Liberal MP crosses the floor to support independent bill for federal integrity commission – The Guardian

Posted on by

Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer has crossed the floor to support an independent bill for a federal integrity commission, after accusing the government of inertia over the issue.

Telling parliament it was a difficult decision to second the motion by independent MP Helen Haines to suspend standing orders to allow her federal integrity commission bill to be debated, Archer said that the time has gone on long enough and progress on the issue was needed.

I dont take this decision lightly at all. I take this decision very seriously to stand here. And its a difficult decision. This is one of the most important things that we come to this place to do, Archer said.

The MP for the marginal Tasmanian seat of Bass said she believed all sides of politics wanted to see a robust federal integrity commission, but the legislation had stalled because it was too politicised.

There is a place for politics, theres a place for the partisan point-scoring, but on something as important as trust and confidence in elected officials, that is not it.

The move to suspend standing orders sparked confusion in the House of Representatives under the management of the newly-elected speaker, Andrew Wallace.

As a result of changes made to Parliamentary procedure to prevent the spread of Covid, questions are framed in the negative so that MPs dont have to unnecessarily cross the chamber. This meant the vote had to be taken a second time, but was lost because an absolute majority was required.

Guardian Australia reported on Thursday that Archer was considering the dramatic move, criticising the coalitions inertia over the legislation.

Archer said she was perplexed at the Morrison governments failure to release a revised bill to establish a commonwealth integrity commission, almost three years after it was promised before the last election.

The government has been under pressure from within its ranks and from crossbench MPs to finalise the bill, with the attorney general, Michaelia Cash, undertaking consultations after a draft of the bill released last November was criticised for being too soft.

I really have a strong view that this is the most important thing we need to do, Archer told Guardian Australia on Wednesday.

I am a bit perplexed at one level as to why we havent brought something forward, I accept there was a draft bill, there was extensive consultation, there were a number of submissions and it would have been my expectation that some work would have been going on to draft it, given the feedback.

I am a bit offended, in a way, that we are prioritising in a rush I might add the religious discrimination bill over an integrity commission.

Archer had warned earlier she was absolutely prepared to cross the floor to support the legislation.

To be perfectly clear, I always reserve my right to cross the floor, that is one of the reasons I sit on this side [in the Liberal party], Archer said.

It has certainly been my view that the government and the opposition ought to be working together constructively with Helen Haines on her bill. Whats in there that we think is good? What is in there that we could amend?

There is a real tribalism to politics at the moment and I think that is sometimes at the expense of governance, and what I think we end up with is inertia. That is probably why the government hasnt brought it forward, because it is so politically contested now and it just creates a vacuum, and there is inertia.

Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

Archer said that she believed the integrity commission bill should be above politics. She said without a multi-partisan approach to the development and implementation of such a body no one is going to have trust in it anyway.

Archers call for the bill to be introduced to parliament swiftly was echoed by the Liberal MP for the seat of Curtin, Celia Hammond, who said the establishment of a federal integrity agency was an issue that had been raised by her constituents since she was first elected in 2019.

It is something I support and have advocated for over the past two years and I continue to do so, Hammond told Guardian Australia.

I recognise there are many different bodies and models across Australia and many different views on what should or should not be included and covered.

I know that the attorney general has undertaken significant consultation and work on this matter with a goal of producing an appropriate model and legislation for the federal context. I appreciate that there may be further consultation required, but personally I would like to see the legislation introduced as soon as possible.

Haines has been lobbying MPs to support her bill, with the proposed model including all of the robust features of an integrity commission with teeth, and safeguards that means we dont see vexatious and frivolous referrals.

The legislation also includes an exoneration clause, that would see anyone whose reputation was unfairly tarnished by an Australian federal integrity commission hearing to be the subject of a report to parliament exonerating them.

In question time on Wednesday, in response to a question from Haines, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, defended the delay in releasing the legislation for the integrity commission, saying the government was returning to priority legislation after being diverted by the pandemic response.

The attorney general has been working steadily away and been working with cabinet on our draft legislation for an integrity commission, and that also soon will be available for people to give their responses to, and we will see whether that has support, Morrison said.

Haines said that if the government truly want to pass a bill they would have written it, tabled it and brought it on for debate.

Thats what I have done, but youve shut down debate on my bill in the House, youve shut down debate in the Senate and youve muzzled the attorney general, who is missing in action on this, Haines said.

Come clean with the Australian people. Prime minister, do you honestly expect Australians to believe you truly want a robust integrity commission?

See the original post here:

Liberal MP crosses the floor to support independent bill for federal integrity commission - The Guardian

8 times liberal media tried to ruin Thanksgiving, from ditching turkey to declaring genocide remains on menu – Fox News

Posted on by

As Americans prepare to gather with relatives and enjoy a Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, far-left pundits, columnists and news organizations have set their sights on the holiday.

Woke critics have labeled Thanksgiving "a celebration of racist genocide," frowned upon eating turkey when "manyvegan turkeyalternatives" are available and even credited White supremacy for the holidays popularity.

NBC SUGGESTS NOT HAVING THANKSGIVING TURKEY THIS YEAR TO DEAL WITH INFLATION COSTS

"You there, fellow American! Were you under the impression that Thanksgiving is the uniquely American holiday that celebrates how English settlers and Native Americans peacefully crossed linguistic, cultural and racial barriers to share a meal together and create a model for gratitude and tolerance that would be the envy of the world? Wrong! Says Woke America," New York Post columnist Kyle Smith recently observed.

"Thanksgiving is about murder, plunder and hate. Invite your relatives over to spread love and gravy? No, if you really want to honor the spirit of Thanksgiving, you should whip yourself with barbed wire all day," Smith continued.

A liberal website urged Americans to eat vegan turkey alternatives on Thanksgiving. (iStock)

Here are some of the most egregious examples:

MSNBC segment declares genocide is "still on the menu" in America

An MSNBC segment aired on Saturday that accused White people of not accurately telling the story of Thanksgiving and blaming the pilgrims for the "White supremacy" affecting the nation today.

"Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence. That genocide and violence is still on the menu," guest essayist Gyasi Ross said on "The Cross Connection."

"State-sponsored violence against Native and Black Americans is still commonplace and violent, private White supremacy is celebrated and subsidized," Ross continued. "Indigenous and Black people are still being murdered by those paid to protect us."

Americans scolded for consuming turkey with "so manyvegan turkeyalternatives on the market"

Green Matters, a website dedicated to fighting climate change and environmental justice, published an article looking at the history of Thanksgiving. It details a variety of reasons why the holiday is "bad" and eventually lands on the tradition of eating turkey as the centerpiece of the annual feast. The article notes "there is actually no written evidence that turkeys were eaten at the 1621 Thanksgiving" and scolds Americans for sticking with the tradition modern despite vegan options.

"Every year, Americans breed,kill, and eat around 46 million turkeys on Thanksgiving and there's really no reason for this cruel and unsustainable tradition. These days, there are so manyvegan turkeyalternatives on the market, which are all more compassionate and environmentally-friendly choices," Green Matters writer Sophie Hirsch wrote.

"If you are hosting or attending a Thanksgiving dinner this year, remember the true origins of the holiday and consider sharing the true story with your friends and family," Hirsch continued in the piece headlined, "Thanksgiving Glorifies the Abhorrent Colonization of Indigenous Peoples."

THANKSGIVING TRAVEL: BEST AND WORST TIMES TO GO

As Americans prepare to gather with relatives and enjoy a Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, far-left pundits, columnists and news organizations have set their sights on the holiday. (iStock)

NBC suggests not having Thanksgiving turkey this year to deal with inflation costs

A segment on NBC's "Today" on Saturday suggested American families could drop the traditional Thanksgiving turkey from their tables this year to deal withinflation.

"With inflation on the rise, prices are going up on everything from your Thanksgiving meal to your gifts for the holidays," anchor Kristen Welker said to introduce the segment.

NBC News correspondent Vicky Nguyen noted the 6.2% rise in prices in October from a year ago a three-decade high calling it "real money." Nguyen then said something she admitted may be controversial.

"Perhaps forgo the turkey," she said. "Bear with me. I know that is the staple of the Thanksgiving meal. However, some people think turkey is overrated. It tends to be the most expensive thing on the table. Maybe you do an Italian feast instead."

Nguyen added that if you tell people you're ditching the turkey, "some guests may drop off the list, and that's a way to cut costs too."

While the segment was light-hearted, it was swiftly mocked on social media

USA Today reports holiday is "a day of mourning" for Indigenous people

USA Today published a story Tuesday headlined, "What is Thanksgiving to Indigenous people? 'A day of mourning," which focuses on what certain Native Americans feel about the holiday. The story is reported, not an opinion piece, so it comes across as more serious and thoughtful than bold hot takes by American pundits, but it remains an example of liberal media pooh-poohing Thanksgiving nonetheless.

"For many, rather than a celebration of peace and shared prosperity between Native Americans and Pilgrims, Thanksgiving represents the dark shadow of genocide and the resilience of Native people," reporter Michelle Shen wrote.

Shen spoke with tribal citizens Dennis W. Zotigh and Julie Garreau, who both explained the holiday isnt a happy time for them and they consider it a day of mourning.

"This year, Julie is not celebrating Thanksgiving and is instead organizing an event onNative American Heritage Day called Thanks for Kids, which celebrates Native children," Shen wrote.

Many liberals dont think Thanksgiving is a reason to celebrate. (iStock)

WALL STREET JOURNAL REFUSES TO BOW TO LEFT'S DEMANDS TO CANCEL THANKSGIVING EDITORIALS: 'WE WON'T BEND'

Critics of Wall Street Journal want to cancel Thanksgiving editorials

The Wall Street Journal editorial board was forced to announce that the paper will continue with the publishing of its annualThanksgivingeditorials despite efforts by the left to cancel them.

Ina Monday op-ed, the board declared that efforts by progressives to stop the publishing of the "racist"1620 accountof the first Thanksgiving, as well as a mid-20th century "contemporary contrast" of American progress, would not succeed and that The Journal wouldn't "bend to political demands for censorship."

"No doubt it was only a matter of time. The progressives have come for our annual Thanksgiving editorials. They wont succeed, but we thought wed share the tale with readers for an insight into the politicization of everything, even Thanksgiving," the board wrote.

It noted that the pair of editorials had been run every year since 1961 without complaint.

"But we live in a new era when the left sees nearly everything through the reductive lens of identity politics. It sees much of American history as a racist project that should be erased," the board wrote, before noting that the motivation to censor the Pilgrim editorial was being driven by a petition on left-wing site Change.org.

The author of the petition, which has garnered around 50,000 signatures, claims that "it's time to stop publishing 17th century racism" in 2021. It also complains that the editorial refers to Native Americans as "wilde men" and says that the Pilgrims were separate from "all the civil parts of the world."

CRITICS PAN THANKSGIVING ADVICE IN NEW YORK TIMES THAT KIDS WHO AREN'T FULLY VACCINATED SHOULD EAT QUICKLY

New York Times suggests kids "eat quickly" to avoid infecting vaccinated Americans with coronavirus

The New York Times published a guest essay last week in which a Virginia Tech professor suggested semi-vaccinated children "eat quickly" on Thanksgiving to avoid spreading COVID to vaccinated adults.

"If our child, 9, and a cousin, 10, have each received one dose of the vaccine two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, is it safe for us to eat indoors? There will be about 20 guests, all vaccinated, and the 65 and older crowd have all received boosters," one reader from San Francisco asked in the essay.

"Im glad to hear that the children and all guests are vaccinated. As the kids will not be fully vaccinated until two weeks after their second shot, I think some care is warranted, especially because some attendees are 65 and older and thus at greater risk of more serious breakthrough infections. You could have the kids wear masks, eat quickly and stay away from the older adults when eating," Virginia Tech engineering professor Linsey Marr wrote in response.

4 SMART TIPS FOR THANKSGIVING TRAVEL

Philadelphia Tribune declares Thanksgiving to be a celebration of racist genocide, mass land robbery

The Philadelphia Tribune published a column Saturday by correspondent Michael Coard headlined, "Celebrating Thanksgiving is celebrating racist genocide."

"When the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, they didnt bring thanks. They didnt even give thanks. Instead, they brought racist genocide and gave nothing," Coard wrote.

"And they eventually succeeded in mass killing and mass land robbery not because they were smarter or stronger but because they were sadistically evil racists who initiated the use of a weapon of mass destruction that previously had been unheard of on this land," Coard continued. "Thanksgiving, as an American holiday, is a celebration of that racist genocide and massive land robber."

Coard then listed "five indisputable facts you must know about Thanksgiving so you wont make the mistake of celebrating racist genocide" on Thursday.

Washington Post examines why Native Americans regret helping Pilgrims

The Washington Post started early, publishing a Nov. 4 piece headlined, "This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later," which examines how members of the Wampanoag Nation wish their relatives didnt participate.

"Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal ofChristopher Columbus statuesand pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of hisbrutality toward Indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving," Post reporter Dana Hedgpeth wrote.

Hedgpeth dove into a lengthy explanation of why the Mashpee Wampanoag doesnt celebrate the holiday, noting that American children are often taught "fiction" in school pertaining to Thanksgiving.

"This year some Wampanoags will go to Plymouth for the National Day of Mourning. Others will gather at the old Indian Meeting House, built in 1684 and one of the oldest American Indian churches in the eastern United States, to pay their respects to their ancestors, many of whom are buried in the surrounding cemetery," Hedgpeth wrote. "Plenty of Wampanoags will gather with their families for a meal to give thanks not for the survival of the Pilgrims but for the survival of their tribe."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Fox News Andrew Mark Miller, David Rutz and Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report.

Visit link:

8 times liberal media tried to ruin Thanksgiving, from ditching turkey to declaring genocide remains on menu - Fox News

Liberals introduce bill to provide sick pay, ban intimidation of patients and health-care workers – CBC.ca

Posted on by

The Liberal government has introduced legislation to provide workers in federally regulated sectors with 10 days of sick pay while also making it an offence to intimidate or preventpatients from seeking care, orto interfere with healthprofessionals trying to deliver it.

Bill C-3, which amends the Criminal Code and the Canada Labour Code, was unveiled today by Labour Minister Seamus O'Regan and Justice Minister David Lametti.

O'Regan said the pandemic showedhow a lack of sick days left many workers at risk. He saidthat now is the "time to close the gap that the pandemic exposed in our social safety net."

"It is important for our well being, important for health and safety and important for our economic recovery," O'Regan said. "It is crucial to finishing our fight against COVID-19."

According to government officials speaking on background, about 950,000 people workin the federally regulated private sector. About583,000 of those workershave less than ten days of paid sick leaveand would stand to benefit from the legislation.

O'Regan said that while the federally regulated workforcemakes up only about five per cent of workers in Canada,the law could set a standard for provinces to follow.

"We know that the only way we are going to get through this pandemic is [that] when people are sick ...they stay at homeand [don't have to be] afraid about losing compensation," Unifor's national president Jerry Dias said Friday.

WATCH| Labour minister discusses new bill on CBC's Power & Politics

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who had been calling on the federal government to make this change throughout the pandemic, welcomed the announcement.

"Today's announcement is very long overdue. Justin Trudeau owes frontline workers an explanation about why he couldn't help them when they needed this over a year ago," Singh said in a media statement.

Lametti said the pandemicalso revealed the abuse and intimidation inflicted onhealth-care professionals and patientsat vaccination centres, abortion clinicsand hospitals.

Protests against vaccine mandates and other COVID-19-related public health measuresheld outside hospitals in September were condemned by politicians and health-care organizations as unacceptable and unfair to staff and patients.

The changes to the Criminal Code create two new offences meant to protect patients and health-care workers from abuse.

The first offence makes it illegal to intimidate health-care workers and patients to prevent them from accessing health-care services, or to prevent health-care workers from administering care.The second change to the Criminal Code makes it an offence to bar anyone from accessing health services.

Those convicted of either offence could face up to 10 years in prison.

Lametti said the government is also drafting new sentencing provisions that will require courts to consider serious penalties for anyone targeting a health-care provider at work.

Lametti said he'sdisappointed that such a law is necessary.

"Even this week, COVID deniers were trying to stop children from receiving vaccinations," hesaid."Every day, health-care workers are coming forward and speaking out. They are exhausted, they are discouraged and they are fearful, and the sad reality is that these sorts of threats predate the pandemic."

Linda Silas ispresident of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, which represents some 200,000 nurses across the country. She welcomed the announcement, calling it a first step in recognizing the threats facing health-care workers.

Silas said that before the pandemic, 90 per cent of nurses reported beingexposed to physical violence on the job. During the pandemic, 60 per cent of those nurses reported that the level of violence had increased.

Lametti said he hopes Bill C-3 moves swiftly through Parliament. Silas said she wants to see all federal parties jump behind the initiative.

"In the previous Parliament both the NDP and the Conservatives proposed private members bills to do something similar here,"Silas said."So I would be stunned and very disappointed if there's not unanimous consensus to protect health-care workers."

In an interview airing Saturday, criminal defence lawyer Ian Runkle told Chris Hall, host of CBC Radio's The House, that it's already a criminal offence to block access to a hospital. He said that if those cases are not being prosecuted, it's because of a lack of will, not a lack of legal authority.

"Police have more than enough tools in their toolbox here in terms of offences like mischief, which makes it an offence to obstruct, interrupt or interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property," Rundle said. "That covers blocking off infrastructure."

Read more:

Liberals introduce bill to provide sick pay, ban intimidation of patients and health-care workers - CBC.ca

John Ivison: Liberals so focused on carbon taxes, they missed the flood coming in the back door – National Post

Posted on by

Breadcrumb Trail Links

For a Liberal government that has made climate change one of its top priorities, its policies on disaster mitigation have been nothing short of negligent

Author of the article:

Publishing date:

Justin Trudeau saw for himself the impact of the atmospheric river that broke rainfall records in British Columbia, leaving dikes breached, homes submerged, highways washed out and livestock drowned.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Another pulse of storms is forecast for this weekend. Well see what God has in store, one resident told Global TV, stoically.

But as distressing as the flooding has been, the lack of preparation for extreme weather in the province has been just as shocking.

Ed Fast, the MP for Abbotsford, one of the worst affected cities, said all levels of government have been aware for years about the potential for flooding but didnt act. We should have seen it coming but nothing substantive was ever done about it, he said.

As a minister in the Harper government, Fast bears his share of the blame for that inertia.

But the Liberals have been in power for the past six years and for a government that has made climate change one of its top priorities, its policies on disaster mitigation have been nothing short of negligent.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

This weeks throne speech committed the Liberals to develop Canadas first ever National Adaptation Strategy, prompting a question that begs an answer: Why wasnt such a strategy commissioned after the Fort McMurray fire in 2016 or the spring flooding in Ontario and Quebec in 2017?

What is apparent is that the Liberal government has been almost entirely focused on addressing the politically virtuous battle of reducing emissions, at the expense of the less sexy alleviation of climate changes ramifications.

Resilience has been a victim of ideology. The country has been fractured by debates about carbon pricing, while the far less contentious issue of preparing for floods and fires has been neglected.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Take the update to the governments climate plan in December 2020, which allocated $2.6 billion over seven years to make homes more energy efficient but ignored the issue of flood proofing.

There was a strong push by the Insurance Bureau of Canada to have some of the money directed toward a flood resilience subsidy for sump pumps, window wells and so on which would, in turn, have yielded insurance discounts for homeowners.

However, then Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson did not want to dilute emissions-reduction efforts.

The Insurance Bureau dismissed the resulting strategy as half a plan, arguing it did little to protect Canadians from floods, fires, windstorms and hail.

With 2021 set to be the most expensive year on record for insured damage (surpassing 2016s $5.2 billion), it is in the industrys interests to call on Ottawa to do more. But that doesnt mean its wrong.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

When then Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna requested money for a disaster mitigation fund, she was allocated $1.4 billion over 12 years a fraction of what she asked for. (The Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimates the country should be spending $5.3 billion a year on adaptive infrastructure.)

Belatedly, the government has shifted course.

A damning new report by the environment commissioner, Jerry DeMarco, said that Canada has been the worst performer in the G7 since the Paris Agreement when it comes to emissions reduction. But he also condemned the governments record on climate resilience, pointing out that 10 per cent of households are at risk of flooding. He said the Liberals should centralize the responsibility for adaptation and other functions from the Environment Department to the Privy Council Office and Finance Canada. It appears that change will now take place, along with the adoption of other Liberal campaign commitments such as funding for the retrofitting of homes to protect against extreme weather, the development of flood maps, and the creation of a national flood insurance program for homeowners at high risk. A taskforce on flood insurance was struck in 2020 by then Public Safety Minister, Bill Blair, and is set to report back next May.

A more serious approach to adaptation is long overdue.

When it comes to global emissions, Canada should live up to its international commitments but it cannot control the amount of greenhouse gases being discharged by China and others.

However, it can do more to help Canadians protect themselves from the depredations of extreme climate.

It is too bad that it has taken Old Testament-style tumults of rain to expunge the misplaced belief that adaptation is a distraction from achieving net-zero emissions.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notificationsyou will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.

Excerpt from:

John Ivison: Liberals so focused on carbon taxes, they missed the flood coming in the back door - National Post

Liberal economists got the memo: Build Back Better couldn’t possibly worsen inflation | TheHill – The Hill

Posted on by

Democrats are on a mission to dispel any notion that massive new government spending in their Build Back Better (BBB) bill will let roaring inflation out of its decades-old cage. And right on que, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighs in: History Says Dont Panic About Inflation."

Actually, history doesnt say that, just Krugmans headline.

Its a hard sell, though. Krugman makes his case based on a July 6 article from the White House Council of Economic Advisors entitled, Historical Parallels to Todays Inflationary Episode.

Note that the Biden White House published this article more than four months ago, when inflation may not have been out of its cage yet but certainly seemed to be on a long leash. Inflation numbers have steadily increased and will likely go even higher.

But with BBB headed to the Senate for mangling, or even rejection, all the big-spenders, including Krugman, are trying to convince those understandably concerned about raging inflation both senators and the public that the beast will be back in its cage soon.

Maybe, but there is at least one important point that Krugman and the White House ignore.

The Councils paper says that since World War II, there have been six periods in which inflation as measured by the CPI [Consumer Price Index] was 5 percent or higher. The Council and Krugman both argue the period most closely resembling todays inflation was the one immediately following the war, 1946-48.

And its easy to see why. Rationing and price controls during the war constrained consumption, so pent-up demand was high at the wars end just as pent-up demand has been high coming out of the pandemic.

But supplies were limited after the war because manufacturers were transitioning away from war-time products to making products for consumers similar to the way supply chain problems are limiting supplies now.

But, Krugman informs us, the inflation didnt last. Inflation plunged in 1948, and by 1949 had turned into deflation, where prices were falling. [T]he biggest mistake policymakers made in response to that inflation surge was failing to appreciate its transitory nature.

Krugmans advice: Dont worry about the price surges youre seeing. Theyre a result of a special set of circumstances coming out of the pandemic, not Bidens spending spree. The current inflation problem will resolve itself relatively soon, as it did in 1948.

We should note that some prominent Democratic economists have raised inflation concerns. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been warning since February, before Bidens $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed, that the White House was ignoring inflationary pressures.

Obama administration economist Jason FurmanJason FurmanLiberal economists got the memo: Build Back Better couldn't possibly worsen inflation Biden should signal to the Fed that it's okay to raise rates next year The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by ExxonMobil - Biden hails infrastructure law, talks with China's Xi MORE was blunter in a recent interview with the Associated Press: They poured kerosene on the fire!

And yet both have more recently claimed that all the spending in the BBB would add little or nothing to todays inflationary pressures.

One difference in Krugmans then-vs.-now comparison is the wealth effect, where people feel much more financially secure and are willing to spend more when assets like their home or stock prices rise.

A falling stock market can have the opposite effect. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked in April 1946 and started heading downward quickly. By the beginning of the recession in November 1948, the Dow had lost a third of its value.

A steadily declining Dow may have depressed demand for more goods, taking the pressure off inflation.

Today, just the opposite is happening. Stock indexes are creating new highs. And a much larger percentage of the public is investing in the market. Moreover, the personal savings rate hit record highs during the pandemic. The wealth effect is still having an impact, at least for now, and may encourage people to buy more goods, even at the higher prices.

Bidens Build Back Better bill is a huge and costly political and economic gamble. His big spending isnt the only cause of inflation, but it has poured kerosene on the fire, as Furman said. Now Biden wants to double down on that spending.

If inflation continues, it could mean an even tougher drubbing for Democrats at the polls next year. Because the only beast more dangerous to political careers than raging inflation is an angry voter.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews.

More here:

Liberal economists got the memo: Build Back Better couldn't possibly worsen inflation | TheHill - The Hill

Is the honeymoon period over for liberal arts in Asia? – Times Higher Education (THE)

Posted on by

For many of us teaching in the liberal arts colleges and universities that have opened in recent years across Asia, the Yale-NUS split came as a shock.

On 27 August, the National University of Singapore announced that Yale-NUS College a 10-year collaboration with Yale University would close and be merged into a new interdisciplinary honours college within NUS called New College. From 2025, Yale will have only an advisory role.

The announcement, which waswidely reportedaround the world,brought a jolt of historical irony. Back in 2015, Id heard Peter Salovey, then the president of Yale, speak on liberal arts education in Asia. At the time, I was in the process of moving from California to Delhi, to be part of the early cohort of faculty at the new Ashoka University and to set up a department of creative writing. After Saloveys talk, hosted in Delhi by Ashoka, I asked him why Singapore, a state not particularly known for free thought, was collaborating on the American model of liberal education. His response struck me as prescient: the government of Singapore knew that a messy kind of democracy was coming to the country soon and that a liberal arts education was the best way to prepare its citizens for it. There was a new excitement for innovative liberal arts education in Asia, and I felt a part of it myself.

More specifically, I recognised a culture of interdisciplinary creativity such as Id seen in my previous institution, Stanford University, translated into a new Asian demand for innovative, multidisciplinary education. At the heart of this demand were the professional needs of rapidly evolving knowledge economies. It was the kind of interdisciplinarity that went beyond the narrowly technocratic or financial aptitude that is the core mandate of specialised schools of business or technology. It entered a broader domain of human thought, behaviour and knowledge. It evoked the human-centred business models of Peter Drucker, who, back in 1959, coined the term knowledge worker, predicting that the future corporation would have to balance significant social, economic and human dimensions.

This liberal arts model, with obvious corporate enthusiasm behind it, was inevitably elite and expensive. It was generously supported by philanthropic entrepreneurs from Asias new digital economy. It evoked suspicion as well as differing levels of enthusiasm within the larger Asian landscapes of colonially structured, government-directed higher education systems of raggedly uneven quality. But it was fairly clear why an economically ambitious and technologically progressive state such as Singapore was interested in it and why it also appealed to the forms of private philanthropic higher education emerging around some of the major cities of India.

To understand the contradictions that have begun to disrupt this trajectory and to examine the sustainability of liberal arts in Asia today, it helps to take a quick look at how this form of education developed across different nations over the past few decades.

The most striking success story comes from South Korea. In a significant discussion published in the New Republic in 2010, Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, argues that the foundation of this success lies in the countrys long-held Confucian tradition of humanistic education.Japanese domination in the 1940s represented a violent onslaught against this tradition, when Koreans were limited to low-level vocational education and schools were only allowed to use Japanese. The crucial recovery of national identity involved an invocation of Confucian humanistic education, but in a newly democratised form that made space for women and the working classes. American missionaries played a deeply constructive role in helping this modernising process.

Although the educational success story of South Korea is also driven by government initiatives, such as universal secondary education, Nussbaum ascribes significant credit to what she calls a productive synergy between Confucian nationalism and American progressive education. The result, she writes, has been the widely democratized, pluralistic, and market-driven education system that obtains today.

This, however, has been a rare instance of creative synergy; nothing like it has quite happened in other major Asian countries.

Take Hong Kong. Since the handover in 1997, the city has been moving away from the British system of single-subject degrees towards a more broad-based liberal education. The most obvious reasons were those I have already described: the countrys projection of itself as a service- and knowledge-based economy and an economic mediator between the East and the West, which called for a population with a more well-rounded education. This was what attracted the support of business figures such as Po Chung, the co-founder of the Asia-Pacific branch of the shipping giant DHL.

But the introduction in 2009 of liberal studies as a mandatory subject in Hong Kongs secondary education, with the specific aim of promoting critical thinking, has been intensely controversial. While some have lauded it as an exemplary curriculum which broke away from the rote learning of the mainland, pro-China leaders have criticised it as an instigator of student unrest especially since the pro-democracy protests of 2014.It is interesting that liberal studies was introduced by a Beijing-controlled regime, but as Robert Spires, now anassistant professor of education at the University of Richmond,has pointed out, it may have been intended as a minor concession to deflect attention from larger forms of administrative authoritarianism.

Last November, it was announced thatliberal studies at school would be renamed and recastto include more content about mainland China and less about current affairs. Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam blamed the education system for fuelling the 2019 pro-democracy protests by teaching children false and biased information.

If we look at Asia more generally, it is clear that the liberally educated graduate, as opposed to one professionally cast in a single direction, has great appeal for employers in the 21st century, in which many skills and careers seem to be ephemeral. But, as the Hong Kong situation aptly demonstrates, liberal is a troublingly expansive word that refuses to stay within an apolitically conceived disciplinary framework.

We can see some of the contradictions when authoritarian regimes seek to institute liberal arts education for various reasons of their own. In a 2019 article for Indian newspaperThe Print, Anushka Prasad, an MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania,describes a conversation with Gan Yang, a dean at Tsinghua University, who pointed out that the Chinese governments investment in liberal arts education was not intended so much to produce active citizens or independent critical thinkers in the Western sense as to cultivate and promote traditional Chinese culture and thought in the Confucian tradition.

That view is endorsed byWalter Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker distinguished professor of Romance studies at Duke University, which has a campus in Kunshan, near Shanghai.China wants to know what the West already knows and to take advantage not to be converted to liberal education but to appropriate Western liberal education in order to set up their own system of education," he says.It is clear that the government is not westernising.

Ethnic chauvinism is also obvious in the Indian BJP-led governmentsinvocation of a tradition of liberal arts rooted in classical Hinduism in its 2020 National Education Policy. Indeed, debates about the meaning of free speech and the right to dissent on university campuses were exploding just at the time when disciplines were opening up to another kind of freedom in elite higher education spaces. While student protests and brutal state suppression raged through the public Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi in 2016, I could not help wondering, in the pages of this magazine, what right there would be to such dissent on the new private campuses. Little did I know that Ashoka, that very summer, would be bitterly split over a petition about military activities in Kashmir, leading to the resignation of some of those involved.

The stark opposition between economic openness and political restriction in parts of East and South-east Asia and now, increasingly, in South Asia explains the contradictions experienced by the project of liberal arts education in these countries. Looking further west, the Gulf countries have also seen substantial investment in liberal arts education and collaboration with American universities. There, we find not so much the direct suppression of free thought and speech against which at least the American overseas campuses are more or less protected but various other kinds of unfreedom which reflect the political climate, as well as a certain traditional and bureaucratic mindset about education.

In these countries, too, access to liberal arts education in the newly opened universities is largely limited to the elite. They are, according to Shafeeq Ghabra, professor of political science at Kuwait University, colleges for the privileged, partly because profit-based universities have limited scholarship opportunities and do not offer student loans. A significant insulation from life outside their rarefied campuses a consistent feature of the new liberal arts universities across Asia is possibly also what maintains a certain freedom within these institutions and protects them from social prejudices and governmental restrictions.

Ian Almond, professor of world literature at Georgetown University, has taught at Georgetown Qatar for the past eight years.

Were really in a Washington bubble, he tells me, our VPN [virtual private computer network] on campus is set to Washington! And Im not sure Ive had any interference that Ive noticed. Once, he recalls, the university planned a debate on whether God is a woman, which the dean had to cancel as he got a lot of heat. But the cancellation annoyed even the conservative students since the Georgetown brand is sold in Qatar on the basis of a free-speech campus.

But while government interference in his teaching has been almost non-existent, Almond feels that self-censorship might be a bigger issue. I still try to show films which have sex scenes without editing them, he says, although I realise that now, if a film has too much sex, I would probably choose judiciously which sections to show. I know many of my colleagues experience some version of this.

If the bulk of higher education in the Gulf, as Gabra writes, remains highly centralised, with the government controlling curriculums, admissions, and recruitment, the socio-political climate inside a campus such as Georgetown Qatar (where about only half the students are Qatari) speaks of a very different world.It is strange, Almond wrote to me, the extent to which the woke vibes in the US reappear on our Qatar campus here, on the other end of the planet, there are very similar arguments amongst our students about Black Lives Matter, trans rights, colonialism and all the issues that get discussed on American campuses. He feels that one certainly wouldnt find this outside of the campus in Qatar which is part of the appeal of GUQ. Yet it also means that the campus has a reputation, amongst local Qataris, of robbing students of their Islamic beliefs and making them cynical about everything.

In any event, the alienation of the American campus from the local socio-political climate is very stark.

In some contexts, systemic, structural and social factors all present a challenge to the new liberal arts model. Writing in 2013 about her experience of setting up Effat College (later University) for women at the request of Princess Lolowah al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the now-retired academic Marcia Grant outlines the barriers to allowing students to gain a broad, cross-disciplinary education. Since students in Saudi Arabia are streamed into either the sciences or the humanities before high school, it was very difficult for them to experience knowledge and practice across the disciplinary divide, as Effat had intended, following the liberal arts model.

The segregation of disciplines, reports Grant, went with the segregation of sexes, which decreed that no men could enter the campus while students were at the school. (This vigilance extended to ensuring that the buildings were constructed in such a way that men could perform repairs to the overhead air conditioning system without walking on the campus.) The hiring of male professors in the womens college was initially impossible, although this problem was later circumvented by obtaining permission from the students families and using closed-circuit television to deliver lectures on screen in the classrooms.

Although neither students nor their parents wanted this kind of segregated experience, as Grant points out, Islamist members of parliament and the university council continued to insist on it. Mixed with these deadening effects, she goes on, are fundamental flaws in a tertiary education system that depends upon an ill-suited consultant army; a dearth of locally generated, relevant learning material; and a myopic educational focus.

It is clear that across Asia there are deeply entrenched obstacles to a mode of higher education that is liberal in multiple senses disciplinary and epistemological but also social and political.

Smaller bureaucratic restrictions about curricula are sometimes symptoms of larger ideological resistances. The Gulf campuses, Yale-NUS and the private universities in India have so far only been able to exist as islands. This is a serious limitation in itself, but it gets aggravated beyond repair when resentment about their insulated existence deepens in the world outside and in the government and begins to corrode their protected status. This is partly what happened at Yale-NUS, and it has been happening to my own institution, Ashoka, from the uproar over the Kashmir petition in 2016 to the controversial resignation of two senior faculty members earlier this year. The genuine enthusiasm for multidisciplinary universities in Indias National Education Policy 2020 is poorly matched with the states consistent suppression of student dissent on campuses across the nation.

American liberal arts education developed as humble, local and provincial. While closely linked to the church, it was free from the larger structures of government. Without the cosmopolitan ambitions of the medieval European university, the American college in the nineteenth century was a hometown entity, writes education historian David Larabee in his 2017 book A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. In a land of competing churches, founding a college was an effective way to plant the flag and promote the faith. A college put a sleepy country town on the map, so that it could demand a railway stop and pitch to be the county seat (or even the state capital), and thus raise the value of local real estate. This possibly explains the remote and provincial locations of so many liberal arts colleges in the US.

Later in the century, two very different elements were imported from Europe that would blend surprisingly well with the institutions foundation in the local community: the German research university and the British undergraduate college. This was an unexpected, even accidental development: three very contradictory forces populist, elite and practical, as Larabee calls them coming together to shape one of the most formidable institutional forces of the 20th centuryalthough one currently facing aggravating challenges of its own. Except perhaps in South Korea, such a harmonious combination of local and global forces has been largely absent in Asia.

The liberal arts model requires significant freedom and a certain amount of decentralisation institutions and faculty must have the liberty to choose their own curricula and adapt them to local needs. But with freedom comes responsibility. Im not sure many institutions and their faculty want that responsibility. I have seen colleges in India gain autonomy and yet change practically nothing in their curricula or pedagogy. And many governments remain keen to centralise higher education and unwilling to grant significant liberties to institutions.

I think its fair to say that the honeymoon period for the liberal arts in Asia is over. Such educational initiatives are still very sustainable, if only for historical reasons the rising youth population (compared with a declining college-age population in the US), significant student talent sharpened by the traditional Asian attention to education, the expanding middle class and its increasingly ambitious vision for higher education. The needs of business and corporate interests in the new global economy also point to employees shaped by a broad, multidisciplinary education.

But its clear that liberal arts institutions are likely to encounter much envy, suspicion and even hostility within their own societies. In nations with histories of state-sponsored, socialist education, institutional models based on private philanthropy are unwelcome to the leftist intelligentsia. To some degree, this suspicion is justified. The very nature of liberal arts education makes it resource-intensive; the perpetual challenge is whether it can be both intellectually exclusive and socially inclusive at the same time.

As it is currently conceived, Asian liberal arts education is likely to continue in institutions that exist as islands. Yet if the mistrust between the islands and the oceans surrounding them stretches beyond a certain point, the compact, whether tacit or explicit, will break. That is what seems to have driven the disintegration of Yale-NUS.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He is grateful for research input from Harshita Tripathi.

See the rest here:

Is the honeymoon period over for liberal arts in Asia? - Times Higher Education (THE)

A 20-year spike in inflation could put the bite on the Trudeau Liberals – CBC.ca

Posted on by

Heath Krevesky is a self-confessed political junkie and a bit of a nerd.

That's his way of explaining why he's been tracking his weekly grocery bill for years now. And why he's worried that inflation is taking a bigger and bigger bite out of his food budget.

"In 2019, it cost me $9,826 to feed myself. In 2020, that cost of feeding myself went to $11,994,an increase of 22 per cent," he said.

"I can't wait to find out how this year wraps itself out. It appears as though it's going to be close to $14,000 for a single individual to feed themselves."

Food prices. Gasoline. A meal out. The cost ofmanyeveryday items is going up after inflation hit 4.7 per cent last month the highest rate in nearly twenty years.

For Krevesky, higher prices means scaling back the menu and adjusting his tastes.

The resident of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island said he buysless meat these days, and when he does, he leans to beef ribs rather than steak.

"It's sort of like your poor man's choice of beef, if you will," he said during an interview for a special segment on inflation airing on this weekend's edition of CBC's The House.

"Everybody would like to be able to afford a prime rib, you know, on a semi-regular basis, I cannot afford that ... Ideally, I like to eat a little bit of beef or chicken, fish, throughout the week, so I get a balanced diet, but it's becoming increasingly more [expensive]."

16:57Whats causing Canadas inflation woes?

It's hard to point to a singlefactor behind rising prices.

Droughts in Canada and other countries reduced crop yields. The pandemic reduced production in manufacturing plants as consumers emerged fromlockdowns with money they're both willing and able to spend.

"What we're seeing around the world is supply chain bottlenecks," Finance Minister Chrystia Freelandsaidthis week when asked by a reporter if the Liberals' plan to spend another $100 billion on post-pandemic programs is to blame forthe jump in inflation.

"We are seeing higher energy prices. Energy is a global commodity. When those prices are higher in one country, they are higher around the world. We're seeing a basic challenge that shutting down the world's economy turned out to be a much simpler process than turning the global economy back on."

But for a government that remains relentlessly focused onwhat it likes to call "the middle class and those working hard to join it," inflation isn't some abstract economic concept. It's making life less affordable for those very same people.

Kathy Wainberg is the owner of Pita Ikram. She has two locations,strictly take-out, in the northwest corner of Toronto. Like many small restaurateurs, she struggles to hire staff andserve asteady stream of customers.

A few months ago, she put up a noticeletting customers know the prices of their favourite shawarma meals were going up by about 20 per cent.

"Things like oil that we use for frying food have, like, tripled in price," she told The House. "We waited to raise prices for as long as we possibly could but in the restaurant industry, the margins are razor thin, so we were unable to absorb maybe as much of the costs as the customer would have liked to have seen."

It's stories like these that makeinflation a convenient target for any opposition politician intent on linking government policy to rising prices.

Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre led the opposition charge this week. He accusedthe Liberal government of wanton spending, saying inflation is worse in this country than most other democratic countries because, like the United States, the Liberals have been "printing money to pay their bills" instead of controlling spending.

"The cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Almost a half a trillion dollars of inflationistLiberal deficits mean more dollars chasing fewer goods, driving higher prices," he said.

Poilievre is one of those politicians who can boil down complicated issues like fiscal policy into easily-understood soundbites, packaged with claims that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is entirely out of touch with Canadians' lives.

"The prime minister says he doesn't think much about monetary policy," he said."That's no surprise. After all, it's 'Justin-flation.'"

But economist Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary said Poilievre is stretching the data by suggesting inflation is worse in Canada than in places like Switzerland.

"I can cherry-pick countries, too. Israel has among the highest rates of money supply growth in the developed world, but among the lowest rates of inflation," he said.

"So overall, across all developed economies, there really isn't a strong relationship between the money supply growth and observed inflation."

Economist Armine Yalnizian acknowledges the Liberals aren't immune to the political impact of rising prices, even if the inflation rate now is more of a short-term spike than a long-term trend.

"Of course the Liberals are vulnerable to people feeling like they're losing purchasing power," she said.

Continue reading here:

A 20-year spike in inflation could put the bite on the Trudeau Liberals - CBC.ca

John Rawls and Liberalism’s Selective Conscience – The Nation

Posted on by

In December of 1944, on the Philippine island of Leyte, the soldiers of F Company of the 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, dug in. Stationed just outside the town of Limon, they were attempting to take a strategic ridge overlooking the town. In the face of fierce Japanese resistance, it was all they could do to hold their position. A first lieutenant who was also a Lutheran pastor addressed the company and gave words of encouragement by means of a brief sermon. God guides the US Armys bullets toward the Japanese, the lieutenant assured his fellow soldiers, while protecting us from theirs. Books in Review

These words failed to lift the spirits of at least one young soldier in F Company; instead, they infuriated him. Years later, he described this incident as one of the experiences that best explained why he eventually abandoned his faith. Whatever Gods will actually was, he decided, it would have to accord with the most basic ideas of justice that we havethereby ruling out the lieutenants assertion that God had selective concerns for one side in a clearly godless war. What else could the will of an all-just God be? By that same token, what else could justice be? If absolutely nothing else, any true God would have to be fair.

Katrina Forresters In the Shadow of Justice provides a detailed account of the intellectual development of this young soldier, John Rawls, who eventually became the celebrated philosopher. The question of fairness would remain with Rawls for the rest of his life. In 1971, his 600-page magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, debuted to critical acclaim and cemented his position as one of the most famous political philosophers in the English-speaking world by insisting that justice was fairnessthat the kind of objective standards for human society and individual action capable of replacing God required an ability to view the world from a distance and assess what allocations of duties and wealth were fair. In the book, Rawls argued that basic liberties and the equality of citizens were essential to this idea of fairness. Societies could deviate from an equal distribution of benefits and burdens only in cases governed by the difference principlewhich includes a requirement that inequalities should provide the most benefits to the least advantaged. Otherwise, a just society would have to be governed by the fair distribution of responsibility, work, hardship, and the wealth produced by a communitya distribution whose fairness, he insisted, could be determined from behind a veil of ignorance that prevented a hypothetical person from knowing exactly where he or she would end up in the social hierarchy.

With its doctrine of fairness, A Theory of Justice transformed political philosophy. The English historian Peter Laslett had described the field as dead in 1956; with Rawlss book that changed almost overnight. Now philosophers were arguing about the nature of Rawlsian principles and their implicationsand for that matter were once again interested in matters of political and economic justice. Rawlss terms became lingua franca: Many considered how his arguments, focused mostly on domestic or national issues of justice, might be applied to questions of international justice as well. Others sought to extend his theorys set of political principles, while still others probed the limits of Rawlss epistemology and the narrowness of his focus on individuals. A decade after A Theory of Justice appeared, Forrester notes, 2,512 books and articles had been published engaging with its central claims.

Rawlss liberal theory of justice as fairness has continued to define the shape and trajectory of political philosophy and liberalism writ large to this day. In this sense, In the Shadow of Justice is aptly named. But as Forrester shows, the limits of Rawlss theory and the political philosophy that it helped birth remain with us as well. By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawlss book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice.

Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, the second of five sons in an affluent Episcopalian family. He had a privileged and mostly happy childhood; the kinds of calamities and hardships suffered by many during the Depression were sharply attenuated by his familys wealth and status in the city. After attending private schools, Rawls quickly rose through some of the most prestigious universities in the world: He received his doctorate from Princeton and studied at Oxford, after which he taught at MIT and Harvard.

Yet Forrester reminds us that not everything was as rosy as it might seem on the surface. Two of Rawlss siblings died in childhood from diseases they had contracted from him; such tragedies likely influenced his later interest in questions of fairness and luck and how both formed the basis of a just political system. His native Baltimore was a deeply segregated city and had cultivated social norms and mores to match. (Rawls later recounted his mothers fury when she learned that he had struck up a friendship with a Black boy and had even visited his house.) But Rawls knew from an early age that the luck of being born into an affluent white family entirely explained the difference between his opportunities and those of his Black friend. As well, Rawlss graduate studies at Princeton were interrupted by the trauma and violence of his three years in the infantry in the Pacific theater during World War II, and his experiences with luck during the war likewise shaped his view of justice. At one point, he was passed over for a mission because he had the right blood type to donate to a wounded soldier; the man who went in his place was killed in an ambush. This was only one of the countless examples of bad luck and unfairness found in any warbut in particular in the wars that had become commonplace in the first half of the 20th century. When Rawls returned to Princeton, his wartime trauma and disillusionment led him to abandon his interest in theology and to turn instead to political philosophy in his search for a system that would ground political decision-making in an objective morality rather than in God or fealty to the state. Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

Rawlss highly abstract and intricate philosophical system was not a flight from the real worlds effects on him, Forrester argues, but rather a direct response to the harrowing experiences, personal and political, that had shaped much of the first three decades of his life. Rawls was trying to find something to stand in place of the God that had abandoned him and his enemies alike on the battlefield as well as the two siblings who had died when he was growing upbut it also had to be something that did not involve simply trusting in the state. Neither the God he had lost faith in nor the military he had served in could be fair, Rawls contendedbut perhaps, if we relied on the kinds of rules that could emerge from rational decision-making processes, society could be.

Forresters book next turns to the real-world politics of the 1950s and 60s, which made Rawlss pursuit of a tidy, fairness-preserving system of justice so difficult. The postwar years were an era of social upheaval, defined by the struggles against Jim Crow at home and the Vietnam War abroad, and to develop his system in these uncertain years, Rawls began to publish a series of essays reckoning with the times that would eventually become A Theory of Justice.

Rawls advanced his view of justice as fairness in these years, but with certain qualifications. A fair and just society, he argued, would be one with a basic structure of democracy: The societys major institutions would endow everyone with a fundamental set of political liberties and divide the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in a broadly egalitarian way. Social inequalities could be tolerated only if they met two conditions: They needed to be attached to offices open to all under the conditions of fair and equal opportunity, and they needed to work to the greatest benefit of the societys least advantaged members.

Rawlss view of justice as fairness would apply in a society free of racial segregation. But since he was convinced that Jim Crow was so clearly unjust, he addressed it only indirectly: The philosophical questions he regarded as worth asking were exclusively implementation ones about how to dismantle it. At the same time, for Rawls, the questions concerning Vietnam and the draft in particular were harder to engage. In one sense, being conscripted into the military was a matter of luck, as some young men received draft cards and others did not. But college men, predominantly from privileged class and racial backgrounds, were able to escape military service when other men could not: 2-S deferments exempted some university students from conscription. If distributive justice was at the center of Rawlss overall theory of justice, then he had to reckon with how the deferments that many of his students received gave them an unfair advantage at the expense of othersand this meant not only pondering his political arguments in the abstract but also in terms of the institution where he actually worked. To remedy this situation, Rawls helped organize Harvards faculty to oppose the deferments.

Readers like you make our independent journalism possible.

The civil disobedience tactics that various youth movements used to challenge the war posed another problem for Rawlss theory of justice. His own and his contemporaries commitment to liberalism and its attendant values, such as stability and the rule of law, needed to reckon with the fact that civil disobedience was a response to an unjust war that the countrys citizens had every right to protest and oppose. Could breaking the law be justified, Rawls wondered, if the law itself was conceptualized as a fair agreementthe outcome of a process of rational deliberation among the people subject to it? How could political philosophers account for the kind of moral exception being claimed by those breaking from this overall cooperative scheme to conduct sit-ins or burn their draft cards?

Rawls finally published his answer at the end of the 1960s. Civil disobedience could be justified as an occasional escape hatch, he maintained in a 1969 essay, when the majority overreached and placed too heavy a burden on others. But individual conscience could not reign supreme: Even if would-be protesters had a serious moral objection to some decisions of the majority, this was not enough to justify breaking the law, as it would result in an unstable scheme of society. In coming to this view, Rawls made a telling shift from his earlier fair play view of social cooperation, in which obligations were voluntarily acquired, to a stronger one that regarded stability as a natural duty binding all citizens within a society. Thus, civil disobedience could be tolerated, but only within strict limits. Such protest had to be aimed at changing a societys laws, and its participants had to accept punishment and arrest without resistance.

Rawlss evolving views on obligation and civil disobedience, Forrester notes, helped shape A Theory of Justice. In general, Rawls believed that the aim of political philosophy was to find a reliable method built on noncoercive procedures to justify ethical beliefs and judgmentsand that included acting according to ones political duty (such as military service) and also according to ones moral conscience (such as opposing an unjust war). Rather than try to generate freestanding moral principles to guide human conduct, Rawls argued, or uncover hidden truths that were separate from life as it was actually lived, philosophers needed to study the ethical principles already implicit in peoples intuitions and actions and then develop a system through which these could be judged and assessed.

Mining the nascent field of game theory, Rawls contended that this system could be built on the rational procedures that follow from someone acting in their economic and material interests. To decipher a moral approach to real-world problems required a system that could, in effect, step outside the real worldone that was bound not by history or sociology but by human rationality alone. Rawls described a hypothetical procedure, conducted from behind a veil of ignorance about ones status in society, for deciding on its basic rules. Heads of households, he argued, should be placed in an original position that allowed them general facts about psychology and economic life but denied them information about the past history of their society as well as where they would themselves end up in the society they were designing. This disinterested position, Rawls argued, would allow these heads of households to formulate rules that would benefit people in a range of social positions, since they would have no clue which one they might fall into, and these rules would then form the basis for a fair and well-ordered society.

Of the many things that Rawls proposed in his 600-page opus, the original position is among the most hotly debated and sharply criticized. It is indeed a move that prominently displays many of the shortcomings of his approach to philosophy. Populating the original position with heads of households involved a seemingly uncritical nod toward patriarchal social relations, and the related organization of family life drew serious and sustained criticism from feminist political philosophers like Susan Muller Okin and Iris Marion Young. Philosophers attentive to race and colonialism, like Charles Mills, likewise criticized the original positions abstraction from the history of society, which Mills argued would serve to obscure issues like racism and other forms of injustice that a theory of justice ought to respond to directly.

While many of these criticisms have teeth, they also demonstrate the profound success of Rawlss thought. The Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby noted as much in his high-profile debate with Mills: While the latter offered strident objections to Rawlss racial amnesia, he stopped short of providing alternative principles or procedures or suggesting that the liberalism undergirding so much of Rawlss thought should be fully abandoned. And while Mills would later offer his own principles of corrective justice, they were explicitly presented as additions and revisions to Rawlss set. Whether this effort succeeds or not, it was literally proposed on Rawlss terms.

If anything, Mills was ahead of many of Rawlss critics in having a comprehensive and positive position on what constitutes a just society. While there were examples of alternative systems of distributive justiceespecially from the so-called communitariansmost of the writing on the subject was dedicated to critiquing Rawlss system and offering suggestions on what to avoid when theorizing on such questions in the future, whether the objection was to the patterns of abstraction (heads of households instead of past injustice), or to abstracting too much or too freely (e.g., criticisms of ideal theory and of systematic moral philosophy), or even to the purported objectivity or universalism undergirding the abstractions in the first place. But proffered alternatives to the Rawlsian approach were few and far between, and their authors often found it difficult to match the scale and systematic nature of A Theory of Justice, tending instead to offer ad hoc, incomplete, and overly specific moral systems instead of all-encompassing ones.

Forrester tracks in exacting detail the responses that Rawlss elaborate system of thought prompted. But if theres a criticism to be made about her book, it is that this meticulous tracking of key figures and concepts risks overwhelming readers with unnecessary detail. At times, Forrester seems to take the challenges posed by the historical moment more seriously than the subjects of her investigations did. As a result, the abundance of detail about how Rawls and his contemporaries did change their political commitments in response to their times can risk obscuring the fact that they mostly did not. Indeed, they were often selective about which of the many philosophical questions posed by their tumultuous times they deigned to answer, and it is this selective conscience that is the most assailable aspect of Rawlss legacy. He may have been speaking on laudable principle when he insisted that Jim Crow was obviously unjust, but in the same breath he also excluded it from philosophical discussion.

Rawlss leadership in the faculty opposition to 2-S deferments marked another principled stand against the consequences disproportionately suffered by others because of race, class, or perceived mental ability. But even here, selective conscience ruled the day. The decades of the Cold War were punctuated by intense levels of violence. The Vietnam War killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians, injured over 5 million more, and displaced some 11 million people. This violence included known massacres like the infamous My Lai incident and untold numbers of unknown ones; as recently as 2001, the results of internal war-crimes investigations lay rotting and forgotten in a nondescript case of records in the National Archives. And yet the body count for this war piled up largely outside the United Statesand thus mostly outside the sphere of domestic justice that Rawls was willing to consider at the time. The barbarity and injustice of the war itself went neglected in his discussions of military conscription and its opponents.

Thank you for subscribing to our Books & the Arts newsletter.

Please enter your email below and subscribe to our bi-weekly collection of the best of the Books & the Arts.

Thank you for subscribing to our Books & the Arts newsletter.

So too did the violent footprint of the American empire as a whole. Vietnam, after all, was but one theater in a hot war waged by the United States and its allies for control of the global economic and political system. In Indonesia, for instance, nearly 1 million civilians were murdered by a US-backed anti-communist dictatorship. Indonesia was simply one of 22 third world countries in which the United States facilitated mass murder between the end of World War II and the 1990sat which point, Forrester observes, international politics finally attracted Rawlss consideration. Throughout the period of the Vietnam War, liberation movements confronted US-supported apartheid regimes in wars of national liberation: in Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa. What differentiated Vietnam from these struggles? I can hazard a guess: their lack of major deployments of US troops, and thus a link for a domestically focused philosopher like Rawls to consider.

To his credit, Rawls was a vocal and public opponent of the Vietnam War from the beginning. But amid all the global carnage, it was the draft deferments that he chose to organize against. The primacy of domestic justice and the natural duty of social stability directed his political action toward fighting the unjust distribution of draft cards in the United States rather than the unjust distribution of napalm and Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. One would be on principled grounds to insist, contra Rawlss own theory and pattern of political action, that addressing the latter injustice ought to have far outweighed addressing the former. Such an approach might acknowledgeas a younger and perhaps wiser Rawls had clearly been willing to dothat neither God nor justice should care whether you were American or Vietnamese.

Rawlss selective concentration on the homeland has parallels in the basic tenets of his political theory. He developed what has been called a two-tiered approach: Domestic politics constituted one tier and international politics the other, with the former taking precedence. Meanwhile, waves of national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia upended the map of the world. Through it all, the Cold War stamped the domestic politics of these new nations and the old ones alike with the indelible mark of geopolitical maneuvering. Rawlss theory gave so much primacy to domestic justice that Forrester describes him as having set aside the international realm altogether until the 1990s.

Despite Rawlss relative inattention to supposedly secondary global matters, prominent philosophers in the 1970s began to bring his insights to bear on the international realm. The fit was odd and unwieldy: Rawlss theory makes the basic structure the target of domestic justice, which he takes to be the institutions that primarily distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.

Under the highly theoretical conditions of A Theory of Justice (including a society that is closed to external intervention), the basic structure can reasonably be assumed to refer to a given country. But in the context of an international system, the central Rawlsian assumption of a closed society does not apply. The United Nations debated a New International Economic Orderone predicated on economic sovereignty for every countryunder pressure from many of its new member-states. The most dynamic political movements of the time were attempting to literally remake the world, and Rawls and his colleagues were content merely to add the occasional epicycle to their existing theories of ideally just practice.

None of this is to say that they were politically unserious or responding cynically to the events of their day. In Rawlss case especially, the point is exactly the opposite: At the end of the day, he was genuinely committed to the project of liberal philosophy as he understood it. As such, he was also committed to the fundamental intellectual tenets that sustained it: trust in liberal political principles and in the basic common-sense arguments of the state system that had spread them (even though he was less interested in the historical particulars of how that spreading was done).

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response. These challenges were, in the main, the same radical challenges that liberalism has faced since its inception. That inception did not take place in a hypothetical state of nature but rather in a real era of slave states and imperial conquest on a planetary scale, and it was these forces that spread its putatively universalist tenets around the world as it developed ever more incisive criticisms of injustice and inequality. That liberal vision had long been wedded to theories of property and popular sovereignty formed in response far more to imagined histories of political and economic inheritance than to the actual history that explained the distributions of income, rights, and privileges that liberalism and liberals promised to equitably manage. By every indication, Rawls really meant what he said about equality, fairness, and justice in his personal and intellectual life, though he came to a partial and selective understanding of what those things required of him and the structures around him.

Of course, things could be worse. Many of liberalisms cousins to its political right could not manage to sustain even a pretense of interest in equality and justice for all. Perhaps this lack of even a pretense is what irked the young Rawls as he listened to that first lieutenant insist that God was on their sideand their side alonein their deadly struggle with the Japanese. Whats so godly, after all, about a selective conscience?

Go here to see the original:

John Rawls and Liberalism's Selective Conscience - The Nation

Ana Pateman will run for council in the east ward – Daily Liberal

Posted on by

news, local-news,

Ana Pateman has run for council in the past and she is hoping this time things are a bit different when Dubbo votes on Saturday. Ms Pateman is running as an independent, solo candidate in the Dubbo Regional Council election and believes the new group of councillors should refocus on the task at hand. "I did nominate last time for east ward," she said. "I decided to nominate again because I think the council needs some very stable governance in this next term. "I'm in a position to offer that to the community of Dubbo." Ms Pateman returned to Dubbo two decades ago and will run in east ward for the election after having a long history with that part of the city throughout her life. "I actually was born in Dubbo and grew up in Dubbo," she said. "I came back to Dubbo 20 years ago and I've lived in east ward the whole time I've been back." Like many council candidates in the running at the election, Ms Pateman said she had kept a keen eye on how things have been going during the last term of council and knows how vital local government is to supporting the community. READ ALSO: "I've always I guess aware of local government," she said. "It doesn't matter where I live, I've always been very conscious of what happens with the local government and how they support the community." Ms Pateman has worked as a teacher around the state but is currently the chief executive officer of Western Student Connections and feels she is in a great position to be able to actively contribute should she be elected. "I have felt that I wanted to be able to contribute for quite a few years now," she said. "Last time I was in a position to do so and I just thought this time I will do it again. "I think we need a lot of variety amongst the candidates. "We need lots of candidates to provide people with a choice." Ms Pateman also admitted she was against having the current ward system and believes the residents of Dubbo need to have their confidence restored in leadership and management moving forward. Ms Pateman and her fellow candidates will have their fate decided on Saturday when the local government elections are held. Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/118079462/53588281-022c-44f5-871a-af2a873eaf79.jpg/r0_1272_3936_3496_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

COUNCIL ELECTIONS

November 29 2021 - 8:36AM

CONFIDENCE: Ana Pateman is running in east ward at the local government elections on Saturday. Picture: CONTRIBUTED

Ana Pateman has run for council in the past and she is hoping this time things are a bit different when Dubbo votes on Saturday.

Ms Pateman is running as an independent, solo candidate in the Dubbo Regional Council election and believes the new group of councillors should refocus on the task at hand.

"I did nominate last time for east ward," she said.

"I decided to nominate again because I think the council needs some very stable governance in this next term.

"I'm in a position to offer that to the community of Dubbo."

Ms Pateman returned to Dubbo two decades ago and will run in east ward for the election after having a long history with that part of the city throughout her life.

"I actually was born in Dubbo and grew up in Dubbo," she said.

"I came back to Dubbo 20 years ago and I've lived in east ward the whole time I've been back."

Like many council candidates in the running at the election, Ms Pateman said she had kept a keen eye on how things have been going during the last term of council and knows how vital local government is to supporting the community.

"I've always I guess aware of local government," she said.

"It doesn't matter where I live, I've always been very conscious of what happens with the local government and how they support the community."

Ms Pateman has worked as a teacher around the state but is currently the chief executive officer of Western Student Connections and feels she is in a great position to be able to actively contribute should she be elected.

"I have felt that I wanted to be able to contribute for quite a few years now," she said.

"Last time I was in a position to do so and I just thought this time I will do it again.

"I think we need a lot of variety amongst the candidates.

"We need lots of candidates to provide people with a choice."

Ms Pateman also admitted she was against having the current ward system and believes the residents of Dubbo need to have their confidence restored in leadership and management moving forward.

Ms Pateman and her fellow candidates will have their fate decided on Saturday when the local government elections are held.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

Excerpt from:

Ana Pateman will run for council in the east ward - Daily Liberal

No need for overdevelopment: Labor, Liberal councillors united in opposition to apartment towers – The Sydney Morning Herald

Posted on by

The site is bounded by busy roads and opposite the Waverley Bus Depot, which in the past has been speculated as a target for property development.

Ms Glass said the apartment towers would destroy a local heritage area and overshadow Oxford Street, creating wind tunnels like the ones further east on the street.

Ms Glass also criticised the planning process under which changes were made to local planning rules to accommodate the development.

The state government in 2019 approved an increase in maximum height and floor space ratio controls for the site to support urban renewal, a Planning Department spokesman said.

More than 570,000 new homes have been approved in NSW in the past decade, with 194,000 more homes planned for delivery by 2026.

Planning alone cant solve housing affordability, but were driving the biggest reforms to the planning system in decades to unlock more housing supply, the spokesman said.

Loading

Waverley Liberal councillor Angela Burrill said the apartment towers were an overdevelopment and would breach height limits, which were more than doubled to 36 metres over the opposition of residents and the council.

The site is in a high traffic area and can only increase congestion already experienced locally, she said.

Cr Burrill said a huge amount of apartments had been built in Waverley Council in the past five years, meeting housing targets so there was no need for the overdevelopment of this site.

Certainly residents voices, impacts on congestion and density as well as heritage should factor into decisions on increasing heights that allow these large apartment blocks, she said.

Loading

Waverley Labor councillor Paula Masselos said overdevelopment, affordable housing and population growth were major concerns for voters who will elect a new council on December 4.

She said the proposal showed a total lack of concern about its negative impacts on the community and stress it places on already overtaxed infrastructure.

Feeder schools have already said they are full and cannot take any more students, while Oxford Street is already gridlocked, she said.

Cr Masselos said the apartment towers would also undo efforts by local mayors to protect Centennial Park from the impact of private developments.

This building is visible from the centre of the park, which goes against the charter of the park that promotes views of the sky to the horizon not high-rise buildings, she said.

But Mr Leis said the project did not directly impact on any neighbouring residents or encroach on the heritage area or Centennial Park.

Mr Leis said Bondi Junction was an established town centre with good public transport links, access to park and beaches as well as shops, schools and medical services.

The site was presented to us by a local agent who highlighted the merits of the location for residential housing and held the view that this end of Oxford Street was also in need of some revitalisation, he said.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the days most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Link:

No need for overdevelopment: Labor, Liberal councillors united in opposition to apartment towers - The Sydney Morning Herald

Liberal Party members running as independents, community candidates in local elections – The Sydney Morning Herald

Posted on by

Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size

Liberal Party members are running in the upcoming council elections as independents and under the banner of community tickets, with no mention on their websites or promotional material that they hold Liberal Party membership.

The NSW Liberal Party does not endorse candidates in some council areas, including North Sydney, Kiama and Shoalhaven.

Local Liberals who wish to run for office in those councils are not allowed, under Liberal Party rules and the NSW Electoral Act, to use Liberal Party branding, even if they openly identify as Liberals.

Elle Prevost, a first-time candidate who is running as an independent for North Sydney council, said she was a proud Liberal party member.

North Sydney candidate Elle Prevost.Credit:ellefornorthsydney.com

I am a Liberal, but we are not endorsed in the North Sydney area, she said. Maybe its me being naive, but because I am not endorsed by the Liberal Party, my understanding is Im an independent.

Ms Prevosts ticket is called Team Elle. Its website announces her as an Independent for North Sydney council and her Liberal Party membership is not mentioned. The membership is disclosed in Ms Prevosts candidate nomination form, filed under a subheading in a PDF document on the NSW Electoral Commission website.

This is a really Liberal area, so I should be screaming it from the rooftops because it would win me more votes, she said.

Retired naval officer Mark Croxford is a member of the executive of the NSW Liberal Party, and a Liberal Party member. But his connection to the Liberal Party is not mentioned on the promotional materials for his run at the Kiama council in the upcoming elections on December 4.

Mark Croxford is standing for election in the Kiama LGA elections.Credit:Janie Barrett

Mr Croxford is at the top of the Your Community Candidates ticket, which pledges to form a council free from party political agendas. The groups website urges voters not to risk a council influenced by party politics and says that party politics has no place in local government.

Mr Croxfords bio on the Your Community Candidates website lists his background as a lobbyist and a senior ministerial adviser in the Howard government, but not his position as a country representative on the NSW Liberal Party executive, or his party membership.

The membership is declared on his nomination form on the Electoral Commission website.

I hide in the open, Mr Croxford said. I am in the Liberal Party for the purpose of federal and state politics. I personally dont believe there is any room for party politics in local politics.

He said he always discloses his Liberal Party roots when he is speaking to constituents.

I am happy to say I am a Liberal member but as a councillor I want to be a representative of my community, he said.

The Declaration of Independents Local Government, created by the Voices of North Sydney group, has been signed by 56 candidates in the Lane Cove, North Sydney, Willoughby, Hunters Hill and Georges River councils.

Rod Simpson, the co-convener of the Voices of North Sydney group, says the intention of the declaration is to get some transparency into local government.

Its asking people what their political status is and whether they have been [a member of a political party] in the past and whether they have made political donations or been a staffer, says Mr Simpson, who is a former environment commissioner with the Greater Sydney Commission.

Its really hard for people to untangle this and we are just trying to bring it up to the surface and make it easy for people to see what on earth is going on.

The Declarations stated intention is to differentiate community-minded independents from independents who are affiliated with political parties. A community minded independent is defined as a candidate who is not currently a member of a political party, and will vote as an individual.

At the Shoalhaven Council, Serena Copley is billed as an independent on the ballot form, but the NSW Electoral Commission records show she is also a Liberal Party member.

Serena Copley is a candidate for Shoalhaven City Council.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

The same goes for the other candidates on her ticket, Fred Campbell, Leonard White and Francoise Sikora.

Ms Copleys team is called A Fresh Approach and does not mention any connection with the Liberal Party in its promotional materials.

Council candidates Fred Campbell OAM and Leonard White.Credit:Facebook/Serena Copley for Shoalhaven City Council

Loading

In response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Copley said she had been a member of the Shoalhaven community for more than 30 years.

They know me and what I stand for, she said. I am running as an independent so I can represent my community and only my community, not any party or their agenda.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the days most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Read the original here:

Liberal Party members running as independents, community candidates in local elections - The Sydney Morning Herald

Suspected Omicron case in Switzerland – Daily Liberal

Posted on by

The first probable case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Switzerland as the country tightens entry restrictions to check the spread. The case relates to a person who returned to Switzerland from South Africa around a week ago, the Federal Office for Public Health said on Twitter. Testing will clarify the situation in the coming days, it added. Switzerland has ordered travellers from 19 countries to present a negative test when boarding a flight to the country, and must quarantine for 10 days on arrival. The list includes Australia, Denmark, Britain, Czech Republic, South Africa and Israel. Swiss voters on Sunday backed the government's pandemic response plan by a bigger than expected majority in a referendum, paving the way for the continuation of exceptional measures to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases. Some 62.01 per cent voted in favour of a law passed earlier this year to provide financial aid to people hit by the COVID-19 crisis and laying the foundation for certificates giving proof of COVID-19 vaccination, recovery or a negative test. These are currently required to enter bars, restaurants and certain events. Australian Associated Press

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/aae2f08d-7d74-418e-8a85-637b812f1a12.jpg/r0_74_800_526_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

November 29 2021 - 5:44PM

The first probable case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Switzerland as the country tightens entry restrictions to check the spread.

The case relates to a person who returned to Switzerland from South Africa around a week ago, the Federal Office for Public Health said on Twitter.

Testing will clarify the situation in the coming days, it added.

Switzerland has ordered travellers from 19 countries to present a negative test when boarding a flight to the country, and must quarantine for 10 days on arrival.

The list includes Australia, Denmark, Britain, Czech Republic, South Africa and Israel.

Swiss voters on Sunday backed the government's pandemic response plan by a bigger than expected majority in a referendum, paving the way for the continuation of exceptional measures to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases.

Some 62.01 per cent voted in favour of a law passed earlier this year to provide financial aid to people hit by the COVID-19 crisis and laying the foundation for certificates giving proof of COVID-19 vaccination, recovery or a negative test.

These are currently required to enter bars, restaurants and certain events.

Australian Associated Press

Continue reading here:

Suspected Omicron case in Switzerland - Daily Liberal

Toongi will be home to a new Critical Minerals Hub – Daily Liberal

Posted on by

news, local-news,

Toongi is set to be home to Australia's first Critical Minerals Hub as the NSW government continues its push to become a major global supplier of critical minerals and high-tech metals. Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW Paul Toole announced the hub at the Toongi property where the facility will be constructed on Monday morning along with Member for Dubbo Dugald Saunders. "This is a working property and it's a pretty unique site," Mr Saunders said. "The strategy itself is about delivering economic growth and also delivering advanced manufacturing jobs in the future. "There is global demand and we will be at the forefront of the demand." Mr Toole believes the construction of the minerals hub will be a big investment in the future of regional NSW and the central west. "This is important because as the deputy premier I want to make our state the number one investment when it comes to mining and advanced manufacturing," he said. "They are going to be future." READ ALSO: Mr Toole is confident once the minerals hub is finished, NSW will have to ability to provide high-tech metals and minerals to organisations around the world. "We want to be a global supplier," he said. "But we also want to lead the world. "When you have a look at regional NSW this is the place where we are going to make the investment. "It means now that we will see billions of dollars being invested in regional NSW." Four high-tech metals will be mined at the facility which are cobalt, tungsten, titanium and copper along with other rare earths. Mr Toole is confident the hub will set NSW apart from other locations as the demand for critical minerals increases in the next 40 years. The state government's Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy will also have room for further geological surveys to deliver data for explorers. There is hope that the minerals hub will adequately help fulfil the supply chain link between mines and manufacturing. Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) chief executive officer Warren Pearce knows the minerals will be useful for a range of different products whilst providing skilled jobs to local workers. "Critical and high-tech minerals are the minerals of the future," he said. "These are the minerals that will be needed to manufacture batteries, power electric vehicles and construct wind turbines and solar panels that will support a low carbon future. "The Critical Minerals Strategy will support NSW in a new era for the industry." Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/wF2AsUhhR8g62Py4v8BYyb/508a4bce-08e5-42be-b411-0a8935739c7e.JPG/r0_281_5568_3427_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

SUBSCRIBER

November 29 2021 - 1:14PM

+20

Toongi is set to be home to Australia's first Critical Minerals Hub as the NSW government continues its push to become a major global supplier of critical minerals and high-tech metals.

Deputy Premier and Minister for Regional NSW Paul Toole announced the hub at the Toongi property where the facility will be constructed on Monday morning along with Member for Dubbo Dugald Saunders.

"This is a working property and it's a pretty unique site," Mr Saunders said.

"The strategy itself is about delivering economic growth and also delivering advanced manufacturing jobs in the future.

"There is global demand and we will be at the forefront of the demand."

Mr Toole believes the construction of the minerals hub will be a big investment in the future of regional NSW and the central west.

"This is important because as the deputy premier I want to make our state the number one investment when it comes to mining and advanced manufacturing," he said.

"They are going to be future."

Mr Toole is confident once the minerals hub is finished, NSW will have to ability to provide high-tech metals and minerals to organisations around the world.

"We want to be a global supplier," he said.

"But we also want to lead the world.

"When you have a look at regional NSW this is the place where we are going to make the investment.

"It means now that we will see billions of dollars being invested in regional NSW."

Four high-tech metals will be mined at the facility which are cobalt, tungsten, titanium and copper along with other rare earths.

Mr Toole is confident the hub will set NSW apart from other locations as the demand for critical minerals increases in the next 40 years.

The state government's Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy will also have room for further geological surveys to deliver data for explorers.

There is hope that the minerals hub will adequately help fulfil the supply chain link between mines and manufacturing.

Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) chief executive officer Warren Pearce knows the minerals will be useful for a range of different products whilst providing skilled jobs to local workers.

"Critical and high-tech minerals are the minerals of the future," he said.

"These are the minerals that will be needed to manufacture batteries, power electric vehicles and construct wind turbines and solar panels that will support a low carbon future.

"The Critical Minerals Strategy will support NSW in a new era for the industry."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

Read more:

Toongi will be home to a new Critical Minerals Hub - Daily Liberal

YouTube Makes Modifications to Upload Details and Analytics – Digital Information World

Posted on by

Creators have become a bit of a precious commodity for most platforms, and YouTube is no exception especially when you consider the fact that it was perhaps the first ever hub for online creators to be able to just post whatever they wanted to based on their creativity.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that YouTube has just made a relatively small change that would nevertheless make it so that content creators would have a much easier time uploading lots of videos with ease. This change is coming to YouTube Studio, and it is basically making it so that you can reuse the same details that you might have added to older videos because most content creators have a set of signature information that they add underneath the details regarding the video itself.

Another change that YouTube is making is that it is adding a lot more analytics to its mobile app. While these are all analytics that you could already get on the desktop version of the service, you should bear in mind that being able to access this information on mobile is crucial. It can allow you to stay up to date on the state of your channel on the go. Most creators need to move around a lot while they are making their content, so this is a change that would definitely come in handy for most them in a really big way.

Read next:YouTube Is Adding Preview Thumbnails To Android TV and Google TV, While Also Testing Out Preview Comments For The Mobile App

See more here:

YouTube Makes Modifications to Upload Details and Analytics - Digital Information World

How to fundraise for nonprofits and charities on every social media app – Mashable

Posted on by

There's no denying the power of a skyrocketing social media post millions of likes, views, or shares later, and people have suddenly built a fanbase, or raised tens of thousands of dollars, or finally reconnected with a long lost friend. Social media, with all its ills, can still be a startlingly impactful tool.

The majority of us may never have a viral post change a life, but social media apps allow users to make small differences for causes that matter. From Facebook's full fundraising platform to Instagram's donation stickers, your social profiles can see frequent use as mini-donation centers for nonprofits and charities. And, in a small way, maybe that can help soothe the complicated relationship we have with social media as a whole. Here's how it all works within each app.

While the app recently removed its personal fundraising tool that allowed users to receive funds directly for personal causes or small businesses (like its own version of a GoFundMe), users still have a ton of options to raise money for outside organizations. To support a verified nonprofit or charity, account holders can post fundraisers in their Instagram bios, use Instagram's Donation sticker, or host an Instagram Live for charity.

Instagram users can use posts and profile bios to create 30-day fundraisers for organizations of their choice. Just make a post as you normally would, by selecting the "plus icon" on either the Instagram home page or your profile page. Under the New Post settings, right below the location tag, select "Add Fundraiser" and choose your organization.

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

The post will link to a donation site, and a fundraising notice will be added to your profile's bio. The link will stay live for 30 days; 100% of donations go directly to the organization.

First, create a story on your personal profile by tapping the "plus" icon. Take or upload a picture something relevant to your cause would probably be helpful. Before uploading, add a sticker by clicking the square smiley face icon in the top right corner of the post draft page.

From there, simply click the sticker labeled "Donation" and scroll through or search for nonprofits and charities accepting donations on Instagram. Select the one of your choice.

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

You can also edit the text on the donate button to personalize your fundraising campaign.

To start a fundraiser on an Instagram Live, hit that same "plus" button and select the "Live" option. Before starting your Instagram live feed, select the "Fundraiser" icon on the left side of the screen (you might only see a small heart inside of a coin icon), and then choose your fundraiser.

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

Credit: Mashable / Instagram

Start your Live broadcast, chat with your followers, and raise money at the same time. During your Live, you can keep track of how many donations you've received by tapping the "View" button on the bottom of the screen and acknowledge donors by sending them "Waves" after they contribute.

Any TikTok user can add a fundraising campaign to their profile bio, which links followers to an in-app donation portal that keeps track of the campaign's progress.

Go to your profile page, tap "Edit Profile," and scroll down to the "Nonprofit" section. Click to select your nonprofit and save your changes. A pink link will show up under your bio alerting your followers that you're supporting an organization.

Credit: Mashable / TikTok

Credit: Mashable / TikTok

Users can also add their campaigns to TikTok LIVE broadcasts. Start a Live video by clicking on the "Create" (or plus) button at the bottom of your screen. Swipe to the right to go to a Live video, and then start your broadcast. During the session, click the three dots in the bottom right corner to add a donation sticker to your LIVE, which will allow viewers to donate while watching. Keep in mind, the sticker will link to whatever organization you are currently supporting in your TikTok bio.

Unfortunately for those of us who use the app mainly to surf others' content, TikTok's LIVE fundraising tools are only available to users with more than 1,000 followers (and are at least 16 years old). For more information on how to use TikTok LIVE, visit TikTok's support center or view the in-app guide by going to your profile settings, clicking creator tools, and then going to the LIVE Center.

Credit: Mashable / TikTok

Facebook's integrated charity platform, Facebook Fundraisers, allows users to raise money for nonprofits and personal causes through their own profiles.

To start a fundraiser, log into your account and go to the account menu. (For app users, find the bottom right icon with three lines, or use the scroll bar on the left side of your screen for desktop.) Scroll down to "Fundraisers" you may have to select "See More" to find it.

At the top of the Facebook Fundraisers page, select "Create Fundraiser" to start either a nonprofit campaign or a personal fundraiser for yourself, a friend, or a business you must link a bank account to use personal fundraising tools.

If you select a nonprofit fundraiser, you'll be directed to a searchable list of organizations and a page where you can edit the campaign name, description, monetary goal, and even currency. Once your details are in, create the campaign and revisit the Facebook Fundraisers page at any time to check your progress, post updates, and manage the fundraiser. The campaign will also be displayed at the top of your Facebook profile.

Also, be aware: Facebook's fundraising tools vary by country.

Credit: Mashable / Facebook

Credit: Mashable / Facebook

View original post here:

How to fundraise for nonprofits and charities on every social media app - Mashable

The Gadget Show’s Ortis Deley reveals his favourite tech from the show – Metro

Posted on by

Ortis thinks rollable TVs are the future (Picture: Getty/ Metro.co.uk)

Ortis Deley, 48, is best known for trying out cool bits of tech on The Gadget Show.

But what gadgets does he like to use in real life?

We chatted to the TV presenter about rollable TVs, foldable phones and wasted vinyl.

Rollable TVs a flat TV screen that rolls into a box and, when youre done with it, you put it away. Its like an overheard projector but a fully functional TV screen.

The TV is usually the centrepiece of the living room but with this you can just roll it out of the box when you need it.

I liked the Microsoft HoloLens. You can be in different parts of the world but get together around a holographic image of, for example, a machine youre all working on so you can see your colleagues take pieces apart.

A few years ago, smart fabrics blew my mind. I visited a company that developed a fabric that conducted electricity and allowed you to power torches.

I have bought things after weve tested them. I bought a TV from the Sony Master series. Over the years, TVs have become thinner so you need a soundbar to go with it.

Im not a huge fan of soundbars and with this TV there are eight speakers directly behind the screen.

Foldable phones. Samsung are leading the charge with that. I like tech getting smaller and more discreet.

One day you wont see my phone, it will be woven into the fabric of my clothes.

Theres a growing market for nearly new tech you can find stuff that has a small defect like a slight scratch but that works just as well for a fraction of the price.

Fiit, which is for training at home. I started using investment apps over lockdown. Ive been using Kucoin, Binance and Coinbase. Im currently up but its been a mad ride.

As a young teenager I really liked the Lego Technics range. I had one that was a chassis of a car with a working gearbox and you could opt for two- or four-wheel drive. My daughter has reignited my love for Lego.

Ive bought the big Batmobile from the Tim Burton film and the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 car.

About ten years ago I bought a Pro-Ject turntable because I still have around 100 pieces of vinyl.

My plan was to get a piece of vinyl out and play it every day, then it went to playing it once a week, then once a month and now Ive probably only used it six times. Its just because I dont make time to use it.

Its concerning. My wife and I can spend an hour on the sofa not talking to each other, just scrolling through Instagram and uploading things. If its that bad for adults it can be damaging for young children. We limit our childrens screen time. Balance is important theyre young and wed prefer them to go outside and do activities.

Were trying to build resilient human beings so when they do see things online they can make judgements about what theyre seeing rather than thinking, I want to see more.

Deley is a judge of this years Royal Society Science Book Prize. The winner is announced on Monday

MORE : Black Friday 2021: How to get the best deals on tech and gadgets

MORE : Tech team smash world record for biggest domino chain of laptops

MORE : Diversitys Perri Kiely on eco-tech and using his Apple Watch to count calories

Metro newspaper is still available for you to pick up every weekday morning or you can download our app for all your favourite news, features, puzzles... and the exclusive evening edition!

Download the Metro newspaper app for free on App Store and Google Play

Go here to see the original:

The Gadget Show's Ortis Deley reveals his favourite tech from the show - Metro

Eagles All-22 Film Review: Observations from the win over the Saints – Bleeding Green Nation

Posted on by

Another Eagles win! I could get used to breaking down good football. More of this please!

The usual disclaimer - I will be breaking down film on my Twitter account and then uploading the tweets with some more analysis in this piece. I obviously cannot post everything so I will focus on certain things each week that stand out to me. I might see something a few times on film but only upload one example as you dont need to see everything, so you will have to take my word if I say that I have seen something multiple times.

First big 3rd down conversion was a beauty. Eagles run these deep outs really well (although - the Saints took them away later on) and this a perfect throw by Jalen Hurts and a great route by Dallas Goedert. I think its interesting looking at the Saints pass rush too, it highlights the benefit of a really mobile QB. They are very concerned about him breaking contain like he did last week so they dont really go all out to get him.

What can you say about the Eagles run game right now? It is truly unbelievable. The offensive line is playing so well its almost absurd. They are so well coached and ran so many different concepts effectively this week. Game planning for this run game must be an absolute nightmare. There were so many different examples of successful run plays I could have pulled for this article but I have tried to keep it to just a few to show you some of the different concepts.

Jordan Howard contract extension just because of this in my opinion...

I think Nick Siranni noticed how the Saints always move a defender out of the box to deal with motion and took advantage of it this week. Look at the size of this hole? What more can you say about the execution and design of the run game this week? The Eagles have used the shotgun more in the run game the past couple of weeks to take advantage of Hurts mobility more but they still had under center snaps where they pounded it with 3 TEs on the field. Some teams see the run game as an accessory that is needed to keep the defense honest but the Eagles are building the offense around the run game and it is working right now.

Oh yeah, the Eagles can still just line up and run inside zone well too. Give Jeff Stoutland a pay raise or whatever he wants because this offensive line is playing out of its mind right now. Remember - this was against the number 1 run defense!

I didnt actually think the passing game was great on Sunday. Hurts was a touch late a couple of times and missed a few throws I would like him to make. This play is a fantastic example of Hurts slight limitations with arm strength and lack of anticipation. Some QBs make this throw by throwing it earlier, others with elite arm strength and velocity. Hurts is just a touch below par in both areas but I am glad he is making the throw and reading the defense correctly, I just want him to speed it up ever so slightly.

I felt sorry for the Saints defensive ends at times this game. When you line up against the Eagles in the shotgun, there is absolutely no way you can ask a defensive end to play Jalen Hurts in the run game unless he is an unbelievable athlete. Hurts is one of the top athletes on the field each week and defensive ends cannot be expected to contain him like this.

Another minor example of an area I would like to see progress from Hurts. Hurts is exceptional at not taking negative plays or making back breaking mistakes. However, on 3rd and long, risking a sack by stepping up in the pocket is worth it occasionally. I think there was an opportunity for him to step up here and complete the ball downfield but he chose to roll to his right as he often does.

I really have been so impressed with Siriannis game planning and play calling the past few weeks. I thought he had a great understanding for what the Saints wanted to do on defense and was very successful sequencing his plays in a way that confused the defense. This is just a very clever play call based on what the Eagles were doing on offense earlier on in the game.

So, I am not going to go all-in on Jalen Hurts as a franchise QB. The NFL is a strange league and some players play well in spells and poorly in others. Personally, I still have concerns about Hurts ability to process quickly and make big throws late in the down when the Eagles have fallen behind in the game.

However, anyone who does not think Hurts is playing himself into a starting role next year is kidding themselves. You cannot evaluate his role in the passing game without also looking at his impact in the run game. He has runs that are absurd. He is not on Lamar Jacksons level as a runner, but he is not that far away.

Philosophically this is not the type of offense that I would build if I was in charge of a franchise and I do believe you need an elite passing offense to win it all in the NFL. However, the Eagles are showing that they can build a unique offense around Hurts skill set and if he continues to develop as a passer he clearly has earned another season (on a very cheap rookie contract) to see how far he can take the Eagles. Sirianni and Hurts both deserve huge credit for the turn around the past few weeks. I have been impressed with both of them and are really happy with what they are doing at this stage in the season.

As much fun as I had breaking down the Eagles offense down this week... I found the defense to be even more fun. Gannon was bringing the heat consistently. Yes, they gave up some points (Siemian made some absolutely insane throws late in the game) but I am totally fine with them being an aggressive defense who gives up some plays but also makes a lot of big plays. As I have highlighted the past few weeks, the Eagles have moved away from being a 2 high defense and have started to disguise their coverages far more than at the start of the season. Now they are starting to throw all sorts of blitzes at QBs too. They seemed to run a different blitz or coverage every single 3rd down this game.

As you know, I am a bit of an Alex Singleton fan so I didnt think the Eagles lost too much but it sucks to see Davion Taylor go down with an injury as he was finally starting to play well.

Darius Slay is playing as well as any Eagles cornerback I have watched in a long, long time. His understanding of route concepts, ability to break on the ball and stay in a receivers pocket is elite right now. He is playing exceptionally well right now. I would be willing to bet he is buying into what the defense is doing and grinding the tape hard right now because he seems to have such a good read on what opposing offenses are throwing at him.

Ive been saying the past few weeks how well he has been playing... well this was his best game all season! He had more than a few snaps where he flat out dominated the guy in front of him.

This right here is my favorite play of the week. The way Maddox/Slay/McLeod communicate so quickly and effectively after the Saints motion tells me that this defense is on the same page right now. Its a little thing, but it tells me a lot about the way that the Eagles defense is playing right now.

Ending on a slight negative but... I dont mind this? The Eagles gave up no big plays earlier in the season but were getting killed by short passes and they were too passive. Now they are playing more man coverage, more single high, disguising coverages and all the defenders are getting downhill quicker. The downside is that they will give up plays but I can live with that!

Overall, a fantastic team win and I am excited to see how this team continues to grow.

Read this article:

Eagles All-22 Film Review: Observations from the win over the Saints - Bleeding Green Nation

6 Steps That Will Help You Start Your Music Career – The Roanoke Star

Posted on by

Most people describe music, not as a profession but lifestyle. If you are one of the rare with musical talent, good music taste, and you want to present it to the world then you should not wait for the wind to be still but take action instead. Good groundbreaking never went unnoticed. With some technological improvements, things are easier and more available to both future music artists and music enthusiasts who enjoy listening to and studying new music. In this line, here are six steps that may help you in making your own music career.

If you want to be remarkable and authentic then your music should follow this attitude as well. So, you need to make a sound that will make a statement, leave a mark, and make people follow you. Time is the key. Take as much time as you need to study new things, make new and different concepts, make outstanding combinations of sound and lyrics, compose music that is not only conventional and suitable to the greater masses, improve yourself every day, etc. Having feedback from your dear people with a good ear can be very valuable and help you elevate both your own skills and the music you make. This is especially important for you since people outside the studio will notice some mistakes or flaws of the sound more easily than yourself having in mind that you already got used to sounding. Additionally, always save and keep your sounds as you might need them later.

Once you are sure about your music it is high time for you to start thinking like an artist and businessman at the same time. There is no point in you not living your dreams and things you are passionate about. You need to establish yourself as a brand and have your work integrated into the entire concept. This means that your brand, logo, name, appearance, and music comply with each other. Once you have these things planned and executed then you need to breakthrough and have your music published for a better reach. In sum, you need to come up with a business plan and label your music so that it is noticed and heard by big names in the music industry.

You must think of your music as the means you use for your business going. You can use all of the famous music platforms, social networks, or search engines for promoting your work. One of the best ways for promotion is mouth-by-mouth and creating a chain of your family and friends posting it on social media. Also, you can do the promotion of your work in agreement with Internet advertising policies. This means that links to your content or video material can pop up on the browser or channels like YouTube.

Nowadays, it is quite easy to upload your music on huge platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud. The key for platforms like SoundCloud is constant activity. Try uploading your content at least once a week. Set up the account solely for your music and upload as much as you can. This way you will get more noticed and greater masses of people will follow you. The more followers you have, the more streamed you will get. But, do not let instant success put you in a state of hibernation. You must keep up and be productive. Additionally, you should learn about advertising and selling tactics in order to build and expand your audience. The faster you get featured the faster you will get the results.

Even the greatest artists started with small and short steps. For you to expand you need to let people hear your music. You can use some platforms like TuneCore that will distribute your music efficiently and for free to some bigger platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc. But, online streaming is not the only way of letting people hear your music. You can play gigs in local areas and secure a reputation, which is immensely important from the very beginning.

Once you start making money, it is high time for you to start investing in yourself. Start from the top priorities, like equipment which will make your business easier. Finally, you can set up your home studio and have the proper background for sudden inspiration waves. Buying lyrics from reputational lyric writers can also boost your music and help you grow even more.

Starting a musical career as tough as it is, is living your dream to the fullest. Sometimes, you might find it to be too overwhelming, but all beginnings are. Just as for any other career, the long path starts with a single step.

Original post:

6 Steps That Will Help You Start Your Music Career - The Roanoke Star

Illuminate by TEDxMcGill – The Bull and Bear

Posted on by

On Saturday November 13th, 100 audience members gathered from 11AM to 6PM at LAstral in Montreal to watch a series of 13 speakers share what the concept of illumination means to them. The international panel of speakers was brought together by Illuminatea public and independently organized TEDx event by TEDxMcGill. As the title suggests, the theme of Illuminate was to reflect on what the concept of illuminations means following a difficult year of uncertainty. Throughout the event, audience members heard 13 unique interpretations of illumination, influenced by each speakers passions, profession, and life stories.

As the title suggests, the theme of Illuminate was to reflect on what the concept of illuminations means following a difficult year of uncertainty.

Jonathan Spencer set the stage by describing a typical stroll through the city. He pointed out that, although the average person is likely to notice the art around them, one rarely questions its meaning. Jonathan then introduced ArtworxTO, a project that maps and offers interactive ways to explore the public art around Toronto, which he believes is instrumental to appreciating the hidden messages of city artwork.

Laurence Liang, an Engineering student at McGill, argues that the falling costs of bioengineering, increased access to patient data, and developments in AI will expand medical innovation beyond the confines of expensive laboratories. Laurence believes that the rapid pace of medical innovation is illuminating a path to a future where people can cure incurable diseases from the comfort of their own homes using increasingly user-friendly software interfaces.

Laurence believes that the rapid pace of medical innovation is illuminating a path to a future where people can cure incurable diseases from the comfort of their own homes.

In a similar vein as Laurence, Trevor Cotter sheds light on the growing impact of technology on medical applications. Trevor is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering and works on developing physics-based simulators that allow spinal surgeons to practice surgery. By mimicking the texture of muscle tissue, bone and nerves with robotics, this technology would allow surgeons to hone their surgical skills before they enter the operating room. Trevor highlights the importance of his work with a single question: when you or a loved one enters the operating room, would you rather this be the hundredth time, or the first time your surgeon operates?

Ida Derish, a PhD candidate at the department of Experimental Surgery at McGill University and a medical entrepreneur, begins her talk by illustrating how current methods to test heart disease medication are inefficient. Instead of using a one-size-fits all approach, Ida advocates for patient-specific heart disease treatment, made possible by her innovative research. By drawing blood from patients and deriving stem cells from their samples, Ida is able to grow human heart cells in her lab, where the effects of medication can be uniquely tested on a patients heart cells. Idas research is revolutionizing cardiovascular disease treatment, and she is convinced it will light the way for future advances in medicine.

In his talk, Naeem Komeilipoor, a well-versed scientist with backgrounds in neuroscience, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, asks the audience a series of questions: Can you imagine controlling technology with your thoughts? Or perhaps being able to speak to everyone on the planet in their native tongue? Or what about uploading any file of information into your brain? Although the answers to these questions may seem out of reach, Naeem believes that the future of innovation lies at the intersection of technology and neuroscience, where external devices, such as a pair of glasses or a headset, will allow us to perform these very tasks. Naeem drives his point home by demonstrating examples of neurotechnologies used today such as the cochlear implant, a device used by deaf people to hear, and bionic limbs, which allow humans to control their robotic appendages with their mind.

The talks discussed so far revealed illuminations in knowledge and innovation that will change lives for the better, but Dr. Alexandra Simonds speech showcased that illumination does not always reveal good things.

The talks discussed so far revealed illuminations in knowledge and innovation that will change lives for the better, but Dr. Alexandra Simonds speech showcased that illumination does not always reveal good things. Dr. Simond is a McGill graduate, science educator and researcher. In her talk, she disclosed an event that happened to her at her research lab when her experiments groundbreaking results were not taken seriously by her supervisor. For over a year, Dr. Simond battled for her results to be published, but her ideas werent taken into account until a male coworker presented similar findings of his own. By sharing this experience, Dr. Simond hopes to shed light on the obstacles and double standards women face in science and by doing so, advocate for their place in academia.

This article showcased a select number of speakers, most of whom believe illumination is synonymous with innovation, but TEDxMcGills Illuminate featured many other interpretations of the concept as well. Whether it be by writing a book, overcoming an autoimmune disorder, or being thrown into a pool by your friends, the speakers shared the common message that illumination is the process of discovering something new. By presenting a diverse range of speakers, whose talks highlighted both positive and negative aspects of illumination, TEDxMcGill succeeded at transmitting an all-encompassing and well-balanced definition of Illuminate.

Follow this link:

Illuminate by TEDxMcGill - The Bull and Bear

Stacey Solomon reveals bombshell new look on date night with Joe Swash – Metro

Posted on by

Stacey gave herself a drastic makeover and did a great job (Picture: @staceysolomon, Instagram)

Stacey Solomon is rocking a bold new look after dying her hair bright red before heading out on a rare date night.

The Loose Women star quite literally painted the town red as she got glammed up for a night out with fiance Joe Swash, while their newborn baby girl Rose also joined them for the evening.

In her latest Instagram post, Stacey, 31, debuted her striking new hairdo with cute photos of her posing with Joe, 39, and multitasking by breastfeeding Rose at the restaurant. At one point, Rose was seen adorably gazing at Staceys new hair colour and it looked like the tot approved.

Sharing an update with her followers, the TV presenter explained: Date Night We had our first night (well late afternoon) out today I may have had a little moment and decided to dye my hair bright red before we went

I havent been out and felt like Ive looked human for a long time so I may have gone overboard but lashes didnt feel like enough.

She continued: You only live once. And I dont want to live it always looking like a foot 99% of the time i dont mind but ever so often its nice to feel nice .

Stacey clarified that Rose accompanied them on their evening out as she hasnt mastered the art of expressing yet and she doesnt feel ready to leave her alone but, at the same time, was keen to get a break and leave the bedroom.

Earlier in the day, the TV star had teased the process of her makeover by uploading a hilarious photo of her pulling a silly face with red dye in her hair and smeared across her forehead. She explained that would usually visit the hairdresser for such a job, but her stylist is also on maternity leave so she settled on the DIY job instead.

Stacey offered some encouragement for other mums and wrote in one Instagram story: On a serious note though it was nice to do something for myself.

Sometimes I think dont bother because maybe somewhere subconsciously I think it should never be about me and always about the pickles.

But it should definitely sometimes be just for us.

Stacey and Joe welcomed Rose, their second child, in October while the couple are also parents to two-year-old son Rex. She also has older sons Zach, 13, and Leighton, nine, while the former EastEnders actor is dad to son Harry, 13, who he shares with ex Emma Sophocleous.

Got a story?

If youve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page wed love to hear from you.

MORE : Im A Celeb 2021: Tensions flare between Naughty Boy and Frankie Bridge in row over rice

MORE : Coleen and Wayne Rooney glam up for date night at Robbo: Bryan Robson Story premiere

Original post:

Stacey Solomon reveals bombshell new look on date night with Joe Swash - Metro