vocal about the racist issues in France since not many people like her are able to do so. Although she has always been an activist, the inspiration that inspired this film to be made was her recent firing within government (Aljazeera). The film explains her journey experiencing racism within the French government, as well as the threat to freedom of speech in France.

     Diallo was part of the Digital Council within the government but was controversially asked to step down from it due to her efforts to tackle state-sponsored racism (Aljazeera). The Digital Council in France is an independent public body composed of about 30 members whose goals are to issue independent opinions and recommendations on any question regarding the impact of digital technologies on the economy and society (Wikipedia). The Council is closely related to the government and helps them with new legislations, as many of the issues involve challenging policies (Oxford Internet Institute). Diallo’s firing was seen as she openly stated she supported Muslim women wearing a hijab in France, something that is not legal to do in public institutions in France. Diallo firmly believes that French institutions not only support but encourage racism. She claims that in France if you are perceived as someone with Arab or African descent, you experience more racism in France. As stated in the Guardian, “The 2016 ruling that found France guilty of carrying out unjustified identity checks on non-white men came after a case was brought by 13 French men of black or North African origin aged 18 to 35 (The Guardian). Their professions ranged from student to teacher, local councilor to a professional sportsman. All said they were stopped by police in various cities across France because of their race” (The Guardian). This shows that they are exploiting a whole race of people within the countries. Diallo also explains how French territories have different laws and regulations for safety than France, because they are mainly occupied by people of color. An example of this is the use of harmful pesticides in these territories that are illegal on French mainland soil. Upset about racism is not a new thing being expressed by immigrant people. The Marche des Beurs, slang for children of North African-Arab immigrants, occurred in France in 1983 and was once again commemorated and re-enacted in 2013 (Mulholland, 2013).  In the spirit of the French, 100,000 stickers and supporters of North African-Arab descent rallied together to march in Paris to protest civil rights issues and discrimination in France (Mulholland, 2013). This shows how issues regarding racism were prominent 30 years ago, 6 years ago, and still today in France. As the document states, “The youth of today needs symbols, models. It is essential that this little story is integrated into the greater history of France" (Mulholland, 2013). If history is repeating itself this much, it is evident that something is wrong and nothing concrete is happening.

       The supreme court ruled that the State was performing racial profiling, to which the State did not even try to deny and responded by saying that they were justified in their actions (Aljazeera). Amnesty International, the UN, and others like them have also stated that they felt France could do more to help these pressing issues of racism in the country (Aljazeera). Diallo wants to make sure that people know she is not claiming all of the French people are racist, but rather that the French institutions and the State are the ones who need to stop racism within them. In regards to Macron, Diallo feels that he is a younger and more progressive president compared to past leaders (Aljazeera). She has hope that because he has grown up in a more diverse France, he would be more open to a more inclusive France. However, the reforms for immigration currently in place are not much different from what they had prior to his leadership. He also replaced the state of emergency, which allowed the police to have more power and judges to have less power, which does not seem fair to Diall (Aljazeera). She feels the state of emergency just reinforces division within France.        There are strict secular laws in French which allows for a separation of church and state (Aljazeera). This implies, on paper, that freedom of religion is allowed in France. However, the ban of the hijab and any religious symbol in state institutions in 2004 says otherwise. There have been debates over the wearing of Islamic headscarves in public schools in 189, 1994, and 2003 (Scott, 2007, p. 21). As Joan Scott states in his book The Politics of the Veil, “What the chronological sequence does reflect is a hardening of the government’s position in reaction to the steadily growing political influence of the anti-immigrant far right” (Scott, 2007, p. 21). Diallo explains how institutions like school should be a place where you learn diversity, rather than hide our differences as the French state justifies as making all children equal (Aljazeera). The law so-called reminded parents that being a French citizen is a social counteract, as the New Yorker interestingly put it (New Yorker). This is an interesting idea as many people claim being a French citizen means you must look, act, and sound the part. As the New Yorker states, several thousand French Muslim women still leave their houses everyday wearing burkas and covering their faces to make a defiant statement to people everywhere (New Yorker). The ban on the veil connects to issues with women’s rights. If a woman wants to cover her body, she should be able to, and vise versa. Diallo explains that she feels this is patronizing and ethnocentric to tell Muslim women specifically to dress or undress as a way to define freedom (Aljazeera). Overall, while there are many things the French government needs to work on, Diallo believes there’s hope for the future since she as a black Muslim woman is able to speak on television about these issues.                   This film clearly explains many of the issues going on in France today, many of which can be blurred within the details of different laws and rhetoric of politicians. The film provides an authentic and genuine perspective on France, that does a good job of not bashing the country or its people, but rather identifying its issues and the way in which they should and can be resolved (Aljazeera). The way in which it is structured in interview form allow for clear questions to be answered, many of which I myself would have wanted to ask Diallo. The perspective of a black Muslim woman living in France on these issues makes the film much more invigorating. It is much different to hear a white, male politician discuss racism, or often in their opinion lack-of racism, in France, then to someone who experiences it every day. One of the things I like about Diallo is that she admits there are others who experience the everyday hardships of racism against one’s color, ethnicity, and religion than she does. She does not portray herself as a victim, but rather a fighter who is willing to speak out against her prior employer and the injustices of her country for both herself and others like her (Aljazeera).                                                          This film relates to some of the pressing issues we have discussed in class, such as the treatment of immigrants and people of color in Europe, and the censorship of the media by the government. As discussed in Chapter 14 of Populism and the Media by Luca Manucci, state-controlled media is seen in many populist countries. He claims, “the presences of populism is often linked to certain socio-economic and political conditions such as low credibility of mainstream parties and scandals of corruption” (Manucci, 467). This is seen with Diallo and the scandal around the government firing her from her Digital Council position because of her outright defense in the media of the hijab and diversity in France (Aljazeera). The government is essentially constricting what their employees are allowed to say and do, both publicly and in the media, using Diallo as an example of one’s fate if they go against the government’s beliefs. This censoring of their own employees is essentially their way of trying to control what information the people of France are being fed.

Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton University Press, 2007. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8497.html (Scott, 2007)

https://www.academia.edu/38695092/Populism_and_the_Media (Manucci, 467)

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/behind-frances-burka-ban?irclickid=UmZXeoR162nDyOkwsBxOERwCUkl1cr34eXpg2Y0&irgwc=1&source=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_Viglink%20Primary&utm_source=impact-affiliate&utm_medium=27795&utm_campaign=impact&utm_content=Online%20Tracking%20Link&utm_brand=tny (New Yorker)

https://signin.lexisnexis.com/lnaccess/app/signin?back=https%3A%2F%2Fadvance.lexis.com%3A443%2Fdocument%2F%3Fpdmfid%3D1516831%26crid%3Df48bc437-eb82-4000-a131-c05d554ea669%26pddocfullpath%3D%252Fshared%252Fdocument%252Fnews%252Furn%253AcontentItem%253A59YW-S8C1-J9YR-G4H4-00000-00%26pddocid%3Durn%253AcontentItem%253A59YW-S8C1-J9YR-G4H4-00000-00%26pdcontentcomponentid%3D389195%26pdteaserkey%3Dsr0%26pditab%3Dallpods%26ecomp%3D1fyk%26earg%3Dsr0%26prid%3D7195c314-c930-4fd4-bab8-c2f2d88ef0a1&aci=la (Mullholland, 2013)

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The Trump Administration Is Attacking Critical Internet Privacy Tools

A few weeks ago, I was shocked to learn that the US government had begun dismantling the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a major funder of open source tools like Signal, Tor, and Tails that allow internet users to circumvent censorship and protect themselves from online spying.

The organization’s entire leadership team had been summarily fired by Michael Pack, an ally of Steve Bannon and the new Trump-approved CEO of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The firings were just a small piece of a bigger reconfiguring of the organizations administered by USAGM, which include government-run media networks Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. But as someone who has watched OTF thrive for the past eight years as a member of its Advisory Council, this stood out as an attack against the organization that gave birth to some of our most important anti-censorship and privacy tools.

When I began studying online censorship in 2008, it was not a particularly well-known phenomenon in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, however, was a different story: In places like China, Tunisia, Syria, Vietnam, Iran, and Thailand, a heavily restricted Internet was the norm. Individuals in a number of countries were commonly prohibited from accessing information about human rights, foreign news publications, social media websites, religious content, and information about sexuality and sexual health.

In those days, it wasn’t easy to circumvent web blocks. While organizations like Tor had long provided anonymous and uncensored access to the Internet, they did so on shoestring budgets. Basic web proxies were often free but worked poorly, while paid VPNs required a credit card—something out of reach for many web users worldwide. Back then it seemed like a divided, Balkanized web was our global shared future.

Then, in January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at The Newseum introducing Internet freedom as a core component of “21st century statecraft.” Acknowledging information networks as “a new nervous system for our planet,” Clinton spoke to the need to “synchronize our technological progress with our principles,” and laid out a plan to fight online censorship, connect more people to global information networks, and find diplomatic solutions to strengthen cyber security.

That plan came with funding, first through the State Department’s Department of Democracy, Rights, and Labor (DRL), and later joined by OTF, launched under Radio Free Asia and funded through USAGM (then called the Broadcasting Board of Governors).

That funding, as anyone in the Internet freedom community can attest, has altered the landscape of the Internet for millions upon millions of users around the world by providing support for technology that enables users to leap over firewalls and protect themselves from pervasive government surveillance. It has provided organizations in numerous countries where local funding is impossible and major foundations fail to reach with the necessary support to keep Internet users in their countries safe from harm and able to access important information.

I’ll readily admit that I was, and remain, skeptical of the Internet freedom agenda. The State Department agenda seemed heavily focused on countries where the US sought regime change—like Iran, Syria, and China. And I wasn’t the only one: Prominent Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia criticized the agenda for its propensity to disincline the US from engaging in action that would “endanger the ‘stability’ of the dictatorial Arab order,” while writer Evgeny Morozov challenged the very idea that the Internet could bring about freedom or change.

In those heady, early days it was not uncommon for untested and unvetted tools—at least one of which turned out to be utter snake oil—to receive funding, invitations to State Department events, or even awards. In my circles, rumors of Beltway Bandits competing for lucrative Internet freedom contracts abounded.

But OTF, launched in 2012, sought to change all that by putting into place measures that ensured that any technology it funded was open source. Recognizing the mistrust that existed amongst much of the global internet freedom community, OTF put together an expert advisory council (of which I was a founding member) to review applications for funding, and began to create a sense of community amongst OTF-funded projects through the creation of an annual summit that has, over time, grown to be a diverse, inclusive, and community-led event.

This is what sets OTF apart and, regrettably, what is most at stake if Michael Pack gets his way. Neither Pack—nor James Miles, his recent appointee to the position of the position of OTF CEO—is an expert on Internet freedom, but some powerful players have his ear, among them the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and the lobbyist Michael Horowitz, another Steve Bannon ally. Both have long worked to get the majority of funding for a particular set of tools backed by the anti-gay religious group Falun Gong that includes China-focused VPNs Ultrasurf and Freegate.

The Lantos Foundation would have you believe that it is that affiliation that has prevented their favored tools—which include Ultrasurf and Freegate—from receiving funding from OTF, claiming prejudice against this oppressed religious group. But the fact of the matter is that the people behind the tools have for many years refused to open up their code, and thereby verify the accuracy of their security claims. The battle is, therefore, between closed and open source technology.

Open source technology is critical in the internet freedom space, because it allows —anyone to inspect the code and understand how a given program works, or whether its code contains any bugs or backdoors. If bugs are found, they can be reported to the developers, helping them to improve upon the technology.

OTF requires that the tools it funds make their code open and publicly available, allowing it to be used by other developers, who can learn from it or reuse parts of it to build new programs or create applications that run on top of existing ones. Closed source technology, on the other hand, withdraws that knowledge from the public—it is inherently proprietary, unavailable for audit by anyone but hired experts under a non-disclosure agreement.

For OTF’s global community, this is a matter of trust and safety. I have attended most of OTF’s annual summits and spoken to a number of the developers, researchers, and activists from all over the world. Many of them speak of persecution by the state, of targeted surveillance, and pervasive censorship. They trust open source technology because they understand that using it does not present yet another vulnerability in their lives, the way that an unvetted closed source tool could.

Open source can also be a matter of thrift: OTF’s estimated annual budget is $15 million—hardly a dent in what myriad state actors spend each year to go after activists and dissidents. By using open source code, technologists can stretch that budget even farther, creating news tools that run alongside existing ones, or “forking” existing code for new purposes. It also ensures sustainability: If a project’s founders move on, they leave their code behind, allowing another group to pick up the slack and continue the work.

OTF’s opponents have failed time and time again to engage with any of these arguments, instead hammering on how their favored tools will ensure that more people can leap over China’s Great Firewall. That is certainly a noble goal, but what concerns me is that it seems to be their only goal.

While China’s censorship model is one of the most sophisticated, there is no publicly available instruction or guidance from the developers of tools such as Ultrasurf or Freegate on how users can continue to use this tool despite some enforcement of VPN restrictions in China, as well as VPNs repeatedly being removed from China’s Apple store. Because these tools are closed source, no one can say whether they’re even safe for Chinese users. Yet, these problems are regularly discussed and new approaches piloted among other open source anti-censorship projects, so that they can learn from each other’s hard work.

As the space for online free speech continues to shrink, the developers of these tools have apparently done little to nothing to make their technology available to, say, activists in Uganda impacted by the country’s new social media tax. Using these tools, protesters in Hong Kong will be unable to access censored content or safely hide their online identity amid growing surveillance capabilities used to find protesters. There’s also no evidence that Lebanese human rights defenders could make use of these tools to organize safely.

The digital threats that face anyone whose right to existence is under attack are not isolated to one country. Civil society worldwide must work together to overcome well-coordinated, well-resourced digital adversaries, and must trust in the technology that holds their sensitive conversations and identities. This trust can only be earned through open source code.

It is for these reasons that nearly five hundred organizations—and more than a thousand individuals, many of whom are experts in the field—have signed a letter calling on Congress to require Internet freedom funds to be awarded through an open, fair, competitive, and evidence-based decision process; to remain fully open-source in perpetuity; to ensure that all technologies supported by government funds receive regular security audits; and to pass the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act.

It is difficult to say what exactly will be lost if Michael Pack is allowed to continue his tyrannical reign, but one thing is for certain: The Internet freedom agenda is going to look a lot more like the Trump agenda—dangerous and ineffective.

The Trump Administration Is Attacking Critical Internet Privacy Tools syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/