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Cambodia casinos warned to halt online gambling by Dec. 31 – CalvinAyre.com

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Cambodias casinos could face legal action if they dont halt their online gambling operations by January 1, according to a government spokesman.

On Christmas Day, VOA Cambodia quoted Finance Ministry official Ros Phearun saying that government officials would conduct inspections of local casino operators to ensure they are complying with Prime Minister Hun Sens August directive to rescind all online gambling licenses by the end of 2019.

This past weekend, Hun Sen confirmed that the directive was no passing fancy, telling a local festival audience that in days to come, online gambling will completely disappear. The August directive declared that no new online licenses would be issued and that existing licenses wouldnt be renewed when they expired at the end of this year.

Phearun, the governments traditional point person on gambling issues, echoed Hun Sens recent comments by claiming that the online gambling ban was intended to reduce money laundering by unscrupulous operators. Phearun claimed Cambodia currently lacked the technical capabilities to ensure that all operators were complying with their regulatory obligations.

Many of the new casino licenses issued over the past two years have been for Chinese-run operations in Sihanoukville. VOA quoted a Preah Sihanouk provincial spokesperson saying that local authorities had no choice but to implement what is set by the government and thus Sihanoukvilles casinos will be closely monitored to ensure theyve shut their online operations.

Phearun told the Khmer Times that there were 141 active casinos in Cambodia down from 163 in June, a possible reflection of the exodus of Chinese operators following Augusts directive of which 89 were operating online gambling and arcade machines. Some 72 casinos are believed to be officially operating in Sihanoukville alone.

Phearun added that a joint committee will inspect each casino to see if online operations are ongoing, and that we will not wait until January we will start to crack down on the night of December 31. Casinos found to be flouting the new rules will face not only license revocation but also legal action.

While most Cambodians seem okay with the governments anti-online steps, not everyone is convinced the government will allocate sufficient resources to ensure compliance. This spring, the government ordered the closure of a land-based casino in Sihanoukville that was pumping raw sewage into the sea but the owner who at the time had been operating without a license for over a year simply ignored the shutdown order for three months.

Cambodia casinos warned to halt online gambling by Dec. 31 - CalvinAyre.com

UK gambling-related hospital admissions up to more than one a day – The Guardian

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Gambling-related admissions to hospital have reached more than one a day, as the health service grapples with betting addiction across Britain.

There were 379 such admissions to hospital in 2018/19, up 28% on 2015/16, according to NHS Digital figures that include those diagnosed as having a pathological gambling addiction.

Gambling disorder is linked to compulsive behaviour, the risk of self-harm and substance misuse. It also occurs in conjunction with serious mental health difficulties, such as depression, anxiety and psychosis.

The north-west had the greatest number of admissions over the past year, followed by London. About a sixth of those admitted to hospital across England, Scotland and Wales were under 25 but it was unclear how many were children.

The number of children classed as having a gambling problem is 55,000, while 450,000 under-18s bet regularly, according to industry regulator the Gambling Commission.

Last week, the Royal Society for Public Health warned that betting-style features in video games, including loot boxes, are polluting young peoples lives and should be reclassified as gambling.

Gambling disorder significantly impacts on a persons mental health, increasing the risk of self harm and suicide, said Matt Zarb-Cousin from gambling blocking software firm Gamban.

Were now at the point where more than one person every day in Britain has to be admitted to hospital as a result of gambling. Its time to look properly at the types of gambling available and their role in causing such severe harm to people.

Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said earlier this year: The links between problem gambling and stress, depression and mental health problems are growing and there are too many stories of lives lost and families destroyed.

He added: This is an industry that splashes 1.5bn on marketing and advertising campaigns, much of it now pumped out online and through social media, but it has been spending just a fraction of that helping customers and their families deal with the direct consequences of addiction.

The NHS opened the National Problem Gambling Clinic in London this year to provide young people specialist help to deal with betting addiction as part of an expansion of its treatment offering in the area.

The figures do not include patients who were diagnosed in a primary care setting, or who attended hospital as an outpatient.

The World Health Organization first recognised gambling disorder as a medical condition in 2000. In the UK, there are about 340,000 adult problem gamblers, 0.7% of the population, according to the Gambling Commission.

Bookmakers have closed dozens of shops on high streets and are increasingly pushing customers towards online betting, after stakes on fixed-odd betting terminals described as the crack cocaine of gambling were limited to 2 this year.

The gambling industry in the UK made 14.4bn in 2018/19 and Denise Coates, the multibillionaire founder of the gambling company Bet365, paid herself 323m last year.

More than half of people aged 16 or older in England gambled at some point during 2018, according to official figures.

NI gambling consultation welcomed by Christian charity – The Irish Catholic

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

A gambling consultation launched by the Northern Irish government has been welcomed by charities who say the current law is not fit for purpose and is leading to suffering.

Launched by the Department of Communities (DfC) it runs from December 16, 2019 to February 21, 2020 and consults the public and stakeholders as to the effectiveness of current law.

It covers a wide range of issues including casinos, online gambling and research, education and treatment for individuals suffering from problem-gambling.

The Northern Ireland Office has previously said that NI has an extraordinary rate of problem gambling which makes the new consultation even more significant, according to Christian charity CARE NI.

Mark Baillie, CARE NI Policy Officer said: It is well known problem-gambling can have a devastating impact on individuals and families. It can lead to financial problems, family breakdown and in extreme cases it can even lead individuals to take their own lives.

The current law is no longer fit for purpose and real people right across our society are suffering as a consequence.

Northern Ireland has proportionally the highest problem-gambling prevalence within the UK.

DfC Permanent Secretary Tracy Meharg acknowledged that the industry is an important employer and responsible gambling is enjoyed by many.

However it is very important to recognise that for some people, gambling has the potential to cause considerable harm. Any future changes to the law must balance the interests of the gambling industry with the need for regulation to protect vulnerable people, Ms Meharg said.

She added there is no doubt that current legislation is outdated and hasnt kept pace with industry and technological changes.

Details of the consultation documents can be found at

http://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/consultations/consultation-regulation-gambling-northern-ireland

NI gambling consultation welcomed by Christian charity - The Irish Catholic

Gambling Traditions That Fit Festivities Well – Tunf.com News

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Christmas time has come, and in many parts of the world, gambling could be seen as the type of activity that goes well with a holiday spirit. After all, people tend to have fun during festivities and sometimes that could include a card game or a friendly wager.

Operators know that well. This is why any sensible operator would arrange some kind of Christmas promotion for its customers. This goes double for lottery operators.

How many times it happened, a family finishing a Christmas dinner, kids playing in other rooms and then the adults pull out their lottery or scratch tickets. After all, this is a group activity, spending moments in joy, laughing and joking while waiting for the results. Scratch tickets are even more common because in many different cultures these are regarded as the perfect gift that could provide fun and if you are lucky enough, some money.

And then, there are cards. Of course, everyone owns a card deck. Playing a round of poker or some other game where participants place wagers (of course, we are talking about trivial sums, just to spice things up) and then try to defeat each other, sharing jokes and sipping some refreshing drink along the way.

When realized in a tight circle of family and friends, Christmas gambling habit is actually just a form of low-stake entertainment that keeps all those involved entertained. Of course, this is just for the adults (although kids do love scratch tickets sometimes), and it should be done in a relaxed manner, without tension or high stakes involved.

Source: https://calvinayre.com/2019/12/24/business/a-canadian-christmas-gambling-tradition/

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Gambling Traditions That Fit Festivities Well - Tunf.com News

Gambling addiction drove loving father to take his own life after spending 111,000 – Mirror Online

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

A loving dad and husband killed himself after he could not cope with his enormous gambling debts, an inquest has heard.

Jowan Evans, 32, took how own life in March this year after facing "significant financial problems" and racking up debts from online gambling websites.

An inquest into his death revealed over the past 11 years the father-of-three had spent more than 111,000 in online bookmakers and betting shops including more than 53,000 in the six months before his death, with losses amounting to 19,000, reports Cornwall Live .

Mr Evans wrote about his gambling addiction in a note discovered by police investigators after his death.

He said he had kept his addiction hidden from everyone - including his wife Lucie.

It read: "This monster living inside me has ruined my life."

Lucie described her husband as "perfect" and shared a powerful message urging anybody suffering at the hands of similar demons to seek help.

The inquest heard Mr Evans was last seen on March 17 after he dropped off his older son from a previous relationship with his mum.

He is understood to have then hanged himself in a wooded area some 800 metres from his car which he left on the car park.

His concerned wife Lucie raised the alarm after he did not re-appear that night.

A search operation was then launched which involved a helicopter, heat-seeking camera, sniffer dogs and members of the Cornwall Search and Rescue Team.

Mr Evans' body was discovered the following day.

Further investigation of his bank accounts revealed the extent of Mr Evans' gambling addiction with bets on the two sites ranging from a few pounds to 1,500 or 2,000.

In the months prior to his death, Mr Evans had borrowed 20,000 from his father to help him expunge other debts, particularly on his car as it was about to be repossessed, but that money was used to gamble on various sporting events.

Detective Sergeant Stephen White, who led the investigation, told the inquest at County Hall in Truro that Mr Evans' first partner had left him because he had gambled away 30,000 which had been put aside as a deposit for a house.

Assistant coroner Guy Davies said these gambling sites operated on a pay-as-you-bet basis with money coming directly out of people's bank accounts without any deposits required onto the sites themselves, making it quite easy to gamble.

Recording a suicide conclusion, Mr Davies said: "This is a case in which Jowan Evans struggled with his hidden gambling addiction which led him to take his own life.

"There had been nothing to warn his family about what went on in his mind. There was no cry for help. Police investigation revealed a note left in his van. It was clearly a suicide note. In it he mentioned how he gambled his money away again and again.

"Jowan had significant financial problems and a longstanding gambling addiction and unpaid finance as well as un-repaid loans from family members.

"For him it was an accumulating wall of debt. He took his own life as a direct result of his gambling debt and his perception to beat his gambling addiction."

If you need confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see http://www.samaritans.org for details.

For help with gambling issues visit the NHS website here or see information about the NHS's National Problem Gambling Clinic here or the Gamblers Anonymous charity can be found here .

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Gambling addiction drove loving father to take his own life after spending 111,000 - Mirror Online

Ontario Ministry of Transportation employee suspended after arrest in Hells Angels gambling bust – Toronto Star

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

A provincial civil servant has been suspended after he was among 28 people including three Ontario Hells Angels who were charged last week in what police call a multi-million-dollar illegal offshore gambling enterprise.

Richard Pereira, 35, of Oshawa, was charged with criminal breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer in the police operation, which police said was linked to York Region mobsters as well as outlaw bikers.

Pereira is a Ministry of Transportation employee and was the only civil servant charged.

The employee in question has been placed on suspension pending investigation, Alisha Tharani of the provincial Treasury Board Secretariat told the Star.

She offered no details about the terms of the suspension.

The Ontario Public Service will cooperate with authorities as required, Tharani said in an email. As this is currently an active human resources matter we are unable to comment further at this time.

Charges against other suspects in the police crackdown included commission of offences for a criminal organization, bookmaking, firearms, money laundering and tax evasion.

The Ontario Provincial Police said they seized more than $12 million in assets, including sports cars, two golf carts, seven residences, nine illegal handguns, jewelry valued at approximately $300,000, $330,000 in precious metals, $1.2 million in financial accounts and approximately $1.7 million in cash.

The multi-jurisdictional police operation was dubbed Project Hobart and began in January 2018. There were 228 charges laid against 28 people from across the province and Oka, Que., last week.

Police said the complex gambling network was controlled by Ontario Hells Angels bikers with ties to York Regional mobsters.

The operation pulled in more than $131 million in gross revenues and included the websites Ultimate SB, Titan SB, PlaytoWin WB, Privada SB and Players SB, police said.

Gamblers were allowed credit limits as high as $20,000, but they were also expected to settle doubts within a week, police said.

The groups also operated a gaming house in Mississauga, police said

The three full-patch Hells Angels who were charged by police are Robert Barletta, 49, a London, Ont. strip club owner; Craig (Truck) McIlquham, 49, of Oakville; and Eugenio (Gino) Reda, 55, of King City.

Barletta was hit with 11 charges, including illegal firearms possession, bookmaking and commission of an offence for a criminal organization.

McIlquhams dozen charges include possession of a restricted weapon, bookmaking and commission of an offence for a criminal organization.

Reda faces three bookmaking charges and another for commission of an offence for a criminal organization.

Niagara Hells Angel Michael (Diaz) Deabaitua-Schulde was originally also targeted in the project. Deabaitua-Schulde was murdered on March 11 after leaving a workout at a gym in a commercial plaza in Mississauga.

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The gambling operation was linked to the Figliomeni Crime Family of York Region, some alleged members of which were charged in July by York Regional Police in a sweeping investigation called Project Sindicato, OPP Chief Supt. Paul Beesley said.

Three Montreal men were charged with first-degree murder in Deabaitua-Schuldes death and another Montreal man has been charged with complicity after the fact.

Police said the investigation was spurred by an escalation of violent crimes across Ontario, including attempted murders, arson, extortion and threats.

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Ontario Ministry of Transportation employee suspended after arrest in Hells Angels gambling bust - Toronto Star

Christmas in America – The Washington TImes

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

What if Christmas is a core value of belief in a personal God who lived among us and His freely given promise of eternal salvation that no believer should reject or apologize for? What if Christmas is the rebirth of Christ in the hearts of all believers? What if Christmas is the potential rebirth of Christ in every heart that will have Him, whether a believer or not?

What if Jesus Christ was born about 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem? What if He is true God and true man? What if this is a mystery and a miracle? What if this came about as part of Gods plan for the salvation of all people? What if Jesus was sent into the world to atone for our sins by offering Himself as a sacrifice? What if He was sinless? What if His life was the most critical turning point in human history? What if the reason we live is that He died?

What if after He died, He rose from the dead? What if He was murdered by the government because it feared a revolt if it did not murder Him? What if the government thought He was crazy when He said He was a king but His kingdom was not of this world? What if He was not crazy but divine? What if when He said that He could forgive sins, He was referring to Himself as God?

What if He is one of the three parts of a triune God? What if this is an inexplicable mystery? What if there is no power without mystery? What if the power He possessed, He exercised only for the good? What if He truly gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, musculature to the lame, hope to the disillusioned, courage to the weak and life to the dead?

What if He freely did these things but sought no acclamation for them? What if after each of these miracles, He disappeared into the temple precincts or walked well past the crowd, lest the crowd hail him as a temporal or secular leader? What if there was in that towering personality a deep thread of shyness? What if He was shy about His Godness? What if He was shy about His goodness? What if He loved saving us? What if He was joyful but did not want us to see His joy?

What if He knew all along how profoundly untimely and utterly painful the end of His life on Earth would be, but He neither feared nor avoided it? What if His greatest display of love was self-restraint on the cross?

What if most of the world that He came to save has rejected Him? What if He still loves those who have rejected Him? What if He still offers them salvation? What if His offer is real and forever?

What if many folks today have rejected the true God for government-as-god? What if the government-as-god has set itself up as providing for all secular needs in return for fidelity to it? What if this seductive offer has been accepted by millions in America?

What if the acceptance of this seductive offer of government-as-god has ruined individual initiative, destroyed personal work ethic, fostered cancerous laziness, enhanced deep poverty and impelled thoughtless obedience to government in those who have accepted it? What if the blind acceptance of government-as-god chills the exercise of personal freedoms for fear of the loss of the governments munificence? What if government charity is really munificence with money it has taken from those who work and earn it? What if its then given to those who dont? What if it is impossible to be truly charitable with someone elses money?

What if Jesus came to set us free from the yoke of government oppression and the chains of personal sin? What if freedom is our birthright, given to us by the true God, not by the government-as-god? What if the true God made us in His own image and likeness? What if the most similar likeness between us mortals and the true God is freedom? What if just as God is perfectly free, so are we perfectly free? What if we have failed to preserve freedom and have permitted governments to take it from us? What if we are not fully human without full freedom?

What if the world was full of darkness before He came into it? What if there is darkness still today but yet much light? What if we recognize that He is the light of the world? What if Christmas is the birthday of the Son of God and the Son of Mary? What if we recognize the presence of the Son of God and the Son of Mary in our hearts and among us? What if the God-as-baby whose birthday we celebrate is the Savior of the World? What if we dont mask this but live it?

What if we say with our hearts and mean with our words Merry Christmas?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is a regular contributor to The Washington Times. He is the author of nine books on the U.S. Constitution.

Christmas in America - The Washington TImes

Christians are being persecuted around the globe. That’s the real war on Christmas. – USA TODAY

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Scott Arbeiter, Opinion contributor Published 7:00 a.m. ET Dec. 24, 2019

The next time you get offended when someone wishes you "happy holidays," remember those who won't get to celebrate those holidays at all.

Americas War on Christmas has been raging for over a decade, inciting controversies over nativity scenes, Christmas lights, holiday cardsand even Starbucks cups. Everyone from The New York Timesto Timehas commented on the so-called war,with one side claiming that Christianity itself is at risk, and the other side dismissing the outrage as histrionics.

There may or may not be a war on Christmas in America. But there certainly is one in other parts of the world, and it is these wars that should be getting our attention. Open Doors USA calls persecution of Christians one of the biggest human rights issues of this era,citing instances of violence, imprisonment and murderin countries around the world. According to Open Doors, in 2018over 245 million Christians were living in places where they experienced high levels of persecution.

A report published this year by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) found that Christians in Burma, the Central African Republic, China, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam face the highest levels of persecution.According to a USCIRF commissioner, "Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world," and that persecution is only intensifying.

What does that persecution look like? It looks like government oppression, mob attacks and churches being burned.It looks like rape and attacks on the elderly. It looks like 11 Christians being killed every day for their faith.

Christians at a church on Dec. 12, 2014, in Erbil, Iraq.(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

In Syria, where over 800,000 people are Christians, Christian villages have been hollowed outby ISIS, according to The New York Times. Most historic churches have been demolished or claimed by Islamic groups.Last September, six Christian children were killed in a bomb attack ona Christian village.

Today, with the recent U.S. decision to withdraw most troops fromSyria, 150,000 Christians in Northeast Syria are in danger, along with those of many otherfaiths, according to Lauren Homer, an attorney with Law and Liberty International.Hundreds have already died as their villages have been bombed.

Time to wake up: Global Christian persecution is worsening while American churches slumber

At the same time, there is little hope of resettlement as refugees, especially in the U.S. In the past several years, there has been a sharp decline in the resettlement of Christian refugees, particularly from countries where Christians face extreme persecution. From FY2016 to FY2019, the number of Christian refugees from Iran has plummeted 95.4%; 94.2% fewer Christians have been resettled from Iraq; and the same group from Pakistan has dropped 74.1%.

And now, a Christian pastorseeking asylum in the U.S. isbeing sent back across the borderunder the White Houses remain-in-Mexico policy.Last week, I met Douglas Oviedo,a Honduran youth pastor who was so effective at drawing young people to Jesus and away from gangs that the gangs threatened his life, compelling him to flee his country.After 11months of waiting in Mexico, Pastor Douglas was granted asylum by a U.S. immigration judge.But he is still not in the clear, because our government has inextricably appealed his case, such that Pastor Douglas could be deported back into the hands of Honduran gangs rather than be allowed to stay in the U.S. and bring his wife and small children.

While I appreciate that President Donald Trump has affirmed his support for Christmas greetings, a much more impactful gesture would be fulfilling his pledge to facilitate the resettlement of persecuted Christian refugees. This would also mean rolling back changes to asylum policy that threaten to deport pastors and others back to the Central American gangs seeking to harm them.

Don't forget about them: On Good Friday and beyond, remember Christians who aren't allowed to take refuge in the US

Its okay that not everyone in America shares the same faith; in fact, the religious freedom that allows each person to choose for themselves how (or if) to believe is a core American value. My own Christian faith compels me to welcome refugees and asylum seekers whether persecuted for their faith Christianity or any other or for their ethnicity, political opinion or other reasons. I challenge War on Christmas warriors to keep their focus on the real sufferers this Christmas.

As we reflect upon the nativity story, lets not forget this detail from the Bible: Just after the three wise men brought their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, Jesus himself was carried by Joseph and Mary across a border to Egypt, fleeing the genocidal persecution of King Herod. We can best honor a refugee Saviorthis Christmas by remembering brothers and sisters persecuted by the Herods of today and by insisting that our government resume its role as a safe haven for persecuted Christians and others fleeing persecution.

Scott Arbeiter is the president of World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization that is among nine agencies that resettles refugees in the U.S.

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Christians are being persecuted around the globe. That's the real war on Christmas. - USA TODAY

Who rules the roost? – Daily Pioneer

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

The year 2019 has been of Shah but he will do well to note that the nation saw a political voice emerge: Those of Indias young, who have spoken against the Governments high-handedness

As the year comes to a close, in this weeks article, lets take a look back to see how we have come by. The year 2019 marked the commencement of polling in the worlds largest democracy. The rhetoric espoused by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led to it winning the elections with a comfortable majority of its own. After the swearing-in of the Narendra Modi-led BJP Government, the nation saw the appointment of Amit Shah as the Union Home Minister. This is when things got interesting. Ever since, the year has been most obviously punctuated by events with the Home Minister at its forefront.

In the years between 2014 and 2019, Shah was primarily viewed as the orchestrator of the BJPs victories in a few States, some through strategy and others through blatant subversion of democracy. Each such victory whether through subversion or strategy was lauded by certain media organsiations. Some news anchors came up with the kind of servile praise that would make even the Korean Central News Agency look on in admiration.

After giving another five years to the Modi-led BJP Government, we saw Shah rise to a much more prominent position, in administration and in the Government. This is surely distinct from the much more clandestine and behind-the-scenes role that Home Ministers have been given while working for the party. As the BJP president, rumours and discussions were already doing the rounds about just how much power and influence Shah held even then. But now, there is hardly any debate. He is possibly the most powerful man in the Government and its agenda is being driven by the Home Minister. The change in dynamics was visible even before the new Government was sworn in, most visibly during the Press conference held by the Prime Minister. If one were to watch the briefing even now, it will be evident that the address was led by Shah. It was incredible to see a Prime Minister, the head of the Government, look at the soon-to-be Home Minister before answering questions put before him. This set the tone for 2019.

Then came one of the first significant decisions of this Government, the abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of Jammu & Kashmir into two Union Territories. Whatever ones views on the change in status of Kashmir may be, there can be little debate that this change in status came with little or no discussion or debate with the real stakeholders in Kashmir, namely the people of the former State. Instead, what we saw was that in the blink of an eye, a tectonic change in Indias political and Constitutional landscapes was thrust down our throats even before we were given a chance to debate the niceties. It is good governance and frankly, a basic principle of our federal democracy that the Central Government, while exercising a decision that affects each citizen of the State, takes the concerns of its people into account. However, there was no debate or discussion on Article 370 as to what could have been the best way to take such a move forward.

Instead, what we have seen and what we continue to see is an entire State still under lockdown. This is a State, where internet services have been shut down for almost half a year now and where the local leadership has been silenced through not only the internet embargo but also through house arrests. From the reports that have emerged in the international media and from what we have seen in other States, where internet services have been shut (such as Assam and Uttar Pradesh), major repercussions and reaction of the people of Kashmir to such a move can really be gauged after the internet blockade is lifted. All we can hope is that the damage and oppression caused by such a move does not result in us losing Kashmir altogether. I believe that the entire episode could have been handled by involving all stakeholders, especially the people, who are the most affected.

The same brazen approach was followed by the Government during the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, now the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). I have already written in detail about how the CAA goes against the spirit of the Constitution and the very idea of India that the framers of our Constitution and the builders of modern India had envisaged. I will not go into these details again but the person leading the CAA and the one who forced it down our collective throats was the Home Minister. The standard procedure for the passage of any Bill calls for it to be presented before the Standing Committee. However, in the case of CAA, the Government did not deem it fit to take the views of the Opposition or of the public.

The CAA and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are two sides of the same coin. It was interesting to see the juxtaposition between the Prime Ministers understanding of the NRC and that of the Home Minister. In light of the protests against the divisive CAA, the Prime Minister spoke to the nation to presumably pacify those, who have been protesting against the Act. However, he left the citizens largely confused.

The Prime Minister said that the Government does not intend to implement a pan-India NRC. However, Shah explicitly stated on more than one occasion (including in Parliament) that the NRC will take place all across the country. So whos right? Whom do we trust? Is it the Prime Minister or the Home Minister?

Recently, the Cabinet gave a go ahead to the National Population Register (NPR). There is widespread fear that the data collected as part of the NPR will be the basis of the NRC. This squarely provides the answer. While the Home Minister and the Prime Minister may deny any link between the NRC and the NPR, they have given us little reason for their decisions. It is this trust that the Prime Minister and the Home Minister will need to earn back.

So, it appears that from the date of the infamous Press conference the only one by the Prime Minister till today, the BJP and the ruling Government are increasingly being cast in the image of the Home Minister.

A word of warning though should be in order. The year 2019 has till now been the year of Shah but he would do well to note that the end of the year has seen a political voice emerge: Those of Indias young and old Constitutionalists, who have grown tired of the oppressive, divisive and high-handed acts of the Government and have decided to voice their concern in a largely peaceful and democratic manner. The BJP would do well to note that while 2019 may have been largely about Shah, 2020 could well belong to our youth.

(The writer is a former IPS officer, a former MP and currently a member of the AAP)

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Who rules the roost? - Daily Pioneer

Donald Trump: What Has Two Thumbs And Kills More Birds Than Wind Power? THIS GUY! – Wonkette

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Last week, Donald Trump unleashed yet another unhinged lie-filled rant claiming wind turbines cause American Bird Carnage. As Wonkette's Liz Dye pointed out, nah, many times more birds are killed by buildings and domestic cats, though generally not at the same time. Then, on Christmas Eve, the New York Times ran a major story on a very real threat to far larger numbers of birds: the Trump administration's decision to gut the Migratory Bird Act in 2017, by changing how the law is enforced.

The report is based on a trove of government documents and emails about the new enforcement priority -- really a policy of nearly complete non-enforcement. The administration has effectively eliminated any penalties for companies that kill birds or destroy their habitats, and is now actively discouraging industry as well as state and local governments from taking actions to protect wild birds.

Wouldn't you know it, Trump's bitter tears about all the poor birds being murdered by wind energy aren't just fake; his own policies pose a far greater environmental risk. Isn't that a surprise.

The Migratory Bird Act was originally passed in 1918 to protect birds from over-hunting and poaching -- a couple of decades late for the passenger pigeon, but it at least managed to prevent other extinctions. The Times explains how enforcement of the law evolved:

Beginning in the 1970s, federal officials used the act to prosecute and fine companies up to $15,000 per bird for accidental deaths on power lines, in oil pits, in wind turbines and by other industrial hazards.

Republicans and their oil industry owners have long complained that the law was being used to prevent Americans from getting prosperous by wiping out pesky birds that don't yield any profits for anyone, or at least not for anyone who matters. Those complaints only accelerated during the Obama administration, because War On Oil, and one industry flack sobbed bitterly that "It felt like [the law] was weaponized against one industry."

So as a gift to polluters and other job creators, the Trump administration reinterpreted the rule so we can all get rich without government oppression, hooray!

If landowners destroy a barn knowing it is filled with baby owls, they would not be liable, as long as the intent was not to kill owls, the opinion said. The illegal spraying of a banned pesticide would not be a legal liability either as long as the birds were not the "intended target."

For anyone to get prosecuted now, a company would have to actually have its employees shooting birds, and even then, Interior might insist on documentary proof that they were aiming at the birds, not at, say, black helicopters they thought were spying on them.

Again and again, government records show Interior Department officials explaining, to state and local governments and other federal agencies, that America is out of the business of protecting migratory birds.

In that last example, though, you get a hint of how some career agents with USFW feel about the new regime:

To make matters worse, the administration is also going out of its way to tell state and local governments that any efforts to mitigate harm to migratory birds are "purely voluntary," so if you want to let a new construction project wipe out nesting areas, go for it. Trump administration lawyers advised the state of Virginia that it didn't have to develop an artificial island that would make up for wiping out nesting grounds in a major bridge and tunnel project near Chesapeake Bay. So the state dropped the plan, which it had been working on in conjunction with an environmental group.

The birds, now south for the winter, will return in March and April to land that has been paved. Construction crews may have to take aggressive measures to prevent the birds from nesting wherever they can, like in cracks in the asphalt.

There's your beat-up little seagull, Mr. Newman.

How's this for a jaw-dropper? Under the new rule, the Times explains,

And all this is happening as scientists reported in September that North America has lost nearly a third of its wild birds in the past 50 years.

It's insane, and yet another example of how Team Trump is using the narrowest possible interpretation of environmental laws to fuck over the environment because regulation is bad for business. And with the big crop of judges who think it's legal to tell truck drivers they must freeze to death on the job, there's no reason to think the federal courts will help a bunch of stupid birds, who don't even hire the best lobbyists.

But at least if your toilet is clogged with dead owls, you'll be able to clear 'em out with one mighty flush.

[NYT / NYT / Audubon]

Here is the original post:

Donald Trump: What Has Two Thumbs And Kills More Birds Than Wind Power? THIS GUY! - Wonkette

Navy bans TikTok from government-issued phones – Engadget

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

There's little doubt as to why TikTok might face restrictions, though. US politicians remain concerned about TikTok's Chinese ownership and the potential for the app to serve as a conduit for Chinese government plans. There's no evidence that TikTok is siphoning personal info, but that might not matter to jittery officials. As it stands, there are also worries that China may be shaping TikTok's message, even for American users. Critics are concerned that TikTok could be a recruiting tool, or else sanitize the atrocities and other forms of oppression in China.

The US Army recently told cadets not to use TikTok.

ByteDance hasn't commented on the ban. It previously said that TikTok's US operations are separate from China and has denied serving on the government's behalf. That stance won't assuage the Navy, though, and it looks like the Navy's rank and file will have to use personal phones if they're going to use TikTok at all.

Navy bans TikTok from government-issued phones - Engadget

China Will Rewrite the Bible to Support Socialism, Communist Party – PJ Media

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Last month, Chinese communist apparatchiks agreed they would rewrite seminal religious texts almost certainly including the Bible, the Quran, and others in its attempt to make religion more Chinese and more socialist.

As Britain'sDaily Mail reported, China will create new editions of religious books excluding any content that contradicts the teachings of the Communist Party. Any paragraphs the government deems anti-Communist or too foreign will be amended or re-translated o support the regime.

The Communist Party called for a "comprehensive evaluation of the existing religious classics aimed at contents which do not conform to the progress of the times." Apparatchiks gave the order in November during a meeting of the Committee for Ethnic and Religious Affairs at the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

A group of 16 experts, believers, and representatives of different religions from the Communist Party's Central Committee attended the conference, and the religious censorship meeting was supervised by Wang Yang, chairman of the People's Political Consultative Conference.

Wang called on members of the conference to follow President Xi Jinping's instructions to interpret religious beliefs in accordance with "the core values of Socialism" and "the requirements of the era." Xi repeated previous instructions to build "a religious system with Chinese characteristics." In 2017, the president had declared that religion should be "Chinese in orientation."

Chillingly, the representatives of the religions at the meeting gladly went along with the Orwellian censorship, saying the mission "is the choice of history." They also said that by "re-evaluating" religious books, they would prevent "extreme thoughts" and "heretical ideas."

The censorship plans "show how manipulative the Chinese government is, hypocritically allowing certain religions to operate in China but only strictly with what content the Chinese government allows," Patrick Poon, China Researcher at Amnesty International, told theDaily Mail. "In many ways, the Chinese governments control, including censorship of the Bible and the Quran, has twisted the doctrines of these religious texts and thus the religions. There is simply no genuine religious freedom."

This news comes amid the ongoing scandal of Chinese oppression of the Uighurs in the far-western province of Xinjiang. The Communist Party runs a system of detention camps aimed at re-educating Muslims. Former detainees claim they were forced to eat pork and speak Mandarin. After denying the camps' existence, China later claimed the camps were "vocational education centers."

Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said leaked documents proved that Chinese authorities were engaged in massive and systemic repression of Muslims and other minorities. The Chinese embassy in London called the documents "pure fabrication and fake news."

In 2017, China attempted to ban performances of Handel'sMessiah.While the communist regime allows an official state church that represents a watered-down version of Christianity, it persecutes Christians in a variety of ways. In 2017, China forced Christians to take down posters of Jesus and replace them with posters of Xi Jinping. Last year, the regime launched coordinated raids against a church, blocking Christians' social media accounts before arresting them.

Even so, Christianity is spreading rapidly in the Middle Kingdom.

Censorship of the Bible, the Quran, and other religious texts in order to make them "conform to the progress of the times" is chilling. It seems oddly reminiscent of the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who sacrificed a pig to Zeus in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, inspiring the Maccabean revolt an uprising celebrated every year in the festival of Hanukkah. China's action also mimics the rush of LGBT activists to reinterpret the Bible to support their morality.

Follow Tyler O'Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at@Tyler2ONeil.

Continued here:

China Will Rewrite the Bible to Support Socialism, Communist Party - PJ Media

Beijing Controls Chinese Citizens Through Family, Education, and Speech – The National Interest Online

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

You may have read about Chinas practice of foot-binding. Its an ancient custom dating back to the supposedly pleasing aesthetic sense of the 10th century.

To improve their marriage prospects, women would bind their feet with bandages from an early age to stunt the growth of them.

The tradition was damaging to the development of the body, yet was accepted and practiced. Fortunately, the practice has since been condemned and discontinued.

But communist China has adopted other methods of suppressing the growth of the individual by attacking three bedrock institutions of society; namely, the family, the school, and free speech.

In 1980, communist China announced a one child policy to prevent a population crisis. Chinese families were limited to only one child or faced severe penalties. The punishments included heavy fines, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, or even infanticide.

Throughout the 35 years of the one-child policy, there were a recorded 196 million sterilizations and 336 million abortions. (That 336 million figure is greater than the entire population of the United States.)

Since 2015, communist China has amended the policy to allow another baby to be born without the Chinese Communist Party intervening. The abortion rate, however, remains above 24.2 for every 1,000 babies born.

Communist China also controls the populace through its school system. The Communist Party has complete power over education, so much so that school principals are either members of the party or operate under the direction of a party member.

This close monitoring of schools allows communist China to indoctrinate children at a young age into Communist Party propaganda.

Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers, writes that Chinese classrooms for grade-school students resemble barracks more than learning centers.

The curriculum is so strict that students fear speaking out of line. They learn to parrot Chinese Communist Party guidelines as gospel.

As if to underscore the point, the founder of a communist grade school in Henan stated in an interview: Maoist thought is God.

Chu says that the government explicitly bans discussion of democracy, freedom of speech, and past mistakes of the Communist Party. Other bans include Google, Facebook, Instagram, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

There seems to be no limits to the censorship. Both South Park cartoons and Winnie the Pooh childrens stories are forbiddenthe former for criticizing the Chinese government; the latter for vaguely resembling President Xi Jinping.

Nothing seems to lie outside the Communist Partys grasp. Suppression has become oppression.

Yet, in Hong Kong, the people demonstrate.

The demonstrations forced the government of Hong Kong to take a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal proclaiming that Hong Kong remains a free society. It lists nine different freedoms, ranging from freedom of speech and freedom of the press to freedom of religious belief.

Hong Kong may comfort itself with ads, and it might comfort others. But the truth is thatits freedoms are under serious threat.

Its under threat from the communist government in Beijing, which is worried and weak, and whose tools of oppression will not work in Hong Kong the way they worked30 years ago in Tiananmen Square.

Beijing is reduced to hoping that Hong Kongers eventually will tire of their protests. Thats a baseless hope, however, because it doesnt recognize the innate desire for freedom that exists within every human being and inspires the brave people of Hong Kong to demonstrate until their city is fully free.

Image: Reuters

This story was first published by the Daily Signal in December 2019.

The rest is here:

Beijing Controls Chinese Citizens Through Family, Education, and Speech - The National Interest Online

Huawei now hounded over oppression of Uighurs: A day in the New Cold War on China – RT

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Nebojsa Malic

What connects 5G cell networks, Uighurs, and Hong Kong protesters? Apparently, they all have a role to play in a Yellow Peril pageant this holiday season, courtesy of the mainstream media New Cold War narrative about China.

Her Majestys government should not work with Huawei to set up 5G networks in the UK, until allegations that the Chinese telecom giant is involved in the oppression of the Uighur minority are comprehensively dismissed, argues a letter signed by thirteen parliamentarians and published by the Sunday Times.

We feel sure that you will agree that due diligence including human rights violations and co-operation with those abusing human rights must be undertaken, considering not only the potential reputational risks but also the profound implications for the UKs responsibility in funding or supporting actions that would leave us accountable, wrote the group.

While their concern with reputation and liability is touching, their insistence on treating Huawei as guilty until proven innocent is new even by the highly likely standards of modern Britain.

The groups leader, Tom Tugendhat, is a retired intelligence officer and an influential Tory MP who chairs the Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee. Labour MP Sarah Champion is also among the signatories, as are eleven members of the House of Lords.

Yet the letter does not really stand out against the steady drip of stories about Huawei, Uighurs and China in British papers. The Telegraph has been beating the drum about the dangers of Huawei to Tugendhats tune for months now. On Monday, the Guardian ran a story about Huaweis supposedly cozy relationship with the government, citing the arrest of a former employee charged with giving away trade secrets.

Chinas telecom giant has found itself under increased scrutiny in recent years by the media and politicians of the Five Eyes countries as the intelligence alliance of US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand is known. Declaring Huawei a threat to their national security, ostensibly for offering China surveillance capabilities that only they consider themselves entitled to possess, these countries have sought to embargo the company from doing business on their territory, and browbeat their allies to do the same.

In December 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huaweis CFO and daughter of the companys founder, on charges that she violated US sanctions against Iran. She is still fighting a US extradition request.

A number of senators in Washington have actively and successfully lobbied for outlawing Huaweis sales to the US military, and are pushing for banning the company from doing business in the US outright. Huawei has responded by building new devices without any US parts.

While it seemed that the campaign against Huawei may have been part of a broader trade war against China pursued by US President Donald Trump, tying it to the alleged persecution of the Uighurs suggests that there is more to it.

Mainstream media outlets in the Five Eyes countries have reported as an established fact that Beijing runs concentration camps for Uighurs, a Muslim minority in the western Xinjiang province. The US Congress has even passed a bill allowing sanctions for these human rights abuses.

These claims have been amplified by the World Uyghur Congress, an outfit based in Germany, and in recent days the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong which Beijing has been increasingly suspecting may be receiving backing from Five Eyes governments.

Moreover, remarkably little actual evidence is offered for these claims. One of the sources is the US-backed pressure group Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), whose 2018 report is based on interviews with just eight Uighurs.

The Tugendhat letter also cites a paper by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) operated by the defense ministry in Canberra and German academic Adrian Zenz, a controversial figure working with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-backed advocacy group. None of them offer more than rumors, speculation and vague extrapolations.

Its beginning to look like whatever may or may not be happening in Xinjiang or with Huawei, or in Hong Kong is quite beside the point, because the Five Eyes media and governments are determined to demonize China as expansionist, aggressive, threatening even genocidal in a bid to shore up their own perceived world hegemony.

Still not convinced? Here is Niall Ferguson a leading neoconservative scholar perhaps best known for lamenting the demise of the British Empire in WWI declaring in the New York Times earlier this month that a new Cold War has already begun, and its with China.

Turns out that Xinjiang Muslims, cell phones and Hong Kong protesters waving US and British flags do have something in common after all.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Huawei now hounded over oppression of Uighurs: A day in the New Cold War on China - RT

Another protesting family to reunite with daughter abducted by PKK – Daily Sabah

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

A PKK terrorist whose family has been protesting in front of the pro-PKK Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) headquarters in Diyarbakr was brought to Turkey after surrendering to security forces in Iraq, Interior Minister Sleyman Soylu said Wednesday.

Soylu called the Kaya family to inform them that their daughter Mekiye Kaya fled the terrorist organizations camp in northern Iraq and surrendered to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) security forces in Irbil on Dec. 21. She was brought to Turkey through rnaks Silopi district and will be able to meet with her family on Thursday, Soylu told her mother Hsniye Kaya.

Euphoric about the news, Hsniye Kaya thanked the authorities for bringing her daughter back.

I thank everyone, President Recep Tayyip Erdoan and our Interior Minister Sleyman Soylu for their efforts, Kaya told the Demirren News Agency (DHA).

Mekiye Kaya was abducted by the PKK terrorists five years ago at the age of 14. She was initially brought to Syria, then to the terrorist groups camps in northern Iraq.

The Kaya family had been participating in the sit-in protest in front of the HDP headquarters in Diyarbakr since Sept. 8.

The sit-in has been ongoing since Sept. 3. Initially, a lone mother, Hacire Akar, started the protest in front of the offices of the HDP in Diyarbakr in September. Akar wanted her 21-year-old son Mehmet Akar, who had been missing for three days after he was abducted by the PKK terrorist group, to be returned to her. Following her sit-in, and with the help of security forces in Diyarbakr, Akar was finally reunited with her son.

The protests have been largely successful with many teenagers returning to their families.

Cafer Ceylan, who was kidnapped four years ago when he was 15 years old, reunited with his family earlier this month after he learned that his mother had taken part in the sit-in.

Once the terrorists surrender, they are provided with many opportunities including access to education and the freedom to live without fear and oppression.

They are treated well, allowed to contact their families and given access to a lawyer. The judicial process will be held.

The Turkish state offers a variety of services to ensure their integration into society.

The surrendered teenagers said they were threatened with torture by the senior operatives of the terror group if they dared to flee.

In 2011, families whose children were kidnapped by the PKK terrorist organization once again gathered for a sit-in protest in Diyarbakr to show their discontent toward HDP officials.

Nongovernmental organization representatives were also present at the protest and pointed out that abducting a child for war and conflict falls under the U.N.'s category of crimes against humanity. Blaming the HDP for being indifferent to the fact that children are being handed guns and trained for war, the protesters voiced their anger and asked for the government's help.

In July, the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the YPG, admitted recruiting children between the ages of 11 and 16 for terrorist activities in a meeting with a U.N. representative.

More here:

Another protesting family to reunite with daughter abducted by PKK - Daily Sabah

Can now really be the best time to be alive? – Waging Nonviolence

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Editors note: The following exchange is between 33-year-old organizer Yotam Marom and 82-year-old George Lakey, whose activism, organizing and training spans over 50 years.

Dear George,

I remember sitting at the small round table in your kitchen, with tea you had just made. It was Spring, and light was coming in through the window above the sink, where you were bustling around as you often do. We talked about life, work, politics. You were excited about something or other maybe your How We Win book tour, or something I was up to, or a new trend of growth in the movement like the Democratic Socialists of America or Sunrise. Im always mystified by how genuinely excited you are about things young people are doing. I think its part of what attracts so many of us to your kitchen table.

I think you had recently turned 82, so we were talking about your age. I like to joke that youre now only now entering your prime. (Even as we speak, you are on a 40-city book tour, no big deal.) Between your family genes and your own stubborn goodwill, youve probably got another 40 years in you!

It might have been after an aside about your age that you said something like: Im so happy to be here now. Theres no other time in history Id rather be alive for.

It feels like Im standing with my three-year-old daughter on one of those flat escalators slowly churning toward the edge of a cliff

I dont know if I thought much of it at the time. Old people say wacky things sometimes, and young people (on a good day) smile along and humor them (though Im sure that, in reality, most of the time youre the one smiling along and humoring us). But then I heard you say this again, and again I even went to one of your book events and you said it there too. In all honesty, it seemed a bit insane to me. The fact that you could feel happy to be alive in this particular historical moment was miles away from how I felt.

Most of the time, I feel pretty unlucky to be alive at this time. I wake up with the sense that could probably manage if all we had to do was overcome the many political, economic and social crises were facing. But climate change changes the game dramatically, both by making the stakes completely existential, and by putting a time limit on what we can do about it. I live with a quiet, constant sadness at the loss people around the world are already facing, a nagging fear of whats to come and a sort of ashamed hopelessness about what we can do to stop it.

I dont think Im alone in that. It seems that other folks in my peer group, people in our 30s, feel similarly. Depression is becoming more and more widespread, and younger generations kids in high school now seem to be showing even deeper signs of it.

Theres a line in the opening episode of the Sopranos, where panning over a hollow, grey suburban life in New Jersey Tony says: Lately, Ive been getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. Its a bit harrowing, a guy really framing his whole existence inside the collapse of the American dream, and the bleakness of it all. That line now comes to me often. It feels like Im standing with my three-year-old daughter on one of those flat escalators slowly churning toward the edge of a cliff, wondering how much more life shes going to get to live before we get to the edge, what shell get to see, what shell miss, what happens to her, and after her, if anything.

So, George, your feeling that this is the best time to be alive doesnt resonate. But its also confusing.

What is the path to power in times like these? What are you seeing, George, that Im not seeing?

My general orientation about everything thats fucked up in the world is that the solution is mass movements. Want to change the world? Build a movement. And so part of what is depressing to me about this particular time in human history is that our movements are, unfortunately, not prepared for the task ahead. Our labor movement has been in collapse for decades. We have no serious political power or parties of our own to wield it at a national scale. Even our most massive demonstrations are eclipsed by the average attendance of a football game. On a good day, I can see that movements are on the rise, that we are contending for political power in a way that is actually ground-breaking, that we are building institutions, getting better and sharper. Some days, I can almost taste a Green New Deal, imagine a world in which black lives really matter, see the border wall collapse, almost believe a social democratic economy is within our grasp. But most days I think: too little, too late.

And thats where the confusion sets in: Youve been around for so many of the movement moments I envy! You helped train some of the first lunch counter sit-ins in the civil rights movement, were part of the movement against the war in Vietnam and everything that circled it, the nuclear disarmament movement, and everything between then and now. Youve witnessed entire decades in U.S. politics where millions of people regularly took the streets, where massive cultural change took place, where huge layers of the population were politicized, where it looked like there might even be a revolution. And yet, here we are, in the midst of a crisis perhaps deeper than human beings have ever faced, knowing that movements are our only hope, but living at a time in which our movements are not yet ready to organize at the scale of the crisis, and in which theres a time limit to avert the worst of whats before us.

What about that could possibly make us lucky to be alive at this time? What is the potential? What is the path to power in times like these? What are you seeing, George, that Im not seeing?

So I decided to ask you and ask you again, and again. And what has emerged is this response, for which Im grateful. May we always be lucky enough to have the vision, backwards and forwards, from mentors like you. May we have the humility to learn from that wisdom and also the arrogance to break the rules when we need to. Im sure you wouldnt want it any other way.

Love,Yotam Marom

Dear Yotam,

I first want to acknowledge your feelings of urgency and anguish. I see the grim picture youre seeing. I take it personally, as you do. My housemates sometimes see me crying as I read the morning newspaper over breakfast.

Even so, I feel lucky to be alive now because this is the best chance in my lifetime to make really big progressive change. Our difference is partly that I see powerful conditions emerging, under the surface, that open new possibilities. I call them signals of emergence. I see evidence, right now, that these trends will give us a chance to gain victories we havent been able to reach before in this country.

Please notice that I said, a chance. No guarantees. Mine isnt a new version of the old scientific Marxism I dont believe in the inevitability of progress. But thats OK because I am willing to take chances. When, at age 39, I was expected to die from a very nasty cancer, my community and I committed to the chance that I would live.

Im grateful that I went for it then, and that now Im part of your community, eager to go for it now. And because I like to argue with you, Ill point to evidence of conditions emerging that give our progressive movements the chance this time to make decisive change.

The signals of emergence are obscured by the drama of pain, from opioids to floods to shootings to the guy who occupies the White House. In all this high-decibel confusion, the signals of emergence can get lost.

The previous high-water mark: the 1960s-70s

Lets compare today with the 60s. The prelude to that decade was kicked off in 1955 by the Montgomery bus boycott, a mass movement of 50,000 black people in Alabama. Although neither political party wanted to touch the civil rights movement in the early 60s, we forced major changes.

Victories continued for Chicano and Filipino farmworkers, women, LGBTQ people, elders, mental health consumers, environmentalists, and many other groups inspired to stand up and fight for their rights. The momentum of the 60s continued well into the 70s.

We often needed the drama of direct action in order to arouse the numbers needed for success. When I joined the tiny opposition to the Vietnam War I found it hard to draw attention to something happening in a small country few people had even heard of.

Soon I found myself on a Quaker sailing ship confronting naval gunboats off the coast of Vietnam, one of the dramatic campaigns in 1967 that awakened Americans to the war. The peace movement grew massive and helped force the U.S. to give up its self-appointed mission of replacing the French Empire in running Vietnam.

Millions of Americans in that period took direct action, acting outside the box defined by high school textbooks as the proper place for civic duty: the electoral system. Inspired by the drama of nonviolent direct action, even more millions lobbied and canvassed and drove voters to the polls. It would take thousands of words to describe the progressive victories gained from 1955 to when President Ronald Reagan began the counter-offensive in 1981 by firing the air traffic controllers and breaking their union.

Whats different now?

Much of what discourages your generation is not new. During the 60s and 70s we also faced a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, armed militias, and a revival of the Nazi movement. We saw militarization of police departments and police infiltration of social movements. We saw the shooting and killing of students by Mississippi State Police at Jackson State and the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. We even saw assassinations of some of our greatest political leaders, and an all-out war by the police on black organizations and communities. In other countries, the U.S. Empire run by politicians at home in the interests of the economic elite was killing millions of people.

In those days of rampant injustice we built mighty movements that forced progressive change. Dick Cluster mischievously titled his book about those movements and the sparking role that had been played by the student sit-ins, They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee.

You and I agree that those movements didnt change the system deeply enough. This time around, with the climate crisis at our door, we need to go farther. In this letter Ill focus on what makes that possible, like the signs that the system itself is cracking.

Trends that open the door for a bigger leap forward

I see four new trends that open the door for bigger change than we could make in the 1960s: inequality-led polarization, economic insecurity, decline of federal governmental legitimacy and climate disasters. We also have assets we didnt have back in the day.

1. The two-headed impact of polarization

While traveling on book tours Ive heard a widespread belief that political polarization keeps us stuck. Intuitively, the claim sounds true. How can a country move forward if everyones shouting and no ones listening?

Historically, however, polarization has a double impact. One is stalemated governments and divided communities. The other impact is a loosening, a setting in motion. My favorite metaphor is a blacksmiths forge: polarization heats up society, making it malleable.

Were frustrated and saddened by the first impact of polarization: relationships fracture, racism becomes more overt, violence more frequent.

However, the volatility also makes positive change easier to get. In the polarized 1930s progressive movements got changes they could only dream of in the 20s, like unions, labor laws, Social Security, conservation, electricity for millions, bank regulation and better policies for family farmers.

Theres no guarantee that increased volatility will yield changes for the better. In Germany and Italy during the 1920s and 30s polarization made fascist outcomes possible.

During those same decades Scandinavian polarization predictably generated fascist growth. Fortunately, the left in those countries navigated the polarization brilliantly, using the volatility to grow mass democratic socialist movements. The result: more individual freedom than Americans have, accompanied by more equality, a stronger social safety net, and higher productivity.

The late black historian Vincent Harding likened history to a river. Remembering my experience on a class V river in West Virginia I think of activism during polarization as white water rafting. In the 1920s and 30s the river of history for Germany and Italy, the United States, and the Scandinavians all hit the turbulence of white water. The first two countries capsized. The United States navigated pretty well and made progress. The Scandinavians, with historical advantages and better strategy, made a breakthrough everyone can learn from.

Forward to my lifetime, the 1960s and 70s: racial, gender, generational and other conflicts created turbulence. Even though we lacked then some assets we have today, we made important gains.

Different now from the 1960s is the economic inequality thats driving polarization. Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal found that political polarization correlates directly with economic inequality. The more inequality, the more polarization. The United States has now become one of the most unequal societies in history.

The 2018 tax law generates even more inequality. That in turn drives more polarization. We can expect, therefore, that the resulting volatility opens more opportunity for progressive change than Ive experienced in my lifetime.

2. Economic insecurity

In the 60s, the United States experienced an overall condition of stable prosperity. Young people in each generation expected to become more prosperous than their parents. Since then weve seen the loss of well-paid working class jobs and debt-bondage for those who try to get into the middle class through college. At the same time, a pension crisis looms.

Falling economic security compared with the 60s shakes things up. The result: more openness to new ideas and bolder approaches.

Increasingly teachers cant afford to live in growing cities where they teach. Commuting becomes more difficult the national engineers give the United States a D- grade on infrastructure. The war on immigration makes it even harder to imagine either re-populating emptying towns or re-building the infrastructure.

A dysfunctional health care system fails to control costs, leaves tens of millions uninsured, ignores untold numbers of trauma victims, and has waiting lists for the mentally ill and drug addicted. Some life expectancies are declining. Healthcare bills drive up bankruptcies, destabilizing towns already reeling from loss of jobs.

All these trends hit people of color even harder than white people.

Compare that to the 60s when the American dream was still around: Upward mobility was high, especially for white men, and life expectancies were increasing. For us social movement organizers, the situation was daunting: So many people could ignore the value of collective action for change because their individual prospects looked promising.

Upward mobility has declined. The economic dream is fading.

Many express their disappointment and rage by moving away from centrism, opening to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or, on the other hand, voting for the first time in their lives for a socialist, even an elderly Jew from Brooklyn who represents hippie Vermont in the U.S. Senate!

Falling economic security compared with the 60s shakes things up. The result: more openness to new ideas and bolder approaches.

3. Decline in governments legitimacy

In the 60s governmental legitimacy was high. When the public was awakened to the scandal of widespread poverty in the wealthiest country on earth, President Lyndon B. Johnson responded with a War on Poverty that was met with widespread approval.

At the time I heard civil rights leader Bayard Rustin cynically comment that the War on Poverty was the first time the United States is going to war with a BB gun. He was right, but an outlier. Most people had a sunny confidence that, if the federal government chose to solve a problem like poverty, it could do it.

That confidence has largely disappeared, regarding poverty (most national politicians avoid the subject) and a whole lot else. The feds have trouble simply keeping the government open to do basic functions like safety inspections and collecting taxes.

Compared with earlier in my lifetime, the loss of confidence in government makes it easier now to initiate grassroots actions.

Since 2001, the Gallup organization has sought data on how proud Americans are of our country. The polls show pride has been sinking, hitting its lowest point so far in 2019. Of the various aspects measured, pride is lowest in our political system.

Many people nowadays believe there is widespread corruption, prompting presidential candidate Donald Trump to promise to drain the swamp. A majority even of Republicans polled believe the economic elite has too much power in governmental policy-making. One poll shows a majority of Americans now believe that ordinary people would do a better job of solving problems than elected officials.

Compared with earlier in my lifetime, the loss of confidence in government makes it easier now to initiate grassroots actions, and new technology makes it easier for the actions to spread.

4. Climate the game changer

I agree with you that this is fundamental. Climate is also linked to the previous trend: government failures further undermine its own legitimacy.

Additionally, the mind-blowing nature of the climate challenge is at last impacting activists who once defined it as a single-issue effort. Now movement leadership is shifting toward those who can hold a bigger picture and design visions to fight for, like the Green New Deal.

The dynamics unleashed by climate change can promote unity in a larger, broader, and more visionary mass movement powerful enough to take on the 1 percent.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow long ago outlined a hierarchy of human needs that prioritized security as well as physiological needs like food. From extreme weather following hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the growth of severe asthma to the epidemic of wildfires, basic human needs for safety are at risk because of governments incapacity to respond to the climate crisis on the scale needed. The science is clear. To come even close to competency, the federal government would need to respond to the climate crisis the way it did to World War II: an all-out mobilization.

The government cant deal with climate because the 1 percent vetoes significant action. Its veto power is not new. According to the Princeton University oligarchy study, the economic elite was the primary player in governmental policy even before the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United ruling released even more money into elections. Thats why leading Democrats as well as Republicans have refused until now to respond to the climate crisis.

Barack Obama discovered this early in his presidency when he asked then-Sen. John Kerry to develop a climate bill (the Dems being in control of Congress at the time) and Kerry reported back that he couldnt create a bill his colleagues would support.

While part of the economic elite is doubling down on climate denial, another part is moderating on climate, as reflected in the activity of billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. That split gives permission to Democrats to shift so they can play their traditional good cop role in U.S. politics, leaving once again the bad cop role to the Republicans.

In that way the Democratic leadership, constrained by loyalty to the elite, can hope to co-opt the growing climate justice movement, as it did with the labor and civil rights movements. Its worth recalling that the civil rights movement made its greatest gains 1955-65, when it was independent, then slowed to a crawl once embraced by the Democrats.

One Democratic professional politician prominent in his state actually said to me with a cheerful grin, after I called out the Democrats for co-opting movements: Youre right about what we do, and were good at it.

Climate disasters and the decline of some prejudices mean that divide-and-rule is less available for the establishments defense of its dominance.

The traditional U.S. political division of labor is now playing out with climate: the Republicans are deniers while Democratic leadership talks climate and rejects the only proposal before them that takes the crisis seriously: the Green New Deal.

As journalist/activist Bill McKibben says, even Congress cannot suspend the laws of physics. Growing failure on the environmental front produces what political scientists consider a recipe for rapid change and even revolution: the demonstrated inability of a government to solve the basic problems faced by society.

How does all this influence me to say were facing the biggest chance of my lifetime to make breakthrough change? The dynamics unleashed by climate change can promote unity in a larger, broader, and more visionary mass movement powerful enough to take on the 1 percent.

In the 1960s and 70s we were able to generate sufficient grassroots power to change some laws and policies backed by the 1 percent, but we could not challenge the elites dominance. Although the elite was put on the defensive, it was able to use lines of cleavage in our society, especially race, to regain the offensive in the 1980s.

When he was interviewed by the New York Times in 2006 billionaire Warren Buffett described the economic elites move as class warfare, and he went on to say its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning.

True enough their counter-offensive launched in the 1980s has been winning victory after victory. The climate crisis is something new; it provides an existential basis for solidarity that did not exist previously. The third 500-year flood that hit Houston in three years hurt everyone except the very rich, as do the wildfires and floods in the Midwest.

Each crisis impacts different groups differently, but the accumulated impact is felt by all except the class that has vetoed real action for sustainability. (The very rich are currently buying property in New Zealand for their new homes.)

While climate change itself can become a force for solidarity, it comes at a time in which Americans have already reduced the lines of division that were so deep in the 1960s. Even though we are still far from reaching Martin Luther Kings dream, and classism has hardly been touched, the United States is much less racist, sexist, homophobic and elder-intolerant than it was in the 60s.

To put it together: Climate disasters and the decline of some prejudices mean that divide-and-rule is less available for the establishments defense of its dominance. Many more people are losing confidence that the masters of the universe and elected officials are able to protect life and dignity. They are looking to each other for leadership, and we see that in the emergence of more grassroots activism in the last decade. Expect these powerful trends to accelerate.

How to navigate the river

Earlier I mentioned Vincent Hardings metaphor for history as a long river. Sometimes it moves very slowly and other times quickens to white water. Ive studied and participated in movements that handled the rapids poorly and drowned, and also movements that absorbed the energy of the white water to navigate successfully.

Thats how I can picture what our successful navigation might look like. Im not predicting exactly how the river will run this time, or the exact moves well make. Im describing how I think our paddling might turn out, based on the right moves other movements made in other times and circumstances, and what moves are available to us as we hit the white water.

I picture American activists realizing how much they can learn from their mistakes, rather than repeating them. Organizers and leaders decide to base their moves on evidence-based knowledge, gained through wide use of study groups and training workshops. Movement cultures adopt a focus on our learning curve.

This makes quite a difference when it comes to the question of whether to use violence in direct actions. Organizers use the evidence produced by social scientists showing that nonviolent action is much more practical and effective than violence, even for protection. The resulting discipline frustrates our opponents, who are still sending provocateurs into the movement to try to instigate violence and make it possible to shut us down.

Training also helps us build solidarity more quickly. Prior to the 2020s some activists were unwittingly helping out the elites divide-and-rule strategy by activists using the calling out tactic to respond to oppression dynamics they found in the movement. Resorting to shame-and-blame generated a toxic activist culture in some movements and a sense of scarcity that meant any oppressed group that wasnt in the limelight at a particular moment was somehow being left out.

However, training organizations like Momentum, Wildfire, and Training for Change grow rapidly to meet the movements need to drop old divisive habits.

Activists shift from one-off protests to sustained campaigns. In nonviolent direct action campaigns organizers use a series of escalating actions directed toward deciders who can yield our demand. With campaign strategy activists move beyond protests really just the expression of their opinion to the sustained series of actions that gains actual wins.

This shift is influenced by the popularity of electoral campaigns by Bernie Sanders and other outliers. Activists watching Sanders 2015 espousal of Medicare for All grow into a major policy proposal that occupied center stage in 2019 learned how much it matters to focus on a demand in a sustained way over time.

Even though the mass media still call the campaigners dramatic actions protests, most organizers move on to the advanced technology of direct action campaigns. The wins support morale and build the spirit of unity. The community that activists experience over time by learning how to struggle together proves an excellent antidote to despair.

In addition to re-discovering direct action campaigns, activists from various movements are learning from the civil rights struggle the movement power grid. Multiple local campaigns in the South networked with each other in the 1960s. When one of them needed help or seemed ready for a growth spurt, energy could flow into that one from elsewhere, in the form of organizers, money, name leaders.

To cite just two examples, that strength of the grid made it possible for Birmingham in 1964 and Selma in 1965 to shake the national power structure. Alabama, geographically far from Washington, D.C., twice provided the pivot to force national wins!

I see national movement leaders realizing that, instead of calling national marches at this or that place, they can become strategically organic by directing energy and mass to local campaign sites. To use military terms, movement leaders shift turns the entire nation into potential battlefields instead of relying on the tired destinations of New York City and Washington, D.C. That strategy shift accelerates our struggle.

In fact, back in 2016-17 grassroots activists anticipated the strategy shift when a mass influx showed up in South Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline; it was the largest assembly of native Americans in decades, and the solidarity stimulated other pipeline fights around the nation.

Sharpening up strategy for struggle isnt enough

Can now really be the best time to be alive? - Waging Nonviolence

In the World’s Eyes, the Indian State May Be Declining But Its Citizenry Is Rising – The Wire

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Not long before his election to the Indian premiership in May 2014, Narendra Modi expressed confidence that his Hindutva face would be an asset when dealing with foreign affairs with other nations. In late 2019, with the wisdom of hindsight, this confidence now reads as delusion.

In recent days, as nationwide protests and demonstrations have railed against the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, seasoned commentators on the domestic-international interplay have written of the risk that the current leaderships policies pose to Indias international status. They have pointed to the Modi governments unconcealed majoritarian agenda and divisive politics. They have also focused on Indias failing economy.

But the rot goes deeper. All three of Indias historically significant routes to high international status the acquisition of material capabilities, recognition by established powers and the cultivation of likeminded followerships have been eviscerated by Modis leadership.

A way out of Indias reputational impasse remains, however. It resides in the life breath of Indias democracy the countrys hundreds of millions of youth many of whom are rising up to claim back the nation.

In order to understand Indias simultaneous decline over the past five years and rise again over the past fortnight, it is necessary to examine Indias pathways to international status.

The most obvious route is rising material power. After five years of a Modi government, the prospects for economic growth, investment in Indias military-industrial complex and major change within the Indian armed forces look dim.

Also read: German Student Made to Leave India for Protesting Against CAA

Indias economic growth has now fallen for six consecutive quarters. The governments fiscal innovations have been unable to address the slow employment growth that has led to weak consumption demand. Self-reliance in defence remains a distant dream: SIPRI data shows that Indias arms imports have increased by 24% between 2008-12 and 2013-17, as compared to Chinas, which fell by 19% during the same period. No major Make in India contract has come to fruition. Where military modernisation is concerned, the governments decision to appoint aChief of Defence Staff a move designed to bring coherence a reform to Indias defence policy is being eyed skeptically as yet more symbolism over substance.

Rising material power, however, has historically not been the most important to Indias global stature.

The second pathway to high international status is social. It centres on recognition from existing major powers. Ascendancy via this route, as Michelle Murray has argued in her recent book, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations, depends on whether incumbent powers view an aspiring major power as compatible with the international order.

Demonstrators carry posters during a protest against a new citizenship law, outside the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, December 21, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis

There is a reason why India has, until recently, been lauded by the North Atlantic powers as the worlds largest democracy and celebrated as a vibrant and largely open economy. There is also a reason why Indias embrace of the rhetoric of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific has met with enthusiasm in Washington, Brussels, Paris and London, as well as in Tokyo and Canberra. Through a commitment to liberal values at home and abroad, India has convincingly spoken the post-Cold War language of recognition, signalling its relevance to the management of the existing international order. The willingness to embrace this script has formed the core of Indias value added compared to China.

Under the Modi leadership, however, Indias democratic credentials now face their greatest challenge since the Emergency. The systematic erosion of Indian democracy over the past five years runs wide and deep, but since August of this year, the abrogation of Article 370, the potent linkage of the NRC with the CAA, and the brutal police crackdown on student protesters have made toxic headlines in the same capitals that have celebrated Indias apparently liberal rise.

Of course, Indias engagement with the liberal international order has always been guarded, and on its own terms. However, the turning away from a free and open domestic political system under Modi has weakened Indias freedom to engage selectively. Decisions like the governments withdrawal from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which really may be in the interest of the nation, can only be humoured abroad if much else appears congruent with Indias liberal international image.

Also read: These Are the 25 People Killed During Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act Protests

The third pathway to high international status is also social. It is the route that Rajesh Basrur and I examined in our book Rising India: Status and Power. There, we traced the counter-hegemonic pathway that India pursued in the early decades of independence. It was a pathway that shunned international power and domination in favour of the cultivation of a followership of likeminded states, based on trust and mutual confidence. It was a route which lent India surprising levels of international status when it was neither materially strong nor recognised by the established powers.

Counter-hegemony has served a number of social purposes. It has differentiated India from the dominant, neo-imperial powers of the post-WWII order. It has denied the possibility of full collaboration with those powers even in the face of Indias more recent recognition seeking. More recently, it has sought to differentiate Indian engagement in Asia, Africa and Latin America from Chinese assertiveness.

It is this third pathway that the current government has actively sought to destroy, until recently mostly in rhetoric. Modis 2016 alleged boycott of the Non-aligned Summit played well (or was well played) in the Indian media, for example, implying Indias graduation from a group of lesser powers. Yet despite efforts to exorcise Nehruvianism from domestic-focused foreign policy discourse, Indias outwardly-trained foreign policy practice has retained international solidarity with weaker nations as an essential resource. The governments 2015 goodwill tour of the Indian Ocean, for example, bannered under the catchphrase Security and Growth for All in the Region, rests on an unmistakably Nehruvian benign, egalitarian and inclusive form of leadership.

The central hallmark of this leadership has always been the invocation of a shared experience of oppression and a will to rise up against inhumane treatment, narrow self-interest and the structural violence of social, racial and religious hierarchies. Now that the Indian government has become the oppressor at home, whom can it inspire abroad? Which follower state could have confidence and trust in the regional or global leadership of an oppressive regime?

Also read: Why the CAA Is More Lethal Than a Projected NRC

It is here that the intervention of the Indian citizenry matters most in the eyes of the outside world. Certainly, the peoples defence of democracy reads well through the lens of the established powers quavering faith in the future of liberal democracy. But for those nations and peoples who still struggle in positions of weakness in the global hierarchy, the images of a rising citizenry restore a shared sense of fraternity and sisterhood. India, that model nation of solidarity with the downtrodden and that clear voice of the oppressed may have disappeared from the seat of government. But it is alive and well on the streets of Indias metropoles, leading courageously from below.

Modis Hindutva face has been rejected by Indias citizen defenders like an organ after a failed transplant. The mobilisation of recent days suggests an immune system whose core vitality is intact. Those protesting have turned the governments idea of a foreign body on its head, peeling Modis face away from the nation.

In late 2019, India may have declined on the world stage, but its citizenry is rising.

Kate Sullivan de Estrada is Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia, University of Oxford and author, with Rajesh Basrur, of Rising India: Status and Power (2017).

Communal politics and reactions – The Malaysian Insight

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

THERE was an interesting article by DAP rep Satees Muniandy advising Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad on foreign policy.

The article was on Dr Mahathirs criticism of the Indian government over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, which is seen as discriminatory since it accepts Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, and leaves out Muslims.

It is surprising that Muniandy, who comes from a secular party, does not question why religious identification is important for oppressed groups, when oppression and violence are a universal phenomenon.

As for Dr Mahathir, dancing to the tune of the Muslim audience at home, he was wrong to make a citizenship comparison in this country with regard to the Chinese and Indians, when the Indian law is not about the citizenship of local Muslims, who have been in India for generations and have their own unique history.

If he is authentically opposed to the law and its discriminatory nature, he should have question why Tamils from Sri Lanka are also excluded. It is a well-known fact that the BJP government has always been against Tamil nationalism, and this could be the reason it rejects the inclusion of Tamil refugees.

It is ironic that certain leaders in DAP, while opposed to ethno-religious politics in Malaysia, are quick to support the Indian government when the mainstream BJP politicians are similar to Umno and PAS in the way they approach politics.

While Dr Mahathir tried to trigger the Muslim world with his communal vision and politics, it is sad that certain DAP leaders were quick to respond without having done a thorough analysis of the Indian law and its discriminatory nature that is very much rooted in Hindu nationalism or the Hindutva ideology, which tends to create a dichotomy between different religious groups. This is the reason southern India, with states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, vehemently opposes the law, citing its violation of Indias secular constitution.

With the rise across the globe of populism and nationalism that have taken on ethnic and religious tones, it is vital to comprehend the underlying ideology of parties with ethno-religious rhetoric, as well as the policies they come up with that cater to such thinking.

For example, US President Donald Trump came to power by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiments. This was done in the context of white Americans facing unemployment for years and a widening gap between the super-rich and poor.

The Trump administration set in place a policy restricting migrants from certain Muslim countries, as well as Mexico. The policy has a clear demarcation between Americans and migrants, even though the nation itself was built by migrants and has a strong secular constitution.

In a different setting, Indias BJP government has a similar ideology, where it tends to divide people between the majority and minorities, based on ethnicity or religion. The citizenship lawis testimony to the underlying Hindutva ideology, which has similar characteristics to right-wing movements around the world. In Malaysia, it includes the likes of PAS, Umno and Bersatu.

What makes it interesting and puzzling is that when ones perception of a given issue has a communal nature,what comes out in the discourse is also communal, but disguised as human rights or the purported desire to maintain good relations with a bigger country. December 25, 2019.

* Ronald Benjamin is secretary of the Association for Community and Dialogue.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight.

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Communal politics and reactions - The Malaysian Insight

26 of the Best LGBTQ Novels We Discovered This Year – Advocate.com

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

A Peoples History of Heavenby Mathangi Subramanian is the story of a group of women outsiders who band together and create their own safe haven, the city of Heaven. The women come from different backgrounds and experiences but share a fierce desire to protect and support one another. Among them, there is a transgender Christian convert, a pre-teen graffiti artist, a blind girl born to an orphan, and the queer daughter of a hijabi union leader. Subramanian was inspired to write the novel after spending time studying Indias public education centers, oraganwadis, when she realized their power they were the only public spaces were poor women of all ages, castes, and faiths could gather in public. (Algonquin Books) Desire Guerrero

Life of David Hockneyby Catherine Cusset isa compellingexposon thelife of one of the mostrevered (andfinancially successful) living artists of our time.Part biography,part novel,Cussetboldlyweaves fiction and factto paint a colorful portrait of thegayartist.FromHockneyssmall-townchildhood in 1930s and40sEngland, to the stories behind some of his most iconic works,to his heartbreak atliving through the initial AIDS epidemic,the book leaves nostone unturned.Though much ofthe events and details areembellished orinventedcompletely, Cusset alsorevealsmuch of Hockneys real life,learned through her extensiveresearch, includinga personal meeting with the artist himself. (Other Press) DG

Stray Cityby ChelseyJohnsonis a refreshingly modernandwittynovelthat favors reality over romanceand sentimentality.Andrea Morales is a 23-year-oldartistwhodesperatelycravesfreedom from herMidwestern Catholicroots, especially once she realizes shes intogirls.Whenshedecides toleaveher hometown, comes out of the closet,and iswelcomedwith open armsinto thetight-knit and supportiveunderground lesbian communityof Portland, Or., it seems all of Andreastroubles are over or have they just begun?When a drunken night after abadbreakup leadsto a secret affair with (gasp!) a man,Andreais forced todeal withtheharsh realitiesand consequencesthat follow.Could this situation cause her tosacrifice the new lifeof community and freedomshes worked so hard tobuild?(Custom House) DG

Holy Landsby Amanda Sthers ischarmingly unique talethat follows the trials and tribulations of aquirkyJewish-American familyover a period of several months.After a sudden epiphany,an agingHarry Rosenmercksuddenly leaves his cardiology practice in New York tobecome a pig farmer in Israel. AsHarrysex-wife Monique struggles with a seriousillness, the couplesadult children struggle with their personal lives.Their sonDavid, a successful playwright,seeks to mend his relationship with his father(which has been rocking sinceDavidcameout)while daughter Anabelle nurses a broken heart in Paris.Written in a wryandwhimsical Wes Anderson-esque tone,Holy Landsis the perfectbook to curl up next to the firewiththis winterseason.(Bloomsbury Publishing) DG

Last Night in Nuukby Niviaq Korneliussen gives us, perhaps for the first time, a raw and intimate look into what life is really like in Greenland especially for young queers. Filled with authentically fleshed-out LGBTQ characters, this brilliant debut novel delves into their daily realities and touches on some of the countrys biggest taboos: rampant alcoholism, isolation and depression, and the enduring effects of colonialism (Greenland has been a territory of Denmark since 1814). Whether through Inuk, a young man having an affair with a powerful married man, or Fia, his sister, whos gone off the sausage (given up men), Korneliussen paints an honest and vivid picture of their lives. She also keeps the tone fresh, bold, and honest, never relying on sentimental tropes (i.e., dog sleds and Northern Lights) typically used when describing this part of the globe. A bestseller in both Greenland and Denmark, this new English edition marks the sixth languageLast Night in Nuukhas been published in. (Grove Atlantic) DG

Why do Birdsby Rob Hoerburger takes us back in the glittery neon world of the early 1980s pop music scene. Set in New York City in 1982, the novel follows several queer or gender-nonconforming characters in their plights to find love, success, and reclaim some of the innocence theyve lost. Theres the former pop superstar who now finds herself growing older, largely forgotten by the world, and struggling with a deadly illness. Then we follow a younger woman and occasional D.J. who is the survivor of a horrific childhood accident, and an undercover gay cop trying to reconnect with a musical past. As their stories unfold and their paths begin to intersect, we see the common themes emerge that unite them but also threaten to destroy them. (71 Songs) DG

In West Millsby DeShawn Charles Winslow, set in Southern Black community in 1941, follows a young, strong, and defiant woman, Azalea Knot Centre, whos not about to let anyone or anything control. Freedom is what she values above alland doesnt care much about her reputation about town. What Knot does like is cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature and sex. However, soon the consequences of her free-wheeling lifestyle begin to come forth, as Knot finds herself pregnant, broke, and ostracized from her family and local society. Feeling lost and alone, she turns to her friend and neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some sense of family and home. After Otiss recent failure to save his troubled sister living a dangerous lifestyle in the up north, the lifelong fixer is all too happy to try and help Knot and redeem his sense of self-worth. It soon becomes clear that his penchant for focusing others problems is really a subconscious effort to avoid dealing with the dep secrets and issues within his own family. Peppered with lively and nuance queer Black gay characters, including Knots best friend Valley,In West Millsis a magical, moving story about family, friendship, and the liberating power of love. (Bloomsbury Publishing) DG

The Travelersby Regina Porter, named one of the best books of the year byEsquiremagazine, follows the story of James Samuel Vincent, an affluent Manhattan attorney who avoids ever mentioning his modest Irish American background, though in many ways still models much of his fathers roving ways. Jamess already strained relationship with his son Rufus is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia, whose mother is Agnes Miller Christie a beautiful African-American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that leads her to a new life in the Bronx. Meanwhile, Agness husband Eddie, on duty on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, grapples with the escalating racial tensions on the ship and counts the days until he can see his beloved wife again. Filled with authentic, unique, and unforgettable characterslike the unapologetic black lesbian who finds her groove in 1970s Berlin, a moving man stranded during a Thanksgiving storm, and a Coney Island waitress pining for a too-good-to-be true Prince CharmingThe Travelersis a fascinating exploration of what it means to be American today.(Hogarth Publishing) DG

InEverything Grows: A Novelby Aimee Herman, its1993 when 15-year-old Eleanor (El) is abruptly confronted with the news that her bully has died by suicide. Her mother recently attempted to end her life in a similar fashion, and when El is assigned to write a letter to a deceased person, El chooses to write to James. What follows is an emotional yet ultimately uplifting journey of self-discovery, acceptance of others, and learning that life is better than the alternative. El loses friends, gains new ones, rebuilds relationships within her family, and learns to leanupon a system of support that is accepting of her burgeoning queer identity. (Three Room Press)DP

Northern Lightsby Raymond Strom follows Shane Stephenson who returns to his hometown in 1997 in search of the mother who abandoned him in his adolescence. His long blonde hair and androgynous looks arenot well received by the locals.His father has recently died and a disapproving uncle kicked Shane out of his home years ago, and the townspeople seem as closed-minded as his uncle was. There is also an undercurrent of white supremacism that runs through the small Minnesota town. Threatened by a particularly violent and bigoted contingent that doesnt take well to outsiders, Shane eventually finds comfort with a group of other disaffected youth who find escape and solace in the abuse of drugs.Northern Lightsis at its heart a story of a son in search of lost family but also on a quest for identity and acceptance. (Simon & Schuster)Donald Padgett

Overthrowby renowned critic and author Caleb Crain follows idealistic and optimistic young New Yorkers hoping to change the world in the face of government oppression. Grad student Matthew and skateboarding poet Leif are both involved in the Occupy movement but seem to have little in common. But as their attraction intensifies, Matthew finds himself shunning his studies to spend more time with a magnetic group of young protestors. The group runs afoul of the law when they hack a questionable government contractor and Matthew is forced to choose between loyalty and self-preservation. Crains previous writing includes the novelNecessary Errorsand works forThe New Yorker,Harpers, andThe Atlantic. (Penguin Random House)DP

FeastDayof the Cannibalsby Norman Lock isthe sixth stand-alonebook in The American Novels series,a unique blend where historic figures are given new (fictional) lives yet their re-envisioned stories shed light on the formation of the American mind and the fabric of our society. InFeast Day of the Cannibals, Shelby Ross is a merchant ruined by the economic crash of 1873. He is hired as an appraiser at the New York City Customs House by Herman Melville, the embittered author of the American classicMoby Dick, and there Ross is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with another young man. Along the way, the reader is introduced to Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel Clemens, Thomas Edison, and Brooklyn Bridge engineer, Washington Roebling. (Bellevue Literary Press)DP

The Prisonertranslated by Carol Clark is the first completely new translation of Marcel Prousts masterpiece since the 1920s and it brings out the originals comical and lucid prose. Proust effectively wrote sprawling novels with autobiographical elements, andThe Prisoneris his magnum opus. Notoriously agoraphobic and neurasthenic, Proust died before the novel was published. The story follows orphan Albertine with whom Marcel had fallen in love at the close ofSodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume in the In Search of Lost Timeseries. Albertine has moved in with Marcels familysParis apartment, where there is a seemingly endless flow of money and judgmental servants. Marcel grows increasingly concerned with Albertines relationships with other women and becomes more desperate and irrational in his attempts to control her life and eventually confines her to their apartment.The Prisoneris at once a tragedy of possessive love and a comedy of human folly. Clarks translation provides a new and refreshing read of a timelessclassic. (Penguin Random House) DP

By Carolina De Roberts, award-winning author (The Invisible Mountain),Cantorasis the story of five women who found a refuge in an isolated South American beach city during a time of political persecution. Uruguay in the late 1970s was a dangerous place for political dissidents and those who did not conform. The military dictatorship outlawed everything from opposing opinions to groups of more than five in a familys home. Same-sex relationships could be cause for imprisonment or death.Cantorasbrings together five women from different strata of society with wildly different personalities who share a desire to escape the heteronormative strictures of society. Over the next 35 years on the beaches of Cabo Polonio, they escape the harshness of their daily lives and discover the beauty and their shared love for life and each other. (Knopf Doubleday) DP

The Editorby Steven Rowley (bestselling author ofLily and the Octopus),follows struggling writer James Smale, whosenew publisher just happens to be themost famous woman in the world,Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the former first lady and American royalty personified. She is impressed with the young novelists style and candid exposition of his own deeply dysfunctional family. But Smale finds the pressure of an unraveling family and the relationship with his partner preventing him from completing his manuscript. He is saved by his unlikely friendship with Mrs. Onassis, who deftly pushes and prods the impressionable and fragile young author to finish his work. In the poignant and funny novel, Smale learns toconfront the dark secrets of his relationship with his mother and uncovers Mrs. Onassiss true motives. (G. P. Putnams Sons) DP

On Swift Horses:A Novelby Shannon Pufahl is set in the developingWest of post-World War II America. Muriels mother died shortly after she turned 19, leaving her a house in Kansas and a huge hole in her heart. Despite some reservations, she marries her suitor Lee but it is his gay brother Julius with whom she bonds most. They move to San Diego and plan to live together, but soon the restless Julius is off to Las Vegas where he falls in love with a card cheat named Henry. Muriel gets a job as a waitress where she meets a series of gamblers from the local track. She starts joining them at the track and winning big, hiding her earnings from her husband. Henry eventually gets caught and run out of town. Lovestruck Julius follows and finds himself south of the border in Tijuana. Everyone has a story and a mystery inSwift Horses, and they all are in search of something. The question is whether they will find what they seek or will it tear them apart. (Riverhead Books) DP

Wandererby Sarah Lon, originally published in France to critical acclaim when the author was 21, is the poetic tale of music, love, lust, and dark secrets. Music teacher Hermin was happily living an isolated life near Frances Bourbonnais Mountains when he meets up with an unexpected visitor from his past. Hermins former student Lenny, now a renowned pianist, suddenly reappears after vanishing without a word a decade before. As the story shifts back and forth between past and present, details of an intense relationship between the two men unfold. Now the men are forced to confront the ghosts of the past as well as the growing sexual tension. Discover why young talent Lon was the only author personally invited by French President Emmanuel Macron to the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair in this new English version ofWanderertranslated by John Cullen. (Other Press) DG

The Lion Tamer Who Lostby Louise Beech follows two young men whose lives intertwine repeatedly over the years. After a chance meeting at a library, troubled college student Ben and aspiring writer Andrew begin an intense relationship. Ben has a dream of traveling to Africa to volunteer at a lion reserve, meanwhile, a childhood wish of Andrews comes true though his feelings may now have changed. Eventually, dark secrets and the prejudices of others conspire to tear the couple apart as the storys gripping conclusion unfolds. (Orenda Books) DG

The Dollmakerby Nina Allen is a beautifully strange tale of two lonely souls brought together by a shared passion and a desire to break free from the circumstances that imprison them. Andrew Garvie, a master dollmaker of the traditional antique style, had long ago accepted a life of solitude due, in part, to his diminutive size, until he decides on a whim to answer a personal ad in one of the collectors magazines. Bramber Winters, a sheltered woman living in an institution with a tragic past, is the author of the ad. Through their letters to each other, along with wonderfully creepy, fairytale-like lore involving dolls coming to life, Allen creates a vividly real fantasy world somewhere between the universes of Tim Burton and Anne Rice. As Andrew sets out with a plan to rescue Bramber, the story gains momentum and will have you turning pages as the exciting climax unfolds. (Other Press) DG

The Parting Glassby Gina Marie Guadagnino is the steamy and scandalous Victorian-era love triangle youve been craving. Set in 1837 New York, the story centers on Maire (whose real name is Mary Ballard, altered to hide her Irish identity) and her brother Seanin. The siblings both share a devotion to the same woman, beautiful young heiress, Charlotte Walden, for whom Maire works as a maid. Though her feelings for Charlotte have deepened beyond a working relationship, Maire must regularly hide her heartbreak as she secretly delivers Seanin to her ladys bedchamber every Thursday night and then eases her heartache by slipping into a seedy underground world that exists around Washington Square. There she meets strong and industrious sex worker Liddie Lawrence helps distract Maire from her emotional suffering with lust and friendship. As Seanin struggles to navigate the stifling lines of class and nationality, the two women struggle to keep their double lives secret. However, Maire soon realizes that Charlotte may have some secrets so dark that not even she can save her. (Atria Books) DG

Dont Whisper Too MuchandPortrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbellaby Frieda Ekotto is the first work of fiction by the African scholar, professor, and author (What Color is Black? Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic).The book contains three separate narratives that present beautiful, positive love stories between African women. Through examining the romantic lives of queer African women, Ekotto is able to then touch on the larger issues that affect them. She comments on what its like living in a post-colonial Africa, and questions from whose perspective is history being recorded.In Dont Whisper Too Much, wetravel back in time to follow young village girl Ada, on a quest to write her own story, her own way.Bona Mbellamoves us back to the present, focusing on the life of a young woman living in poverty in a rough neighborhood in a bustling African city. Finally inPan, the many themes fromDont Whisper MuchandBona Mbellaare brought together while exploring the emotional and sexual connections between these women. Even in the face of suffering and humiliation, they are able to discover their own personal power and ability to transform their lives. This new paperback edition has been beautifully translated into English by Corine Tachtiris. (Rutgers University Press) DG

When Katie Met Cassidyby Camille Perri, acclaimed author ofThe Assistants, comes the story of two women whose lives suddenly go topsy-turvy when unexpected chemistry suddenly develops between them. Katie Daniels, a 28-year-old Kentucky transplant with traditional values, has just been dumped by her fianc when she meets the savvy, sexy, and confidant New Yorker Cassidy Price, chicly dressed in a mans suit. At first, neither knows how to respond to the spark between them but soon their undeniable chemistry and mutual attraction forces them to re-evaluate all their previous notions of sex, love, and lust. At its heart,When Katie Met Cassidyis a fun, heartfelt, and hilarious modern lesbian romance about the complications of gender, sexuality, and the importance of figuring out your true self in order to find the happiness you want. (G.P. Putnam's Sons) DG

Cleannessby Garth Greenwell is the followup novel to his wildly passionateWhat Belongs to Us. In the original, an American teacher in Bulgaria becomes romantically involved with a hustler he picked up in a Sofia public bathroom. InCleanness, the author expands the teachers story to include a much broader and more diverse range of relationships: lovers and friends, teacher and student, past and present. There are new locations, from a writers residency on the Baltic Sea to small towns in rural Italy and Bulgaria. The teachers romance with a closeted student brings not just physical pleasure but also transforms his understanding of himself and the world around him. Greenwell has written a collection of narratives that stand-alone but also coalesce to reveal a sweeping narrative and character arc. As always, his work contains detailed accounts of explicit sex that are as much titillating as aesthetically pleasing and metaphysically revealing. (Macmillan Publishers) DP

Courting Mr. Lincolnby Louis Bayard is a historical fiction about the early life and loves of Abraham Lincoln. Grounded in fact but brought to life with a flourishing vision of what might have been, the novel is an intimate evocation of the love between the brilliant yet melancholic future President and two of the most important figures in his early life. Mary Todd is the temperamental yet politically wise daughter of slave-owning Southern aristocrats. Joshua Speed is Lincolns charming confidante with whom hes rumored to have a deeper romantic relationship. The story is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of both Todd and Speed. This Todd is educated, opinionated, astute, self-possessed debutante with a firecracker personality. She was fiercely anti-slavery in a family of slave owners, and her relationship with Lincoln proved to be instrumental to his later successes. Speed was a more mysterious figure, an extremely close friend at a time when male friendships were often more personal and philosophically intimate than those with their wives. With a style and wit worthy of Austen, Bayard has plotted a complicated story of romance and intimacy. (Algonquin Books) DP

A Transcontinental Affair: A Novelby Jodi Daynard is a story of forbidden love and exploration between two women set against the backdrop of a transcontinental rail journey from Boston to San Francisco following the Civil War. Louisa is a southern bell and preachers daughter fleeing Virginia after the devastation of the Confederacys disastrous war of slavery and secession. She takes a job as governess to a cruel family as they journey from Boston to California. The view from her window is the only thing that gives her hope and makes her feel alive. Hattie is the brash, daring, and enigmatic daughter of a wealthy Beacon Hill family and daughter of a famous Congressman. She seizes the chance to travel on her own, even knowing that her new fianc awaits her at the end of the line. The pair meets when Louisa finds Hattie drunk and asleep on a trunk in one of the train cars. The two girls couldnt be more dissimilar at first glance but are drawn together by a force that neither fathomed possible. Their romance parallels their rail journey, filled with twists, turns, and unexpected stops and starts. Their shared journey opens their eyes to not just their own desires, but also the realities of oppression that exist all around them. Inspired by true events,A Transcontinental Affairis a remarkable story of love, adventure, and self-discovery, a powerful and eye-opening novel that crosses genres as it crosses the continent. (Lake Union) DP

Find Meis the follow-up to Andr Acimans 2007 bestsellerCall Me by Your Name(adapted into the 2017 Oscar-winning film).Find Merevisits Elio, Oliver, and Samuel 15 years after their eventful summer. The brilliant Elio is now a classical pianist moving to Paris, where new romance awaits. Samuel is changed by a chance meeting on a train. And Oliver is still in America, with a wife and kids, but dreaming of Paris. Could a visit lead to another life-changing encounter?Call Mecaptured the emotional grip of falling in love and the pain of having it ripped away.Find Meis a worthy follow-up showing the consequences of their choices and asking if it is ever too late to find love. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) DP

The Last to Let Go by Amber Smith is the authors second novel focusing on the lasting impacts of family abuse. Life was finally looking up for teen Brooke Winters, who was making plans to change schools and leave her hometown and troubled family and past behind. That is, until she receives the news that her mother has killed their abusive father. Now on her own, Brooke struggles to separate herself from her violent and dysfunctional family, though her own abusive outbursts begin to threaten her relationship with her new girlfriend. Now Brooke must find the strength to try to break the cycle and assume her true place in the world and learn to let go. (Simon & Schuster) DG

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26 of the Best LGBTQ Novels We Discovered This Year - Advocate.com

How Artificial Intelligence Is Totally Changing Everything – HowStuffWorks

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Danzig

Back in Oct. 1950, British techno-visionary Alan Turing published an article called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in the journal MIND that raised what at the time must have seemed to many like a science-fiction fantasy.

"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?" Turing asked.

Turing thought that they could. Moreover, he believed, it was possible to create software for a digital computer that enabled it to observe its environment and to learn new things, from playing chess to understanding and speaking a human language. And he thought machines eventually could develop the ability to do that on their own, without human guidance. "We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields," he predicted.

Nearly 70 years later, Turing's seemingly outlandish vision has become a reality. Artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, gives machines the ability to learn from experience and perform cognitive tasks, the sort of stuff that once only the human brain seemed capable of doing.

AI is rapidly spreading throughout civilization, where it has the promise of doing everything from enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate the streets to making more accurate hurricane forecasts. On an everyday level, AI figures out what ads to show you on the web, and powers those friendly chatbots that pop up when you visit an e-commerce website to answer your questions and provide customer service. And AI-powered personal assistants in voice-activated smart home devices perform myriad tasks, from controlling our TVs and doorbells to answering trivia questions and helping us find our favorite songs.

But we're just getting started with it. As AI technology grows more sophisticated and capable, it's expected to massively boost the world's economy, creating about $13 trillion worth of additional activity by 2030, according to a McKinsey Global Institute forecast.

"AI is still early in adoption, but adoption is accelerating and it is being used across all industries," says Sarah Gates, an analytics platform strategist at SAS, a global software and services firm that focuses upon turning data into intelligence for clients.

It's even more amazing, perhaps, that our existence is quietly being transformed by a technology that many of us barely understand, if at all something so complex that even scientists have a tricky time explaining it.

"AI is a family of technologies that perform tasks that are thought to require intelligence if performed by humans," explains Vasant Honavar, a professor and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at Penn State University. "I say 'thought,' because nobody is really quite sure what intelligence is."

Honavar describes two main categories of intelligence. There's narrow intelligence, which is achieving competence in a narrowly defined domain, such as analyzing images from X-rays and MRI scans in radiology. General intelligence, in contrast, is a more human-like ability to learn about anything and to talk about it. "A machine might be good at some diagnoses in radiology, but if you ask it about baseball, it would be clueless," Honavar explains. Humans' intellectual versatility "is still beyond the reach of AI at this point."

According to Honavar, there are two key pieces to AI. One of them is the engineering part that is, building tools that utilize intelligence in some way. The other is the science of intelligence, or rather, how to enable a machine to come up with a result comparable to what a human brain would come up with, even if the machine achieves it through a very different process. To use an analogy, "birds fly and airplanes fly, but they fly in completely different ways," Honavar. "Even so, they both make use of aerodynamics and physics. In the same way, artificial intelligence is based upon the notion that there are general principles about how intelligent systems behave."

AI is "basically the results of our attempting to understand and emulate the way that the brain works and the application of this to giving brain-like functions to otherwise autonomous systems (e.g., drones, robots and agents)," Kurt Cagle, a writer, data scientist and futurist who's the founder of consulting firm Semantical, writes in an email. He's also editor of The Cagle Report, a daily information technology newsletter.

And while humans don't really think like computers, which utilize circuits, semi-conductors and magnetic media instead of biological cells to store information, there are some intriguing parallels. "One thing we're beginning to discover is that graph networks are really interesting when you start talking about billions of nodes, and the brain is essentially a graph network, albeit one where you can control the strengths of processes by varying the resistance of neurons before a capacitive spark fires," Cagle explains. "A single neuron by itself gives you a very limited amount of information, but fire enough neurons of varying strengths together, and you end up with a pattern that gets fired only in response to certain kinds of stimuli, typically modulated electrical signals through the DSPs [that is digital signal processing] that we call our retina and cochlea."

"Most applications of AI have been in domains with large amounts of data," Honavar says. To use the radiology example again, the existence of large databases of X-rays and MRI scans that have been evaluated by human radiologists, makes it possible to train a machine to emulate that activity.

AI works by combining large amounts of data with intelligent algorithms series of instructions that allow the software to learn from patterns and features of the data, as this SAS primer on artificial intelligence explains.

In simulating the way a brain works, AI utilizes a bunch of different subfields, as the SAS primer notes.

The concept of AI dates back to the 1940s, and the term "artificial intelligence" was introduced at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College. Over the next two decades, researchers developed programs that played games and did simple pattern recognition and machine learning. Cornell University scientist Frank Rosenblatt developed the Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, which ran on a 5-ton (4.5-metric ton), room-sized IBM computer that was fed punch cards.

But it wasn't until the mid-1980s that a second wave of more complex, multilayer neural networks were developed to tackle higher-level tasks, according to Honavar. In the early 1990s, another breakthrough enabled AI to generalize beyond the training experience.

In the 1990s and 2000s, other technological innovations the web and increasingly powerful computers helped accelerate the development of AI. "With the advent of the web, large amounts of data became available in digital form," Honavar says. "Genome sequencing and other projects started generating massive amounts of data, and advances in computing made it possible to store and access this data. We could train the machines to do more complex tasks. You couldn't have had a deep learning model 30 years ago, because you didn't have the data and the computing power."

AI is different from, but related to, robotics, in which machines sense their environment, perform calculations and do physical tasks either by themselves or under the direction of people, from factory work and cooking to landing on other planets. Honavar says that the two fields intersect in many ways.

"You can imagine robotics without much intelligence, purely mechanical devices like automated looms," Honavar says. "There are examples of robots that are not intelligent in a significant way." Conversely, there's robotics where intelligence is an integral part, such as guiding an autonomous vehicle around streets full of human-driven cars and pedestrians.

"It's a reasonable argument that to realize general intelligence, you would need robotics to some degree, because interaction with the world, to some degree, is an important part of intelligence," according to Honavar. "To understand what it means to throw a ball, you have to be able to throw a ball."

AI quietly has become so ubiquitous that it's already found in many consumer products.

"A huge number of devices that fall within the Internet of Things (IoT) space readily use some kind of self-reinforcing AI, albeit very specialized AI," Cagle says. "Cruise control was an early AI and is far more sophisticated when it works than most people realize. Noise dampening headphones. Anything that has a speech recognition capability, such as most contemporary television remotes. Social media filters. Spam filters. If you expand AI to cover machine learning, this would also include spell checkers, text-recommendation systems, really any recommendation system, washers and dryers, microwaves, dishwashers, really most home electronics produced after 2017, speakers, televisions, anti-lock braking systems, any electric vehicle, modern CCTV cameras. Most games use AI networks at many different levels."

AI already can outperform humans in some narrow domains, just as "airplanes can fly longer distances, and carry more people than a bird could," Honavar says. AI, for example, is capable of processing millions of social media network interactions and gaining insights that can influence users' behavior an ability that the AI expert worries may have "not so good consequences."

It's particularly good at making sense of massive amounts of information that would overwhelm a human brain. That capability enables internet companies, for example, to analyze the mountains of data that they collect about users and employ the insights in various ways to influence our behavior.

But AI hasn't made as much progress so far in replicating human creativity, Honavar notes, though the technology already is being utilized to compose music and write news articles based on data from financial reports and election returns.

Given AI's potential to do tasks that used to require humans, it's easy to fear that its spread could put most of us out of work. But some experts envision that while the combination of AI and robotics could eliminate some positions, it will create even more new jobs for tech-savvy workers.

"Those most at risk are those doing routine and repetitive tasks in retail, finance and manufacturing," Darrell West, a vice president and founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public policy organization, explains in an email. "But white-collar jobs in health care will also be affected and there will be an increase in job churn with people moving more frequently from job to job. New jobs will be created but many people will not have the skills needed for those positions. So the risk is a job mismatch that leaves people behind in the transition to a digital economy. Countries will have to invest more money in job retraining and workforce development as technology spreads. There will need to be lifelong learning so that people regularly can upgrade their job skills."

And instead of replacing human workers, AI may be used to enhance their intellectual capabilities. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by the 2030s, AI have achieved human levels of intelligence, and that it will be possible to have AI that goes inside the human brain to boost memory, turning users into human-machine hybrids. As Kurzweil has described it, "We're going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value."

How Artificial Intelligence Is Totally Changing Everything - HowStuffWorks

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