What libertarianism has become and will become State Capacity Libertarianism – Hot Air

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9. State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats. Modern Democrats often claim to favor those items, and sincerely in my view, but de facto they are very willing to sacrifice them for redistribution, egalitarian and fairness concerns, mood affiliation, and serving traditional Democratic interest groups. For instance, modern Democrats have run New York for some time now, and theyve done a terrible job building and fixing things. Nor are Democrats doing much to boost nuclear power as a partial solution to climate change, if anything the contrary.

10. State Capacity Libertarianism has no problem endorsing higher quality government and governance, whereas traditional libertarianism is more likely to embrace or at least be wishy-washy toward small, corrupt regimes, due to some of the residual liberties they leave behind.

11. State Capacity Libertarianism is not non-interventionist in foreign policy, as it believes in strong alliances with other relatively free nations, when feasible. That said, the usual libertarian problems of intervention because government makes a lot of mistakes bar still should be applied to specific military actions. But the alliances can be hugely beneficial, as illustrated by much of 20th century foreign policy and today much of Asia which still relies on Pax Americana.

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/what-libertarianism-has-become-and-will-become-state-capacity-libertarianism.html

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What libertarianism has become and will become State Capacity Libertarianism - Hot Air

A look ahead to the 2020 elections: Answers to some of the big questions – Hickory Daily Record

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Elections will dominate 2020, and it wont be long before Catawba County residents will be able to cast their ballots.

Primary elections will be held on March 3, with early voting set for February.

Heres an overview of the 2020 primaries:

What races will have primaries this year?

For federal offices, there will be Democratic and Republican primaries for president and U.S. Senate.

The Libertarian and Constitution parties will also have primaries for president.

The race for the 10th U.S. Congressional District, currently represented by Republican Patrick McHenry, will have a Republican primary while the Fifth Congressional District represented by Republican Virginia Foxx will have a Democratic primary.

There will be Democratic and Republican primaries for governor, lieutenant governor, auditor and superintendent of public instruction.

The races for attorney general, insurance commissioner, labor commissioner and secretary of state will only have a Republican primary.

The races for agriculture commissioner and treasurer will only have a Democratic primary.

There will also be a Republican primary in N.C. Senate District 42.

There will be no primaries for either of the N.C. House seats in Catawba County because only one Republican and one Democrat are running in each of the two races.

Locally, the races for Catawba County commissioner and register of deeds will have Republican primaries.

When will the polls be open?

Early voting will run from Feb. 13 through Feb. 29.

The polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on weekdays, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. on Sundays.

The Newton Main Library, Highland Recreation Center, Conover Station, Southwest Library and Sherrills Ford-Terrell Library will be the early-voting sites.

Catawba County residents are permitted to vote at any of the five sites, regardless of where they live.

On the March 3 primary day, polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Residents voting on March 3 must vote at their assigned polling places.

Who can vote in which primaries?

The primaries residents will be able to vote in will depend on their party affiliation.

To vote in the Republican, Democratic or Libertarian primaries, a resident must either be registered with the party or be registered as unaffiliated.

The Constitution Party only allows voters registered with the party to vote in its primaries.

Will I have to show ID to vote?

Residents will not have to show ID during the primary as a result of a court ruling blocking the states voter ID law.

N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein said the state will not appeal the decision until after the primary, according to an Associated Press report.

The voter ID law was approved by voters in 2018 and was set to go into effect this year.

What is the deadline for voter registration?

Residents wishing to vote on March 3 must be registered by Feb. 7.

Same-day registration will be available during the early-voting period. Residents must show some form of identification such as a drivers license or copies of government or financial documents showing a persons name and address.

Residents may register by printing off, filling out and returning the registration forms available for download at catawbacountync.gov/county-services/elections/voter-registration.

Forms are also available at public libraries, public high schools and admissions offices of colleges.

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A look ahead to the 2020 elections: Answers to some of the big questions - Hickory Daily Record

Bill Weld: Ho-Hum, Donald Trump Ordered The Assassination Of Qassem Suleimani OpEd – Eurasia Review

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In 2016, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld received the Libertarian Partys vice-presidential nomination. This year, having returned to the Republican Party, Weld is challenging President Donald Trump for the Republican Partys presidential nomination.

Many people would assume that Weld would be criticizing Trump for ordering this weekskillingin Iraq of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani. This assumption would make sense given the libertarian position favoring nonintervention overseas.

However, Weld has longfavoredmany policies far afield from libertarianism, including an interventionist foreign policy. True to form, Welds milk-toast response to Trumps assassination order in no way challenges the order itself or any aspect of the US governments ongoing intervention in Iraq, the Middle East, or anywhere in the world. Indeed, Welds response is evenblasregarding whether a US war with Iran is a good or bad thing.

Weld presented his response in two Friday Twitter posts. First, Weldwrote:

Soleimani was evil. Of that, there is no doubt. While there are real questions to be asked about this Administrations strategic approach toward Iran, today, our focus MUST be on the safety & security of our fellow Americans standing in harms way at a very dangerous moment.

Weld then followed up with thistweet:

Right or wrong, the United States is closer to war with Iran than we have been in decades. How we got here is a conversation for another day. Where we go from here? That is a question that demands clear and stable leadership.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

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Bill Weld: Ho-Hum, Donald Trump Ordered The Assassination Of Qassem Suleimani OpEd - Eurasia Review

Meet the Kochs – The Mountain -Ear

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Gene Strandberg, Gilpin County. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, was a founding member of the John Birch Society, a right-fringe group that spouted conspiracy theories about communist subversion plots in the U.S. These two sons would organize and lead the real subversion one generation later.

Fred helped Stalins engineers build 15 oil refineries, establishing Russias oil industry. The American businessman and Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis hired Winkler-Koch Engineering to supply the plans and oversee construction of a huge oil refinery in Hitlers Germany, one of the few in Germany that could produce high octane fuel for fighter planes.

The John Birch Society tried to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren, after SCOTUS desegregated public schools. In 1968 Fred wanted a Birch Society member to run for President on a platform of segregation and the abolition of all income taxes.

In 1966 Charles was an executive and trustee of the Freedom School, founded in 1956 in Larkspur, Colorado by Robert LeFevre, who promoted the abolition of the state. The school opposed anti-poverty programs, Medicare, and forced integration. It taught that robber barons were heroes, taxes were theft, slavery was less evil than a military draft, and the Bill of Rights should consist of only one right, the right to own property.

According to a 1982 Bill Koch deposition, Charles led his brothers David and Bill in an attempt to blackmail his brother Fred out of his share of the family business by threatening to tell their father that Fred was gay, resulting in Freds disinheritance. The plot failed, because Fred wasnt gay, and he wouldnt give in. Exposing his character, Charles gave Fred so little notice of their mothers death that Fred could not get home in time for her funeral.

In 1974 Charles told a group of businessmen, The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today. In 1976 the Center for Libertarian Studies was founded with $65,000 from Charles Koch. At a Center conference Charles suggested the movement attract young people because, that was the only group open to a radically different social philosophy. Charles was supported by Leonard Liggio, a libertarian historian with the Kochs Institute for Humane Studies from 1974-1998. He lauded the Nazis youth movement and said libertarians should organize university students to create group identity.

Former Birch Society member George Pearson presented a paper that was adopted for their higher education indoctrination grants. It proposed funding private institutions within universities, where they could influence who would be teaching and what would be taught. Pearson said it would be essential to use ambiguous and misleading names and hide the programs true agenda.

In a 1978 article for Libertarian Review, Charles wrote, Ideas do not spread by themselves; they spread only through people, which means we need a movement. Our movement must destroy the current statist paradigm.

In 1980 they tried through election, with David Koch as the Libertarian candidate for Vice-President. The platform called for the abolition of: the Federal Election Commission and all campaign finance laws; Medicare, Medicaid and all other government health care programs; Social Security; all income taxes and corporate taxes; the Securities and Exchange Commission; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence Agency; the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; minimum wage laws; child labor laws; seat belt laws; public schools and all welfare programs for the poor. The parallel with ALEC and the current Republican goals is not coincidental.

Even arch-conservative William F. Buckley called their views anarcho-totalitarianism. They got only 1% of the vote, so they decided infiltrating universities, establishing think tanks, and co-opting the Republican Party was a better way to destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.

In the 1980s their disciple Richard Fink wrote The Structure of Social Change, which Fink described as a three-phase takeover of American politics. Phase 1 is an investment in academia, where the ideas to achieve their goals would be born.

Phase 2 is the establishment of think tanks to turn the ideas into palatable policies.

Phase 3 is forming front groups (promoted as grassroots), to influence officeholders to enact the policies.

If the Kochs were truly free market libertarians, they would have opposed the government bailout during the financial collapse, which the House of Representatives did reject. After the stock market dropped 777 points in one day, the Kochs and their think tank, Americans for Prosperity, scrapped ideology in favor of money. Two days later a list of conservative groups now supporting the bailout was shown to Republican legislators. The Senate soon passed TARP with overwhelming bipartisan support.

By 2009 Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas were speakers at the Koch donor summits, which are secretive to the point of paranoia. Attendees are told to destroy all document copies, not to post any related information online, and to keep notes and materials secure. Names of guests and agendas are kept secret, sign up is done through Koch staff, not resort staff, name tags are required, all electronic devices are confiscated before sessions, and white-noise emitting loudspeakers are placed facing outward to defeat any eavesdropping attempts. One would think they had something to hide. Sources include politico.com January 2016, the New Yorker August 30, 2010, and prwatch.org January, 2016

Next time: secret money

(Originally published in the December 5, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)

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Work for Dominic Cummings at your peril, but his take on the states flaws is not without merit – The Guardian

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When Dominic Cummings arrived in Downing Street, some of his new colleagues were puzzled by one of his mantras: Get Brexit done, then Arpa. Now, perhaps, they have some idea of what that meant. On 2 January, Cummings published on his blog the wackiest job proposals to emerge from a government since the emperor Caligula made his horse a consul.

The ad took the form of a long post under the heading Were hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos, included a reading list of arcane academic papers that applicants were expected to read and digest and declared that applications from super-talented weirdos would be especially welcome. They should assemble a one-page letter, attach a CV and send it to ideasfornumber10@gmail.com. (Yes, thats @gmail.com.)

It was clear that nobody from HR was involved in composing this call for clever young things. Alerting applicants to the riskiness of employment by him, Cummings writes: Ill bin you within weeks if you dont fit dont complain later because I made it clear now.

The ad provoked predictable outrage and even the odd parody. The most interesting thing about it, though, is its revelations of what moves the man who is now the worlds most senior technocrat. The Arpa in his mantra, for example, is classic Cummings, because the Pentagons Advanced Research Projects Agency (now Darpa) is one of his inspirational models. It was set up in 1958 as part of Americas response to the Soviet space satellite programme and was charged with generating and executing research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science.

Arpa, as it was then known, was the agency that funded the arpanet, the precursor to the internet, and is famous for the lavishness of its funding, the speed with which it operates and its decisiveness. When Bob Taylor had the idea of funding the arpanet, for example, it took him just 20 minutes to get his boss to agree to it. Other Cummings inspirations are the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, and the Apollo mission, which first put men on the moon.

Note that all these inspirational projects have some interesting things in common: no politics, no bureaucratic processes and no legal niceties. Which is exactly how Cummings likes things to be.

One of Cummingss abiding obsessions over the past few years (often aired on his blog) is his conviction that SW1 his term for the entire government machine and its political masters is totally unfit for purpose in the modern era. In a way, his job ad is a 3,000-word articulation of this belief. SW1, as he sees it, is scientifically and technologically illiterate, stuffed with Oxbridge humanities graduates, generalists, amateurs, etc. When mounted on this particular hobbyhorse, Cummings sounds like CP Snow on speed.

I have some sympathy with these views as do some of the younger civil servants I meet. The problem is that the thinking implicit in Cummingss blog post is flawed in two ways. The first is that he has swallowed the Silicon Valley delusion that data (and data science) provide the key to life, the universe and everything. The second is that his recruitment wheeze is strategically naive. The idea that the huge bureaucratic machine of the British state can be transformed by the injection of a cadre of disruptive young geniuses is, to put it mildly, bonkers. The civil service has a powerful immune system for rejecting outsiders and Cummingss stated ambition that his new hires will make him redundant in a year or two is therefore daft. What he has are ideas when what he needs is a strategy.

Which is odd, because his main claim to fame from the Vote Leave campaign and Johnsons election victory is as a gifted strategist. Deep down, Cummings is what the economist Tyler Cowen calls a state capacity libertarian. This sounds like an oxymoron (a libertarian who believes in a strong state), but what it appears to involve is a conviction about the need for a capable state. In this regard, writes Cowen, sometimes the problem is too much government, sometimes the problem is not enough government. Most often, the problem is the wrong sort of government.

If this is indeed what Cummings believes (and much of his derisive blogging about the stupidity and incapacity of SW1 suggests that it is), then he needs a more sustained strategy to make the British state more capable of handling the challenges of governing a 21st-century society. In other words, a state that would never have screwed up on a universal credit scale.

In some ways, Cummings is his own worst enemy (though David Cameron might retort: Not while Im around). Many people are repelled by the way he interweaves radical insights with what looks like vulgar abuse. He mixes understanding with wacky afterthoughts and lets his compulsive autodidactism run away with him.

But he also has an acute sense (which most Brexiters seem to lack) that a UK outside the EU will need to become a much more capable and creative state if it is to escape becoming either a gigantic imitation of Singapore or the sandpit for private equity envisaged by Jacob Rees-Mogg and his cronies. Given Cummingss role in Number 10, and the elective dictatorship bestowed on his master by the rackety British constitution, he has a real opportunity to do some good. Lets hope he takes it.

John Naughton writes the Networker column for Observer New Review

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Work for Dominic Cummings at your peril, but his take on the states flaws is not without merit - The Guardian

Disputed Appointments and the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy, in 1937 and Today – Cato Institute

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Here is news you probably cant use: a new Texas Law Review analysis by University of Chicago law professor William Baude concludesthat Justice Hugo Black, who served on the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971, was unconstitutionally appointed.

The relevant text is the Constitutions Article I, Section 6, which says No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time.

At the time of his appointment Black was serving as a senator from Alabamaas part of a Congress that had enacted new retirement benefits for Justices, and while his backers argued that the clause did not apply to bar his nomination, Baude concludes that it probably did. One litigant before the high court challenged Blacks right to serve, but the Court chose to sidestep the merits of that claim by ruling against its standing, and the controversydied.

All of this might seem purely academic. At this remove there would be no way to unscramble the legal omelet as to Blacks jurisprudential contributions, even were there a will. (Despite an unpromising start, the Alabaman eventually showed a libertarian streak on many Bill of Rights issues.)

But the issue is not quite so remote as that, because more than a few contemporary commentators have flirted in some cases more than flirted with claims that the makeup of the present Supreme Court is illegitimate.

After the Senate leadership refused to hold hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, the editorial board of the New York Times repeatedly declared the seat of the late Justice Scalia to have been stolen, and then-Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said of eventual nominee Neil Gorsuch that hes not there properly.

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy brought renewed attack, with former Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court can justifiably be questioned and other high-profile figures taking a similar line.

Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky raised the ante with this remarkable assertion in The American Prospect: each of the five conservative justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh or someone like him (emphasis added) came on to the Court in a manner that lacks legitimacy. Perhaps at some point it will lead to open defiance of the Court.

Other commentators were happy to take up the exciting theme that future Court opinions written by, or decided by the votes of, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and perhaps other Justices might meet with open defiance or resistance from a future Democratic president, from state officials, or from people marching in the streets.

What can the Supreme Court do? Send its tiny police force to storm the White House? wrote Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. Libertarian-minded law professor Ilya Somin, who does not welcome the efforts to de-legitimize the Court or promote defiance of its rulings, nonetheless found them worth taking seriously enough to analyze at length last year.

Baudes research may provide a bit of reassurance in this respect. The challenge to the legitimacy of Blacks seat fizzled in part because it gained little headway with the public, but much more because the Courts other Justices welcomed Black aboard.

Most of the scenarios in which triumphant Democrats in 2021 or 2022 defy Supreme Court rulings are difficult to reconcile with the reality that the Courts liberal Justices have, to all appearances, been entirely content to regard Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as legitimate colleagues, and would, themselves, neither counsel nor welcome defiance of Court rulings. As I wrote last year, "the federal courts are not as polarized and tribal as much of the higher political class and punditry at nomination time."

Baude puts it this way at the conclusion of his article: the real source of constitutional settlement in our system is not always judicial decision, but sometimes sheer practice.

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Disputed Appointments and the Supreme Court's Legitimacy, in 1937 and Today - Cato Institute

The first decade in history – The Week

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I have many fond memories of the end of history. Not the bestselling book of that name by Francis Fukuyama, whose attempt at a Hegel for Dummies was published when I was 2 years old, but the actual historical and economic conditions he was describing. In the 1990s, you did not need to be a Harvard academic or a Davos attendee to understand that following the Cold War the United States had achieved a degree of peace and prosperity unknown in human history. You could see and hear and feel it: the clean, packed malls in which it was impossible to find a parking spot; the KMarts with row upon row of Nintendo cartridges in their stolid-looking cardboard boxes; the multiplying subdivisions in which all your friends seemed to live; the platinum-selling CDs that everyone owned, including ones that were meant to assist those displaced by history's very last war, which was happening far away in a place no one in particular cared about; the radio jingles promising even more wealth ("If you need a loan and own a home / Call First Finance / You could be sitting on a fortune!"); above all, the World Wide Web, which was going to make us all smarter, healthier, richer, and probably save the Amazon and plug the hole in the ozone layer too.

This sense that history itself had reached its fulfillment was not limited to these shores or even to world leaders. In the relentless glad-handing optimism of the late Pope (now St.) John Paul II, there was also the clear implication that after the upheavals of two world wars and the chaos of the years that followed the Second Vatican Council, even the Catholic Church, the world's most ancient institution, had arrived at a final synthesis.

Not everyone subscribed to this thesis. On the fringe continental left, a handful of postmodernists decried the hubris of mainstream political theorists who were not even conscious of the absurd premises underlying their arguments; much closer to home and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in their different ways argued that the future of abundance secured by globalized neoliberal hegemony was a mirage, beyond which lay more of the violence and immiseration from which human society is never more than a generation or two removed. Nor was this pessimism the exclusive province of maverick politicians and French philosophers. In the orgy of violence and rapine into which Woodstock '99 descended, one can see something like a definitive, if unwelcome, answer to "Peace, Love, and Music" from the children of those who had seamlessly transformed the revolution into an Apple commercial. (One could argue that earlier in the decade both West Coast gangster rap and grunge gained cultural currency precisely because they rejected an unquestioned optimism about race relations and the virtues of consumer capitalism, among other things.) In the Church, both traditionalist followers of Archbishop Lefebvre and antinomian liberals questioned the permanence of the John Paul II synthesis.

In world affairs the question of history's continuation was answered definitively on September 11, 2001. At the beginning of what would be 10 or so years of transition between the end of history and its revival, Osama bin Laden and his followers reminded the world that there were forces more powerful than neoclassical economics, atavistic ideologies more intoxicating than liberal democracy, and billions of people yet to be persuaded of the merits of either. For all his faults, George W. Bush understood this. The failures of his presidency were at the level of decision making, not of ideological disposition toward the reality of evil. In the Church, too, history would be revived almost single-handedly by Pope Benedict XVI, who, with a single phrase ("never lawfully abrogated"), not only restored the traditional Latin Mass but reconvened debates about ecumenism and the fundamental nature of Church-state relations that his predecessor insisted had been answered decades ago.

During his eight years in office, Barack Obama seemed unwilling to acknowledge that history was undergoing a not-so-soft reboot. Despite the rhetoric of world-historic transformation that defined his first presidential campaign, he seemed to govern as if the only thing that prevented America and the rest of the world from returning to the golden path was a minor technocratic fix here or an unenforceable arms control treaty there. While he lectured his opponents on the virtues of civility, decaying industries collapsed for good and seemingly robust ones were allowed to lay the seeds of their doom. Picture websites and an online bookstore became trillion-dollar concerns while heavy industry receded further into the economic horizon. Instead of a restored peace, the Middle East found room for more misery and destruction. Millions of us killed ourselves with drugs and alcohol, and many more became mentally ill. The Information Superhighway became a terrifying purveyor of misinformation fatal to democracy and a haven for terrorists both foreign and domestic.

Where does America and the world find itself at the end of this first decade in the newly revived history of the world? I am tempted to say in a position curiously similar to that in which it arrived. Instead of teeming malls and the latest Britney Spears disc, we have Amazon Prime and Billie Eilish on Spotify Premium, but otherwise we have succumbed again to the old delusions. The reality behind our techno-commercial republic of leisure is globalized wage slavery, addiction to pornography and drugs, and, if chiliastic prophets are taken at their word, the imminent doom of the planet itself. While we speculate about the NFL draft and gobble up recaps of our favorite prestige streaming dramas, history screams from the void into which we have attempted to banish it.

We cannot remain in this comfortable senescence. President Trump does not believe in the end of history. Nor do Xi Jinping, the prophet of a Chinese empire that spans from from Taiwan to Mauritania, or Narendra Modi, who dreams 10,000-year-old dreams of subjugation, or the leaders of the populist movements of both the left and the right who are destroying the last vestiges of Cold War-era Christian democracy in Europe. The late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi obviously believed that history was far from over.

If we do not wish to see its second decade written by some (or any) of these figures, we must accept that they have been right all along about history.

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The first decade in history - The Week

A Cycle of Slavery Thrives Inside Jammu and Kashmirs Brick Kiln Industry – The Wire

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New Delhi: On New Years eve, Bhuvneshwari, who is in her mid 20s, sits with her child in her lap in the lawns of Parabhatara hostel at the Institute of Social Service, in R.K. Puram, with 90 other people. These men, women and children mostly Dalits and Gond Adivasis hail from nondescript tribal villages in Chhattisgarh. Three days ago, on December 29, 2019, these 91 daily-wage labourers were rescued from brick kilns in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir.

He said we were sold to him for Rs 20 lakh, Bhuvneshwari said, referring to her maalik-thekedar or principal employer.

Enslaved for more than 500 days inside the campus area of Tiranga and BBK brick kilns in Rajouri, the daily-wage labourers were forced to work for more than 12 hours a day, often without breaks and proper meals. According to Bhuvneshwari, she and 90 others were duped by two men, Raju and Raja, who she claimed were zamindars from Chhattisgarh.

Their ordeal began last August. Even before they were forced into bonded labour in the brick kilns, the touts confiscated their cellphones and identification documents like Aadhaar cards. According to the labourers, they were often made to sign blank sheets or other papers, the purpose and contents of which they were not told about.

Daily-wage labourers at the Parabhatara hostel on December 31, 2019. Photo: Bhumika Saraswati

Manisha Bai, from Raveli village in Kabirdham district of Chhattisgarh, said that they first worked for seven months in Jammu. Later, they were taken to Srinagar for five months, followed by another five months in Rajouri. During this entire time, they received little or no wages.

Kishan Lal (27), who comes from the Janjgir-Champa district in Chhattisgarh, said that he would often plead for proper food with his employer. How will we work with an empty stomach, I used to tell him, said Lal. However, such pleas went unanswered. The living conditions were also deplorable, workers said. They had no access to clean drinking water or proper clothes, and were forced to live in shanties made of plastic and tins.

Also read: Modern-Day Slavery: How Dalits From Lalitpur Became Bonded Labourers in Delhi

As the temperature in Kashmir dropped to the sub-zero levels, many of the labourers, especially children, suffered. Laxmi, a 30-year-old mother of five, revealed that she managed to take her nine-month-old son to a nearby government hospital, only to find that he had been suffering from pneumonia. That was the only time she was allowed to leave, but not without a guard. In fact, guards and sometimes Durgesh, the landowner himself, would accompany the labourers everywhere they went sometimes even when they went to bathe, Laxmi and other women said.

Daily-wage labourers at the Parabhatara hostel on December 31, 2019. Photo: Bhumika Saraswati

Towards the end of 2019, a labourer, Amit Kumar, escaped and reached Delhi. Then, with the help of an activist, Nirmal Gorana, who is the convener of the National Campaign Committee for Eradication of Bonded Labour (NCCEBL), and the district magistrate of Rajouri, a raid was successfully planned and executed on December 26-27, 2019.

After being freed, all the rescued labourers reached Delhi on December 29, 2019. However, none of them received a release certificate an essential document that is needed to claim the rehabilitation package due by law, as mentioned in the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, and the rehabilitation scheme of 2016.

An Anti-Slavery International Volunteers for Social Justice report from September 2017 highlighted that 100% of brick moulders were from traditionally marginalised classes and castes and that children made up one-third of the total population in brick kilns making it the worst form of child labour under international law.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that in India, there is no understanding of the bonded labour system, Choudhary Ali Zia Kabir, an advocate with Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) organisation, said.

Daily-wage labourers at the Parabhatara hostel on December 31, 2019. Photo: Bhumika Saraswati

Anyone who is not being given the minimum amount as per The Minimum Wages Act, 1948 is a bonded labourer because he/she is being exploited by the employers, Kabir said. Nearly negligible conviction rates in such cases indicate that the courts and the administration, do not acknowledge it as a crime.

Watch | Bonded Labourers From Chhattisgarh Rescued in Srinagar, Demand Release Certificates

Lack of awareness problem is with the lower rung; it cant be the case with the cabinet secretaries, labour commissioner and labour ministry, they obviously know the law, but they dont keep the accountability, highlights Kabir. Apathy and the lack of accountability to hold the administration responsible continues to provide fertile grounds for the exploitation of hundreds, including minors.

Daily-wage labourers at the Parabhatara hostel on December 31, 2019. Photo: Bhumika Saraswati

Seven-year-old Arjun, playing with a punctured ball in the laws of Parabhatara hostel while the elders pass time chit-chatting, said, Khelte the toh thekedar marta tha. Marke-marke kam karwata tha, phir ham eith palti karte the (If we used to play, the employers would beat us up and force us to lift bricks).

While Arjun and 90 others pass time in Parabhatara hostel, activists and lawyers are reaching courts to seek their release certificates, which will help them receive some interim compensation to help them reach their villages and start anew. They are also planning to file a PIL in the Supreme Court.

Bhumika Saraswati is an independent journalist based in Delhi. She is currently pursuing her masters at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Scapegoats to supply chains: Five aims for the anti-slavery fight in 2020 – Sight Magazine

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02 January 2020 MOLLY MILLAR

London, UKThomson Reuters Foundation

With a decade for the world to meet a United Nations target of ending modern slavery, experts say anti-slavery efforts must be guided by survivors, supported by law enforcement and kept at the top of the global activism agenda.

About 40 million people globally are estimated to be enslaved - in forced labour and forced marriages - in a trade worth an estimated $US150 billion a year to human traffickers, according to the UN International Labour Organization.

Tea leaves are left to dry at a tea plantation at a mountain village in Nannuoshan in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China, on 12th July, 2019. PICTURE: Reuters/Aly Song

Here are five priorities for the global anti-slavery movement in 2020 as told to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by campaigners, civil servants, and migration and trade experts.

1. Let survivors leadSurvivors of modern slavery are increasingly being championed to inform and lead anti-trafficking efforts - from raising awareness to supporting victims and shaping policy.

"We must double our efforts to strengthen worker solidarity and survivor-led initiatives, and to open more platforms for meaningful worker participation in policy and practice," said Lucila Granada, head of the charity Focus on Labour Exploitation.

More than 220 survivors have signed up to the Survivor Alliance since its launch in 2018 as an online network that provides a forum, expert contacts and consulting opportunities.

"In 2020, the anti-slavery movement needs to put their investment behind survivor leadership, create scholarships for education, and create liveable wage employment opportunities," said Minh Dang, co-director of the Survivor Alliance.

2. Secure justiceFrom India to Britain and the United States, authorities and activists alike have voiced concerns about a lack of justice for trafficking victims despite fast-growing awareness of the issue.

Governments worldwide carried out 11,096 trafficking prosecutions in 2018 and won 7,481 convictions, according to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons report.

Trafficking prosecutions have risen since 2012 - but hit a peak of 19,127 in 2015 - according to the compiled estimates.

Obstacles to securing convictions include persuading victims to speak out, tracking traffickers online and tracing their gains, and the complexity and length of cases, experts say.

"Slavery thrives when traffickers and slave-owners can brutally enslave people with little fear of any consequence," said David Westlake, head of International Justice Mission UK.

3. Protect migrantsUndocumented migrants are particularly vulnerable to slavery but are too often either demonised or overlooked, activists say.

"Migrant workers being scapegoated is just going to increase their level of vulnerability to human trafficking," said Neha Misra, anti-slavery specialist at US-based Solidarity Center.

More than 70 million people were uprooted last year by persecution and conflict in a record high, UN data shows, yet this figure does not include migrants seeking a better life.

Without the legal right to work or resettle, many migrants end up trapped in slavery and afraid to speak out or seek help.

The discovery of 39 dead Vietnamese in a truck near London in October spotlighted the illicit trade that sends the poor of Asia, Africa and the Middle East on risky journeys to the West.

"We need to create laws and policies - globally and in Britain - that would allow people to migrate for work safely," said Jakub Sobik, media manager at Anti-Slavery International.

4. Adjust attitudesFrom opinion polls showing limited public awareness to sensationalised images including handcuffs, chains and scars, modern-day slavery is widely misrepresented and misunderstood.

Traffickers rely far more psychological methods of coercion and the use of debts than on physical violence to trap their victims, found a recent study by Britain's Nottingham University, which researches the global ill.

Modern slavery is too often seen mainly as a criminal issue, according to experts who say this diverts focus from cultural factors such as caste, globalisation and the rise of informal work, and attitudes towards and policies around migration.

"The idea that modern slavery is somewhere 'out there' perpetuated by evil criminals is only true for a very small percentage of people subject to egregious exploitation and abuse," said Cindy Berman of the Ethical Trading Initiative.

"It's in our midst," said the head of modern slavery strategy at the organisation, which is a coalition of trade unions, companies and charities promoting workers' rights.

5. Maintain momentumWith a host of political and environmental issues demanding the world's attention, some advocates fear that slavery might fall down the agenda as a crime that mostly occurs out of sight.

While teenage activist Greta Thunberg - TIME Magazine's Person of the Year - has inspired public action on climate change, people must also be engaged and inspired to consider the human cost of services and products they buy, campaigners say.

"We must continue to mobilise government action, business engagement and public concern about the exploitation taking place in our local communities and global supply chains," said Sara Thornton, Britain's independent anti-slavery commissioner.

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Scapegoats to supply chains: Five aims for the anti-slavery fight in 2020 - Sight Magazine

Iain Macwhirter: Labour has to learn the language of progressive nationalism if it is to survive – HeraldScotland

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LABOURS attempts to come to terms with its worst defeat since 1935 have been as painful as they are predictable. The party simply cant understand how it lost to an Eton-educated Tory. Dont voters know whats good for them? We even offered them free broadband...

But people rarely vote on their own narrow material interest, rather on what they think is best for the country as a whole. They clearly didnt think Jeremy Corbyn believed in Britain or had the nations best interests at heart.

Now, one of Mr Corbyns disciples, Rebecca Long-Bailey, has recognised this. In her leadership pitch in the Guardian she has called for Labour to adopt progressive patriotism to bring the country together. She is suggesting that Labours electoral problem was not just opposition to Brexit but its ambivalence regarding the nation.

Ms Long-Bailey doesnt see why patriotism should be the property of the right. We should celebrate Lancashire mill workers who supported Abraham Lincolns anti-slavery blockade of cotton from the American South. But even this tentative and politically-correct version of patriotism proved too much for the guardians of Labour purity on Twitter. She was taken to task for spreading loathsome nonsense...Tory Lite...dog whistle nationalism. Progressive patriotism is an oxymoron, said one critic, like humane fascism. For many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn love of country is irremediably toxic.

During the long Brexit culture war, this attitude finally alienated Labours older, socially conservative voters in the Midlands and North of England. The question is whether Labour has the will or the capacity to win them back. It would have to go a lot further than history lessons about anti-slavery.

Can you imagine Momentum activists saying how much they love Britain and its history? Can you hear David Lammy say that, actually, Britain is not a racist country? Mr Corbyn saying that the British Empire wasnt all bad?

Imagine Ms Long-Bailey saying that our armed forces are the best of British. Or that most men are kind and loving fathers and not part of an oppressive patriarchy. Twitter would go into meltdown if Labour started talking about controlling immigration.

I just cant see Labour becoming patriotic in a way northern English voters would recognise. Stormzy would be furious. The Guardian would say it had gone populist, fascist, even.

But the inconvenient truth is that many voters just seem hard-wired to regard their community and their country with pride. It is a lot to do with accentuating the positive. The relentless miserablism of the Left leaves people with nothing to feel good about. Its like watching a permanent Ken Loach film.

Scottish nationalists used to make the same mistake of revelling in miserablism. They banged on about how Scotland was impoverished and demeaned by England and how theyd stolen our oil. Then in the noughties it discovered positive nationalism and started talking up Scotland as a progressive country that could be a model for the world. Inclusive, democratic, equalitarian.

It worked. The SNPs electoral dominance today is directly related to its celebration of Scotland. The 2014 referendum campaign, with its Yestivals and Saltires, was all about feeling good about being Scottish.

Could Labour learn from this? Or has Labour sold its soul to a version of liberal identity politics which loathes the very idea of nations? Labour intellectuals like Emily Thornberry laugh at flag-waving English patriots. Labour academics regard Britain as a neocolonial power, with blood on its hands, oppressing people abroad and racist at home.

This is why this General Election could be terminal for Labour. Unlike in Scotland, the English Left seems incapable of finding any positive dimension to nationalism. Britishness is seen as inherently right wing and racist even though Britain gave the world parliamentary democracy, abolished the slave trade and led the defeat of fascism.

Boris Johnsons One Nation Conservatism, by contrast, is a version of progressive nationalism that goes back to Disraeli. It even has similarities with contemporary Scottish nationalism. It is racially inclusive, for a start. Mr Johnsons cabinet is far more ethnically diverse than the SNPs. He is also articulating social democratic themes of redistribution and state intervention.

The Tory PM is dismantling the overtly racist, imperial nationalism of Churchill and Thatcher, in favour of the self-mocking, popular nationalism of the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Danny Boyles pageant of English identity was of course authorised by Mr Johnson as London Mayor. It featured NHS nurses, Chartists and icons of popular culture. Thats the kind of One Nation Conservatism that Boris Johnson is grasping for, and is temperamentally capable of delivering.

It is about reflecting the nation in a favourable light, but it is also a way of doing politics. The Prime Minister is successful because he is relentlessly positive. He makes people feel good about themselves. Labours characterisation of him as a hard-bitten racist demagogue doesnt ring true. Mr Johnson is actually more in the hail-fellow-well-met mould of one Alex Salmond, who made the SNP what it is today.

Mr Salmond too was a gifted populist leader, a romantic nationalist who loved Scottish history and understood the importance of supporting the Scottish regiments, even the Queen. The media regarded him with suspicion, but many Scottish voters loved him. He wedded nationalism to social democratic themes of inclusion and equality. In his 2012 Hugo Young lecture on progressive nationalism he hailed left-wing policies, like tuition fees, as the social wage.

Unlike Mr Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon does not like nationalism, and is quite obviously embarrassed by it. Shes even said she would like to remove the word national from the party name. But if she did she would risk throwing the cultural baby out with the liberal bathwater. The SNP was an early the beneficiary of the wave of populist nationalism that has now swept England.

SNP intellectuals loathe the idea that Scottish nationalism might have anything in common with Brexit and English nationalism. But the similarities are too obvious to ignore. They were both populist rebellions against globalisation and neoliberalism by people who love their country and seek sanctuary within it.

How these two nationalisms, Scottish and English, learn to coexist or dont will decide the future of the United Kingdom. Labour may have to learn the language of progressive nationalism to have any future at all.

Read more: Why I'm giving up Twitter in 2020

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Iain Macwhirter: Labour has to learn the language of progressive nationalism if it is to survive - HeraldScotland

Crimes of Fashion – Fairplanet

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Most chances are youre wearing jeans while reading these words. Half the population of the world does so every day. Jeans statistics are insane: 6 billion pairs are manufactured yearly (while in the whole world there are 7.5 billion people), jeans, you could say, are the uniform of humanity.

The jeans fabric was born in France and Italy during the 17 century. Primarily the fabric was coloured with indigo produced from Nil plants imported from India. But in the beginning of the 20-century, German chemists had developed a method to create synthetic indigo using chemicals as Sodium hydroxide, Potassium hydroxide and more. The tough competition in the field made synthetic Indigo a standard, and nowhere in the world is flooded with it as Xintang, in South China's Guangdong province, known asthe "Blue Jeans Capital of the World". More than 200,000 people in 3,000 factories in Xintang produce 800,000 pairs of jeans a day, 5 percent of the global production.

Saying synthetic Indigo is flooding the city is not a metaphor: the colours are pouring into a river flowing into the Dong, a tributary of the Pearl River, one of the largest rivers in China. Consequences for the river are devastating: it has become a sewage canal, tainted blue which is even caught through satellite photography. A Greenpeace examination shows the Dongs water is filled with heavy metals, such as lead, copper and cadmium (found exceeding national "soil environmental quality standards" by 128 levels), as well as high levels of PH (11.95) and other metals. Fish do not live in the river estuary anymore.

Some of the pairs are taken from China to the largest city in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, where, after being washed with stones, they get a worn-out look. One kilo of jeans, about three pairs, requires 20 litres of water, also coloured blue. More chemicals used to hasten the wearing out process are also eventually poured into the rivers-system, which nourishes the drinking water in the Dongs delta.

In the past, you would get the worn-out look after five years of wearing. The accelerated process takes about seven hours, but also shortens the fabrics life. In the past you used to wear a pair of jeans for five years until you got that look, and could keep wearing it for five years after, explains fashion journalist Dana Thomas to Calcalist.

Today in the U.S. people wear an item for an average of seven times before it is thrown out - which isnt surprising, given its poor quality. Despite the low prices, we buy clothes that are essentially fake. And all that, as Thomass new book Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes explains, comes at a huge environmental price.

Thomas is one of the most valued writers of the fashion world. She started her career in the Washington Post, and since has been writing regularly to Vogue, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Financial Times and other leading journals. She won many prizes for her writing including the decoration of the Order ofArts and Letters, given to her by the French minister of culture. She has already published two best sellers on the subject: Deluxe (2007) which exposes how a few large companies took control over the elite fashion houses, and Gods and Kings (2015),dealing with the rise and fall of Alexander Mcqueen and John Galliano.

The highly praised Fashionopolis, is an incisive indictment against the fashion industry and its part in the responsibility for the climate crisis. Thomas claims that if the industry will not come back to its senses and change its conduct, the situation will lead to an inevitable ecological collapse and bring the widening of economic gaps to unprecedented levels.

The pace: an item every five days

The trigger to write Fashionopolis, Thomas reveals, was the collapse of the textile factory Rana Plaza in Daka, the capital of Bangladesh, in April 2013. Approximately 1,000 people had died in the disaster, most of them textile workers working in sweatshops located in an international fashion companys structure. But after the disaster, not one of these companies took even partial responsibility for it.

This disaster clarified one of the things that bothered me in the fashion industry, says Thomas, a handful of people in the industry get richer and richer (five of the 41 richest people in the world are owners of major fashion groups), while the vast majority of the sectors workers are paid less than a living-wage, even in the third world. These people work under the conditions of slavery. I dont buy the excuse that the industry creates jobs in places where there is hunger, its simply untrue.

I felt like I could write the story of the industry and the destruction it creates - the fact that it essentially perpetuates the inequality and global poverty rates, while simultaneously generates terrible pollution. We need to talk about these things because we all need to put on clothes every morning. The focus on fashion is in fact a prism through which we can discuss globalisation: I could write a book about almost any other topic related to industry and business. As a matter of fact, when people ask what the book is about, I say about humankind on earth.

The main cause for exploitation and contamination characterising the field, Thomas explains, is over consumption in large scales. Each person in the world acquires, on average, about 68 fashion items a year. According to Pulse of the fashion industry, an annual report produced by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) firm and Global fashion agenda (a body following the environmental damages of the fashion industry), by 2030, world population will grow to 8.5 billion and GDP per capita will grow by 2 percent in developing countries, and by 4 percent in developed countries. In parallel, the quantity of consumed clothes in the world will jump by 60 percent, from 64 million to 102 million tons a year.

Already, the current damages of large-scale production of clothing are destructive and irreversible. According to Kate Fletcher, a research fellow from the University of the Arts London, 27 million tons of cotton are produced in the world yearly, requiring 2.5 percent of the cultivated land, 13 percent of insecticides consumption and enormous amounts of water (1,540 litres for a kilo of cotton), crude oil and whitening chemicals including sodium chloride, sodium chloride and hydrogen peroxide. The whitening also damages the cotton fibres, causing accelerated erosion of the fabric and clothes made from it, which, in turn, accelerates the consumption pace.

The most popular source for the industry, other than cotton are synthetic fibres, such as polyester, present today in 60 percent of clothes: these are produced from crude oil in a process releasing huge amounts of polluters. These fibres are non-perishable and will pollute the environment for hundreds of years.

According to data by the World Bank, theclothing industry is responsible for 20 percent of global water pollution and 10 percent of emissions of nitrogen dioxide; one kilo of clothes produces 28 kilos of greenhouse gas, and a quarter of the chemicals produced in the world are meant for the textile industry. The fashion industry, Thomas emphasises, is responsible for carbon emissions in larger scales than the air and sea transportation industries combined.

Thomas refuses to mention names of specific companies (due to my work in journalism, she reasons, implying, perhaps, to the strength of fashion publishers), but the names can be fished from other sources. The aforementioned BCG report, which was published in May this year during the Copenhagen summit for sustainable fashion, reminds that three groups - British Primark, Swedish H&M and Spanish Zara, hold together about 43 percent of the world market. Report writers estimate if these groups will implement an environmental policy, they will manage to reduce the pollution scale they cause by 30 percent.

Another report, the Dirty Fashion Report, is published annually by the Changing Markets foundation, a Dutch organisation acting on behalf of sustainability in consumption markets. The 2018 report discovered that H&M, Zara and Marks and Spencer acquire viscose from polluting factories in Asia. Viscose is presented as a product with environmental values, but, as the report reveals, a line of dangerous chemicals are used in its production.

The Model: wear and dump

An understanding of the model of Fast Fashion motivating the field completes the picture of the damages. Under this model, fashion manufacturers produce collections at a dazzling pace, moving them to the selling points in high speed, and using high-tech to recognise when they have outgrown themselves and have to be replaced. At the same time, a deliberate decrease of the production quality shortens the clothes life, forcing consumers to buy more and more. This way, an average American bought in 2018 five times more clothes than they bought in 1980.

It was Amancio Ortega, the owner of Zara, whose fortune amounts to 70 billion dollars, Thomas explains, who refined this model, becoming one of the six richest men in the world. Ortega founded Zara in Spain, but was a pioneer in importing the production out of it, first to Morocco and then to other developing countries. He was also a pioneer in creating a network, including the whole supply chain (design, production and selling), which allowed him huge flexibility: if a collections sales do not live up to expectations, Zara will replace it within a week with another one that is designed to match what goes on in the market. And since production costs are so low, the failed collection can be thrown to the trash at a very low cost.

The outcome is that in the last twenty years, the amount of clothes we throw away has multiplied by seven. Every year, two million tons of fashion items are being thrown away worldly, most of them transferred to Africa. The rationale is that its a poor continent, and we are coming to help it, Thomas explains. But the Kenyans pay a heavy price, both because the importation flood demolishes the local textile industry and since most of the clothes transported to the country remain unused and are eventually thrown out. Even though they buy the jeans for cheap, in 2018 the Kenyans considered halting the purchasing of the clothes, but the U.S. threatened with boycotts, and Kenya reversed its position and went back to being the Wests dumpster.

The damage inflicted on local industries is particularly severe since the growth of the sector had turned it to a leading source of employment: every sixth person in the world is employed in the clothing industry. Most employees in the field are women, and 20 percent are children. In the past year we were exposed in Turkey to sweatshops of Syrian refugees children. In Sri Lanka I met an employee who took a loan from the company she works for to take care of her teeth, and when she could not repay the loan she had to work in prostitution. The sewing workshop she works for makes clothes for a line of renowned brands.

The key: pricier clothing

Breaking the vicious circle, claims Thomas, requires a new model. In her book, she examines a line of brands and designers working to change the trend by going back to traditional crafts, technologies such as 3D printing, clean jeans manipulation, smart production, hyper localism, recycling fabrics and growing materials in labs. Among others, she conducts a fascinating interview with elite designer Stella McCartney, who turned her renowned brand sustainable. In order to stop the damage, she concludes, the fashion industry must return to a local production and raise prices.

Doesnt it remind you of Donald Trumps discourse? After all he wants to raise taxes and to bring America back to its glory by way of local production.

Thats a totally different thing. Trump is pushing to bring people back a hundred years. He wants to return people like coal miners back to their old jobs, but you cant turn reality backwards. My vision is the opposite: I propose to take the old textile factories that sit empty, infuse them with new technology, and train people who will work in computer rooms.

This will not supply employment to many people

Youre right. But at least out of 3,000 unemployed people who used to work in fashion I will employ 300. Thats something.

Can the sustainable solutions youre offering be widely implemented?

Stella McCartney proved that there is a business incentive and profit in the transition to a cleaner society. We need to understand that pollution and garbage cost money, and somebody will have to pay for them. You can also save on raw materials. At the end of the day, if you think about it in the right way, you could also make a profit.

Most of your solutions would raise the price of clothing. That will hurt the poor, who will be unable to buy clothes.

Clothes must become more expensive. Today we pay for them the same price people paid a hundred years ago: the price of housing has increased, the price of food has increased, only the price of clothing went down. And the reason it is so cheap is that 98 percent of workers in the sector are not being paid enough to feed their families, while we buy clothes, wear them for a moment, and then throw them away. If we respected these workers we wouldve paid them a fair wage, and then the price of clothes would have been higher, which would have made us appreciate the items more. Today you pay ten dollars for a piece of clothing at Zara, and it doesnt pay off to send it to dry cleaning. You simply throw it out and buy a new one.

A system that enables a handful of people, such as Ortega, to become exceptionally rich while people in Bangladesh die of starvation and disasters so that this master will make more money is a distorted system. So, yes, the price of clothes needs to go up.

How will you make it happen?

By creating awareness. This is why I wrote the book. Lots of people who read it told me they didnt know that this is how things were being run. You can make quality tags for clothes that will report on companies that exploit workers and use poisonous chemicals. If people look at a shirt and say I refuse to buy it because it causes great damage we will be able to change things.

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Crimes of Fashion - Fairplanet

Our nation’s self-serving myths fell apart in the decade since 2010 – Milwaukee Independent

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The 2010s was the decade that forced American politicians and commentators to confront the limits of the countrys own mythology.

Political elites in both parties had long shared the same conventional wisdom about the United States, grounded in ideas of exceptionalism and institutional perfection. But with the rise of Donald Trump and the return of a virulent politics of xenophobia and exclusion, it became increasingly difficult, even for many in the political establishment, to reproduce these past homilies.

Today the US is truly at a crossroads. Are Americans willing to confront the failures that led to the present, or will the US remain trapped in the same cycles of crisis and popular disaffection?

If you grew up in the US in the late 20th century, you would have imbibed a familiar account of the country. This was the idea that the US, from its founding, had always been committed to principles of universal equality, self-government and personal liberty. For starters, this consensus assumed that those in the US with wealth and power generally deserved it because they were the best and brightest. And such faith in meritocracy meant that even people on the centre left embraced American-style capitalism and the idea that the US constitution along with the federal judges who presided over it produced a near-ideal realization of democracy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became a truism that victory in the cold war had vanquished all ideological competitors proof that the country had the best and only viable means of running an economy and political system. The US was a beacon on the international stage, justly exercising power as global policeman. Americas principles, coupled with cold war triumphalism, also suggested that the political change was only ever a story of improvement. As Barack Obama declared in 2008, the country was nothing less than an improbable experiment in democracy, one steadily being perfected, generation after generation.

But as the decade began, the country was facing a series of rolling crises that challenged all of these assumptions: failing overseas wars started on false grounds; financial near-collapse; the social blights of mass incarceration and worsening inequality. Each problem was the product of a policymaking approach rooted in the governing mythology.

Yet political elites responded by essentially doubling down on the conventional wisdom. The Obama administrations strategic choices were guided by the same philosophy that had long informed American politics, above all, placing faith in markets and in national security experts (despite the recent and catastrophic failures of both). And, in the end, the policies were simply not up to the challenges of the times.

Moreover, what the centre right and centre left could not make sense of given their overall vision was the extent to which the US had succumbed to deep and structural decay; a fact that both Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter activists highlighted. This decay was perhaps epitomized by the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the American constitutional system itself.

This system had long been characterized by the proliferation of corporate money and by checks on popular authority from the Senate and the disproportionate power it gave to small population centers, to gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, and from widespread practices of voter disenfranchisement to an unelected federal judiciary serving for life. And, as politicians faced overwhelming problems, such constraints only reinforced the sense of paralysis. They made it increasingly apparent that, rather than reflecting actual mass sentiment, politics was now controlled by a wealthy and white minority coalition within the Republican party which enjoyed a veto power that was well beyond its actual public support.

Trumps victory in 2016, despite losing the popular vote, not only made plain these institutional flaws but also made it almost impossible for establishment politicians to repeat the old truisms. How could you talk about American meritocracy when so much of political and economic power was defined by nepotism, incompetence and sheer impunity? Indeed, a slew of headlines exposed how even at places like Harvard 43% of admitted white students were either legacies, recruited athletes or children of targeted donors.

Meanwhile, the idea of either the benevolence of American power or the inherent progressive direction of national history a new post-racial society seemed absurd. At a time when the president and the ruling party openly embraced white nationalism and separated children at the border from their parents, it became hard to repeat bromides about the US being great because it was good.

As the decade ends, one of the defining features of the 2020 Democratic primary has been the degree to which the old-fashioned rhetoric is being abandoned by centrist candidates, let alone more left-leaning ones. Even the New York Times, with its interactive, online 1619 project on the legacy of slavery, is demythologizing the national past. But the problem today is that both Republicans and most Democrats have responded to the collapse of the American myth by peddling a version of nostalgia. Trumps nostalgia is for a 1950s America, both racially and in terms of national prosperity and prestige. But the centre left also traffics in nostalgia, even if only for a time any time before Trump.

Alas, there is no real turning back. Trumps rise was in many ways the product of fundamental failures within the old consensus, of which Obama himself was a critical part. And for this reason, there is only one path forward for the US a politics of genuine transformation. This means nothing less than democratic changes to the electoral process, the economy and the political-legal order more broadly.

There are clearly incipient moves in this direction, from the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns to the activists involved with the Movement for Black Lives, the minimum wage campaign Fight for $15, the so-called Moral Mondays movement and the Democratic Socialists of America, to name just a few. The upcoming decade therefore will be shaped by real political struggle. For the sake of the country, one hopes that some version of nostalgia will not win out.

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Our nation's self-serving myths fell apart in the decade since 2010 - Milwaukee Independent

Rhythm, Divination, and Naming in Jay Wright’s Poetry – Hyperallergic

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If such a conceit sounds heady, thats because it is. The book is the latest installment in Wrights ongoing effort to write a poetry of ideas, wherein matter takes on ritual proportions and Afro-Caribbean ritual thought responds to the exclusionary history of Western rationalism. His corpus is a formalist fantasia the way most rituals are. Every aspect of the page layout, typography, illustration, tense, soud, and symbol holds value in the divination process. To read Wright is to adopt the position, often thematized in his work, of the postulant, trembling into knowledge of Gods body, knowledge of his naming (Transfigurations 148). But if Wrights reader is a candidate seeking entrance into a rarified order, it is an ecumenical one, diasporic in scope. The name of the absolute is not written in the language of any single denomination or intellectual province. It is scrawled in a host of esoteric tonguestribal icon, variable equation, philosophical abstractionmaking the name less a stable thing and more an echo of entangled ideology.

Within this corpus one finds all the clear markings of phone-number chunking. There is the early, narrative-driven work of The Homecoming Singer (1971), the mature eight-book cycle collected in Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000), and the prolific late-career output five books following Transfigurations. (Surely a collected late poems is in the works.) The premise for The Prime Anniversary is laid out in the preceding volume, Disorientations: Groundings (2013). There, we find Wright adopting the familiar posture of the late poet: I ask you now to consider the old poet / as he sits in his Bradford garden (6). From this vantage, the venerable poet of Vermont takes stock: The old poet has done a study / of exploration, of rhythm as ethos. If rhythm is ethos, its message is perseverance. I would fasten myself to that rhythm, says Wright, an anniversary of salt and serenity. This is the anniversary referred to in the title of Wrights recent collection. Rhythm, for the poet, becomes transportive, carrying him into an ethereal plane.

The opening long poem delineates the prospect of a post-late poetics.

Truth: names travel a watery route to heaven,

so says Concha Mndez, or so she would have said,

if she had any regard for physics. Seven

witnesses report that ether surely has failed,

a small erasure hardly noticed at Quito;

lines in that atmosphere seem to circle and flow

tangent to themselves. What does geometry know?

In the past Wright has identified a single biographical figure or perhaps two to guide him through a collection. Here no single figure rises above the others. We have references like the one in this poem to Concha Mendez, which point back to the poets and musicians of Spains Generation of 27. These names run up against the names of Greek natural philosophersEmpedocles, Ptolemy, and Cleonidesin paratactic fashion, demanding the reader play along by offering some interpretation of their relation. One such interpretation might be that what connects these figures is their shared status as explorers. Wright, after all, described himself in the previous collection as conducting a study of exploration. Another interpretation is that they all exist as names, and thus build upon Wrights fascination with nominalization. If there is a truthfulness to poetry, the opening line suggests that it lies in the function names have in life and in the watery beyond. The names reference distinct individuals, but the poem celebrates them in the light of their ongoing contribution to human understanding. By virtue of their names, these explorers exceed earthly expiration. They endure in the language of the poem at hand; where, against a sea of abstractions, they stand out like shimmering buoys, enticing the reader to set keel to breakers and depart on their own exploratory study.

One may think this is a long way of saying that poets attain immortality through virtue of their reputations. But Wright is up to something different. He is less concerned with the name in and of itself, its referential function, than in the medium through which names pass on their path to perpetuity. As the poem above suggests, if one is to understand infinity as heavenly afterlife, literary pantheon, or mathematical concept one must first understand the milieu through which a projective phenomenon passes. Taking Wrights lead, we recall that the failure of ether was the failure of scientific consensus in the 19th century, when physicists assumed that since sound waves pass through air, and ocean waves pass through water, light must travel through some similar atmospheric jelly, which they dubbed ether. While little is obvious in this poem, the profound presence of measure and rhyme suggests that Wright considers rhythm to be the milieu of continuity. Less jelly, more Jelly Roll. Each return of the beat is an anniversary, as the title would suggest, and with each anniversary comes an encounter with that which makes a post-late poetics possible: a transition overtaking a terminus.

When describing rhythm and its folding of finite sensory experience into infinity, Wright reaches for evidence in the objective realm physics, geometry, and chemistry finding in such propositions a parallel to world mythology.

Do not be astonished if you hear a drumming,

or meet an unattended leopard in the bush.

The mask half in shadow, half in sunlight will bring

you through death; you might think of this as pull and push

of an electron, orbiting its own demise.

We know our scholars speak too often in disguise,

embrace Abaku, always sit to improvise.

Here the death ritual of the Abaku dramatizes scientific thought. The images at the opening refer at least in part to the belief that when a sovereign dies in the Cuban initiatory fraternity, his body is buried without any announcement to the members. Once the death is announced, the members go out in search of the body, which, the ritual insists, has been transformed into a leopard. When the leopard goes undiscovered, the animals spirit is said to find its way into the form of the sovereigns successor. The dance of the members and their masking rhymes with the staggered route of the diminished electron. Scattered insights and embodied belief come together over a beat. The essential pulse of the body lives on through the pulse of the drum, which is the pulse of the poem, as Wright extolls, Nothing overcomes the radiant iambic; / no one forgets the geometry of lyric.

In another sense altogether, the book suggests that what lies beyond late poetics is that very thing that existed before lyric became the poetic norm. Recalling the Greek conception of poetry as largely a dramatic genre, modern poets have for some time been interested in recovering the lost dialogic basis of poetic expression. This is evidenced by the numerous poets who embed playwriting within their concept of poetic practice. Amiri Baraka, T.S. Eliot, Robert Duncan, and Lorine Niedecker are but a few examples. The second half of Wrights book features one of the many theatrical works he has written over his career. Entitled The Geometry of Rhythm, the one-act play returns us to the foundational question that undergirds the book: in what ways does poetry survive the poet?

Grogach: You taught me the fragile geometry of self

Bivio: And you have taught me to live with my ambiguous rhythm

Grogach: Shall we exchange names?

Bivio: Lets do.

The various threads of the book are here woven into a light, yet taut, textile. Selfhood is not particularly well-suited for perpetuity, rhythm is not mere regularity, and names find their meaning in the ongoing exchange.

The Prime Anniversary (2019) by Jay Wright is published by Flood Editions.

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Rhythm, Divination, and Naming in Jay Wright's Poetry - Hyperallergic

Why A U.S.-Iran War Isn’t Going To Happen – The National Interest Online

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Will Tehran and Washington let slip the dogs of war following last weeks aerial takedown of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpss IRGC) Quds Force? You could be forgiven for thinking so considering the hot takes that greeted the news of the drone strike outside Baghdad. For example, one prominent commentator, the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass, opined that the Middle East region (and possibly the world) will be the battlefield.

Color me skeptical. The apocalypse is not at hand.

Haass is right in the limited sense that irregular military operations now span the globe. Terrorists thirst to strike at far as well as near enemies in hopes of degrading their will to fight. They respect no national boundaries and never have. Frontiers are likewise murky in the cyber realm, to name another battleground with no defined battlefronts. The United States and Iran have waged cyber combat for a decade or more, dating to the Stuxnet worm attack on the Iranian nuclear complex in 2010.

The coming weeks and months may see irregular warfare prosecuted with newfound vigor through such familiar unconventional warmaking methods. Its doubtful Tehran would launch into conventional operations, stepping onto ground it knows America dominates. To launch full-scale military reprisals would justify full-scale U.S. military reprisals that, in all likelihood, would outstrip Irans in firepower and ferocity. The ayatollahs who oversee the Islamic Republic fret about coming up on the losing end of such a clash. As well they might, considering hard experience.

So the outlook is for more of the same. Thats a far cry from the more fevered prophecies of World War III aired since Soleimani went to his reward. To fathom Tehrans dilemma, lets ask a fellow who knew a thing or two about Persian ambitions. (The pre-Islamic Persian Empire, which bestrode the Middle East and menaced Europe, remains the lodestone of geopolitical successeven for Islamic Iran.)

The Athenian historian Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War, a fifth-century-B.C. maelstrom that engulfed the Greek world. Persia was a major player in that contest. In fact, it helped decide the endgame when the Great King supplied Athens antagonist, Sparta, with the resources to build itself into a naval power capable of defeating the vaunted Athenian navy at sea. But Thucydides also meditates on human nature at many junctures in his history, deriving observations of universal scope. At one stage, for instance, he has Athenian ambassadors posit that three of the prime movers impelling human actions are fear, honor, and interest. The emissaries appear to speak for the father of history.

Fear, honor, interest. There are few better places to start puzzling out why individuals and societies do what they do and glimpse what we ought to do. How does Thucydides hypothesis apply to post-Soleimani antagonism between the United States and Iran? Well, the slaying of the Quds Force chieftain puts the ball squarely in the Islamic Republics court. The mullahs must reply to the strike in some fashion. To remain idle would be to make themselves look weak and ineffectual in the eyes of the region and of ordinary Iranians.

In fecklessness lies danger. Doubly so now, after protests convulsed parts of Iran last November. The ensuing crackdown cost hundreds of Iranians their livesand revealed how deeply resentments against the religious regime run. No autocrat relishes weakness, least of all an autocrat whose rule has come under duress from within. A show of power and steadfastness is necessary to cow domestic opponents.

But fear is an omnidirectional, multiple-domain thing for Iranian potentates. External threats abound. Iranians are keenly attuned to geographic encirclement, for instance. They view their country as the Middle Easts rightful heavyweight. Yet U.S. forces or their allies surround and constrain the Islamic Republic from all points of the compass with the partial exception of the northeastern quadrant, which encompasses the stans of Central Asia, and beyond them Russia.

Look at your map. The U.S. Navy commands the westerly maritime flank, backed up by the U.S. Air Force. Americas Gulf Arab allies ring the western shores of the Persian Gulf. U.S. forces remain in Iraq to the northwest, where Suleimani fell, and in Afghanistan to the east. Even Pakistan, to the southeast, is an American treaty ally, albeit an uneasy one. These are forbidding surroundings. Tendrils of U.S. influence curl all around the Islamic Republics borders. Breaking out seems like a natural impulse for Iranian diplomacy and military strategy.

And yet. However fervent about its geopolitical ambitions, the Iranian leadership will be loath to undertake measures beyond the intermittent bombings, support to militants elsewhere in the region, and ritual denunciations of the Great Satan that have been mainstays of Iranian foreign policy for forty years now. Iranian leaders comprehend the forces arrayed against them. A serious effort at a breakout will remain premature unless and until they consummate their bid for atomic weaponry. The ability to threaten nuclear devastation may embolden them to trybut that remains for the future.

Next, honor. Irregular warfare is indecisive in itself, but it can provide splashy returns on a modest investment of resources and effort. Having staked their political legitimacy on sticking it to the Great Satan and his Middle Eastern toadies, the ayatollahs must deliver regular incremental results. Direct attacks on U.S. forces make good clickbait; so do pictures showing IRGC light surface combatants tailing U.S. Navy task forces; so do attacks on vital economic infrastructure in U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia. And headlines convey the image of a virile power on the move.

The honor motive, then, merges with fear. Iranians fear being denied the honor they consider their due as the natural hegemon of the Gulf region and the Islamic world.

And lastly, interest. Mischief-making must suffice for Iran until it can amass the material wherewithal to make itself a hegemon. Its fascinating that Thucydides lists material gain last among forces that animate human beings. After all, foreign-policy specialists list it first. Interest is quantifiable, and it seems to feed straight into calculations of cost, benefit, and risk. It makes statecraft seem rational!

Theres no way to know for sure after two millennia, but it seems likely the sage old Greek meant to deflate such excesses of rationalism. Namely, he regarded human nature as being about more than things we can count, like economic output or a large field army. For Thucydides cost/benefit arithmetic takes a back seat to not-strictly-rational passionssome of them dark, such as rage and spite, and others brightthat drive us all.

And indeed, for Iranians material interest constitutes the way to rejuvenate national honor while holding fear at bay. Breaking the economic blockade manifest in, say, the Trump administrations maximum pressure strategy would permit Tehran to revitalize the countrys moribund oil and gas sector. Renewed export trade would furnish wealth. Some could go into accoutrements of great power such as a high-tech navy and air force.

In turn Iranian leaders could back a more ambitious diplomacy with steel. They would enjoy the option of departing from their purely irregular, troublemaking ways and competing through more conventional methods. Or, more likely, they would harness irregular means as an adjunct to traditional strategic competition. Material gain, in short, not just satisfies economic needs and wants but amplifies martial might. In so doing it satisfies non-material cravings for renown and geopolitical say-so.

And the American side? Repeat this process. Refract U.S. policy and strategy through Thucydides prism of fear, honor, and interest, consider how Iranian and American motives may intersect and interact, and see what light that appraisal shines into the future. My take: perhaps World War III will come one daybut today is not that day.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy, out last month. The views voiced here are his alone.

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Explained: Savitribai Phules impact on womens education in India – The Indian Express

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Published: January 3, 2020 8:14:10 pm

Savitribai Phule, the social reformer who is considered to be one of Indias first modern feminists, was born on January 3, 1831. Among her accomplishments, she is especially remembered for being Indias first female teacher who worked for the upliftment of women and untouchables in the field of education and literacy.

Phule was born in Naigaon, Maharashtra in 1831 and married activist and social-reformer Jyotirao Phule when she was nine years old. After marriage, with her husbands support, Phule learned to read and write and both of them eventually went on to found Indias first school for girls called Bhide Wada in Pune in 1948. Before this, she started a school with Jyotiraos cousin Saganbai in Maharwada in 1847. Since at that time the idea of teaching girls was considered to be a radical one, people would often throw dung and stones at her as she made her way to the school.

Significantly, it was not easy for the Phules to advocate for the education of women and the untouchables since in Maharashtra a nationalist discourse was playing out between 1881-1920 led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. These nationalists including Tilak opposed the setting up of schools for girls and non-Brahmins citing loss of nationality.

Essentially, both Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule recognised that education was one of the central planks through which women and the depressed classes could become empowered and hope to stand on an equal footing with the rest of the society.

In his essay written for the Savitribai Phule First Memorial Lecture Hari Narke has written, In the social and educational history of India, Mahatma Jotirao Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule stand out as an extraordinary couple. They were engaged in a passionate struggle to build a movement for equality between men and women and for social justice. The Phules also started the Literacy Mission in India between 1854-55. According to Narake, the Phules started the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society for Truth-Seeking), through which they wanted to initiate the practice of Satyashodhak marriage, in which no dowry was taken.

Because of the role Phule played in the field of womens education, she is also considered to be one of the crusaders of gender justice, as one paper published in the International Journal of Innovative Social Science & Humanities Research has said. The paper also credits Phule as being one of the first published women in modern India, who was able to develop a voice and agency of her own, at a time when women were suppressed and lived a sub-human existence.

Even though her poems, which were written in Marathi, she advocated values such as humanism, liberty, equality, brotherhood, rationalism and the importance of education among others. In her poem titled, Go, Get Education she wrote:

Be self-reliant, be industrious

Work, gather wisdom and riches,

All gets lost without knowledge

We become animal without wisdom,

Sit idle no more, go, get education

End misery of the oppressed and forsaken,

Youve got a golden chance to learn

So learn and break the chains of caste.

Throw away the Brahmans scriptures fast.

Her books of poems Kavya Phule and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar were published in 1934 and 1982.

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The Art of Resistance: Kabir Kala Manch gives us a timeless song of defiance in times of repression – Scroll.in

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Even if they kill the body,They cannot kill thought,O religious mercenariesCan you stop the wheel of progress?

This opening verse of Sachin Malis Marathi song, Sampvila Deh Zari, sets the tone for a poetic but scathing evaluation of Hindutva fascism in India. Sung evocatively by Malis partner Sheetal Sathe, the song is a tribute to rationalist activist Narendra Dabholkar, shot dead in 2013, and Communist leader Govind Pansare, killed similarly in 2015. Both are suspected to have been killed by Hindu fundamentalists, who had threatened the activists in the past.

Mali and Sathe are former members of Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural troupe from Pune that performs songs and poems about caste oppression, rationalism, resistance and revolution. The couple, along with other members of Kabir Kala Manch, had been arrested in 2013 for alleged involvement with Naxalites. They are now out on bail, while the charges against them are yet to be proven.

Mali wrote Sampvila Deh Zari in 2015, while still in prison, as a song of defiance. Its verses are full of references to icons of rational, scientific and secular thought throughout history from philosopher Charavaka and Bhakti saint Tukaram to Galileo, Copernicus, Gandhi and communist playwright Safdar Hashmi. Religious fundamentalists may have tried to destroy all of them, Mali writes, but the ideas and ideologies they stood for continue to thrive.

Read all the articles in the Art of Resistance series here.

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The Art of Resistance: Kabir Kala Manch gives us a timeless song of defiance in times of repression - Scroll.in

Webinar: How Providers are Harnessing the Power of Genomics to Improve Community Health – ModernHealthcare.com

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James Lu, M.D., PH.D.Co-founder & Senior Vice President of Applied GenomicsHelix

James is a co-founder and SVP of Applied Genomics at Helix, a population genomics company with a mission to empower every person to improve their life through DNA. Helix is accelerating the integration of genomic data into clinical care and broadening the impact of large-scale population health programs by providing comprehensive expertise in DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and individual engagement. Powered by our proprietary Exome+assaya panel-grade exome enhanced by more than 300,000 informative non-coding regionsHelix partners with health systems to provide a scalable solution which enables the discovery of medically relevant, potentially life-saving, genetic information. Additionally, Helix offers a suite of DNA-powered products for continued individual engagement and discovery.

At Helix, James is responsible for the scientific teams which include bioinformatics, laboratory operations, regulatory, quality, translational research and policy teams.

Prior to Helix, James was a faculty member at Duke University where he focused on translational genomics and machine learning methodologies for electronic medical records. James has also explored a broad range of research topics in population genetics, Mendelian genomics, and computational psychiatry and has published dozens of papers in journals such as Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

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Webinar: How Providers are Harnessing the Power of Genomics to Improve Community Health - ModernHealthcare.com

These 2 Stocks Will Fall After the New Year – Motley Fool

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For all of the hype surrounding gene therapy and gene editing, the precision genetic medicine approach that turned in the best 2019 may have been RNA interference (RNAi). The gene-silencing technique earned its first regulatory approval for a novel targeted delivery method. That may not sound like much to get excited about, but it promises to open up numerous high-value opportunities for RNAi drug developers.

The approval, coupled with promising early-stage clinical results and massive partnership deals, explains why Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ARWR) and Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:DRNA) erupted higher in 2019. The RNAi drug developers saw their market valuations increase by 450% and 106%, respectively, last year.

While both companies have promise, thepharma stocks are likely to fall in early 2020. What does that mean for investors with a long-term mindset?

Image source: Getty Images.

Shares of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals had a pretty good first nine months of 2019, but the most impressive gains came in the fourth quarter. The RNAi stock gained heading into the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) Annual Meeting in November. Investors were eagerly awaiting the results of two drug combinations being developed to treat chronic hepatitis B (CHB) by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) subsidiary Janssen.

The results lived up to the hype. The most impressive data came from a triple combination of an RNAi drug from Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals (now called JNJ-3989), an antiviral drug from Johnson & Johnson (JNJ-6379), and a nucleos(t)ide analog (NA). After 16 weeks of treatment, all 12 individuals in the study achieved at least a 90% reduction in two biomarkers of hepatitis B virus activity.

Investors gobbled up shares of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals because the triple combination appears to be the industry's best hope for developing the first functional cure for CHB (although it can't be called a functional cure just yet).

Additionally, the RNAi drug candidate in the triple combination is based on a targeted delivery platform called TRiM. The approach is simple: The gene-silencing payload is attached to a special sugar that's absorbed by the liver. Since many RNAi drug candidates need to interact with DNA in liver cells, and the sugars are easily metabolized by the liver (improving safety over prior-generation lipid nanoparticle delivery vehicles), it's a perfect pairing.

It helps that just a few weeks after AASLD, Givlaari from Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY)became the first RNAi drug candidate based on a conjugated-sugar delivery method to earn regulatory approval. It also helps that Dicerna Pharmaceuticals landed two massive partnerships in the fourth quarter of 2019 -- both based on its own conjugated-sugar delivery platform. Following those deals, there's now considerable overlap between the pipelines of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, which are both all-in on targeted delivery.

RNAi Developer

Partner, Indication

Financial Terms

Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals

Johnson & Johnson, hepatitis B

$175 million up front, $75 million equity investment, up to $1.6 billion in milestone payments, royalties

Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals

Johnson & Johnson, undisclosed

Up to $1.9 billion in total milestone payments for up to three additional drug candidates, royalties

Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals

Amgen, cardiovascular disease

$35 million up front, $21.5 million equity investment, up to $617 million in milestone payments, royalties

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals

Roche, hepatitis B

$200 million up front, up to $1.47 billion in milestone payments, royalties

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals

Novo Nordisk, various liver-related cardio-metabolic diseases

$175 million up front, equity investment of $50 million, an additional $75 million over the first three years, up to $357.5 million per drug candidate, royalties

Data source: Press releases, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Despite all of the progress from both Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and Dicerna Pharmaceuticals in 2019, both companies are likely to fall back to Earth a bit following giant run-ups.

Consider that Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals is valued at $6.3 billion at the start of 2020. The company's most advanced drug candidate, ARO-AAT, recently began dosing patients in a phase 2/3 trial in a rare genetic liver disease associated with alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT or A1AT) deficiency. While that study can be used for a new drug application (NDA), and the drug candidate could achieve over $1 billion in peak annual sales, that alone doesn't support a $6.3 billion valuation.

Meanwhile, the triple combination in CHB could support a market valuation well above $6 billion, especially if it proves to be a functional cure. The drug candidate could eventually earn peak annual sales of over $10 billion in that scenario. But the recent gains were spurred by results in only 12 individuals after 16 weeks of follow-up. A phase 2b trial now underway will enroll 450 patients and follow them for two years. In other words, there's plenty of time for investors to take some gains off the table.

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals is valued a little more reasonably, at just $1.5 billion, but it has only one drug candidate in mid- or late-stage clinical trials. The pipeline programs at the center of recent deals with Roche and Novo Nordisk are still in preclinical development or phase 1 studies; there's little to no clinical data from the programs for investors to survey. While the business will be flush with cash after receiving up-front payments in the coming months, there's a lot of work to be done.

To be clear, both Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and Dicerna Pharmaceuticals hold a lot of promise. Targeted delivery of RNAi drug payloads into the liver could open up considerable opportunities to treat -- for the first time, in some cases -- rare diseases, viral infections, and cardiovascular ailments. Both companies have even demonstrated early work to target gene-silencing payloads to other cell types, such as muscle tissues, which may open up additional avenues for drug discovery and development.

However, these two RNAi stocks have fallen 10.7% and 12.3%, respectively, since Dec. 3 -- and both are likely to fall a bit further in early 2020. If and when that occurs, investors may want to give each stock, especially Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, a closer look.

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These 2 Stocks Will Fall After the New Year - Motley Fool

Free Gene Therapy Available for Patients with Alzheimer’s – HealthITAnalytics.com

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January 03, 2020 -Maximum Life Foundation (MaxLife), a non-profit organization focused on aging research, is providing a promising free gene therapy for ten patients with Alzheimers disease.

According to the Alzheimers Association, Alzheimers disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the US. Over five million Americans have the condition, leading to costs of $277 billion a year.

With this gene therapy, researchers have seen improvements in Alzheimers symptoms and the recovery of normal brain functions in experiments with mice. In human cell experiments, the therapy had the same effects through the rejuvenation of microglia, the brains first line of defense against infection, and neurons.

In August 2018, a patient received a low dose of the therapy with no adverse side effects. To date, the patients disease hasnt progressed.

MaxLife will grant 100 percent of the therapy costs to help bring pioneering gene therapy to cure this disease and make Alzheimers disease a thing of the past, said David Kekich, MaxLifes CEO.

Studies have proven that aging is the leading factor in many life-threatening diseases, including Alzheimers. This new gene therapy aims to treat the cellular degeneration caused by aging.

The new treatment is offered by Integrated Health Systems, a gene therapy facilitator that is seeking to treat other adult aging-related diseases with no known cure, including sarcopenia, chronic kidney disease, and atherosclerosis.

This technology could halt many of the big age-associated killers in industrialized countries, said Kekich. Compassionate care helps patients with no other option to get access to experimental therapies that may benefit both themselves and society as a whole.

Other healthcare organizations have stressed the need to leverage gene therapies and precision medicine to improve treatment for Alzheimers and other diseases. A recent study published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience discussed how precision medicine tactics will help improve cognitive disease treatment.

Taking a precision medicine approach, the question is no longer Does treatment work? but Who does treatment work for? Identifying the characteristics of non-responders becomes as important as responders in understanding the impact of a particular intervention, the team said.

Such an approach may result in considerable health benefits by allowing more effective selection of individuals for treatments based ona prioriknown profiles of disease risk and their potential response to treatment.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) also recently discovered that certain genetic variants may help protect individuals against Alzheimers disease, a finding that could hold important implications for precision medicine therapies.

The team studied a patient who carried a mutation in a gene known to cause early onset Alzheimers but didnt show signs of mild cognitive impairment until her seventies. This is nearly three decades after the typical age of onset. Evaluating this patient, and patients like her, could help researchers understand more about the progression of Alzheimers.

This single case opens a new door for treatments of Alzheimers disease, based more on the resistance to Alzheimers pathology rather than on the cause of the disease. In other words, not necessarily focusing on reduction of pathology, as it has been done traditionally in the field, but instead promoting resistance even in the face of significant brain pathology, said Yakeel T. Quiroz, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist and neuroimagingresearcher at MGH.

With the new gene therapy, MaxLife will add to the growing body of research exploring the use of precision medicine and genetics in chronic disease treatment.

If we can prove a benefit to patients that have no other option now, we can potentially treat Alzheimers disease in people in early to mid-stage Alzheimers, finally creating effective medicine at the cellular level, states Kekich. If successful, this treatment could potentially be used on other diseases such as Parkinsons and ALS.

To apply for a free therapy or for more information, click here.

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Chinese Researcher Who Created Gene-Edited Babies Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison – NPR

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He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher shown here at a conference last year in Hong Kong, has been sentenced to three years in prison. Kin Cheung/AP hide caption

He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher shown here at a conference last year in Hong Kong, has been sentenced to three years in prison.

Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET

A Chinese scientist who shocked the medical community last year when he said he had illegally created the world's first gene-edited babies has been sentenced to three years in prison by a court in southern China.

He Jiankui announced in November 2018 that he had used a powerful technique called CRISPR on a human embryo to edit the genes of twin girls. He said he modified a gene with the intention of protecting the girls against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Many scientists expressed concerns about possible unintended side effects of the genetic changes that could be passed down to future generations.

Last fall, He also indicated there might be another pregnancy involving a gene-edited embryo. The court indicated that three genetically edited babies have been born.

The closed court in Shenzhen found He and two colleagues guilty of illegal medical practice by knowingly violating the country's regulations and ethical principles with their experiments, Xinhua news agency reported. It also ordered He to pay a fine of about $430,000.

He's colleagues, Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou, were handed lesser sentences and fines.

"None of the three defendants acquired doctor's qualifications. [They] craved fame and fortune and deliberately went against the country's regulations on scientific research and medical management. [They] went beyond the bottom lines of scientific research and medical ethics," the court stated, according to the South China Morning Post.

He has defended his controversial work by saying that it will help families. "I understand my work will be controversial," he said, as NPR's Rob Stein reported. "But I believe families need this technology. And I am willing to take the criticism for them."

At the time, scientists had previously genetically modified human embryos, but none had publicly claimed to have implanted embryos in a woman's womb in an experiment that resulted in human babies.

Chinese police detained He in January and, as the Post reported, an initial investigation concluded that he "organised a project team that included foreign staff, which intentionally avoided surveillance and used technology of uncertain safety and effectiveness to perform human embryo gene-editing activity with the purpose of reproduction, which is officially banned in the country."

The gene that He edited, CCR5, is known as a pathway for HIV to infect immune system cells. But as Stein notes, research carried out since He's stunning announcement has suggested that the genetic changes he made could cause more harm than good to the babies' health.

A study in Nature Medicine analyzed the DNA of more than 400,000 people and found that the changes that He made could make people more vulnerable to viruses such as West Nile and influenza.

"This is a lesson in humility," George Daley, the dean of the Harvard Medical School, told Stein. "Even when we think we know something about a gene, we can always be surprised and even startled, like in this case, to find out that a gene we thought was protective may actually be a problem."

Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, said in an email to NPR that He's "reckless and self-serving acts should highlight the broader and deeper risks and the pointlessness of any proposal to use gene editing in human reproduction."

William Hurlbut, a scientist and bioethicist at Stanford who had attempted to persuade He (who is nicknamed JK) not to do the experiment, called his arrest a "sad story."

"Everyone lost in this (JK, his family, his colleagues, and his country), but the one gain is that the world is awakened to the seriousness of our advancing genetic technologies," Hurlbut said in an emailed statement. "I feel sorry for JK's little family though I warned him things could end this way, but it was just too late."

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