SOARIZON by Thales and Iris Automation announce partnership – sUAS News

Posted on by

SOARIZON by Thales and Iris Automation announce partnership to help unlock the true potential of unmanned air systems. The partnership will also allow customers to package services from both providers at a discount

SOARIZON by Thales, the integrated drone operations technology provider, and Iris Automation, the leading detect-and-avoid (DAA) technology, today announced the formation of a new partnership. Together the companies will provide customers with Iris Automations leading DAA technology to enable Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations paired with SOARIZONs complete drone operations management platform.

Based in San Francisco, Iris Automation is the market leader in DAA technology for UAS. Its modular system, Casia, is the first commercially available computer vision detect-and-avoid solution to enable BVLOS operations for autonomous vehicles. Casia enables a drone to truly understand and react to the aviation environment around it as if a pilot were on board.

SOARIZONs partnership with Iris Automation supports the ambitions of both companies to promote safer use of the skies. The alliance will enable innovative testing and safe BVLOS projects, bringing together mission planning, compliance, remote ID and DAA capabilities, unlocking the future of unmanned flight for everyone.

With the SOARIZON ecosystem taking care of all aspects of drone operational planning, compliance and security, this new collaboration will enable organisations to push the boundaries of whats possible with drones with new and innovative use cases.

Ben Orcan, Partnerships Manager at SOARIZON, said of the partnership: We are thrilled to work with Iris Automation. The Casia system is the first of its kind and is at the forefront of innovation in unmanned flight. We already have exciting projects planned as part of this partnership and we look forward to demonstrating what our combined expertise and capabilities can achieve to further advance the drone economy.

Tamiko Sianen, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Iris Automation, said: SOARIZON is a leader in the drone industry, building the tools to meet the safety needs of operators and the public. Together, we are enabling scaled BVLOS operations by providing tactical deconfliction for customers in support of the services provided by SOARIZON.

As part of the partnership, the two companies will provide a mutual discount on their products and services. SOARIZON users get a discount to Casia software licenses and Casia customers will get a discount on SOARIZONs paid plans.

About SOARIZON by Thales:

SOARIZON empowers scaled UAS operations through its secure, compliant and efficient ecosystem. Combining best in class drone operational management capabilities, such as NOTAMs, airspace data and full risk assessment and compliance tools, SOARIZON enables enterprises of all sizes to maintain full visibility and control of drone operations, from planning through to approval and delivery. Find out more and sign up for free at SOARIZON.io.

About Iris Automation:

Iris Automation is building a computer-vision-based avoidance system that helps drones see the world how pilots do. The company is based in San Francisco and is led by a team with experience at NASA, Boeing, and Nvidia, including PhDs in computer vision. Iris is a key partner on multiple FAA UAS Integration Pilot Programs, a participant of NASAs Unmanned Traffic Management program and a participant of Transport Canadas BVLOS Technology Demonstration Program. Learn more atwww.irisonboard.com

Excerpt from:

SOARIZON by Thales and Iris Automation announce partnership - sUAS News

This husband-wife duos startup helps companies automate their workflows – YourStory

Posted on by

Automating infrastructure operations of applications and reducing errors and resolution time for businesses excited husband-wife duo Anand Purusothaman and Karunya Sampath so much that they set up their startup, AppViewX, in 2009, to help companies with their workflows.

AppViewX is a hybrid cloud, low-code application platform that enables the automation and orchestration of network infrastructure.

Anand explains,

Anand Purusothaman

The absence of automation warrants huge investments in IT infrastructure and manpower to deliver the superior experience needed in the current digital space. It was to solve for this that AppViewX came into existence.

Currently, the majority of the startups customer base are in the US and Europe.

Anand had an entrepreneurial bent of mind right from his days at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore. After his masters in the US, he spent around 10 years working for different tech startups in the New York area.

Around this time, he started experimenting with various product concepts and thus started his entrepreneurial journey with Payoda, a tech firm incorporated in 2004. Headquartered at Texas, Payoda offers software solutions, products, and services to clients across the world.

Karunya, who is the Co-founder of both Payoda and AppViewX holds a masters degree in Computer Engineering from PSG College of Technology. She has over a decade of experience in business operations and management.

AppViewX was a product incubated out of Payoda.

On deployment, the AppViewX platform discovers the network and security infrastructure and brings it to manage state.

The product helps network and security operations and engineering teams as well as application teams of companies. AppViewX charges based on the solutions delivered on the platforms as well as the size of the network and security infrastructure that is being managed. It is an annual subscription service.

AppViewX serves customers with a large set of applications that are hosted on-premise or on a multi-cloud setup. These are typically Fortune 5000 companies across BFSI, healthcare, retail, oil and gas, manufacturing, and deep technology.

According to Markets and Market, the globalnetwork automation market sizehas grown from $2.3 billion in 2017 to $16.9 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 48 percentage.

Although there are numerous players in the automation space such as IBM with its Ansible tool, and Anuta Networks, what makes AppViewX unique, Anand says, is the platform capabilities as well as the solution set.

The platform has capabilities such as low-code drag-and-drop automation, closed-loop automated troubleshooting, intuitive visual tools, and an application-centric view and management of network infrastructure. AppViewX has the unique advantage of being the pioneer in this space with some of the solutions such as orchestration of application delivery services and certificate lifecycle automation, says Anand.

Across its Coimbatore, Bengaluru, and overseas offices in New York and London, AppViewX has a total headcount of 300 employees, with a majority of the engineering and product folks based out of the Coimbatore location.

We are a fast-growth company averaging around 70 percent year-on-year growth with a strong pipeline for three years to maintain an even accelerated growth, says Anand, who refused to disclose revenue figures.

After 10 years of bootstrapping, in mid-2019, a self-sufficient AppViewX raised a funding of $30 million from Brighton Park Capital (BPC) to fund the ventures growth and expansion plans.

The Co-founder hopes that the startup sustains the same growth rate for the next five years.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)

Go here to see the original:

This husband-wife duos startup helps companies automate their workflows - YourStory

Why Police Love the Idea of Automated Content Moderation – Slate

Posted on by

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

In March 2019, a shooter livestreamed on Facebook as he attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing more than 50 people and injuring many more. The livestreams slipped through the platforms content moderation systems, allowing thousands of people to view, download, and redistribute the horrific footage. In the aftermath of the attacks, Facebook and YouTube removed millions of copies of the videos in an effort to stifle their viral spread, but platforms struggled to keep the videos offline.

It was just one of a series of horrific violent episodes that have circulated on social media platforms like Facebook Live, Instagram, and even Amazons gaming platform, Twitch, in the past year. In response, governments and tech companies are forming new partnerships and strategies to keep violence from going viral online and to prevent it from being broadcast in the first place. But the strengthening of relationships between tech companies and law enforcement agencies illustrates the risk of content moderationhistorically a zone of private regulationbeing co-opted to facilitate law enforcement and digital surveillance.

As platforms develop more robust ways of identifying and ferreting out violent content, they also whet the appetites of police and intelligence agencies that might benefit from thosecapabilities.

Facebook, Twitch, and most other mainstream social media platforms ban the dissemination of violent content, but their content moderation systems arent always able to keep up. Once a video proliferates, its nearly impossible to entirely remove it from the internet and the world. Current content moderation entails chasing after prohibited content, rather than preventing its upload in the first place. And many content moderation workers are underpaid contractors working under abysmal conditions, as the scholar Sarah Roberts has documented. When moderation workers have to look at dozens of horrific photographs and videos each minute, they will inevitably make mistakes, and some banned content will slip through. Facebook and other big social media platforms are working on artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to detect and prevent violent content from ever being posted, but those techniques are still fairly rudimentary.

One response is the call for more collaboration between platforms and government actors. In May 2019, a group of dozens of nations, tech companies (including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter), and civil society organizations adopted the Christchurch Call, committing to accelerate research into and development of technical solutions to prevent the online dissemination of terrorist and extremist violence. These collaborative arrangements bring together a mix of enhanced content moderation efforts, automated technologies, and law enforcement input.

The tech industrys hope is that by developing new techniques and technologies to comply with government pressures, the sector can stave off strengthening calls for harder regulation. The tech industry is touting its private development of automation and artificial intelligence as a promising answer to the proliferation of online violence. But private sector investment is driven in no small part by government pressure. As platforms develop more robust ways of identifying and ferreting out violent content, they also whet the appetites of police and intelligence agencies that might benefit from those capabilities.

Accordingly, the tech sector is doubling down on investments in automated technology to address the challenges of moderation at scale. A separate tech industry consortium, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, has created a shared database of hashesdigital fingerprintsto identify violent terrorist videos and keep them from being shared across social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as other online services.

New automated moderation techniques will create ripe new sources of information for both private and public sector surveillance of users. The more platforms automate their content moderation techniques, the more data they can easily and quickly aggregate about users who attempt to post prohibited contentmapping their relationships, associations, and networks. For example, New Zealand police could ask Facebook to provide a list of all the users who attempted to repost the Christchurch video, or a list of all the users who watched one of the streams. Platforms could be asked to share this information with law enforcement in response to subpoenas, warrants, or other less-formal demands.

Consider, for example, social medias response to the changing relationship between the United States and Iran. Soon after the United States designated Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization, Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram began deleting the pages and profiles for IRGC officials and associates. In the wake of the United States killing of IRGC commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a January 2020 strike, Facebook and Instagram also began deleting posts that expressed support for Soleimani.

From a platform perspective, deleting these posts and pages is the quickest and easiest way to ensure that companies are not punished for hosting unlawful content. And if the chief policy goal is to stop dangerous ideas from spreading, then Facebook and Instagrams approach offers a highly effective silencing technique.

But from a law enforcement perspective, deleting these posts and pages might also deprive authorities of useful sources of intelligence. As Instagram and Facebook build out their capacity to automatically identify support for terrorist organizations, law enforcement might want to use these pages as honey pots, ensuring access to key information about those who engage with this content. This information could be used to map networks of terrorist sympathizers or help shed light on the diffusion of dangerous propaganda. Or it might simply help law enforcement identify and monitor those who have viewed dangerous content.

Information from social media platforms has long been a critical asset for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Using search warrants and subpoenas, law enforcement agencies frequently get access to user data in the course of investigations. These demands are limited by privacy laws and the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals against unreasonable government searches and seizures. As platforms redesign their content moderation rules and systems, law enforcements influence is equally widespreadbut less constrained by formal rules.

In some cases, police needs and automated content moderation systems are converging. London police, for instance, have partnered with Facebook to provide images from body-worn cameras in order to train Facebooks artificial intelligence system to detect first-person footage of shootings. If we want Facebook to be able to identify and filter out unlawful violent content, as the consensus seems to hold, then this kind of cooperation is critical.

But law enforcement also influences the design and implementation of content moderation systems in more subtle and alarming ways. In 2016, Israeli authorities attributed a wave of violence in part to Palestinian incitement on Facebook and sharply criticized the platform for sabotaging law enforcements efforts to take down posts from Palestinian users. The Knesset considered a law that would have required Facebook to take down inflammatory content. According to the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, Facebook responded to the rising pressures by cracking down on Palestinian posts and pages. While the law ultimately was shelved at the eleventh hour, Facebook has reportedly continued to work closely with Israeli law enforcement to identify violations of its community standards. Or some of them. Last year, the Jerusalem Post reported that incitement by Israeli posters against Palestinians has remained a major problem on the platformone that neither Facebook nor Israeli law enforcement appears eager to address.

Even as the relationships between policing and platforms grow more embedded, they have remained pretty opaque to the public. Surveillance technologies are rarely subject to the same public oversight and control mechanisms as other government contracts, as Catherine Crump has shown. And when these relationships are unofficial, informal pressures on platforms tend to take place through backdoor channels that are less amenable to public scrutiny.

Though we often think of content moderation and surveillance as two entirely separate issues, the extent of law enforcement pressure on private content moderation shows how entwined they are. Together, platforms and law enforcement are capable of identifying individualsboth online and offfor monitoring and surveillance to an unparalleled degree. And the push for automated content moderation adds to these capabilities, expanding the wealth of data about users, their relationships, their interests, and their engagement with online content and creating new sources of data that are highly relevant to law enforcement investigations. Platforms abilities to identify, track, and control our online behaviors might be unsettling, but they are a gold mine for law enforcement. The good thing is that the tech sector might do more to limit the spread of horrific content on social media. But it would be wise to remember that its users interests might be different from law enforcements preferences.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

View post:

Why Police Love the Idea of Automated Content Moderation - Slate

Smart Elevator Automation System Market 2019 Trends, Size, Segments, Emerging Technologies and Industry Growth by Forecast to 2023 – Packaging News 24

Posted on by

The global Smart Elevator Automation System market reached ~US$ xx Mn in 2019 and is anticipated grow at a CAGR of xx% over the forecast period 2019-2029. In this Smart Elevator Automation System market study, the following years are considered to predict the market footprint:

The business intelligence study of the Smart Elevator Automation System market covers the estimation size of the market both in terms of value (Mn/Bn USD) and volume (x units). In a bid to recognize the growth prospects in the Smart Elevator Automation System market, the market study has been geographically fragmented into important regions that are progressing faster than the overall market. Each segment of the Smart Elevator Automation System market has been individually analyzed on the basis of pricing, distribution, and demand prospect for the Global regions.

Request Sample Report @ https://www.researchmoz.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=2226816&source=atm

Each market player encompassed in the Smart Elevator Automation System market study is assessed according to its market share, production footprint, current launches, agreements, ongoing R&D projects, and business tactics. In addition, the Smart Elevator Automation System market study scrutinizes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis.

The following manufacturers are covered in this report:Fujitec Co.Ltd.Mitsubishi Electric CorporationHitachi Ltd.Kone Corporation

Smart Elevator Automation System Breakdown Data by TypeBy ServiceInstallationRepair & MaintenanceModernisationBy ComponentCard ReaderBiometricTouchscreen & KeypadSecurity & Control SystemSensor, Motor & Automation SystemBuilding Management SystemSmart Elevator Automation System Breakdown Data by ApplicationResidential UseCommercial UseOthers

Smart Elevator Automation System Production by RegionUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanOther Regions

Smart Elevator Automation System Consumption by RegionNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaMalaysiaPhilippinesThailandVietnamEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalyRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC CountriesTurkeyEgyptSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & Africa

The study objectives are:To analyze and research the global Smart Elevator Automation System status and future forecastinvolving, production, revenue, consumption, historical and forecast.To present the key Smart Elevator Automation System manufacturers, production, revenue, market share, and recent development.To split the breakdown data by regions, type, manufacturers and applications.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends, drivers, influence factors in global and regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.

In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Smart Elevator Automation System :History Year: 2014 2018Base Year: 2018Estimated Year: 2019Forecast Year: 2019 2025

This report includes the estimation of market size for value (million USD) and volume (K Units). Both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to estimate and validate the market size of Smart Elevator Automation System market, to estimate the size of various other dependent submarkets in the overall market. Key players in the market have been identified through secondary research, and their market shares have been determined through primary and secondary research. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns have been determined using secondary sources and verified primary sources.

For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2018 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.

Make An EnquiryAbout This Report @ https://www.researchmoz.com/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=2226816&source=atm

What insights readers can gather from the Smart Elevator Automation System market report?

The Smart Elevator Automation System market report answers the following queries:

You can Buy This Report from Here @ https://www.researchmoz.com/checkout?rep_id=2226816&licType=S&source=atm

Why Choose Smart Elevator Automation System Market Report?

For More Information Kindly Contact:

ResearchMoz.com

Mr. Nachiket Ghumare,

90 State Street,

Albany NY,

United States 12207

Tel: +1-518-621-2074

USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948

Email: [emailprotected]

Go here to read the rest:

Smart Elevator Automation System Market 2019 Trends, Size, Segments, Emerging Technologies and Industry Growth by Forecast to 2023 - Packaging News 24

Connectivity is the key to early wins in connected and automated mobility – FleetNews

Posted on by

There are those who assume autonomous vehicles will soon be able to function safely, independently and efficiently, irrespective of the environment they are in.

This is clearly not the case.

Connected and automated mobility (CAM) can deliver substantial social and economic benefits.

Estimates include 3,900 lives saved, 420,000 jobs created and 62 billion per year added to the economy by 2030.

These benefits come from increases in safety, inclusion, productivity and environmental benefits.

These objectives will only be achieved if we shape the environment in which the technologies can thrive.

This will unlock the social and economic benefits by allowing us to self-supply as a nation, rather than buy these technologies from abroad.

Fundamental to reaching this objective is ensuring connectivity.

The UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030 shows that connectivity will unlock the flow of data, enabling key decisions to be made, and advances ranging from patient care for ambulance services to infotainment for the public.

The technologies that are being installed in our cars, buses, and other vehicles are constantly improving their capabilities.

But they are no more than components in a system.

The system delivers the service for consumers but the components have to be integrated and the sophistication of the integrated system is what gives quality of service to individual consumers and to society.

Simply put, cars cant roam freely around the city if congestion and conflicting rules exist.

The best way to reduce congestion and apply etiquette is to allow for communication between vehicles and infrastructure, indeed everything including people. In transport-speak, this is V2V, V2I, V2X connectivity.

It is true that theoretically speaking an omniscient Society of Automation Engineers (SAE) Level 5 vehicle should not be dependent on anything in its environment.

However, we are now fairly comfortable saying that significant deployment of SAE Level 5 vehicles is achievable within the next decade.

Estimates of one-in-five miles being automated by 2030 are not unreasonable.

Moreover, if those miles are in geo-fenced areas (including motorways), or in restricted operating design domains, I believe this challenging target might be met if we ensure the ecosystem is designed to help itself.

Oxbotica, one of the leading self-driving companies in the UK, has shown that its vehicles can navigate through complex environments with GPS and without V2V (vehicle to vehicle) or V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) communications.

Their system is highly regarded and among the global leaders in what it does and achieved with factors within Oxboticas sphere of influence.

FiveAI, Streetdrone, Aurrigo and the other world-class autonomous vehicle companies in the UK are also driving towards similar objectives.

The losers in this are the travellers in mixed traffic and the transport authorities and operators who want to deliver efficient and reliable journeys.

The way to win is to exploit the proliferation of Internet of Things-enabled equipment and increase the rich mix of information available to systems and operators alike.

Read more:

Connectivity is the key to early wins in connected and automated mobility - FleetNews

2.7m Aussie jobs at risk of automation – ACS

Posted on by

Nearly three million Australian jobs could be lost to automation over the next 15 years, warns a new report prepared for ACS by AI data analytics company Faethm.

The Technology Impacts on the Australian Workforce report outlines the types of work most likely to be squeezed out as automation ramps up across different sectors of the economy.

Retail looks to suffer the most job losses with around 450,000 of the nation's 1.6 million workers in the sector facing automation which is unsurprising given the current prevalence of self-serve checkouts and stores that track let you just walk out the door with your groceries.

Proportionally, Faethms modelling expects around a third of both the transport and administrative services industries could be automated by 2034.

No industry will be entirely unimpacted by technological advancement with most jobs and skills showing some level of technological augmentability these jobs will be changed by technology but wont be entirely automated. For example, only seven per cent of jobs in the education and training sectors are automatable but nearly 40 per cent are marked as being augmentable.

An 'unemployable underclass'

When launching the report on Wednesday morning, Labor MP Matt Thistlethwaite expressed his concern an underprepared workforce could suffer greatly from technological change.

There is a serious risk of an unemployable underclass developing in Australia and inequality rising as a result of automation and artificial intelligence, Thistlethwaite told the crowd of technologists at ACS offices in Sydney.

Surely the goal of automation must be not only to generate economic benefits and improve efficiency and productivity but also to improve human outcomes and to improve living standards and equality in our country.

[L-R] ACS CEO Andrew Johnson, Labor MP Matt Thistlethwaite, ACS President Ian Oppermann, and Faethm Chief Data Scientist Richard George holding the report on Wednesday morning's launch.

Thistlethwaite said education and reskilling will be invaluable, especially for sections of Australias workforce in the mid to late part of their working life who may have been in one job, with one skillset, for much of their working life.

For people like that, retraining and dealing with automation is a huge challenge, he said.

And its a big challenge for government to make sure we get that right.

The evolution of work

The Technology Impacts on the Australian Workforce report echoes other research into the future of work in Australia that indicate a rapidly changing landscape that could cause wide-scale unemployment if large swathes of workers are caught unawares.

If adequately addressed, however, automation can provide opportunities for Australias economy with the report showing a potential gain of 5.3 million new jobs by the middle of the next decade.

Faethms chief data scientist, Richard George, said the way to look at the data was through the lens of the evolution of work.

Every task we do now is slowly changing, George said. So were going to start seeing the reduction in those routine, monotonous tasks that we do and an increase in the more human things that we do the communication, the presentations, and the more complex analysis in our jobs.

We need to stop thinking about the end of work and the future of work because its happening now and were evolving.

Originally posted here:

2.7m Aussie jobs at risk of automation - ACS

Will The Tesla Model Y Allow Fully Automated Production To Happen? – InsideEVs

Posted on by

The video above has the goal of proving how people that bet against Tesla lost. It did not even mention the 1,000,000th car Tesla produced on March 10, 2020. Anyway, we consider it meaningful for a reason that may seem secondary: remembering Elon Musk once dreamed of a fully automated production line. We have strong signs that the Model Y may have been conceived with that goal in mind.

5 Photos

Although humans are underrated, as Muks once said, he probably still wants to reduce the human component in vehicle production. That would make production more predictable, repeatable, and reasonably more reliable.

Imagine a factory that only needed a few people to work. Would it be affected by a coronavirus outbreak? Probably only at getting the necessary parts from suppliers. Would there be concerns with unions, labor injuries, or stress? That is what the Tesla CEO possibly wanted to avoid, along with achieving productivity gains.

Elon Musk learned the hard way that mass production was tough. Munro & Associates showed him the Model 3 body was way more complicated than it should be. When he realized that, he probably noticed it would not be possible to reach the level of automation he wanted with that vehicle. However, Tesla could create one that would do the trick.

The Model Y has elements that point to a less complex manufacturing process. The main one is its new electric architecture, with the least number of wiring harnesses a modern vehicle has ever presented.

Only a human worker can currently get complicated harnesses all around the car. If the assembly process is simplified, a machine can do it. Check what the patent for the new electric architecture said:

Traditional car wiring for vehicles is piecemeal solutions. Typically, there are different wiring harnesses that connect each different electrical component to a central battery or power source. Each component receives power but requires multiple wiring harnesses for communication and signals. The total length of the wire may be many miles within a single vehicle. These wiring harnesses typically consist of multiple round conductors that are not rigid. Round conductors are not optimal for transmitting current and the lack of rigidity of traditional wiring harnesses requires assembly into the vehicle using human hands, which can be a slow process. Further, connecting each component to the central battery is not optimized on an automobile level.

Hence, there is a need for wires and a wiring-system architecture that overcomes the aforementioned drawbacks.

We still need an explanation of that new architecture but, if Tesla managed to accomplish what the patent proposed, it would at least cut a lot of time on the assembly lines, with fewer people required to perform it. In the best-case scenario, robots will be able to do it.

The other point in making assembly more straightforward is the use of die-cast parts. We also discovered that with patents and had the precious help of multiple specialists in learning more about it.

Curiously, this is precisely one of the main criticisms Sandy Munro had about the Model 3 body. The car had 40 percent more parts than other vehicles, which made it heavier than the competition. The less weight an electric vehicle presents, the more range it can get. Check the video below with his interview to Sean Mitchell exactly at the point in which he mentions that:

Did you realize this is one of the main die-cast parts the Model Y will have? As Munro suggested, Musk now has a single part for the wheel wells, but it is not stamped: it is cast. If robots can extract the cast components, check them, and put them on the assembly line, alien dreadnought is one step closer to becoming a reality.

Well probably not see that happen with the Model Y, as the picture of the 1,000,000th Tesla surrounded by workers tells us. That does not mean it will not be the stepping stone for future images with much fewer people or even only robots around the cars.

Go here to read the rest:

Will The Tesla Model Y Allow Fully Automated Production To Happen? - InsideEVs

Bots bring automation to the war on data entry – C4ISRNet

Posted on by

Before automation comes to the battlefield, it will come to the back office.

AFWERX, the Air Forces internal catalyst for incorporating innovation from industry and other places outside the Pentagon, announced March 9 the award of a contract for the next generation of business process workflow automation.

The work to be automated is less sortie planning, more data entry. Specifically, the goal is to automate the processing of forms that have to be entered, validated, and approved manually, freeing up humans to do work that requires human input.

That wont remove humans from the data entry process entirely; instead, their time will be devoted to the cases that need a second look, and as planned the automation tools will provide information and recommendations to aid humans in making the determinations the computers cannot.

OM Group, which received the contract, wants to use mechanical precision to limit the amount of human error in the process.

Our DoD clients have handwritten forms and complex approval processes that involve tedious work validating data in multiple legacy systems. Its manual and prone to error. Those delays cost money and they slow down decision-making for service men and women, said Sangita Subramanian, OM group vice president and chief operating officer in a release. I challenged our [Robotics Operations Center] to see how automation can help.

Efficient data management, mitigating human error while retaining human judgement to catch problems machines themselves cannot solve, is a way to take advantage of the tasks computers do best.

Such business automation is not particularly flashy, but even the tip of the spear is downstream from the bureaucracy of war.

Link:

Bots bring automation to the war on data entry - C4ISRNet

We Need to Resacralize the World – lareviewofbooks

Posted on by

MARCH 16, 2020

BOTH JACK MILESS Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story and Karen Armstrongs The Lost Art of Scripture are contributions powerful in their own ways to the comparative study of religion. Miles was general editor to the Norton Anthology of World Religions, and his new book more of a pamphlet really serves as an introduction to his introductions in that extraordinarily ambitious project. Religion as We Know It sketches how the comparative approach to religion got underway as an academic field, and how Miles himself became an enthusiast. Armstrongs more substantial volume continues her decades-long rereading of the great texts of the worlds religions as rumination on ineffability, on religious practice as a way of knowing, and on compassion as the vital heart of the major approaches to the sacred. If Miless book is not quite a book, Armstrongs work is an anti-book. She wants to free us from the notion that religion is essentially about holy texts that contain the Truth; she urges us to leave literalism behind in appreciating what can never be written down but can still be lived with authenticity, even devotion.

Both authors are trustworthy, accomplished guides in these explorations. Although they have held distinguished academic positions, they use scholarship to go beyond the academy to speak to large and varied audiences. Miles won a Pulitzer Prize for his God: A Biography, a highly readable and insightful account of the emergence of the deity in the Hebrew Bible. He went on to produce thoughtful and accessible works about God in the Quran and about Jesus. Armstrong has been writing learned (and prize-winning) books on religion that reach a general audience for almost 40 years. Having begun with the Christian tradition, she has written on Muhammad and Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and a host of other topics related to the politics and cultural relevance of religion.

Miless brief origin story concerns the development of the comparative study of religion a study that began in the West from a Christian perspective. Christianity introduced the notion that one could convert to a religion and still maintain ones previous ethnic and civic identity. You could become a Christian and still remain a Roman a conversion he judges an unprecedented and socially disruptive novelty. Rabbinic Judaism would reject this form of religiosity, insisting that there are no Judaists, only Jews. This rejection was in accord with most religious practices elsewhere, but the contrary Christian notion that religion could be separated from culture, politics, and ethnicity spread widely in the wake of European imperialism. Isolating religion from other aspects of identity and society would eventually protect the idea of faith from scientific knowledge at least for many. It also led to the academic field of comparative religion, giving it a subject to study distinguishable from that of a geographical area or a nation state or even a culture. Religion came to be considered its own thing.

Another origin story sketched by Miles here deals with religion as he came to know it. He confesses to an early pessimism, a time when he held firmly to Bertrand Russells dictum that the whole temple of mans achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. The young Miles, also attracted to Camuss The Myth of Sisyphus, was determined to accept no consolation that would insulate him from this tough reality. Describing himself in those days as a sucker for this stuff, he judges that what he really wanted was closure. Eventually he began to wonder it was really wrong for any of us to seek some kind of interim closure, some way of coping with our own invincible ignorance. Religion wasnt, he came to think, a way of defeating ignorance (or even unbelief); it was an acknowledgment of what we do not know. This is, for Miles, not just a theoretical issue: [T]he hope must be for a reasonable way of coping with the practical impossibility of our ever living a perfectly rational life.

Karen Armstrong explores how people around the world have responded to this need to cope with what we cannot know, how they have constructed ways of living that are ordered and meaningful without claiming to be being perfectly rational. She presents a historical account, and she proceeds roughly in chronological order. But Armstrong sees historical accounts as always speaking to the concerns of their own time, and hers is certainly aimed at some of our pressing issues today, from Islamophobia to climate change. Much public discourse these days is dominated by dismissive quasi-scientific atheists and committed ultra-orthodox literalists. She is neither. [T]o read the scriptures correctly and authentically, she insists, we must make them speak directly to our modern predicament.

Some predicaments go back a long way. The ancient, sacred Jewish texts are marked by the traces of destruction, deportation, and displacement, and so its no wonder that Hebrew scripture has insisted on the vital importance of memory. Armstrong underscores that most scripture has the function of cultural transmission, especially because these texts are always embedded in rituals. Recitation, song, moving ones body, scripture should never be taken separately from the forms of life in which it is encountered. Armstrong makes the point in relation to China, but the same can be said in regard to many other parts of the world: In an age when few people were literate, scripture became a compelling force only if recited and performed. And performances are arts of memory.

Scripture becomes a compelling force as it evolves in a performative context. Theological proofs were a matter of complete indifference to the Buddha; Buddhist spirituality was rooted instead in bodily, often meditative, practices. When the Qurans verses were committed to memory, it was not to promote literalism, but to liberate the person chanting to achieve a transcendence that words alone would not inspire. Transcendence and the overcoming of ordinary conventions is the goal of the religious practices to which Armstrong is drawn. The stories of baby Krishna express a yearning for an ekstasis that is impossible in the humdrum world of the habitual. The habitual is also the world of our everyday language, and the religious practices described in The Lost Art of Scripture always strain toward the ineffable. Whether its Sufis or Sikhs, Confucian scholars or Yeshiva bochers, nobody gets the last word because there is no last word. There is no definitive meaning that ends the discussion. Commentaries and interpretations, new chants and dances that build on the old ones, are to be expected and celebrated.

Armstrong is writing against those who think there is a single significance for a text, or final answers to enduring questions. She rejects the Western quest for certainty or at least for overcoming doubt that she finds in Cartesian philosophy and in much of the Enlightenment. She also rejects those who claim to return to scripture for the final authoritative answer to how one should live. Protestant and Islamic fundamentalists alike dont have the toleration for ambiguity that her conception of a spiritual life requires. Unfortunately, she herself tries to ground her rejection of scientific reductionism in a neurological reductionism of her own. Throughout the book, Armstrong sprinkles in references to the right hemisphere as the place of metaphor, openness, and empathy in ways that are meant, I suppose, to give her hermeneutics a scientific veneer. For this reader, it is an unnecessary distraction, at best.

Turning all concerns about presentism aside, Armstrong is confident that the lost art of the worlds religions can return us to lives of compassion and to the quest for what she calls social justice. She minimizes whatever debates there might be about what counts as justice and about whom one ought to have compassion for in a world in which religious practices, even the bodily ones, lead to intense conflicts. She believes in the modern scientific scriptures enough to have faith that the idea of compassion is built into our neurology, but she doesnt say anything about whether the ideas of hatred and violence are also hard-wired into humans.

Be that as it may, Armstrongs book is a powerful commentary on spiritual commentaries, a midrash to be added to the debates about the meanings of religious practice. Like Miles, she seeks to cultivate practices that make sense of a world of suffering while acknowledging our invincible ignorance. As she puts it in her Post-Scripture, whatever our beliefs, it is essential for human survival that we find a way to rediscover the sacrality of each human being and resacralise our world. The rest is, and will be, commentary.

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatists Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses and Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters.

Go here to read the rest:

We Need to Resacralize the World - lareviewofbooks

Jefferson Hack: The Beauty and Violence of Willy Vanderperre’s Photography – AnOther Magazine

Posted on by

March 12, 2020

Lead Imagehurt, burn, ruin & more, 2020Photography by Willy Vanderperre

Vicious,You hit me with a flower,You do it every hour,Oh, baby youre so vicious.

WhenLou Reed sings about the cruelty of attraction in the opening lines of Vicious, on his 1972 album Transformer, he captures brilliantly the dark psychic oscillation between obsession and revulsion. Through the use of a repetitive, abrasive guitar sound and his staccato voice, like a razor blade gently slicing through flesh, he tacitly transfers the hippy symbolism of a freshly plucked flower and eroticises it, tortures it. All love, he muses in Vicious, comes with an emotional price tag.

Another New Yorker of that period who sees beauty in the detritus of the downtown scene is Susan Sontag. She describes photographers as connoisseurs of beauty, wittingly or unwittingly. In her remarkably sharp introductory essay for Peter Hujars Portraits in Life and Death, Sontag calls them the recording angels of death, and writes, The photograph-as-photograph shows death. More than that it shows the sex appeal of death.

Willy Vanderperreis most known as a fashion photographer, whose cool and calculated eye has produced some of the greatest fashion advertising campaigns and magazine covers of the last decade. He hasimmortalised the Kardashian family for Calvin Klein and projected an idealised, sacrosanct beauty for Prada. His dark-tinged, gothic surrealism first began fetishising youth and unconventional beauty in the early 00s. What started as an underground aesthetic pushed through the advertising campaigns ofRaf Simons and the pages ofDazed and AnOther would, by the middle of the last decade, rise into a globally recognised pop culture style. Like Andy Warhols imperfect, slightly grubby graphic silk-screens ofMarilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, work that was once seen as critical of a mainstream idealised version of beauty, as shocking, the sex appeal of death that links both Vanderperre and Warhols most iconic works soon became subsumed into the mainstream.

hurt, burn, ruin and more is a self-conscious act of returning to the roots of that sex appeal, the origins of Vanderperres melancholia-tinged romantic revolution in photography. Not a negation, but an urgent exploration of the forces that inspired it and catalysed it. Sontag saw that whatever their degree of realism, all photographers embody a romantic relation to reality.

The romance in Vanderperres hurt, burn, ruin and more is that of imperfection and a personal rejection of the vanity of traditional fashion photography, in the way that 17th-century northern European Vanitas paintings or memento mori traditionally shunned materiality for spiritual enlightenment. In the large-scale representation of a decayed rose in Untitled #15, we are brought so close to the decomposition of the image that it becomes a new landscape of the imagination, an almost interiorised view, like a proto-psychedelic Blakean vision. Oh Rose thou art sick, writes poet and painter William Blake in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as he takes us on an electric ride through sexual pleasure laced with secrets, shame and guilt. Sub rosa is the name given to the roses symbolic ancient relationship to silence and secrets. Here, Vanderperres scale of display unlocks the secret power of macro photography to fetishise our mortality. As much as it renders the seemingly useless and overlooked fascinating, almost fantastical, it also suggests a fresh life beyond death for the fate of this rose; a spiritual rebirth or even the promise of an afterlife.

In this new series of works we are confronted with Vanderperres attempt to capture the double standards of idealised beauty, and a deeper exploration of the very corruption of the essence of beauty itself. The corrupting nature of extreme beauty is an idea brilliantly framed by one of Japans most famous post-war authors, Yukio Mishima. In his book The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (inspired by a real-life story of a young monk who burns the most beautiful of Zen temples) we are brought into a psychological paradox beyond mere envy or jealousy, of an obsession with beauty that leads to its fateful destruction. Mishima who famously committed harakiri a Japanese Samurai tradition of ritual suicide was also a fan of Noh theatre. In an interview about Noh in 1971, he took the idea further, giving agency to the destructive nature of beauty itself, telling the interviewer: True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs and finally destroys.Georges Bataille, the Surrealist author of the influential Story of the Eye, who spent a life-time studying transgression and erotics, wrote: Beauty has a cardinal importance. For ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism, the greater the beauty the more it is befouled.

The flower in Untitled #11 curves upwards, a sexualised, single stem of irrefutable beauty. Its silk-thin stamen cradles a smattering of microscopic pollen, its anthers rise in peak production and its leaves dance mercurially, like an ancient deity, ordering the cosmos to bring its energy, via bird or bee or flutter of wind into the magical act of cross-pollination and the spreading of its seed. Flowers in this context can be viewed as our eroticised alter egos, waiting to be hurt, burnt or ruined, or as is the case with this monochromatic white background flash of inspiration, to also be adored, worshipped and deified.

In the creative production of these flower sculptures, we see Vanderperres relation to beauty and erotics reflected in his own mortality and also his own legacy. The dance of violence and art is a ritual as ancient as the cave paintings of Lascaux. In Untitled #3 we see smashed glass covering a bouquet of thistles, tulips, anthuriums and Birds of Paradise, caught in ballistic flight and fused into the white-heat of a lightning strike. They appear like the photograph of a crime scene shot by Weegee, asking if we should be witness to this death-scene, this torture garden? It feels like the perversion of the ceremonial laying of bouquets on a grave, as if hurled through a night sky in the midst of a storm in a cemetery.

We know from the shotgun paintings of William S. Burroughs andNiki de Saint Phalle that purposefully destroyed art can be more than just an act of pure nihilism. It can be a search for transgression, or even transcendence. We know it from the broken, ruined, imperfection in the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, and, more close to Vanderperres own biography, we know it from his love of post-punk electronic music a melancholia wrapped in sharp electronic dissonance, the coded and de-sexualised sound of synths, of the first innocent and exciting sonic merging of human and machines in culture.

The smashed screen of Untitled #1 speaks to the erotised, surreal violence of JG Ballards Crash, the automation of life (when the only way to get off is literally to drive high-speed into a wall) and also to the smashed hopes and sexual failures of our mobile screen age. Vanderperre talks about the aggression of social media and it must be an almost daily reality for a fashion photographer and their subjects whose imagery is regularly exposed via those automated channels. In Untitled #1 plastic-wrapped bouquets are being suffocated, choked and mangled into fantastic architectural shapes as if caught in a social media car wreck. Is it a reaction to the high-speed collision of images on social media which reduce meaning to surface, and where comments leave no room for morality? On social platforms there are no boundaries, no safe spaces, just a strange generational acceptance of pain and suffering a barrage of extreme love and abuse in equal measure. Its something exemplified in the persona ofGrimes on her album Miss Anthropocene, a construct for whom extinction is her own rebellion. She describes the album in Interview as a modern demonology or a modern pantheon, where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die. She goes onto say, its the sound at the end of the world.

hurt, burn, ruin and more, represents our collective human fragility, the inevitability of our own plastic-wrapped self-destruction as a species. But its not defeatist, there is within it a vital spark, an energy and intensity that wishes to transcend the hyper-normality of conventional aesthetics that hold and frame us in the mirror of our failure. Willy Vanderperres work as a photographer has been a study of the energy of beauty, the interior and exterior magic and a search for its soul. WhenBjork sings dont remove my pain, its my chance to heal on notgetfromher heartbreak album Vulnicura, we tap into the essence of an acceptance of and transcendence beyond failure. To first break denial there needs to be a radical shock to the system, before the broken dreams and smashed hopes are revealed for what they are. In hurt, burn, ruin and more, we see a cosmic explosion of pure life energy and a new potentiality for beauty to emerge from darkness and chaos. Like all natural phenomenon, the new shoots of flowers always lean towards the light.

Willy Vanderperres new exhibitionhurt, burn, ruin and more is at The Store X, 180 The Strand, from March 13 22, 2020, 11am to 6pm, closed Mondays. A line of collectables including T-shirts and stickers will be available.

Read more:

Jefferson Hack: The Beauty and Violence of Willy Vanderperre's Photography - AnOther Magazine

Agnes Pelton Went to the Desert in Search of Solace. Her Paintings at the Whitney Show She Found Something Magical There – artnet News

Posted on by

Consider two paintings.

One isMother of Silence(1933), by the early 20th century spiritual-abstractionist painter Agnes Pelton. She is the star of a show that hasjust arrived at the Whitney Museum, part of a wave of recent interest in experimental art by previously unsung or undersung female artists working in esoteric or occult traditions, a vogue that is currentlyrewritinghow museums approach the history of modern art.

Mother of Silencecenters on a cluster of numinous blobs in pale lavender, pink, and turquoise pastels, set off against a red and black background and wreathed by precisely organized whorls of energy. It suggests the form of a seated Buddha.

Installation view of Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence at the Whitney. Image: Ben Davis.

Now consider a painting not in the show,Mother of the World(1924), by the Russian painter, set designer, adventurer, and mystic NikolaiRoerich. In rich tones and flattened perspective, it depicts the veiled figure of the ultimate female goddess in Roerichs occult system, seated on her mountain throne and framed by divine halos.

Left to right: Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence (1933) and Nicholas Roerich, Mother of the World (1924).

Look at the two together and you get a clear sense of the kind of archetypal image that Pelton is adumbrating in her abstraction. I have no idea if Pelton is referencing this exact image. However, she and her art both were deeply inspired by Agni Yoga, the doctrine that Roerich and his wife Helena dreamed up in the 1920s, claiming to be channeling Eastern wisdom through spiritual sances.

Indeed, one of the rare figurative works in the Whitney showand a slightly unsettling beat in its otherwise serenely etherial atmosphereisIntimation(1933). This is Peltons portrait of Nikolai Roerich, rendered in gauzy, unearthly colors and full guru style, his beady-eyed gaze transfixing the viewer.

Agnes Pelton, Intimation (1933). Image: Ben Davis.

Agni Yoga meant Path to the Divine Fire. The Roerichs doctrine celebrated fire as the symbol of the energy animating all fixed things and all forms of wisdom, the essence of the entire life, all-embracing, evading nought. The veiled goddess-of-goddesses shown in Nikolais painting was conceived as his ultimate unifying symbol of the divine light, whose energy, he preached, would be at last unveiled when the coming Age of Fire dawned. Then, as theHandbook of the Theosophical Currentexplains, fiery energies will move toward the sphere of the Earth to purify it from a surrounding heavy atmosphere caused by the crimes committed by humans.

In any case, the comparison merits two linked comments, one formal, one symbolic.

Formally, Roarichs painting clearly draws on Russian orthodox icon depictions of the Virgin, given a fanciful Buddhist-accented makeover. This mash-up makes sense, since Agni Yogas ideas were syncretic, promising to reveal the common secret wisdom at the root of all religions. Pictorially, however, it takes us towards devotional clich.

The modernist vortex of Peltons Mother of Silence, on the other hand, makes for a quietly more awesome spin on the subject.

And consequently, Peltons Mother better fits what I take to be both works underlying idea: a spiritual presence who incarnates the protean energy at the root of all earthly things. The miasmic, dreamy character of the Pelton painting is far more evocative of that idea than the deliberately stiff, folk art style of the Roarich one.

The student surpasses the master here, or the acolyte outshines the guru.

Originally organized at thePhoenix Art Museum byGilbert Vicario, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist features 40-odd paintings by Pelton, of the only 100 or so abstractions she made during her life. She made figurative art too, tourist-friendly California landscapes (she actually called them Tourist Paintings) that she sold to support herself when money got tight, but none are here. Her more modernist works are what she considered to be her calling.

Always do this work first, others only when these do not call you, Pelton advised herself in her diary, writing of the abstract-symbolic works. She arrived at their forms via extensive meditation and trance, transcribing into her notebook exact sketches of the seemingly aleatory constellations of forms and symbols that came to her before rendering them to canvas.

Agnes Pelton, Fires in Space (1938). Image: Ben Davis.

Without knowing anything about Agnes Peltons story, you would likely guess something about these paintings subject matter: solitude (because of their evocations of empty landscapes); healing (because of their gentle, nourishing color palette); and mysticism (because of their many occult symbols: evening stars, floating portals, roses, swans, lotus flowers, magic mountains, holy deserts, windows of illumination opening in space, and flares of the divine Roerichian fire breaking into reality).

Still, its worth knowing a bit about Peltons life story. Born in 1881, her life was vividly shaped by family events that happened before she was even born: 19th-century Brooklyns most infamous sex scandal, the BeecherTiltonAffair. Her grandmother, Elizabeth Tilton, had been exposed as having an affair with liberal preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Her grandfather, once a Beecher acolyte, sued for alienation of affection. Doubling his humiliation, he lost in court, and was estranged from the church and from New York society.

Agnes Pelton, Orbits (1934). Image: Ben Davis.

Of her familys heritance of infamy, Pelton would remember that it cramped our whole life and it also cramped mine. [it] overshadowed me. Her mother (who had been the one to report the infidelity) married a wealthy but troubled man from a Louisiana sugar empire. He died of morphine overdose in 1891. Young Agnes grew up inclined to melancholy and tears, surrounded by deeply religious and perhaps unnecessarily serious people. She was diagnosed with neurotic fever at 19, and may have had an eating disorder.

Pelton would find comfort in two things. One was art, which she studied at Pratt starting as a teenager, going on to paint portraits for money, and Symbolist-inspired canvasses out of passion. She would show at the 1913 Armory Show, the sensational survey that introduced ideas of modern art to still-provincial USA (Marcel Duchamps Cubistic Nude Descending a Staircase was the big succs de scandale). There, Peltons work appeared alongside future heroes of the art history textbooks like Charles Sheeler and Marsden Hartley.

Agnes Pelton, Room Decoration in Purple and Gray (1917). Image: Ben Davis.

The Whitneys show features just one introductory example that gives a taste of Peltons early mode of the 1910s, her Imaginative Paintings. Its a large canvasher largest, actually a painting for a muralfeaturing a woman walking in a secluded garden landscape that has a swirling, animate character. It skirts Symbolist kitsch (her own later judgment on these early works, according to the show catalogue, is that they were insincere and not real).

Nevertheless, the idea of the solo female seeker in communion with natural and cosmic forces was the foundation of all the more experimental work Pelton didthough a theme she would elaborate in less and less literal ways.

Peltons other comfort was alternative spirituality. In the 1920s, in her 40s, her mother died and she left New York to live in a windmill house on Long Island. She also developed an interest in Theosophy, the epiphanic slurry of pan-religious beliefs pioneered by Russian migr and occult entrepreneur Helena Blavatsky (18311891). It was under the influence of Theosophical ideas about accessing an abstract Divine Reality at the root of all perception that Pelton began her adventures into abstraction, such as the The Ray Supreme (1925) and Being (1926), which suggest physical reality shot through with spiritual vibrations.

Agnes Pelton, Being (1926). Image: Ben Davis.

Her best works, however, are from a little later. In 1930, through an acquaintance with composer and transpersonal astrologer Dane Rudhyar, Pelton would discover the Roerichss Agni Yoga doctrine, a heretical elaboration of Theosophy that, in addition to spinning pages of alluring hokum out of the transcultural significance of fire, stressed self-help and moral improvement through spiritual living.

The Roerichs tome, Leaves of Moyras Garden, advised the reader: In creation realize the happiness of life, and unto the desert turn thine eye. In 1932, Pelton complied literally, moving West to Cathedral City, California, near Desert Hot Springs, where she found the solitude in which she had always longed to work, as well as the community of others with similar esoteric interests.

Made after her arrival, a painting like Sand Storm can be read as allegorical of Pelton literally turning her eye to the desert to find happiness: The canvas shows a floriform window of divine light, piercing through the swirling clouds of desert sand, conjuring a hardy, healing rainbow.

Agnes Pelton, Sand Storm (1932). Image: Ben Davis.

How to look at these paintings, with their wonky, hieratic quality? Part of their appeal is their exotic sense of marshaling secret totems and magical signs, but a lot of their esoteric symbolism remains remote. I also think the search for a master code might miss the point of such imagery for Pelton herself.

Peltons family history had been scarred by the rigidity, coldness, dogma, and moral judgementalism of New Yorks Gilded Age religious society. Aside from offering the spiritual warmth of a literal fire cult, proto-New Age philosophies like Agni Yoga appealed because they seemed a tool to free yourself from dogmatic constraintsthey encouraged curiosity in the whole panoply of world religions, and you could take from them what you wanted, in a highly personal way.

Agnes Pelton, Resurgence (1938). Image: Ben Davis.

Pelton seems to have read deeply and widely in esoteric literature and forged her own synthesis to meet her own needs. As much as Mother of Silence evokes Roerichs goddess of divine fire, for instance, it also seems to have been for the artist an avatar of her own mothers spirit as well. In Peltons California studio, she kept the canvas near her, to commune with its spirit for advice on painting and to give her comfort in times of money woes.

What made esoteric philosophies so appealing to so many people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was how they triangulated between faith and freedom. They offered a sense of metaphysical order and higher truth appealing to those from religious backgrounds, but also promised a modern freedom from old doctrinal rigidities and the ability to make ones own path. This delicate balance is coded into the formal texture and symbolic vocabulary of Peltons canvasses: Her art gives a comfortingly ordered, hieroglyphic form to symbols of protean, unbounded potential: holy fire (Mount of Flame, 1932), swelling oceans (Sea Change, 1931), rippling atmosphere (Red and Blue, 1938).

Agnes Pelton, Red and Blue (ca. 1938). Image: Ben Davis.

And what is true within the canvasses is also true between them: Peltons art embodies a protean spirit in that she never really repeats an idea.

Clearly, Peltons work has its own recognizable mix of abstract color-forms, allusions to landscape, and far-out symbolism. But each composition distinctly introduces a new pictorial ideaand you cant help but think that the newness is part of the point, that what each work symbolizes, in its unique conjugation of forms, is being in touch with an energy that is ever-changing.

Agnes Pelton, Prelude (1943). Image: Ben Davis.

The point I would make is that her particular spiritual disposition is also an aesthetic asset. Peltons restlessly questing imperative is part of what makes her art a font of pleasant surprises. Just when you think youve got her style figured out, there appears something like Prelude (1943), with its saffron sky blossoming with floating gear shapes. Whered that come from? Its like a little revelation.

Perhaps you could argue that all this simply means that, as much as Agnes Peltons art answered a spiritual call and an inner necessity, she also was a trained artist and brought an artists instinct for formal freshness to her quiet desert studio.

Though she did not experience huge success in her lifetime, Pelton showed her spiritual-abstract works at such non-arcane institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She certainly seemed to have believed that she was bringing into the world images with a higher significance, but unlike more mediumistically inspired artists who viewed themselves as mere vessels, Pelton signed her finished canvasses with her name, at the bottom corner, like someone who hoped to be recognized for her individual vision.

But theres a reason to think that Peltons avoidance of repetition or working in series was more than just an artistic taste, a clue that continuous symbolic evolution was the lifeforce of her mode of creation in a particular way. Throughout the decades of her oeuvre as seen at the Whitney, she never repeats herselfexcept for once.

Agnes Pelton, Light Center (1947-48). Image: Ben Davis.

In 1947-48, Pelton made a work called Light Center, a hovering oval of energy suspended between an animate, rippling earth and a gauzy, serenely agitated sky.

Agnes Pelton, Light Center (1960-61). Image: Ben Davis.

In 1960-61, she repeated the same composition. Charcoal lines remain on the canvas, where you see her trying to plot how exactly to tweak the image to make it repeat. These lines remain on the work because she died before she finished it.

Who knows why Agnes Pelton turned, at that moment, to her own back catalogue for inspiration. In 1943, a friend, Jane Levington Comfort, had observed in a letter to a mutual acquaintance that Pelton is very fragile and very potentmuch more so than she knows anything about or would dream of believing if you told her. And so it is a beautiful thought that this artist, who had all her life restlessly looked for wisdom from the beyond, was complete enough at the end to let herself take inspiration from her own power.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, through September 1, 2020.

The rest is here:

Agnes Pelton Went to the Desert in Search of Solace. Her Paintings at the Whitney Show She Found Something Magical There - artnet News

Agnes Pelton Joins the Underappreciated Female Artists Finally Getting Their Due With a Major New Show at the Whitney – Vogue

Posted on by

The artist Agnes Pelton was born in 1881, but her paintingsenigmatic abstractions based on her New Age-y spiritual inquiriesmake perfect sense in our zodiac, meditation, and yoga-obsessed age. Its her moment, says Barbara Haskell, the Whitney curator overseeing the museums installation of Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, the first survey of the artists work in more than two decades.

When Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist opens in New York this Friday, it will be something of a posthumous homecoming for Pelton, who spent much of her childhood in Brooklyn, a time marked by trauma. Her father died of a morphine overdose when she was nine. And shortly before her birth, her maternal grandfather Theodore Tilton, a high-profile abolitionist newspaperman, unsuccessfully sued his pastor Henry Ward Beecher for criminal intimacy with Tiltons wifea national scandal that cast a shadow over Peltons mothers life.

Agnes Pelton, Fires in Space, 1938. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 25 in. (76.5 63.5 cm). Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

The artist, understandably skeptical of Christianity, sought succor in esoteric spiritual movements, first in the teachings of New Thought and Theosophy, later in the study of Agni Yoga. In her early adulthood, Pelton painted nostalgic scenes of Grecian maidens in sylvan glades, two of which appeared in the seminal 1913 Armory show. But following her mothers death in 1921 and a move to live in an abandoned windmill on Long Island, the artist leaned into abstraction, mining her transcendental explorations to produce paintings like The Fountain, a 1926 canvas depicting plumes of water vaporizing before a glowing orb. At 50 she permanently decamped to Cathedral City, California, a dusty town outside Palm Springs, and her work took on the expansive feel of the desert. Her later paintings are metaphysical landscapes, notes Phoenix Art Museum curator Gilbert Vicario, airy, luminous fantasias populated with cryptic theosophical symbols: lotus flowers, wings, stars. (PAM organized the traveling survey.) Equal parts ethereal and hokey, they seem to describe another plane of existence, one the artist accessed in meditative trance states, and faithfully translated into paint.

For Pelton, these paintings were vehicles for her own insight into spiritual enlightenment, says Haskell, so draining to produce that she worked on them intermittently and kept them for herself, making money by hocking more straightforward desertscapes to tourists. (Always do this work first, she wrote of the abstractions, others only when these do not call you.) Though she showed her paintings occasionally, her retreat from the art world and increasingly inward-facing practice meant that by her 1961 death, Pelton, childless and unmarried, had fallen into obscurity. Her abstractions were dispersed: one later resurfaced at a Santa Monica thrift store; another was sold at a Santa Barbara museum deaccession sale for a few bucks. Haskell encountered Peltons work in the 90s, and even then, convincing the Whitney to acquire its first painting took years.

As the art world rediscovers a glut of fantastic 20th-century female artists unfairly ignored by history books, Pelton often comes up alongside fellow desert painter Georgia OKeeffe (they shared an early teacher) and fellow Theosophist Hilma af Klint. But whats really remarkable is her utterly idiosyncratic vision. Pelton is sui generis, marvels Haskell. She really was such an independent artist.

See original here:

Agnes Pelton Joins the Underappreciated Female Artists Finally Getting Their Due With a Major New Show at the Whitney - Vogue

How Rishikesh Became the Capital of Yoga Worldwide – Communal News

Posted on by

Its no new story that yoga was first introduced in India. People from all over the world visit this spiritual country to learn the holistic teachings of Yoga. The traditional art of Yoga has been kept alive for many centuries for the mental and physical well-being of people. So, long before people even had the idea of gym or fitness, Yoga was doing its part to maintain the wellness of people.

All the sages and yogis started residing in Rishikesh over the years. A major reason for this was the holy river Ganges. In Hindu mythology, the river Ganges is considered prestigious and sacred, which is why Hindus worship the river. Taking a dip in the water is known to wash away the sins of people. So, this became a major attraction for people. Other than that, the lush-green mountains add more beauty and divinity to this location. It is considered a mystical place with a serene aroma attached to it. Rishikesh became a home for the seekers of enlightenment. As Rishikesh was already a holy point for the locals of India, slowly the activities started to seep in. Yoga started gaining its popularity in this land. So, many yoga programs were getting introduced in yoga schools and ashrams because of the increasing demand. Yoga gurus started getting attention from the West too.

Now, the main credit of Rishikesh being discovered goes to the English rock and pop band- The Beatles. It was after their visit in 1968 to learn transcendental meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that Rishikesh gained the attention of the masses in the West. That was the turning point. Tourists and wanderers came in to look for a rejuvenating experience, and they werent disappointed. The place is very peaceful, and people are always curious to visit The Beatles ashram, where they visited and started their spiritual journey.

Rishikesh is known to be the birthplace of Yoga, and the city of saints. It is one of the oldest pilgrimage places of India. It is a gateway to your spiritual world. It is known as Tapobhumi, a place for Yoga and Meditation. The place is filled with spiritual energy in between the emerald Himalayas. It is believed that during the ancient times, a rishi, Raibhya was sitting on the banks of river Ganges and performed various yoga asanas and intense practices. According to ancient mythology it is believed that Lord Vishnu appeared and gave him blessings. Since then, the traffic of spiritual seekers, yogis increased threefold when saints started meditating and doing sadhanas near the holy river.

There are innumerable yoga centers in Rishikesh and it became a common point for the saints, yogis, and seekers to connect and elevate their potential through Yoga and sadhanas. Many yoga teacher training and yoga retreats were starting to take over the market of Rishikesh more rapidly than ever. Before we knew it, Rishikesh became the world capital of yoga teacher training in India. Many yoga programs like 200-hour yoga teacher training (YTT), 300-hour YTT, and 500-hour YTT started became popular. These programs ensured that aspiring yogis, who can complete the 1 month to 3 months courses, gain the eligibility to be a global-level yoga teacher.

From that point on Rishikesh became the hub for yogic studies. People from different corners of the world were drawn to this ancient city to immerse in the authentic teachings of yoga. The spiritual aura of the town served as the perfect abode to learn the ancient science from its roots. Till date, Rishikesh continues to draw millions from across the world to its lap to discover the secrets of this timeless practice.

Why is Rishikesh the Yoga Capital of the World?

Mental and Physical health

The practices of Yoga include both mental and physical exercises. The most famous and oldest yoga style was Hatha Yoga which eventually gave birth to many other modern forms like Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga which exist today. With the growing tensions in the world, chaos has nestled in our competitive and busy lives. The lifestyles and eating habits have become insanely poor, and therefore the illnesses and diseases have conquered the bodies and minds of people. To protect you from damage, a little bit of effort and patience is needed. Yoga is a natural way of healing; so the practices of Hatha yoga, Meditation, Pranayama, Ashtanga yoga got the recognition it deserved by showcasing the required results. This way of balancing and harmonizing ones mind, body, and soul got popularized in the West rather quickly.

Cleansing and detoxifying purposes

Living like a yogi isnt easy especially if you are used to city life. Here, you will be cutting out your obsessions with the materialistic world, so that you can look within and internalize your thoughts. Getting to know your body is a part of the yoga practice through Yoga anatomy. Whatever we are consuming affects the body in some way or the other, therefore combining the practices of Yoga with Ayurveda is the best advice you can get from any esteemed yogi. This is an herbal way to detoxify your body, cleanse the body of all the toxins, and it purifies your soul.

A natural way of healing

We cannot be more thankful to the yogis who incorporated yoga in the Vedic scriptures and the following books like Hatha Yoga pradipika, etc. Throwing light on this natural way of healing has saved the lives of people long before the hospitals ever existed. This therapeutic way of living keeps you away from illnesses and diseases which attack the system. In the foothills of the Himalayas, you can nurture yourself and others around you with self-awareness, and connecting with nature.

The community of yoga gurus and spiritual seekers

Rishikesh was the hub of yogis for many years, even before the Beatles stepped in. This community of yogis has only increased over time, by attracting many spiritual seekers to the city. The yoga gurus of Rishikesh are considered as the most astounded yogis in the entire world for their dedication, years of experience, and learning. The main essence of spirituality is sparked by your teacher or yoga guru who becomes the guide to help you walk on the path of enlightenment. Here, all the like-minded people grow and transform themselves with the life-changing practices of yoga under established gurus of yoga ashrams/schools.

The divine spiritual energy

Leave your city and just visit Rishikesh to check the difference in the vibrational energy of Rishikesh. The place is covered in lush-green scenery, pristine waters, and tranquil air. It is not a polluted city and is rather refreshing. The tourists have noticed the peaceful vibe amidst nature in Rishikesh, which makes this spiritual journey even more interesting. It is a perfect place to unwind your thoughts, and fill yourself up with positive energies and natural force.

All of these reasons make Rishikesh the most-preferred destination in the whole world for the teachings of yoga. Come and unlock your internal power through Yoga to live a more rejuvenating, fulfilling, and healthy life.

Continue reading here:

How Rishikesh Became the Capital of Yoga Worldwide - Communal News

Opinion: General Buratai in the eyes of the people by Abe Kolawole – Latest News in Nigeria & Breaking Naija News 24/7 | LEGIT.NG

Posted on by

Editor's note: Abe Kolawole, a former public relations officer at the National Association of Nigerian Students writes on the operations of the Nigerian Army against terrorists in the northeast.

Kolawole suggests that the Army under Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai has come to become the best and most engaging security outfit in the country.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.

Your own opinion articles are welcome at info@corp.legit.ng drop an email telling us what you want to write about and why. More details in Legit.ngs step-by-step guide for guest contributors.

Contact us if you have any feedback, suggestions, complaints or compliments. We are also available on Twitter.

It was Plato who, during the Golden Age, when history was rising as a major sign of the growing sophistication of the Athenian society, declared that a life not examined is a life not worth living. As myth gave way to more accurate chronicling and prose replaced verse as the medium for preserving facts, the fifth-century Greek came closer to the scientific spirit of free inquiry in modern times.

Memories are made of these! Yet, nothing seems more characteristic of the present age than the homogeneity of its point of view. We may frown at its developmental smugness.

But we must admire its optimism, its cosmopolitanism, its intellectual refinements, its spirit of true enlightenment and the critical engagement with which it examines the world and its leaders. For, it is always instructive for the serious student of history to start by trying to determine what an age thought of itself.

Such an investigation is made easier by studying the lives and times of the important men and women that shaped the age with their actions.

In documenting the life and times of a towering personality, exciting experiences are selected, which present emotional and spiritual values, to interpret the tale as it is rehearsed in imagination or told to an admiring listener or hearer.

As a revolutionary, a faithful servant, a dedicated realist and reformer, who can bridge all gulfs, level all mountains and put a lamp in every tunnel, as exemplified by his selfless service to Nigeria, his fatherland since he was appointed the Chief of Army Staff by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, has undoubtedly, come to be seen as a modern-day phenomenon whose corpus requires a large canvas.

Under him, the Nigerian Army has come to become the best and most engaging security outfit in the country.

For his effort in modernizing the Nigerian Army for global relevance since becoming Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Buratai has been lionized by millions of Nigerians both at home and in the Diaspora.

Due to his leadership role and gallantry in checkmating the Boko Haram insurgency, Gen. Buratai has been venerated for excellence in Security, Selfless devotion, service, vision, courage, doggedness, the willingness to take action, patriotism, performance and inimitable commitment to the national ideal in our democratic journey. These are the essential characteristics of a national hero.

Tukur Buratai is, undoubtedly, a reputable military expert, a historian, a philosopher, an administrator, a development expert, an iconic personality, and a perception management expert. Comments of many Nigerians on Buratai reflect the looming intellectual profundity of the man in question.

A man who can think out of the box to contain the security challenges facing the country, Buratai builds synergies with other countries armies around the world. He attracted the Chief of Army Staff of South Africa to Nigeria recently.

According to him, the outcome was quite tremendous. For him, the understanding that they needed to work together to improve the two African countries' securities in view of contemporary security challenges in the world, was a major achievement.

He has enthused that the fight against terrorism is a global phenomenon and it requires a global approach. Consequently, Africa needs this cooperation to approach it holistically.

The gathering of African military chiefs in Nigeria has brought to the fore the individual challenges African soldiers are facing in the continent and collectively they have put together measures to address the challenges in order to foster peace and security in the region.

Nigeria has started receiving the results and reaping the fruits of the summit.

Nigerian Army has come to become the best and most engaging security outfit in the country.Source: Twitter

There is now a common understanding and strategies on the cascading insecurity in the continent and how to tackle it together. This shows that Buratai is a modern team player and continental leader.

General Buratai as COAS believes that national interest can be better secured when there is cooperation among the security agencies, hence the synergy with other security agencies in the fight against criminal elements across the country.

He also believes that the solution to criminal insurgency does not lie in military operations alone. Hence he always reiterates the efficacy of joint efforts of all Nigerians: the military and civil populace, in the war against crime and criminality in the country.

It is in recognition of this remarkable leadership quality that he is variously described as a game-changer, a man of distinction, a man who places national interest above self, a man who personifies patriotism, courage, inspiration and motivation, as well as the initiator of some uncommon initiatives, a man who rekindles the fighting spirit of the Nigerian Army.

General Buratai's private home in Borno was destroyed by the insurgents at the peak of the battle. But he saw that as a personal sacrifice which could not deter him from his plans for the redemption of his fatherland.

This man of distinction changed all that was needed to be changed, especially as regards strategies and policies, all aimed at the rebirth of the Nigerian Army and defeating the dreaded Boko Haram terrorists.

General Buratai's exceptional leadership style as exemplified by his father-son relationship with the troops has changed the known norms.

Thus, for the first time, we have a COAS who advances to the battlefield with his troops. This is informed by his belief that one cannot live in absentia if one wants to achieve meaningful results. This uncommon attribute became the magic-wand that he uses to perform uncommon feats.

The highly motivated troops had no choice but to charge before the terrorists and defeat them thereby liberating Nigerians from their stranglehold as well as regaining not only the lost territories but also the glory of the Nigerian Army.

The effect of that singular action has led to the massive reduction or elimination in the incidents of bombings and attacks especially in States like Yobe, Kano, Kaduna, Adamawa and the FCT, Abuja.

While Borno state is still experiencing occasional attacks on soft targets, there is no doubting the fact that the Nigerian Army under the eagle eyes of General Buratai has been able to deal a decisive blow on the capacity of the terrorists to plan major attacks on government houses, security formations, police and army barracks, places of worship and others.

By relocating to the theatre of war in Borno state, General Buratai boosted the morale of troops and made the soldiers believe that Nigeria was worth dying for.

It was Buratai's sterling leadership qualities that created the late Lt. Muhammad Abu-Ali who did an excellent job in the war theatre before he was killed by the sect in 2016. He coordinated series of attacks on the sect and launched a massive one on Sambisa Forest where many of the terrorists were killed and their flags and other symbols recovered.

Since then, the sect has only been able to launch a few cowardly attacks on soft targets in Maiduguri. General Buratai has a firm grasp of basic leadership principles.

PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news update

It was a firm grasp of basic leadership principles that enabled Napoleon, an obscured soldier from Corsica, to take a bankrupt and war-devastated France and defeat the most powerful nations on earth, dominating Europe during his time.

Hitler literally was a little corporal and was never commissioned as an officer, yet he arose to dominate some of the great generals of his time.

For a while, he dominated Europe even more than Napoleon had in the past. To do this he seized a few basic principles of leadership and used them better than the generals and other politicians that he dominated. General Buratai did not emerge from the blues.

He attended the Nigerian Defence Academy, NDA, Kaduna as a member of the 29th Regular Combatant Course (29 RC). On the successful completion of his Officer Cadet training, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on December 17, 1983, into the Infantry Corps of the Nigerian Army.

A highly brilliant officer who earned a degree in history from the University of Maiduguri and another in philosophy from Bangladesh University of Professionals, Dhaka, Gen. Buratai also graduated from the National Defence College, Mirpur, Pakistan.

General Buratai, our amiable Chief of Army Staff makes his times. He is an aggressively creative leader.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service!

Buhari should put an end to banditry, unrest in Zamfara - Nigerians cry | Legit TV

See the original post here:

Opinion: General Buratai in the eyes of the people by Abe Kolawole - Latest News in Nigeria & Breaking Naija News 24/7 | LEGIT.NG

Digital Wisdom in the Time of Coronavirus Disease 2019 – Patheos

Posted on by

Last year the three of us who contribute to this site published an essay on the digital transformation of higher education. The goal of that paper was to present a framework for thinking about how colleges and universitiesespecially faith-based institutions, such as oursmay develop goal-oriented formative practices as they integrate digital technologies into teaching and research.

This is what we wrote over two years ago:

Institutions of higher education are hastily updating material technologies for digital education and digital scholarship, but our formative technologiesour practices for cultivating wisdom for a digital ageare most in need of an upgrade. This involves much more than digital skills and literacy The great challenge and opportunity before all of us in higher education concerns the epistemological and ethical formation of people who will have a certain type of relationship with [new information and communication technologies]. Within the context of Christian higher education, the need to integrate new ICTs into our individual and institutional lives well and wiselyas we consider what technologies are doing to us and what we will do with themis of utmost significance if we are committed to the cultivation of competence, character, and wisdom.

Our institution, Seattle Pacific University, is located not too far from the first large transmission cluster of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) identified in the United States. An earlier case had been identified in the area in January, but the first death in the greater Seattle area was recorded on February 28. At that time our educational technology team was in the midst of planning for a faculty in-service program on online learning design, but they quickly shifted their planning to prepare all faculty for online instruction. On March 6, we were among the first universities to announce that we would complete our current quarter online. On March 12, we announced that our next quarter would be online as well.

Now were in the midst of managing this significant transition. Fortunately, after years of investing in an educational technology stack and creating a department focused on instructional design (ID), we have human and technological resources to prepare and support faculty as they explore digital alternatives to face-to-face educational experiences.

There is a spectrum of online instruction that ranges from basic remote instruction at one end to well-designed online instruction on the other. For finishing up a term with a few remaining weeks, remote instruction typically is sufficient. But preparing for a whole term online requires a move towards ID.

There are good models for online instruction, and plenty of quality and open resources. The most important point to realize is that good online instruction requires rethinking how instructors are present (e.g., providing early and frequent feedback), how students interact with content (i.e., not through long video lectures), and how to cultivate community in a virtual place (e.g., through group discussions). Im not an ID expert, but Ive learned some simple and helpful things over the years to improve the digitally mediated relationships I have with my online students. Ive also learned how to transfer ID strategies into my face-to-face classes.

ID is often used in conjunction with backward designi.e., beginning with the end in view, such as learning outcomes or standards. More holistically, the entire educational enterprise can be approached from the perspective of backward design: What sort of people do we hope to form? Those goals or endsour wholetelosshould govern the adoption and adaptation of technology.

So the first part of our framework concerns defining a shared telos. For Christian higher education, that involves individuals and institutions participating in new creationthe transformation of all things. It also includes more common goals, such as disciplinary and ethical competencies as well as preparing for wok and civic life. All of these have a technological dimension to them. Students need to understand critically, and ethically use, new and emerging technologies to participate in our changing world. But how do we select and shape appropriate technologies and practices?

The first claim is rather familiar and problematic. It often takes the form of something like, Swords dont kill people, people kill people. Yes, people kill peopleand people design swords with which to kill people. The sword inherits the intention of its designer, which shapes the sword that participates in the action of the one who wields it. The sword on my shelf may seem innocent enough by itself, but why does Isaiah imagine a time when swords shall be beaten into plowshares?

On the other hand, surrendering to apparent or actual technological autonomy is also problematic. We are responsible for our artifactseven the artificial agents to which we increasingly transfer many of our responsibilities. If we understand how others views of and assumptions about technology influence designers intentions, as well as our use of their creations, we may discover that these technological teleologies are not aligned with our desired telos. We may find ourselves distracted from our own goals and captive, in both thought and action, to others ends.

This leads to the third part of our framework, which focuses on developing counter-formational practices and rituals related to technology. Drawing from different spiritual disciplines, we provide a number of examples in our paper that can help redirect attention and agency toward the ends were seeking. Some of these alternative liturgies involve technology and some do not; each is rooted in ancient formative wisdom. The point is to cultivate our own robust practices that resist competing teleological practices so that we may realize our intendedtelos.

When the modern university emerged, it integrated new formative practices with new print technologies to cultivate and form a particular type of personone whose attention and agency were focused on certain disciplinary ends. (See Chad Wellmons excellentOrganizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University[Johns Hopkins, 2015] for more about this history.)

For many decades now, institutions of higher education have been updating missions and material technologies for a digital world being shaped by new ICTs. With the current pandemic, technological adaptation is accelerating and many worry about leaving behind and losing the best of what higher education has been. But this is another technological narrative that needs to be critiqued. Our emerging information and technological environment is rapidly changing us and our world, and educators need to be shaping it actively. Our goals, our critiques of our technological culture, and our new formative practices will enable us to become and cultivate people of digital wisdompeople who are able not only to manage technological challenges but also to use technology wisely to create a new and better world.

Read more:

Digital Wisdom in the Time of Coronavirus Disease 2019 - Patheos

Reflections for the III Sunday of Lent – Vatican News

Posted on by

Fr. Antony Kadavil reflects and comments on the readings at Mass for the third Sunday in Lent. He says that we are challenged by todays Gospel to remain thirsty for the living water, which only God can give.

Ex 17:3-7; Rom 5:1-2, 5-8; Jn 4:5-42

Introduction: Todays readings are centered on Baptism and new life. Living water represents Gods Spirit who comes to us in Baptism, penetrating every aspect of our lives and quenching our spiritual thirst. The Holy Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the Sacraments of God in the Church are the primary sources of the living water of Divine Grace. We are assembled here in the Church to drink this water of eternal life and salvation. Washed in it at Baptism, renewed by its abundance at each Eucharist, invited to it in every proclamation of the Word, and daily empowered by the anointing of the Spirit, we are challenged by todays Gospel to remain thirsty for the living water, which only God can give.

Homily starter anecdote: Photeine, the Samaritan woman evangelist: Venerated as a saint among the Greek and Russian Orthodox and given the name Photeine (Greek) or Svetlana (Russian), which means radiant or shining (from the Greek noun phos or light), the woman at the well has been variously praised by Origen, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Teresa of Avila as: (1) an apostle, (2) one who left her water pot at the well in order to go off and preach the Gospel, (3) the first apostle to the Gentiles who invited her neighbors to Come and see. Legend has it that when the woman left Samaria to preach the Good News, she eventually made her way to Carthage in Africa where she was imprisoned for the Faith and died a martyr. Another legend, preserved in Spain, says that Photeine (also Photina) converted and baptized Neros daughter and 100 of her servants (Margaret Hebblethwaite, Six New Gospels, Cowley Publications, Boston: 1994). Fascinating legends and traditions notwithstanding, the woman of Shechem offers veteran believers and catechumens a living example of the dynamics and ramifications of Christian Baptism including: (1) the overture of God to the sinner 2) the sinners growing response in Faith and consequent conversion. (3) the mission of the disciple to proclaim the Good News to others. (http://frtonyshomilies.com/)

Scripture lessons summarized: The first reading describes how God provided water to the ungrateful complainers of Israel, thus placing Jesus promise within the context of the Exodus account of water coming from the rock at Horeb. The Responsorial Psalm (Ps 95), refers both to the Rock of our salvation and also to our hardened hearts. It reminds us that our hard hearts need to be softened by God through our grace-prompted and -assisted prayer, fasting and works of mercy which enable us to receive the living water of the Holy Spirit, salvation, and eternal life from the Rock of our salvation. In the second reading, Saint Paul asserts that, as the Savior of mankind, Jesus poured the living water of the gift of the Holy Spirit into our hearts. In the Gospel, an unclean Samaritan woman is given an opportunity to receive living water. Today's Gospel tells us how Jesus awakened in the woman at the well a thirst for the wholeness and integrity which she had lost, a thirst which He had come to satisfy. In revealing himself as the Messiah to the Samaritan woman, Jesus speaks to her of the fountain of water he will give the life-giving waters of Baptism. The water that Jesus promises is closely linked to conversion and the forgiveness of sin. Here is a woman who comes to Faith and becomes a missionary who brings others to Jesus. Jesus recognizes the gifts and ministries of women in his future Church. This is also a narrative about God wooing the outsider or, as Paul will say, the godless. The Samaritans, who were considered godless in general, in this town ended up confessing Jesus as the Savior of the world. This Gospel passage also gives us Jesus' revelation about Himself as the Source of Living Water and teaches us that we need the grace of Jesus Christ for eternal life, because He is that life-giving water.

The first reading: Exodus 17:3-7, explained: Today's Gospel gives us Jesus' revelation of himself as the Source of Living Water. Hence, the passage chosen from Exodus tells of the Jews complaining about their thirst, a figure of human longing for God and spiritual satisfaction. The rock which Moses strikes represents God who gives the water (Gods own life), essential for our spiritual life. This reading shows us a time when God's people literally thirsted, and God satisfied them. The Israelites had been slaves for several generations in Egypt, and for the most part, they had forgotten their ancestral religion and their Gods Covenant with their patriarch Abraham. Now their new leader, Moses, was telling them that their ancient Lord had at last heard their cries and was now leading their escape from Egypt back to their homeland. In spite of the mighty deeds God had done for their liberation from Egypt, the former slaves complained that in Egypt, at least they were not thirsty. It is astounding to see their lack of Faith.

The second reading: Rom 5:1-2, 5-8 explained: In the second reading, Saint Paul asserts that, as the Savior of mankind, Jesus poured the living water, or the gift of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. We need the Holy Spirit to sustain us spiritually, just as we need water to sustain us physically. Through Jesus, God gave us the Spirit when we were dying of thirst. Paul realized that he and all the Jews who kept the Law of Moses were trying to become justified on their own. But keeping the Law is not an adequate means of justification because we are unable to make ourselves worthy of God's favor, whether by good works, by keeping the Commandments, by rituals or by prayers. The word grace, in this context, means the gratuitous, unearned, undeserved love and favor of God for us. By living water in todays Gospel, Jesus is referring to this grace as a relationship with God and an active participation in His life. According to Paul, redemption or justification is the gratuitous gift of God manifested in Jesus saving death on the cross. By virtue of his death, Jesus has made just, or put in right relationship with God, every sinner who will appropriate His saving gifts by Faith. Faith, then, is the admission that one cannot justify oneself, and that it is God who will grant us justification by His grace.

Gospel exegesis: The conversion texts for Cycle A Gospel: Since each of the persons featured in the Gospels, e.g. the woman of Samaria (Lent III Sunday), the man born blind (Lent IV) and Lazarus (Lent V), is an example of conversion, their stories offer excellent catechesis for Lenten penitents and RCIA participants, and, hence, they were placed in the Lenten Sunday lectionary from the fourth century, where they have remained. Each of these Gospel texts also features the transforming love of Christ for those whom he calls to salvation; he is living water, light and sight for the blind, and the source of life for all who believe.

Jesus mission trip from Judea to Galilee: Palestine is only 120 miles long from north to south. Judea is in the extreme south, Samaria in the middle and Galilee in the extreme North. In order to avoid the controversy about baptism, Jesus decided to concentrate his ministry in Galilee. The usual route around Samaria, normally taken by the Jews to avoid the hated Samaritans, took six days. The shortcut (three days journey), from Judea to Galilee crossed through Samaria and, on the way to the town of Sychar, passed Jacobs well. The well itself was more than 100 feet deep. It was located on a piece of land that had been bought by Jacob (Gn 33:18-19), and later bequeathed to Joseph (Gn 48:22).

Jesus encounter with an outcast sinner: Jesus came to the Samaritan town called Sychar, near the land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacobs well is there and Jesus, tired by the journey, sat down by the well.When Jesus and his disciples reached the well, it was a hot midday, and Jesus was weary and thirsty from traveling. Ignoring the racial barriers and traditional hostility between Samaritans and Jews, Jesus sent his disciples to buy some food in the Samaritan town. It was at this point that a Samaritan woman came to the well to draw water. She had probably been driven away from visiting the common well in the town of Sychar at dawn by the other women of the town, as a moral outcast. It was this woman whom Jesus asked for water, and it is no wonder that she was surprised, because the petitioner was a Jew who hated her people as polluted outcasts and betrayers of Judaism. The scene recalls Old Testament meetings between future spouses at wells. Jacob meets Rebekah at the well of Haran, and Moses and Zipporah meet at a well in Midian.

The background history: The mutual hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans had begun centuries earlier when the Assyrians carried the northern tribes of Israel into captivity. The Jewish slaves betrayed their heritage by intermarrying with the Assyrians, thus diluting their bloodline and creating a mongrel race called the Samaritans. The Assyrian men who were relocated to Israel married Jewish women, thus producing a mixed race in Israel as well. Hence, southern Jews considered all Samaritan bloodlines and their heritage impure. By the time the Samaritan Jews returned to their homeland, their views of God had been greatly contaminated. By contrast, when the southern Hebrew tribes were carried off into captivity, they stubbornly resisted the Babylonian culture. They returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, proud that they had compromised neither their religious convictions nor their culture. So, when the Samaritans offered to help to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, the southern Jews who had returned from exile vehemently rejected Samaritan assistance. Consequently, the rejected and ostracized Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim. But in 129 B.C. a Jewish General destroyed it, a slap in the face for Samaritan dignity that continued to sting for centuries, deepening the mutual scorn and hostility between Samaritans and Jews.

The Divine touch and conversion: So, the water-seeking Samaritan woman who faced Jesus that day belonged to a heritage rejected by the Jews. In addition, she expected scorn simply because she was a woman, for in the ancient Middle East, men systematically degraded women. Finally, this Samaritan woman seemed unwanted by her own people. Since she had had five husbands, and was living with a sixth lover, she seems to have been considered by fellow villagers a social leper, and she seems to have been driven from the common well of the town by the decent women. Perhaps she had not stopped wishing that somewhere, sometime, some way, God would touch His people that He would touch her! Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at Jacobs well illustrates the principal role of Jesus as the Messiah: to reconcile all men and women to the Father. Hence, Jesus deliberately placed himself face-to-face with this person whom, apparently, no one else wanted. Jesus saw, in this social outcast and moral wreck, a person who mattered to God. The Samaritan woman must have unburdened her soul to this stranger because she had found one Jew with kindness in his eyes instead of an air of critical superiority. She was thirsting for love that would last, love that would fill her full and give purpose to her life. Just as Jesus confronted the woman at the well with the reality of her own sinfulness and brokenness, so we must, with Gods grace, confront our own sinfulness and, in doing so, realize our need for God.

The conversion leading to witnessing: Jesus not only talked with the woman, but, in a carefully orchestrated, seven-part dialogue, he guided her progressively from ignorance to enlightenment, and from misunderstanding to clearer understanding, thus making her the most carefully and intensely catechized person in this entire Gospel. Jesus always has a way of coming into our personal lives. When Jesus became personal with this woman and started asking embarrassing questions about her five husbands, she cleverly tried to change the subject and talk about religion. She didnt want Jesus to get personal. But Jesus wanted to free her, forgive her, shape her life in a new direction, and change her. He wanted to offer this woman Living Water. [Scholars have debated as to precisely what Jesus meant when he referred to living water. As Raymond E. Brown has explained, there are two possibilities: living water means the revelation or teaching which Jesus came to give, and it also means the Spirit which Jesus bestows (The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible, Vol. 29, Doubleday, New York: 1966).]Theliving watermay refer to Baptism and the gift of the Spirit, the source of life. It may also refer to Jesus as the source of life. At the end of their long, heart-to-heart conversation, Jesus revealed himself to the woman as the Messiah, which in turn led her to Faith in him. This growth in understanding on the part of the woman moved through several stages: first, she called him a Jew, then Sir or Lord, then Prophet, and finally Messiah. When the Samaritans came to hear Jesus because of her testimony, their affirmation of Faith reached its climax as they declared that Jesus was the Savior of the world, and that they believed in him not just because of what she had said for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world. Step-by-step Jesus had led the marginalized woman in her Faith journey, and her enthusiastic response, powerful personal testimony and brave witnessing with its dramatic results in her town, stand in dramatic contrast to Nicodemus' hesitance (3:9), the crowd's demand for proof (6:25-34) and the Pharisees' refusal to acknowledge the hand of God in the healing of a blind man (9:24-34).

Life messages: 1) We need to allow Jesus free entry into our personal lives. A sign that God is active in our lives is His entering in to our personal, private lives. Jesus wants to get personal with us, especially during this Lenten season. Jesus wants to get into our private lives because we have a private personal life which is contrary to the will of God. Christ wishes to come into that private life, not to embarrass us, not to judge or condemn us, not to be unkind or malicious to us, but to free us, to change us, and to offer us what we really need: living water. The living water is God the Holy Spirit Who enters the soul of the woman through Jesus and his love. We human beings are composed of four parts: mind, body, emotions and spirit. When we let God, the Holy Spirit come into us and take control of our thinking, our physical activity, our emotions and our spirit, He can bring harmony to all four parts of our humanity, and so to the way we live. We can find this living water in the Sacraments, in prayer and in the Holy Bible.

2) We need to be witnesses to Gods work in us, just as the Samaritan woman was, proclaiming Jesus as God and Savior through our loving lives. Let us have the courage to "be" Jesus for others, especially in those "unexpected" places for unwanted people. Let us also have the courage of our Christian convictions to stand for truth and justice in our day-to-day life. Today, the invitation of the Samaritan women to Come and see reminds all thirsty sinners that we are daily called to be cleansed, taught, renewed and satisfied by Jesus great gift.

3) We need to be open to others and accept others as they are, just as Jesus did. We have been baptized into a community of Faith so that we may become one with each other as brothers and sisters of Jesus and as children of God. To live this oneness demands that we open ourselves to others and listen to one another. We need to provide the atmosphere, the room, for all to be honestly what they really are: the children of God. It is the ministry of Jesus that we inherit and share. Jesus did not allow the womans status, past, attitude, or anything else to obstruct his ability to love her. And loving her, he freed her and made her whole, made her the child of God she already was. Let us also open our hearts to one another and accept each other as Gods gifts to us. Thus, we shall experience resurrection in our own lives and in the lives of our brothers and sisters.

4) We need to leave the husbands behind during Lent as the Samaritan woman did. Todays Gospel message challenges us to get rid of our unholy attachments and the evil habits that keep us enslaved and idolatrous. Lent is the time to learn from our mistakes of over-indulgence in food, drink, drugs, gambling, promiscuity, or any other addiction that may keep us from coming to the living waters of a right relationship with God. We all have our short list, don't we? And we all know, honest to God, what it is we need to leave behind before we come to the Living Water and the Bread of Heaven. Let us make an earnest attempt to do so during this Lenten season.

5) We need to turn to Jesus who loves us with non-judgmental, unconditional love: We all face moments when guilt plagues us; when we are upset for falling for the same temptations again and again; when we make choices that turn out to be all wrong; when our relationships with others fall in a heap; when we feel lonely, sick and tired of the way people are treating us; when we are depressed and upset and cant see anything good in ourselves; when our Faith is at rock bottom and we feel as if the Church and religion arent doing anything for us; when we beat ourselves up for lack of enthusiasm to be true disciples of Jesus ready to do anything for him; when we survey the days that have gone by without a word of prayer; when all we feel is failure and defeat. During such moments it is great to read a story about Jesus and his love and acceptance of the woman at the well. Let us rest assured that Jesus is there to accept us warmly and help us to see that he will give us the strength and the power we need to overcome whatever it is that is grieving us. (Fr. Antony Kadavil, chaplain, Little Sisters of the Poor, Mobile, AL, U.S.A.)

See the original post here:

Reflections for the III Sunday of Lent - Vatican News

Black business and superstition – Bulawayo24 News

Posted on by

SUPERSTITIOUS beliefs and practices have negative consequences and thus need to be curbed to avoid society breaking down into medieval mayhem, something which is quite easy to do as illustrated in the narrations. The kuchekeresa phenomenon, Zengeza Zombie and Sunningdale magic worm narrated in detail last week are just a few of the examples which show how detrimental superstitious beliefs can be if not regulated.

Witchcraft, witch finding and related crimes are contained in sections 97-102 in Part IV of the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act which replaced the old Witchcraft Suppression Act. The law neither admits that witches and witchcraft exist nor does it deny their existence.

The law as far as possible tries to concern itself with things that can be proved with tangible evidence or on a balance of probabilities. It is important to note that claims and beliefs of supernatural occurrences are not evidence.

The law acknowledges that people indeed can engage in practices that are commonly associated with witchcraft like using charms or casting spells whether they work or not.

Engaging in practices normally associated with witchcraft is illegal and not the outcome thereof because that cannot be proved. No known empirical evidence has been adduced and scientifically verified that proves the veracity of claims of voodoo, mermaids, vampires etc.

The Randi Paranormal Challenge was a US$1 million dollar prize ran by former magician turned sceptic James Randi from 1964 to 2015. It challenged people to come forward to prove the veracity of their supernatural claims and psychic powers. In its 51-year history none of the more than 1 000 claims voluntarily submitted to the challenge was able to claim the prize.

Locally there is a glut of stories of paranormal occurrences like baboons which drive cross-border trucks, gorillas which talk and retrieve cheating spouses, money spitting snakes, etc.

The stories are funny and would be funnier if it wasn't for that many people sincerely believe them and take them very seriously. It does not matter how educated or intelligent these people are.

There is just a deep need to believe in the supernatural. Michael Shermer in his book Why Intelligent People Believe Weird Things explains that superstitious intelligent educated people are actually better and more sophisticated at rationalising superstitious beliefs so they hold them even more strongly because they believe there is good reason to.

It is not an exaggerated assertion that the majority of black Zimbabweans are superstitious and hold dearly to those beliefs even without sensible reason. Something just must be out there to explain the phenomenon they cannot understand.

Despite so many of them believed to be crawling around the country and so many camera phones to date, no-one has ever shot even a grainy photo. The strange objects found here and there always look curiously hand-made and contrived to look scary.

Superstitious practices and beliefs are no laughing matter as they have serious tangible consequences. Death, injury, family conflicts and rifts arise from accusations and reprisals. Witch-hunting usually done by tsikamutandas that prey on the gullible is illegal.

People should be educated on the importance of steering away from unproductive supernatural beliefs and associated practices. A superstition only breeds under-development. Unfortunately Zimbabwean society is rapidly becoming increasingly superstitious concurrently with the increase of dubious unregulated religious sects.

The witchcraft phenomenon is not unique to Zimbabwe or Africa. It is a universal phenomenon. The only difference is the extent of the seriousness with which it is taken. Beliefs in witchcraft were deep rooted in medieval Europe. Ritual killings, witch-hunting and burning witches was the order of the day but eased with regulation and enlightenment.

The United States also had its troubles. The Salem Witch Trials took place in Massachusetts in the 17th century. Most of the accused people were vulnerable women of course.

They were blamed for causing disease and illness in society pretty much like happens in our own society and other undeveloped societies which do not fully comprehend the germ theory of disease.

Once a person is accused of being a witch there is no way out of a brutal execution because nothing can be proved or disproved.

The accusation itself is the proof. Anything can lead to a witchcraft accusation good looks, bad looks, poverty, wealth anything at all. Attempting to defend an accused person can itself lead to an accusation.

The madness of the Salem witch trials and senseless executions only stopped when the senselessness became evident and the realisation that supernatural claims need to be curbed and regulated by the law to stop society breaking down into mayhem.

All articles and letters published on Bulawayo24 have been independently written by members of Bulawayo24's community. The views of users published on Bulawayo24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Bulawayo24. Bulawayo24 editors also reserve the right to edit or delete any and all comments received.

More:

Black business and superstition - Bulawayo24 News

Do You Have a First Amendment Right to a Slayer-Themed License Plate? – Reason

Posted on by

There are few things more intimate than a personalized license plate. Yet California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) rejects tens of thousands of applications for individualized plate slogans each year for being offensive to "good taste and decency."

Yesterday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public interest law firm, filed a lawsuit against state DMV director Steve Gordon alleging his department's license plate policy violates the First Amendment's free speech protections. The DMV, they are arguing, is using a dangerously expansive definition of "government speech" to unconstitutionally censor motorists' expression.

"Our lawsuit is about vague laws that give government bureaucrats unbridled discretion to regulate speech, and that inevitably leads to arbitrary results," says Wen Fa, an attorney with PLF. "It's basically at the DMV's whims what might be offensive and what isn't."

In 2018, the state DMV rejected 30,000 of the roughly 249,000 personal plate applications they received. PLF is representing five people who've similarly had their plate applications rejected.

That includes Paul Ogilvie, an army veteran, who wanted to combine his military nickname 'OG' with childhood nickname 'Woolf' to make an 'OGWOOLF' license plate. The DMV rejected this for supposedly being offensive.

They did the same thing to Amrit Kohli, a gay computer programmer and musician, whose application for a license plate saying "QUEER"a reference to Kohli's own identitywas rejected for being "insulting, degrading, or expressing contempt for a specific group or person," according to the PLF complaint.

James Blair is also suing the DMV after being told that his proposed "SLAAYRR" platea reference to the metal band Slayerwas "threatening, aggressive, or hostile" and therefore violated the department's prohibition on offensive plates.

In addition, PLF is representing English pub owner Paul Crawford, whose proposed "BO11LUX" license plate was turned down for being too sexual, and motorcycle enthusiast Andrea Campanile for a rejected "DUK N A" license plate (a reference to Ducati motorcycles and her first name).

This is not the first time California's personal plate regulations have come under attack. Last year PLF sued the department on behalf of university professor Jon Kotler who'd likewise had his application for a personalized plate rejected.

The state DMV argued in that case that because it was the one issuing the plates, it was the government speaking, and not the private citizen requesting the plates. Therefore, it was up to the discretion of the department which messages it would allow.

A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California rejected this argument in denying a government motion to dismiss the case, writing that it "it strains believability to argue thatviewers perceive the government as speaking through personalized vanity plates."

That case was resolved in January 2020 when the DMV decided to issue Kotler the initially rejected plate. However, the department has kept its regulations about offensive plates on the books, prompting PLF to file a second lawsuit.

"The government speech doctrine has very wide implications for free speech in general. The government is increasingly relying on that doctrine to say individuals have no free speech rights at all, and therefore the government can ban speech it finds offensive or hateful," says Fa. "If the DMV's logic were correct, then the government could censor offensive speech in public parks, which is also government property."

See the article here:

Do You Have a First Amendment Right to a Slayer-Themed License Plate? - Reason

EDITORIAL: No labor law exception to the First Amendment – Las Vegas Review-Journal

Posted on by

Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government workers may not be mandated to pay union dues as a condition of employment. The ruling was a victory for free speech and free association.

Now, in a lawsuit out of Maine, the justices have another opportunity to rein in the power of labor organizations to force workers to accept their representation. The case could have major ramifications for many states, including Nevada.

The legal action brought by Jonathan Reisman, an associate professor of economics in the University of Maine system involves the common practice of governments granting public-sector unions exclusive workplace bargaining rights. Mr. Reisman argues that this runs afoul of the Constitution because it prevents him and other like-minded individuals from speaking for themselves in contract negotiations and forces him to associate with an organization that acts contrary to his beliefs.

If the state cannot compel public employees to financially support union advocacy how can states require these same public employees to accept representation from unions that many of them have chosen not to join? an attorney for Mr. Reisman asked.

Mr. Reisman, according to news accounts, was formerly a union officer, but came to object to many of the policy positions for which his labor group advocated. A federal appeals court rejected his arguments, but the Supreme Court is now considering whether to accept the case.

The matter is ripe for review. As Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burris and Michael Collins wrote last month for the Cato Institute, arrangements involving exclusive representation restrict a number of individual freedoms.

Exclusive representation simply cant be justified by any state interest, let alone a compelling one, that would validate the serious impingements it imposes on dissenting nonmembers associational rights, they argue. Put plainly there is no labor law exception to the First Amendment, and labor laws that violate constitutional principles must be held to heightened judicial scrutiny.

Indeed, union complaints about free riders nonmembers who dont pay dues yet nevertheless enjoy the wages and protections negotiated during union contract talks are legitimate only because of exclusive representation powers that many states have granted public-sector labor groups. There are no free riders if independent workers are able to represent themselves as they see fit.

Gov. Steve Sisolak last year signed legislation allowing state of Nevada workers to bargain collectively. It will eventually bust the budget, but it also grants exclusive representation rights to labor. Lets hope the Supreme Court recognizes the constitutional difficulties inherent in such a provision.

Original post:

EDITORIAL: No labor law exception to the First Amendment - Las Vegas Review-Journal

How The Trump Campaign Is Weaponizing Libel And Threatening The First Amendment – wgbh.org

Posted on by

So now President Donald Trumps re-election campaign is filing SLAPP suits against news organizations that is, libel suits with no legal merit whose goal is to intimidate rather than to expose the truth.

The lawsuits have targeted The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, all of which have the resources to defend themselves. But the Trump campaigns tactics raise a larger question: Will these suits embolden others to weaponize the courts against media outlets that lack the financial wherewithal to fight back against deep-pocketed opponents?

SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation. A typical example might involve a developer whos seeking to build a controversial strip mall and who files a frivolous libel suit against neighborhood critics or a small local newspaper in order to silence them. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 31 states, including Massachusetts, have anti-SLAPP laws aimed at discouraging such suits. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law.

For a president's political operation to sue news organizations for libel is virtually unprecedented but not surprising coming from Trump, who said during the 2016 campaign that he wanted to open up our libel laws so that it would be easier for public figures to collect damages. The lawsuits involve four opinion pieces all of which, as Jacob Gershman notes in The Wall Street Journal, contain passages implying Donald Trump sought or welcomed Russia's intervention in the 2016 presidential election or the 2020 race.

The articles in question were written by Max Frankel, former executive editor of the Times; two Post opinion journalists, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman; and CNN contributor Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission.

Without going into too much detail, the pieces all assert that the Trump campaign had sought help from the Russians during the 2016 campaign and that it appeared to be willing to do so again. (Noble links to an ABC News interview with Trump in which the president all but invited foreign interference in 2020.) Among other things, the Trump campaign cites the Mueller Report as evidence that there was no collusion between the campaign and Russia.

Yet the Frankel commentary was published several weeks before the mostly unredacted version of the Mueller Report was released. Moreover, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton last week lambasted Attorney General William Barr for mischaracterizing the Mueller Report in his initial summary, writing that Barr had sought to obscure ties between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as multiple episodes of possible obstruction of justice. You could almost say that it sounds like collusion.

As for 2020, the Times recently reported that Russia is attempting once again to help Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders, according to the Post). Trumps indifference and even outright hostility to efforts aimed at curbing that influence could certainly be characterized as welcoming Russian interference.

All this is by way of arguing that the lawsuits are publicity stunts aimed at stirring up the Trumpist base. Not only are they outrageous in and of themselves, but they could also pose a threat to the First Amendment.

Im not a lawyer, but the constitutional principles at issue are well understood. First, there is the fact that the articles in question are opinion pieces. Opinion is protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court put it in Gertz v. Robert Welch (1974), there is no such thing as a false idea. Of course, if you make a defamatory statement about someone that could be proven false, merely labeling it as opinion is no protection, as the court ruled in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal (1990). But the facts laid out in the Mueller Report, as well the Trump interview with ABC News cited by Noble, cut against the Trump campaign's legal argument.

More important, the three news organizations are protected by the 1964 precedent set in New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the court found that public officials would have to prove actual malice in order to win a libel suit; that standard was later extended to public figures as well. Because of the Times decision, the Trump campaign would have to show that the media outlets published the four pieces in question despite knowing or suspecting they were false. (As I wrote last year, Justice Clarence Thomas has said that he would like to weaken the Times v. Sullivan protections. But of course.)

Not only would the Trump campaign find it virtually impossible to prove that the Times, the Post and CNN knew what they were publishing was false there are mountains of evidence to suggest that what they published was true.

In other words, these are the presidential equivalent of SLAPP suits, designed solely to harass and intimidate.

So what is the solution? Judges are strongly encouraged to throw out frivolous libel suits at the earliest possible stage because of the chilling effect that they have on news organizations and others seeking to exercise their First Amendment rights. That is exactly what should happen with the Trump campaigns suits.

More broadly, the suits should serve as a wake-up call. The libel laws are intended as a way for people who have been harmed by false, defamatory statements to obtain compensation. But libel can also be used to silence critics or, in the case of the Times, the Post and CNN to discredit them in the eyes of Trumps supporters.

Not only do the courts need to throw out these suits as quickly as possible; they also must take steps to ensure that the Trump campaigns actions dont trickle down to the state and local levels, which would encourage the widespread abuse of the courts for partisan political advantage.

One possible answer: Passing anti-SLAPP laws in places that dont have them, including the federal courts. And, where necessary, strengthening them to make sure they have real teeth.

WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedys blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

Read this article:

How The Trump Campaign Is Weaponizing Libel And Threatening The First Amendment - wgbh.org