You May Have Missed Borderlands 3’s Weapon Buffing Hotfix Yesterday – Forbes

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Borderlands 3

There was an absolutely tremendous amount of Borderlands 3 news dropped yesterday, mostly focused on the new DLC, Guns, Love and Tentacles which features the wedding of Hammerlock and Jakobs with a bonus cameo by Gaige as the wedding planner.

I covered all of that in a post here, and yet there was something that happened yesterday in the actual game itself that probably flew a bit under the radar. There was a Borderlands 3 hotfix that buffed some of the weakest weapons in the game, which is always nice to see, rather than nerfing the strong things. Some of these weapons are so common and bad theyre memes, but now? Maybe, just maybe, theyll be okay.

Heres the full list of the buffed weapons:

The Lob

Now has a magazine of 12, not 4, and shoots three balls instead of one giant ball. Damage per tick has been greatly increased. I feel like this has already been buffed once before, but it didnt do the job, it seems. Curious to use it now.

Borderlands 3

DAHL Assault Rifles

I always thought these rifles were underperforming, and now they have received a 35% damage boost across the board.

Which Assault Rifles are DAHL, you ask? That would be Breath of the Dying, Kaos, Warlord and Star Helix as the most common ones, and Barrage and Good Juju as two of the more rare ones. So knock yourself out with these.

Woodblocker

If there ever was a meme weapon in the game, its this, which seems to have like a 50% drop rate from bosses. Well, now it has had its critical damage increased by 100% and it has better recoil.

Malaks Bane

And heres the other common Sniper Rifle you will find absolutely everywhere. The shotgun part of it now costs less ammo, but the only buff we know is greatly increased damage. By just how much? I guess we have to use it and find out.

Rubys Wrath

Forgot this even existed. No exact numbers here, just greatly increased damage and greatly increased the cooldown of the singularity grenade. Its still probably no ION Cannon, but these buffs should help.

The problem, of course is that these weapons have been terrible for so long that I have deleted practically all of them from my vault and characters unless they had some super good Anointment. I dont think I have a single Lob, Woodblocker or Rubys Wrath across all 300+ saved items in the game, so I guess its time to farm some. If their old drop rates are similar, this really shouldnt be much of a problem at all.

Love to see underused stuff buffed which Borderlands has been pretty good about lately. We still have a month until the DLC so not much going on until then except experimentation with some of these guns, perhaps.

Follow meon Twitter,FacebookandInstagram. Pick up my new sci-fi novelHerokiller, and read my first series,The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also onaudiobook.

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You May Have Missed Borderlands 3's Weapon Buffing Hotfix Yesterday - Forbes

Space Force Working "Pretty Closely With Elon Musk and SpaceX" – Futurism

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Some Answers

As the Space Force evolved from a vague Trumpian thought to a full-fledged branch of the U.S. military, questions surfaced about what exactly it would do and how it would differ from NASA and the Air Forces ongoing work in orbit.

Lieutenant General David Thompson, the Space Forces second-in-command, sat down with GEN to clarify exactlywhat it does revealing the agencys goals, the scope of its operations, and that its already collaborating with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

In addition to scanning for hostile missile launches and other surveillance missions, the Space Force is also responsible for maintaining communication, GPS, and military satellites.

We already work pretty closely with Elon Musk and SpaceX, Thompson told GEN, specifically on developing and maintaining satellite constellations like Starlink.

Mainly, Thompson pressed back against the idea that launching a Space Force would be anything like Star Trek or Star Wars. The uniforms wont be spandex or have capes, he told GEN, nor does it expect to fight battles on the Moon or Mars any time soon.

Rather, Thompson told GEN the Space Force exists because we have to ensure space capabilities are there for the folks on the ground.

READ MORE: Space Forces Second-in-Command Explains What the Hell It Actually Does [GEN]

More on space: Space Force General: Russian Satellite Is Unusual and Disturbing

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Space Force Working "Pretty Closely With Elon Musk and SpaceX" - Futurism

Here’s a Glossary for the Ongoing Coronavirus Outbreak’s Vocab – Futurism

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As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, sickening and claiming the lives of patients around the world, a plethora of confusing and occasionally-conflicting information is spreading along with it.

It doesnt help that it took so long for the World Health Organization (WHO) to nail down an official name for the disease. Nor is it ideal that the name we know it by, the name of the actual virus itself, and the outbreaks previous (unofficial) moniker are all fairly similar.

To help you and ourselves here at Futurism, to be honest stay on top of the vocabulary surrounding the outbreak, we put together the following glossary.

This is a now-outdated term that was used to describe the coronavirus linked to the outbreak before the WHO formally named it SARS-CoV-2 (see below). Its an acronym that stands for the novel CoronaVirus discovered in 2019.

The word coronavirus has served as an easy way to reference the ongoing outbreak, but its not terribly specific,since a coronavirus is a broad category of virus. There are hundreds of coronaviruses which, when they infect a human, cause diseases with flu-like symptoms. Think respiratory trouble, soreness, fever and, in more serious cases, pneumonia or kidney failure.

COVID-19, short for COronaVIrus Disease 2019, is the illness caused by a SARS-CoV-2 infection.You could say that a SARS-CoV-2 infection made someone come down with a case of COVID-19 not unlike how the varicella zoster virus causes the disease chickenpox.

A mortality rate is a statistic that represents the proportion of people dying from a specific cause. In this case, it means the percentage of people who get COVID-19 and ultimately die, not a tally of total fatalities.

As of this storys publication, Chinas COVID-19 mortality rate is around 3.4 percent higher than the mortality rate for the rest of the world, which is currently about 1.7 percent.

A pandemic is the term for an outbreak thats spreading rampantly on an international or global scale, as opposed to a more localized epidemic.

The WHO maintains that the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is not a pandemic: even though cases have been confirmed in 41 global territories, most of the countries affected have more or less contained the disease thus far.

Pronounced R naught, this is a statistical measure that represents how many people, on average, someone whos infected with a disease will spread it to. Tracking down an R0 value for COVID-19 has been difficult, in part because mild cases can go undetected and also because some countries have been hit harder than others.

Different studies have arrived at wildly different R0 values for the COVID-19 outbreak, and the number likely wont be solidified until after the fact but thus far the WHO suggests the R0 lies between two and three.

This is the formal name of the specific coronavirus thats causing a commotion right now.

The name is an acronym: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related CoronaVirus 2. SARS-CoV-2 is highly similar to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003. In fact, when SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in Wuhan, China in December, one of the first doctors to send out a warning about it actually confused it for a resurgence of SARS.

A vaccine is a preventative tool that can strengthen the immune system against a disease. Administered in advance, a vaccine is different from a treatment or cure in that it doesnt fight the virus directly it just better equips your body fight it off and prevent the associated disease.

Specifically, a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 would contain inert and harmless fragments of the virus. If your immune system is exposed to the vaccine, it would generate antibodies capable of fighting the virus in the future, ultimately preventing you from getting sick with COVID-19. Thus far, there are no vaccines available, though many teams are working on them.

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Here's a Glossary for the Ongoing Coronavirus Outbreak's Vocab - Futurism

Bright-Red "Blood Snow" Is Falling From the Sky in Antarctica – Futurism

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Blood Snow

A Facebook post by Ukraines Ministry of Education and Science shows a research station on an island just off the coast of Antarcticas northernmost peninsula covered in blood snow.

The gory-looking scene is not the result of a seal hunt gone wrong its an astonishingly red-pigmented, microscopic algae called Chlamydomonas nivalis,which thrives in freezing water as the ice melts during Antarcticas record-breaking warm summer.

When summer hits the polar regions, the algae bloom, staining the snow and ice around it in blood-resembling red, as Live Science explains. The phenomenon was first noticed by Aristotle thousands of years ago and is often referred to as watermelon snow thanks to its subtly sweet scent and color.

What makes the blooming algae red is the same stuff that give carrots and watermelons their reddish tint carotenoids.

Its a stunning display of a natural phenomenon but it also creates a nasty feedback loop that causes the ice to melt faster. The red color causes less sunlight to be reflected off the snow, causing it to melt faster, as the Ukrainian team explains in its post. The accelerated melting then causes more algae to grow, completing the cycle.

Its not the only surreal display in the world caused by such a feedback loop, as Live Science points out. Blooming algae caused sea foam to swallow up the coast of a Spanish town in January. Similar algae blooms even caused shores around islands in the East China Sea to glow blue.

READ MORE: Spooky blood snow invades Antarctic island [Live Science]

More on algae: A New Bioreactor Captures as Much Carbon as an Acre of Trees

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Bright-Red "Blood Snow" Is Falling From the Sky in Antarctica - Futurism

Astronomers: Our Planet Might Have Another Moon, Except It’s Tiny – Futurism

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Mini-Moon

The Earth might have asecond Moon albeit a tiny and temporary one.

Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3, wrote Kacper Wierzchos, astronomer and self-described comet hunter at the Catalina Sky Survey, in a Tuesday tweet. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object.

A team of astronomers at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey near Tuscon, Arizona suspect theres a small asteroid that caught itself in our planets gravity, as CNET reports. The discovery was confirmed when The International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center (MPC) announced on Tuesday that Earth has a new temporary captured object.

According to Wierzchos, the comet entered Earths orbit about three years ago. Its diameter is between 1.9 and 3.5 meters (6.2 and 11.5 feet). Despite its tiny size, its a big deal as out of ~ 1 million known asteroids, this is just the second asteroid known to orbit Earth, Wierzchos noted in a follow-up tweet.

The first asteroid tobe discovered orbiting our planet was RH120, also discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2006. It featured a similar diameter, stayed in orbit for 18 months, and was later given minor planet designation in 2008.

Astronomers are now racing to find out more about the unusual space rock.

Further observations and dynamical studies are strongly encouraged, wrote the MPC in its announcement.

READ MORE: Astronomers say Earth might have a new mini-moon [CNET]

More on asteroids: Europes Space Agency Joins Mission to Deflect Killer Asteroids

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Astronomers: Our Planet Might Have Another Moon, Except It's Tiny - Futurism

Artificial and Biological Neurons Just Talked Over the Internet – Futurism

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For the first time, scientists haveengineered and switched on a working neural net that allows biological and silicon-based artificial brain cells to communicate back and forth.

Researchers in Switzerland, Italy, and the U.K. connected a series of neurons: two high-tech artificial neurons and one biological neuron cultured from a mouses brain, that were able to communicate back and forth over the internet in a highly similar way to how neurons pass along signals in the brain.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, is in its early days. After all, one mouse neuron in a petri dish is hardly the same as an internet-connected human brain. That cell is housed in a lab at Italys University of Padova, from which it signals back and forth with the artificial neurons at University of Zurich via University of Southampton-build nodes called synaptors, named after synapses, the connections between individual brain cells.

For now, its a simple network. But, it could be an important first step toward smarter and more adaptive prosthetics and brain-computer interfaces and potentially lay the groundwork for a world where neural implants create real brain networks.

On one side it sets the basis for a novel scenario that was never encountered during natural evolution, where biological and artificial neurons are linked together and communicate across global networks; laying the foundations for the Internet of Neuro-electronics, Themis Prodromakis, a nanotechnology researcher and director at the University of Southamptons Centre for Electronics Frontiers said in a press release.

On the other hand, it brings new prospects to neuroprosthetic technologies, paving the way towards research into replacing dysfunctional parts of the brain with AI chips.

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Artificial and Biological Neurons Just Talked Over the Internet - Futurism

Uber Tells Drivers to Stay Home If They Have the Coronavirus – Futurism

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Uber is warning all its drivers to stay home if they have symptoms of the deadly COVID-19 coronavirus.

On Friday, the company sent a memo of recommendations like frequently washing hands and covering sneezes as well as encouraging drivers to turn away passengers who make them feel unsafe, according to Business Insider.

But Ubers advice struck drivers as tone-deaf: the company advised drivers to stay home if they start experiencing coronavirus symptoms like fever or respiratory trouble. Thats solid workplace advice from a public health standpoint, but it also assumes that sick workers can afford to stay home until theyre feeling better.

Its worth noting that Uber doesnt offer drivers sick leave. In fact, it doesnt consider them employees at all. So like other gig economy workers, if a driver stops taking passengers, they also stop making money. In that light, the company urging its contractors to stay home doesnt reflect the realities of life without a steady income.

Its a troubling disconnect. Nipping an outbreak in the bud could at least partially come down to the publics everyday behavior, but many dont have the resources to simply stop working when theyre not feeling 100 percent.

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Uber Tells Drivers to Stay Home If They Have the Coronavirus - Futurism

Governments Shut Down the Internet Hundreds of Times in 2019 – Futurism

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Fake News

According to a new report by digital rights group Access Now, dozens of world governments intentionally shut offthe internet more than 200 times last year, affecting tens of millions of people world wide.

This kind of harm may on its face look less damaging from the standpoint of scope, reads the report. Yet these silenced voices may be absolutely crucial for alerting the public to human rights violations and abuse, and for getting help to those impacted.

According to the new report, India had the most shutdowns in 2019: 121 occasions, the majority of which occurred in the disputed Kashmir region. Venezuela, the second on the list, only shut down the internet 12 times.

Access Now also found an increasing number of shutdowns were smaller, but targeting specific groups of people.

In 2019, there were at least 14 cases of internet providers significantly slowing down the connection, rather than a complete blackout. The idea is to stifle sharing of multimedia, particularly over social media. Most of these cases ended up in a complete blackout eventually.

The shutdowns often appeared to be responses to public protests, according to the report, which framed them as an overreaching method to stifle dissent.

It seems more and more countries are learning from one another and implementing the nuclear option of internet shutdowns to silence critics, or perpetrate other human rights violations with no oversight, Access Now told the BBC.

READ MORE: What happens when the internet vanishes? [BBC]

More on the internet: In the Face of Climate Change, the Internet Is Unsustainable

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Governments Shut Down the Internet Hundreds of Times in 2019 - Futurism

Whistleblower: US Gov May Have Helped Spread Coronavirus – Futurism

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A whistleblower has come forward with some serious allegations, claiming that the US government may have inadvertently helped spread the deadly COVID-19 outbreak inside US borders by breaking protocol, according to an exclusive report by The Washington Post and afollowup by The New York Times.

Its an accusation that will likely cause problems for the White House, which is already struggling to find a consistent message about the ongoing outbreak.

The whistleblower alleges that she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after ringing alarm bells that more than a dozen healthcare workers from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) were deployed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to quarantined areas in which COVID-19 patients coming from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, were being processed.

According to the whistleblower, the HHS workers didnt receive adequate training and didnt bring appropriate protective gear, potentially putting them in danger of becoming infected and infecting others.

The workers were in contact with evacuees in quarantined areas at Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base, according to the complaint. The whistleblower wrote that appropriate steps were not taken to quarantine, monitor, or test [the workers] during their deployment and upon their return home, as quoted by the Post.

One of the whistleblowers lawyers, Lauren Naylor, told the Post that the ACF workers were allowed to leave quarantined areas and return to their communities, where they may have spread the coronavirus to others.

According to the Post, several people within HHS voiced objections over sending the unprepared ACF workers. The workers were also never tested for COVID-19, since they didnt meet the criteria at the time.

The whistleblower claimed that concerns over the ACF workers health were dismissed by administration officials as detrimental to staff morale, and that concerned employees were accused of not being team players, as quoted by the Times.

Ominously, the whistleblower report comes shortly after the first community transmission of the deadly virus observed in the US was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early this morning. In other words, this is the first infected person in the country who is not known to have traveled anywhere linked to an outbreak. That means they may have picked up the virus in the US instead of abroad.

That connects to the whistleblower story albeit circumstantially because the patient is from Solano County, the same county as Travis Air Force Base. CNN did note however that the patient has no connection to [the base].

To be clear, any ties between the whistleblowers report and this particular infection have not been confirmed. But commentators as prominent as MSNBC host Chris Hayes are suggesting that the connection may be more than a coincidence.

HHS confirmed the existence of the report, but distanced itself from any wrongdoing.

We take all whistle-blower complaints very seriously and are providing the complainant all appropriate protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act, a spokeswoman told the Times. We are evaluating the complaint and have nothing further to add at this time.

During a Thursday briefing, representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) pressed HHS Secretary Alex Azar on the whistleblower reports.

To your knowledge, were any of the ACF employees exposed to high-risk evacuees from China? Gomez asked, as quoted by the Times.

Unless with the proper equipment and special suits, they should never have been, Azar replied. To maintain quarantine, that should be the case.

Online, the report was met with outrage.

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Whistleblower: US Gov May Have Helped Spread Coronavirus - Futurism

Anti-Coke Lawsuit: "Plastic Is Set to Outweigh Fish in the Ocean" – Futurism

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Environmental group Earth Island Institute filed a lawsuit in California last week against Coke, Pepsi, Nestl, and a number of other plastic polluters for knowingly misleading the public about how much of their produced plastic is being recycled (and landing in the ocean instead), VICE reports.

These companies should bear the responsibility for choking our ecosystem with plastic, said David Phillips, executive director of Earth Island Institute, in a statement sent to The Guardian. They know very well that this stuff is not being recycled, even though they are telling people on the labels that it is recyclable and making people feel like its being taken care of.

At this rate, plastic is set to outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, the complaint reads, as quoted by VICE. The complaint also alleges that the ten companies named in the suit are guilty of engaging in a decades-long campaign to deflect blame for the plastic pollution crisis to consumers.

This is the first suit of its kind, Phillips said in a statement. These companies are going to have to reveal how much theyve known about how little of this stuff is being recycled.

According to 2017 numbers, the US only recycled roughly nine percent of all produced plastic with the rest ending up in incinerators (about 12 percent), or the landfill.

And that was before China, formerly Americas largest importer of recycling materials, banned most types of plastic imports in 2018. The ban recycling programs across the globe to stall and landfill to pile up.

Beverage companies shot back saying that they were already working on a solution, of course:

Americas beverage companies are already taking action to address the issue by reducing our use of new plastic, investing to increase the collection of our bottles [], and collaborating with legislators and third-party experts to achieve meaningful policy resolutions, read a statement by an American Beverage Association spokesman, as quoted by Bloomberg.

READ MORE: Coke and Pepsi sued for creating a plastic pollution nuisance [The Guardian]

More on plastic: China Announces Plan to Ban Single-Use Plastics

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Anti-Coke Lawsuit: "Plastic Is Set to Outweigh Fish in the Ocean" - Futurism

How the humanities became the new enemy within – The Guardian

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The strain of conservatism that has now taken up residence in Downing Street is tireless in its identification of enemies. The BBC and Channel 4 were put on notice during the latter stages of the election campaign, and the government is now openly pursuing the termination of the BBC licence fee. Dominic Cummings long-harboured resentment towards civil service mandarins is driving Whitehall reform, imperilling its independence.

The vanguard of rightwing thinktanks and newspapers is redoubling its attacks on universities, with a pitifully thin Policy Exchange report on the topic this week earning a Times headline decrying these sneering institutions. Meanwhile, a bogey-ideology known as wokeness, constructed by conservative commentators and free speech advocates, now serves as an all-purpose bin into which any form of activism, complaint or critical theory can be thrown.

These various hostilities are often lumped together as symptoms of a culture war, in which the demographic and educational divisions that came to light around Brexit are amplified and exploited for political gain. But we can be more specific than that. The new conservative ideology coalesces around one theme in particular: hostility towards the modern humanities, and their elevated status in British public life.

The 20th century witnessed a distinctive model of interlocking political, educational and artistic institutions, with the humanities at their core. Public bodies such as the British Academy and the BBC set the template for the optimistic, post-1945 era of public investment in the arts and humanities. The state actively supported their expansion after the war via such icons of mass cultural modernity as the Arts Council, BBC2, the Open University and the new redbrick universities. By the 1980s, this project had borne such fruits as the South Bank Show, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and Channel 4. Threaded through all of this was the principle that there was a public interest in understanding ideas, artefacts and events.

Cummings has never hidden his contempt for humanities subjects, forged partly out of his own experience of studying history at Oxford. He has been a long-term advocate for an expansion of Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) in the school curriculum, and for attracting more Stem graduates into the civil service. His notorious blog-cum-recruitment ad, which sought to attract data scientists and weirdos to Whitehall, was also notable for its dismissal of Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers.

More fundamentally, the humanities play a pivotal ideological role for contemporary conservatism: they sit in the crosshairs of both Thatcherite neoliberals and nationalists. It is often difficult for free marketeers to find common ground with nationalists, especially on issues such as immigration. The possession of a shared enemy provides coherence to an otherwise unwieldy coalition. The figure of the publicly funded humanities graduate, whose cultural privilege grants them access to the London elite, fuels a paranoid fantasy that is now central to conservative ideology.

The neoliberal position is that a humanities degree is a simple waste of money, as revealed in the earnings of graduates. To people of this mindset, the benefit of the post-2010 tuition fee regime, allied to a host of league tables and audits, is that it exposes latent inequalities in higher education that were previously concealed by public funding. If somebody chooses to study art history (and not, say, computer science), then this is a high-risk investment, which they should be personally liable for. The recent announcement by the University of Sunderland that it would be terminating all its history, languages and politics courses, and replacing them with vocational alternatives, therefore represents progress.

The nationalist concern is very different, and stems especially from the perceived influence of continental philosophy over the past 50 years. For those who buy into rightwing conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism or the milder anxiety surrounding postmodernism, humanities graduates are an enemy within, a segment of the liberal elite that lacks national loyalty.

Opposition to public institutions such as the BBC has been incubated by Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers for many years. More recently, Brexit has given nationalists the confidence to cast suspicions upon a wide array of independent public bodies, from universities to the Bank of England. One thing that neoliberals and nationalists can agree on is that anyone whose education and career has been spent in publicly funded liberal institutions, telling a story about the public interest is a fraud. The popular appeal of Johnsonism lies in its antipathy to this elite.

But in favour of what exactly? The Cummings plan is for esoteric forms of rationalism to topple the humanities: not just data scientists but game theorists, cognitive scientists, software developers and people who never went to university should shape government thinking. This is a vision of society as a programmable machine, a form of post-humanism, which denies that culture or history require any specialist interpretation, but merely provide more data to be fed into predictive mathematical models. The social sciences and humanities will eventually be taken over by physicists.

If Cummings wants to accelerate away from the 20th century, then conservative traditionalists want to reverse it. If, as the economics professor Thomas Piketty argues, we are returning to a form of oligarchy last seen prior to the first world war, one can easily envisage how the arts and humanities will be sustained: via the patronage of the rich and the indulgences of their children. The brief historical period, when learning about literature or, yes, Lacan, was a gift from the state, accessible to all regardless of background, is firmly over.

It is telling that, while Cummings wants to hire people who use analytical languages: eg Python, SQL, R, Boris Johnson is just as likely to lapse into Latin. The liberal humanities are being caught in a pincer movement, between hyper-modern futurism and pre-modern classicism. Taken to extremes, the dream of wiping away modern culture in the name of some distant future and some primordial past has inspired the most hideous of rightwing regimes. Even at its mildest, this is a project that sees little intrinsic value in a public library, a primetime documentary or a history degree.

The 20th-century cultural establishment has plenty of failings, which are readily exposed by its opponents. It has never been as inclusive as its rhetoric pretends, and it is far from democratic. Resentment towards cultural and political elites has clearly been brewing for decades, especially among non-Londoners and non-graduates an electoral goldmine for Johnson. Too often, these elites have reflexively countered the attacks of Thatcherites and the Murdoch press by closing ranks, relying on the power of their contact books, free tickets and charm, but only deepening the sense of metropolitan luvvies doing favours for each other. The defence of universities and the BBC is going to be an important test case for how much of that establishment survives this government.

William Davies is a sociologist and political economist. His latest book is Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World

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How the humanities became the new enemy within - The Guardian

The Problem We All Live With and the political awakening of Norman Rockwell – Vox.com

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Sometime on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, a 66-year-old widower and self-described moderate Republican went to his polling place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to vote for his states junior senator for president. Never the most forthcoming of men, Norman Rockwell hadnt told his family he was backing John F. Kennedy. Hed painted portraits of both candidates for the Saturday Evening Post, and he just didnt like Richard Nixons face.

It was only a short walk down Main Street from the two-story Colonial house supposedly once occupied by Aaron Burr, whose derelict red barn Rockwell had converted into his fastidiously tidy studio. Hed called Stockbridge home since relocating from rural Vermont six years earlier, mainly for proximity to its renowned Austen Riggs psychiatric center. His second wife, Mary, who struggled with alcoholism and depression, had been a chronic patient there.

In those newly cosmopolitan times the Mad Men era, for shorthands sake the Anytown, USA, that Rockwell had depicted on hundreds of Post covers was becoming a curio at best and an object of derision at worst. Nixon still espoused a mealy-mouthed fealty to those pseudo-Rockwellian virtues. By choosing Kennedy instead, Rockwell might as well have been casting a ballot to hasten his own obsolescence. But nobody could disagree that hed had a good run.

Born in 1894 on Manhattans Upper West Side, Rockwell had never shown interest in any other career besides commercial illustration. Before his 16th birthday, he had dropped out of high school to enroll at New Yorks Art Students League. Untempted by the bohemia of Greenwich Village and seemingly indifferent to (or unnerved by) the concept of a love life, he had business cards printed for himself while he was still in his teens.

Most midcentury Americans would have had trouble fathoming the idea that Norman Rockwell had ever been that young or unknown. In the four and a half decades since his Post debut in 1916, his humorous vignettes of awkward situations and glowing ones of social and domestic rituals had defined the nations most idyllic self-image. From Andy Hardy movies to Frank Capras Its a Wonderful Life, Hollywoods version of homey American verities was by and large a facsimile of Rockwells.

But by the time he cast that vote in 1960, his perspective was growing increasingly remote from the bulk of his fellow citizens lived experience in cities and postwar suburbs. The concept of kitsch had begun following Rockwell around in print like one of the lovelorn puppies he would include in a painting whenever he was at a loss for an effect (a habit that he would later mock).

Worse, the Saturday Evening Post wasnt the national arbiter it had been. A few months after JFKs inaugural, the magazine would promise jittery advertisers a drastically modernized look under a new editor-in-chief who promptly recanted the Posts endorsement of Nixon the previous fall. The demotion of Rockwells Main Street America to the Rat Packs Nowheresville wasnt explicit, but everybody got the gist.

Its unlikely he even considered retiring. At ease only when at his easel, he took little interest in hobbies or even in his family. Not the most well-rounded of men, Rockwell, when asked to describe his leisure activities by Edward R. Murrow on CBSs Person to Person in 1959, responded that he couldnt think of any, except the countless hours he spent tearing up diaper cloths for use as paint rags.

In any case, he was obviously too sedate to change his spots, no matter how speedily the country around him was changing. That would have been most peoples guess, at least.

It would have been spectacularly wrong. The tumultuous 60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal and the eras unlikeliest practitioner of polemical art.

Even the Norman Rockwell Museum cant make sense of his late-life political transformation. Amid the familiar Rockwelliana on display there is 1964s The Problem We All Live With which his biographer Deborah Solomon, in her 2013 book, American Mirror, calls the most famous painting of the civil-rights movement as jarring as it must have been in the pages of Look magazine more than 50 years ago. But it was only the first of his 1960s paintings to upend everything Norman Rockwell stood for.

Indeed, one of the minor marvels of the 60s was that the period made Rockwell happier than hed ever been. The hippies he came to dote on had a word for it: liberation.

After Mary died unexpectedly of coronary heart disease in August 1959, her husbands vestigial social life centered on a Stockbridge mens club called the Marching and Chowder Society. Its members met once a week to chew over the news of the day, from the nuclear arms race to the Souths roiling battles over desegregation.

Up until then, the average lamppost had taken a livelier interest in current events than Rockwell did. His only concessions to topical urgency had come between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Besides proselytizing for democracy with his epic Four Freedoms series (a quartet of paintings depicting freedom of speech and worship as well as freedom from fear and want the last of these featuring his celebrated image of a familys Thanksgiving feast), hed regaled Post readers with covers featuring a regally posed Rosie the Riveter and a youthful soldiers homecoming. But then hed gone back to his familiar tableaux, seemingly unaffected by Elvis Presley, suburbias advent, or the Cold War and certainly not by Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, or Little Rock.

Rockwell had every reason to feel personally un-implicated in the countrys burgeoning racial strife. Theres no record of him encountering black-white tensions during his youth in New York City and New Rochelle, nor, later on, in relatively isolated (and white) Vermont or Stockbridge. As for his Saturday Evening Post America, it could have been what Ronald Reagan had in mind when he notoriously reminisced about the days when we didnt even know we had a racial problem a we as defining, if far more damning, than the one in The Problem We All Live Withs title.

The Post banned illustrations showing African Americans in anything other than menial roles. Rockwell had generally been docile about that. Very little in his Post work had prepared his audience for how unambiguously and provocatively he declared himself on the subject of desegregation in his Look magazine debut.

At the time, most white Americans still thought of racial injustice as a problem only Southerners wrestled with. The contest between Kennedy and Nixon ran its course without civil rights being much of an issue, with one dramatic exception. In October 1960, a month before the election, Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed after leading an Atlanta sit-in. In a surprise move, JFKs brother Robert F. Kennedy publicly intervened to help secure his release. The Kennedy familys actions while Nixon cautiously kept mum would abruptly change the equation. African American voters significantly bolstered JFKs razor-thin margin of victory.

Rockwells only involvement in the 1960 election, aside from voting, had been his portraits of Kennedy and Nixon. His son Peter (one of the three he had with Mary) remembered Rockwell grousing that the problem with doing Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesnt look like Nixon anymore. As the magazines preferred candidate, Nixon got the cover dated closer to Election Day, not that it did him any good.

Never fond of television, Rockwell probably went to bed without watching the evening news on November 14, 1960, just under a week after Kennedys victory. If so, he wouldnt only have missed the sight of a knackered Nixon shaking hands with the new president-elect in Key Biscayne, Florida. Hed also have missed a mob of white New Orleanians howling abuse as they witnessed the unthinkable: a quartet of US marshals escorting a 6-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges as she entered school to attend first grade.

Bridges was one of just four African American first-graders whod been chosen to integrate the citys school system. But at least Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne got to enter McDonogh 19 school as a trio. Bridges, flanked by the marshals, went up the steps of William Frantz Elementary School on her own.

Not that anybody knew her name. To readers and viewers of most news outlets, she was simply the little Negro girl, and so she remained until the 1990s, when the adult Bridges was reunited at a Black History Month event in New Orleans with one of her real-life escorts and the painting.

What drew Rockwell to the subject three years after the fact? His interest may have been sparked by the writings of psychiatrist Robert Coles, whod met with and counseled Bridges and her family. The artist may have read John Steinbecks 1962 bestseller Travels With Charley, whose concluding chapter contains his eyewitness account of the havoc outside the school on a typical day in the autumn of 1960. One passage, in particular, vividly anticipates the central figure in Rockwells painting: a glimpse of the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

Yet Rockwell unmistakably had Ruby Bridgess ordeal on his mind before either Coles or Steinbeck weighed in. His most ambitious painting of 1961 was The Golden Rule, which featured more than two dozen people of all races and faiths illustrating the caption Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Two of them are African American: a man in a pointedly middle-class white shirt and tie as well as a neatly dressed girl prominently placed in the foreground. In an early version of The Golden Rule, which is the one propped today in the artists studio at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, the girls hands are simply clasped in prayer. In the final painting, theyre clutching two schoolbooks.

Not many Post subscribers in 1961 were likely to miss the allusion to the child whod gotten so much news coverage the previous autumn. Segregationists certainly didnt; they sent Rockwell the only hate mail hed received in his 45-year career. But his relationship with the Post had been deteriorating in any case. Its editors had concluded that his brand of folksy humanism was pass. They also seemed uninterested, as The Golden Rule hinted, that their former mainstay had a burgeoning interest in more provocative social themes. That summer, the new regime unveiled its plans for a revamped Post, including art work ... considerably more abstract than anything that has appeared in the magazine. Rockwells sardonic response was his very funny January 1962 cover, The Connoisseur, depicting a stocky gent in bankers gray pondering a Jackson Pollock riot of splattered red, yellow, and blue.

His imitation Pollock was expert enough to delight the artist Willem de Kooning. But The Connoisseur proved to be the last of his great Post covers. Just five months after it was published, Rockwell got new marching orders, and they rankled. He was to be confined from then on to producing portraits of statesmen, plus the occasional celebrity.

Terrified of ending his relationship with the Post, he tried to oblige his bosses. But in May 1963, he scrawled a remarkably agonized 3 am lament: All of this debasement, depression, unsatisfaction. Isnt this the answer if necessary, die doing something worthwhile. A worthy end ... not humiliating fear and groveling. Have I got the sustaining courage to cut it through? Cut the knot myself not die groveling.

Four months later, he wrote the Posts latest art director that hed come to the conviction that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme.

His major emotional sustenance during this period came from his new wife. Fourteen months after Mary died, after a brief acquaintance, he married Molly Punderson, a 64-year-old schoolteacher who, as biographer Solomon puts it, was not known to have had any male suitors before they wed. But Rockwells marital needs had never been primarily sexual, and he knew what he could count on from her: You will help, be with me, admire me, he addressed Molly in that same insomniac cri de coeur. I have the courage with you.

Rockwells final Post cover, for the memorial issue commemorating John F. Kennedys assassination, that November, was a reprint of the artists 1960 JFK portrait. But by then, hed already signed up with Look. The rival to Henry Luces Life magazine, the more politically adventurous Look had no misgivings about the unlikely image Rockwell proposed as his debut, despite how it diverged from everything he was famous for unless, of course, that was part of its appeal. On October 1, 1963, art director Allen Hurlburt wrote him, As you know, Dan [Mich, Looks editor] and I are very excited about your idea for a painting of the Negro girl and the marshals. ... In checking our production schedules I find that we should have the art work by November 10 to make an early January issue.

Rockwell told Hurlburt hed gotten a head start on the painting, having identified a willing model: I already have the 7 yr old little girl and she is perfect. Her grandmother is sewing the white dress for her. ... Be assured I am very excited about the picture. Excited wasnt a word hed often used about his assignments for the Post.

Rockwells search for the perfect little girl may seem odd, given the common belief that Problem simply replicates a news photograph. But that misconception is an unwitting tribute to how completely the real episode and Rockwells depiction of it have fused in our collective memory. Aside from the basic situation, virtually every detail of the picture is Rockwells invention.

His usual MO was to sketch or paint from photographs of local residents, who would come to his studio and then follow his directions as they struck various poses. Hed employed a photographer named Bill Scovill virtually full-time since 1953, and it was Scovill who likely took the reference photos for The Problem We All Live With.

Only two African American families lived in Stockbridge then. Rockwell was friendly with the patriarch of one of them: Bill Gunn, whod posed for The Golden Rule and also chaired the Berkshire County chapter of the NAACP. Rockwell became a lifetime member in October 1963, around the time he began working on The Problem We All Live With.

Two of Gunns granddaughters were approximately the right age to stand in for Bridges: first cousins named Lynda and Anita Gunn. Lynda ended up doing most of the posing. Anita and other members of the Gunn family, who had been invited to observe the photo sessions, enjoyed the Coca-Colas that Rockwell passed around. For Lynda, the tricky part was balancing herself on two wooden boards front foot tilting upward, back foot tilting down to simulate walking. It was an old device of Rockwells, and he also used it for the separate reference shots of her four adult escorts.

At least two of the burly men who posed for the painting were authentic US marshals sent out from Boston to oblige him. Another was Stockbridge Police Chief William J. Obanhein, who, oddly enough, would later enjoy a peculiarly 60s-ish fame of his own as the Officer Obie of Arlo Guthries 1967 hit song Alices Restaurant.

But well never know which of Bridgess escorts he impersonated. In one of Rockwells boldest breaks with representational convention, the marshals are painted from their shoulders down not just faceless but headless. While that doesnt dehumanize them, exactly if anything, it makes their determined bearing more eloquent nothing could better emphasize Rockwells understanding that the moments emotional truth lay in Ruby Bridgess solitude. Of course they were terribly disappointed that I didnt show their faces, he would explain years later. But if Id shown the four faces, you wouldnt have seen the little girl.

Rockwells depiction of Bridges was another matter. He chose to darken her skin tone, making it darker, in fact, than that of either Lynda or Anita Gunn. Today, such artistic license deliberately darkening a subjects appearance as a way of overemphasizing race and provoking the viewer would be seen as racially insensitive. But he plainly hoped to disconcert Looks readers by making her blackness the pictures central issue. Paradoxically, that also made her unmistakable individuality more arresting.

Except for the somewhat too-vivid yellow of the marshals armbands arguably, the pictures only flaw and the almost bridal whiteness of the little girls dress, which is one of its masterstrokes, the only patch of color thats meant to draw the eye is the stain on the wall behind them, the residue of a flung tomato. (It took me ten tomatoes to look as though it had really splashed, Rockwell later recalled.) But its not as prominent as Problems most shocking ingredient today: the all-caps racial slur scrawled on the wall.

With its decapitated marshals and the diminutive Ruby walking in stark profile, the painting is among Rockwells most stylized. There is even an artificiality to the way the four bodyguards left arms are cocked back so that the viewer can see their badges as well as the court order tucked into the lead marshals side jacket pocket. The artist has pared down the actual event to its essential meaning an atypical treatment for Rockwell, who loved to pack his canvases with incidental detail.

Whats strikingly absent, except by unpleasant implication, is Rockwells most durable theme: community. The mob heckling Ruby Bridges is nowhere to be seen, and only gradually does it sink in that its because were looking at Bridges and her escorts from the mobs point of view. We can only dissociate ourselves from them by refusing complicity.

When the Look issue came out, Rockwell was in Moscow, which would have confirmed white bigots worst suspicions even or especially if theyd known he was participating in a cultural exchange program at the US Information Agencys behest. He didnt return home until early February, entirely unaware of how The Problem We All Live With had been received.

According to Solomon, he was greeted by sacks of disapproving mail from readers that Looks editors had forwarded to him. The negative letters were venomous: Anybody who advocates, aids or abets the vicious crime of racial integration is nothing short of a traitor to the white race, and a traitor to the illustrious white founders of this country, wrote G.L. Le Bon of New Orleans. THE WAR HAS JUST BEGUN!

But there were supportive letters, too. Chester Martin of Chattanooga, Tennessee, wrote, I have never been so deeply moved by any picture. ... Thank you for showing this white Southerner how ridiculous he looks. The truth is pretty hard to take until we get it from a Norman Rockwell. Onetime Negro League third baseman turned real estate broker and occasional poet David J. Malarcher was stirred enough to send Look a poem hed written in honor of the illustration, including these verses: Their hands are tense / Their gait is rare / Their arms are ready for the fray / The little girl is unaware / That she is history today.

Another approving letter came from a self-described former Rockwell debunker whod once scoffed at how maudlin and commercial his work was. Permit me now to choke on my words. ... YOU have just said in one painting what people cannot say in a lifetime. In his thank-you letter, Rockwell modestly explained that I am [sic] just had my seventieth birthday and I am trying to be a bit more adult in my work.

Adult is an interesting choice of words for a man his age. When Mary was alive, Rockwell had plunged into therapy, almost as if he couldnt stand the idea of Mary monopolizing the shrinks attention. He had sessions twice a week with Erik Erikson, the analyst to whom we owe the locution identity crisis. Erikson was famous mainly for his work with troubled children, and the most beloved illustrator in American magazine history occasionally resembled one. The side of Rockwell that had never matured left him uncommonly dependent on validation from others, maybe now more than ever.

As a result, Hurlburts encouragement thrilled him. Besides offering specific recommendations that Rockwell happily accepted it was Hurlburt who suggested the marshals be depicted with their arms back he provided the support and approval Rockwell craved. I dont want to sound slushy or sentimental, he wrote Hurlburt in the spring of 1966, but I cant resist writing you to tell you how much your creative art direction has meant to me. You have given me the opportunity over and over again to paint pictures of contemporary subjects that I am fascinated with.

The most unsparing picture he ever painted was the accompanying illustration for a 1965 Look article called Southern Justice. As unknown today as Problem is famous, Murder in Mississippi was Rockwells depiction of the June 21, 1964, killing of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney two white New Yorkers and a local African American volunteer by Klansmen and local police. Spooky, harshly lit, and almost barren, its as close as Rockwell ever came to Goyas Los Desastres de la Guerra.

Because the exact circumstances under which the three men died werent known, Rockwell struggled with deciding how to portray their final moments, initially including their killers in the frame before reducing them to looming shadows. What stays constant is his depiction of the victims: one dead, one dying, one grimly preparing to meet his fate.

Sprawled on the ground, Goodman has already been killed. Schwerner is still standing, his head turned in profile to gaze at his executioners. Linking the two white men is Chaney, whos been shot once and is on his knees, clutching Schwerner with both hands for support. Schwerners right hand has pulled him close in an embrace, tugging up Chaneys T-shirt to expose his bare back, Rockwells way of emphasizing both Chaneys race and his vulnerability.

Rockwells unusually detailed notes on the murders are a moving testimony to his determination to do right by the civil rights workers. He remarked on Goodman and Schwerners beatnik sneakers and blue jeans. In one poignant observation, he wrote that they had, all three, had haircuts the day before. The reference photos also emphasize his emotional commitment. His son Jarvis modeled as Schwerner, and Rockwell himself posed for a detail photo of Chaneys bloodied hand gripping Schwerners bicep. Both the hand and the bicep are Rockwells.

It could be the most strangely haunting picture of Norman Rockwell anybody ever took. Because his facial expression doesnt matter, hes gazing placidly at the camera, wearing a slight smile. Yet, consciously or not, by impersonating Schwerner and Chaney simultaneously, hes claiming an identification with both victims one black, one white.

I tried in a big way to make an angry painting, he wrote to Hurlburt in May 1965. If I just had a bit of Ben Shahn in me it would have helped. Its an interesting wish, since the very left-wing Shahns Depression-era paintings had derived their force from semi-grotesque distortions that were utterly at odds with Rockwells innate naturalism. As it happened, Hurlburt apparently agreed; Look opted to print not Rockwells final version of the scene but one of his rawer preliminary studies. Only 18 months into their association, this was the acid test of Rockwells trust in his new patrons. Initially disgruntled, he ended up conceding that All the anger that was in the sketch had gone out of the finished painting.

Look would never print a Rockwell picture that angry again.

During the next five years, Rockwells paintings on contemporary subjects for Look were hardly confined to indictments. Hed simply gotten more selective in the aspects of modern America he found worth celebrating. He painted more than one picture championing the Peace Corps: I love ... the ideals and the performances of these young people, he told Hurlburt. He boosted Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty. Maybe most endearingly, he was besotted with NASA, producing gadget-happy depictions of the space program.

Even the third and last of his major civil rights paintings for Look struck a relatively hopeful note, amounting to a reconciliation of the Norman Rockwell of yore with his new focus on topicality. New Kids in the Neighborhood featured a pair of black children and a trio of white ones sizing each other up as a moving van is unloaded behind them. The benign mood is undercut only by a detail that isnt easy to spot even face-to-face with the original and that must have been indiscernible in Looks reduced reproduction: a white woman peering from a nearby window, her expression conveying worry, verging on hostility.

Rockwell hardly wanted New Kids in the Neighborhood to be his last word on the subject. But he and Look were unable to agree on the much grimmer painting he proposed next. Existing in multiple versions, none of which seems to be fully finished, Blood Brothers depicts two men one black, one white dying side by side in a pool of their intermingled blood. The point, of course, is that you cant tell whose blood is whose.

Initially, Rockwell wanted to set Blood Brothers in the ghetto, in the parlance of the era. But Look urged him to transpose the scene to Vietnam, which would obviously have implied a different set of pieties. Rockwell gave the revision a dutiful try. By late 1968, however, he was grumbling, I think I want to go back to the ghetto.

Either because of that impasse or some other dispute, he and Hurlburt eventually abandoned the idea. But if the combat zone version of Blood Brothers had seen print, it would have been Rockwells only painting for Look to deal with the Vietnam War head-on. He may have balked because the concept left his personal position on the war unstated, and he and his wife, Molly, were both staunch in their opposition to it.

As citizens, he and Molly werent shy about letting Lyndon Johnson know where they stood. An uncooperative sitter when Rockwell had painted the new president in 1964, LBJ likely grew weary of the stream of telegrams from the couple demanding negotiations instead of bombing. But a Rockwell artwork directly attacking the war would have been too polarizing for Looks editors, and it appears he never proposed one.

What he could do was agree to paint philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russells portrait for the very left-leaning Ramparts in 1967. Almost a quarter-century after tackling the Four Freedoms for the Pentagons Office of War Information, he firmly refused a Marine Corps request to produce a propaganda poster. I was supposed to do a portrait of a soldier in Vietnam kneeling over to help a wounded villager and love shining in their eyes, Rockwell told Womens Wear Daily in 1968. I thought about it a lot, and my wife said, You cant do that and you know you cant. [So] Im doing John Glenn instead. The first American astronaut to orbit Earth was the kind of Marine Rockwell had no problem lionizing.

By the late 60s, he often heard from older fans who wondered why he couldnt go on giving them those sweet old pictures like you used to do. But Rockwell was unmoved. You cant make the good old days come back just by painting pictures of them, he snorted. That kind of stuff is dead now and I think its about time, he told another interviewer.

After a lifetime of diffidence, Rockwells interviews from the end of the decade are remarkably energetic and cocky, militant, even. Without disavowing his earlier work I couldnt have had my tongue in my cheek for 50 years he never stopped insisting that red-cheeked little boys and mongrel dogs no longer typified America. Now its all sex or race troubles, he remarked, homosexuality or college riots, and I think its a great challenge. Even more startlingly, he declared in that pivotal year of protest, 1968, that he couldnt paint the Four Freedoms now. I just dont believe in it.

A different kind of freedom entranced him instead. Rockwell was enamored of the counterculture, not least for its visual clat. I think the hippies and the Yippies are wonderful, he told the International Herald-Tribune. I think of everybody as models, and Im so goddamned sick of business suits with conventional haircuts, like I have. In 1968, Rockwell pointedly included a hippie couple he in a fringed jacket, she with a flower in her hair among the concerned citizens in The Right to Know, his last political painting, which shows a multicultural cross-section of Americans staring accusingly at an empty leather chair. (The captions mention of wars we do not want finally made his position on Vietnam explicit.) Touchingly, among the faces all dramatically underlit is the artist himself, his hand tenderly resting on the young womans arm.

Rockwell desperately wanted to paint beat poet Allen Ginsberg as well as Bob Dylan and his family. While nothing came of either project, Rockwell did paint two of Dylans onetime sidemen when he agreed to do the cover art for guitarist Mike Bloomfield and organist Al Koopers album The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Its one of his most carefree paintings, showing Bloomfield smoldering through ice-blue irises and looking more sensual than any other man Rockwell ever painted, as Vanity Fairs David Kamp noted in a 2010 essay.

Nonetheless, Look expected Rockwell to do his due diligence in election years, even if his enthusiasms lay elsewhere. Tasked with painting the 1968 presidential candidates Gene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey among the Democrats; Nixon and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller among the Republicans he chose to render all of them with two faces: the Rockwellized version of Greek masks of comedy and tragedy. (He wanted to paint independent segregationist candidate George Wallace in front of a funereally black background, but Look vetoed that one.)

As had been the case in 1960, the eventual Republican nominee the hardest man I had to paint, ever was a challenge. [Nixons] got a mean eye, he said. And then he has these big chestnuts in his jowls. That August, with the Republican convention done and the Democrats debacle in Chicago looming, Rockwell wrote to Hurlburt, I was delighted to have you call me yesterday and tell me that I dont have to paint Mr. Nixon again.

But he did. Once Nixon won, Rockwell had to paint him as Mr. President. Its now the only Rockwell painting in the National Portrait Gallery, and this time around, he managed what hed once said was impossible. His subject looks like a nice man who is, nonetheless, unmistakably Richard Nixon. At any rate, Rockwell as no one else did captured Nixons eternal, tentative, thwarted wish to be the good-hearted person he wasnt, which is the paintings peculiar beauty.

Despite his aversion to the new president as a subject for portraiture, Rockwell had voted for him this time around. Whatever prompted his choice loss of heart, alienation from the Democratic Partys 1968 shambles, or credulous hope that Nixon might actually end the war in Vietnam it was a wan coda to the most dramatic and exhilarated (indeed, the only) self-reinvention of his long career.

Largely sidelined after 1972 as he developed dementia, eventually dying in 1978 at age 84, Rockwell never painted another significant picture again.

Tom Carson is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, the New York Times, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and other publications.

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Bitcoin Cash’s Misdirected Transactions Make Up a $2.8 Million Jackpot – Crypto Briefing

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Millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin Cash have been misplaced due to erroneous transactions.

Ever since Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin in 2017, users have inadvertently sent transactions to nested Segwit addresses, a type of address that Bitcoin Cash does not support. Later changes to Segwit rules caused the pool of lost funds to grow in 2018 and 2019.

CoinMetrics estimates that a minimum of 19,000 BCH has been lost over time.

Now, it has dug into past events to find out how much has been recoveredand how much is left.

In 2017, more than 400 BCH was at stake (worth $500,000 at the time).

To access those funds, miners needed to improve their chances at mining a block. To do so, they would have needed to spend $15,000 to rent out a small fraction of Bitcoins mining hashrate for a day. In return, they would gain a 63% chance of mining the jackpot and earning $500,000.

Though one miner seemingly attempted to reap a reward in this way, he never actually succeeded due to the difficulty in finding mining pools that were willing to break certain standards rules.

Ultimately, the Bitcoin Cash community recovered the funds. BTC.com and the Reddit user bchsegwitrecover distributed the lost cryptocurrency back to its proper owners for a finders fee.

However, much of that Bitcoin Cash (402 BCH) went unclaimed.

Though BTC.com continued to recover user funds, missing funds continued to grow.

Hard forks in November 2018 and May 2019 modified the rules around Segwit recovery. In the months between those two changes, nearly 4,000 BCH accumulatedworth $1.6 million at the time.

When a miner attempted to obtain those funds in 2019, large mining pools forced a chain reorganization. This prevented the user from profiting, and it sent funds back to the proper owners.

The mining pool BTC.TOP succeeded in recovering about 3,800 BCH, but this only represents about half of all Bitcoin Cash that has been lost and found over time.

CoinMetrics suggests that 9,128 BCH, currently worth $2.8 million, is still unaccounted for.

Potentially ill-gotten mining rewards are entirely unrelated to Bitcoin Cashs ongoing mining tax controversy, which has attracted much more attention over the past several weeks.

In January, several mining pools proposed directing 12.5% of block rewards toward infrastructure development. Mining pools plan to enforce this by orphaning blocks from non-compliant miners. A later revision proposed reducing the tax over time, but this has done little to earn the communitys approval.

Dissidence continues to grow: BCHN has recently released a drop-in mining client that allows miners who disagree with the taxation plan to comply with future upgrades. This could potentially avoid a chain split similar to the one that created Bitcoin SV, according to some commenters.

Since the taxation plan will ultimately be enacted through voting, its future is uncertain.

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Bitcoin Cash's Misdirected Transactions Make Up a $2.8 Million Jackpot - Crypto Briefing

An unknown Bitcoin Cash miner just Swept nearly $3 million worth of BCH – Coingape

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A Bitcoin Cash (BCH) miner has successfully swept and recovered $3 million worth of the coin.

The coins, technically lost in the digital ether, had accumulated over the last three years and only accessible to Bitcoin Cash miners.

To understand how the miner pulled this off, one has to travel back in time and understand the special relationship between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin is the first network is the first autonomous system where users can send and receive funds without a third party.

A financial institution. It continues to enjoy the first mover advantage but is still plagued with several issues chief amongst them being scalability.

Roger Ver, a former Bitcoin evangelist turned avid BCH supporter, is a conspicuous figure in the Bitcoin Cash community.

The spin off was formed on Aug 1, 2017. And the main difference is that it took the block-size increment debate as a reliable mode of improving the networks scalability without secondary layers like Lightning Network.

Bitcoin Cash also implemented SegWit (segregated witness) on Aug 24, 2017. And this is where all these monies, a modest estimate places it at around 9,000 BCH or roughly $3 million, accessible only to miners.

The initial fork and the second hard fork on Aug 24, 2017 created similar assets that shared every other detail except the nested SegWit which look like normal P2SH addresses, but their spending script uses SegWit.

Nested SegWit offered an easy and backward compatible way to onboard users to SegWit. With time, users mistakenly sent BCH to this nested SegWit addresses. To access the jackpot, a miner needs to only know the executing script.

The bet and the effort to recover this started back in 2017. Then a Redditor noticed a worrying trend that Trezor cold wallet users were sending BCH to a nested SegWit address.

Considering this, he proposed the setting up of a miner-run service to recover and re-distribute back BCH to users less a finders fee.

The first recovery was initiated on Nov 2017 and has been going on diligently since mid-Sept 2018.

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An unknown Bitcoin Cash miner just Swept nearly $3 million worth of BCH

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A Bitcoin Cash (BCH) miner has successfully swept and recovered $3 million worth of the coin. The coins were only accessible to BCH miners.

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Dalmas Ngetich

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CoinGape

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An unknown Bitcoin Cash miner just Swept nearly $3 million worth of BCH - Coingape

The Crypto Daily Movers and Shakers -02/03/20 – Yahoo Finance

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Bitcoin slipped by 0.05% on Sunday. Following on from a 1.91% slide on Saturday. Bitcoin ended the week down by 14.3% at $8,556.7.

A choppy start to the day saw Bitcoin fall from an early morning high $8,716.5 to $8,550 levels before striking a mid-day intraday high $8,775.0.

Steering clear of the major support levels, Bitcoin broke through the first major resistance level at $8,741.23.

Hitting reverse through the afternoon, Bitcoin fell to a late afternoon intraday low $8,460.

Finding support at the first major support level at $8,469.53, Bitcoin managed to reverse the losses from the day.

The near-term bearish trend, formed at late Junes swing hi $13,764.0, remained firmly intact, with Bitcoin having struggled to break out from $10,000 levels.

For the bulls, Bitcoin would need to break out from $11,000 levels to form a near-term bullish trend.

Across the rest of the top 10 cryptos, it was a mixed day for the crypto majors.

Bitcoin Cash SV and Bitcoin Cash ABC bucked the trend on Sunday, with gains of 8.01% and 0.89% respectively.

It was a bearish start to the month for the rest of the pack, however.

Tezos slid by 4.35% to lead the way down.

Binance Coin (-1.72%), Cardanos ADA (-3.03%), Moneros XMR (-2.06%), and Stellars Lumen (-1.50%) also saw heavy losses.

EOS (-0.03%), Ethereum (-0.05%), Litecoin (-0.76%), Ripples XRP (-0.95%), Trons TRZ (-0.64%) saw modest losses on the day.

It was a bearish week for the pack, however, with all the majors seeing heavy losses.

Litecoin (-27.77%), Tezos (-25.79%), Cardanos ADA (-25.94%), Moneros XMR (-24.18%), Stellars Lumen (-23.21%), Trons TRX (-22.70%), Bitcoin Cash ABC (-22.48%), Bitcoin Cash SV (-22.47%), and Ethereum (-21.13%) all saw particularly heavy losses.

Binance Coin (-17.5%), EOS (-19.66%), and Ripples XRP (-19.78%) saw relatively modest losses in the week.

Through the week, the crypto total market cap rose to a Monday high $290.09bn before hitting a Sunday low $240.85bn. At the time of writing, the total market cap stood at $246.41bn.

Bitcoins dominance rose to 64.% levels before easing back. At the time of writing, Bitcoins dominance stood at 64.0%, which was still up from sub-63% levels seen on Monday. The rise came off the back of heavier losses for the rest of the crypto majors on Sunday.

Trading volumes hit a week high $196.34bn on Thursday before sliding back to sub-$130bn levels. At the time of writing, 24-hr volumes stood at $128.81bn.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was up 1.16% to $8,655.6. A bullish start to the day saw Bitcoin rise from an early morning low $8,524.6 to a high $8,700.0.

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

Elsewhere, it was also a bullish start to the day for the major cryptos.

Cardanos ADA and Binance Coin were up by 2.26% and by 2.00% to lead the way.

Bitcoin would need to move back through to $8,700 levels to bring the first major resistance level at $8,734.47 back into play.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Bitcoin to break out from the morning high $8,700.0.

Barring a broad-based crypto recovery, the first major resistance level would likely pin Bitcoin back on the day.

In the event of a crypto rally, the second major resistance level at $8,912.23 and $9,000 levels could come into play.

Failure to move back through $8,700 levels could see Bitcoin hit reverse.

A fall back through to sub-$8,600 levels would bring the first major support level at $8,419.47 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, however, Bitcoin should steer well clear of sub-$8,400 support levels and the 23.6% FIB of $8,200.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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The Crypto Daily Movers and Shakers -02/03/20 - Yahoo Finance

Bitcoin and Altcoins Trading Near Crucial Juncture – Cryptonews

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This past week, bitcoin fell more than 5% and it settled below the USD 8,850 support area. BTC/USD even spiked on a couple of occasions below the USD 8,550 and USD 8,500 support levels. It is currently (08:00 UTC) consolidating losses above USD 8,500 and it could either recover towards USD 9,000 or extend its decline to USD 8,250.

Similarly, most major altcoins are preparing for the next major move, including ethereum, XRP, litecoin, bitcoin cash, BNB, EOS, TRX, ADA, and XLM. ETH/USD is consolidating near USD 220, with resistances near USD 225 and USD 230. XRP/USD seems to be struggling to stay above USD 0.230 and USD 0.228 support levels.

Total market capitalization

After testing the USD 8,450 zone, bitcoin price started a short term upside correction. BTC/USD recovered above the USD 8,550 and USD 8,600 levels. An initial resistance is near the USD 8,700 level. However, the first key resistance is near the USD 8,850 level, above which the price could test the USD 9,000 weekly resistance.To start a strong increase, bitcoin must settle above USD 9,000. If not, there are chances of more losses below the USD 8,600 and USD 8,550 levels. The next major support is near USD 8,250.

Ethereum price seems to be forming a strong support base above the USD 210 and USD 212 levels. On the upside, ETH/USD must climb above the USD 225 and USD 230 resistance levels to start a fresh increase. The next weekly resistance is near the USD 240 level.On the downside, the USD 212 and USD 210 levels hold the key. A bearish break below USD 210 might lead the price towards the USD 200 support area.

Bitcoin cash price tested the key USD 300 support level this past week. BCH/USD is currently forming a base above the USD 305 and USD 310 levels. If the price gains pace above the USD 325 level, it could recover towards the USD 340 and USD 350 resistance levels. On the downside, the main supports are near USD 305 and USD 300.Litecoin struggled to stay above the USD 62.00 and USD 60.00 support levels. On the downside, the USD 56.00 support area is acting as a strong buy zone. Therefore, there are high chances of a fresh upward move above the USD 60.00 and USD 60.00 levels. The next stop for the bulls could be USD 64.50.XRP price is facing a couple of key resistances near the USD 0.235 level (the previous breakdown support). If the price climbs above USD 0.235 and gains momentum above USD 0.238, the bulls are likely to aim a test of the USD 0.245 level. On the downside, the main weekly supports are near USD 0.222 and USD 0.220.

In the past three sessions, many small-capitalization altcoins gained traction and surged more than 10%, including BCN, DRG, ELF, AION, REN, BTG, VSYS, REP, and LUNA. Conversely, KNC and MOF are down more than 10%.

Overall, bitcoin price is trading near a crucial juncture above the USD 8,550 and USD 8,500 supports. Therefore, there are chances of a fresh increase above USD 8,850 and USD 9,000 unless there is a break below the USD 8,500 support area._____

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Bitcoin and Altcoins Trading Near Crucial Juncture - Cryptonews

Turkey to Inspect Cryptocurrency Exchanges as Part of Government Offensive Against Online Gambling – Bitcoin News

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Turkish authorities will soon be going after crypto exchanges operating in the country, local media reported. Although the trading platforms are not the prime target of a new push to increase budget receipts, they will be placed under close examination. The news comes as a military escalation with Syria and the coronavirus outbreak in the region increase demand for alternatives to the national fiat currency.

Also read: Australian Court Accepts Cryptocurrency Exchange Account as Security for Legal Costs

Turkeys Financial Crimes Investigation Board (Masak) will conduct the checks as part of its offensive against what Turkish regulators regard as illegal betting and gambling in the virtual space. Online gaming, unless organized by the government, has been prohibited for over a decade, but many Turks continue to play on the internet.

In an interview with the state-run Anadolu Agency, Masak Chairman Hayrettin Kurt revealed that illegal bets and games of chance will be treated as crimes under a draft legislation that has been filed in the Turkish parliament. The Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) will block local and foreign websites that facilitate them. The head of the board added that most of these platforms are based abroad and Turkish regulators are working in cooperation with international counterparts on the issue.

Masak has so far established that the annual revenue from Turkey of these gambling platforms amounts to 350 400 million Turkish lira (up to $64 million). Following the measures undertaken by the board in 2018, the state revenues from the sector increased by around 10 billion liras in 2019, or approximately $1.6 billion.

Hayrettin Kurt emphasized that the Financial Crimes Investigation Board will continue its efforts to prevent the tax losses. Working closely with other administrations, Masak has registered an increase in the proceeds from fines its imposing for online betting and gambling. They currently range between 10,000 and 43,000 liras (almost $7,000) per violation.

Discussing further how online gaming works, the Masak official pointed out that various alternative payment tools are often employed, including cryptocurrencies. Thats why the board intends to check digital asset trading platforms, which will be closely examined in the near future as part of the efforts to suppress what Turkey views as illegal business. Quoted by the crypto news outlet Muhabbit, Hayrettin Kurt stated:

We have recently prepared a very serious action plan. We will conduct a serious investigation on the accounts that use cryptocurrency exchanges which act as intermediaries.

The Masak chairman also made it clear that the Turkish state has already obtained the means to track gamblers and online gaming platforms, even on the deep web, and warned that offenders will not escape government penalties. The investigative body has discussed the attractiveness of cryptocurrencies for participants in the black economy and explored the experience of other nations in the sector. Hayrettin Kurt remarked that while some governments prohibit their use in payments or are developing their own digital currencies, others have adopted regulations for crypto assets and exchanges.

Cryptocurrencies in Turkey, with its inflation-stricken economy and political instability in the past few years, have become an attractive investment for ordinary citizens. According to media reports, the demand for cryptos and foreign fiat currencies is now rising in the country, this time on the backdrop of a recent military clash with Syrian forces and tensions with Russia, as well as the spread of the coronavirus epidemic in the region. Almost 320 BTC have changed hands only on the BTCTurk exchange in the past 24 hours, with the price per coin reaching a high of close to 55,000 liras ($8,800).

The importance of the Turkish crypto market has been highlighted by global leaders in the space establishing presence there. Among them are crypto exchange Binance, which introduced support for the lira through a partnership with a local payment processor, and the major crypto exchange in Eastern Europe, Exmo, which registered a Turkish subsidiary last year. In early January, news came out that Turkish authorities are stepping up efforts to increase oversight in the crypto space.

Online betting and gambling has seen significant growth with the development of internet and mobile technologies, and not only in Turkey. Cryptocurrencies have contributed to the trend as well with the utility they bring to electronic payments and their privacy-oriented features. Online gaming platforms, like Bitcoin.coms Cash Games for example, accept cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin cash (BCH). Besides, not all countries facing socio-economic challenges have a negative stance on this type of gambling. Venezuela, for example, recently authorized the opening of a crypto casino in the landmark Humboldt Hotel in Caracas.

Whats your opinion about the measures Turkey plans to take against online gambling and cryptocurrency exchanges? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation, endorsement, or sponsorship of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Did you know you could win big with bitcoin gambling? Choose from a range of BCH games including BCH poker, BCH slots, and many more. All games are provably fairgood luck!

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Bulgaria. Quoting Hitchens, Lubomir says: Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do. International politics and economics are two other sources of inspiration.

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Turkey to Inspect Cryptocurrency Exchanges as Part of Government Offensive Against Online Gambling - Bitcoin News

SEC Karate-Chops Steven Seagal Over Promoting Cryptocurrency Touted as the Next Gen Bitcoin – Bitcoin News

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged actor Steven Seagal for unlawfully promoting a cryptocurrency investment scheme claiming to be the next generation of bitcoin. Seagal failed to disclose that he was being compensated in cash and crypto by Bitcoiin2gen, or B2G, for marketing its token offering, such as on Twitter and Facebook.

Also read: Bitcoin, Tesla Stock, Tron: How Warren Buffett Got His First Bitcoin

The SEC announced Thursday that it has settled charges against Hollywood actor and producer Steven Seagal over his promotion of a cryptocurrency investment product. The SEC explained that Seagal touted on social media a security that was being offered and sold in an initial coin offering (ICO) without disclosing that the issuer was paying him for the promotions. The offering was conducted by Bitcoiin2gen, also known as B2G. Noting that the actor violated the Securities Act, the Commission elaborated:

Seagal failed to disclose he was promised $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of B2G tokens in exchange for his promotions, which included posts on his public social media accounts encouraging the public not to miss out on Bitcoiin2gens ICO and a press release titled Zen Master Steven Seagal Has Become the Brand Ambassador of Bitcoiin2gen.

The SECs order finds that Seagal violated the anti-touting provisions of the federal securities laws. Without admitting or denying the SECs findings, Seagal agreed to pay $157,000 in disgorgement, which represents his actual promotional payments, plus prejudgment interest, and a $157,000 penalty. In addition, Seagal agreed not to promote any securities, digital or otherwise, for three years, the agency clarified.

Steven Seagal earned his net worth as a big action movie star of the 1980s and 90s. He appeared in more than 50 films, including Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Out for Justice, Under Siege, and Out of Reach. Seagals net worth is now $16 million, according to celebritynetworth.com. The 67-year-old currently lives in Moscow, Russia. President Vladimir Putin presented a Russian passport to him in 2016.

According to the SECs order, from about Feb. 12 to March 6, 2018, Seagal touted the B2G cryptocurrency investment opportunity on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. At the time, he had approximately 107,000 followers on Twitter and 6.7 million on Facebook. While he was not running the ICO, Seagal allowed his pictures to be used on Bitcoiin2gens official website and marketing materials. He additionally received payments for participating in a webinar with potential investments.

Bitcoiin2gen described its B2G tokens as the next generation of bitcoin, the SEC wrote. Its marketing materials say Bitcoiin 2nd Generation. Bigger and better than the original. The company claimed that the funds raised would be used to build an ecosystem that would allow users to trade B2G tokens, provide wallet staking, and trade altcoins and fiat currencies, all on a secure, comprehensive platform,' the SEC described, noting:

Participants in the ICO invested bitcoin, U.S. dollars, euros, or made payments via credit card in exchange for B2G tokens.

The SEC further pointed out that Bitcoiin2gens press release included a quote from Seagal stating that he endorsed the token offering wholeheartedly. Noting that these promotions came six months after its DAO Report warning that cryptocurrencies sold in ICOs may be securities, the SEC emphasized that in accordance with the anti-touting provisions of the federal securities laws, any celebrity or other individual who promotes a virtual token or coin that is a security must disclose the nature, scope, and amount of compensation received in exchange for the promotion. Kristina Littman, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Divisions Cyber Unit, clarified:

These investors were entitled to know about payments Seagal received or was promised to endorse this investment so they could decide whether he may be biased. Celebrities are not allowed to use their social media influence to tout securities without appropriately disclosing their compensation.

What do you think of the SEC charging Steven Seagal for promoting a cryptocurrency investment scheme without disclosing compensation? Let us know in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation, endorsement, or sponsorship of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, CNN, and Bitcoiin2gen.

Did you know you can buy and sell BCH privately using our noncustodial, peer-to-peer Local Bitcoin Cash trading platform? The local.Bitcoin.com marketplace has thousands of participants from all around the world trading BCH right now. And if you need a bitcoin wallet to securely store your coins, you can download one from us here.

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.

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Ripple Would Be Unprofitable Without XRP Sales, CEO Admits – Cryptonews

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Brad Garlinghouse. Source: a video screenshot

California-based fintech company Ripple would not have been where it is today without the monthly selling from its massive holding of XRP tokens, an admission from its CEO suggests.

In an interview with the Financial Times published on Friday, Ripples CEO Brad Garlinghouse was pressed on Ripples financial situation and revenue sources, but appeared hesitant to give clear answers with regards to XRPs role in funding Ripples operations. The article said:

When pressed on Ripples own profitability, Mr. Garlinghouse noted that Ripple, the company, was cash flow positive. How much of that cash flow was coming from service provision as opposed to sales of pre-existing XRP stock was less clear.

Pressed further about XRPs specific role as a revenue source for Ripple, Garlinghouse said:

Well XRP is one source. I dont know how to answer that because if you took away our software revenues, that would make us less profitable. If you took away all our XRP, that makes us less profitable. So I dont think about it as one thing, the CEO said, while adding later: We would not be profitable or cash flow positive [without selling XRP], I think Ive said that. We have now.

A popular trader and analyst Luke Martin, reacted by tweeting: Dumping XRP on you is how Ripple stays alive.

Also, Martin Walker, a director of banking & finance at industry organization Center for Evidence-Based Management, noted that even XRP users such as remittance company MoneyGram, co-owned by Ripple, sell the token whenever they get it, implying that the more professional users XRP attracts, the more tokens will be sold on the open market:

In the same article by the FT, MoneyGram confirmed that it is compensated by Ripple in XRP for developing and bringing liquidity to foreign exchange markets, facilitated by the On Demand Liquidity platform: We refer to this compensation as market development fees.

Watch the latest reports by Block TV.

As reported in January, Ripple reduced sales of XRP from its escrow fund last quarter when it secured USD 200 million in funding. In September 2019, Garlinghouse confirmed that Ripple is selling XRP to some of their institutional clients at a discount.

The company has long been under suspicion for exercising a great deal of control over XRP, while also using the token mainly as a funding vehicle for its own operations. Although this would imply that Ripple has a vested interest in keeping the price of XRP up, the asset is still down by more than 90% from its all-time high in early 2018. Bitcoin, by comparison, is currently down about 55% from its all-time high.

As of press time on Monday (10:50 UTC), XRP is up by 0.6% over the past 24 hours to a price of USD 0.234. Meanwhile, bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) were up by 1.6% and 1.5%, respectively.____Learn more:The USD 500bn Card Didn't Help Ripple, XRP 'Stays in the Crosshairs'Ripple is Like Amazon In Its Early Days, Says Brad Garlinghouse

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Ripple Would Be Unprofitable Without XRP Sales, CEO Admits - Cryptonews

13,000 ATMs in South Korea to Support Litecoin Withdrawal and Remittances – Cointelegraph

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On Feb. 28, the Litecoin Foundation announced a partnership with MeconCash to roll-out Litecoin (LTC) to Korean won withdrawals and remittances from 13,000 ATMs in South Korea.

The partnership will see LTC integrated onto MeconCashs M.Pay payments platform. Litecoin will also be accepted as payment on MeconCashs retail platform MeconMall, and to pay for games that accept M.Pay rewards.

According to CryptoCompare, 24-hour trade between Litcoin and won produced nearly $4.3 million in trade comprising 0.82 percent of total trade at press time.

Charlie Lee, the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation, described the partnership as a big step toward expanding Litecoins footprint in the South Korean market.

In 2018, South Korea produced a record volume of remittances with $6.25 billion worth of transfers.

An increasing number of cryptocurrencies are seeking to capture the Asian remittance market, with Ripple launching several partnerships in the region during February.

On Feb. 25, Ripple announced that South Korean cross-border remittance provider and money transfer companies Hanpass and Sentbe had joined its blockchain-based financial services network RippleNet.

The next day, Ripple revealed a partnership with European money transfer provider Azimo to use distributed ledger technology for its remittance service into the Philippines.

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13,000 ATMs in South Korea to Support Litecoin Withdrawal and Remittances - Cointelegraph