#no credit of the photographer to protect his identity from the government

[meqtrfe]

Caracas, Venezuela

[madeofitzits]

In honor of the impending return of Brooklyn 99, here are 99 reasons that...

1. He was precocious enough to know, at 5 years old, that he wanted to change his name (x)

 2. He has a bunch of nicknames: Sandy Amberg, Young Sandwich, etc. but the most endearing one is 'Droidy', his family's name for him (x) 

3. He is still super close friends with people he's known since: Elementary School (Chelsea Peretti) (x)...

4. Junior High/High School (Kiv and Jorm) (x) 

5. … Summer Camp (Irene Neuwirth) (x)

7.  ...and Film School (Chester Tam) (x)

8. Before he met Joanna, he dated other famous ladies but - out of respect - he never discussed it/them (x) 

9. He loves turtles and tortoises. When he was a kid, he had a pet turtle that he named 'Squirt' because the first time he held it, it peed on him. His Mom, Margie, accidentally killed Squirt when Andy was at Summer camp... (x)

10. … Maybe this is why, when shooting 'Popstar', Andy fell hard for Maximus (Conner 4 Real's turtle). He says they "had a good thing going" and that he wanted to adopt him. In the end, he decided against it because there are a bunch of coyotes in his neighborhood and he was worried the little guy wouldn't be safe. (Popstar: DVD Commentary)

11. Speaking of his Mom, despite being a super private person, he appeared on 'Finding your Roots' so that he could help her track down her birth family (x)

12. When he succeeded he cried (although we never got to see it on camera) (x)

13. That's because, like all good boys, he loves his Mama which is why - as part of the same episode - he said "My mom is basically the kindest person I know… and many people would corroborate that" (x)

14. Andy's Sisters, Hannie (Johanna) and Darrow, used to make him wear diapers and put his hair in pigtails until he was 5 years old. He says he didn't mind because he just liked that they were paying attention to him (x)

15. That's why he sees his identity in comedy as being 'America's kid brother'. When he was young, he would annoy his sisters until they laughed and he claims to have been replicating that approach to entertainment ever since

16. Although a bunch of his characters have 'Daddy Issues', Andy definitely doesn't. He's super close with his Papa (Joe) and has said "he's a good man" and "the best Dad in the world" (x) 

17. Joe was Andy's youth soccer coach and in one scene in 'Hot Rod', Joe's favorite photograph can be seen in the background. It shows a very young Andy posing with a soccer ball, after "scoring the winning goal against Mersey" (x)

18. He's been a loyal Golden State Warriors fan since he was a little kid, living in Oakland (then Berkeley) and, in 2010, he correctly predicted that they would "win a Championship in my lifetime" (x) 

19. The proceeds from his Umami Burger ('The Samburger') went to a deafness early detection program in Berkeley. This cause is close to his heart because Margie uses hearing aids and used to work in the special needs program, teaching deaf kids (x)

20. He, Kiv, and Jorm have made multiple donations to their old school district, including $250 000 to its theater program (x)

21. On the subject of The Lonely Island; Andy always goes out of his way to make sure that everyone knows how much he owes to his buddies. For instance, he told Marc Maron, during his WTF appearance, that "I get a lot of credit for what Kiv and Jorm have done" (x)

22. He makes this face when he knows he’s said something naughty…

(Gif credit: @andrewsambags)

23. During his 'Wild Horses' appearance, he said that he can't watch scary movies because they freak him out too much. He told 'Complex' that he's still scared of 'The Shining' (x)...

24. … Similarly, when he was at UC Santa Cruz he worked at the Del Mar movie theater and he had a hard time coping with screenings of 'Species 2' (x)

25. He fell in love with Joanna, the moment he met her, when she greeted him by addressing him as 'Steve the C**t' (x)

 26. He listened to 'Ys', everyday for a year, before he and Joanna started dating (x)

27. He bought the original portrait that was used as the basis of the cover art for 'Ys' and gave it to Joanna as a Christmas present, so that she could hang it in her music room (x)

 28. He loves birds and goes hiking and birding with Joanna (x)

 29. Every new comment he makes about Joanna becomes an instant contender for 'most beautiful thing a person has ever said about their spouse' (x)

30. For example, he readily admits that Jake's iconic heart eyes are the result of him thinking about his amazing wife (x)

31. There are many stories about how incredibly romantic Andy and Joanna's wedding was and Jorm has said that it featured "the most magical vows I've ever heard" (x)

32. The Newsombergs now live in Charlie Chaplin's old house (x)

33. On the Emmys Red Carpet (2015), the year he hosted, they took a momentary break from posing for the world's press to whisper 'I love you' to each other (x)

34. At last year's Vanity Fair party, Andy carried Joanna's purse for her so she could grab a snack (x)

35. He was a semi-permanent fixture in the audience for her recent run of shows for the 'Strings/Keys Incident' tour, even officially confirming his status as the 'President of her Fan Club' (x)

36. He used his Golden Globes monologue to call out the government for framing and murdering the Black Panthers (x)

37. On the Carpet for the Guy's Choice Awards, he called the event "a ridiculous farce", adding that "men already have it so easy - it's insane that there's a show that celebrates them". That makes sense when you consider that he, Kiv and Jorm have made an entire career out of parodying toxic masculinity (x)

38. He once said that only "idiot-ass men" think that women aren't funny (x)

39. He’s been wearing glasses since 7th Grade and he has the most heartbreakingly cute habit of nudging them up his nose, (especially when he wears his Sol Moscot frames) (x)...

40. ... and of rubbing his eyes under them (x)

41. He barely ever wears glasses for roles but he also avoids contacts (because he doesn't like touching his eyeballs) which means he's almost always 'acting blind' (x)

42. He has worn his glasses in character a few times - as 'himself' ('Lady Dynamite'), as 'Paul' ('I Think You Should Leave') and during a very small number of SNL sketches (e.g. during his one appearance in a 'Gilly' with Kristen Wiig) (x) 

43. He can't tolerate glare and when that makes him squint it's a sight that's too cute for words (x)

44. He owns about six outfits and has been rotating them for well over a decade (x) 

45. He barely ever breaks during shooting/while performing, so when he does it's aggressively adorable. (x), (x)

46. He's a grown ass man who persuades people to come with him to the bathroom because if he goes by himself he'll get lonely (x)

47. He didn't announce he was leaving SNL, until after his last appearance, selflessly choosing not to detract from Kirsten Wiig's huge and emotional send-off (x) 

48. He undertook a quest to smell like Lorne Michaels (x) 

49. He's ageing like a fine wine (x)

50. To protect their daughter's privacy, Andy and Joanna never announced that they were expecting. They've never released their little girl's name or date of birth and most news outlets still report that they became parents in August 2017 (even though that's inaccurate) (x)

51. Although he's careful not to talk about his daughter often, sometimes he can't keep from gushing about her. For example, when asked about his first year of fatherhood he said: "It’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just like a beautiful, incredible dream. It has surpassed every expectation I ever had. It’s definitely been very blissful" (x)

52. After their daughter was born, Andy and Joanna spent the first 40 days at home with her (in a practice known as 'confinement'). He's described it as being "a really special time". (x) 

53. Andy is famously mild-mannered but, when asked about what triggers his 'Dad claws', he admitted that if anyone attempted to touch his daughter, without permission, he'd "probably sock them hard in the face"…

54. ...Characteristically, he went on to add that he hopes that never happens, since he hasn't been in a fight since 6th Grade (x)

55. Cyndi Lauper was his first celebrity crush and he plays her record ('She's so unusual') for his daughter all the time. (x)

56. His is the very definition of a precious laugh (x)...

57. It's made even more wonderful by the way it makes his voice go high-pitched (x)

58.  … and the way it causes his eyebrow to rise involuntarily  

59. It's impossible not to smile at his impression of his Mom (x)

60. And laugh at his impression of John Mulaney (x)

61. He was so convinced he wouldn't win the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical, that he didn't prepare a speech. Instead, as he explained to David Letterman, he "just went… and started drinking". The resulting list of improvised 'thank yous' was perfect in every way (x)

62. As producers, Andy, Kiv and Jorm have given life to some amazing projects ('Alone Together', 'Brigsby Bear', 'I Think You Should Leave')...

63. … and gone out of their way to support women in comedy ('Party Over Here', 'PEN15') (x)

64. As well as being a comedy legend, he's a super-talented dramatic actor, who gave the performance of a lifetime in 'Celeste and Jesse Forever' but, after the movie wrapped, and it was time to do press for it, he was straight back to goofing around (x) 

65. His lip bite should be illegal (x)

66. Even though he wears the same vanishingly small number of outfits, over and over, he has a vast collection of the most excellent socks (x)

67. He always gives 'editing notes' during his own interviews (x)

68. He has a super sweet and sincere way of thanking interviewers when they compliment him (x)

69. He adjusts his hoodie constantly (x)

70. The two most perfect Jake laughs in b99 are actually real Andy laughs 'https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W38A_xuXaeg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVm9nYrTWRQ

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71. Virtually everyone who has ever worked with Andy has talked about what a wonderful person he is. This explains why so many of them have been involved with more than one of his projects (x)

72. It's not only his colleagues who talk about what a delight he is (x), (x)

73. This lovestruck fool wore his own wife's merch when he went out to dinner (x)

74. No one else uses the word 'dinky' quite like Andy (x). The same goes for 'snacky' (see point 70)

75. He does this with his tongue (x)

76. He still likes to play soccer but his eyesight is so bad that he has to keep his glasses on for it

77. When he lets his gorgeous floofy hair grow a little it sits perfectly over the arms of his glasses (x)

78. He gifted the world with Jakey's little curl (x)

79. At the James Franco Roast, he couldn't bring himself to be mean to anyone except himself (and Jeff Ross, a little!) (x)

80. In fact, he's always been willing to laugh at himself (x) and he still is (x)

81. He changes b99 scripts to make them more feminist (x)

82. Despite their humble insistence that they just benefited from 'good timing', the reality is that Andy, Kiv and Jorm (along with Chris Parnell) revolutionized digital media, when 'Lazy Sunday' popularized YouTube, increasing its traffic by 85% overnight (x)

83. He once attended the Vanity Fair party because his Mom told him to (x)

84. He has an amazing way of subtly but firmly shutting down inappropriate questions, like when this interviewer suggested that Holt being gay was something that could have been played for laughs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=idQsYQfkR5o

85. He auditioned for SNL at the same time as Bill Hader. Hader thought he'd blown it because Andy had a bunch of props and Bill had none. In the meantime, Andy thought he'd blown it when he saw Hader and realized 'this guy doesn't need any props' (x) 

86. His bromance with Seth Meyers is one for the ages (x)

87. Every single second of this video is proof of why Andy, Kiv and Jorm deserve the world (x)

88. He once dragged Mulaney up on stage for SNL Goodnights, even though writers weren't allowed to join in (x)

89. He has a hilarious phobia of pooping anywhere except his own bathroom (x) 

90. His beautiful, beautiful, face: His smile (radiant), his eyes (caramel - hella disarming), his ears (adorably asymmetrical), his nose (perfect), His chin (the dimple… *swoon*), his jaw (could cut glass), The 'Sambeard' (another amazing layer of pretty) (x)

91. His body: His butt (x), his thighs, (x) his soft lil tummy (The ‘Sambelly’) (x), his hands. (x), his arms (x), his hips…

(Gif credit: @amystiago /@badpostandy on Twitter)

92. All signs point to the fact that, like Jake, Andy uses his glasses case as a wallet (x) 

93. Jake's "cool-cool-cool-cool-cool-cool" is an irl Andy-ism that the writers worked into b99 scripts. What's even better is that Joanna does it, too (x)

94. He has a really good arm and is low key competitive, which is super hot https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e32K_nBDy3Q

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95. He's one half of the cutest Red Carpet pose of all time (x)

96. He barely ever seems to get mad but if angry Jake is anything to go by, maybe he should... (x)

97. He's a huge nerd, who geeks out over GOT, LOTR, 'Star Wars', 'Alien(s)' and anything relating to time travel (x), (x)

98. He has a gorgeous speaking voice, especially when he’s tired or a little sick. (Bonus points for any time he uses the word ‘correct’. See point 30) (x) 

99. He’s still so committed to his b99 fans and fam, even after all this time and is as excited as the rest of us that...

[paullicino]

A Year like No Other

(Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon.)

A lot of people are now calling 2020 the lost year and it’s not difficult to see why. Most of us have never had a year remotely like this last one. For some of us, the calendar began to blur, weeks and even months merging into one another in a sickly, uneasy timelessness that had us double-checking what day it was. For others, there was stress after stress, as we worried about our health, our jobs, our governments, even our countries. And the two experiences certainly weren’t mutually exclusive.

This month, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that, acknowledging both the struggles and the successes. It’s sometimes been a difficult twelve months for me, but it certainly hasn’t been without its inspirations and its wonderful moments. I wanted to share some of those, to talk about a few ideas and to spotlight the things that helped me through 2020. I hope it helps. I figure it’s as good a time as any for us to be sharing our blessings.

And I think that first involves celebrating you. I think that’s very important. This past month, a year on from the first COVID cases being widely-reported (and also the first reports of cases where I live), I’ve read a lot by people asking questions like “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” when they look back. They ask these questions when they think about things like their life changes, their mask wearing, their activism or their voting. They see an ongoing pandemic, social unrest or political inaction and wonder why they should make an effort while others are lax or apathetic. It’s natural to wonder that. I think anyone can understand the fatigue, the cynicism and the disillusionment.

But I also, get this, have a Hot Take on this that says that the choices you made were vital. When you chose to wear a mask, to socially distance, to restrict when and where you went, you actively helped fight a deadly virus. You may well have saved lives, saved someone’s health, protected livelihoods by acting as you have. When you voted, shared a cause on social media, attended a protest or talked to even one person about helping others or making the world better, you contributed to improving your society.

In fact, I have capital-O Opinions about these things so strap in and hold on, 'cause here they come.

I’ve been very fortunate to share much of my work on the internet over the years, which is a very particular medium, and sometimes that work reaches a lot of people. My experience of this is that you never know who it truly reaches, or when, or even how, and most of the time you never find out. There’s certainly an immediacy to things where you can see, pretty quickly, what the instant reaction to something is, but that’s fleeting. It doesn’t last and, within moments, there’s already something newer demanding more responses.

In time, the true consequences of things shake out. People get back to you with their more considered opinions. Sometimes months, even years after you do something, you find out from someone what they thought about it, how it affected them or even how they were changed. It can take time for a person to realise how they were changed, too, and we rarely have perspective in the moment. Sometimes it takes us years to appreciate the choices and the actions of our friends, our family members, our teachers, our communities. People have contacted me about work I’ve done long, long after I first shared it, and many of those people have come from places that I never expected, have found my work in ways that I never expected. I think, now, that consequence never travels in straight lines. That cause and effect are strangers rather than siblings.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that we don’t always notice the good things that we have done. We ask “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” because we don’t get those answers immediately, or for a long time, or sometimes ever. But not knowing when we saved someone’s health, when we changed someone’s mind, even when we inspired someone’s actions doesn’t mean that we aren’t making a difference. There is a point to our life changes, our mask wearing, our activism and our voting.

I hope you can celebrate yourself and give yourself credit for the choices you made this last year. They have mattered.

I also want to thank you so, so much for supporting my Patreon. I know many of you have been with me since day one, for more than two years now, and I’m so grateful for both your capital-P Patronage and your presence, whether that’s in our Discord community or through your comments and your correspondence. That’s made a big difference to me this past year, helping me pay rent and put food on the table during a time when so much has been uncertain. 2020 was to be my first full year back in Canada after a complicated, circuitous absence and I had half-finished projects, freelance ideas and half a dozen tabs open in my browser with writing residencies to apply for, everywhere from nearby Richmond to the Yukon Territory. I hoped this would be a year that I’d both finally see more of Canada and be able to write about it, too. A lot of things didn’t quite work out, freelance budgets were slashed, work timelines lengthened and I became ill, but as I look back now I’m thankful for a great deal.

I still managed to fulfill some ambitions. At the start of 2020 I’d been finishing up some work on Zafir, which had been an absolute delight, and I was not far off starting spring work on Magical Kitties Save the Day. The close of the year saw me resuming work on a Feng Shui expansion and each of these projects has been really good for me. All of them gave me a chance to work with skillful, progressive people and to become a better designer.

As spring continued, I decided to make a one-off video about board gaming and mental health during a pandemic, partly to offer a practical and helpful introduction to playing board games online and looking after yourself, but also because I wanted people to feel that their actions during a pandemic mattered. Among the things I referenced and linked to, I’ve continued dipping into Headspace from time to time, and this helpful list of brief work-from-home tips has been further updated. I’ve also since further investigated the terrific work of Dr. Ali Mattu, a psychologist and therapist who has produced a lot of material over the last year focusing on how to handle the pandemic.

With the summer came widespread protests across the United States, which highlighted the oppressive and fatal consequences of systemic racism and the urgent need for police reform, both issues not exclusive to the that country (for me, the events echoed the protests that began on my Tottenham street in  2011 and the violent response to 2010’s student protests). I shared a list of resources that I thought were important at the time, but there also followed a wide call for white people to make more effort to both seek out, engage with and promote motion pictures made by Black Americans, or which reflected the Black experience. It wasn’t a big ask and, as well as watching films that had been recommended many times over (such as Us, Da 5 Bloods, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and the excellent BlacKkKlansman, which was the best film I saw last year), I also tried to diversify my social media feeds more. Instagram was host to a growing discussion about how the platform seems to (deliberately or accidentally) divide people by race, something which I think may still be the case, and several nature photographers I follow promoted Tsalani Lassiter and Rae Wynn-Grant. To my delight, among many of the things they speak about and share, both are experts on bears.

I thought it was important to look more closely at Canada, too, so I made more of an effort to follow Indigenous issues and have begun reading Indigenous news sources, including First Nations Drum, Windspeaker and the Nunatsiaq News. CBC runs its own Indigenous news section, much of which is written by Indigenous reporters.A lot of freelance and writing opportunities dried up as the pandemic contracted the world’s economies, but in 2020 I was able to start writing for VICE, working with my old colleague and friend Rob Zacny, and interview the world’s most famous board game designer. VICE has written a lot of relevant, helpful and informative material about current events over the last year and I was heartened by the words of a fellow VICE writer, Gita Jackson, who concluded her essay about living in The Cool Zone of historical possibility by reminding us how “In The Cool Zone, we can also rediscover hope.”

This year I was also inspired by Faith Fundal’s widely-shared CBC podcast They and Us, which was an excellent (and still rare) example of a mainstream media exploration of gender identity and trans rights, and really pleased for my friend Brendan, who launched his podcast project Hey, Lesson! in the autumn. Of course, I can’t mention podcasts without again reminding you of my love for the spooky, supernatural Death by Monsters, which I got to host last winter. It was my dear friend Paula, one of its presenters, who recommended that I start streaming regularly, something I now do here. She was absolutely right when she talked about how positive and social an experience it can be. It’s been a real joy, as well as added some important structure and schedule to my week.

And, of course, the arrival of my first full year as a Canadian resident meant that I got to celebrate my first anniversary as a Canadian resident. I paid my taxes! Let me tell you, it was a slightly confusing and esoteric experience, but it was also one of those mundane, humdrum things that confirms and validates you. Though I didn’t get to throw a party for that anniversary, I did get to enjoy my birthday celebrations before the pandemic really hit. My partner surprised me with a trip to the not-quite-remote-but-definitely-secluded Gibsons, on the quiet British Columbia coastline, which was the best birthday gift anyone’s ever given me and a chance to see more of the rocky, forested, mountainous fringes of a place I’ve fallen so in love with. Before Vancouver closed down, I was also able to collect more than a dozen people (representing five different nationalities!) together in a brewery and then a restaurant, something that now feels like an extremely alien concept. For some of us in our friend group, it’s the last memory we have of coming together and being in the same space. That gives it a pronounced poignancy, a bittersweet quality.

Finally, I’d like to share two more things with you. The first is particularly peculiar and personal: I found my wizard. After drafting this piece last summer, then sharing it in the autumn, a few suggestions led me not straight to my goal, but ultimately down the right path. The game that I was thinking of is called The Tomb of Drewan and I very much doubt that anyone, anywhere is likely to have heard of it. It’s thirty-nine years old this year and it was distributed by a publisher in Berkshire, not so far from where I grew up. It only took me three and a half decades to see what it looks like in colour.

Tracking down this game was a softly satisfying experience. It’s exactly as I remember. Everything makes sense. Reading through the manual reminds me of how difficult it was to try and understand this thing through a monochrome monitor, though I also think it was likely way too complex for the child I was. I don’t think I ever got anywhere. I don’t think I ever could have. But I at least know that my memory has served me well. That wizard was as real as could be.

The second thing is something about my own missing year, something that has also resurfaced in my memory as we’ve plodded through 2020. In the long, dark winter months, in the unstructured days and the collapsing weeks, I’ve been transported back to the early 2000s and to a time that now feels very familiar. Here's what that was like.

I’d been writing professionally for a few years, comfortably and competently, while still living in suburban Hampshire. As publishing moved from magazines to the internet, my work began to dry up, my options narrowed and, honestly, I didn’t respond to this shift by producing my best material. I also didn’t know what to do about all this change, becoming directionless and unsure. I didn’t yet have the confidence to take some of the larger steps that I eventually did and, instead, somewhere in all that I began to move backward. I struggled to find work. I slept the strangest hours. I was frustrated, but it also didn’t matter nearly enough to me because also, I was no longer motivated.

I have memories of waking up at all kinds of times of day and night. Of not knowing where to go. Of running out of things to take photographs of, after looking at the same local sights over and over. It was like living at the bottom of a well, with a tiny, distant view of the world and no handholds for climbing out. I wasted time because I had time to waste, something I deeply regret now, and I became crabby, unhealthy and inward-looking. I was far from my best.

The last time I was in England I found myself going through old things from the early 2000s. I found many of the books I read, a great deal of writing I’d done and, in particular, a lot of my old RPG notes. A lot of old RPG notes, an absolute wealth of work that far exceeded anything I’d done outside of any work except that on Paranoia. I’ve written before about my roleplaying past and how I have fond memories of it, but I had completely forgotten exactly how much material I had collected together. I had so many biographies that I’d indexed them. I was starting to form an encyclopedia of everything I’d done, just so that I could find and reference the things I needed.

I had also read so much, which both prepared me for my degree and began to make me a better writer. I’d mostly stopped reading in my mid-teens and this was a new spurt of interest that led me toward many of the tastes and preferences I have today. I began to develop my fiction and non-fiction writing styles and I developed an interest in non-fiction that had paid me back a thousandfold.

I was building a new me.

I see now that I didn’t lose a year. I was certainly caught in a swamp of sorts, struggling to make progress, but the experiences I had during that time still mattered. They didn’t matter right away and they didn’t matter in any way that seemed at all obvious to me at the time, but they helped to shape me and to guide me, to show me both what I wanted and, certainly, what I didn’t want. If I had the chance to repeat it, I’d for sure live that missing year differently. I’d live it so much better, so much wiser and so much more fruitfully, but I can at least see it now as not the waste I long thought that it was.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that, some time in the future, you may look back on 2020 and find your successes, your satisfaction, even your strength. I don’t mean to disregard anyone’s suffering or sadness, your feelings are valid and the pain, loss and difficulties you’ve encountered are very real. I don’t much like people who dismiss the feelings of others and I apologise if I’ve been too glib. I think a past version of myself needed to read something like this, a long time ago, and I only want to give them, you or anyone who might see this, hope for the future, a few reasons to be optimistic and, very importantly, a reminder to celebrate yourself.

Happy 2021. You made a difference. You always have.

[icyradio]

⋮ ❄ ї𝐜𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐨: THIS WEEKS HOT GOSSIP

DUBAI DENIES THAT R.KELLY HAS A SHOW OUT THERE AND THAT HE WASN’T INVITED TO MEET THE ROYAL FAMILY.

Seems like #RKelly wasn’t invited to perform or meet the royal family after all.  According to The Associated Press, Dubai’s government said that singer R. Kelly has no planned concert and has not been invited by the Dubai royal family.  In a statement, it said, “Authorities in Dubai have not received any request for a performance by singer R. Kelly nor are there any venues that have been booked.” It also added that R. Kelly “has not been invited by the Dubai royal family for a performance.” R.Kelly’s lawyer responded back to The Associated Press saying, “Mr. Kelly had a signed contract with a legitimate promoter, and any information that was included in the motion to travel was from that contract. We did not say he was invited by The royal family, but the contract did provide that he would make himself available to meet with them.”

LUPE FIASCO EXPOSES ATLANTIC RECORDS FOR TRYING TO MAKE HIM USE GHOST WRITERS. 

Rapper Lupe Fiasco has slammed his record label, Atlantic Records for attempting to strip artists of their creative identity and control. Lupe alleges that the label wanted him to use ghostwriters and wanted him as far removed from the creative process as possible. “They hit this wall where it’s like, ‘We don’t want what you really bringin,’ and Atlantic’s so filthy with the sh*t- it’s that they would turn around and have a team of writers, a team of producers waiting for you. So once you go through the meeting, they strip away all your esteem. They strip away all your confidence and your own work. They send you right to the studio with the hot producer of the time, with the creative team and the writers – and they got whole songs waiting on you. And for some n*ggas they even got they raps waiting on you. You won’t believe the phone calls I got in the middle of the night from n*ggas talkin’ ’bout, ‘Man, won’t you come into the studio, but let me write all your sh*t'," he said speaking to the camera. He then continued: “I mean, I wouldn’t wanna give that to you, like as a critic or whatever. I wouldn’t wanna be like, ‘Oh, I got this dope ass song, it’s gon’ be huge, it’s gon’ be all over the radio. I’m finna sell a bunch of records, the video finna be crazy – but I ain’t have sh*t to do with it.’ That’s a decision where you think about, ‘Man, do I really wanna be a part of something I really ain’t a part of just to appease- you know?’ And I’m not really finna get paid off of it, because I ain’t got nothing to do with it. I’m not finna get no real publishing off of it. I’m not finna have any equity in the song. But if I do it, I’ma be able to go on tour as long as the song is hot. And maybe I can open up for this person, or jump on this dude’s tour…”

MALLY MALL ARRESTED AFTER HOME RAID FOR EXOTIC FOR ANIMALS.  

Check this out! This Love & Hip Hop star and producer was under investigation for trafficking of exotic animals. The investigation led to a raid at Mally Mall’s home in Encino, California which he ended up getting arrested. According to #TMZ, officers served a search warrant Wednesday morning in connection with exotic animals trafficking investigation. Mally Mall is apparently known for having exotic animals. He shows off his wild cat named Cleo, and his monkey named Bubbs on his Instagram account. This ended up catching the eye of law enforcement. Mally Mall's cotton-top Tamarin monkey and sevral cat were seized during the raid. It is illegal to have a monkey as a pet in California without a permit, according to a spokesman for the department of fish and wildlife.

HOLLYWOOD UNLOCKED'S JASON LEE GETS SLAMMED FOR POSTING SINCE-DELETED PHOTO OF BEYONCE AND JAY-Z'S TWINS, BLUE IVY.

Hollywood Unlocked's Jason Lee got slammed over social media Wednesday for allegedly "leaking" a photo of Beyoncé and Jay Z's daughter and twin boys."Jason Lee leaked these pictures of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s children," one Twitter user wrote. "Who leaks pictures of kids?" "This is the same man that said Ariana Grande made Pete Davidson kill himself," the Twitter user added, presumably mistaking Davidson for Grande's ex Mac Miller, who died by suicide in September 2018. "He is sick in the head." "Oh, Bey is about to sue his a**," another Twitter user added. "We know Bey is not to be messed with when it comes to her privacy!!!" While most social media users acknowledged the children's physical similarities to their parents, others questioned who was at fault for the photo's likely unauthorized release. The picture, which was credited by Hollywood Unlocked to another Instagram account known as Freeish Media, clearly looked like a photograph taken of a framed picture hanging on a wall. With the glare of what looks like a ceiling light, commenters quickly pointed out that "someone is getting sued." "Whoever took this picture is in for some trouble if the ok didn’t come from Hov and Bey," one commenter wrote on the Hollywood Unlocked Instagram post. Since the backlash of the photo's publication, the photo has been deleted off of Hollywood Unlocked's Instagram page. Both Beyoncé and Jay Z have been highly protective of the privacy of their three children. While eldest child Blue Ivy has made multiple public appearances with her parents, pictures of her are rarely shared on social media. The last picture the Lemonade singer posted of her daughter was in January, comparing a picture of seven-year-old Blue Ivy to herself, saying: "Someone made this comparison of me at age 7 and Blue at age 7. My baby is growing up." Beyoncé first debuted her twin boys Sir Carter and Rumi in July 2017 with a picture similar to her pregnancy announcement. Since then, the public has only seen the youngest Carters only a handful of times.

[orderoftheavengers]

Slytherin Hart

Summary: School newspaper journalist Christine Everhart is the daughter of Rita Skeeter and a half-Veela man

House: Slytherin

Species: 3/4 Human, 1/4 Veela

Blood Status: "Halfbreed"

Wand: Maple, 10 inches, Veela hair core

Broom: Moontrimmer (good for spying from above)

Patronus: Swan

Specialties: Muggle Studies, Ancient Runes, Aparating, Concealment, Divination, Charms  

Sorting: Christine is not in Slytherin because she's another "mean blonde."

This is not another Pansy Parkinson. Christine Everhart is in Slytherin because of the extremes to which she'll go to get her stories (sleeping with Tony Stark, who she usually dislikes), her competitive personality, and her draconic expression of her beliefs. Let it be noted that the Hat very seriously considered Hufflepuff, due to Christine's near-psychotic work ethic and clear devotion to social justice. Even her surname, Everhart, sounds Hufflepuff-y. But in the end, Slytherin won out, because the extremes to which she'll go to succeed often transcend from "hard work" into "cunning" and "any means" territory.

But, Christine does care about social justice. If you look past her bitchy makeup and banter with Pepper, you'll notice that nearly every news story she does involves serious social issues. She is genuinely p*ssed at Tony Stark when she thinks that he has sold weapons to terrorists. She tells Tony "You have some nerve showing up here!" and he at first assumes she's mad about him dumping her, only to find she's talking about the weapons he didn't realize had been sold behind his back. Christine couldn't care less about dating Tony.

So why was she provoking Pepper with her "doing his laundry" comment? Why do you think a journalist slept with Tony Stark in the first place? And what was Christine doing just before Pepper showed up? Christine was poking around the Stark Castle, trying to get into places she wasn't allowed. She banged Tony to get juicier info  for her story (and yeah, because he's Tony Stark and he's sexy, even if he is insufferable). Then she provoked Pepper to get some extra gossip on those rumors about just how close the Slytherin playboy was with his Hufflepuff muggleborn secretary.

At the final press conference, Christine cunningly provokes Tony into revealing his identity as Iron Man. ("...I never said you were a superhero." "Oh. Uh, good, because that would be outlandish and...um....fantastic.")

Many of Christine's further appearances (in DVD extras) involve her tackling more social issues, but always with a heavy dose of Slytherin competitiveness and occasionally sadism. For example, her "shocking" interview with

her "shocking" interview with Scott Lang

Basically, she has the devotion to work and justice of a Hufflepuff, the ambition and cunning of a Slytherin, and Ravenclaw's thirst for knowledge. The only House she won't set one foot into is Gryffindor, with her obvious disdain for that brand of "heroes." (She's pretty anti-war, the more one thinks about it.) Still, her Slytherin traits seem to win out.

Being in Slytherin has given Chrstine ample access controversial classmates to harass and seduce for interviews, like fellow Slytherins Tony Stark and Scott Lang. It's also helped her make connections with (shady) people and companies that furthered her career.  

The Hat will close by reminding everyone that Merlin was both a Slytherin, and a Muggle-rights activist. (Word of God by J.K. herself!) 

Background:

After Hermione Granger ruined Rita Skeeter's career in England, the illegal animagus stowed away on an airplane in beetle form and migrated to the States, where she found easy work with a number of unbiased Muggle news programs for both the Right and Left. Here in America, she met and married a human/Veela hybrid named Avis Everhart. Christine Talladega Everhart was the couple's only child, before Skeeter's husband left her for a younger man.

After the divorce, Rita Skeeter and her daughter moved back to England, where Skeeter somehow bribed someone into giving her her job back at the Daily Prophet. Christine attended Hogwarts, but by that point had already acquired an American accent from her U.S. origin.

Christine inherited a catty bitchiness from both parents. Her Veela nature made Christine prone to being seductive yet temperamental. However, being a "halfbreed" gave Christine a sense of social justice, hence her interest in reporting on important social topics like Tony's weapons and the Avengers' Civil War Drunken Quidditch Brawl. Even in her pursuit of truth and justice however, Christine was more than willing to put her journalism on pause to seduce or tase someone.

Patronus: 

Swans are known for elegant exteriors and extremely nasty tempers. But specifically, their tempters tend to stem from protecting their nests. Christine is a bitch, but more often than not it's her moral grounds she's being a bitch about.

How Many Veelas We Got in this School Anyhow?

Hogwarts currently has a small handful of part-Veela studnets. In addition to Christine, there is also Sharon Carter, who utilizes her Veela charms in her esponiage; and of course, Bill and Fleur's three kids.

Sharon Carter does not like Christine, because Christine's job poses a direct threat to Sharon's. Sharon is an undercover agent, and she doesn't want a journalist who specializes in criticizing government practices coming near her. Sharon uses her Veela charms in her esponiage, completely the opposite of Christine's more straightforward seduction. Mostly, Sharon is pissed at Christine for posting a photo of that kiss with Steve Rogers, enraging all of Steve's fans and turning half the school to hiss at Sharon when she walks down the hall and occassionally throw frogs (chocolate and real) at her.

The Weasley kids on the other hand quite like Christine. As their mother's children, they enjoy the spotlight, and as Weasleys, they are eager to provide Christine with juicy gossip as part of larger planned schemes and pranks.

Things Christine Everhart has Exposed to the Public:

Provoked Pepper Potts into revealing her feelings for Tony

Provoked Tony into revealing he was the Iron Wizard

Caught photograph evidence of Peter Parker’s Emo Dance around the Great Hall—and remember that in the wizarding world, photo evidence is basically video evidence

Posted a picture of Steve Rogers kissing Sharon Carter in the school paper, causing outrage

Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers have been changing out much faster with Christine now at Hogwarts

Notes:

I'm a fan of Christine Everhart, and think she is a character who deserves more credit. And apparently, she played the mom in that "Talladega Nights" movie.

[perfectdocument]

Voter Id Card, How to Apply It?

How to get a Voter ID? All you need to know !

A Voter ID Card is an Elector's Photo Identity Card that enables the Indian residents to make a choice and is given by the Election Commission of India. This character confirmation permits the Indian residents to practice their privileges to take part in the majority rule cycle of choosing a Government.

Aside from empowering the citizens to practice their privileges, the card likewise satisfies different goals like filling in as a personality evidence that shields against appointive acts of neglect and other deceitful exercises. Pretty much every other distinguishing proof approval in the nation, beginning from banking to purchasing a house is affirmed through a Voter ID card.

Qualification for a Voter ID Card

The candidate applying for a Voter ID Card needs to satisfy the qualification models.

The candidate should be a reputable resident of India.

The age of the candidate should be 18 years or more.

The candidate needs to have a lasting inhabitant address.

Document needed to be submitted for a Voter ID Card

During the time spent applying for a Voter ID Card, the candidate needs to present these archives.

Identification Proof: An ID Proof of a candidate can be his bank passbook, Aadhar Card, PAN Card, or understudy ID Card.

Photo: Passport size photos.

Address Proof: In a location verification, the candidate can present a copy of his/her power charge, phone charge, house charge receipt, bank passbook, and so forth

Application Process for a Voter ID Card

The Online Method:

The candidate needs to visit the site of the Election Commission.

Snap on the connection of the National Voter's Service Portal (NSVP).

Select the fitting choice for another Voter ID Card and apply for the enlistment interaction.

An online Form 6 will show up, which should be filled in subtleties.

Supporting records and photographs ought to be transferred.

A reference number will be given after the interaction.

The Offline Method:

The candidate needs to visit the close by State Election Office.

Request Form 6 from the regarded specialists.

Top off every one of the fundamental subtleties in Form 6 accurately and cross-check every one of the parts.

Supporting reports and photos ought to likewise be submitted.

Submit Form 6 with different archives to the separate counter of the Election Office.

Elector ID Cards will be given after the confirmation cycle is finished.

The Semi-Offline Method:

The candidate needs to visit the site of the Election Commission.

Snap on the connection of the National Voter's Service Portal (NSVP).

Apply for the enlistment cycle of another Voter ID Card.

Fill every one of the subtleties in Form 6 with the necessary supporting records and photos.

Submit Form 6 and different records in the close by Election Office.

The connections can likewise be submitted to the Election Office by post.

The Election Office will check every one of the subtleties and reports presented by the candidate after which it will give the Voter ID Card.

Voter  ID Card Tracking Process:

After the candidate has applied for a Voter ID Card, he can follow the situation with a similar on the web. The interaction is recorded in subtleties underneath for a speedy reference:

The candidate needs to visit the site of the National Voters Service Portal (NSVP).

Snap and track the application status for enrolment.

Enter the reference number or affirmation receipt number to follow the status.

The status will be shown after the number has been entered.

The Government of India has as of late dispatched a site to care for all the Voter ID data, and candidates can follow every one of the essential subtleties from that point. As the application cycle is finished, a candidate can check the status through the method referenced above on the web.

The parts of the application status can likewise be followed through SMS dependent on the SMS organization and SMS number of a specific state. There is likewise a complementary helpline number that engages various inquiries of the candidates with respect to the Voter ID Card.

Besides, the candidates can likewise visit the close by Election Commission Office actually to get every one of the important insights about the application status. These are a portion of the actions that will assist the candidates with knowing the current status of their Voter ID Card in the event that they are not getting it on schedule.

Importance of a Voter ID Card:

Casting a Vote

The Voter ID Card is a useful asset that is intended to engage the residents to make a choice for the Government and exercise their central rights. This constituent card is significant in setting and changing stories of the country. Since each vote checks, one can respect it to shape the eventual fate of your country and its compatriot, To practice the option to cast a ballot, it is required to hold a Voter ID Card in the given supporters of the name being enrolled on the discretionary rundown,

Appointive Registration in Non-Domicile State

A Voter ID Card is similarly fundamental in enrolling a candidate's name in the appointive rundown of a state which isn't their residence state. This is vital for occurrences when an individual has chosen to move somewhere else for work or instruction purposes. It causes them to select their names in the appointive rundown of the neighborhood body electorate or the region.

ID Proof

The Voter ID Card fills in as personality confirmation to an Indian resident who needs to practice their privileges during the political decision measure. This personality evidence is likewise legitimate for a few different workplaces and foundations where distinguishing proof reports are required. In India, a large portion of the Government worked organizations like banks, protection workplaces, guarantee organizations, credit establishments request that the candidate outfit individual ID subtleties like a Voter ID Card.

Key Takeaway:

Elector ID Card is a fundamental distinguishing proof report that causes the resident to get acknowledgment and convey their major obligation of making a choice. In a popularity based nation, casting a ballot is the essential way to choose the Government and fills in as an establishment in building the country. There are a couple of significant things that residents ought to know about while applying for a Voter ID Card.

The candidate for a Voter ID Card should be of 18 years or more old enough. This causes him/her to get lawful position to make a choice.

The individual applying for a Voter Card shouldn't be insane or monetarily bankrupt.

People ought to apply for Voter ID Cards just through the authority site of the Government.

Every one of the fundamental subtleties filled in the application structure should be right similar to spelling, address, date of birth, and others. The data outfitted should be genuine lawfully and not false.

Could NRI's made a choice through Voter ID Card?

The Election Commission of India has presented the privilege to the Non-inhabitant Indians to project votes in India. The NRI's should be available genuinely in the country in their neighborhood electorate to make a choice. There is no way to bring this whole interaction distantly through the web. Presently NRI's can apply both on the web and disconnected on the off chance that they are available in India and get their Voter ID gave.

How to re-apply for a Voter ID Card in the event that it is lost or lost?

A Voter Card is the most principal ID archive gave by the Election Commission for the benefit of the Government. In the event that, a resident has lost or lost the Voter Card; they need to apply for it through the on the web or disconnected system. The candidate either needs to get Form EPIC-002 or download a duplicate. In the wake of topping off the important subtleties and submitting different archives, a reference number will be given. After the check from the constituent office, the candidate will be advised about gathering the copy Voter ID Card.

[sciencespies]

How the Revolutionary Thinker Alexander von Humboldt Helped to Create the Smithsonian

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-the-revolutionary-thinker-alexander-von-humboldt-helped-to-create-the-smithsonian/

How the Revolutionary Thinker Alexander von Humboldt Helped to Create the Smithsonian

For the last five years, Ximena Velez-Zuazo has been monitoring the playful antics of a colony of Humboldt penguins living on a breakwater off the central coast of Peru. The embankment was built to diffuse the energy of the waves to protect the coastline, but quite unexpectedly, Velez-Zuazo says, it became home to a thriving colony of Humboldt penguins. Because this species is endangered in Peru, finding colonies that are doing well is critical for increasing their chances of survival. According to Velez-Zuazo, Humboldt penguins typically reproduce either once or twice a year and lay one or two eggs each time, depending on the health of the colony. On this artificial reef, she says, “we’re truly surprised and very happy to report nesting activity twice a year and that the penguins are laying two eggs. And now they’re becoming a solid colony of over a thousand penguins.”

Velez-Zuazo is the marine managing director of the Biodiversity Monitoring and Assessment Program at the Smithsonian Conservation and Biology Institute’s Center of Conservation and Sustainability. The penguin she studies and the habitat where they live, the Humboldt Current, which runs along the coast of Chile and Peru, are named after the 19th-century Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who is credited as the first person to see and report these penguins in Lima in the early 1800s.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C., Humboldt, a great influencer of American art and cultural identity, is the subject of the special exhibition “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture,” which goes on view September 18 when the museum reopens after being shuttered for the past 20 weeks due to the global pandemic.

Between the 1820s and 1850s the charismatic von Humboldt wrote more than 36 books and 25,000 letters to his friends, prominent scholars, artists, writers and scientists around the globe. He was a world traveler, having set foot on four continents, a progressive thinker who defended the autonomy of America’s Native populations and as a staunch abolitionist, condemned the country’s original sin of slavery. He was an exemplary scholar of true Democracy and gave full-throated support to the great American experiment of self-governance. By the time he died in 1859 at the age of 89, his scholarship in astronomy, botany, geology, mineralogy and zoology would seal his credentials as one of the Age of Enlightenment’s brightest minds. His scientific endeavors and intellectual pursuits formed a legacy that through the twists and turns of international influence lead a pathway straight to the founding in 1846 of the Smithsonian Institution. The organization would become a national repository for the collection of specimens, artifacts and artworks; and its scientists, researchers, historians, curators and educators would advance the Institution’s mission to “increase and diffuse knowledge.”

In 2007 when a gas company was constructing a breakwater in Peru, workers noticed two Humboldt penguins hanging out. Before long, a colony had grown by the hundreds.

(Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

This type of colonization is rare for penguins, so Smithsonian researchers are studying why penguins are thriving in this unlikely man-made habitat.

(Ximena Velez-Zuazo, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

Humboldt penguins, which have white c-shaped patches of feathers on their heads, are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

(Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

“We’re truly surprised and very happy to report nesting activity twice a year and that the penguins are laying two eggs.” says the Smithsonian’s Ximena Velez-Zuazo. “And now they’re becoming a solid colony of over a thousand penguins.”

(Ximena Velez-Zuazo, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

“Here at the modern-day Smithsonian, men and women continue to study across the breadth and depth of every branch of knowledge that Alexander von Humboldt pursued,” says senior curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, who created the exhibition. “The Smithsonian has art museums, science museums, history museums, cultural museums, libraries, archives, observatories, conservation and biological centers, all founded on Humboldt’s principles.” While the name Smithsonian evokes the postcard image of the red sandstone Castle building and the handful of nearby museums and galleries that line the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in fact, the Institution is a global influencer with outposts in hundreds of states around the U.S. and countries around the world.

The Smithsonian’s global reach, from coordinating maritime archeology throughout the African diaspora, to monitoring forests in 27 countries, to learning from indigenous communities in the Arctic, to studying penguins in Peru demonstrates Humboldt’s continued relevance. SAAM’s exhibition features nearly a dozen experts from across today’s Smithsonian whose work can be linked back to Humboldt. A series of audio interviews, accompanied by captivating in-the-field photographs, plays on a large-scale looping projection.

Notably, the projection also expands the story being told in the exhibition by incorporating numerous voices that would have been largely excluded in Humboldt’s day, when science, art, exploration, scholarship, and the public sphere writ large fell under the purview of affluent white men.

Since 2014, the Slave Wrecks Project has fostered a network of researchers in West Africa (above: archaeological survey and training in Dakar).

( NMAAHC, Susanna Pershern, National Park Service)

Ken Stewart, founder of Diving With a Purpose, a partner of the Slave Wrecks Project, poses with instructors and students in Biscayne National Park, Florida.

(Diving with a Purpose)

Jaco Boshoff, Iziko Museums of South Africa, on the site of the São José wreck in Cape Town, South Africa. Artifacts from this ship are on view at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

(Jonathan Sharfman)

The remains of America’s last slave ship the Clotilda is being studied in Alabama, where many of the residents of Africatown are descendants of the Africans who were trafficked aboard this ship.

(NMAAHC, Alabama Historical Commission)

Curator and historian Mary Elliott (second from left) and the museum’s Fleur Paysour (second from right) visit with members of the Africatown community in 2019.

(NMAAHC, Alabama Historical Commission)

Along with Ximena Velez-Zuazo, the biologist studying Humboldt penguins, the projection features forester and ecologist Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, geologist Liz Cottrell, science educator and graphic artist Sofia Elian and historian Mary Elliott.

As a fierce abolitionist, Humboldt’s writings over the first half of the 19th century included repeated, forceful denunciations of slavery, which he called “the most important evil which afflicts humanity.” Leading abolitionist newspapers like Frederick Douglass’s North Star and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator published Humboldt’s letters on this subject. Humboldt’s insistence of the innate equality of all people refuted white supremacy in all its manifestations: “we also reject the disagreeable assumption of superior and inferior peoples. . . there are no races which are more noble than others. All are equally entitled to freedom,” Humboldt wrote in 1845.

Highlighting the humanity of enslaved people is inherent in the work of Mary Elliott, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, who is on the International Leadership Team of the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), a network of researchers and institutions that looks at the global story of slavery through maritime archeology. The SWP searches for the wreckage of ships that carried enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, literally bringing this history to the surface. Elliott leads the project’s efforts in Africatown, Alabama, and in Saint Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and works closely with their local communities. “Whether it’s getting people to dig in the dirt, to dive underwater, to look at artifacts, or to do public programming, all of that comes together to really help people think more deeply about this history and understand why it matters,” says Elliott.

Alexander von Humboldt believed in the interconnectedness of all living things, a radical concept he called the “unity of nature.” He was one of the first to identify the negative impact that humans can have on the environment, pinpointing links between deforestation and climate change as early as 1800. Work like this is carried on by Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute with a joint appointment at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and the leader of the Ecosystems and Climate Program for the ForestGEO network.

“ForestGEO stands for Forest Global Earth Observatory,” says Anderson-Teixeira, “and we are a global collaboration of researchers studying forests all over the world. We currently have 69 sites in 27 countries, and in total we monitor more than 6 million trees.” What, exactly, does it mean to monitor a tree? “We go to every tree in that forest larger than one-centimeter diameter breast height, so a little larger than your thumb. Those stems are all marked, mapped and identified to species. And then we come back every five years and record which ones have died or newly recruited, and we remeasure the diameters.” These efforts yield critical information about our planet and its future. “Forests are incredibly important for regulating the Earth’s climate. ForestGEO allows us to not only understand forests and how they’re changing, but how we can best conserve them and use them to help protect Earth’s climate system in the coming decades,” says Anderson-Teixeira.

“We are a global collaboration of researchers studying forests all over the world,” says Anderson-Teixeira. “We currently have 69 sites in 27 countries, and in total we monitor more than 6 million trees.”

(Kristina Anderson-Teixiera)

“We go to every tree in the forest,” says Kristina Anderson-Teixeira. “Those stems are all marked, mapped and identified to species. And then we come back every five years and record which ones have died or newly recruited, and we remeasure the diameters.”

(Kristina Anderson-Teixiera)

Humboldt’s quest to understand our planet did not stop at its surface—he traced Earth’s history down to its core. At the turn of the 19th century, Humboldt embarked on a five-year expedition of South America. He was particularly drawn to the volcanic chain of mountains in the Andes, home to all of the highest volcanoes in the world. As Eleanor Harvey notes, Humboldt’s “exuberant descriptions of smoking and rumbling volcanoes lent an air of excitement to his scientific observations.” From these observations, Humboldt formulated a theory about the connection between volcanic and seismic activity, “beginning to discern what would later become the theory of plate tectonics,” adds Harvey.

Liz Cottrell, a geologist at the National Museum of Natural History, studies volcanic rocks and works with the Global Volcanism Program, which keeps track of the names, locations and eruption histories of all of the volcanoes on the planet. Like Humboldt, Cottrell is “interested in the earth under the volcano—way, way under the volcano,” she explains. “Humans have no way of getting that deep. We rely on volcanoes to bring us rocks from the interior of the planet. I travel to volcanoes to get the samples that volcanoes are bringing to the surface. I can bring them back to the Smithsonian and do analysis to understand how our planet works.”

“I travel to volcanoes to get the samples that volcanoes are bringing to the surface.” says Smithsonian geologist Liz Cottrell. “I can bring them back to the Smithsonian and do analysis to understand how our planet works.”

(Liz Cottrell)

Just like Cottrell, Anderson-Teixeira, and Velez-Zuazo, Humboldt studied the planet’s geology and ecosystems by putting himself in the field. Humboldt conveyed his scientific observations using data visualization that was groundbreaking for his time. His Naturgemälde, a map detailing plant geography at various elevations, has been called the very first infographic. Sofia Elian is a graphic designer and artist at the Smithsonian Science Education Center who, like Humboldt, communicates scientific concepts through art, creating illustrations for projects like the Smithsonian Science for the Classroom program.

“I work with curriculum developers on scientific illustrations, taking science and interpreting it for younger students to understand,” Elian explains. “As a graphic designer, it’s kind of a large umbrella.” While she creates illustrations for various projects, including games and simulations, “I really like botanical illustration,” she says. “I’ll go out to different gardens and draw the bees and flowers and trees.” Humboldt also crafted many botanical illustrations during his extensive travels, communicating the science he witnessed first-hand through art he created with his own hand.

When Humboldt traveled to England in 1790, he met a young chemist named James Smithson. The two spent time together later in Paris in 1814 and Smithson joined Humboldt’s global network of revolutionary thinkers trying to live up to the lofty goals of growing and disseminating knowledge as a practice of the age of enlightenment. Upon his death, Americans were pleased to learn that Smithson’s will gifted his considerable fortunes “to found at Washington, an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum September 18, 2020 through January 3, 2021. For admission to the museum, visitors must sign up for free, timed entry passes. The Smithsonian is amplifying women’s stories and accomplishments with support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.

#Nature

[districofcolumbiaprelawland-blog]

2020 Developments In State Protest Laws

By Jessica Bride, George Washington University Class of 2022

June 17, 2020

Across the United States, it is likely that every individual knows of a protest happening in their area or at least in their state. With the right to free speech at the core of America’s protections from the government, protests remain a critical way to exercise that right. In 2013, the Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc. was founded to “to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” after Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted [1].On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd was killed due to the use of excessive force by a police officer [2]. His death highlights the history of enormous discretion and frequently unchecked power within police forces, especially as the public notices the relationship between inadequate police conduct and the skin color of victims.

While anti-racism protests have occurred in the past, the American public has now protested in all fifty states in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Even other countries have held their own peaceful protests to demand justice and participate in the movement.The American and global efforts strengthen Black Lives Matter protests as a significantcivil rights movement. Still, U.S. states have been proposing new bills that restrict one’s ability to protest, change the penalties for protesting, and other consequences [3]. Depending on when you access this article, the International Center for Not-For-Profit Lawmay have more current information about these laws on their tracker, which they created in 2016 [3].As nationwide protests continue, it is helpful to review the proposed changes since the beginning of 2020.

January 2020

22nd: Tennessee’s bill to create new penalties for protestors who conceal their identity was recalled[4].

28th: Oregon’s bill to implement harsher penalties for protesters who conceal their identity, whether partially or fully, was defeated/expired [5]. If passed, protestors with the intention to riot could have been punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine [3].

29th: South Carolina’s bill to penalize protestors based upon their affiliation with campuses they protest on is currently pending [6]. Protests include students, community members, and even people who do not live where they are protesting. If passed, this bill would create new penalties for protesters on school and college campuses who are not students so even faculty and staff would be at risk [3].

February 2020

6th: South Dakota’s pending bill would change provisions regarding emergency management, specifically add “disorderly conduct” and “protests” to cases where the Governor can suspend state agency rules [7].

12th: Rhode Island currently has a pending bill that would penalize people participating in protests and parades for concealing their identities with protective equipment and masks or disguises [8].

24th: Alaska’s bill establishing mandatory sanction for campus protestors is currently pending [3]. The University of Alaska would not be allowed to take official action on most public policy matters, instead assume public policy neutrality [9].

24th: Minnesota’s bill to increase the penalties for protests near gas and oil pipelines is pending [3]. If passed, trespass liability and vicarious liability would be created, and it would be a crime to recruit or educate others to trespass or damage such infrastructure [10].

March 2020

6th: New Jersey’s pending bill aims to expand the definition of “riot” to include disorderly conduct that results in property damage or economic loss [3]. However, the state’s current definition for disorderly conduct includes swearing. Protesters would also be responsible for reimbursing property damage and can be charged with a crime if that damage is above two thousand dollars [11].

12th: Alabama’s bill to penalize protest near gas and oil pipelines is currently pending, though it was approved by their Senate [3].It would be a Class A misdemeanor to protest, or trespass, near these places, and if a protestor “injures” or “interferes” with the facility then they could be charged with a Class C felony [12]. If passed, this bill would also penalize photographing and electronically recording at these locations [12].

18th: South Dakota has enacted SB 151 which makes protesting near pipelines and other infrastructures punishable by a year in prison and a two thousand dollar fine if only trespassing occurred [3]. A protestor can be charged with a felony if they cause “substantial interruption or impairment” [13] .

23rd: South Dakota enacted HB 1117 which includes new criminal and civil liability for “incitement to riot” [3]. It is now a Class 5 felony in South Dakota to intend to cause a riot, so protestors risk up to five years in prison and ten thousand in fines [14].

25th: West Virginia enacted HB 4615 which confirms new penalties for protests near gas and oil pipelines [3]. The bill expanded what facilities, specifically those considered “critical infrastructure facilities”, are prohibited for protest as well as vandalism and trespassing [15].

30th: Utah enacted SB 173 which created new criminal penalties for protestors who engage in “disorderly conduct”, from “unreasonable noises” to public inconvenience, that disturbs legislative or other government meetings [3].

June 2020

1st: Mississippi currently has a pending bill to establish two new crimes: “critical infrastructure trespass” and “impeding critical infrastructure” [3].Trespass could be a misdemeanor, but the harshness of a protestor’s penalty will be determined by damage and economic loss [16].

2nd: Louisiana’s bill that would create new penalties for protests near critical infrastructure is pending but has been sent to their Governor for executive approval [17]. Protestors could face felony charges for an increased number of places. If a state of emergency is enacted, then even peaceful protestors can be punished with 3-15 years of imprisonment and a fine between five and ten thousand [17].

5th: New York, concerned about non-resident protestors, has a pending bill that would create two new criminal offenses for non-resident protestors who riot [3]. The new crime, called “Travel to riot in the second degree”, would be a Class E felony, but a Class D felony if in the first degree with increasing monetary fines for both crimes depending on the amount of offenses [18].

________________________________________________________________ Jessica Bride is a rising junior at The George Washington University pursuing degrees in Psychology and Criminal Justice. She is interested in pursuing a career in public service that allows her to conduct research. Along with the social sciences, she is also passionate about creative writing and activism.

________________________________________________________________

[1] Black Lives Matter. “About.” Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc.https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

[2] Emmert, Mark, Hughes, Trevor,and Lorenzo Reyes. “Medical Examiner and Family-Commissioned Autopsy Agree: George Floyd’s Death Was a Homicide.”USA Today, 1 June 2020,https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-findings-released-monday/5307185002/

[3]“US Protest Law Tracker.” International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, 8 June 2020, https://www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/?location=&status=&issue=&date=custom&date_from=2020-01-01&date_to=2020-06-08&type=

[4] Lundberg, Jon. “SB 1750”. Tennessee General Assembly, http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillNumber=SB1750

[5] Oregon. Legislature, 80thGeneral Assembly. HB 4126. Available at. https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2020R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB4126

[6] South Carolina. Legislature, 123rd General Assembly. H 5045. Available at. https://www.scstatehouse.gov/query.php?search=DOC&searchtext=5045&category=LEGISLATION&session=123&conid=28826664&result_pos=0&keyval=1235045&numrows=10

[7] South Dakota. Legislature, 95th State Legislature. HB1288. Available at. https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/66984.pdf

[8] Corvese, Arthur. “H 7543.” https://legiscan.com/RI/text/H7543/2020

[9] Alaska. Legislature, 31st State Legislature. HB 295, Free Speech/Policy Neutral Univ.Available at. http://www.akleg.gov/basis/Bill/Text/31?Hsid=HB0295A

[10] Minnesota. Legislature, 91st State Legislature. HF 3668, Brooklyn Larson’s Law. Available at. https://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/cco/journals/2019-20/J0226067.htm#6509

[11] Dancer, Ronald. “A2853.” https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bills/BillView.asp?BillNumber=A3760

[12] Ward, Cam. “SB 45.” http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/ALISON/SearchableInstruments/2020RS/PrintFiles/SB45-int.pdf

[13] South Dakota. Legislature, 95th State Legislature. SB 151. Available at. https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/69887.pdf

[14] South Dakota. Legislature, 95thState Legislature. H 1117. Available at. https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/69658.pdf

[15] West Virginia. Legislature, 84th State Legislature. HB 4615, West Virginia Critical Infrastructure Protection Act. Available at http://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Text_HTML/2020_SESSIONS/RS/bills/HB4615%20SUB%20ENR.pdf

[16]Bain, Nick. “HB 1243.”http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2020/pdf/HB/1200-1299/HB1243PS.pdf

[17] Zeringue, Jerome. “HB 197”. http://www.legis.la.gov/legis/BillInfo.aspx?s=20RS&b=HB197&sbi=y

[18] Rules, Fall. “A 10603.” https://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A10603&term=2019&Summary=Y&Actions=Y&Text=Y

Photo Credit: “Rally to protect the right to peacefully assemble” by Fibonacci Blue

[benchgenderstudies]

The Unfashionable era of couture models

By Michael Bench, MEP, GCERT

Unrealisitic images of thin runways models pinned to the edges of grocery isle magazine racks are more than an insult to the senses.A Celebrity wrinkle cream on every other page, guaranteed good sex advice despite no guarantee of sex, and top abdominal exercises are constant. Its like the fashion and womens media are as ineffective in personal guidance as the Congresspersons in WashingtonDc.

Year in and year out: the same rhetoric interrupted by new empty nutrient comfort food and new diets.If the female public of America and Europe find  the abandonment of credit limits a peachy reckless therapy; they abided the trickery. Retail therapy they call it; and out in the malls they went. Loyal to their sense of fashion, not reason.Their closets brim full of clothes they don't wear.Sometimes they don't fit by excuse and othertimes;

most other times; the fad diet fed to them on the glossy paper of Cosmopolitan or Vogue; Womans World or Tabloids have them binging exercise one day and clung to the bed in PJs the next.  Diuretics and stimulants all in one. The wealthy mix in the cocaine and the poor find their sack of crack or meth. Women face media manufactured body dissatisfaction as though it should be a norm. Media told them as much in the 80s and 90s' . Female teen body dissatisfaction was so frequent it was considered a norm according to the mainstream media.(Brumberg) As frequent were Macy's ads for overpriced  couture and the latest synthetic body odors from France. Jacques love jism: Odore Mi Spoog'.

People are as lame to buy fitness as they will buy love or sex. Americans throw money at problems and the french are

more than happy to catch the funds; sans ethics. Sans concerns the fashion models ; gullible and or idiotic; will falsely norm small emaciated females the preferential look. We can skip all past the debate whether fashion models instruct eating disorders. They do. It’s a fact. Fashion models of couture and their handlers and designers expect a size no matter the female. Is it not the talent agent determining function and looks already?. The designer designs around the living being. To be alive she will be alotted her figure, not his.  Dare he not say he designs clothes for females and instead for Douglas Fir 2x4s. Lumber has consistent linear physique; Not humans. Are we hearing each other Hedi Slimane and That Corpsy Pilgrim figure.. Whats his name? Oh yeh. Karl Lagerfeld. The guy who achieved a corpse's body to die for before he actually died. I stress a typical rhetoric we hear of models. The young girls say their  role models on the runway have a body to die for; and in small ways that model really is dying for it.  

Little has the united states government done to end the  predatory consumer defining of gender roles of women. Women stay botched in their comfort with self.From religion to fashion. Did I mind if gays were able to be married? No. Did I mind if gays were in the military. Not at all. The evangelical, white  and rapist male constituency in the military is far more a concern than gays could ever be as threats of morality against other personnel.

Still, homosexuality had a concealed secret for the sake of clothing sales and legitimacy not even they would address. GLAAD hasn't raised a finger to denounce haute couture female emaciation.  The haute couture upscale fashion have skeletons in their closet; for 3-4 hours a day. Then the skeletons came out of the closet and design dresses for anorexics they credit themselves for . "Vickie'deSpewdin-Ateagain  by Phillipe So'ure". I suppose a dress could be named in the same way a guitarist names his instrument. Taking credit for a whole person as if to be owned is a distorted sense of identity. A practiced sense of distortion by fashion's stars mad under the hat.  Designers favorite anorexics are the  fit-models. A real coveted secret stored in hospital rooms when out at shows or shopping.  Skeletons, these gay skeleton fashion designers have poor sight as expected. Inside and out neither france or united states wanted to correct. Foolish. Very.

I knew from the start it was OSHA sitting on its ass. Since 2007 I tirelessly addressed it to Edwin Foulke Jr and his successors. At that point, the private sector was continually referred control under the GW Bush administration  OSHA; and US LABOR OIG guilty by association;  refused to update its occupational roles and regulations to meet with the technological and arts products of the time. The predominently homosexual male fashion designer has a 'vision' of beauty  with as excessive a reacharound as Kevin Spacey to child actors. Dresses are built around a model, she doesn't make your expectations .. for a gay male, of a female with a sexual and physical ambivalence toward wellbeing in parallel.  Who knew? In the most extreme cases, being objectified keeps females fed? Legitimately of course. I'm not suggesting a  life lived on cum is a nutrition better than starving to death.

Fashion models have made a mockery of women of their offseason size and many other sizes.  When not living to be on camera, the females were born to have a particular frame. The brain in the frame has an excessive loyalty to her fame that she will allow the public to endure unreasonable envy; the waif is a face of shame. She's the idol for industry: generic Adam Venits, Ed Westwicks, and  Weinsteins want her for  coerced female. A puny sex object  I can't at all suggest Weinstein&Co  effect the fashion industry. A lobby or more is out there that are and have legal liability for endangered minors and onsite work abuse.. Back to the puny sex object:  We're talking about the ease of intimidation and making an ideal of her miniscule frame as a supermodel of sex symbols. And smaller still. She goes along with it; She feels important with little effort except long hours, smirking and getting dressed. Women who live like Barbie dolls. Except; I can't call living at the whim of hair dressers, seamstresses and cosmetics techs personal growth at all. Toxically pampered adults are what fashion models seek employment.For reward,  become industry loyal liars.

In Protection of their fame, we all read the same excuses in the interviews. Regulation can't happen because the Body Mass Index is unreliable, they claim  Did you know that's a lie? In detecting underweight pathology the the Body Mass Index is absolutely appropriate. The Body Mass Index Scale errs only in athletic hypertrophy. It can't guess if excessive mass is from fat or muscle if a persona is of a conditioned state with sufficient strength.  A fashion model determined normal or underweight is likely still to have under conditioned her muscular strength. The role of traditional classism mocks a strong female. Being strong and having tone are two separate matters. A distorted concept of waif is as distant to healthy fit  female as strongman is from male pornstar or male runway model. We're not talking about body building at all. Having a sixpack abs and good muscular definition says nothing about cardio endurance, functional strength or proprioreceptive balance. All three factors make for a good preparation toward competition and survival. No, what we see to be called models are very small specimens of people that require a minimum of resistance exercise for the tone they have'. Good tone under ectomorph low adiposity looks more impressive than the work put into it. But will it save his core in a car accident?

With the designers, these models are the industry's skeletons from the closet. A small body with small muscles will have noticeable yet limited small results. Males of the actual mesomorph and endo mesomorph ( powerlifting) are very big but they don't have lasting tone beyond a week. The methods to achieve that tone are askew from fitness eating and conditioning especially. Most of the people seeking fitness advice are broken people in their goals. They want an athletes' respect before knowing to do the work of merely the active adult promised no assurance of professional sports aspirations.

Models represent a broken truth with advertising health. They aren't it. Media doesn't sell fitness; They sell sex from what was believed a harlequin novel physique. The large burly barbarian soon became a more realistic size, and beyond reasonably anatomical. Remember, our first photographs of what sexual men and women looked like were distorted by the artists illustration. Because of the artists of the model these days, womens and mens senses of normal fitness are still inaccurately portrayed in the wants of the camera.  Magazine covers and any other body in a photograph specialize conditioning as a model. Ss specialized as a body builder for different reasons. As specialized as a downhill mogul skier doing standing vertical box jumps and sprints up stadium stairs. If a fashion model cared about the masochistic effort she put into a runway show, a sensible female with values would be training for marathons some other sport and at least able to fuel fully each day. We see the corrupt gamble of fame without the competition for functional skill. Walking in a straight line with a cold pout is dimwittery.  Life cannot be lived in front of the camera as an ideal. The public are being lied to.

The fashion model's body as prepared for the photographer is only sustainable for days and hours. It's not a daily sustainable body even for the very smallest and leanest of body types. To say otherwise is at most a prospecter of an unreasonable disciplined regiment likely to fail eventually. Definitely more than a young person self identifying a fashionista can manage without advanced study in physiology and biochemistry. Remember, the real miracle stories are driven by compensation.An unusual unhealthy brain chemistry.  Active people are active because of their brain reward system. Lazy on the outside starts with lazy on the inside. The fat brain is a primary affliction slowing weightloss and  weightloss can only remain a goal until such time as an active lifestyle is fulfilled going through the motions til a fit weight. Then starts training or personal dissatisfaction in the truthful letdown.

 In short if there is a point of prospecting a body sculpting supplement for profitable venture, I would expect the entrepreneur would eventually be arrested. The  temptations to dabble in modified methamphetamine derivatives and steroids would run the gamut of possession with intent to deliver charges to practicing medicine without a license from a motel room loaded with synthol-plus in syringes.  The quest to make money becomes a desperate need of money during long searches. Desperation sacrifices ethics and without ethics a freelancer takes advantage of any sucker for better or worse. Habits of easy money die hard even among the best of downtrodden researchers.

An inactive United States government has allowed antidepressant/anxiolytic sales, ambiguous sport supplements , suicide risks , unvetted child endangerment in fashion media, ambivalence of New York state's ill functioning labor department and completely unconcerned with the ongoing pharmaceutical pollution. Such antidepressants leaving 28-37 % of females enter  the water table after excreted from the body resulting in triggered autism genes in frogs and sterility in fish. To purposely  alarm you: those frogs and fish are very much the embryo stages that anti abortion  zealots honk about while passing Planned Parenthood clinics. I'm not saying some antidepressants aren't necessary. Causing their need with a deadbeat OSHA, NIOSH, CDC, and private sector's invalid CFDA indoctrinating children to fraudulent fashion images is gross negligence. The United States government has been deliberately void of ethics since 1998 in the regulation of the fashion model industry.

The Body mass index is appropriate for regulating fashion with the additional caveat of restricting the waif from industry as a liability of her size to be convinced of loyal industry silence. Cara Delevingne knows all about that. By my evaluation  19.2 BMI is the only sufficient  low limit at a frame size of US 8.  Since we haven't seen OSHA make a move on regulating the fashion industry, we know that Dorothy Dougherty either doesn't know anything about current topics or has her hands tied by congress or the president. Since either branch doing something  would evidence a competent government, both parties need to be sorted out. Obama was useless on the matter and so was GW Bush and Clinton.. I'd certainly eject Bob Casey and Pat Toomey. I know those two have no interest in legitimate incumbent clout. Bob Casey has been stagnant since I called on him in 2007. Ask him how much effort his staff put forth researching OSHA and the regulation of fashion model anorexia from February 2014 to July. He didn't even have his secretary's file a GAO research request.

The Executive branch defends anorexic fashion ideology. Neither David Michaels or Edwin Foulke Jr moved on it. Infact. David Michaels wouldn't respond to me at all. How about that? Hey, well, inturn , my turn of disrespect on the united states government and the parties within calls to exempts the entirety of Pennsylvania and Oregon from federal income taxes for ten years. To be subsidized by the democrats and republican House and Senate reelection funds. Don't waste my 10 years, us gov. Disrespect will follow promptly. My disrespect will rewrite the flag. My title has been robbed at the time before France's regulation to put United States in the Free World leader role it taunts now emptily. There's no leaders in that government; Pray do Jong Un cull the garbage in congress dancing about their sugar plums and incumbency dreams for all they only serve themselves.  Whether a healthcare bill could come from Democrats or not, they're a compromised source too stupid to know not to involve republicans. Conservatives can't be salvaged and certainly not while the need for single payer was the only legitimate option.  Lets look toward today.

Trump wants America to be great again. Ok, Regulate fashion immediately per my regulations. Regulate fashion because at a much earlier age this Donald Trump already knew fashion modeling was dangerous for Ivanka.  In cowardice or favor he refused to damn the couture gay designers  at the same time he damned transgender Americans in the military. What is the protection purpose boundary here with anorexia? Its Obvious: the Deliberate oppression of female health with negligent nonfeasance to eliminate a domestic and foreign threat in textile consumerism.

Big Macy's and Nordstrom's Lobby has a big endangerment-of-minors class action lawsuit whether intending to speak up for themselves or not. France's snail is cooked whether they got to regulation before United States or not.    Dr Bryn Austin and Katherine Record may be my cohorts of demanding reasonability. They aren't up to being my  peers  I won't accept merely copy and pasting France's late and ineffective regulation. The models aren't only being hired as undersized. They're being coaxed to remain and become undersized. Haute Couture and any other form of disordered eating or exercise addiction in fashion is the vision of the designer. It's his dysmorphia. Anorexia can occur for other reasons such as over strict-abusive guardianships, distrust,  and over religious parenting. In cases where the minor or young adult doesn't have a sense of secure habitat, she might opt to stop eating. Sexual abuse can cause anorexia and concurrent depression. We have to consider in each case of anorexia nervosa a coresident matter of Narcissist Personality Disorder and Stimulant addiction issues before all else. Without prejudice this differs with Dr. Austin and Katherine Record. They might presume a nonvictim blaming course of approach with statistics presuming a probability of rape or family abuse.  

What is fashion modeling but a pageant. The methods of body modification are as old as the corset but the result is still anti anatomical health.  Mothers with unhealthy perspectives of body perfection cause eating disorders in their daughters surrounding the pageant circuit. One girl was fed tapeworm eggs by her mother, in Mexico,  to cause her to lose weight. The hospital staff delivered all her babies despite finding none of them were human and the pregnancy was a bad case of constipation.

In no way am I saying fashion causes all cases of disordered eating. What Is being charged is in the past 40+ years fashion media and fashion models have engaged in unhealthy behavior and delivered recommendations in interviews for any reader and especially minors to  expect of a fictional body.  Why would the model lie to her fans? That so not nice.

Coin a term "Pretty Little Liars" for prime time , and I retort. Pretty? Couture models and Victoria Secret Angels? On the inside: ugly enough to put a bag on their head and banish from the universe. Expect the same from Las Vegas showgirls vying for top dancer. Prostitutes and well dressed couch surfers short on appetite for intellectual work or its tedious lessons of modesty till and after success.  Where competition and vanity intersect, you'll find damaged goods overwrapped.

------------------------

Michael Bench is an author, athlete, and researcher actively staying abreast of

case law of Gender Anthropology and Sports Medicine.//

(forward to editor)

Dear editor, enclosed is a sour editorial by a premier exercise physiologist demanding the heads of the most recent three

OSHA directors, Elaine Chao , and George Washington University's Milken School for not pressuring David Michaels to promptly

invest time regulation at the time France addressed fashion model thinness. At this time.The parity of France's Ministry of Health  would be

The US Health and Human services Department Secretary.  Former Secretary Price did not respond to me nor has OSHA secretary Dorothy Dougherty since April.  During the Obama administration, NIOSH, GAO, New York Department of Health, New York Department of Labor, Pennsylvania FBI , Governor Wolf , Pennsylvania, AG Kathleen Kane's Office, Eric Schneiderman and Tom Perez made no effort to clarify if in doubt what regulations were being discussed.  The matter of FBI being inept is telling of their own corruption. The Newark FBI were involved in addressing the Johnson and Johnson Morcellator case ; a cancer removal device that actually accidentally circulated cancerous material in the bloodstream after severing it from its original growth area. The FBI's refusal to address the fashion anorexia matter is a clear matter of New York and federal conservative politics allowed to abuse and profiteer on subtle womens abuse.

I consider by the text enclosed the United States government to be a dormant fixture while republicans and democrats prove incapable the basic functions of cabinet duty per the times at hand.  I've been addressing OSHA since 2007. Obama's administration will be indicted for negligence for their victims of duty refusal are still victims as can be said of New York State. M Patricia Smith deliberate circumvented regulation of the fashion industry of 2009 and was promoted to US Labor Solicitor where such calls to regulate likewise were ignored. Without a doubt the terms of promotion rewarded an insider for the abuse of children and exploitation of their appeal to be called ' the next sex symbol' or analog in their superstar models shadow.     M Bench

[ericvick]

Correspondent Products; Lender Eligibility for SBA PPP Loans; Dir. Calabria Said What?

Correspondent Products; Lender Eligibility for SBA PPP Loans; Dir. Calabria Said What?

While in captivity it is important to keep calm. “Many parents are discovering that the teacher was not the problem.” One of the kids next door phoned in a bomb threat to his own mother! Speaking of home life, when I’m in a rascally mood, after my dog eats and wanders off, I will put piece of kibble in his bowl. And he’ll wander back at some point, see the kibble, and think that he missed it the first time and gobble it down. Always amusing. Now I think he’s amused by me, since about every 40 minutes I wander over to the refrigerator or cupboard and look inside to see if I missed anything from 40 minutes earlier that looks appetizing. Nope, nothing magically appears. Good employees rarely magically appear, either, and here’s a fun video from Joe Thompson in Austin, Texas about recruiting. What isn’t fun is the FHFA’s Mark Calabria seeing no evidence of systemic crisis among nonbank servicers, and saying Fannie & Freddie are unlikely to aid mortgage companies as payments dry up. Some would say he’s showing his true colors, others ask if he needs stronger glasses. The MBA’s response is below.

Lender Products and Services

Prelim, a Y-Combinator backed software company, is providing a free version of its SBA Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) online application to community banks and credit unions with less than $10 billion in deposits to do our part to help U.S. small businesses apply and receive federal assistance. Click here to sign-up. Questions should be directed to CEO Heang Chan.

Lenders now have a viable solution to the challenges and limitations around the recent COVID-19 alternative appraisal guidance. The Property Vision app was designed with the Lenders security interests in mind. Appraisal Logistics, a leading provider of appraisal management technology and compliance solutions, has created Property Vision, a mobile friendly web-based solution to guide a Borrower through their interior and exterior inspection. Property Vision promotes social distancing by allowing consumers to answer questions about their property while taking photographs using any web-enabled device equipped with a camera. It automatically collects geocoding information and other metadata to ensure the photographs are current images and develops a detailed report for the appraiser. Property Vision gives borrowers assurance their lender cares about their wellbeing and gives lenders compliant, accurate valuations. There is no app to download and consumers are provided simple instructions that walk them through the process. To learn more, contact Mark Tague. 

We thought 2019 was a wild ride, but we had no idea the chaos 2020 had in store for us. COVID-19 and all of the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic has turned the lending world upside down and we’re all just trying to adjust to our new normal. A new eBook from Maxwell, “Lend from Home: Practical Tips for Remote Mortgage Teams,” is a comprehensive guide for mortgage professionals adjusting to working from home. A must-read for all lending professionals and managers, get your complimentary copy here (no form required).

Congratulations to Annemaria Allen, Founder & CEO of The Compliance Group  named as a “Trailblazer” in Mortgage Women’s Magazine, March/April 2020 edition. She currently sits on the board of directors of at the California MBA and is a proud member of the Women Presidents’ Organization. The Compliance Group (TCG) is an almost 20-year old firm focused on three core services in mortgage banking: Quality control as an outsource solution; compliance, both file level reviews and broader compliance audit work; and, servicing quality control, assuring agency servicing standards are adhered to. Learn more about TCG at TheComplianceGroup.net. 

Looking to sell your loans off faster? TMS is still buying loans on average under seven days! Do you use Encompass? As an Encompass Investor Connect partner, TMS is able to buy your loans even faster and reduce the workload for your post-closing team! Learn more about the benefits of partnering with TMS CAREspondent or bid a tape today at correspondent.themoneysource.com.

A note from Chad Jampedro, President of GSF Mortgage and GO Mortgage: “I would like to take this opportunity to thank our industry partners for their diligence and support during a very challenging March and beginning of April. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of our staff along with our warehouse partners, broker-dealers, realtors, builders, manufactured dealers, title companies, appraisers, notaries, vendor partners, and anyone who assisted our company in funding loans during this time. We are unable to be successful without the partners who support our company. We are in this together. We appreciate all of you, and if we can help you in any way please feel free to reach out at GO Mortgage or contactus@gomortgage.com. Stay safe and healthy.”

Leadership through a crisis begins with taking action. As a 30-year-lender, Stearns Lending continues to support the Wholesale lending community by providing tools to remain competitive and nimble in this environment. SNAP 2.0 provides the ability to leverage the bSNAP digital application and loan tracking tool, forward lock prior to registration, lock for 60 days with a 30-day-price, and initiate all Broker and Lender disclosures with one-click.  Take action, lean on each other and be grateful in these times. Click HERE to learn more about this platform or connect with a Stearns Account Executive.

Property inspections have become increasingly difficult to perform as homeowners shelter-in-place due to the COVID-19 crisis. Land Gorilla has introduced Remote Inspections to aid in the completion of interior and exterior inspections while eliminating in-person contact during the inspection process. Homeowners and other stakeholders work with a Land Gorilla Remote Inspector to validate locations and verify identities using live streaming video. The result is a fast and safe inspection report, allowing homeowners and lenders to overcome major roadblocks in these impacted times. To learn more, visit Land Gorilla.  

Corona, Liquidity, Servicing

Lenders and servicers should familiarize themselves with the definitions of, and differences between, deferral, modification, forbearance, and foregiveness when it comes to not making a mortgage payment or changing the terms. (For example, this article states that Chase is offering them, and that deferral and forbearance are interchangeable. And HUD spells it out.) Payments are delayed, not waived! With forbearance mortgage payments are reduced or suspended for a period a borrower and their servicer agree to, and at the end of that time, the borrower resumes (in theory) making regular payments as well as a lump sum payment or additional partial payments for a number of months to bring the loan current. With the CARES Act, no interest is accrued, nor are any additional fees charged. It is as if time stops for 6 months or 12 months. But everyone knows that no one is going to make three or six mortgage payments all at once. Two is a longshot.

And the big issue is whether any lender can deliver a loan to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac not in forbearance but with a forbearance inquiry or forbearance request. The federal financial institution regulatory agencies, in consultation with state financial regulators, issued a revised interagency statement encouraging financial institutions to work constructively with borrowers affected by COVID-19 and providing additional information regarding loan modifications. The revised statement also provides the agencies’ views on consumer protection considerations.

Ginnie Mae announced that it had approved the inclusion of a servicing advance financing facility under its Acknowledgment Agreement program.  Under its Acknowledgment Agreements, Ginnie Mae has permitted a Note Securitization (NS) structure, which was developed in 2016 and allows for the securitization of servicing cash flows through a trust. This structure has been strongly supported by institutional investors that previously lacked a vehicle for investing in mortgage servicing rights (MSRs). Five of Ginnie Mae’s top 11 Issuers (by February issuance volume) utilize the NS structure. 

As a result of the current transaction, PennyMac Financial Services, Inc. will be able to access financing for servicing advances through the NS trust. This transaction represents the first time that the NS Structure, which was originally designed to provide financing based on the value of the MSRs as a whole, has been expanded to separately finance the advanced payments that a servicer makes in connection with individual loans in its MBS pools. Separate financing for servicing advances under government-insured mortgage lending has been much more difficult for the private market to supply than for conventional loans.

Out of the California MBA comes word from attorney Joe Lynyak (Dorsey & Whitney) about lender and servicer eligibility for an SBA PPP loan. “We have confirmed that many mortgage servicers and some mortgage borrowers can qualify as an SBA-eligible borrower because the SBA is generally following its operating manual for its existing SBA lending programs, which is SBA Manual—SOP 50 10 5(J) (the “Manual”). As a general matter, a business that engages in lending cannot obtain an SBA loan, However, in the section which states categories of ineligible borrowers, the Manual contains an important exception: iii. A mortgage servicing company that disburses loans and sells them within 14 calendar days of loan closing is eligible. Mortgage companies primarily engaged in the business of servicing loans are [eligible]. Mortgage companies that make loans and hold them in their portfolio are not eligible.

“We discussed this exception from the prohibition and were informed by an SBA staff member working on the PPP program that mortgage servicers are clearly eligible, and a smaller universe of mortgage lenders are also eligible. Accordingly, the refusal by a bank to consider a mortgage servicer’s PPP loan application because of ineligibility is incorrect and needs to be explained. Until this gets sorted out, we suggest eligible servicers and mortgage bankers insist that a bank take their applications and commence processing. (Of course, all other qualification criteria apply.)”

The CFPB outlined the responsibility of credit reporting companies and furnishers during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a joint agency policy statement and its own compliance guidance FAQs to facilitate mortgage servicers’ ability to place consumers in short-term payment forbearance programs such as the one required by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). “The compliance statement and FAQs also address flexibility concerning loss mitigation notices, early intervention communications, annual escrow statements, continuity of contacts, pay off statements, and electronic communications with borrowers.”

The Down Payment Resource, a good source of down payment assistance (DPA) programs and first-time homebuyer information, set up a page for DPA program updates and trends.

By the way, readers should know that any news pertaining to “Wells Fargo Funding” is the Correspondent division? WFHM retail’s jumbo purchase is alive and well.

MGIC is temporarily suspending its insuring of investment properties and cash-out refinances, making underwriting and eligibility changes effective for MI applications received on or after May 11, 2020. Until further notice, the following are no longer eligible for mortgage insurance: investment properties and cash-out refinance transactions. “Additionally, we’re modifying our earlier guidance to note that desktop and exterior-only appraisal flexibilities announced by the GSEs on March 23 and March 31 are not eligible for loan amounts that exceed $1,000,000.

Gateway First Bank Correspondent Lending, the master servicer for Texas Vet programs, offering HUD 184 Programs and also servicing for about 3-4 State HFAs… “Effective immediately, all loans in which borrower(s) are actively seeking forbearance on any mortgage debt obligation, pending acceptance of a forbearance plan or have entered into a forbearance period, are ineligible for purchase by Gateway First Bank. This applies to all loan types and applicable to all borrowers related to the transaction, regardless if the borrower is making a form of payment during the forbearance period. Any loan purchased by Gateway First Bank, is susceptible to repurchase should any borrower(s) related to the transaction enter into or actively pursue forbearance within 14 days of the purchase date.”

loanDepot Wholesale has made the decision to “temporarily suspend the requirement for IRS Tax or W-2 transcripts under all circumstances except for: Jumbo Advantage. As a standard course of business, when federal income tax returns are used to document the Borrower’s income, tax transcripts of the Borrower’s federal income tax returns (1040s) are required to be obtained directly from the IRS. As a result of the IRS suspension, loanDepot Wholesale has made the decision to temporarily suspend the requirement for IRS Tax Transcripts on Jumbo Advantage transactions and utilize the following alternative documentation options. In order to be eligible, IoanDepot Wholesale must verify, via cancelled check(s) and/or bank statement(s), one of the following: evidence of refund received, or proof of payment(s) made to the IRS for taxes owed. Proof of refund or tax payment(s) is required for all tax years used for qualifying income and must be compared to the refund/payment(s) filed on the applicable IRS Form 1040.

“Due to increased risk, loanDepot Wholesale will also require IRS tax transcripts under the following circumstances: Handwritten tax returns, amended tax returns within 30 days prior to application date, through note date, wage earner employed by family member, or at the discretion of Underwriting Management. loanDepot Wholesale is not currently requiring tax transcripts on the following Agency transactions: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA, and FHA. A completed and signed 4506-T form is still required on all transactions.

Clients received, “Please be advised that First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation will temporarily suspend accepting all new government locks effective tomorrow 04-08-2020. No lock extensions will be permitted.”

MBA President and CEO Robert D. Broeksmit, CMB, responded to Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Mark Calabria’s recent comments about mortgage servicers. “The FHFA Director’s recent statements send a troubling message to borrowers, lenders, and the mortgage market. Servicers are required to offer borrowers widespread forbearance under a plan devised and approved first by FHFA and then codified by the CARES Act. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are contractually obligated for the payments to investors. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will eventually reimburse mortgage servicers for the payments they must advance during forbearance, Director Calabria should advocate for the creation of a liquidity facility at the Fed to ensure the stability of the housing finance market.”

Capital markets

Rate volatility has quieted down: a good thing. U.S. Treasuries pulled back again yesterday as optimism surrounding the spread of the coronavirus continued. The 10-year yield closed the day +5 bps to 0.73 percent despite a late afternoon rally due to OPEC reportedly ready to agree to production cuts tomorrow if the U.S. is part of the production cut plan. For the day, the Desk purchased $21.746 billion MBS, slightly up from the day prior.

Today will see the same six FedTrade operations with the $25 billion tentative maximum. The MBA’s mortgage application survey showed a decrease of 18 percent from one week earlier for the week ending April 3, as economic weakness and the surge in unemployment continue to weigh heavily on the housing market. Purchase activity declined again, with the index dropping to its lowest level since 2015 and now down 33 percent compared to a year ago. Later today will be a $17 billion 30-year bond reopening auction as well as the release of the minutes from the emergency FOMC meeting on Sunday, March 15. We begin the day with Agency MBS prices worse .125 and the 10-year yielding .76 percent.

[tipsycad147]

Maximón

By shirleytwofeathers

Titles: The Old Man; The Uncle

Also known as: Maam; Don Pedro; Saint Simon; Brother Simon; Brother Peter

Pronounced: Mah-shee-mon

Origin: Maya

Maximón is a master shape shifter, reconciling religious traditions and offering guidance to indigenous Mayans who venerate him in Guatemala. He is also a heavy drinker and smoker.

Maximón, also known as San Simón, is an important Mayan folk saint in Guatemala represented by a dressed up wooden effigy sitting on a chair who, unlike other saints, smokes cigars and drinks alcohol. Today Maximón is actively worshiped as part of what we could refer to as “folk Catholicism“, especially in the highlands of Guatemala.

His visitors travel from near and far to come see him and ask for protection, money, to be cured or even find a husband. Maximón receives everyone – men and women, villagers and urban dwellers, prostitutes and entrepreneurs – who come with many offerings including tobacco, liquor, money and tortillas (his favourites).

Christian missionaries who came to Guatemala to convert the local people encountered the primordial Mayan deity Maam, Lord of the Universe. Attempts to syncretize him to Saint Simon backfired. Instead of the Mayan god fading discreetly into the identity of the saint, Maximón, as he became known, took on a whole new life and personality of his own: defiant, rambunctious, anti-social. The Church then attempted to syncretise him with Judas Iscariot or even Satan, but it was too late. All they did was enhance Maximón’s outlaw image and make his devotees love and admire him even more.

Maximón’s appearance varies greatly by location. While he’s popularly depicted as a man in a suit and hat, this isn’t a constant. In Santiago Atitlán, he wears colourful garlands and scarves, while in Zunil, he wears sunglasses and a bandanna.

Although his wardrobe has been updated and modernised, Maximón is an ancient, primordial spirit. He has survived numerous attempts to suppress his veneration and is now more popular than ever, venerated throughout the Americas and Europe.

He is generally benevolent, associated with healing, prosperity, and protection. In Guatemala, Maximón is traditionally invoked for protection for or from anti-government forces. Nothing is beyond his assistance or outside his jurisdiction. Maximón is said to represent both light and dark, and to be a trickster. He is both a womaniser and a protector of couples. Be wary.

Maximón is a crossroads spirit. He mediates between the living and the dead, people and spirits. He serves as a bridge between malevolent and benevolent spirits. Maximón is an extremely responsive spirit who works for comparatively modest offerings.

He makes people’s dreams come true. He challenges believers. He heals. He helps overcome obstacles. He stands against injustice. He dances the night away. He brings wealth and success. Fertility and prosperity. He wins the heart of women and protects from infidelity. In fact, he is the lord of sexuality standing for all unresolved matters of a moral nature.

Legend says that one day he was caught sleeping with the wives of the village men who had supposedly gone to work. Furious, they cut his legs and arms off. So Maximón also makes mistakes, which makes it easier for people to relate to him. Sometimes when he brings justice to a person, it is even at the expense of another. Thus, he sits at a crossroads between being both a deity and a trickster, a friend and a fiend.

Maximón may indicate his presence via the smell of cigar smoke when no cigars are present. He visits in dreams.

Spells, Rituals and Operations:

Maximón is invoked in numerous magickal spells, rituals, and operations.

Protection of your business

Place his image in your shop or store to stimulate better business and for luck, money, and protection. Maximón foils and/or punishes shop-lifters and thieves

Abusive people or situations.

If someone abuses you, whisper your needs directly into the ear of Maximón’s image. Place the person’s photo under Maximón’s left foot, or write a note and place it there.

Requests for love.

Coil a rope around his image (even around his neck!) to show him that you need his help capturing someone’s heart or alternatively, for hobbling competing suitors. Whisper in his ear to tell him what you need.

Marital issues.

Wrap a rope around his image to keep your spouse from running off with another.

Maximón is invoked to heal addictions.

He will accept request on behalf of others, especially addicts. He may be invoked on behalf of someone else who cannot or will not ask him themselves. It is not necessary to tell the person that you have requested Maximón’s blessings on their behalf. The deal is between you and Maximón. Make offerings and tell him what the other person needs. However, even if the other person reaps the blessings, Maximón is doing YOU the favour; YOU must fulfil any vows or promises made.

Colours and Candles

An elaborate colour scheme is used to communicate with Maximón. Those who are experienced candle-burners may choose to retain their own candle colour associations, but the following colour chart is commonly used to communicate desires and petitions to Maximón. Burn the colour candle that closest represents your needs:

Black: Protection from envy, jealousy, enemies, and the deliberately cast Evil Eye

Blue: For good luck, employment

Brown: Protection from resentment and the accidentally cast Evil Eye

Green: Business, prosperity, cash

Light Blue: Cash, travel, education, and happiness

Pink: Hope, health

Red: Love, fidelity

White: Protection of children

Yellow: Protection for adults

Offerings:

Hats, silk scarves, flowers (he likes bougainvilleas, carnations, and gladioli), fruit, tobacco products especially cigars, copal incense, water, Coca-Cola, tequila, aguardiente. An elaborate offering when you really need a big favour or as a fulfilment of a vow is forty candles plus copal incense.

Images:

The oldest images of Maximón consisted of masks and mysterious wrapped bundles. However a modern votive image has also evolved possibly based on the only known existing photograph of shaman, wizard, and Maximón devotee Francisco Sojuel (died circa 1907), credited with crafting the first modern Maximón mask. This image depicts Maximón as a moustached man wearing a black suit and a Stetson or similar hat. He is usually, but not exclusively, depicted sitting.

The modern image closest to his ancient one consists of a bundle of fabric topped with one or more Stetson hats.

The name Maximón is often interpreted as deriving from Maam and Simon. Another theory suggests that it derives from Maam and ximon, a Mayan word that may refer to a bundle or the act of “tying up,” essentially creating a bundle. The use of bundles as sacred objects is not uncommon in indigenous American spiritual and magickal traditions.

Votive images range from pocket-size to life-size. The mouth of his statue may be open so a real cigar may be inserted.

Alternatively, the statue may be designed so that the cigar can be placed in his hand. Ashes and stubs from offerings are collected and preserved. Placed in a small charm bag they serve as amulets, allegedly bringing good luck. Sometimes tubes are inserted into statues so Maximón can actually “drink.” Liquor passing through his system is then reserved for ritual use.

Maximón often accumulates an extensive wardrobe. He is a fastidious spirit whose clothes must be kept clean. The rinse water used when hand-washing his clothes may be preserved as Holy Water, or magickally charged water. It is said to have magickal and healing powers.

Festivals and Sacred Sites:

Guatemalan festivals dedicated to Maximón coincide with Holy Week, culminating on Good Friday.

One of the aspects of Maximón is that he can appear in any form. During Easter week he takes on the form of Judas Iscariot, who in betraying Jesus became the catalyst who put into action the events ended in the crucifixion of Jesus. Judas (Maximón) then hangs himself.

What has sometimes been described as a lynching in Guatemala, is actually a Easter Week re-enactment of the crucifixion where the hanged man is Maximón in his guise as Judas Iscariot. The Tz’utuhil Maya workers on the fincas [plantations] on the coastal side of the Volcano Atitlán have brought their customs with them from the highlands in Santiago Atitlan.

Maximón is the subject of innumerable home shrines, but his major public shrine is in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.

In Santiago Atitlán, Maximón’s effigy resides in a different household every year. His image is normally only taken out of this house during Holy Week, where after it will change households, but is on display year-round due the popularity of pilgrimages. The effigy of Maximón in Santiago stays with one of five families, who are members of a religious brotherhood looking after the saint. He stays there for an entire year, and is moved during the procession of Holy Week.

Maximón lives in a room within the family home, and he is accompanied by two chosen family members at all times. Yep, you read that right: at all times…for a year. The chosen two won’t work for a year; guarding Maximón and spending time with him is their full-time job for 365 days. They stay by the altar year-round, drinking and smoking alongside it.

But that’s not all. These guys are also there to pass on offerings from visitors to the effigy, which are usually in the form of cigarettes, cigars, money, tobacco, and moonshine. Visitors can then ask for good health, good crops or marriage counsel. The two guardians usually put on one of Maximón’s two cowboy hats and speak to him in a local dialect.

It looked like they were having a casual chat, the guardian resting his arm on Maximón’s shoulder in a brotherly way, stopping his speech every once in a while, as if listening for Maximón’s reply, or simply to tip the ash off his cigarette.

If you want to share a drink with Maximón, you can do that too. He likes the local ‘Quetzalteco’ and his guardians will pour it through Maximón’s mouth. Because he’s hollow, the liquid flows through him and out between his leather boots. It’s then caught in a glass and drunk by the guardians or other family members who happen to be passing through. Like some kind of spiritual keg you can tap. This means the guardians are always drunk, or at least sleeping off a big drink. All the time.

In the town of San Andrés Itzapa, there is a large temple to Maximón. Here, offerings such as corn, flowers, and candles are burned in public by Shamans for the deity. Pilgrims travel to this temple from all across Latin America.

Maximón is more than just a saint. He represents the resilience of Mayan people in the light of their struggles against oppression, a symbol of hope and transformation.

Myths and Legends:

According to some legends, Maximón was an elder who reincarnated to protect his people. During the Spanish Conquest, an elder named Ri Laj Mam, upset by the evils of the Spaniards, encouraged his people to start a rebellion. He was eventually executed, but returned to life in the form of a judge named Don Ximon, who fought to give land back to the native people of Guatemala.

Another legend states that Maximón was hired by travelling fishermen to protect the virtue of their wives. Instead, Maximón disguised himself and slept with all of them.

In Santiago Atitlán, an alternative tale says that Maximón was never a man, but a wooden figure created by Shamans to defend the village from witches. However, Maximón used trickery to harm the people of the village, so the Shamans twisted his head around and broke his legs to stop him. He then did his job properly and protected the people of the town from evil.

Sources:

The Encyclopedia of Spirits

Wikipedia

Lifegate

https://shirleytwofeathers.com/The_Blog/powers-that-be/maximon/

[jbaquerot]

Big data, as its proponents have been saying for nearly a decade now, can bring big benefits: advertisements focused on what you actually want to buy, smart cars that can help you avoid collisions or call for an ambulance if you happen to get in one anyway, wearable or implantable devices that can monitor your health and notify your doctor if something is going wrong.

It can also lead to big privacy problems. By now it is glaringly obvious that when people generate thousands of data points every day — where they go, who they communicate with, what they read and write, what they buy, what they eat, what they watch, how much they exercise, how much they sleep and more — they are vulnerable to exposure in ways unimaginable a generation ago.

It is just as obvious that such detailed information, in the hands of marketers, financial institutions, employers and government, can affect everything from relationships to getting a job, and from qualifying for a loan to even getting on a plane. While there have been multiple expressions of concern from privacy advocates and government, there has been little action to improve privacy protections in the online, always connected world.

It was more than five years ago that the Obama administration published a blueprint for what it termed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (CPBR), in February 2012. That document declared that, “the consumer privacy data framework in the U.S. is, in fact, strong … (but it) lacks two elements: A clear statement of basic privacy principles that apply to the commercial world, and a sustained commitment of all stakeholders to address consumer data privacy issues as they arise from advances in technologies and business models.”

Three years later, in February 2015, that blueprint became proposed legislation by the same name, but it was immediately attacked, both by industry groups, who says it would impose “burdensome” regulations, and by privacy advocates, who says it was riddled with loopholes. It never made it to a vote.

The CPBR declaration that the, “consumer privacy data framework in the U.S. is, in fact, strong …” ironically came about a year before revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government was, in fact, spying on its citizens.

Beyond that, government hasn’t been able to agree on other privacy initiatives. The so-called broadband privacy rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just before the 2016 election, which would have limited data collection by Internet service providers (ISPs), were repealed by Congress in March, before they took effect.

Susan Grant, director of consumer protection and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), called it “a terrible setback,” and says it would allow ISPs, “to spy on their customers and sell their data without consent.” Others, however, have argued that putting limits on ISPs would still leave other online giants like Google free to collect and sell the data they collect, and consumers would see few, if any, benefits.

Given all that, it should be no surprise that experts say privacy risks are even more intense, and the challenges to protect privacy have become even more complicated. Organizations like the CFA, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), along with individual advocates like Rebecca Herold, CEO of The Privacy Professor, have enumerated multiple ways that big data analytics, and resulting automated decision-making, can invade the personal privacy of individuals. They include:

1. Discrimination

EPIC declared more than three years ago, in comments to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy that, “The use of predictive analytics by the public and private sector … can now be used by the government and companies to make determinations about our ability to fly, to obtain a job, a clearance or a credit card. The use of our associations in predictive analytics to make decisions that have a negative impact on individuals directly inhibits freedom of association.”

Since then, things have gotten worse, privacy advocates say. While discrimination is illegal, automated decision-making makes it more difficult to prove. “Big data algorithms have matured significantly over the past several years, along with the increasing flood of data from the nascent internet of things, and the ability to analyze these data using variants of artificial intelligence." says Edward McNicholas, global co-leader of the Privacy, Data Security, and Information Law Practice at Sidley Austin LLP. “But despite this technological growth, the legal protections have not advanced materially.”

“I think the discussion around big data has moved beyond mere accusations of discrimination to larger concerns about automated decision-making,” says Joseph Jerome, policy counsel at the CDT, who noted that it has been used, “to direct calls at call service centers, evaluate and fire teachers, and even predict recidivism.”

Herold has been saying for years that big data analytics can make discrimination essentially “automated,” and therefore more difficult to detect or prove. She says that is true, “in more ways than ever” today. “Big data analytics coupled with internet of things (IoT) data will be — and has already been — able to identify health problems and genetic details of individuals that those individuals didn’t even know themselves,” she says.

McNicholas believes, “the most significant risk is that it is used to conceal discrimination based on illicit criteria, and to justify the disparate impact of decisions on vulnerable populations.”

2. An embarrassment of breaches

By now, after catastrophic data breaches at multiple retailers like Target and Home Depot, restaurant chains like P.F. Chang’s, online marketplaces like eBay, the federal Office of Personnel Management that exposed the personal information of 22 million current and former federal employees, universities, and online services giants like Yahoo, public awareness about credit card fraud and identity theft is probably at an all-time high.

Unfortunately, the risks remain just as high, especially given the reality that billions of IoT devices in everything from household appliances to cars, remain rampantly insecure, as encryption and security guru Bruce Schneier, CTO at IBM Resilient, frequently observes in his personal blog.

3. Goodbye anonymity

It is increasingly difficult to do much of anything in modern life, “without having your identity associated with it,” Herold says. She says even de-identified data does not necessarily remove privacy risks. “The standards used even just a year or two ago are no longer sufficient. Organizations that want to anonymize data to then use it for other purposes are going to find it increasingly difficult. “It will soon become almost impossible to effectively anonymize data in a way that the associated individuals cannot be re-identified,” she says.

Besides being vulnerable to breaches, IoT device are a massive data collection engine of users’ most personal information. “Individuals are paying for smart devices, and the manufacturers can change their privacy terms at a moment's notice,” Jerome says. “It's one thing to tell a user to stop using a web service; it's another to tell them to unplug their smart TV or disconnect their connected car.”

4. Government exemptions

According to EPIC, “Americans are in more government databases than ever,” including that of the FBI, which collects personally identifiable information (PII) including name, any aliases, race, sex, date and place of birth, Social Security number, passport and driver’s license numbers, address, telephone numbers, photographs, fingerprints, financial information like bank accounts, and employment and business information.

Yet, “incredibly, the agency has exempted itself from Privacy Act (of 1974) requirements that the FBI maintain only, ‘accurate, relevant, timely and complete’ personal records,” along with other safeguards of that information required by the Privacy Act, EPIC says. The NSA also opened a storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, in 2014 that is reportedly capable of storing 12 zettabytes of data — a single zettabyte is the amount of information it would take 750 billion DVDs to store.

While there have been assurances, including from former President Obama, that government is “not listening to your phone calls or reading your emails,” that obviously ducks the question of whether government is storing them.

5. Your data gets brokered

Numerous companies collect and sell consumer data that are used to profile individuals, without much control or limits. There was the famous case of companies beginning to market products to a pregnant woman before she had told others in her family, thanks to automated decision-making. The same can be true of things like sexual orientation or an illness like cancer.

“Since 2014, data brokers have been having a field day in selling all the data they can scoop up from anywhere they can find it on the internet. And there are few — none explicit that I know of — legal protections for involved individuals,” Herold says. “This practice is going to increase, unfettered, until privacy laws restricting such use are enacted. There is also little or no accountability or even guarantees that the information is accurate.

Where do we go from here?

Those are not the only risks, and there is no way to eliminate them. But there are ways to limit them. One, according to Jerome, is to use big data analytics for good — to expose problems. “In many respects, big data is helping us make better, fairer decisions,” he says, noting that it can be, “a powerful tool to empower users and to fight discrimination. More data can be used to show where something is being done in a discriminatory way. Traditionally, one of the biggest problems in uncovering discrimination is a lack of data,” he says.

There is general agreement among advocates that Congress needs to pass a version of the CPBR, which called for consumer rights to include:

Individual control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.

Transparency, or easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices.

The collection, use and disclosure of personal data to be done in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.

Security and responsible handling of personal data.

Access to their personal data in usable formats, with the power to correct errors.

Reasonable limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain.

McNicholas says that “transparency” should include an overhaul of “privacy policies,” which are so dense and filled with legalese that almost nobody reads them. “Telling consumers to read privacy policies and exercise opt-out rights seems to be a solution better suited to last century,” he says. “Consumer privacy must shift to consumer-centric, where consumers have real control over their information."

Jerome agrees. “I certainly don't think we can expect consumers to read privacy policies. That's madness. What we should expect are better and more controls. It's a good thing that users can review and delete their Echo recordings. It's great that Twitter allows users to toggle all sorts of personalization and see who has targeted them,” he says. “But ultimately, if individuals aren't given more options over collection and sharing, we're going to have serious issues about our personal autonomy.”

Given the contentious atmosphere in Congress, there is little chance of something resembling the CPBR being passed anytime soon. That doesn’t mean consumers are defenseless, however. What can they do?

Jerome says even if users don’t read an entire policy, they should, “still take a moment before clicking ‘OK’ to consider why and with whom they're sharing their information. A recent study suggested that individuals would give up sensitive information about themselves in exchange for homemade cookies.”

Herold offers several other individual measures to lower your privacy risks:

Quit sharing so much on social media. “If you only have a few people you want to see photos or videos, then send directly to them instead of posting where many can access them,” she says.

Don’t provide information to businesses or other organizations that are not necessary for the purposes for which you’re doing business with them. Unless they really need your address and phone number, don’t give it to them.

Use an anonymous browser, like Hotspot Shield or Tor (The Onion Router) when visiting sites that might yield information that could cause people to draw inaccurate conclusions about you.

Ask others not to share information online about you without your knowledge. “It may feel awkward, but you need to do it,” she says, adding that the hard truth is that consumers need to protect themselves because nobody else will be doing it for them.

Regarding legislation, she says she has not heard about any other drafts of the CPBR in the works, “and I quite frankly do not expect to see anything in the next four years that will improve consumer privacy; Indeed, I expect to see government protections deteriorate. “I hope I am wrong,” she says.

[ourbalajisymphony-blog]

Home Financing Options For NRI Buyers

When a non-resident Indian (NRI) opts to purchase a property in India, there are several regulations that govern how such a purchase can be financed.

Sources, for financing a real estate investment in India, for NRIs

The money for purchasing a property in India, has to come through banking channels only. Consequently, the payment cannot be tendered in the form of traveller’s cheque or foreign currency. An NRI can also use the money in his/her credit, in non-resident external (NRE) rupee or non-resident ordinary (NRO) or foreign currency non-resident (FCNR) account, maintained in India.

NRIs are allowed to purchase property in India, by availing home loans in Indian rupees, from banks or housing finance companies. The home loan can also be granted by the Indian employer of the NRI employee, for the purpose of financing of the property.

How can NRIs obtain a home loan

As NRI investment in Indian real estate is only allowed in residential or commercial properties, banks too, can finance only these properties. Almost all banks offer home loans to NRIs for buying a house or constructing one. One can also get a loan, for purchase of land (non-agricultural), for constructing a house in India.

The application for the home loan can be made online, as well as offline. The nature of documents that need to be submitted, will depend on whether the NRI is a salaried employee or whether s/he is self-employed. It will also vary, depending on the NRI’s country of residence. Nevertheless, copies of one’s passport and visa, passport-sized photographs and proof of residence in the foreign county, will be required in all cases.

Depending on whether the NRI is salaried or self-employed, s/he also has to fulfil a minimum period of stay in the country of present residence, to avail of the home loan. Banks may also insist on an acceptable co-applicant, or an NRI guarantor. The NRI guarantor too, has to submit documents pertaining to identity proof, address proof and income proof.

How can NRIs service the home loan

EMIs on the home loan can be paid through remittances from outside India, through a proper banking channel, or by debiting the NRE, or NRO, or FCNR account. In case the property is let-out, the rental yields can be used for servicing the NRI home loan. Money transferred to the NRO account from close relatives, can also be used for servicing the home loans. In case the property is purchased for self-occupancy, the NRI can avail of a loan against the FCNR or NRE account deposits, of up to Rs 1 crore, for servicing the home loan.

Remittances out of India

An NRI is allowed to repatriate some of the funds, in case the property so acquired is sold.  However, the number of properties (whether purchased or inherited), for which s/he can remit or send money to India, is restricted to two. Moreover, the amount that can be repatriated, cannot exceed the amount (denominated in foreign currency) received as remittances from outside India, either for purchase or servicing of the NRI home loan. Under normal circumstances, an NRI is allowed to remit an amount of USD 1 million in a year, out of India, from his NRE, NRO, or FCNR accounts, which includes the amount remitted for sale of a house.

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[sigma7]

Life under President Sigma Seven

I found this old text file on a hard drive from 2013 (it’s hauntingly prescient in a few places).  It’s my narrative version of a game of Democracy 3 (2?) I was playing with some marginal success, finally.  Sadly, it just cuts off in 2020.  I either got bored or started losing badly, can’t remember which....

(I tweaked a Chargers-miss-the-playoffs reference to refer to their move to LA.  I still don’t want to talk about it.)

Anyhow, enjoy the fact that I forgot the inauguration would be in 2017, not 2016 (I may have been tired/medicated while composing this little missive):

Wednesday, January 20, 2016 After running on a platform based largely on contempt for the American voter and promising to bring back Firefly, Ironic Anarchist Party candidate Sigma Seven was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States and the first to have successfully completed the entire Mass Effect trilogy.

Seven's inauguration address reiterated his campaign's primary goals: eliminating crime, erasing the deficit, making inroads on the national debt, increasing Americans' health, and ending poverty.  The particulars of this initiative were still somewhat vague, though he used the word "magnets" 76 times during his speech.

Monday, February 15, 2016 The first major act of the Seven administration came with the signing of the Moar Police OMG Bill, which increases spending on national and local police and investigative staff from $31 billion to $51.65 billion.  Despite an $8.63 billion deficit and a $3.1 trillion dollar debt, the bill gained widespread support from grassroots initiatives, especially among conservatives.

A highly-placed source inside the White House indicates funding for various national intelligence services has also increased, but that could not be confirmed.

Friday, March 18, 2016 President Seven signed into law the All Your Jailz Are Belong To Us Bill, which allowed the operation of privately-owned and -managed prisons.  Consolidation of the prison system, Seven said, would bring consistency to the incarceration of American prisoners.  This move has been largely applauded by liberal and civil rights groups.

Monday, March 28, 2016 President Seven's approval rating has taken a minor two-percentage-point drop, giving him 23.6% approval nationwide.  The president insists much of the dissent can be blamed on Joss Whedon's unwillingness to return his phone calls.

Friday, April 1, 2016 President Seven signed legislation curtailing the activity of debt collection agencies, restricting use of unsolicited phone calls and capping interest rates for short-term loans.  Multiple occurrences of the word "dirtbags" in the law were scratched out in the bill's final draft by a sheepish-looking vice president.

Monday, April 11, 2016 President Seven signed the Electric Punchbug Initiative today, increasing federal subsidies for hybrid vehicles from $1 billion to $3.7 billion.  An unnoticed clause in the 3,590-page document, requiring all such vehicles to be bug-shaped and/or bug-painted, went completely unnoticed by legislators of both parties until a gloating president pointed it out, snickering, during his morning press conference.  President Seven has promised any future expansion of federal health care laws will cover punchbug-related injuries.

Friday, April 15, 2016 President Seven waited until late Friday afternoon to sign the Sip It And Grip It Bill, which institutes a nationwide 75% tax on all alcohol sold for human consumption.  Notes left on a Post-It on the White House front door indicate that this measure is more of a deterrent than an attempt at leveraging an income source, and also, "sorry lol."

Thursday, May 5, 2016 President Seven signed the Phoenix Wright Law today, increasing federal legal aid from $4.77 billion to $9.31 billion, effective August 1.  While the move was applauded by liberal and social justice groups, President Seven did not hold a press conference, only issuing a statement acknowledging that "y'all prolly still pissed off about the booze thing."

Monday, March 23, 2016 President Seven signed the Personal Information Collection Allowed to Be Unveiled Act, extending and expanding the Freedom of Information Act to databases of personal data held by medical, insurance, and debt-collection entities.  The PICABU Act would not extend to personal web browser or search history, the president insisted to a press corps which had collectively stopped breathing.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016 Amid reports of a gradual downturn of the national crime rate, President Seven is enjoying a personal-best 48% approval rating, with retired, conservative, and state-employee focus groups giving the highest marks.

Monday, June 13, 2016 The president's two-week vacation kicked off today with news that he had quietly signed the Yeah I Did That Thing Again Act, which increases national taxation of tobacco products from 11% to 75%.  The move will bring in an additional estimated $90 billion per quarter, but polls indicate that literally 0% of Americans approve of increasing tobacco laws.  The president was, unsurprisingly, unavailable for comment, and the vice president is currently hiding behind large pieces of furniture.

Friday, August 12, 2016 In a prime-time televised statement, the president announced that a top-secret military raid by a classified unit in a classified location had captured the mastermind of a terrorist network, the identity of both being...classified.  High-resolution pool photographs of the president indicated the phrase "I ain't telling you shit" crossed out on his printed speech notes.

Monday, August 22, 2016 The Bureau of Justice Statistics announced this morning that the wave of antisocial conduct which had plagued the country for a year was officially broken, and that national crime rates have dropped 26.7% since January.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016 Amid bipartisan support, the president signed the Race Discrimination Act into law today, a move lauded not only by minority and liberal groups, but 70% of the entire American populace, as well.

Monday, October 3, 2016 President Seven signed his nationwide recycling imitative today, providing $9.33 billion in government funds for universal doorside collection of most recyclable household products.

Friday, October 28, 2016 The Federal Reserve announced today that an uptick in the gross domestic product helped eliminate the budget deficit, and a $168.36 billion budget surplus has lowered the national debt to under $3 trillion.  President Seven issued a statement consisting entirely of a yelled "I done tol' you!" with an emphatic right-hand two-finger gesture, after which he strutted back to the Oval Office.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016 The National Center on Family Homelessness reported today that despite drops in crime and unemployment, the number of Americans living in poverty has increased 28% since January.  President Seven unveiled an anti-poverty task force in a Rose Garden ceremony today, off-handedly mentioning "I was getting around to this, sorry."

Monday, November 28, 2016 A new bill pushed through conference committee at presidential behest would expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly known as food stamps, by $4 billion to $23.47 billion by January.  The president announced that this was just the first step in what would be a series of measures to combat American poverty and homelessness, both of which have increased under his administration.

Sunday, December 4, 2016 Following the San Diego Chargers' announced move to Los Angeles, the president interrupted prime-time programming for a special announcement that, after analysis, turned out to be nothing but an uninterrupted string of profanity, sometimes in different languages or reversed or ROT13'd.  An executive order signed an hour earlier gave the president the capacity to "say whatever the [heck] I want on TV."

Tuesday, December 13, 2016 Spurred by poor earnings and increasing poverty levels, several prominent trade unions have called for a general strike to begin at midnight.  The strike's purpose, say labor leaders, is to advocate for a living wage and better health coverage for current workers as well as unemployment assistance.

Friday, December 23, 2016 When Congress reconvenes after the holiday break, they will begin debate on the most ambitious of President Seven's proposals: the Back to School Act, which would burn off almost the entire federal budget surplus on public education, increasing funding from $94.27 billion to a proposed $228 billion in three years.  President Seven says the measure is a necessary step to fight poverty and unemployment in the long term.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017 The Centers for Disease Control announced that alcohol consumption in the United States has decreased by 48% in the last year.

Monday, January 9, 2017 As expected, the United States' credit rating has been downgraded to CCC amid economic uncertainty and labor strife.

Tuesday, February 28, 2017 With approval ratings at a personal-best 58%, President Seven is nevertheless, by his own admission, "hiding out" at Camp David amid reports of a budget deficit over $300 billion.

Monday, April 3, 2017 Despite a recent sweatshop scandal, congressional and labor leaders announced the Peoria Accord, ending the general strike that had stifled the American economy for four months.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017 Despite the president not making a public appearance in three months, the Community Policing Initiative of 2017, which was left on his desk in the Oval Office, was found, signed, by White House clerks early this morning.  The bill will provide $14.51 billion in funding for community watch groups to act in cooperation with local law enforcement.  The president is rumored to have gained access to the White House by being disguised as a Coke machine.

Monday, July 3, 2017 On the eve of the nation's birthday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that pollution levels in the United States were at their lowest in 40 years.

Monday, July 11, 2017 A dramatic rebound of the nation's gross domestic product has turned a $300 billion deficit into a $194.48 billion surplus, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Monday, July 24, 2017 From an undisclosed location, President Seven announced via Skype his approval of the Pell Grant expansion sent to his desk last week.  The bill, which the president has indicated he would sign, will raise the amount of government grants for university education from $107 billion a year to over $240 billion year by January of next year.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017 After confessing to binge-watching From the Earth to the Moon on NetFlix, President Seven signed a bill increasing NASA funding by 20%, with the agency's new goal the establishment of a permanent space station.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017 The Beltway rumor mill is working overtime after reporters discovered White House Press Secretary Heather Campbell's updated resume on LinkedIn.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017 President Seven returned to Washington for the first time in several months amid reports of a new general strike, rising pollution levels, and a swoon in the gross domestic product.  He was unhappy to return, he expressed in terms not fit for public consumption.

Monday, November 6, 2017 To bipartisan acclaim and in light of a renewed budget surplus, President Seven repealed the nationwide car tax today.  The only major lobbying group to oppose the repeal was the Survivors of Punchbug Trauma, whose membership has swelled in the last several months.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 Even amid the general strike, labor groups are applauding the Seven administration's offer of extended coffee breaks for all American workers.  However, a late-minute lobby by the American Heart Association has curtailed the president's mandatory coffee break plans, at least for the time being.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017 In what insiders are calling a "watershed moment" in the American penal system, President Seven is proposing a complete overhaul of the nation's prisons, championing what he says would refocus the mission of the facilities from containment to re-education and rehabilitation with the ultimate goal of producing citizens ready to be reintegrated to society.  Prominent members of both parties have replied anonymously with "Yeah, right" at least a dozen times. The cost of prison upgrades and maintenance would roughly double over the next year to $64 billion a year.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017 A foreign website has posted what it says are early drafts for an upcoming retooling of the American healthcare system under the name "SevenCare."  The veracity of the posting is undermined by a paragraph that would give the president the powers and privileges of a doctor of any discipline and require that he no longer be addressed as "Mister President" but "Doctor President."

Tuesday, December 26, 2017 An anonymous source in the Seven cabinet has confirmed the accuracy of the SevenCare leak, adding, "You don't want to push the doctor thing, believe me."

Saturday, December 30, 2017 President Seven signed the Mary Kate and Ashley Act into law, making it illegal to employ any American under the age of 16 for more than five hours a week. The Senate invoked cloture after an embarrassing hour of confusing the law with the Miley Cyrus Act, which regulates the acceptable behavior of an extended tongue in a public setting.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018 With President Seven's term nearing the half-way point, his 73% approval rating has been tempered by the downgrade of America's credit rating to a new-low CC.  The president's news conference on the downgrade was marred by the president's inability to say "CC" without immediately following it with "Sabathia." All major international credit agencies issued statements reiterating that there is no such rating as CC Sabathia.

Monday, January 22, 2018 President Seven's State of the Union address made oblique mentions to possible health care reform initiatives, while predicting swift resolution to renewed labor strife and pollution issues while including the fewest number of profanities of any of his previous addresses, coming in at just 40.

Wednesday, January 31, 2018 By executive order, use of the font Comic Sans is now a felony.

Tuesday, February 6, 2018 Congressional Budget Office estimates indicate that the quarterly budget deficit will top $500 billion.

Monday, February 26, 2018 President Seven vetos legislation that would create a nationwide DNA database for tracking suspects, noting that nowhere in the legislation is the word "suspect" defined.

Friday, March 2, 2018 After nine cups of coffee, a confident President Seven announces "I can do anything today" at approximately 8:12 am.  By 4:20 pm, the nationwide general strike is over, studies are released that indicate pollution and alcohol abuse are at new national lows, and the Department of Education says Americans are more prepared and trained for entering the workforce than ever before.  

Monday, March 5, 2018 President Seven has been asleep for three days.  According to the Constitution, if he does not awaken tomorrow, he must be jostled in a rousing fashion by the President pro tempore of the Senate.

Tueday, March 6, 2018 The president is awake, but photography has been forbidden under penalty of exsanguination.

Monday, March 19, 2018 After a new poll shows President Seven with an unprecedented 81.9% approval rating, opposition party members have unified their message, emphasizing the nation's most outstanding political issues -- an asthma epidemic, drug abuse, and Internet crime.  The presidential response amounts to three words on official letterhead: "Ain't no thang."  The president also Instagrams himself doing duckface before embarrassingly deleting it.

Friday, April 6, 2018 Press Secretary Heather Campbell has resigned via a Twitter post.  In a sign that the parting is amicable, the president retweeted the resignation tweet without a single Internet acronym or emoticon.  Kathryn Sanchez, a former representative from Arizona whose popularity with trade unions made her a powerful force in the House, is the favorite to replace Campbell, who is said to be working on a book of her experiences in the White House.

Monday, April 23, 2018 During the morning press conference, the Associated Press pool reporter asked the president "Have you seen the new numbers on the national debt?"  The president replied that he had not, and when he heard the figure, as is his wont, responded in many words that cannot be repeated or describe acts of blasphemy or physical improbability.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018 Spurred by last quarter's deficit, the national debt, after fluctuating for the last two years, now stands at $4.3 trillion.  The budget for this quarter, however, is being buoyed by a strong worldwide GDP and is operating under a projected $291 billion surplus.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018 New polls from Gallup indicate presidential approval has dropped over 40 points since March, giving the president a 38% approval rating.  According to the new numbers, the president is barely more popular than stepping on a Lego, botulism, and not being able to find a parking spot downtown.  However, the latest Zogby poll shows the president has a 203% approval rating, numbers even the White House are finding somewhat suspicious.

Friday, June 1, 2018 The president posted an enigmatic Tweet this morning, saying only "see u suckrz in august roflmao," and changing his Twitter location to the simple phrase "nunya."  The president's daily Instagram of his cooling Caribou Coffee clearly shows the outline of a window on Air Force One.

Monday, June 4, 2018 Internet icon Grumpy Cat was welcomed to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning, but it will remain forever unknown if her presence contributed to the 600-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and subsequent crash felt across international markets.

Monday, June 11, 2018 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said today that the nation was in a state of "profound recession," including references to growing pollution concerns and escalating gridlock through major American urban centers.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018 In a 5-4 decision along political lines, the Supreme Court ruled today that laws requiring the president's signature could not be signed via Twitter.  The president later posted a bit.ly link that Rickrolled the entire court.  The court declined to review the legal standing of an Instagrammed signed coffee citing, for some reason, the War Powers Act.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018 The Centers for Disease Control noted today that drug abuse had reached a 60-year low, while the Department of Justice announced that Internet crime was also at a 60-year low...somehow.  The president posted a YouTube link to Geto Boys' "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta," which was promptly taken down for copyright infringement.  

Monday, July 2, 2018 Paul Krugman boldly announced that the "American debt crisis is over," noting the country's $92 billion dollar surplus.  Markets replied with indifference and a general malaise.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Reports are circulating around the Beltway that a SevenCare proposal is still being revised, though its cost would be in the range of $600 billion a year.  The Doctor President clause has been confirmed to exist by a highly-placed source in the administration.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018 President Seven's bold, confident arrival into Andrews Air Force Base was marred when a reporter asked about the president's plans to run again.  The president closed his eyes tightly and said many words that only adults can use.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018 The Automobile Association of America announced that urban gridlock issues had come to an end, largely due to the injury and treatment of multiple punchbugging.  A law criminalizing the punchbug died in committee last week.

Monday, September 17, 2018 Department of Justice Director Christopher Rodriguez gave his morning press conference in a chicken suit, replying to every question with a series of clucking sounds.  An administration official indicated that Rodriguez may have made a substantial wager on the outcome of yesterday's Kansas City Royals/Washington Nationals game, which the Royals won in extra innings. This account is possibly supported by the president Tweeting the word "chikin" repeatedly for almost two hours.  Privately, Rodriguez is said to be seriously displeased.

Friday, September 21, 2018 A YouTube video posted by a group calling itself the Revolutionary Army made a series of demands and threats against the Seven administration today.  After some research, the Department of Justice found that the Revolutionary Army had threatened terrorist acts against various members of the government for several years, but had done so on Google Plus, so nobody noticed.

Thursday, October 18, 2018 New Gallup polls show the president's approval rating at 78%.  The president seemed moderately stunned during his morning press conference before nodding and saying "Yeah, that's right."

Monday, November 19, 2018 Global economic strain pushed the national budget into a $110 billion deficit and the national debt back to $4.2 trillion.  Amid calls to balance the budget, the president has refused to either increase taxes or cut spending, particularly defense spending, a popular target for deficit hawks.  The president's sole justification for keeping defense spending at its exorbitant rate has been "Don't wanna."

Monday, January 21, 2019 At his State of the Union address, President Seven literally dared the populace to vote for the opposition candidate in the next election.  His ominous statement of "I know where you live" became a mantra, repeated 13 times during his speech.  

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 The Southern Poverty Law Center announced today that racial tension in the United States has fallen by a third and crime has been more than halved, indicating a probable endorsement of President Seven in the November election.

Friday, March 18, 2020 President Seven refuses to campaign for reelection and has taken to what his staffers privately call "pouting" in the Oval Office.  Administration officials and party representatives are especially hesitant to prod the president on the issue, as those who do so have had the White House Wi-Fi password changed on them without notice.  

April 12, 2020 While opposition party primaries are winding down, the president's reelection campaign has started without him, taking quotes out of context to use as motivational material during rallies and the eventual convention.  At the moment, the campaign's slogan is "Seven '16, I Don't Even Care."

May 4, 2020 An American has become the first person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature with an Internet meme.  The winner, known popularly as LeGaLiZe_420, has credited Adobe Photoshop and the font Impact for his recognition.

June 12, 2020 Worldwide economic forecasts remain dire, even as the United States' credit rating is bumped back up to 'B.'

[bluewatsons]

Cass R. Sunstein, Fifty Shades of Manipulation, 1 J Marketing Behav 213 (2016)

Abstract

A statement or action can be said to be manipulative if it does not sufficiently engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. One problem with manipulation, thus understood, is that it fails to respect people’s autonomy and is an affront to their dignity. Another problem is that if they are products of manipulation, people’s choices might fail to promote their own welfare, and might instead promote the welfare of the manipulator. To that extent, the central objection to manipulation is rooted in a version of Mill’s Harm Principle: People know what is in their best interests and should have a (manipulation-free) opportunity to make that decision. On welfarist grounds, the norm against manipulation can be seen as a kind of heuristic, one that generally works well, but that can also lead to serious errors, at least when the manipulator is both informed and genuinely interested in the welfare of the chooser.

For the legal system, a pervasive puzzle is why manipulation is rarely policed. The simplest answer is that manipulation has so many shades, and in a social order that values free markets and is committed to freedom of expression, it is exceptionally difficult to regulate manipulation as such. But as the manipulator’s motives become more self-interested or venal, and as efforts to bypass people’s deliberative capacities becomes more successful, the ethical objections to manipulation become very forceful, and the argument for a legal response is fortified. The analysis of manipulation bears on emerging first amendment issues raised by compelled speech, especially in the context of graphic health warnings. Importantly, it can also help orient the regulation of financial products, where manipulation of consumer choices is an evident but rarely explicit concern.

I. Introduction

It ranks among the most powerful scenes in the history of television. Don Draper is charged with producing an advertising campaign for Kodak, which has just invented a new slide projector, with continuous viewing. It operates like a wheel. Using the device to display scenes from a once-happy family (as it happens, his own, which is now broken), Draper tells his potential clients1:

In Greek, "nostalgia" literally means, "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again . . . to a place where we know we are loved.2

The Kodak clients are sold; they cancel their meetings with other companies.

Now consider the following cases:

A parent tries to convince an adult child to visit him in a remote town in Nebraska, saying, “After all, I’m your father, and I raised you for all those years, and it wasn’t always a lot of fun for me -- and who knows whether I’m going to live a lot longer?”

An automobile company advertises its new vehicle by showing a sleek, attractive couple exiting from it before going to a glamorous party.

In an effort to discourage people from smoking, a government requires cigarette packages to contain graphic, frightening health warnings, depicting people with life-threatening illnesses.3

In a campaign advertisement, a political candidate displays highly unflattering photographs of his opponent, set against the background of frightening music. An announcer reads quotations that, while accurate and not misleading, are taken out of context to make the opponent look at once ridiculous and scary.

In an effort to convince consumers to switch to its new, high-cost credit card, a company emphasizes its very low “teaser rate,” by which consumers can enjoy low-cost borrowing for a short period. In its advertisement, it depicts happy, elegant, energized people, displaying their card and their new purchases.

To reduce pollution (including greenhouse gas emissions), a city requires public utilities to offer clean energy sources as the default providers, subject to opt-out if customers want to save money.4

Both public and private law are pervasively concerned with the problem of coercion, arising from the literal use of force. The Due Process Clause is designed to impose procedural safeguards in the event of actual or threatened coercion on the part of government, and if private actors plan to resort to force, both criminal law and the law of tort will stand in their way. There are also legal constraints on lying and deception.5 The first amendment protects commercial advertising, but it does not ban regulation of false or deceptive commercial speech.6 The Federal Trade Commission is explicitly authorized to control “unfair and deceptive” trade practices.7

But what of manipulation, undertaken by either private or public institutions? Within law, there is no sustained analysis of the topic.8 To be sure, there is a great deal of work on lies and deception,9 and we can identify an overlap among lying, deceiving, and manipulating. We could even see manipulation as a master concept that includes lying and deceiving, or understand the three to be on some kind of continuum. Certainly this is so if our master principle is personal autonomy; if so, the three violate that principle, though for somewhat different reasons. (I shall have something to say about the extent to which this is so.) But in ordinary usage, it is reasonable to think that the concept of manipulation is distinctive, certainly in the sense that it can occur (as in the mythical Kodak commercial) without lies or deception (at least in their standard forms). What does manipulation entail, and what is wrong with it? How, if at all, should the law respond to it – for example, in the context of consumer protection or in constraining government itself? One of my major goals here is to put the category of manipulation on the legal viewscreen.

It should be clear that an action does not count as manipulative merely because it is an effort to alter people’s behavior. If you are a passenger in a car, and you warn the driver that he is about to get into a crash, you are not engaged in manipulation. The same is true if you remind someone that a bill is due. A calorie label and an energy efficiency label are not ordinarily counted as forms of manipulation. So long as a private or public institution is informing people, or “just providing the facts,” it is hard to complain of manipulation.10 There is also a large difference between persuading people and manipulating them. With (non-manipulative) persuasion, people are given facts and reasons, presented in a sufficiently fair and neutral way; manipulation is something different.

It is often thought that when people are being manipulated, they are treated as “puppets on a string.”11 Almost no one wants to be someone else’s puppet (at least without consent12), and in some respects, it is especially bad to be a puppet of government. Many of the worst governments in history have attempted to turn their citizens into puppets.13 If we keep the puppet metaphor is mind, the idea of “manipulation” can be applied to many kinds of behavior; but it is not entirely clear that it is a unitary concept, or that we can identity necessary and sufficient conditions.14

Manipulation takes multiple forms. It has at least fifty shades, and some people wonder if they are tightly identified with one another.15

The principal goal of this Article is to make progress in understanding what manipulation is and what is wrong with it. If we can make progress on those tasks, we should be better equipped to assess a wide range of problems in ethics, policy, and law. For example, plausible objections might be made to acts of government that can be counted as manipulative; such objections might not treat citizens with respect.16 There are also first amendment questions. When the government compels speech, is there a difference between mandating a purely factual disclosure and mandating one that has arguably manipulative features? When is advertising manipulative, and if it is, what, if anything, should be done about it17? Are there circumstances in which manipulative speech, on the part of government, raises due process problems18 or runs afoul of existing statutes19? How, if at all, should government respond to manipulative behavior by the private sector,20 for example in the context of financial products (such as credit cards or mortgages)? As we shall see, an understanding of manipulation bears directly on the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and might help to orient some of its work,21 which is at least implicitly concerned with the problem.

I suggest that an effort to influence people’s choices counts as manipulative to the extent that it does not sufficiently engage or appeal to their capacity for reflection and deliberation. The word “sufficiently” leaves a degree of ambiguity and openness, and properly so. It is not possible to know whether manipulation is involved without asking about the sufficiency of people’s capacity to deliberate on the question at hand.22 We can imagine clear cases of manipulation (subliminal advertising23), cases that clearly fall outside of the category (for example, a warning about deer crossings in a remote area), and cases that can be taken as borderline (a vivid presentation about the advantages of a particular mortgage or a redesign of a website to attract customers to the most expensive products).24 It is important to emphasize that countless choices are at least partly a product of variables that do not involve reflective deliberation – and choosers tend to be unaware of that fact.25 The problem of manipulation arises when choosers justly complain that because of the actions of a manipulator, they have not, in a sense, had a fair chance to make a decision on their own.26 Often the distinguishing mark of manipulation is a justified sense of ex post betrayal.

Of course there are degrees of manipulation, as some forms of influence attempt to bypass deliberation altogether (such as subliminal advertising), and other forms merely try to influence it by triggering certain forms of automatic processing (for example, through framing a problem so as to provoke the desired response27). Some forms of manipulation are modest and relatively benign. In the Kodak commercial, the goal is to connect the product with a set of evocative associations – childhood, a carousal, and a magical ability to recapture, and make permanent, a lost past. Manipulation often occurs through such associations, which are a pervasive feature of political campaigns28; but the concept is much broader than that. Manipulators often describe choices so as to make certain outcomes vivid and appealing (such as purchases of lottery tickets), or vivid and unappealing (such as failures to buy life insurance) -- even though a more neutral frame would present the whole problem in a less tendentious manner, leaving the chooser in a more objective position to weigh the relevant variables (and in that sense more free).

In such cases, a central problem with manipulation is that it can violate people’s autonomy (by making them instruments of another’s will) and offend their dignity (by failing to treat them with respect).29 The manipulator is leading the chooser to make a choice without sufficiently assessing, on the chooser’s own terms, its costs and its benefits. For this reason, the most strongly felt moral objections to manipulation are deontological in character. The objections reflect a sense that people are not being treated respectfully. Their own capacities – to assess, to weigh, to judge -- are not being given appropriate deference. For deontologists, a central question is whether choosers have given appropriate consent to the act of manipulation, or whether the manipulator has properly inferred consent under the circumstances.

From the welfarist point of view, the objection to manipulation is much less straightforward. Some people can benefit (a great deal) from being manipulated (consider a smoker who desperately wants to quit), and within limits, being manipulated can even be fun. In some forms, manipulation is a form of play, undertaken with a smile and a wink. (A speculation: Those who are intensely opposed to manipulation, in all its shades and forms, lack a sense of humor.) In other forms, it is not fun at all, even deadly serious (consider efforts to manipulate kidnappers or terrorists30). On welfarist grounds, there is no simple evaluation of manipulation, at least if we embrace the foregoing definition.

The foundation of the welfarist concern, I suggest, is the view, associated with Mill31 and Hayek,32 that the chooser, and not the manipulator, knows what is in his best interest. Of course Mill’s principal concern, and Hayek’s too, is with coercion, but the welfarist objection to manipulation stems from the same source: a belief that choosers know best. It follows that the anti-manipulation principle is strongly derivative of Mill’s Harm Principle; it suggests that choosers ought to be able to make their own decisions, and that the role of others should be restricted to informing them or attempting to persuade them (without manipulation).33

If choosers know best, then the welfare-increasing approach is to avoid manipulation and to engage the chooser’s deliberative capacities. But the manipulator refuses to do that. The skeptic wonders: Why not? A tempting answer is that the manipulator is promoting his own interests, and not those of the chooser. The use of manipulation, rather than (say) information or persuasion, creates a risk that the manipulator does not have the chooser’s interests in mind. For that reason, manipulation undermines the welfare of the chooser. The welfarist analysis of manipulation closely parallels the welfarist analysis of fraud and deceit.34 In a sense, the manipulator can even be seen as a kind of thief, taking something from the chooser without real consent. In some cases, that is indeed the right way to assess an act of manipulation; it helps to illuminate recent initiatives in the area of consumer financial protection.35

From the standpoint of the legal system, the problem is that as defined here, manipulation can plausibly be said to be pervasive. It can be found on television, on the Internet, in every political campaign, in countless markets, in friendships, and in family life. Even if we insist (as we should) that manipulation cannot occur without intentional manipulators,36 the scope of the practice is very wide. It would be odd and perhaps pointless to condemn practices that people encounter daily, and with which they live while mounting little or no objection.37 Indeed, it would be fussy and stern – even a bit inhuman – to try to excise it. Because of the pervasiveness of manipulation, and because it often does little or no harm, the legal system usually does not attempt to prevent it.38 At least in general, the costs of regulating manipulation would far exceed the benefits. But as we shall see, the proper evaluation of acts of manipulation depends a great deal on context, including the expectations associated with particular roles.39 In some contexts, regulators do aim at manipulation, at least implicitly.40

Everyone knows that a car company wants to sell cars, and under existing conventions, it is acceptable to produce advertisements that do not exactly target people’s deliberative capacities (at least if falsehoods are not involved). Something similar can be said about political campaigns. To be sure, there remains a question whether deliberative capacities are “sufficiently” engaged; in such cases, they are hardly on hold. But it would be plausible to suggest that the sufficiency requirement is not met. If so, the ethical objection gains strength under two conditions: (1) when the manipulator’s goals are self- interested or venal and (2) when the act of manipulation is successful in subverting or bypassing the chooser’s deliberative capacities. When both conditions are met, there is good reason for an ethical taboo on manipulation, and perhaps legal constraints, certainly (but not only) when it comes from government. As we shall see, there is also reason for heightened concern, from the standpoint of the first amendment, when the government compels speech in order to manipulate those who encounter it; in such cases, the government should face an elevated burden of justification.

The remainder of this Essay is organized as follows. Part II explores conceptual and definitional issues, distinguishing manipulation from deceit, and linking the idea of manipulation to recent psychological and behavioral findings. Part III turns to normative questions, investigating whether and how manipulation might be unacceptable in light of commitments to autonomy, dignity, and welfare. Part IV examines the relevance of consent, transparency, and democratic authorization. It concludes that while individual consent justifies manipulation, transparency and democratic authorization do not. Part V explores free speech issues and consumer protection. Part VI briefly concludes.

II. What Manipulation Is

A. Insulting Deliberation

A great deal of effort has been devoted to the definition of manipulation, almost exclusively within the philosophical literature.41 Many of the efforts focus on the effects of manipulation in counteracting or undermining people’s ability to engage in rational deliberation. On T.M. Wilkinson’s account, for example, manipulation “is a kind of influence that bypasses or subverts the target’s rational capacities.”42 Wilkinson urges that manipulation “subverts and insults a person’s autonomous decision making,” in a way that treats its objects as “tools and fools.”43 He thinks that “manipulation is intentionally and successfully influencing someone using methods that pervert choice.”44

Recall, for example, efforts to enlist attractive people to sell cars, or to use frightening music and ugly photos to attack a political opponent. We might think that in such cases, customers and voters are being insulted in the sense that the relevant speaker is not giving them anything like a straightforward account of the virtues of the car or the vices of the opponent, but is instead using associations of various kinds to press the chooser in the manipulator’s preferred direction. On a plausible view, manipulation is involved to the extent that deliberation is insufficient. Here again, it is important to notice that we should speak of degrees of manipulation, rather than a simple on-off switch.

In a related account, Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp define psychological manipulation as “any intentional act that successfully influences a person to belief or behavior by causing changes in mental processes other than those involved in understanding.”45 Joseph Raz suggests that “Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person’s options. Instead it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences or adopts goals.”46

Of course the idea of “perverting” choice, or people’s way of reaching decisions or forming preferences, is not self-defining; it can be understood to refer to methods that do not appeal to, or produce, the right degree or kind of reflective deliberation. If so, an objection to manipulation is that it “infringes upon the autonomy of the victim by subverting and insulting their decision-making powers.”47 The objection also offers one account of what is wrong with lies, which attempt to alter behavior not by engaging people on the merits and asking them to decide accordingly, but by enlisting falsehoods, usually in the service of the liar’s goals (an idea that also points the way to a welfarist account of what usually makes lies wrong48). A lie is disrespectful to its objects, not least if it attempts to exert influence without asking people to make a deliberate choice in light of relevant facts. But when lies are not involved, and when the underlying actions appear to be manipulative, the challenge is to concretize the ideas of “subverting” and “insulting.”49

It is tempting to adopt a simple definition, to this effect: A statement or action is manipulative to the extent that it does not engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. The problem with this definition is that it is far too broad, sweeping up much action that is a standard part of daily life, and that it is rarely taken as manipulative. Suppose, for example, that a good friend frames an option in the most attractive light and with a cheerful voice; or that the Department of Transportation embarks on a vivid, even graphic public education campaign to reduce texting while driving50; or that a politician argues in favor of same-sex marriage in a way that points, in an emotionally evocative way, to the lived experience of same-sex couples. In all of these cases, we might have long debates about whether the relevant statements are appealing to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. And even if we conclude that they are not, we should not therefore be committed to the view that manipulation is involved.

To warrant that conclusion, the word “sufficiently” is required, to add the suggestion that people have been in some sense tricked or fooled, or at least that their deliberative capacities have not been adequately engaged. In this sense, there is a connection between the idea of manipulation and the idea of deceit; we can even see the former as a lighter or softer version of the latter. With an act of deceit, people almost inevitably51 feel betrayed and outraged once they are informed of the truth. The same is true of manipulation. Once the full context is revealed, those who have been manipulated tend to feel used. They ask: Why wasn’t I allowed to decide for myself?

In an illuminating discussion, with implications for policy and law, Anne Barnhill defines manipulation as “directly influencing someone’s beliefs, desires, or emotions, such that she falls short of ideals for belief, desire, or emotion in ways typically not in her self-interest or likely not in her self-interest in the present context.”52 Notwithstanding its ambiguity and need for specification, the idea of “falling short of ideals” is helpful, and it should be seen as an effort to capture the same idea as the word “sufficiently.” Note that the standard here is best taken as objective, not subjective. The question is whether someone has, in fact, sufficiently engaged a chooser’s deliberative capacities – not whether the chooser so believes. But there is a problem with Barnhill’s definition, which is that it excludes, from the category of manipulation, influences that are in the self- interest of the chooser. Some acts of manipulation count as such even if they leave the chooser better off. (You might be manipulated to purchase a car that you end up much enjoying.) We might say that such acts are justified – but they are manipulative all the same.

To understand manipulation in this general way, it should not be necessary to make controversial claims about the nature of choice or the role of emotions. We should agree that many decisions are based on unconscious processing and that people often lack a full sense of the wellsprings of their own choices.53 Even if this is so, a manipulator might impose some kind of influence that unduly undermines or bypasses reflection and deliberation. It is possible to acknowledge the view that emotions might themselves be judgments of value54 while also emphasizing that manipulators attempt to influence people’s choices without promoting much in the way of reflective thinking about the values at stake. In ordinary language, the idea of manipulation is invoked by people who are not committed to controversial views about psychological or philosophical questions, and it is best to understand that idea in a way that brackets the relevant controversies.

B. Manipulating System 1

We can make progress in understanding some kinds of manipulation with reference to the now-widespread view that the human mind contains not one but two “cognitive systems.”55 In the social science literature, the two systems are described as System 1 and System 2.56 System 1 is the automatic, intuitive system, prone to biases and to the use of heuristics, while System 2 is more deliberative, calculative, and reflective. Manipulators often target System 1, and they attempt to bypass or undermine System 2.57

System 1 works quickly. Much of the time, it is on automatic pilot. It is driven by habits. When it hears a loud noise, it is inclined to run. When it is offended, it wants to hit back. It certainly eats a delicious brownie. It can procrastinate; it can be impulsive. It is easy to manipulate. It wants what it wants when it wants it. It can be excessively fearful and too complacent. It is a doer, not a planner.

By contrast, System 2 is reflective and deliberative. It calculates. It hears a loud noise, and it assesses whether the noise is a cause for concern. It thinks about probability, carefully though sometimes slowly. It does not really get offended. If it sees reasons for offense, it makes a careful assessment of what, all things considered, ought to be done. It sees a delicious brownie, and it makes a judgment about whether, all things considered, it should eat it. It is hardly to manipulate. It insists on the importance of self-control. It is a planner more than a doer.

We need venture contested claims about the nature of the two systems58 in order to find it helpful to suggest that many actions count as manipulative because they appeal to System 1, and because System 2 is being subverted, tricked, undermined, or insufficiently involved or not informed. Consider the case of subliminal advertising, which should be deemed manipulative, because it operates “behind the back” of the person involved, without appealing to his conscious awareness. People’s decisions are affected in a way that entirely bypasses their own deliberative capacities. If this is the defining problem with subliminal advertising, we can understand why involuntary hypnosis would also count as manipulative. But almost no one favors subliminal advertising, and to say the least, the idea of involuntary hypnosis lacks much appeal. The question is whether admittedly taboo practices can shed light on actions that are more familiar or that might be able to command broader support.

D. Illustrative (and Not Easy) Cases

Consider some cases that test the boundaries of the concept of manipulation.

(1) Suppose that public officials try to persuade people to engage in certain behavior with the help of relative risk information: “If you do not do X, your chances of death from heart disease will triple!”59 But suppose that for the relevant population, the chance of death from heart disease is very small – say, one in 100,000 – and that people are far more influenced by the idea of “tripling the risk” than they would be if they learned that if they do not do X, they could increase a 1/100,000 risk to a 3/100,000 risk (to say the least, a modest increase). The relative risk frame is far more attention- grabbing than the absolute risk frame; a tripling of a risk sounds alarming, but if the increase is by merely 2/100,000, people might not be much concerned. It is certainly reasonable to take the choice of the relative risk frame (which suggests a large impact on health) is an effort to frighten people and thus to manipulate them (at least in a mild sense).

It is true that any description of a risk requires some choices; people who describe risks cannot avoid some kind of framing. But framing is not the same as manipulation. There is a good argument this particular choice does not sufficiently engage, or show a great deal of respect for, people’s deliberative capacities; it might even be an effort to aim specifically at System 1. As we shall see, that conclusion does not mean that the use of the relative risk frame is necessarily out of bounds.60 This is hardly the most egregious case of manipulation, and if it saves a number of lives across a large population, it might be justified. But it can be counted as manipulative.

(2) Suppose that public officials are alert to the power of loss aversion,61 and hence they use the “loss frame,” so as to trigger people’s concern about the risks associated with obesity and excessive energy consumption. They might deliberately choose to emphasize, in some kind of information campaign, how much people would lose from not using energy conservation techniques, rather than how much people would gain from using such techniques.62 Is the use of loss aversion, with its predictably large effects,63 a form of manipulation?

The answer is not obvious, but there is a good argument that it is not, because deliberative capacities remain sufficiently involved. Even with a loss frame, people remain fully capable of assessing overall effects. But it must be acknowledged that the deliberate use of loss aversion might be an effort to trigger the negative feelings that are distinctly associated with losses.

Here too, it is a separate question whether the use of loss aversion raises serious ethical objections. Within the universe of arguably manipulative statements, those that enlist lost aversion hardly count as the most troublesome, and in the case under discussion, the government’s objectives are laudable. If the use of loss aversion produces large gains (in terms of health or economic benefits), we would not have much ground for objection.64 But we can identify cases in which the use of loss aversion is self-interested, and in which the surrounding context makes it a genuine example of manipulation.65 Consider, for example, the efforts of banks, in the aftermath of a new regulation from the Federal Reserve Board, to enlist loss aversion to encourage customers to opt-in to costly overdraft protection programs by saying, “Don’t lose your ATM and Debit Card Overdraft Protection” and “STAY PROTECTED with [ ] ATM and Debit Card Over- draft Coverage.66 In such cases, there is an evident effort to trigger a degree of alarm, and hence it is reasonable to claim that customers were being manipulated, and to their detriment.

(3) Alert to the behavioral science on social influences,67 a planner might consider the following approaches:

Inform people that most people in their community are engaging in undesirable behavior (drug use, alcohol abuse, delinquent payment of taxes, environmentally harmful acts).

Inform people that most/many people in their community are engaging in desirable behavior.

Inform people that most/many people in their community believe that people should engage in certain behavior.

The first two approaches rely on “descriptive norms,” that is, what people actually do.68 The second approach relies on “injunctive norms,” that is, what people think that people should do. As an empirical matter, it turns out that descriptive norms are ordinarily more powerful.69 If a change in behavior is what is sought, then it is best to emphasize that most/many people actually do the right thing.70 But if most/many people do the wrong thing, it can be helpful to invoke injunctive norms.71

Suppose that a public official is keenly aware of these findings and uses them. Is he engage in manipulation? The word “sufficiently” becomes relevant here as well. Without doing much violence to ordinary language, some people might think it reasonable to conclude that it is manipulative to choose the formulation that will have the largest impact. At least this is so if social influences work as they do because of their impact on the automatic system, and if they bypass deliberative processing.72 But as an empirical matter, this is far from clear; information about what other people do, or what other people think, can be part of reflective deliberation, and hardly opposed to it. So long as the official is being truthful, it would strain the boundaries of the concept to accuse him of manipulation: When they are informed about what most people do, people’s powers of deliberation are sufficiently engaged.73

(4) Default rules often stick, in part because of the force of inertia, in part because of the power of suggestion.74 Suppose that a public official is aware of that fact and decides to reconsider a series of default rules in order to exploit the stickiness of defaults. Seeking to save money, she might decide in favor of a double-sided default for printers. 75 Seeking to reduce pollution, she might promote, or even require, a default rule in favor of green energy.76 Seeking to increase savings, she might promote, or even require, automatic enrollment in retirement plans.77

Are these initiatives manipulative? Insofar as the default rules carries an element of suggestion -- a kind of informational signal -- they are not. Such rules appeal to deliberative capacities insofar as they convey information about what planners think people ought to be buying. The analysis is less straightforward insofar as default rules stick because of inertia: Without making a conscious choice, people end up enrolled on some kind of program or plan. In a sense, the official is exploiting System 1, which is prone to inertia and procrastination.78 The question is whether automatic enrollment fails “sufficiently” to engage reflection and deliberation.

In answering that question, it is surely relevant that an opt-in default is likely to stick as well, and for the same reasons, which means that the question is whether any default rule counts as a form of manipulation. The answer to that question is plain: Life cannot be navigated without default rules, and so long as the official is not hiding or suppressing anything, the choice of one or another should not be characterized as manipulative. Note that people do reject default rules that they genuinely dislike, so long as opt-out is easy – an empirical point in favor of the conclusion that such rules should not be counted as manipulative.79

(5) A potpourri. There is no question that much of modern advertising is directed at System 1, with attractive people, bold colors, and distinctive aesthetics. (Consider advertisements for Viagra.) Often the goal is to trigger a distinctive affect and more specifically to enlist the “affect heuristic,” which puts the question of manipulation in stark relief.80 Much of website design is an effort to trigger attention and to put it in the right places.81 Cell phone companies, restaurants, and clothing stores use music and colors in a way that is designed to “frame” products in a distinctive manner. Doctors, friends, and family members (including spouses) sometimes do something quite similar. Is romance an exercise in manipulation? Some of the time, the answer is surely yes, though the question of “sufficiently” raises special challenges in that context.82

Acting as advocates, lawyers may be engaged in manipulation; that is part of their job, certainly in front of a jury. The same can be said about some aspects of the provision of medical care, when doctors want patients to choose particular options, and enlist behaviorally informed technique to manipulate them to do so. Or consider certain uses of social media – as, for example, when Facebook attempted to affect (manipulate) the emotions of 689,003 people though the display of positive or negative stories to see how they affected their moods.83 A great deal of conduct, however familiar, can be counted as manipulative in the relevant sense.

III. What Is Wrong With Manipulation, So Understood? A. Autonomy and Dignity

1. Respect. The most obvious problem with manipulation is that it can insult both autonomy and dignity. From the standpoint of autonomy, the problem is that manipulation can deprive people of agency, resting on a continuum for which coercion is the endpoint. (If people are manipulated into buying a product, they might feel coerced.) From the standpoint of dignity, the problem is that manipulation can be humiliating. Healthy adults, not suffering from a lack of capacity, should not be tricked; they should be treated as fully capable of making their own decisions. Their authority over their own lives should not be undermined by approaches that treat them as children or as puppets. An act of manipulation does not treat people with respect.84

Suppose, for example, that someone thinks, “I want all my friends to do certain things, and I know a number of strategies to get them to do those things. I have read a great deal of psychology and behavioral science, including the best work on social influence, and my project is to use what I know to manipulate my friends.”85 Such a person would not be respecting her friends’ autonomy. She would be using them as her instruments. Indeed, her actions would be inconsistent with the nature of friendship itself, which entails a relationship that is not strictly or mostly instrumental.

Now turn to the case of government. Suppose that public officials – say, in a governor’s office – similarly learn a great deal about how to influence people, and suppose that they decide to use what they learn to achieve certain policy goals. Suppose that some of the relevant instruments attempt to subvert or bypass deliberation. We need to know the details – what, exactly, are they doing? -- but it could well be fair to say that manipulation is involved, and that public officials are not sufficiently respecting their citizens’ autonomy.86 Again we need to know the details, but it could also be fair to say that such officials are not treating citizens with respect; they might be using them as instruments or as puppets for their own ends (or for the perhaps public-spirited ends that they favor).87

2. Role. We should be able to see, in this light, that role greatly matters to the assessment of manipulation. Suppose that Jones is trying to obtain a job. It is hardly unacceptable for Jones to attempt to get prospective employers to like him, and if Jones learns about social influence and the operations of System 1, it would hardly be illegitimate for him to take advantage of what he learns. To be sure, there are ethical limits on what Jones can do, and even for someone seeking a job, the most egregious forms of manipulation would cross the line. But in interactions or relationships that are instrumental, and that are so understood, deontological constraints are weakened or at least different.

In an advertising campaign, everyone knows the nature of the interaction. Manipulation is the coin of the realm. The purpose of advertisements is to sell products, and while we can find purely factual presentations, many advertisements do not appeal to reflection or deliberation at all. They try to create certain moods and associations. Something similar can be said about some aspects of political campaigns. The relationship between a campaign and voters has an instrumental character: Campaigns want votes, and everyone understands that. In the process, both advertisements and speeches will have manipulative features. It would be extravagant to say that in such cases, people have consented to manipulation in all imaginable forms. Here too, lines can be crossed.88 But it is important that people are aware of the distinctive nature of the relevant enterprises.

Other roles are accompanied by different norms, and manipulation might not fit with, or might even violate, those norms. When governments deal with their citizens, they face radically different norms from those that apply in campaigns. At least this is so in free and democratic societies, in which it is understand that the public is ultimately sovereign. To be sure, public officials are hardly forbidden from framing options in a way that casts those they prefer in the most favorable light. But as the manipulative characteristics of their actions become more extreme, the scope for legitimate objection becomes greater.89

B. Welfare

Suppose that we are welfarists, and that we believe that what matters is how people’s lives are going.90 Suppose too that we care about violations of autonomy and dignity only insofar as such violations affect people’s subjective experiences (for example, by making them feel confined or humiliated). If, how should we think about manipulation?

It should be clear that there is no taboo on the practice. As we shall see, manipulation might promote people’s welfare. But there is a distinctive welfarist objection to manipulation, which takes the following form. As a general rule, choosers know what is in their best interest (at least if they are adults, and if they do not suffer from a problem of capacity91). They have unique access to their situations, their constraints, and their tastes.92 If they are manipulated, they are deprived of the (full) ability to make choices on their own, simply because they are not give a fair or adequate chance to weigh all variables. If someone wants to help people to make better choices, his obligation is to inform them, so that they can themselves engage in such weighing.

The problem with the manipulator is that he lacks relevant knowledge – about the chooser’s situation, tastes, and values.93 Lacking that knowledge, he nonetheless subverts the process by which choosers make their own decisions about what is best for them. Things are even worse if the manipulator is focused on his own interests rather than on those of choosers. It is in this sense that a self-interested manipulator can be said to be stealing from people – both limiting their agency and moving their resources in the preferred direction.

For these reasons, the welfarist objection to paternalism is rooted in the same concerns that underlie Mill’s Harm Principle. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,”94 and the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”95 When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.”96

These points apply to those engaged in manipulation no less than to those engaged in coercion.

Notwithstanding these points, it should be clear that from the welfarist standpoint, there should be no ban on manipulation.97 Everything depends on whether manipulation improves people’s welfare. To see the point, imagine a benign, all-knowing, welfare- promoting manipulator – a kind of idealized parent – who is concerned only with the welfare of those who are being manipulated, who has all the knowledge he needs, and who simply does not make mistakes. By hypothesis, the welfare-promoting manipulator should be celebrated on welfarist grounds. The major qualification is that if people know that they are being manipulated, and do not like it, there will be a welfare loss, and that loss will have to be counted in the overall assessment. The simple point is that if people hate manipulators, manipulation is less likely to be supportable on welfare grounds (unless it is hidden, which raises problems of its own98).

But put that point to one side. The main problem with the thought experiment is that manipulators are unlikely to be either benign or all-knowing. Often they have their own agendas, and the fact that they engage in manipulation attests to that fact. If they are genuinely concerned about the welfare of the chooser, why not try to persuade them? Why cross the line to manipulation? To be sure, the manipulator might be able to answer this question if, for example, time is of the essence, or if the chooser lacks capacity (because, for example, he is a child or very ill). Or suppose that graphic health warnings, aimed directly at System 1, save numerous lives; suppose too that numerous lives cannot be saved with a merely factual presentation unaccompanied by graphic health warnings. On welfarist grounds, a great deal might be said on behalf of graphic health warnings.99

The example shows that from the standpoint of welfare, everything depends on the context; the fact that manipulation is involved does not necessarily impeach the manipulator’s welfare calculus. But in many situations, suspicion about manipulators’ goals is perfectly justified. To this point it must be added that even when those goals are admirable, manipulators may not know enough to justify their actions. Consider Friedrich Hayek’s remarkable suggestion that “the awareness of our irremediable ignorance of most of what is known to somebody [who is a planner] is the chief basis of the argument for liberty.”100 I will return to this point, and the question of regulation, in Part VI.

V. Consent, Transparency, Democracy

A. Manipulation With Consent: “I Welcome It!”

Suppose that people consent to manipulation.101 An alcoholic might tell his wife: “I am trying so hard to quit. Please use whatever techniques you can think of to help me. Manipulation is very much on the table. I welcome it!” Or suppose that the overwhelming majority of smokers tell their government: “I want to stop! If you can find a way to help me to overcome my addiction, I would be grateful.” T. M. Wilkinson notes that it is too crude to say that manipulation infringes upon autonomy, because “manipulation could be consented to. If it were consented to, in the right kind of way, then the manipulation would at least be consistent with autonomy and might count as enhancing it.”102

The conclusion has a great deal of force. We can understand consent as suggesting support from System 2, which might welcome a little manipulation (or possibly a lot) as a way of cabining the adverse effects of System 1. The tale of Ulysses and the Sirens is instructive here, whether Ulysses was requesting manipulation or something else.103 Nor is there an objection, in the case of consent, from the standpoint of welfare. The chooser has decided that he will be better off if he is manipulated. If we see his choice as presumptively promoting his welfare, we should respect it, even if what he chose is manipulation.

In the easiest cases, consent is explicit. In harder cases, it is only implicit, in the sense that the manipulator infers it from the circumstances or believes, with good reason, that the chooser would consent if asked. If the inference is less than reliable, the consent justification is correspondingly weakened. If the belief is reasonable but potentially wrong, it might make sense to insist on obtaining explicit consent in order to avoid the risk of error. It is important to see that consensual manipulation is an unusual case; those who need help do not ordinarily ask, “Please manipulate me.” But such cases certainly do exist, at least when people face serious problems of self-control.

B. Transparency and Manipulation

The idea of manipulation is sometimes taken to imply a lack of transparency, as if something important is being hidden or not being disclosed.104 If a manipulator is acting as a puppeteer, he might be failing to reveal his own role; that can be an important feature of manipulation. With respect to manipulation, however, it is not entirely clear what transparency even means.105

Sometimes manipulation itself consists in a lack of transparency about a relevant feature of a situation; that is the very manipulation involved. (A parent tells a small child: If you are very good, Santa Claus will bring you a toy giraffe.) Once the relevant feature is revealed, the manipulation is gone. But the manipulative character of some acts does not consist in their hidden quality. (Recall the use of relative risk reduction.) Some acts can be both manipulative and fully revealed to those who are being manipulated.106 A graphic health warning, for example, is perfectly transparent (and if it is required by regulation, it is even likely to preceded by a period for public comment107). Subliminal advertising could be preceded by an explicit warning: “This movie contains subliminal advertising.”

In the pivotal scene in The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” The man behind the curtail is of course a mere human being who is masquerading as the great Wizard – and who is both claiming far more authority than he deserves and designing social situations in a way that hides features that, if revealed, would greatly alter people’s judgments and choices. Or consider a less celebrated movie, The Truman Show, in which the life course of Truman, the movie’s hero-protagonist, is affected by multiple decisions from a master manipulator, who conceals the facts that Truman is the unwitting star of a television show and that his friends and acquaintances consist of actors. Covertness and hiding are common features of manipulation. Whenever people who are imposing influence conceal their own role, it seems reasonable to object. A lack of transparency offends both autonomy and dignity.

From the standpoint of welfare, we might ask why, exactly, someone has failed to be upfront with the chooser, who ought to be able to make his own decisions, armed with relevant information. As before, however, the analysis of welfare is more complex, for we could imagine cases in which transparency is not necessary and may in fact be a problem. Suppose that someone suffers from a serious self-control problem and that his life is in danger (from, say, alcohol or drug addiction). Suppose too that a manipulator has come across a life-saving strategy and that transparency would render the manipulation less effective. By hypothesis, welfarist considerations argue against transparency. Points of this kind have the strongest intuitive force when applied to people who lack capacity (young children, the mentally ill), but we can imagine contexts in which adults with full capacity would benefit from being manipulated.108

There might also be a welfarist justification for hidden manipulation in other extreme circumstances – as, for example, when people are trying to stop a kidnapping or to save a kidnapping victim. If the goal is to stop a wrongdoer, or someone who threats to do real harm, it may be perfectly acceptable or even obligatory to manipulate them and to hide that fact. They have forfeited their right to be treated with respect, and their welfare, as choosers, is not a matter of much concern.

In standard cases, however, this argument will be unavailable. It follows that most of the time, manipulation should not be hidden or covert, even when it is justified; return to the case of graphic health warnings. Transparency is a necessary condition. Note, however, that it is not sufficient.109 Subliminal advertising would not become acceptable merely because people were informed about it. If a movie chain announced that its previews would be filled with subliminal advertisements, people could fairly object.

C. Democratically Authorized Manipulation

What if manipulation is democratically authorized? Suppose that a national legislature expressly votes for it, perhaps in order to improve public health (as, for example, by discouraging smoking or unhealthy eating), or perhaps to promote other goals (such as enlistment in the military or adoption of the currently preferred ideology). In relatively benign cases, involving little or no manipulation, a legislature might support an educational campaign that is designed to reduce illnesses and deaths and that enlists a series of behaviorally informed strategies, targeting System 1, to accomplish its goals.

It should be clear that democratic authorization ought not by itself to dissolve otherwise reasonable objections to manipulation. The most obvious problems arise if the national legislature has illegitimate ends (say, the inculcation of racial prejudice or self-entrenchment of some kind). But the familiar objections – involving autonomy, dignity, and welfare -- apply even if the ends are legitimate. If a national legislature authorizes subliminal advertising, it remains fully possible to object on grounds of both autonomy and dignity. An objection from the standpoint of welfare is also possible: Why did the democratic process authorize manipulation, rather than some other kind of communication?

To be sure, we could understand democratic authorization as a form of majority or collective consent, suggesting support from System 2, which might welcome a little manipulation (or possibly a lot) as a way of cabining the adverse effects of System 1. In general, however, there are evident risks in authorizing public officials to pursue this line of argument. The objection to manipulation comes from individuals, who do not want to be manipulated; the fact that a majority wants to manipulate them is no defense.

But in certain contexts, the argument on behalf of at least a modest degree of manipulation might not be implausible, and it is strengthened if the democratic process has supported it. Imagine, for example, a public education campaign that is designed to reduce the risks associated with texting while driving,110 or an effort to combat the use of dangerous drugs or to convince people to stay in school. Many such campaigns are vivid and have an emotional component; they can be understood as efforts to combat self- control problems and to focus people on the long term.111

If government is targeting System 1 – perhaps through framing, perhaps through emotionally evocative appeals – it might be responding to the fact that System 1 has already been targeted, and to people’s detriment. In the context of cigarettes, for example, it is plausible to say that previous manipulations – including advertising and social norms – have influenced people to become smokers. If this is so, perhaps we can say that public officials are permitted to meet fire with fire. But some people might insist that two wrongs do not make a right – and that if the government seeks to lead people to quit, it must treat them as adults, and appeal to their deliberative capacities.

Recall that there are degrees of manipulation, and there is a large difference between a lie and an effort to frame an alternative in an appealing, unappealing, or ugly light. In ordinary life, we would not be likely to accuse our friends or loved ones of manipulation if they characterized one approach as favored by most members of our peer group, or if they emphasized the losses that might accompany an alternative that they abhor, or if they accompanied a description of one option with a grave look and a frown. These are at most mild forms of manipulation, to be sure, and it is important to see that mild forms might well be acceptable and benign (and a bit fun) if they promote the interests of those people at whom they are aimed. No legal system has a general tort called “exploitation of cognitive biases.”

D. Unifying Strands

If the various arguments are put together, we might be able to evaluate acts of manipulation with the help of the following matrix:

The matrix helps to orient the appropriate response to manipulation from the standpoint of ethics, politics, and law, and indeed it captures widespread intuitions. In the bottom right cell, we can find actions by self-interested or venal public officials both in undemocratic systems112 and occasionally in democratic ones as well.113 In the top right, we can find foolish or venal statements or actions by private and public actors that do not entirely bypass people’s deliberative capacities, but that hardly do justice to them. Many government agencies, and many ordinary companies, act in accordance with the top left cell; they portray their behavior in an appealing light, and they try to attract favorable attention, but the particular form of manipulation is hardly egregious. Some governments, some of the time, act in a way that fits in the bottom left cell, perhaps especially with graphic campaigns.

The matrix also provides a start toward an analysis of how the legal system should respond to manipulation. From the welfarist standpoint, the central question is whether the benefits of restricting the manipulative action or statement justify the costs. To answer that question, we need to know what would happen if the action or statement were not made (or were transformed into a non-manipulative version). In this respect, the analysis of manipulation closely parallels the analysis of deception.114 The costs of manipulation depend, in large part, on whether the manipulator is malign or uninformed. To the extent that it is, there is a risk of serious welfare losses. But suppose that an advertiser is part of a well-functioning competitive process, and that its advertisement includes a degree of manipulation in order to sell a product. If the competitive process is genuinely well-functioning, consumers are not likely to lose much, and market pressures will discipline the use and the effectiveness of manipulation.115

The question, then, is whether some kind of market failure exists, so that manipulative behavior can persist or be rewarded. In light of information problems and behavioral biases, the answer is likely to be affirmative, at least in some markets.116 Of course consumers will have diverse understandings of, and reactions to, statements and actions that plausibly fall within the category of manipulation.117 Empirical testing of representative populations could provide highly informative here. The fact of heterogeneous understandings will create serious challenges for regulators seeking to prevent arguably harmful forms of manipulation. As we shall see, however, some manipulative acts are so plainly welfare-reducing that it makes sense to restrict them.

VI. Manipulation, Freedom of Speech, and Consumer Protection

Under established doctrine, government can regulate threats118; it can also regulate false or misleading commercial speech119 and certain forms of coercive speech.120 May it also regulate manipulation? It is also clear that government can compel certain kinds of speech.121 May it compel speech that is arguably manipulative?

A. Compelled Speech

As a testing case, consider the efforts of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require cigarette packages to contain graphic health warnings. The court of appeals invalidated the requirement on the first amendment grounds, concluding that the FDA lacked sufficient evidence to justify the compelled speech.122 In so ruling, the court did not emphasize the arguably manipulative nature of the graphic warnings. But the lower court opinion did exactly that.123

The court found it relevant that “the Rule's graphic-image requirements are not the type of purely factual and uncontroversial disclosures that are reviewable under this less stringent standard.”124 It added, plausibly, that “it is abundantly clear from viewing these images that the emotional response they were crafted to induce is calculated to provoke the viewer to quit, or never to start, smoking: an objective wholly apart from disseminating purely factual and uncontroversial information.”125 The court concluded that when the government compels speech that does not involve the “purely factual and uncontroversial,” it has to meet a higher burden of justification.

The central idea here lacks support in Supreme Court decisions, but it has some appeal: The first amendment imposes particular barriers to government efforts to require speech that does not merely appeal to deliberative or reflective capacities, but that engages and attempts to activate System 1. On this view, there is no firm rule against compelling manipulative speech of that kind (so long as it is not false or deceptive), but if government is engaging in such compulsion, it must have a strong justification for doing so.

This analysis raises an assortment of issues. Do the graphic warnings count as manipulative? They are certainly designed to create a visceral response (and they do exactly that). But the question is whether they do not sufficiently engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. Here the answer has to come from specifying the idea of “sufficiently.” There is an empirical component to the specification: What, exactly, do people understand after they see the warnings? Suppose that for a large part of the population, understanding is actually improved. If so, there is a good argument that manipulation is not involved.126 But suppose that understanding is not improved. Can the warnings nonetheless be justified?

We could imagine two such justifications. The first is welfarist: Graphic health warnings will save a significant number of lives, and purely factual information will have a far weaker effect. If this is so, then the graphic health warnings do have a sufficient justification. The second is rooted in autonomy: Smokers, and prospective smokers, do not sufficiently appreciate the health risks of smoking, and graphic warnings can promote a kind of “debiasing” that statistical information fails to provide.127 To this point, it might be added that government regulation is hardly being imposed on a blank slate. Recall that efforts to promote smoking involve a high degree of manipulation -- portraying happy, attractive smokers – and the government can legitimately respond. In light of the number of lives at risk and the underlying evidence, these kinds of justifications do seem sufficient in the particular context of smoking.

B. Regulating Manipulation

Should government regulate manipulation? In the context of political speech? Commercial advertising? We could imagine, or find, egregious cases in which it is tempting to say that it should. But the first amendment barriers are severe.

1. Political speech and public figures. In the context of political speech, the leading case is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell,128 where the Court said that the first amendment protects a parody, depicting Protestant minister Jerry Falwell as engaged in an incestuous act with his mother at an outhouse. The parody was satirical; it can also be seen as a form of manipulation, designed to lead readers to see Falwell as a ridiculous figure and also a hypocrite. In the terms used here, the parody was an effort to appeal directly to System 1, so that people would not be able to regard Falwell in the same light in the future.

The Court unanimously ruled that the first amendment protected the parody. The Court acknowledged that to prevent genuine harm, states could regulate false statements of fact, which “are particularly valueless; they interfere with the truth-seeking function of the marketplace of ideas, and they cause damage to an individual's reputation that cannot easily be repaired by counterspeech, however persuasive or effective.”129 But satire must be treated differently. “Were we to hold otherwise, there can be little doubt that political cartoonists and satirists would be subjected to damages awards without any showing that their work falsely defamed its subject.”130 Even the most outrageous forms of satire are protected, because the idea of outrageousness has “an inherent subjectiveness about it which would allow a jury to impose liability on the basis of the jurors' tastes or views, or perhaps on the basis of their dislike of a particular expression.”131

To be sure, the Court’s reasoning was not unbounded. It acknowledged that the “actual malice” standard – allowing recovery of damages for statements known to be false or made with reckless indifference to the question of truth or falsity132 -- would apply if readers had taken the parody as depicting actual facts.133 But readers could not so take the parody here. This point leaves open the possibility that even in the political domain, certain forms of manipulation could be regulated if readers or viewers were affirmatively misled. But in view of the fact that the Court has pointedly declined to create a general exception to the first amendment even for false statements of fact,134 any effort to regulate manipulative speech in the political context would run into severe trouble.135

With the design of any restrictions on such speech, there are independent questions of vagueness and overbreadth. If a government wants to prohibit the most egregious forms of manipulation in the political context, what, exactly, would it say? I have ventured a definition of manipulation here, but it is not exactly easy to adapt that definition to fit a provision of civil or criminal law. Manipulation has too many shades – which means that any effort to restrict it would likely be too vague and too broad.

2. Commercial speech. The context of commercial advertising is different, because the burden on regulators is lighter.136 But here as well, the first amendment obstacles are formidable. So long as the relevant speech is neither false nor deceptive, the government would need a powerful justification for imposing regulation.137 The definitional issues remain severe, and even if they could be resolved, it would be plausible to say, in the general spirit of Hustler Magazine, that the marketplace of ideas is full of efforts to appeal to System 1, and to downplay or bypass deliberation and reflection.

Even if the commercial sphere is less immune from speech regulation, it is emphatically a place where manipulation is pervasive. The hope is that consumers will understand that advertisements are generally self-serving and that the process of competition will provide a sufficient corrective. To be sure, behavioral economics has raised serious questions about the realism of that hope.138 But it is highly doubtful that those questions provide a sufficient basis for a general “manipulation exception” to the existing protection accorded to commercial speech.

C. Consumer Protection

None of these conclusions mean that narrower forms of regulation could not be imagined. In the context of consumer financial products, various forms of manipulation are a widespread problem. Indeed, manipulation can be seen as a defining motivation for recent regulatory initiatives.139 The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act states that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) should ensure that “markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive.”140 It calls for attention not only to “unfair and deceptive” acts and practices but also to “abusive” ones,141 which can be seen as a reference to the worst forms of manipulation. In monitoring the relevant markets, the CFPB must consider the “understanding by consumers of the risks of a type of consumer financial product or service”142 – a phrase that can easily be taken to reflect a concern about manipulation.

Implementing these requirements, the CFPB has adopted as its slogan, “know before you owe,” and its various efforts to ensure informed choices can be understood as an attack on manipulation as I have understood it here.143 In consumer markets, of course, one problem is complexity, which can defeat understanding.144 But another problem falls in the general category of manipulation, as in the form of “teaser rates” and various inducements that fall short of deceit, but that emphatically prey on System 1.145

A short, simple credit card agreement, of the sort provided by the CFPB, can be seen as a direct response to the risk of manipulation146 -- and as an effort to ensure that System 2 is firmly in charge. Proposals to ban or restrict teaser rates can be understood in similar terms.147 In cases of this kind, there is ample room for considering the problem of manipulation in deciding how best to regulate financial products. It is important to see that in such cases, government is regulating commercial practices, not advertising, and that its real concern is with practices that do not sufficiently trigger reflective deliberation on the part of consumers. We have seen that this is far from a self-defining category, but the CFPB’s initiatives can be taken as initial efforts to specify it.

Conclusion

A statement or action can be counted be counted manipulative to the extent that it does not sufficiently engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. Some forms of manipulation are egregious, as where a vivid, graphic description of an outcome (winning the lottery, dying in an airplane crash, losing a child) is invoked in order to convince people to engage in certain conduct (to buy a lottery ticket, to take a train, to buy extra life insurance). Some arguable forms of manipulation are mild, as when a politician, an employer, or a waiter uses loss aversion, tone of voice, and facial expressions to encourage certain decisions. Thus defined, manipulation is a pervasive feature of human life. It is for this reason that while the legal system is generally able to handle lies and deception, it has a much harder time in targeting manipulation.

In their troublesome forms, manipulative acts fail to respect choosers; they undermine people’s autonomy and do not respect their dignity. The welfarist objection, rooted in the idea that choosers know what it in their best interests, is that when they are products of manipulation, people’s choices may not promote their own welfare, precisely because choosers have not been put in a position to deliberate about relevant variables and values. This is likely to be true if the manipulator is ill-motivated, but it might also be true because the manipulator lacks relevant information.

From the welfarist point of view, manipulation is only presumptively disfavored. A benign, knowledgeable manipulator could make people’s lives go better and possibly much better. But under realistic assumptions, the presumption against manipulation is justifiably strong, because manipulators are unlikely to be either benign or knowledgeable.

Footnotes

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1105057/quotes

Revealingly, nostalgia actually means “longing for a return home,” rather than “pain from an old wound.”

On the FDA’s effort to require graphic warnings on packages, see RJ Reynolds v. FDA, 696 F.3d 1205 (DC Cir 2012), available at http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/4C0311C78EB11C5785257A64004E BFB5/$file/11-5332-1391191.pdf, affirmed on other grounds, RJ Reynolds v. FDA, F3d (DC Cir. 2012), available at http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/4C0311C78EB11C5785257A64004E BFB5/$file/11-5332-1391191.pdf. For the government’s own graphic campaign, see http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/resources/videos/ For evidence of success from graphic warnings, see http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2011/p0526_cigarettewarnings.html

See Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia Reisch, Automatically Green: Behavioral Economics and Environmental Protection, 38 Harv Env L Rev 127 (2014). The example should not be taken to suggest that green energy is necessarily more expensive than other forms.

Within Anglo-American law, deceit has long been tortious. See Derry v. Peek, LR 14 App Cas 337 (1889); John Hannigan, Measure of Damages in Tort for Deceit, 18 B.U. L. Rev. 681 (1938). An extensive body of law deals with the related issue of misrepresentation. See John Cartwright, Misrepresentation, Mistake and Non-disclosure (3d ed. 2012). On the ethical issues associated with lying, see Sissela Bok, Lying (2011).

See Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 US 748 (1976).

15 USC 57a (a)(1)(B).

The most valuable treatment involves the analogous problem of deception. Richard Craswell, Interpreting Deceptive Advertising, 65 BU L Rev 657 (1985); Regulating Deceptive Advertising: The Role of Cost-Benefit Analysis, 64 Southern Cal. L. Rev. 549 (1991). As we shall see, manipulation is a different concept, and it is much harder to define and police. Craswell’s superb discussions nonetheless bear on the question of regulating manipulation, and indeed helps show why regulation is so difficult.

See Craswell, Interpreting Deceptive Advertising, supra note, for the seminal discussion.

A qualification is necessary. If a disclosure requirement focuses on one of many aspects of a situation, and fixes people’s attention on that aspect, a charge of manipulation would not be unreasonable. Consider the controversy over the idea that sellers should have to disclose that food has genetically modified organisms (GMOs). See Charles Noussair et al., Do Consumers Really Refuse to Buy Genetically Modified Food?, 114 Economic Journal 102 (2004). For those who object to compulsory labeling about GMOs, there is a plausible claim that labels are a form of manipulation, activating public concern where there is no objective reason for that concern. Of course those in the private sector might engage in similar forms of manipulation, drawing people’s attention to a feature of a product that, while real, appears far more important than it actually is.

See T. M. Wilkinson, Nudging and Manipulation, 61 Political Studies 341, 242 (2013).

See below.

See Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (2012); Susan Bachrach, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda (2009).

For a number of instructive treatments, see Manipulation (Christian Coons and Michael Webster eds. 2014).

A valuable cautionary note: “People can be manipulated when they go shopping, strike contracts, vote, study at school, visit their doctors, decide whether to have sex or take turns to do the housework. A full account would have to cope with the enormous variety of sites and methods of manipulation. Indeed, we do not have such an account.” Wilkinson, supra note, at 344.

See Jeremy Waldron, It’s All For Your Own Good, New York Review of Books (2014), available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/cass-sunstein-its-all-your-own-good/ Consider in particular this passage: “Deeper even than this is a prickly concern about dignity. What becomes of the self-respect we invest in our own willed actions, flawed and misguided though they often are, when so many of our choices are manipulated to promote what someone else sees (perhaps rightly) as our best interest?” In the particular context that concerns Waldron, I believe that the question is overheated, see Cass R. Sunstein, Nudges and Choice Architecture: Ethical Considerations, Yale J Reg (forthcoming 2015) (arguing that nudges are generally not manipulative, and should not be adopted if they are), but the question is legitimate in many other contexts and in the abstract. An instructive discussion is Pelle Goldberg Hansen and Andreas Maaloe Jespersen, Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice, 4 EJRR 3 (2013).

For a provocative discussion, see Allen W. Wood, Coercion, Manipulation, Exploitation, in Manipulation, supra note, at 17.

A possible “yes” answer is provided in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 US 111 (1942), though the Court ruled “no” on the particular facts, where the Secretary of Agriculture gave an arguably manipulative speech on behalf of a referendum: “There is no evidence that any voter put upon the Secretary’s words the interpretation that impressed the court below or was in any way misled. There is no showing that the speech influenced the outcome of the referendum.” Id. at 116.

Labor law has an important pocket of doctrine that raises this question, though the fundamental problem is coercion (in the form of threats) rather than manipulation. See NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., 395 US 575 (1969).

A separate body of law deals with manipulative behavior in connection with swaps; the “manipulation” is a term of art in that setting. See http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2010/34-63236.pdf

See below; see also the discussion of potential regulation of payday loans in http://www.wsj.com/articles/cfpb-sets-sights-on-payday-loans-1420410479

Compare the related discussion in Anne Barnhill, What is Manipulation? in Manipulation: Theory and Practice 50, 72 (Christian Coons and Michael Weber eds. 2014).

See Augustus Bullock, The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Advertising (2004).

Importantly, the word “sufficiently” applies to the degree of reflection and deliberation that are involved; it does not speak to the issue of justification. For example, would-be kidnappers might be manipulated (in the sense that their deliberative capacities are bypassed) by police officers who are trying to stop a kidnapping, and a terrorist might similarly be subject to (justified) manipulation.

See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). For a related point from a different angle, see Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting, 81 Royal Institution of Philosophy Supp. 81 (2006) (contending that for small and large decisions, choices might not be based on reasons).

There is, however, a set of cases that complicate the definition I offer here, and that suggest that it does not exhaust the category of manipulation. Suppose that people’s judgments are properly and legitimately automatic and not a product of deliberation. (Immediate attractions to certain foods or persons are plausible examples.) We can imagine efforts to alter those automatic judgments through rational arguments that cannot be characterized as manipulative. But we can also imagine efforts to alter those judgments that do not involve rational arguments at all. A friend, or an outsider, might attempt to use associations, or vivid pictures of some kind, to create a relevant change. The question is: Mightn’t such cases involve manipulation, even if they do not involve judgments that ought to involve reflection and deliberation? That question raises the possibility that nondeliberative efforts to alter properly nondeliberative judgments might also be counted as manipulative. But discussion of this possibility would take me beyond my focus here. I am grateful to Anne Barnhill for raising this point, and see her discussion in Anne Barnhill, What is Manipulation? in Manipulation: Theory and Practice 50 (Christian Coons and Michael Weber eds. 2014).

See Perspectives on Framing (Gideon Keren ed. 2010).

The most famous, or infamous, example is Lyndon Johnson’s terrifying “mushroom cloud” advertisement in his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, ending, “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO0R4k1tVMs

The “undue influence” doctrine in contract raises related concerns. See Ray Madoff, Unmasking Undue Influence, 81 Minn L Rev 571 (1997).

For relevant discussion, see Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures, 17 J. Polit. Phil. 202 (2009).

See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).

See Friedrich Hayek, The Market and Other Orders (2014).

It is true, however, that people might consent to manipulation, just as they might consent to coercion. See Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (1983); John Beshears et al., Self Control and Liquidity: How to Design A Commitment Contract (unpublished manuscript 2015). For discussion of consent, see infra.

See Pierre Picard, Economic Analysis of Insurance Fraud, in Handbook of Insurance 349 (2013).

See infra.

Nature can, in a sense, manipulate people; cold weather and snow, for example, can affect people without sufficiently triggering deliberation. But it seems useful to limit the category to intentional efforts; in ordinary language, intentionality appears to be a defining characteristic of the concept of manipulation.

I bracket the existence of longstanding and entrenched practices, such as discrimination on the basis of sex and disability, which are rightly subject to scrutiny and objection.

For exceptions, see below.

On the relationship between “nudges” and manipulation, see Wilkinson, supra note; Cass R. Sunstein, Nudging and Choice Architecture: Ethical Considerations, Yale J Reg (forthcoming 2015). In my view, nudges generally do not count as manipulative in the sense defined here. Consider, for example, information disclosure, reminders, and warnings, none of which is plausibly treated as manipulative (in the absence of special circumstances). Graphic warnings, loss aversion, default rules, and social norms are taken up below. It is true, however, that some nudges (not defended by me or to my knowledge anyone else) can cross the line; for general discussion, see id.

An example involves a 2014 rule requiring integrated mortgage disclosures, available at http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201311_cfpb_final-rule_integrated-mortgage-disclosures.pdf. A useful but skeptical catalogue of CFPB actions, some aimed at manipulative behavior, can be found in Adam Smith and Todd Graziano, Behavior, Paternalism, and Policy: Evaluating Consumer Financial Protection (2014), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2408083

An excellent overview is Manipulation (Christian Coons and Michael Webster eds. 2014).

Christian Coons and Michael Webster, Introduction, in id. at 11.

Wilkinson, supra note, at 145.

See id. An especially valuable discussion, reaching a different conclusion, is Anne Barnhill, What is Manipulation? in Manipulation: Theory and Practice 50, 72 (Christian Coons and Michael Weber eds. 2014). Note the emphasis, in defining manipulation, on the manipulator’s attempt to influence choices and decisions. If one tries to put people in a certain mood (for example, by taking them to lunch), manipulation is not involved if there is no effort to influence their choices, even when the attempt to lift their mood does not involve an appeal to their reflective and deliberative capacities. (Indeed, the most successful efforts to lift moods often make no such appeal.)

Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent 354-68 (1986).

Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom 377-79 (1986).

See Wilkinson, supra note.

Of course some lies are justified; the intentions of the liar might matter (for example, to spare someone’s feelings), and the consequences might be exculpatory (to prevent serious harm). See Bok, supra note.

For relevant discussion in the context of deception, see Craswell, supra note.

This is not hypothetical. See http://www.dot.gov/briefing-room/us-department-transportation-releases-new-“faces-distracted-driving”-video

They might be grateful, however, if the deceit was genuinely undertaken in order to promote their interests.

Anne Barnhill, What is Manipulation? in Manipulation: Theory and Practice 50, 72 (Christian Coons and Michael Weber eds. 2014). Barnhill builds on Robert Noggle, Manipulative Actions: A Conceptual and Moral Analysis, 34 Am Phil Q 57 (1995).

See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). 54 See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (2003).

See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (2003).

Kahneman, supra note; Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves (2014).

See Kahneman, supra note.

For related observations, see Hansen and Jespersen, supra note.

At this point, it might be asked: What, exactly, are these systems? The best answer is that the idea of two systems is a heuristic device, a simplification that is designed to refer to automatic, effortless processing and more complex, effortful processing. But it is also true that identifiable regions of the brain are active in different tasks, and hence it may well be right to suggest that the idea of “systems” has physical referents. An influential discussion states that “[a]utomatic and controlled processes can be roughly distinguished by where they occur in the brain.” Colin Camerer et al., Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics, 43 J. ECON. LITERATURE 1, 17 (2005).

Wilkinson, supra note, at 347, uses this example.

See Craswell, Regulating Deceptive Advertising, supra note, at 552: “Advertisements are potentially dangerous ‘products,’ and advertisers should take reasonable steps to prevent consumers from being harmed by their products. But advertisers should not be faulted if any further changes would have made matters worse for consumers rather than better.”

See Eyal Zamir, Law, Psychology, and Morality: The Role of Loss Aversion (2014).

See Elliott Aronson, The Social Animal 124-25 (6th ed. 1996).

See id.

Craswell, Regulating Deceptive Advertising, supra note, at 551-555.

See Lauren E. Willis, When Defaults Fail: Slippery Defaults, 80 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1155 (2012).

Id. at 1192.

For a summary, see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge (2008).

See Robert Cialdini, Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment, 12 Current Directions in Psychological Science 105 (2003).

Id.

Id.

Id.; Wesley Schultz et al., The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of vSocial Norms, 18 Psych Science 429 (2007).

For relevant (but not decisive) findings, see Caroline J. Charpentier et al., The Brain’s Temporal Dynamics from a Collective Decision to Individual Action, 34 J. Neuroscience 5816 (2014).

Note here the related finding that notwithstanding the power of suggestion, and accompanying social influences, people reject default rules that they do not like. See Zachary Brown et al., Testing the Effects of Defaults on the Thermostat Settings of OECD Employees, 39 Energy Econ. 128 (2013).

See Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, Decisions by Default, in The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy 417 (Eldar Shafir ed. 2013); Cass R. Sunstein, Choosing Not To Choose (2015).

See Johan Egebark and Mathias Ekström, Can Indifference Make the World Greener? (2013), available at http://www2.ne.su.se/paper/wp13_12.pdf

See Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia Reisch, Automatically Green: Behavioral Economics and Environmental Protection, 38 Harv Env L Rev 127 (2014).

Shlomo Benartzi & Richard H. Thaler, Behavioral Economics and the Retirement Savings Crisis, 339 Science 1152 (2013).

See Riccardo Rebonato, Taking Liberties: A Critique of Libertarian Paternalism 3-7 (2011).

See Brown, supra note; John Beshears et al., The Limitations of Defaults (Sept. 15, 2010) (unpublished manuscript), available at http://www.nber.org/programs/ag/rrc/NB10-02,%20Beshears,%20Choi,%20Laibson,%20Madrian.pdf.

See THE FEELING OF RISK: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON RISK PERCEPTION 3-20 (Paul Slovic ed., 2010).

Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Usability (2014).

I am aware of no detailed treatment of this question, but for relevant discussion, see Eric Cave, Unsavory Seduction and Manipulation, in Manipulation, supra note, at 176. 83 See Adam Kramer et al., Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks, 111 PNAS 8788 (2014).

See Marcia Baron, Manipulativeness, 77 Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 37 (2003), and in particular this suggestion: “By contrast, the person who has the virtue corresponding to manipulativeness – a virtue for which we do not, I believe, have a name – knows when it is appropriate to try to bring about a change in another’s conduct and does this for the right reasons, for the right ends, and only where it is warranted (and worth the risks) and only using acceptable means. The virtuous person tries to reason with the other, not cajole or trick him into acting differently. . . . being manipulative is a vice because of its arrogance and presumption, and because the manipulative person is too quick to resort to ruses . . . .” Id. at 48, 50.

A classic source here is Robert Cialdini, Influence (2006); another classic, far less academic but highly informative, is Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1998). Both books can be seen as offering a great deal of advice about successful manipulation.

See Sunstein, Ethics and Choice Architecture, supra note, for detailed discussion.

Nudges do not run afoul of this conclusion, at least most of the time. See id.

See Oren Bar-Gill, Seduction By Contract (2012), for a superb discussion.

See Goodin, supra note.

I am bracketing here various questions about how welfarism is best understood. It is possible to have a conception of welfare that includes consideration of autonomy and dignity. See Amartya Sen, Development As Freedom (2000); Martha Nussbaum,

Creating Capabilities (2011); Utilitarianism and Welfarism, 76 J Phil 463 (1979). For instructive discussion, see Matthew Adler, Welfare and Fair Distribution (2011).

A child, or a person suffering from some form of dementia, has a weaker objection to manipulation. Parents manipulate young children all the time, partly to promote their welfare. Caretakers manipulate people who are suffering from dementia. These practices are largely taken for granted, but we could imagine situations in which they would raise serious ethical questions. Even if the relevant manipulation is in the interest of those who are being manipulated, the interests in autonomy and dignity impose constraints even here.

See Hayek, supra note.

Id.

Mill, supra note.

Id.

Id.

Note that the question here is whether manipulation increases or decreases welfare; it is not whether the law, or some regulator, should ban manipulation. The latter question raises issues about institutional competence and decision costs. It also requires attention to the effect of manipulation on large populations with heterogeneous understandings. In response to an advertising campaign, for example, some people might be manipulated (in the sense that System 1 is essentially all that is affected) while others are not (because the campaign triggers a significant amount of deliberation).

Hidden manipulation is risky, because it might be disclosed, and people will not be happy to learn that it has been hidden.

Christine Jolls, Product Warnings, Debiasing, and Free Speech: The Case of Tobacco Regulation, 169 J Institutional and Theoretical Economics 53 (2013).

See Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, supra note (emphasis added).

On one view, the concept of manipulation presupposes a lack of consent. See Robert Goodin, Manipulatory Politics 9 (1980) (discussing the idea of “unknown interference”). But the examples given in text suggest that manipulation can be a product of consent and even invitation.

Wilkinson, supra note, at 345.

See Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (1983).

See Goodin, supra note, at 7-12.

On nudging, transparency, and manipulation, see Hansen and Jespersen, supra note.

See George Loewenstein et al., Warning: You Are About To Be Nudged (2014) (unpublished manuscript). For relevant findings, see Gidon Felsen et al., Decisional Enhancement and Autonomy: Public Attitudes Toward Overt and Covert Nudges, 8 Judgment and Decision Making 203 (2012). On the fact that manipulation can be transparent rather than covert, see Barnhill, supra note: “I think that deceptiveness or covertness is a favorite technique of manipulators – manipulation is more likely to succeed if its target doesn’t realize what’s happening. But manipulation needn’t be covert. Covertness isn’t what’s definitive of manipulation.”

As was the case for the FDA regulation invalidated by the court of appeals. See note supra.

Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy 149-72 (2012), offers a series of cases in which, on her view, coercion is justified, among other things on welfare grounds. If manipulation passed the relevant tests (involving cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness, id. at 150-52), it would be justified on similar grounds. Conly herself offers cautionary notes about manipulation, pointing to its uneasy relationship with autonomy. Id. at 30-31.

See Hansen and Jespersen, supra note.

See note supra.

To be sure, educational campaigns of this kind might not be counted as manipulation at all, because deliberative capacities are sufficiently engaged.

See note supra.

See Goodin, supra note, for many examples.

Craswell, Interpreting Deceptive Advertising, supra note.

See Edward L. Glaeser, Paternalism and Psychology, 73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 133 (2006). 116 See Bar-Gill, supra note.

See Bar-Gill, supra note.

See Craswell, Interpreting Deceptive Advertising, supra note, at 672-75.

Watts v. United States, 394 US 705 (1969).

Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 US 748 (1976).

See note supra.

See Note, The Future of Government-Mandated Health Warnings, 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. 177 (2014).

See note supra.

See RJ Reynolds v. FDA, F. Supp. (2011).

Id. at

Id. at

See Jolls, supra note.

Id.

485 US 46 (1988).

Id. at 52.

Id. at 53.

Id. at 54.

New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).

485 US at 56.

United States v. Alvarez, 567 US – (2012), emphasizing that “some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation.”

At a minimum, it would be necessary to show that the manipulative statement created serious harm, and in the political context, such a showing would be highly unlikely to be enough, given the general commitment to the principle that the best correction, for arguably harmful speech, is more speech rather than enforced silence. See Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 374 (1927) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

See note supra. For a valuable discussion from an economic perspective, see Richard Craswell, Regulating Deceptive Advertising: The Role of Cost-Benefit Analysis, 64 Southern Cal. L. Rev. 549 (1991).

Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, 447 US 557 (1980).

See Oren Bar-Gill, Seduction By Contract (2011).

See Bar-Gill, supra note; Bubb and Pildes, supra note.

12 USC 5511

Id.

12 USC 5512.

See http://www.consumerfinance.gov/credit-cards/knowbeforeyouowe/

See Bar-Gill, supra note.

See Ryan Bubb and Richard H. Pildes, How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails and Why, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1595, 1661-1662 (2014).

http://www.consumerfinance.gov/credit-cards/knowbeforeyouowe/

Oren Bar-Gill and Ryan Bubb, Credit Card Pricing: The Card Act and Beyond, 97 Cornell L. rev. 967 (2012).

[lodelss]

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

Stella Anne Bulla was born in November 1949 in Asheboro, North Carolina to Dorothy Ann Lemon and Brinford Bulla, a man who served in the Navy and worked for the federal government as a postal employee most of his life. Stella — who, at some point, preferred to be called by her middle name, Anne — was one of five children: brothers, Artis, John and Brad, and a sister, Cara. The children were raised devout Southern Baptists, attending church meetings once during the week, and twice on weekends. Anne wanted to grow up one day and live in a place where she could ride horses. 

By high school, Anne adhered to the “higher the hair, the closer to God” school of thought: Where other girls of Grimsley High School smiled with youthful innocence from photos, Anne grinned knowingly, hair teased high and wide into a flipped bouffant. 

Later, Anne met a man named Barry Byrd, and the two married, had a daughter, and moved to Stevens County, Washington in 1973, after Barry got out of the Air Force. He took a job in a Colville body shop — finally starting his own in the tiny town of Northport. The Byrds started a band called Legacy. Anne’s brother, Brad Bulla, joined them, playing mandolin, lead guitar, and banjo along with the Byrds’ vocals. The group released two records: Sons of the Republic and, in 1984, Judah’s Advance — which were sold via mail order by Christian Identity groups as far away as Australia. “Legacy is unique in that their music is designed with the Israel Identity image, and is an excellent way to introduce the subject to thousands of people,” the Australian group wrote in a newsletter. 

  Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

The Judah’s Advance cover features a drawing of a ship bearing down on a rocky coastline, where a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments sat amongst a pile of rocks that had fallen from the sky. In the center, an American flag — bearing just 13 stars and the number 76 — whips in the wind.

On Judah’s Advance, Dan Henry, the pastor at The Ark — the Christian Identity church where Byrds worshipped, but that has also helped produce violent acolytes — read a line of scripture, and the band thanked him in the credits. The producer for the album, they said, was YAHWEH. 

The back of the album is even more Christian Identity than the front. Alongside a photograph of the grinning musicians, the band lays out its beliefs: “Our forefathers understood that the establishment of this country was the fulfillment of the prophecy concerning the re-gathering of the nation of Israel,” it explains. The savior, the band writes, was a descendant of the “Judahites”, while “the true children of Israel,” after being freed from captivity, migrated westward, settling in “Scotland, Ireland, Britain and every other Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation in the world today.”

It reads like the liner notes to a Christian Identity concept album, and it made Legacy a popular feature on the Christian Identity and white supremacist conference touring circuit. In 1986, the band played the Northwest Freedom Rally in Richland, Washington alongside a bill of racist speakers. And from 1987 to 1989, the group reportedly traveled yearly to Colorado to play Pete Peters’ Rocky Mountain Bible Camps. Peters had been a guest at The Ark and the Aryan Nations, lecturing on the end of the world, and his hatred for Jews and homosexuals.

But Legacy was more than a band providing musical accompaniment to racists: In 1988, Barry Byrd and his brother-in-law and Legacy bandmate, Brad, were two of just 15 men who deliberated for about a week about their beliefs, and authored a document entitled “Remnant Resolves.” 

The document elaborates that the men felt a “spiritual burden”: “This burden was the need and desire to see Biblical principles of government once again established in our nation,” it reads. The men agreed that if they could not come to a consensus on solving that burden, they would not proceed with writing the document.

What comes next are resolutions to fix society for “the remnant” — the way for the chosen people to live in the fullest realization of liberty. Biblical principles should be put into practice at every level of government. The band maintained that in the home, women should be submissive to their husbands. Locally, the civil government should punish evil and protect the good. And at the federal level, taxes need to stop, since you can’t tax what God created. 

“It is blasphemous to regard antichrists as ‘God’s chosen people’ and to allow them to rule over or hold public office in a Christian Nation,” it reads. “Aborticide is murder. Sodomy is a sin against God and Nature. Inter-racial marriage pollutes the integrity of the family. Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.” 

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names. 

A year after the Remnant Resolves, Legacy (now named Watchman) was back on tour, scheduled to play a Santa Rosa, California church affiliated with Dennis Peacocke, a self-described political activist turned leader in the “shepherding movement” — a religious movement in the 1970s and ’80s that involved congregants turning over all personal decisions to a spiritual leader, and has been criticized as cult-like. 

The Byrds made more than one trip to Peacocke’s church for Fellowship of Christian Leaders (FCL) conferences. During one visit, they stayed with a church host family: the Johnsons. Rick Johnson would eventually move his family north to Marble in the mid-1990s, and still lives there today.

At the time, Johnson’s son Jesse was just a kid, but he still recalls meeting the Byrds. Something about Anne immediately stuck out to him. “She has these piercing blue eyes,” he recalls. “I remember kind of being off put by that and … just by her presence. Because she didn’t smile very much. She was really intense and when she talked to you it was about what you’re doing to have a better relationship with the Lord. And I was, like, 8.”

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.” 

But back in 1992, when the Byrds were still working on bringing their vision of a “Christian covenant community” to life, people in Stevens County were nervous, citing concern over the couple’s connection with Pete Peters. People called the group cultish; the Byrds made a brochure that said they weren’t “the least bit cultish or isolationist.” In that same brochure, the couple predicted “cataclysmic events.” At a city council meeting, they claimed to their neighbors that they weren’t racist, and didn’t “condone hatred”— in fact, Barry told the Spokesman-Review that they wanted to create a ministry and a working ranch to “take youngsters” of all races in. The couple claimed they’d severed ties with Peters and that their attendance at the Rocky Mountain Bible Camp was only to play music. They didn’t mention the “Remnant Resolves.” Debate about the Byrds and Peters raged for months in the pages of the Colville Statesman-Examiner. 

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.” 

The Byrds attempted to shoot down a list of rumors they were asked to address by Northport’s mayor at a May 1992 city council meeting. They said they had no relationship with Peters, never held white supremacist beliefs, and concluded that people with concerns should come to Marble. Barry Byrd “advised that reading newspapers was not a worthwhile way of attaining accurate information,” according to a report on the meeting. 

Meanwhile, in nearby North Idaho, Bo Gritz — a former Green Beret who once ran for President, and who famously served as a liaison between federal agents and Randy Weaver at the end of the Ruby Ridge standoff — attempted to create his own Christian covenant community, called “Almost Heaven.” Some said he modeled it after what the Byrds created at Marble.

Paul Glanville, a doctor, liked the idea, too, when he heard it. He brought his family north to Marble in 1992, several years after meeting the Byrds. He was delivering a presentation on low-cost or free medical care at a Christian seminar when he encountered the couple, who were  giving a talk on establishing covenant communities. “They are very charismatic,” Glanville recalls. “I really was interested in this idea of a Christian community where I could practice medicine in what I considered a very Biblical way.”

Once at Marble, he says he enjoyed the close community, the focus on church and family. It felt like his family had moved to the promised land. People would get to church early, chattering with the company of the other people who lived there, hurrying downstairs to stake a claim for the casserole dishes they’d bring each Sunday for a potluck, before rushing up again for church. 

But over time, cracks emerged in the smooth veneer of the Marble promise. Nothing drastic, just small fissures that, over time, built up. In the spring of 1997 Glanville noticed a strangely competitive drive behind — of all things — Marble’s softball teams. He says he felt there was a need to win, to conquer all of the other church teams from the area, as if to prove Marble’s superiority. Glanville sometimes skipped the adult games to watch his kids play softball. Soon after, the leaders called an emergency meeting to chastise anyone who skipped the adult games. Glanville found the suggestion that he watch the Byrds’ team over his own child’s bizarre. 

After a few years, Glanville started to feel that he hadn’t made a covenant with God so much as with the Byrds. “What they mean by ‘covenant’ is total, absolute obedience to the leadership without questioning, and that the leadership eventually has your permission to question you and scrutinize your life in the most invasive ways that you can possibly imagine,” he says. “They might not start that out from the beginning like that, but they will end up that way.”  

From the pulpit, the couple preached about “slander,” about never questioning their leadership, and turning in anyone who did. The Byrds gave sermons about submission, obedience. The word “individual” was sinful — individuality being a sin of pride. 

The church leaders would encourage the families there to turn against their own blood — parents reporting on children, children reporting parents, neighbors against neighbors — if that meant preserving perfection at Marble. 

Glanville says his own children went to Marble’s leadership and told them that he was skeptical of their intentions and teachings. By the summer of 1994, he says, “My kids and wife had been totally brainwashed.” He continues, “They were turning me in to Marble for negative talk.”

But even he didn’t understand how quickly he’d lost them: When he finally decided to leave, Glanville was shocked that his wife and family refused to come with him. “My wife filed for divorce when I left. And my kids basically all signed the divorce papers,” he says. 

“I could do a lot of things in this church,” Barry Byrd said in one 1994 sermon. “I have the authority. I could misuse it. I could manipulate you and intimidate you, which you know, I’m sure we’ve done some of that. Not meaning to, but that’s just part of the deal.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

“We’re fighting for something that much blood has been shed for, beginning [with] the blood of Jesus,” he said. “If the spirit of the Lord does not reign supreme and this book is not the law that governs all of life and living, then there is no peace and there is no liberty!” He spoke of righteous anger and “holy hatred” for those getting in the way of “the government of God.”

Byrd even glorified martyrdom as a way to achieve the church’s goals: “So you see, I don’t have any problem being martyred if I know it’s what God’s called me to. If I know that my blood is going to water the tree of Liberty and build for future generations, I would gladly give my life today.”

Two decades since he left Marble broken-hearted, alone, Glanville still sometimes hears the Byrds’ words in his head, nagging at him, pulling him back to that time, making him question how he could have fallen under the place’s sway. 

His mind goes back to the moments he still blamed himself for not being perfect. Times when Marble convinced him he was the problem, meetings when Barry Byrd stood over him shaking a fist, making him believe he was lucky they were being so patient with him.

“And you could say ‘well why did you put up with that?’” he tells me this spring. “A lot of people who are trying to leave a cult have magical thinking. That if they just could say the right thing, or do the right thing, the leaders will suddenly see the truth and repent and everything will be alright.”

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones. 

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

Anne’s eldest brother, Art Bulla, at the time, was living in Utah and had converted away from the family’s Southern Baptist roots to his own racist interpretation of Mormonism. He found himself maligned from the mainstream LDS church in the early 1980s when he called himself “the one mighty and strong,” claiming he was receiving revelations. He also expressed his belief in polygamy, but admitted he’d had trouble recruiting women to marry him. He split from the church when it started ordaining blacks. 

Art Bulla, who I reached by phone at his Baja, Mexico home, says he visited his siblings Anne and Brad Bulla, and his brother-in-law Barry, in the early days of their Marble community. And though he says his sister and Barry were still practicing racist Christian Identity beliefs — which he points out he actually agrees with — he thought the couple seemed to be controlling the people who would form Marble. 

“Barry had a very strong personality, and Anne did too, and so they were able to hornswoggle if you will, the gullible,” he says. “I had suspected that Anne had gone too far with the controlling thing.” 

Art Bulla tells me he’s the only prophet in the family — not Anne and not their brother I found who pastes notes that say “God’s only priest” to cutouts of naked women and posts the pictures to Twitter. Art says he is the chosen one. 

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?” 

***

By the late 1990s, Paul Glanville, the doctor who had come to Marble hoping to bring God into his medical practice, was hardly the only person questioning Marble’s leadership, and the Byrds’ true intentions for the community. According to letters written during this time, between 1997 and 1998 Anne Byrd excommunicated her brother and Legacy bandmate, Brad, and his family. (Requests for comment by Brad Bulla were not returned.) 

The excommunication drew the attention of Jay Grimstead, an evangelical scholar who had briefly lived in the Marble community and become known for pushing dominionism. Grimstead wrote several letters to the Byrds detailing his concern for what he saw as the community’s increasingly authoritarian structure. 

In one letter to Barry and Peacocke, from September 1997, Grimstead wrote that Marble “is a clear, ‘top down’ monarchy that is governed primarily by a queen, ‘Queen Anne,’” he wrote. “The people at Marble live in great fear of displeasing the Byrds, particularly Anne.” 

Grimstead also excoriated Barry for not publicly condemning Christian Identity, which he referred to as “weird, unbiblical stuff.” He was even being told by Marble members that the ideology was still being discussed in 1997. 

In January of the next year, he wrote to Anne and Barry: “Please respond in some way to the letter of grave concern wherein I told you I was receiving an increasing amount of evidence that Marble, under your leadership, was fast becoming an authoritarian cult,” he wrote. 

Grimstead, with each letter, begged for answers, and grew more suspicious. “I am having more and more concern about the mental health (sanity, ability to process reality, etc) of both Anne and Barry, but Anne in particular,” he wrote in a letter to Peacocke. 

That same year, letters came to Grimstead, too — not from the Byrds, but from families who’d left Marble. They wrote of financial manipulation, of tithes that went to the Byrds (one person told me their partner tithed tens of thousands of dollars without their knowledge, and racked up a credit card bill of $55,000), of public confessions of sins that would later be weaponized against members. “No one was ‘forced’ to do it. Yet we all did,” one person wrote of these public confessions, where even children would allegedly confess dark thoughts. “What else could any of us done? Barry and Anne knew best. We trusted them. They were hearing from God, they told us.”

People who’d gotten away still feared Christian Identity was the agenda driving the church, despite what the Byrds had said about leaving the ideas of Peters and the Ark behind. One man, who had adopted non-white children, wrote to Grimstead, recounting a meeting with the Byrds. “Barry stated he did not believe in interracial marriage and that our non-white children would not be allowed to marry any of the sons and daughters at Marble, and that we would have to have faith that God would provide them with mates of their own race,” he wrote. 

But by the fall of 1998, 15 men signed a letter on FCL letterhead saying that Grimstead’s questioning of Marble’s intentions forced the organization to “mark him.” They called him a “factious and dangerous man” and sided with Marble. Among those signatures were Peacocke’s and — in the same loopy letters that marked the Remnant Resolves — Barry Byrd’s.

I wrote Grimstead this past spring, to see if he’d talk about that time, about those letters, that mark placed on him by his good friends. Grimstead’s response was curt: “If you have any of my letters from those years … my opinion of the Marble Fellowship under the Byrds has not changed,” he wrote in an email. “What I said in those letters is still true and provable as far as I know and I was never proven wrong in what I said.”

He declined to comment further. He is “too busy with positive work for the Kingdom.”

***

Jesse Johnson is 33 years old now, and for years he lived in Los Angeles, where he attended art school and came out as gay. He lived at Marble until he was 17, when he was excommunicated, and left to live with his maternal grandmother. For years prior, Johnson says his grandmother begged his mother to leave, believing Marble was a cult. She didn’t listen.

I meet Johnson in the spring of 2019, at a small house in Northport, Washington. A dog gnaws at a bone under the table. We’d been talking on the phone for months about his time at Marble. He tells me about a childhood dictated by fear of the Byrds, and an exclusion of the outside world. “The world is evil and the government is evil, and their whole thing is wanting to get back to Puritan America,” he says. “They would talk about that all the time: the founding fathers and how this isn’t what they wanted.” Johnson says leaders continually reminded the congregation of what happened to the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas — how something like that could play out at Marble, too. He recalls being told the community was on a federal watchlist. “I’m pretty sure that was all made up,” Johnson says, “but they were telling us that, so it was almost like stirring up the fear … are we next? Maybe we should prepare. That was definitely talked about from the pulpit, like, what we would do when — it wasn’t if — it was when the world collapses.”

Church was a harrowing experience: In one instance, Johnson says he was locked in a basement with all of the other children, who were told only to emerge only when they were speaking in tongues. “One of my friend’s dads whispered in my ear ‘just make something up,’” he remembers when he was one of the last in the room. 

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Teenagers were expected to follow stringent courtship rituals, which condemned even the smallest displays of affection, like hand holding, and punished offenders by garnishing their wages or with physical labor making repairs or cleaning leaders’ homes. Every year, a “purity ball” celebrating chastity was held for teenagers, and formal etiquette lessons were given. Homosexuality was not tolerated in the community — Johnson tells me stories of boys who were sent to conversion therapy. I hear stories of suicide. 

Punishment for children was constant and rules were always changing. Johnson says one day, he suddenly found out the Byrds had been made his godparents. “When I found that out it was kind of off-putting because if anything ever happened to my parents, the hope was that we wouldn’t have to be at Marble anymore.”

When families left or were forced out, “they were basically dead to God, dead to the community,” Johnson says. “To have contact with them would be hurting Marble.” Some people wanted to leave, but couldn’t sell their homes. Marble had the first right of refusal.

Several women who were raised there spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, expressing fear for the safety of family members still involved in the community. From all of them, I got the sense that to be a female at Marble is a particularly cruel experience: a life of shaming, abuse, and fear. They weren’t allowed to show skin — even swimsuits were deemed inappropriate. “We couldn’t show our arms. It was our job to protect the men from having bad thoughts, so we had to cover ourselves,” one woman said. I heard stories of physical and sexual abuse. Another shared a journal entry with me. “It was called Marble, and like the stone, it was beautiful and soft to touch and wrapped you up in its pure form,” she wrote, “But held the capacity to crush you under its cold weight, so that even if you escaped, the scars would never heal properly.” 

One woman claimed that when she was 4, she was molested by an older boy in the community, but her parents were told not to go to the police, that Marble would handle the problem on their own. Confused about why she felt the community didn’t take action, she swallowed a bottle of pills one day when she was 12 in a suicide attempt — but survived. “I didn’t tell my parents until a year or two later,” she told me. “I definitely did not want to continue living like that.” Today, she says she can’t even walk into a church without feeling overwhelming, paralyzing fear.

“I’ve gone back [to Marble] once or twice,” she said. The people “literally look like zombies walking around. They look like… just zombies. They don’t have a soul. They don’t have any control of their lives. They’re just being little robots for Barry and Anne.”

Children allegedly grew up handling firearms — something that is not unique or strange about living in a place as rural as Marble. But “most people around here with guns aren’t talking about the end of the world or having to protect themselves from the government,” Johnson tells me. “I don’t think tomorrow they’re all gonna take up arms… my concern is there are certain people that are impressionable, especially some of the younger people, and they do have access to quite a lot of guns.” 

But not everyone sees harm in the way things are run at Marble. Zion Mertens moved there when he was 6 years old, leaving briefly. He moved back as an adult with his own children, but doesn’t attend the church. He says today about half the community is like him. I ask him if Marble is a cult, and he says no but then offers this: “I prefer to avoid groupthink,” he says about the church. “I try to avoid it. So it’s not really so much that I disagree with them, it’s that I don’t really like sacrificing my own identity to the identity of a larger group.”

Mertens says he’s never caught a whiff of Christian Identity there, despite volunteering that the Byrds used to attend the Ark. “That place is, without a doubt, a white supremacist group,” he says. But things like homosexuality definitely are condemned. He doesn’t disagree completely with the Byrds on that, and he says it’s grounded in the leaders’ hope to make society “better.” 

I ask about how the outside world is supposed to reconcile his feeling that Marble isn’t racist with the guest appearance of a neo-Confederate racist preacher, John Weaver, in 2015. He says that surprised him, too. “I actually really don’t have an answer on that one,” he says. “I had never encountered anything like that there, so when I ended up finding out that was his background, for me it was kind of like a little bit of a shock.” 

But it’s clear it didn’t bother people in the community enough for them to speak up. I get the sense that maybe it’s just easier to turn a blind eye. Pretend it’s not there — to only see the place for the Christian, patriotic flowers pushing through the surface, not the roots of where they come from.

Jesse Johnson was excommunicated for not attending “prep school,” what Johnson describes as a religious pre-college program held at Marble to prepare young people to rebuild society after an “inevitable global and national conflict.” Later, when he came out as gay, he received a barrage of scornful emails from the Byrds and people still living at Marble. He changed his email address, but his family continued to shun him.

“I was informed by my family that I wasn’t allowed contact with any of my siblings,” he says. “One day I called just like crying and begging if I could just talk to one of my brothers and sisters. And [my mom was] like ‘yeah, change your lifestyle and come back to God and we can talk about it. But I’ve got to go to church,’ and then she just hung up.”

Life on the outside was not easy for Johnson. He says he was homeless for a while. “They say ‘you’re going to leave and everything’s gonna go wrong for you and everything is gonna be horrible until you come back,’” he says. 

“Were they right?” I ask. 

“No, not at all,” he says. “I don’t think anyone who’s left has had an easy time. And I think the majority of people I’ve talked to they say they felt like we were part of a psychological experiment… we were the guinea pigs.”

Paul Glanville, the doctor, agrees. Today, he’s reconciled with most of his children, but his ex-wife and one of his sons still live near Marble. He says he believes Marble is a cult that took away his family.

Johnson, too, has gone to great lengths to open communication with his parents again. A few years ago, Johnson moved back to the rural area after spending 14 years away. By then, his siblings had left Marble. His family was talking to him again. But his parents remained in the Marble community. “My mom and I had to come to an agreement that she wouldn’t talk about my sexuality and I wouldn’t critique her religion,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s worked well but it’s definitely allowed us to have more of a relationship.”

I wanted to understand how Johnson perceived Marble’s growing association with the Patriot Movement, with politicians like Shea. Johnson told me he suspected the Biblical Basis for War was from a Marble sermon. And he says the group is now filled with vehement Trump supporters — which flew in the face of everything he’d told me about how the Byrds felt about the federal government. 

“There’s an underlier of something that’s a little more sinister,” he says. It isn’t about loving the government, suddenly, but loving what might come next. “I think it’s more of the fact that [Trump] is destroying everything so quickly. Like maybe this will progress to their revolution that they’re waiting for.”

Trump is, potentially, “bringing the apocalypse,” he says. “They definitely have thought the world was ending a few times and were super excited about it.” 

This reminded me of something Glanville had told me, about how people at Marble were always talking about what to do when the end times came. And it sharpens something Matt Shea — their friend and acolyte, who sees the end times as an “opportunity” — has brought up in the Biblical Basis for War and the state of Liberty. They’re the blueprints for a rebooted nation. 

***

I ask Johnson about what Tanner Rowe and Jay Pounder — the guys who made the Biblical Basis for War public — advised me: I’d need to be armed and in body armor to go to Marble. He was excommunicated, but he still offers to take producer Ryan Haas and me there that afternoon. He said that since his parents still live there, it’s not strange for him to be on the property.

When we pull under the gates of Marble, there’s not a person to be seen. Up ahead there’s a street sign: “Liberty Way,” it reads. There are signs for a bunkhouse, a hitching post.

Admittedly, I’m nervous, afraid to have my notepad out, and Haas tucks the microphone away as Johnson’s car crawls up a rocky road, up a hill where he says you can see the whole community. At the top, a group of people are out for a stroll. They stop and stare at the car. For a second, it feels like maybe we’ve been caught. 

But Johnson throws the car into park and pops out. He knows everyone here. “Hey, Barney!” he yells and struts toward them with a big smile across his face. They talk for a minute or two, and Johnson comes back. Everything’s just fine. “Have a good one guys!” he calls to them.

We keep driving up the hill and stop at the place a big white cross has been mounted, overlooking the community. Johnson says groups pilgrimage up the hill from Marble, down below, every Easter Sunday. 

For a few minutes, we stand there overlooking a patchwork of green fields, under a sky that feels bluer and wider than anywhere I’ve ever been. The sound of chickens clucking carries its way up the hill. It’s the opposite of the Branch Davidian compound or the remote cabin at Ruby Ridge. It’s a sparse community of houses. Some are big, beautiful homes — the type that rich people might call “the cabin.” Others are rickety shacks melting back into the earth. The Byrds don’t live on the Marble property, but instead, in the nicest house of them all up one of those side roads Rowe told us to stay away from. Johnson doesn’t disagree with that advice. 

“It’s beautiful,” Johnson says, standing there, looking out over it. And it’s striking to me that someone could look out over a place that caused them so much pain, and still see a kernel of good in it. By the end of the day, we’ll have driven all around the property for two hours, and Johnson keeps hopping out of the car to say hello to someone, to tell them he’ll stop by soon, to ask how they are. 

He says he figures if he’s nicer than anyone here, no one can hate him anymore — no matter what the Byrds say. 

  II.

Just before I moved to Spokane, Washington as a college freshman, at age 18, in 1999, a girl at my high school jibed that the place was filled with Nazis — living, breathing white supremacists. I ignored her, figuring that, like myself, she didn’t know what she was talking about.

In fact, both being Oregon-bred white teenagers, we’d both been living around white supremacists our entire lives. The state of Oregon was a haven for Confederate ideas even after the Civil War, a place that, from its very start, was built for whites and whites alone — a part of the state’s history that was omitted from our education. We didn’t learn that the KKK once had a strong presence among Oregon’s state officials. We didn’t know neighborhoods where our friends lived — only decades before — had exclusion laws discriminating against who could own property there. 

In January 2011, I thought of that conversation with that girl again. 

It was a cold winter morning in Spokane: the day of the Martin Luther King Jr. Unity March, a parade that went right down Main Avenue through the center of the city, and was always filled with kids and people with their arms linked. Sometime that morning, a Stevens County white supremacist named Kevin Harpham planted a backpack bomb on the parade route near a metal bench and a brick wall, a block away from my apartment.

Before the parade could begin, as marchers gathered, milling in the streets, filling the city with energy, Harpham — armed with a remote detonator — strolled amongst the crowd taking photos of himself. But before it detonated, several city workers saw that black backpack, thought it seemed out of place, and they called it in. 

Inside the backpack was a six-inch long pipe bomb welded to a steel plate. The bomb was packed with more than a 100 lead fishing weights coated in rat poison and human feces. The backpack also contained two T-shirts commemorating events that took place in small towns in nearby Stevens County.

If those city workers had continued on, ignored the backpack, and that bomb would have gone off, it would have immediately twisted that metal bench into daggers of shrapnel. Those shards and the fishing weights would have rocketed at that brick wall, ricocheting off and firing into the marchers’ bodies. The rat poison — which contained an anticoagulant — would have made sure the people hit wouldn’t have stopped bleeding easily; the feces was likely there to cause an infection in every wound.

At the time, most of my day-to-day life happened in the two city blocks surrounding the bomb site. Police tape closed off the entrance to my apartment building. Traffic was re-routed. When it happened, I remember looking at all the guys in hazmat suits, the bomb robot, the closed streets, and figuring it was a big fuss over nothing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Violence like what was narrowly missed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day has plagued this part of the Northwest for decades. But that history was something I’d had the privilege to navigate around as a white person living in a majority white city in the whitest part of the country. When I was a kid I had an excuse: No one told me. But as an adult, I’d come to believe that good always had, and always would, prevail. 

But white racism in the American West was not a rumor or a chapter of history that had been solved and tied up with a bow. Racists weren’t burning crosses over there, in some other place, wearing KKK hoods, and performing Nazi salutes, wearing swastikas so they could be easily spotted. It seems like such a cartoon image of a racist now, when I think about it. What willful ignorance to think the enemy is always one you’ll recognize, that they’ll always look and act the same.

Those history books I read as a kid never talked about weapons made of rat poison, fishing weights, and human shit. But when Kevin Harpham chose my neighborhood to try to commit mass murder, he didn’t bring a burning cross or a Nazi flag. His hatred had him making that bomb for who knows how long. Investigators later found he bought those weights in batches. Piece by piece. That attempted bombing was my introduction to this entire subject.

I started devouring books and documentaries on the history of North Idaho and the Aryan Nations compound that had, for years, sat within an hour of my home. I read about the militias that had long thrived here in the Northwest, and the conspiracies that inspired them to action. I learned about Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Montana Freemen. 

I needed to understand how hate had stayed so alive in America, what the fuel was that kept it burning — not just in the hills of some faraway place, but right here. Hate happened here. Hate happened in the morning. It happened on a Monday.

Five years later, on another cold January morning, another explosive event occurred in my backyard. By then I was in Oregon, back in my hometown. 

A group of armed men took over a wildlife refuge in the far southeastern corner of the state. Among them were militias and white racists who had really radical ideas about the federal government, race and religion.

My editor at the Washington Post asked if I could help with coverage. My life hasn’t been the same since.

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  III.

In late 2016, I started asking people about the bombing in Panaca — a thing I’d read about, but never heard much about what happened. Finally, in May of 2019, I got some answers.

I’d asked the Kingman Police Department, in Arizona, for documents about the raid on Glenn Jones’ trailer — that’s the guy who blew himself up and the Cluff’s house in Panaca, Nevada. Kingman was Jones’ last address before the bombing. Police reports had talked about his journal, about some writing about LaVoy Finicum — so I asked if I could see it. 

They sent over photos of a spiral bound notepad of graph paper with a bright red cover. Inside, Jones had carefully written a note in black marker: “This is for the murder of LaVoy Finicum and all the other Americans who have died for freedom.” 

He had flipped the page, and written it again: “This is for the murder of LaVoy Finicum and all the other Americans who have died for freedom.” 

He’d done it a third time, and had written the same words. 

I needed more pages. I asked Kingman police for more photos, more pictures of his trailer. I wanted everything I could get so I could try to answer this one question I’d had rolling around in my mind: Was Glenn Jones a suicide bomber for the Patriot Movement?

I asked for web searches on his laptop, GPS waypoints on his Garmin. I wanted photos of journals, photos of the trailer, photos of the storage unit. I couldn’t stop thinking about how no one really knew Jones. How people in Panaca just called him “the person” or “the suspect” because, even though he lived in the tiny town for years, no one seemed to really know him. 

They said he was quiet, shy, forgettable. They were the same words people used when TV reporters descended on Stevens County, Washington to describe Kevin Harpham — the Spokane MLK Day parade bomber, who was eventually sentenced to 32 years in prison. They’re the same words people used to describe Stephen Paddock, the man who killed 58 people in a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017. Or Dylann Roof, when he murdered black parishioners in a church in South Carolina. They’re the same words used to describe people who’ve spilled blood in the name of an ideology from Virginia to Colorado. 

Kingman officials told me I’d have to get all that from the FBI. They’d handed most of their files over. For months, I sent requests for comment. Calls went nowhere; I couldn’t tell if my emails were reaching anyone. Finally, I got a response. The FBI said, “It is the policy of the FBI not to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

But two departments had told me the FBI had taken everything over. I knew it was an investigation — wasn’t it? Still, no comment.

I couldn’t believe the story of what really happened there was solely one being kept by Josh Cluff — who had also declined to talk to me. So, in a journalistic hail mary, I told Kingman officials that, well, since the FBI says maybe no investigation even exists, I guess you can send me that evidence now. 

On a rainy Saturday, two weeks later, a CD filled with photos arrived in my mailbox.

There was no manifesto, no clear explanation of why Glenn Jones did what he did. They didn’t even send most of the things I’d asked for. But the photos did make the story clearer: Jones was not just a nice guy who blew up a house one time, but a guy who was so invisible to the rest of the world, no one had any idea who he really was. He had navigated nearly six decades on the planet like a specter who’d been walking in the shadows his whole life. No one noticed the guy living in the RV with very little else besides bombs.

At the end, he lived inside the type of camper a family of four might take on a tour of national parks. It was a tight, cramped space — not a place someone appeared to be living, but a space used as a workshop to build explosives. 

Every window was covered, and every surface was covered with wires and gun powder, fuses and power tools. If he was truly living there, it was like he was existing inside a junk drawer.  The only food in his cupboards were cans of soup, some chips, and some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The silverware drawer had no forks or spoons or knives, but pliers, scissors, and wire cutters. The fridge and microwave were spotless. The shower floor was crusted with black gun powder; there was no showerhead. 

Investigators hauled bucket after bucket of supplies outside. They stacked huge antique bomb shells on a picnic table, and several metal ammunition boxes that were filled to the brim with gunpowder, fuses snaking out of holes drilled in the sides. There were guns — some modern, some antique. White briefs and socks were folded neatly in one cabinet. A pair of puffy white sneakers sat next to the bed. 

Next to denture cleaner and cigarette butts, they found some of his journals: They contained shopping lists, to-do lists, notes about cars for sale, phone numbers for realtors. There were also drawings of bombs, complete with careful measurements of gunpowder, what charges were needed.

I kept flipping through the photos again and again, trying to absorb what story they told about Jones. I did it again: dirty trailer, no food, handwritten notes, stacks of materials.

I was idly staring at a photo of an open notepad, a note telling some unnamed person they’d better watch their back, when I realized the dark handwriting on a previous page was showing through to the other side — a page the police department hadn’t sent me. I zoomed in, flipped the image so I could read it. 

It was a letter — a letter written to Josh Cluff, dated July 3, 2016. 

Hay Stoupid [sic] — 

Remember the $8,000-$10,000 I needed? 

I could have leveled out the whole BLM Building — But, NO, you had to get greedy and not pay back any of the $60,000 you borrowed. 

Plus, you bet the “farm” you went “All In,” You almost had this Bomb delivered to your houses. Never bet your family on a desperate idiot. Don’t ever assume somebody won’t shoot you + wife + kids over money. 

Fuck You, Josh. 

Glenn

I wish I had 2 Bombs. You would [illegible]

 But the thing was, ten days later, he had two bombs. He delivered them to Cluff’s house, and told his wife and children to leave before they went off. 

I started flipping all of the pages, looking for more shadows left by an invisible man. “We are different than Iran and Syria,” he wrote in one note, “… Another generation doesn’t need to see [illegible] of Waco and Ruby Ridge.” He wrote the word “ranchers” at the bottom of the page, but I couldn’t read the rest. On yet another page, he wrote the name of the man who baptized LaVoy Finicum in the 1960s. It’s Josh’s grandfather. 

The letter Jones never sent to Cluff made it clear that he was planning to commit an act of terrorism that would destroy a Bureau of Land Management building. And then, the day before the bombing was supposed to happen, the plan fell apart. Something — or someone — got in the way of that plan. He turned the bomb on Cluff.

 But the journal showed Jones was thinking like so many other people I’d interviewed over the years across the West, from a Nevada rancher to a Utah militiaman, to an Arizona widow, to people in Washington who grew up being told the government was out to get them. Jones was writing about revenge and martyrdom and all the things the Patriot movement thrives on. 

But he wasn’t always like this. When investigators called his ex-wife, Kathi Renaud, and told her that he died in such a violent way, she was shocked. They hadn’t spoken in years, but it didn’t sound like the guy she’d been married to. She had a hard time even believing it was true — her daughter demanded proof, she tells me, “whatever to make sure that’s really him. You know? Because this is not his demeanor.”

But it really was her ex-husband. And I asked her why she thought Jones changed.

“I think somebody, in my own opinion, I think had to put that into his mind to make him think that, cuz like you know. No, he never talked bad about the government or anything. Nothing bad. At all.” I asked her for names of more of Jones’ family, friends. She gave the name of one guy — who never got back to me — but no one else. No one really knew him.

But someone, she says, along the way must have gotten to him. Put an idea into his head.

***

The Jones bombing showed me that extremist violence, in some ways, is changing. I talked to one extremism expert after another, asking if they’d ever heard about a Patriot suicide bomber. All of them said no. Some people had committed suicide by cop, trying to go out in a blaze of glory. A guy even once crashed a plane into a building that housed IRS offices on purpose. But a suicide bomber? That would be new. 

Adam Sommerstein, who used to be an analyst with the FBI, told me, “that is a particular phenomena I have never seen in either the Patriot movement or the overall right-wing terror movement.”

A suicide bombing is saying something different than an attack. It’s a sign of devotion to an idea. And it says that this idea is important — more important than my life. And by blowing myself up, I believe this idea will reach more people.

But domestic terrorism still seems to be a thing lots of Americans aren’t even aware exists. And now here — with Jones — it was changing, evolving, maybe becoming even more extreme. And yet his bombing barely made the news outside Nevada.

After so-many high profile shootings, the violence at Charlottesville and other ideologically motivated killings in recent years, lawmakers in Washington are pushing for change. They’ve held hearings on white supremacy — even introduced legislation to create a better response to domestic terrorism. They say the government needs more power to stop extremists in this country. 

“But that’s absurd,” Mike German, from the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. He’s the one who infiltrated and helped take down white supremacist and militia groups as an undercover FBI agent in the ’90s. He says this discussion about passing new terrorism laws as a way to stop extremist violence is a huge red herring. 

“There are 57 federal crimes of terrorism. That’s what they’re called in the United States Code. Of those 57 federal laws of terrorism, 51 of them apply to domestic terrorism as well as international terrorism,” he says. “And if there is a group of intergalactical terrorists, it will apply to them too. It just applies to terrorism. But the fact that it doesn’t say in the law — domestic terrorism — the Justice Department is using that as an excuse to argue for new powers.”

In German’s view, the more of a power grab law enforcement can pull off, the more the government can become like the thought police. And that’s not just anecdotal: He says the government has been doing it against Muslims regularly since 9/11. Someone gets a label and their rights are gone. Historically, those people are brown or black, not white.

German says it’s a flawed thought pattern to want to snatch away the civil liberties of someone who holds racist or radical anti-government views, and thinking that couldn’t also be done to you with the next shift of the political winds. People can hold despicable views — politicizing what thoughts are OK normalizes the continual pushing of the envelope that’s been common since the Twin Towers attack. It’s “the opportunity to target people who you don’t like,” he says. 

And I can’t help but think that making the issue of radical violence something that the government needs to fix as a new way for people to make it someone else’s problem. If that law doesn’t pass, things just stay the same. We say, ‘god, why don’t lawmakers do their job?’

But, see, I think that’s a misdirection — putting the onus on powerful people, who benefit from power structures that have just one definition of terrorist. It ignores that radical violence is the end result of the extreme ideas that have crept into our daily lives. 

Where, once, conspiracies were stories someone had to seek out, or that came to a person on a flyer at a militia meeting or a gun show, they’re now commonplace in everyone’s home. They come through Facebook feeds, Twitter posts and YouTube videos. And maybe you don’t click on them. You already know they’re crazy. But maybe one of them you do, and so do 1000 other people. A video on guns leads you to a fake news story about firearms regulations, which leads you to Agenda 21, or theories about the New World Order. And maybe something there speaks to a certain pain that feels familiar. You agree just enough — so you post it to Facebook. Your friends like it, and that feels good — so you keep posting things just like it. 

And then conspiracy theories aren’t fringe anymore. Online, they become prevailing arguments — things worth entertaining, at the least. They’re noise — noise we’ve all gotten used to drowning out. They’re posts your uncle or your neighbor or brother-in-law is sharing, that your family is liking and re-sharing. And none of those people consider themselves members of the Patriot Movement. They’d never take over a wildlife refuge. They wouldn’t drive away from cops if they got pulled over. But, in daily life, they’re indulging the ideas that have led to instances of violence. 

Sometimes those ideas get in the wrong person’s head, and turn violent. And unless it’s directed at you, it feels like someone else’s problem to fix. 

It seems like the real battle here is over the narrative. The prize is to get your version of things on top — at the top of politics, at the top of search results — no matter how based in falsehoods and hatred it is. 

***

After I found everything in Glenn Jones journal, I called Sheriff Lee, back in Panaca. When we’d sat down in person over the winter, he really couldn’t tell me much about the motives behind the bombing. But as I reported, people kept asking me ‘hey, if you find something out, will you let me know?’ I got the sense they felt a little forgotten — like the biggest thing that had ever happened in their town was the smallest concern to the rest of the world.

Sheriff Lee hadn’t heard of any of the evidence I uncovered — so I read him the entries from Jones’ notebook over the phone. 

“My first words are: Wow,” he said, a solemness to his voice I hadn’t heard in any previous  interviews I’d had with him. “My second words are: It sure would have been nice to have that shared with another law enforcement entity whose conducting an investigation on this.” 

He’s shocked that the target really was supposed to be a BLM office. “And it looks like he had more of an intention than just putting bombs, talking about shooting people,” he says. “This could have been a hell of a lot worse than it was.”

For such a nice guy, Lee sounds pissed — I get the sense he’s not a guy to throw the word “hell” around willy-nilly, too. But I get it: A bomb went off in his tiny town, a place that was always supposed to be this perfect haven of purity in a wild state. And even he can’t give people answers about what happened. The feds never told him. 

“Who radicalized him?” he asks. 

Glenn Jones said he could have “leveled out” a government building because he believed so much in the story of LaVoy the martyr. He was willing to die for it.

Ultimately he didn’t bomb the BLM. I don’t know why he didn’t carry out his original plan. I don’t know what the FBI knew about him. I do know, though, that during that very same summer, the feds “wanted to push [Keebler] outside his comfort zone to take his temperature” on a bombing… when right here, just a few hours away, Glenn Jones was sitting in an RV making a bomb so large it would shower a town in a mile’s worth of shrapnel. 

Lee thinks somebody knew — Panaca’s too damn small for people not to — he thinks they just didn’t say anything, says people might consider it not their business, or figure “nah — not my problem,” he says. 

I think until Kevin Harpham’s bomb arrived just down the street from me in Spokane, maybe I was like that, too. Nah, not my problem. Figured domestic terrorists were over there, white supremacists over there. 

But now I know, I just wasn’t letting myself see what had always been around me. Until that happened, I think I was trying to protect myself from the from the messy business of dealing with hate, unwilling to acknowledge that white supremacist structures support white people who are willing to be violent in the name of ideology and how those people are rarely called terrorists.  

Americans think terrorists are these fictional people streaming over the borders, when in reality, most terrorists are already here — they are white, they are Christian, they were born in America. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2018 was one of the deadliest years for domestic extremist violence since the Civil Rights era — and almost every attack had some link to a type of right-wing extremism, especially white supremacy. A government assessment of mass attacks in public spaces from that same year also showed that about a third of those attackers believed in a violent ideology — from white supremacy to conspiracy theories, to sovereign citizenry. 

But transparency could change how Americans see terrorism. So when instances of violence happen, the government could tell people what homegrown terrorism really looks like. Because every time the feds cover something up, or use questionable tactics, or don’t say anything at all, it hands the Patriot Movement a new victory. It helps them tell their story. The narrative is in their hands. One more thing they could point to and say ‘look, the government always lies to you.’

I think that’s one step in fixing all this, in creating new Patriots — just not the kind in the Patriot Movement. 

Maybe real Patriots are the ones who can look at themselves, their own communities, and have some uncomfortable conversations about who they really are. Maybe they’re people who can say something is out of place in their own community.

Like the city workers in Spokane who saw that backpack and trusted their guts to say something, likely saving hundreds of lives.

Or Tanner Rowe and Jay Pounder, who leaked the Biblical Basis for War: two conservative guys who used to work for Matt Shea but weren’t so hypnotized by a belief system that they couldn’t recognize when it was turning into something dangerous. 

Or Jesse Johnson, who didn’t turn anyone in, but instead simply turns a cheek again, and again, and again to the people at Marble. Extending a hand out to the people who hurt him, killing them with kindness. Or trying to. They can believe what they want, but he doesn’t have to hate them back.

Because Johnson knows that hate takes work. He was raised in a place where anger and violence were preached as virtues, but grew up to be a man who knows those weren’t the words of God. They were words of people trying to play God.

So each of them took a risk. They all stood up. They all exposed a problem. They stopped living in fear.  

They know that in the light, there can be no shadows.

***

Listen to the audio version of this series.

  Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.