Fox Searchlight Pictureshas revealed a newretro 70s-style poster for Battle of the Sexes, telling the story of the infamous tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Featuring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, you can check out the Battle of the Sexesposter in the gallerybelow!

The electrifying 1973 tennis match between World number one Billie Jean King (Stone) and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs (Carell) was billed as the Battle of the Sexes and became the most watched televised sports event of all time. The match caught the zeitgeist and sparked a global conversation on gender equality, spurring on the feminist movement. Trapped in the media glare, King and Riggs were on opposites sides of a binary argument, but off-court each was fighting more personal and complex battles. With a supportive husband urging her to fight the Establishment for equal pay, the fiercely private King was also struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, while Riggs gambled his legacy and reputation in a bid to relive the glories of his past. Together, Billie and Bobby served up a cultural spectacle that resonated far beyond the tennis courts and animated the discussions between men and women in bedrooms and boardrooms around the world.

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, creators of the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine and indie favorite Ruby Sparks, the film also starsElisabeth Shue, Sarah Silverman,Alan Cumming, Andrea Riseborough , Eric Christian Olsen, Natalie Morales, Austin Stowell, Wallace Langham, Jessica McNamee, Mickey Sumner and Bill Pullman.

Battle of the Sexeswill debut in theaters September 22.

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New Battle of the Sexes poster with Stone and Carell - ComingSoon.net

Language is flexible, and definitions can easily turn on a moment or a movement. Change can grip even the most literal of terms: adjectives can go from functional one day to charged the next. Which is what has happened to woke a word that once invoked the state after sleep but this week officially entered the Oxford English Dictionary in its socially conscious, online-friendly 2017 form.

To recap: to be woke is to be sensitive to social issues and how they shape the world we live in, but moreover it suggests that you will call them out, noisily, online and offline. It implies a distrust of elites, imparts exasperation with the status quo, and connotes action and change. The wakeful cohorts tend to be young, and obviously Left-leaning. Incidentally, the term has shades of entitlement: ultimately, you can only wake up to the existence of deeply etched social issues if they havent really affected you much until now.

Furthermore, the term is complicated by the allegation that it has been appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement. Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better, explains the Merriam-Webster dictionarys blog. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement [and] became a word of action.

Perhaps sensitive of this, the OED justified the words addition to this years book with characteristic straightness. By the mid-20th century, it notes, woke had been extended figuratively to refer to being aware or well-informed in a political or cultural sense. Though Urban Dictionarys version is less generous, calling it a state of perceived intellectual superiority one gains by reading The Huffington Post.

Inclusion in the OED signifies a words transition from counterculture to mainstream. And wokes shift has undeniably been in process for a while. But perhaps the definitive moment of its evolution into a buzzword for (gently) entitled modern activism was Brexit.

Just over a year ago to the day, the country woke up literally to the news that we had voted to leave the European Union, and 48 per cent of us also woke up figuratively to the idea that the country was mired in a battle of ideals. The top line, Leave versus Remain, disguised a rather more opaque clash of ideologies which are still being thrashed out, and tripped off a summer of protest and prevarication, led mainly by the woke.

Inevitably, the dismal summer became a dismal autumn, which became a desperate winter, when the world woke up literally to the news that Trump had been anointed President and liberals woke up figuratively to the reality that they definitely hadnt called this, and they definitely didnt know who or what to call on now.

2016 crescendoed into a loud backlash against Trump: the liberal echo chambers roared while the fake news sites catered to the illiberal versions of the same cacophony. Memes lampooned the President and rumours impugned his campaign; zeitgeist television shows such as Saturday Night Live the distillation of woke entertainment satirised his verbal ticks and physical curiosities.

As the year turned, we remained wakeful: in January, women marched in pussy hats, so-called after Trumps infamous instruction to grab women indelicately. Woke boys or, woke baes marched with them, determined to show wakefulness does not discriminate on gender grounds.

It was a frantic few months, although not everything that is political is, by definition, woke. And so when the general election was called, it seemed like it could mark a settled, sleepy period. Certainly, the early stages of the campaign had a somnambulant feel: no one seemed very invigorated by the prospect of going to the polls at all, and many hypothesised that turnout would be abysmal. Politicians seemed only to be going through the motions: the Tories kicked off on a vow to be strong and stable, Corbyn didnt seem to have kicked off at all.

And then, suddenly, the electorate animated. Pundits did not predict it, though if theyd been more sensitive, they might have realised the restfulness of the preceding months was unlikely to fall suddenly dormant. Defying expectations from both camps, Jeremy Corbyn animated a youth base that is typically too apathetic to turn up on election day. It is estimated that turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was as high as 64 per cent for this election, making it the highest turnout since 67 per cent voted in 1992, and ended two decades of disproportionately low turnout in that cohort. They had woken up and roared, and in the mean time got in the way of a neat Tory majority. This in turn drove May towards the DUP, and ignited change.org after a Facebook page about how to agitate.

So it is perhaps poetic that, on Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn (at 68, a notable exception to the rule that the woke tend to be young) addressed the unwashed and underslept crowds on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, which is where many bereft Remoaners found out last year that we would be leaving the EU. He quoted Shelley, while the crowd retorted with choruses of Oh, Jeremy Corbyn to the tune of the White Stripes Seven Nation Army.

In a year, the woke have acquired an official conference, a protest song and a namecheck in the Oxford English Dictionary. No ones sleeping for the foreseeable future.

@phoebeluckhurst

Continued here:

Oxford English Dictionary extends its definition of the word 'woke' - Evening Standard

EXCLUSIVE: Fox has set Life And Def: Sex Drugs Money + God, a feature biopic that chronicles the rise of Russell Simmons from the inner city streets of Queens to one of the most influential music/fashion culture impresarios of his era. The studio has set to write it Kenya Barris, the creator of ABCs hit series Black-ish and co-writer of films that include Barbershop: The Next Cutand the upcoming comedy Girls Trip (written with Tracy Oliver). Pic is a co-production between SimmonsDef Pictures and Misher Films, with Simmons and Kevin Misher producing. Jake Stein, Bobby Shriver, Josh Bratman and Andy Berman are the exec producers.

Associated Press

Fox last year signed a deal with Barris and his production company, Khalabo Ink Society, to hatch films aimed at telling compelling stories that pull back the curtain on the parts of our society that typically go unnoticed. Life And Def will capture the rebellious rise of rap and hip hop in America, through the prism of the disruptive Simmons and the formation of Def Jam Records. That label started with rap icons like L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys and grew to include Kanye West, Jay-Z and DMX.

Its a different view of a zeitgeist movement than L.A-set films like Straight Outta Compton or All Eyez On Me. The backdrop here is New York City in the early 80s, when crime and crack were spreading like wildfire, Gotham City teetered on bankruptcy and MTV was blowing up as disco was dying. Into that vacuum walked Simmons, a young party and record promoter who emerged from hustling on the streets of Hollis, Queens to managing young musical artists who were rapping words to a beat instead of singing a melody, with furious passionate lyrics that burned across ethnic, class and geographic lines and spoke to an emerging youth culture.

Barris is represented by CAA, Principato Young, and Morris Yorn.

Read more from the original source:

Kenya Barris To Write Russell Simmons Biopic For Fox, 'Life And Def: Sex Drugs Money + God' - Deadline

ERBIL, Iraq Here in the capital of Iraqi Kuridstan, the mood is "Kurdistan First" with the announcement of a referendum on independence in September. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, it's "Saudi First," as a brash young crown prince steers the kingdom toward a more assertive role in the region. In Moscow, where I visited a few weeks ago, it's "Russia First," with a vengeance. And so it goes, around most of the world.

The politics of national self-interest is on steroids these days. For global leaders, it's the "me" moment. The nearly universal slogan among countries that might once have acted with more restraint seems to be: "Go for it."

The prime catalyst of this global movement of self-assertion is, obviously, Donald Trump. From early in his 2016 campaign, he proclaimed his vision of "America First" in which the interests of the United States and its companies and workers would prevail over international obligations.

Trump has waffled on many of his commitments since becoming president, but not "America First." He withdrew from the Paris agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to name two multinational accords that Trump decided harmed American interests, or at least those of his political supporters.

Trump's critics, including me, have been arguing that this selfish stance is actually weakening America by shredding the network of global alliances and institutions on which U.S. power has rested. But let's put aside this issue of self-inflicted wounds and focus instead on what happens when other leaders decide to emulate Trump's disdain for traditional limits on the exercise of power.

Nobody wants to seem like a chump in Trump world. When the leader of the global system proclaims that he won't be bound by foreign restraints, the spirit becomes infectious. Call the global zeitgeist what you will: The new realism. Eyes on the prize. Winning isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.

Middle East leaders have been notably more aggressive in asserting their own versions of national interest. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates defied pleas from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to stop escalating their blockade against Qatar for allegedly supporting extremism. Their argument was simple self-interest: If Qatar wants to ally with the Gulf Arabs, then it must accept our rules. Otherwise, Qatar is out.

For the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, the issue has been whether to wait on their dream of independence. They decided to go ahead with their referendum, despite worries among top U.S. officials that it could upset American efforts to hold Iraq together and thereby destabilize the region. The implicit Kurdish answer: That's not our problem. We need to do what's right for our people.

Trump embraces the same raw cynicism about values-based foreign policy as does Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Who are the outliers in this me-first world? France and Germany retain the conviction that their destinies involve something larger than national self-interest. Fear and nationalism have shaken Europe, but not overwhelmed it. An enlightened center is holding at Europe's core.

China, too, manages to retain the image that it stands for something larger than itself, with its "One Belt, One Road" rhetoric of Chinese-led interdependence. The question, as Harvard's Graham Allison argues in his provocative new book, "Destined for War," is whether the expanding Chinese hegemon will collide with the retreating American one.

The politics of selfishness may seem inevitable, in Trump world. But by definition, it can't produce a global system. That's its fatal flaw.

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David Ignatius: Selfishness rises in global politics | Columnists ... - Billings Gazette

It seemed that once upon a time MGMT owned the brand of indie-pop. When the genre was really taking off into the mainstream in the late aughts, their psychedelic electronics took the culture's ear by storm. They were youthful, introspective, and accessible. At some point, they got sick of their own brand and tried to break free, and landed themselves in relative obscurity, whether that was their ultimate goal or not.

They've been teasing new material for over a year now and with a festival run this summer, it seems like a new album is coming soon. Back in 2013, I questioned whether they were going to go further down the path of strangeness and experimentation or take it back to their roots, gunning for a more crowd-pleasing sound? They would up going way past the Congratulations side of strange with their self-titled third album MGMT. Even more than their sophomore album, MGMT seemed to estrange some fans and wasn't doing much to bring in new ones. So now I'm asking myself a similar question, what direction will they be going in for album number four. A return to their early sound or another leap into the unknown?

What happened to MGMT is really not different than what happens to a lot of small bands that hit it big right out of the gates. They, very understandably, got sick of what got them famous. They gained a small amount of popularity as "The Management" and once they transitioned to MGMT and released their EP Time to Pretend, they were mustering up support online and had some notoriety for their crowd-capturing performances. Their early sound was gruff electronic alt-dance rock, it even had a punk feel to it. They had their deep moments and their fun moments. They were an appealing sound as rock changed its forms, looking for a new movement to grab onto in those years.

So Oracular Spectacular comes out in 2007 and they are bonafide indie-rock stars. "Kids" is everywhere, and "Time to Pretend" and "Electric Feel" are lighting it up as well. Critically the album fared well, garnering a generally positive response, and chartered well to boot, eventually going Gold. For the next few years, they seemed to stay relevant while the indie-rock scene was really booming, with acts like Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse making waves commercially.

By 2010, MGMT seemed ready to repeat themselves. Early that year, Kid Cudi dropped one of the highlights of his career, the anthemic "Pursuit of Happiness", which featured MGMT along with the electronic-rock duo Ratatat. It seemed like the extra buzz generated from that single just months before Congratulations, their sophomore effort, would come out would poise the trippy indie-kids for success. And with the album debuting at Number 2 on the Billboard 200, it seems their momentum was holding true.

That momentum would slowly fade as the ambitious departure in sound and style that Congratulations was made it a hard sell to new fans and some old. While Oracular came into the sonic zeitgeist of 2007 and took off, Congratulations was an experimental and personal record for the duo. They opted out of some of their more electronic tendencies, just as bands like Foster the People were proving that style to still be in demand, in order to pursue a more full-band production. It became evident that they, like many acts before them, had grown weary of the sound they had become popular on. It was even evidenced in live performances, like the recording Qu'est-Ce Que C'est La Vie, Chaton? (Live At The Bataclan), where they would play parts of the set with only acoustic instruments, which they were sure to announce.

It's a legitimate struggle, mostly for acts that start small, without necessarily a strong aim to go big, that happen to get boosted into the mainstream fairly quickly. They grapple with concerns over entering into the big scary industry. "How do we keep our authenticity as we make these big deals, as we get a hit single?". They were certainly not the first band to battle with that transition. MGMT's response was essentially to make the record they wanted to make and move away from the growing indie-pop sound. In 2011, Frank Ocean's "Nature Feels" on Nostalgia Ultra, which sampled MGMT's "Electric Feel", would continue to prove the enduring nature of the band's early sound.

One thing I never doubted was their more dedicated fans. MGMT has seemed to maintain a following with a strong attachment to them, whether it be due to nostalgia or respect for their constant experimentation and disregard for convention. When I saw them at Firefly in 2013, they garnered a large crowd bubbling with excitement. People sang along and were generally entranced, for one reason or another. Although, there were definitely a few that were perturbed by MGMT's classic refusal to play "Kids".

It's hard to say what would've happened if they had stayed the course. It's very likely that had they stuck with the sound that made them famous, people would have gotten sick of it quickly. On the other hand, maybe they did push too hard and far away. Their self-titled MGMT might not have totally alienated dedicated fans but it certainly didn't attract too many new ones. While they were cautiously praised by some critics for their experimental efforts, in general critical and commercial performance was pretty weak but I mean, do they even care about all of that?

In an interview given pretty early on in 2013, they answered my question of what direction they would be going in, and that answer was they were going weirder. "We're not trying to make music that everyone understands the first time they hear it," Ben Goldwasser told Rolling Stone. So fair enough, that's their M.O. Nonetheless, I'm wondering the same thing I did in 2013 about this next album, which they recently announced would be titled Little Dark Age.

The group has been teasing at new content for over a year and a half now, mostly through their Twitter. Like has happened in the past, the project's expected release has been continuously pushed further and further back. With a string of festival appearances this summer, it seems like the same timeline as their last album, so it seems right to expect it sometime in early fall. If I'm correct in seeing a similar timeline, we should probably be expecting a single sometime soon.

Ostensibly, a new logo stylization for the band

As far as content goes, the most we've gotten at this point that they've personally released is a cryptic video appearing on their website. It's ambient. It's got a meandering dream-scape vibe that's only further reinforced by the video accompaniment. If this is what we can expect sound-wise for the new album, then yes, I think the answer is that they will again go down a strange new path. The operative there, though, is new given that while it still doesn't sound like they're trying to hit the same notes they did in their early work, the strangeness of this new sound isn't defined by the compressed, distorted anarchy of their last album.

So we'll have to wait and see. Hopefully they will be releasing more content soon and we'll get a better listen as to what we're in for. Given that Indie Rock has seemed to have fallen off the mainstream radar in the last few years, it's always interesting to see what the once-juggernauts are up to.

Giphy

Read more here:

REVIEW | Is MGMT ready for a comeback? - Popdust

The last Labour leader to win a general election resigned as Prime Minister 10 years ago today.

Tony Blair took his final session of Prime Ministers Questions at the despatch box and said: I wish everyone, friend or foe, well and that is that, the end.

A decade on, its clear this was more than the end of a premiership. It was the end of a political age that is radically different to the one we inhabit today.

Gordon Brown had spent years dreaming of how he would lead Britain from No 10 but the financial crash and the mission to rescue the economy defined his tenure. David Cameron and Nick Clegg presided over austerity measures and Theresa May now hopes to oversee Britains departure from the European Union this is not the future Mr Blair will have wanted for Britain.

It would be fascinating if he allowed a team of scientists to attach sensors to him to measure whether he gets more riled by the prospect of Brexit or the sight of Jeremy Corbyn leading the Labour party.

Its doubtful whether Mr Blair will spend much time today thinking back to his final hours in Downing St. One of the traits of true political animals is that they rarely engage in self-analysis and much prefer to pound forward.

There is clear evidence the triple election-winner wants to stage another great disruption in politics, and not just in the UK.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is advertising for a managing editor to take forward its key messages, one of which is that there is an urgent need for a new agenda to provide radical but sensible answers to challenges including the rise of a false populism.

This populism, according to the institute, represents a convergence of the political left and right around isolationism and protectionism.

Whether it is President Trump trashing trade deals or Ukip championing Brexit, Mr Blairs vision for the world is being challenged on multiple fronts. He wants to fight back.

He plans to use his institute to revitalise the centre ground through a corpus of new thinking.

This zeal to shape the future contrasts with how George Bush spends his time. The ex-President does a lot of painting and is winning steadily more positive praise for his portraits.

Mr Blair is not looking for a hobby. The question is how big a bang he wants to make.

This ardent pro-European once looked destined to lead the campaign to take Britain into the euro. Instead, he is now watching the Tories David Davis helm Brexit negotiations.

Mr Blair persuaded Labour to abandon its commitment to nationalisation ahead of his first landslide election victory but admirers of Marx now hold positions of power at the top of the party.

He must look around for younger talent who could champion the type of policies he put at the centre of his reform agenda in the pre-Iraq years. Mr Blair wanted to harness the energy and resources of the best of the private sector for the common good.

He shredded socialist orthodoxy and fought for foundation hospitals, academy schools and even introduced tuition fees to get cash into the university sector. It is still remarkable that a party that had been led by Michael Foot as recently as 1983 went on this neoliberal adventure.

Welsh Labour distanced itself from such policies with its decision to let clear red water flow between Cardiff and London. But during the recent election campaign Mr Corbyns Labour shadow cabinet looked to the left of the Welsh Government.

If Mr Blair wants inspiration he may gaze across the Channel and marvel at how Emmanuel Macron quickly founded a proudly pro-EU party, trounced the National Front, won the presidency and then saw his supporters storm parliament.

His institute exists to support those in the active front line of politics but he may struggle to find a British Macron around Westminster.

David Miliband has become New Labours prince across the water. From his base in New York he leads the International Rescue Committee, one of the worlds most respected refugee agencies.

What would happen if Mr Blair gave his old aide a call and urged him to come back across the Atlantic and start a new party of radical centrism?

It would not take long to raise the cash to start a pro-business party that sees a key role for the private sector in helping the NHS and social services meet the challenge of caring for an ageing population. The real cost would be a psychological one.

Britains remaining Blairites may loath what has happened to their party but when they were at the helm they never thought they were betraying Keir Hardie or Aneurin Bevan. Rather, they believed they were taking forward Labours finest values and using the power of prosperity to advance redistribution and an opportunity revolution.

Activists throughout the different factions of the Labour family see their party as one of the greatest engines for social progress Britain, and the world, has ever known. It is one thing to fight to reclaim the party it is quite another to try and replace it.

Mr Blair, a maestro of political marketing must also understand that he is among the most divisive figures in UK politics. If he does want to help a new movement transform the zeitgeist, one of the best things he can do is stay in the background.

And if he does find himself once more at the centre of national attention, it is easy to imagine his old ally Peter Mandelson whispering some sage advice in his ear before a TV interview: Dont call it a comeback.

Here is the original post:

It's 10 years today since the last Labour leader to win a general election quit as PM - WalesOnline

It is lamentable that theres no famous dessert named tau, Michael Hartl told me recently at a sunny, stylish caf in Venice, California. He reluctantly admitted that pi, the constant approximately equal to 3.14, has this one advantage over tau, a number he introduced to replace it.

Pastry puns aside, Hartl has achieved minor internet fame for arguing that tau is superior to its vastly better known cousin. In his popular 2010 Tau Manifesto, inspired by Bob Palais 2001 essay Pi Is Wrong, Hartl posits that pi, the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter, creates unnecessary complications in many formulas. A more appropriate number to work with when it comes to circles would be 2pi, or about 6.28. He named that number tau, and declared June 28 (6/28) to be Tau Day.

The circle constant ought to be defined in terms of radius, Hartl told me over the chatter of other caf patrons. By choosing to define the circle constant in terms of the diameter, you introduce this factor of 2.

Full disclosure: pi is my favorite number and the one I am most known for writing about (i.e. while on staff at CNN in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014). To obliterate the use of pi, first introduced as a symbol with its present meaning by William Jones in 1706, would upend more than 300 years of mathematical notation. But I respect how deeply Hartl has thought about tau and the benefits it carries. For instance: a quarter circle is tau/4 radians instead of the current pi/2 radians, which could be seen as a more simple and elegant way to define sections of circles. (The lengthy manifesto has more in-depth pro-tau discussions, and there is also a Pi Manifesto rebuttal.)

Hartl chose tau to represent 2pi because it nicely ties in with the Greek word tornos, meaning turn, and looks like a pi with one leg instead of two. But he is not the first to turn to the letter tau to represent an influential idea. Since I first read the manifesto, Ive noticed that this Greek letter has popped up in several unrelated but groundbreaking scientific discoveries, as well as formulas that engineers commonly use today. In fact, the colorful threads of tau form an intricate fabric of cutting edge-scientific inquiry.

Tau Protein

In 1975, Marc Kirschner was interested in microtubules, tiny tubes that help give structure to cells. While exploring these small formations in pig brain cells, Kirschner and his graduate students at Princeton University isolated a protein no one had described before. His student Murray Weingarten led the discovery paper, but Kirschner chose the name for it: Tau.

The researchers realized that the protein acts like a glue that holds together the microtubules, whose building blocks are another protein called tubulin. But in 1975, they had no idea of the implications for neurology. Other scientists later discovered that polymers made of tau form neurofibrillary tangles, structures found in the brain cells of patients with Alzheimers disease, prefrontal dementias and other neurodegenerative conditions. The collection of diseases associated with these tangles is now called tauopathies.

Interest has soared in exploring taus role in these diseases. It is now one of the two most important biomarkers for identifying Alzheimers pathology, and many researchers hope it will be a clue to treatment, too.

Kirschner, now at Harvard, has been asked many times about his reasons for the name.

I was looking for something that evoked tubulinso, the Greek letter for Tand I wanted a name that didnt presuppose that I understood at that time exactly how it worked, he said. While we know a lot more about tau now than we did 42 years, we still dont know everythingso, its OK that that the name seems to evoke some amount of mystery, he said.

Tau Lepton

The same year that Kirschners group published their tau protein discovery, 1975, researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now called the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), in a group led by the late physicist Martin Perl, were on the road to a groundbreaking discovery of their own. Coincidentally, it would be called the tau lepton.

Right now the tau protein is probably more famous than the tau lepton, although Im sure for many years it was the other way around, Kirschner said. It was, for the record, the tau lepton that netted Perl the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics.

A lepton is a type of elementary particle that does not feel the strong force, the interactions that hold protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of the atom. Electrons, negatively charged particles orbiting the nucleus, are perhaps the most famous leptons. By the 1970s, scientists had additionally identified charged leptons called muons, and neutral leptons called electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos.

Then, at SLAC, indications of a new lepton emerged. It was more than 3,500 times more massive than an electron, and decayed in about 10-13 seconds. At first, the team called it the U particle, where U stood for unknown, Gary J. Feldman, now a physics professor at Harvard, wrote in 1993. But once they figured out it was a heavy lepton, Feldman reminded Perl that it should have a real name.

Everyone felt that a lower case Greek letter was called for, in analogy with the , Feldman wrote, referring to the muon particle. The problem was that most good Greek letters were already in use.

The group eventually narrowed down their search to lambda and tau. Lambda had never been used as the name for a specific particle. But tau could stand for triton, the Greek word for third, reflecting this particles status as the third charged lepton. Counting against it: Tau had previously been used as part of the name for a particular decay of a particle called a kaon. When the scientists asked their secretary which would be more aesthetic, she chose tau. I remember this as the final piece of evidence that caused us to adopt tau as the name, Feldman wrote. Perl then introduced the name in 1977 at a physics conference in the French Alps, and it has stuck ever since.

The story wasnt over, though, because physics is full of symmetry. The Standard Model of Physics predicted that each charged lepton had a neutral counterpart: A tau lepton couldnt exist if there werent also a tau neutrino. In 2000, a group at Fermilab led by Byron Lundberg used the Tevatron accelerator to find the elusive particle. Slamming protons into a block of tungsten yielded 100 trillion neutrinos, just nine of which were tau neutrinos (and while theres no pastry called tau, the tau neutrino was discovered at an experiment called Direct Observation of Nu Taua.k.a. DONUT).

Lundberg, for his part, hasnt thought much about the name tauit would be all the same to him if tau had been chosen from a dartboard with Greek letters, he said. In our business, there are so many designations for particlesyou just call it what its called.

Other Uses

The letter tau has many other uses in physics. Equations that need to differentiate time as measured by an observer, coordinate time, use tau to represent a movement through time as measured with respect to a moving object, called proper time. Proper time is independent of a stationary onlookers clock. Einstein used the letter tau in his 1905 special relativity paper, describing how two synchronized clocks should show different times if one moves at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light and then returns. In this case, tau would be the time by which the traveling clock has slowed.

Tau is also used in some contexts to represent the golden ratio, defined as half of 1 + the square root of 5. This number, about 1.618, has shown up all over art and nature, including in defining the shapes of nautilus shells and plants with spiral forms in their leaves or petals. According to Wolfram MathWorld, the tau usage comes from the Greek word tome, meaning to cut. But the more common Greek letter for the same number is phi, as an homage to the Greek sculptor Phidias who used the golden ratio in many works.

Perhaps the greatest conflict with introducing a number called tau is that, in engineering, tau also stands for torque, a rotational force. Torque involves circular motion, which must involve a circle constant, so those formulas would get hairier if each 2pi got replaced with tau, too. But Hartl, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, effortlessly listed several examples where the same letter stands for two different things in a single equation.

I think people underestimate how good physicists, engineers and mathematicians are at dealing with that kind of notational ambiguity, Hartl said.

Tau as 2pi

Tau as the ratio of circumference to radius hasnt been in the nerd zeitgeist for nearly as long as these other, more official usages of the Greek letter (and there are others, like Tau Ceti and all of the other stars that have Tau as part of their names). So far the American Mathematical Society has not changed its pi-ous ways, and pi is still largely the constant that professionals and students alike use for undertaking calculations involving circles. Hartl is serious enough to give tau talks and update his website with an annual State of the Tau. But he has no intention of making tau advocacy a full-time job, and doesnt want it to be his only legacy (he is the founder of Learn Enough to Be Dangerous and author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial).

Still, the tau movement has sparked tangible interest. MIT now announces admissions decisions on Pi Day (3/14) at Tau Time (6:28), and a beer has emerged called Key Lime Tau. The popular web comics XKCD and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal have both featured tau. If you type tau/2 into Google, youll get a calculator with the correct response: 3.14159265359.

Unlike the taus of science, Hartl ultimately considers the number tau a social hack. It taps into the natural human desire to one-up other people and rise in a dominance hierarchy, he said. A manifesto about math, spanning more than 8,000 words and attacking a beloved number associated with tasty treats on March 14, is ample ammunition for geeks to outgeek each other.

Im sure it would not have been as well received if I hadnt baked those ingredients into the cake...

...or the pie! we said together.

See original here:

The Tao of Tau - Scientific American (blog)

Getty Images/ E! Illustration

If television audiences were to turn on CMT right about...now, they would see a very familiar face onNashville.Rachel Bilsonhas officially joined the cast of the country crooner show in her first role sinceHart of Dixie wrapped. She'll be playing the chief strategy officer of the show's Highway 65 Records, a character that she described to E! News as a "strong, business-savvy woman."The actress has a five-episode arc planned for the drama, but industry observers and fans alike can't help but feel like it's the start of something big: A return to the screen, if you will, and an opportunity to come full-circle in the decade since she officially retiredThe O.C.'s Summer Roberts.

And when those same audiences start channel surfing (during commercial breaks, of course) they'll realize that Bilson is part of a movement. That all of the most popular (and fan-favorite) lady stars of the 2000s (if they were a band or a sports team they might call themselves the Aughts A-Listers) are in the middle of what can only be described as a heyday.

There's Bilson and her country revival, of course.Alexis Bledelbrought back her belovedGilmore Girls and is also catching critic and general public attention of the chillingHandmaid's Tale. And Leighton Meesterhas her first series regular gig since Blair Waldorf simultaneously charmed and terrified the world onGossip Girl. The woman behind the most famous eye roll in history has been largely off the airwaves since 2012, so her turn on Fox'sMaking Historyis something to be celebrated.

What binds these three actresses together is more than just the fact that they happen to have been on-air at the same time during a certain partof the decade. Rather, they were integral membersof the zeitgeist of the mid-aughts. To millennial women they were our role models, our obsessions, our constant sources of quoted material.You can't make people love you, but you can make them fear you. Nothing excites me before 11 a.m.And who could forget,Ew.These were the TV shows that we stayed up late binge-ing, that we turned to after a breakup or a failed test or a bad fight. The shows that guided us through countless hangovers and heartaches, and that kept us company as we snacked on literally everything possible.

The O.C.introduced a world of wealth and privilege and totally absurd individuals to young people all over America.Gossip Girldid the same, but with beachfront mansions swapped for historic townhouses.Gilmore Girlsshowed the charms of small-town America.The O.C.brought us the enduring appeal of the bad boy.Gossip Girl fought for the sexy mystery behind a lonely boy. The O.C.andGossip Girl brought cautionary tales of partying and rule-breaking, while the Gilmores peddled more in warnings against over-consumption of Chinese food delivery and diner coffee.

They made us realize how lucky we were not to have parents like Julie Cooper or Eleanor Waldorf. They made us realize how much we were dying to have parents like Lorelai Gilmore and Sandy Cohen. They gave us theme songs that will be stuck in our heads for the next decades, and the next and the next. The wordsCalifornia here we come orIf you lead I will follow orYou know you love me will forever bring us directly back to that exact moment in front of the TV. That and any mention of Chrismakkah.

But all that came to an end:The O.C.shut its beachside doors a decade ago,Gilmore Girlssaid its last breathless words (though notthe last four words) that same year, andGossip Girlfinally revealed itself in 2012. Since that era, there has barely been a single show that has represented the zeitgeist so well, let alone an entire group of shows. And with the downtime for the viewers came some downtime for the stars themselves. After spending a significant portion of their youth in front of the cameras, Bilson and her teen drama counterparts Meester and Bledel took a step back from the spotlight.

As Bilson told E! News, starring in an hour-long drama can take its toll as much as it can launch you into fame and fortune. "To do an hour-long drama and be one of the leads, that's your whole life," she said. "I really respect that and I'm grateful to have had that, but it's your life and the hours are no joke. Things have just changed [for me] now."

FollowingThe O.C., Bilson took on a few roles here and there, appearing in the futuristic filmJumper (where she just so happened to meet her fianc and the father of her daughter Briar) and in a few episodes ofHow I Met Your Mother. Then of course cameHart of Dixie, which was a cult favorite in and of itself, among Summer's biggest fans and those who had never seenThe O.C. alike. But most importantly she took time off to build her family. She has been with the aforementionedHayden Christiansen for a decade (with a few on-and-off periods), and in November, 2014 she welcomed her baby girl. They have been living what they describe as a quiet, family-oriented life since then, spending time in the country and cookingjust check her Instagram for proof.

Meester and Bledel seemingly followed in her footstepsalthough, technically, it's hard to nail down who exactly led the way. In an adorably full-circle twist of fate, Leighton ended up falling in love with none other than the real-life Seth Cohen (that would beAdam Brodyof course), getting married in 2014 and having a daughter in September, 2015. Alexis fell forMad MenstarVincent Kartheiserafter she appeared in a few episodes of the show, marrying in June, 2014 and welcoming a son in the fall of the following year.

As far as acting goes, Meester has been largely absent from her place in front of the cameras. (She did star in the 2014 rom-comLife Partners, where she met her husband). Bledel starred in the two installments ofSisterhood of the Traveling Pants shortly after biddingadieu to Stars Hollow, but did mostly bit arts save for herMad Menarc. Until now, of course.

In case anyone needs it written out plainly, let's just review: All three actresses starred in outrageously popular teen dramas, all three met their actor-husbands during roles following those shows, and all three took time off from acting to take care of their now-toddlers. Uncanny? Yes. Fate? Definitely.

But now the heyday is back in full force. It's really never been a better time to have starred in a mid-2000's network television teen drama. Each actress did have their own path back to the big screen that's worth examining, however. Bledel's was perhaps the most obvious, withGilmore Girlsjumping onto the revival train early. There is no Stars Hollow without Rory Gilmore and the actresses obliged all of her adoring fans when she agreed to appear alongside the rest of the cast in the Netflix miniseries.

"We're all just so happy we got to do these episodes," she told E! at a press event for the revival this winter. "it's wild and very surreal. And we're excited that it means so much to people."

The actress is also in the midst of full-on critical acclaim for her turn as Ofglen inThe Handmaid's Tale, a piece of work that truly couldn't be more different than anything we've seen her in before. It's easy to question what it is about a project that makes someone decide to go for such a drastic change and she cited an interest in streaming platforms at this year's Television Critics Association gather.

"It's really new to me in a way because it's just this year I jumped into this realm," Bledel explained. "But I really do like telling a story from beginning to end, knowing what the whole story is going to be, and then revisiting it six months later."

For Bilson, the return to the screen was on account of finally finding a way to balance her career passions with her desire to devote herself to motherhood. She explained that having her daughter in her life has impacted who she chooses roles, and that how any potential job affects her being there for her daughter is a large part of the decision-making process.

"I'm very lucky to have had some success [in my career] and I just look for good roles and things that I want to spend my time doing," she says. "If I'm away from my daughter it has to be worth itall my decisions are based around her now."

Meester has echoed those sentiments in many interviews, citing a bit of a burnout after her time onGossip Girl. This spring she told Vulturethat she had no interest in doing a show with 20-plus episodes a year, nor did she want to do an hour-long program, explaining "That's now how I want to spend my time working."

The actress met with Fox and decided that it would be the perfect fit for her next network project and then the new seriesMaking History came along at the exact right time. "I've been working when the work comes for things I've been excited by," she described as her new career outlook. "There's been a natural progression of roles that seem to fit how I feel at that moment."

We would be remiss to continue a discussion of the biggest stars of the early aughtsand their current comebackswithout a pause to reflect on an actress who is having a full-on career renaissance. We speak, obviously, of oneMandy Moore. She wasn't on a life-changing teen drama but she did start her acting career with a series of pivotal roles during that period. It all started withThe Princess Diaries andA Walk to Remember (in 2001 and 2002 respectively) and she went on to appear in cult classics like 2004'sSaved and rom-coms likeBecause I Said So andLicense to Wed, both in 2007.

Things cooled down for the actress but with her star turn in the breakout hitThis Is Us, she has become one of television's most sought-after actresses. Put bluntly, she's having the best year of her life. She's the star of the biggest cult-hitof 2017, she has several movies coming up, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe (her first major award nod). Moore herself is in a state of relative shock in regards to her recent resurgence, as she told E! at this year's TCAs.

"I cannot believe I'm on a television show that's airing," she said. "It didn't get cancelled. I didn't film a pilot and have it not get picked up. Every other pilot I did I was like, yeah, this is going somewhere, and then it never does. But I'm a firm believer in everything happening for a reason."

So what's next for all these women? That's up to them, but one imagines it involves equal parts reveling in the moment and looking forward to the next step. And they'll also continue to process what life is like a decade out from their breakthrough successes. Their time on the screen, both big and small, has had a large impact on each actress. It's hard to shake the typecasting that comes with being a teen iconnot that they're all trying to.

For Mandy Moore it's all about having an appreciation for a time when everything was new (and scary). "I remember not knowing what I was doing onA Walk to Remember," she said at the TCAs. "I didn't know how to hit a mark or memorize lines or take stage direction. When I think back about that film I think about having to really step up and learn everything."

For Alexis Bledel her time onGilmore Girls(the original show) is something that she tries not to cling to. "I try to be present in the moment," she said of her acting past. "And just focus on whatever I'm supposed to be working on at that moment. That takes all my attention."

Bilson is seemingly as sentimental aboutThe O.C.as her fans. "It's really nice that people loved the show so much and embraced it so much," she gushed. "I'm still so grateful to this day for the opportunity to be a part of something like that. It's influenced everything, when it comes down to it. Itwas the launching pad and the starting point and it's where it all began for me."

For most of the show's fans, they could say the same thing.

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The Teen Actress Comeback: Inside Rachel Bilson, Alexis Bledel and Leighton Meester's Television Reinvention - E! Online

"We felt some kinship to the alt-rock scene of the early Nineties, but we wanted to do it on our own terms. We wanted to be able to love Hank Williams and love punk rock." While this sentiment from Old 97's frontman Rhett Miller isn't a strange concept today, it was still a relatively underground idea when he and his bandmates unleashed their raw-and-rowdy major label debut Too Far to Care 20 years ago this month and helped birth a whole new subgenre in the process.

Together with guitarist Ken Bethea and drummer Philip Peeples, Miller and Hammond mixed the explosiveness of punk rock and the raw sonics of alternative music with heavy doses of classic country swagger. Two albums 1994's Hitchhike to Rhome and 1995's Wreck Your Life quickly put Old 97's on the map outside of their native Dallas, Texas, and generated major label buzz.

By Miller's count, no less than 15 labels courted the band over a six-month period. "They were flying us to New York and Los Angeles and taking us to every major sporting event you could imagine," he says. "There was so much noise and so much ego inflation. I can see why so many bands get lost when their ship comes in."

It was a unique moment in time for both the band and also the unruly, amorphous musical scene of which they were a part. "It felt like there was something in the zeitgeist happening with this genre of music that everyone was still trying to find the right name for," he says of the nascent movement, which also included Uncle Tupelo (and its post-breakup offshoots Wilco and Son Volt), Drive-By Truckers and the Ryan Adams-led Whiskeytown.

Questionable terms like "yalternative," "honky skronk" "insurgent country" and "cow punk" (a holdover from the Eighties) were being thrown around to describe the sound, with the consensus eventually landing on "alternative country," often shortened to just "alt-country."

"It's like we all had the same education but were on different campuses," Hammond says of the scene and its like-minded bands. "We'd all gone through punk rock and Sixties garage rock and we all liked Johnny Cash and rediscovered country music around the same time."

Eventually signing with Elektra Records, Old 97's decamped for El Paso to record at the famed Sonic Ranch studio (then known as Village Productions). The bucolic setting near the Rio Grande helped inspire what would become Too Far to Care.

"When we finally wound up out in this little desert hacienda surrounded by a pecan orchard, it felt like one of those science-fiction movies where you get squeezed through a time portal," Miller says. Working with producer Wally Gagel, the band cut some of the most enduring songs of their career and refined their sound along the way.

Miller points to the boozy ballad "Salome" as a notable evolutionary step in the songwriting of the 97's. Sandwiched in between the full-throated chorus of "Broadway" and the twangy railroad chug of "W. TX Teardrops," the song features the pedal-steel work of guest Jon Rauhouse, who would also play on the band's 2014 effort Most Messed Up. "That song was a really big breakthrough because the live sound of our band was so caveman at that time," Miller says. "We went from being a band that was always at 9 or 10 on the volume and energy scale, to being a band that could make something work on the lower, quiet side."

Still, the group also raged, cutting the scorching album opener (and frequent live-show encore) "Timebomb." For the record's howling closer, "Four Leaf Clover," they enlisted Exene Cervenka of L.A. punk band X to sing harmony. "I was a little star-struck around Exene," says Hammond, "but now she's my buddy. I don't always know what to talk to people about, but with Exene I know I can always talk music and UFOs."

For Miller, it's two other subjects that remind him most of the Too Far to Care sessions: presidents and telephones. Both, he says, have evolved greatly in the last two decades.

"We play 'Barrier Reef' every night and I have to sing the line, "Midnight came, midnight went, I thought I was the president," he says of the album's second song. "When I wrote it, Clinton was in office but he hadn't yet gone through the Lewinsky scandal. When that happened, I would sing it and think that it was a sly, subtle reference to oral sex. Then when Bush was in office, I was personally not a fan of his policies, so that line changed to being about a warmonger. Now it's even more complicated because of our current president."

Miller is even more amazed by how anachronistic payphones have become. On the road in support of the band's early albums, the quarter-call was his primary source of connecting with loved ones. "When I wrote the line 'telephones makes strangers out of lovers' in 'Niteclub,' I was imaging a guy on the side of the road with trucks whizzing by in the rain and him getting yelled at by a girlfriend," he says. "Now when I sing it, I'm looking down at an audience full of people where the majority of them are on their cell phones. Telephones are still making strangers out of lovers, but it's because it's all we look at and all we think about."

The line about "calling time and temperature just for some company" in LP standout "Big Brown Eyes" is especially dated which Miller admits to realizing even at the time he wrote it. "It was already a joke in '97," he says. "It was just my way of shouting out to a past that was disappearing."

Surprisingly, that landline past came rushing back to Miller when he returned to the Sonic Ranch to record the band's latest album, Graveyard Whistling, released in February. Opening a drawer of a bedside table, he discovered a note containing the telephone number of the girl about whom many of the songs on Too Far to Care were written.

But for Miller, the legacy of Too Far to Care isn't about phone calls, ex-presidents or even alt-country. In fact, the "alt-country" tag gave him grief for quite some time. "It took me a bunch of years to come to peace with it, but I embrace it to some extent now," he concedes. "I feed my kids with alt-country who would've thought that was even possible?"

Rather, he credit's the album's staying power to a certain innocence and lack of irony. He and the 97's were writing, recording and playing from the heart.

"There was nothing calculated or self-aware about Too Far to Care," he says, "and that's what people still respond to when they hear those songs."

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Old 97's' 'Too Far to Care': Inside Alt-Country Heroes' 1997 Breakout - RollingStone.com

Former US CTO Aneesh Chopra talks about big data, the importance of net neutrality, and why there's hope yet for getting things done in Washington, D.C.

For this week's edition of Fast Forward, I'm talking to Aneesh Chopra, the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, but now the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government and founder of NavHealth and Hunch Analytics.

We discuss how technology can change government, consumer privacy and most importantlyhis optimism about technology, government, and the direction in which the country is heading.

Dan Costa: I want to talk about the optimism that I have sensed from you about technology and government because frankly, that optimism is hard to find these days.

Aneesh Chopra: But it's grounded in reality. That's the best news. We have reasons to be hopeful we'll get into.

I will allow you to convince me. But first, you were the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. I understand that role is now open. Is there any chance you would like to serve again?

No. I will not serve in this role but I will say, I'm excited about the team that President Trump has already assembled in that office. His Deputy Chief Technology Officer [Michael Kratsios] is a phenomenally talented technology leader and has already begun making, I think, very positive moves to continue and build upon the work that we'd started.

So you were the first CTO. Can you just explain to the audience why the United States needs a Chief Technology Officer?

Well, let's begin with what the President had called for. President Obama ran for office and he basically said we've got to find a way to tap into the expertise of the American people to solve big problems. He didn't really believe Washington was going to be the center. And whether you voted for the President or not, that was his philosophy and he realized, early, that we have new technologies that allow us to communicate all over the world instantly

But...to influence [anyone in] Washington, you've got to hire lobbyists, you've got to be in some smoke-filled room in D.C. It didn't have the same sense of democratization, and so [Obama's] assignment on day one, when he was in the midst of the economic crisis, was to create a position called the Chief Technology Officer, who would help him advance a more open and transparent government. Not only to make the data the government held more available, but to listen to the American people's voices so we were more participatory and to find [a way] to collaborate between the public and private sector and nonprofit sectors to solve big problems. And that's exactly what we focused on in the first term.

We're going to get to the sort of government data sets in a bit, but I saw you gave a very optimistic speech yesterday. It's obviously a very polarized environment in Washington, D.C. right now, but your speech was filled with optimism that I think is really hard to find these days. Why do think things are getting better, at least in this particular respect?

Well it appears we're on a bipartisan trajectory to modernize the interface between the public sector and the private sector, and what that means is that both parties are in general agreement that we want to tap into the expertise of the American people, allow entrepreneurs and innovators to join hands. We may disagree on what we want them to focus on and we'll have a big political debate should it be on closing up our borders or advancing health care for everyone. That's a healthy debate. We're not going to see a lot of consensus potentially on an agenda, but if we have an underlying infrastructure that's open, there's no R or D highway lane.

We use it every day to advance commerce. So if we had that same construct in our infrastructure, increasingly our digital infrastructure, than I can bring my own device to school, I can have my kids connect their educational learning records to the Khan Academy so when they come home, we can watch the Khan videos that directly relate to the subject matter they're struggling with in the classroom and it can all work seamlessly. We're using these new technologies [to make] our personal lives better but [they can now] transform our health, our energy, our education, our financial services, the regulated sectors, and that's why I'm hopeful.

Are there more examples of common-ground issues that are not R versus D but really American ideals that can be advanced through technology?

I might be aggressive in suggesting that the strategy for American innovation that President Obama published and President Trump's new Office of American Innovation will likely have the same core elements. One, that the country's going to redefine its role in infrastructure, away from traditional roadways, railways, and runways but to expand it and include human capital, R&D, and digital infrastructure, which you can think of as broadband but can be more broadly, the digital electrical grid as well as the healthcare systems.

Second, that we have rules of the road. Whether we think they should be heavy or a light touch, there will be rules of the road to protect our security, engage on privacy issues, and make sure that we've got some competition policy that makes the digital economy work for everyone. Again, we may have differences of specific tools but the framework is that we need to have some collaborative view.

And then last but not least, this notion of opening up. That regardless of how we want to deliver government services, that the most efficient way is not to have everybody log in to one website but to have many choices. Some privately sponsored, some nonprofit sponsored, some public sector sponsored but with the premise of making sure people have all the information they need about the decisions in their lives, at each moment of a decision and at that moment, we have a country that's moving forward.

That's actually one of the things that I think you were most successful at during your tenureproviding access to these government data sets to consumers and businesses. Can you talk a little bit about that process, because we've come along way in a relatively short period of time?

Well, it started with what we've already known to be a successful case study, which is the weather industry. Going back 50+ years, there's been this consensus, not sure exactly if it was sort of master planning or just serendipity, but there had been the notion that we would invest the billions the country invests in satellites and sensors and other equipment, bring that information into an environment and then expose it. It was a judgment made going back over the last several decades that that information should be freely available.

At one point there was a debate, 'why do we need to have a weather.gov when we have weather.com?' That was sort of a naive understanding that weather.com is 100 percent powered by the open data sets that power weather.gov and that it's not an either or but it's reference of limitation that we compete on making it better. When we realized that that model works, we said let's shift the default. What President Obama's instructions to us were and our directive back to the agencies was three things.

One, immediate culture change. Make three data sets in your current environment openly available in 45 days. Two, develop a plan and engage the American people in the development of that plan so that you're listening to the data sets they value. And then three, we wanted to build some celebratory best practices and sort of honor those who've done it right to scale what works.

It turns out my successor, Todd Park, was the first awardee of our Best Practices because he didn't really focus on the supply of data. Can we add another data set to a website that no one ever heard of? But he went out and visited developers and said, 'Hey I've got a whole menu of data sets. Why don't you begin thinking about using it.' So he emphasized the use, not the supply, and that led to this movement. There are now thousands of people that convene in Washington every year in Health Datapalooza, and it's because people are now being engaged on the use of that data to build better products and services for people who need healthcare and that's something that we're seeing scale in every domain.

So that's the private sector taking public data and innovating with it and creating products and businesses?

That's right.

Does it flow the other way? Do private sector companies like Uber share their data sets with the cities they're operating in because it's got better traffic and commuter data than the cities themselves?

Yeah. Well, Waze struck an agreement with the City of LA exactly for that purpose. When we were grappling with what to do in the wake of emergencies, FEMA said, 'Well, what if we collaborated with utilities and others and we said let's crowd source information so that we can be smarter about what happens at every moment in time.'

In fact, data collection has always been a role of government. It's been a regulatory tool in government but we hadn't thought about it in the context of digital products. I just want to drive home in the fastest, safest way possible and if getting there is a combination of sensors in the roads when they're being built that can communicate speeds in combination with crowd sourced information, collected by a private entity or a group of them, the marriage of those two data sets could help me live a better life. This isn't the private sector doing it outside of the role of government. It's in collaboration with.

Thanks to the digital economy, there's no scarcity. It's not like I give you a copy of the data set and therefore I cannot give it somebody else. There doesn't need to be a single owner of the data. Copies can be made available more widely and let the marketplace decide how and where the best methods of information sharing might be.

So, it is most certainly coming back. We had a national broadband map where people began telling us where and how they were not getting access to broadband and that was informing policy about gaps. So this notion of crowdsourcing and collaborating can be done at the individual or corporate levels.

One of the things that often gets left out of these conversations is the idea of consumer privacy. It's great to share, but there's so many privacy issues that get brought up. Is that an area where we need more regulation?

For sure. President Obama asked our team to look into modernizing privacy in a digital age and we called it our Internet Privacy Bill of Rights. In the early parts of 2012, we put up a framework that said, 'Look, we need to move to a baseline regulatory standard.' And we used the Fair Information Practice standards inside government ... That's a basic principle that you've got to communicate and honor the wishes of your customer. So we thought one way to do that would be to shift the world from notice and consent where ... Have you read a user agreement online?

I have not. I have clicked through a ton of 'em.

It's like how fast can I find the agree button to move on? But if you have settings panel ... So if you go to Netflix.com/settings, it reminds you of all the places you've authorized to gain access to your Netflix account. Now, that may be sensitive to youlike what movies you watchand that may not be something you want advertisers to know when they hit you up on your magazine's properties. We did put forward a framework. It didn't make it through Congress, but there are two other ways we've had influence.

One, there are existing regulations for health privacy, education privacy, financial services and teller communications and so we said, 'Okay, in the regulated domains, let's get each expert agency to begin advancing the ball.' What we're starting to see is a more voluntary alignment. So let me give you an example. In the medical records space, when your doctor or your hospital holds your data, they're regulated. If you ask for a copy of that data and you want to put in your computer or on an app on your phone, unregulated. What that app does with your data might be benign. 'Hey, I'm just going to give you information about the time you have take your medications.' Or maybe a little bit untoward, which I'm going to sell the fact that you've got this health condition to advertisers so that they can more directly influence you.

Well, we put up a model privacy notice and what does Apple do? Apple says that any developer that wants to touch HealthKit must sign the Office of the National Coordinator Model Privacy Notice, which says 'Disclosure and choice on I'm going to sell your data or not, etc.' Doesn't dictate what knobs and dials are set but it just describes what you have to do. And if you do it and lie about it, the Federal Trade Commission can bring you up on existing statutes about not lying to your customer.

So that'll work in regulated industries.

That's right.

Do you think we need something that's broader?

Our opinion was, we're no longer in the administration, that a base line FIPS [Federal Information Processing Standard] for everyone in the internet economy and that led to questions like do not track, which was sort of a manifestation of that policy in action. I do think we still need to have that consumer internet privacy bill of rights, there may be a new framework besides the way we've described it. The new FCC approach to privacy is to deregulate and shift the responsibility over to the Federal Trade Commission so voluntary enforceable codes of conduct might be the regulatory path. I don't know. But again, we're going to see flavors of different parties' prioritizing different aspects, but we do think there needs to be some regime, even if it's light touch, that advances the baseline privacy principles.

Sticking with the FCC, Ajit Pai has announced his intention to pretty much dismantle all the neutrality regulations across the board.

Cray-cray. What's he thinking?

It's not unexpected, since it's been his position for a number of years. But now he's putting that position into effect. Can you explain why consumers should care about net neutrality protections?

So we have believed, universally, in a free and open internet. Frankly, both parties have been committed to a free and open internet. And their only debate is whether a preventive regulation might retain what we live today or whether we wait for a crisis to emerge and then respond.

Now, thoughtful people can have disagreement about the threat but what I would say to the American people, and frankly to those around the world, is if you believe a core value of our internet is that you can say what you want, you can consume whatever you want and it's your choice how and in what manner you engage, then why not instantiate that in our global framework? Not so much whether the US is more or less aggressive around this but also to protect our free and open internet when we travel around the world.

So having a baseline governance framework that says 'This platform is meant to be neutral.' Not to play favorites, one against the other. Then it give us more leverage around the world to say, 'Where there are developing country-specific internet infrastructure, that that's actually in violation of this broader movement.'

I think the consumer who wants to protect that right should rise up and tell the Federal Communications Commission to stand down on the dismantling of what I think is a really critical piece of regulatory infrastructure for free and open internet.

What's the worst case scenario? How is it going to affect somebody who goes home and logs online? How could their experience change if there are no net neutrality protections?

Well, let's begin by saying, let's presume you enjoy watching your videos on Netflix but your internet provider also happens to be your cable set-top box provider and they make the judgment that the experience, the speeds, the quality of the transmission will be worse if you stick with the Netflix path because you're hurting their revenues. Maybe you even choose to threaten to get rid of your cable account because you don't need it now. You can cut the cord. If they respond in the manner in which there is no net neutrality regulation, they may subtly weaken the quality of service that you have on one application to the betterment of the one that is preferenced in their economic stack.

That's not how we want access to our internet controlled. The internet is an open resource. It's free. It's available for us to connect. App developers have built products and services and if you believe in competition, free markets, entrepreneurship, you're going to want to retain that level playing field. And not have the person who you pay to provide the pipe to your home somehow dictate in what manner you can consume that information.

I think it's safe to say that Netflix would not exist if the cable companies were able to shut it down at an early level and prevent access.

They're in a very difficult spot because once you make it and you become a much needed application, the ability to discriminate against Netflix today is very, very hard. The consumer outrage would be off the charts. The fear is not Netflix, it's the second, third, fourth iteration of it that doesn't yet have scale that might give us a better experience that we'd never know because it was squashed prematurely and treated unfairly in today's market place. That's the fear.

Look, as far as I can tell, when the Title II regulations were promulgated, it's not like the internet stocks all crumbled. It's not like we saw a massive devaluation. It's not like anyone threatened to actually cut back their capital investments to build out networks. Quite the opposite. I love the transparency of our publicly traded markets. You have to report to your shareholders facts. No fake news allowed to your shareholders. They were asked explicitly, 'Does this regulation harm your growth plans for capital investment.' And it was an unequivocal no across the board.

Yeah, Verizon is on the record saying it had no effect and they don't think it's going to hurt their earnings at all.

So here we have rules of the road that we all broadly speaking, agree with. It didn't have the negative effects we were worried about and now we want to rip off the bandaid and start over? #Fail.

Let's talk about another disconcerting topic, which we talk about a lot on this show, which is automation. The technological revolution we're living in is amazing but the truth of the matter is, we're doing more with computers and automation and it's costing jobs. Entire industries are getting restructured because of automation. How big a problem is that? What is the appetite in Washington to actually deliver solutions?

So, three points. One, it is real but it is an area that has upsides and downsides. Industries that have been automated for 50+ years, i.e., manufacturing, [like] building a car in the era of the Model T, pre-automation [versus] building a car today. We still employ tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people across the automotive supply chain. Just the scope of work changes. More creativity, design, programming, quality assurance, less rote repeatable tasks.

We can produce cars with fewer people now than we could 10 years ago.

Yeah, and what that means is it unleashed the creativity of those who might've worked in the auto industry to now move from just being a worker, one shift and one role, to potentially being an entrepreneur, to take what they've learned and apply it to build out a feature that now could be part of the global supply chain. So there is a dynamism to the economy.

My second point would be if you look at the effects, one could either stall them, i.e., weaken the pace of change, or I would argue, double down and take those very same technologies and apply them to help us find the next big opportunity in our lives. We all have passions, talents that are unique to us and if we could share them with the very same automation tools that are going to help our industries be more productive, then they might say a niche. Every day there's a job opening somewhere in the country that's been built for you. Someone involved in a corporation could say 'Enough people in that region have so many talents. I might want to open up a new company just to take advantage of the human capital.' I think if we find a way to double down on the use of those technologies to help us make work force development decisions, that is a great role of government.

Last but not least, there is a movement to decouple the social safety net from a single employer. So the more we can say you're going to have some baseline income, you're going to have some access to health insurance, you're going to have some worker's compensation that's built around your needs, whether I take two or three jobs, start my own job, join a big company, I can have the stability and safety that I need while responding to the increasingly dynamic economy that might result in me having 10, 12, 15 jobs over the course of my lifetime. We need to have a more agile, personally driven social safety net to make these pieces work.

And part of it's the way the labor force has shifted to where unemployment's at a five-year low.

That's right.

But a lot of those new jobs that have been created are 1099 jobs. They're part-time jobs, they're gig jobs. They're not W2 jobs that come with a 401K and healthcare. And there doesn't seem to be something that's replacing that gap for that new class of worker.

Yeah and bipartisan leaders, including my mentor, Senator Mark Warner, are really focusing in Washington on how to think about a social safety net in the 21st century and again, I say to the point, my sense of hopeful optimism about where we're going, that may not make the headlines. The Russian investigation and the Comey hearing took over the oxygen this week, but that very same Senator Mark Warner, who led the Democratic response, if you will, to that hearing, has been working with his Republican counterparts on building a social safety net in the 21st century and you can have both Washingtons, the popcorn, kind of sugar high on the news, but the more fundamental collaboration that we so desperately need.

Before we get to my closing questions, I want go back to that initial point, because I think it's a really important one. You've got access to a lot of the government actors and agencies that are operating below the political level that are just trying to get stuff done. People look at all the noise and all the politics and all the recrimination, can you let people know what's really going on here at that next level down?

Let's take healthcare. We know we're having a raging debate about the future of healthcare reform yet there's a program called healthcare.gov that, by the way, is still operational and one could've made the case and I think politically many on the left are making the case, that the Trump administration is actively undermining the program. It's cutting marketing budgets for healthcare.gov, it may not be investing in its capabilities. Yet, quietly, only two or so weeks ago, the Trump administration announced, 'We're going to add application programming interfaces, APIs, so third-party health insurance online brokers can directly enroll people in healthcare.gov.'

So we may lament the weakening of marketing dollars for the website healthcare.gov, but we should be celebrating the Trump administration's decision to open up APIs. So if Governor McAuliffe in Virginia wants to build McAuliffe's healthinsurancestorefront.com, in partnership with one of the online brokers, we might increase our own marketing budgets and collaborate to get more Virginians enrolled this year than ever before, even if the Trump administration weakens the website.

So our view is, in the trenches, we proceed in promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in opening up of government, even in the Trump administration, and I think that should be celebrated. We may have a debate about 'don't cut Medicaid $800 billion' and let that be a healthy, vibrant democratic debate. Be hopeful that, 'Wow, this decision actually will increase the chance that people that need that health insurance subsidy will get it.'

That's a great example. Closing questions. What technological trend concerns you the most? What keeps you up at night?

Cyber security. We have very real, nation-state actors who are dedicating incredible resources into disrupting the use of our digital assets, whether it be in our elections for our democracy, our banking systems. Frankly, the operations of almost every sector of the economy are at risk. While the private sector can respond to private sector threats, private sector response to a nation-state actor is quite different.

I am very afraid that as we proceed to aggressively digitize every sector of the economy, including regulated sectors, that our capacity to protect our networks may not keep up with the pace of the attack vectors. DARPA called this asymmetrical warfare. You only need to write a few lines of code and to convince a few people to authorize you to get access to a network and disrupt a great deal of our global infrastructure while our defense systems have to be aware of the many, many, many versions of those small attacks. We can only build but so many moats, and I'm anxious about that issue. But I'm hopeful that we'll continue to collaborate to solve it but anxious.

What does the government need to do in order to protect itself?

I think it's three-fold. One, we've got to open up more information sharing and collaboration so the tools we have to protect our government network should be as widely available to protect commercial networks without it being a burden. Two, I think we need to keep investing in research and development to promote next-generation models. As an example, even if an attacker gets into your network, tools to mitigate the impact once they're in may be as important, if not more, than just protecting them at the edge. Building up a new cyber-security insurance market that builds standards so that we know who's a better or a weaker performer in this market, could clean up the system.

And then last but not least, I think we need to have a new understanding of digital infrastructure. India has given a billion people a unique digital identity. That means they can register for a bank account, schedule a physician appointment, maybe even vote in a future election, using their unique digital identity. And if they can do it for pennies on the dollar for a billion people, certainly the rest of the world can begin to think about digital identity as core infrastructure and that we find a way to get out of the user names and passwords rut that has been a complete disaster and a weakness of almost any application.

Politically, that would be labeled a National Identity Card.

One can do it in the private sector. You can have a national identity standard that's an acceptable standard so that today, when I want to use TSA Pre or I wanna get fast tracked through airport security, the private sector company CLEAR allows me to be identified and vetted to bypass the lines. So CLEAR is not an arm of the government. CLEAR met the industry's standards that were required of the government and were participating in that market place. So I think there is a way to do this that isn't Big Brother but a competing network of privately selected products and services that are acceptable forms of identification in the digital front door. That's the hope.

On a more optimistic note, what technology do you use that inspires wonder?

I will say Twitter continues to be my application of choice because I'm able to see and witness and learn from voices I don't normally interact with in my private personal life. So the delight I get from following the Twitter feeds, capturing the zeitgeist of the moment by particular hashtags, that just gives me delight and educates me in ways that I'm very thankful for. And for a whopping zero dollar investment, right? We get this free public utility that is Twitter.

That's caused them some problems.

There is an argument to be made about Twitter as a utility because I'd be happy to pay a utility fee to get access to this unbelievably powerful resource.

You don't find the conversation too coarse or too noisy? How to manage the trolls?

It's funny, you know. You sort of witness what's going on. You figure out who you can avoid. You don't read a lot of the comments back. At the end of the day, I know the network of people whom I trust that tweet thoughtful information and they have a network and then they have a network and so you get exposed to sources of information that delight you every day. I think it's an unbelievable resource.

Other than Twitter, is there any other technology or device or service that you use that's changed your life?

Slack. At the end of the day, the internet is a communications mechanism and you think about the way we communicate in these regulated sectors. Could you imagine communicating with your doctor? Today, it's like you have to schedule an appointment eight months from now to do something and I just want to ask a question. Can't I just Slack my doc a question? We have not brought that simple, elegant communications experience, which is thriving in the commercial setting, into our interactions with teachers, our interactions with doctors, our interactions with our banks. So I think bringing Slack to the regulated sectors of the economy would be a phenomenal gift.

How can people find you online, track what you're doing, and keep up with you?

So I wrote a book called Innovative State and I keep on innovativestate.com updates about my policy proceedings and my points of view.

I also have a company, an incubator we call it, Hunch Analytics. So if you have ideas on what we should be investing in and focusing on [let us know]. We really hatch our own ideas, but we're informed by partnerships.

We also have a healthcare program called NavHealth that I'm currently putting the bulk of my time on. And we're trying to bring this open data framework to life, to help patients make better decisions at every step of their care journey.

So my hope is that if anyone who is interested in those areas, to engage among Twitter @aneeshchopra. I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm very keen to connect with as many people as have interested in this shared vision of the future.

For more Fast Forward with Dan Costa, subscribe to the podcast. On iOS, download Apple's Podcasts app, search for "Fast Forward" and subscribe. On Android, download the Stitcher Radio for Podcasts app via Google Play.

Dan Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com and the Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff-Davis. He oversees the editorial operations for PCMag.com, Geek.com, ExtremeTech.com as well as PCMag's network of blogs, including AppScout and SecurityWatch. Dan makes frequent appearances on local, national, and international news programs, including CNN, MSNBC, FOX, ABC, and NBC where he shares his perspective on a variety of technology trends. Dan began working at PC Magazine in 2005 as a senior editor, covering consumer electronics, blogging on Gearlog.com, and serving as... More

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Why Obama's First CTO Is 'Hopeful' About DC, Loves Twitter - PCMag

Fox Searchlight has released a UK trailer for Battle of the Sexes. The film is based on the real-life showdown between tennis champion and feminist icon Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and chauvinist has-been Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell).

Whats notable about this trailer is that while the US trailer only hinted at Kings homosexuality, this UK trailer makes it a plot point, developing Kings budding romance as she continue to fight for equality. It also makes King look more like the main character who constantly has to push back against the obnoxious Riggs. Part of that could simply be that Stone is riding high off her well-deserved Oscar win from La La Land, and its easier to see Carell playing the buffoon, but its still interesting to see her directly in the lead rather than a co-lead as seen in the US trailer.

Check out the new Battle of the Sexes trailer below. The film opens September 22nd and also stars Sarah Silverman, Andrea Riseborough, Elisabeth Shue, Alan Cumming, Bill Pullman, and Eric Christian Olsen.

Heres the official synopsis for Battle of the Sexes:

The electrifying 1973 tennis match between World number one Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) was billed as the BATTLE OF THE SEXES and became the most watched televised sports event of all time. The match caught the zeitgeist and sparked a global conversation on gender equality, spurring on the feminist movement. Trapped in the media glare, King and Riggs were on opposites sides of a binary argument, but off-court each was fighting more personal and complex battles. With a supportive husband urging her to fight the Establishment for equal pay, the fiercely private King was also struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, while Riggs gambled his legacy and reputation in a bid to relive the glories of his past. Together, Billie and Bobby served up a cultural spectacle that resonated far beyond the tennis courts and animated the discussions between men and women in bedrooms and boardrooms around the world.

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'Battle of the Sexes': New Trailer Finds Emma Stone Leading a Feminist Revolution - Collider.com

Theresa Mays ill-fated snap election seems to have transformed the UKs national zeitgeist, not least in the public narrative over Brexit.

Much diminished is the focus on controlling migration and sovereignty and much more to the fore is a focus on safeguarding jobs and the economy. Mays erstwhile inexorable march toward the cliff of so-called Hard Brexit no longer seems unstoppable. And whilst, at least for the moment, there are few voices challenging the UKs eventual departure from the EU, key political and business figures are openly advancing ways forward which involve transitional arrangements, continued membership of the Customs Union and, even, for some, continued membership of the Single Market recognising that compromises would be necessary over EU migration and the continued role of the European Court of Justice.

Here, we link to a report we published in January which explores how controlling free movement and continuing free trade between the UK and the EU might be reconciled and which set out some thoughts which, we would submit, are more relevant now than ever. We also link here to a flowchart we published soon after the referendum last year and track the progress since.

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What are the options for the UK and EU to reach a compromise over free movement and access to the single market? - Lexology (registration)

Gay movements in Canada must confront the history of the Canadian state or risk folding into the nation-building project of dispossession

As Canada 150 draws nearer, those committed to supporting Indigenous sovereignty and dislodging the power of colonialism are faced with the task of dispelling the myth of Canada as a benevolent nation. While the expanding grip of neoliberalism has given rise to a reactionary global righft-wing populism, the violence of supposedly progressive liberal settler-colonial states has fallen through the cracks of popular analysis and comprehension.

One of the more recent assets to the liberal nation-state has been Gay Pride. Today the event is perhaps entering its most contentious year in Vancouver. Breaking the silence that generally surrounds Gay Pride, queer and trans activists, led by Black Lives Matter Vancouver, are calling for the removal of any inclusion of the police/carceral state from the annual march (Vancouver Police Department, RCMP, Corrections Canada etc). But for nearly the past three decades, Pride and associated queer festivals have repeatedly shown their allegiances to the rich (through corporate partnership) and to projects of settler-colonialism, for example by accepting and promoting the occupation of Palestinian land through Brand Israel Pinkwashing propaganda among festival floats and sponsors globally. The truth is that Canadian homosexuals have long been in bed with the state apparatus and its colonial interests.

While commie fags and trans dissidents have always existed, a new wave of resistance is emerging in response to a growing neoliberalization and corporatization within the mainstream LGBT community. In particular the past decade of radical queer leftist organizing in North America and abroad has attempted to reposition and re-emphasize the political origins of gay liberation as being founded in disruption and riot. Groups such as Black Lives Matter Toronto and anti-capitalist queer groups such as Gay Shameand the Against Equality archive have worked tirelessly to bring to the forefront of our collective zeitgeist the idea that state violence cannot be reformed or diversified. While the state and its police attempt to apologize for the crimes they have committed historically against queer and trans people, activists have shown up to confront them and the mainstream gay populace with the selectively forgotten histories of co-optation and current state practices of pinkwashing and assimilation.

Today it is important to examine the shift in thinking and priorities that caused the more radical tenets of gay liberation to be forgotten. How did gay liberation in North America transform into a movement whose only concern was gay rights and equal opportunity under neoliberal capitalism? Were these movements ever liberatory to begin with? If we trace the beginnings of the Gay Rights Movement in Canada back to the states decriminalization of homosexuality in 1968, we must also recall the White Paper of the following year, which attempted to further assimilate Indigenous peoples into the nation-state by eradicating treaty rights and title. The historical proximity of the White Paper and the Criminal Law Amendment Act reveals the instrumentalization of queer settlers against Indigenous people in order to strengthen the nation-building project of dispossession in Canada.

Interrogating the radicality of gay liberation

At the end of the 1960s in North America as well as in many western European countries, a new gay liberation movement was gaining momentum as a response to the violence of an inherently heteropatriarchal and increasingly neoliberal society. Bound by similar lived experiences of oppression, queers who had been subjected to state violence based on their gender presentation and sexual orientation began organizing together. Like similar left struggles emerging at the time, most notably womens liberation, many factions of the gay liberation movement (most commonly known as the Gay Liberation Front) viewed the collective liberation of all struggles as being inextricably linked by systemic marginalization. It was the street hustlers and trans sex workers of color that catapulted a movement now embraced as gay pride, while the upper echelon of closeted gay white men were sitting in boardrooms and working on moving capital across borders.

In recounting his days in the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, Ferd Eggan recalls a conviction amongst his comrades that, the global capitalist system function[ed] through conquest and exploitation and [could] only maintain itself through oppression. From this, many reasoned that in order to eliminate the root of oppression they would have to work towards dismantling the United States of America. When speaking about the nature of early gay liberation, SFU Professor Elise Chenier reaffirms that the movement was one of radicalization, not reform. It also recognized class struggle as being intimately tangled up with sexual liberation. An analysis of class oppression could have led early activists towards an intersectional understanding that the root of their common subjugation was to be found not only in the structures of capitalist domination but also in colonial power.

Liberation, however, was effectively de-radicalized by forces that shifted their politics towards a rights-based movement. What had begun as a retaliation against police brutality at Stonewall in New York and the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco, and a broader resistance to heteropatriarchal society, would eventually dissolve into a relatively homogeneous and obedient liberal political body seeking recognition and rights from the state. To understand why and how the history of a queer rebellion eventually collided and colluded with capitalism and colonialism in a Canadian context, gradually woven into a national narrative of tolerance, it is helpful to analyze the very social fabric of Canada itself.

The Canadian progress narrative

The modern myth of progress in Canada, or the Canadian dream, is predicated on the fallacy that all individuals are given equal opportunity to prosper in a multicultural and egalitarian society. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that Canada, like the United States of America, is a settler-colonial occupation on lands that either remain unceded or were stolen away from Indigenous nations through treaties written primarily by English speaking colonizers. Inequality not only lies in the disparaging difference between settler populations (white and immigrant) populations and Indigenous people, but also the uneven distribution of wealth along class lines. In order to rationalize the concentration of wealth amongst an elite class in our societies, a productive citizen narrative has been constructed in order to make poverty into an individual issue. One simply has to work hard to achieve comfort. What goes constantly ignored in this narrative is that the privilege of settlerhood and Canadian citizenship, as well as class mobility, comes at the expense of dispossession. Canada relies on the cooperation of its citizens to enact this violence by turning Indigenous economies into capitalist ones open to resource exploitation and the forces of the free market. In recent decades, Gay cooperation has played an important but under-examined role in creating, legitimizing and sustaining the occupation of Canada.

In 1967, one hundred years after confederation, Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal government invited homosexuals into the ever-expanding folds of the nation by declaring that, theres no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. Trudeau specified that he believed that the introduction of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which decriminalized sexual acts between consenting men, would bring Canada up to speed with civilized society. Up until this point, the homosexual in many parts of the western colonial heteropatriarchal society had been criminalized and was seen as a threat to the reproduction of labor under capitalism. Suddenly he was being reconceived as a citizen, and therefore someone who could at least potentially be neoliberalized and used in favor of imperial expansion.

This shift in policy would be the first benevolent gesture an olive branch extended towards gays helping to memorialize the Trudeau dynasty as allies and to begin the process of queer assimilation. Perhaps less common knowledge among gay Canadians is that not long after the Trudeau administration had decriminalized homosexual acts, the White Paper was introduced in 1969. As mentioned, the White Paper was an effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the nation state of Canada by eradicating Aboriginal title and treaty rights. This Trudeau/Chrtien initiative was eventually withdrawn due to the resistance and activism it was met with by Indigenous leaders like George Manuel. Yet then minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrtien saw this only as a temporary setback, shelving it in his words for the generation of leaders who [would] accept it.

This shift in the multicultural states concern for gay citizens in a civilized society can be interpreted as an early incarnation of what would later be articulated by activists and scholars as Pinkwashing. While queer people were among some of the last populations to be employed in nation-building techniques by Canada, LGBT settlers are now some of the most patriotic citizens when boasting of Canadas progressive policies and the rights they have acquired. While Indigenous peoples continue to fight against the expropriation of Indigenous lands and economies for resource extraction, settler queer populations have been much more susceptible to cooptation, trading in Molotov cocktails for rights and the relative boredom offered by assimilation into this society.

Under the present-day Trudeau administration, efforts to further assimilate and eradicate Indigenous sovereignty and land title continue through attempted treaty re-negotiations. This imperial expansion of the state goes unnoticed as Justin Trudeau continues to march in pride parades, raises the rainbow flag on Parliament Hill, and is constructed as a sex symbol in the eyes of those privileged enough to be able to overlook his ugly policies.

No Pride in Policing or Settler-Colonial Occupation

Besides welcoming their gay-loving prime minister into the family, many middle-class gays and lesbians in Vancouver and across the nation are also eager to embrace police representation in pride celebrations, brushing aside class struggle and the fight against anti-black racism. In response to Black Lives Matter-Vancouvers call to remove uniformed police officers from marching in the citys pride parade, reactions and opinions amongst a supposedly homogenous LGBTQ community have unsurprisingly been split along the fault lines of class and racial privilege. While many activists of color and queer radicals of all generations have labored strenuously to remind the assimilated majority of the violence and racism inherent in the military and police force, the predominantly white middle-class gay and trans liberal body has jumped to the defense of the police. The police are heralded as saviors who will protect queer and trans people from the homophobic and transphobic reactionary violence of a constructed, pervasive homophobe or terrorist, always assumed to be planning an attack on queer gatherings. We are also informed that inclusion and representation within the police is a good indicator of how far weve come, and that young children will look on in wonderment as a cop cradles his rainbow-painted gun. One thing dutifully left out of these narratives is that most attacks on queer people are racially driven, and that these violent phobias and structural reactions are a product of the same society and state that those terror-stricken gays wish to protect and reproduce.

In an attempt to defend and preserve the Canadian legal system, some Gay Citizens are able to identify supposedly corrupt or bad cops while simultaneously praising so-called progressive cops. Their line of reasoning does not take issue with structural violence, and is not dissimilar to the position that decolonization is possible exclusively by reforming the nation-state in an effort to repair damage done by colonial histories of residential school and cultural genocide. Of course because Canada continues to exert colonial control, decolonization is inseparable from the dismantling of state power and redistribution of occupied land. Believing that the actions of police can be changed by inclusionary representation (black and gay cops) and educational reform (trans and sex worker competency training) is dismissive of the concerns raised by black queer activists and others who will never feel safe due to the degree of their marginalization and criminalization of their modes of economy. These concerns highlight the underbelly of anti-black racism, class privilege and colonial violence that exist within queer communities. They also demonstrate that until the system premised on criminalization is radically transformed and overcome, there can be no simple inclusionary reforms.

In Vancouver, cop-sympathetic gay and trans people attempt to provide a logic of localism, which posits that the problems of police violence happen elsewhere, most notably down south in the US or out east in Toronto, but not in our own backyard. Such claims erase and minimize police violence on Coast Salish territories, including the recent murder of Phuong Na (Tony)Du and brutalization of Solomon Akintoye, and the ongoing violence and incarceration of Indigenous people and other low-income residents of the Downtown Eastside. They also posit an insular and unidimensional queer identity politic, where issues that supposedly do not concern gays are irrelevant, allowing some to embrace violent institutions that have never harmed them or harmed them less often. This narrow lens fails to acknowledge that the nation-state, which protects their privilege and wealth, was built and continues to be expanded through slavery (both historic and current racist incarceration practices), indentured labor and the genocide of Indigenous peoples.

If a queer politics is truly to be anti-colonial, it must understand that the police and RCMP are agents of the state, whose jobs are to enforce laws in Canada, by policing poor and racialized people and furthering the process of settlement. The state is able to expand its control of these lands by prioritizing settler safety and welfare over that of Indigenous people, by renegotiating treaties to further assimilate and remove Indigenous sovereignty, and by sanctioning resource extraction. While the state may attempt to win over queer approval of its apparatus, it is in our best interest to reject this relationship.

Against Canada, towards collective liberation

As we approach a global zenith in the amalgamation of state power and gay liberal politics, homonationalism in Canada has visibly intensified. This is perhaps most pronounced in the recent merging of cultural narratives around the celebration of 150 years since Confederation with those of Pride celebrations, depicted as being complementary and congruous with one another. Roots Canadas campaign celebrating 150 years of being nice cites the legalization of same-sex marriage through the Civil Marriage Act in 2005 as an example of Canadas progressive and brave nature, while the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce raises a rainbow flag in advertisements to celebrate gay capitalism. Unsurprisingly absent from these corporate promotions is any counter-discourse challenging Canada 150 and its ongoing history of displacement and genocide.

A renewed gay liberation should emphasize the need to no longer define queer and trans people in relation to whether or not it aligns with the colonial nation-state. In fact, it should recognize decolonization as critical to any liberation process. When the rights bestowed upon some queer citizens by the state protect the lives of the privileged and visibly white, we must not ignore that the very material violence of the neoliberal state as occupier and expanding imperial force extinguishes the lives of those who are racialized and marginalized.

Indigenous and Black people in Canada are some of the largest growing prison populations, and are also disproportionately living with and criminalized for HIV/AIDS, an illness that many privileged queers feel has all but been turned into a manageable condition. The misconstruction that we are living in a post-AIDS world fails to take into account the multiplicity of queer experiences under capitalism. It is ironic that while homosexuality is decriminalized by the Canadian state, the very vocation held by the youth who initiated the early queer riots i.e. sex work remains effectively criminalized. In addition to assisting Indigenous peoples on the urban frontlines of anti-gentrification struggles and rural sites of land defense, radical queers must recognize the criminalization of our bodies and economies as yet another form of state violence.

In our efforts to build relationships with Indigenous nations, settler queer populations (especially white settlers) must be cautious in our approach to Indigenous solidarity. In particular we must not co-opt Indigenous voices and narratives as a means to our own end of radicalism (the dismantling of capitalism and the state). This includes resisting the urge to impose western frameworks of understanding gender and queerness on Indigenous people, or using Two-spirit histories for our own narratives.

Whiteness as a supremacy, as well as anti-Indigenous racism, sex work antagonism and anti-Black racism within queer communities must be confronted and eradicated. In order to achieve this, the assumed homogeneity of the LGBT community must be challenged as no longer being composed of individuals with shared experiences, but rather an uncomfortable and antithetical combination of those benefiting from neoliberal forces and those suffering under them.

Liberation is both a psychological undertaking and a material project. Those of us who remain imprisoned and oppressed must fight to name and interrogate the forces that shape our world, and this includes the colonial foundations that surround us. A truly liberatory queer politic rejects the idea that gay matters are limited to the LGBT alphabet soup of identity politics, instead asserting that queer struggles should center and prioritize the liberation of all those incarcerated, displaced and dispossessed. Understanding this, queer liberation must then announce itself as separate from and incompatible with the nation-state project of settler-colonialism, which continues to expand and acquire wealth from resource extraction, aided and abetted by neoliberal gay complicity. Collective liberation, in short, means liberation from Canada.

Centering an anti-colonial approach in organizing our radical queer movements means understanding our complicated history with police forces and colonial governments, including the ways in which queer settler populations have been and continue to be used against Indigenous peoples. With this knowledge, we should be able to break with oppression and rejoin movements that are working towards the dismantling of the nation-state and its apparatus, and assist Indigenous peoples in their movements for sovereignty and land reclamation.

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Against Canada, Towards Queer Liberation - The Mainlander

LOS ANGELES, June 23 Check out this new trailer for Battle of the Sexes that serves up the ultimate showdown between men and women in the form of a tennis match.

Emma Stone and Steve Carrell star in this film about the famous 1973 clash between tennis greats Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

The synopsis of the film reads: The electrifying 1973 tennis match between World number one Billie Jean King (Stone) and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs (Carell) was billed as the Battle of the Sexes and became the most watched televised sports event of all time. The match caught the zeitgeist and sparked a global conversation on gender equality, spurring on the feminist movement. Trapped in the media glare, King and Riggs were on opposites sides of a binary argument, but off-court each was fighting more personal and complex battles. With a supportive husband urging her to fight the Establishment for equal pay, the fiercely private King was also struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, while Riggs gambled his legacy and reputation in a bid to relive the glories of his past. Together, Billie and Bobby served up a cultural spectacle that resonated far beyond the tennis courts and animated the discussions between men and women in bedrooms and boardrooms around the world.

The film also stars Sarah Silverman, Andrea Riseborough, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Pullman and Alan Cumming.

Battle of the Sexes is set for release on October 20.

A screengrab from Battle of the Sexes that stars Emma Stone and Steve Carrell among others.

Link:

Emma Stone, Steve Carell face off in 'Battle of the Sexes' (VIDEO) - Malay Mail Online

Attuned to the emerging alternative galleries and performance spaces in downtown Manhattan, the journal, published out of Ms. DeAks SoHo loft, turned the spotlight on art at the margins: performance art, video art, conceptual art and outsider art. She had a special affection for street art, which she once called information from the middle of the night.

Ms. DeAks critical style was personal, quirky and inventive, with adjectives like nuancical popping up unexpectedly.

You couldnt tell if it was a Joycean toying with the language or a problem of translation, Mr. Robinson said in an interview. She was a poet.

The prose was a calculated affront to the rarefied theorizing that surrounded minimalism and dominated the slick art journals.

Theres something rotten about a structure that produces terminological pollution and calls it theory, like a mob-controlled waste disposal company, Ms. DeAk once wrote. The goal was to destroy the criticship of critics, she was quoted as saying in an unpublished article for Artforum magazine in 1974.

It was also to get there first, even if that meant writing about art still in the studio. As a part-time assistant at the alternative gallery Artists Space, Ms. DeAk organized a series in 1974 devoted to video, performance art and readings that included Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper and Jack Smith. She was later among the first critics to notice Jean-Michel Basquiat, before he began showing in galleries.

She continued to beat the bushes in the early 1980s as a contributing writer for Artforum, where she and her fellow critic Rene Ricard covered the downtown scene like a zeitgeist tag team. Ms. DeAk later wrote an occasional column for Interview magazine. Called The New According to Edit DeAk, the column was based on her Polaroid pictures of gallery openings and parties.

The critic William Zimmer, in The SoHo Weekly News, summed her up succinctly: DeAk has been everywhere before anybody.

Edit Deak was born on Sept. 16, 1948, in Budapest, to Bela Deak and the former Vira Csatkai, a teacher. Little is known about her early life.

At 18 she married Peter Grosz, an artist, who later changed his surname to Grass. Soon after, the couple, traveling separately in the trunks of two cars, crossed the border from Hungary into Yugoslavia and, after a stay in Italy, made a beeline for Manhattan, determined to plunge into the New York art world.

Ms. DeAk also changed how she rendered her last name; capitalizing the a, she seemed to think, made it seem more American. She used a lowercase d at the beginning of her career and an uppercase d later.

Her marriage to Mr. Grass ended in divorce. Her survivors include a sister, Eva.

Ms. DeAk earned an art history degree from Columbia in 1972. In her senior year, she took a seminar on art criticism given by Brian ODoherty, the editor in chief of Art in America. Also in attendance were Mr. Robinson and Mr. Cohn, who became her fellow conspirators in the creation of Art-Rite.

The magazine, published irregularly until expiring in 1978, envisioned the alternative art scene as a social collective and itself as an enabler. It invited Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, William Wegman and others to design its covers, and made space in its pages for artists to write or show their work.

In 1976, Ms. DeAk, with Mr. Robinson, Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, helped found Printed Matter, a publisher and distributor of artists books.

When Ingrid Sischy, the director of Printed Matter, took over as editor of Artforum in 1979, she saw a kindred spirit in Ms. DeAk, who had contributed gallery reviews to the magazine for several years someone who blurred the boundaries between art, fashion and night life and practiced art criticism as theater.

Ms. DeAk, in return, delivered prescient articles on the Italian Neo-Expressionist painters and the post-Conceptual artist Joseph Nechvatal.

Poor health and heavy drug use sidelined Ms. deAk for the last two decades of her life. The scene she covered so vividly retreated into distant memory, but traces of her presence lingered.

In 2007, as developers converted a loft at 151 Wooster Street in SoHo into a luxury condo, they uncovered a wall decorated with graffiti by Mr. Basquiat (then using the tag SAMO), Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000, seminal figures in the graffiti art movement.

It turned out to be Ms. DeAks old apartment.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2017, on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Edit DeAk, a Champion of Artists Outside the Mainstream, Dies at 68.

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Edit DeAk, a Champion of Outsider Artists, Dies at 68 - New York Times

The signs appeared quietly. In isolated blips at first, and then with increasing frequency, till they could no longer be ignored. In 2014, it was the single visual identifier of Wes Andersons The Grand Budapest Hotel. In 2015, Drake championed it in his Hotline Bling video, inspired by legendary light-and-space artist James Turrell. In 2016, the ubiquity of a particular dusty blush hue led to its christening as millennial pink by New York magazine, and with that, its takeover of the cultural zeitgeist was complete.

But pinks road to reinvention hasnt been easy. Though it only came to be associated with femininity fairly recently (after the end of World War II, canny advertisers began directing pastel pink appliances and upholstery towards women largely as an antidote to the military-inspired fashions and textile rationing of wartime, according to Bloomberg), the tag has proven to be nearly impossible to shake off. Thanks, however, to an uptick in dialogue about gender fluidity, spurred by television shows such as Transparent and Orange Is The New Black, and a more vocal, visible fight for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights, the global lexicon began to slowly stretch beyond reductive gender-binary terms. And pink has emerged as the surprising symbol of this blurring of lines. To be specific, it is the aforementioned millennial pink, a colour that was everywhere you looked last summeron sneakers, sofas, social media feeds.

According to the New York magazine feature: Its been reported that at least 50 percent of millennials believe that gender runs on a spectrumthis pink is their genderless mascot. And somewhere along the way in its journey to post-gender, pink also became post-pretty. Heck, pink became cool. Free of its gender-normative shackles, it finally had the leeway to have personality, layers, subjectivity.

Reading the global tea leaves, Pantone, a company that sets industry standards for colour, picked, in an unprecedented move, the blending of two shades for its 2016 Colour of the Year: Rose Quartz (a warm rose) and Serenity (a cool blue). In many parts of the world, we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has impacted colour trends throughout all other areas of design, explained Pantone Color Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman in a press release.

This year, although it was a yellowish shade of green that got top billing, Pantone included two shades of pink at opposite ends of the spectrum in its Spring 2017 colour report: Pale Dogwood, a soft blush, and Pink Yarrow, a deep fuchsia. But why should Pantones choices matter to us?

Because Every December for the last 26 years, Pantone predictsand consequently helps influencethe single hue that the design world will go nuts about for the next year, according to business magazine Fast Companys design offshoot Co. Design.

And go nuts it does. In 2017, pink has gone rogue, proclaimed a recent piece in The Guardian. Spring/Summer 2017 runways saw pink displaying its full potential: from powdery at Sanchita, Huemn (both from India) and Givenchy to bright at Cline and Balenciaga, to bold at Haider Ackermann and Valentino. The SS17 menswear shows, too, got their dose of pink, courtesy Gucci, Topshop and Ackermann (again). Raf Simons sold-out collaboration with adidas includes a pastel-pink version of the iconic Stan Smith shoe, and Nikes newest Air Force 1 Jewel Swoosh sneaker for men comes in Pearl Pink.

Guccis Alessandro Michele, whose love for the colour is well-documented, told The New York Times at his Resort 2018 show in Florence last month: Pink is very powerful. It makes you feel sweet and sexy, also if you are a man. A recent piece for Esquire answered the question, Should you wear pink?, with a resounding, Hell yes, you should. Vogue.com ran a piece last year titled Why Pink Is The Most Radical Colour In The Rainbow Right Now, with the writer stating: Its tough to think of a single hue with which to fly your freak flag and subvert gender norms better than pink.

In other words, pink now sends out a message loaded with a subtext. Its impossible to discuss the politicization of this colour, and indeed its projection as a signifier of strength rather than frailty, without mentioning the Gulabi Gang, Indias fuchsia sari-wearing group of female vigilantes. The groups leader, Sampat Pal Devi, explained this sartorial choice to Vice magazine back in 2008. In rallies and protests outside our villages, especially in crowded cities, our members used to get lost in the rush. We decided to dress in a single colour, which would be easy to identify. We didnt want to be associated with other colours as they had associations with political or religious groups. We settled on pink, the colour of life. Its good. It makes the administration wary of us.

A movement that harnessed the power of pink early on was the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign, in response to right-wing group Sri Ram Senes attack on young women at a bar in Mangaluru. Nisha Susan, one of the organizers, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian: It amused us to send pretty packages of intimate garments to men who say they hate us.

Then, in a blend of attempted feminism and right-wing nationalism, the RSS womens wing, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, recently held a summer training camp for young girlsoutfitted in pink-border salwar kameezesto teach them how to protect themselves and also guard (their) country, its traditions, its sanskriti and its languages, as the Samitis Chandrakantha, chief guest at the camp event, put it.

Pink may have started rubbing shoulders with politics, but sports is an arena its long been shut out of. Serena Williams pink-pleated tennis outfits at last years US Open, which the athlete described to the US Vogue with obvious delight, made headlines because it embraced the eye-catching colour. The candy-colour shade has been Williams favourite since girlhood, and regularly creeps into her beauty routine, tooa petal lip here or cotton candy nail polish there, reports the piece. I always try to wear it, Williams said. Yesterday, I had a rose-colour eyelid, which was fun. Closer home, in a surprising move not likely influenced by the global trend, Force Indias new Formula One cars for the 2017 season were unveiled in an arresting Pepto-Bismol hue.

But nothing made as loud and as globally resonant a statement as the Womens March in January, when pink-knit pussy hats flooded the streets of Washington, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and beyond in support of womens rights, LGBTQ rights and racial equality, as well as, of course, in staunch defiance of then freshly inaugurated US President Donald Trumps blatant misogyny and sexism. The pink pussy hat later found its way on to the head of every model at Missonis autumn/winter show in Milan this spring, and temporarily atop the Fearless Girl statue in New Yorks financial district, boldly facing down the Wall Street bull.

Los Angeles-based screenwriter Krista Suh, whose brainchild, The Pussyhat Project, led to the viral sartorial movement, told The Atlantic: Femininity, whether its in a man or a woman, is really disrespected in our society. What were trying to do with this project is embrace pink, embrace the name pussyhat, and not run away from that.

And so it was that pink came to be a symbol of power, of resistance, of revolution, while still holding on to its notions of womanhood. It is everything all at onceboth a reclaiming of femininity and a disavowal of it.

First Published: Fri, Jun 23 2017. 11 47 AM IST

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The politicization of the colour pink - Livemint

22nd Jun 17 | Entertainment News

A record breaking Irish independent film starring Ardal O Hanlon and Pat Shortt

For a country that loves the cinema so much, the Irish have a lot of trouble capturing the essence of what makes us so unique on the big screen. Director Tom Ryan is set to buck this trend with his sophomore outing; Twice Shy.

The coming-of-age drama centres around a young, unmarried couple (played by Shane Murray-Corcoran and Iseult Casey) as they make the journey from rural Ireland to London to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. The film flashes back to chronicle their relationship and turbulent lives that led them to the situation, with growing up, parental distresses and inabilities to communicate throwing up roadblocks in their fairy tale romance.

Twice Shy has no hesitations about latching on to the zeitgeist of modern Ireland, hitting many hot-topic buttons like the 'Repeal the 8th' movement, and the inadequate provisions for those suffering from depression. It's refreshing to see a take on Ireland that doesn't feel like a Hollywood imitation, but a more candid outlook on our lives.

Bringing together the impressive newcomers and TV veterans in Pat Shortt and Ardal O'Hanlon, coupled with a soundtrack filled with familiar Irish stars, director Ryan delivers a confident follow up sure to appeal to the Irish audience it is made for.

Twice Shy is in selected cinemas Friday 23rd June.

Richard Waters (@RichMWaters)

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Twice Shy Brings The Irish To The Big Screen - TV3.ie

I was truly shocked when a slim majority voted for Brexit a year ago, on June 23. It was to be the first shock caused by an election outcome in 2016 in which populists whipped up popular resentment and won. The question troubling me since: When is it going to stop? When's the world coming to its senses?

When you haven't got the benefit of hindsight it's hard to tell major bumps along the way, a cluster of exceptional incidents, from real historical trends. Is history running its course or is the zeitgeist drunk at the wheel but could still come to its senses before crashing into the wall?

I feared Brexit, further propelled by voting Trump into office, might not have been a freak phenomenon but a historical turning point that could usher in an age of reactionary politics, and even sustained decline. The West really might be well past its heyday, once and for all.

Strangely enough, it's almost always the people shouting to want to make this, that or the other great again who will very likely achieve the exact opposite. How great will Britain really be after Brexit? How great will America be after Trump's reign of angry incompetence has run its course?

The West had shaped the last few centuries on a global scale - not always for the better, but surely to its advantage. Now it showed serious signs of self-combustion. Looking for historical parallels, I thought, we might be witnessing times that the late Romans witnessed before us.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Particularly from a liberal German perspective, the world turned a darker shade last year. Brexit in June and Trump in November shook many Germans' belief and trust in two long-time allies and important role models.

Most historically aware Germans very much appreciate what the United Kingdom and the United States did after the Second World War: Rebuild Germany from the rubble after a terrible war ignited by her own doing. That's what I call true greatness.

The Western Allies fostered reconciliation, even though the reflex to punish Germany for her systematic and large-scale misdeeds must have been formidable. Without the foresight of the liberal minded leaders of those two Anglo-Saxon countries West Germany, and therefore today's reunited Germany, would not have become a post-war democratic power in its own right.

After the First World War, the Entente powers chose to fiercely punish Germany, eventually resulting in another world war. After the Second World War, a broadminded approach towards Germany under the leadership of the UK and the US fostered a period of peace and prosperity never seen before in European history.

You could argue that America and Britain also had their own interests at stake: An economically dependent and politically unstable Germany would not have made for a good buffer state against the Soviets, who quickly turned from a wartime ally into a Cold War foe.

After Brexit and Trump, it looked like populism and anti-internationalism might not just discredit two longstanding role models, but could spread further: Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Lech Kaczyski in Poland, Viktor Orbn in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Germany's homegrown populist movement, Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD), were all vying for or already in power.

Beginning with the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the below chart depicts some of the outcomes of votes which pitched populist candidates or ideas against more moderate or liberal candidates and ideas. Each vote had its very particular national setting, so this overview is also food for thought if those votes can and should be thrown into the same basket.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Some of the votes were close calls, like the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, or the Turkish referendum that granted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers. Other votes that observers thought might be tighter races were clearer cut, like the presidential election in France, in which right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron battled it out.

For now, it looks like the populist movements have lost some momentum, probably because people realise that the world order really is in a fragile state - one more kick and the whole thing might come tumbling down. Therefore, the underlying question might be, if those voting for populists are really convinced of those policies or if they are more concerned with throwing a wrench in the works, to send a message.

Germany is voting for a new Bundestag in a general election in late September 2017. This will also be a vote on the liberal-leaning policies of incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel. The broad sentiments that underpin the success of populist movements are still simmering. The jury is still out on whether we have reached peak populism yet...

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A Year After The Brexit Vote: Have We Reached Peak Populism Yet? - HuffPost UK

A civil war may be defined as a violent clash within the boundaries of a particular country initiated by radicals who are unwilling to accept the governance of anyone not chosen by them. The goal of the radical element is to regain power to the ends that abolish, by any means necessary, the existing government policies. An integral part of any civil war is the undermining of the party du jour, i.e., spreading scurrilous and false information to the people without naming any sources. This insures that the population would have no way to challenge the information. Once this operation has placed a seed of discontent and suspicion against the ruling party, the radicals then move to phase two: Visual displays that graphically depict the party in power as vile racists and xenophobes? The modern day radical has the same modus operandi, but it is more refined. I digress. The question is: What drove these modern day radicals to such extreme measures? Simple answer: Donald J. Trump. And who is to blame for the flame out of the Democrat party? Well, lets see. How about Hillary? I would quote Camille Paglia who said, With her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement persona, who was a disastrously wrong candidate to begin with, and secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals. The most fervid Hillary acolytes (especially among young and middle aged women, show biz types, and denizens of the unisex movement) were so obtusely indifferent to Hillarys incompetence as Secretary of State, they failed to recognize that the only accomplishments of note (but those only deserve a Bronx cheer) by Hillary was her piling up air miles, lying to the family of the Ben Gazi victims, and the destabilization of North Africa. After Hillarys loss, her dazed and confused sycophantic pant-suit gang expected some sort of salvivic sermon of regret, or in the least a mild crimination, but no. Hillary went hiding into the woods and just recently (to receive a big fat check for a speech) emerged. Subsequently, after the retirement of Harry Reid as Democratic Leader, the disingenuous Chuck Schumer, who had neither a care nor concern for moral authority, ascended to the leadership role. There were no statesman-like words of caution and restraint from either Reid or Schumer. Thus, there was none. The crazies among the radicals took the gloves off. One hack comedian published on national social media the (beheaded) bloody head of President Trump; a theatre troupe in New York put on a play ostensibly about Julius Caesar, when in actuality it graphically showed the assassination of President Trump and his wife; Madonna expressed her desire to blow up the White House (I suppose with the President in it). Now for the denouement by the crazy left. Some hayseed Trump hater from Illinois moved bag and baggage into his van, put sheets over the windows, and drove on down to Alexandria, Virginia to be near Congressional goings on. After his shower at the YMCA, he produced an assault rifle and began to fire indiscriminately at a baseball practice squad consisting of a bunch of republicans. A left wing radicals dream. Edward Gibbon said in his Magnus Opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some convenient difference in age, character, or station, to justify the distinction.This was the prevailing zeitgeist in 476 A.D. at the fall of the Roman Empire. Does it have a familiar ring in 2017 A.D?

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Zeitgeist: The Movie is a documentary film with two sequels: Zeitgeist: Addendum and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, presenting a number of conspiracy theories and proposals for broad social and economic changes. Peter Joseph created all three films.[1]

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Zeitgeist: The Movie is a 2007 documentary-style film by Peter Joseph presenting a number of conspiracy theories.[2] The film disputes the historicity of Jesus (the Christ myth theory) and claims that the September 11 attacks in 2001 were pre-arranged by New World Order forces,[3] and claims that bankers manipulate world events.[4] In Zeitgeist, it is claimed that the Federal Reserve was behind several wars and manipulates the American public for a One World Government or New World Order.[3][4][5]

The Zeitgeist film, according to writer Paul Constant, is based solely on anecdotal evidence, its probably drawing more people into the Truth movement than anything else.[3]Jay Kinney questioned the accuracy of its claims and the quality of its arguments, describing it as agitprop and propaganda.[6]

Released online on June 18, 2007, it soon received tens of millions of views on Google Video, YouTube, and Vimeo.[7] The film assembles archival footage, animations and narration into a kind of primer on conspiracies.[4]

According to Peter Joseph, the original Zeitgeist was not presented in a film format, but was a performance piece consisting of a vaudevillian, multimedia style event using recorded music, live instruments, and video. Zeitgeist, the first movie of the trilogy, has been described as a pseudo-expos of the international monetary system. The expos theme runs through both its sequels, according to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates. Many of the themes of Zeitgeist are sourced to two books: The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, a member of the John Birch Society, and The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins.[7]

The film starts with animated visualizations, film segments and stock footage, a cartoon and audio quotes about spirituality by Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, then shots of war, explosions, and the September 11 attacks. Then the films title screen is given. The introduction ends with a portion of a George Carlin monologue on religion accompanied by an animated cartoon. The rest of the film is in three parts with narration by Peter Joseph.[3]

Part I questions religions as being god-given stories, asserting that the Christian religion is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical assertions, astrological myths, and other traditions, which in turn were derived from other traditions. In furtherance of the Jesus myth hypothesis, this part claims that the historical Jesus is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured by political forces and opportunists.[3]

Part II alleges that the 9/11 attacks were either orchestrated or allowed to happen by elements within the United States government; the governments purpose, it alleges, was to generate mass fear, initiate and justify the War on Terror, provide a pretext for the curtailment of civil liberties, and produce economic gain. It asserts that the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the attacks, that the military deliberately allowed the planes to reach their targets, and that World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 underwent a controlled demolition.[3]

Part III states that the Federal Reserve System is controlled by a small cabal of international bankers who conspire to create global calamities to enrich themselves.[4] Three wars involving the United States during the twentieth century are highlighted as part of this alleged agenda, started by specifically engineered events, including the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The film asserts that such wars serve to sustain conflict in general and force the U.S. government to borrow money, thereby increasing the profits of the international bankers. The film also states that the Federal Income Tax is illegal.[3]

This segment also alleges a secret agreement to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union as a step toward the creation of a single world government. The film speculates that under such a government, every human could be implanted with an RFID chip to monitor individual activity and suppress dissent.

The newspaper The Arizona Republic described Zeitgeist: The Movie as a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity saying also that the movie trailer states that there are people guiding your life and you dont even know it.[8]

A review in The Irish Times wrote that these are surreal perversions of genuine issues and debates, and they tarnish all criticism of faith, the Bush administration, and globalizationthere are more than enough factual injustices in this world to be going around without having to invent fictional ones.[9]

Ivor Tossell in the Globe and Mail cited it as an example of how modern conspiracy theories are promulgated, though he praised its effectiveness:

The film is an interesting object lesson on how conspiracy theories get to be so popular. Its a driven, if uneven, piece of propaganda, a marvel of tight editing and fuzzy thinking. Its on-camera sources are mostly conspiracy theorists, co-mingled with selective eyewitness accounts, drawn from archival footage and often taken out of context. It derides the media as a pawn of the International Bankers, but produces media reports for credibility when convenient. The film ignores expert opinion, except the handful of experts who agree with it. And yet, its compelling. It shamelessly ploughs forward, connecting dots with an earnest certainty that makes you want to give it an A for effort.[4]

Filipe Feio, reflecting upon the films Internet popularity in Dirio de Notcias, stated that [f]iction or not, Zeitgeist: The Movie threatens to become the champion of conspiracy theories of today.[10]

Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, mentioned Zeitgeist in an article in Scientific American on skepticism in the age of mass media and the postmodern belief in the relativism of truth. He argues that this belief, coupled with a clicker culture of mass media, results in a multitude of various truth claims packaged in infotainment units, in the form of films such as Zeitgeist and Loose Change.[11]

Jane Chapman, a film producer and reader in media studies at the University of Lincoln, called Zeitgeist a fast-paced assemblage of agitprop, an example of unethical film-making.[12] She accuses Peter Joseph of implicit deception through the use of standard film-making propaganda techniques. While parts of the film are, she says, comically self-defeating, the nature of twisted evidence and use of Madrid bomb footage to imply it is of the London bombings amount to ethical abuse in sourcing. In later versions of the film a subtitle is added to this footage identifying it as from the Madrid bombings.[citation needed] She finishes her analysis with the comment: Thus, legitimate questions about what happened on 9/11, and about corruption in religious and financial organizations, are all undermined by the films determined effort to maximize an emotional response at the expense of reasoned argument.

Alex Jones, American radio host, prominent conspiracy theorist and exe cutive producer of Loose Change, stated that film segments of Zeitgeist are taken directly from his documentary Terrorstorm, and that he supports 90 percent of the film.[13]

Skeptic magazines Tim Callahan, criticizing the first part of the film (on the origins of Christianity), wrote that some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberallyand sloppilymixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus.[14]

Chris Forbes, Senior lecturer in Ancient History of Macquarie University and member of the Synod of the Diocese of Sydney, severely criticized Part I of the film, stating that it has no basis in serious scholarship or ancient sources, and that it relies on amateur sources that recycle frivolous ideas from one another, rather than serious academic sources, commenting that [i]t is extraordinary how many claims it makes which are simply not true.[15] Similar conclusions were reached by Dr. Mark Foreman of Liberty University.[16]

Paul Constant writing in Seattle newspaper The Stranger characterized the film as fiction couched in a few facts.[3] Of the religious critique in the film he said: First the film destroys the idea of God, and then, through the lens of 9/11, it introduces a sort of new Bizarro God. Instead of an omnipotent, omniscient being who loves you and has inspired a variety of organized religions, there is an omnipotent, omniscient organization of ruthless beings who hate you and want to take your rights away, if not throw you in a work camp forever.[3]

In Tablet Magazine, journalist Michelle Goldberg criticized Zeitgeist: The Movie as being steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and she went on to write that the film borrows from the work of Eustace Mullins, Lyndon LaRouche, and radio host Alex Jones, and that it portrays a cabal of international bankers purportedly ruling the world.[7] In an interview with TheMarker, Joseph stated that while the film does mention bankers it does not seek to place blame on any individual or group of individuals. He argues they are merely a product of a socioeconomic system in need of change.[17]

Chip Berlet writes that the 9/11 conspiracy theories are bait used to attract viewers from the 9/11 truth movement and others who embrace conspiracist thinking to the idiosyncratic antireligion views of the videographer and the world of right-wing antisemitic theories of a global banking conspiracy.[18]

According to Jay Kinney:

At other times, Zeitgeist engages in willful confusion by showing TV screen shots of network or cable news with voice-overs from unidentified people not associated with the news programs. If one werent paying close attention, the effect would be to confer the status and authority of TV news upon the words being spoken. Even when quotes or sound bites are attributed to a source, theres no way to tell if they are quoted correctly or in context.[6]

In June 2013, Peter Joseph directed the music video for God Is Dead? by Black Sabbath, using extensive imagery from Zeitgeist: The Movie and its sequels.[19]

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Zeitgeist: Addendum is a 2008 documentary-style film produced and directed by Peter Joseph, and is a sequel to the 2007 film, Zeitgeist: The Movie. It premiered at the 5th Annual Artivist Film Festival in Los Angeles, California on October 2, 2008.

The film begins and ends with excerpts from a speech by Jiddu Krishnamurti. The remainder of the film is narrated by Peter Joseph and divided into four parts, which are prefaced by on-screen quotations from Krishnamurti, John Adams, Bernard Lietaer, and Thomas Paine, respectively.

Part I covers the process of fractional-reserve banking as illustrated in Modern Money Mechanics, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The film suggests that society is manipulated into economic slavery through debt-based monetary policies by requiring individuals to submit for employment in order to pay off their debt.

Part II has an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who says he was involved in the subjugation of Latin American economies by multinational corporations and the United States government, including involvement in the overthrow of Latin American heads-of-state. Perkins sees the US as a corporatocracy, in which maximization of profits is the first priority.

Part III introduces futurist Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project and asserts a need to move away from current socioeconomic paradigms. Fresco states that capitalism perpetuates the conditions it claims to address, as problems are only solved if there is money to be made. The film looks at Frescos proposal of a resource-based economy, which puts environmental friendliness, sustainability and abundance as fundamental societal goals. He goes on to discuss technology which he sees as the primary driver of human advancement, and he describes politics as being unable to solve any problems.

Part IV suggests that the primary reason for what the film sees as societys social values (warfare, corruption, oppressive laws, social stratification, irrelevant superstitions, environmental destruction, and a despotic, socially indifferent, profit oriented ruling class) is a collective ignorance of the emergent and symbiotic aspects of natural law. The film advocates the following actions for achieving social change: boycotting of the most powerful banks in the Federal Reserve System, the major news networks, the military, energy corporations, all political systems; and joining, and supporting The Zeitgeist Movement.

Zeitgeist: Addendum won the 2008 Artivist Film Festivals award for best feature (Artivist Spirit category).[20]

Originally, the film was uploaded-released on Google video. The current video posting on YouTube surpassed 5,000,000 views by late 2013.[21]

Alan Feuer of The New York Times noted that while the previous film was famous for its alleging that the attacks of September 11 were an inside job, the second installment was all but empty of such conspiratorial notions, directing its rhetoric and high production values toward posing a replacement for the evils of the banking system and a perilous economy of scarcity and debt.[22]

Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) started the chain of events leading to the introduction of the Zeitgeist movement.[7] The group advocates transition from the global money-based economic system to a post-scarcity economy or resource-based economy. VC Reporters Shane Cohn summarized the movements charter as: Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system.[23] Joseph created a political movement that, according to The Daily Telegraph, dismisses historic religious concepts as misleading and embraces a version of sustainable ecological concepts and scientific administration of society.[24] The group describes the current socioeconomic system as structurally corrupt and inefficient in the use of resources.[22][25]

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is the third installment in Peter Josephs Zeitgeist film trilogy. The film premiered at the JACC Theater in Los Angeles on January 15, 2011 at the Artivist Film Festival,[26] was released in theaters and online. As of November 2014, the film has over 23 million views on YouTube.[27] The film is arranged into four parts. Each part contains interviews, narration and animated sequences.[28]

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The film begins with an animated sequence narrated by Jacque Fresco. He describes his adolescent life and his discontinuation of public education at the age of 14 and describes his early life influences.

Part I: Human Nature

Human behavior and the nature vs. nurture debate is discussed, which Robert Sapolsky refers to as a false dichotomy. Disease, criminal activity, and addictions are also discussed. The overall conclusion of Part I is that social environment and cultural conditioning play a large part in shaping human behavior.

Part II: Social Pathology

John Locke and Adam Smith are discussed in regard to modern economics. The film critically questions the economic need for private property, money, and the inherent inequality between agents in the system. Also seen critically is the need for cyclical consumption in order to maintain market share, resulting in wasted resources and planned obsolescence. According to the movie, the current monetary system will result in default or hyperinflation at some future time.

Part III: Project Earth

As with Zeitgeist: Addendum, the film presents a resource-based economy as advocated by Jacque Fresco discussing how human civilization could start from a new beginning in relation to resource types, locations, quantities, to satisfy human demands; track the consumption and depletion of resources to regulate human demands and maintain the condition of the environment.

Part IV: Rise

The current worldwide situation is described as disastrous. A case is presented that pollution, deforestation, climate change, overpopulation, and warfare are all created and perpetuated by the socioeconomic system. Various poverty statistics are shown that suggest a progressive worsening of world culture.

The final scene of the film shows a partial view of earth from space, followed by a sequence of superimposed statements; This is your world, This is our world, and The revolution is now.

List of Interviewees

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward received Best Political Documentary in 2011 from the Action on Film International Film Festival.[29]

A review in the The Socialist Standard regarding production values said the film had a well-rounded feel. In terms of content they criticized the shaky economic analysis contained in the second part of the film, said that Karl Marx had already undertaken a more scientific analysis, and that, despite these false beginnings the analysis is at least on the right track. Regarding transition to the new system proposed in the film, the review critically noted that in the film there is no mention of how to get from here to there.[30]

Fouad Al-Noor in Wessex Scene said that the film was more focused on solutions than the previous film, and commented that while there are controversial elements, he challenged those using labels to describe the film to watch the films.[31]

In her article, published in Tablet Magazine, Michelle Goldberg described the film as silly enough that at times [she] suspected it was [a] satire about new-age techno-utopianism instead of an example of it.[7]

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Zeitgeist Movement | Prometheism.net - Part 23