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1933 Industries Partners with Five Star Extracts for the Production of its Exclusive Cannabis Products in Nevada – Stock Day Media

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

PR Newswire

VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 6, 2020

VANCOUVER, BC,Aug. 6, 2020/PRNewswire/ 1933 Industries Inc. (the Company or 1933 Industries) (CSE: TGIF) (OTCQX: TGIFF), a vertically-integrated cannabis consumer packaged goods company, is pleased to announce the addition of top brand Five Star Extracts to its select roster of licensed partners inNevada. The Companys subsidiary, Alternative Medicine Association LC (AMA), signed a licensing agreement withCalifornia-based Five Star Group, LLC, (Five Star Extracts or Five Star) for the cultivation, manufacture and sale of Five Star Extracts branded products inNevadafor a one-year term.

The Companys newest partnership reaffirms AMAs position as a top producer of cannabis concentrates inNevada. AMAs expertise in the field has been developed over several years as one of the first cultivation and production licensees in the state. AMA will manufacture Five Star products, including its exclusive flavored Double Shot line and flavored cannabis tinctures. Under the licensing agreement, AMA will manufacture, distribute and sell the licensed products, ensuring compliance withNevadaregulations as well as third-party laboratory testing and certification. The licensed products have already received the approval from the newly formed State of Nevada Cannabis Compliance Board (CCB).

Five Star Extracts are some of the highest quality THC products in the market. Five Star follows strict proprietary extraction procedures to achieve clarity and potency for a smooth cannabis product that stands above the rest. We are excited to work with a team who shares the same high standards, passion and pride for crafting top quality cannabis products, stated Mr.Jordan Stroum, Director of Sales for 1933 Industries brands and brand partners. Five Star brings a differentiated approach to their product offerings with an innovative suite of products that are easy to consume, discreet and can be taken on the go. The Double Shot line is a fast-acting beverage containing 20mg of THC in a variety of flavors and their cannabis-infused tincture beverage enhancers with mix and match flavours are unique to our brand offerings. We are excited to assist Five Star grow its brand inNevada.

Mr.Jason Winkler, CEO & Co-Founder of Five Star Extracts, stated, Five Star is very excited to expand the brands footprint in additionalstates with trusted and like-minded partners such as 1933. We are looking forward to having our Five Star quality product lineup and executing the same marketing initiatives wepride ourselveson withinNevada.

About 1933 Industries Inc.

1933 Industries is a vertically-integrated, growth-orientated company, focusing on the cultivation and manufacturing of cannabis consumer branded goods in a wide range of product formats. Operating through two subsidiaries, the Company controls all aspects of the value chain with cultivation, extraction, processing, and manufacturing assets supporting its diversified portfolio of cannabis brands and licensing partners.

Our award-winning proprietary portfolio of brands include: AMA flower and AMA concentrates,as well as CBD-infusedCanna Hemp, Canna Hemp X, Canna Fused, and hemp-specificproducts. Partners under licensing agreements include:Birdhouse Skateboards,Blonde Cannabis, Bloom, Denver Dab Co., Five Star Extracts, Grizzly Griptape, The Pantry Company, PLUGplay, and The Original Jack Herer.

The Company owns 91% of Alternative Medicine Association, LC (AMA), and 100% of Infused MFG LLC.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Notice regarding Forward Looking Statements: This news release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words anticipate, continue, estimate, expect, may, will, project, should, believe and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this news release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Companys disclosure documents, which can be found under the Companys profile onwww.sedar.com. 1933 Industries undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

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SOURCE 1933 Industries Inc.

1933 Industries Partners with Five Star Extracts for the Production of its Exclusive Cannabis Products in Nevada - Stock Day Media

Global Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market Know What Factors Will Drive The Market In Upcoming Years And How It Is Going To Impact On Global…

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Global Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market presents comprehensive insights into the present and upcoming industry trends, enabling the readers to identify the products and services, hence driving the revenue increase and effectiveness. The research report presents a complete breakdown of all the major factors affecting the market on a global and regional scale, including drivers, constraints, threats, challenges, opportunities, and Complementary and Alternative Medicine industry-specific trends. Further, the report mentions global facts and figures along with downstream and upstream analysis of leading players.

The study gives answers to the following key questions:

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Major Players:

Columbia NutritionalIyengar Yoga InstituteHelio USAHerb PharmPure encapsulationsHerbal HillsYoga TreeNordic NaturalsDeepure PlusJohn Schumachers Unity Woods Yoga CenterThe Healing CompanyQuantum Touch

This research presents Complementary and Alternative Medicine market growth rates and the market value based on market dynamics, growth factors. The complete knowledge is based on the newest innovation in the business, opportunities, and trends. In adding up to SWOT analysis by key suppliers, the report contains an all-inclusive market analysis and major players landscape.

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The regional segmentation covers:

Segmentation by Type:

BotanicalsAcupunctureMind, Body, and YogaMagnetic Intervention

Segmentation by Application:

Direct ContactE-trainingDistance Correspondence

Any Query Or Specific Requirement? Ask to our Research expert @

https://www.globalmarketers.biz/report/pharma-&-healthcare/global-complementary-and-alternative-medicine-market-2019-by-company,-regions,-type-and-application,-forecast-to-2024/141733#inquiry_before_buying

Report Objectives

Global Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market Size, Status and Forecast 2020-2024

Browse Detailed TOC & Table Of Figures

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Global Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market Know What Factors Will Drive The Market In Upcoming Years And How It Is Going To Impact On Global...

Letters to the Editor | Opinion – Ahwatukee Foothills News

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Applauds readers AFN

essay on race in America

I write to applaud the opinion piece What I know, Dont Know when it Comes to Race so beautifully written by AFN guest writer Christopher Gentis in the July 29 edition of your paper.

I have known and admired Chris for many years. I knew him, as we both served together on the Phoenix Police Department, as a bright, conscientious, professional and caring police officer and police leader.

I was able to observe how he supervised his subordinates and when possible, modeled humane problem-solving in our Phoenix community. Over the years as an Ahwatukee resident, I have also admired his work on the many boards and civic efforts he has led to make this community better, fairer and more accepting.

Chriss penetrating discussion and heartfelt understanding of the racial history and disparities in our country, reflected in this piece, is a must read an expos I will be sharing with my good white friends and neighbors when they inevitably ask What do they (BLM) want? We have made so much progresswhy cant they just be patient?

Thank you, Chris. My admiration continues to soar for your timely contributions to our community peace and understanding.

-Jerry A. Oliver

QuikTrip a bad idea for

current 40th Street

I am a resident of the Paseo II community and have been for many years. I decided to pick this community for its well-kept environment for my family retirement calmness. I also chose this community for my family and retirement based on its well- kept and peaceful environment.

The piece of property that is being proposed to house the QT, located off the South East side of Cottonwood Lane and 40th Street near the east exit ramp of the 202 across from the Phoenix Bus Terminal, is in my opinion a horrendous proposal. Please consider my reasoning:

1. The lot is too small to accommodate the number of patrons and their vehicles, i.e. semi-trucks, morning commuters.

2. The intersection in question is already congested due to the bus terminal and early morning traffic.

3. The proposed single entrance to the QT would contribute to major congestion and potential hazards including accidents.

4. A business should have at least two points of ingress and egress for comfortable operation.

Problem solution: Do not build the business at all in that location. Build the proposed QT on the North East Corner of Cottonwood Lane and 40th Street, next to the medical facilities where the property is larger and would help resolve the above issues.

- James C. Mead

Conservancy survey shows skewed thought

My husband and I were elated that someone had taken an interest in the Golf Course. We became very frustrated with the Conservancys interference and on July 23 expressed our displeasure with their measures.

The following is an exchange that took place between July 23 and July 25 and gives the readers an idea of how numbers can be manipulated.

The CWC is not opposed to having a community vote, as long as everything is done legally. Our attorneys say that the Board cannot change the CC&Rs for land the association does not own. The Board disagrees, so a trial is being scheduled to decide whos right in court. Lets consider all options, have a vote... but lets do it legally. That seems reasonable.

We are also quite willing to review any proposal from The Edge, and they are certainly free to sell their plan to the community. Thats what they did at Altadena School in late January. For their next proposal, the Edge have hired a Scottsdale PR agency and also started advertising in the AFN. So, lets be clear. No one is stopping the Edge from presenting any plans.

We believe the community should have the final say. In fact, we believe so strongly in listening to the community that we funded a broad survey of over 2,500 households across Club West in June (every address the post office had). Before presenting options to the community, we think it is wise to ask the community what they want (and dont want) in advance. The survey had over 800 respondents, and is statistically projectable to the entire community with a margin of error of only +/-3%. We asked how they felt about 4 different options -- if they want a restored golf course, a park, leave as is or new houses.

The survey indicates that the community could be happy with 3 of these options (golf, park or leave as is), but the vast majority (80%) is decidedly against the prospect of new housing. This was crystal clear. Unfortunately, the only option being considered by the HOA Board or sold by the new land owners is the one that the community doesnt want.

The majority (77%) would like to see the course re-opened, but 85% would be happy with just a park if the golf option is unrealistic. More telling is that 81% of the community would be content to leave the land just as is if thats what it takes to avoid new houses. Not everyone likes as is, but are we going to ignore a majority of 81%?

Further, it is also significant that 78% of people who do NOT live on the golf course say it would be unethical to build new houses behind their neighbors that do live on the course. Not everyone feels this way, but 78% if a significant majority that cannot be ignored.

If fielding this survey was butting in in anyones opinion, then so be it. Apparently, the vast majority of the community is glad we did, based on the survey results.

-Club West Conservancy

Thank you for your response. It gave us a window into your skewed thought process. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: you do not have the majority voice of this community.

Eight hundred responses are only 1/3 of the residents. Obviously, many others, or should I say the majority, were not interested in your questionnaire. Relying on your questionnaire for answers to complicated questions was a mistake.

Yes and no answers will not suffice, considering the complexities of these issues.

The property is now owned by The Edge. They have taken an interest in our community and taken a chance with their personal finances to solve a serious problem which no one else wanted to address.

They should have a chance to develop a plan before any decisions are made. Your litigation which was voted on and approved by no one but at the same time affects all residents will push an ultimate solution months and months down the road. Our belief is that very few residents want that.

Too many issues are currently decided by a minority without giving thought to the majority. We do agree on one thing, the community should have the final word. Continuing to say that 78% of people who do not live on the golf course say it would be unethical to build new houses behind their neighbors is totally false.

What is unethical is your constant statement that a majority feels that way. Your credibility is brought into question when you continue to use these percentages to state your case.

We all know that there will never be another golf course because there is no water! The as is course of action is ridiculous. Leaving the golf course a barren waste land (i.e. The Lakes) is an option way below the quality of our community and its residents.

Now is the time for everyone to grow up and act like mature adults. The petty bickering needs to end and all residents need to unite in favor of a reasonable solution that solution is parkland.

We all need to face the reality that The Edge Group will have to build some homes somewhere within our community. Hopefully, the design will be amenable to everyone and make the land the quality we all want.

-Greg and Sandy Peterson

Our scientists will save us if we listen to them

Hopefully, Americans can see that the strain of anti-intellectualism that led to our current leadership is now killing Americans.

I would argue that it is not just the sciences of biology, virology, biochemistry, biophysics and so on that are important. They are greatly important and will more than likely save many of our lives.

But I believe going forward that psychology, psychiatry and history will be sciences that will be essential in healing the wounds that have been inflicted on us these last years and vitally important for keeping them from happening again.

Psychiatry and psychology are still considered mumbo jumbo by a segment of the American population, but they have been and will continue to be wildly important both in helping Americans recover from the effects of the virus and for helping us choose wisely in the future.

Had we been more attuned to theories of personality we may have noticed some things. I am not a psychiatrist, but if we consulted one, she would probably tell us that you would not need to be Sigmund Freud to figure out some simple things about personality.

For instance: If every candidate running for presidency for 50 years released their income taxes and there was huge pressure to do that and the person running does not, we can assume he is hiding something. Pretty obvious.

If we see patterns of cruelty, we may want to judge that person unfit to lead us. We have seen serious cruelty in the last four years from our leader. Cruelty is often a marker for mental health issues.

Making fun of a reporter with a disability, ordering children separated from their parents and put in cages, tweeting about women calling them dogs, fat and ugly are examples of needless cruelty. President Trumps latest cruelty was having a campaign rally in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

Encouraging people to ignore the advice of scientists. To gather inside without masks. This will certainly lead to needless suffering from the virus. Concern only for himself and his re-election and not his supporters is certainly cruel and should disqualify anyone from a leadership position.

Historians know that the tyrants of history engage in cruelty and suppression of opposition. Hitler, Stalin, Putin could all give orders to have people killed and not miss a moments sleep.

He degrades and denigrates members of his staff. At his recent rally in Tulsa Oklahoma, Trump announced that he asked his administrators to slow down testing. This is cruel. It does not allow Americans who believe themselves to be ill to get a test. It also allows the virus to spread and kill more Americans.

President Trumps most recent authoritarian and cruel move is to send unidentified federal officers to Portland. They are picking up U.S. citizens and hauling them off, with our citizens having no idea who just kidnapped them. They even shot one peaceful protester in the face with non-lethal rounds, shattering bones.

I taught students that authoritarian governments have secret police forces that only answer to, and take orders from, the dictator, and that free counties should never stand for that.

Educating our nation in the biological sciences is huge to save our lives; teaching our nation psychology and history will help us save our democracy from authoritarianism.

-Barry Smith

FDA is leading Americans down the wrong path

The Food and Drug Administration has fought alternative medicine for more than 20 years. Alternative medicines pose a huge problem for them, as they can cure any disease, even death, whereas mainstream medicine only supports Big Pharmas drugs.

These drugs are foreign to the body and challenge the immune system. Nearly all of these drugs have side effects, causing other diseases, sometimes forcing the patient to use other drugs for these new diseases.

Even our vaccines are bad. Twenty years ago, Dr. Garth Nicholson, director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine, decided to inspect vaccines. His claim to fame was that he directed one of the five most powerful microscopes in America. He found that the major contaminant in vaccines was mycoplasmas.

As Dr. Nicholson has shown, when children get vaccinated they are receiving mycoplasmas which activate all internal diseases. He published this info in one of the major journals for all to see, but the FDA did nothing to correct this problem with vaccines, as evident by the number of childrens hospitals in this country .

When God put life on earth, he put mechanisms in humans to prevent children from getting a disease. The human body has to grow to late teens to start producing mycoplasmas, which accumulate in its body as you age. Mycoplasmas are required to activate disease cells for diseases to occur.

Lets take our present problem: We have a coronavirus ravaging our country. The World Health Organization has already labeled the virus as a global health emergency.

Our country is gearing up its testing, using diagnostic kits, which shouldnt be what we focus on. We have a medical system that has no treatment for this disease. Also, there is no vaccine. The whole system is now focused on vaccines because our government is bankrolling this effort.

Alternative medicine has many cures, but the FDA wont use these treatments, not because they dont work, but if these treatments cure, then the government will quit funding Big Pharma. So, the FDA is sacrificing the health of our society for the all mighty buck.

This virus is spreading because we are relying on everyones immune system to be functioning well enough to stop it. This cannot happen without help from medicine. If the present treatment continues, all patients with weak immune system will die because their immunity systems are not efficiently functioning.

How long are we going to wait for the correct approach to this virus?

It looks like we need to toss out our coronavirus team, and get a team that isnt led by FDA people, people who are willing to accept natural alternative medicine and spread the word to the public that they are going to have to quit depending upon the government and protect themselves from this disease.

-Don Crook

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Letters to the Editor | Opinion - Ahwatukee Foothills News

11 Healing Revolutionary Herbs Used In Teas – Anti Aging News

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Throughout history, herbs have been used for different purposes. Yet, there was no scientific information about their specific abilities in recorded history. However, this didnt stop our ancestors from using herbs for ingredients in teas, brews, and various meals for their healing purposes.

As modern medicine and technology have provided the ability to test the many health benefits of all sorts of herbs that are used in tea, lets look at ten of them and how they can help treat ailments and the body.

1. Ginger

Ginger is a popular herb present in many meals and drinks mainly as spice. Its health benefits are wide and significant. Using ginger for morning tea can help ease morning sickness in pregnant women. Other known benefits include preventing heart disease, decreasing the risk of cancer, and settling an upset stomach.

2. Cannabis

Many cannabis users know medical marijuana is best ingested by eating, smoking, or vaping it. Nonetheless, very few people are familiar with the less traditional methods of infusing it in tea. It is even considered a healthier and gentler way of introducing CBD or THC into the body than smoking.

Cannabis (marijuana or hemp) usage isnt a new innovation. Different cultures have used it for its therapeutic effects throughout history. If you have any throat or mouth conditions, or any respiratory diseases, cannabis tea is an excellent alternative that helps you prevent these risks associated with smoking.

3. Peppermint

A healthy body is usually stress-free with a well-functioning immune system. Peppermint tea is placed in high regard when it comes to stress and anxiety relief. Thus, placing less strain on your immune system and allowing it to work at prime condition. Peppermint Tea also facilitates sleep and can even help with bad breath.

4. Chamomile

Chamomile tea is rich with chamazulene, which possesses analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and antispasmodic properties. A hot cup of chamomile tea also treats colds, reduces period pains, and helps calm stomach aches. Its qualities are popular throughout Asia.

Additionally, the intake of chamomile tea helps reduce stress and aging. Both factors are regular problems people face daily due to the daily hassles of life. In all, chamomile helps boost the immune system in its way.

5. Hawthorn

This is a go-to herb for blood and heart issues. Drinking hawthorn tea promotes heart functions by first decreasing blood fats and stabilizing blood pressure. Both high and low blood pressure can be treated with hawthorn tea since the herb can serve as a vasodilator.

6. Ginseng

For centuries, Ginseng has been a traditional and popular herb in China. It is so popular in China that people subconsciously think of China whenever the name Ginseng arises in a conversation. The herb comes in three different types; white, red, and fresh.

The herb is beneficial for the body as it primarily boosts the immune system. Additionally, it contains relaxing effects similar to CBD, which is one of the reasons why CBD products are so popular. Yet, Ginseng is more known for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. The male reproductive system also enjoys excellent benefits from the regular intake of Ginseng.

7. Hibiscus

Hibiscus tea comes in different flavors due to the variations of the herb. However, its medicinal properties are all the same. Studies prove that the herb works well in lowering blood pressure and blood fat levels. Both conditions are threatening towards human life, as many lives are lost yearly due to these conditions.

Additionally, the intake of hibiscus helps boost your liver. Liver health studies have been conducted where hibiscus extracts provided protection qualities.

8. Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a great herb that can be beneficial to your health when taken sparingly. The presence of little coumarin can counter the health benefits including fighting off infections.

9. Echinacea

With a total of nine species, this herb has only three with healing qualities. The presence of active compounds in echinacea is impressive since the variety is outstanding. A few of such active compounds include phenolic acids, polyacetylenes, rosmarinic acid, and caffeic acid. Together, these active compounds make echinacea tea a healthy herbal drink by helping fight cancer cells.

10. Blackberry Leaves

The tannins and vitamin C levels are impressively high in blackberry leaves. Together, you can use blackberry leaves to tackle diarrhea and gastrointestinal inflammation. The combination also improves the immune system and speeds up tissue repair processes. This quality makes the herb great for recovery from open wounds.

11. Jasmine

Like other beneficial herbal teas, Jasmine teas burst with antioxidants. The Jasmine plant has a great aroma when infused with green, white, or black tea. Typically, Jasmine tea is made alongside green tea leaves, which merges with the herb to control weight.

The high presence of polyphenols in the herb is excellent for heart protection. These polyphenols also help lower the risk of Parkinsons and Alzheimers diseases. Jasmine tea, combined with cannabis products, prove to control Alzheimers effectively.

Conclusion

The healing qualities of herbs are great for the immune system. With different active ingredients and antioxidants, our list of ten healing herbs is noteworthy. Depending on your choice, theres bound to be significant health benefits from the herbal tea of your choice.

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11 Healing Revolutionary Herbs Used In Teas - Anti Aging News

UPDATE 1-Pandemic just a bump in the road for Sturgis motorcycle rally – Reuters

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

(Updates with quotes, details from rallygoer Bina)

By Brad Brooks

Aug 7 (Reuters) - At least 100,000 people are expected to attend the 10-day annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakotas Black Hills that opened on Friday, with its economic heft overriding concerns it could be a coronavirus super-spreading event.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the event that in normal years sees upward of 500,000 motorcycle enthusiasts descend on the small town of Sturgis and the surrounding area. The rally injects $800 million into South Dakotas economy.

Local authorities expect to take an economic hit with fewer in attendance this year and have halved the number of vendors allowed to participate to 300 in total.

But they are still counting on a massive crowd - one of the biggest in the world since the coronavirus pandemic began - to pack concerts with at least 34 national acts playing. Most rallies bring a sea of black leather, boots and bandanas into Sturgis, which has a population of 6,900 in normal times.

The rally is going to stay the same in many respects, said Meade County Sheriff Ron Merwin. Its going to be a lot of people and a lot of motorcycles all over the place. People are tired of being penned up by this pandemic.

Merwin said many locals have voiced concerns about the public health impact the rally will have. South Dakota has fared better than most states - it ranks No. 38th in COVID-19 deaths per capita, according to a Reuters tally - but cases have spiked in recent weeks as hotspots moved into the Midwest.

The sheriffs office overlooks Sturgis Main Street, and from Merwins vantage point he saw few precautions taken as the town began to fill up Thursday evening.

Im sitting here and Im watching people walk up and down the street, watching people ride up and down the street. A few have masks - most dont, he said. Theres not much we can do. Everybody is coming here with their eyes wide open. They know what theyre getting into.

More than 60% of Sturgis residents who responded to a survey the City Council mailed out in May said they wanted the rally canceled. But on June 15 the council voted to move ahead with the rally, though they canceled all city-sponsored events associated with it and included measures such as hand sanitizing stations.

Merwin and others interviewed said the event is considered an annual headache by most residents, but one that must be stomached considering the money and jobs it brings to the region.

With the rally lasting more than a week and people flocking to massive campsites in the Black Hills National Forest and in nearby towns, trying to halt the event would have been fruitless, local officials said.

It would have been just as irresponsible for us to not prepare for these people who were going to show up regardless of what we wanted, City Councilwoman Beka Zerbst said. Its just common sense to be prepared.

Zerbst said before the pandemic organizers were expecting upward of 800,000 people this year. She said it was anybodys guess how many will actually show up, but local leaders were counting on at least 100,000 people.

In a videotaped address to city residents the day after the City Council voted to move ahead with the rally, Mayor Mark Carstensen said throughout the pandemic, the state of South Dakota has been the freedom state and the city of Sturgis has stayed true to that.

Carstensen emphasized that public health could not be pitted against the economy and peoples ability to maintain livelihoods.

Its a situation where those can work together. Its not easy, the mayor said. But were all in this together.

Mitch Bina, a 61-year-old businessman from Dallas, was making his sixth pilgrimage to Sturgis this year with his wife, Christi. He said that safely navigating the rally should not be harder than living in a large city and managing to buy groceries or enjoy recreation in a park.

If we go somewhere and it gets too crowded, well just walk away, said Bina, who rides a 2008 Harley-Davidson Street Glide motorcycle.

Bina said he would spend most of his time riding in the Black Hills and not attending crowded venues or concerts. Despite Sturgis rowdy reputation, he didnt think anyone who wanted to maintain social distancing would have problems.

In Sturgis, your freedom ends where my nose begins, he said. Up there you have to respect peoples space, people really respect one another and that wont change. (Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Bill Tarrant, Lincoln Feast and Paul Simao)

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UPDATE 1-Pandemic just a bump in the road for Sturgis motorcycle rally - Reuters

The Crypto Daily Movers and Shakers August 1st, 2020 – Yahoo Finance

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Bitcoin, BTC to USD, rallied by 2.04% on Friday. Following a 0.05% gain on Thursday, Bitcoin ended the month up by 24.04% to $11,350.0.

A bearish start to the day saw Bitcoin fall to an early morning intraday low $10,990 before making a move.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $10,923.2, Bitcoin rose to a late afternoon intraday high $11,440.0.

Bitcoin broke through the first major resistance level at $11,255.4 and the second major resistance level at $11,387.8.

A late pullback saw Bitcoin fall back through the resistance levels before finding support.

Bitcoin broke back through the first major resistance level to wrap up the day at $11,350 levels.

The near-term bullish trend remained intact, supported by the latest move through to $11,000 levels. For the bears, Bitcoin would need to slide through the 62% FIB of $6,400 to form a near-term bearish trend.

Across the rest of the majors, it was a mixed day on Friday.

Binance Coin (+7.76%), Bitcoin Cash SV (+7.19%), and Ripples XRP (+6.22%) led the way.

Bitcoin Cash ABC (+2.22%), Ethereum (+3.46%), Litecoin (+2.46%), and Moneros XMR (+4.39%), also found strong support.

EOS (+1.36%), Stellars Lumen (+0.73%), Tezos (+1.44%), and Trons TRX (+1.93%) trailed the front runners.

Cardanos ADA bucked the trend, however, falling by 1.17%.

It was a bullish July for the crypto market.

Cardanos ADA surged by 67.38% to lead the majors.

Bitcoin Cash SV (+46.21%), Ethereum (+53.82%), Litecoin (+41.45%), Ripples XRP (+48.21%), and Stellars Lumen (+45.72%) also found strong support.

Binance Coin (+34.44%), Bitcoin Cash ABC (+34.87%), EOS (+30.56%), Moneros XMR (33.17%), Tezos (+20.69%), and Trons TRX (+20.39%) trailed the front runners.

In the current week, the crypto total market cap rose from a Monday low $285.49bn to a Monday high $335.81bn. At the time of writing, the total market cap stood at $326.94bn.

Bitcoins dominance rose from a Monday low 62.44% to a Tuesday high 64.58% before easing back. At the time of writing, Bitcoins dominance stood at 63.53.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was down by 0.82% to $11,257.0. A mixed start to the day saw Bitcoin rise to an early morning high $11,398 before falling to a low $11,238.0.

Bitcoin left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Elsewhere, it was a mixed start to the day.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin Cash ABC (+0.14%), Cardanos ADA (+0.21%), and Stellars Lumen (+0.69%) found early support.

It was a bearish start for the rest of the majors, however. Ripples XRP was down by 1.44% to lead the way down.

Bitcoin would need to move through the $11,260 pivot to support a run at the first major resistance level at $11,530.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Bitcoin to break out from Fridays high $11,440.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level would likely cap any upside.

In the event of a crypto breakout, Bitcoin could eye the second major resistance level at $11,710.

Failure to move through the $11,260 pivot level would bring the first major support level at $11,080 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, however, Bitcoin should steer clear of sub-$11,000 levels and the second major support level at $10,810.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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The Crypto Daily Movers and Shakers August 1st, 2020 - Yahoo Finance

Goldman Sachs Sees ‘Resurgence of Interest’ in Crypto from Institutions – Cryptonews

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Source: Adobe/pvl

There is currently a resurgence of interest in cryptocurrencies, but this time around its not from retail investors, but rather the financial institutions, the new head of digital assets at investment banking giant Goldman Sachs revealed in a recent interview.

Mathew McDermott, the recently appointed head of digital assets at the investment bank, told CNBC that the bank has definitely seen an uptick in interest across some of our institutional clients who are exploring how they can participate in the crypto space. He added that it feels like there is a resurgence of interest in cryptocurrencies from this segment.

As previously reported, US-based major digital asset manager Grayscale recorded its largest quarterly inflows in the second quarter, saying that it reflects a rapidly growing demand for digital assets, as investors increasingly look to diversify their portfolios amid aggressive monetary and fiscal intervention resulting from the COVID-19 crisis. Also, a US-based major software company MicroStrategy said recently that it may invest part of its cash into bitcoin (BTC) and other alternative investments, citing negative real yield on US dollars.

Meanwhile, London-based McDermott also revealed in the interview that he plans to significantly step up Goldmans efforts in the crypto and blockchain space, doubling his teams headcount across Europe and Asia.

Also, the investment banker has its own vision for financial markets, where all assets reside on a blockchain:

In the next five to 10 years, you could see a financial system where all assets and liabilities are native to a blockchain, with all transactions natively happening on chain. So what youre doing today in the physical world, you just do digitally, creating huge efficiencies, McDermott told CNBC, adding that this could include things like debt issuances, securitization, loan origination.

Essentially youll have a digital financial markets ecosystem, the options are pretty vast, the 46-year-old banker said.

McDermott also revealed that Goldman is currently exploring the commercial viability of developing a fiat digital token of its own, like its competitor JP Morgan has already done with the JPM Coin. He also said that Goldman has been able to lure over JP Morgans former head of digital assets strategy, Oli Harris, who is known to have been involved with the JPM Coin project.

However, the executive added that Goldman Sachs is still early in the process of exploring such a coin, and that it continues to work through the potential use cases of it.___Learn more: Goldman Sachs Strategist Warns of 'Real Concerns' Over US DollarMIT's Narula: If Goldman Sachs Likes Bitcoin, We're Doing Something WrongWhy You Should and Shouldn't Care About Goldman Sachs' Report on BitcoinGold and Bitcoin Surge Exposes Generational Divide JPMorgan

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Goldman Sachs Sees 'Resurgence of Interest' in Crypto from Institutions - Cryptonews

The Journal of Drugs in Dermatology Publishes Results from Positive Phase 1/2a Trial of Arcutis’ ARQ-151 (Topical Roflumilast Cream) for the Treatment…

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif., Aug. 03, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcutis Biotherapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARQT), a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing treatments for unmet needs in immune-mediated dermatological diseases and conditions, or immuno-dermatology, announced today that The Journal of Drugs in Dermatology has published positive results from a Phase 1/2a trial of its investigational drug topical roflumilast cream for the treatment of chronic plaque psoriasis. The article has been published in the August 2020 issue of the journal. These results demonstrate that ARQ-151 (roflumilast cream) was safe and highly effective at doses of 0.5% and 0.15%, and represents a potential novel once-daily topical therapy for the treatment of chronic plaque psoriasis.

Psoriasis imposes a high burden for patients, and current standards of care to treat this skin disease often carry significant treatment limitations, resulting in poor outcomes. Poor outcomes often have a negative impact on patient quality of life, said Kim A. Papp, MD, PhD, of Probity Medical Research and K. Papp Clinical Research Inc., and lead author of the publication. Roflumilast once-daily cream demonstrated significant improvements in psoriasis signs and symptoms. Notably, roflumilast cream demonstrated favorable tolerability, without any patient discontinuation due to adverse events. The positive results from this study are encouraging for patients and clinicians who are desperate for a new topical treatment solution that will simplify disease management and improve the patient experience. Enabling patients with more effective chronic treatment in all areas of the body is our hope.

Roflumilast cream (ARQ-151) is a once-daily, highly potent, selective phosphodiesterase-4 (PDE-4) inhibitor being developed for chronic plaque psoriasis. Arcutis is currently conducting a Phase 3 clinical program with topical roflumilast cream, including two ongoing pivotal Phase 3 clinical trials (DERMIS-1 and -2). The company anticipates topline data from the Phase 3 studies in the first half of 2021.

The Phase 1/2a study assessed the safety and efficacy of once-daily roflumilast cream 0.5% and 0.15% in patients with chronic plaque psoriasis. The study enrolled a single-dose, open-label Phase 1 cohort (0.5% cream applied to 25 cm2 psoriatic plaques), and a 28-day, double-blinded Phase 2a cohort (1:1:1 randomization to roflumilast cream 0.5%, 0.15%, or vehicle). Patients had chronic plaque psoriasis of > 6 months duration with 5% body surface area involvement. Outcomes included safety (adverse events) and efficacy (percentage change in the product of Target Plaque Severity Score [TPSS] and Target Plaque Area [TPA]) at week 4.

For Cohorts 1 (n=8) and 2 (n=89), adverse events (all mild/moderate; none serious or severe) were similar between active arms and vehicle. Treatment-related events were confined to the application site, with no difference between active and vehicle. No patient discontinued treatment due to adverse events. The primary efficacy endpoint was met for both roflumilast cream doses: TPSSTPA improvement at week 4 was statistically significant for roflumilast 0.5% (P=0.0007) and 0.15% (P=0.0011) versus vehicle; significance was reached as early as 2 weeks. For both roflumilast cream doses, 66% to 67% improvement from baseline was observed at week 4, without reaching a plateau, versus 38% improvement for vehicle.

The results from this Phase 1/2a study provide further evidence of the potential of roflumilast cream as a once-daily treatment for patients with plaque psoriasis who currently lack suitable treatment options, and who often have to settle for trade-offs in drug efficacy, safety, and tolerability, said Frank Watanabe, Arcutis President and Chief Executive Officer. We believe that topical roflumilast has the potential to deliver the efficacy that enables meaningful symptomatic improvement and a safety and tolerability profile that supports chronic use and the ability to use in all body areas.

Please refer to the paper, Roflumilast Cream Improves Signs and Symptoms of Plaque Psoriasis: Results from a Phase 1/2a Randomized, Controlled Study for the full description of the design and results of this study.

About ARQ-151 (Topical Roflumilast Cream)Topical roflumilast cream is a once-daily, topical cream formulation containing roflumilast, a PDE4 inhibitor, that Arcutis is developing to treat plaque psoriasis, including intertriginous psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis. PDE4 is an intracellular enzyme that regulates pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokine production and cell proliferation. Roflumilast was approved by the FDA for systemic treatment to reduce risk of exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in 2011, has shown greater potency (25 - 300 fold) than other two FDA-approved PDE4 inhibitors used in dermatology.

About PsoriasisPsoriasis is an immune disease that occurs in about two percent of adults in western countries. About 90% of psoriasis cases is plaque psoriasis, which is characterized by plaques, or raised, red areas of skin covered with a silver or white layer of scale. Psoriatic plaques can appear on any area of the body, but most often appear on the scalp, knees, elbows, trunk, and limbs, and the plaques are often itchy and sometimes painful. Plaques in certain anatomical areas present particular treatment challenges, including the face, elbows and knees, scalp, and intertriginous areas (where two skin areas may touch or rub together).

About Arcutis - Bioscience, applied to the skin.Arcutis Biotherapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARQT) is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing treatments for unmet needs in immune-mediated dermatological diseases and conditions, or immuno-dermatology. The company is leveraging recent advances in immunology and inflammation to develop differentiated therapies against biologically validated targets to solve persistent treatment challenges in serious diseases of the skin. Arcutis robust pipeline includes four novel drug candidates currently in development for a range of inflammatory dermatological conditions. The companys lead product candidate, topical roflumilast, has the potential to revitalize the standard of care for plaque psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, scalp psoriasis, and seborrheic dermatitis. For more information, visit https://www.arcutis.com or follow the company on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Contacts:Investor Relations:Heather Rowe ArmstrongVice President, Investor Relations & Corporate Communicationsharmstrong@arcutis.com805-418-5006, Ext. 740

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The Journal of Drugs in Dermatology Publishes Results from Positive Phase 1/2a Trial of Arcutis' ARQ-151 (Topical Roflumilast Cream) for the Treatment...

WhatsApp brings new ‘search the web’ feature to curb fake news – Deccan Herald

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

For the past few years, WhatsApp has been scaling up security measures to thwart the spread of fake news on its messenger apps. Key features included tagging the forwarded messages with ' double arrows' and also set limits on the number of forwards a person can send to his or her contacts per day.

Now, it has introduced a new 'search the web' feature to help the person to fact-check the information received as WhatsApp forwardis genuine or not.

"Today (August 4), were piloting a simple way to double-check these messages by tapping a magnifying glass button in the chat. Providing a simple way to search messages that have been forwarded many times may help people find news results or other sources of information about the content they have received," Facebook-owned WhatsApp said.

This Search feature allows users to upload the message via their browser without WhatsApp ever seeing the message itself.

Search the web feature is being rolled out via software update WhatsApp for Android, iOS, and WhatsApp Web starting Tuesday in Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, UK, and the US.

It is expected to be expanded to more regions including India in the coming days.

Get the latest news on new launches, gadget reviews, apps, cyber security, and more on personal technology only onDH Tech.

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WhatsApp brings new 'search the web' feature to curb fake news - Deccan Herald

FAQ: Why Brazil’s Plan to Mandate Traceability in Private Messaging Apps Will Break User’s Expectation of Privacy and Security – EFF

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Despite widespread complaints about its effects on human rights, the Brazilian Senate has fast-tracked the approval of PLS 2630/2020, the so-called Fake News bill. The bill lacked the necessarily broad and intense social participation that characterized the development of the 2014 Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet and is now in the Chamber of Deputies. The Chamber has been holding a series of public hearings that should be considered before releasing a new draft text.

The traceability debate has mostly focused on malicious coordinated action on WhatsApp, which is the most popular encrypted messaging tool in Brazil. There has been minimal discussion of the impact on other tools and services such as Telegram, Signal, or iMessage. WhatsApp uses a specific privacy-by-design implementation that protects users by making forwarding indistinguishable for the private messaging app from other kinds of communications. So when a WhatsApp user forwards a message using the arrow, it serves to mark the forward information at the client-side (and count if it's more than 5 times or not), but the fact that the message has been forwarded is not visible to the WhatsApp server. In such a scenario, the traceability mandate would take this information, which was previously invisible to the server, and make it visible, affecting the privacy-by-design secure implementation and undermine users' expectations of privacy and security.

While we do not know how a service provider will implement any traceability mandate nor at what cost to security and privacy, ultimately, any implementation will break users expectations of privacy and security, and would be hard to implement to match current security and privacy standards. Such changes move companies away from privacy-focused engineering and data minimization principles that should characterize secure private messaging apps.Below, we will take a deep dive into a series of questions and answers to explain why the current language of two critical issues of the Senates bill would undermine human rights:

PROBLEM I: A tech mandate to force private messaging servers to track massively forwarded messages sent to groups or lists

Article 10 of the bill compels private messaging applications to retain, for three months, the chain of all communications that have been massively forwarded. The data to be retained includes the users that did the mass forwarding, date and time of forwardings, and the total number of users who received the message.The bill defines mass forwarding as the sending of the same message by more than five users, in an interval of up to fifteen days, to chat groups, transmission lists, or similar mechanisms that group together multiple recipients. This retention obligation applies only to messages whose content has reached 1,000 or more users in 15 days. The retained logs should be deleted if the virality threshold of 1,000 users has not been met in fifteen days.

Many of the most obvious implementations of this article would require companies to keep massive amounts of metadata about all users communications, or else to break encryption in order to get access to the payload of an encrypted message. Even if other implementations are possible, we dont know exactly how any given provider will ultimately decide to comply, and at what cost to security, privacy, and human rights. Ultimately, all such implementations are moving away from the privacy-focused engineering and data minimization that should characterize secure private messaging apps.

When does access to the traceability records occur?

The third paragraph of Article 10 states that access to these records will only occur with the purpose of determining the liability of mass forwarding illicit content, to constitute evidence in criminal investigation and procedural penal instruction, only by court order as defined in the Brazilian Civil Framework for the Internet. (In Brazil, defamation liability can be obtained through a moral damage claim under civil law. But it is also a crime. Criminal defamation has been widely criticized by UN Special Rapporteurs on Free Expression and others for hindering free expression.)

The text is ambiguous. In one interpretation, both mass forwarding purpose and criminal investigation are mandatory elements. This means that the metadata could only be accessed in criminal investigations that involve the mass forwarding of a message.In another interpretation, this article may allow a much broader range of uses of the recorded message history information. In this interpretation, the elements related to the responsibility for massive forwarding of illegal content and to use in criminal investigations are separate, independently permitted uses of the data. In that case, the retained metadata could also be used to investigate illegal acts under civil law related to massively forwarded messages and also could be used for criminal investigations unrelated to massively forwarded messages.

How does traceability break the users expectation of secure and private messaging?

In common implementations, including WhatsApps, probabilistic end-to-end encryption ensures that an adversary can neither confirm nor disconfirm guesses about a messages content. That also includes confirming a specific guess that the message was not about a certain topic. In such scenarios, traceability allows someone with access to the metadata to confirm that a user did send a message that was identical to another message (even when the content of that message is unknown). This disconfirms the guess that the user was actually talking about something else entirely, disconfirms the guess that the user was writing something original, and disconfirms many other possible guesses about the content! In general, forward vs. write something new is a kind of activity that is fundamentally related to knowing something about the content.

In some cases, the fact that a person forwarded something could be extra-sensitive even when the forwarded item is not necessarily illegal, e.g. when someone who made a threat wants to punish someone for forwarding the threat, or when someone wants to punish a leaker for leaking something. WhatsApp made a specific privacy-by-design implementation that protects users by making forwarding indistinguishable for WhatsApp server from other kinds of communications.

How does traceability for criminal and civil cases interfere with the right to privacy and data protection?

Traceability in civil and criminal cases creates serious concerns about privacy and freedom of expression. Revealing the complete chain of communication for a massively forwarded message can also be intrusive in a distinctive way beyond the intrusion of revealing individual relationships: the complete history for certain messages may reveal the structure and membership of a whole community, such as people who all share a certain belief or interest, or who speak a certain minority language, even when none of them is actually involved with illegal activities. The avenues are open for abuse.

Brazil is one of the few democracies with a Constitution prohibiting anonymity exclusively in the context of freedom of expression. However, that prohibition does not extend to the protection of privacy nor in accessing information anonymously. Moreover, such a restriction to anonymous speech cannot serve to impede the expression altogether when this protection is crucial to enable someone to speak in circumstances where her life or physical integrity might be at risk.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression has explained that privacy should be understood in a broad sense as every personal and anonymous space that is free from intimidation or retaliation, and necessary for an individual to be able to freely form an opinion and express his or her ideas as well as to seek and receive information, without being forced to identify him or herself or reveal his or her beliefs and convictions or the sources he or she consults. Anonymity does not shield Internet users who engage in illegal speech in accordance with international human rights law. In all those cases, the IACHR Office has noted that judicial authorities would be authorized to take reasonable measures to disclose the identity of a user engaged in an illegal act as provided by law. At the United Nations, the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression has also noted that encryption and anonymity provide individuals and groups with a zone of privacy online to hold opinions and exercise freedom of expression without arbitrary and unlawful interference or attack.

What could go wrong with achieving a traceability mandate?

First, forwarding a popular message does not mean you should automatically be under suspicion. In fact, the virality of a message does not change the privacy and due process rights of the original sender nor the presumption of innocence, a core requirement of international human rights law.Second, the first person to introduce some content into a particular private messaging system could be wrongly viewed as or assumed to be the author who massively forwarded an alleged illegal message.Third, a person who forwarded content by any means other than an apps forwarding interface could be wrongly viewed as or assumed to be the author. People could be framed as authors of content that they were not actually involved in creating. People could also be more frightened about sharing information if they think its more likely that someone will try to punish them for their role in disseminating it (which is also a very disproportionate measure for the huge majority of innocent users of messaging systems).Finally, the line between originating and forwarding messages can be blurred either by the government, leading to overzealous policing, or in the public's eyes, leading to self-censorship. The latter also creates a serious concern for freedom of expression.

Which assumptions are wrong in the traceability debate in Brazil?

Article 10 seeks to trace back everyone who has massively forwarded a message for the purpose of investigation or prosecution of alleged crimes. This includes the originator as well as everyone who forwarded the message, regardless of whether the distribution was done maliciously or not. The supporters of the bill have argued that mass retention of the chain of communication is needed to help trace back who the originator of the message was.

That assumption is wrong from the outset.

First, while the details of how traceability will be carried out are based on the providers implementation choices, it shouldn't necessarily imply that there will be mass centralized retention. However, that would be the most simple implementation, so we have serious concerns about it. Mass data retention is a disproportionate measure that would affect millions of innocent users instead of only those investigated or prosecuted for an illegal act under criminal or civil law. Mass data retention programs can be arbitrary, even if they serve a legitimate aim and have been adopted on the basis of law. On this front, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that it will not be enough that the [legal] measures are targeted to find certain needles in a haystack; the proper measure is the impact of the measures on the haystack, relative to the harm threatened; namely, whether the measure is necessary and proportionate. These measures are not necessary and proportionate to the problem being solved.

Second, legislators should take into account that metadata is personal data under Brazils data protection law when it relates to an identified or identifiable natural person. This means that companies should limit personal data collection, storage, and usage to data for legitimate, specific and explicit purposes, and such processing should be relevant, proportional, and non-excessive in relation to the purposes for which the data is processed. Recently, the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a landmark decision stressing the constitutional grounds for the protection of personal data as a fundamental right, separate from the right to privacy. As Bruno Bioni and Renato Leite have argued, The new precedent of the Supreme Court is such a remarkable shift of how the Court has been analyzing privacy and data protection because it changes the focus from data that is secret to data that is attributed to persons and might impact their individual and collective lives, regardless of whether they are kept in secrecy or not. Legislators should consider the impact on the right of data protection when requesting a traceability mandate in light of such developments.

Third, the bill assumes that only messages that become widely forwarded need to be traceable, regardless of whether the distribution of the message was done maliciously or not. This assumption is wrong on both counts.

Fourth, the bill ignores the fact that data minimization is essential in every privacy-by-design system, and is a key component of Brazils data protection law. Some systems have been developed to retain less data by not tracking the relevant information and dont necessarily have a sensible way to begin to track it, which may lead to technological changes that would break users expectations of privacy and security.

Fifth, traceability will not help trackback the originator of a message. Users of private messaging apps routinely use them to share media that they got somewhere else. For example, WhatsApp users might share a cartoon that they originally found on a web site or a social media site, or that they previously received through a different messaging app like Telegram or iMessage or through WhatsApp Desktop. In that case, a version of WhatsApp with traceability still doesnt have any way of distinguishing between the case where the first user drew the cartoon herself, and the case where she found it in one of these other media. Shes simply tracked as the first person to introduce that cartoon into a particular forwarding chain on WhatsApp, but thats obviously different from having created it herself. Similarly, for text messages, anyone who retyped a text message, or copied and pasted it (maybe from a different app or medium), would still be tracked as the original author by virtue of having been the first one to introduce the message into the particular app.

Forwarding something other than by using a traceability-compliant in-app forwarding feature would presumably break and restart the chain. For example, WhatsApp users who receive text messages could copy and paste them instead of using the forward button inside WhatsApp or WhatsApp Desktop. The software wouldnt have a way to correctly identify this as a form of forwarding. Likewise, if the phone number used is a virtual number or a foreign non-Brazilian one, the non-Brazilian account nor the virtual number will be covered by this law. In such scenarios, the software wont be able to trace back the foreign originator. Similarly, in WhatsApp, the originators identity is not strongly and reliably authenticated by technical means. It is simply maintained as a metadata field within the forward encrypted message that can be seen by the clients applications but not by the WhatsApp server. For example, the encrypted message headers might say that a certain message had originated from the user with an indicated telephone number. Official client software that complied with the requirements of these proposals would then copy that header, with no changes, when forwarding a message to new recipients.) So people using unofficial client software could remove or obscure it, or could even frame someone else as responsible for a message. It would not be practical to confirm by technical means whether the reported sender was really involved in originating the message or not. (Other proposals may be able to solve these problems, but at a significant cost to privacy, since the service provider would need to have much more access to confirm for itself exactly what its users are doing before the malicious act happens.)

Why are calls to separate private, encrypted conversations from group conversations misguided?

One argument for traceability is that, while private conversations and mass media or mass discussions should each be able to exist, they shouldnt be combined. In other words, a particular tool or medium should either be private and secure (and only practical for use by small groups of people) or public (and visible, at least to some extent, for others in society to notice and respond to either in the media or via the legal system). This argument criticizes existing services for having both a private character (in terms of the confidentiality of contents and users behavior) and a quasi-mass media character (in terms of the extremely large audience for some forwarded items). But these arguments ignore the fact that, even under this traceability mandate, messages can be forwarded from person to person while not preserving their ultimate origin, or entire forwarding history, making it much less likely that the true original sender of very widely distributed content can ever be identified with confidence.

Many existing private messaging systems already do not necessarily provide traceability. Why not?

Consider email: you can forward an email message without necessarily forwarding any information about where you got it fromand you can also edit it when forwarding it, to remove or change that information. Systems like email dont have traceability because theyre somewhat decentralized, and because they give users complete control over the content of the messages they send (so that the users could simply edit out any information that they dont want to include).

Encryption and privacy features have also discouraged traceability because modern systems are typically designed so that the developer or service provider doesnt know exactly who is writing what, or what the content of a message isincluding properties like whether or not two messages have the same or similar contents. (Even when WhatsApp, for example, centrally stores a copy of media attachments so that users dont have to use up time and data re-uploading things that they forward, the design of the system avoids letting the company know which media is or isnt included as an attachment to a particular message.)

Regardless of why, many recently-developed messaging tools also do not allow traceabilitysome for the same reasons as email, some simply because their developers dont feel that it would be in the users interest overall, and they may want to reduce users anxiety about being punished or threatened over information that they have passed along.

Why will newer technologies or messaging systems have difficulties complying with these proposals?

Though the messaging apps themselves may not appear decentralized, as email is, the idea of tracking when a user forwards a message may depend on control over client applications that simply dont exist. Its implausible to imagine that all client applications will cooperate with restrictions and limitations in the same way, or even can.Some systems are too decentralized (there is no central operator who could be responsible for compliance). This mandate assumes that application providers are always able to identify and distinguish forwarded and non-forwarded content, and also able to identify the origin of a forwarded message. This depends in practice on the service architecture and on the relation between the application and the service. When the two are independent, as is often the case with email, it is common that the service cannot differentiate between forwarded and non-forwarded content, and that the application does not store the forwarding history except on the user's device.This architectural separation is very traditional in Internet services, and while it is less common today in the most-used private messaging applications, the obligation would limit the use of XMPP or similar solutions. This could also negatively impact open source messaging applications.

Is there any connection between traceability and innovation according to Article 10 and 11 of the Senates version of the bill?

Article 10 compels private messaging applications to retain the chain of communications that have been massively forwarded based upon a virality threshold. Article 11 states that the use and trading of external tools by the private messaging service-providers aimed at mass messages forwarding are forbidden, except in the case of standardized technological protocols regarding Internet application interaction. The bill requests that a private messaging service provider must adopt policies within the technical limits of its service, to cope with the use of these tools.We dont know how a provider will comply with either Article 10 or Article 11, but it will presumably require developers to actively try to block and suppress the use of third-party software that interacts with their platforms by strictly controlling the client applications (to ensure that they cooperate with tracking forwarding history by recording whether they had or had not forwarded a message, and updating the records about the history).Many traceability proposals may require the developer of a communication system to stop other people from developing or using third-party software that interacts with that system. So the developer may be expected or required to monopolize the ability to make client application tools, and in turn to be the only one who is allowed to change or improve those tools. This limits interoperability in a way that will likely be damaging to competition and innovation.

How does traceability relate to other efforts to regulate messaging services?Some countries such as China, Russia, and Turkey have threatened to ban messaging tools that dont force data localization, and mandatory legal ID of users. This traceability mandate would force similar practices to Brazilian users. No ones government should keep them from practicing private, secure communication, and Brazils government should not consider joining the ranks of countries whose residents are at risk of prosecution and privacy invasion simply for using secure messaging.

As a result of this article, large social networks and private messaging apps (that offer service in Brazil to more than two million users) may demand a valid ID document from users where there are complaints of violations of the "fake news" law, or when there are reasons to suspect either automated accounts are bots not identified as such, or that they are behaving inauthentically, such as assuming someone else's identity to deceive the public. The system for submitting complaints for violations of the law could also create new serious unintended consequences by opening the door to abusive, inaccurate claims. For example, malicious actors may file false claims as a means to identify a certain account in order to harass the user.The bill also exempted parody and humor, as well as pseudonyms from the application of the law. But this supposed failsafe wont protect pseudonymous users; while users are explicitly permitted to use pseudonyms, the service provider may still demand their legal identities.

Article 7 (sole paragraph) compels social networks and private messenger apps to create some technical measures of detecting fraud in account creation and in the use of accounts that fail to comply with this bill. Providers will be forced to convey those new mechanisms in their terms of use and other documents available to users. Read together with Article 5, I, (identified account, means that the application provider has fully identified the account owner with confirmation of data previously provided by the owner). These new provisions seem to match many companies' existing practices but may be expanded and enforced in cases of non-compliance with this bill.

How will companies' obligation to identify users impact human rights?

Compelling these companies to identify an online user should only be done in response to a request by a competent authority, not by default without the legal process. Currently, Brazil's Civil Rights Framework exempts subscriber data from the usual requirement for a judicial order for competent authorities. Competent administrative authorities can already directly demand these types of data in certain crimes. Police authorities have also already claimed the ability to directly access subscriber data, and at a recent hearing at the Chamber of Deputies, the representative of the Federal Prosecutors' Office agreed that the information already collected by application providers is enough to identify users in investigations. Also according to the prosecutor, demanding the collection of ID numbers would be disproportionate, run afoul of data minimization concerns, and could bring issues regarding ID counterfeit as well as authenticity challenges.Ultimately, forcing companies to demand identification of users will not solve the fake news problem; it will create a new series of problems, and will disproportionately impact users.

Conclusion

There are policy responses and technical solutions that can improve the situation: for example, limiting the number of recipients of a forwarded message, or labeling viral messages to indicate they did not originate from close contact. Silencing millions of other users, invading their privacy, or undermining their security are not viable solutions. While this bill has several serious flaws, we hope the Chamber of Deputies will take into account these particularly egregious ones, and recognize the danger, and ineffectiveness, of the traceability mandate.

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FAQ: Why Brazil's Plan to Mandate Traceability in Private Messaging Apps Will Break User's Expectation of Privacy and Security - EFF

WhatsApp has done well to curb fake news, but social and messaging services need to invest more in tech – The Financial Express

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

On Tuesday, WhatsApp announced another significant step towards fighting the infodemic. The company said that it would add a search feature, making it easier for users to fact-check messages. Although WhatsApp will still not be able to read the contents of the message, it has devised a safe way for consumers to search it on the web. Earlier in April, it had announced new limits on the forwarding of viral messages. Before that in March, it had announced a grant of $1 million to the Poynter Institutes International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) as part of its #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance. The company in association with the IFCN also provides a list of numbers and a chatbot for fact-checking.

Although, WhatsApp being a messaging service has been somewhat shielded from the ire of authorities with regards to the spread of fake newsTwitter and Facebook by virtue of being social media platforms have been the targetthe platform still had to weather criticism given its role in modern communication. WhatsApp, however, has been doing its bit by continually upgrading its systems. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have incorporated artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect deep fakes. But, more investment in technology is needed to curb the spread of misinformation. Twitter, earlier this year, revived its defunct fact check system. Most social media companies and messaging services have fared well on the coronavirus front, but the US elections will be a litmus test.

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WhatsApp has done well to curb fake news, but social and messaging services need to invest more in tech - The Financial Express

Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages – NBC News

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing any of the company's stated penalties, according to leaked materials reviewed by NBC News.

According to internal discussions from the last six months, Facebook has relaxed its rules so that conservative pages, including those run by Breitbart, former Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk, the nonprofit media outlet PragerU and the pundit Charlie Kirk, were not penalized for violations of the companys misinformation policies.

Facebook's fact-checking rules dictate that pages can have their reach and advertising limited on the platform if they repeatedly spread information deemed inaccurate by its fact-checking partners. The company operates on a "strike" basis, meaning a page can post inaccurate information and receive a one-strike warning before the platform takes action. Two strikes in 90 days places an account into repeat offender status, which can lead to a reduction in distribution of the accounts content and a temporary block on advertising on the platform.

Facebook has a process that allows its employees or representatives from Facebooks partners, including news organizations, politicians, influencers and others who have a significant presence on the platform to flag misinformation-related problems. Fact-checking labels are applied to posts by Facebook when third-party fact-checkers determine their posts contain misinformation. A news organization or politician can appeal the decision to attach a label to one of its posts.

Facebook employees who work with content partners then decide if an appeal is a high-priority issue or PR risk, in which case they log it in an internal task management system as a misinformation escalation. Marking something as an escalation means that senior leadership is notified so they can review the situation and quickly -- often within 24 hours -- make a decision about how to proceed.

Facebook receives many queries about misinformation from its partners, but only a small subsection are deemed to require input from senior leadership. Since February, more than 30 of these misinformation queries were tagged as escalations within the companys task management system, used by employees to track and assign work projects.

The list and descriptions of the escalations, leaked to NBC News, showed that Facebook employees in the misinformation escalations team, with direct oversight from company leadership, deleted strikes during the review process that were issued to some conservative partners for posting misinformation over the last six months. The discussions of the reviews showed that Facebook employees were worried that complaints about Facebook's fact-checking could go public and fuel allegations that the social network was biased against conservatives.

The removal of the strikes has furthered concerns from some current and former employees that the company routinely relaxes its rules for conservative pages over fears about accusations of bias.

Two current Facebook employees and two former employees, who spoke anonymously out of fear of professional repercussions, said they believed the company had become hypersensitive to conservative complaints, in some cases making special allowances for conservative pages to avoid negative publicity.

This supposed goal of this process is to prevent embarrassing false positives against respectable content partners, but the data shows that this is instead being used primarily to shield conservative fake news from the consequences, said one former employee.

About two-thirds of the escalations included in the leaked list relate to misinformation issues linked to conservative pages, including those of Breitbart, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Gateway Pundit. There was one escalation related to a progressive advocacy group and one each for CNN, CBS, Yahoo and the World Health Organization.

There were also escalations related to left-leaning entities, including one about an ad from Democratic super PAC Priorities USA that the Trump campaign and fact checkers have labeled as misleading. Those matters focused on preventing misleading videos that were already being shared widely on other media platforms from spreading on Facebook and were not linked to complaints or concerns about strikes.

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Facebook and other tech companies including Twitter and Google have faced repeated accusations of bias against conservatives in their content moderation decisions, though there is little clear evidence that this bias exists. The issue was reignited this week when Facebook removed a video posted to Trumps personal Facebook page in which he falsely claimed that children are almost immune to COVID-19. The Trump campaign accused Facebook of flagrant bias.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone did not dispute the authenticity of the leaked materials, but said that it did not provide the full context of the situation.

In recent years, Facebook has developed a lengthy set of rules that govern how the platform moderates false or misleading information. But how those rules are applied can vary and is up to the discretion of Facebook's executives.

In late March, a Facebook employee raised concerns on an internal message board about a false fact-checking label that had been added to a post by the conservative bloggers Diamond and Silk in which they expressed outrage over the false allegation that Democrats were trying to give members of Congress a $25 million raise as part of a COVID-19 stimulus package.

Diamond and Silk had not yet complained to Facebook about the fact check, but the employee was sounding the alarm because the partner is extremely sensitive and has not hesitated going public about their concerns around alleged conservative bias on Facebook.

Since it was the accounts second misinformation strike in 90 days, according to the leaked internal posts, the page was placed into repeat offender status.

Diamond and Silk appealed the false rating that had been applied by third-party fact-checker Lead Stories on the basis that they were expressing opinion and not stating a fact. The rating was downgraded by Lead Stories to partly false and they were taken out of repeat offender status. Even so, someone at Facebook described as Policy/Leadership intervened and instructed the team to remove both strikes from the account, according to the leaked material.

In another case in late May, a Facebook employee filed a misinformation escalation for PragerU, after a series of fact-checking labels were applied to several similar posts suggesting polar bear populations had not been decimated by climate change and that a photo of a starving animal was used as a deliberate lie to advance the climate change agenda. This claim was fact-checked by one of Facebooks independent fact-checking partners, Climate Feedback, as false and meant that the PragerU page had repeat offender status and would potentially be banned from advertising.

A Facebook employee escalated the issue because of partner sensitivity and mentioned within that the repeat offender status was especially worrisome due to PragerU having 500 active ads on our platform, according to the discussion contained within the task management system and leaked to NBC News.

After some back and forth between employees, the fact check label was left on the posts, but the strikes that could have jeopardized the advertising campaign were removed from PragerUs pages.

Stone, the Facebook spokesperson, said that the company defers to third-party fact-checkers on the ratings given to posts, but that the company is responsible for how we manage our internal systems for repeat offenders.

We apply additional system-wide penalties for multiple false ratings, including demonetization and the inability to advertise, unless we determine that one or more of those ratings does not warrant additional consequences, he said in an emailed statement.

He added that Facebook works with more than 70 fact-checking partners who apply fact-checks to millions of pieces of content.

Facebook announced Thursday that it banned a Republican PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, from advertising on the platform following repeated sharing of misinformation.

But the ongoing sensitivity to conservative complaints about fact-checking continues to trigger heated debates inside Facebook, according to leaked posts from Facebooks internal message board and interviews with current and former employees.

The research has shown no evidence of bias against conservatives on Facebook, said another employee, So why are we trying to appease them?

Those concerns have also spilled out onto the company's internal message boards.

One employee wrote a post on 19 July, first reported by BuzzFeed News on Thursday, summarizing the list of misinformation escalations found in the task management system and arguing that the company was pandering to conservative politicians.

The post, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed, also compared Mark Zuckerberg to President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Just like all the robber barons and slavers and plunderers who came before you, you are spending a fortune you didnt build. No amount of charity can ever balance out the poverty, war and environmental damage enabled by your support of Donald Trump, the employee wrote.

The post was removed for violating Facebooks respectful communications policy and the list of escalations, previously accessible to all employees, was made private. The employee who wrote the post was later fired.

We recognize that transparency and openness are important company values, wrote a Facebook employee involved in handling misinformation escalations in response to questions about the list of escalations. Unfortunately, because information from these Tasks were leaked, weve made them private for only subscribers and are considering how best to move forward.

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Sensitive to claims of bias, Facebook relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages - NBC News

Ulrich Beck Is the World’s Most Important Pandemic Intellectual – Foreign Policy

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

EDITORS NOTE: Were making some of our coronavirus pandemic coverage free for nonsubscribers. You can read those articles here and subscribe to our newsletters here.EDITORS NOTE: Were making some of our coronavirus pandemic coverage free for nonsubscribers. You can read those articles here and subscribe to our newsletters here.

We all know the Chernobyl script. A badly designed reactor suffered a meltdown. The decrepit Soviet regime tried to hide the disaster. Millions of citizens were put at risk. And the truth came out. The regime paid the price. Its legitimacy was in tatters. Collapse followed.

For liberals it is a pleasing morality tale. Dictatorship fails when faced with the challenges of modernity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

When COVID-19 struck, we wondered whether it might be Chinese President Xi Jinpings Chernobyl. But after initial prevarication driven by Wuhans local politics, Chinas national leadership reasserted its grip. The worst moment was Feb. 7, when hundreds of millions of Chinese took to the Internet to protest the treatment of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who had died of the disease. Since then Beijing has taken control, both of the disease and the media narrative. Far from being a perestroika moment, the noose of party discipline and censorship has tightened.

By the spring it was White House staffers who were likely watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and wondering about their own boss. Lately, the historian Harold James has asked whether the United States is living through its late-Soviet moment, with COVID-19 as President Donald Trumps terminal crisis. But if that turns out to be the case, it will not be because of a botched cover-up; Americans are living neither in late-Soviet Ukraine nor in the era of Watergate, when a sordid expos could sink a president. Of course, Trump was culpably irresponsible in making light of the disease. But he did so in the full glare of TV cameras. The president reveled in flouting the recommendations of eggheaded public health experts, correctly calculating that a large swath of his base was not concerned with conventional norms of truth or reason.

But the fact that neither Xis China nor Trumps United States are a good match for the late Soviet Union doesnt mean that Chernobyl is not relevant to our COVID-19 predicament. What should interest us is not so much the downfall of the Soviet Union as the more mundane preoccupations of the Western Europeans who in 1986 found themselves in the path of the Chernobyl radiation cloud. As the news leaked out of the disaster, they faced many of the same questions that have haunted us in 2020. Which tests were to be trusted? Was it safe to go outside? Should children play in sand pits? What types of food were safe? How long would it last? What were the trade-offs? What exactly was a becquerel? How many were safe? Which of the vast array of reports, data, and recommendations should one read? Which should one trust?

There is no HBO series about life under the fallout cloud that summer. (In terms of curies per square kilometer, the radiation was worst in two belts: one stretching northwest across Scandinavia, the other to the south across Slovenia, Austria, and Bavaria.) What we do have is a book, Risk Society, published by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck with exquisite timing in the spring of 1986.

Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope, anonymous and invisible, were the common denominator of our new epoch: A fate of endangerment has arisen in modernity, a sort of counter-modernity, which transcends all our concepts of space, time, and social differentiation. What yesterday was still far away will be found today and in the future at the front door. The question, so vividly exposed by the crises such as Chernobyl and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is how to navigate this world. The relevance of Becks answers are even more apparent in our day than they were in his own.

Beck was in many ways an emblematic figure of postwar Germany. Born in 1944 near the Baltic coast in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, now Slupsk in Poland, Becks family fled the Red Army to settle in the booming industrial city of Hanover. He studied sociology not in the famously radical Frankfurt, or at the Free University of Berlin, but in Freiburg and Munich. By the early 1980s he was comfortably ensconced as a professor of sociology upriver from Frankfurt, in picturesque Bamberg. Following the success of Risk Society, Ulrich Beck would emerge as perhaps Germanys most widely recognized social scientist after Jrgen Habermas.

Not for nothing Beck has been dubbed a zeitgeist sociologist. The intellectual world he was responding to in the early 1980s in West Germany was one of considerable uncertainty. The reform momentum of the 1960s and 1970s had ebbed. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohls government had little of the energy of U.S. President Ronald Reagan or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Habermas characterized the period in intellectual and political terms as die neue Unbersichtlichkeitthe New Obscurity. The most common move was to refer to the period as an age of post-post-industrial, postmodern, postcolonial. But as Beck put it, the use of the term post- was a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual equivalent of a blind mans stick probing in the dark. Facing up to the challenge of providing a positive definition, Beck chose risk society.

In the early 1980s, the theme of risk was in the air. The escalation of Cold War tension created a pervasive sense of threat. The campaign against DDT, given huge prominence by Rachel Carsons bestselling Silent Spring, had heightened awareness of invisible chemical pollution. The Three Mile Island incident of 1979 brought home the danger of nuclear accidents. In the United States in 1982, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky had outlined their cultural theory of risk, elaborating on Douglass earlier anthropological work. Charles Perrow warned that in living with massive complex systems such as air traffic control systems, dams, and nuclear reactors, accidents must be accepted as normal.

Becks contribution in Risk Society was to offer a compelling sociological interpretation of this pervasive sense of undefined but omnipresent threat, both as a matter of personal and collective experience and as a historical epoch. But more than that, Risk Society is a manifesto of sorts, proposing a novel attitude toward and politics for contemporary reality.

The Wests first wave of modernization had been carried forward by an enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of nature by science and technology. The disorienting realization of the late 20th century was that those very same energies, those same tools were now the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment. To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not deny the benefits of modern medicine. But nor could we deny its risks and side effects, intended and unintended. What was required was, for want of a better description, a scientific approach to science. In this age, which Beck dubbed second or reflexive modernity, the challenge was to find ways to employ the tools of modernityof science, technology and democratic debatewithout succumbing to the ever-present temptations of glancing backward to a more familiar age or engaging in denial.

This is not easy to do. There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the contemporary risks created by modern technological development. It was not a matter of denouncing dictatorship or know-nothing populism. Indeed, there is every reason to think that the problems of risk society will be most acute precisely for those who fancy ourselves as particularly reasonable and modern, because they cannot evade the dilemmas and paradoxes that it generates.

Beck shared with the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s the dawning awareness of the gigantic risks produced by modern economic development. It was the nuclear question that catapulted risk society into public consciousness. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of widespread awareness both of climate change and the emerging diseases paradigm. If climate change was the result of carbon emissions, the emergence of viruses such as HIV, and the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 could be traced to the intrusion of humans into delicate forest ecosystems and the vast animal incubators of the agro-industrial complex. As citizens of successful modernizing societies, we face all-pervasive risks that fundamentally blur the distinction between the social and the natural. Beck could rightly claim to be one of the first thinkers of what we know today as the Anthropocene.

But Beck goes a step further. If it is true that we are now faced with pervasive risks generated and brought upon us by the forces of modernity and yet not accessible to our immediate senses, how do we cope? Until you start suffering from radiation poisoning, until your fetus suffers a horrific mutation, until you find your lungs flooding with pneumonia, the threat of the radiation or a mystery bug is unreal, inaccessible to the naked eye or immediate perception.

In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous in advance of encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it, incompetent in matters of our own affliction. Alienated from our faculties of assessment, we lose an essential part of our cognitive sovereignty. The harmful, the threatening, the inimical lies in wait everywhere, but whether it is inimical or friendly is beyond ones own power of judgment. We thus face a double shock: a threat to our health and survival and a threat to our autonomy in gauging those threats. As we react and struggle to reassert control, we have no option but to become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization. We take a crash course in epidemiology and educate ourselves about R zero. But that effort only sucks us deeper into the labyrinth.

The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than starting from immediate experience and abstracting from there to general claims about the world, the news of the day starts by reference to mathematical formula, chemical tests, and medical judgements. The more we rely on science, the more we find ourselves distanced from immediate reality. Every encounter with our fellow citizens as we go about our normal business is shadowed by a calculation of virtual risks and the probability of contamination. The result is paradoxical. The path of science leads us into a realm in which hidden forces, like the gods and demons of old, threaten our earthly lives. A strange mixture of fear and calculation pursues us into our very dreams. Whereas animistic religion once endowed nature with spirits, we now view the world through the lens of omnipresent, latent causalities. Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the harmless faades. Everything must be viewed with a double gaze, and can only be correctly understood and judged through this doubling. The world of the visible must be investigated, relativized and evaluated with respect to a second reality, only existent in thought and yet concealed in the world.

As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main functions of a face mask is to remind oneself of invisible dangers and to signal to others that one is taking those risks seriously. In the United States they have become something like an article of faith, a way of indicating publicly that one belongs to those who take the science seriously.

Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible. Omnipresent pollutants and toxins take the role of spirits. In our effort to cope we develop our own evasion rituals, incantations, intuition, suspicions and certainties. Of course, we insist, this isnt exorcism. This is about science, medicine, engineering, technology. But references to those authorities dont actually solve our problem. Because on most matters we care about, it turns out that science speaks with many voices. Science is, at best, a rowdy, self-willed choir with many people with different ideas of the tune they should be singing. As we have discovered to our horror in 2020, anyone who professes to believe that medicine, science, and public health expertise will by themselves tell us how to act is either naive or in bad faith. Though overwhelmed and underinformed, we cannot escape the responsibility of both personal and collective political judgment.

Furthermore, the more we know, the more we realize that we are not the only ones judging. Every interested party is picking and choosing its sources. It is an enlightening but also shocking exposure to how the sausage of modern knowledge is truly made. And as Beck reminds us, it would not be so dramatic and could be easily ignored if only one were not dealing with very real and personal hazards.

This is clearly a deeply modern world, saturated with technology and expertise. But it is not a cookie-cutter image of modernity in which scientific reason marches to victory over superstition and censorship. Would that it were so clear-cut. Instead we find ourselves in a world in which rationalism and skepticism are turning on themselves. Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of clearly recognizable truth but in admixtures and amalgams. It is transported by agents of knowledge in their combination and opposition, their foundations, their claims, their mistakes, their irrationalities, all of which all too obviously go into defining the possibility of their knowing the things they claim to know.

As Beck remarks, this is a development of great ambivalence. It contains the opportunity to emancipate social practice from science through science. We gain a far more realistic understanding of how scientific results are generated and vaccines are produced. But the resulting disillusionment and skepticism also has the potential to immunize prevailing ideologies and interested standpoints against enlightened scientific claims, and throws the door open to a feudalization of scientific knowledge practice through economic and political interests and new dogmas.

So, not only is technological progress churning up nature and generating massive and dangerous blowback, but at the moment when we need it most to orient ourselves, science and the governments decisions based on it forfeit their basis of legitimacy. And as the full extent of this shock sinks in, it unleashes a third process of destabilization: We begin to wonder about the broader narratives of progress and history within which we understand our present.

It is Becks openness to the ambiguity and complexity of global development, his insistence on the multiplicity and surprising quality of potential reactions to risk society, that helps to keep his book relevant as a map for reading our current situation. If we go back to 1986, Beck anticipated three ways in which societies might deal with the risks he identified.

What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan micropolitics. This was a logical extension of his model of reflexive modernity, in which not just science has been dethroned, but also the previously demarcated sphere of national politics, dominated by parliaments, sovereign governments, and territorial states. What Europe witnessed starting in the 1980s was a double movement which, on the one hand, dramatically reduced the intensity of political conflict between parties in the parliamentary sphere and, at the same time, politicized previously unpolitical realms such as gender relations, family life, and the environment, spheres which he dubbed sub-politics or micropolitics. For Beck this was no cause for lament. The challenge was to invigorate subpolitics at whatever scale they operated. This could be intensely local, as in struggles over road projects or airport runways. But it could also be global in scope.

When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for Beck a demonstration of a global micropolitics in action. New networks of risk actors led by doctors, researchers, and independent public health experts overcame the initial efforts at secrecy by the Chinese state. If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a Chernobyl moment, this was it. Bottom-up environmental politics and social-justice activism was for Beck the model of a new mode of politics. But one might also think of the remarkable effort involved in stabilizing an institution such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a global authority in mapping the climate emergency. It involves a tireless and massive effort of scientific politics. Again and again climate scientists from all over the world, using different models, starting from different assumptions, paid for by governments with oppposing interests have struggled to reconcile their differences and define reasonable bands of agreement. The reality of this kind of science is more like the workings of a complex system of legal arbitration than the pristine image of the lab bench.

But, as Beck acknowledged, there were also at least two other possibilities. One was a retro politics of going back to the future. This would be a politics that aimed to restore the certainty of social development and the rule of organized politics and scientific reason that had guided the first modernity. The United States war on terror was one such attempt. It turned a 21st century security risk into a conventional war against Saddam Husseins regime in Iraq. It was a disaster. The most successful effort to control risk society within the framework of a classic industrial modernity is China. Its response to the COVID-19 crisis has put that on full display. COVID-19 was contained and CCP rule ensured by a full-bore mobilization of societal discipline, targeted deployment of medical spending, and state power, all of it clad in the guise of what the regime calls 21st-century Marxism, a self-confident narrative of modernization and progress. There is no room for questioning the modern epic of the China dream. The lack of a positive attitude is enough to trigger suspicion.

Another response with which we have become all too familiar in the contemporary United States is a retreat from the vertiginous whirl of self-reflexive rationality toward new taboos, superstition, rigidification, and denial. This for Beck was not to be understood as a hangover from traditional folkways, but as a new superstition raised in response to new threats. Given the spiraling uncertainty of risk society, it was hardly surprising that some might react this way. During the response to COVID-19, it was all too easy to find oneself torn between two camps described by Beck in his article on Chernobyl: Some refuse to perceive the dangers at all, while others energetically insist on blanket condemnations in the name of self-protection or the preservation of life on this earth. How was one to decide between these positions? The polarization of views in the eddying arguments of risk society could easily extend to science itself. If, by an honest fallibilistic account, science is only a disguised mistake in abeyance then where does anyone derive the right to believe only in certain risks? A realistic skepticism about scientific authority all too easily shaded into a general obfuscation of risks. It was, Beck admitted in Risk Society, a knifes edge, in which debates about invisible risks mutated into sort of modern seance with the dial on the Ouija board being moved by rival scientific and counterscientific analyses.

Once the invisible has been let in, Beck wrote, it will soon not be just the spirits of pollutants that determine the thought and the life of people. This can all be disputed, it can polarize, or it can fuse together. New communities and alternative communities arise, whose world views, norms and certainties are grouped around the center of invisible threats. How can one not think of our ongoing struggle over face masks?

And then there is denial. Outside a totalitarian setting, a social problem such as a labor dispute cannot easily be settled by denial. But perceived risks can always be interpreted away (as long they have not already occurred). Barring the actual disaster, mounting anxiety may be relieved simply by pushing the danger out of mind. Risk is a matter of perception; therefore, it originates in knowledge and norms, and they can thus be enlarged or reduced in knowledge and norms, or simply displaced from the screen of consciousness. The awareness of modern risks was not a one-way street. It was reversible. Troubled times and generations can be succeeded by others for which fear, tamed by interpretations, is a basic element of thought and experience. Here the threats are held captive in the cognitive cage of their always unstable non-existence. Later generations would look back and mock the fears that had once so upset the old folks. A recurring refrain in the response to COVID-19, notably from the populists of the Americas, whether in the United States, Mexico, or Brazil, has been essentially this: We will just have to get used to it. After all, we live with flu. It will blow over.

As Beck warned more than 30 years ago, we may be at the beginning of a historical process of habituation. It may be that the next generation, or the one after that, will no longer be upset at pictures of birth defects, like those of tumor-covered fish and birds that now circulate around the world, just as we are no longer upset today by violated values, the new poverty and a constant high level of mass unemployment. The word out of the White House in the summer of 2020 is that Trumps strategists are looking forward to the day when news of tens of thousands of new cases per day no longer ruffles the headlines.

Beck was at heart a sociologist more than a critical theorist or normative political theoretician. He did not denounce the development of denial or unreason so much as chart and explain it. In dealing with risk society, one had to reckon with its basic motive force: the powerful emotion of fear. This was the basic question it posed:

How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fearsand not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?

In 2020, that question is even more pressing than it was in 1986.

Beck is no longer with us to help us with the answer. He died suddenly of a heart attack on New Years Day in 2015 while walking home from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Risk Society had made him into one of the emblematic figures of European social science of his day. It had been translated into 35 languages. There are no fewer than 8,000 articles in Chinese academic journals that refer to Becks work. Somewhat surprisingly, Risk Society did not appear in English until 1992 and, relative to his standing in Europe and Asia, Becks impact on the academic scene in the United States was slight. For the United States social-scientific mainstream, he lacked rigor. Starting in the 1980s, behavioral economics and experimental social science came ever more to the fore as ways of accounting for how people form judgments under uncertainty. For intellectual entrepreneurs of the American left, who trade in exotic continental imports, Beck was not radical enough. They preferred their theory French. In political terms, Beck, like his friend and collaborator Anthony Giddens, was associated during the 1990s and 2000s with the Third Way of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the red-green coalition in Germany.

But it is not just academic politics that accounts for Becks muted reception in the United States. One must also ask how far Becks sketch of the contemporary cultural condition actually extended across the Atlantic. Beck himself clearly drew inspiration from the American environmental politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which led the world in turning scientific research to critical purposes. Silicon Valleys hybrid of tech and New Age religion could be cited as a classic instance of Becks second modernityimmensely wealthy tech wizards unafraid to seek enlightenment wherever they might find it, whether in yoga, outlandish diets, or shamanic outings to Burning Man. But the United States national politics presented a very different picture. What was one to make of a political system convulsed by arguments over the interpretation of an 18th-century constitution, the merits of teaching the biblical version of creation, and the veracity of climate science? There was plenty of opposition to climate politics from self-interested fossil fuel businesses in Europe, but few if any mainstream voices questioning the laboriously established scientific consensus. And in the United States all this came cloaked in a quasi-theological nationalism, embodied in the countrys sacrosanct way of life.

In the United States of 2020, faced with the confluence of evangelical religion, the Trump presidency, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, it is tempting to conclude that Becks announcement of a second modernity was premature. It is tempting to rally the liberal troops and to announce that in the United States today it is not the struggles of reflexive modernitythe self-generation of uncertainty and riskthat need to be fought so much as the battles of the first modernity, against superstition, atavism, and obscurantism.

This may be appealing. But it ignores the obvious fact that the vortex of televangelism, a reality-TV presidency, and viral Internet memes is itself a product of our high-tech capitalism, unimaginable in an earlier era. To answer them with a retreat to rationalism is to indulge in what the British sociologist Will Davies has recently termed Enlightenment kitsch. What we are living through is indeed Becks second modernity, just in a more conflicted and catastrophic version than he ever imagined. Hence, perhaps, the attraction of the Chernobyl scenario. How pleasant to imagine that our problems are those of the late Soviet regime and that what we need is simply a dose of liberty and perestroika, when the real path of progress is both more ambiguous and more sweeping, because it implicates the country as a whole.

If Becks readership in the United States was thin, the same was not true in East Asia, where since the 1980s the German sociologist cultivated a devoted following. Beck was attractive notably for progressive Korean social scientists dedicated to the critique of their national model of authoritarian modernity. For Beck, the eagerness with which his concept of second modernity was adapted by Asian social scientists was living proof of the dynamic open-endedness of the reality he was trying to describe. In such collaborations a process was set in motion that provincialized European concepts and history without consigning them to irrelevance. Japan, South Korea, and China were undergoing an industrial revolution more rapid than anything experienced in the West. They were huge laboratories of the Anthropocene and the churning appropriation of nature.

In July 2014, Beck visited Seoul and laid out the implications of his model of risk society for thinking about crises such as the Japanese nuclear accident at Fukushima in 2011, the Sewol Ferry Tragedy in Korea in 2014, and Chinas plague of air pollution. Beck was particularly keen to suggest ways in which East Asia might creatively overcome the bitter legacy of 20th-century history, if not at the level of national politics, then through the subpolitics of cooperation between the megacities of the region that were fast emerging as global hubs. The progressive administration of the city of Seoul launched a city lab to incorporate Becks ideas into their urban planning. Shocked by his sudden death in the spring of 2015, his South Korean collaborators staged a Buddhist commemorative service at which the mayor of Seoul, at the time one of the leading lights of the Korean opposition, gave a funeral oration.

Beck would no doubt have appreciated the syncretic gesture. Five years later, he would have been even more pleased to see the entire world taking lessons from a progressive South Korean government on how to handle the COVID-19 crisis. In the face of bitter opposition from medical interest groups, the South Korean government effectively mobilized coalitions of businesses and scientists to deliver fast and effective testing and tracing. Rather than relying on clichs about Confucian conformity to collective norms, they set out to build trust through transparency and effective delivery. Not only did the Democratic Party government contain the epidemic, but it even managed to hold a national election in the midst of the crisis and win it handsomely. The country offers an example, in what remains of this pandemic, of how to get risk society right.

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Ulrich Beck Is the World's Most Important Pandemic Intellectual - Foreign Policy

HaKashaph: The Witchy Jewish Potential of BtVS: WILLOW #1 – Monkeys Fighting Robots

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Joss Whedon has created myriad iconic female characters throughout his career and yet, besides Buffy, I would defy anyone to find a Whedonverse character more beloved than Willow Rosenberg. Shes the ideal friend and sidekick; shes loyal, loving, intelligent, and physically strong in her own right. Its easy to fall under the spell of this red-haired lesbian (or bisexual?) Jewish witch.

Its been seventeen years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended, and still, fans obsess over the nerdiest member of the Scooby Gang. While the enduring conversation about Willow revolves around her addiction storyline and gayness, an understated yet key aspect of the character is her Jewishness.

In the new spin-off series from BOOM! Studios, the creators can and should mine Willows Jewish identity. Mining her identity would not only bolster representation but broaden the character, taking her in a new direction.After all, Buffy was not created in a culturally-unaware vacuum. It was both sub-textually and textually feminist in correspondence with political movements of the period.

Furthermore, the series premiered during a new epoch of Jewish representation on television. Comedies like Seinfeld and The Nanny exposed folks from all over the world to Jews and Judaism. So, with or without the influence of producer and Jew Gail Berman, Willow Rosenbergs Jewishness was most likely a deliberate response to the zeitgeist.

Similar to television, the world of comics has always had a prominent Jewish presence behind the scenes. Unfortunately, this presence did not transfer to the comic book characters themselves until around ten years ago when writers such as Dan Slott (The Thing) and G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel) created religious Jewish heroes.

Whedon himself said that Willows Jewishness and sexual orientation werent big issues. Ive interpreted this statement as expressing a desire to normalize queerness and Jewishness on TV. But Willow is not presented as a religious Jew either in the show or the comic books. Can one normalize or even claim to represent a culture or belief without showing a character practicing and otherwise participating in it?

As Lisa Liebman noted in her article for Vanity Fair, a recent trend in Jewish television grew in response to a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes across America. Whats interesting about the trend is that while there are shows representing secular Jews (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), we have more shows than ever before representing religious Jews (Unorthodox, Shtisel). I dont know whether the creators of these shows had any specific intent to normalize Orthodox Jews, but they found a way to make whats singularly Jewish [into something] broadly appealing. Comic book writers have the same opportunity.

Willow does not necessarily need to be ret-conned as a Chassid or a committed socially-conscious Reform Jew to check off some representation box. Nonetheless, her Jewishness must go beyond a few quips about not worshiping Santa. Consider this: there is a movement called Semitic Neopaganism made up of Jewitches. According to Witchipedia, Jewitchery is either the practice of witchcraft by a Jewish person or the integration of Wiccan spirituality with Jewish culture. What if Willow took to some Jewitchery, or met a self-described Jewitch?

Witchcraft and Judaism go way back, anyway. Parts of the Bible unequivocally condemn witchcraft (mahashefah), yet Moses and Aaron do some things that would qualify as spells or magic. Thus, an exploration of Judaism and witchcraft could yield plenty of conflict and questions about identity.

Willow isnt at peace in England.

As Willow #1 is the beginning, no Jewishness or much witchcraft has been brought up. Willow has left Sunnydale to study abroad in England, a move motivated by the heartbreaking events of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Hellmouth arc. Shes on a solo journey of self-discovery and freedom from literal hell. Will her journey lead her to a discovery of Jewitches? Only Mariko Tamaki and Boom! Studios creative team can tell.

By incorporating the religion and culture in Willows arc in some way, the writers can normalize a certain kind of Jewishness without compromising other aspects of the character. Religious folklore, ritual, and holidays may also serve the plot.

For example, in Issue #8 of The Things Idol of Millions arc, Ben Grimm gets the bar mitzvah he never had. Errors in representing the tradition notwithstanding, the issue uses Judaism to explore emotional backstory that perhaps previously wasnt addressed. Most importantly, this coming-of-age ritual connects his adaptation to life as The Thing to a religious transition. Whats more, none of this comes at the expense of the characters trademarks. Slott proves here that religion can bolster storytelling and identity, to use the words of G. Willow Wilson.

I believe that many non-Jewish or simply non-religious creatives are too scared even to try developing anything seriously religious because they dont think such a story is universal. They may also fear their project being labeled Jewish/Christian/Muslim, which would then somehow beholden them to cater to that demographic.

But these concerns prevent comic book creators from interpreting religion for plot and character. Even in the Year of Our Lord 2020, when politics and fiction have entered into a toxic Spike/Buffy relationship, Willow can be made Jewish (or a Jewitch) without the burden of social commentary.

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HaKashaph: The Witchy Jewish Potential of BtVS: WILLOW #1 - Monkeys Fighting Robots

Why Generation Z are the fully digital pioneers [Q&A] – BetaNews

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

The Center for Generational Kinetics and WordPress platform WP Engine recently released a study looking at the digital habits of Europeans born between 1996-2015.

It shows that Generation Z has become the most internet-dependent generation, but what does this mean both for the Gen Zers themselves and the wider digital community? We spoke to Fabio Torlini, EMEA MD at WP Engine to find out.

BN: Why is Gen Z such an important generation?

FT: 2020 has taught us the stark importance of the digital world. Billions of people were forced to go online to work, study, and stay in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic. After years of knowing they needed to adopt digital transformation strategies, the pandemic forced organizations to not only accelerate those plans but put them into immediate action. Gen Z was born into a world that was already online, where the foundation of today's digital ecosystem was already visible. As such, this generation sees the web as the starting line, it's an intrinsic part of their everyday lives. Given this omnipresent role of connected technology, Gen Z's expectations for the digital world far exceed those of any generation that has come before them.

As members of this generation graduate from college, join the workforce, and increasingly realize their colossal buying power, they are changing the way we all identify with and are influenced by the internet and the larger digital world.

BN: This group of people seem to spend all day online -- what are the trends you have seen from this study?

FT: Based on their strong connection to the web, Gen Z's identity is deeply intertwined with the digital world. Because the internet plays such a strong role in their lives, it's not surprising that Gen Z views what they do online as their digital identity, and to a greater extent, their identity overall.

This is clearly reflected in Gen Z's prodigious content creation, but it's also apparent in the way Gen Z feels direct and personal involvement in activities, even if they only occur online. For example, 74 percent of Gen Z believe they can be part of a social movement even if they only participate through social media.

Equally compelling, 51 percent of Gen Z is friends with someone they only know online and have never met in person, and stunningly, almost a quarter of Gen Z (22 percent) trusts someone they meet online more than someone they meet in person.

BN: What are the key differences in the way different generations access and use the internet?

FT: Gen Z also represents a shift when it comes to what they depend on the internet for, which is primarily entertainment and access to their friends. This is a huge divergence from Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers, who all rely on the internet primarily for access to information. 59 percent of Gen Z primarily use the internet for entertainment, unlike Boomers where 67 percent use the internet for information.

BN: It's a challenging time right now for everyone. How do you think this has affected Gen Z's use of the internet?

FT: It has only accelerated trends we've seen within Gen Z, and the other generations. People are becoming more reliant on the internet and the tools of communications with one another, businesses, and the greater world. Our study found that 60 percent of Gen Z cant go more than four hours without accessing the internet. Considering school going virtual and cancellation of public gatherings, Gen Z's entire social life has been forced online, likely increasing the number of Gen Z who can't stay offline. It took the pandemic for other generations to finally catch up to Gen Z online.

BN: Given their digital native position among other generations, are Gen Z the best placed group of people to prosper during this global lockdown?

FT: The pandemic is the defining moment for this generation, much like 9/11 was for Millennials. As such, they are still adapting to its far-reaching implications, both socially and economically. That said, they were already used to a digital world, so the adjustment wasn't as severe for them.

BN: Given how quickly the tech world moves, what are companies doing to stay relevant for Gen Z?

FT: 61 percent of Gen Z think that in the next 10 years, all shopping will take place online. If you're not providing Gen Z with the entertaining, engaging digital experiences they expect, someone else most certainly is -- the endless amount of choice available on the internet is not lost on this generation.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that Gen Z's version of a digital-first world is the new digital paradigm. The only real choice you have is to get on board and meet this generation where they are, digital is the new front door.

Gen Z has also stressed the importance of brands taking a stand on global issues. 76 percent of Gen Z say they would buy from a company that contributes to social causes, with 37 percent saying they would stop buying from a company contributing to causes they disagree with. The act of taking a stand is enough to show you care.

BN: What does the future look like for the internet as its increasingly adapted and designed for Gen Z?

FT: Young people have always embodied the zeitgeist of society, profoundly influencing trends and technology adoption alike. As we forge ahead in our lives, working from home, shopping for groceries online, and learning in front of our screens, Gen Z will increasingly take their place in the driver's seat of society.

Their influence -- as the first generation of true digital natives -- is now radiating outward at a faster pace than other generations of youth in their time, precisely because it is digitally-based. They've never drawn a distinction between the physical and digital worlds. For them, whether online or offline, the critical element is that they can seamlessly move between both of them.

As weve seen in past studies, if this generation of pragmatists, self-starters, and entrepreneurs, finds it doesnt exist, Gen Z won't wait around for something to happen. They will build it.

Image credit: Dmyrto_Z/depositphotos.com

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Why Generation Z are the fully digital pioneers [Q&A] - BetaNews

Shelter Island Reporter Letters to the Editor – Shelter Island Reporter – Shelter Island Reporter

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Filling a need

To the Editor:

COVID-19 has taken a toll on many lives and businesses globally. The negative effects of the virus have also been felt across our country, New York State and Suffolk County. The Town of Shelter Island is dealing with the same issues faced by many, with an additional burden the need for continuous ferry service between the island and the twin forks to support Islanders and Island businesses.

Due to restrictions on travel, the shuttering of certain Shelter Island businesses, and the cancellation of many activities that draw travelers to Shelter Island (e.g., fireworks, 10K), traffic volume has been drastically diminished. The commercial traffic and cash fares from day trippers that subsidize our resident and commuter discount tickets have been negatively impacted. Unfortunately, running the ferry is a high fixed cost business and our cash flow is seasonal. Our expenses cannot fall at the same pace as our revenues.

The Town Board and North and South Ferries have been working together since the onset of the pandemic to ensure ongoing and consistent service to the island. That partnership extended to working with local lawmakers such as Legislators Fleming and Krupski, Assemblyman Thiele, and Congressman Zeldin all of whom have been supportive and empathetic to the unique situation Shelter Island faces vis a vis dependency on ferry service.

Bill S. 4150, the CERTS (Coronavirus Economic Relief for Transportation Services) Act, is before the Senate now. The town, together with the ferry companies, has reached out to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. This bipartisan legislation would provide $10 billion in emergency economic relief funding, in the form of grants and other economic assistance to U.S. flag passenger vessel operators, and other U.S. transportation service providers that are deemed essential. North Ferrys preference is to take advantage of these Federal funds as other publicly-owned transportation companies would be eligible to as opposed to negatively impacting our service schedule and/ or our rate structure in the event of a prolonged decline in traffic.

STELLA LAGUDIS, General Manager, Shelter Island Heights Property Owners Corporation

The golden rule

To the Editor:

I really liked the cartoon in the July 30 issue. While I got the humor of the family disagreement, the real message was exactly what we all need to hear: lets work together for the common good, respect, decency and the golden rule. And that resonated with me after reading the ongoing series of responses to the Marie Eiffel Go FundMe page debacle.

I do not think anyone has it in for this particular merchant, but how wonderful would it have been if she had seen this outpouring of support from her summer community as worth sharing with all the hard-working businesses here on Shelter Island, many of whom serve us year-round, as well as those who come in the summer, or seek refuge from the pandemic?

Sharing that fund with the struggling others who make up our community would have captured exactly the message of this cartoon.

Well, we all can be sure to give as much support to these businesses as we can to show our appreciation and live up to this spirit of unity.

WENDY C. TURGEON, Shelter Island

A vote for Nancy

To the Editor:

In November, voters will be presented with a clear choice between Nancy Goroff, a trail-blazing scientist who would put the interests of the Island and the 1st Congressional District first, and Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), who has placed loyalty to President Trump first.

Nancy, the former chair of the chemistry department at Stony Brook, believes that science-based solutions are key to addressing the range of critical problems we face. The most urgent problem, COVID-19, has claimed the lives of esteemed members of our community and had a terrible impact on so many, especially business owners, workers, seniors, school-age children and their parents. Other critical problems include the quality of our drinking water and health of our bays, as well as the impact of sea level rise and other undeniable effects of global warming.

A first-time candidate who would be the first female Ph.D. In Congress, Nancy has always been committed to finding solutions based on facts, not politics. She won a hotly contested primary, despite not having been endorsed by most of the Democratic Party establishment here or elsewhere.

By contrast, Mr. Zeldin has stood with President Trump as he has been fatally slow to accept mainstream science concerning the seriousness of COVID-19, and how to slow its spread and treat its victims. He has ignored the environmental challenges facing us here and well beyond.

Shockingly, Mr. Zeldin stood by when Republicans crafted a tax bill with a cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes, which hurts many and helps no one in our district, and did not oppose it until his opposition was meaningless. President Trump then signed it into law, which remains in effect, to the delight of lower tax states generally and those in the highest tax bracket everywhere in particular.

For those interested in learning more, visit goroffforcongress.com. To volunteer to help send a scientist to Washington, contact [emailprotected]

STEPHEN JACOBS, Shelter Island

Peace

To the Editor:

Freedom of speech is key to democracy. We should all be able to voice our opinions and beliefs without malice, no matter how varied. Differences need not be derisive.

Hearing anothers viewpoint may be educational and enlightening. Especially when an opinion is reasoned, informed and backed with facts.

Agree to disagree without acrimony. Diversity enriches life.

Peace,

S LADIK, Shelter Island

Illegal behavior

To the Editor:

For the safety and well being of Silver Beach residents at Bootleggers Alley, Crab Creek landing, and Peconic Ave. landings, a residents-only parking policy must be implemented immediately.

The behavior of the never-ending large groups of anonymous day transients cannot be supervised by limited police patrols, particularly remote areas that require foot patrols. Bootleggers Alley, Peconic Ave. and Crab Creek Road access points require too much time to patrol properly.

The patrols have failed to stop all the illegal behavior thus far. New groups of non-residents arrive every day that repeat the same offenses and add new unforeseen crimes to the list. The anonymous aspect of these large groups facilitates an accountability problem. No one is held accountable for the bad behavior of the group. Everyone in the group looks the other way, no one sees the trespassing, defecation, littering, public drinking of alcohol, drug use and broken beer bottles in the sand.

DWI comes with the drinking and drug use; this puts everyone at risk. The pedestrian and bike traffic by resident families is at an all time high in Silver Beach and throughout the Island. Thats whats happening and thats what will continue to happen on the remote beaches. It will not happen on the public beaches where theres accountability.

These folks come from an area of high COVID-19 infection.

The town policy must be to stop large groups of anonymous non-resident day transients from using our town landings and beach access points. Safety of residential neighborhoods must be the priority.

Louis Beach, Ward Beach and Shell Beach can be used by these large groups of non-residents. All non-residents that want to use these public beaches must register and pay for a non-resident day pass.

The town landings and beach access point are for residents only and their guests. Folks who are staying here on vacation can get a pass at town hall that will give them access to the public beaches.

Anyone who needs to sleep in their car overnight can do so at the police parking lot. All roads should have a no overnight sleeping restriction.

All potties must be removed from town landings and beach access points.

CHRIS STEHLING,Shelter Island

Julie Chen Moonves On The Season Premiere Of Big Brother: All Stars: Its Fun But Yet Its Very Real – CBS New York

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Big Brother: All Starscomes to CBS this Wednesday, August 5th at 9/8c. The 22nd season of the worldwide phenomenon comes with a special twist as all 16 houseguests will be returning players unveiled during the premiere. Julie Chen Moonves returns as host for this unique season that saw the houseguests spend weeks in isolation before entering the house due to the coronavirus.

CBS Matt Weiss spoke to Chen Moonves ahead of the shows premiere to discuss the new season, the new house and answer the question, are you smarter than a fifth grader?

MW: First of all, how have you been holding up the last couple monthswith quarantine.Howhaveyou been doing?

JCM:Well,how much timedoyou have, Matt? [Laughs] In a nutshell, home schooling and my 87-year-old mom, who was on March 1st going to test out living with us for about three weeks because of my father, who was 89, unexpectedly passed away.

So, its like, mom do you really want to live alone? That testturned into five months.She just left like three weeks ago to go back to her retirementcommunity,where God bless,shes enjoying it. But it was a little bit of craziness we were all learning how to handle that.

With the home schooling I went from being a Tiger Mom tobeinglike, hey Troy, do you want to watchTiger King with me and dad for a midnight showing? Luckily,he wasnt interested.That being said,I did hear him singingthe CarolBaskin song one day and I said things have got to change.Im building back structure.Im going back to work.Im putting a structure in. Were slowly pulling it together. [Laughs]

MW: A learning experience for everyone.

JCM:Hes a rising 5th grader and hesstarting school in a couple of weeks. I realized how not tech savvy I am. Doyou remember that show are you smarter thana 5thgrader?Turns out Im not even assmart as afourth grader.Im going back to Big Brother where I know how to do what I do.

MW: [Laughs] Speaking ofBig Brother,this will be a season like never before.What can fans expect from this all-new season?

JCM:Yougottathink about it.Big Brother, weve been on for 20 years, this is our 22nd season.Anyone who doesnt know the concept of the show,you basically take six strangers lock them into a house and they have to coexist for up to three months.Each week voting out one of their own,while theyre all competing with one another,only one person takeshomethe half $1,000,000 grand prize.We were the originalquarantine!

Whats different this season are two main things because of the pandemic, we brought in former Big Brother houseguests, anAll-Star cast. Were bringing back eight of the most memorable women and eight of the mostmemorablemen for various reasons.We have past winners, past people who almost got the half $1,000,000 but didnt, people who came in 11th place but due to circumstancesgot bouncedtoo early; they all have something to prove.

We had to bring in these 16 houseguests to our area of Los Angeles, whether we had to fly them across the country or some alreadylivein the area, then put them up in homes by themselves for weeks. During that time we weretesting them on a regular basis to make sure they donthave the virus so that we canput them into the Big Brother house.Once we threw all these 16 past houseguests in that Big Brother house might bethe safesthousein the world! Once they go in they dont have any contact with the outside world.

There are no camera operators inside the house.All the camera operators are on the other side of the glass or were using cameras that are locked down in various corners and walls. The good news is we were kind of designed to do a show duringquarantine.Itsgoing to look exactly like how you saw it last year.Its not going to look like aZoom showbecause its not.

MW: A bunch of people locked up in a house for three months, the show is more relatable than ever!

JCM: Exactly, we were ahead of our time, weve been doing this for 20 years, we are the original quarantine. We joke but when it comes to this season and taking precautions were not taking anything lightly.

MW: Great timing as well to be able to provide some normalcy for fans of the show to see something new yet familiar.

JCM:I think that its going to be a nice break.We could all use a little bit of a break from all the drama but not stick our heads in the sand to whats happening out in the world.Thesehouseguests,Im sure,theyre going to talk about what thequarantinehas done to their families.Alot of these returning houseguests went in single when they first did it and now some of them are married, some have children, theres a lot to offer there.

I think its going to be perfect break we kindofneed,without ignoring the reality of the world were living in right now.Heres the hope, the hope is whether youre a returning Big Brother fan or youre new to it youre going towatchthis andlearn,cant we all get along?We all want the same thing.We all want to be safe.We all want a vaccine.We all want to be working.What can we do?What smallthing canwe eachdo,small or big to help get to that common goal we all want.We all want to be heard.We all want to be respected.How about we all start by practicing the Golden Rule; treat others the way you want to be treated.

MW: Absolutely! I think the last few months have really shown people whats important and allowed folks to examine themselves.

JCM:Its pretty simple. I have to tell you, we should all take this time just to lean intoGod. Im telling you whatever behavior have, you have to think for a second, now is God looking down at me and being like yeah thats whoI created you to be,thats how you should behave. I learn my lessons all the time like when I lose my patience with my 10-year-old, I have to remind myself patience is a virtue; this is not who God created me to be. I just need to [deep breath].

MW:I couldnt agree more. Circling back to Big Brother and some changes that needed to be made for this season. Were there any major changes you had to make as the host?

JCM: Weve had to do a lot of things.Everyone has had to take tests before returning to work and we all have to be masked but when you see me on TVbroadcasting,I wont be wearing a mask.Each week when someone getsevicted, they wont be shaking my hand wewill be keeping a distance.

If you were to pull the cameras wide and see you know everyone who works on the show,theyre all wearing a mask.No live audience this season for obvious reasons, but if youre a long-time fan of the show, we didnt have a live audience from season two to I think like season seven or eight.

I really feel safe about going back to work and happy about it.Weve taken the precautions and yet its going to be not only a safe environment but a fun environment for people at home to watch.

MW: And when people are watching in their homes theyll be looking at a brand new Big Brother house, the reveal came out online earlier this week and it looks incredible. Where does this house stack up to you all-time in Big Brother history?

JCM: Well this is the first year Ive never gone into the house.Usually I bring cameras into a house tour,but for obvious reasons I did not.I got a tour throughZoom and I was blown away.This house celebrates some of the most memorable moments and former houseguests in the history of the show. Twenty years and 21seasons, plus the two celebrity runs and one version that was just online.Whether youre new to the show or youveonlywatchedthe last few seasons,or youve been there since season one, youre going to see the history.

I told Scott Storey, who has been doing the house and the show maybe since season two or maybe sinceseason1, I said Scott you have to submit for an Emmy this year, it looks so good.I never wantitto change again. Lets make it amuseum, letsadd more memorable houseguests.

MW: And now last question before I let you go, what message do you have for fans heading into season 22 on Wednesday night?

JCM: So this is what I always think about Big Brother, its fun butyetits very real life. When youre watching it, youreprobably not going to love everyone that you see in the house.Hopefully you can find outthis one facet of that person,whereyou have compassion for thatperson,or you relate to that person.Lets all watched this summer and have a good time, but lets also learn,lets not be so quick to judge one another and lets try and give everyone in our world,in our life,and these houseguests,if youre watching them,the benefit of the doubt.

I think its important for everyone to remember if you communicate in a respectful gentle manner you will get far in the Big Brother house and in life.Treat others with respect.If you dont agree with someone we should respectfully and peacefully agree to disagree. Lets bring forward the better sides of all of us.I gotwartsandflaws;we all do.Letsallput our best foot forward.

MW: Very poignant advice for everyone out there. Thank you so much for the time today Julie, always a pleasure speaking with you. All the best with the new season and with the home schooling!

JCM: God bless you, stay safe. Thank you Matt!

Tune in the all-new premiere of Big Brother: All Stars Wednesday night at 9/8c, only on CBS and streaming on CBS All Access. Check your local listings for more information.

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Julie Chen Moonves On The Season Premiere Of Big Brother: All Stars: Its Fun But Yet Its Very Real - CBS New York

PGA Championship Odds, Picks & Promotions: Bet $20, Win $100 if Brooks Koepka Makes a Birdie This Weekend – The Action Network

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

We have yet another big week in the golf world, with the PGA Championship being played at Harding Park.

Tiger (Woods, have you heard of him?) is playing, Brooks Koepka is in the hunt for his fifth major and sportsbooks all over the country arent hesitating to incentivize you to bet on the first major of 2020.

Brooks Koepka is hungry for more majors! Hes off to a great start at the PGA Championship and is in a solid position to win his fifth major.

Even if he doesnt win, you can win $100 if he can make at least one birdie! Heres how:

Note: Weve used Brooks Koepka as an example, but you can bet on any golfer youd like and win $100 if they make at least one birdie.

If Koepka wins, youd walk away with another big chunk of change from your original bet. If he doesnt, oh well the chances are very high youll get $100 from this promotion.

Bet $20, Win $100 if Brooks Koepka Makes a Birdie This Week!

Click here to see more PGA Championship offers

Queue up the Bruce Springsteen, folks, because youll be rooting for anyone born in the U.S.A. at this weeks PGA Championship.

BetMGM is offering new users 100-1 odds that an American will win at Harding Park and in case youre not aware, there are some pretty good American golfers at the moment.

To take advantage of this promo:

This promotion can be taken advantage of all the way up to Sunday morning, which means you can even bet on it if the top-10 was chock full of Americans after three rounds.

Plenty of Americans are near the top of the leaderboard early on, including some of the pre-tourney favorites like Brooks Koepka, Xander Schauffele and Bryson DeChambeau.

Of course, plenty of you will be rooting for Tiger Woods, who is off to a hot start himself.

In summary: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Bet $1, Win $100 if an American Golfer Wins the PGA Championship

Click here to see more PGA Championship offers

Fun fact: Tiger has never once played a tourney in which hes failed to break 80. So, barring a disaster, this looks like a pretty safe bet.

Even if you missed out on his first round 68, you can still sign-up and bet on this promotion on Friday.

To take advantage of this offer:

If Tiger, perhaps the best golfer of all time, manages to break 80, youll be rewarded $50 in free bets, which only need to be rolled over 1x.

Whether you love Tiger or hate him, you have to admit the odds of him doing this are remarkably high!

Bet $25, Win $50 if Tiger Breaks 80 on Friday

Click here to see more PGA Championship offers

The age old adage less is more is not something that applies to betting. More is more, and this profit boost will allow you to win more money than you normally would when betting on the PGA Championship.

All bettors at Unibet in Indiana can boost their profits on the PGA Championship bet of their choosing by:

There are a few routes bettors could go down when using this. Just be sure to remember the golden rule of boosts: the bigger the original payout, the more additional money youll win with the boost. Its science.

If you bet $50 on a -110 matchup bet and it wins, youd win $45.45 x 115% = $52.27, or an additional $6.83.

If you bet $50 on a +5000 outright winner, youd win $2,500 x 115% = $2,875, or an additional $375. The max winnings on this boost are $5,000.

Whether you want to earn an extra few bucks or few hundred bucks, the profit boost is the way to do it.

Get a 15% Profit Boost on the PGA Championship

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PGA Championship Odds, Picks & Promotions: Bet $20, Win $100 if Brooks Koepka Makes a Birdie This Weekend - The Action Network

Heat wave: National Health Authority reminds people to drink enough water and look after the elderly – RTL Today

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

With temperatures expected to rise over 30 degrees during the weekend, the National Health Authority is reminding people of its action plan against the heat wave.

One golden rule which applies to everyone is to drink a lot of water, at least 1.5 litres per day.

However, heat is not the only thing to look out for while being out in the sun. The risk for skin cancer also rises, which is why people should either avoid sun light altogether or take precautionary measures. The National Health Authority also recommends keeping windows closed during the day and instead let some air in once sun light becomes less intense in the evening. Showers are a great way to cool down, while sport or physical activity in general should be avoided during the warmest hours of the day.

People with elderly relatives or neighbours should check on them regularly and make sure that they have enough water and are drinking enough of it.

In the case of a red alert, specific aids will be made available and people on the Red Cross' lists for heat wave events will receive help at their own homes.Those with any further questions about heat waves can reach out to the National Health Inspectorate by calling(+352) 247-85653.

Additional information is also available on the Health Directorate's website(in French) as well as in the brochureAttention canicule Prenez soin de votre sant ! /Hitzewelle - Achten Sie auf Ihre Gesundheit !.

Meteolux has issued an orange alert for Saturday. However, the warning also applies for Friday.

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Heat wave: National Health Authority reminds people to drink enough water and look after the elderly - RTL Today

I Galloped Racehorses for a Living, But I Freeze in the Hunter Ring. Here’s How I’m Dealing With It. – Noelle Floyd

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Danzig

Ive been a horse lover since I can remember. When I was young, I would walk four miles round trip to "pet" the horses that lived down the road from my father's house. Eventually, my father took me to a stable to ride, and I can still remember the feeling of cantering Blackie boldly down a narrow dirt path, the wind in my hair, not a care in the world.

By the age of fourteen, my mother had finally given in to my horse craziness, and I bought my first horse Shotzy, an old gelding with Navicular disease (of course I didn't know that when I bought him because when you only pay $250 for a horse you obviously don't get them vetted!). I couldnt afford a saddle, so I rode bareback for a year before I scrounged up the $95 to buy an english saddle that was as old as the hills. In those days, it was just Shotzy and I on the trails, having fun. No lessons, no shows, no agenda. Just pure joy.

Eventually, I started working at a local Thoroughbred racetrack as a groom. My secret hope was to eventually get to gallop, but I also knew that there was much more to galloping a racehorse than what I had done. So, I kept on with the barn chores for a while, enjoying the job for what it was. Then one day, I got my lucky break. A friend who was married to a trainer from Sagamore Farm, a training facility for young Thoroughbreds, called and offered me a position exercising horses. I was surprised because I had never ridden a Thoroughbred before, at least not one in training, but she explained that her husband had seen me on a horse and was willing to train me. The pay was not enough to pay my bills, but I was eager to accept anyway, so I moved into the girls living quarters at the track with four other roomates. I worked under trainer Buddy Troyer and Hall of Fame trainer Henry Clark. I learned to break the young horses and gallop the older ones.

I was living my dream.

About four months into the job, I remember a particularly rainy day. Things were soggy, so we were using the inside 1/4 mile track. Mr. Clark put me on an older horse, one that had raced many times, and I had not yet learned the golden rule of racehorses: Do not pull back to try and get them to stop.

That day, I learned. The horse ran off with me four times around (1 mile) in this narrow track, at a wide open gallop, and to this day it was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me on a horse in my lifetime. For weeks after that, I feared getting on the older horses (the young horses hadnt run before, so they were less likely to run off).

My First Experience With Fear in the Saddle

I was young and resilient and brushed it off. I didnt have a mental skills practice back then, I just kept riding and putting as much time and practice in as I could. I was offered jobs at tracks all around the country. I became the most experienced rider in the barn, so I was put on the most challenging horses. This did make my job more difficult and as I got older I began tothink more about my wellbeing than I ever had before.

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These horses are kept in a stall 23 hours a day, then exercised or raced, and are back in the stall.As athletes, they are fed high protein feed and supplements. Most of them are under four as their career begins as 2-year-olds. While we all know that riding horses isnt the safest activity in the world, these factors compounded the risk that I was subjecting myself to on a daily basis - and with each passing year, I felt it more.

This feeling really came to a head when I had my daughter at age thirty. When she was 6-months-old, I was coming off the gap at Pimlico Racetrack. The horse I was on was wearing blinkers, and of course my stirrups were very short. She was quite a tough horse to gallop,but usually very well behaved. She saw something that scared her and I was too relaxed, and before I knew it I was in the air grabbing for something, anything. I was totally airborne, and had a sinking realization in that moment that I was about to hit frozen ground. As I laid on the cold track, with a broken collar bone and bruises head to toe, I knew it was time for a new profession.

Changing Lanes

I moved to Ocala, Fla., and went into the medical field. Years passed and Ive always had a horse at my small farm here, since my daughter has the horse obsession as well. I felt lifetimes away from those adrenaline-filled days at the track, and there was a lot to be said for having a job that didnt threaten bodily harm!

Six years ago, when I was 56, my daughter told me I should start taking jumping lessons. I had always wanted to learn, but didnt even know the difference between hunter and jumper, I just knew I was too old to try and beat the clock on a horse. So, I agreed to take lessons with a hunter trainer - I met Isaac Leffkowitz and that was the day my life changed.

When One Door Closes...

What started as the occasional lesson with Isaac turned into purchasing a school horse. I had a blast. I was learning flatwork and jumping crossrails and just having fun. I felt reconnected to my old life but in a new, more fulfilling way. My amazing mare had an injury and we were out for 8 months, then 6 months after starting work again, I lost her to an infection. I suffered from severe depression due to losing her and that was a very difficult time in my life. I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me, and I missed her.

As I was searching for another horse, Isaac wanted me to try a horse that had soured as a top dressage horse. Hed bred her and he couldn't find a person that meshed with her. I rode her and at first felt her hesitation, but we began to get to know each other. We have worked hard as a team, and learned each other's needs and expectations with Isaacs guidance, and I could not be happier. She went from a horse that people feared to one that I would comfortably put my 9-year-old granddaughter on for a pony ride.

I know that being in my head is holding me back and Im really struggling with confidence. It's funny now because people say, You galloped racehorses, but youre afraid to get in the show ring?"

Anxiety Creeps In

At this point, I have competed three times in the hunters. The first show was in Tampa and I rode in the long stirrup class which had been combined with the childrens, so I competed against 10-year-olds and their ponies. It was the ultimate embarrassment, but I had to start somewhere. The fear and anxiety was overwhelming. I did it, but can barely remember anything that happened in the ring. In my most recent show, I was again so overwhelmed with anxiety, but it was easier and I did fairly well.

I know that being in my head is holding me back and Im really struggling with confidence. It's funny now because people say, You galloped racehorses, but youre afraid to get in the show ring?" My fear is not of my horse. It's not even of getting hurt. It's thoughts like, "I'm going to forget the course" or "I'm going to miss my distance.

How Im Working on Improving

With my trainer Isaac, weve identified that my tendency is to freeze in the show ring. When I was showing at HITS in March, I was very anxious about forgetting my course. It was cold and windy so, lucky for me, there were no spectators except my barn mates. I reviewed the course with Isaac one last time, walked into the ring knowing my first jump, and suddenly blanked on how to get to that jump. Which way do I go? Which lead do I need to be on? Luckily, Isaac was there to direct me and it ended up being my best round.

I now know what happened to me when I froze, thanks to Dr. Jenny Sussers Masterclass. The blood had rushed out of my frontal lobe causing my "fight or flight" instinct to kick on - as she says, I had "literally lost my mind." I knew I had to figure out how to deal with this anxiety.

Dr. Sussers Masterclass made me understand what physiologically happens, which helps immensely. She also helped me understand that I struggle with anxiety, not fear (and they are different). Since taking her class, I have been doing the box breathing and am learning the correct way to meditate.

I would recommend the Masterclasses to any other riders who deal with this type of mental block. Specifically, Ive enjoyed Dr. Jenny Sussers and Annette Paterakiss courses. It has helped me take back control of my body and mind. The more you know, the easier it is to deal with. I also feel that showing more often will help me gain experience - and with experience comes confidence.

Good luck to all my fellow riders out there - we CAN master our minds!

Isanxiety holding you back in the saddle?Dr. Jenny Susser's Masterclass gives you the tools to become more powerful than your fear.

Inset photo byVictoria DeMore Photography.

I Galloped Racehorses for a Living, But I Freeze in the Hunter Ring. Here's How I'm Dealing With It. - Noelle Floyd

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