#this current regime works and will work even more after i start the phd

[pulquedeguayaba]

Im so dumb, didnt realise it was for censoring the tt 🤡

Amazing fanart tho 10/10 she never disappoints 🔥

[longitudinalwaveme]

Arkham Files: Dr. Alchemy/Dr. Albert Desmond/Mr. Element

Hugo Strange: From the patient files of Dr. Hugo Strange, director of Arkham Asylum. Patient: Dr. Albert Desmond, also known as Dr. Alchemy and Mr. Element. Patient suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Session One. So, Dr. Desmond, how are you feeling? 

Dr. Alchemy: Go away. I’m reading. 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond, I promise that you will be able to return to your books as soon as this session is over. But for right now, I need you to talk to me. 

Dr. Alchemy: I am not interested in conversation. Leave me alone. 

Hugo Strange: I’m afraid I cannot do that, Dr. Desmond. As your psychologist, I have a responsibility to maintain your well-being. 

Dr. Alchemy: I have read countless books on the subject of psychology, Dr. Strange. There is nothing you can teach me that I do not already know. 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond, this is not about knowledge. It is about helping you to live a more productive life. 

Dr. Alchemy: Dr. Desmond would likely appreciate the sentiment, but he isn’t here right now. So please, leave me to my studies. I have important work to do, and no time for idle chatter. 

Hugo Strange: I take it I am speaking to one of Dr. Desmond’s alters, then? 

Dr. Alchemy: Yes. I am Doctor Alchemy. Now kindly go away and leave me alone. 

Hugo Strange: I’m afraid that I cannot do that, Dr. Alchemy. As your psychologist, it would be irresponsible of me not to hold these therapy sessions with you. 

Dr. Alchemy: You are not my psychologist; you are Dr. Desmond’s psychologist. Dr. Desmond is not here right now, so you have no responsibilities in this room. Go away. 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Alchemy, you and Dr. Desmond share the same body, and are fragmented parts of the same basic personality. Medically and legally, both of you are my patients...as are any other alters that may exist. 

Dr. Alchemy: Be that as it may, I have nothing to say to you. Go away.

Hugo Strange: (Sighs) If I arrange to have some more rare books delivered to your room, will you agree to participate in the session, Dr. Alchemy? 

Dr. Alchemy: (Pleased) Yes. Thank you, Dr. Strange. (Pause) What do you want to know? 

Hugo Strange: According to your files, you are a very educated man. You have PhDs in chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology. You could easily earn money legitimately...and, in fact, Dr. Desmond does just that in his career at S.T.A.R. Labs. Why, then, did you choose to become a costumed criminal? 

Dr. Alchemy: Research is expensive, Dr. Strange. How else was I to fund my experiments? 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond usually asks for grant money. 

Dr. Alchemy: Only because he wastes our talents on safe, predictable work. I, on the other hand, push the boundaries of established science. That frightens the complacent and the simple-minded, and as such, they dismiss my work as lunacy and refuse to help me in my endeavors to expand humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. 

Hugo Strange: Even if that is true, Dr. Alchemy, your file indicates that you are a metahuman with the power to transmute the elements at will. Why not use that power to create gold or silver, sell it for a profit, and use that to fund your experiments? 

Dr. Alchemy: And debase my powers by using them for something as mundane as earning petty cash from the mindless multitudes? Never. 

Hugo Strange: But you’re perfectly willing to use those same powers to steal money from the same mindless multitude? 

Dr. Alchemy: Of course. I am the lord of the very elements! It is my right to take whatever I desire. 

Hugo Strange: You are stealing! Like a common thief! 

Dr. Alchemy: A common thief could not turn your blood into formaldehyde, Dr. Strange. 

Hugo Strange: Was that a threat, Dr. Alchemy? 

Dr. Alchemy: No, not a threat. Merely a reminder of your position. 

Hugo Strange: (Angry) Let me make one thing clear, Dr. Alchemy. When you were sent here, you were, effectively, declared a ward of the state. I am the head of this Asylum. I want to help you, but if you prove to be a threat to me, the other patients, or the staff, I will authorize that you be put on a regime of enough antipsychotic drugs to all but kill your conscious mind. 

Dr. Alchemy: (Quiet laugh) And break your Hippocratic Oath by sentencing poor Dr. Desmond to a living death? I don’t believe you have that in you, Dr. Strange.

Hugo Strange: (Icily) To prevent one of the most powerful metahumans in the world from laying waste to this institution? There is very little I would not do, Dr. Alchemy. Metahuman power dampeners have a very limited effect on you, and I am not enough of a fool to rely solely on your goodwill to keep you in check. 

Dr. Alchemy: (Quickly) In that case, I rescind my reminder. 

Hugo Strange: I’m glad to hear that, Dr. Alchemy. (Pause) So tell me, what is your relationship with your city’s scarlet-clad vigilante? 

Dr. Alchemy: The Flash? He’s an impediment to my research, nothing more. 

Hugo Strange: And your decision to put on a costume was in no way inspired by him? 

Dr. Alchemy: Perhaps on some level. But he means nothing to me. Dr. Desmond is the one who cares about him. 

Hugo Strange: In that case, will you permit me to speak with Dr. Desmond? 

Dr. Alchemy: Certainly not. That weak-willed fool would only interfere with my studies. 

Dr. Hugo Strange: If you cooperate, I’ll see what I can do about getting you a first-edition copy of The Grapes of Wrath. 

Dr. Alchemy: Very well. If I can find Dr. Desmond, I’ll let him know that he wishes to speak with you. 

(Long pause) 

Hugo Strange: Are you all right, Dr. Alchemy? 

Albert: (in a voice that is similar to, but distinguishable from, Dr. Alchemy’s) W-where am I? What’s going on? 

Hugo Strange: (Realizing) Is this Dr. Albert Desmond? 

Albert: Y-yes. (Pause) Who are you? What is this place? What am I doing here? 

Hugo Strange: I am Dr. Hugo Strange, director of Arkham Asylum. What is the last thing you remember, Dr. Desmond? 

Albert: I...I was at home with my wife, Rita. She was making dinner, and I felt a headache coming on, so I went outside to get some fresh air and-(Pause) Oh, no. It happened again, didn’t it? 

Hugo Strange: I’m afraid so, Dr. Desmond. A week ago, Dr. Alchemy was captured by the Flash whilst attempting to turn an entire stadium’s worth of people into tungsten. Since Iron Heights Penitentiary is currently incapable of holding metahuman criminals, it was decided that he should be transferred to Arkham Asylum, pending his trial. 

Albert: Not again...not again!  It’s been three years since the last time. I thought that the nightmare was finally over. 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond, the courts are aware of your… highly unusual...form of Dissociative Identity Disorder. You will almost certainly be declared not guilty by reason of insanity. 

Albert: And then they’ll lock me away in a hospital instead of a prison. Rita and I...we have a baby son! Is he going to grow up with his father shut away in a mental institution? (Pause) I should have had her divorce me. At least that way she wouldn’t be raising our son all by herself. And she wouldn’t have to worry about both her and the baby being murdered by a costumed maniac! 

Hugo Strange: Neither of your alters have ever actually murdered someone, Dr. Desmond. 

Albert: No. But from what I’ve been told, it hasn’t been from lack of trying. (Pause) I let her marry me. I knew what I was, and I let her marry a monster. 

Hugo Strange: You are not a monster, Dr. Desmond. Your family members, the police and judicial departments of Central City, and even your city’s costumed vigilante all swear as to your good moral character. 

Albert: Good moral character? Dr. Strange, both of my alters are criminals; which means that there’s a part of me...there’s a part of me that wants to do the things they do. If there wasn’t, surely I would have been able to get rid of them by now. The fact that I haven’t proves that I don’t have good morals. 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond, do you ever remember the actions of your alters? 

Albert: Almost never. (Pause) I usually end up finding out about it after the fact. You have no idea how horrible it is to have someone tell you that your body went on a crime spree that you don’t remember anything about. 

Hugo Strange: In other words, you have dissociative amnesia during the periods in which your alters are dominant. (Pause) Do you make an effort to prevent your alters from emerging, Dr. Desmond? 

Albert: Of course I do! I take medication, I exercise, I ensure that I always get a full night’s rest, I go to therapy….I don’t want to be a monster. 

Hugo Strange: A monster wouldn’t battle his illness in the way that you do, Dr. Desmond. You are not a monster. You are ill, and through no fault of your own. 

Albert: I...I wish I could believe that, Dr. Strange. (Pause) But honestly? I’m starting to think that maybe I should just be locked up forever. It would...it would be better for everyone. 

(Long pause) 

Hugo Strange: Dr. Desmond? Dr. Desmond, are you all right? 

Mr. Element: (in a voice that is similar to, but distinguishable from, Dr. Alchemy and Albert’s voices) I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong man, Doc.

Hugo Strange: Who are you? And what happened to Dr. Desmond? 

Mr. Element: Nothing. I just decided to take control. It seems that Doc Alchemy’s actions have caused him to almost give up hope completely this time, and that meant he couldn’t put up much of a fight against me. (Pause) Thanks for getting Doc Alchemy to give up control voluntarily, by the way. You have no idea how tough it is to win fights for control with that guy. 

Hugo Strange: I take it you’re Mr. Desmond’s other alter? 

Mr. Element: That’s right, Doc. You can call me Mr. Element. 

Hugo Strange: Not Dr. Element? 

Mr. Element: Nah. The other two got most of the brains, I’m afraid. It’s why I’m not as powerful as either one of ‘em. (Pause) Not that you’d know it from looking at Albert, of course. He’s got no idea how powerful he really is. He’s even more powerful than Doc Alchemy! 

Hugo Strange: I suppose that that makes a certain amount of sense. Dr. Desmond is, after all, the personality from which the two of you split off. Perhaps that allows him to mainline the power, so to speak. (Pause) So, Mr. Element, why do you commit crimes in a silly costume? 

Mr. Element: To get money and attention. Doc Alchemy could care less about that sort of thing, and Albert’s too much of a goody-good to admit that he wants either, so it’s up to me to make sure people remember us. 

Hugo Strange: And the costume, was it inspired by the Flash? 

Mr. Element: No. It was based on our fascination with elements. The mask was so that I could inhale pure oxygen; I used a carbon atom as my symbol because life has its basis in carbon-you get the idea. Albert’s the one who has an emotional connection to the Speedster. 

Hugo Strange: Yes, yes. Dr. Alchemy said the same thing. (Pause) So, are either you or Dr. Alchemy Rogues, Mr. Element? 

Mr. Element: No. Doc Alchemy and I both prefer to work solo. Besides, I think the Doc kind of freaks them out. 

Hugo Strange: Are there any particular concerns you want to talk to me about, Mr. Element? 

Mr. Element: Not really. Albert’s the one with the hang-ups. 

Hugo Strange: In that case, I am going to bring this session to a close. I need some time to reflect on your case and how to best treat it. It is noticeably abnormal, and I will need to adjust my strategies accordingly.

[wb-ivy]

An Incomplete History of Music

A/N: I wrote this about a year ago as a result of coming out as trans and being punished for it. Decided that for Trans Awareness Week I would share this with you. Stay Strong and Remember, YOU ARE VALID!!!

Masterlist

Choral music as we know it was first recorded around the beginning of the 10th century C.E. Although score sheets have been around for longer, the first piece of polyphony music was not actually discovered until December of 2014 by an intern at the British Library who was studying for his PhD at Cambridge University. He discovered the piece in the manuscript of Bishop Maternianus of Reims. Before going any further, it should be noted that polyphony music is music specifically written for several voice parts to perform at the same time. Since this only covers the history of polyphony choir music, solo opera pieces, songs written with only voice part but performed by a large group, and instrumental symphonies will not be discussed throughout the next ten pages. 

Choral music is believed to have originated from modern day Germany with only two parts before making its way to Western Europe where it becomes elaborated for eleven hundred years to become the intricate expressions we see in every school and church across the globe. Choral music became the main event in churches, right after the Lord, during the Medieval period. Although historians have known the significance of  group performances during the Middle Ages, no physical sheets of scores have yet to be discovered. 

During this time period, the most typical and popular piece of polyphony music was in the “organum” style. Pieces written in the organum style were performed with the accompaniment singing either above or below the melody, but they both sang the same tune. The most intriguing part about the birth of polyphony music is that historians originally thought it was developed using a set of strict rules that the composer had to follow. The discovery of this artifact, along with the organum style of music shows that the creator of choral music was breaking the rules of his own invention. These discoveries have helped to smash down old assumptions made based off of The Winchester Troper, the world’s second oldest choral music currently known.

The original was then discovered to not actually be written all at once. Experts believe that it was actually written in the early 10th century as a solo piece before adding on a seperate piece a few years later during the same century. This priceless work also shows that it was nearly the basis of experimentation to create an original work that harmonized several groups of singers all at once. It seemed that the composer had bigger visions to a multiple part song.

The middle ages was truly the start of choral music becoming popular inside the catholic walls. Although most of what we currently know about this music era is guess work, many groups specializing in medieval music prefer to use easily blended sounds without any vibrato. All musicians in this line of work will try to make their educated guesses of the original sound by comparing the music to other pieces found during that time alongside the renaissance pieces known by every singer, no matter their profession. During this time, although Catholic churches preferred to use instruments to help emphasize the vocal sounds, Jewish synagogues preferred to leave singers unaccompanied to show off the beauty of the choirs natural sounds. These types of a capella performances were known as Gregorian chants and differed greatly from street singing that was common in populated cities.

Street performances during the middle ages were normally made more attractive to make the performers more money by including intricate dances that followed the rhythm with their songs. These songs were almost always accompanied with smaller instruments such as flutes, but were normally a song that was written in only one part for several singers in unison. Synagogues preferred to use advanced harmonizing that was unaccompanied with music or dance because they believed that it distracted from the word of god. Synagogues also excluded women from performing in their ensembles, whereas street singing was a gender neutral activity.

Numerous examples can be seen throughout score sheets that Christian and Catholic choirs are heavily based on the hebraic performances that started in the Jewish community. Although the Catholic community mainly performed for much larger scaled gatherings of church goers once a week. They still shared the belief that music was meant to spread the psalms and proverbs to the masses.

During the Roman Catholic regime, singing saw a drastic change of its members. Beforehand, only priests and their congregations could sing the gospel, until a special group known as a choir was formed of talented members of the congregation to accompany and contrast the priest’s solos in order to make his voice stand out. Women had major roles in the start of official choirs until 578 when the Hebraic rule that didn’t allow female singers was reinstated in the Catholic church. It wasn’t until the 20th century that choirs weren’t made up of just men and young boys, when women’s rights were brought into the religious circle and helped regain female positions in the choir.

When the renaissance gave the average person more free time then their ancestors ever saw, choral music saw a boom in composition. This was the start of vocal music outwaying instrumental pieces in importance. Scores were written mainly in Latin, and composers were preoccupied by wanting the listeners to be awed by the music to actually worry about the harmonies. Choirs would consist with about three people for each section and with countertenors instead of altos, the higher of the four parts (soprano and countertenor) still consisted of young school boys instead of women. The renaissance period also tried to stay away from the vibratos used during the dark ages because they felt like it blurred the individuality of the voice parts and caused horrible blends of the melody.

During the renaissance period young boys were only able to perform high pitched parts until their voices cracked and they had to be moved to the lower sections (tenor and bass). Nowadays it would be impossible to find a male soprano to perform the complex and intricate music that rang throughout the Roman Empire. The reason choir directors could get away with boys singing intricate songs before puberty was because the average male didn’t hit puberty until the age of seventeen, much later than the current person hits puberty. The voice ages helped the choral industry stay male dominated and hindered the allowance of women in the chorus.

Strict rules had started to be imposed on composers during the renaissance in order to attract the most attendants to the church without straying too far from the words of God. Churches knew that if they didn’t allow the music to be brilliant and inspire the crowds that attendance at the services would drop, causing a decrease of funds they get from weekly offerings. On the other hand, churches were weary that if they music was too astounding that people would be too fixated on the sounds to get the message out of it that church wanted you to know. Composers during the time were seldom allowed to write about anything other than the gospel because there were few places other than the house of god for music to be performed. 

During the late sixteenth century, the Renaissance slowly slipped away and was replaced with the Baroque period. This Era saw the founding of concertato style, where a soloist or a quartet stood out and sang something different from the rest of the ensemble. The Baroque age also saw the sizes of choirs increase by tenfold and start to try to re-include instruments into its pieces. Some historians say that the Baroque period didn’t include anything new or special from choral pieces, but that it just simply continued top experiment and expand on the Renaissance’s most famous techniques. Though others argue that the Baroque age brought in a “new style” of music, such as the canata and the oratorio, which had never been used until then. Renaissance ideas that had started to fade out of fashion towards the end of the period saw itself newly revived and at the front and center of the Baroque period. An example of this included the use of several independent lines for vocal parts, which had become obsolete and had been replaced with a form of composing that where a single melody was performed vocally with a bass part performed by an instrument. 

Some of the most notable figures in the choral sphere of the Baroque period were Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Claudio Monteverdi was most known for transitioning music from prima prattica to seconda prattica. Even to this day, three of his twelve most important pieces have been preserved and are frequently performed. Heinrich Schutz made musical history by writing the best pieces throughout all of Germany and varied his collections from passion to oriatos and motets. Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most famous choral composers to this day. Being known for his music internationally,he produced over three hundred pieces of work during his lifetime. Bach was able to produce songs the artfully combined the most spectacular techniques from every type of music during the Baroque period. Not to mention, his music helped define choral pieces for centuries and for centuries more to come.

The classical age of music came right after the Baroque age with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart carrying most of the figurative choral weight upon his shoulders. The classical age had a major slow down of vocal pieces as composers started to experiment with the capabilities of instrumental music at its full capabilities. It was known as the classical age for attempting to revive the ancient Greek and Roman forms of fine arts and literature, which wasn’t very big on vocal music. The Classical age was famous for a Rococo style of music, which was light in nature, homophonic, and very elaborate compared to any other style of vocal performances. The Classic age was also heavily defined by its association with the church. Composer finally had the ability to write scores from a secular viewpoint with public concert halls being constructed for the first time. Choral music was finally allowed to be enjoyed by all no matter their beliefs or political views and actually became one of the most important parts of life for the socially elite in Europe.

Unlike every other musical time period, the Classical period only had three famous composers rather than several dozen of them. These three men were Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791), Frans Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), and Ludwig van Beethoven(1770-1827). Even though the popularity of vocal musicians increased, people like Mozart kept it alive with elaborate pieces that would have made the Fathers of choral music proud. Most of Mozart’s pieces were biblical and written to be performed at masses due to the fact that he was an archbishop. Some of his most famous works include Great Mass in C Minor, Coronation Mass in C Major, and Requiem Mass even though it had never been fully completed before Mozart’s death. Haydn was known for creating both The Creation and The Seasons after being a choirboy himself growing up until he was eight.

 “A Brief History Of Choral Music.” Calgary Children's Choir, 30 Mar. 2015, https://calgarychildrenschoir.com/a-brief-history-of-choral-music/.

Brown, Mayer, and Howard. “CHORAL MUSIC IN THE RENAISSANCE.” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 1 Apr. 1978, https://academic.oup.com/em/article-abstract/6/2/164/402312?redirectedFrom=PDF.

Foss, Lukas, and John Patrick Thomas. “The Middle Ages.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 8 Aug. 2011, https://www.britannica.com/art/musical-performance/The-Middle-Ages.

“Introduction To Renaissance Choral Music.” Choral Music In The Renaissance, http://dlib.info/home/braxton/.

Kozinn, Allan. “The Sound of the Middle Ages, Through Research and Intuition.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 May 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/04/arts/the-sound-of-the-middle-ages-through-research-and-intuition.html.

Riley, Danny. “A Tour through the History of Choral Music.” By Bachtrack for Classical Music, Opera, Ballet and Dance Event Reviews, Bachtrack Ltdhttps://Bachtrack.com/Themes/bachtrack2013/Mastheadlogo.png, 17 Jan. 2018, https://bachtrack.com/feature-at-home-whistle-stop-choral-music-june-2017.

Stevens, Denis William. “Choral Music.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 19 Jan. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/art/choral-music.

THE BAROQUE PERIOD (1600-1750), http://cmed.faculty.ku.edu/private/hyltonbar.html.

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD (1775-1825), http://cmed.faculty.ku.edu/private/classical.html.

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1825-4900), http://cmed.faculty.ku.edu/private/romantic.html.

[skepticaloccultist]

The St Cyprian Scholar

An interview with José Leitão.

José Leitão is an author and scholar as well as a Portuguese Saint Cyprian devotee. Besides a PhD in experimental physics from the University of Delft, the Netherlands, his current research focuses on using ethnographic and folkloric methodologies to map the concepts of folk magic, sorcery, and witchcraft as described in the records of the Portuguese Inquisition.

The translator of "The Book of St Cyprian: The Sorcerer's Treasure", and the Bibliotheca Valenciana", both on Hadean Press as well as his collection of Portuguese folk tales related to the Cyprian Book "The Immaterial Book of St Cyprian" on Revelore Press and numerous articles he is developing a considerable body of Portuguese language works translated for the first time into English.

In my travels to Portugal for field research I cross paths with José in the university town of Coimbra, where he is currently conducting research. Over a handful of coffees I managed to get him to give me an interview about his work and research. He is almost as much of a recluse as I am!

  +++

For a man with a background in physics you are making a considerable mark on the history of occult literature in the early 21st century. Is there some long term plan or are you more of the wandering academic/perpetual scholar type?

Let’s not start making history before it happens… you’re not the only skeptic around here. From what I’ve observed occult literature shifts its focus often and in unpredictable ways. I may yet be a one hit wonder.

That being said, I suppose it might be a bit of both, or perhaps neither… at least in regards to my written material. To be honest I had no plan behind my first book, it was something that just kind of happened due to a number of circumstances in my life and at the time I really didn’t think I would be writing anything else besides that.

It’s hard for me to describe this in detail at this point, because it’s difficult to tell what where my genuine feelings then or what are later rationalizations. The fact that I have a physics PhD is largely circumstantial, it barely has anything to do with anything I’m doing right now and I’ve turned my back on that world probably permanently. There’s likely no real point in going into details here, but after a very long time in that world I simply came to the realization that that life was not conducive to my happiness; a reflection which was very much aided by my work and translation of The Book of St. Cyprian. Once I figured that out I started doing everything I could to walk away from where I was, and that’s what I’m still doing. So, it’s not so much about being a wandering or perpetual academic, it’s really about the path of least emotional resistance and unpleasantness at this point.

But, of course, I could have chosen to go down the purely ‘practitioner’ way, but I chose academia instead. I’ve also come to realize that I can’t function properly outside of a university or a university-like environment, so I fully identify as an academic at this point, and indeed there is a lot of wandering involved in that.

When we talk about the myths and folklore of the people of the Iberian peninsula very little of the primary sources have made their way into English translation. Why now, what do you think is driving the growing interest in Iberian folk magic?

I think there are a number of issues at play simultaneously, and I don’t ascribe a necessarily ‘supernatural’ origin to any of them. It reads a lot like regular human geography and white people taking their heads out of their asses (btw, Iberians aren’t white; we simply think we are because we’ve always had somebody darker to compare ourselves to).

I read this as the reality that the major trendsetting countries (USA mostly) have had an increasing immigrant population from Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries for years now, but what makes this moment different is that the white people living there, due to contemporary political reasons, have started to pay them attention (and not always in the good way). This means that, right now, a lot of new concepts are being brought into cultural visibility which were exclusive to Iberian and South and Central America until very recent, not because they were hidden, but rather because no one gave a fuck.

You need to also remember that besides the long standing white disdain for anybody south of the American border, in Europe we still suffer the stigma of the Black Legend. The narratives of accepted modernity have always been historically presented, firstly, by Protestantism and, secondly, by the Enlightenment, both of which were (and are) ultimately profoundly hostile to Catholic Iberia, so the situation wasn’t (or isn’t) much better here. We have a European stigma associated with emigration and typical association with menial labor in central and north Europe. Iberians are still exotic and given to stereotyping as under educated simpletons (think Manuel from Fawlty Towers); a nice place to visit during the summer and be entertained by our quaint non-Europeaness.

So, a reappreciation of both these cultural spaces is happening right now, but I see this as happening mostly for mundane reasons. But also… regarding the Iberian aspect in itself in America… I’m going out on a limb here, so feel free to call bullshit on what follows, but I also think that there might still be some extra racism involved in this. ‘Iberian’ sounds old and ennobled; you get images ancientness, castles, knights errant, good food and wine and beautiful dancing gitana girls. For a white American, it removes the source of the practice from your immediate (brown) neighbors and places it in an old (assumed white) Iberian no one really knows anything about.

Lusitanian culture specifically is of particular interest to me personally. Remnants of pre Roman cultural ideas seem to be scattered within the larger dynamic of Portuguese culture. Do you think that forms of folk magic practice found in say the 2nd or 3rd century have continued down through the ages?

Interesting you mention the Lusitanian. One of the major (unintentional) overarching themes of my next book is actually Portuguese cultural identity, and I offer some criticism on the Lusitanian problem from a contemporary practitioner perspective.

This is really the sum of it: the identification of the Lusitanian as the par excellence pre-historical Portuguese (the Portuguese before there was Portugal) is a politically motivated construction of the Estado Novo for identity and cultural control. The Lusitanian continuity thesis was one of Vasconcelo’s babies, but this was far from being universally accepted and during its time it received very heavy criticisms, mainly from Alexandre Herculano, one of the greatest and most cursed Portuguese historians. However, due to this and other difficult issues regarding the, at times, overly romantic Portuguese historiographic tradition, Herculano was for a long time largely ignored, and Vasconcelos pretty much became the regime’s scholar of choice.

I’m not disparaging Vasconcelos, he was good at what he did, but scholars need to be given the right to be wrong. His work has, in the past, been used for sinister purposes and that shouldn’t be ignored anymore. You see, if you are a heavy paternalistic right wing clerical regime and you do a hard streamline to the Lusitanian, a people we still don’t really know that much about, as the ‘archaic’ Portuguese, you are able downplay every other major population influx into Portugal and fashion our ‘archaic’ identity in whatever way you see fit. This means that you get to downplay Neolithic dolmens and standing stones, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Jewish and Muslim/North African influences, and construct an idealized and racially pure Christian Portugal. The Lusitanian, as an identity, are essentially nothing.

But obviously I can’t say that there aren’t Lusitanian influences in what Portugal is or that this doesn’t exist in Portuguese folk magic. That would be another form of insanity, mainly because we simply don’t know what the Lusitanian did. But to isolate the Lusitanian like that is historically problematic. So… no, I don’t think 2nd or 3rd century practices are particularly visible, at least not more than Roman, Jewish or Muslim ones.

The idea of "Lusitanian" culture being used as a kind of nationalist symbol in which to rally people in support of a regime is fascinating. Years ago I studied kaballah with Lionel Ziprin in NYC and he had a whole theory about the "publicly accepted kaballah" that was presented by Gershom Scholem. How the texts that get translated and the things that are accepted as truths were part of a broader narrative meant to occlude certain aspects of historic kaballah. How involved do you think the church was in the utilization of this "Lusitanian" national identity?

That’s hard to say… one thing that also needs to be understood is that, even if the regime guided itself by Catholic morals and ideals, and the Church did draw immense social advantage from this, the Catholic hierarchy actually had very little power to influence the political decision making. Ultimately, by the accurate manipulation of words and an irreducible concordat, Salazar could instrumentalize the Church for political gain and identity and behavior control, and it ended up becoming as much a prisoner of the state as anybody else, leading to Catholic dissension in the 50s. So, probably the Church didn’t really have an active role in the utilization of the Lusitanian, it was simply another tool the regime could manipulate and fit together to selectively construct a useful identity and narrative of itself. Although I’m sure many within the religion didn’t really mind this.

In reading your "The Book of St. Cyprian: The Sorcerer's Treasure" on Hadean one concept that really interested me was this idea of the "mar Coalhado" or Curdled Sea. It struck me as both an afterlife in the model of the Norse Hel, but also some kind of purgatory or abyss. Though I have been unable to find much in English! Is this concept still common in Portuguese culture?

That’s also one of my favorite concepts, interestingly. This is something which is pretty much still in the air for me.

Ultimately, on a general or ‘global’ scale, I don’t think I can give you any actual answer to what this concept might be… or any such concept to be frank. If we’re going back in time to look for such ideas we must remember that we’re going into circumstances when the circulation of information had its limits. Most researchers tend to bypass this problem by implicitly assuming that such folk concepts are ‘ancient’ or ‘archaic’, which meant that they should have had time to spread homogeneously across large geographical areas. I tend to avoid this approach because it removes active agency and imagination from the non-contemporary, non-educated, or non-white individual practitioner. That being said, a few other scholars have noted the occurrence of mentions to the ‘Mar Coalhado’ or something of apparent equivalence in a few procedures. Most often nobody ever offers anything on it except its occurrence, but I recently ran across a particular book by a fellow Coimbra researcher called António Vitor Ribeiro, O Auto do Místicos, which seemed to shed some light on the matter. It’s a cool text, exploring ideas, descriptions and practices of mysticism in Portugal from the clerical and literary circles down to the folk and rural levels. It’s a very ambitious work, but he tend to do really clumsy simplifications and linearization via some sneaky moves using Ginzburg or Eliade, and he uses words of complex meaning and implicit significance very frivolously… I like my methodologies to be more hygienic. Anyway, in one of the many interesting Inquisition documents he finds there is a mentioning of something referred to as the ‘Aguas Salgadas’, or ‘Salty/Salted Waters’. It’s not a perfect fit, but it does seem like somewhat similar to what we’re discussing. But what’s more interesting is that this isn’t in an actual Inquisition processes and this wasn’t mentioned as part of a particular folk magic procedure.

You see, there is a secondary collection of Inquisition documentation in Portugal called the ‘Cadernos do Promotor’, or the Prosecutor’s Notebooks, collections of denunciations, confessions or observations taken by Inquisition prosecutors that never made it into actual processes. There are several reasons for this, most often no crime was actually identified for a prosecution to be mounted, and other times it was because the reports and accusations are so outlandishly bizarre that the Inquisitors couldn’t make any theological sense of them in order to determine if what was being described actually constitutes heresy.

In this case, what was being reported were apparent visions, visitations and possessions by Mouras. Thus, a woman called Maria Leamara would fall into possession ‘rolling on the ground making it quake and making great arches with her feet’, saying while in this state ‘Let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go to the burrow of the moura, let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go across the salty waters, let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go to the Boulder of the See’. Then, when questioned about what any of this meant, she would only say that ‘they’ wanted her to deny Christ, and that the ‘salty waters’ meant outside of Christianity.

This whole thing then seems very akin to an anti-world, or ante-world, particularly evident by this apparent connection with Mouras, who apparently live across the Salty Waters and potentially the Curdled Sea. If Mouras are described and interpreted as these strange being of extremely remote existence, echoes and inhabitants of a bygone time, the banishing of something to this space would be akin to banishing it to somewhere outside of creation; this cosmic-now, or Christianity as that which created and defines the cosmic order we currently inhabit.

But in truth you have a number of varieties of this type of concept all across Europe. Very common formulas for the banishing of illnesses, bad weather or evil spirits into this type of space usually go along the lines of ‘go to where no baby cries, no roster sings or no dog barks’, for example, and I do see these as being somewhat equivalent concepts, as they both seem to describe a place removed from a humanly conceived cosmos, but these punctual examples of Moura crossovers do give it a particular local flavor.

If you think about it this is actually an extremely violent form of banishing. You’re basically casting something out of creation itself (as an anthropocentric concept). I think Jonathan Roper (one of my favorite folk magic scholars) has some material on this if you’d like to look him up.

But if you want to talk about actual application… even if some people might still use this concept (and it is quite common), I don’t think that what it actually signifies really is of much concern, even if it might be understood as significant. When you’re talking about magical formulas you always need to admit that there might be an aspect of simple habit or ‘tradition’ in the use of certain words and expressions. The impulse to break down an idea like that into tangible and rational concepts is pretty much a ‘learned��� and contemporary preoccupation. In all truth, a much more common occurrence in inquisition processes and documentation is that when an accused is questioned about a particular procedure he was witnessed as using, and which apparently calls upon a variety of spirits and characters, if asked who these characters are he will most likely answer that he simply don’t know. My reading of this is that it’s not their job or preoccupation to know; the words don’t have to have a rational meaning, which is something also supported by the observation that these types of traditional magical formulas frequently use nonsensical expressions, onomatopoeias or forced alliterations. The complete understanding of every single words and expression used beyond the cultural meaning of the procedure itself as a whole is a preoccupation which is mostly non-existent in the environment where these procedures occur. Both contemporary scholars and contemporary occultists are descendants from this overly analytical mentality, and it seems to me that the first step in actually understanding these is to admit that we are ultimately alien to this form of thinking.

You brought up the ‘Cadernos do Promotor’, or the Prosecutor’s Notebooks, which seem like a massive untapped resource in the folkloric study of witchcraft belief. Do you know if these types of records are only found in Portugal? How extensive are these documents?

To be honest, I’m still pretty new to that particular database and I’m not that familiar with the bureaucratic functioning of other Inquisitions in order to answer that question. However, in terms of how extensive… I’ve counted 352 volumes, some of which are 14 centimeters thick.

These are it. The thousands of processes everybody likes to talk and fetishisize about are just the tip of the iceberg; this is the real deal. Pure, uncut, unadulterated, untortured, uninterrogated words. No leading the witness, no feeding the answers to the accused, no theological projection, no nothing; just people voluntarily and spontaneously saying the crazy shit they saw, crazy shit they did and the crazy shit that was done to them.

The amount of work needed to work this source is soul crushing, but the potential is just breathtaking. Even beyond just the information in them… I’ve only scratched the surface on these, I’ve so far mostly been reading what other people have written about the reports in the Notebooks, but the things in there are dangerous on a cognitive level.

This goes back to the whole issue of the contemporary analytic mind, you need to remember that this is a window into a whole cosmology, worldview, understanding and interaction with the universe we simply don’t understand and are irreducibly alien to. Reading a few snippets has been enough for me to start to question reality… the ease and apparent normality which some things are described is just disturbing. And it gets Lovecraftian at the drop of a nickel… like ‘I was making a sandwich when all the sudden a door opened on the dark corner of my room. A Mouro with a red hat and shiny shoes walked out and lead me into a palace where the other Mouros were dancing and I met the Virgin Mary, who had the face of a monkey, her sister Saint Quiteria and King Sebastian and his five children. This has been happening every night and my husband complains that he wakes up when the Mouro takes me away during the night’… it’s stuff at this level and worst (or better).

With your recent complete translation of Jerónimo Cortez's "Bibliotheca Valenciana" you break into a realm of seeing and understanding the cosmological context in which much of the Cyprian magical traditions are rooted. A point before hard science, where the role of magician/scholar/alchemist merge and formed a kind of proto-scientist. What in Cortez's opus do you see as the most valuable content for those trying to understand the context of Cyprianic magic and early modern Iberian cultural beliefs in general?

Well… there’s a point in your question I can’t let slide. There is no such thing as a ‘proto-scientist’. The only way you can say that is if you root yourself in the contemporary time, take the definition of ‘scientist’ as it exists currently and project back in time to where it didn’t exist nor did it make sense (that’s the way most scientists think and why you can’t trust them to write their own history). So, the Cortez books don’t describe proto-science, they describe the science of their time, which is just as valid in its time as ours is in our time.

But regarding your question, there are a few points I wanted to make with the Bibliotheca Valenciana. The first of these is pretty straightforward: the Cortez books are not only one of the major sources for some of the later forms of the Cyprian Books, but they are themselves one of the major resources for your average Portuguese (and Brazilian) folk practitioner. While the reference to Cortez is actually fleeting in The Book of St. Cyprian I translated, as you move along the literary tradition of Cyprian Books, the repacking of material from the Physiognomy and the Lunario becomes ever increasing, particularly in Brazil. This by itself, in my own conception of what the work I’m supposed to be doing is meant to be, not only justifies the writing of that book but actually demands it.

The second point is probably more on the line of what you are alluding to. Besides the immediate relevance these books would have for someone interested in St. Cyprian related practices, they very efficiently describe what would be the early modern Catholic cosmology in purely functional terms and straight across social classes, even if this might at times not be completely explicit in the text. Note that there isn’t a distinction here between science and religion. Those are western academic categories and a person placing herself in the environment from where those books come from would not make this distinction in any way.

So, the point was not to simply offer context for St. Cyprian practices, but really to try to open up early-modern Catholicism as a still functional magical worldview and to offer the chance to approach the spiritual structures of the Church with an eye for (a rogue) practicality. If, as you say, Iberian folk magic is in fashion, if you try to reframe many of these practices into a Protestant cultural background (which is where Anglo-American occultism is based at), and if you’re serious about what you’re doing, you’ll run into more than a few bumps on the road. So the point was to offer a cosmology for when (or if) a cosmology is necessary.

And my final point with that book was part of a personal issue I’ve been working around regarding the nature of grimoires. I’m sure there are some purists out there who will vehemently disagree with me, and they might have a point; but I’ve come to think that that title cannot be solely given to a book by its author. If you analyze the way, historically, certain books are reacted to by the environments they enter you start to realize how arrogant it is to claim that one book is a grimoire in exclusion of another. ‘Grimoire’ should at times be a behavior description. It shouldn’t be about ‘this book is a grimoire’, but rather ‘I act towards this book as if a grimoire’. Once again, I believe that the denial of this is a ‘learned’ issue, a thing of high society and a claim of authoritarian elitism. So, to me, the Cortez books looked like Catholic grimoires in form and function, and they were certainly treated as such by people over here for hundreds of years, and logically they overlap with The Book of St. Cyprian. This is a line of work I intend to keep on exploring, and I’m actually right now planning on putting together something else further articulating this; some 18th century Catholic books I’ve recently fallen in love with.

When you talk about the Cortez books being used like grimoires, were his books perceived in Iberian society as "dangerous" or otherwise taboo in the way that Cyprian's Book was? Or do you mean more from a practical standpoint that the material in the book was used in much the same way one uses material in a grimoire?

I mean it from a practical standpoint mostly. This is something I’m still trying to figure out completely, but the construction of fear around the Book of St. Cyprian seems to be quite more recent than the Cortez books.

Overall I haven’t found that many references to Cyprian in the 17th-century, so it’s hard to say for certain what the image of The Book was for people familiar with it back then. But anyway, the emotional reactions to the two were probably very different. Although Cortez was a pioneer in the general prognostication literary genre, books of that sort weren’t particularly new or persecuted. They could at times be frowned upon (which lead to many being given false publication cities), and used as circumstantial evidence to prosecute someone accused of illicit practices, but they were never a particularly fearful thing in anyone’s eyes.

Witchcraft in Portugal is very under researched. It's my understanding that the history of witchcraft and its persecution is very different in Portugal than in neighboring Spain due to lack of an Inquisition in Portugal. What facets have shaped what we would call witchcraft practices that separate Portuguese and Spanish traditions?

First of all, a correction: Portugal did have an Inquisition. It started off slightly later than in many other countries, in 1536, but it lasted into 1821, so we had plenty of it over here. Now, what usually distinguishes it from many other such similar institutions was the absence of witch-hunting. While the practices perceived as witchcraft were still very much against the law, and if found these would be persecuted, there was no major active effort by any institution to actively search and persecute ‘witches’.

The only period where we do have anything close to a witch-hunt is actually in the 18th century, when you have a marked rise in related accusations. This instance had, for a long time, been somewhat of a mystery, but Timothy Walker in his Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition has very efficiently related this to an active effort by Coimbra trained doctors to eliminate folk healers and New Christian competitors from the market by becoming Inquisitional snitches. But overall, the number of witchcraft cases (and we can throw ‘superstition’, ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’ in there) on the Portuguese side of things are actually quite reduced, seeing as the Inquisition was much more preoccupied with the persecution of hidden Jews (real or imaginary).

One other side of this is that the narratives of diabolical witchcraft popularized in other European countries didn’t find a very strong foothold here, leaving many of the descriptions of practices and ‘folk magical’ procedures free from learned projections, interpretations and prosecution. And finally, one other important particularity here was that witchcraft accusations didn’t seem to have a very pronounced female persecution aspect to them, with the divide being 40% male and 60% female… which really throws a wrenched into essentialist feminist witchcraft narratives.

What must be remembered is that witchcraft image construction is always culturally located, and to weave a Pan-European narrative is to fall into historical fallacies and anachronisms. Over here the typical targets of persecution were individuals who had no clear connection to any ‘public’ or ecclesiastic institution and had an uncertain source of income. In this category you then have widows, beggars, vagrants, Jews or day to day swindlers and small fry businessmen… and there are no significant Sabbat descriptions.

Comparing the case with Spain (of which I’m not an expert in by the way), it should also be noted that the usual portrait of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, in regards to witchcraft persecution, are inaccurate… that is another echo of the Black Legend. In Spain there were actually three parallel tribunals with authority to persecute witchcraft and related practices: the Secular, the Episcopalian and the Inquisitorial (mostly active in urban centers), and out of all of these the Inquisitorial was actually the most lenient. This has to do with the very Inquisitorial process, which tended to be extremely bureaucratic (leaving an immense paper trail which can be followed today, contrarily to the other tribunals which didn’t keep much of a record and consequently become less historically visible) and it was actually quite complex in terms of finding anyone guilty of such ‘immaterial’ crimes… again, against popular opinion and whatever savage nonsense was happening in Protestant Inquisitions. In order to condemn anybody to death for witchcraft, there needed to be proof of an explicit satanic pact, which was nearly impossible to achieve. Consequently, what we see with the Spanish Inquisition is that people accused of witchcraft or magical practices in rural areas would frequently flee to a city in order to be judged by an Inquisitional court because, even if they could end up condemned of something, the chance that they would be sentenced to death was much smaller. Maria Tausiet has a nice book on this actually, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, although she makes some horrible mistakes in her dealing with magic and folklore in general, going as far as quoting the Libro Magno de San Cipriano (from the 19th century) to explain spirit summoning in the early modern period…

The same thing is true of Portugal. Magic and witchcraft cases very rarely ended in death. It was much more common to give the accused a tap on the hand, give him or her a fine, have them make a public abjuration and them ship them off to one of the colonies or some forsaken place in the country. But you do start to find more common death sentences in relapse trials, but this once again wasn’t related to witchcraft itself, but rather because this implied that your original confession and abjuration had been a lie, which constituted sacrilege and was a considerably worst offense.

Ultimately, what in my opinion would distinguish both countries in terms of witchcraft narratives is something that goes beyond this straight duality of Portugal and Spain. True, we have had our borders nicely established for many hundreds of years and there are indeed certain distinctions that can be made between one side of the line and the other, but the error that this carries is that it is often assumed that whatever exists on either side of the border is itself homogeneous. There are some clear overarching motives and witchcraft narratives both in Portugal and Spain, but given the particular persecution circumstances, there are probably much stronger regional distinctions than national distinctions. There’s a very interesting book by Gunnar Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons, which very clearly demonstrate how ethnical and cultural differences between Northern and Southern Spain actually give rise to different forms of witchcraft narratives. I believe this should also be detectable in Portugal, and you could expect clear narrative distinctions between the North and the more Muslim influenced South.

Witchcraft image construction and narrative distinction is a very subtle field of work, and why I usually avoid talking about these issues with self described witchcraft practitioners. Contemporary witchcraft narratives tend to be monolithic and essentialist, and these are all pseudo-historical construction. I don’t mean this as an offense in any way; contemporary witchcraft has its own real history, and this is not in any way less ‘noble’ or worthy, but it’s most often not the history it tells of itself.

Contemporary feminist witchcraft, for example, while having a concrete and positive purpose in today’s society needs to be understood as being constructed over a particular narrative which is entirely local and politically motivated. The general tendency to want to apply this particular narrative, constructed by characters such as Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardener based on flawed and biased reading of historical documents, is a violent form of colonialism (curiously, a Patriarchic mode of behavior), frequently using anti-intellectualism claims in order to deny concrete historically observed practices and traditions that don’t fit a particular worldview.

Established religious traditions, be them Christian or Pagan, tend to have the same responses to what they perceive as attacks on their theological legitimacy and power monopoly. It’s the same mentality with a different opinion.

That was a bit of a tangent to your question I suppose… but as far as a distinction goes, that’s my position. I think a clear blind spot in Iberian Inquisition and witchcraft studies (and not just Iberian) is the common disregard for folklore and local culture to help frame and contextualize the several different practices being placed under the same category of ‘witchcraft’. This is once again a reflection of the ‘learned’ position of academic culture which is still a direct descendent of the actual Inquisitors who created this category in the first place (Wouter Hanegraaff has some nice material on this… although he doesn’t explicitly deal with the Inquisition and certainly not Southern Europe).

What projects do you have coming up?

I have a few things in the air right now. First and foremost, I spent most of last year traveling and researching for a new Cyprian book, and I’m hoping to have that published before the end of this year. This is one I’m very proud of and I think it’s safe to say that I found documentation that probably nobody had ever looked at (people have surely seen it, but not really looked).

It’s going to be something quite big I think, in the literal sense… it’s about 400k words long.

Other than this I have a few things on the drawing board. Like I already mentioned I’m playing around with a few 18th-century Catholic books from which I can make a very cool compilation of very pragmatically practical procedures involving Saints, exorcism and blessings. I think a thing like that would work very well with the Bibliotheca Valenciana, since the Bibliotheca is all about describing a Cosmology and this other one is all about practicality.

I have also a good list of papers and essays I’m working on, both as part of my current academic studies and my general writing. Most of these are based on particular selections of Inquisition processes of interest. There isn’t much of a study of magic and esotericism in Portugal, so this is the type of work that needs to be done in order to bring attention to understudied intellectual and religious currents over here. And, logically, in about four year I hope to have a thesis on folk magic and religion written.

  José has organized a spectacular one day conference, "Colóquio Peculiar: Transdisciplinaridades improváveis", on occult and esoteric subjects to take place 8 June, 2018 at the University of Coimbra.

[khalilhumam]

‘The war in Karabakh has made the possibility of conflict resolution even more distant’, fears Armenian politician Mikayel Zolyan

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-war-in-karabakh-has-made-the-possibility-of-conflict-resolution-even-more-distant-fears-armenian-politician-mikayel-zolyan/

‘The war in Karabakh has made the possibility of conflict resolution even more distant’, fears Armenian politician Mikayel Zolyan

As fighting rages in Nagorno-Karabakh, what are the chances for peace?

Armenian politician and analyst Mikayel Zolyan. Photo courtesy of Mikayel Zolyan, used with permission.

The conflict currently raging in Nagorno-Karabakh does not only concern Armenia and Azerbaijan.Thus this conflict has significant international dimensions: neighbouring countries with interests in the South Caucasus can play a significant role in inflaming or de-esclating the violence. As a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), Armenia has close ties to Moscow. Meanwhile, Turkey appears to have offered extensive political and military support to Azerbaijan during the recent fighting. Nearby Iran and Georgia watch warily. Much has changed in Armenia since a ceasefire in 1994 cemented the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh. Rulers have come and gone, several of them made and unmade by their approach to this bitter dispute. In 2018, Armenians launched mass protests and ousted longtime President Serzh Sargsyan, himself a native of Nagorno-Karabakh. These events, which became known as the Velvet Revolution, brought a new generation of politicians to power — key among them Nikol Pashinyan, a former journalist turned opposition deputy who became Armenia's prime minister. Another is Mikayel Zolyan, who entered politics in the 2018 parliamentary elections as a deputy for Pashinyan's ruling My Step Coalition. Zolyan is also a member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations of Armenia's National Assembly. Before starting his political career Zolyan, who holds a phD in political science, was a prominent analyst and commentator on the South Caucasus for various research institutions. In this interview, he shares his thoughts about the latest violence in Karabakh and what it means for Armenia and beyond.

In this interview, Zolyan uses certain terms to describe territories and locations that reflect his own perspective. These do not imply an editorial position on their status. For more on the issue of disputed names, check our explainer here. This interview has been edited for brevity and style.

Filip Noubel (FN): In which way is the escalation that started on September 27 different from previous fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia?

Mikayel Zolyan (MZ): The short answer is that it is not an “escalation” any more. It is a full-blown war, with artillery, tanks, missiles, airplanes and killer drones. All this weaponry is being applied against the civilian population: Stepanakert [the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh] and other towns of Artsakh [an Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh] have been under heavy shelling for days, with casualties among the civilian population. The First Karabakh war — we can already call it that — ended in 1994, leaving behind an unstable ceasefire. It was often broken by more or less significant incidents, but still allowed most Armenians and Azerbaijanis to live in relative peace. The current war represents a completely new level of violence, unseen for 26 years. And many of the young people dying on the frontline on both sides were born long after the end of the first war. Another major difference is that this time we know for sure what has happened: this war started around 7 a.m. on Sunday, September 27. The order to start the offensive came from Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev, with encouragement from Turkey’s president [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan. These two people bear the full responsibility for all the deaths and destruction happening today. The fact that it was Azerbaijani forces who started the full-scale offensive is so obvious that even Aliyev’s propaganda is hardly trying to deny it. So is the fact that Turkish military are taking part in the fighting on Aliyev’s side, together with pro-Turkish mercenaries from Syria, recruited and transported by Erdoğan.

FN: Why is Turkey so prominently and openly supportive of Baku this time? What does that mean for Turkey’s ambitions and for Armenian politics?

MZ: The war in Artsakh is part of the regional strategy of Turkey’s Erdoğan, who seeks to re-create some version of the Ottoman Empire. Artsakh is just another piece in the chain of Erdoğan’s aggression along with Northern Syria, Northern Iraq, Libya, Greece, and Cyprus. His aim is to project power and make Turkey a key player in all these regions. He is competing with both Russia and the West. And in this case, Erdoğan made Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev a tool for his neo-imperialist agenda. Aliyev has been willing to allow that, since his hereditary petro-dictatorship is under severe strain because of the weight of economic difficulties and lack of popular legitimacy. “A small victorious war” is the perfect way to salvage a crumbling autocracy, especially since anti-Armenian sentiment is pretty much the only thing that unites Aliyev supporters and critics in Azerbaijan. For Armenia, Turkey’s involvement means that what is happening today is an existential matter. It takes only a little bit of empathy to understand what Turkey’s direct involvement means for a people that still vividly remembers the 1915 genocide in Ottoman Turkey, which by the way Erdoğan’s government continues to deny.

FN: Do you think Russia is unable or unwilling so far to impose a ceasefire, perhaps because of Pashinyan’s ambiguous position on Armenia’s dependency on Russia?

MK: Russia is one of the mediators in the conflict, as co-chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, together with the US and France. For years, the Karabakh conflict was one of the few remaining areas where Russia and the West had a relatively efficient cooperation. The current war presents a major challenge to all the three mediators, since it undermines their role in the region, It is an especially acute challenge for Russia, since it is happening in the vicinity of its borders. Russia is also a military ally of Armenia, as member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), however the CSTO guarantees apply to the territory of the Republic of Armenia proper, while the Republic of Artsakh is not a member of CSTO. Finally, Russia also has a working partnership with Azerbaijan, which it is not willing to lose. Moreover, there is a strong Azerbaijani lobby in Russia, which is trying to paint Armenia’s current government as “secretly pro-Western”. In any case, Armenia after the [2018] revolution has been loyal to all its commitments. What we are doing today is keeping our partners, both Russia and other co-chair countries, informed about the situation, and it is up to them to choose which actions can be more efficient in stopping the war. We see that today both Russia, France, and the US are working to stop the conflict.

FN: In your view, what are most optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the coming days and weeks?

MK: Well, we all hope that the fighting will end as soon as possible. However, it is hard to tell. The blitzkrieg strategy of the Aliyev regime has failed to achieve his goals, but he is doubling down, like a gambler who has already lost a lot. Erdoğan is encouraging Aliyev to keep raising the stakes, both through public statements and continuing flow of weapons and mercenaries into Azerbaijan. If this continues, the escalation of the war can become uncontrollable and have disastrous consequences for all sides involved. Today the South Caucasus is seen as the meeting point of Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Central Eurasia: both Azerbaijan and Armenia are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Council of Europe, OSCE, EU's Eastern Partnership. If this war continues, especially with the involvement of mercenaries and terrorists, the South Caucasus may become the gate through which instability floods both Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. That is why I believe it is in the interests of both Russia and the West to stop this war as soon as possible.

FN: Do you see space for dialogue in Azerbaijan and in Armenia? What voices are calling for it? If so, whose and where?

MK: Official negotiations can start only after the aggression against civilian population is stopped. As for contact between civil societies, it is hard to imagine such contacts at this point. In any case, Armenia is ready for dialogue, both on the government level and on the society level, but right now we are fighting to defend the lives of people in Artsakh, our freedom, our independence and the gains of the Velvet Revolution of 2018. I don’t know what Azerbaijanis are fighting for, but I assume they believe that they are defending some kind of a just cause. So, dialogue is hard to imagine today. When the war is over, there will be a lot of work to do in order to establish a new dialogue. I am sure that one day Armenians and Azerbaijanis will be able to come together and talk about their issues not as enemies, but as people who want to resolve them. But this war has made the possibility of conflict resolution even more distant. After the war in the 1990s there already was a lot of pain and suffering separating Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Unfortunately, the new war has made this gap even more difficult to bridge.

Read an interview with the Azerbaijani journalist Rovshan Aliyev here

Written by Filip Noubel

[newstfionline]

Can Techie Parents Reinvent School For Everyone—Or Just Their Rich Kids?

By Ainsley Harris, Fast Company, Sept. 11, 2017

Six-year-old Tiana had just gotten her ice cream machine working for the first time, and she was triumphant. Wrapped in hot pink decorations and duct tape, the device was now capable of churning out flavors that the young scientist planned to dub “Mint Speshel” and “Tiana’s Dlitght.”

Eyes wide, Tiana turned to her teacher, Shira Leibowitz.

“Shira, this is the most important day of my career,” she declared.

Leibowitz, a founding team member of startup Portfolio School in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, recalls that story with a laugh. Portfolio School has been designed to look and operate more like the workplace of the future than the classroom of today, but no one expected students to internalize that approach quite so literally.

“They view themselves as working,” says Leibowitz, who has a doctorate in education. “They’re never learning something because one day they’ll need it, they’re learning something because they need it right now.”

As in a modern office, a typical day at Portfolio School revolves around individualized goals and collaborative, interdisciplinary projects. Tiana’s ice cream machine was the culmination of a unit called “learning is delicious,” which ran the course of the fall 2017 semester. As students explored that theme and built their machines, they learned about science (states of matter), math (measurement), and history (the commercialization of ice). When I first visited the school one morning last October, Tiana had just produced a trial batch of mint ice cream and proudly shared a bowl with me.

Portfolio School is at the vanguard of a movement of startup schools seeking to foster learning experiences, like Tiana’s, that map to the jobs of the future. Many are “micro-schools,” where students of different ages occupy a single multi-purpose space. Many are based on the Montessori method, which emphasizes curiosity and guided choice. And nearly all of these startup schools aim to personalize learning by using technology to deliver individualized lessons alongside group activities.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the founders of this new wave of schools are often former technology executives who have started families. In their previous roles they ushered in a new way of working, now prized across industries, which values collaboration, creativity, and iteration. They look at traditional school, with its textbooks and lock-step progressions, and see the need for revolution.

Portfolio School cofounder and CEO Babur Habib fits that profile exactly. He grew up in Pakistan, where he attended public schools, and moved to the U.S. to pursue his PhD in engineering. (He and cofounder Doug Schachtel, who manages operations, met on the squash courts at Princeton, where Habib earned a doctorate in engineering.) Early in his career, Habib designed and debugged microprocessors. Later, he cofounded an education company that was eventually acquired by Intel in 2014. After the deal closed, Habib spent a year managing the integration. Around the same time, his daughter Sophia was born.

“That was the eye opener,” he says of his stint developing educational mobile and tablet applications at the hardware processor. “I visited so many schools, talked to so many administrators.” Over time he grew to share school leaders’ frustrations. Constraints, like classroom design, limited their ability to experiment with technology.

“There’s so much room to reimagine this stuff,” says Habib. “If things are changing in the real world, why aren’t they changing in schools?”

Other parent-technologists have arrived at a similar conclusion.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan established a complementary lab school that he describes as “Montessori 2.0.,” infused with the type of video-based math lessons that Khan Academy has popularized since 2007. Across the country, former Google executive Sep Kamvar created Wildflower Montessori, which launched as a storefront school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2014, and has since added nearly a dozen locations. And then there is AltSchool, a network of micro-schools that is the brainchild of another former Google executive, Max Ventilla. He has managed to recruit an executive team that includes parent-leaders from Airbnb, Uber, and Zynga.

“‘I want something better for my child’--that’s what’s motivating a lot of these high-tech entrepreneurs,” says Tony Wagner, a former teacher who now serves as an expert in residence at Harvard’s Innovation Lab.

Wagner, who advises Portfolio School, sees the growing interest in startup schools as both a reaction against the dominance of test-prep pedagogical regimes and an embrace of the knowledge and skills that future jobs will likely reward.

“The big leap we’re trying to make is moving away from content standards to performance standards,” Wagner explains. “Can you use knowledge, can you apply knowledge?” Demonstrating mastery of chemistry, in this line of thinking, would involve designing a study and presenting the findings, rather than memorizing the periodic table.

“Content is not as important anymore. Content is in our back pockets, literally,” Habib says, gesturing toward his iPhone. “Whatever knowledge you’ve gained, how do you apply it? That is the central thesis of this school. We feel that the creative process of taking an idea and then producing something out of it is so important, so important for the future.”

But as Habib and other parent-founders are discovering, turning lofty pedagogical aspirations into daily reality for a small group of children is no easy task.

It requires patience, for one. Habib, who previously taught physics at Stanford and authored papers on quantum dots, has had to learn how to explain the basics to tiny beginners. During one of my visits to Portfolio School, I found Habib at a whiteboard, teaching long division to an advanced 7-year-old. Habib and Schachtel are not trained educators, but they have taken a hands-on approach in their school’s classrooms and made a point of hiring expert counterparts. After recruiting Leibowitz, they signed on engineer-turned-teacher Nancy Otero, who previously created digital fabrication labs for schools in China, Brazil, and Spain.

At Portfolio, Otero installed a “Makerspace” in one corner of the rented ground floor space that the school occupies. Wire cutters, a sewing kit, and other tools hang from pegboards on the wall. There is also a soldering iron, which Portfolio’s kindergarteners wield with surprising aplomb.

“We don’t distinguish for the kids between a pencil or a scissors or a 3D printer or a laser cutter or a book or an online science simulation,” says Leibowitz. “They use what they need when they need it to learn and to create, so that it’s seamless. It’s not ‘now we’re going to technology, now we’re going to the art room.’”

Before Portfolio, Tiana was homeschooled by her mother, Jackie, who paused her Wall Street career to oversee a schedule that included piano and violin lessons and trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Jackie felt limited by her own breadth of experience: “I only knew traditional school.” At Portfolio, she says, “They have a vision even above my vision, and they can implement it.”

Though a high achiever by any standard definition--she majored in math and economics as an undergraduate, and earned a Stanford MBA--Jackie has little interest in the status markers of academic success that dominate New York’s competitive private schools.

“Giftedness--what does that mean? Winning a chess championship? It’s good for the parents to brag, but it’s meaningless for the kids,” she says. Portfolio, in contrast, emphasizes the virtues of intrinsic motivation.

“They put the challenge back to the child, and I love that,” she says. “They’re teaching how to be a self-sustaining learner. [Tiana] feels she can do anything.”

Over morning coffee and biscuits at Bubby’s Tribeca, around the corner from Portfolio, Habib and Schachtel reiterate that vision.

“It should never be more about school than learning, or succeeding just to get the right grades and get into the right school,” Schachtel says. Growing up, he logged one accolade after another--Princeton diploma, Columbia MFA--but struggled to find purpose in his studies, and later in his work. “You get on this track,” he says.

Like Habib, Schachtel envisions that Portfolio students will one day attend top universities--but “that’s not the expectation that’s put upon kids and the driving motivator.”

Of course, if Portfolio students do happen to aim for the Ivies, many years from now, they will be ready--perhaps even at an advantage.

“Our approach of building impressive student portfolios from the age of 5 is preparing them for admissions,” says Leibowitz, who notes that top schools, including MIT, now review portfolios of student work alongside essays and other application materials.

Plus, she adds, “If [students] are still taking SATs when these guys are preparing for college, we’ll teach them strategies for the test as if it were any other project. We want all the doors to be open to them.”

For $35,000 per year--Portfolio’s current tuition rate--parents expect nothing less.

And therein lies the tension facing private startup schools like Portfolio, many of which rely on wealthy parents to get off the ground but aspire to serve children of all backgrounds by selling products and services like teaching training and project-based curricula to their public school counterparts. The steep price that Portfolio parents pay ensures that their children are taught by PhDs and given access to resources like a Makerspace. Meanwhile, at nearby Manhattan public schools, teachers with STEM backgrounds are a rare luxury, and budgets are so tight that parents routinely pay for Kleenex and other basic supplies.

If AltSchool founder Ventilla has a pedagogical bias, it is toward participatory lessons--like most of the educational entrepreneurs in this new era. “Students should be encouraged, at every stage of the learning process, to adopt an active stance toward their education,” Khan wrote in his 2012 book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. “They shouldn’t just take things in; they should figure things out.”

Tiana and her peers had that type of learning experience during Portfolio’s first year, and so too did Habib and his founding team. They scrambled throughout the spring to create lessons and projects that incorporated student interests, with largely promising results. As part of a unit on domesticated animals, Portfolio’s students welcomed two guinea pigs into their classroom and designed a custom house for them, complete with sensors and webcam. “They built a three-story castle,” Habib recalls with pride.

One boy, 9 years old, trained a neural network to tell the two guinea pigs apart, using the webcam video feed, so that he could analyze their behavioral patterns. An investor who happened to attend Portfolio’s end-of-year presentation described the student as “immediately employable”--to his parents’ great surprise and Habib’s great delight: “This is the first time the parents don’t know as much as the kids do.”

[coin-river-blog]

In an age where governments are trigger happy at censoring or shutting down networks, it is reassuring to know that Bitcoin can operate sans internet. Network censorship, after all, is not some dystopian storyline but a power exercised by many democratic governments across the world. Thankfully, there are solutions that enable people to send and receive bitcoin even in a worst case scenario. For an advanced technology, it turns out that cryptocurrency can get surprisingly low-tech.

Also read: Bitcoin and Weak Frequency Signals: Bypassing Network Censorship With Radio

Send Bitcoin by Radio and Circumvent Network Censorship

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the internet is down. Not because the wifi’s been disconnected: instead, your government has pulled the plug . You’ve no idea when it’ll be back online, and in the meantime, you’re cut off from life as you know it, ranging from contact with loved ones abroad to paying for anything by card. Since society isn’t big on keeping cash these days, and ATMs stock up on only so much paper money at a time, chances are you’ll have to sidestep – or engage in – a few fistfights if you’re to put a meal on the table.

Since bitcoin is, itself, a form of digital currency, it takes a good amount of preplanning to set up a transaction, but in theory, it could still operate even when conventional options are forcefully removed from the equation.

What do –

Greeks Cypriots Venezuelans Argentinians Brazilians Zimbabweans and Ukrainians have in common?

They all woke one day and the banks were shuttered and capital controls were put in place to avoid an economic collapse.

Bitcoin doesn't close 🚀

— Jason A. Williams 🦍 (@JWilliamsFstmed) February 12, 2019

While most of us will hopefully never experience a dystopian world of intermittent internet, the productivity sages remind us that a failure to plan is planning to fail. Knowing how to transact with cryptocurrency in a chaotic world is the sort of knowledge that might just come in handy one day, and in the meantime will make you the most interesting guest at the dinner party.

Depending on the political stability of your geographic location, learning how to send bitcoin without internet could be nothing more than a fun Saturday afternoon science project. Then again, it could provide the way out of a tight spot one day, whether it’s transferring funds to a buddy stuck in the middle of the ocean or bribing a zombie to feast on the coins stored in your brain wallet instead of devouring your brain.

Bitcoin Over Airwaves

2014 saw the earliest mentions of bitcoin being sent via the airwaves. Hamradiocoin was one of the early vanity altcoins, geared at the ham radio industry. While it wasn’t entirely clear why said niche industry needed a dedicated currency, its current $794 market cap – unchanged since May 2017 – adds to crypto’s rich historical arsenal of questionable coins.

But the idea of marrying Marconi and Satoshi was bound to lead to more useful experiments. A step in the right direction saw Finnish company Vertaisvaluutta.fi propose the creation of a P2P half-duplex CB/HAM radio cryptocurrency. Also in Finland, Kryptoradio partnered with a national broadcaster to pilot a cryptocurrency data transmission system that broadcasts bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data via national DVB-T television networks in real time. The project failed to launch its commercial phase, with founder Joel Lehtonen explaining:

The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without internet connectivity.

Come 2018, there was a new experiment in town. Ingredients: Brooklyn-based gotenna, a mobile, long-range, off-grid consumer mesh network, and bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet. A New Zealand developer transported crypto from a distance of 12.6km away, entirely offline, using only a network-disconnected Android phone and four portable antennas. Though as his Twitter recount acknowledges, it took one heck of a prep, including setting up relay stations.

Over the weekend I sent a bitcoin transaction to a relay 12.6km away with no cell network or internet connection. Here's a tweetstorm about how I used @gotenna and @SamouraiWallet to do it

— ℭoinsure (@Coinsurenz) October 16, 2018

Fast forward to this year, and in perhaps the most simplistic effort yet, Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak managed to move BTC some 600km away from Toronto, Canada to Openbazaar co-founder Sam Patterson in Michigan, USA. And in that moment, Bitcoin-by-sky went international.

Advocates for Bitcoin by Air

In 2017, computer scientist Nick Szabo and PhD researcher Elaine Ou delved into the topic at Stanford’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, introducing a research project that proposed tethering bitcoin to radio broadcast to secure consensus proofs using weak signal radio propagation. (View their talk, a copy of the presentation, and our coverage of the event for further information.)

With Novak and Patterson’s latest feat, crypto Twitter went wild. Szabo, showing that he’s still a firm proponent of taking bitcoin skyward, chimed in to congratulate the duo for a successful sendoff that not even a snowstorm could stop.

Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite — just nature's ionosphere. https://t.co/IKCAXGs9fW

— Nick Szabo 🔑 (@NickSzabo4) February 12, 2019

How to Send Bitcoin by Radio

As Novak and Patterson have illustrated, you don’t need to overload on gear or make space for satellite storage in your backyard to send bitcoin by air. Accompanying an SDR ham on this quest was nothing more than a 40m 7Mhz antenna and the JS8call application.

While the setup seems simple enough (Google “ham radio for beginners” for a primer), in practice this is probably not something you’ll dive into unless you’re just messing around or, in real life, shit gets real.

Gearing up is as easy as H-A-M

In truth, there are restrictions aplenty when it comes to sending bitcoin by radio.

First off, legalities. To stay on the right side of the law, some countries require you to be a licensed ham operator, and even then you’re unable to send any encrypted messages or use the airwaves for commercial purposes unless so licensed. At this point, it’s not yet clear which governmental task force will join the SEC and co in clamping down on illegal apocalyptic bitcoin-via-radio transactions.

Since legal restriction is the mother of all invention, Novak and Patterson circumvented this by broadcasting their experimental, non-commercial wallet encryption sendoff via public cypher.

Then there’s prepping it all. For this to be a viable – albeit last resort – solution in an actual nail-bite situation, sender and receiver would have to set it all up in advance. Novak and Patterson were able to execute their experiment by communicating and collaborating in lieu of the transfer, using a brain wallet. (The brainwallet, which is simply storing your mnemonic recovery phrase in your brain, is not to be confused with the recent more nefarious version – the deathwallet popularized by CEO Gerald Cotten who took the keys to Quadriga’s crypto kingdom to his grave.)

Thus, if you’re going to use this as a backup plan for when stuff hits the fan, you’d better secure a right-hand wo/man and a fool-proof project management blueprint while things are still web-friendly. If this process seems as though it walked off the pages of a James Bond novel, yes. It’s decidedly more involved than a mere intra-wallet send-off.

However, if you’re gung-ho on testing out alternative bitcoin transports, don’t let the naysayers stop you. Yours might well be the next proof of concept the interweb is waiting for. The blog Better Off Bitcoin, for one, offers a run-through protocol tutorial.

Scalability Is a Big Bottleneck

Clearly, scaling is a non-issue here. For the foreseeable future, sending bitcoin by radio isn’t happening unless it absolutely has to.

According to Australian crypto trader Boss Cole, “As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are moving into the future, it is an interesting concept to think about what would happen if we instead went into the past. It is possible and easy to transfer Bitcoin without an internet connection, but it is not convenient. There are a number of projects working on this with satellites or their own infrastructure, however at the time of this writing they are not “popular” simply because there is no real demand.” He continues:

In the case of government censorship, the infrastructure would change rapidly. If we were dealing with serious problems, the infrastructure would follow. Because it is possible. If we went into the dark ages, the main way to transfer Bitcoin would be transferring private keys between individuals. This would be simple, but not convenient.

Not even extreme weather conditions can deter the determined from sending bitcoin via radio waves

So while it’s theoretically possible to take to the skies and send crypto wallets around the world and all the way into space, DIY bitcoin ionosphere amateurs won’t be sending satoshis to the dark side of the moon any time soon.

Why Radio Wave Transmission Might Be Necessary

We tend to associate worst-case scenarios in which the main character has nothing but a walkie talkie and an old ham lying around with Hollywood’s portrayal of doomsday.

Yet for unstable regimes like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, internet blackouts were how 2019 got its start. In reality, network censorship is an all-too-common control tool for many governments around the world.

India leads the pack with 288 shutdowns between 2012 and 2019, with 134 instances in 2018 alone. The Middle East and Africa aren’t strangers to forcing citizens into offline mode, either.

Good luck stopping information across borders when all you need is 40 watts of power, a long piece of wire, a radio and a computer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 12, 2019

Under the Communications Act 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the U.K. has an internet kill switch, which could be enforced in light of a serious threat such as a significant cyber attack. The U.S. has had, for the past 85 years, the power to kill electronic communications under the Communications Act of 1934. And with talks of Russia considering a test run to decouple from the global internet, we risk taking a rude awakening if we assume the world’s 72,558 Google searches every second to be an unquestionable given.

Bitcoin for Every Situation

It might have taken a mini-library worth of code to get NASA astronauts to the moon, but sending bitcoin there won’t be nearly as hard. All you need is a radio. Okay, that and a moon rocket. But the point is, this new technology can be just as comfortable – or accessible – even when when the tech you’re using is decidely old school.

Peer-to-peer networks built on the internet have a special allure because of the sense of resilience they have without a central point of failure. A bit misleading: they are really built on many computers and the connections between them.

Not true with radios. True peer to peer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 16, 2019

Bitcoin might have been invented on the internet for the internet, but it can straddle both the digital and analog worlds. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin walk the line between money under the mattress and cash in the bank. As these trailblazers show, bitcoin can straddle those worlds not only functionally, but also technically. Thanks to the efforts of the pioneers profiled here, crypto has shown it can survive in even the most challenging environments.

Sending bitcoin by radio isn’t quite carrier pigeon, but in tech terms it might as well be. Which, says crypto developer John Villar, is “probably the most low end you can get before smoke-signaling a brain wallet.”

Can you envision a situation in which you might have to send bitcoin by ham radio? What other ways could you picture cryptocurrency being transferred without the internet? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

Tags in this story

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Radio Broadcast, brainwallet, BTC, Censorship Resistance, Data Transmission, Elaine Ou, gotenna, HAM radio, N-Technology, network censorship, Nick Szabo, Rodolfo Novak, Sam Patterson, samourai wallet, Scaling Bitcoin 2017, Stanford University, Weak Signal Radio

Nadja Bester

Nadja has been involved in the cryptocurrency industry in numerous capacities, ranging from journalist, writer, marketing and communications specialist, and speaker. She has reported on cryptocurrency since 2017.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.2'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

V. B. Borjen

is an author and visual artist currently based in the Czech Republic. His first poetry collection in Bosnian, Priručnik za levitiranje (en. Levitation manual), won the 2012 Mak Dizdar Award for the best first manuscript by a young poet. His work in English and his recent visual art have appeared in AZURE, Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable, The Esthetic Apostle, Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk, Chaleur Magazine and Honey & Lime.

Twitter: @Borjen

Instagram: samoniklo

The Interview

1. What inspired you  to write poetry?

It goes a long way back, but I am not sure I would call it inspiration. I was eleven and I suddenly started writing poems. I have a vague memory of finding my father’s poem ‘Melancholy’ in one of the cabinets (he had perished some seven years before, during the Bosnian War). Perhaps that was what made me think I could write too? I don’t think he was ever serious about it though, I mean as I am.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Beyond that memory, I don’t remember poetry having much importance in my nearest surroundings in those early days. Nobody at home encouraged me to write, or discouraged me for that matter. My interests have always been many and quite various, so it must have been hard to see any one activity as worthwhile some significant engagement from my mother’s side. But as far as encouragement outside of home is concerned, I had a great teacher of Bosnian in the 5th grade of primary school, Murisa Jukan, and she would always end her lessons by saying: OK, and now Beganović will read us one of his poems. What she saw in those ridiculous little things, I cannot say. But it was the first encouragement from a person of some literary authority. So I kept at it.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Not at all for many years. I guess the first serious brush with other people’s poetry was in the secondary school and then later at university. Was there “anxiety of influence”, to quote Harold Bloom? I don’t think so. Early twenties are characterised by a strange, oblivious sense of unwarranted entitlement. This is not unusual, but as one gets to late twenties/early thirties one realises how strong a sway the past and tradition hold over us after all. It’s a humbling experience.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I used to get up really early, at five or so, and write till 7 or 8. Now with the full-time job, the part-time jobs and the PhD dissertation pending, it is a bit hard to keep to a strict writing routine. But I am trying to get back to this regime. I’m at my best very early in the day. But I write whenever I can find the time.

5. What motivates you to write?

With me it’s a need. Kafka said it well: “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

6. What is your work ethic?

Work is one of the most rewarding things, both for my physical and mental well-being. But it has to be meaningful. Like reading, writing, or painting. The corporate job is rather numbing and draining because I see no purpose in it, other than that it pays the bills. Could I transplant Dr Angelou’s title here and say I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? I must.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

The books I read in my childhood and all the books I’ve loved since are very much alive inside me. They are like a protective circle of good friends. I do not find them threatening, I do not think I’ve outgrown any of them. I’ve learned to appreciate that all the books have their greatest meaning in their own time, which comes for each of us individually. It would be ideal if they could come to us always exactly when we need them, but even if I read Winnie the Pooh or Moominvalley in November only now when I am 33 it does not matter; they speak to the child in me and so are timeless.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

From among the writers, I need Dubravka Ugrešić (for the beauty of her prose and the timely calibration of my moral compass), the late Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin for the same, then Jeanette Winterson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith…

As far as the poets are concerned, I love the work of Heather Derr Smith, Ferida Duraković, Julia Beach, Senka Marić, Anita Pajević, Todd Smith, Monika Herceg, Šima Majić, Mathew Yates, Lee Potts, Moira J. Saucer, Lidija Deduš, Kyla Houbolt… This is such an exciting time for poetry. The digital age has reinvigorated it.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

To share the experience of being alive and out of the need to understand, everything and anything, or at least to try to. All writing is, among other things, an attempt at understanding.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

If they must ask that, I would tell them: don’t bother. People write for different reasons, but I do not think this is a kind of work that should be done lightly, or because it seems cool. I mean, everyone is welcome to do it, but if one cares deeply about literature, one has also this sense of responsibility. If one is supposed to be the continuation of the great voices of the past then think of the responsibility. I would not want to publish something now that 10 years on I would be ashamed of.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I am currently working on a poetry collection in English. My first collection in Bosnian, Priručnik za levitiranje (2013, en. Levitation Menual) won the Mak Dizdar, an important award in the region of former Yugoslavia. The second collection in Bosnian, Odjezd (roughly, Riding Out) is still waiting for a publisher. So this English collection is my third. I have another project going on, a hybrid of prose and poetry which could be published as a chapbook once it’s done. Meanwhile, I keep submitting, as most of us do, and talking literature and sharing my paintings with our inspiring literary community on Twitter. It’s a great time to be a poet.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: V. B. Borjen Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[shirlleycoyle]

Trump Didn’t Create Our Face Recognition Nightmare, He’s Just Expanding It

Biometric surveillance is everywhere. In recent years, we’ve seen biometric systems steadily creeping into our everyday lives—especially in the realms of policing and immigration. In the U.S., Congress has allocated $100 million to develop “smart border” initiatives such as facial recognition; Customs and Border Patrol has begun fingerprinting and DNA testing children; ICE and other federal agencies, cracking down on undocumented migrants, have started accessing state DMV records for facial recognition while working on a “biometric entry-exit system”—a diplomatic way of saying “checkpoints.”

All of this can feel overwhelming. The alignment of an administration that is explicitly, directly hostile to immigration (particularly from Central and South America) and new technologies of surveillance and control has led to widespread fears of the consequences of these technologies, and the motivations that led to their deployment.

These fears are legitimate, and it’s often tempting to hold Donald Trump and his administration uniquely responsible for the proliferation of facial recognition and other dystopian biometric tech. But the history of these programs shows that the attitudes which motivated this kind of AI-driven crackdown—and the legal authority to make it possible—are a lot older. In truth, the desire for massive biometric surveillance networks has been shared by politicians of all stripes for decades.

Race, Face and the Border

Over my last two years as a PhD student at the University of Washington, I have collaborated with my Dartmouth colleague Nikki Stevens to research the history of facial recognition. There are many points in time where one could begin this history. Simone Browne rightly considers facial recognition part of the long history of the surveillance of Blackness, starting with slavery. In the context of borders and immigration, you could start the history at the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which dramatically expanded immigration powers and expectations of identity verification as part of a racist backlash against Chinese immigration. But in the context of the Trump administration’s current actions, a good place to start is far later, in 1996.

When the Cold War ended, the world changed, and so did the U.S. government’s priorities. Instead of worrying about the Soviet Union and other nation-states, the U.S. shifted to scrutinizing individuals, their bodies and their movements. National security became about, as Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick put it, “terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and alien smuggling”. It became about racialised fears of demographic change and undocumented immigration, as demonstrated in a speech by President Clinton at Portland State University in 1993, where he condemns the undocumented immigrant who “flouts our laws, strains our tolerance,” and “taxes our resources.” Clinton worried aloud that “within five years there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years there will be no majority race in the United States.”

Three years later, Clinton signed into law two pieces of legislation: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Personal Responsibility Act. Each one contained new constraints on immigrants: there were increased resources for border patrol (including funding for the first fence), looser restrictions on what could get someone deported, and reduced access to public support such as food stamps. One common thread in each of these efforts was biometrics; the legislation mandated the first biometric identifiers in border-crossing ID cards, and encouraged states to integrate photographs and fingerprints into the cards needed to access public support programs. The result was the widespread collection of biometric data—largely from Black and brown bodies, and framed around fears of Black and brown immigration. Clinton’s statement on the Immigrant Responsibility legislation explicitly called out “the southwest border,” while framing immigration as a matter of state sanctity and security.

But at the same time, this data was ultimately fragmentary, limited in detail, and inconsistent. There was no standard for what should be collected. With food stamps cards, the legislation just required states to use “measures to maximize the security of the system using the most recent technology available”, leaving it up to the states to decide what “most recent technology” meant. Using it for Trump-style mass raids or surveillance simply wouldn’t make sense: you’d spend more time trying to get the system to work than using it. Biometric data collection had been made acceptable, but that didn’t make it useful.

Biometrics after 9/11

In the aftermath of September 11th, that all changed. Various committees were assembled to investigate how the attacks had been possible, and what might prevent similar tragedies from happening again. Their conclusion was, in part, that there was insufficient data sharing and collection between different government agencies, and insufficient rigor in the systems the U.S. used to establish whether someone was “really” them.

Once more, biometrics provided part of the answer. The Real ID Act was passed, requiring state drivers licenses and federal IDs such as passports to embed photographs and fingerprints that could be digitally read and stored in databases for comparison. The PATRIOT Act instructed the National Institute of Standards and Technology—the Department of Commerce’s technical research branch—to investigate the possibilities of biometrics for security, and work on making the technology better. The U.S. focused on identity verification, validation, and standardization, collecting a mass of data through DMVs, visa applications, and other interactions with the government.

To make this useful, though, you need more than just consistent collection—you need the data to be shared and accessible. Thus, the federal government began not only standardizing data but assembling it, interlinking every database they could get their hands on. The Consular Consolidated Database, containing fingerprints and photographs for everyone who had even applied for a visa, was made available to the FBI and ICE; under the Real ID Act, those nice new consistent DMV records were required to be exchangeable between states, and between states and the federal government. The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) became more and more interlinked with local law enforcement, automatically drawing from a wide range of policing databases. It was later replaced with the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which contains not just fingerprints for matching but photographs for facial recognition.

At the border, all of this was to be integrated into automated “biometric entry-exit” systems, comparing visitors and immigrants against this vast database of photographs and fingerprints. By 2014, when the NGI system became fully operational, those experiments with immigrant fingerprinting that started with Clinton had turned into a vast array of data stores, widely accessible by ICE, the FBI and other agencies, and containing over 23 million photographs.

Responsibility and Recognition

It’s easy to hold Trump and his administration responsible for the surveillance and data practices we see built into proposals like DMV access for facial recognition systems. But as this history shows, they’re building on a long history of work under multiple administrations, stretching back into the 1990s, to make precisely the systems we’re seeing today. Trump might have accelerated the biometric entry-exit system, but the legal authorization to do so stemmed from 1996 under Clinton, and 2002 under Bush. ICE might be taking records from the DMV, but they’ve been able to do so for almost 20 years, authorized by our elected representatives.

This isn’t to say that the Trump administration shouldn’t be held responsible for these data practices and the racially-charged violence, rhetoric, and enforcement that comes with them. But the desire by government for biometric control and policing is not limited to this moment in time, this administration, or its party. Even as Democratic members of Congress decry ICE’s actions, they propose “smart borders” which ultimately depend on and legitimize the same kind of data collection that drives Trump’s crackdowns. All too often, our elected officials ask not how to make immigration humane, but how to make it less visibly inhumane.

We need to look at and confront these programs and their consequences, but we need to do so in a historically-informed way. We need to use this moment as an opportunity to recognize that this terrifying surveillance regime did not spring up overnight. Rather, it was enabled by anti-terrorism legislation from the 2000s, and anti-immigrant and anti-poor legislation from the 1990s. We need to acknowledge that immigration restrictions, identity documents, and these data collection practices have always been about race, and that in such an environment, collecting this data—even with the best of intentions—will always end up putting a weapon in the hands of those who would use it against poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people..

Trump Didn’t Create Our Face Recognition Nightmare, He’s Just Expanding It syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[gyrlversion]

Revealed: Ministers meeting with eco group

Claire Perry held meetings with the Extinction Rebellion (XR) group at a climate change conference in Poland in November

A Business Minister was last night facing questions about why she met members of a radical environmental group which is plotting to paralyse London this week.

Claire Perry held meetings with the Extinction Rebellion (XR) group at a climate change conference in Poland in November.

Ms Perry told The Mail on Sunday she had a ‘good and productive chat’ with the activists, who have links to Labour’s far-Left Momentum faction and are preparing a new onslaught of civil disobedience and criminality conceived with military precision to bring Britain to its knees.

It comes as an undercover investigation by this newspaper has revealed a hardcore movement determined to turn the clock back to a life without fossil fuel – and usurping Parliamentary democracy in the process.

The first stage of their global ‘Rebellion Week’ begins tomorrow and involves a plot to paralyse central London for at least three days, creating human barricades at five key points: Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Some protesters are even planning to super-glue their hands to objects in the road and each other, requiring specially trained police officers to laboriously unstick them using chemicals.

Ms Perry met members of the group at a summit in Katowice. She said: ‘We had a good and productive chat and have been in correspondence since.’

Organisers have talked of up to 30,000 eco-activists attending mass protests – and crucially many of them being arrested.

The protests have been seven months in the planning.

Their goal is to shut down vital roads and transport links, causing misery for millions of commuters and keeping over-stretched police officers busy for hours.

Ms Perry told The Mail on Sunday she had a ‘good and productive chat’ with the activists, who have links to Labour’s far-Left Momentum faction

Behind it all lies a chilling manifesto, with the prime goal for the Government to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025. The result of this would return Britain more or less to the Dark Ages.

XR was founded just a few months ago but has rapidly grown into a vast global organisation, with more than a hundred groups across Britain. Last November, they blocked bridges across London to bring chaos to the capital. In February, they took part in a nationwide school strike in which thousands of children were urged to miss lessons for a day and take to the streets in protest.

And on April 1, during one of the Brexit debates, a group of them stripped off in the Commons to stage a ‘cheeky protest’ about climate change policy.

Founder who became activist after taking psychedelic drugs 

Wiltshire mother and ‘neo-pagan’ Gail Bradbrook

Extinction Rebellion is the latest of several campaigns to be organised and partly financed through a private limited company called Compassionate Revolution.

One of its directors – and a key figure in ‘XR’ – is Wiltshire mother and ‘neo-pagan’ Gail Bradbrook, 47, who said on a recent podcast that she decided to become an activist as a direct result of taking huge doses of two powerful psychedelic drugs.

Despite the damage caused by air travel, she flew to Costa Rica to take a dose of ibogaine, a hallucinogenic shrub growing in West Africa. She also tried ayahuasca, a highly toxic, mind-bending potion made by Amazon jungle shamans. Bradbrook, left, who has a PhD in molecular biophysics, says the drugs ‘rewired’ her brain and gave her ‘the codes of social change’.

Afterwards, she ended her marriage and began her activism in XR. Within XR, she holds mystic ‘moon circles’ with female colleagues inside a tepee, at which they ingest another ‘natural’ drug, mugwort, used by ancient Celts.

She has warned that warming in the Arctic is likely to cause ‘the collapse of the food system’ in just three years – a belief no scientist would endorse.

She has also said she ‘does not condemn’ protesters who ‘choose to damage property in order to protect nature’, although she personally prefers non-violence.

The end goal is revolution through civil disobedience – to bring the Government to the table to discuss climate change objectives.

XR wants to break up the political class and replace representative democracy with a process called sortition – in which randomly selected people, without reference to ability or training, would be appointed as decision makers in a People’s Assembly.

Among the prominent figures in XR is Left-wing academic Roger Hallam, whose stated ambition for the group is to ‘bring down all the regimes in the world and replace them’, starting with Britain.

Hallam, 52, said in a recent YouTube video setting out his strategy: ‘The conventional forms of activism are no good. The emailing, going on marches… doesn’t work.

‘You need about 400 to go to prison and you need two to three thousand people to get arrested.

‘You win through fearlessness. This is not some pretty process where everyone’s going to be fine, but it’s better than violence.’

Another XR member, Tamsin Omond, is a former public schoolgirl and granddaughter of a baronet who is a veteran of Left-wing protest groups, including Occupy London.

Co-founder Stuart Basden says global warming is only ‘a symptom of a toxic system’ and likened prison to ‘boarding school’ as he urged XR followers to break the law.

Their creed has proved irresistible to Extinction Rebellion’s celebrity supporters, with actress Emma Thompson appearing in a video calling on people to take to the streets. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has also given his support.

A source close to Ms Perry – who is senior enough to attend Cabinet – said she had ‘tried to convince the group that the UK is leading the way in reducing climate emissions and that the Government was listening and acting’.

The source added: ‘She asked them what their solutions were, and they told her that she should “declare a war” on climate change.

‘She replied that she understood the need for urgency, but believed you don’t start wars if you don’t have either weapons or tactics. She will meet anyone who is passionate about cutting emissions and who has ideas we can implement.’

XR grew out of an activist group called ‘Rising Up!’ – which tried unsuccessfully to stop the expansion of Heathrow. Its financial support comes from philanthropic foundations and crowdfunding. Their online crowdfunder, launched in October, has raised £166,000.

Last night a member of Extinction Rebellion denied that the movement planned to ‘usurp Parliamentary democracy’ but rather expected the ‘inevitable breakdown of the current system’.

Who’s ready to get arrested? Reporter goes undercover with the eco-activist group Extinction Rebellion – and finds they are as ruthlessly professional as they are deluded 

Special report by Holly Bancroft for the Mail on Sunday 

Cigarette break: XR training volunteer Clare Farrell

I’m sitting in a cavernous community hall in East London with a group of eco-activists huddled in thick jackets against the cold.

We’re being drilled for our arrest – like soldiers being trained for capture and interrogation by the enemy.

Our tutor is a sixtysomething woman with fuzzy white hair who knows all about civil disobedience and its legal consequences.

She explains passionately that we must not speak to the police, other than to give our name and date of birth.

We must not get drunk before the ‘action’ in just a few days’ time.

And we should consider wearing adult nappies – in case we’re locked up for hours in a police van with no access to a lavatory. Or if we decide to chain ourselves to railings, barriers or whatever else to cause maximum disruption.

Welcome to Extinction Rebellion (XR), the revolutionary protest group hell-bent on eliminating fossil fuels from Britain.

To achieve this, they are planning an onslaught of civil disobedience on a scale rarely seen in this country. And I’m here undercover as a new recruit, or ‘rebel’ as they call it.

My induction took place late last month in an anonymous office block near Euston station. I’m told XR was given the space for free by a well-placed sympathiser.

A lift takes me to the fourth floor – an open-plan space with a smattering of desks and some 40 new recruits, an even mix of male and female, all casually dressed.

A handmade poster by the lifts is daubed ‘Eco not Ego’. A large sign warns us to avoid ‘suppression juice’ – that’s alcohol – so we can ‘rebel with a clear body and mind’. Brightly coloured banners hang from the ceiling – ‘No Brexit in a dead planet’, says one – while a giant papier-mâché skeleton of some big beast lies, under construction, in the corner.

This introductory meeting is led by a bearded XR activist called Greg, who lives in a squat in West London with other members of the group. His first move is to lead us in an awkward ‘ice breaker’. Sitting in rows on school chairs, we’re instructed to stick both arms in the air and waggle from side to side, chanting ‘woo-hoo’.

Preparing for action: A photo of an XR meeting taken by our undercover reporter. There is no suggestion those pictured are all intending to break the law

Then comes a minute’s silence for ‘the dying planet’. Struggling not to laugh, I bowed my head with the others, eyes down.

‘Devote some of your brain to imagining the kind of world you want to create,’ says Greg. ‘To get through this struggle together, we need to hold tight to our dream.’

We’re asked to think of one word to describe the world we want – and shouts of ‘harmony’, ‘sharing’ and ‘green’ come from around the room. ‘Courageous’, mutters a boy in a long beige trench coat sitting next to me.

Questions follow. The volunteers are keen, but concerned.

A charity worker with short blonde hair says she is worried about XR’s policy of deliberately getting arrested.

Not that she’s against breaking the law – just that it might deter volunteers who cannot take the risk of getting into trouble.

Eating her dinner from a Tupperware box, another young woman raises concerns about XR’s links to Labour’s hard-Left Momentum faction. George agrees XR and Momentum have a good relationship.

‘Training session’: XR potential recruits Greg, left, and George

Then we are told to get in a long line, arranged in order of willingness to get arrested. It is time to hone our tactics and strategy for the forthcoming ‘rebellion week’ – which starts tomorrow.

‘Move around the room according to what you feel,’ says Naomi, one of the lead activists.

‘The question is this: how arrestable are you in XR?’

A handful immediately place themselves at one end of the room, the extreme that signifies: ‘Yes, I really wish to be arrested right now.’ A few walk to the opposite side, meaning: ‘Absolutely not.’

Middle-class zealots who’ll make Monday a misery for millions 

The most prominent – and radical – of the XR leaders is failed organic farmer and PhD student Roger Hallam

Failed farmer wants a world revolution 

The most prominent – and radical – of the XR leaders is failed organic farmer and PhD student Roger Hallam.

After years in a succession of Left-wing groups, the 52-year-old says the ‘name of the game’ for XR is to ‘bring down all the regimes in the world and replace them’. Hallam (above) says paralysing traffic will eventually cause food shortages and trigger uprisings.

In a recent interview, he said XR protesters should be ready to cause disruption through personal ‘sacrifice’. If necessary, they ‘should be willing to die’.

XR co-founder Stuart Basden, 36, a middle-class writer from Bristol

Co-founder says jail’s like boarding school 

XR co-founder Stuart Basden, 36, a middle-class writer from Bristol (above), has goals that go way beyond a desire to curb global warming.

Indeed, he has claimed: ‘XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life.’

Basden has urged XR followers to embrace going to prison – where he spent a week after defacing London’s City Hall with spray paint last year – saying it is ‘a bit like boarding school’

Tasmin Osmond, 35, is a veteran of ‘direct actions’

Veteran campaigner from baronet family 

Tasmin Osmond, 35, is a veteran of ‘direct actions’ which had little to do with climate change, such as Occupy London, the poverty protest which set up a camp outside St Paul’s cathedral in 2011.

The granddaughter of Dorset baronet Sir Thomas Lees, Omond (above) went to Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read English.

She was thrown out of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid after saying the green movement ‘brand’ was ‘unwashed, unshaven and up a tree’, and this ‘doesn’t represent me’.

George Barda, 43, believes the ‘Criminal UK Government’ is to blame for climate change

Student who’s on Putin’s TV channel 

George Barda, 43, believes the ‘Criminal UK Government’ is to blame for climate change.

A post-graduate student at prestigious King’s College in London, the son of classical music and stage photographer Clive Barda still finds time to be a dedicated revolutionary and camped outside St Paul’s cathedral in the Occupy London campaign.

Today, Barda (above) is a director of XR parent company Compassionate Revolution and regularly appears on Russia Today, Russia’s controversial British TV channel.

I’m with the majority shuffling around in the middle amid embarrassed laughter. This position says: ‘Maybe, let’s think about it.’

They ask us how far we’ll go. Will we commit a litany of protest crimes – smashing windows, defacing buildings? Will we glue ourselves to doors or block roads using ‘swarming’ – sitting down for a few minutes at a time to stop traffic?

‘I’m comfortable with spray paint that permanently damages but not breaking windows,’ states a woman in her 30s from a refugee charity.

‘I’m somewhere between the permanent spray paint and the chalk spray paint,’ says a man studying for a PhD in environmental activism. ‘They can’t charge you with criminal damage if you use chalk paint.’

After an hour or so, we’re all split up into what they call ‘affinity’ groups based on how radical they judge us to be. They don’t seem to think I’m very revolutionary.

Roles are assigned for the forthcoming ‘action’. Our group has a ‘wellbeing co-ordinator’, a ‘legal observer’ and a ‘media organiser’.

How far would we go for the movement? A Scottish actress in her 20s tells us she’s planning to recruit her mother. ‘I think I’d be OK with being arrested,’ she adds. ‘It’s just that I’m so in and out of the country, I work between here and Paris. I don’t know if I would be able to make my court date, so I don’t know if it would work out.’

Another young woman, a university student, says she’ll bring her harp along to keep us entertained during ‘rebellion week’. Before the meeting breaks up, the organisers call for mature women willing to be trained as ‘de-escalators’.

These are the people asked to calm down frustrated members of the public, particularly drivers, trapped in the traffic jams we’re going to cause.

Then the evening comes to a conclusion with repeated chants of ‘Extinction… Rebellion’ from the hardened activists, who then treat us to an impromptu and utterly excruciating dance.

A beat box starts blaring, one long-haired man sways expansively, arms waving out of time, the others jig about. I leave, armed with XR stickers and posters to plaster on the streets.

The group gives me constant updates through the WhatsApp messaging system, and a few days later I’m back in the office block for another training session. This time, it’s altogether more alarming.

An activist in her 20s called Jess lays out XR’s terrifying vision of the future: ‘We want to build a structure, a community and test prototypes for the coming structural collapse of the regimes of Western democracies. And we see this as inevitable – this has to happen.’

Now, we’re drawn further into the plans for illegal protest, and made to take part in role-play scenarios of activists clashing with the police.

The golden rule is to stay silent when confronted by police – unless we quote from a self-righteous prepared statement outlining our supposed right to break the law as a ‘conscientious protector’ of Planet Earth.

And we must never, ever identify any of the XR organisers in case they are charged with inciting illegal activities.

Activists who plan to ‘lock on’ by super-gluing themselves to public property are warned to expect a long wait, as few police officers are trained to dissolve the glue.

The hope is to cause the maximum amount of chaos. They might even have activists locked on at five separate protest points in London. If we are seized by the police, we must make our bodies go floppy, to tie up more officers as they attempt to carry us away.

I endure a further marathon training session at a climbing centre in North London.

We’re being addressed by the white-haired lady, who I now know is press officer Jayne Forbes. Stating her own readiness for martyrdom and jail, she tells us that: ‘I’m an older person with no responsibilities.

‘I’m prepared to go to prison and I think we are privileged in this country to have prisons that are relatively acceptable.

‘If I was living in Brazil or something, I could get killed as an activist. Our prisons are not bad compared to many in the world.’

She tells us never to agree to a caution because that would be ‘an admission of guilt’.

We must never accept the help of a duty solicitor because they would be ‘pally with the police’. I’m learning a great deal.

We’re advised only to bring an old-fashioned ‘burner’ mobile phone to the protest in case the police want to seize the device as evidence.

I’m told a paperback will help me while away the long hours in a police cell – and that I can ask for up to three blankets from the custody officers.

I now have a list of ‘friendly’ solicitors on a small sheet of paper reminding me of my legal rights. Can we get vegan food in prison? XR thinks the answer is ‘yes’.

By the time I say my goodbyes, I’m truly worried. If this week goes according to plan for Extinction Rebellion, I know that many of its members will be only too delighted to learn first-hand about the inside of our police cells and our prisons – believing they have come one step closer to making their dangerous plan a reality.

The post Revealed: Ministers meeting with eco group appeared first on Gyrlversion.

from WordPress https://www.gyrlversion.net/revealed-ministers-meeting-with-eco-group/

[cryptswahili]

No Internet, No Problem: How to Send Bitcoin by Amateur Radio

In an age where governments are trigger happy at censoring or shutting down networks, it is reassuring to know that Bitcoin can operate sans internet. Network censorship, after all, is not some dystopian storyline but a power exercised by many democratic governments across the world. Thankfully, there are solutions that enable people to send and receive bitcoin even in a worst case scenario. For an advanced technology, it turns out that cryptocurrency can get surprisingly low-tech.

Also read: Bitcoin and Weak Frequency Signals: Bypassing Network Censorship With Radio

Send Bitcoin by Radio and Circumvent Network Censorship

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the internet is down. Not because the wifi’s been disconnected: instead, your government has pulled the plug . You’ve no idea when it’ll be back online, and in the meantime, you’re cut off from life as you know it, ranging from contact with loved ones abroad to paying for anything by card. Since society isn’t big on keeping cash these days, and ATMs stock up on only so much paper money at a time, chances are you’ll have to sidestep – or engage in – a few fistfights if you’re to put a meal on the table.

Since bitcoin is, itself, a form of digital currency, it takes a good amount of preplanning to set up a transaction, but in theory, it could still operate even when conventional options are forcefully removed from the equation.

What do –

Greeks Cypriots Venezuelans Argentinians Brazilians Zimbabweans and Ukrainians have in common?

They all woke one day and the banks were shuttered and capital controls were put in place to avoid an economic collapse.

Bitcoin doesn't close

— Jason A. Williams (@JWilliamsFstmed) February 12, 2019

While most of us will hopefully never experience a dystopian world of intermittent internet, the productivity sages remind us that a failure to plan is planning to fail. Knowing how to transact with cryptocurrency in a chaotic world is the sort of knowledge that might just come in handy one day, and in the meantime will make you the most interesting guest at the dinner party.

Depending on the political stability of your geographic location, learning how to send bitcoin without internet could be nothing more than a fun Saturday afternoon science project. Then again, it could provide the way out of a tight spot one day, whether it’s transferring funds to a buddy stuck in the middle of the ocean or bribing a zombie to feast on the coins stored in your brain wallet instead of devouring your brain.

Bitcoin Over Airwaves

2014 saw the earliest mentions of bitcoin being sent via the airwaves. Hamradiocoin was one of the early vanity altcoins, geared at the ham radio industry. While it wasn’t entirely clear why said niche industry needed a dedicated currency, its current $794 market cap – unchanged since May 2017 – adds to crypto’s rich historical arsenal of questionable coins.

But the idea of marrying Marconi and Satoshi was bound to lead to more useful experiments. A step in the right direction saw Finnish company Vertaisvaluutta.fi propose the creation of a P2P half-duplex CB/HAM radio cryptocurrency. Also in Finland, Kryptoradio partnered with a national broadcaster to pilot a cryptocurrency data transmission system that broadcasts bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data via national DVB-T television networks in real time. The project failed to launch its commercial phase, with founder Joel Lehtonen explaining:

The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without internet connectivity.

Come 2018, there was a new experiment in town. Ingredients: Brooklyn-based gotenna, a mobile, long-range, off-grid consumer mesh network, and bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet. A New Zealand developer transported crypto from a distance of 12.6km away, entirely offline, using only a network-disconnected Android phone and four portable antennas. Though as his Twitter recount acknowledges, it took one heck of a prep, including setting up relay stations.

Over the weekend I sent a bitcoin transaction to a relay 12.6km away with no cell network or internet connection. Here's a tweetstorm about how I used @gotenna and @SamouraiWallet to do it

— ℭoinsure (@Coinsurenz) October 16, 2018

Fast forward to this year, and in perhaps the most simplistic effort yet, Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak managed to move BTC some 600km away from Toronto, Canada to Openbazaar co-founder Sam Patterson in Michigan, USA. And in that moment, Bitcoin-by-sky went international.

Advocates for Bitcoin by Air

In 2017, computer scientist Nick Szabo and PhD researcher Elaine Ou delved into the topic at Stanford’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, introducing a research project that proposed tethering bitcoin to radio broadcast to secure consensus proofs using weak signal radio propagation. (View their talk, a copy of the presentation, and our coverage of the event for further information.)

With Novak and Patterson’s latest feat, crypto Twitter went wild. Szabo, showing that he’s still a firm proponent of taking bitcoin skyward, chimed in to congratulate the duo for a successful sendoff that not even a snowstorm could stop.

Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite — just nature's ionosphere. https://t.co/IKCAXGs9fW

— Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) February 12, 2019

How to Send Bitcoin by Radio

As Novak and Patterson have illustrated, you don’t need to overload on gear or make space for satellite storage in your backyard to send bitcoin by air. Accompanying an SDR ham on this quest was nothing more than a 40m 7Mhz antenna and the JS8call application.

While the setup seems simple enough (Google “ham radio for beginners” for a primer), in practice this is probably not something you’ll dive into unless you’re just messing around or, in real life, shit gets real.

Gearing up is as easy as H-A-M

In truth, there are restrictions aplenty when it comes to sending bitcoin by radio.

First off, legalities. To stay on the right side of the law, some countries require you to be a licensed ham operator, and even then you’re unable to send any encrypted messages or use the airwaves for commercial purposes unless so licensed. At this point, it’s not yet clear which governmental task force will join the SEC and co in clamping down on illegal apocalyptic bitcoin-via-radio transactions.

Since legal restriction is the mother of all invention, Novak and Patterson circumvented this by broadcasting their experimental, non-commercial wallet encryption sendoff via public cypher.

Then there’s prepping it all. For this to be a viable – albeit last resort – solution in an actual nail-bite situation, sender and receiver would have to set it all up in advance. Novak and Patterson were able to execute their experiment by communicating and collaborating in lieu of the transfer, using a brain wallet. (The brainwallet, which is simply storing your mnemonic recovery phrase in your brain, is not to be confused with the recent more nefarious version – the deathwallet popularized by CEO Gerald Cotten who took the keys to Quadriga’s crypto kingdom to his grave.)

Thus, if you’re going to use this as a backup plan for when stuff hits the fan, you’d better secure a right-hand wo/man and a fool-proof project management blueprint while things are still web-friendly. If this process seems as though it walked off the pages of a James Bond novel, yes. It’s decidedly more involved than a mere intra-wallet send-off.

However, if you’re gung-ho on testing out alternative bitcoin transports, don’t let the naysayers stop you. Yours might well be the next proof of concept the interweb is waiting for. The blog Better Off Bitcoin, for one, offers a run-through protocol tutorial.

Scalability Is a Big Bottleneck

Clearly, scaling is a non-issue here. For the foreseeable future, sending bitcoin by radio happening unless it absolutely has to.

According to Australian crypto trader Boss Cole, “As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are moving into the future, it is an interesting concept to think about what would happen if we instead went into the past. It is possible and easy to transfer Bitcoin without an internet connection, but it is not convenient. There are a number of projects working on this with satellites or their own infrastructure, however at the time of this writing they are not “popular” simply because there is no real demand.” He continues:

In the case of government censorship, the infrastructure would change rapidly. If we were dealing with serious problems, the infrastructure would follow. Because it is possible. If we went into the dark ages, the main way to transfer Bitcoin would be transferring private keys between individuals. This would be simple, but not convenient.

Not even extreme weather conditions can deter the determined from sending bitcoin via radio waves

So while it’s theoretically possible to take to the skies and send crypto wallets around the world and all the way into space, DIY bitcoin ionosphere amateurs won’t soon be sending satoshis to the dark side of the moon any time soon.

Why Radio Wave Transmission Might Be Necessary

We tend to associate worst-case scenarios in which the main character has nothing but a walkie talkie and an old ham lying around with Hollywood’s portrayal of doomsday.

Yet for unstable regimes like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, internet blackouts were how 2019 got its start. In reality, network censorship is an all-too-common control tool for many governments around the world.

India leads the pack with 288 shutdowns between 2012 and 2019, with 134 instances in 2018 alone. The Middle East and Africa aren’t strangers to forcing citizens into offline mode, either.

Good luck stopping information across borders when all you need is 40 watts of power, a long piece of wire, a radio and a computer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 12, 2019

Under the Communications Act 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the U.K. has an internet kill switch, which could be enforced in light of a serious threat such as a significant cyber attack. The U.S. has had, for the past 85 years, the power to kill electronic communications under the Communications Act of 1934. And with talks of Russia considering a test run to decouple from the global internet, we risk taking a rude awakening if we assume the world’s 72,558 Google searches every second to be an unquestionable given.

Bitcoin for Every Situation

It might have taken a mini-library worth of code to get NASA astronauts to the moon, but sending bitcoin there won’t be nearly as hard. All you need is a radio. Okay, that and a moon rocket. But the point is, this new technology can be just as comfortable – or accessible – even when when the tech you’re using is decidely old school.

Peer-to-peer networks built on the internet have a special allure because of the sense of resilience they have without a central point of failure. A bit misleading: they are really built on many computers and the connections between them.

Not true with radios. True peer to peer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 16, 2019

Bitcoin might have been invented on the internet for the internet, but it can straddle both the digital and analog worlds. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin walk the line between money under the mattress and cash in the bank. As these trailblazers show, bitcoin can straddle those worlds not only functionally, but also technically. Thanks to the efforts of the pioneers profiled here, crypto has shown it can survive in even the most challenging environments.

Sending bitcoin by radio isn’t quite carrier pigeon, but in tech terms it might as well be. Which, says crypto developer John Villar, is “probably the most low end you can get before smoke-signaling a brain wallet.”

Can you envision a situation in which you might have to send bitcoin by ham radio? What other ways could you picture cryptocurrency being transferred without the internet? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

The post No Internet, No Problem: How to Send Bitcoin by Amateur Radio appeared first on Bitcoin News.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[currentrepairs-blog]

Why Practical Skills Will Matter More Than Your Degree In The New Economy

When Giancarlo Martinez applied a few years ago to be a web developer at Genome, a digital marketing firm in New York, he was confident that he had the ability. But he couldn’t help but wonder whether company recruiters would be able to recognize his chops—and even if they did, he worried that they still might not give him a chance.

The reason: Although he had gone to coding school, Martinez was largely self-taught—”Staying up until 6 a.m., Googling things, and just figuring it out.” Others angling to work at Genome, he presumed, “probably had master’s degrees in computer science.”

“I was very intimidated,” recalls Martinez, now 26.

But Genome was welcoming. “At the end of the day, it’s not the piece of paper on your wall,” says Stephanie Plumeri Ertz, who interviewed Martinez for the position. “It’s what you can turn out.”

To seal the deal, she gave Martinez a test, asking him to follow a set of technical specifications while designing a webpage featuring cupcakes. Martinez showed a solid command of the basics. He also added a few impressive flourishes, including an animation of a conveyer belt that churned out cupcakes heaped with frosting, which tumbled off the end of the assembly line and dropped into the mouth of a cute, if voracious, blue robot.

“The coding challenge became my golden ticket,” says Martinez, who was immediately brought on for $70,000 a year—a huge bump from the $40,000 or so he’d been scratching together through a string of less stable tech jobs and freelance gigs.

Among the big questions now confronting the U.S. labor market is this: How common will stories like Martinez’s become?

Given the passion with which some business and educational leaders talk about it, you might well imagine that we’re on the cusp of a major revolution.

Skills, Not Degrees

“Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree,” the company’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, has asserted. “What matters most is relevant skills.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been pushing the same message at his company. And David Blake, cofounder of the learning platform Degreed, has put it like this: “It shouldn’t matter how you picked up your skills, just that you did.”

But others are decidedly cautious, noting that longstanding cultural norms and institutional inertia stand as powerful roadblocks to this new way of thinking. Some experts are particularly skeptical that a skills-oriented approach to learning and hiring can transcend the tech industry.

“We’re in the early innings of this transition,” says Mike Adams, cofounder and chief product officer of MissionU, which offers an educational alternative to a traditional degree by focusing on skill building and job placement. Indeed, he anticipates that it will take “decades to shift” to an environment in which capability trumps academic pedigree on a wide scale.

The situation is evolving—but “not fast enough,” adds Karan Chopra, executive vice president of Opportunity@Work, a social enterprise whose signature program, TechHire, has enabled thousands of Americans from underserved communities to access training and jobs. (Among them is Martinez, a native of the South Bronx, who was supported by the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, a part of the TechHire network, to help pay for a six-month stint at Flatiron School so that he could polish his coding skills before auditioning at Genome.)

“It’s important to realize that this is a problem of collective action,” Chopra says. “Individual employers changing their hiring practices one at a time won’t work—or won’t work quickly enough. A critical mass of employers needs to shift behavior, signaling to the rest and influencing a change in the way the market operates today.”

To be clear, no one who is advocating for a skills-centered system is suggesting that learning isn’t essential. In fact, the idea is that ever more of us must engage in lifelong learning as automation and other technological advances render our skills obsolete. Having only a high school diploma is not sufficient to land and hold a job anymore.

The goal, then, is to make all kinds of courses readily available in physical classrooms and virtual settings alike, allowing folks to acquire know-how that’s useful in the real world and then demonstrate their prowess to employers.

Under this scenario, it is envisioned, many will still obtain four-year degrees. Many others will earn two-year degrees or technical certificates. Meanwhile, the continued emergence of even more affordable options—such as online badging regimes, which can signal when someone has completed an area of study and mastered a discrete skill—will enhance the job prospects of those currently being left behind.

A False Choice

“Making it skills versus credentials is a bit of a false choice,” says Beth Cobert, CEO of Skillful, an initiative of the Markle Foundation that, in partnership with Microsoft, is aiming to give educators a sharper picture of which skills are in demand in their region while helping businesses adopt skills-based hiring and training practices. “This is about changing mind-sets.”

The difficulty in doing so is that the vast majority of businesses and individuals are largely locked in their old ways.

Despite employers’ constant gripes that they can’t find enough qualified workers in a host of industries, many are screening out those who lack a bachelor’s degree—even though they could tackle the tasks at hand without one. “An increasing number of job seekers face being shut out of middle-skill, middle-class occupations” because of this phenomenon, Burning Glass Technologies, a provider of labor market analytics, warned this month. “This credential inflation . . . is affecting a wide range of jobs from executive assistants to construction supervisors.”

For many families—and the battery of institutions of higher education eager to win them over—there’s also little interest in reconceiving how to best prepare their kids for what lies ahead. “People still build their identity around being a four-year college graduate,” says MissionU’s Adams. “That has a pretty strong stranglehold on society,” even amid deep concern about swelling student loan debt.

Martinez felt that tug himself. His stepdad didn’t approve of him skipping college. And his mom, who is from the Dominican Republic, also had misgivings at first. “As an immigrant mother, she always expected me to have a degree,” he says.

Another issue is how hard it can be to exhibit one’s skills outside of tech. If a company is looking for a Python developer with a certain level of experience and competence, “it doesn’t matter whether you come from high school or come from a PhD” program, says Spencer Thompson, the founder of Sokanu, a career-matching platform. “If you can prove those things, that’s great.” But suppose someone wants to be a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technician?

“How do you measure whether a person is a good HVAC installer?” Thompson asks. “What are the . . . atomic units of being an installer, and how do you actually measure whether somebody is good or bad at those things? That’s where the whole model just completely breaks down.”

The Skills Embedded In The Study Of Literature

Even tougher to see, perhaps, is how the liberal arts can fit in. But Cobert proposes that—beyond having considerable value in their own right—such subjects might be radically reconsidered to capture what employers find most meaningful. “When you take Victorian literature,” she says, “we do not break it down to show that you learned writing skills, you learned critical thinking, you learned how to respond to feedback.”

Others also are hopeful that new avenues for highlighting skills are starting to open up, not necessarily as a replacement for formal education but as a companion to it.

“I don’t think it’s about tech at all,” says Connie Yowell, the CEO of Collective Shift, a nonprofit whose platform, LRNG, teaches tangible skills to young people, gives digitals badges (sometimes called “microcredentials”) to track their achievements, and uses these markers to unlock academic credit, internships, and jobs. “This is the future of learning.”

Adams, of MissionU, is somewhere in between. He believes that tech is a sweet spot. That’s why the first two cohorts completing his program—about 50 people in all—are concentrating on learning data analytics and amassing a portfolio of work to share with potential employers.

Yet MissionU, unlike many tech boot camps, also teaches general business skills, in part through a self-paced project in which students research a topic and present the findings in Excel. This can offer concrete “evidence that you can solve problems” inside a company, Adams says—and, sure enough, employers have begun to regard this assignment as a good indicator of fundamental business proficiency. Because of it, Adams foresees some MissionU graduates finding their way into human resources and other functions, not just being data geeks.

As for Martinez, he has done well for himself. After leaving Genome, he went to work at Yashi, a video advertising company. Once again, he found a boss who admired his skills and didn’t care about his schooling. “It’s not about the path you’ve taken, but what you bring to the table,” says Dipak Shetty, who hired Martinez.

Recently, Martinez moved from New York to Austin, Texas, where he’s mulling what to do next. He may take another job in software. Or he may attempt to shift into a broader management role. For that, though, he acknowledges that he will be forced to finally get a university education, maybe even an MBA.

“If I were to pursue a business job,” he says, “I definitely need a degree to compete.”

After all, skills are everything. But for all too many employers, credentials remain the only thing.

[zaotslabvaneblogsite-blog]

How to Lose Bodyweight With no the Yo-Yo Dieting

Are you hoping to lose individuals extra lbs . brief? If you are wanting for a "swift way" to eliminate excess weight, there are no shortages of trend diets all around. Most individuals currently get caught in the "newest and best" diet plan fads, promising to assist you get rid of several lbs . in as little as a 7 days or two. Most of these diets assert you can reduce bodyweight speedy with minimum work. You may perhaps have read some of the guarantees, "eliminate ten lbs in a 7 days", "how to eliminate body weight rapidly", "shed your overall body body fat in 10 times". If you've been making an attempt to lose fat, these varieties of diet plans can be incredibly tempting... but consumer beware! There is no magic tablet, or no distinctive combination of foods that will MAKE you reduce pounds. As a issue of fact, most of these trend diets are not well worth making an attempt at all.

The truth of the matter is, however, many of us have followed these fad weight loss plans and these forms of diet programs can do a lot more damage to your health and fitness than good. Most of these fad diet programs never perform to help you lose pounds and preserve the excess weight off extended time period. In addition, the pounds most eliminate in the beginning is put back in with Excess lbs. With this currently being stated, to thoroughly have an understanding of how to get rid of excess weight and continue to keep it off, we all will need to appear to an knowing of how our bodies function pertaining to dieting. It is really critical that we briefly mention the value of being aware of your figures. For instance, know your best fat, your blood strain, your overall body mass index, your cholesterol ranges, and many others. Knowing these numbers will help you to optimize your fat reduction attempts with a prepare that is just a correct in shape for your system. An in depth discussion on these numbers will adhere to later on. For now, let us start by conversing about the results of the fad dieting on our bodies. Trend diets entice dieters who seek to get brief effects. When you try out a trend eating plan, you will most likely drop kilos in a subject of times as promised considering that you will be having a extremely limited diet program. When you make important modifications in your physique, your body will respond. Most of the time, the bodyweight you get rid of more than the training course of the initially couple times is commonly just h2o body weight and/or muscle mass mass. These fad meal plans are also restrictive and uninteresting, building it tough to maintain about the very long phrase. The moment you prevent the diet regime and resume your ordinary life style, likelihood are that you will achieve the pounds back again - with a handful of more kilos. Fad meal plans also prohibit you from having certain forms of food items. Some of these eating plans limit or reduce fruits, greens, dairy products, and full grains.  If you are you looking for more information about bilki za otslabvane stop by our web-site. These foods are loaded with nutrients that are thought to support protect against numerous persistent situations. The diet programs that get rid of selected food items from a person's diet regime totally put the man or woman at threat for nutrient deficiencies. Analysis has proven that in get to obtain the amount of nutrients our human body wants on a everyday foundation we will have to take in a well balanced and various diet. Trend eating plans do not permit individuals to eat a nicely-balanced eating plan in most circumstances which leads to the lack of nutrients to the body. In addition, many trend weight loss plans limit the volume of calories and nutrients you take in which can direct to strength deprivation and major nutritional deficiencies. Mainly because most fad diets involve you to eat a structured amount of food on a structured schedule, you can also conclude up disrupting your normal metabolic process. Your metabolism is the charge at which your body burns calories. The body, in its ordinary point out, known as homeostasis, learns to retain the body weight you typically have just after a period of time. If you drop pounds far too quickly you are probably dropping muscle mass mass/lean tissue. As we reduce muscle our metabolisms slow down. Once you radically lessen calorie intake, your human body starts altering to a lot less foods and a new homeostasis is made based on the reduce calorie rely. Your entire body learns to function ordinarily with a lot less which implies that when you start off feeding on standard food stuff again you will get again significantly more weight than just before mainly because your body is employed to surviving on less calories. Dropping excess weight slowly and gradually with a healthier diet plan of all varieties of meals will continue to keep your rate of metabolism doing the job adequately. As formerly stated, muscle mass loss is yet another detrimental effect of trend diet programs. Because your diet plan is very low in calories, your body looks for other strategies to get vitality. One particular of these ways is by digesting your muscle mass. This is essentially harmful to weight decline because muscle tissues help you burn up much more calories even when you are at relaxation. Fad eating plans are swift fixes, not long lasting alternatives to the weight issue. You may possibly eliminate pounds originally, but as before long as you get started consuming common food stuff once again you gain the pounds again. The difficulty is your consuming routines and lack of action. Until you begin having healthier and working out often, your excess weight will proceed to go up and down. So what is the reply to attaining your weight decline purpose? The remedy is a balanced ingesting program that involves good vitamins mixed with reasonable physical action. Losing body weight is as basic as it is complicated. No distinct food stuff or products can cause body weight obtain or decline. The only way to reduce excess weight is to adjust your behavior and continuously try to eat much less calories and training much more in excess of a period of time of time. To reduce weight you need to have to consume considerably less energy than you burn up. Consume a well balanced diet plan prosperous in all foods groups focusing on what to consume, as an alternative of concentrating on what not to eat. Increase your activity level by undertaking everyday moderate exercising and you will experience greater emotionally, mentally, and bodily. It is so simple but yet few of us are able of carrying out it, while undertaking this will adjust your life. We realize the dilemma with dieting, we know the answer, why is the being overweight price in The us nonetheless climbing up? Health industry experts will notify you time and again that the only way to efficiently lose weight and keep it off is by generating very long-expression variations to your life-style, these as adapting a more healthy eating plan and frequently doing exercises. Useless to say, creating these improvements is not particularly simple neither swift. Market pro Robyn A. Osborn, RD, PhD, a dietician and instructional psychologist, suggests individuals will need to really feel that the gains of altering their habits will outweigh the expenditures. For numerous dieters the psychological price of providing up their fattening way of living appears to be way too excellent. So they choose for the "quick repair." Fad dieting is not so a great deal about the healthier facets of shedding pounds, but a lot more about the psychological benefits of the bodyweight loss benefits. Does this necessarily mean that body weight decline is more mental than it is bodily? "The exploration is distinct-diet programs do not perform! It can be not only dieters who fall short, the eating plan applications are unsuccessful as very well. We know that considerably less than 10% of all dieters maintain any pounds reduction, about fifty% finally get much more than they get rid of, and that the most prevalent end result-yo-yo excess weight loss-can be worse for people's wellness than just becoming over weight. Even more, we are finding out more and more about how our society of "thinness" is damaging to the esteem and health of women and ladies." claims David Bedrick, J.D., Dipl. PW writer of Conversing Back to Dr. Phil: Alternate options to Mainstream Psychology. In accordance to a new survey of psychologists implies that when it will come to dieting, body weight decline and pounds gain, feelings enjoy a central purpose and may well be the main impediment to bodyweight reduction. A lot of of us glimpse at ourselves and compare ourselves to these we see every single day in magazines, on Television set, and in newspapers. We instantly feed "adverse speak" into ourselves contacting ourselves unwanted fat, complaining about our overall body components and so on so forth. We often then occasions make excuses, "I am also occupied", "It can be hereditary", "I like myself this way". In all honesty, most people today want to reduce a couple of lbs ., but the undertaking just would seem so darn tough! Attempting to persuade ourselves to do points that we really don't actually want to do -- behaviors our mind is not applied to -- is not easy. We are extremely adept at creating wonderful excuses as to why we won't be able to do what we never want to do. The fantastic news is you CAN reach your preferred entire body form and pounds loss plans. Self-picture is intently linked to the achievement or failure of any purpose you pick to look for immediately after, but none much more so that the purpose to get oneself in shape and nutritious. With the proper imagining, a standard psychological workout and being familiar with of how to get optimal diet, shifting to balanced consuming patterns is just a web page absent!  

[rachelcarsoncenter]

In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center. For more information, please click here.

Chernobyl By Melanie Arndt

The “Chernobyl March” in Minsk, Belarus, on 26 April 1996, the tenth anniversary of the Chernobly disaster (photo by author).

I grew up in a country that does not exist anymore—East Germany or the GDR. Perhaps this partially explains my interest in Eastern Europe and its environmental history. Even though I was too young to completely comprehend the events of 1989, I have vivid memories of that tumultuous time. It certainly accounts for my eagerness to explore the world, half of which was essentially inaccessible to me behind the so-called Iron Curtain. It flickered by on the forbidden West German television programs that animated our living room; during other times, I was able to imagine those places with the help of the colorful postcards that arrived from our West German relatives, or the relatives of friends and neighbors who were willing to share a glimpse of the world “over there” (“drüben”, as we used to say). There were also some books that provided me with components to build up my image of “the West,” the most powerful of which were those about nature and wildlife. I received “Australia’s wildlife,” translated from Czech, from my parents on one of my birthdays. It was a wonderful gift. I was completely blown away by the drawings in the book, the descriptions of many unknown animals whose habitat and diet I quickly learned by heart. Because of that book, Australia ranked first on my list of “most favorite countries” for a very long time, despite my being fully aware that I might never have the chance to go there; it happened to be on the wrong side of the political division of the world.

But it was not only “Western” nature and wildlife that fascinated me: my parents made ample use of our limited travel options and showed us many of the landscapes available to us in Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s and up until the early 1990s, East Germany, like many other Eastern European countries, went through a phase of ecologization—people started to speak out against the devastating environmental degradation they had been experiencing for decades. One of the rather paradoxical outcomes of the Cold War is the green belt that winds through the former border and no-man’s-land between East and West. Once the place of a homicidal border regime, it is now a wildlife sanctuary for some rare birds and animals. In my hometown, Lutherstadt Wittenberg, I became one of the sandal-wearing cyclists who protested against the straightening of the Elbe, denouncing the demolition of its marshy meadows, and demanding more bicycle paths.

After secondary school, and some five years after Germany’s reunification, I spent 18 months as a volunteer in Minsk, Belarus. Even if the choice of an Eastern European country seemed strange to many of my relatives and friends (we finally could go West!), it did not come as a big surprise for others. I belonged to the minority who had always loved the Russian language. In fact, I have had a pen pal in Minsk since the fifth grade, and I had spent several summers entertaining “Chernobyl children” during their recuperation.

Working for one of the first civil rights and Chernobyl non-governmental organizations and in an orphanage for disabled children, the time I spent in Minsk was incredibly important for both my personal and professional life. I not only learned a lot about another country in flux and a disaster so impossible to comprehend, I was also forced to deal with challenges of my own identity. Rather suddenly I was transformed from an East German, or “Ossi”, to a West German, or “Wessi.” Although I had grown up in the Soviet bloc, fellow Eastern Europeans perceived me now (and sometimes I even perceived myself in this way) as coming from the affluent, democratic West. These experiences taught me how easily perspectives can change, how fragile seemingly self-evident matters can be, and how much there is to understand about ourselves and others if we switch our frame of reference from time to time. I have never forgotten.

The “Chernobyl March” in Minsk, Belarus, on 26 April 1996, the tenth anniversary of the Chernobly disaster (photo by author).

The “Chernobyl March” in Minsk, Belarus, on 26 April 1996, the tenth anniversary of the Chernobly disaster (photo by author).

The “Chernobyl March” in Minsk, Belarus, on 26 April 1996, the tenth anniversary of the Chernobly disaster (photo by author).

The “Chernobyl March” in Minsk, Belarus, on 26 April 1996, the tenth anniversary of the Chernobly disaster (photo by author).

Since Belarus was the country most affected by the radioactive fallout of the 1986 disaster, I read all the material available to me about Chernobyl before moving to Minsk. Arriving there (with a backpack full of “clean” milk powder) I quickly learned about the ambiguous role the disaster had played for the people in the capital and even more in the provinces. While my new Belarusian friends laughed at this over-anxious “Wessi” with her milk powder, and did not care about the origins of the products they consumed, “Chernobyl”—ten years after the explosion of the reactor—became a crucial political issue, driving hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets of Minsk. I was confronted with this “political Chernobyl” not only in the streets but also daily at the office of the NGO, which was one of the main organizers of the protest marches. But I was also confronted with yet another side of the disaster: the office was a busy transit point for a huge number of foreign organizations offering what they understood would be of most help for the disaster victims. Even though I had taken care of “Chernobyl children” back in my hometown, it was only at this moment, that I understood the scope of the solidarity movement “Chernobyl” had created and that broke open all Cold War barriers.

My firsthand experiences and the many questions they raised made me want to return to the topic since the day I left Minsk. I remain most intrigued by the often-paradoxical consequences of the disaster, especially by the very different approaches to coping with the problem. After studying in Potsdam, Berlin, and London, and finishing a PhD on a quite different topic, I finally returned to Chernobyl. As the director of an international research project with five Belarusian and Ukrainian PhD students, I finally had the chance to reexamine my earlier experience through the lens of science. At first I was most interested in the disaster’s impact on the development of civil society in Eastern Europe. Increasingly, however, I realized that the underlying problem was much bigger and that Chernobyl was not just a “typical Soviet” disaster—as many continued to believe until the disaster at Fukushima proved them wrong. The problem has much more to do with the “nature” of radioactivity itself.

I discovered environmental history rather late in the game; it was essentially by accident through the works of Joachim Radkau. This field fascinated me because it offered ways to break down my observations to the very intimate relationship everyone has with nature, defining our well-being. In my current book project, which I developed during rigorous intellectual exchanges with the fellows and staff at the Rachel Carson Center, I have set out to use the approaches of environmental history to analyze the social and political processes that flow from irradiated landscapes, or, rather, from attempts to understand, mitigate and compensate for them—not only in the Soviet Union but also in the US. The exchange with scholars from all over the world, working on so many different topics, but all related to the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature—be it in colloquia, in the kitchen or on the top of the Bavarian mountains—was incredibly fruitful and I am very grateful for this experience. Even if I had to learn from the Australian fellows that the dingo, my favorite animal from my childhood book, is an allegedly dangerous animal.

Making Tracks: Melanie Arndt In the “Making Tracks” series, RCC fellows and alumni present their experiences in environmental humanities, retracing the paths that led them to the Rachel Carson Center.