An Artist Tries to Save Pepe the Frog From Fascists – Hyperallergic

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Poster forFeels Good Man (2020), dir. Arthur Jones (all images courtesy Cinetic Media)

Feels Good Man is a rare film that manages to be harrowing on multiple, completely different wavelengths. For normies (to use the lingo of the kind of people profiled by the documentary), theres the horror of seeing the machinations of the internets far right in action, and being introduced to its utterly absurd vagaries and subcultures. Youre entering the land of 4chan, bizarre racist symbolism, and most pertinently, Pepe the Frog. For a certain subset of very onlineviewers (such as your humble critic), theres the added mortification of already knowing how all this works. Watching this movie with such context evokes the same feeling as having to sit down and explain Gamergate to someone not in the know. God, why am I already familiar with all this? What am I doing with my life? And thats all before they get to the Pepe cryptocurrency.

Cartoonist Matt Furie seems a pleasant fellow, so its deeply unfortunate that one of his creations became a preeminent symbol of modern fascism through the (only partly explicable) alchemy of the internet. He inventedPepe in 2005 for his zine Boys Club, a comic about anthropomorphic creatures living in slackersqualor. In his debut, the character urinates by pulling his pants all the way down, explaining that it feels good man. This apparently is what endeared him to the users of 4chan, which started Pepe along the road to becoming one of the notorious forums most ubiquitous memes, and eventually led to him being used in all manner of awful imagery by members of the so-called alt-right.

Feels Good Manchronicles this upsetting series of developments from Furies point of view, along with his various futile attempts to reclaim his creation for the forces of goodness and decency. Many a Frankenstein comparison has been made to this predicament, butthey feel lacking; its more like ifbelovedPogocreator Walt Kelly accidentally created a virus.(A deeply weird and stupid virus.) Furie is almost comically out of his depth in trying to save his frog child, having seemingly never heard of the Streisand effect. Killing Pepe in a comic did nothing to slow online fascists, and we see how a subsequent resurrection and attempt to save Pepe by encouraging people to draw positive representations of the character further backfired. These well-intentioned but inept responses provide an instructive microcosm of how progressive liberals have tried and failed to control social narratives during the Trump years. They dont understand that one cannot combat stochastic, organic phenomena with engineered movements.

One also cant fight Nazis with kindness, so Furie fortunately wises up on that front and takes to the courts to fight the misuse of Pepe where he can. Still, the soul of his character is something now forever beyond his control. Such is the nature of memes. The movie artfully illustrates this with animated sequences depicting Pepe on a sort of surreal quest, going through his own heros journey that parallels the conflicts over him in the real world. Its touches like that which help make a strange, sometimes even esoteric subject comprehensible for the lay viewer.

If theres a weakness toFeels Good Man, its that it might not understand its own lessons. Late in 2019, Pepe began cropping up in the Hong Kong protests. The film includes an obviously rushed coda about this development to give itself an upbeat ending, but I wouldntsayyou can reduce this issue to a good meme canceling out a bad meme. For one thing, its still not clear just how Pepe cross-pollinated to Hong Kong. Pro-Trump elements within the protests may well be the source, and if thats the case then I dont know if I would call this a win, even if Pepe is not invoked there the way he is in the US and Europe. After 90 minutes of demonstrating how terrifying the unpredictability of the internet can be, pulling out one example of how it can create a friendlier result doesnt really mitigate things.

Feels Good Man is now playing in virtual cinemas, and premieres on Independent Lens on October 19.

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An Artist Tries to Save Pepe the Frog From Fascists - Hyperallergic

Pepe the Frog Mutates from a Far Right Meme Into a Lovable, Far Gone Figure in Feels Good Man – The Texas Observer

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Matt Furie, a San Francisco-based cartoonist of reluctant notoriety, is a frog lover. Hes always drawn frogs: goofy frogs, peaceful frogs, frogs on bike rides, frogs having tea. Its just been kind of a slow drip of frogs throughout my entire life, he says at the start of Feels Good Man, a new documentary about him and the character who leapt out into a life of his own. Eventually, it was Pepe. Hes a happy little frog.

Most people who have seen images of the now-infamous Pepe the Frog probably wouldnt describe him that way. In the years after Furie created him for his lighthearted comic Boys Club, Pepe the Frog became a wildly popular internet meme. After catching on with weightlifters on Myspace, Pepe became the unofficial face of the anonymous imageboard site 4chan, and then exploded on other social media. Users redrew images of him as sad, smug, rageful, and sometimes violent: There has been school shooter Pepe, 9/11 Pepe, Nazi Pepe. In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) designated Pepe the Frog a hate symbol.

Directed by Arthur Jones and co-produced by Houstonian Giorgio Angelini, the Sundance award-winning Feels Good Manwhich was scheduled to premiere at South by Southwesttakes us through the underbelly of the alt-right, drawing on complex research, data, and theory. But most of all it grounds us in Furies strange, unprecedented experience of accidentally creating a meme and watching his character morph into something unrecognizable.

Feels Good Man, which launched on streaming platforms and in some indie movie theaters in September, follows Furies quest to get Pepe removed from the ADLs list of designated hate symbols. He gives speeches and launches a social media campaign called #SavePepe. He sues alt-right figures, like Austins Alex Jones, who sell Pepe merchandise. But the internet is too vast and chaotic for the admittedly endearing efforts of his tight-knit community to turn the tide. When a higher-up from the ADL says they simply cant take Pepe off the hate symbol list, we know hes right. Still, the film captures something less concrete and more wondrous: an exploration into the soul of American culture and the landscapes of cyberspace, and a cautionary tale rich with beauty and meaning missing from the nihilism with which Pepe has been poisoned.

Early on in the film, Furies friends and peers describe Boys Club as fun, unserious, and one of the funniest comics of the last 10 years. Originally inspired by Furies own friend group and their hijinks after college, the comic casts Pepe as the little brother character. He and his animal friends drink beer, smoke from bongs, play video games, and get dumb tattoos. In the frame that started it all, according to Furies partner, Aiyana Udesen, Pepe goes to the bathroom and pulls his pants all the way down to his ankles to pee. When his friend later asks why, Pepe simply responds: Feels good man.

The line works as a mantra for the film as it tracks how Pepe was turned upside down. Instead of a good feeling, memes of him mutated to express something that feels bad man. Predominantly young men on 4chana forum website known for its total anonymity, influential memes, and politically charged controversiesused the so-called Sad Frog to show anguish, dissatisfaction, and anger. Researcher Aleks Krotoski says that Pepes popularity exploded at the same time other parts of the internet, like Instagram, were starting to commodify positivity, monetizing images of happiness. I think for a huge population, online and offline, says Krotoski, were not really allowed to express sorrow or sadness or grief.

From there, the worst impulses of the 4chan niche festered and turned dangerous. Writer Dale Beran explains that memes on 4chan have historically been presented with a mocking sense of humor, a guarded irony, a pretense that the celebration of white supremacy and mass shootings is so inflammatory that its just a joke, harmless on the screen of a webpage. In 2014, after Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger went after women as retribution for rejecting him, the hero status 4chan users afforded him exposed that this stance was not in fact a joke at all.

Jones and Angelini indicate that Pepe memes reflect this crisis of masculinity. When cheerful young girls started gravitating toward memes of Pepe, 4channer boys viciously attacked them and drove them off the site. The rage and hostility seen in memes of Pepe and in his alt-right followers drastically departs from the sweet frog in Matt Furies cartoons, and the type of man he appears to be. In one interview, a female cartoonist friend of Furies lovingly pokes fun at the boyish potty humor in his comics: Its the sort of masculinity where you can be in your underwear singing to Shania Twain, she says, referencing a frame of Boys Club. The masculinity celebrated in the comic doesnt resemble the online male supremacist ecosystemas the Southern Poverty Law Center calls it in their list of hate groupsthats thriving among incels and other young, predominantly white men in subreddits, 4chan, and 8kun.

Hatred isnt the only thing festering in these spaces: So too is the unsettling potential for alt-right men to remake reality, matched only by Trump himself. Drawn to Trump supposedly as a joke, these users came to identify with him in 2016, seeing him as the ultimate troll and a master of the media. Images emerged of Trump as the personification of the smug Pepe meme, a recasting embraced by the then-candidate. As the film tells it, the memification of Trump accelerated users support: Time to warp reality, they posted, and Make the meme real. When Trump won the presidency, 4chan celebrated: We memed a man into the White House.

Feels Good Man is a marvel of documentary filmmaking of the Trump era. It captures a quiet terror at the heart of this moment: that any semblance of objective truth will break down, and the nightmare delusions of the internet will replace it. Trumps team knew the political weight of memes, whether they were created by American or Russian trolls. His former tech strategist Matt Braynard states in the film that the production of far right memes was a campaign tactic. On the other hand, the decontextualization of the internet has already allowed for Pepe to find new meaning. Out of nowhere, youth protestors in Hong Kong are using him as a symbol of resistance against authoritarianism. But here in the U.S., this frog is still sick, dragging misery in his wake.

As the film comes to a close, Jones leaves us with no illusions about where the real, the compassionate, and the meaningful actually are. A stunning, vibrant animation shows three Boys Club characters standing at the bottom of an Egyptian pyramid flanked by two stone Pepes. The voice of author and druid John Michael Greer takes over; he imagines Pepe to be an omen. In a lot of traditional societies, it was very standard to look for omens, he says. That was a warning that something was shifting in society, something had gone wrong, or there was something building that you needed to know about before it arrived. Pepe the Frog is an omen. We need to listen, because its not going to go away until we hear the message that it has to say. At the top of the pyramid, storm clouds clear, and a calm Pepe turns back to smile at his friends, before swimming away into a pink-orange sunrise.

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Pepe the Frog Mutates from a Far Right Meme Into a Lovable, Far Gone Figure in Feels Good Man - The Texas Observer

How Pepe the Frog’s Creator Rescued Him From the Alt-Right – Daily Beast

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Matt Furie, the cartoonist and creator of the Pepe the Frog character (though crucially, not the meme), reminds me of quite a few of my male friends growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even more of them now that I live in California. Hes carefree, weird in a fun way, queer-adjacent, creative, and a vessel of good vibes. Its this personality type that draws people in: other cartoonists, his wife, his energetic toddler, his long-haired townie roommate in California. But contained in this positivity is also Furies general aversion to conflict, to bad vibes, which ultimately kept him from getting ahead of the meme-ification of Pepe.

Pepe is the main character of Boys Club, a good-natured, rowdy, stoner-culture comic strip starring four groovy animal friends that Furie created in 2005. But years on, the character would get far away from him, becoming a symbol of incel culture on 4chan, then directly ironic bigotry, then Trumpism, with the president posting an image of Pepe made to look like him on Twitter ahead of the 2016 election. Feels Good Man, a cultural and political documentary by Arthur Jones, closely traces the stories behind both Matt and Pepe, offering a rigorous meditation on how good-vibes-only passivity can unwittingly provide a platform for hatred and violence.

It would perhaps take something away from the wild ride of the film to trace the Pepe meme for you here, and journalists have already done that work. Whats vital to know is that Furie is probably about as removed from 4chan as you can get.

He originally began posting Boys Club comic strips online during the early days of Myspace, when the platform was not only still in existence, but also an energetically yet minimally designed vortex for curious sociality. This is the internet I know, though Im quite a bit younger than Furie (Im not technologically literate in practice, only in theory). I also knew the Boys Club comic strip, and recognized the Pepe the Frog meme when it would come up occasionally on Twitter (where I have to be because of work), though I never caught on, not even in the throes of the 2016 election, that Pepe had been appropriated as a symbol of bigotry. So I came into Feels Good Man about as cluelessor naive, as his friends put itas Furie himself, at least on the internet-culture front.

At the same time, Ive always been a bit paranoid, not so carefree, worried about freak accidents, shady acquaintances, political unrest, cellphone radiation. But Im not just a bit anxiousIm also Black and a woman. Most of my sense of concern was instilled by my parents to keep me alive. For guysparticularly white guyslike Furie, these thoughts and feelings are just stress, man. With his first feature, Jones is expert in drawing genuine reactions and reflections out of Furie, as well as in his move to consult people with some dark ideas about the culture that Furies innocent comic got sucked into. The film asks us to reflect on the worlds most troubling cornerscorners that have fought their way to become the center, and a center that not only desires but laughs at the prospect of everyone elses annihilation.

Furie calls the worst of what he has seen Pepe become unsurprising since its a garbage world. Americans produce trash, consume trash, die from the pollution of our own trasha world full of kindness and delight would be more of a shock to him. In that way, Feels Good Man serves as a wake-up call to the many sweet slackers who have skirted danger for too long. Even if the abuse comes as no surprise, ignoring it wont usher in the good times.

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How Pepe the Frog's Creator Rescued Him From the Alt-Right - Daily Beast

You Can’t DM People on 4chan: Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini on Pepe the Frog Documentary Feels Good Man – Filmmaker Magazine

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Pepe the Frog, an anthropomorphized stoner, originated in the 2006 comic book, Boys Club, by artist Matt Furie. Like most amphibious beings who take an interest in cannabis accoutrements, Pepe is innocent enough, hanging out with his roommates and being an all around chill dude. Who could ever mistake Pepe for being something malicious? And how in the world could he ever be associated with (and co-opted by) the rising Alt-Right movement?

Pepes unfortunate journey from kid-friendly, zen bro to sinister symbol of hatred and domestic terrorismjointly Google Pepe the Frog and 9/11 if you dareis the basis for Arthur Joness debut feature, Feels Good Man, a documentary that follows Furies journey to reclaiming his creation. Showing us in uncomfortable detail just how the hell we got to this point, Feels Good Man chronicles the descent Pepe unwillingly took from the world of 4chan message boards to being the inspiration troubled youths needed to carry out violent acts of murder.

Its not all doom and gloom, however. While you might still unwillingly come across memes of Pepe in various forms of evil dictatorship (sometimes being shared by evil demagogues themselves) on social media, various campaigns to make Pepe good again have proven successful, leading Furie to acknowledge and embrace his creation once more. At its heart, Feels Good Man is about an artists coming-to-terms with his symbol of hatred and being driven to reverse-engineer the madness.

After having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (where it received the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker), Feels Good Man premiered on digital platforms last week. I spoke with Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini about working with Matt Furie, their relationship to social media since marketing the film widely, and how the rise of conspiracy theorist groups like QAnon have frighteningly entered into the mainstream.

Filmmaker: Given that Feels Good Man is centered by and grounded in animation (both pre-existing and original), I wanted to ask if you both come from a background in the fine arts yourselves.

Jones: We come to filmmaking through different disciplines, with Giorgio being an architect, a restaurateur and a musician, and I being a graphic designer and animator. Before making Feels Good Man (my first feature), I had previously worked on a few friends documentaries (Michael Stabiles Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story and Amy Scotts Hal) and thats how I caught the documentary bug. Around this time, Giorgio was directing a feature documentary, Owned: A Tale of Two Americas, about housing policy in a post-war America, and I was hired to craft some animation on the project. Thats how Giorgio and I met.

Angelini: We come from a multidisciplinary background within the creative arts, and Feels Good Man struck us as an opportunity to create something that serves as both journalism and an opportunity to move the documentary form forward.

Filmmaker: Had you been looking to make a film about the toxicity found in internet culture and, subsequently, Pepe the Frog became the central focus? Or did you already know Matt Furie and thought he would make for a fascinating subject?

Jones: A combination of both. I was a fan of Pepe before he became an internet meme. I had bought Boys Club comics back in the day and was more generally a fan of indie comics, and thats how I initially befriended Matt. I enjoyed his artwork and thought he was a sweet, thoughtful, funny dude. I wasnt necessarily looking to make a film about him, but I was looking to collaborate in some way, initially on a cartoon project. We were kicking around a bunch of ideas, but it kept [getting stalled], in part because the negative baggage associated with Pepe was too much for us to overcome. We pitched ideas to a variety of places and everyone was like, I dont know, Pepe has a lot of negative baggage to him. All the while, I kept working in motion graphics and documentary films.

One day it occurred to me to try making a documentary about the issue. This really became clear post-Charlottesvilles Unite the Right rally in 2017, as I then felt a real sense of purpose to make something that would cut through the cultural static. From previously working with Giorgio, I knew that he had the same intention. The events at Charlottesville affected us in a pretty visceral way, and the story of Pepe subsequently became an important story to tell as it was, yes, about this stoned cartoon frog, while also speaking to the cultural moment in a relatable way. This angle felt like it could prove more effective than the making of a general survey film about the Alt-Right.

Angelini: We love any opportunity to tell an incredibly specific and eccentric story while simultaneously telling a much broader one about the culture-at-large. Thats the best way to get people to understand. Sure, you could do a Ken Burns style survey project (which are special in their own right) but this film offered a unique opportunity to tell an important story in a relevant way. Theres something about Matt, as a character, that feels very relatable. I think one of his friends in the film, Skinner, even says something like, of all of our friends this could happen to, of course it happens to you.

Jones: This could only happen to you.

Angelini:Thats right. And its true! Matt is a lovable guy, hes innocent and naive in a way, and because of that, he offers the audience an incredible lens through which to experience these trials and tribulations. Its been rewarding seeing how people have connected with Matt through the film. Certainly, film is subjective, and some audiences have been rather take it or leave it with Matt, but thats the case with any project.

Filmmaker: Upon agreeing to participate, did Matt have any demands for you? Or was he hands-off and trusting in how you would tell his story?

Jones: He only had one demand and that was that the animation we were creating didnt fucking suck. He didnt want the animation to be the standard documentary animation thats used to fill in a story gap or fill in the narrative; he wanted it to stand on its own. He also wanted Pepe to be represented in the way that the character initially was in the Boys Club comics. But other than that, Matt wanted us to make the decisions we felt were right for the film.

I think it was an uncomfortable process for him, as hes a very private person and most comfortable in his studio, drawing. And obviously, making a film about him was not going to be that. I think Matt had a number of bad experiences over the years with journalists telling his story and felt that if someone else was going to tell it, it needed to be someone he was close to. Thats why he trusted us.That being said, he has a complicated relationship with the movie and deserves to have a complicated relationship with it. He likes the movie, but there are parts of it that make him feel uncomfortable, and thats understandable.

Filmmaker: Several of those animated sequences mimic the animated style of Matt (and, in effect, the likeness of Pepe the Frog). Did you work with him on storyboarding those out? Or did he give you his blessing to run wild with it?

Angelini: That was one of the earliest conversations Arthur and I had, of first figuring out what percentage of the film would consist of animation. From the very beginning the idea was that the film had to canonize Pepe within these animations, because there are so many other memed cartoon characters (like SpongeBob SquarePants!) or even historically, growing up, Im sure you saw those Calvin and Hobbes stickers where theyre pissing on a Ford or Chevy or whatever else?

Filmmaker: Yes.

Angelini: Everyone knew upon seeing those animations that they were bootlegs, that those werent actually from cartoonist Bill Wattersons Calvin and Hobbes. But each of these cartoon characters have machinery behind them that reinforce the artists intention. Matt, and by extension Boys Club, didnt have that luxury of audience familiarity. And so our film needed to canonize Pepe so that, once and for all, we could reverse-engineer the collective consciousness of Pepe and say, No, this is Pepes origin story and this is where hes from. Any derivation of that just is what it is.

Jones: The storyboard process was pretty unique. Sometimes they would be taken from Matts comics and I would trace them and elaborate on certain scenes. And then sometimes (if we were really trying to underline some sort of cultural point) we would craft a storyboard and then kick it over to Matt to draw Pepe into it. He can obviously draw Pepe like no one else. Its his character!

Filmmaker: Pepe originated in an era of slow dial-up internet, annoying pop-up ads and the proliferation of MySpace. Your film tries to capture that digital oasis we might have once described as the wild, wild west. Theres an analog feel to much of the first half of the film and Im curious how you came up with getting that across to the viewer.

Angelini: Navigating the cultural moment of the film (and how we now talk about and promote it) has been interesting, especially when it comes to getting the word out via social media. We launched a TikTok account recently and, having never been on TikTok before, it was all very new to me. Almost instantaneously, the younger Gen-Z kids (having not even seen the film yet) checked out the trailer and the entire comment thread was about how the film portrays a more innocent moment in the lifespan of the internet. There has already been an interesting generational divide where the younger generation understands that there was this prior moment in the internets history and I think they see the film as a harbinger of that experience.

Jones: Its a good question for a few different reasons. When we were structuring the film, we definitely thought in terms of how to give the film analog parts, as thats Matts world and his living in his studio (our composers, Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope, even used organic instruments for the films score to further illustrate the analog identity). And then in thinking about how we would portray the internet, it was more about a world of digital crunchiness and of data breaking up.

In order to understand the rejection of normies that happened online in 2014 and 2015, we had to acknowledge the fracturing that was taking place amongst people who were extremely online. If you were interested in the internet back then, that was completely your identity. You were someone who was on 4chan all the time, but your mom and dad werent on the internet much. The internet was your place. In the same way someone might consider themselves a punk rocker, these people were on/of the internet. The Normies Out movement were these people rejecting all kinds of non-internet people.

The founder of 4chan, Christopher Poole, eventually left the site because he felt it was no longer a place of innocent creativity, and when I say innocent, I mean naive. A lot of the early stuff on 4chan was pretty terrible, but it represented somewhat of a cultural shift.

Filmmaker: The film features one of those 4chan frequenters, a young man by the name of Mills, living in a basement and spending his days very much online. Even though you blur out the faces of his family (whom he lives with), I was surprised by the access you were allowed. How did you find willing participants of the Normies Out crowd for the film? Did you search for them on 4chan/8chan and announce that you were making a documentary?

Jones: While we did search 4chan looking for someone to be featured in the film, its a difficult place to start a conversation because its anonymous and completely public. For example, you cant DM people on 4chan. You have to essentially write them a public note, opening yourself up to communication that way. As it turns out, Mills was himself a meme within 4chan (you can find photographs of Mills being used as shared memes on particular 4chan message boards). I recognized him from those memes and discovered that he had his own YouTube channel where a number of videos had been archived. One of those videos (that had very few hits) was of Mills talking directly to his cell phone and the first line he says is, what does Pepe mean to me? Thats when I knew that he was going to be our guy.

From the very beginning of production, we wanted this story to be told from a primary perspective. We didnt want to lazily cut to a journalist explaining 4chan to you. In order to understand 4chan, you needed to hear it from someone who really cared about Pepe as a character and felt that the role/connection to the character was a part of them, representing a personal symbol of their culture. That was important to us, and from there, we reached out to Mills in earnest and began a dialogue.

Filmmaker: You interview several academic scholars who have studied meme culture and other unsettling aspects regarding the darker side of the internet. These men and women offer additional context, of course, but as filmmakers, you essentially bring these memes to a broader, more relevant light.

Angelini: The concept of memes was created by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s as a very academic concept for how to explain culture through a biological and evolutionary lens. A British professor by the name of Susan Blackmore then literally wrote the book on memes, The Meme Machine, in 2000, and now, of course, we have this internet version of what we consider memes. And just by accident, our inclusion of author John Michael Greer came to us through someone who had listened to an interview of mine when I was promoting Owned. I had mentioned that we were working on this film about Pepe and the listener recommended that we reach out to this occultist, John Michael Greer. It took a real wizard and archbishop of the druid order to be able to explain our story in the most salient way!

Jones: The study of memetics or, as John Michael Greer discusses in the film, the study of meme magic are really about people making an effort to talk about how peoples personal imaginations subsequently move out into culture, affecting the mass mind that any society projects onto itself. In every single interview we did for the film, we would bluntly ask, why Pepe? No one could really answer that question because theres something about it thats completely baffling. We wanted to have a way to talk about that in the film. John and Susan gave us the ability to navigate these bigger ideas in a way where the viewer can decide for themselves whether they agree with each.

Filmmaker: Once the film was announced for Sundance and you had a website created for the film, were you following any online chatter surrounding it? In a strange way, any online discussion of your film adds an additional layer to the power and allure of Pepe.

Jones: Weve been pleasantly surprised by how positive the reaction to the film has been. Everyone asks us about worrying about the negative possibilities of it all, but, personally, Ive closed the laptop on 4chan. I have not looked at 4chan since weve finished the film. As weve migrated promotion of the film onto social media, its been interesting to see how the undercurrents in social media have changed even since we finished the film back in December. Pepe is used on Twitch now in a totally different way! Hes being used as he originally was, as a reaction image. People use it in Twitch threads as a reaction image in a way that (for the most part) is baggage-free. Hes used on TikTok in a pretty baggage free-way too. We could not have predicted that when we made the film several months prior. The internet continues to shift and change and thats just the way it is.

Angelini: Its been both terrifying and rewarding to put this film out in the world, at least based on seeing viewers responses to the trailer. There was a very predictable response from the 4chan contingency (which you can read via the comments of our trailer on YouTube). But its also been interesting to see how each social media platform has its own contingency, like Facebook

Jones: Its the worst. Facebook is the worst.

Angelini: Yeah, but Instagram has an interesting mix of Gen-X and millennials who are very internet savvy, who may be into comics and understand what this film could mean to them on a personal level. Its a film about their generation thats being spoken about in a way it hasnt before. The really rewarding aspect has been observing the TikTok kids and Gen-Z kids instantaneously get (from just the trailer) what this film is and isnt about. As you might imagine, some see the image of Pepe and immediately recoil. Its been heartening to see that kind of response being very minimal, that people are giving the film the benefit of the doubt.

Filmmaker: Its true that the world has definitely changed since you finished the film last December. QAnon has crossed over into the mainstream, infiltrating normies Facebook newsfeeds with hashtags like #SaveTheChildren and #Plandemic. Even the Wachowskis had to recently come out and say please stop using the term red pill from our Matrix franchise to describe your strange movement. Has it been weird following our further decline into this online world of vitriol as you await the wider release of your movie?

Angelini: So, were actually going to be doing the QAnon Anonymous podcast soon, as (fortunately and unfortunately) the films relevancy has only grown. The meme magic behind Pepe has only intensified with the rise of QAnon. QAnon started off as a joke on 4chan and its now basically become the body politic of the Republican Party.

Filmmaker: Some QAnon followers may even be headed to Congress soon.

Angelini: Yeah, Laura Loomer just won her primary in Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene won her own in Georgia. And then you have Trumps former Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who is also an avowed QAnon dude.

Jones: While its considered niche message board stuff, its now trickling out into the mainstream and the Republican Party isnt doing anything to fight against the insanity. In fact, theyre actually emboldening it.Our movie is ultimately about media literacy. Its about recognizing a troll when theres a troll in front of you, and then also just understanding that the troll is not going away. This is a story about a stoned cartoon frog, yes, but it tells a much larger truth about whats currently happening in America.

Angelini: What QAnon and the co-opting of Pepe represent is this pernicious trend that the commoditized internet experience has brought upon the culture-at-large. Its infiltrated the culture and placed its realities onto our collective understanding of what is real and what is not. In this moment of dissonance, the real predators get to succeed. You have the Alex Joneses of the world (and whoever the heck Q is) succeeding in this particular moment, where being nihilistic and cynical and trolly used to exist and flourish online but is now flourishing in real life.

Our film is a rejection of that notion. We cannot build a society on these impulses. It doesnt work. COVID-19 is a perfect, unfortunate example of how it doesnt work. I hope that people who watch the film come away with an understanding that you shouldnt let the internet shame you out of your capacity for empathy and understanding. Never let it control you in that way. You have to remember to, as Matt might say, go outside, take a walk, be with nature for a minute.

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You Can't DM People on 4chan: Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini on Pepe the Frog Documentary Feels Good Man - Filmmaker Magazine

Open Air Cinema and Streaming Series Continue at The Loft – Tucson Weekly

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As announced last week, The Loft has started an Open Air Cinema series, screening films outdoors Thursday-Saturday nights. The tickets sell out fast so you will want to keep an eye on their website for film announcements and the ability to buy tickets. This week's offerings, including Jaws, the greatest film ever made, had mostly sold out by the time this note went to press.

For those of you looking to keep things indoors for the time being, The Loft's streaming series continues. Here are this week's offerings:

The Hole

Set just prior to the start of the 21st century, this vaguely futuristic story follows two residents of a quickly crumbling building who refuse to leave their homes in spite of a virus that has forced the evacuation of the area.

Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll PresidentPart-rockumentary, part-presidential portrait, Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll Presidenttraces how rock music helped propel Jimmy Carter to the White House.

Feels Good Man

When indie comic character Pepe the Frog becomes an unwitting icon of hate, his creator fights to bring Pepe back from the darkness.

Buoyancy

This gripping drama tells the story of a Cambodian teenager sold into forced labor on a Thai fishing boat, offering a passionate testimony against social injustice and a moving coming-of-age tale about a boy whose humanity is put to the test.

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Open Air Cinema and Streaming Series Continue at The Loft - Tucson Weekly

Satanic Temple Is Trying To Strike Pro-Life Laws In The Name Of Religion – The Federalist

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The Satanic Temples Religious Reproductive Rights campaign will expandto more states this fall. But contrary to the recent speculations of some, The Satanic Temple will continue to fail in its efforts to use religious liberty to strike down state laws regulating abortion, as it failed with its initial foray in Missouri, because of the groups poor understanding of laws protecting religious freedom.

Anti-religious confusion and misdirection abound with The Satanic Temple. The group does not worship a personal Satan. Instead, it advocates atheistic, anti-supernatural rationalism that exalts the self with its saying, Thyself is Thy Master. The group misleadingly uses Satanic terminology and symbols to scare and confuse others about its anti-religion agenda.

The groups legal efforts show its contempt for religion by advancing causes intended to shrink First Amendment freedoms that protect everyone. The Satanic Temple has promoted after-school Satan clubs, placed goat demon statues in government spaces with Ten Commandments monuments, and engaged in other such antics to frighten officials into eliminating these expressive forums in order to silence the voices of religious believers.

The groups abortion-related campaigns based on religious liberty are equally disingenuous and flawed. The Satanic Temple explains that the Satanic abortion ritual does not require women to get abortions but sanctifies the abortion process by instilling confidence and protecting bodily rights. Part of its abortion ritual involves the woman reciting the Personal Affirmation: By my body, my blood, By my will it is done.

The Satanic Temple claims to feel so strongly about the sacredness of this abortion ritual that it is conducting a raffle to raise money for its legal efforts, with the winner receiving up to $2,500 toward her abortion. Buying a raffle ticket also allows one to vote for the state in which the group will next work to challenge abortion regulations.

Fortunately, the first foray of the groups legal strategy in Missouri has utterly failed. The Missouri lawsuits involved a female member of The Satanic Temple who challenged two Missouri laws in federal and state courts.

One of the laws requires women seeking abortions to be given the opportunity to read a pamphlet about possible health risks from undergoing an abortion and scientific information about fetal development. The other law requires a 72-hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion. The woman argued that the laws violated the Establishment Clause and the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Both the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit rejected The Satanic Temples extreme Establishment Clause argument that these laws are unconstitutional because they coincide with pro-life Roman Catholic theology. That reasoning would wipe out many laws that also happen to coincide with Catholic doctrine, such as laws against theft and murder, and government programs giving aid to the poor.

If a court ruled in favor of The Satanic Temples position, that ruling would also violate the Establishment Clause because it would place The Satanic Temples religious dogma into law. Such an expansive interpretation of the Establishment Clause would make governing and legislating impossible.

As to the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Satanists said they believe abortion is a holy rite, so laws hindering their religious practice must be struck down. But RFRA laws do not grant automatic exemptions from laws merely because someone says, My religion requires me to do something different. A modern-day Aztec could not justify homicide by claiming he was making a human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl. If a state RFRA actually operated as an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card, the most popular church in town would be the one preaching, Paying taxes is sinful!

A state RFRA is a defense one can raise against a government command, but it does not guarantee that the religious believer will win an exemption from that law. RFRA laws, such as Missouris law, usually have a four-part test that filters the strong religious liberty claims from weak and frivolous ones.

The believer must show (1) sincere beliefs rooted in religion that (2) the governments requirement substantially burdens; then (3) the government must show it has a compelling interest that (4) it furthers by the least restrictive means possible. The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously rejected The Satanic Temples religious liberty challenges to the informed consent law and 72-hour waiting period requirement.

At the first step, one can reasonably doubt whether The Satanic Temple has sincere beliefs about abortion that are rooted in religion. Its past actions show repeated mocking and trolling of religious beliefs. It looks more like the group is invoking religion to promote abortion by using state religious freedom laws to own religious pro-lifers.

Next, Missouris laws dont substantially burden a Satanists beliefs because they dont stop her from getting an abortion. The law did not require her to read the states pamphlet, and she still could get an abortion after the waiting period. These commonsense regulations dont amount to a substantial burden on her religion; she simply disagrees with the law.

Under the third and fourth RFRA factors, the state must show it has a compelling state interest in the specific legal requirements, implemented by the least restrictive means. Here, Missouri has a strong interest in making sure people undergoing significant medical procedures know all the relevant facts and have sufficient opportunity to reflect upon what they have learned in order to consent with an informed understanding of what will happen to them and the risks. Offering women the information and giving them time to consider the information is the least restrictive means to accomplish that goal.

It is difficult to take the pro-abortion advocacy of The Satanic Temple seriously because of its long history of disdaining religious believers with sloppily conceived, publicity-seeking campaigns and lawsuits meant to disrupt and diminish religious liberty protections for all. If the group really wants to advance its religious beliefs, it needs to work seriously within the legal protections that all Americans enjoy.

Perverting constitutional and statutory freedoms because of policy disagreements is wrongheaded, short-sighted, and disrespectful to fellow citizens. May the courts continue to reject these dangerous efforts.

Jordan Lorence is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which is defending the freedom of conscience of numerous creative professionals in court.

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Satanic Temple Is Trying To Strike Pro-Life Laws In The Name Of Religion - The Federalist

The Flawed Genius of the Constitution – The Atlantic

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Why do I love the U.S. Constitution? This instrument formally converted the worth of my great-great-grandfather Sidiphus into three-fifths that of a free person. Living in the East Indies as a free man, Sidiphus had been tricked into enslavementrecruited to a Georgia farm just before the Civil War by the promise of a foremanship. Had he managed to escape Georgia and bondage prior to the onset of the war, the Constitution would not have protected his God-given natural rights.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution determined that representation in Congress and direct taxation would be apportioned to the states by adding up the whole number of free people, plus three-fifths of all other personsmeaning enslaved personsexcluding Indians not taxed. These words carried into the Constitution a compromise first formulated in 1783 in a proposed amendment to the Articles of Confederation. That compromise was later adopted in the Constitution to resolve the conundrum of how to tax the plantation wealth of the South without giving white landowners outsize power in Congress by including enslaved people in the official count of the population.

Given the crime against humanity written into the Constitution because compromise was necessary to form a unionand given the sharp and unabating attention that the nations Founders and their writings have received in recent monthsI had better have a rock-solid explanation for my love of that document. Simple love of country, land of my mothers milk, wont do. My love must be sighted, not blind.

Special project: The battle for the Constitution

As it happens, Sidiphuss God-given natural rights had been much earlier asserted by none other than Thomas Jefferson and fellow members of the drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence. They took the trouble to make this assertion in the original draft of the Declaration, when they castigated the King of England for violatingthrough his protection of the trade in enslaved peoplethe sacred rights of life and liberty of Africans who had never done him any harm. We will never know if it was Jefferson who thought up those wordswords that would take many Americans today by surpriseor another committee member, perhaps John Adams or Benjamin Franklin. Adams, from Massachusetts, never enslaved anyone and thought enslavement was wrong. Franklin, from Pennsylvania, who himself had been an indentured servant, did enslave African Americans early in his life, but he eventually abandoned the practice and became a full-throated abolitionist. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts would be the first states to abolish enslavement, in 1780 and 1783, respectively (and gradually in the case of Pennsylvania)years before the U.S. Constitution was adopted, and even before the Revolution was formally over. The Continental Congress, of course, in its revisions to the draft of the Declaration of Independence, struck out any explicit recognition of Africans human rights, postponing their protection until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.

Already in 1776, Benjamin Franklin could make cutting jokes about the so-called slave interest and its influence on American politics. In the July 1776 debates over the Articles of Confederation, this exchange occurred between Franklin and Thomas Lynch Jr., of South Carolina, as recorded in the Journals of the Continental Congress:

franklin: Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep; sheep will never make any insurrections.

Franklin knew that enslaved men, women, and children were fully his equal, as capable of insurrection and revolution as he and his colleagues had been that hot July day in Philadelphia when they resolved to break away from Britain. Franklin recognized that a society built on a foundation of domination would be as unstable as the foundation itself.

Eleven years later, though, Franklin was helping shore up the Great Compromise, the adoption of the three-fifths clause that underestimated my great-great-grandfathers worth. In the final days of the Constitutional Convention, delegates debated whether they would convey their draft to Congress without individual endorsements or seek to have each delegate affix his signature to the document. The latter approach, which in fact played out, would amount to a pledge of commitment and ensure that dissent would die in the Conventionsworn secrets of the debates long concealed until James Madisons unofficial notes surfaced decades later. Franklin was in favor of consensus and for burying reservations. In a statement he said:

With these words, Franklin articulated the deepest, hardest truth of free self-government. People can have the chance of self-government through the institutions of constitutional democracy if and only if they prioritize the preservation of those institutions over wins in substantive domains of policy. For this lesson, Abraham Lincoln is our foremost teacher. When union and policy commitments come into conflict, those who wish to preserve free self-government must choose union. In that spirit, Franklin chose freedom for some over freedom for none.

Yet not all compromises are good ones. And not all are necessary. To understand and embrace the centrality of compromise to the sustainability of constitutional democracy and the self-government of free and equal citizens, one needs to be able to distinguish between good and bad compromises. Both the Declaration and the Constitution (via the Bill of Rights) include another important compromise, this one not about enslavement but about religion. The Declaration simultaneously uses the languages of rationalism and of faith to establish the grounds for its moral commitment, as when it invokes the Laws of Nature and of Natures God. While the text refers to a Creator, to divine Providence, and to a Supreme Judge, it studiously avoids using the vocabulary of any specific religion or doctrine. The text is capacious. Believers and nonbelievers alike are given reason to sign on; no specific form of belief takes precedence. Similarly, the Constitutions inclusion of the protection of religious freedom and the separation of Church and state formed the structure for a profoundly valuable and durable compromise. James Madison led the argument for the provision, responding to efforts in Virginia to pass a law requiring all taxpayers to make an annual contribution or pay a moderate tax in support of churches. (Advocates of the law included some of the old lions of the Revolution, such as Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, and Richard Henry Lee.)

What made the compromises around religion morally legitimate and sound was that they took into account the perspectives of all those in the new country who would be affected by them. Every religious point of view present in the colonies in 1776 was conceivably embraced by the language, including those of the disenfranchised. The compromise about enslavement did not, in contrast, consider the perspective of all those affected by that decision. Standing on partial ground, it lacked moral legitimacy and would ultimately prove destabilizing for the country.

From the October 2015 issue: How the Constitution caused our dysfunctional government

Yet the compromise was made, and Franklin was not the only one who understood himself to have been complicit in it. So too did James Wilson. Wilson, like Franklin, was from Philadelphia. At the Constitutional Convention, he was one of the few elder statesmen who had also signed the Declaration of Independence. (Wilson was 44; Madison was 36.) He repeatedly asserted that the work of creating the Constitution was but an extension of foundations laid by the Declaration. Wilson was Madisons equal at the Convention in terms of learning and influence. Although he was a member of the first Supreme Court, we have nonetheless all but forgotten him, presumably because he was also the first and only Supreme Court justice to go to debtors prison (as a result of failed land speculations). He died of a stroke while fleeing the reach of the law.

Whereas Franklin was an enslaver in the earlier parts of his life, Wilson was an enslaver for much of his life. Even while publicly writing and speaking against enslavement, he owned a man named Thomas Purcell for 26 years. However, two months after marrying a Quaker woman, Hannah Gray, he emancipated Purcell, an act often attributed to Grays influence. Like Franklin, Wilson fully understood the nature of the compromise in the Constitution, and was prepared to accept it. During Pennsylvanias ratifying convention, he responded thus to a Pennsylvanian who objected to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution and to another provision, in Article I, Section 9, protecting the right to import enslaved people for 20 years:

The best, then, that can be said about the compromises regarding slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve unanimity is this: Those who knew enslavement was wrong but nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a path that would lead inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all.

We cannot, however, assume with Wilson and Franklin and others like them that incrementalism was the only available path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitutions compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for enslaved people or for people more generally. Britain offers a natural experiment with which to make judgments about alternative paths. Revolutionary ideas were afoot there too in the 1770s and 80s. Universal suffrage for men was proposed in Parliament for the first time in 1780 by Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, an ardent supporter both of the American revolutionaries and of radicals in Britain. Yet at home, in the British Isles, the Crown managed to fend off the revolution it could not defeat in 13 of its colonies.

This, however, did not result in the permanent nonfreedom of British subjects. A British legal judgment in 1772 introduced a doctrine against selling enslaved people abroad, a doctrine that was commonly though erroneously thought to mean that no one could be held as a slave on English soil. In de facto fashion it reduced enslavement in Britain and redirected the attention of abolitionists to enslavement in the British colonies. In 1793, Upper Canadain essence, the region just north of the Great Lakespassed the Act to Limit Slavery, the first law of its kind in the remaining British colonies. Britain itself in 1833 passed the Slavery Abolition Act, dismantling enslavement throughout its Caribbean colonies and making Canada a free land for African Americans who escaped slavery in the U.S. The law helped make possible the Underground Railroad, the fights about the Fugitive Slave Act, and the dynamics that eventually led to the Civil War.

As to universal manhood suffrage, there the United Kingdom moved slowly. In 1832, Britain introduced the first of what would eventually be three 19th-century Reform Acts. This act had different rules for those living in counties versus towns. In towns, men who occupied property with an annual rent of at least 10 pounds could vote. That still left six out of seven men without voting rights. Britain adopted another reform measure in 1867 and one more in 1884. The third Reform Act gave the vote to all male house owners and all males paying rent of 10 pounds or more a yearleaving out 40 percent of men and of course 100 percent of women. These changes were accomplished without a bloody internal war.

The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.

In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britains constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.

What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference. Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.

So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the worlds greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.

Why do we have three distinct aspects of powerlegislative, executive, and judicialand why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call separation of powers and checks and balances. Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.

The exercise of power originates with the expression of a will or an intention. The legislature, the first branch, expresses the will of the people. Only after the will is expressed can there be execution of the desired action. The executive branch, the second branch, is responsible for this. The judiciary comes third as a necessary mediator for addressing conflicts between the first and second branches. The three elements of powerwill, execution, and adjudicationare separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold officials accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by which those who are responsible for using power are also always engaged in holding one another accountable.

James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitution, put it this way:

To ensure that power could be held accountable, the designers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. They assigned one power to each of three branches. Then they developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for officers in each branch to not only exercise their own powers but also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power by others. The point of giving each branch ways of slowing down the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able to dominate and consolidate complete power.

The rules and procedures they devised can also be called mechanismsprocedures that in themselves organize incentives and requirements for officeholders so that power flows in good and fair ways.

We all use mechanisms to limit power and achieve fairness in our ordinary lives. A good example is the kind of rule parents use for helping children share desserts. If Ive got a cake, and I need to divide it up between two children, the easiest way for me to achieve a fair outcome is if I let one child slice while the other child gets first pick. The child who slices has an incentive to slice as fairly as possible, knowing that the second child will surely choose the bigger slice if the slices are not equal. Parenting books do not generally cite Federalist No. 51, in which Madison advised, Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

The U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to structure the incentives of officeholders to make sure power operates in fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy of the identification in The Federalist Papers of the highest and best features of the Constitution:

Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the other, which means no branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populating its personnel and staff.

Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the others for emoluments annexed to their offices, which means no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping for a raise.

No double-office holding is permitted, which means that trying to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is strictly off-limits.

The executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be overruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country.

The executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratification requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties from being struck as personal deals with benefits to the executive and thereby hinders corruption.

The Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made by the president, but the Court has the power of review over laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be overruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch has itself consented.

The Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated amendment process, by the peoples standing legislative representatives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the purposewhich means the final power always rests with the people.

I delight in the cleverness of these mechanisms. There are many more. Instituting a bicameral legislaturehaving a Senate and a House of Representativesis itself a check on monolithic legislative power. I marvel at the Constitutions insight into the operations of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought to design institutions and organize the government with the goal of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, but I love its avowalby stipulating the process for amendment, to date exercised 27 timesof its own mutability. Remarkably, the Constitutions slow, steady change has regularly been in the direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress not only in politics but also in moral understanding. This is what figures like Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for).

It would be a mistake to think that Britains own slow march toward the expansion of freedom was in no way prodded along by the example across the Atlantic and domestic pressures flowing from that example, just as Britains earlier abolition of enslavement generated pressures that drove the march of freedom forward here at home.

The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of where I found it. Instead, I own it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from generation to generation, none but the living can own the Constitution. Those who wrote the version ratified centuries ago do not own the version we live by today. We do. Its ours, an adaptable instrument used to define self-government among free and equal citizensand to secure our ongoing moral education about that most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our Constitution, and that fact is empowering.

That hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because it is my home. The second love is instinctual. The first comes with open eyes.

This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person.

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The Flawed Genius of the Constitution - The Atlantic

Coin Commemorates 100th Anniversary of World’s Largest Water-Management Steam Pumping Station – CoinWeek

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By Coin & Currency Institute

The Royal Dutch Mint is celebrating the centennial of the Ir. D.F. Woudagemaal (in English: the D.F. Wouda Steam Pumping Station), the largest, still-operating steam pumping station in the world.

It was opened on October 7, 1920, by Queen Wilhelmina, and its job was to pump excess water from the northern province of Friesland into the Zuiderzee, and later into the Ijsselmeer, both bays bordering the North Sea. To this day, the Woudagemaal plays a crucial role within the Frisian water authority.

Water poses many problems, not just in the Netherlands, but in the whole world. There are three main issues: too much, too little, or too dirty. The Woudagemaal is a laudable example of Dutch water management and represents a highlight of the work of Dutch engineers and architects in the war against water.

Three coins are being struck, identical in design but in three different metals, to mark the occasion. Visual artist Berend Strik designed the Woudagemaal coin that is also the first commemorative coin to depict King Willem-Alexander with a beard. On the obverse, the waving flag of the province of Friesland is visible behind the portrait of the king.

Underneath, is a fragment of the canals surrounding the Woudagemaal. On the reverse is a drawing of the Woudagemaal in straight and simple lines. All depicted from a birds-eye view, to show the steam pumping station in the typical flat Friesland landscape. The font used on both sides of the coin is the same as found on the steam engines inside the Woudagemaal.

The proof .900 fine gold 10, weighing 6.72 grams and 22.5 mm in diameter, costs $635.00. It is limited to 1,000 pieces. A sterling silver .925 fine proof 5 piece weighing 15.5 grams, 33 mm in diameter, and restricted to just 4,600 coins, is $69.95. An uncirculated 5 made of silver-plated copper is $19.75 It measures 29mm and weighs 10.5 grams.

Mintage is 60,000. The first day of issue is October 7, 2020.

The Woudagemaal is one of the 10 recognized heritage sites of the Netherlands on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is the ninth issue in the series of Dutch World Heritage (2012-2021), following the Schokland 5 Euro Coin (2018) and the Beemster 5 Euro Coin (2019).

These and many other issues may be obtained from the Coin & Currency Institute, P.O. Box 399, Williston, Vermont 05495. They can be viewed and ordered online at http://www.coin-currency.com. $5.75 should be added to each order for shipping and handling. Major credit cards are accepted. Call toll-free 1-800-421-1866. Fax: (802) 536-4787. E-mail: mail@coin-currency.com.

An enormous amount of steam and quite some sounds: if you visit the Woudagemaal when it is put under steam, you are in for a treat! It takes about six hours to fill the boilers with water and start the pumps. The result is breathtaking the entire building disappears in the steam the station creates. The facility is put under such steam at least twice a year.

During these predetermined training days, staff and volunteers keep their knowledge about the working of the station up-to-date. When the water rises to dangerously high levels, the steam pumping station is (still) commissioned.

Even when the Woudagemaal is not operational, it never fails to impress. The smokestack, with a height of 197 feet, is a recognizable beacon for sailors on the Ijsselmeer. The special architecture provides a unique appearance for the turbine hall, which houses the four impressive head steam engines. About 120 volunteers work at the Woudagemaals visitor center. Two of the main attractions are the interactive exposition hall and the 3D cinema. The center is open from February until December.

The Woudagemaal in the town of Lemmer has a rich history. The steam pumping station was designed by the Chief Engineer of the Provincial Public Works, Dirk Frederik Wouda, in 1917-1918. The majestic building shows beautiful, traditional architecture in the style of Rationalism (an architectural trend from the early 20th century). It was officially opened by Queen Wilhelmina on October 7, 1920.

Before the station was operational, excess water in the province of Friesland was pumped into the Zuiderzee and the Wadden Sea with windmills and sluices. This became problematic in the course of the 19th century because the peat bogs were sinking. The development of the pumping station in Lemmer was a big step forward in the field of water management in Friesland.

From 1966 onwards, water administration in Friesland had greatly improved and the electric Hoogland pumping station near Stavoren partly took over from the Woudagemaal. The pumping station is however still in use and is owned by the Wetterskip Frysln (the Dutch water board in the province of Friesland). In addition, the building and the steam engines are attractions for architectural or steam enthusiasts.

UNESCO on the Woudagemaal: whc.unesco.org/en/list/867

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Coin Commemorates 100th Anniversary of World's Largest Water-Management Steam Pumping Station - CoinWeek

Why fewer Indians have joined ISIS – ThePrint

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The mystery behind the very few Indian names appearing in the long list of foreign fighters in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has puzzled strategic thinkers for some time now. This pleasant yet inexplicable surprise finds a historical precedent in the conspicuous absence of Indians from the legions of foreign mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s and from the Taliban and al Qaedas Islamic Emirate of the 1990s. One of the reasons for the non-existent mujahideen from India could be that unlike some West Asian states then, India never had disposable radicals at home, nor would it ever pursue a policy of conveniently banishing them to foreign war theatres.

Thus, the apparent apathy of the Indian Muslims towards the ISIS impassioned exhortations for global jihad is not a recent and isolated instance. It can also be viewed as the communitys continuing rejection of the so-called global jihad, since the time it rose to prominence in the Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) region four decades ago.

Yet, barring a handful of perceptive articles and a few kumbaya panegyrics that sing the praises of the peace-loving Indian Muslim and a cohesive Indian socio-political milieu, strategic experts have not presented even a modicum of seriously researched or insightfully argued propositions (some of which will be discussed ahead) to explain this conundrum. This issue brief surveys some of the propositions and ideas published in journals or magazines or being aired in various seminars and conferences held on the subject of terrorism or radicalisation in India.

How can a country with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, which was partitioned over the issue of Islamism; has had a history of communal violence since independence; suffered a spate of terror attacks by homegrown and Pakistan-backed terrorists in recent decades; witnesses a continuing insurgency in the Muslim-majority Kashmir; and whose polity is still deeply divided over the Muslim question produce fewer adherents of ISIS and al Qaeda than many Western states having a much smaller Muslim population? The inability to find any clear answer or a set of answers to this question has led to the subject being dismissed as an irrelevant non-issue or an academic red herring of little consequence. Some would argue that the Indian strategic community should consider even the relatively few al Qaeda and ISIS cases as too many, given the danger a handful of terrorists can pose to national security.

However, such questioning in this instance is significant because it calls for the identification of those mysterious elements that promote immunity within the Indian society that hinder the spread of the global jihadist contagion. Counter-terrorism and security experts need to be aware of inhibiting factors that protect the Indian society from the menace of transnational terrorism which has spread to different parts of the world.

Many of the prevailing propositions and explanations are mostly speculative (albeit backed by some historical and statistical evidence) because the premise of the subject makes it difficult to be verified through empirical research. Even the most plausible of them only partially explain some of the reasons behind this phenomenon.

Also read: India was of little value to ISIS. Thats all set to change now

It is interesting to note that out of Indias population of over 172.2 million Muslims (constituting 14.23 per cent of the Indian population), less than a 100 migrants (in several batches) are thought to have left for the ISIS territories in Syria and Afghanistan, while 155 were arrested until last year for having ISIS links.

These numbers constitute less than one per cent of the over 30,000 fighters from at least 85 countries who joined the so-called ISIS Caliphate by December 2015, a count that reportedly swelled to around 40,000 in the following years. The number of recruits from India was much less than that of the European Union (EU), from where between 3,922 and 4,294foreign fighters joined the ranks of the ISIS Caliphate by 2016. A breakdown of foreign fighters from the EU shows that over 1,700 of them came from France, 760 from Germany, an almost equal number from the United Kingdom (UK), and around 470 from Belgium. The numbers from Russia stood at above 2,500, while the tally from the former Soviet Republics exceeded 7,000 as early as 2015. In fact, Indian migrants to ISIS are even fewer than that of the Maldives (173), a country having a population of less than 400,000 people.

Also read:ISIS influence growing in South India, particularly Kerala: Social media monitoring firms

Many well-meaning Indian politicians and Muslim leaders often vociferously state that Indian Muslims are peaceful citizens, who, unlike their co-religionists in other parts of the world, have embraced the pluralistic ethos and culture of India and have moderated the radical zeal and ardour of their faith to live peacefully and harmoniously with other communities in the country.

According to former diplomat Talmiz Ahmad: The rejection of extremist doctrine and action by Indian Muslims results from Indias unique syncretic traditions that have fostered an extraordinarily pluralistic culture. Similarly, Manu Joseph, in his insightful article published in March 2019, states: At the first sign of suspicious outsiders or activities, the local Muslims alert the police. India has faced very few terror attacks, not in spite of its Muslims but because of them.

To David Heyman, former United States Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security, the moderation of the Indian Muslim is reflective of the great Indian identity cherished by all its citizens. He states: India was born a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-denominational society that embraces that diversity.

These laudable claims are difficult to contest for any Indian, who lives and breathes in the common and composite cultural air of the country every day. However, this is not a rigorous explanation; moreover, it makes convenient and sweeping generalisations about the Indian Muslim community. It does not anticipate a response to any obvious questions that might be raised against the proposition.

For one, the explanation could have acknowledged and addressed the fact that the Indian Muslim community is not entirely peaceful and has always had its fair share of radical elements that have been involved in communal riots and terrorist attacks. Though not many, homegrown terror groups such as the Indian Mujahideen, Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Base Movement (not to mention several Kashmiri secessionist groups) have posed a security threat. The community is also known for having its share of firebrand leaders, some of whom have even been jailed for making incendiary hate speeches. Many Pakistan-based terrorist groups have exploited vulnerable members of the community to carry out major terrorist attacks such as the Bombay blasts of 1993, Parliament attack of 2001, Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, etc.

Therefore, the idea that the Indian Muslim community is peaceful and has thus rejected al Qaeda and ISIS does not appear entirely convincing. The real issue is that despite the existence of several fundamentalist and radical elements, the Indian Muslim community has so far avoided joining global jihadist groups in large numbers, which remains an unanswered question.

Also read:What Muslims in India say about Balakot, national security, ISIS and Kashmir

A similar, but slightly different explanation posits that the Indian Muslims mainly follow Sufism, a peaceful strain of Islam, which inhibits them from joining its more fundamentalist and militant antithesis, namely Salafi-Wahhabism. It is argued that Sunni terrorism in the world is mainly led by Salafi jihadist organisations like al Qaeda and ISIS, barring a few Hanafi-Deobandi groups like the Taliban and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In this regard, noted historian Romila Thapar states that Sufi teachers played a central role in the interaction with Bhakti sects and gave Indians a unique belief-system. This consisted of teachers who, brought up either as Hindus or Muslims, gave up the formal tenets and rituals of their faith and propounded devotion to a personal god, while emphasizing social ethics, social equality and tolerance. This was faith of most Indians, Hindus and Muslims, for 500 years.

There is no doubt that Sufism has helped cultivate a syncretic ethos in the Indian society, but the claim that Indian Hindus or Muslims have given up their formal religious tenets, dogma or rituals for the sake of a collective faith is untrue. It is also not correct to assert that Muslims in India exclusively follow the Sufi school of Islam, nor is there any merit in the idea of viewing the Deobandi, Ahl-e-Hadeeth or even Salafi beliefs as problematic vis--vis a supposedly benign Sufism. It is important to note that even the founding ideologues of Salafism such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ahmad Shah Sirhindi were practitioners of Sufism, although they criticised the scholasticism of some Sufi orders.

Besides, many adherents of Sufism have been known to indulge in acts of violent extremism over the ages. For instance, the Sufi group named Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi Order (JRTN) led by former Saddam Hussain loyalist Izzat Al Dourri colluded with ISIS in fighting the current Iraqi dispensation. Similarly, it is mainly the Sufi Barelvi adherents who persecute and even kill Pakistani Christians on the charge of making blasphemous remarks. Undoubtedly, Sufism teaches peace and universalism but the existence of Christian and Buddhist militant groups goes a long way to prove that extremist violence can be perpetrated even by followers of largely non-violent religions or ideologies.

As for Salafism, the movement is too broad and means different things to different people. Many Salafis of northern Africa follow the teachings of the founder (Jamaluddin Afghani) to embrace Western rationalism and enlightenment. The overwhelmingly large majority of Salafi-Wahhabis in West Asia are known as Quietists because of their belief in eschewing politics and violence which they view as spiritually corrupting influence. The predominantly Salafi-Wahhabi states of the Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar, are home to millions of Indian and foreign expatriates of various religious denominations, which shows the moderate face of Salafi-Wahhabism.

When it comes to non-Muslim places of worship, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are not better or worse than Shiite Iran or Sunni Hanafi Turkey. Still, Ibadism-dominated Oman (a school of Islam having strong theological affinities with Wahhabism) has several Hindu temples, most notably the over hundred-year-old Shiva temple in Muscat. In the UAE, the grand BAPS Shri SwaminarayanMandiris being built inAbu Dhabi, which will be the second Hindu temple in that country after the Shiva-Krishna Mandir in Dubai. Thus, the fact that al Qaeda and ISIS have come from a virulent offshoot of Salafism does not make Salafi-Wahhabi a problematic community in and of itself. Thus, the false binary of peaceable Sufi versus militant Salafi does not make for an informed discussion, nor does it help answer the apparent Indian Muslim revulsion to global jihadism.

Also read: No proof Tablighi foreigners spread Covid, were made scapegoats Bombay HC quashes FIRs

Some counter-terrorism scholars, namely Kabir Taneja of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Mohammed Sinan Siyech of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), have presented a more thought-provoking explanation over why Indian Muslims have refrained from joining global jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS.

They make the case that Indian migration to the former ISIS-held territories in Syria and Iraq did not happen in large numbers due to logistical problems. They claim that Western migrants to the ISIS Caliphate could fly to Turkey with a passport and easily obtain an air ticket. However, the less well-to-do Indian ISIS enthusiast found the trip too expensive and the journey to the ISIS dystopia too treacherous. Thus, Siyech states: The passport ownership rate in India stood at 5% in2017, with Muslims (of whom more than 67% live in poverty) plausibly comprising an even smaller group. For those few who undertook the long process of obtaining a passport, thevisa requirements to enter Turkey for Indians were quite strenuousAdding to this, the idea of travelling to a foreign conflict-ridden land where Arabic (a non-India Muslim language) is spoken without any combat training made it even easier for Muslims to stay back.

On the face of it, this explanation appears plausible in that it presents a more realistic reason for the fewer number of Indian fighters in the ISIS ranks and avoids the speculative theorising of other propositions. However, it has its own shortcomings. A large number of Indians work in Gulf countries and have become quite adept at migrating to countries of West Asia. In fact, over 25,000 Indians currently live and work in Iraq, mainly in Erbil, the capital of the northern region of Kurdistan, which was close to the territories held by ISIS earlier.

In addition, fighters from other South Asian countries would have also faced somewhat similar economic and logistical hardships, yet migrants from Maldives (which sent 173 migrants to ISIS), Bangladesh (40), Philippines (100), etc., turned up in much larger numbers at the gates of the ISIS proto-state.

Also read: Iran, not Israel, becomes the unifying enemy for the Middle East

There is also the argument that the Indian subcontinent has a plethora of old, well-entrenched radical groups (such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-i-Taiba, Hizbul Mujahideen, etc.) which new terror conglomerates like ISIS are finding difficult to dislodge.

However, this argument fails to explain the success of ISIS and al Qaeda in other parts of the Muslim world, such as in Africa and Southeast Asia, which have also seen homegrown terrorism for a long time. Even when al Qaeda and the Taliban were ruling the roost in Afghanistan in the 1990s, they could hardly intervene in India. It is also noteworthy that while ISIS has found a strong base in Afghanistan, in spite of its arch-rival Talibans pre-existing presence, it struggles to find any organisational footing in India.

Here, the superlative performance of Indian security agencies cannot be praised enough for maintaining constant vigil, for always being ahead of the curve in foiling attacks of global jihadist groups against the country. However, highly effective surveillance and prevention measures alone cannot explain the limited resonance and traction for their call among Indian Muslims.

Traditional Indian social and family values have also been viewed as an inhibiting factor, yet similar societies in the subcontinentlike in Maldives and Bangladeshdid not show equal resilience to the ISIS message.

Also read: Not your pawn Kapil Mishras Kabul attack tweet doesnt go down well with Sikhs

This issue brief presents a few explanations of its own to advance the ongoing debate, without making any claims of having found the proverbial silver bullet as a solution. The first proposition is that the West Asian Islamism does not appear as revolutionary a phenomenon to the Indian Muslim mind as it might to other Islamic communities around the world. For example, the idea of creating an Islamic state is something Indian Muslims have already dealt with and suffered the consequences of, with many families splitting up due to the creation of the now failing Islamic state of Pakistan. Therefore, any proposal for a new experiment in Islamism, whether by the brutally repressive Taliban or the terrorist proto-state of ISIS, fails to enthuse the Indian Muslims imagination.

The call for restituting the Caliphate also does not appeal to most Indian Muslims. This is because Indian Muslim rulers never paid allegiance to any West Asian caliph, nor did they send their forces to foreign lands to fight for the glory of Islam. The replacement of Persian and Arabic languages in Indian courts with English and Indian vernacular languages as well as the flowering of Urdu literature has further reduced Indias social and cultural links with West Asia.

Therefore, Indian Muslims developed their own distinctive theological schools like Deobandi and Barelvi and their own fundamentalist movements like the Tabligh Jamaat and Jamaat-e-Islami. Unlike other parts of the Muslim world, spanning North Africa to Southeast Asia, that have remained under the theological and cultural influence of Arabia, India has been able to develop its own versions of Islam and holds its own against West Asian influences.

Even radical and extremist Islamic movements such as Abul Ala Maududis Jamaat-e-Islami were not subsumed by Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, Hasan Al Banna and Sayyid Qutb the early ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood acknowledged the formative impact of Maududis political Islam on their intellect and in support of Jamaat-e-Islami, and yet the organisation has no branch in the Indian subcontinent to date.

In sum, Indian Muslims, both of the extremist and moderate kind, are comfortable in their own skins and barring a few exceptions in Kashmir and Kerala do not feel the need for any foreign interference in their religious, political and social affairs.

Also read: In Afghanistan, a new great game with ISIS, ISK and Pakistan is on with a vengeance

For a long time, India did not figure prominently in the grand schemes of al Qaeda and ISIS because radical Salafi-jihadist ideologues consider India Muslims weak of will and bereft of religious ardour. For several centuries, radical leaders of West Asia have looked down upon Indian Muslims for having failed to fully Islamise the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the Mongol marauder Timur invaded India on the excuse of punishing Indian Muslim sultans for showing excessive tolerance toward their Hindu subjects, a sentiment shared by many religious extremists in West Asia to this day. Thus, even among the list of non-Arab Muslims (pejoratively called Ajami or mute) Indians feature below Turks and Iranians. Areeb Majeed, a young Indian Muslim who returned after joining ISIS in Syria, speaks of how ISIS made him and his other Indian compatriots do menial jobs like cleaning the toilet and providing water to soldiers and never trained them to go to war.

It is noteworthy that the Salafi-Wahhabi movement is said to have risen in opposition to the independent reasoning and analogous interpretations (ijtihaad and qiyas) of the Hanafi and Shafai schools of Sunni jurisprudence, to which an overwhelmingly large majority of Indian Muslims subscribe. Many fundamentalist Salafi-Wahhabi ideologues even consider the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam (which include both the Indian Deobandi and Barelvi schools) to be heretical because of their strict adherence (taqleed) of Imam Abu Haneefas jurisprudence. This Salafi-Hanafi divide was the main reason for al Qaeda hard-liners like Abu Qatada and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi to oppose the Hanafi-Deobandi Talibans emirate as Islamic in the 1990s, and this doctrinal divide remains the principal reason for Salafi ISIS to oppose Taliban to this day.

In addition to doctrinal issues, Salafi jihadists dislike Indian Muslims for having embraced citizenship of a secular nation and to have refused Shariah-based governance since medieval times. For this reason, ISIS equates Indian Muslims with their favourite hate term Murjiah, an extinct Muslim sect that refused to detest people on the basis of their faith.

This brings us to this issue briefs second explanation that the Indian clerical movements led by Darul Uloom Deoband, the Sufi as well as Barelvi schools hold strong sway over the behaviour of Indian Muslims. In March 2009, Darul Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa declaring India as dar al aman (land of peace), where militant jihad is prohibited. Similarly, a joint fatwa was issued by 70,000 Indian Muslim scholars against ISIS, Taliban, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in 2015, which has helped in refraining a large number of Indian Muslims from joining the ranks of global jihadist terror groups.

Also read: Terror outfits have invaded our social media but India lags in countering it

It should also be noted here that violent extremism and terrorism fester in an environment of repression and exclusion. West Asian polities, where dissent is often quashed, find expression only in violent outbursts and so the region suffers most from jihadist violence than any other part of the world.

The third explanation is that violent extremism does not thrive on the Indian soil for long. Here, the bearded Indian Muslim man and burqa-clad women freely walk the bazaars of Indian towns and villages, just as the naked Digambar Jain or the turbaned Sikh feel equally at home and remain proud of their religious and national identities.

Thus, Muslims find their identity and place in India, which even the liberal West does not openly accord to its increasingly diverse population in that it expects all communities to assimilate and imbibe Western values and ways of life. Indias democratic polity and eclectic demographic allows even homegrown fundamentalist groups to live and express themselves, which inhibits the rise of exclusivist and violently extreme groups like ISIS and al Qaeda to fester. The cost-benefit analyses of such terror mercenaries do not add up here and even a few misadventures fail to give the big returns that these groups find elsewhere.

Thus, the non-dualist (Advaita) celebration of opposites rolls on and even the absolutist elements are swept up in the cosmic sweep of the great Indian juggernaut.

The author is Research Fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. Views are personal.

Thisarticle was first published by IDSA.

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Anthem, Ascension Wisconsin Partner to Offer ACA Health Plans in 2021 – Business Wire

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MILWAUKEE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Thanks to a new partnership between Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Ascension Wisconsin, Southeast Wisconsin consumers shopping for 2021 health insurance plans this fall will find several new choices at Healthcare.gov. Ascension Wisconsin and Anthem announced today that they are teaming up to offer ACA health plans in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine, Kenosha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. The Anthem plans will feature Ascension Wisconsins 24 hospital campuses, 110 care locations, and more than 1,300 physicians. The plans will also include Childrens Wisconsin for pediatric care.

Ascension Wisconsin and Anthem are both deeply committed to Wisconsin communities and we share a goal of assuring all Wisconsinites enjoy affordable access to quality healthcare, said Paul Nobile, president of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin. Especially now, in the wake of COVID-19, people need highly coordinated, personalized healthcare. Thats what this partnership is designed to offer.

The open enrollment period for the health exchange begins on November 1 and ends December 15.

Ascension Wisconsin is pleased to be Anthems primary and specialty care partner for this new health insurance exchange offering, stated Bernie Sherry, Senior Vice President, Ascension and Ministry Market Executive, Ascension Wisconsin. We know that todays consumers want quality, access and choice. Thats what this partnership delivers. Whether in person at our hospitals and clinics or through virtual visits, our commitment is to provide value to our patients by delivering quality care, in the right place at the right time for the communities we are privileged to serve.

Both organizations have been taking strong actions to support Wisconsin communities in response to COVID-19. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shields parent company, Anthem Inc., has committed $2.5 billion to support members, employers, care providers and charitable organizations through the pandemic and its aftermath, including nearly $1 million to Wisconsin nonprofits alone. Anthems other actions include:

Ascension Wisconsin quickly pivoted to provide care in new and innovative ways during the pandemic. Highlights include:

About Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield is the trade name of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin (BCBSWI), Compcare Health Services Insurance Corporation (Compcare) and Wisconsin Collaborative Insurance Company (WCIC). BCBSWI underwrites or administers PPO and indemnity policies and underwrites the out of network benefits in POS policies offered by Compcare or WCIC; Compcare underwrites or administers HMO or POS policies; WCIC underwrites or administers Well Priority HMO or POS policies. Independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Anthem is a registered trademark of Anthem Insurance Companies, Inc. Additional information about Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin is available at http://www.anthem.com. Also, follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/anthemBCBS or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AnthemBlueCrossBlueShield.

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Anthem, Ascension Wisconsin Partner to Offer ACA Health Plans in 2021 - Business Wire

Ascension Sacred Heart to open free standing ER in Lynn Haven – The News Herald

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Jacqueline Bostick|The News Herald

LYNN HAVEN Lynn Haven couldl soon welcome a free standing emergency room.

City commissioners unanimously approved Tuesday a development order on the behalf of Ascension Sacred Heart Bay for the15,000 square-foot facility.

"I just love the idea that it'sgoing to be so close to Lynn Haven. It's going to help an awful lot of people," said Commissioner Judy Tinder. "It's going to be great for our community."

No date has been set for the start of construction, officials said.

More: Ascension Sacred Heart Bay reopens rehab at new facility Monday

The ER will be located at 3135 State Road 77 on a 6.77-acre lot just south of the local social security office. It will have 13 treatment roomsand two trauma rooms staffed by emergency medicine physicians, nursesand respiratory therapists, according to officials. The ER will also have a lab, CT scannerand X-ray imaging.

At the meeting, representatives of the project described the ER as a "regional ambulatory trauma center" that will bring "good things for Lynn Haven."

"Our new Emergency Center will be open 24 hours a day and will include separate areas for treatment of children and adults," Heath Evans, president of Ascension Sacred Heart Bay, said in a news release Friday.This is part of our ongoing efforts to extend our outpatient services into the community and provide high-quality care at a time and place convenient to patients."

The new facility will be similar to the ER that ASH operates on Panama City Beach, officials said. The new free-standing facility will be supported by the Level II Trauma Center at the ASHon 6thStreet and by the Studer Family Children's Hospital at Sacred Heart, located in Pensacola.

More: Panama City hospital marks full reopening since Hurricane Michael, welcomes new chapel

The 6thStreet location recently held a reopening ceremony for its facilities. The event gave a moment of reflection on the impact of Hurricane Michael on medical services and the commitment ASH continues to make to regain ground and grow those services.

Evans said in a news release Friday that the Lynn Haven area is no exception.

"We have a long history of serving Lynn Haven before some services were displaced by Hurricane Michael and we look forward to expanding access to emergency services in a growing community," he said.

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Ascension Sacred Heart to open free standing ER in Lynn Haven - The News Herald

Class of 2017 physician publishes article on empathy immigrants bring to health care – The South End

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The Detroit Free Press published an opinion piece by Zlatan Cizmic, M.D., a member of the Wayne State University School of Medicine Class of 2017, on the importance of the empathy and commitment that immigrant physicians bring to health care.

Dr. Cizmic, 29, who also completed his undergraduate degree at Wayne State University, and his family fled war-torn Bosnia in the 1990s. He is now an orthopedic surgery resident in the Ascension Hospital system in Detroit.

His article, published Sept. 4, also touches on the many contributions immigrants make in Detroit and nationwide in the areas of health care, business and industry.

The complete article is below, and can be read in the Detroit Free Press.

Detroits immigrants, refugees play crucial role in COVID-19 recoveryZlatan Cizmic

I was three years old when a grenade flew over my head and exploded against the side of our apartment building. It was 1994, and my familys native Bosnia was engulfed in civil war. Heaps of drywall collapsed on top of me, and as my parents dug me out of the rubble, they knew exactly what they had to do: flee.

We escaped to Croatia, applied for refugee status and, six months later, moved into a tiny apartment in Detroit. We were poor and knew little about our new home, but we vowed to repay Americas kindness. Today, Im an orthopedic surgery resident at the Ascension Hospital system, treating both orthopedic and COVID-19 patients across the Detroit metro area. My personal experience of poverty and war has equipped me to help vulnerable patients especially now.

Immigrants and refugees bring a unique empathy and commitment to our work on the front lines. According to new research from New American Economy, released in partnership with the City of Detroit and surrounding counties, we are nearly 12% of the citys health care workforce, 17% of local pharmacists and 14% of grocery workers. We own businesses and create jobs at high rates, especially in industries like health care and hospitality that are vital to our economic recovery.

My own experience as a refugee has proved crucial during the pandemic. I weathered those grueling 24-hour shifts in the spring in part because Id already learned to cope with upheaval and trauma. When patients arrived suffering from the double anguish of COVID-19 and shattered bones, I could empathize with their fear. That understanding puts my patients at ease and allows them to open up about their own struggles. As a result I can tailor their treatment for a better recovery. Entering the relationship with empathy is key; studies show that this trait among doctors increases successful outcomes.

Speaking a patients native tongue also leads to better health results. Many immigrant health care workers are multilingual, which helps hospitals and private practices reach a broader client base. Immigrants also bring cultural fluency, which means we can deliver medical care more effectively. On a previous rotation, my attending and I were treating a Bosnian patient who was reluctant to take her blood pressure medication. I explained everything in her native language and addressed unspoken concerns about Western medicine, which I could sense in her hesitation. She thanked me, and when she returned a month later, her health had improved greatly.

The pandemic has made the importance of effective communication all too clear. None of us are safe until all of us are safe, and that includes immigrant communities. Multi-lingual health care workers have been crucial to spreading the safety standards that effectively contain the virus. But health care workers both immigrant and American-born cannot shoulder the burden of protecting our city and state. COVID-19 relief measures must include immigrants, low-income residents and other vulnerable populations. COVID-19 testing and treatment should be affordable for everyone.

Beyond health care, we need to support immigrant essential workers, especially business owners. After the Great Recession, immigrants played a key role in our economic recovery; in 2011, they founded 550 new businesses per month for every 100,000 immigrants, more than twice the rate of native-born Americans, according to NAE.

Lets give them the tools they need to do that again.

Here in Detroit, I am dedicated to serving the community: volunteering to translate in hospitals and providing pro-bono health services to students in addition to my professional work. I do this because Americans modeled this same selflessness when my family landed here, war-weary and scared. A resettlement agency helped my parents find jobs, furnish our new home and get acclimated to the U.S. They helped our family transition from scarcity to security. Now my family and so many immigrant families want to do the same for this country. Give us the chance and we will.

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Class of 2017 physician publishes article on empathy immigrants bring to health care - The South End

Around Ascension for Sept. 9, 2020 | Ascension | theadvocate.com – The Advocate

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Household hazardous waste collection canceled

Ascension Parish government's household hazardous materials collection day set for Saturday at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center has been canceled.

For more information, call (225) 450-1200.

John Couvillon, president and founder of JMC Analytics and Polling, will be the featured speaker at the September Ascension GOP Roundtable, sponsored by Ascension Republican Women. The Roundtable will be at 11:30 a.m. Sept. 17 at the Clarion Inn, 1500 W. La. 30 in Gonzales.

Couvillon holds a B.S. in accounting from LSU and a masters degree in information systems.

The cost for lunch is $22, which will be collected at the door. The event is open to the public and guests are welcome. Reservations are requested. RSVP: (225) 921-5187 or e-mail: ARWrUS@aol.com.

Join the Ascension Parish Library for the Build a Better Business Virtual Series of small-business workshops to be provided via Zoom. This series is made possible with a Libraries Lead with Digital Skills Grant through Grow with Google and the Public Library Association.

The grant initiative has also made it possible for the Ascension Parish Library to create its new Business Resource Center website to help small businesses succeed.

Benita Benta Rice, a profit and growth consultant, will be the guest speaker for this virtual series. Benta Rice has over 20 years of corporate experience working with C-level executives in several roles asset management, management analyst and project management roles. This virtual series will provide small businesses with decision-making tools to manage and grow their businesses. Topics for the series include:

Creating a Financial Scoreboard: Using Numbers to Build a Better Business Session 1 on Sept. 9 at 6:30 p.m.

Creating a Financial Scoreboard: Using Numbers to Build a Better Business Session 2 on Sept. 16 at 6:30 p.m.

April 15 is Back Again: Maximizing the Benefits of Tax Reporting for Entrepreneurs - Sept. 23 at 6:30 p.m.

How to Prevent your Business from Failing: Identifying Strategies and Systems to Grow your Business - Sept. 30 at 6:30 p.m.

To register for these virtual sessions, visit the librarys new Business Resource Center website at http://www.aplbusinessresource.com under webinars. You can also register by calling the Donaldsonville location at (225) 473-8052. After registering, you will receive an email with more information on how to join the discussion(s) via Zoom. If you happen to miss a class, training sessions will be recorded and can be viewed later on the Business Resource Center website.

Visit with local folk artist Alvin Batiste and help the Ascension Parish Library celebrate 60 years of library service. Batiste will be painting during the celebration in Donaldsonville from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 22.

A classic cars on display and other activities are also planned. For more information, call the library at (225) 473-8052.

Ascension Parish Library hosts "Days Gone By: A Look at Donaldsonvilles Pas"t with Sidney Marchand III at 2 p.m. Sept. 15 on Zoom. Born and raised in Donaldsonville, Marchand is the grandson of Sidney Marchand Sr., local historian, mayor, attorney and author of the well-known collection of books on Donaldsonville history.

Marchand will share historic photos and images in this virtual glimpse back in time of Old Donaldsonville and talk about how this historic town has changed.

To register for this virtual presentation on Zoom, call the library at (225) 473-8052. You will receive an email with meeting information on how to join the live session.

Visit any Ascension Parish Library location starting Monday, Sept. 21, and pick up a Comic Book Fun packet. Inside, find the instructions and materials you need to create your own comic book as well as a TV bingo sheet. Use the bingo sheet to play TV bingo while you watch an Inspector Gadget cartoon episode on Hoopla! Check out our Comic Book Fun YouTube video at youtube.myapl.org to find cool links to e-comic books and more!

Editor's Note: This column was changed on Aug. 9 to announce the cancellation of the planned Household Hazardous Waste day.

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Around Ascension for Sept. 9, 2020 | Ascension | theadvocate.com - The Advocate

Ascension Living can help keep seniors in their homes – KSDK.com

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The Live at Home program from Ascension Living can help keep seniors active, healthy, and engaged!

ST. LOUIS There is a program that can help keep seniors comfortable and safe in their own homes. One of Danas favorite people and former 5 On Your Side Meteorologist, Mike Roberts is here to tell us all about Ascension Livings Live at Home program.

Mike tells us that he is now the Business Development Manager for a new program from Ascension Living called Live at Home. Ascension is headquartered right here in St. Louis, and Live At Home is unique in that it provides an opportunity for seniors to remain in their homes while staying, active healthy and engaged.

Home is where most seniors want to stay, and right now it is probably the safest place for them to be. Ascension Living, Live at Home understands that no two seniors are the same and you can get a care package specifically tailored to your needs. You can sign up for as much or a little help as you need. There is a 24/7 concierge phone line, transportation, meals programs, home cleaning, and more! You will even get a Wellness Partner to help you every step of the way.

You can learn more by calling the concierge phone line at 855-744-7282 is the concierge phone line, or visit AscensionLiving.org/liveathome

THIS ARTICLE INVOLVES COMMERCIAL CONTENT. THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FEATURED APPEAR AS PAID ADVERTISING. FOR MORE INFORMATION, EMAIL US AT SMSL@KSDK.COM.

SHOW ME ST. LOUIS IS A PART OF 5 ON YOUR SIDE AND FEATURES ST. LOUIS EVENTS, COMPANIES, BUSINESS PEOPLE AND OTHER GUESTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY.

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Ascension Living can help keep seniors in their homes - KSDK.com

Aces all around: Efficient Parkview Baptist excels in 3-0 victory over East Ascension – The Advocate

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Experience can never guarantee a volleyball victory. But it came up aces in more ways than one for Parkview Baptist.

The senior-laden Eagles recorded 19 aces during a 3-0 victory over East Ascension on Thursday night and PBS (2-0) won 25-9, 25-13 and 25-5 in the nondistrict matchup between teams from different divisions.

Weve been practicing hard and changing up the lineup to see what will work best for us, Parkview's Taylor Sharer said. We have close to the same lineup we had last year and I think that is a huge advantage for us. We have played together so long, which helps with the chemistry of the team.

The 5-foot-10 Sharer and teammate Madison Cassidy made the most of their swings as outside hitters. Both players finished with 10 kills for the Division IV Eagles. Sharer had four aces, while setter Morgan Lambert led the way with seven aces and 10 assists.

It was a game of contrasts because Parkviews lineup includes 10 seniors. East Ascension (0-3) entered the season with a lineup of primarily first-year varsity starters. Melinna Carrero led the Spartans with three kills and two assists.

Our goal this year is to learn because we have some very young kids on the floor, EAHS coach Jamie Gilmore Simmons said. Its going be a process and this wont be about where we start, it will be about what we learn and how we finish.

There were some things I thought we did improve on today. They (the Eagles) are an experienced team and they play like it.

PBS displayed its experience in serve-receive throughout the match. The Eagles pushed the Spartans to the baseline to retrieve long serves multiple times to record aces. And when Division I EAHS got comfortable with that, Parkview would drop a short serve just over the net for a point.

Lambert ended the second set with a pair of aces. Six PBS players recorded aces in the final set. When the Eagles did score via an ace, Sharer and Cassidy were connected on kills down the line or crosscourt. Parkview scored 10 of the first 11 points in the last set.

East Ascension is young and they are learning, Parkview coach Becky Madden said. What I talked to our girls about was playing our game and being as consistent as possible. Make sure we are talking and communicating. I thought we did that.

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Aces all around: Efficient Parkview Baptist excels in 3-0 victory over East Ascension - The Advocate

Duchess Camilla to be under legal duress following Prince Charles ascension to the throne – The News International

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A debate around Duchess Camillas royal title, following her husband Prince Charless ascension to the throne is up for public fury currently. The biggest reason being the loving soft corner many Brits still carry for the late Princess Diana.

Experts believe that if the Duchess were to change her title from, the lesser known Princess Consort to Queen Consort, a constitutional issue might arise. However, at the end of the day Clarence Houses statement about Duchess Camillas future title is something which her husband will ultimately decide.

Royal expert MacMarthanne spoke out about this legal loophole during a conversation with Express.UK and was quoted saying, "Upon his accession, the Duchess of Cornwall will automatically become Queen Consort. There has been much speculation over this issue principally because of the sensitivities relating to Diana, Princess of Wales."

He went on to say, "This, however, does not change the fact that in law the duchess will become Queen Consort. Indeed, presently she is entitled to be known as Princess of Wales, but again mindful of Diana, Princess of Wales the decision was taken to use one of Prince Charles subsidiary titles. There has been much debate as to what title will be taken when Charles becomes King, Princess Consort being one."

"There is no precedent for such a style, but that does not preclude its eventual use, nor would its use mitigate her legal right to be recognised as Queen Consort."

Britains University College London's Constitution Unit also put forward another legal reason why Duchess Camilla might not warrant the title of Queen Consort.

The official site of the university states, "Under common law the spouse of a King automatically becomes Queen. But there are two possible reasons why Camilla might not assume the title. The first is the argument that Camilla cannot become Queen because her 2005 civil marriage to Prince Charles was not valid."

"The argument runs as follows: because the Marriage Acts from 1753 have explicitly excepted royal marriages from their provisions, the only valid marriage which a member of the royal family could contract in England was a religious marriage in the Church of England."

While this claim was dismissed by The Lord Chancellor in 2005, the Duchesss title frenzy might still pose a threat later down the line.

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Duchess Camilla to be under legal duress following Prince Charles ascension to the throne - The News International

John Couvillon to speak at Ascension GOP Roundtable – Weekly Citizen

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Staff Report| Gonzales Weekly Citizen

John Couvillon,president and founderofJMC Analytics and Polling, apolitical consulting firm,will be the featured speaker at the SeptemberAscension GOP Roundtable,sponsored by Ascension Republican Women.The Roundtable will begin at 11:30 a.m. Sept. 17 at the Clarion Inn, 1500 W. Highway 30 in Gonzales, with a meet-and-greet. The event will begin at noon.

Couvillon holds aB.S. in Accounting from Louisiana State University and aMasters Degree in Information Systems. His political expertise is sought frompublications such as the National Journal, Business Insider, The Hill, POLITICO,Roll Call, Campaigns and Elections, Real Clear Politics, and the Wall Street Journal. Couvillons polling in the 2019 Louisiana governors race made him a finalist for the Reed Awards for polling by Campaigns and Elections Magazine.

2020 Republican candidates are welcome to meet and greet with guests.

Cost for the lunch is $22, with a choice of three entrees. The event is open to the public, and guests are welcome. Reservations are requested. RSVP:225-921-5187or e-mail:ARWrUS@aol.com. Payments will be collected at the door (checks and cash preferred).

Entree Choices are: Fried Catfish, Fried Shrimp or Marinated Chicken. All meals include a salad, stuffed potato, iced tea and dessert.

Members and guests are asked to bring non-perishable items for the St. Theresa Food Bank.

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John Couvillon to speak at Ascension GOP Roundtable - Weekly Citizen

20 Highly Anticipated Albums We Can’t Wait To Hear This Fall/Winter – This Song is Sick

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Its hard to imagine its gone by this quickly, but 2020 is already approaching its final quarter. Regardless of the extremely turbulent times, there has still been a ton of new music that has come out, and theres still plenty more to come.

With projects on the way from the likes of GRiZ, Porter Robinson, Gorillaz, Joey Bada$$, and ZHU, we have whole heap of good music to look forward to. We went and looked up who exactly had announced albums for the remainder of this year, and compiled them into a list. Some our dropping as soon as this week, with others still mostly shrouded in mystery.

As we approach the final stretch of 2020, here are 20 the albums were most looking forward to hearing before the year wraps up.

The Flaming Lips American HeadRelease Date:September 11

The Flaming Lips never seem to stop making music. And for that, were thankful. Their sixteenth studio album American Head is due to be released this week on September 11. Frontman Wayne Coyne said that the interview was inspired by the life and travels of a young Tom Petty, a nostalgic album about longing for home while being on the road. Were eager to see what American Headbrings.

Joji NectarRelease Date: September 25

Joji will be releasing his sophomore album, Nectar, on 88rising in just a couple weeks. After channeling a very melancholy sound on most of BALLADS 1, were very eager to see the direction he takes for this one. Hes already released Breathe and Daylight, with Diplo.

Action Bronson Only For DolphinsRelease Date:September 25

As we mentioned in our coverage of the lead single GoldenEye, Action Bronson STAYS working in the studio. Now, in the wake of the single drop, hes announced a new full-length album Only For Dolphins. According to Bronson, it meant to be a tribute to dolphins and their overall intelligence, and the fact that Bronson believes they operate on the same wavelength as he does (but of course). With production credits from the likes of Alchemist, Budgie, Samiyam, Daringer, and Bronson himself, this oneis sure to be a strong follow up to 2018sWhite Bronco.

Jadu Heart Hyper Romance Release Date: September 25

In conjunction with the release of their newest single Walk the Line Bristol-based duo Jadu Heart also announced that theyll be dropping their second album Hyper Romance on September 25th. Set to be a further exploration of their unique blend of raw, energetic psych-rock mixed with sonic healing, were excited to see how their songwriting prowess has expanded since their last release.

Sufjan Stevens The AscensionRelease Date:September 25

Indie folk idol Sufjan Stevens is releasing his first album in five years on September 25, The Ascension. Stevens has kept busy over the past few years working on various projects like the exquisite Call Me By Your Name soundtrack and the score for 2017 ballet The Decalogue. One single, America, has been released so far from of The Ascensionand it is brilliant, in its own melancholic blissful way. Stevens heavenly vocals on America make us look forward to his latest even more.

ford. The Color Of NothingRelease date: October 16

ford. is gearing up to release his sophomore album, and its a return to ODESZAs tastemaking label, Foreign Family Collective. Weve already gotten a taste of it with singles such as the title track and Hold On. The Color Of Nothing is due out on October 16.

Gorillaz Song Machine: Season 1 Strange TimezRelease Date: October 23

After months of Gorillaz dropping off singles from a mysterious project called Song Machine, we finally have a release date. The project, now fully titled Song Machine: Season 1 Strange Timez, is out October 23. Each track stars a different guest feature, and theyve enlisted some of the best: Beck, Elton John, The Cure, and ScHoolboy Q to name a few

Kasbo The Making Of A ParacosmRelease Date: October 23

Another one coming off Foreign Family Collective, Kasbos sophomore effort, The Making Of A Paracosm is one were very much looking forward to. The two singles Play Pretend and Show You have captivated us with a fresh new sound from the unique Swedish talent.

John Frusciante MayaRelease Date: October 23

John Frusciante, the former (and now current) guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been releasing solo electronic music under the name Trickfinger. This time, in honor of his late cate,Maya, John will be releasing the album under his own name. Its an experimental, IDM sound that you can get a preview of with the lead single, Amethblowl.

Malaa Illegal Mixtape Vol. 3Release Date: TBA

Instead of releasing albums, Malaa chooses to drop mixtapes. He announced the volume three of hisIllegal Mixtapeseries back in June with the drop of the banger DONT TALK. Still no release date on this one, but with all the music hes releasing recently, its probably right around the corner.

GRiZ Chasing The Golden Hour Pt. 3Release date:TBA

GRiZ announced recently that he had finished completing Chasing The Golden Hour Pt. 3, his project focused on the perfect sunset vibe. Were big fans of parts one and two, so knowing that he is sitting on this one, were hoping he decided to drop it before the end of the year.

J. Cole The Fall OffRelease Date:TBA

While the release of J.Coles latest album The Fall Off is still up in the air, he has treated fans to two new tracks off of his upcoming project. Infectious trackLion King On Ice accompanied by old-school vibe The Climb Back, both released in July, have had J Cole fans everywhere hungry for more. The rapper said he wanted to take his time with The Fall Off, which is why there is no official release date yet.

Alicia Keys AliciaRelease Date:TBA

Alicia Keys has already had quite the year. With the release of her inspirational smash hit Underdog earlier this year, Alicia has unsurprisingly managed to make her superstardom span decades. Her seventh studio album, Alicia, is slated for release sometime in 2020. While we dont have an official release date yet, were looking forward to what this icon will deliver next.

Tchami YEAR ZERORelease date: TBA

Despite championing a record label focusing on a unique sound for the past few years, Tchami has yet to release an album. Thats coming to a close soon, however, with the drop of his debut album titled YEAR ZERO. This one was announced in late May, however a release date has yet to be finalized. You can check out the handful singles released from the project, here and here.

Porter Robinson nurtureRelease Date: TBA

The highly-anticipated follow up to Porter Robinsons 2014 Worlds project is finally happening this year. The project is called nurture, and weve already been gifted three singles from the project so far. There was a slight delay with the project, but Porter has already continued the rollout, so it could arrive any day now.

Red Hot Chili Peppers TBA

RHCP recently announced that John Frusciante was returning on the next Red Hot Chili Peppers album, and weve been at the edge of our seats ever since. Frusciante was instrumental for some of their best work. No further details have been announced since, but its been a solid nine months since. Theyre due.

ZHU TBA

At the beginning of 2020, ZHU announced that he had an album that he was aiming to drop by the end of the year. With all the new music and merch that hes been putting out recently, we have no reason to doubt that its coming soon.

Phoenix TBA

Its been a few years since Phoenixs 2017 album Te Amo, but with the release of a new single last month, and subsequent information coming out via both their own social channels as well as other news outlets, it looks like a new release from the beloved indie-pop outfit is imminent. Ever since their 2009 album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix dominated our listening rotation, weve been waiting with baited breath every time new material is announced. And thankfully, now it looks like our latest wait is almost over.

Joey Bada$$ TBA

Joey made a triumphant return recently with the release of The Light Pack, three brand new tracks that show Joey at his finest yet. Joey confirmed an album on the way when he tweeted: Wow, this is really my best album. No release date announced yet.

BROCKHAMPTON TBA

In May, BROCKHAMPTON delivered two new singles, and even announced the release of not one, but two new albums during a private livestream. The singles, however, have since been removed from YouTube, so we cant be sure whats to come of the albums. Their socials have been quiet since then, but were hoping Kevin Abstract stays true to his word!

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20 Highly Anticipated Albums We Can't Wait To Hear This Fall/Winter - This Song is Sick

Check out the Week 1 High School Volleyball Schedule for Baton Rouge – The Advocate

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Week 1 schedule

Most match-ups begin with at least one subvarsity contest. Games listed are being played in the Baton Rouge area.

Central at Parkview Baptist, 4 p.m.

Dunham at St. John, 4 p.m.

Hammond at Walker, 4 p.m.

Livonia at False River Academy, 4 p.m.

St. Amant at St. Josephs Academy, 4 p.m.

West Feliciana at Baton Rouge High, 4 p.m.

University at St. Michael, 4 p.m.

McKinley at Ascension Christian, 5 p.m.

Thrive Academy at Capitol, 5 p.m.

Woodlawn at Central Private, 5 p.m.

Baker at Istrouma, 5 p.m.

Live Oak at Madison Prep, 5 p.m.

Family Christian at Port Allen, 5 p.m.

St. Michael at Dutchtown, 4 p.m.

Live Oak at Brusly, 5 p.m.

East Ascension at Central, 5 p.m.

Zachary at Dunham, 5 p.m.

Baton Rouge High at Episcopal, 5 p.m.

Northeast at Istrouma, 5 p.m.

Catholic-Pointe Coupee at Liberty, 5 p.m.

Cristo Rey at McKinley, 5 p.m.

Baker at Tara, 5 p.m.

St. John at West Feliciana

East Ascension at Parkview Baptist, 4 p.m.

Ponchatoula at Central, 4 p.m.

Terrebonne at St. Amant, 4:30 p.m.

South Terrebonne at Ascension Catholic, 5 p.m.

Central Private at Ascension Christian, 5 p.m.

McKinley at Baker, 5 p.m.

Episcopal at Brusly, 5 p.m.

Iota at Catholic-Pointe Coupee, 5 p.m.

Thrive Academy at East Iberville, 5 p.m.

Slaughter Community Charter at Family Christian, 5 p.m.

Walker at Liberty, 5 p.m.

Zachary at University, 5 p.m.

Plaquemine at West Feliciana, 5 p.m.

White Castle at Woodlawn, 5 p.m.

E.D. White at St. Amant, 9:30 a.m.

Sam Houston at Dutchtown, 11 a.m.

Ascension Catholic at East Ascension, 11 a.m.

Zachary at Live Oak, 11 a.m.

Sam Houston at East Ascension, 2 p.m.

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Check out the Week 1 High School Volleyball Schedule for Baton Rouge - The Advocate

VIDEO: Extreme Performer David Blaine Floats High Above the Earth From a Bunch of Balloons – ourcommunitynow.com

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Courtesy of David Blaine Ascension (YouTube)

Illusionist, magician, and performer David Blaine, known for his mind-boggling feats,successfully accomplished another daunting stunt earlier this week. Blaine reached an altitude of about 25,000 feet by floating skyward using only heliumballoons.

The stunt, "Ascension",was likely the most dangerous and ambitious feat he has ever attempted. He partnered with YouTube Originals to live-stream the event, which he says was inspired by his daughter and his ownchildhood dream. Blaine spentmonths training prepping for the stunt; becoming an expert at skydiving and flying balloons, as well as acclimating to cooler temps found in higher air.

On Wednesday, September 2, Blaine put all those hours of training to good use when he performed the high-flying feat. After two hours of prep, he began his ascent over Page, Arizona. Gripping a bunch of about 50 large helium balloonsthese were not your birthday party variety balloons;they were much larger andoutfitted with camerasBlaine carried weights on him that he periodically dropped to increase his ascension once he lifted off.

Watch the stunt below:

The illusionist had a goal of reaching 18,000 feet, and he exceeded that by hitting a high of 24,900 feet. Once there, he let the balloons go and skydived and parachuted back to the ground where he landed safely. The stunt itself took about a half an hour, from lift-off.

An entire team of engineers, stunt experts, weather experts, and more were involved in the project.

What do you think about this high-flying stunt? Would you want to float above the earth from a bunch of balloons? What other mind-bending stunts would you want to see someone like Blane perform? Sound off on the comments.

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VIDEO: Extreme Performer David Blaine Floats High Above the Earth From a Bunch of Balloons - ourcommunitynow.com