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BetConstruct strengthens live casino offering with Hi-Lo addition – Casino Beats

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

BetConstruct has enhanced its live casino offering after launching Hi-Lo, an adaptation of the once viral web game The Higher Lower.

Hi-Lo will give players the chance to predict whether the next card dealt by a dealer is of a higher, lower or equal value to the one lying face-up on the table.

To deliver fair gameplay and dynamic odds, BetConstruct will use the ShuffleStar Continuous Shuffler hardware system to create real-time non-stop shuffling action for all eight decks.

In addition to making a prediction on the card value, players will also be able to place a number of side bets which BetConstruct emphasised will liven up the game and add up revenue figures.

BetConstruct highlighted that the straightforward nature of the Hi-Lo game has a clear and major potential of attracting mass audiences, giving BetConstructs operators the opportunity to roll out the quick-to-play game for their players.

Earlier this month, Betconstruct rolled out its Swift Roulette title, introducing new rules for what it lauded as a fan-favourite game.

Swift Roulette combines eight different roulette tables in one view which allows players to choose their betting amount, or save their favourite bets, and play the game immediately without waiting for other players to join in. Once a player makes a bet, the payout is determined by the roulette game which is the first out of eight games to announce the winning result.

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BetConstruct strengthens live casino offering with Hi-Lo addition - Casino Beats

What You Need to Know About the Coronavirus Right Now – The New York Times

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

(Reuters) - Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

10,000 deaths in 11 days

U.S. deaths from the novel coronavirus were approaching 150,000 on Wednesday, the highest level in the world and up by 10,000 in 11 days, a Reuters tally showed.

This is the fastest increase in fatalities since the United States went from 100,000 cases to 110,000 cases in 11 days in early June.

Nationally, COVID-19 deaths have risen for three weeks in a row while the number of new cases week-on-week fell for the first time since June.

A spike in infections in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas this month has overwhelmed hospitals. The rise has forced states to make a U-turn on reopening economies that were restricted by lockdowns in March and April.

Wrangling resumes in Washington

Top Trump administration officials and Democratic congressional leaders will try on Wednesday to narrow their differences over a coronavirus aid bill, with no guarantees they can craft a compromise before some jobless benefits expire at the end of this week.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were expected to resume negotiations with the two senior Democrats in Congress - House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

An hour-long meeting of the four broke up on Tuesday with no sign of progress.

Senate Republican leaders are pushing for around $1 trillion in new aid, on top of more than $3 trillion enacted since early this year. Democrats see a far greater need as they back $3 trillion in new spending.

'Quarantine roulette'

Heathrow Airport, once Europe's busiest, called on Britain to urgently back a passenger testing regime, warning that without one, the country's strict quarantine rules will stop travel, stall the economy and lead to more job losses.

Heathrow said that to avoid losing a game of global "quarantine roulette", the government should change its rules to cut quarantine from 14 days to around eight for passengers who take two tests over the course of a week.

The worst public health crisis since the 1918 influenza outbreak has wrought economic turmoil across the world and just as the travel industry restarted there are fears of a second wave of shutdowns after Britain hastily imposed a quarantine on travellers from Spain.

The cost of having a coronavirus test at the airport would be about 150 pounds ($195) per person and the passenger would be expected to pay.

Aged care home crisis in Australia

Australia has sent defence and emergency medical teams, usually deployed to disaster zones, to aged care homes in Melbourne to help contain the country's worst outbreak of the virus. There are 804 active COVID-19 cases linked to the homes, including workers, state premier Daniel Andrews said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison described as "very distressing" the situation in 13 care facilities in the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is capital.

The outbreaks have largely been due to transmission from workers at the homes, many of whom might have been unaware they were carrying the virus. "When it rains, everyone gets wet. And that is what we're seeing with broad-based community transmission in Victoria," Morrison said.

Melbourne, Australia's second-most populous city, is in the midst of a reimposed lockdown that has stalled the reopening of businesses, forced other states to shut borders with Victoria and held off reopening travel with New Zealand.

Brink of large coronavirus outbreak

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam warned the city is on the brink of a large-scale outbreak and urged people to stay indoors as strict measures to curb the spread took effect on Wednesday.

The new regulations ban gatherings of more than two people, close dining in restaurants and make the wearing of face masks mandatory in public places, including outdoors. These are the toughest measures introduced in the city since the outbreak.

The government has also tightened testing and quarantine arrangements for sea and air crew members. The measures will be in place for at least seven days.

(Compiled by Linda Noakes and Karishma Singh; editing by Barbara Lewis)

Joel Cummins Covers Journey, Wilco & Elton John ‘Live From The Living Room’ – JamBase

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

Umphreys McGee keyboardist Joel Cummins presented a 70-minute set livestreamed from his home for the Live From The Living Room series on Wednesday night. Cummins mixed UM originals with classical compositions, a jazz tune and covers of songs by Journey, Wilco and Elton John.

Joel kicked off the performance with a jam that led into Bachs Prelude In C Major #2. The pianist then played DeBussys Serenade For The Doll and jazz artist Lee Morgans Sidewinder. Cummins first vocal offering of the evening was Dont Let The Sun Go Down On Me, a song Elton John originally released on his 1974 studio album, Caribou.

Dont Let The Sun Go Down On Me led into Mamu, an Umphreys McGee original the band has only played three times since 2002. Joel then jammed UMs Wife Soup into the Wilco classic Sunken Treasure. From there, Cummins fit Roulette within Higgins before Hajimemashite bled into Journeys beloved Dont Stop Believin. The set came to a close with the end of UMs own All In Time.

Donations were split between Team Umphreys McGee and the National Civil Rights Museum. Watch Joels set below:

Set: Improv > Prelude In C Major #2, Serenade For The Doll, Sidewinder, Dont Let The Sun Go Down On Me > Mamu, Wife Soup > Sunken Treasure, Higgins > Roulette > Higgins, Hajimemashite > Dont Stop Believin > All In Time Coda

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Joel Cummins Covers Journey, Wilco & Elton John 'Live From The Living Room' - JamBase

DraftKings Casino App in PA Designed with the iGaming Player in Mind – PA Online Casino

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

DraftKings expanded its realm by launching a mobile casino app in Pennsylvania. Users can link accounts across DFS, sports betting, and casino sites and have a shared wallet.

And now, the DraftKings standalone casino app is available on iOS. However, its not available for Android.

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DraftKings online sportsbookoperates in Pennsylvania through a partnership withThe Meadows. The Meadows did not apply for an online casino license so DraftKings iGaming platform operates under Hollywood Casinos license.

A DraftKings spokesperson explained to Play Pennsylvania the reasoning behind the standalone casino app:

While our Sportsbook app caters to sports bettors, the DraftKings Casino standalone app is a more wholesome product designed with the iGaming player in mind. Irrespective of the annual sports calendar, DraftKings Casino leverages our unique, in-house technology and games to offer a best-in-market gaming experience.

The new app allows us to focus on our strengths, including our dedicated DraftKings Live Dealer studio and best-in-class DraftKings-built game suite, and highlight market-leading promotionslike our monthly $250K leaderboards.

How to download DraftKings casino app in Pennsylvania:

The DraftKings Casino app in Pennsylvania has 17 table games, Game King Poker, and 30 slot titles.

The biggest difference from other online casinos in PA is that DraftKings has branded and themed table games like:

For min and max bets:

Baccarat: Minimum bet $1.00, max bet $10,000

Game King Poker: Minimum bet .20, max bet $200

The response in Pennsylvania has been exciting, said a DraftKings spokesperson. Our players have clearly been waiting for DraftKings to launch our trusted gaming experience in the state, proving demand for something different in the market. So far, the most popular games have been DraftKings Blackjack and Roulette; land-based slot titles such as Cleopatra and Wheel of Fortune always prove popular.

As of late July, no online casino in Pennsylvania offered Live Dealer. Live dealer is a popular online casino feature that allows users to play games like Blackjack in real-time, with a real dealer, from home.

A press release from DraftKings announcing the app said that customers in PA will soon have access to the custom DraftKings Live Dealer Studio which will operate 24/7.

When asked in mid-July about a possible timeframe for the arrival of Live Dealer, a DraftKings spokesperson said they expect it to made available within the next few months.

DraftKings Casino App in PA Designed with the iGaming Player in Mind - PA Online Casino

Marvels Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 10 review: Inhuman roulette – Culturess

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

MARVEL'S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. -"Stolen" After Enochs sacrifice propelled them out of the time storm, the team arrives back in 1983 where Nathanial and Kora are hard at work building an army of hand-selected anarchist Inhumans at Afterlife. When the agents split up to cover more ground, Daisy is tasked with protecting Jiaying and is compelled to confront her mother for the first time since her death; while the others quickly learn theyll need to face yet another supercharged former enemy in order to stop Malick on "Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," airing WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 (10:0011:00 p.m. EDT), on ABC. - (ABC/Jessica Brooks)THOMAS E. SULLIVAN

DearMarvels Agents of SHIELD, will we see Fitz in this weeks episode? Probably not? Lets get to it!

Nathaniel Malick is recruiting John Garrett. I was wondering how wed bring him back into the picture! Malick brings him to Afterlife and introduces him to Sibyl and the process of transferring Inhuman powers to normal humans.

Roxy actually made it into SHIELD! Shes been holding down the fort at the Lighthouse, ready to meet up with the rest of the team at the Triskelion (which exists ahead of schedule). Whats the plan of attack? They bring in Gordon and Jiaying and send Coulson and Gordon in to do some recon.

MARVELS AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. -Stolen After Enochs sacrifice propelled them out of the time storm, the team arrives back in 1983 where Nathanial and Kora are hard at work building an army of hand-selected anarchist Inhumans at Afterlife. When the agents split up to cover more ground, Daisy is tasked with protecting Jiaying and is compelled to confront her mother for the first time since her death; while the others quickly learn theyll need to face yet another supercharged former enemy in order to stop Malick on Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., airing WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 (10:0011:00 p.m. EDT), on ABC. (ABC/Jessica Brooks)FIN ARGUS, CLARK GREGG, HENRY SIMMONS

Too bad Jiaying shows up and drops the bomb about Daisys sister before May and Elena can warn her. Cora killing herself in the original timeline led Jiaying to leave Afterlife and do charity work, meet Calvin Zabo, have Daisy

Gordon and Coulson are discovered immediately because Malick has the time stream. Of course Garrett is going to get Gordons teleporting powers. This is going to go poorly. They come into the Lighthouse.

Sousa gives Daisy some insight on talking to her mom. The time streams are screwed anyway, so whats one conversation? Its a very heartfelt scene, one thatAgents of SHIELD is always stellar at. Telling Jiaying that theyre from the future fills in some blanks for Jiaying. Chloe Bennet steals the show.

Of course Malick ruins it by blowing Daisys cover and starting on a tangent about their future and everything Jiaying will put Daisy through. Theres a head-to-head with Daisy and Malick, but the shocking moment is when Malick snaps Jiayings neck and kills her.

They were afterSimmons! The twists keep coming! They steal her and the Zephyr (with Deke onboard).

Malick tells Simmons the one thing that stands in their way of succeeding in every single timeline: Fitz.

May kicking the crap out of Garrett was very satisfying. He was a fun villain of season one, thats for sure.

Clever. Digging up our greatest hits, Coulson says as he meets young Garrett. Touch, Coulson.

Kudos toAgents of SHIELD for using Bill Paxtons real-life son to portray young John Garrett. And a double kudos to theGuardians of the Galaxy Easter egg of Deke listening to an awesome mix on a tape player with orange headphones.

Simmons also has her breakdown moment. Daisy asks what she remembers before wiping her memories, recalling how she was inconsolable. Simmons breaks down to Deke, wondering if Fitz isnt dead and the time jumps were pre-programmed. Well, based on that post-credits stinger, we should be seeing him very soon.

Next weeksAgents of SHIELD looks like the team might fall for Cora wanting to become part of SHIELD. Or maybe she actually means it. Well have to find out.

Marvels Agents of SHIELD season 7 episode 10 review: Inhuman roulette - Culturess

Coronavirus In Texas: Plano Teen Helps Develop Technology Aimed At Speeding Up Detection, Treatment For COVID-19 Patients – CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

PLANO, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) Its a new technology that could drastically speed up the detection and treatment of patients with COVID-19.

A member of the team who developed it is a teenager from Plano.

Sixteen-year-old Moksh Nirvaan has passion for artificial intelligence that led to a brainstorming session with a team of doctors.

It has resulted in whats called COVID Scan AI.

It is technology that uses artificial intelligence to read X-rays of possible COVID-19 patients faster than humans and does it non-stop.

It helps avoid delays that can waste valuable time when Nirvaan says patients could instead be getting treatment.

Nirvaan says the technology already has a 95% accuracy rate detecting whether a patient has COVID-19-related pneumonia.

Moksh Nirvaan (CBS 11)

The software recently placed in a Facebook competition and Nirvaan is looking to offer it to hospitals and clinics.

We are actually very excited about it currently. We are working to get this out and clinically validated, get it out to clinics and hospitals all over the world, said Nirvaan. I hope that it can be a really big breakthrough and in the sense that it can save lives.

Nirvaan was a student at Clark High School, but he already has college credit hours two years ahead of most kids his age and plans to pursue a career pioneering uses for artificial intelligence.

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Coronavirus In Texas: Plano Teen Helps Develop Technology Aimed At Speeding Up Detection, Treatment For COVID-19 Patients - CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

Fast-growing Sharpen Technologies could add 75 employees by end of 2021 – Indianapolis Business Journal

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

Sharpen Technologies, an Indianapolis-based developer of cloud-based customer service software, came out of the gates fast this year, and despite a pause in March has continued to experience dramatic growth right through the pandemic.

Simmons

The company is reporting 236% year-over-year revenue growth through the first half of this year and is projecting similar growth during the second half. The growth through June came despite the fact that the companys business nearly ground to a halt for a period in March as the coronavirus pandemic erupted in the U.S.

We had to lift and shift to work at home. And we had a challenging period where we had to figure out the market, Sharpen Technologies Chairman Mike Simmons told IBJ. By the second quarter, we were back on our projections. We came into the year forecasting big growth.

Many of Sharpen Technologies customers saw their business significantly interrupted this spring and summer by the pandemic. Sharpen officials said their software has helped many of those customers to kickstart and accelerate their business in todays work-at-home environment.

Simmons doesnt think Sharpens growth will slow anytime soon, as the company is projecting to double its revenue again next year.

Simmons said the growth tear started last year after the company made some management changes and brought in new team members.

In the last few years, Sharpen Technologies has changed its focus. In 2016, most of the firms revenue came from providing small business systems. Today, more than 90% of its revenue comes from providing systems to call centers.

This year, Simmons said, 70% of Sharpen Technologies growth is coming from new customers. Some of those wins are coming against much larger competitors, he added.

And Sharpen has landed some big fish. For instance, Radio Systems Corp., the largest manufacturer of pet products in the U.S. and parent company of PetSafe, SportDog and Invisible Fence Brand, signed a deal with Sharpen this year.

The pandemic seems to be accelerating growth, Simmons said.

Eighty percent of our customers are still running [on-premise] gear and moving to the cloud, he explained. The working-at-home situation everyone was forced into by the pandemic has accelerated that process.

Having call center employees work from home is impossible with on-premise system, Simmons said. The technology wasnt designed for that. With what Sharpen Technologies offers, it makes it much easier for call center employees fire up from home.

Simmons said the companys growth will get a boost by the release this week of Performance Tiles, a new feature within its Performance Management platform. Performance Tiles offer agents real-time visibility into their work, providing scoring metrics against specific targets and larger peer groups.

For its beta customers, Performance Tiles has improved call center wait times, first-time resolution and other core metrics, Simmons said.

People are seeing improvements literally in the first week, he said. Its very easy to implement and quite impactful. We think the implementation of this is groundbreaking.

Performance Tiles not only helps call center employees to measure their own work, but offers managers a better way to monitor their employeeseven when working remotely, Simmons said.

Using the program, one leading financial technology company with more than 1,000 agents estimated an $800,000 annual savings after a 4.7% improvement in call time. A software company saw a 12% reduction in call time, improving service levels by 12% and reducing staff costs by 8%, according to Sharpen data.

And, Simmons said, Sharpens offerings are designed to make call centers jobs easier and more enjoyable, which in turn reduces turnover, a major problem for call centers globally.

We try to make tools that makes employees happier and more fulfilled and reduce turnover, he said. Thats the area where we really excel. We work hard to give call center employees the very best experience.

The price of Sharpens software and services varies based on the customer size, but Simmons said it can be as little as $40,000 annually, with the average annual contract running between $200,000 and $250,000. Typically, the deals run on a two-year contract.

The privately-held, venture-backed firm keeps its revenue figures and other business-related data close to the vest, but Simmons said the company has added a good number of customers this year and now has more than 250. The firm is still in growth mode and not yet profitable, he added.

To keep that growth rolling, Simmons said the company will likely look to raise more capital in the next year or two. The company, founded in 2011 and known as Fathom Voice until 2016, closed on a $15 million round of growth capital in March 2019.

If we continue to grow, there will be plenty of capital available to us, Simmons said. Were not in a position right now where were contemplating that.

While Sharpen Technologies growth would certainly make it an acquisition target, selling the company is not on Simmons radar.

Were very focused today on growing the business here, he said. We dont think in terms of an exit.

The company, which has 75 full-time employees, is in hiring mode, specifically looking for sales and engineering workers, but Simmons admits the pandemic is complicating the hiring process.

We want to be prudent in our growth plans and not get over our ski tips in terms of hiring employees, Simmons said. We are actively hiring, but at a little slower pace than originally planned.

Still, he said, the thought of doubling our team by the end of next year is not unreasonable. As a growth company, once we get through this malaise, our hiring would track with our revenue. If we hit our sales numbers, well have to add that number of people.

While growth for Sharpen Technologies appears all but assured, getting back into the office any time soon is not.

As of now, we dont have a plan to get people back in the office until after the end of the year, Simmons said. Were in a post-vaccine model. First quarter of next year, I think, is the earliest we would be back in the office. Q2 may be most likely. We are as productive as ever, but well be excited when we can get people back to the office safely.

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Fast-growing Sharpen Technologies could add 75 employees by end of 2021 - Indianapolis Business Journal

Sacrifice and Security: A Pandemic’s Lessons on Building ‘Consent’ as an Element of Strategy – War on the Rocks

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

Americans too often resort to the metaphorical use of the term war when confronting societal problems, the war on poverty and the war on drugs being among the more famous examples. It should not surprise, then, that policymakers and pundits alike have turned to war as an analogy for the nations response to the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic. Critics, however, have been rightfully skeptical about the utility of comparing what we are going through to war. As Cynthia Enloe argues, mobilizing for war is far different than mobilizing a society to provide effective, inclusive, fair and sustainable public health.

If militarized metaphors are ill-chosen, the public debate over Americas pandemic response still offers important insights into not only how societies react to crises but also what strategists might learn from these public responses. What should strategic planners take from this moment in history as they think about war? Namely, that those involved in the making and study of strategy should consider the role of public consent as an element of strategic planning.

In a large sense, the inability of national leaders to communicate a coherent narrative to the American public and gain its consensus on why sacrifices are necessary to combat COVID-19 accounts for Americas relatively dismal response. Much of the ensuing debate has centered on tensions between sacrificing personal comforts for the greater good and preserving individual freedoms. Calls for social distancing and mask wearing have been wrapped into arguments over the infringement of civil liberties with some outraged protestors even linking mandates to the Holocaust.

Such tendentious reactionism has demonstrated that emotion plays an important role in how citizens decide what government initiatives they will or will not support. For those in the national security field, these public responses should merit attention. As the late Colin Gray noted, societies and their cultures make war and peace, not just policymakers. War, Gray contended, is a social institution.

Certainly, other historians and theorists of war have wrestled with this idea, B.H. Liddell Hart being foremost among them. In Strategy, first published in 1954, Liddell Hart spoke in retrospect of military commanders in the American Civil War, like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, having to adjust themselves to the psychology of a democracy. As servants of a democratic government, they had less rein than an absolute ruler, firmly in the saddle. Thus, faced with these inevitable handicaps, officers needed to reconcile with the inconvenient reality that military efforts rested upon a popular foundation. To the British theorist, even the chance of continuing to fight at all depended on consent of the man in the street.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this sentiment would not have been unfamiliar, especially to Americans who had just come out of World War II. Laying aside the military, economic, and diplomatic implications of the Mighty Endeavor, the decision to undertake the 1944 invasion of France fulfilled another requirement one that, for Gen. George C. Marshall, was a hallmark of American grand strategy: Strategy had to consider the role of morale on the home front.

In making this point, one needs only to recall Marshalls most frequently quoted observation, a statement that has become a dictum in some circles. Why, Marshall was asked in 1949, had he been so persistent in pressing for the earliest invasion of Western Europe? Because, he replied, a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War. This statement was Marshalls way of acknowledging a factor that could frustrate the implementation of American grand strategy, however logical its formulation: the potential problem of war weariness.

Marshall had flagged this problem during the Washington Conference of 1943 when he addressed the implications of postponing an invasion across the English Channel. It would mean a prolongation of the war in Europe, and thus a delay in the ultimate defeat of Japan, which the people of the United States would not tolerate, he said. While casting a shadow on strategic planning throughout the war, the problem of war weariness became more acute in 1944 and 1945. Historian Charles Brower argues that a major consideration guiding the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs during the wars final year was the requirement to maintain the commitment of the American people to the presidents grand strategy. And, no one was more emphatic than Marshall in stressing the need to develop strategy that could contain the problem of war weariness.

In using the term war weariness, historians are not putting words in Marshalls mouth. He used the term himself when expressing concern about maintaining political will on the homefront during the period between the end of the war in Europe and the defeat of Japan. Perhaps paradoxically, the defeat of Germany rather than reinforcing commitment to the war with Japan could have had the effect of exacerbating what Marshall called the great impatience of Americans for a return to normalcy. He highlighted this problem in off-the-record remarks for the Academy of Political Science in New York in April 1945:

Once the fighting ceases in the European Theater the natural reaction of almost every man will be an overwhelming desire to return home, to get clear of the tragic scenes of destruction to rejoin his family and resume his civil occupation. His family will be equally impatient and probably even more articulate. Appeals will be made to our representatives in Congress to bring pressure on the War Department. The papers, columnists, the broadcasters, will carry the reflection of this great impatience.

With the global wars end came similar debates on the merits of universal military training, a plan that proposed that every able-bodied young American shall be trained to defend his country. During the Truman years, however, domestic political considerations ensured that universal military training would ultimately stall in Congress. As military historian Russell F. Weigley maintained, the American electorate wanted a return to tranquility after the long years of depression, New Deal social revolution, and war; they wanted their boys home from the army, not committed indefinitely to be called into it. Public sentiments, in short, had proscribed strategic planning choices.

Even in an era of limited war, senior military officers and civilian policymakers alike fretted over maintaining the consent of men and women in the street. During the long American war in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Saigon, in both official correspondence and in public forums, used the word attrition to express his concern over maintaining morale during what he considered would be a long pull. As Westmoreland wrote the Joint Chiefs in June 1965, he saw no likelihood of achieving a quick, favorable end to the war. Thus, he urged that we should prepare US and world opinion for the rigors ahead.

The following year, the general offered a public appraisal in which he warned that there had been no lessening of North Vietnams resolve to prosecute the war. Of note, at the same briefing, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the American people must know that there will be no quick victory. In this way, Westmorelands concerns over the staying power of the American home front thus helped propel the word attrition to the forefront of dialogue on the U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia. As the anti-war movement grew in strength after the 1968 Tet Offensive, those concerns proved well founded.

By the conflicts final years, both President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, bemoaned the loss of public support as they attempted to depart the long, stalemated war in Vietnam. Writing to the president in September 1969, Kissinger warned of the increasing pressure of public opinion on you to resolve the war quickly. The elements of an evaporation of public consent were clearly present less than a year after Nixons slim electoral victory.

After Saigons fall in 1975, Nixon railed against the disillusionment of the mid-1960s that, to him, had been the result of a public misinformed and misled by the shallow, inflammatory treatment of events by the media. So much had public consensus mattered, the former president argued that defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory because we lost the war politically in the United States. Clearly, by withholding its consent, the American public had commanded considerable influence over U.S. grand strategy and foreign policy.

More than simply expressing war weariness or opinions on the validity of foreign wars, American citizens could also object to the loss of their civil liberties as the state waged war against real and perceived enemies abroad. Debate over the 2001 Patriot Act which enhanced, to unprecedented levels, the governments surveillance powers centered on the pull between national security and individual civil liberties. As criminal justice professor Michael Welch notes, critics asserted that routine surveillance [was] bound up with political repression. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however, far too few Americans felt any need to speak out against the trampling of their rights. To them, defeating the threat of global terrorism outweighed their concerns over authoritarian rule in a post-9/11 America.

Thus, understanding Americas historical deliberations over national security and individual civil liberties may help us better understand what seems, to so many, an irrational reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic response. Indeed, Americans should avoid and condemn facile attacks on todays younger generation. Anyone who has read the work of C.J. Chivers or Sebastian Junger, for example, will realize that todays young men and women can endure, even at great costs, the very worst of war.

Rather, the national pandemic response should encourage an examination of how strategists should consider the will of the people in their planning. A health epidemic is not war. It is far from it. But, current debates over how best to deal with COVID-19 do offer insights into the roles that sacrifice and civil liberties play in strategic planning.

Military officers, in particular, often examine strategy as a process of balancing ends and means, but rarely do they discuss how building public consensus should be part of the larger planning process. Shaping perceptions is not just about influencing adversaries and allies behavior. It also requires an effort at home. In short, strategic dialogue to build consensus must occur at multiple levels.

This unanimity may be more difficult to achieve in conflicts where the ends themselves are debated. For example, the pandemic end state likely will not emerge for many more months to come, generating angst and fear that support dissent against mandates for social distancing and mask wearing. Thus, when considering past conflicts like those in Korea and Vietnam, one might ask if consent from the American public was more difficult to attain because an armistice or negotiated settlement seemed unnatural to them. Writing in 1956, historian Walter Millis thought Americans found the Korean conflict bewildering because it fitted none of the accepted patterns of war.

There is no doubt that the international order is as bewildering today as it was in the mid-1950s. The most recent White House National Security Strategy offers a geographic laundry list of instability, radical ideologies, and threats to American interests in Iran, North Korea, Syria, China, Africa, and so on. The world, we are told, is as dangerous today as it ever was. But, if leaders are going to call for U.S. intervention, especially of a militaristic sort, into any of these regions, then they should build compelling arguments to do so.

Are we at a moment in the nations history where Americans are less willing to voluntarily give their consent? Perhaps.

But, as Hew Strachan reminds us, strategy and war have long had intimate links to the pursuit of national self-interest. How to balance this pursuit with that of individual self-interests can be instructive for those engaged in national security. Pandemics are not wars but strategists can nonetheless learn from them by following Liddell Harts counsel to attune their strategy, so far as is rightly possible, to the popular ear.

Gregory A. Daddis is the USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History at San Diego State University and author of Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Mens Adventure Magazines.

Col. (Ret.) Paul L. Miles, Ph.D., has taught military and diplomatic history at the United States Military Academy at West Point and Princeton University.

Image: U.S. Army (Photo by Capt. Brendan Mackie)

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Sacrifice and Security: A Pandemic's Lessons on Building 'Consent' as an Element of Strategy - War on the Rocks

The War on Drugs, Waxahatchee to Play Virtual Voter Registration Concert – Rolling Stone

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

The War on Drugs, Waxahatchee, Fleet Foxes Robin Pecknold, members of Grizzly Bear and more will partake in the Vote Ready livestream concert/voter registration drive, August 14th starting at 7 p.m. ET.

The free virtual concert was put together by the voter registration group HeadCount and Fort William Artist Management and will be part of the Live From Out There livestream series. The show will feature original, self-recorded and socially distanced performances, and those that want to attend can secure a free eTicket simply by verifying their voter registration status (international viewers and those under 18 can get a ticket by pledging to vote in the next election theyre eligible). Free eTickets will be available through August 13th at 6 p.m. ET, after which theyll cost $20.

The Vote Ready show will boast performances from Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear of Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radios Kyp Malone and Jaleel Bunton, Kevin Morby, Hand Habits, Tarriona Tank Ball, Ziggy, the Suffers Kam Franklin, the Building, and Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla of Our Native Daughters.

This is a first of its kind event, HeadCount executive director Andy Bernstein said in a statement. We love the idea of serving up original performances to anyone who checks their voter registration status. We applaud the artists and Fort William Management for their leadership, and we hope it inspires many more similar events in the future.

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The War on Drugs, Waxahatchee to Play Virtual Voter Registration Concert - Rolling Stone

When California declared war on cannabis growers and called in the Army – San Francisco Chronicle

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

Driving through Humboldt County last winter, I heard radio ads for help harvesting and selling cannabis crops, as well as for products geared toward commercial cultivation. But less than 40 years ago, the same area was one of the main battlefields of Californias war on pot growers.

By the late 1960s, the three counties of the Emerald Triangle had developed a reputation for growing a high-quality product. Demand grew rapidly, and prices skyrocketed, fueling greater production. In 1983, after several unsuccessful attempts to cut down production, the state started the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP.

A search in the Chronicle archive shows decades-old photos of raids in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, backlash from local communities and more recent coverage on why CAMP is still operating today.

On July 21, 1983, Attorney General John Van de Kamp announced a coordinated campaign using federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to raid marijuana grows in more than a dozen California counties.

Were not here today to make great sweeping promises that all marijuana planting will be eradicated in Northern California this year, Van de Kamp said.

But this is a serious effort, he added, explaining the federal Drug Enforcement Administration would use spy planes to map forested, remote regions to target the raids.

After the first 10-week effort, Van de Kamp reported 65,000 plants, or about 215,000 pounds of marijuana with an estimated street-value of more than $130 million, had been rounded up and destroyed.

Van de Kamp had to admit that there was no reliable way to measure how much of the states crop had been destroyed.

They havent even scratched the surface, one North Coast grower told reporter Steve Wiegand. There are gardens so far back that even the growers have trouble getting to them.

But CAMP continued.

Barry Inman, a 22-year-old reserve police officer with a crew cut, took a machete to a marijuana garden yesterday, with the gusto of a young man who enjoys his work, Chronicle correspondent Paul Liberatore wrote in 1985 as he and staff photographer Vince Maggiora accompanied a raid in Willits (Mendocino County).

Being able to take something illegal from someone and getting the dope off the street is a good feeling, Inman said, shifting an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

Inman was one of about 200 reserve officers who volunteered for dope duty, Liberatore wrote, making about $10 an hour and hoping it would mean a springboard into full-time jobs in law enforcement.

The raiders knew they werent welcome. Were the bad guys, said Richard Sinclair, a reserve officer from the Monterey area. Were seen as being the system, the police state. People yell things and flip us off.

While that years CAMP efforts had already netted 29,000 destroyed plans and 16 arrests, local growers said it was primarily a good show.

They are wasting their money and time, one self-described mom and pop grower told Liberatore, There is dope all over these hills. They will never get rid of it. They will never win.

The 1990 CAMP efforts made the war on drugs idea more literal: The U.S. Army got involved. One Humboldt County operation involved 50 federal agents, 75 California National Guard troops, 60 soldiers and seven helicopters from Fort Ord.

Locals considered it an escalation. About 200 residents protested at the closely guarded gate to the wilderness camping area where CAMP was based.

Its really scary, and the whole community is up in arms, said Jake Lustig, a teenage construction worker from Whale Gulch (Mendocino County). Lustig said the heavily armed ground forces, supported by helicopters and military vehicles, gave the impression of an invading army.

Federal and state officials were pleased with the raid.

Im very proud of the way our forces have handled this and how the military has operated, Cy Jamison, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, said on the fifth day of the sweep.

CAMP raids continued, despite California legalizing medicinal and then recreational use of cannabis. In 2000, San Mateo County and state justice officials announced they had found more than 12,000 marijuana plants growing near Crystal Springs Reservoir, not far from Huddart Park, a record bust for the county.

But the efforts began shifting. After years of trying to contain local growers, federal officials said they would now focus on the Mexican drug traffickers who had expanded their marijuana-growing operations in public California parkland.

We dont even bother with medicinal grows, Michael Johnson, the statewide commander of the CAMP task force, told The Chronicle in 2009. What were concerned about is the destruction of the habitat.

Operation Limelight: How a fearsome, fast-talking union boss helped legalize pot, took kickbacks and ended up in prison.

Grateful Dead in S.F.: Surprise 1975 Golden Gate Park concert a Deadhead delight.

A blast from the recent past: Mitt Romney, in marching for Black Lives Matter, found inspiration in his father and an S.F. battle in 1964.

Moratorium Day: When an anti-Vietnam War march brought out squares and students.

From the Archive is a weekly column by Bill Van Niekerken, the library director of The Chronicle, exploring the depths of the newspapers archive. Its part of Chronicle Vault, a twice-weekly newsletter highlighting more than 150 years of San Francisco stories. It is edited by Taylor Kate Brown, The Chronicles newsletter editor. Sign up for the newsletter here, and follow Chronicle Vault on Instagram. Contact Bill at bvanniekerken@sfchronicle.com and Taylor at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com.

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When California declared war on cannabis growers and called in the Army - San Francisco Chronicle

Ten Suggestions for a ‘Russia Strategy’ for the United Kingdom – War on the Rocks

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

The release of a long-delayed report on Russian interference in the United Kingdom by the British cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee has inevitably revived the debate about how a democratic state can best resist Moscows meddling.

The trouble is, of course, that political point-scoring and competitive rhetoric quickly dominate such discussions. The Intelligence and Security Committee refused to grapple seriously with whether or not Russian political operations affected the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum or the 2016 Brexit vote. Along with a general lack of clarity on just how certain sources of potential influence, from oligarchs to trolls, may affect the political system, this means everyone can put their own personal spin on the issue. The risk, then, is that this simply generates a short-term storm of comment, reaching few actionable policy conclusions, that is soon overtaken by the next issue of the moment.

This would be to squander an opportunity. The administration already has a Russia strategy intended to minimize the impact of Russian activities in the short term, while working for a Russia that chooses to co-operate, rather than challenge or confront. The Intelligence and Security Committee is brutal in dissecting what it sees as an uncoordinated process in Whitehall, though, and a lack of clear tactics as to how to advance the strategy, so here are 10 suggestions.

1. Tackle the Oligarch Problem, but First Decide What It Is

Rich Russians have flocked to London, and their wealth buys them a degree of political leverage: Is this a security problem, an ethical challenge, or simply how Britain has always done business? The report raises concerns about the way that the United Kingdom has become a favored destination for rich Russians and their dirty money. Apparently, the veteran parliamentarians of a country that for decades has welcomed the wealthy of the worlds dictatorships and kleptocracies were shocked, shocked to discover that Russian oligarchs no less appreciate the charms of one of the worlds great financial centers combined with one of the worlds great cities.

The report claims that this money is also invested in extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment. One particular weakness is that the Intelligence and Security Committee gives no examples of how this practice actually influenced the political process, and how the Kremlin may have benefited from this.

Of course, there are close ties between many rich Russians and the Kremlin, just as there are between many rich Chinese expats and the Communist Party, for example. Arguably, this is not a Russian oligarch issue but a wider problem of how money can buy access and leverage, distorting the democratic process on behalf of foreign interests. In this case, it needs to be tackled across the board, addressing everything from media control to political funding.

It would be nice to think of the United Kingdom becoming a superpower of ethics. Lets be honest, though: It prizes its role as a magnet for global assets. Especially while facing the potential economic hit of Brexit, no British government is going to be eager to turn away foreign cash. The priority is going to be to deal with the immediate threat that rich Russians could become Russian President Vladimir Putins lobbyists.

The British government will need the will and the powers to tackle specific cases where Russian money is buying influence at the Kremlins behest. This is a tough problem, which is really in the realm of the intelligence services rather than the police. However, being more cautious about handing out passports to rich Russians (so that they can more easily be deported or excluded) and having a register of foreign agents (criminalizing acting as an instrument of the Kremlin without declaring that role) is a start. In truth, it is no more than that, but for the present it probably represents the most that is politically feasible.

However, we also need to be honest here: Just as welcoming rich Russians into the United Kingdom and allowing them to enjoy all the benefits of a law-based democratic society did not, as the Intelligence and Security Committee notes, lead to reform in Russia, so too cracking down on them now will not put meaningful pressure on the Kremlin. Putin is committed to a personal agenda of great-power politics and building his historical legacy. If some oligarchs have to lose some of the millions they have already been allowed to steal on his watch, he will not be especially concerned.

2. Russian Organized Crime Is Not Just for the Police

The expat Londongrad set has to be seen to work within the law; an even more serious potential threat that needs to be addressed comes from gangsters mobilized as tools of the Kremlin.

In parallel, there needs to be a sharper focus on the aspects of transnational crime that pose a clear and present national security threat. Russian-based organized crime has been used to generate chyornaya kassa funds (black accounts, or deniable and untraceable moneys), carry out assassinations abroad, and even smuggle wanted agents across borders. Most recently, a Georgian Chechen was gunned down in Berlin by what seems to have been a gangster hitman, recruited by Russias Federal Security Service, and an online fraudster accused of stealing up to $2 billion is allegedly being protected by Russian military intelligence. Kremlin outsourcing of its operations to criminals continues unabated.

In the United Kingdom, despite regular rhetorical statements about taking a tough line on Russian criminality, it has in practice been a lower priority for police agencies. There have been several high-profile deaths of Russians but in practice most were probably not murders (allegations of untraceable poisons and carefully contrived fake accidents notwithstanding) and those which were essentially resulted from criminal score-settling. Only two, the murder of defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and attempted killing of turned Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in 2018, have been ascribed to the Kremlin.

The threat appears limited to Russians who themselves were likely involved in questionable activities, and generally driven purely by business interests. To be blunt, for the police, this makes them less of a concern than the gangs directly responsible for public disquiet. As one police officer told me, So long as the Russians are not committing crimes on the streets, were not going to be able to justify putting resources into going after them. Instead, in the United Kingdom, Russian-based gangs largely operate as a facilitator and wholesale supplier behind the more immediately dangerous gangs. However much sense it may make from a public safety perspective to give them a lower priority, because of the wider national security concern, the National Crime Agency needs to be tasked and resourced with giving Russian gangs a harder time.

3. Fight Disinformation Through Demand, not Supply

Information operations continue to be regarded as a serious threat, even if there is still very little evidence that they actually have a major impact on peoples attitudes. At most, these efforts tend to strengthen existing beliefs of whatever shade, although that is not something to be taken lightly when it can push mild dissatisfaction into protest.

Like corruption, though, this is not something exported onto a hapless and helpless nation. You cant bribe an honest official and likewise its hard to get traction on the minds of people who are essentially content with the status quo and who trust their politicians and the mainstream media. The reason there is such an appetite for alternative narratives is that, at present, just as elsewhere in the West, the United Kingdom is going through a legitimacy crisis. Communities that feel alienated and unheard are the natural constituency for information operations peddling alternative answers, conspiracy theories, and bile.

Just as with the struggle against narcotics, its easy to focus on supply rather than demand. Already there are renewed calls for Russian foreign-language TV channel RT to be banned, for example. To be sure, RT does carry blatant propaganda (just as it also carries decent news coverage), but an outlet with just 3,400 viewers at any one time is not a serious threat. Likewise, the fad for myth-busting operations meant to counter fake news is always tempting for governments keen to be seen to act, and bureaucracies that mistake activity for impact, but there is little credible evidence they really work except as part of a wider program.

One clear organizational recommendation in the Intelligence and Security Committee report is that the Security Service (better known as MI5) ought to be responsible for the integrity of the democratic process. The implication is that the challenge comes mainly from hackers and trolls. But this isnt the case, and following this advice would be disastrous. In reality, Britains main problem consists of alienated communities. It would be unwise to basically put MI5 in charge of policing thought crime and news accuracy, let alone media education.

Of course, there should be proper media and social media regulation, but this should not be confined to Russian outlets. Instead, the harder and more important task is to address demand. In part, the answer is media education, and not just for schoolchildren but at every level, including seniors (this doesnt have to be in a classroom: as the fight against cigarettes and drugs has shown, even storylines in soap operas have their role) to create resilience against this problem. It is also a much bigger issue, about closing the trust gap and exploring how well democratic systems originally founded in the 19th-century industrial age work in the postmodern, 21st-century information era. This is, of course, way larger than just being about Russia, but is also a fundamental question that, so long as it is dodged, leaves the United Kingdom and the rest of the West vulnerable to such information operations.

4. Upping Britains Intelligence Game, a Critical and Expensive Task

Information operations are only a small part of the wider Russian active measures (covert political activities) challenge. Many of the more nefarious, involving corruption, blackmail, chyornaya kassa support for subversive political movements and the like are managed or supported by Russias extensive intelligence community. Russia needs to be much more of a focus for both intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence, but this needs to be supported with real funding, not just airy assumptions that it can be covered by working smarter.

Britain needs more and better information about the Kremlins goals and methods, not least to make the strategy to respond to it as effective as possible. Here the Intelligence and Security Committee was critical, highlighting the extent to which MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6), Defense Intelligence, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency) all scaled down the attention they paid Russia dramatically through the 1990s and 2000s.

One can hardly blame them, as during this time their political masters were demanding they focus on new threats, from jihadist terrorism to China, North Korea to transnational drug cartels. They have also continued to maintain the United Kingdoms status as one of the worlds intelligence superpowers, even though the Single Intelligence Account (the budget for MI5, MI6, and GCHQ) is only around one-twentieth the $85.75 billion the United States will (officially) spend on intelligence this year.

It seems likely that there will be a new Espionage Act to replace the dusty and largely ineffective Official Secrets Act (originally passed in 1911, albeit revised since), including some register of foreign agents in the style of Americas Foreign Agents Registration Act. However, the Intelligence and Security Committee did not call for an increase in spending, instead talking of smarter working and effective co-ordination the usual bureaucratese for doing more with the same.

This is not enough: The suggestion that the intelligence community should be able to mount more effective information-gathering against what is still a hard target like Russia, and also do more to counter aggressive activity from Moscow, and also maintain existing commitments to other problems and challenges all on the same budget is unsustainable. More money for U.K. intelligence will be a sound investment when set against the direct and indirect costs of everything from technological secrets lost to Russian hacking to the political impact of covert influence. These funds will also better position Britain to cope with another increasingly adversarial actor: the Peoples Republic of China.

5. A War with Russia Is Unlikely, but Planning for It Is Critical

In raw terms although these comparisons are as meaningless as they are tempting the U.K. and Russian defense budgets are quite similar. Of course, in real terms, Russias is perhaps three times as large. The United Kingdom does not need to plan to win or deter a one-on-one war with Russia, though, being both part of NATO and also on the other side of Europe. The question becomes, then, how far the Russian challenge ought to inform British defense planning and spending, something that will increasingly also mean cyber security in an age of ubiquitous connectivity and undeclared, ambiguous conflicts. Britain cannot pretend to be able or need to deter Russia itself, but it must stop trying and failing to do everything. Instead, it should make a serious commitment to being able to mount expeditionary operations as part of wider alliances, but to be able to do so in the face of the latest Russian tactics and technologies.

Britain clearly wants to play a credible role within NATO: It already spends a greater proportion of its gross domestic product on defense than most members. It also has particular interests of its own relating to defending its territorial waters and lines of communication to overseas territories, aims that sometimes rub up against Russian operations. Although the planning for the next integrated Strategic Defense and Security Review, due this year, was temporarily paused because of COVID-19, some tough decisions will soon have to be made. As the Royal United Services Institutes Jack Watling wrote, given resource constraints, the United Kingdom will be faced with a stark choice: whether to accelerate and expand the modernisation of its heavy forces, or move away from heavy forces and prioritise the development of resilient reconnaissance and fires.

So far, the government looks inclined toward the latter in order to maintain a credible rapid expeditionary capability, not least as this fits the continued commitment to a Global Britain. Nonetheless, as Moscow sells more and more of its latest kit to buyers around the world, even if they will not be facing Russia, British forces will have to be configured and prepared to fight Russian-equipped and -trained forces. Besides which, as deterrence is anchored on signaling capability and intent, the United Kingdom ought to look willing and able to take on Russian forces. There is, it seems, no escaping the continued centrality of Russia in British military thinking.

6. Cultivate Solidarity by Defending Others

Alliances also matter in responding to non-military challenges. Following the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018, Moscow was surprised and shaken when Britain successfully brokered a campaign of expulsion of 130 suspected Russian spies from 28 states plus NATO. This was a striking and groundbreaking example of international solidarity of a sort that had been sadly absent until then. And since then, for that matter, but if the United Kingdom wants to be able to call on similar support in the future, it has to make preparations now and also be willing to offer it to others, and not be dependent on ad hoc responses. This ought not to be focused on NATO, nor in a time of Brexit the European Union. Rather, it should be a coalition of the willing, perhaps starting with the Anglosphere Five Eyes intelligence partners (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), expressing a willingness collectively to respond to future Russian adventurism.

7. Engagement Is a Weapon Too

The answer to Russian political war intended to divide, distract, and demoralize is generally not to try to fight fire with fire. There is not only a moral high ground to be lost a central element of Putins narrative is that Russia is simply responding to Western subversion but open, democratic societies tend to be more vulnerable to any such active measures arms race. Instead, it is worth considering how the best lessons of the Cold War can be adapted and amplified in the modern age, using soft power to counter Putins dark power.

Although hawks will nod toward historical traditions, or notions that somehow Russians are genetically predisposed to tyranny and aggression, change is not only possible but inevitable. While containing Kremlin aggression and interference, this must be balanced with a sustained and meaningful effort to engage. There is still a strong vein of Anglophilia in Russian culture: encourage and magnify this. Student bursaries, cultural exchanges, extravagant celebrations of historical ties between the two countries (remember: Ivan the Terrible even offered Queen Elizabeth I his blood-stained hand in marriage), all of this will have minimal impact today especially as the Kremlin does what it can to limit them but will reap benefits in the future, when London will be able, rightly, to tell the Russians it never abandoned them.

They have few illusions about their own leaders, so exposing their corruptions and hypocrisies is of limited real value (even though some in the West think this is their magic bullet). More broadly, using the capabilities of the modern media to support Russias brave independent media and also puncture some of the Kremlins lies would accelerate the existing decay of the regimes legitimacy. The BBC still has a powerful brand, and it can be a powerful link to Russians who increasingly get their news online. That does not mean being a propaganda arm it is important to be objective, and that includes highlighting Russian successes, too but rather, along with British academia, a counter to increasingly blatant Kremlin efforts to mobilize todays news and yesterdays history to its ends.

8. Dig in but Stay Optimistic

After all, Britain has more of a Putin problem than a Russia problem.

There can be little hope of truly meaningful improvement of relations with Russia so long as Putin and his cronies continue to govern the country. Previous attempts at resets such as U.S. President Barack Obamas in 2009 have been grandiose exercises in self-deception, as French President Emmanuel Macron will discover, if he goes ahead with a similar outreach of his own. Putins people are the products of a Soviet upbringing, the kleptocracy rooted in the lawless 1990s, and a bitter sense that Russias global status was somehow stolen by the West. It is highly unlikely that they will change.

However, that political generation is getting older. Putin could reign until 2036, but it is not clear that he even wants to or that his health would allow him to do so. The younger political elite, while dutifully echoing the Kremlins anti-Western talking points, show no signs of really being as enthusiastic about a geopolitical crusade. They are more likely to be pragmatic opportunists, who would love to return to the days of being able to steal at home, bank and spend abroad. These days, for anyone but the super-rich, it is harder and harder to travel to the West, let alone move money there, not just because of our controls, but also because the Kremlin is cracking down on capital flight.

The Russian people seem even less consumed by the strident Kremlin propaganda. Surveys show them being much more positive toward Westerners than vice versa. They do not accept the official line that their country is under threat and now that the Crimea effect has worn off show no enthusiasm for foreign adventures. Russia wont become a liberal democracy any time soon, but the United Kingdom can have reasonable relations with all kinds of hybrid reforming or even downright authoritarian states. It is the Kremlins demand for a special status, for a sphere of influence, and for the right to flout international norms and laws that causes the problem, and this is likely to prove very much a product of Putins transitional generation.

9. Know Your Enemy

While there are some able subject-matter experts within various arms of government, and a real and laudable recent effort to deepen the knowledge base within the military, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and other relevant agencies, this comes at the end of a long, sharp decline. There are simply not enough genuine experts, and the lingering influence of the cult of the generalist unkind souls would say of the amateur within the diplomatic service has often meant even those who do invest the time and effort learning Russian and, more importantly, Russia, will move to wholly unconnected postings for the sake of their careers. Back in 2017, Crispin Blunt, chair of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, warned that the Foreign Offices Russia expertise has disintegrated since the end of the Cold War.

The people who are expected to implement policy ought to understand the country with which they are dealing. That policy ought to be rooted in a detailed, nuanced grasp of the country. Russia is a complex country in transition, still coping with the political and socio-cultural trauma of the end of empire and great-power status. Too often the country and even its leadership are rendered down to some oversimplified clich: mafia state, new tsarism, new Soviet Union, tyranny, whatever. Policy rooted in any such caricature, stripped of the necessary nuance and context, will be fruitless at best, dangerous at worst.

It also contributes to what might be considered a failure of tone, something which is by no means confined to the United Kingdom. The days of speak softly but carry a big stick seem to have been replaced by hector loudly, while waving a small twig. Russia, still coming to terms with its reduced status, is at times also ridiculously prickly and acutely conscious of slights to its dignity. Of course, it has practical and political ambitions, but also is run by human beings who desperately crave respect. It is possible to push back against Kremlin aggression and adventurism even while treating it with that respect, whether it means giving full credit to the Soviet soldiers and citizens who fell in World War II (not for nothing do they still call it the Great Patriotic War) or not repeating the calamitous blunder of dismissing Russia as a mere regional power. Manner and manners, idiom, and tone matter in international relations, especially when dealing with such a personalistic system where a relative handful of individuals call the shots.

10. Make Strategy Matter Again

The Intelligence and Security Committee complained that its investigation has led us to question who is responsible for broader work against the Russian threat and whether those organisations are sufficiently empowered to tackle a hostile state threat such as Russia. This is a fair point. However, the document is much more comfortable making critiques than proposing remedies beyond the aforementioned one about MI5.

If the cross-Whitehall Russia strategy is to mean anything, then the question becomes how to ensure that it genuinely drives policy across the breadth of government. This is in many ways a test case of successive administrations glib rhetoric about joined-up government or all-of-government responses. The strategy is in the hands of the National Security Strategy Implementation Group for Russia, which brings together 14 different departments and agencies under the chair of the Russia Unit in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Much has been done to involve stakeholders in discussions, but in at least some cases, the sense has been which is, of course, code for the gossip I have heard from different quarters that participants treated this as an opportunity to advance their own departmental interests, or simply to make a show of participation. The strategy needs to have teeth, and it is open to discussion whether those of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are sharp enough. If not, either they need honing or the Cabinet Office ought to be responsible for, if not running the group, at least playing a role as its genteel leg-breaker, given that this is arguably its main function in Whitehall.

The point is, after all, that all this matters. It matters not just in terms of the challenge from Moscow which, after all, needs to be taken seriously, but not exaggerated but also because the skills, policies, attitudes, and strategy adopted today are likely to be needed to face rather more problematic threats tomorrow. As China moves into the wolf warrior diplomacy phase of its rise, Britain might even want to thank the Kremlin for the early wake-up call and opportunity to build these capabilities.

MarkGaleotti is an honorary professor at University College London and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Image: President of Russia

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Ten Suggestions for a 'Russia Strategy' for the United Kingdom - War on the Rocks

Highly decorated Vietnam War Veteran Stephen Fanter is the 2020 Semper Solaris Semper Cares Initiative recipient. – PR Web

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

The Initiative has been embraced by the local community and the nation as charitable groups and businesses such as Owens Corning roof deployment project, LG, and Goodman Air Conditioning have donated a majority of materials to assist deserving veterans.

SAN DIEGO (PRWEB) July 31, 2020

Highly decorated Vietnam War Veteran Stephen Fanter is the 2020 Semper Solaris Semper Cares Initiative recipient, a company spokesperson announced today.

Mr. Fanter, a Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart honoree, spent a year in the hospital recovering from wounds after his honorable service in Vietnam. Following his recovery, he served his community as a police officer for the City of Los Angeles and then as a Sky Marshall. Later, he dedicated his efforts to battling the war on drugs in San Diego, CA. Mr. Fanter is now retired. "In the 30+ years I have known him, I've not heard him ask for anything," his nominator said.

The founders of Semper Solaris--Kelly Shawhan and John Almond-- started the Semper Cares Initiative project. The Initiative helps veterans and their families handle high energy costs with major home improvements like solar panel installation. The Initiative has been embraced by the local community and the nation as charitable groups and businesses such as Owens Corning roof deployment project, LG, and Goodman Air Conditioning have donated a majority of materials to assist deserving veterans. They've also made commitments to future veteran recipients of the Semper Cares Initiative.

There are a number of past recipients of the Semper Cares Initiative. They are Mark Creighton, an Army veteran who was honorably discharged in 1979; Michael Gallardo, an Army veteran and amputee who served in Iraq; Tony Ybarra, a Navy Corpsman during the Korean War; Antonio Rangel, an Army veteran who served in the Korean War and was honorably discharged in 1954; Paul Dugas, a Marine Corp veteran whom the Initiative honored on Veteran's Day in 2018; Povas Miknaitis, a former Marine Corp sniper who was wounded in Iraq by an IED; and Carl Schaffrina, who served in the Navy for 12 years as an Avionics Technician.

Semper Solaris is a El Cajon, CA. based company that performs a number of renewable energy and conservation services. Semper Solaris includes solar panel installation, upkeep and repair, solar panel home battery storage installation, upkeep and repair, roofing and heating and air conditioning services. Semper Solaris has received a number of prestigious awards including the 2019 Solar Installer of the Year. The company is proudly veteran owned and operated. Former Marine Corps Captain and co-owner Kelly Shawhan is passionate about renewable energy and its benefits to his customers. Their impeccable work ethic is inspired by the U.S. Marine Corp motto, Semper Fidelis, which means "always faithful." Employees do their work daily operating from the military values they learned while in their branch of service,

As the cost of grid electricity continues to rise, solar collectors have gained great popularity among homeowners in recent years--especially homeowners in states with a good bit of sunshine. With the use of solar panels to collect the sun's rays and solar batteries to store excess energy, it is possible to operate a home solely on renewable energy. Additionally, as this technology continues to make great strides in development, the cost of the solar equipment has continued to come down and that makes solar panels a more affordable option.

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Highly decorated Vietnam War Veteran Stephen Fanter is the 2020 Semper Solaris Semper Cares Initiative recipient. - PR Web

The Business Of Drugs: What Happened To Alexander Shulgin After The DEA Raid – Screen Rant

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Danzig

Netflix's The Business of Drugs documents the MDMA research of Alexander Shulgin. Here's what happened to the "spiritual father of psychedelics."

Now streaming on Netflix, The Business of Drugs explores themental healthbenefits of MDMA, and documentsthe work of MDMA pioneerAlexander "Sasha" Shulgin. In 1994, the Drug Enforcement Agency raided the American chemist's California lab, a moment that forever changed the public discourse about the mind-altering synthesized drugs commonly known as "Ecstasy" or "Molly." So, why was Shulgin targeted by authorities, and what happened to him in the 20 years between the '90s raid and his 2014 death?

The Business of Drugs is fundamentally about exposing drug culture, but doesn't include a damning portrait ofShulgin. In fact, the second episode of the six-part Netflix docuseries suggests that the U.S. government dismissed Shulgin's game-changing research in order to promote a self-serving agenda connected to the "war on drugs." In The Business of Drugs, host Amaryllis Fox acknowledges Shulgin as the "spiritual father of psychedelics," and attempts to explain why he and partner Ann Shulginbelieved that MDMA could be beneficial to people all over the world. Asthe Netflix docuseries reveals, though, American culture wasn't ready to accept that "Ecstasy" had any redeeming value. Incidentally, the 1985 ban of MDMA in the United States not only sparked interest of the substance within domestic underground subcultures, but also caught the attention of curious individualsworldwide.

Related:Why The US Drug War Can NEVER Be Won, According To Business of Drugs

In The Business of Drugs on Netflix, Fox establishes the appropriate context by initially discussing Alexander Shulgin's extensive MDMA research about "therapeutic potential," which is complemented by Ann Shulgin's statement thatMDMA"is so extraordinary valuable for PTSD. Specifically, she reveals that MDMA allows for self-introspection "without self-hate." Midway through the Netflix docuseries, Fox questions Ann Shulgin about her groundbreaking psychedelic-themed books PiHKAL and TiHKAL, co-written by Alexanderfor the sole purpose of ensuring that their research wouldn't be lost. "It took two years for Washington to catch on," Ann Shulgin says. Two years after the first book released, DEA agentsinvaded the Shulgins' home.Alexander was fined $25,000, and his lab was shut down.

In The Business of Drugs on Netflix, Fox states that "The Shulgins' books demonstrated a new path to sharing chemical knowledge and understanding." Even so, theirwork was once described by a DEA Agent as "cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs." While that may be true, the ban of MDMA in America (and elsewhere) inspired peopleto actively seek out the drug, and not necessarily for quiet introspection that could benefit their mental health. As the Netflix docuseries shows, "psychonauts"have long tested out tweaked MDMA formulas, and "Molly" is now mostly correlated with millennial club kids in pop culture. As for Alexander Shulgin, he was already 68 years old when the DEA shut down his lab. He continued research over the years with Ann, and ultimately published four books after the 1991 release of PiHKAL. Shulgin passed away at age 88 in 2014.

The Business of Drugs' synthetics-themed episode ends with a poignantsequence that links to Alexander Shulgin's MDMA legacy.Jonathan M. Lubecky, a U.S. Army Sergeant in the Iraq War, recalls a suicidal moment that led him toThe Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Santa Cruz, California. Lubecky then receivedFDA-approved MDMA-assisted therapy, andreached a "perfect, therapeutic place" after seeing "weird, cool geometric shapes." His anecdote confirms Shulgin's original belief that the synthesized drug could help cure PTSD.The Business of Drugs on Netflix ends with Fox admitting that she feels nostalgic for "the belief that Ann and Alexander Shulgin had in the potential of these drugs"before MDMA became associated with indulgent party culture.

More:What To Expect From The Business of Drugs Season 2

Who Plays Young John Garrett In Agents of SHIELD Season 7

Q.V. Hough is a Screen Rant staff writer. He's also the founding editor at Vague Visages, and has contributed to RogerEbert.com and Fandor.

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The Business Of Drugs: What Happened To Alexander Shulgin After The DEA Raid - Screen Rant

COVID-19 and the Case for Prison Abolition – The Chicago Maroon

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

The carceral state isnt color-blind, and neither is COVID-19. Since the pandemic broke out earlier this year, it has taken a disproportionate toll on people of color, reflecting glaring racial disparities in public health in the United States.

Prisons, with their overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, have exacerbated the spread of the virus as COVID-19 hotspots. Because of this, mass incarceration has severely endangered the lives of those in prison, whogiven the inequality in the criminal justice systemare predominantly people of color. Given the extent to which prisons have contributed to the coronavirus pandemic and compounded the existing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system, the pandemic has made one thing clear: Tackling coronavirus will require us to radically rethink our systems of justice.

The racial health disparities associated with COVID-19 are undeniable. African Americans both contract the disease at higher rates than their white counterparts and die from it at over 2.5 times the rate of whites, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. Indeed, despite comprising only 13.4 percent of the US population, Blacks account for 23 percent of COVID-19 victims where race is known. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latino communities as well: In Iowa, for instance, Latinos are only 6 percent of the population but account for over a fifth of the states coronavirus cases.

And its not biology that discriminates. The virus has not simply chosen to undertake a vehement rampage against Black and brown communities. Its humansand the systems weve builtthat discriminate. Health disparities reflect that. To naturalize the racial health disparities of COVID-19 as nothing more than an immutable biological reality is to deny the effect of racism on health outcomes.

Nowhere is the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on people of color more evident than in American prisons, which have become hotbeds for the virus. Given that Blacks are incarcerated at over five times the rate of whites in the United States, COVID-19s toll on incarcerated populations means that African Americans are severely affected. While prisons across the country have become coronavirus hotspots, Chicagos Cook County Jail has been hit particularly hard. By over-incarcerating to such an extent and maintaining overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, the jail has enabled the rapid spread of the virus, making Cook County Jail the nations largest source of COVID-19 as of April. And according to research conducted by Eric Reinhart of the UChicago Pritzker School of Medicine, just cycling through Cook County Jail is associated with 15.9 percent of COVID-19 cases in Chicago and 15.7 percent of cases throughout Illinois.

As the situation in Cook County shows, COVID-19 and mass incarceration are inextricably connected. Both perpetuate racial disparity and have combined during the pandemic to wreak deadly havoc as the virus sweeps through American prisons. Indeed, we are fighting two pandemics, one coronavirus, the other the racism that undermines the integrity of criminal justice systems worldwide. Unless we recognize this connection and begin to interrogate the systems that allow for rampant racism to persist, we wont solve either pandemic.

Importantly, COVID-19 has exposed the fractures in the American prison system, revealing it as a racist institution that compromises public health. It has reminded us that we cannot continue to attempt to build better prisonsdoing so wont address the police misconduct, wrongful conviction, racist attitudes, and plethora of other factors that cause African Americans to be disproportionately incarcerated in the first place, and moreover, wont address the fact that prisons arent working to effectively deter crime. Indeed, recidivism rates show that nearly one-fourth of those released from prison return for a new crime within three years of release, demonstrating the failure of prisons to successfully deter crime. Importantly, prisons also fail to provide access to adequate mental health resources, which is particularly problematic given that incarceration exacerbates mental health whereas investing in mental health resources can actually reduce crime.

Political activist Angela Davis reminds us why attempting to reform prisons instead of reimagining justice entirely wont work. In her book Are Prisons Obsolete? she writes, Frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison, limiting our ability to reimagine justice and focus on decarceration. Moreover, prison abolitionist Ruth Gilmore reminds us that in a world with different attitudes towards punishment, well actually see less crime: In Spain for instance, which takes a less punitive approach towards violence offensesthe average time a person spends in jail for murder in Spain is seven yearsmurder is actually less common.

COVID-19s disproportionate toll on incarcerated populations throughout the United States has made it clear that in order to combat both coronavirus and racism in this country, we need to reimagine justice and rethink systems of punishment entirely. And Im not just talking about the tearing down of prison walls. As Georgetown law professor and political theorist Allegra McLeod explains, abolition is less about the physical tearing down of prisons and more about abolishing both the culture of racialized punishment in the United States and the conditions that caused the carceral state to come about. The recent deluge of Instagram activismboth in response to COVID-19 and to the death of George Floydis inspiring. However, being liberal is not enough. We cannot use our progressivism as political armor or as an excuse for complacency. Its time we realized that to fight COVID-19 we need to dismantle the carceral state.

Meera Santhanam is a fourth-year in the College and a Viewpoints editor.

COVID-19 and the Case for Prison Abolition - The Chicago Maroon

ETFO Emancipation Day is an opportunity to commit to ridding society of anti-Black racism – PRESSENZA International News Agency

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

Emancipation Day, recognized on August 1, provides an opportunity for Ontario, its institutions and its people to commit to working towards a society that is rid of ongoing systemic and individual forms of anti-Black racism. While Ontario recognized the day in 2008, recognizing Emancipation Day nationally would bring a cross-Canada focus to achieving true equality for all Canadians.

Emancipation Day commemorates the Abolition of Slavery Act that came into force in Canada in 1834. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade created damaging systemic legacies that, 186 years later, are still embedded and normalized within our society in Ontario and Canada. While individual acts of anti-Black racism occur daily, systemic anti-Black racism within institutions oppresses entire Black populations on an ongoing basis. These old, colonial systems are the same that also oppress Canadas Indigenous populations.

As with other institutions such as law enforcement, oppression of Black communities and racialized groups is embedded in systems, policies and practices. Only real structural change and an authentic commitment to dismantle racism and white supremacy will free our society from the burden of colonialism and its effects.

The education sector is not exempt. Protests are leading to change within school boards and within the Ministry of Education. Anti-Black racism is not only explicitly named, but challenged in more formal ways than ever before. Representation has changed within leadership positions at various school boards, but there is much more work to do.

For its part, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) remains committed to working with its educators to stop anti-Black racism and teach ways to unlearn it as part of a multi-year strategy to address anti-Black racism issues within ETFO, the education sector and in broader society.

Recent social justice uprisings and protests remind us that anti-Black racism is all our problem. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter have been joined by diverse community members. The groundswell of these uprisings has forced companies and traditional power structures to re-evaluate their practices to counter anti-Black racism.

Emancipation provided freedom from slavery for people of African descent. The necessary work must be done by governments, institutions and individuals to provide freedom in the form of equity and social justice that is the legal and moral right of every Black youth and adult.

ETFO represents 83,000 elementary public school teachers, occasional teachers and education professionals across the province. Its Building Better Schools education agenda can be viewed at BuildingBetterSchools.ca.

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ETFO Emancipation Day is an opportunity to commit to ridding society of anti-Black racism - PRESSENZA International News Agency

Fact check: The United States is not the only country to abolish slavery – USA TODAY

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

Lawmakers have been trying to pass reparation bills for descendants of slaves. Here's why it's taken so long - and how it might work. USA TODAY

Following months of protests regarding racial injustice in the U.S., critics of the Black Lives Matter movement have taken to social media to question the movement's legitimacy.

They frequently suggest the group doesn't know historyand that BLM supporters deny thatprogress has been made.

One Facebook post claims, "Slavery used to be normal throughout the world. America was the ONLY country that ended it! Black people owned slaves too. White people were slaves too. How many of these morons from Black Lives Matter know that?!"

Fact or fiction: We are factchecking the news and we'll send it right to your inbox. Sign up here.

Contrary to what the post says, the U.S. isnot the only country that ended slavery, nor was it the first to do so.

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln'sEmancipation Proclamation went into effect. This declaredall persons held as slaves shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." However, slavery was not formally abolishedin the U.S. until 1865, after the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

The signature of President Abraham Lincoln on a rare, restored copy of the 13th Amendment that ended slavery.(Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

Spain abolished slavery in 1811, while Sweden banned slave trading in 1813and abolished slavery in 1847.

Slavery was abolished inMexicoin 1829, when Texas was still part of thatcountry. The decision inpart prompted slave holders to fight for the independence of Texas. Once the Republic of Texas was formed, slavery became legal again and remained legal when it became a U.S. state in 1845.

Britain passed its Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which went into effect in August of 1834.The act freed more than 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean,South Africa and Canada.

More: Fact check: The Irish were indentured servants, not slaves

More: In historic move, North Carolina city approves reparations for Black residents

France banned slave trading in 1817, but the ban wasn't effective until 1826. The countryabolished slavery in 1848.

Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888.

And in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating, "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

The Facebook post also claims, "Black people owned slaves too. White people were slaves too."

According to a 2013article written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. from The Root,"some free Black people in this country bought and sold other Black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War." Gates is director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

There has long been a debate amonghistorians about the motives behind freeBlack people owning slaves, with some believing it may have been to protect family members.

John Hope Franklin, who wasone of America's most accomplished historians, wrote:"The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property.There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."

It is unknown exactly how many Black people owned slaves,but the vast majority of slave owners in the United States were not Black.

The Root article offers this: "In 1830, the year most carefully studied by (historian) Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people."

The claim about white people being slaves appears tostem from the long-standing myth that the first slaves in North America were white Irish people whichhas been debunked by various outlets, including USA TODAY.

Historian Liam Hogan has spent years debunking the myth of Irish slavery.In 2018, he told Pacific Standard Magazine that in the British American Colonies,many Irish people were indentured servants butthe majority of themdid so willingly. Indentured servitude required people to work uncompensated for a contracted period, whichis different than slavery.

The claims in the post have been rated PARTLY FALSE. The U.S. was not the first nor only country to abolish slavery. While there is also no evidence to suggest that a large portion of slave owners were Blackor that white people were enslaved in the United States, it is true that some freeBlack people did own slaves.

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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‘We all share responsibility’: Campus Life dismisses movement to abolish Greek Life for its role in systemic racism – Student Life

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

Following a July 14 Zoom panel hosted by Student Union, Washington University has made its position clear: Campus Life has no immediate plans to scrap Greek life.

The panel served as the first time that administrators have made a public statement on Greek lifes standing at the University following weeks of campus-wide calls for abolition to the Womens Panhellenic Associate (WPA) and Interfraternity Council (IFC) for their role in upholding systemic racism, classism and sexism.

The University plans to focus on reforming the Greek system instead, against the wishes of students who have expressed their belief that sustainable reform of an exclusive system is not possible.

The panel featured Leslie Heusted, the executive director of Campus Life, Kawanna Leggett, the interim dean of students, Rob Wild, the interim vice chancellor for student affairs, and Molly Bennett, the coordinator for fraternity and sorority life. It was moderated by sophomore Nkemjika Emenike, SU Senates Diversity and Inclusion chair.

During the panel, Wild said that even if the University eventually chooses to abolish Greek life, it would happen after continuous dialogue within the community, and likely not right away.

The harms that happen, we all share responsibility for, and we all share responsibility for trying to fix these problems as theyre arising But that needs to be a process, and not a moment in time where we immediately say Thats it, theyre done because I dont think that is actually going to, in the long-term, solve the issues that I read about on Instagram, Wild said.

However, Wild later said that if students demonstrated a desire for their Greek organizations to be abolished, the University would respect that choice; they would not work with the national organizations to continue recruiting new members and maintain a chapters presence on campus.

If students dont want to be a part of organizations, then those organizations will go away, and well bring in the kinds of organizations that students feel should be valued as part of our community, he said.

Heusted added that any of the Universitys decisions to potentially reactivate chapters after they have been deactivated would be made with our students in mind.

IFC Social Justice Chair junior Matthew Berman said that at this point in the call, he felt there was a change in tone in the panelists sentiments.

They started with We are anti abolition. And then they resolved to If students dont want to be a part of, or have these groups on campus, they have no place on our campus, Berman said to Student Life. Yet nothing is happening with any of those sentiments Its just another blank promise, a lot of empty words.

Throughout the call, the panelists emphasized their belief that it is the responsibility of the entire Washington University community to break down systems of oppression that exist on campus as a whole.

With most students physically spread out across the world right now, the campaign to abolish Greek life has circulated almost entirely through social media.

Following an anonymous July 1 post on the Instagram account @blackatwashu, an account designed for Black students and alumni to share their experiences of racism on campus, sorority Chi Omega faced pressure to disband after a members repeated acts of racism were detailed in a post.

The post described the members repeated use of the n-word while non-Black members of Chi Omega stayed silent.

The post garnered nearly 2,000 likes and 200 comments, many of which called for Chi Omega to take accountability for the members actions.

The next day, the Instagram account @abolishwashuwpaandifc formed, allowing anonymous users to share more stories of racism, socioeconomic exclusion, homophobia and sexual violence within Greek organizations.

As more stories were submitted, more students called for Greek life to be abolished altogether on Instagram and Twitter. Many members of Greek organizations, mainly sororities, publicly posted about their decision to leave their chapters and their support of Greek abolition.

Currently, most fraternity and sorority chapters are discussing whether to disaffiliate from their national organization, undertake reform efforts or to disband their chapter entirely. The dissolution of a chapter would require the University and the national organization to agree to revoke the chapters charter, an agreement between the two entities allowing the chapter to remain on campus.

While conversations about abolishing Greek life are not new, the movement has gained more nationwide momentum in recent weeks pro-abolition Instagram pages have similarly begun to circulate at universities such as the University of Southern California, Tufts, Northwestern, Duke and Vanderbilt.

Similarly to the @blackatwashu post about Chi Omega, submissions posted to the Instagram account have demonstrated that instances of exclusivity in Greek organizations are not isolated occurrences.

A former member of sorority Kappa Delta submitted a post describing the time that an executive member of their sorority instructed the chapter not to wear your hair messy, like in an afro during recruitment. While the member apologized in the sororitys group chat, her offense was swept under the rug shortly after.

According to the poster, for a low-income student, the financial aid for sorority fees was also largely insufficient the need-based scholarships, if granted, cover only $100, while dues can add up to nearly $500 per semester for a returning member and nearly $900 for the first semester, depending on the chapter.

I dont know whether it was my financial background, being first generation college and a first generation American, my queerness, or my politics that left me feeling like I didnt belong in Kappa Delta I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders when I signed my papers to deactivate, they wrote.

In another post, a former member of Kappa Kappa Gamma told the story of when another member referred to her as the token Black girl of the sorority and continued to call her token for the rest of the year.

Many other girls were around when this happened and all laughed, the member wrote in the post. Even I did too because I felt pressured to try and fit in with these girls. I didnt know my own worth.

The same poster detailed their recruitment practices, which intentionally grouped together BIPOC members and paired them with potential new members of color. When she pointed this out to the rest of her chapter, she was silenced. One girl came up to me and said, Why are you so mad? Dont you want people like you in our sorority? How do you think we convince them to join?

If you do make it into Greek life, you might not experience any racism. But that doesnt mean its not happening all around you, junior Maddy Molina, a recently-deactivated member of Chi Omega, wrote in a statement to Student Life, adding that she wants to take this time to amplify Black voices and be more aware of the systems she has been complicit in.

At the time of publication, there have been more than 50 submissions from current and former students posted on the account, sharing their experiences and beliefs on why Greek life should not be welcomed on campus any longer.

On July 2, the day after the @blackatwashu post went up, Chi Omegas executive board penned a public statement that their current members would deactivate, effectively dismantling the organization for the time being.

We do not have the power to change Nationals in the ways we need to in order to be anti-racist and an equitable institution, the statement read. Even when our chapter did not have racist intentions, participating in Greek life as a whole is a complicit form of racism.

A week after Chi Omegas deactivation statement was publicized, their president, junior Dani Worthalter, walked back this statement in an internal email to the organization announcing that Chi Omega would not disband after all.

When Nationals chartered this chapter 17 years ago, they hoped to make active change and take a firm stand in combating systems of oppression, especially those of racism and inequality, Worthalter wrote in the email. Given our current situation, it feels as though we have failed; not only them, but our members of color. Moving forward, we are faced with the challenge of returning to our foundation on a local and national level, and I look forward to working towards meaningful and enduring change with all of you, in or out of Chi Omega.

Worthalter declined to comment to Student Life.

While several sorority and fraternity chapters are considering disaffiliation from their national organization, Bennett told fraternity presidents that Campus Life will not support fraternities who disaffiliate in a meeting, July 9, according to an anonymous chapter president. They would have to apply to become a Student Union student group.

Similarly to Campus Lifes statements during the town hall, Heusted wrote in a statement to Student Life that because Greek life exists within the greater University community, working to address racism on campus as a whole would be most effective.

The University, Student Affairs and Campus Life have been open in our acknowledgment of systems of racism and classism within our communityWe believe the best path forward is to work with our students to make our campus more inclusive, Heusted wrote. Simply put, closing chapters does not address the systems and beliefs that are causing harm here on campus. We stand ready to work alongside our students to challenge these systems.

She also encouraged fraternity and sorority leadership to listen to the student body and work with them to make change, and that Campus Life is available to help facilitate those discussions.

Campus Life is always focused on improving the co-curricular community and experiences of Washington University students, she continued. Our partnership with the student leadership of sororities and fraternities, and all student groups, is often about challenging the status quo and making changes to improve the overall experience.

However, for many students, including current and former members of fraternities and sororities, the issues ingrained in Greek life are past the point of reform.

I think the excuse for a lot of people joining Greek life at Wash U., and I know it was for me, was that Wash. U. Greek life is different, its more diverse, its not like big state schools, Emenike said in a conversation with Student Life. But theres still a lot of things within Greek life, such as paying dues or the obviously prevalent culture of sexual assault that just cant be reformed. And I think that a lot of the reforms that people are proposing are a lot of things that sororities and frats have tried to implement. It just simply does not work. I think that anything good that can be taken out of Greek life doesnt need the Greek life systemBut I think there are a lot of things that, in my opinion, simply cant be reformed.

Emenike also emphasized that when considering options for reform or abolition, the voices of those who have experienced harm from Greek life should be prioritized.

When we think about reform, I think theres a lot of components to it, like whos going to be doing the reforming? Is that going to take more energy and time out of marginalized groups, many of which who are calling for an abolition of Greek life? If we want to hold ourselves accountable, and we really want to repair the damage thats been done, and if we want to center marginalized voices, then we need to listen to what their demands are because at the end of the day, the ones who are in Greek life, chances are arent the ones who have seen the most harm done, Emenike said.

Most of the students who asked questions aloud or through the chat function during the panel were pro-abolition. Towards the end of the call, Emenike invited any students who favored reform to raise their concerns in the call, but no pro-reform perspectives were publicly shared, except for an anonymous message in the chat that read, I think a lot of students are afraid to say that they think there is room for reform in the system.

Excerpt from:

'We all share responsibility': Campus Life dismisses movement to abolish Greek Life for its role in systemic racism - Student Life

In the face of the past crimes of the European colonial powers and European neo-colonialism, reparations are needed – CADTM.org

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

On 30 June 2020, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Congos independence, the news went round the world: Philippe, King of the Belgians, in a letter to the Head of State and the Congolese people, expressed regret for the colonial past and in particular for the period during which Leopold II personally owned the Congo (1885-1908).

Here is the main passage of this letter: At the time of the independent state of Congo, acts of violence and cruelty were committed, which still weigh on our collective memory. The colonial period that followed also caused suffering and humiliation. I would like to express my deepest regret for those wounds of the past, the pain of which is today rekindled by discrimination that is still all too present in our societies. I will continue to fight all forms of racism[https://plus.lesoir. be/310315/article/2020-06-30/the king recognized the acts-of-cruel-commiss-to-congo-sub-leopold-ii]. This statement by the King of the Belgians is one of the results of the vast international movement of awareness and mobilization that has marked the end of May and all of June 2020 since the assassination of George Floyd by the police in the United States. This statement is totally insufficient because it does not explicitly name the culprits, King Leopold II is not even mentioned. Philip does not present apologies and does not propose that the royal family and/or the Belgian state pay reparations. Nor is there any question of retroceding the goods stolen from the Congolese people at the time of Leopold IIs domination of Congo and at the time of the colonial period during which Congo was part of Belgium (1908-1960). Some of these goods are in the Tervuren Museum or in private collections. Philippe does not propose to unbolt statues of colonizers and other symbols of the colonial period in the Belgian public space or at least to accompany them with plates publicly explaining the horrors of the colonial period.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, for his part, is opposed to the unbolting of statues of historical figures, such as Colbert, who promoted slavery and the slave trade.

A tremendous work remains to be accomplished.

The triangular trade (Europe, Africa, the Americas) was motivated by the search for capitalist development the colonizing countries[1]. For more than 400 years, over 12 million men, women and children were the victims of the dramatic transatlantic slave trade. Women slaves, in particular, bore a triple burden: in addition to forced labour in the hardest of conditions, they suffered extremely cruel forms of discrimination and sexual exploitation as a result of their gender and skin color.

After the abolition of slavery that ocurred in a number of stages over the 19th century, European countries, through massacres, colonized the African continent and divided it at the Berlin Conference held in 1884-1885. The colonization of Africa resulted in genocides, the exploitation of populations, an extractivism devasting resources and biotopes, a cultural and religious oppression.

But that is not all: the colonial powers have resorted to the debt mechanism to keep the former colonies in a coercive economic situation. The World BankWorld BankWBThe World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMFs therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

was directly involved in some colonial debts. During the 1950s and 1960s, it granted loans to the colonial powers for projects allowing the European centers to maximize the exploitation of their colonies. Part of the debts contracted with this bank by the Belgian, British, and French authorities for their colonies were then transferred to the countries that gained independence without their consent. Thus, the former colonies were required to repay the debts that the colonizing states had contracted to exploit them. This was done in violation of international law. However, these debts were not cancelled. Furthermore, the World Bank refused to follow a 1965 UN resolution requiring it to stop supporting Portugal as long as Portugal did not renounce its colonial policy[2].

One of the most striking cases of colonial debt is that of Haiti. In 1804, independence was gained from French imperialism by the slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture among others (the case of Haiti is particularly emblematic as it was the slaves themselves who snatched their freedom). Twenty-one years later, in 1825, France imposed on its former colony an indemnity of 150 million gold francs, threatening it with a military invasion and the restoration of slavery. The burden of this debt still weighs on Haiti and its people. France wanted financial compensation for the loss of income resulting from the abolition of slavery in Haiti. It was therefore the former slaver owners who obtained reparations and not the enslaved people.

The United Kingdom did not act otherwise. After the abolition of slavery in its colonies from 1833 onwards, some 3,000 slave-owning families received 20 million, that is, more than 16 billion today, for their loss of goods, the good in this case being African slaves. Far from being a thing of the past, this episode is very topical as the British government completed the final payments of the Slavery Abolition Loan on February 15, 2015, even as Prime Minister David Cameron, in a speech to the Jamaican Parliament on September 30, 2015, called on Jamaicans to consider slavery a thing of the past and that it was time to get over it[3]. Spain has also claimed substantial compensation from Morocco for its withdrawal from the territory of Tetouan in 1860, which had been under Spanish occupation for years.

Louis-Georges Tin legally defines reparations as legal, moral, material, cultural or symbolic measures set up to compensate a social group or its descendants, individually or collectively, after large-scale damage[4]. Reparations for large-scale damage such as genocides, war crimes, crimes against humanity are provided for by international law. The notion of reparation was born out of the need to do justice to the populations that suffered those damages. However, the demand for reparations raises important questions, since the market thus becomes the main mediator of these policies, which can become a means of putting a price on those sufferings.

The requests for reparations are not recent. They date back to the beginning of the enslavement of black populations. On several occasions, as early as the 17th century the French missionary piphanie de Moirans and the Spanish missionary Jos de Jaca condemned the slave trade and the keeping of Blacks in slavery for the benefit of the colonial economy in America.

In both the North and the South, many attempts have been made to obtain restorative justice for enslaved and colonized populations. In 1993, the first pan-African conference was held in Abuja in support of the demand for reparations for the descendants of the victims of African slavery, colonization, and neo-colonialism. This event revived the struggle for reparations within the African and Afro-diaspora community. The conference explicitly called on the international community to recognize that there is a unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to African peoples that has yet to be paid.

In May 2001, the French law on the recognition of the slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity was adopted by the National Assembly and the Senate. It provides that the French Republic recognizes that the transatlantic slave trade and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and slavery on the other, perpetrated from the fifteenth century onwards, in the Americas and the Caribbean, in the Indian Ocean and in Europe against the African, Amerindian, Malagasy and Indian populations constitute a crime against humanity. The initial proposal for this law, known as the Taubira law, included a paragraph on reparations: A committee of qualified personalities shall be set up to determine the harm suffered and to examine the conditions for reparation due in respect of this crime. However, the article was repealed in the law commission and it was only after the section on reparations was deleted that the law was adopted unanimously by the Assembly. That same year, at the Durban World Conference against Racism, boycotted by the United States, the French delegation did not, however, join those calling for the slave trade and colonialism to be recognized as a crime against humanity, and no European country has since followed the French example.

More recently, since 2010, Haitian social movements have been calling for reparations in the face of the cholera epidemic caused by soldiers of the mission MINUSTAH (2004-2017), an occupation mission under the aegis of the UN. It should be remembered that the territory of Haiti was previously occupied by the United States army between 1915 and 1934.

In Belgium, within the Decade of afro-descendants, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD), visiting Belgium in February 2019, organized meetings with representatives of the State and its institutions, as well as the civil society of African descent, in order to learn about the situation of people of African descent in the country. In its report, WGEPAD recommends that Belgium implement restorative justice and use the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) ten-point plan of action for restorative justice as a guiding framework[5]. Recently, the NGO Human Rights Watch urged Belgium to provide for reparations, meaning financial compensation, but also recognition of past atrocities and the damage they continue to cause, and an end to ongoing abuses[6].

Thus, despite the actions taken in this direction for several years, the responses to requests for reparations have changed very little. Moreover, pressure is often exerted on former colonized countries to abandon claims for reparations, with the result that initiatives in this direction are often limited to declarations, indignation and claims but are generally not accompanied by binding measures (which will remain difficult as long as a political body that is independent of the current balanceBalanceEnd of year statement of a companys assets (what the company possesses) and liabilities (what it owes). In other words, the assets provide information about how the funds collected by the company have been used; and the liabilities, about the origins of those funds. of power is not established)[7].

In addition to requests for reparations, in several European countries (particularly in France and Belgium) campaigns have been conducted for the restitution of cultural property and human remains stored in museums or universities. These mobilizations have moved the lines and were accompanied by numerous announcements of restitution to countries of origin by the French and Belgian authorities. Restitutions - a taboo word only a few years ago - are now mentioned or even announced. However, speeches are rarely accompanied by concrete actions, as the French situation shows, where the serious work of Bndicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr has only led to renunciations since the submission of their report to the French president in 2018[8] . Despite the multiplication of claims, the former colonial powers are very reluctant to proceed with outright repatriation and sometimes content themselves with promising to set up an inventory, or even simply to lend the looted treasures[9].

In 2018, the question of the restitution of cultural goods and human remains looted in Africa was raised in Belgium on the occasion of the reopening of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium). A collective composed mainly of members of the diaspora and researchers published an article in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir calling for the restitution not only of cultural property but also of human remains[10].

As in the question of reparations, the actual actions of the Belgian and French States towards restitution will have to be audited in order to avoid the implementation of mechanisms that would mask a false reparation. We must avoid reproducing what happened with the treaty of friendship between Libya and Italy signed in 2008 by President Muammar Gaddafi and the head of the Italian government Silvio Berlusconi. It provided for compensation from Italy to Libya for the colonial period[11]. This gesture by Italy was in fact guided by economic and political interests. The apology was accompanied by reparations in the form of tied investments, obtaining contracts, control of natural resources and conditionalities such as the control of migration flows, etc., which amounted to imposing and perpetuating a neo-colonial relationship of domination.

The recommendations can be drawn from the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) Committee for Reparations 10-point plan, this group of 15 Caribbean countries whose mobilization is the most successful with regard to reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism. The recommendations that we are going to reproduce below concern France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, which, in addition to a public and sincere apology, are called upon to cancel the external debt of CARICOM member States. That being said, these recommendations constitute good guiding principles for the development of road maps for all European countries responsible for slavery and colonialism.

ReCommonsEurope will pursue its work by extending it as far as possible to ongoing debates and proposals in other countries.

The following are the key measures proposed in the CARICOM committee:

1) A full and formal apology, as opposed to the expressions of regret that some countries may have expressed. Nevertheless, apologies - which have therefore always remained on the fringes of memorial reflections linked to slavery - are largely insufficient since it is known that they are often expressed to serve more strategic ends, set in a political agenda of circumstance and power relations[12].

2) The repatriation of the descendants of more than 12 million Africans abducted and deported to the Caribbean as slaves, reduced to livestock and chattels, to return to where they came from.

3) A development program for indigenous populations who have survived a genocide. In this case, it will be necessary to ensure that the priority of this development model is not the market but the improvement of the living conditions of the inhabitants, particularly in terms of public services.

4) Cultural institutions allowing the transmission of memory of victims and their descendants.

5) Resources allocated to the public health crisis that is rampaging in the Caribbean. The Caribbean being the region with the highest incidence of chronic diseases that emanate directly from nutritional experience, psychological violence and more generally from forms of distress associated with slavery, genocide, and apartheid.

6) The eradication of illiteracy, as black and indigenous populations were left in a situation of widespread illiteracy after independence, particularly in the English colonies.

7) An African Education Program, to inform people of African descent about their roots.

8) A psychological rehabilitation program for the care and reparation of people of African descent populations.

9) Technology transfer to get a better access to science and to the global technological culture. This transfer plays a particularly important role in the need to deal with the consequences of global warming as well as to enable the implementation of an energy transition.

10) The cancellation of all debts to put an end to the tax chains that the Caribbean has experienced since the liberation from slavery and colonialism.

ReCommonsEurope, echoing the demands of social movements in the Caribbean region, supports the demand for financial compensation for the economic exploitation and racist dehumanization of enslaved Africans. It is estimated that the payment of reparations from Britain to Caribbean Africans would be in the order of 7.5 billion. The 20 million paid to African slavers after the abolition of slavery in 1834 in the British Empire would be worth about 200 billion in present value[13]. These funds must be capitalized for an alternative, solidarity-based development model... and be controlled by the people.

In addition, other measures are important in the area of repairs:

Reparations for ecological crimes that result in convictions and financial compensation. Include the history of slavery and colonialism in education in the broadest sense, i.e. not only in the school curriculum (through teaching) but also promote it in cultural policies (awareness-raising, support for associations, events, etc.). The calculation of what the colonizing countries owe their former colonies in terms of stolen goods, looted resources, exploited labor force, etc., is not a simple matter. To do this, a group of economists, lawyers, tax specialists must be created to produce knowledge on reparations. The objective is to find a precise figure that the colonizing country will have to pay to its former colonies for the crimes committed, and to define to what communities, schools, foundations the money should go. The establishment of quotas for representation within the institutions. The effective condemnation of racist comments and acts.

The findings are glaring. Racist and xenophobic statements as well as acts have been on the increase in recent years in Europe. The structural racism that is a system in the global North, accompanied by an uninhibited white supremacy, encourages uninhibited racist behavior. Moreover, the vast majority of these crimes go unpunished. However, the structural nature of racism - and the discrimination that results from it - is no longer to be proved.

On the 26th of March 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Fundamental Rights of People of African Descent recognizing that [...] racism and discrimination against people of African descent are structural [...] and that [...] this form of racism is the result of the historically repressive structures of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade [...]. slaves"[14].

Similarly, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD) concluded the following regarding Belgium in its 2019 statement: The underlying causes of contemporary human rights violations lie in the lack of recognition of the true extent of the violence and injustice of colonization. As a result, public discourse does not reflect a nuanced analysis of how institutions can lead to systemic exclusion in the areas of education, employment, and opportunities. The Working Group concludes that inequalities are deeply entrenched because of overlapping and mutually reinforcing structural barriers. Credible efforts to combat racism require first overcoming these structural barriers.[15].

Yet, despite the above statements, no significant progress has been made in deconstructing these structures. Thus, while apologies and reparations must be taken into account for any project of society that is truly committed to the human dignity of each individual, without distinction of race, ethnicity or national origin, they are not sufficient to achieve the elimination of structures that sustain discrimination. In other words, each of the recommendations listed above is a necessary but not sufficient condition if it is not considered in the context of a wider implementation of all of them.

However, there are bright spots on the horizon: the death of George Floyd in the United States has given a real boost to the Black Lives Matter movement and triggered protests all over the world. Since the 30th of May, numerous rallies have taken place: in Belgium, 10.000 people have demonstrated against racism and police violence; more than 20,000 marched in France, where the story of the death of young Adama Traor has resurfaced. In the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of protestors all over the country. In the United Kingdom statues are being unbolted. In Australia, important mobilizations also took place. In Brazil, Vidas Negras Importam is the slogan that was chanted by the hundreds of inhabitants of the favelas of Rio who gathered on the evening of Sunday 31st of May in front of the headquarters of the regional government. The infamous death of George Floyd had the effect of making a large part of public opinion, particularly among young people, aware of the need to denounce and fight institutional racism.

In the face of the past crimes of the European colonial powers and European neo-colonialism, reparations are needed - CADTM.org

Highways England raises speed limit through roadworks to 60mph – Autocar

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

Highways England has raised the national speed limit through motorway roadworks from 50mph to 60mph in an effort to cut journey times and improve safety.

Drivers will now be able to travel at the higher speed where it is safe for road users and roadworkers and where shown on road signs. The move comes in response to feedback from road users citing frustration at not being able to go quicker through roadworks and research that found fewer people exceed the higher limit.

During trials for the raised limit, Highways England found that allowing cars to travel at 60mph through eight different roadwork zones saved drivers an average of 3780 hours journey time per day.

Workforces at several sites, including stretches of the M1, M6 and M4, were satisfied with the results of the 8-10 week trials and chose to retain the 60mph limit following their completion.

Three new scenarios for the raised limit have been introduced: Permanent, which allows for 60mph driving at all times; Contraflow, which imposes a 60mph limit on stretches of road where main construction activity isn't taking place; and Dynamic, which liftsthe limit from 50mph only on non-working days.

The news comes following the governments recent vow to accelerate investment in the UKs transport infrastructure, pledging 1.7 billion to repairing local roads and fast-tracking 175 million of work on major road and rail networks.

It's expected that the new limit will have most effect in areas where work is ongoing to introduce smart motorways. A recent review of the controversial scheme has resulted in a series of new measures to improve safety, including the abolition of the dynamic hard shoulder concept and increasing the number of Highways England traffic officer patrols.

Jim OSullivan, chief executive of Highways England, said: All of our research shows that road users benefit from 60mph limits in roadworks. They have shorter journey times and feel safe.

Road users understand that roadworks are necessary, but they're frustrated by them. So testing 60mph has been about challenging the norm while ensuring the safety of our people working out there and those using our roads.

We have a huge programme of work planned, so being able to use 60mph where safe will continue to improve everybodys experience of our roads.

Smart motorways review brings 18 measures to boost safety

Government vows to accelerate investment in UK road network

Highways England raises speed limit through roadworks to 60mph - Autocar

The Triple Antagonist of the Police, Policing, and Policy – CounterPunch

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Danzig

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In 1967, Chester Himes wrote, Police brutality toward black people in the United States is of such common usage and longstanding to have attained acceptance as proper behavior. On the one hand, not much has changed. Every day we see the virulent and repressive state violence against Black Lives Matter protestors marching, occupying space, and demanding change in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among countless others. While the tactics may have shifted, the overall strategy of anti-blackness and settler-colonial repression remains the same (consider the actions against protestors at Standing Rock, which Adrienne Keene claims served as training for future state violence, such as that against protestors in Portland, OR). The police serve to protect and uphold whiteness and the system of racial capitalism. This imbrication of police, policing, and policy (both economic and political) can be understood as what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitical power, which names contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death.

On the other hand, Black Lives Matter, social media dissemination, and the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic have generated substantive demands for change by millions of Americans, which has been increasingly reflected in the mainstream media and by politicians. More and more weve seen calls to defund the police and to abolish the police. Within the last two years, writing by activist-scholars, including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, has appeared in mainstream liberal publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker. Although many on the right and left remain either anxious or overtly resistant to abolitionist projects, these discourseswhich reflect various, loosely-connected positionshave nonetheless entered the mainstream. #AbolishICE, #AbolishDHS, and calls to abolish the police abound on Twitter and other social media sites. Such abolitionist work aims to annul the necropolitical reduction of people to states of precarity.

Despite these calls, what has been accomplished so far has been in the nature of insufficient reform. While Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered on 25 May 2020, completed its first step toward abolishing the police, significant obstacles remain. In the meantime, Minnesota has banned chokeholds and aggressive training tactics. These steps emphasize the entanglement of the police and policy, as the police are a symptom of the broader problem of policy-making and policing. Indeed, the police and policy have historically worked to shore each other up.

Rather than merely reform the police through new policies, we need to abolish not only the police but also policing, which, Jacques Rancire argues, works to produce and reinforce a consensus order of society that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of seeing. Against the liberal tradition, Rancire rereads what typically goes by the name politics as the police: the set of procedures whereby aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. The line often used by the police, Theres nothing to see here, can be read as a figure for the consensus of society, which asks us to ignore its necropolitical iniquities.

This generalized notion of the police is helpful because it emphasizes that policing is not merelyor not evenabout police force or state repression but about the productive and regulative organization of space and time. That is, the police determine what or who can appear and how such appearing occurs. To take one example: capitalist consensus, for Rancire, offers a reality of stolen time that subtracts the time for living. Some have had more time stolen than others. This is not only the case for workers who sell their labor-power to survive, but also for those who have been excluded from work entirely. Historically, for instance, Black workers have had greater unemployment rates than white workers, conditions only intensified by the pandemic. Because of the increasing precarity of the United States population, a precarity only exacerbated by escalating unemployment during the ongoing pandemic, any free time today quickly gets absorbed by our gig and service economy. Necropolitics ensures that some lives are valued more than others.

With this generalized notion of necropolitical policing, we can see that even ostensibly liberal institutions work to police bodies and produce subjects for society. For example, the university system conceptualizes the student as consumer and future producer within our global capitalist economy, and citizenship reifies nationalist ideology and its often violent fixation on borders. Yet as Black Lives Matter affirms, citizen does not count for much if that citizen-subject is Black. Politics proper, for Rancire and in contrast to this notion of the police and policing, assumes equality and seeks to interrupt the functioning of inequality in society. Black Lives Matter is exemplary as a political movement, then, for it points to a wrong that structures society, namely, that Black lives do not matter to the white supremacist capitalist order except as material to be used.

The current occupation of Portland, along with other cities across the United States, brings into sharp relief that many Americans have always lived in an occupied territory. To draw on my own local context, one need only compare the differences in policing in Roxbury, MA (a majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood within Boston) to that in Acton, MA (an affluent and majority white suburb of Boston) to see the different logics at work in police operations when linked to diametrically opposed economic and racial demographics. In Roxbury, police operate as antagonists; in Acton, police work with the community to protect and serve. And in Massachusetts, as in many other states, incarcerated Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are overrepresented compared to white prisoners.

The violence currently committed by the United States in the form of mobilizing the police, paramilitary, and military against its subjects is therefore simply the most obvious manifestation of necropolitics. The occupation of cities stresses that some lives are valued, while others are both expendable and disposable. As Angela Davis has argued, the technologies of incarceration extend far beyond the prisons walls.

So the police is, again, merely a symptom of necropolitical policing and policy-making that maintain anti-Black violence and racism, economic inequalities, gender and sexuality discrimination, demands of ableism, and so on. The neoliberal economization of life further emphasizes how life itself is policed. Americans are told again and again that we need to go back to work, back to normal, in order to restart the economy. Or Americans are told that only political partisanship prevents society from reopening. In the case of reopening schools, for instance, Trump insists that politics, rather than COVID-19, operates as the main obstacle, and his rejection of CDC guidelines for school reopening stems from a claim that they are very tough and expensive. In other words, the preservation of life and health of communities is always quantified, and such preservation only takes priority if it is cost-effective. Normal refers, then, to the usual calculus of necropolitics. As Dionne Brand recently pointed out in The Star, normal indeed works in insidious ways. In pre-pandemic times, she asks, Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes. I suppose all of that was normal.

This brutal calculus of returning to normallaid bare by the constructed distinction between essential and non-essential work/workerobscures the costs of this economic imperative. Essential workers are dying at horrifying rates. Such positions are more likely to be held by Black workers, so Black and poor life is being sacrificed in the name of profit and the comfort of more affluent Americans. In the United States, even with the recent outbreak across the Sun Belt and more rural areas, people of color remain at greater risk of dying from COVID-19.

Donald Trumps law and order rhetoric and his insistence on prioritizing the economy for some rather than others makes explicit the necropolitical production of mass death. Necropolitics registers an intensification of a feature present in racial capitalism from its inception. Capital, Marx noted, takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Citing this passage, Gabriel Rockhill puts it even more bluntly: Long-term consequences, like ecocide or the destruction of human life, are of no importance to the imperative of making as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Capitalist accumulation maintains an essential relation to the accumulation of death.

Critiques of protestersclaims that they are destroying private and public property, that they are disturbing the smooth functioning of societywork to reify and justify the police order of racial capitalism, thereby preserving the status quo. Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, has labeled the protestors in Portland extremists and violent anarchists. In this logic, guarding monuments and memorials takes precedence over addressing concerns of structural inequalities that affect millions of lives. These rhetorical positionings and the actions of protestors, however innocuous, justify the brutal and unconstitutional occupation currently ongoing in Portland and other cities.

As Assata Shakur makes explicit, no one has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. Protests ought to be disruptive. They ought to make explicit that American hegemony values property over life, that we need new modes of perceiving to interrupt the violence of anti-blackness and racism, that Trumps administration only cares about profit and power, and that Trump himself seems to suffer from pathological narcissism in which his self-image trumps all other interests. Necropolitics helps explain why some of Trumps actions, such as his virulently anti-immigration policies, in fact conflict with other ostensible aims, such as economic growth. The lawsuit brought against the Trump administration by the United States Chamber of Commerce reveals that when pushed to its extreme, the necropolitical production of death undermines even the neoliberal capitalism it otherwise serves. We need to expunge the contagion of necropolitics, and we need to sever the tie that binds politics as policing to economics.

This economization informs even well-intentioned efforts by Democrats, who can only conceptualize change in terms of investment in communities of color. Such reformist policies risk fetishizing a fantasy of progress at the expense of substantive change. Abolition politics demands not merely an end to the police but an end to the subjugation of life to death, to the police and death-driven policing. It calls for a fundamental reordering of life that breaks from the neoliberal consensus described by Michel Foucault, in which the human subject comes to be nothing other than an entrepreneur of himself. Abolition politics demands, that is, a new politics of the human that refuses to reduce humanity to the brutal economic terms that policing regulates, circumscribes, and, when useful, extinguishes.

The Triple Antagonist of the Police, Policing, and Policy - CounterPunch

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