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Be Stronger Than Fear, Negativity and Doubt with Jeannetta Collier Guiding the Way – Press Release – Digital Journal

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Our world is currently one where fear, negativity and uncertainty are leading the way in human emotion. Due to the pandemic, we no longer have the luxury of having plentiful opportunities at our fingertips.

Those with a dream of financial freedom and success are being compelled to find their own inspiration and forced to light their own spark. With so many challenges to overcome, and limited moments of perceived perfection many individuals face depression and doubt, in regards to a fulfilling future. But despite the obstacles, women and men are in fact emerging with dreams in their hearts and they are seeking a guiding force to help them reach their goals.

Texan, Jeannetta Collier, an entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience, featured twice as One of the Most Notable People in North Texas, and who has facilitated numerous start-ups, is the founder of Imaginary Glass Ceiling. as well as CEO and founder of Jeannetta Collier Enterprises Inc. She is a transformational life coach and business strategist, certified NLP master coach, international speaker, entrepreneur, investment strategist in real-estate and market trading, philanthropist, published author, community advocate, creative and executive producer and radio personality of The Best YOU 365. She is a woman who empowers her audiences through her extraordinary story of triumph over single motherhood and having been diagnosed with a deadly disease she still managed to catapult herself to a life of success and abundance by adjusting her mindset. Collier is an active member in her community through acts of service on numerous boards, commissions and non-profit organizations and uses her knowledge of human development, creative business and leadership development to encourage personal empowerment and peak performance in life, career and relationships. Her super-power is to empower others to do the same.

Twenty-one years ago, Colliers life came to a screeching halt, and right as she was at the peak of her career and in life, having all of her hearts desires with a loving family, her dream home and even a dream job. She was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease and informed she had only 6 months to live. The life that Collier had greatly cherished could easily have vanished, but she was adamant about not changing the blueprint she had already mapped out for her life. But in doing this, she also knew that she had to dramatically change her mindset. Years later she has so much to be thankful for and has come to fully appreciate the power of mindset.

This incredible story of renewal is what led Jeannetta Collier on her mission of helping others achieve new heights, and to personally and professionally step into their best life! A combination of advanced psychology, stemming from her knowledge of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and real-life experiences is what gives Collier a competitive advantage over other coaches who may not be as experienced in what truly helps individuals overcome mental barriers allowing them to move forward to achieve all they are meant to achieve. The creators of NLP believe there is a direct connection between neurological processes, language and behavioral patterns and that these can be changed to accomplish certain goals in life. It is also believed that neuro-linguistic programming methodology can mimic the skills of high-achievers, allowing anyone to acquire those skills. Colliers philosophy is centered on understanding how people think and formulating strategies of what is needed to help them push past their fears and into a place of clarity and confidence allowing them to thrive in the world.

Colliers proven strategies, that help individuals who are not quite yet ready to transform, include one-on-one private coaching and consulting programs, group coaching and training and online and digital e-courses that equips emerging and established women, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and game changers to find their power so they are able to thrive in business and life. Her Mindset Mastery Bootcamp, in particular, is a 2-Day comprehensive workshop that enables participants to discover and develop all of the skills needed in order to reach the next level of success. This event is geared towards entrepreneurs, coaches, speakers, authors and corporate executives who are ready to shine! Sessions are a great reminder of why these leaders have already said yes to their destiny and allows them to network with like-minded individuals who also seek a life of abundance and they provide tools and knowledge for leveraging their own personal story to make a greater impact in the world.

Jeanetta Collier is a woman who has beat all odds and wrote her own story. And now, she is living out her dreams. She is here to let others know that even the biggest dreams are within reach and she can help you get there.

Texan, Jeannetta Collier, an entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience and who has facilitated numerous start-ups, is the founder of Imaginary Glass Ceiling. She is a transformational life coach and business strategist, certified NLP master coach, international speaker, entrepreneur, investment strategist in real-estate and market trading, philanthropist, published author, community advocate, creative and executive producer and radio host of The Best YOU 365. She empowers her audience through her extraordinary story of triumph over single motherhood, having been diagnosed with a deadly disease and managing to catapult herself to a life of success and abundance. Collier is an active member in her community through acts of service on numerous boards, commissions and non-profit organizations and uses her knowledge of human development, creative business and leadership development to encourage personal empowerment and peak performance in life, career and relationships. Her super-power is to empower others to do the same.

Media ContactCompany Name: Mark Stephen PoolerContact Person: TMSP AGENCYEmail: Send EmailPhone: +447930691683Country: United KingdomWebsite: https://contactmark.me/

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Be Stronger Than Fear, Negativity and Doubt with Jeannetta Collier Guiding the Way - Press Release - Digital Journal

TAMIUs 50th anniversary: Planning the next 50 years – Laredo Morning Times

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

External photo of the Academic Innovation Center and the TAMIU Trailblazers Tower, completed in 2020.

TAMIUs 50th anniversary: Planning the next 50 years

As TAMIU celebrates its 50th anniversary, Laredo Morning Times took a detailed look back at the history of the university. This is Part 12 of 12.

For over half a century, Texas A&M International has molded members of the region and around the world into nurses, scientists, writers, artists and more.

In the year 2020, it is hard to imagine Laredo without its university, and the improvements it has brought to the community will not soon be forgotten. While this year has been a tough year for many amid the coronavirus pandemic, just like the university, they carry on.

For 50 years, the university has adapted to the ever-changing community and its needs. And for the next 50 years, it will continue to do the same as well.

According to president Dr. Pablo Arenaz, TAMIU is expected to grow from 10,000 to 12,000 students in the next five years who will all look forward to graduating from either undergraduate, graduate or doctoral programs. To do so, it is also planning to move into a doctoral/professional university, and Arenaz said it is on the way to being recognized as a destination university for several of its programs that will continue to expand to meet the standards of both the students and the industry.

We have plans to expand our doctoral offerings to include degrees in criminal justice, border studies, education, eventually biology, engineering and nursing, he said. We have also recently added degrees in public health as well as petroleum and computer engineering. Also included in our plans is a Center for Entrepreneurship and an Incubator, a Center for Border Security and an Institute for Renewable and Non-Renewable Energy.

In 10 years, the first phase of adding to the area includes a tennis complex which will start by moving the athletic facilities to the back 100 acres. The complex is a partnership between the university and the City of Laredo, and it will be funded by the city. This will allow TAMIU to add tennis, mens and womens track & field, and beach volleyball over the next 5-7 years while keeping the academic focus for the existing campus.

According to Arenaz, students and staff can also expect significant growth in engineering, biology, psychology, the humanities, nursing, education and business programs and degrees. The proposed Center for Border Security and the International Institute for Renewable and Non-Renewable Energy are being designed to expand research capabilities that are critical to the region.

However, the university is not a one-person show.

Hundreds of dedicated staff and faculty members strive for improvement each year, and many have their own goals to complete. Whether its athletics, humanities, science or any field of study, the directors at TAMIU also have a 50-year plan that should delight students who will be veterans in their fields and others who may be going to their first day of school at elementary.

Dr. Claudia San Miguel, the Dean of the TAMIU College of Arts and Sciences, said that the largest and most comprehensive academic unit is currently in development. When finished, it will create new academic opportunities and impactful research to benefit the people of the South Texas region and beyond.

This will include three new degrees that are meant to diversify and enhance career choices. Among them are a doctorate in criminal justice and a bachelors in computer engineering and petroleum engineering. Both current and future students will have more choices, and over the years, more choices will continue to be added. In 2022, a masters in systems engineering is planned to start in the fall.

The college is also an intellectual and research hub. We are proud of the numerous articles, books, creative works and performances produced by 100-plus faculty members, San Miguel said. We are especially honored that the college earned a highly-competitive research grant of $1.65 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This grant will generate new knowledge that advances learning strategies for undergraduate STEM education here and at other Hispanic-serving institutions.

As Laredo is a border town and in 2020 is the strongest land port in the U.S., a heavy emphasis on business both domestically and internationally would be a boon for any student who sees themselves owning or managing a business.

The plans to grow the undergraduate and masters program are always a benefit for students in the area alongside the doctorate program. Additional concentrations, such as a doctorate, masters and an undergraduate degree in international trade and entrepreneurship, are being developed.

These new programs will further strengthen the Sanchez Schools portfolio and underscore its ongoing value to the communities and regions it so proudly serves, Dean of the A.R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business Dr. Steve Sears said.

To complement these programs and opportunities, there are three research centers recognized for their contributions to the Laredo Community and Beyond, Sears said.

The Small Business Center has been recognized with awards for innovative practices among its peers in meeting the needs of small businesses here.

The Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development provides valuable trade data for the border region.

The Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, with the collaboration of the International Bank of Commerce, brings noted speakers to Laredo to speak on timely issues facing our border and beyond.

With the generous gift by Mr. A.R. Sanchez, Jr. and the perseverance, dedication and vision of State Sen. Dr. Judith Zaffirini to establish a doctoral program in her hometown university, the A.R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business has worked hard to build a reputation as a small but powerful business school, Sears said. It is known for its rigorous programs, quality faculty and high research standards, and it is one of the smallest accredited doctoral programs in the world.

According to Dr. James OMeara, the Dean of the College of Education, the goal of preparing 100% of educators in Laredo will continue. He adds that the college has enjoyed record undergraduate intakes, and their online graduate programs continue to grow and attract candidates from across Texas. These candidates are said to have a 100% pass rate in most certification areas, and graduate students have continued to be published in peer-reviewed publications.

As the pandemic has challenged educators across the globe, OMeara said students will also obtain a Google Classroom and Remote Educator Certification to train them in teaching classes in both remote and on-campus settings. This training will not only serve as a reminder of the importance of education and their roles but will also prepare them for other situations in the future.

Through partnerships with the Fun Academy, Raising Texas Teachers and the A&M Systems We Teach Texas initiatives, the goal will continue to be to produce Day 1 ready teachers that are certified and committed to making a difference in and beyond their classroom.

Preparing teachers for the next 50 years requires us to go beyond the successes of 2020, OMeara said.

As medical-oriented students continue to strive for their careers, the College of Nursing at TAMIU will continue to improve and adapt to the growing needs of the community.

A long-term plan will include a new masters degree program in nursing, public health, communication science disorders and kinesiology non-certification, said Dr. Marivic Torregosa, the Dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. Over time, there will be curriculum changes to increase enrollment in kinesiology non-certification programs, as well as a track of pre-physical therapy for students who want to proceed in physical therapy after completing the non-certified degree.

There will also be an RN to MSN program that is being planned to help nurses with associate degrees transition to a masters degree in nursing. Torregosa said that a masters in public health will be offered in three years, and drafts for a masters degree in speech language pathology have been developed and are under internal review.

As the School of Nursing accepts students considered at-risk, underrepresented and first-generation, Torregosa said that the program was ranked 11th in the state, outranking other schools such as the Texas Womans University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

This report is a reflection of the rigor of our BSN program and the commitment of the nursing faculty for student success. Likewise, it also reflects the hard work of our students, she said. The college will continuously mold and hone our programs so that we are preparing graduates who are equipped with the knowledge and skills to problem-solve the healthcare challenges of today and tomorrow.

TAMIU has plans and improvements for alumni or current students planning to continue education after their undergraduate degrees. According to Dr. Jennifer Coronado, the Dean of the TAMIU Graduate School, plans to expand the degree and certificate offerings will continue through the years, starting with the launch of a masters in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in educational leadership and another specialization in special education.

Additionally, a masters in information science and in the family nurse practitioner program will be available this fall. A doctorate in criminal justice is being reviewed by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and if approved, students will be able to register starting in the fall of 2021.

To complement the College of Educations goal of providing remote-instruction training and certification, a masters in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in education technology will also be available for future teachers. The program will help them find better ways to master planning, delivery and assessments while also knowing how to deliver effective and engaging lessons in a virtual environment.

The TAMIU Advancing Research and Curriculum Initiative, a long-term project, is meant to expand the number of Hispanic and other underrepresented graduate and professional students that can be served by expanding courses and institutional resources, Coronado said. She said the project will rigorously examine the metrics that lead to success for graduate students within a dominantly Hispanic population.

We also continue to build on a legacy of faculty and student research collaboration that is uncommon for a university of our size and youth. Student researchers from TAMIU earned the highest number of awards at the competitive 16th-annual Pathways Student Research Symposium that TAMIU hosted last fall, Coronado said. Over 400 student and faculty representatives from throughout the Texas A&M University System gathered at TAMIU for the two-day competition. TAMIU student researchers earned 18 of the 61 awards presented.

With the mission of the University College to empower students to become competent, resilient and self-determined, TAMIU Dean of the University College Dr. Barbara Hong said the college is undergoing major restructuring.

An improved Advising & Mentoring Center is being developed with all the colleges academic success coaches. This is to provide students more consistent and coherent advisement on their majors without interruptions from freshmen enrollment until graduation, Hong said.

The improved AMC, University Learning Center and the reading and writing center will have extended hours, weekends and virtual meetings to meet the students needs now and for the next 50 years.

We aim to enhance the skills of every student through personal empowerment paths that foster a learning community, critical thinking and global citizenship, Hong said. Students will be equipped with a growth mindset, a meaningful purpose and a sense of belonging as they navigate through their education at TAMIU.

The First-Year Seminar will also be restructured to help teach students to cultivate their sense of self-awareness, self-empowerment, self-advocacy and self-regulation. Hong said those skills are essential and are reinforced by a students growth, purpose and sense of belonging (GPS). Additionally, the freshman Signature Course will also help expose students to international, interdisciplinary and intellectual problem-based/inquiry learning.

According to Hong, the course is meant to improve students critical thinking, communication and teamwork skills by tackling real-world problems in their communities and using their sense of self to help others during their academic journey.

We seek to prepare every student who enters TAMIU with a mindset that they are here to grow intellectually, socially, emotionally and professionally, Hong said.

With another 50 years on the horizon, TAMIU staff and leaders cannot change the university by themselves. The goal of improving the community can only start and end with everyone in the community giving input and coming together to advance the university. As Arenaz regularly meets with student government to cooperate in the planning, he said that their input was added to the Academic Innovation Center.

With that in mind, students, staff and alumni have also stated what they believe the university can add and where it can improve. The additions may take months of planning or years of implementing, but the university has the next 50 years to improve and become a university worthy of a major 100-year anniversary.

Alumna Rebekah Maria Rodriguez said she hopes to see an expansion of student services such as health services and student counseling, as those services helped her throughout most of her college years. She believes they are important services, but due to the limited number of counselors and a growing population of students, an expansion would benefit the students in a greater capacity.

Mindy Lee would like to see the communication coursework be added into the core curriculum as opposed to having just English coursework.

It is so important for students to learn basic communication skills and strategies, Lee said. Many students are completing their degrees without learning skills vital to being a competent communicator.

Ryan Duncan-Ayala said he would like to see a larger focus in the arts and hopes to see an improvement and expansion on the current theater program. On the flip side, Miguel Inclan hopes to see more undergraduate and graduate programs involving local government like city planning, sustainability and water/environmental policy, homeland security and emergency management, and more.

As an example of lifes unpredictability, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 changed the way the people of Laredo will remember the year. Despite the uncertainty and fear, people persevere for the hopes of a better future. Fifty years ago, TAMIU students and staff could probably not imagine what the university would be like today. As a cornerstone of the Laredo community, it has evolved from a simple university to a beacon of a grander future for students of all generations.

With the support of an experienced staff, cooperation between them and their students and with strong leadership, TAMIU is striving to continue molding incoming students into nurses, doctors, teachers, scientists, artists, dancers, musicians, engineers and so much more.

In 50 years, who knows what the university will evolve into, but it is already working on it.

TAMIUs 50th anniversary: Planning the next 50 years - Laredo Morning Times

Sundance: Predictably Unpredictable – Book and Film Globe

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Despite a pandemic that warped this years Sundance experience into a self-isolated, laptop-driven stream-a-palooza, the overall slate of films on demand was actually a fairly solid lineup of predictably unpredictable indie storytelling. There were films with prestige and films that crowd-pleased, there were nightmarish midnight movies and metaphorical fantasies to cope with overwhelming realities. There was a mostly evergreen feel to the cine-cornucopia, except for a clutch of titles that felt very of-the-moment with weighted feelings of impending doom.

Oscar bait abounded, as per usual, with one title aiming for Academy Award glory when the latest edition of that delayed-eligibility ceremony airs April 25th. Judas and the Black Messiah, Shaka Kings ferocious thriller about the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, joined the Sundance lineup as a last-minute entry and comes out a week after its virtual premiere. The films galvanic leads, including Daniel Kaluuya as sleepy-eyed martyr Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as the jittery FBI mole who betrayed him, are classic kudos catnip. And the indignant biopic checks all those boxes that Oscar voters usually require, presenting a dramatically familiar but still forcefully effective look at racial injustice in America.

Looking ahead to next years Oscar race are Passing, Rebecca Hills prim, delicately devastating look at light-skinned African-Americans in 1920s Harlem; and Jockey, Clint Bentleys minor-key melodrama about an aging horseman thats as quietly earthy as it is emotionally shattering. And Hill and Bentley, both making their feature directorial debuts, craft sumptuous expressionistic images that enhance and enrich the experience.

Passing, shot in velvety black and white, uses a boxy traditional aspect ratio to make its story feel even more suffocating. Jockeys golden-hour cinematography and chiaroscuro lighting give its tale an elegiac grandeur. But the acting truly elevates both films. Tessa Thompsons upper-class Black housewife is a model of brittle decorum, while Ruth Neggas best friend, hiding her racial identity from the rich racist white man she married, exudes a blithe joi de vivre that belies an ocean of anguish. Jockey has a trio of performances that elevate the film to high tragedy: Clifton Collins, Jr. breaks away from the pack with his majestically understated pathos, a middle-aged rider riddled with regrets, with vital support from Molly Parker as a sympatico but pragmatic horse owner and Moises Arias as the eager, admiring son he never had.

Why all the grim faces? Easy charms made a handful of movies irresistibly sweet and predictably heartwarming. CODA, the jaunty emotional bullseye that stands for Child of Deaf Adults, is the YOLO of hearing-impaired coming-of-age dramedies. The hoary But I want to sing! plot-point chestnut gets a twist, as honey-voiced teenage daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones) tussles with the parents-just-dont-understand tropebecause her songs literally fall on deaf ears. Add in a subplot about her family being a multi-generational fishing clan in Gloucester, with Ruby as the lifeline intermediary between their silent world and the town, and you get the makings of a classic choose your life crossroads. Its obvious, its effective, and it goes down easy with dollops of feelgood positivity.

Together Together, meanwhile, turns a surrogate pregnancy arrangement into a meet-cute between middle-aged app developer Ed Helms and diffident anti-romantic twentysomething Patti Harrison. She agrees to have his baby for the money, hes stunned that she doesnt seem to give a hoot. And over the course of nine months, the two lonelyhearts make each other a better person. Its an obvious arc, but Helms and Harrison exude some disarming sugar-and-spice chemistry. His wide-eyed enthusiasm masks a battered but durable optimism for life, while her eye-roll whateverism is the classic defense against a world that already rejected her.

The most surprisingly endearing film was Playing with Sharks, a polished but paint-by-numbers documentary about Australian deep sea diver Valerie Taylor. Star of 70s documentary Blue Water, White Death, consultant on megahit Jaws, innovator of the chainmail diving suit, and lifelong conservationist, Taylor is just as vivacious now as in the 1960s, when she was the blonde-bombshell winner of the Womens Spearing Championship. Ill probably be diving when Im in a wheelchair, the octogenarian says, before flipping into the ocean for yet another aquatic outing.

Those with a diabetic intolerance for treacly narratives, fear not. Sundances midnight slots went for the jugular. Sometimes literally: in the sumptuous gothic horrorshow Eight for Silver, a gypsy curse causes terror in a 19th century French village, as lycanthropy rips through the townsfolk. An electric opening sectioncapped by a shocking massacre at a Romany encampmentslowly gives way to a flabby midsection of silly jump scares in shock-me-awake nightmares. Plus: hairless werewolves? Odd creative choice. Still, exquisite production value and arresting visual compositions keep this highbrow flesh-render never less than engaging.

The retro-horror film Censor conjured fetishistic visions of early-80s video stores, static-rippled CRT images and the zzt-zzt grind of VHS machinery. A troubled woman on a government review board must rate the video nasties that were a staple of the burgeoning home entertainment craze. Her notes are a hoot. Eye gouging must go! reads one of her scribbles. But her sisters unresolved disappearance as a child continues to haunt her, until shes convinced that the missing kid is now an adult actress in one of these grindhouse flicks. Cue the slow spiral into madness and delusions of gore-filled axe-chopping. Plus: death by award statuette. Its inspired, until its not.

The prize for preachy provocation goes to Pleasure, an art-house harangue about the perils of being a porn star. A barely-legal Swede flies to L.A. with dreams of cum-soaked fame. Warning: it doesnt end well. An initially promising look at 21st-century adult entertainment, Pleasure takes a cheeky peek at entrepreneurial performers with DIY viral marketing and oddly femme-friendly crews that churn out shockingly misogynistic content. But, after flirting with notions of personal empowerment and body-image agency, it quickly descends into obvious backstabbing and cut-bait friendships. Think All About Eve, but with rough sex and interracial double-penetration.

Worse yet was Mother Schmuckers, a Belgian campfest that could double as a celluloid shart. Imagine a young, witless John Waters directing Clerks and youll get a sense of the puerile go-for-the-gutter ambition on display. Two brothers fry up feces for breakfast, lose the family dog, indulge in gunplay, drive their whore-mother crazy, dance in a gonzo music video, and then end up at a bestial orgy. Theres also a scene where homeless vagrants offer up sex with a dead body. Offended yet? More like bored.

Surrealism is a staple of any cineaste diet, so its no surprise that Sundance offered up a few metaphor-friendly films. Those in the market for masochistic parenting will enjoy Pascual Sistos John and the Hole, a chilly, empty-headed drama about a young teenage boy who, for no clear reason, decides to drug his well-off family and throw them into an unfinished concrete bunker. An oddly shallow what-have-we-done-to-deserve-this? condemnation of the affluent and their presumably amoral spawn, John and the Hole traffics in the type of Austrian nihilism that won Michael Haneke two Palme dOrs. Only difference is that Haneke spent more than three decades refining his singular brand of spiritual despair, while Sisto seemed to have binge-watched a master filmmaker and figured he got the gist of it. The result is a Hole thats not very deep.

More intriguing, and marginally more successful, is Mayday, Karen Cinorres through-the-looking-glass feminist fantasy. A put-upon wedding reception waitress (Grace Van Patten) escapes through a kitchen oven door and somehow lands on a WWII-era Pacific island. A misfit band of female GIs finds her and, led by Mia Goth, they send out siren-like SOS calls from a beached submarine so that nearby soldiers will crash on the rocks and drown. Their sociopathic behavior is apparently overcompensation for the chauvinist hostility in their lives. Its time to stop hurting yourself and start hurting others, growls Goth. Van Patten eventually becomes troubled by the severe retribution, but not before reveling in empowering sequences of girl-power independence. Its a just-go-with-it premise that belabors its points, although Cinorres eye for striking composition and confidence with emotional truth bodes well for future projects.

Two documentaries played with perception in more unsettling ways. Rodney Aschers eerie A Glitch in the Matrix takes a look at people who are convinced that were all living in a computer-programmed reality. These interview subjects, appearing as anthropomorphic animal avatars, invoke synchronicities, the Mandela Effect, generative adversarial networks, and exponential leaps in computer processing power to prove their theory about life being a full-scale massively multiplayer simulacrum. Punch-drunk on Philip K. Dick and the Wachowski siblings, these hyper-literate and compellingly articulate interview subjects are a heady mix of paranoia and narcissism. I am a real-life non-player character, one person moans. Another explains how his delusions led to him murdering his mother and father.

Its hard not to feel empathy for Aschers subjects when a documentary like Theo Anthonys All Light, Everywhere reinforces how mass surveillance is bending notions of objective reality. This damning meditation on the inevitable police state focuses almost entirely on Axon Industries, the company that invented Tasers and now holds 85% of the market share for body cameras. Their objective: to be the eyes and ears of law enforcement, create a vast archive of information and track everything with their proprietary lenses on people, cars, and drones. Their research could even create a eugenics-adjacent database to establish patterns of criminal behavior among certain peopleanticipating crime like the Precogs from Minority Report. What could possibly go wrong?

But the Sundance films which seemed the most up-to-date, the ones which really captured that sense of life out of balance, conveyed an almost apocalyptic sense of despair. Just look at Cryptozoo, Dash Shaws dazzling WTF animated adventure that feels like an animal-rights activist on hallucinogens stumbled into a marathon Dungeons and Dragons session. Gorgons, Griffins, and unicorns populate a world where black-market beast traffickers want to enslave them and secret-ops paramilitary want to weaponize them. The strangely earnest action movie never plays for laughs, and creates a weirdly touching portrait of sustained persecution in a hostile world where the strong exploit the weak, the feverishly exotic is always a threat, and no one is ever safe.

Not mincing words, Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones named their movie How It Ends. The quirky existential dramedy imagines the last hours on earth before an asteroid obliterates all life. Today is certainly the fuck-it-all of days, declares Lister-Jones, who endeavors to make peace with as many people as possible, from her parents to her estranged best friend to the jilted ex-lover she never stopped loving. Bursting with motley socially-distanced cameos from Nick Kroll, Fred Armisen, Olivia Wilde, Bradley Whitford, Helen Hunt, and Pauly Shore, the Covid-era production feels shaggy, very off-the-cuff, and eagerly silly. Let whatever come, come, says a sex therapist. The underlying dread, though, is palpable. Its a film brimming with sweet sadness as well as a nagging restlessness that, in 2021, is all too familiar.

Carole King’s Tapestry turns 50, and it’s still one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of all time – Pacific Northwest Inlander

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Thumb through any used record collection worth a damn, and you're bound to come across a dog-eared copy of Carole King's Tapestry. It's one of the quintessential records of the 1970s, the sort of cultural artifact that has become a recognizable totem for a specific time and place.

Released 50 years ago this week, Tapestry is a record whose very title has become shorthand for "all-time great." The recent Rolling Stone poll of the 500 best albums ever placed it at No. 25, and it was one of the first LPs of its era to be preserved by the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, inducted alongside the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.

King had been in the pop game for a little more than a decade before Tapestry was released a day after her 29th birthday. Working amongst the coterie of scrappy young songwriters in New York's Brill Building, King and her then-husband Gerry Goffin penned a slew of radio hits in the 1960s for other artists "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" for the Shirelles; "Up on the Roof" for the Drifters; the dance craze classic "The Loco-Motion," which was recorded by their babysitter Little Eva.

She was one of the most prolific songwriters that most people didn't know, and after her personal and professional partnership with Goffin ended and her band the City called it quits, she branched out on her own in the late '60s. King's solo debut, 1970's Writer, is made up of leftover songs she had written with Goffin (who co-produced the album), and it blends sock hop-era nostalgia with Woodstock-era spaciness.

The album holds up well today, but it didn't get King the recognition she'd hoped for. Tapestry would change all that.

After her separation from Goffin, King became entrenched within the now-mythic musical community of Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon neighborhood, rubbing elbows with the likes of the Doors, Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell (who later contributed backing vocals on Tapestry). The freedom and fluidity of that era is all over Tapestry, which was recorded in a matter of weeks with super-producer Lou Adler and rushed into release in February 1971, a month after it was finished.

"While we were recording the album I wasn't thinking about all the people who might be affected by it, nor was I thinking about the level of success it might attain," King wrote in her memoir, A Natural Woman. "I just wanted to get the songs on tape, enjoy the process with my friends and fellow musicians, and maybe get some radio play."

Perhaps it's that lack of pretense that made the album so effective. It's difficult now to listen to Tapestry and divorce yourself from its legacy, because it almost sounds like a greatest hits compilation. Just about every song has become a standard. It lives up to its title as a patchwork of songs new and old, and the album really serves two functions at once: It's a contemporary singer-songwriter showcase, but it's also a career retrospective of a musician who had been toiling behind the scenes for years without the recognition she deserved.

Tapestry opens with a trio of classic tracks that represent one of the greatest gauntlet throws in pop history the rollicking "I Feel the Earth Move," followed by the wistful ballad "So Far Away," followed by the remorseful relationship postmortem "It's Too Late." All three were massive hits and have become radio staples, and they're arguably King's three most famous originals.

Following that stellar opening, there's the self-empowerment anthem "Beautiful," which lent its name to a Tony Award-winning jukebox musical of King's songbook, and "Where You Lead," perhaps best known as the theme song for Gilmore Girls. The stripped-down "You've Got a Friend" would be covered by King's regular collaborator James Taylor (who also plays guitar and sings on Tapestry), becoming his first No. 1 hit mere months after Tapestry was released. King reimagines "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," which Aretha Franklin made into a hit in 1968, and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" The loping story song "Smackwater Jack" is tinged with gospel and country-rock, while the cozy "Home Again" and "Way Over Yonder" give you the impression you're sitting at the base of King's piano. There's not a single dud.

When it hit record stores, Tapestry was an instant smash. It topped the Billboard charts, eventually selling more than 10 million copies, and the single featuring "It's Too Late" and "I Feel the Earth Move" was a No. 1 hit. It won Album of the Year at the 1972 Grammys, beating such juggernauts as George Harrison's triple album All Things Must Pass, the Carpenters' self-titled debut, and the soundtracks of Shaft and Jesus Christ Superstar.

A follow-up album, Music, was rushed out for the 1971 Christmas season and instantly topped the charts, as well. Though it successfully piggybacked off the popularity of Tapestry, it wasn't met with the same rapturous response. In fact, none of King's follow-up albums are ever mentioned in the same breath as her breakout LP, although 1974's Wrap Around Joy brought her two more big hits with the singles "Jazzman" and "Nightingale." Her last album of original material, Love Makes the World, was released in 2001.

But it's not like King needs to justify a legacy. After all, she wrote more iconic tracks before she was 30 than most musicians record in their entire careers. What's so endearing about Tapestry is that it doesn't sound like a blockbuster album. It has a homey, lived-in quality, from the cover image of King and her cat lounging in a window ledge to the sterling collection of songs that were mostly cherry-picked from an existing catalog. It's like a comfy sweater, perhaps the most modest behemoth album ever recorded. It has endured for five decades, and I have no doubt that it'll endure for five more.

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Carole King's Tapestry turns 50, and it's still one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of all time - Pacific Northwest Inlander

#ElevatedbyArt campaign highlights Latisha Hardy and the Boss Ladies dance team – Colorado Springs Independent

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Is 2021 the year of the woman? The Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region sure seems to think so, and they are ready to celebrate by showcasing a few dynamic women right here in the Pikes Peak region. On Feb. 1, as part of the #ElevatedbyArt campaign series, COPPeR and a team of regional art leaders shared a new video titled Boss It Up featuring dancer and entrepreneur Latisha Hardy and the Boss Ladies dance team.

The #ElevatedbyArt campaign was launched in October of 2020 by a collective of creators and leaders in the arts in Colorado Springs. Its purpose is to illustrate the importance of the arts in lifting up and supporting the community as a whole through shared stories, creative efforts and experiences. Prominent local creators like Hardy are given a platform to share their work, and the community is invited to collaborate by sharing their own stories and posts at the campaign website, elevatedbyart.com.

Hardy established the Latisha Hardy Dance Studio in 2010. While salsa is the form of dance she says helped her to persevere through tough times, the studio embraces multiple types of dance including mambo, bachata, kizomba and zouk, with online options for participation.

The studios ladies team welcomes dancers of all ages and backgrounds, offering them a chance to perform together. The team meets several days each week to train and has built a sort of camaraderie a benefit in addition to the endorphins generated by the rigors of dance.

The dance floor is the only place I feel I can truly express myself, says Hardy. My goal today is to empower the world to empower themselves through the art of dance.

The new video shared by the studio certainly achieves that goal. It features clips of the dance team performing together, interspersed with clips of the dancers sharing candid stories about difficult experiences in their personal lives and how dance empowered them to heal. During the video, Hardy shares her own personal experience about planning for her future after getting out of an abusive relationship.

The only goal I had in life was to say yes to any opportunity that I could, said Hardy.

Her passion caught the attention of the #ElevatedbyArt team, who was excited to share Hardys enthusiasm and message of empowerment as part of the campaign.

The #ElevatedbyArt campaign committee was just so moved by Latishas energy and commitment to empowering her students, says campaign chair Angela Seals, We believe she literally embodies the healing power of art as she passes it along to her students.

free, elevatedbyart.com

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#ElevatedbyArt campaign highlights Latisha Hardy and the Boss Ladies dance team - Colorado Springs Independent

Kristen Noel Crawley Is Helping Black Women Disrupt the Beauty Industry – HarpersBAZAAR.com

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Kristen Noel Crawley wants Black women to not just lean in to the beauty industry, she wants them to disrupt it entirely.

Starting last year, the KNC Beauty founder, known for her cult-favorite lip, eye, and face masks, and essential Supa Balms, partnered with Revlon to provide completely free virtual educational courses for entrepreneurial Black women venturing into the highly competitiveyet lucrativebeauty industry. Aptly titled KNC School of Beauty, Crawley hosts a series of panels and discussions featuring the beauty world's most influential trailblazers in the hair, makeup, skin care, and wellness industries. The curriculum is crafted to empower budding entrepreneurs with invaluable insider advice about building a beauty business. Attendees will also have a chance to receive a $10,000 grant courtesy of Revlon for their soon-to-be brands.

For Crawley, the concept of the beauty school is centered on her firm belief that every industrynot just beautyshould believe and invest in the inherent power and cultural influence of Black women. By sharing her personal insight of creating her own brand from the ground up, as well as the experiences from her fellow industry colleagues, Crawley hopes to inspire a new generation of Black women in beauty to bet on themselves.

Today, the KNC School of Beauty returns with a dynamic lineup of girl bosses, including Brooke DeVard, Olamide Olowe, Karen Young, and Chandra Coleman Harris, with discussions hosted by Crawley herself. Below, we speak with the beauty founder about how her school came to be and how she hopes to see Black women shape the industry from this moment forward.

I was inspired to create KNC School of Beauty at a time when I felt our community needed advice and empowerment from within. It was at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer that I decided to develop this initiative further and connect with other successful Black female entrepreneurs at the top of the beauty industry. I wanted to secure a platform for us to speak on the trials and tribulations of building a business within a market that is discriminatory towards both women and people of color. I felt there was an audience here that could use the advice we have to impart to the next generation of budding entrepreneurs and really turn it into action.

I've been so thankful to my longtime partner, Revlon, who absolutely stepped up to the plate and has been a huge support from the beginning. They've provided a 10K grant as part of the prizes for each of our School of Beauty sessions, and it's been such a major cornerstone in the opportunities we're able to provide here. I want other Black women to know that they can build something larger than themselves that will leave a legacy for generations to come.

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I feel like Black women have been overlooked in the beauty market because we haven't necessarily always been the standard of beauty society strives toward. In ad campaigns and on products, white women have long been the focal point of beauty and, therefore, the consumer most prominently targeted. I think that over time, however, companies have started to see the investment Black women make in their beauty regiments and can now feel our influence in the market when it comes to trends and top products. Now that our consumer power has grown, so has our representation within the industry both behind the scenes and as the face of beauty for many leading brands.

I know that as women we need to be prepared for those people who are always going to try and change our minds or steer us in a different direction, thinking that we can't strategize or invest in ourselves 100 percent. When walking into a room, you have to be steadfast in your vision for yourself as an entrepreneur and hold onto the goals you have for your business. Others would rather try and shape us to fit their mold as opposed to the one we want to create for ourselves and for our community. It's important to persevere as women in this industry, because we truly are the ones who hold all the buying and selling power. Especially as Black women, our voices and ideas matter, and we shouldn't have to consistently prove ourselves in a space where we make the greatest impact.

Through the conversations I've had as a part of KNC School of Beauty, I've grown to admire so much all of the women who have joined me in our various sessions to impart their wisdom and share their personal stories of success and failure. I want to shout-out Nancy Twine of Briogeo, Melissa Butler of the The Lip Bar, Trinity Mouzon [Wofford] of Golde, Shontay Lundy of Black Girl Sunscreen, Jamika Martin of Rosen Skincare, and Beatrice Dixon of Honey Pot, who have all been a part of the School of Beauty and are making major strides in our industry.

For our third session on February 9, we'll be introducing Brooke DeVard of the Naked Beauty podcast, Olamide Olowe of My Topicals skincare, Karen Young of OUI the People, and Chandra Coleman Harris from our School of Beauty partner, Revlon. I'm so excited for the advice that will be shared, because I personally learn an immense amount myself and am always blown away by the depth of our conversations. Women like these are truly the ones that have inspired me all along in my journey to build KNC Beauty and grow it into what it is today.

It feels so empowering to be a Black woman finding success in this business, and I think this is just the beginning for a lot of other girls out there who have the same dreams I did.

I think the biggest misconception is that people tend to believe Black-owned brands are developing products solely for Black women or people of color, and not the full array of beauty consumers out there. While, of course, some lines cater more to the specific needs of Black women in regards to hair and skincare, I feel that many Black entrepreneurs want to create products that can be appreciated by all beauty enthusiasts. I have always said that KNC Beauty is for everyone, and I want to maintain that ethos with each of the products I release. I think it's important to be inclusive, and I know our collective outlook on beauty could be much better with this approach.

I think we're headed to the top! Matter of fact, I know that we have a place in this industry, and I can see our influence growing every day. Our look and our features are so sought after within the world of beauty now, and there's no denying that we have something everyone wants. It feels so empowering to be a Black woman finding success in this business, and I think this is just the beginning for a lot of other girls out there who have the same dreams I did. I think that the KNC School of Beauty speaks to the legacy that can be made if we support one another and make our community's impact greater.

You can register for KNC School of Beauty here.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Kristen Noel Crawley Is Helping Black Women Disrupt the Beauty Industry - HarpersBAZAAR.com

Overtime: The era of shut up and play is over – The Butler Collegian

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Deshaun Watson competes in an NFL game this past season. Watson has requested a trade from the Texans in the NFLs latest example of a disgruntled superstar taking their future in their own hands. Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images.

DEVIN ABELL | STAFF REPORTER | dabell@butler.edu

A new era is beginning in the NFL.

As the United States has undergone a social awakening to consciousness and individuality, players are pushing back against the grain and demanding that they be seen as individuals. No longer are they replaceable bodies for entertainment.

Nothing illuminates this point brighter than the most important position on the field: quarterback.

This all comes at a time of unprecedented change not only within the NFL, but throughout all professional sports, as the new generation of athletes began to take center stage in shaping the future of their respective sport. Much like LeBron James Decision, Deshaun Watsons trade demand has sent a message to the NFL: the players have the power.

As the older quarterbacks pass the torch, the league has been left in good hands with the emergence of young superstars like Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and Deshaun Watson. Among them, it is Watson who has become the ringleader of the burgeoning player empowerment evolution in the NFL.

Watson set career-highs this past season in passing yards, touchdowns and completion percentage. He also threw a career-low seven interceptions. His 33 touchdowns and 4,823 passing yards were also Texans single-season franchise records.

Even with Watson having his best statistical season as a pro, his teams record did not reflect his success after they finished the season 4-12, after an 0-4 start.

To further add insult to injury, Watson was tormented all season as he ranked second among quarterbacks for times sacked.

This comes as a result of the accumulations of miscues form the Texans front office and coaching staff, with the most notable including the trade of star receiver DeAndre Hopkins, trading away of top drafts picks and a team revolt against Bill OBrien as a result of his ineptitude as a head coach and GM.

As the team walked off the field after their final game of the season, fellow teammate JJ Watt walked over to Watson and apologized to him as he felt the organization wasted his efforts throughout the season.

The Texans organization tried to amend Watsons frustration as chairman Cal McNair vowed to work with Watson to rebuild the team and its culture.

Even after the Texans front office and promised Watson he would be involved in the teams new direction, he was further scorned by the organization.

The process used by the team to hire new GM Nick Caserio in early January left Watson unhappy as the team went against his input on the decision. As a result of this ill will, Watson requested a trade from the organization forgoing the no-trade clause in his contract.

Watson shocked the NFL world with this announcement, as he signed a contract extension with the team just prior to 2020 the season starting.

Watson just wanted a voice a say to which franchise he devotes himself and his career. The continuation of disingenuity demonstrated by the ownership has shown the franchises true colors towards its players.

Even at the age of 25, Watson has matured enough as an individual to see how inept the Texans organization is and understands he needs to remove himself from the toxicity the franchise emanates.

However, Watson still has an uphill battle against the organization, as the Texans are reportedly refusing any trade offers for him, further driving divisions between the two parties.

Watson is one of many players throughout the years that have been at odds with their teams over the direction of the organization, however, he has been one of the few with such star power at this stage of his career.

Although Watsons situation is the most prominent currently, he is not alone in trying to find greener pastures. Other quarterbacks throughout the league have expressed their dismay with their team and situation.

Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford was rumored to want out of Detroit due to his dismay with the direction the organization was taking with their coaching changes.

Stafford, who has spent over a decade in Detroit racking up stats, leaves the franchise with over 30 passing records under his name. That is, however, all he has stats.

After 12 seasons with the Lions, he has only three playoff appearances. On top of that, his team has only ever played in the Wild Card round, never winning a Division title.

This is in no part Staffords doing, as he has consistently been the backbone of the Lions organization year in and year out. His talent has been wasted with a franchise that hasnt won a playoff game in over 30 years, while also having never won the NFC North.

After years of his organization failing to build a quality roster supported by a competent coaching staff Stafford has finally had enough.

After putting in a request for a trade, the Lions traded their long-time quarterback to the Los Angeles Rams for quarterback Jared Goff, a third-round draft pick and two first-rounders in 2022 and 2023.

While Staffords situation may have been a more mutual agreement between ownership and player with less drama his and Watsons situation arent all that different.

They are both talented athletes who have dedicated their careers to their franchise, only to have their personal success, health and legacy be hindered by that very same franchise due to its lack of desire to support and listen to their star players opinion.

This has been the status quo for franchises since the conception of professional sports. They dont care about their players opinions, because to these organizations business comes first.

They dont give a damn about their suggestions or criticism, they just want them to go out on the gridiron and make them their money.

In other words shut up and play.

Stafford and Watson are demonstrating a new precedent in professional sports that franchises have long feared. Theyre showing that players can treat professional sports as a business too.

Players are beginning to understand if they are at a high enough level of talent, they have an influence and say in what they want out of their careers. Theyre not just another cog in the machine at the mercy of their ownership.

If Stafford and Watson have proved anything to the league, it is that true power belongs with the players not the ownership.

However, some NFL veterans have taken issue with this new found way of thinking.

One of those individuals is Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, who said, while speaking to Yahoos Minty Bets, that these players make too much money to have an opinion.

Im kind of old school, Favre said. I think you play. You get paid a ton of money to do a certain job and just do it and let the chips fall where they may. I think we make too much money to voice an opinion.

Favre backpedaled, though, as he went on to say although he feels a certain way, he believes the times and that way are changing.

Im not saying hes wrong, Favre said. Again, I think its a different day and time, and it will be interesting to see how the organization handles it.

The hypocrisy demonstrated by Favre is quite unsettling, especially since he has experience pushing for a trade during his career. Favre unretired on the cusp of the 2008 season, and with the Packers committed to Aaron Rodgers, Favre forced the team to ship him off to the New York Jets .

Favres lack of empathy towards Watson shows the standard of thinking that has been instilled into the players over the years and why ownerships and organizations have had their way when dealing with player vs. organization issues.

Watsons willingness to make a stand against organizations and to demand respect has echoed throughout the NFL, as many current and former players have rallied behind him.

As Watson will continue to fight for his respect and to be free of the Texans organization, the situation will prove in time if owners will truly understand that their disingenuous actions against players have consequences.

The way Stafford and Watsons situations have unfolded demonstrates a shift happening, not only in the NFL but in professional sports.

The era of shut up and play is over.

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Overtime: The era of shut up and play is over - The Butler Collegian

Is remote working really the future? Leaders from Amgen, Eaton, JLL and more weigh in – Human Resources Online

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

While remote working has brought about flexibility in work schedules and helped improve employee productivity, it has no doubt brought on its own set of challenges too - such as a lack of work-life balance.In this final segment of a two-part special feature, Priya Sunil speaks to nine leaders across industries on what remote working means for their workforce, and if they see it as a permanent fixture of the future.Are you for or against remote working, and if so, in what format?

Cloris Gu, HR Director, Eaton East Asia

Eaton has been an advocate for remote working for some time. We understand some employees would require flexible working arrangements due to non-work commitments. We want to ensure were able to support them where possible so theyre able to better balance their work and personal responsibilities efficiently.

Susan Otto, Chief People Officer, BlackLine

We are mainly proponents of remote working. Our employees have shown incredible resilience and productivity ever since weve had to implement office-wide work from home arrangements. Weve adapted to remote working well given the nature of our industry where digitalisation and automation are at the core of our business. However, we understand different industries/businesses might take to it differently.

Jessica Simpson, Human Resources Director, Amgen Singapore Manufacturing

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed Amgen to transcend boundaries and experiment with new ways of working while ensuring that health, safety and the well-being of our staff remain top priority. Over the past year, we have made huge strides into an area of work flexibility that we never thought was possible in our bio-manufacturing industry and have successfully adapted to the realities of work-from- home, making remote working arrangements more effective and productive than ever.

Technology lies at the heart of the future of work. That said, we are cognizantsome industries such as bio-manufacturing could never fully go remote at least for now - because some processes would still require workers to collaborate in the same place or to conduct critical work in a specific location.

So, while remote working appears to be here to stay since it is workable for many roles and provides staff with a much-needed ability to better harmonise between workand personal demands, embedding this as part of our new normal will require flexibility on the part of all workers and for all to learn how to work in a different way to ensure business outcomes are not compromised.

Going forward, the future of work is creative, flexible and human. Companies are expected to increasingly adopt a hybrid style of working that balances remote and non-remote work to support the individualized needs of our employees. There is not a one-size-fits-all model and this will take time for our leaders to learn how to be agile and flexible in the way they approach leading teams with this hybrid approach. This model worked well for Amgen in the midst of the pandemic and has enabled us to continue delivering critical medicines for our patients without compromising productivity - all while providing the ability for greater work life harmony for our staff.

With the advent of advanced manufacturing and digital transformation, manufacturing jobs of the future will continue to get redefined. In time to come, we can envision manufacturing processes to be further automated such that workers can control the systems from remote locations, providing opportunities for even further flexibility.

Helen Snowball, Chief Human Resources Officer, JLL Asia Pacific

At JLL, weve always believed in flexible working. Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, we had schemes in place such as the Gradual Return to Work Programme to allow employees to ease back to work after a period of leave.

There is no doubt were able to work efficiently and effectively remotely. But what weve also recognised is that the extensive work-from-home period leads to a lack of boundaries between work and personal life.

This is the time for corporates to reimagine remote working. Beyond merely instituting a hybrid or flexible work model where some time is spent in the office and other days at home, we should use this opportunity to create a better employee experience so that employees feel connected to their organisations and colleagues whether theyre at work or at home.

One way could be a building a virtual toolkit where employees can log on to a single platform for all their resources and to better understand their organisation instead of searching through multiple websites since there are less face-to-face opportunities to get these answers.

Vincent Goh, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, CyberArk

The need to pivot to remote working quickly has accelerated digital transformation in both CyberArk and our customer base, so in many ways I believe that remote working has forced businesses in the region to tap into the potential technology brings; in order to adapt and survive there has been a real impetus to make changes that would previously have taken years, and this is refreshing. As CyberArk is a cyber security business, so we see the other side as well. Businesses that rushed into onboarding new applications and services face a different set of cybersecurity challenges.

Remote working means that each one of us is now a potential entry point into the organisation for attackers, so risks have now increased, and organisations have become more vulnerable to cyberattacks than ever.

Cybercriminals are playing on peoples fears around Covid-19 to conduct social-engineering based attacks. So my caveat for remote working for organisations is that it can be very positive in many ways, but it must also be done in such a way that doesnt place the organisation at risk.

Jeannie Wong, Director of Human Resources, Thales in Singapore & South East Asia

As a HR leader, I believe that an efficient workplace is all about maintaining a good balance, and remote working fits in this picture as long as efficiency and results are not compromised.

Thales adapted quickly to remote working, and the Group has also introduced a global Smart Working initiative where each business unit has the ability to adopt a hybrid work model, based around decentralising decisions and empowering managers to decide how best to organise their teams. In South East Asia, the focus lies on creating collaborative workspaces thats based on trust and results.

June Chui, HR Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage

Definitely for. Even before the pandemic, our employees were able to work remotely, with the agreement of their managers, even if we have a physical office space in the employee's location. As a global company with work teams dispersed across regions and collaboration meetings spanning different time zones, remote working enables our employees to accommodate these early mornings and late-night calls while balancing commitments in our personal lives.

Juliana Ang, Chief Human Resources Officer, NTUC Income

The onset of the Circuit Breaker provided the impetus for us to review our working arrangement at Income. In Q3 last year, we have reviewed all the work requirements for our staff and confirmed that 85% of the roles are able to work from home. As such, since Q4 last year, we have implemented a flexible work arrangement where staff who are eligible to work from home could opt to do so on a permanent basis.

Currently, employees are on split team basis and have the flexibility to either return to the physical workspace during their assigned week, or continue to work from home. It has served us well so far, and we continue to enjoy high levels of staff collaboration and productivity.

Beyond just remote working, the key intent of implementing the work-from-home policy is part of the work culture that we want to build, so that Income stays agile and flexible to adopt and embrace changes rapidly as well as stay relevant in an ever-evolving operating landscape.

Niharica Sand, HR Director, REDHILL

Leading the HR practice and developing policies at a global organisation, I am completely for remote working. Since remote working arrangements kicked in since March last year, the HR team at REDHILL have been taking regular pulse surveys and one-on-one check-ins with all our employees across Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East. These regular surveys help us to identify and assess the challenges and needs of our employees, so that we can address and adjust working arrangements in an efficient manner.

At REDHILL, the hybrid format has been the most successful for our organisation thus far. In a hybrid work arrangement, our employees can choose to work in the office (if local regulations permits) or work from home. Having this flexibility allows teams to come in the office once or twice a week to meet their teammates and have discussions to facilitate collaboration and creative thinking. It also allows working parents and interns to work around their own school commitments and shape their own schedules. We find that face-to-face meetings are still more effective for brainstorming, idea generation and group discussions.

We strongly encourage R&R; Responsibility & Reward, where each employee is responsible for their work, and thus rewarded with the flexibility to manage their time and place of work. Looking at the workforce of the future, such policies help attract and retain strong talent.

Pros

Remote working arrangement supports the agile way of working, while also keeping our customers and employees safe at all times. This enables us to drive bottom-up innovation, build collaboration across teams and cultivate an open mindset, so as to sharpen our competitive edge. A conducive work environment and culture can empower staff to be more self-directed.

Acquiring such a mindset is especially important in keeping ourselves motivated and fulfilled at work. One of the ways we promote agile ways of working across Income is by exposing employees to regular personal development through immersive trainings such as Design Thinking workshops.

Cons

However, remote working also brings about some challenges, one of which is the lack of daily face-to-face social interactions which we would normally expect in a regular office setting. It cannot be replaced but we can work around it and still have productive meetings and discussions virtually with the use of technology, open communication and coordination. Team and project meetings within safe distancing measures are also actively encouraged, when it makes it more productive for work to be done together.

Vincent Goh, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, CyberArk

Pros

It has forced us all to make the effort to interact with the people we need to connect with in a different way. An example would be trade show attendance.

Clearly, getting thousands of people in a room is not possible currently and may not be for some time. So it has forced an accelerated shift to digital; to educate, inform and project what CyberArk can do for customers in a way that is vastly different.

Cons

We, at CyberArk are a very people-driven team; its part of our DNA to meet in person to plan, celebrate, and of course to socialise.

Face-to-face interactions have been central to what the company is about. The bonds we have with our colleagues, customers and partners are strong and have survived the pandemic, and flexible working will be part of life going forward.So while I wouldnt say it hasnt worked, we certainly welcome the promise of the upcoming year in terms of enabling more safe physical interaction.

Jeannie Wong, Director of Human Resources, Thales in Singapore & South East Asia

Pros

Remote working implies a certain shift of autonomy back into the hands of the employees so there has to be an implicit level of trust between managers and their people. The approach sees a new way of working which is more technology-immersive, flexible and results-oriented. We have seen teams organise themselves in the best way possible to serve our customers and keep to their commitments, with employees being more focused on high-quality outputs and being more outcome-driven.

Managers have also adjusted expectations to exclude perpetual presenteeism and to focus on whats really important improving collective productivity so we can better deliver to our customers and stakeholders.

Cons

While it has its benefits, remote working is not possible for all departments and all types of work. Thales is involved across a very diverse spectrum of businesses, which include essential services for key sectors like aerospace and rail transportation. Our colleagues in these business units work on industrial and operational sites that require them to be on-premise daily.

Due to the high level of confidentiality required by many of our projects, we also have teams who need to access secured and encrypted servers and other equipment which are only available at our secure sites. For a company like ours, there is no one-size-fits-all solution and the key lies again in empowering our managers to make the best arrangements for their teams to function effectively.

Helen Snowball, Chief Human Resources Officer, JLL Asia Pacific

Pros

Its helped to shift mindsets and accelerate the embracing of technology. Real estate is still largely a traditional industry, but at JLL, we have invested in the best technology tools for our employees to stay connected and collaborative.

Remote working has also intensified the sense of caring and collaboration at JLL.

For instance, our employees in various offices spontaneously set up fitness groups to encourage each other to stay healthy and active while under lockdowns. Other teams rallied together to donate to the less fortunate in their local communities.

Id say remote working boosts the significance of culture and teamwork in JLL. It gives us greater motivation to continue to nurture these aspects even though we may not spend so much time physically together.

Cons

Its clear that there is a mental toll that comes with working from home where employees juggle multiple responsibilities and there is no clear 'switch off' mode. From an HR point of view, we can do more in terms of training and empowering leaders to manage people remotely.

There will be questions around how line managers can feel comfortable and supported with flexible arrangements. How do you communicate expectations and show accountability? Can you build corporate culture and ensure successful on-boarding of new hires remotely?

These are tricky issues to navigate. It could be some time before companies and their HR teams create a sustainable and effective framework for this.

Susan Otto, Chief People Officer, BlackLine

Pros

Most of our employees were able to experience increased productivity due to the elimination of commute time. Many have also shared an improvement in their work-life balance as theyre able to better juggle their personal and work commitments. Overall, the transition to remote working has been manageable for us. However, we understand not everyones home environment is conducive to remote work. Thus, we work closely with the management and team managers to ensure everyone has the resources and support they need as we continue with mass remote work for some time.

Cons

We do miss the organic and casual interactions which can happen in the office. Its not possible to just bump into a colleague on WebEx or Zoom and strike a conversation. While there are tools for collaboration such as using an online whiteboard, its still a different experience compared to doing so in-person. Hence, we do our best to organiseonline gatherings which are more casual in nature such as games sessions when possible so colleagues have additional avenues to connect.

Cloris Gu, HR Director, Eaton East Asia

Pros

Even prior to COVID-19, we had remote working practices to provide employees with the flexibility and support they need to manage their professional and personal commitments efficiently. With no signs to the end of the pandemic just yet, remote working remains essential in helping us ensure the physical safety of our employees. Supplemented with suitable virtual tools and technologies, it also enables our teams to maintain productivity and continuity.

Cons

Humans are by nature gregarious animals - we long for social interactions. While virtual engagement will never go away, it will never replace the value of genuine face-to-face communication either.

Looking beyond corporations like Eaton, there are many who work in service industries that rely on the existence of corporations and office buildings. These individuals livelihoods have been severely impacted with the sudden and mass implementation of remote working during COVID.

As a society, we are all interconnected and are morally obligated to support each other where possible as we continue on the road to recovery.

Niharica Sand, HR Director, REDHILL

Pros

The most important benefit of remote work has been the realisation and its acceptance as a legitimate alternative to being in an office. This shift in working habits has enabled us to empower every individual to focus on what truly matters to them, and the ability to effectively balance their professional and personal lives.

As an organisation, we have witnessed two key benefits to our bottom line: an increase in employee engagement leading to higher productivity, and sprinkled attendance has led to cost reductions.

Employee engagement has significantly improved as a result of conscious efforts to stay engaged with teams during lockdown. We were also able to identify and address internal communication blind-spots. Such efforts have resulted in a reduction in attrition rates while enabling us to attract great talent.

As an organisation, we continue to leverage on multiple digital platforms and communication tools to support our staff to stay productive and happy while they work. Overall remote working has been hugely beneficial for us.

Cons

One major pain point is the inability to have synchronous communication. As every discussion is scheduled in advance, in the creative field, this can hamper workflow. It is not easy to brainstorm and be creative on schedule. The ability to tap your colleague on their shoulder, walk over to their desk, or just join in is greatly reduced. Socialising becomes forced and the conversation flow is no longer organic.

Secondly, performance evaluations are more difficult to assess. Considering most employees did not have a flexible work arrangement before the COVID-19 pandemic, people needed a few months adapting to over-communication, scheduled discussions and working in isolation. Generally, working remotely makes it more difficult to fairly assess each team members contribution and capability.

Data security risk is also a factor, especially for companies that do not have secure devices for their employees. With data the mantra of today, the security of ones IP is of utmost importance.

June Chui, HR Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage

Pros

It has helped in enabling our employees to better balance their work and home lives and we've seen an improvement in employee morale with little impact on productivity. We've seen that remote working also promotes trust and empowerment, as the focus is on delivering business outcomes as opposed to being "seen" in the office.

Cons

While we ourselves have not seen this directly, one possible downside is that the employee doesn't feel a strong bond with the company. Pre-pandemic, our employees were used to mix remote working with coming to the office. Even for our employees who work in locations with no physical offices, we encourage them to occasionally travel to a location with an office so they can build that bond. In this period of lockdown, we're overcoming this by encouraging our managers and their team members to over-communicate on goals, delivery commitments and feedback.

Managing a remote team is challenging and we provide many tools and resources to our people managers to be conscious of the different aspects including the unconscious bias against team members they may see more often face to face vis-a-vis remote team members.

Jessica Simpson, Human Resources Director, Amgen Singapore Manufacturing

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Is remote working really the future? Leaders from Amgen, Eaton, JLL and more weigh in - Human Resources Online

Fusion innovation: How 30 innovators crossed boundaries to create business value and social impact – YourStory

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Launched in 2012, YourStory's Book Review section features over 280 titles on creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation. See also our related columns The Turning Point, Techie Tuesdays, and Storybites.

Innovation through a combination of perspectives and cultures can spawn new types of value creation. Methods, theories, and stories of fusion innovation in action are presented in the must-read book Innovation Through Fusion: Combining Innovative Ideas to Create New Solutions by CJ Meadows.

This hefty 500-page book profiles 30 world-class innovators with multiple backgrounds. Each inspiring story is based on in-depth interviews with innovators as well as their colleagues and family members, with links to short videos.

Nuclear fusion produces massive energy from combining two nuclei similarly, cross-disciplinary fusion can lead to new types of offerings, organisations and business models. The book combines academic research with inspirational storytelling to illustrate these processes.

CJ Meadows is Director of i2i, the Innovation and Insights Center of SP Jain School of Global Management in Singapore. She has a doctorate in business administration and IT from Harvard Business School, and has over 20 years of international experience as an entrepreneur and coach. She also founded The Tiger Center, a social enterprise in India.

Here are my key takeaways from the 39 chapters in this compelling book, summarised as well in the table below. See also my reviews of the related books The Seven Principles of Complete Co-creation, Cross-Industry Innovation, The Art of Noticing, Non-Obvious Trends, The Serendipity Mindset, and The Creative Thinking Handbook.

The author defines a fusioneer as one who innovates across boundaries between industry, field, country, or social class. They are interdisciplinary creators, lateral innovators, borderless free-thinkers, and boundary-crossing integrators.

Fusioneers have T-shaped personalities, and are sometimes regarded as oddballs. They cross-fertilise ideas, synthesise models, and create mash-ups at intersections of different fields. Through the centuries, opportunities for creativity have mushroomed by mixing and marrying ideas from different industries and countries, and we are now in a new renaissance, the author explains.

A fusioneer is outwardly open. They are highly aware, great listeners, and observant noticers. They are also inwardly open, and are deeply aware of their own interests and talents while excelling in self-management, work-life integration and spiritual reflection as well.

A fusioneer develops an ongoing collection of ideas, people, experiences, skills, certifications and degrees for the workshop of the mind, the author evocatively explains. To sense changes in the world, the fusioneer cultivates a unique lens without prejudice, and is able to see, map and analyse things others miss.

A fusioneer does not just make choices between alternatives but combines or fuses approaches. They deconstruct and re-assemble, and the combination leads to new value creation.

A fusioneer embodies the different types of empathy: emotional, cognitive, and compassionate. They sense and resonate with others emotions, can understand their point of view, and move to action.

Of the 30 fusion innovators profiled, most of them spent six months or more in multiple nations, the author observes. Crossing international boundaries helps them cross other boundaries between cultures and disciplines as well, the author explains.

They have mental diversity irrespective of advanced degrees, and dont just do jobs but create jobs. They are self-directed and driven by inner motivation rather than external incentives.

Many of these facets were discovered by the author using a tool called Multicultural Personality Assessment. An outstanding table in the book (Table 3.1) summarises the innovators international experience, organisations, achievements, and impact.

The bulk of the book features illustrated stories of 30 fusioneers, with personal and professional journeys. Unfortunately, some of the figures are generic photo-stock images and there is a disconnect between the captions, image, and chapter text. Perhaps leaving some images without captions may have helped instead.

References for each chapter are drawn from books, TED talks, HBR, and academic journals like Journal of Experimental Psychology and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It would have been great to have an integrated reference section at the end of the book, pulling all these resources together.

Some of the referenced books have been reviewed by YourStory as well, such as Dual Transformation, Gamechangers, and Innovators DNA. See also our reviews of Creative Edge and Introvert Entrepreneur.

Samuel Gan is a scientist, product developer and educator, who converts some of his knowledge into mobile apps for mass audiences (e.g. DNAapp, VibraTilt). The creative problem solver also co-founded an academic journal on mobile apps, and likes to link fieldwork with labs.

Jawahar Kanjilal pioneered a number of mobile features during his Nokia days in India, such as the ringtone deal for Saare Jahan Se Accha, mobile insurance, Visual Radio, and Life Tools for rural users.

Matthew Rooda, Founder of the aptly-named SwineTech (Fitbit on a pig), developed and combined expertise in agriculture, medicine and engineering to solve the problems of pig breeders.

Robest Young has won the title Malaysias National Inventor of the Year, with a string of products to solve daily problems. The tinkerer has come up with mosquito glue (to attract and kill them, rather than repel them), micro-fertilisers, combined sink-cistern, smartphone accessories for the blind, and rubber stamp technology inspired by the printing industry.

Sister Cyril Mooney was Principal of the Loreto Sealdah School in Kolkata. She extended the private schools facilities for underprivileged and disabled children, combining educational and social causes with a humanitarian mission.

Jack Sim is a serial and social entrepreneur in areas like sanitation, founding the Restroom Association in Singapore, the World Toilet Summit, and BoP Hub accelerator. He was so talkative as a child that he would often be made to stand outside the class (outstanding student, he jokes).

Margaret Connors extended the practice of urban farming as a livelihood generator (green collar labour) for poor communities and food security for neighbourhoods in the US. She founded City Growers and the Urban Farming Institute.

Raffi Rembrand is CTO of BioHug Technologies and an expert in autism diagnosis, blending audiology and touch technology. His inner journey is shaped by his own experience as a parent of an autistic child.

Indian expat Krish Krishnan founded strategy consultancy Jeiva International, and is an advisor to healthcare firm ImmunoHeal. He developed technology for over-clothing breast cancer detection.

Ravi Kumar Banda founded XCyton diagnostics to combine bacterial and viral testing in an affordable manner for broader social benefit. Scientist Adeline Sim specialises in computational structural biology at the Bioinformatics Institute in Singapore.

Drawing on his international and multi-disciplinary background, Livio Valenti founded Vaxess Technologies, which created vaccines that were embedded in silk protein fibres. Med-tech developer Chin Sau Yin is President of Biotech Connection Singapore, and fuses polymer science with healthcare technologies.

Melissa Kwee is a social entrepreneur, blending business with social causes and philanthropy. She has worked on improving the lives of imprisoned mothers and their children. This polymath also served as President of UN Women Singapore, and co-founded One Degree Asia and the Halogen Foundation.

Grace Sai combined co-working spaces, mentorship networks, and events for business and social causes. She founded Books for Hope as a library network in rural Indonesia, and launched Impact Hub in Singapore.

Rick Smolan nurtured his childhood passion for photography and worked at Time, National Geographic and Life magazines. He combined this skill with an entrepreneurial flair and launched bestseller books like A Day in the Life series (Australia, Medicine, One Digital Day, Big Data). He excelled in sensing and visualisation emotion and finding corporate sponsors for his projects by sensing their needs and aspirations.

Ted Saad, of Palestinian heritage, made a mark in the US by combining multiple media businesses; the Emmy Award winner also branched out into wellness products. Chen Yi spent years doing hard labour during the Culture Revolution in China, but emigrated to the US and became a successful composer blending Chinese and Western classical music.

George Kolovos was an early e-commerce pioneer (MenuLog), and expanded into sports and the Quad Caf business as well. Chef Ryan Clift combines multiple cuisines and sciences into his series of restaurants; he began as a dishwasher, and insists that all staff be respected.

Jack Cowin spotted a long line outside a restaurant, which sparked him to launch a series of fast-food restaurants in Australia. He also launched a tourism business for tourists to climb atop Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Arun Abey is of Indian and Sri Lankan origin, and his experience with hardship as an immigrant in Australia sensitised him to the empowerment of financial services. He fused macro- and micro-economic theory with innovative business models in his company, Ipac Securities.

Karen Stephenson, a pioneer in organisational social network analysis and corporate anthropology, combined perspectives from quantum physics, ethnology, mathematical modelling, and management consulting. The founder of Netform Resources, she got an epiphany while watching people movement patterns from an upstairs office on the mezzanine floor.

Mihnea Moldoveanu founded Redline in the early Internet days, and made a mark in the ADSL modem space. He later founded the Centre for Integrative Thinking at the University of Toronto.

Parag Khanna is a founder (Factotum), strategy advisor (Hybrid Reality), author (Connectography) and policy specialist (National University of Singapore). He blends perspectives from technology, geography, and government.

Integrative thinker Edy Greenblatt fuses body and mind by combining dance, ethnology and executive coaching. She helps others focus on the integrated self and integrated team. Sean Leas combined his knowledge of intercultural contexts and corporate environments to become an expert in running international joint ventures.

Sports scientist Kenneth Graham leveraged statistical insights to perfect his dives, winning the best Olympic scores. He coaches across sports disciplines, viewing athletic performances from different perspectives. He also invented a tumbling machine for coaches to better analyse divers and gymnasts.

Growing up as a Turkish immigrant in Austria, Asil Toksal founded Energy Biodiesel, but also expanded into digital media and spirituality. He nurtured a love for experimenting,

Tal ben Shahar is Founder of Potentialife, a leadership development programme. His work combines education, wellbeing, and personal happiness, for children as well as professionals.

The stories above are inspiring as well as informative. The author shows how they offer lessons such as the importance of asking what as well as what if questions, why and why not. Seemingly random connections can actually be useful in the long run.

The fusioneer is hyper-aware with a strong sense of intuition, genuine interest, and constant curiosity. They are voracious and insatiable readers and absorb ideas like a sponge, thus learning broadly and deeply. Greater exposure leads to more dots to connect and patterns to emerge.

Some of them can spot deeper patterns underlying arts and science, and can filter diverse information and take decisions to act upon them. Some innovators also toss out ideas on social media for feedback (idea grenades).

They are non-judgmental and dont close off ideas too early, before their potential has been fully explored. As idea collectors, they do not discard potentially useful ideas. Once they catch a dream, they pass it on, the author evocatively describes.

They can envision and extrapolate from the present. Fusioneers have psychological flexibility, and are not constrained by boxes of the existing convention they either dont see them, or are aware of them but know how to breach them.

They collect and connect dots, and appreciate the fuzziness and grey areas in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaboration. The fusioneer can communicate using analogies and metaphors to figuratively introduce emerging concepts.

They have an innate ability to learn, and some of them were gifted as children while others were even seen as problem children for some time, the author observes. Rather than having failed in school, it was school that failed some of them, she adds.

They withstood criticism from naysayers and detractors in their innovation journeys. They are self-driven and strong-willed. Some are good intellectual sparring partners and even provocateurs; they enjoy idea jam sessions.

The innovators passion for solving problems and understanding customers helps see what others dont. They also probe for a new or better way to solve problems. Many of them have additional roles as teachers or mentors, which are good ways to learn as well. Working with youth can keep the mind creative and spirit young.

The fusioneer combines desire with drive in the bias to action, and helps others by solving their problems. They dont just find problems but care enough to solve them.

They connect ideas as well as people in their journey, and are articulate and authentic in communication. They clarify ideas by drawing, visualisation and extensive note-taking. They have perseverance and take risks, but are open to learning from failure, which they regard as lessons to be repurposed.

They have a creative sense of play and can be almost child-like in this manner. Some of them move quickly from one idea to another, handing them over to others. Others work on multiple projects at the same time. Some get bored with details and move on.

They surround themselves with diverse creative communities for ideation and co-creation. They are dreamers but also help others dream. They can sense other peoples skills and energy flows in groups, and are open to partnering.

Fusioneers are catalysts and mobilisers, and want to live a useful life. They enlist, inspire and empower teams for their causes. They bring their whole self to work, and come across more as conductors than generals. They are a ball of contagious energy and nurture creativity among the people they work with.

The fusioneer blends different influences while also respecting the original sources. They are skilled in pattern recognition and trend spotting, and are good organisers and fixers. Some of them have had experiences as a minority, which makes them sensitive to the issues of other minorities.

At the same time, they also reserve space and time for personal reflection through meditation or swimming and taking long walks (thinkwalking). Such techniques even during boring activities help incubate, germinate, ferment and simmer ideas.

Openness can also create discomfort, dissonance, tension, confusion, and information overload. Too much empathy can lead to burnout and loss of productivity, the author cautions. It is therefore important to know what are the drivers and boundaries of ones inner happiness.

It is not just organisational diversity, but social and mental diversity that are important for tomorrows leaders, the author emphasises. Creative capital is as useful as social capital. This also calls for being comfortable in difficult conversations during the synthesis of intelligence across diverse communities and cultures.

Fusion is different from living two lives or having diverse interests, the author clarifies. For example, TS Eliot was a poet and banker, and Franz Kafka was an insurance clerk and writer but they kept these interests separate.

Fusion calls for generation, not just connecting. Creativity draws from four roles: explorer, artist, judge and warrior, according to Roger von Oech.

In sum, the insights and inspiration in this book will be valuable for aspiring entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, as well as researchers and teachers of innovation. It clearly shows the value and impact of the access, assemble and apply approach to innovation.

The book is packed with inspiring quotes, and it would be fitting to end this review with the sample below.

YourStory has also published the pocketbook Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

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Fusion innovation: How 30 innovators crossed boundaries to create business value and social impact - YourStory

Careless Whispers: Parallels of civilian informants in social media user-reporting policies, but govt must walk a tightrope on this – The Financial…

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

So, the potential for abuse is high. The government needs to walk a tightrope; a misstep and the fall would be absolute.

Government seeking volunteers to report cyber content for certain violations could draw parallels with oppressive regimesthe Gestapo infamously relied on citizen informants as did the Soviet state. But the fact is that Twitter, Facebook et al ask the same of users: Report abuse or flag any post that violates policy. So, there is a benevolent, even beneficial, modern-day parallel of such civilian monitoring.

As per The Indian Express, MHA has notified a programme allowing people to register as cyber-volunteers, and report to the government illegal and unlawful content, including child pornography, rape threats, terrorism, radicalisation and anti-national activities. But, broad sweep, catch-all categories is where things could go terribly wrongand even lead to oppression (the state has substantive penal powers, a Facebook, at the worst,can impose a ban). If differing ideologies, lawful dissent action, and, as recent history shows, even sharp criticism, is to be termed as radicalisation or anti-national, the government will have no leg to stand on.

There are enough instances from the immediate and distant history of ruling political dispensation abusing the powers to shut up critics.

As far as prosecution is concerned, the government will have to exercise careful discretion, beyond just the face-value. The Justice Srikrishna committee report shows that despite an anti-abuse procedure governing phone-tapping, the review committee has to deal with 15,000-18,000 interception requests every meeting.

So, the potential for abuse is high. The government needs to walk a tightrope; a misstep and the fall would be absolute.

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Careless Whispers: Parallels of civilian informants in social media user-reporting policies, but govt must walk a tightrope on this - The Financial...

Oppression against us attracting international attention: Farmers – The New Indian Express

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A day after three international celebrities kicked up a Twitter storm by supporting the ongoing farmers agitation on Delhi borders, the farmers at Tikri border, one of the epicentres of the protest, said the solidarity from abroad is a nail on the coffin for the government. The movement will only grow further, they claimed.

The issue has become an international embarrassment now. How does it reflect on a country when an American singer has to raise awareness on protests happening in India? Indian celebrities who did not post a comment in solidarity with the movement suddenly rushed to the governments aid to issue messages of unity on Twitter. They will oppose Rihannas statement but not condemn basic human rights violations like suspension of Internet and supplies being cut off for farmers.

The hypocrisy lies exposed now, said Varun Chouhan who hails from Madhya Pradeshs Shivpuri. On Wednesday, the Centre had put out a statement against the support lent to the movement by international personalities including American pop singer Rihanna, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and US Vice President Kamala Harris niece, Meena Harris.

Soon, several Union ministers and celebrity film stars retweeted the statement. Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli, and legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar were among others who issued statements on how internal issues could be resolved amicably. Activist Sudesh Goyat said it was unfortunate for celebrities to let down youth who idolise them.

Jasbir Kaur Nat, state committee member of Punjab Kisan Union, said the reaction of international celebrities in support of the farmers was a nail in the coffin for the Indian government. The government stepping up oppression against farmers at the protest sites is attracting more international attention. They thought suspending Internet would help them twist the narrative. However, it turned out to be a move of political suicide for them, he said.

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Oppression against us attracting international attention: Farmers - The New Indian Express

Turkish authorities arrest 65 revolutionaries in a bid to break the backbone of the growing anti-government resistance – Morning Star Online

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

AS ANTI-GOVERNMENTprotests continue to grow,revolutionary forces in Turkey warned today of the states attemptsto break the backbone of their resistance.

Sixty-five people were detained in Istanbul last week after a press conferenceannouncing the launch of a new opposition alliance, theUnited Fighting Forces (BMG).

Many of those hauled into custodywill appear in court tomorrow.There have been allegations of torture during their fourdays ofinterrogation by security services.

The new alliance, which includes the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), Partizan, the Revolutionary Party and the Democratic Regions Party (DBP), has been hailed as a major step in uniting Turkeys revolutionary forces against state oppression.

The government routinely accuses its opponents of terrorism, but ina statementthe BMG said that the only terrorist organisation in this country is the ruling alliance between the ruling Justice & Development Party (AKP) headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the neofascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), its junior partnerin government.

Your attacks will not be able to stop us. We are coming to destroy your terrorist gang, BMG promised.

ESP, founded in 2010 by jailed former Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Figen Yuksekdag, has bornethe brunt of the latest wave of government oppressionwith 48 of its leading members detained earlier this month.

After the latest wave of arrests at least 24 ESP members remain in custody, including co-chair Sahin Tumuklu;another eightare under house arrest.

Ozgur Gelecek reporter Taylan Oztas, Revolutionary Party President Elif Torun and HDP Istanbul co-chair Elif Bulutarealso being held.

But Mr Tumuklu insisted: We will overthrow fascism and gain political freedom.

And Revolutionary Party deputy leader MuratPircan Yaratantold the Morning Star that the state fears unity between Turks and Kurds and wants to break a movement that takes its power from the streets.

There is a pressure on the organisations that speak out, he said, explaining that Turkey is faced with a severe political and economic crisis.

But, he added,Mr Erdogan is afraid of thehuge protests that continue across Turkey, triggered by the appointment of a pro-Erdogan rector, Melih Bulu, at Istanbuls prestigious Bogazici University in January.

Students and other protesters have been targeted by snipers and subjected to sexual assault at the hands of security services with more than 500 detained over the course of last week alone.

We will not bow, we will not look down has become the slogan of a movement the government has vowed to put down at all costs, fearing it will become a new Gezi, the 2013 wave ofprotests that nearly brought down the government.

Mr Erdogan insists the students areterrorists taking instructions from those in the mountains.

Protests in Tunisia conjure images of the past and questions about the future – Atlantic Council

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Tue, Feb 9, 2021

MENASourcebyKeith Jones

A female young protester raises a placard that reads in Arabic, 'there is an armoured vehicle between the representative of the people and the People', as another raises a placard that reads, 'No justice, no peace, fall of the police state' as they stand in front of security forces members forming a wall to prevent their comrades (not shown) from demonstrating in front of the building of the Tunisian Parliament in Bardo. Dozens of young people from the tough neighborhood of Hay Ettadhamen took to the streets in an anti-government protest march that started from their neighborhood and headed towards Bardo city in Tunis. The demonstrators have demanded the release of youths arrested by the police during the latest nightly protests, and denounced the police violence and the repression of the social protest movements. Tunisia, January 26, 2021.

On Habib Bourguiba Boulevard, demonstrations call for the fall of the regime. At night, police clash with protesters in clouds of tear gas. Hundreds of demonstratorsmany who have yet to celebrate their eighteenth birthdayare arrested and thrown in jail. This isnt Tunisia in January 2011. This is Tunisia in January 2021.

The tenth anniversary of Tunisias revolution should have been a time for celebration. Instead, it has been a period of increasing alarm as near-daily protests spread across the country from mid to late January, and some demonstrations continuing in February. A twisted dj vu in which Tunisias youth have returned to the streets to make known their discontent with a government they helped establish a decade ago by overthrowing a dictator.

These protests are important, not just because of what they tell us about Tunisias current political climate, but because they serve as a litmus test for Tunisias approach to democracy building. The Tunisian approach has prioritized political consensus, reasoning that it would maintain stability while still creating the requisite political and economic change to improve citizens socio-economic conditions. However, as these protests make clear, there are serious questions about whether that deference has gone too far, creating too little change and, now, undermining stability.

Delivering democracy without change

As an ever-increasing number of newspaper articles, blogs, and reports have noted, the last decade successfully delivered Tunisian democracy, but it is increasingly apparent that democracy has not delivered for many Tunisians. The rallying cry in late 2010 and early 2011 was work, freedom, and national dignitythe push for democracy was a means towards those ends, not for democracy as an end in-and-of-itself. Ten years after the revolution, nearly nine in ten Tunisians think the country is headed in the wrong direction and the majority of the country is unconvinced that democracy is the best form of government. Those numbers are worrisome, but somewhat expected; Tunisias economy now grows at about half the rate it did before the revolution, inflation has roughly doubled over the same period, and unemployment has gone up.

The ramifications of not delivering on the revolutions rallying cry has been felt throughout Tunisias political system for some time. This is most obvious in the recent prevalence of populist politicians: the rise in profile of a counterrevolutionary politician Abir Moussi in 2020; the 2019 presidential election of Kais Saied; and Saieds electoral opponent, media mogul Nabil Karoui. But it is also apparent in the uptick of Tunisians leaving for Italy and the large protests in response to tax hikes in 2018.

As a recent Institute for Security Studies report notes, The goals and promise of the Freedom and Dignity Revolution remain unfulfilled for Tunisians. It is increasingly clear that regular elections will not translate into better opportunities without deep and structural economic reforms. The coronavirus downturn has exacerbated an already precarious situation.

Taking a cue from the Institute for Security Studies, it is important to position the action in the streets of Tunisia within the broader context of reforms. Doing so illuminates tendencies within the countrys approach to democracy building and raises questions about its stability moving forward. Specifically, these protests create a dichotomy between the state and the citizenry, in the form of police and protestor, which helps illustrate the complexity of Tunisias current political situation.

Security forces havent changed their ways

Police brutality was a very compelling mobilizer during Tunisias revolution. Mohamed Bouazizis act of self-immolation, which launched Tunisias revolution, came after police harassed him about being a street vendor. Bouazizis martyrdom resonated powerfully across the country because his story coalesced Tunisias broader issues of state oppression and economic disparity into a simple narrative. The hopelessness and frustration that Bouazizi clearly felt were deeply familiar to other Tunisians.

In the protests that occurred after Bouazizis immolation, clashes between protests and internal security forces were common. As protests spread across the country and intensified in January 2011, police reform became an important revolution objective. However, while some important initial steps were taken in the first months following the revolution to overhaul security forces, true reform never happened.

Tunisian politicians avoided reforming the security sector in large part because of the myriad of security threats that Tunisia has faced over the past decade: the 2012 attack on the United States Embassy in Tunisia, the civil war in neighboring Libya, multiple largescale terror attacks in 2015, the high number of Tunisian citizens who left to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and the continued existence of Islamic extremists in the mountains bordering Algeria.

But the lack of reformative action also indicates the importance Tunisias elected officials have given to maintaining stability through consensus at the expense of pursuing the revolutions mandate. This logic is the defining characteristic of Tunisias post-revolutionary politics and its mettle is currently being tested in the streets.

With each story of arbitrary detention, arrest of minors by police barging into their homes, or harassment of journalists for filming an arrest, it seems obvious that the security forces are operating much as they did under ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Close observers of Tunisia are not surprised that the police have kept up a number of their pre-revolution tactics, including arbitrary restrictions on movement and torture.

What direction does Tunisia go?

This casts a shadow over Tunisias entire project in democracy building. The institutions that were oppressive instruments of the old regime need to change for Tunisia to achieve work, freedom, and national dignity. Like the timid approach to security sector reformation, deep economic reforms and transitional justice mechanisms have been avoided or defanged throughout the past ten years, as politicians sought to avoid political confrontation that could upset consensus across major political parties.

The argument for this approach is that gradual change produces a more stable long-term trend of democratic consolidation. It has been a decade since Tunisian security forces were in the streets limiting Tunisians freedom and violating their dignity in the name of an autocrat. If the political system is the independent variableswitched from autocracy to democracythen the structure and membership of security forces are the control variable and police repression is the dependent variable. This means that the presence of a democratic election alone has not made much of a difference.

Tunisias politics of consensus has spent most of the past ten years being laudeda grand political coalition that has delivered dialogue instead of destruction. Broadly speaking, that is true. Tunisias was the only Arab Spring revolution to produce a democracy. The country also has avoided a major counterrevolution and there have been repeated peaceful transitions of power over the last decade. However, a growing contingency of experts wonder if the obeisance to consensus has gone too far, creating fissures in the foundation of Tunisias democracy. As a recent report from Sharan Grewal and Shadi Hamid at the Brookings Institute posit, the extended pursuit of consensus in Tunisia, from 2015-19, has also had a dark side, constraining its democratic transition.

The past few weeks make this argument seem prescient. It will likely continue to seem that way throughout the remainder of the year. Even if the demonstrations cease in the short term, the underlying political and economic issues will not, nor will the added socioeconomic stress of the COVID-19 pandemic in the medium term. These broader trends are being compounded by the resemblance between the tableaus of early 2021 and January 2011. That does not mean that Tunisia is on the verge of collapserevolutions are rare and hard to predictbut it is a worrying step in the wrong direction.

Keith Jones is assistant director of corporate relations at the Atlantic Council. He previously conducted research in Tunisia on youth organizations, active citizenship, and democratic consolidation.

Mon, Mar 30, 2020

It is important to monitor the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic, its effects on each North Africa system, and the debate between government elites and masses to better understand the situation in these countries and the long-term implications of the health crisis.

MENASourcebyKarim Mezran, Alessia Melcangi, Emily Burchfield, and Zineb Riboua

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Protests in Tunisia conjure images of the past and questions about the future - Atlantic Council

Will Not be Cowed Down by ‘Oppression’, Says VK Sasikala; To Engage in Active Politics – The Wire

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Tirupathur: Invoking late AIADMK stalwarts M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa, expelled AIADMK leader V.K. Sasikala on Monday called for unity to jointly defeat the common foe and announced her intention to engage in active politics, four years after she completed a prison term in a corruption case in Bengaluru.

Whenever the party faced challenges, it has risen like a phoenix, she said alluding to the mythical bird, even as she kept up the suspense on going to the AIADMK headquarters at Chennai, the building of the ruling dispensation she once controlled.

Both Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa are former chief ministers of the state.

In her first comments days after being discharged from a hospital in Bengaluru where she was treated for COVID-19 post her release from the prison, Sasikala asserted she will not be cowed down by oppression.

I have overcome COVID-19 due to divine intervention and the blessings of my akka (elder sister) puratchi thalaivi idaya deivam (God) Amma who lives in the hearts of the people, she said addressing supporters here en route to Chennai from Bengaluru.

Jayalalithaa is also addressed as puratchi thalaivi, meaning revolutionary leader and Amma.

Sasikala said she would dedicate the rest of her life to ensure Jayalalithaas oft-repeated statement that AIADMK will exist for a 100 years even after her and would follow the principle of family is the party, party is the family.

Puratchi thalaivis children are forever mine too. The party has faced so many challenges and had risen like a phoenix. In lines with the golden words of Puratchi Thalaivar (Ramachandran), we should stand united

My desire is that we must jointly work to ensure our common foe does not come to the ruling saddle again in Tamil Nadu, she said without naming anyone.

It was the duty of all to ensure there should be no place for divide and rule by political opponents and the grand movement which was walking the path laid down by Ramachandran, the founder, should not collapse due to the whims and fancies of a few, she added.

She said she will strive for the AIADMKs welfare till her last breath and said workers should remain united and ensure victory in the coming polls.

Any challenges will be faced with the blessings of Jayalalithaa, Sasikala added.

Quoting late Ramachandran, she told her loyalists, I am bound by love, to the Tamil ethos and the principles I have embarked upon as well as the people of Tamil Nadu. But I can never be enslaved by oppression.

Later, answering reporters query if she would visit the AIADMK headquarters in Chennai, she said please wait and see.

Sure, for party workers was her response when scribes asked if she would engage in active politics, months ahead of the scheduled Assembly polls in the state.

Earlier, Sasikala returned to Tamil Nadu to a grand reception, days after completing her jail term in Bengaluru in the Rs 66.6 crore disproportionate assets case, amid indications of a confrontation with the ruling party.

She underwent her sentence at the Parapana Agrahara central prison in Bengaluru since February 2017 and was set free on January 27.

However, she remained at the Government Victoria Hospital, where she had been admitted after testing positive for COVID-19 while under judicial custody.

She was discharged from the hospital on January 31 after which she stayed at a resort, about 35 km from Bengaluru.

On Monday morning, she left for Chennai.

On AIADMK ministers filing police complaint against her use of the ruling party flag on her car, she said, I think it shows their apprehension.

Responding to Jayalalithaas memorial in Chennai being closed for maintenance, she said, The people of Tamil Nadu know very well what all this means.

Asked about supporters demand to wrest control of the AIADMK, she said, I will meet you all soon. Will speak in detail then.

(PTI)

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Will Not be Cowed Down by 'Oppression', Says VK Sasikala; To Engage in Active Politics - The Wire

When Narendra Modi Exhorted ‘Andolanjivis’ to Rise Up Against the Government in 1974 – The Wire

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

New Delhi: On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi coined a new term andolanjivi to describe people who apparently cannot live without protests. Replying to the motion of thanks on the presidents address in the Rajya Sabha, he also described them as parasites.

The Modi governments second term has faced pan-India protests opposing controversial policy decisions such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the three farm laws. While these protests grew organically into a movement, the government has tried to project them as a ploy fuelled by the opposition parties or the so-called anti-nationals.

He was perhaps referring to these groups, when he said, This community [of andolanjivis] can be spotted wherever there is a protest, be it agitation by lawyers, students or labourers, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes from behind. They cannot live without protests. We have to identify such people and protect the nation from them.

These comments maligning largely peaceful protests and protesters are in stark contrast to the prime ministers exhortation in 1974, when as a youngster in his 20s, Modi took part in Gujarats Navnirman Andolan.

As Raghu Karnad pointed out in his piece for The Wire, Modis personal website dedicates a page to the movement, which is described as Modis first encounter with mass protest and led to a significant broadening of his worldview on social issues. The page adds:

It also propelled Narendra to the first post of his political career, General Secretary of the Lok Sangharsh Samiti in Gujarat in 1975.

The movement began in December 1973, when students at the LD Engineering College in Ahmedabad protested against grievances such as canteen charges. When the police used force against them, protests spread to other campuses by early 1974, leading to state-wide strikes, arson and looting, all targeting the state government.

A scene from the Navnirman protests. Photo: narendramodi.in

According to the Ahmedabad Mirror, the Navnirman Andolan led to the dismissal of the Gujarat government and triggered a national movement against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

A message to the youth written by Modi at the time was later published in a book titled Sangharsh ma Gujarat (Gujarat in a period of trial). In that message, Modi urges the youth to take to the streets and not let democracy die.

The message, translated into English by Ahmedabad Mirror, provides valuable advice to the protesters of today, but also represents the drastic swing in the prime ministers opinion of protests.

Children of Bharat Mata, think in what direction the country is being pushed into today. If you dont act today, take a moment to ponder the consequences you will have to face tomorrow. You are the harbinger of Indias future. Because todays young are tomorrows leaders. Who will take up the responsibility making this nation rise and shine? The answer is clear. The responsibility is yours, Modis message begins.

He says the country has been rendered silent by cheaters and fraudsters and says poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, immorality, corruption, and oppression will be a cross for the youth to bear in future.

The way Democracy is being destroyed in the country today to pave the way for dictatorship, you will be the herd of sheep that will be walked, heads down, he says, in what could well be a reference to the clampdown on dissent and freedom of expression that the Centre has embarked upon since 2014.

If you dont make adequate sacrifices today in this second movement of Independence, who will the history judge harshly? You. Whose names will appear in the list of cowards that historians will compile? Yours How should the history of this country be written? With ink and pen? Or with the blood pouring out from the hearts of the youth? You will decide, he adds.

The Navnirman Andolan was developing around the same time when the ABVP was planning a more-broad based uprising in Bihar. As Karnad explained in another piece for The Wire:

Once [this movement] had taken hold in Bihar, it was joined by a new leader the freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan, or JP, whom students invited back to the public stage to lead them.

This was the beginning of a movement against the Indira Gandhi movement. As the movement became increasingly popular, the then-prime minister imposed Emergency on June 25, 1975.

Karnads piece, written in June 2018, also argues that while the BJP and right-wing groups push the narrative that Modi has encountered more protest, provocations and subversion that the Congress ever did, the truth is the opposite.

He says:

Just try to imagine students rioting in the streets, for months at a stretch, to bring down BJP governments, a Union minister being assassinated, and then a judge dismissing Modi from parliament, and banning him from the following election. Those were the provocations that brought about the Emergency. They may not have justified it. But the fact is, in the past four years, no protests outside of Kashmir have come close to the scale of disruption that Indira confronted for years prior to Emergency. The activism in JNU or at Jantar Mantar is a musical flash-mob in comparison.

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When Narendra Modi Exhorted 'Andolanjivis' to Rise Up Against the Government in 1974 - The Wire

The White Tiger tackles class struggle in the era of globalization – Johns Hopkins News-Letter

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

The White Tiger movie debuted this January after long-delayed plans for movie production, and is one of the largest international releases of an Indian movie in recent years. Its not hard to guess why: Despite its source material being over a decade old, it presents a story of class warfare, global inequality and crises of democracy that have become even more relevant today.

Based on the book of the same name, The White Tiger is a somewhat eclectic story of class struggle in a neoliberal world, a witty critique of the oppressive social hierarchies and government institutions in India, as well as a psychological study of the origins of crime and violence and its complicated morality.

At the center of these threads is protagonist Balram Halwai (played by Adarsh Gourav), who rises from his poor, lower caste, rural background destined to servitude to become his own master and own his own company. He does this all through the murder of the man he worked for: the upper caste, upper class, Americanized Mr. Ashok (Rajkummar Rao). Through Balrams own narration, we see how he grows from a precocious, talented boy into a young man who is constantly dehumanized, controlled and ignored. He is mistreated by his bosses, his family and his government, causing him to lash out in what he believes to be the only way to escape the jungle violence.

Several American reviews have noted that the movie is almost the opposing force to the last great international movie about India Slumdog Millionaire a grittier, more realistic vision of how the Indian poor live. As Balram himself says, no game-show prize awaits him (the crux of Slumdog Millionaire). He only has a life of running from his crimes and struggling to never fall back into poverty. While its true that The White Tiger is certainly darker, rawer and angrier, its not necessarily more real.

What really makes the story so cogent and interesting was that it takes the perspective of the murderer without us knowing that to be the case. All the violence and oppression he faces is filtered to us through him. We come to realize how close he was to his father, who died an early, preventable death due to manual labor and the lack of healthcare in his village. We see how Balram loved and worked for Ashok and his wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) like his parents, only to be let down when they allowed him to be the fall man for the death of a homeless girl that was the fault of Pinky, not Balram.

This, coupled with all the daily humiliations his accent being mocked, being treated as uneducated, the rundown and segregated living quarters he had to live in as a servant means that you cannot help but sympathize when he lashes out, freeing himself from oppression through revolution.

Yet the perspective leaves us purposefully fooled. Much as The Joker (2019) was not a justification for violent revolution against the rich, The White Tiger simply lays out a story of violence against the rich through the prism of a flawed person who faced and understood his oppression in very specific ways. Think, for example, about Kusum, Balrams grandmother and the matriarch of his family, who is considered one of the primary antagonists of the movie constantly pushing Balram to send nearly all of his money home to support the family, to marry, and to leave Delhi and come back to the village.

Balram, of course, resents these demands and wants to preserve his individualism and freedom to break out of the rooster coop of family and its related obligations, which he considers to be the main reason for the lack of lower-class revolt or resistance. Yet from Kusums perspective, a person who is undoubtedly facing the same oppression as Balram, the solution to break out is through the building of family wealth of gradual, stable improvement through the pooling of resources. At the end of the movie, its strongly suggested that Balrams murder of Ashok was met with the retributive murders of Kusum and the rest of his family in the village. I dont think Balram is to blame for those murders, but to Kusum, it wouldve undoubtedly seemed so.

Thus, the strongest point of the movie is that it is able to carry these same moral quandaries to the big screen, aided greatly by Gouravs performance as Balram. He really succeeds in bringing the character to life. His mannerisms, speech and expressions evolve throughout the movie from meek responsiveness to smoldering anger.

Yet by sticking so sincerely to the book, I think the movie does itself a disservice. Nearly all of the lines from the movie and all of the plot points are the same in the book itself, and a substantial amount of the movie just ends up being a narration chock full of Balrams sociological critique and dry humor. This works far better in the book than in the movie, where it has more space to be digested. Yet even with the voiceover, the movie still has a fast-paced, pulpy feel to it. For viewers who have not read the book, it should not be a significant issue.

Overall, The White Tiger provides a compelling and at times difficult watch. It forces you to consider the impact of global capitalism on the nuanced (and often unravelling) social hierarchies of third-world countries reacting to the forces of a changing economy and makes you deal with the moral weight of understanding and empathizing with a killer. While its brevity and overuse of the overbearing narration of Balram may weigh on its exploration of these ideas, its close to as good a recreation as you can get.

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The White Tiger tackles class struggle in the era of globalization - Johns Hopkins News-Letter

Huawei’s situation won’t get any better with the Biden administration – Android Central

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Joe Biden's presidency is well underway, and he has already taken to his new position by pulling back on many of the policies made during the Trump administration while continuing to appoint new members to his cabinet and other leading positions. One decision he doesn't seem to be budging on is the ban on companies like Huawei that have been placed on the Entity List for allegations of threats to U.S. security. Biden's nominee for Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, has stated (via Bloomberg) that she sees "no reason" to remove the company from the list, strongly suggesting the unlikely nature of the scenario.

I understand that parties are placed on the Entity List and the Military End-User List generally because they pose a risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests. I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.

That's not good news for Huawei, which has been dealing with U.S. sanctions for quite some time. After largely losing access to its high-end Kirin chips, the company has been struggling to produce flagship smartphones like the P40 Pro, which is one of the best Huawei phones you can't get. Recently Huawei had to give up ownership of its sub-brand, Honor, in order to keep it from facing the same fate as its parent company, a move that sees Honor free to challenge companies like Apple.

Huawei had hoped that the Biden administration would be more lenient than Trump, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has previously referred to the decision by the U.S. government to restrict Chinese companies as "oppressive," a sentiment that still stands today. "We urge you to stop this wanton oppression against Chinese companies."

Other Chinese companies that had faced government sanctions include ZTE as well as Xiaomi, the latter of which recently placed a lawsuit against the U.S. government for placing it on an investment block.

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Huawei's situation won't get any better with the Biden administration - Android Central

Opinion: Politics should not distract the church from its mission – Online Athens

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

Jessica A. Johnson| Columnist

Ive been giving quite a bit of thought to an opinion piece that noted Chicago Tribune columnist Cal Thomas wrote last year regarding evangelical Christians disappointment with the 2020 election results.Evangelicals were, and many still are, some of former President Donald Trumps most steadfast supporters.

In his column, Thomas referenced an essay thatDr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, wrote for the Fox News website before the election results were confirmed.Jeffress, a fervent backer of Trump, called for evangelicals to continue trusting in God, stating that Our faith and our salvation lie not in any human ruler, but in the ruler of rulers, the King of kings.

Thomas further elaborated on these points by maintaining that although evangelicals are strongly at odds with the policies of the Biden and Harris administration, this disagreement should not prevent them from carrying out their ministry efforts to those in need in their communities.

Given where we are now during the aftermath of the election, American churches are in, to quote the book of Esther, a critical for such a time as this moment, as the country is still reeling from extreme political discord and racial strife while battling through the coronavirus pandemic. Many evangelical congregations were heavily into politics during Trumps term in the White House and were devastated and angry when he lost to Joe Biden.They thought, as Jeffress wrote, that the God of the evangelicals should be on the side of Republicans and conservatives.I believe that God wanted the church to acknowledge two significant issues in the wake of Trumps defeat.First, racial division needs to be addressed, and second, Christians need to refocus on the primary mission in ministry: to share the Gospel and draw souls into the kingdom of God.

When it comes to political headlines in the media regarding evangelicals, race is hardly an elephant in the room of discussion.White evangelicals have been called purveyors of white supremacy and hypocrites regarding their faith.Recent Fact Tank reports from the Pew Research Center list white in many titles in analysis of evangelical approval of Trumps stances on issues such as immigration and travel bans while he was in office.An NPR podcast last year titled Multiracial Congregations May Not Bridge Racial Divide did not offer an overly optimistic view of churches becoming more diverse.

The historical racial divide in American churches is deeply rooted in the South, with racist ideology infiltrating congregations since the days of slavery.The Black Church, also historically known as the Negro Church, formed out of necessity for blacks to have a haven of worship as early as the 1780s.A pertinent question we must ask ourselves today is how can the church be a true witness of the teachings of Christ when stark segregation remains?The ugliness of our politics in the past four years greatly exposed the longstanding racial rifts within the church, placing evangelicals at the forefront, and it is something that both white and Black pastors can no longer ignore.

During this time when so many people are suffering and on the brink of despair, it is imperative that ministers not let ongoing political disputes take their attention away from the work of the Gospel.In fact, when studying the Gospels, it is evident that Jesus really did not get completely immersed in the political debates of His day.For example, Mark 12:13-17 records the devious intention of the Pharisees and Herodians to bait Jesus into speaking against paying taxes to Caesar.Instead of getting into an argument about the oppression of the Roman government, Jesus simply said to render to Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are Gods.

Now, Im by no means implying that churches should idly stand by in the face of injustice and not participate in civic discourse, but when we do take a public stand, Christ must remain in the center of our message.When we minister to those who are marginalized in our society, those in prison, sick, and poor, Jesus said we have ministered unto Him.

This is the ministry the church should be focusing on in this tumultuous political moment, our Esther moment, but we cannot effectively carry it out with the current division within the body of Christ.

Opinion: Politics should not distract the church from its mission - Online Athens

Designating the Proud Boys a terrorist organization won’t stop hate-fuelled violence – The Conversation CA

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

The Proud Boys are a far-right white nationalist organization based in Canada that was recently designated a terrorist entity by the Canadian government. This designation, however, will not stop violent extremists from attacking Canadian values.

This is a moment in time where extremism now pervades social media. This change has been so gradual that we have not noticed our tacit involvement each time we post or pass on softly violent memes and slogans wrapped in humour.

The criminal justice system will be unable to weather this storm unless it adjusts its approach to understanding the true nature of social movements and determining whether terrorist designations are the most appropriate means of dealing with social movements that express soft violence.

Soft violence describes harmful activities that stop short of actual physical violence. It takes the form of culturally nuanced, inexplicit cues that reinforce perceived power disparities. Specific clothing, memes and symbols are all types of recorded social violence activity associated with right-wing extremists.

While groups like the Proud Boys are undoubtedly violent in intention, they are softly violent in their expression. This soft violence demonstrates the creeping normalization of extremist sentiment in our communities.

To receive a terrorist designation, an oganization must meet three criteria: it must intend or have committed physical harm; it must intend to impact decision-making by policy-makers and or intimidate citizens; and it must be driven by ideological beliefs. The danger of physical harm to citizens must be clearly demonstrated with reasonable grounds that it has carried out, attempted to carry out, participated in or facilitated terrorist activity.

Groups that plan, conduct and execute physical harm driven by ideological beliefs are just the tip of the iceberg. Neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division and The Base also designated terrorist organizations by the Canadian government fit this designation: they sell guns and train militias for race wars, and utter and disseminate hate speech.

These organized right-wing extremist groups are the violent visible minority, and a small part of the much larger movement of sympathizers and supporters.

Extremists thrive in environments where they can easily cultivate an identity that is fixated on maintaining the dominance, authority, legitimacy and superiority of the white race. Misogyny and ultra-nationalism are extensions of these constructs of what white well-being and white welfare should look like.

Groups like the Proud Boys recruit and spread their messages through non-offensive affiliations where grievances align. These destructive, inward-looking, nationalistic, race-dominant, regressive beliefs can lead to oppression, community strife and dehumanization.

This is especially true in an uncertain pandemic, where lockdowns lead to an increase in time spent online and conspiracy theories and anger at restrictions prevail.

My research studies a dataset of more than 94 million extremist transactions to examine how online activity may be a confident predictor of the escalation to violence, based on the degree of usage of softly violent mass identity manipulators, like memes and visual cues.

In particular, I look at how these mass identity manipulators strengthen the bonds of violent transnational social movements. My research lab is currently tracking 16 Canadian Facebook groups with over a quarter million followers who engage with extremist rhetoric.

When other platforms are considered, Canadian support for these groups might number in the millions. These followers make up a range of segments within extremism violent transnational social movements are often elements within broader social movements.

Many of the groups we are examining are actually derivatives, splinters or rebrands of known extremist groups. Elements of the Proud Boys have already refashioned into a new incarnation called Canada First, effectively sidestepping their terrorist designation.

The Three Percenters, a far-right militia movement, have created a group called Canadian Sheepdogs, which has more than 400 followers. The Aryan Guard became Blood and Honour, but three of its members who were charged in racially motivated assaults in Vancouver allegedly joined the Asatruu Folk Assembly. The Qubec Soldiers of Odin splintered into the Northern Guard. The Wolves of Odin, Canadian Infidels and The Clann all emerged from the Edmonton Soldiers of Odin.

Alleged neo-Nazis like Gabriel Sohier Chaput have shown that Canadians are highly influential on message boards and forums. The activity of right-wing extremist groups in Canada is a real and present danger.

It is a positive sign that the Canadian government has asserted that violent extremists will be held accountable for their activities, but the punitive measures are incidental at best. The Proud Boys as an organization will not be able to hold property or be named as a charitable foundation.

The members of the group, however, are free to join other groups because they have not been named individually, and expressing nuanced hate is not a crime or a terrorist offence. These groups, like other extremist violent transnational social movements, raise money through crowdfunding being designated a terrorist organization will limit their ability to do so.

This is possibly the single positive tangible benefit of this action.

A consideration for the justice system may be to focus on more appropriate penalties and legislation for criminalizing individuals who incite violence both on and offline. Stopping the normalization of extremism is the direction we need to move. But without addressing the environment, there will always be an endless supply of groups waiting to take the Proud Boys place.

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Designating the Proud Boys a terrorist organization won't stop hate-fuelled violence - The Conversation CA

This week in history: February 8-14 – WSWS

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Danzig

25 years ago: IRA bombs London DocklandsDamage after the South Quay bombing. (Wikimedia Commons)

On February 9, 1996, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed the London Docklands, killing two people and injuring over 100 others. In the incident also known as the South Quay bombing, the IRA had sent warnings prior to detonating the truck bomb, but the area was not completely evacuated.

The explosion took place just a few hundred yards from the Barkantine housing project on the Isle of Dogs, one of the most oppressed working-class neighborhoods in London. Windows were smashed and residents were showered with glass. Thousands of children attending a basketball game at the nearby London Arena narrowly missed serious injury. That the bomb did not result in a massive loss of life was purely accidental.

On February 18, a second bomb ripped apart a London bus traveling through the theater district of the city, killing the bomber himself and seriously injuring others aboard, including the driver.

The bombing campaign marked the end of a ceasefire that had lasted about 17 months. The ceasefire was agreed to in 1994 on the grounds that Sinn Fein, the IRAs political arm, would be involved in peace talks. However, as a precondition to formal talks, the British government had demanded a full and unilateral IRA disarmament. The IRA refused and eventually ended the ceasefire.

The bombings, carried out with total disregard for the lives of innocent working class people, were the acts of a politically bankrupt petty-bourgeois nationalist organization. The IRA was attempting, through means of random violence, to restore its bargaining position at the imperialist negotiating table. Its aim was to pressure the Tory government of Prime Minister John Major.

The conflict centered on Northern Ireland, which, comprising most of the province of Ulster, had remained in British possession after the Irish War of Independence concluded 75 years earlier. Catholics, predominately working class and comprising roughly 40 percent of the population, faced oppression in Northern Ireland at the hands of its right-wing Unionist government and British imperialist forces.

The IRAs targeting of the working class in Britain was not accidental. While claiming to represent the national interests of the oppressed Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, the IRA/Sinn Fein was actually representative of a very thin layer of the Catholic middle class which feared most of all united working-class action against the British government.

The violence was also directed at suppressing any political challenge to the claim that the IRA alone represented the Catholic minority in the North. Just a few weeks earlier, on January 30, the IRA assassinated Gino Gallagher, chief of staff of the Irish National Liberation Army, a rival nationalist group which had refused to support the ceasefire.

On February 2, 1971, a massive earthquake rocked the San Fernando Valley of southern California, killing 64 people and causing extensive damage to homes, hospitals, power lines, dams and other structures. The 6.6 magnitude quake hit just after 6:00 a.m. and lasted for 12 seconds, making it Californias third-largest earthquake in history after the quakes in San Francisco in 1906 and Long Beach in 1933.

The two most deadly building collapses were at Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals at Olive View and San Fernando, which housed hundreds of soldiers convalescing from Americas imperialist war in Vietnam.

The VA at San Fernando saw the most fatalities, with 44 deaths. Twenty-six buildings at the hospital campus were built before 1933, when new construction regulations had been put in place following the Long Beach disaster. Four hospital buildings totally collapsed. A nurse, Betty Van Decar, witnessed the earthquake just after leaving night shift. She spoke of the events in an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News on the 45th anniversary of the earthquake. It buckled down, caved in, the whole building, Van Decar recalled. There was an awful soundyou could hear the ground rumbling. I thought: Theyre not going to make it.

At Olive View, where three died, most of the buildings in the hospital complex had been built before 1933. Damage was concentrated in the basement and first floor, along with several stairwells. Two of the deaths were attributed to power outages that shut off life sustaining support to patients. A hospital worker was struck by falling debris as she attempted to evacuate the building.

Another structure that sustained significant damage was the Van Norman Dam. In the days after the earthquake 80,000 people living below the dam were forced to evacuate until the water could be pumped out. Engineers estimated that if the earthquake had happened one year earlier when the dam was full with 6.5 billion gallons of water, as many as 100,000 people living in the San Fernando Valley would have been killed.

In the aftermath of the earthquake engineers carried out investigations that concluded that current building codes for dams, bridges, highways, hospitals and other large buildings were dangerously inadequate to meet the threat of a major earthquake. Legislation was subsequently passed that created new building codes, restricted development near fault zones, and created the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program which allowed scientists to collect needed data to develop buildings that can withstand stronger earthquakes.

On February 10, 1946, the US governor of the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific Ocean, informed all 167 residents of the Bikini Atoll that they would be permanently relocated as their former home became the scene of American military testing of nuclear weapons.

Over the following weeks, all civilian structures, including homes and a church, were dismantled and the villagers were permanently moved to Rongerik Atoll, some 125 miles away. Rongerik had long been uninhabited, due to inadequate water and food supplies. The Bikini Atoll residents were initially left there with only a few weeks of supplies.

The US seizure of the Bikini Atoll took place in the context of an emerging nuclear arms race following World War II. In the last stages of the war in the Pacific, the US had dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. In addition to terrorizing the Japanese population, the attack was a threat to US rivals among the old colonial powers like Britain and France, but above all to the Soviet Union.

At the conclusion of the war, the US administration of President Harry Truman rapidly drew up plans for expanded testing of nuclear weapons. Experiments in the Pacific were particularly focused on how the devices could be used as an adjunct to naval warfare.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US military detonated 27 nuclear devices in and around the Bikini Atoll, including on the reef, underwater, on land and in the air. One of the first tests, in July 1946, involved the detonation of a massive nuclear bomb 95 feet under water. Dubbed Baker, the operation was described by one Atomic Energy Commission official as the the worlds first nuclear disaster, after it resulted in widespread radioactive contamination. The tests would render the Bikini Atoll uninhabitable.

On February 11, 1921, workers and peasants led by communists seized control of strategic locations in the Lori province of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, a capitalist state headed by the Social Democratic (Menshevik) Party. Lori, a predominantly Armenian-speaking region claimed by Georgia, had been occupied by the Georgian army after the withdrawal of Turkish forces in November 1920.

The uprising set up a Revolutionary Committee in the town of Shulaveri, led by the veteran Georgian Bolshevik Filipp Makharadze. The Committee sought to expand its influence into the rest of Georgia. It called upon the Soviet government to intervene and by February 14 the Red 11th Army had been sent to Georgia. After fierce fighting, the Red Army entered the capital of Tbilisi on February 25 and established the Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Menshevik-ruled Georgia, established in 1918, became a toehold of European imperialism in the Caucasus. The regime at first placed itself under German protection. It permitted German troops to occupy strategic areas and allowed Germany the unrestricted use of Georgian railways and ports. By June 1918, the German military was parading down the main thoroughfare of Tbilisi.

After the defeat of German imperialism in November 1918 by the Allies, Menshevik Georgia allowed British troops to enter the country in December.

The regime committed other crimes, including the suppression of the minority South Ossetians. It opposed land reform in South Ossetia by backing the local Georgian landowners. In a conflict between the South Ossetians and the Menshevik government in 1920, roughly 5,000 Ossetians were killed in a wave of ethnic cleansing.

Leon Trotsky summed up the Soviet experience with bourgeois Georgia in his famous work, Between Red and White (1922):

What took place was the result of long preparation. It was what, owing to the logic of events, could not but take place. The history of the relations between Georgia and Soviet Russia is only a chapter in the book of the blockade of Russia, of military interventions, of French gold, of British ships, and of the four fronts on which the best elements of the working class have been sacrificed. This chapter cannot be eliminated from the book. The Georgia which is being described today by the beaten Menshevik commanders of the civil war never existed. There has never been either a democratic, or a peaceful, or an independent, or a neutral Georgia. There was a Georgian fortress in the all-Russian class struggle. That fortress is today in the hands of the victorious proletariat.

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This week in history: February 8-14 - WSWS

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