Opinion: There’s Nothing Bad About ‘Bucha – Albionpleiad

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Kevita is among many brands of kombucha that have become popular in recent years. While rainbow ice cream and sushi donuts might disappear from the public eye as quickly as they came into it, kombucha has been around for thousands of years, and it isnt going away any time soon(Photo by Jordan Revenaugh).

Food fads are nothing new.

Sushi now comes in many different forms, ranging from donuts to burritos. Some foods, particularly ice cream, now come in unicorn colors, a fancy way of saying rainbow, while others come in charcoal. Classic foods, like lasagna, now come in a deconstructed style, because I guess eating noodles, marinara sauce and cheese together is antiquated. Now, the cool way to eat them is separately.

While many food fads come and go, one of them is here to stay: Kombucha.

Some of you out there roll your eyes at this. You wonder how people can enjoy a bitter, vinegar flavored drink. You wonder how they can stand the feeling of carbonation as the fermented tea-based drink bubbles on their tongues.

You have preconceived notions about kombucha because you assume its just like any other old fad: temporary. You judge kombucha the way I judge a deconstructed lasagna. But, unlike a lasagna that has already been deconstructed, theres more to pick apart when it comes to kombucha.

How long has this stuff been around?

While you might think kombucha was invented in recent years solely for health gurus and hipsters, thats not actually the case. Kombucha is thought to have originated in China approximately 2000 years ago. Records date back to 221 B.C., when kombucha was referred to as the tea of immortality.

Cool, butWhat is it?

Kombucha is a fermented green or black tea made with something called kombucha culture, a mixture of live bacteria and yeast otherwise known as scoby.

Similar to how kombucha is made with kombucha culture, scoby is actually an acronym that stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. The takeaway? When it comes to what ingredients make up kombucha, things are pretty straightforward.

Bacteria: Isnt that gross?

Not when its good for you.

As the scoby digests, it produces sugar. This goes on to create a long list of acids that, aside from amino acids, my chemistry for the non-science major course did not cover in-depth enough for me to understand. What I do understand, however, are the vitamins that are also produced in the digestive process. In addition to the plethora of acids, the decomposing bacteria release vitamins A and C along with B vitamins B1, B6 and B12.

Whats more is that while kombucha contains bacteria, according to Healthline, it also kills bacteria. While this might seem counterproductive at first glance, its not. Acetic acid, which gives kombucha a taste similar to that of vinegar, works to kill off bad bacteria in your gut. What it doesnt do is kill off scoby, the good bacteria within the effervescent drink, or detract from kombuchas natural probiotic properties.

Whats so important about gut health, though?

The thought of gut health tends to allude to thoughts of digestion, but we wont get into that. What we will get into, however, are all the things that are unexpectedly associated with what goes on in your digestive tract.

According to Time Magazine, the gastrointestinal system has been linked to many different health related issues in recent years, ranging from anxiety to many different chronic illnesses, such as Type 2 diabetes and various forms of cancer.

So, maybe its a little bit gross to think about scoby swimming around in your gut, but its doing some good work in there.

How do different kinds of kombucha compare?

When it comes to good old bucha, the list of brands and flavors is nearly endless. When it comes to popularity, GTs and Kevita are probably the most popular brands, each with a vast variety of different flavors.

With each bottle selling anywhere from $2 to $5, depending on where its sold, maybe that seems like a major hit to a college students already dwindling bank account. When it comes to kombucha, though, the pros outweigh the cons.

But if the ticket price is too high to gain approval in your budget (because honestly, thats fair), youre in luck. There are plenty of ways to brew your own kombucha in order to get your fix.

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Opinion: There's Nothing Bad About 'Bucha - Albionpleiad

Star Wars Theory: Vader Immortal Might Reveal the True Purpose of the Death Star – CBR – Comic Book Resources

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The Death Stars were moon-sized battle stations developed by the Galactic Empire, capable of destroying entire planets. Thirty years later, the First Order followed suit, tunneling the kyber-rich planet Illum to build the Starkiller Base. That's par for the course for a militarized regime, but it always seemed like a waste of resources, given the Emperors objectives and his explicit disregard for building lasting political structures. But what if those feats of wartime engineering weren't what the Imperial and First Order officials thought they were? What if the true reason for their existence was to allow Palpatine to achieve immortality? Thats what the VR game Vader Immortal seems to be pointing at, through the legend of Lady Corvax and the Brightstar.

In Vader Immortal, the player character ventures beneath Fortress Vader on Mustafar to retrieve the Brightstar artifact for Darth Vader. Lady Corvaxs spirit guides the player on this quest, and along the way she explains that she stole the Brightstar, the sacred object that provided Mustafar with life, to create a device that would bring her dead husband back to life. (That's why Vader wants the Brightstar too: Hes trying to bring Padm back to life.)

However, while a portal was created, and her husband was trapped in the world between the living and the dead, the Brightstar energy destroyed Mustafar, transforming it into the volcanic inferno that it is now. The portal remained active, a rip in time and space, and it was a major plot point the Marvel comics series Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, in which Vader is also on a quest to resurrect Padm (he blunders, although not because the portal wasnt working).

Vader Immortal peppers the screen with visual hints that this Brightstar is actually primitive Death Star technology: The Brightstar looks like a massive, spiral kyber crystal, within a cave of smaller kyber crystals. The pre-Corvax Mustafarians had been using it as an energy source, or perhaps as a way to keep their world in balance in the Force. Lady Corvax broke that balance to rip the veil of reality and bring back her husband, which caused the devastation.

RELATED: Star Wars, Stop With the Super Weapons Already

Canon material backs up that hypothesis: In Catalyst: A Rogue One novel, scientist Galen Erso discovers that kyber crystals could be faceted to become a very cheap source of energy for entire planets. He also proposed that kyber crystals were able to align the natural dark and light side of the Force to focus, balance and increase this energy output even more. However, without proper containment this energy would lash out and destroy everything that surrounded it as it could be seen in the Death Star I, II and the Starkiller Base, and on a lesser degree, Kylo Rens fractured kyber crystal and crackling, spitting sword, and in the explosion that results from Anakin's lightsaber breaking in The Last Jedi. That's exactly what happened to Mustafar after Lady Corvax unwittingly unleashed the energy of the Brightstar.

The Emperor was obsessed with immortality, and everything he did was designed to lead to that goal. Why bother to harness such a vast and time-consuming military power and building two massive and incredibly conspicuous space stations just to kill people? Could he have been trying to use the same kyber crystal energy around which the Death Stars were based to open a portal to a higher plane of existence, beyond life and death?

There is a plane like that: In The Clone Wars, the Gods of Mortis seem to inhabit and control a space where anything can happen. On Star Wars Rebels, Palpatine uses a Mortis portal to penetrate the World Between Worlds, the place in which the Force connects all points in time and space; staying there would have made him invincible. In the comic book Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, Palpatine implies he knows about the portal under Mustafar, so he probably knew the legend of the Brightstar and its resurrection properties too. All of that, plus the Rur crystal (more on that in a moment), point toward the idea of an advanced civilization that knew how to wield the kyber crystals better than the old Sith and the Jedi. They went extinct, leaving behind only legends, artifacts and gods: a tempting puzzle for a Sith so obsessed with power and eternal life.

The Force Awakens featured Starkiller Base, which was originally the kyber-rich planet of Illum, the place where Jedi padawans went to retrieve crystals for their lightsabers. The First Order took advantage of the extinction of the Jedi to take over the planet, tunnel it and exploit its core to create the most terrifying weapon of mass destruction: one that killed suns and destroyed entire systems across impossible distances. In the novelization, it is mentioned they did this by ripping a hole through time and space. In Finns words, It doesn't operate in what we'd call normal hyperspace. It fires through a hole in the continuum that it makes itself. Everybody was calling it 'sub'-hyperspace." In a different internal monologue, General Hux, closest thing the First Order has to a chief science officer, thinks about how Starkiller melds the quintessence derived from dark matter with the kyber crystals at the core of the planet to create phantasm energy that can travel through the galaxy instead of across it.

RELATED: Kylo Ren Finally Proves He's Better Than Darth Vader - by Slaying a God

It sounds as if the First Order unwittingly created a rip in space and time that shortcut through the World Between Worlds. Within The Force Awakens, there are some interesting Force-related events that occur at the same time as the Starkiller weapon is being charged and deployed: Rey and Kylo Ren (two Force users) are on the base as the Starkiller, a massive machine surrounding an enormous amount of kyber crystals, sucks the sun dry. Kylo Ren surrenders to the Dark Side of the Force and kills his father. Poe Damerons targets the oscillator that ultimately destroys the planet, which coincides with the turning of the tables in the fight between Kylo and Rey. In the novel, interestingly, that's also the precise moment when Rey hears a cold, murderous voice in her head coaxing her to kill Kylo. It's a voice that sounds a lot like the Emperor talking through time and space. Why at that precise moment, and not before, unless Palptine's ability to communicate with the living was dependent on the existence of this hole and the presence of a kyber crystal planet?

But what about resurrection? Other than by ripping the fabric of reality and the balance of dark and light, is it possible for a kyber crystal to help someone come back to life, like Lady Corvax intended? We know that its possible for kyber crystals to hold conscience and Force powers, even for Jedi. In Marvel's canonical Doctor Aphra, the characters finds the ruins of the space-station fortress of the Ordu Aspectu, an ancient, pre-Republic sect of Jedi that wanted to achieve immortality. Their Rur crystal (another artifact that looks an awful lot like a massive kyber, but this time in green) was the computer core of their fortress, its source of energy and the vessel for the Eternal Rur, a corrupted Jedi spirit A.I.

Darth Vader eventually fetched the Rur Crystal, and it became a prized part of Palpatines collection. So, yes, in a way, kyber crystals could technically be used to contain the conscience of Force users. This ancient galactic concept, combined with the legend of Lady Corvax, would work perfectly for Palpatines quest for ultimate power and immortality, and would explain his very disparate interests in ancient history and technological advancement: all along, he was trying to replicate and improve upon these ancient technologies for his own benefit and his ultimate goal: immortality.

When Darth Vader killed the Emperor, he did so by throwing him deeper into the heart of the Death Star, where he exploded into energy. Part of that energy was seen hitting Vaders helmet (that might explain why it speaks to Kylo Ren), but most of it went down the chute, toward the kybers powering the Death Star's core. We know that Sith can attach themselves to objects, so what object would be better for Palpatines spirit than the core of a Death Star, made up of kyber crystals that were probably being tuned to manipulate reality itself?

If Palpatines spirit is indeed stuck in the Death Star, that would explain why Rey, Poe, Finn and probably Kylo Ren are heading to it in The Rise of Skywalker: they want to reach him before the other side does, and prevent him (or assist him) in escaping before another kyber-crystal is used to destroy. And, judging by the red-rimmed Sith Fleet with miniaturized Death Star cannons that blow up Kijimi in the Episode IX trailer, it seems like the amount of tiny starkillers able to assist him has multiplied a thousand-fold.

NEXT: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's Biggest Clues May Be in Trailer Music

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Joker Is An Empty Vessel For a Fascinating Performance

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Star Wars Theory: Vader Immortal Might Reveal the True Purpose of the Death Star - CBR - Comic Book Resources

Who Is The Rottweiler on ‘The Masked Singer’? This Fan Guess Is The Most Legit One Yet – WomansDay.com

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There's already a frontrunner on The Masked Singer and it's the Rottweiler. The judges and viewers quickly found out during the contestant's performance of "Maneater" by Hall & Oates that he was a professional musician (or at least he sounds like one). Judge Nicole Scherzinger raved that his was the best rendition of a song she'd heard yet on the show. But even though they were blown away by his talent, the judges couldn't come to a consensus about who was behind the mask. The viewers, though? They think they have this mystery solved.

When a photo of the Rottweiler first appeared on the show's Instagram page, fans couldn't decide who it might have been. One commenter guessed that it was Snoop Dogg, but that would be a little obvious for a season that has pledged to make the clues harder. Another fan guessed that it could definitely be a rapper, based on the styling of the costume alone.

After hearing the Rottweiler sing so well, most of the judges believed that he was someone from a boy band like the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC. Robin Thicke guessed Brian Littrell from the Backstreet Boys and Ken Jeong agreed, while also throwing out JC Chasez from NSYNC as an option. Jenny McCarthy guessed another boy band member, Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees. Meanwhile, Nicole Scherzinger threw out a complete wild card and said Bruno Mars.

All of the judges admitted that the clue package threw them off, so most of their guesses were based on singing talent only not on the actual hints. Fans on Twitter utilized both the clues and the performance to make their own guesses, though. Many of them came to the same decision that it could be Chris Daughtry from the rock band Daughtry (and from American Idol) under that mask.

When you look closer at the clue package from the show, that guess makes a ton of sense. In the video, blue roses are shown on a shelf, and Daughtry has a big tattoo of a blue rose on his arm. When he got the ink, he posted it to Instagram with a caption explaining his choice. "Blue roses are often portrayed in literature and art as symbols of love, prosperity and even immortality... one could say Eternal Life," he wrote.

He also said he rose to fame "almost overnight." Being on American Idol is one way to get some overnight success in the industry, and Daughtry was on season 5 of the singing show. There were also two references to football in the clue video. One said, "The first time I touched a pigskin under the Friday night lights, I learned preparation is key." And the other clue was a fantasy football champion ring. According to ESPN, Daughtry played football in high school but said he wasn't very good at it.

Perhaps, in the clue video, he was saying preparation was key for football and that he didn't prepare enough because he wasn't good. Also his championship ring is in fantasy football rather than real football because he didn't make it to the pros.

In the video there was a record named "Live" playing, and, as a musician, Daughtry has played live many times. He also said he wants to "show the doubters, it's not over." Well, "It's Not Over" is actually one of Daughtry's most popular songs. Take a look at the clue video for yourself if you want to be further convinced:

None of the judges guessed Daughtry when they heard the Rottweiler sing, but maybe next week they'll hear that tone in his voice. Or maybe we're totally barking up the wrong tree with this Daughtry guess. We'll just have to wait and see when the Rottweiler is unmasked.

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Who Is The Rottweiler on 'The Masked Singer'? This Fan Guess Is The Most Legit One Yet - WomansDay.com

Atheist Kicked Off Egyptian TV Show Now Says He’s Safely in Another Country – Patheos

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It was more than a year ago when Mohamed Hisham (also spelled Hashem in older articles) appeared on the Egyptian channel Alhadath Alyoum TV (Egyptian Street) and spoke openly about his atheism. It was quite a feat considering authorities say there are literally only 866 atheists in the country.

Hishams appearance didnt go over well with host Mahmoud Abd Al-Halim or the former Deputy Sheikh of Al-Azhar Mahmoud Ashour. Both men urged Hisham to see a psychiatrist for his obvious mental illness before he corrupted even more Egyptian youth.

HISHAM: Im an atheist, which means I dont believe in the existence of God. I dont believe in Him.

ASHOUR: What? What was that?

HISHAM: Im an atheist, which means I dont believe in the existence of God. I dont believe in Him. Thats what atheism means. I dont need religion to have moral values or to be a productive member of society.

AL-HALIM: How come you exist in this universe?

HISHAM: Okay, let me explain. There are theories that try to explain our existence. One theory is that God created us. Okay? But there are other theories, with much more evidence, like the Big Bang theory

AL-HALIM: Speak Arabic! You are in Egypt and you are addressing simple people so dont use big words for no reason.

HISHAM: Im using these terms because science is conducted in English.

AL-HALIM: What science are you talking about?

AL-HALIM: You are confused and unreliable. You deny the existence of God and reject our religion and principles

HISHAM: Is this so bad?

AL-HALIM: Of course! You come here to talk about a certain idea but have nothing to offer! You offer atheism! You offer heresy! I apologize to the viewers for having an Egyptian of this kind on our show. Im sorry, Mohammad, but you cannot stay with us on the show because your ideas are inappropriate, Im sad to say. We cannot promote such destructive ideas. You have not uttered a single convincing word.

ASHOUR: Look, dear Mohammad, you need psychiatric treatment. Many young people today suffer from mental illnesses due to material or mental circumstances.

AL-HALIM: Its like Sheikh Mahmoud says. Have you see a psychiatrist?

AL-HALIM: I advise you to leave the studio and go straight to a psychiatric hospital. You shouldnt be here. Unfortunately, I cannot let you be here anymore. Please get up and leave, and I will continue the show with Dr. Mahmoud. Unfortunately, your ideas are destructive and bad for Egyptian youth. You set a very bad example for Egyptian youth.

Hes doing okay, though. Hisham just did an interview with Humanists Internationals Giovanni Gaetani without getting interrupted and he says hes doing okay. He also forgives those hosts.

I would like to excuse the host, because the situation was like that his audience would have thought: Why would you give to this atheist a platform? This means that you are as guilty as him. That could have had very bad consequences for him, like it happened to another Egyptian host who had hosted a gay person and ended up in jail for this.

Hisham described how the police tried to investigate him:

one night the Egyptian Police knocked at his door and searched his house. They even looked at their conversation on Whatsapp, full of atheist and blasphemous content, but didnt understand what they were reading because everything was in English, even the conversation with his Egyptian friends:

Police came and even searched my phone. But thankfully they didnt understand English. My phone was indeed full of atheist material, but I kept everything in English, even my chat with my Egyptian friends. I dont know who did invent the ritual, but we do it, for two reasons.

One is privacy: if you get in a situation when somebody is reading your messages, its harder for them to understand what they are reading, because not many people in Egypt are good at English. The other reason instead is to improve your English.

Clever man.

Hisham is now living safely in Germany, but hes struggling to adapt, learn the new language, and find work. Still, hes alive. That hasnt always been the case for atheists in predominantly Muslim countries who have been vocal about their godlessness. Be sure to watch the full interview. You can support Humanists Internationals campaign to help atheists at risk right here.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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Atheist Kicked Off Egyptian TV Show Now Says He's Safely in Another Country - Patheos

This Life and Outgrowing God review heaven, atheism and what gives life meaning – The Guardian

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Years ago, the magazine US Catholic ran a headline that had the air of being written by a devout believer who had just had an appalling realisation: Heaven: Will It Be Boring? If he believed in heaven, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hgglund would answer with an unequivocal yes. And not merely boring: utterly devoid of meaning. If I believed that my life would last forever, he writes, I could never take my life to be at stake. The question of how to use our precious time wouldnt arise, because time wouldnt be precious. Faced with any decision about whether to do something potentially meaningful with any given hour or day to nurture a relationship, create a work of art, savour a natural scene the answer would always be: who cares? After all, theres always tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

I sometimes feel oppressed by my seemingly infinite to-do list; but the truth is that having infinite time in which to tackle it would be inconceivably worse. The question at issue here isnt whether heaven exists. In This Life a sweepingly ambitious synthesis of philosophy, spirituality and politics, which starts with the case for confronting mortality, and ends with the case for democratic socialism Hgglund takes it for granted that it doesnt. Instead, his point is that we shouldnt want it to. Religious people, even if they dont believe in a literal place called heaven (white bean bags, 24-hour room service, fat babies with wings, to quote Alan Partridge), nonetheless believe that what truly matters most in life belongs to the realm of the eternal and divine. The result is a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being. Hgglunds alternative, secular faith, insists that our finite lives are all we have and that this finitude, far from being a cause for regret, is precisely what gives them meaning.

His annual family holiday, in his childhood home on Swedens wind-battered Baltic coast, is valuable because he wont be around to experience such things for ever, he argues, and because his family relationships are therefore equally fragile and transient. Even the landscape in which the house stands is shifting, as glaciers melt. And its only from the standpoint of secular faith, Hgglund insists, that you can really care about the climate crisis at all. If our finite lives are only a means to eternal salvation, the destruction of life cant matter in a truly ultimate sense.

Dawkins's career in evolutionary biology might stand as an exemplar of the kind of life Hgglund urges us to live

Theres a glaring problem with all this as a critique of religion, which is that religious believers manifestly do find meaning in daily life, are devoted to their relationships, and care about the fate of the planet. (Hgglund acknowledges as much, but suggests they are acting from secular faith when they do so, risking the weird conclusion that religion isnt all that religious.) A more interesting question is how far even the secular among us remain locked in the eternalist mindset, thereby inadvertently sapping our lives of meaning. Like any good rationalist, I know Im going to die, but Im not sure I really believe it; if I did, I probably wouldnt spend so much time on Twitter. In other words, I cant say that I live every moment of my life with an awareness that everything depends on what we do with our time together. This Life makes a forceful case via readings of Sren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, St Augustine and CS Lewis, among many others for keeping that truth in mind.

Yet these lofty thoughts comprise only half its argument. The other half is political. If our finite lives are all we have, it follows that time is the basis of all value and the best form of society is the one that maximises our freedom to use that time as we wish. Through a detailed re-examination of the writings of Karl Marx, Hgglund concludes that capitalism can never be that system, since its committed to using whatever time surplus it generates in the service of further growth. When you sell your labour for a wage, youre selling your life and capitalism, even if it rewards you with great wealth, will always want more of your life. For Hgglund, democratic socialism of a kind far more radical than anything proposed by Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn is the only way to maximise what he calls spiritual freedom: the power to devote as much of your time as possible to what matters most to you.

This certainly sounds preferable to the politics associated with the philosopher most famously obsessed by human finitude, Martin Heidegger, who opted for nazism instead. Still, the usual objections arise: how would you prevent the bureaucratic structures necessary for implementing this freedom from making life much less free? What do you do about seemingly intrinsic human urges, like acquisitiveness, competition, or the desire to provide for ones descendants? Would tasks like participating in the garbage removal in our neighbourhood on a weekly basis really become suffused, under democratic socialism, with camaraderie and meaning? But its best not to treat the book as an election manifesto. The fundamental point is that our fleeting time together is all that counts; you cant take it with you, and our politics fails us to the extent that it has us chasing any goal other than using it for what counts.

Maybe it goes without saying that reflections on building a meaningful secular life are absent from Outgrowing God, Richard Dawkinss latest fulmination against religion, this time aimed at a young adult audience. Like other luminaries of what we should probably now be calling the nearly new atheism, Dawkinss goals are demolitionary. And so a familiar liturgy, recited in a familiar tone of exasperation, fills the books first half. Since you already dont believe in Jupiter or Poseidon or Thor or Venus or Cupid or Snotra or Mars or Odin or Apollo, why randomly believe in one other god, the bearded old man of the Bible? Dont you realise theres no evidence for Jesuss miracles, and not much evidence for the rest of the story? Besides, what kind of mean-spirited deity would drown almost every living thing hed created, sparing only Mr and Mrs Giraffe, Mr and Mrs Elephant, Mr and Mrs Penguin and all the other couples admitted to Noahs Ark? Its possible, I suppose, that younger readers will find this less condescending than I did. Its also possible that they wont.

Unlike Hgglund, Dawkins never explicitly addresses what it is that makes life meaningful, if the answer isnt religious faith. So its ironic that the books (vastly better) second half, on the evolutionary origins of life, vividly demonstrates the spirit of scientific discovery that has made life meaningful for Dawkins himself. His contagious enthusiasm renders the basics of natural selection newly astonishing; triumphs of evolution such as the way humans gestate other humans, or how starlings manage to coordinate themselves in thousand-strong flocks, strike the reader as mind-blowing, as do other truths of biology and physics: that every glass of water you drink probably contains a molecule that passed through the bladder of Julius Caesar; or that two bullets, one fired horizontally from a rifle and the other dropped to the ground, will (assuming a vacuum) land at the very same time.

Who can doubt that the discoverers of this sort of knowledge took their limited time seriously, and used it well? As for Dawkins himself, his career in evolutionary biology might stand as an exemplar of the kind of life Hgglund urges us to live a finite existence, devoted to the fragile and collaborative human endeavour of expanding scientific understanding. But atheism alone cant explain why it should matter to spend your time that way. For that you need secular faith, a belief in the value of our finite projects as ends in themselves. And Dawkins, however intensely this might irritate him, gives every sign of being a true believer.

This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free by Martin Hgglund is published by Profile (RRP 20). Outgrowing God: A Beginners Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins is published by Bantam (RRP 14.99). To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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This Life and Outgrowing God review heaven, atheism and what gives life meaning - The Guardian

As an Afghan immigrant, Britain and atheism showed me the bright side of democracy – The Independent

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Theres so much I wish I could tell people about me, like the fact that my dad doesnt know how old he is (in Afghanistan they didnt used to record birthdays), or that every day I am thankful to be living in a democratic state. I was naturalised as a British citizen when I was very young;being a Londoner is all I have ever known since the age of three. But theres lots of little things that I adore which British-born citizens often overlook.

Ive been back to Kabul, where I was born, since settling in the UK. There is no sewage system, no waste management systems, no rule of law. People burn their garbage in the middle of the street. If you want to send a letter, you cant because theres no postal delivery system. Visiting a friends home for the first time? Good luck trying to find a map that helps you navigate locations; homes dont even have door numbers. As aesthetically pleasing as some places were to visit, travelling to Afghanistan at an early age opened my eyes and gave me perspective. Its one thing to read about democracy in a textbook, its another to experience first-hand how its manifestation can alter the fabric of ones existence.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

She was forced to flee her home with her family after their town was attacked by armed groups. Nooria describes a rocket hitting her neighbours home killing many inside. They fled on foot with just the clothes on their backs and she now lives in Mazari Shariff where Save the Children have enrolled her in school and provide vocational training

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Nooria* hopes for a future with no war; "When they attacked our village, the rocket hit our neighbour's house and they all died. Our house then caught fire and we ran away. My friends who I used to play with - I still don't know if they are alive or if they are dead.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I'm hoping for a better future, to learn, to support my family and to get them out of this difficult life. And I'm hoping for a future where there is no war.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Naveed lost his leg when he stepped on a mine aged just 8-years-old. He was herding the family's sheep in the mountains near their home when he triggered a landmine

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

After months of medical treatment his right leg was eventually amputated. He received physiotherapy and a prosthetic leg from the International Committee for the Red Cross in Mazar

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Now enrolled in school, Naveed is being given vocational training by Save the Children. For around a year I felt and dreamt that I still had my leg. But when I woke up and saw, there was no leg. Sometimes Id feel with my hand to check and find it wasn't there.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

If someone has loses their leg, it does not mean that they have lost their mind."

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"With the help of our minds we can continue to study, learn, and work to make the future of our families brighter.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Several years ago Neveed's father, Mahboob, was brutally beaten with rifle butts by armed groups after, he says, he failed to provide food for them while they were stationed in the family's village. He suffered brain damage which affected the right side of his body, speech and his brain function

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Habiba and Arezo were injured with their mother three years ago in a suicide bombing in Kabul. Arezo is still traumatised from what she saw and has become completely withdrawn

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Arezo's younger sister Habiba cares for her, takes her to lessons and anywhere she wants to go. They are both in school through Save the Children's 'Steps towards Afghan girls' education success' (STAGES) programme, which helps the most marginalised girls get access to education, stay in school and learn.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Habiba says: When I woke up and I opened my eyes I saw lots of bodies and I thought I was not alive any more. It was horrible. I'll never forget that. Whenever there is a big sound she gets scared because she was traumatised by the sound she heard during the attack. I love my sister, and I help her with her lessons, I take her anywhere."

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"She's older than me but I feel like the older one because I support her. I hope for a better future for me and my sister.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Two years ago Khalida lost her 18-year old brother when he was killed in an explosion in Kabul. She misses him every day and says the family are still carrying the grief of his loss

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"Two years ago, my brother was going to Kabul when an explosion happened and he lost his life. We are still carrying the grief and are crying over him. At the time we were happy, everyone was happy. Now no-one is happy in the family. When I remember him, I cry and feel so bad. I hope for peace and that war will stop, and that nobody loses their brother

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I want to get education to become a teacher. I want to teach others who have never been to school

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Sema recalls coming home from her aunt's house and being told that her father had been killed in a suicide attack

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Sema still thinks about him every second and likes to look at his prayer beads (Tisbeh) to remember him. They hang from the curtain in the family home. She loves school and wants to become a teacher one day. Sema says she wants peace in her country to stop other children losing their fathers. We still have lots of his belongings, like his car, his clothes, his watch, his shoes. Whenever we see them we cry. He gave us all so much love every moment and he is on our minds. I want for the powerful people around the world to stop the war and bring peace, because I don't want other children to lose their fathers.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I want to become a teacher to serve the country and I don't want any girls to be illiterate. I want to teach all the girls, so they have access to education.*Names have been changed to protect identities

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

She was forced to flee her home with her family after their town was attacked by armed groups. Nooria describes a rocket hitting her neighbours home killing many inside. They fled on foot with just the clothes on their backs and she now lives in Mazari Shariff where Save the Children have enrolled her in school and provide vocational training

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Nooria* hopes for a future with no war; "When they attacked our village, the rocket hit our neighbour's house and they all died. Our house then caught fire and we ran away. My friends who I used to play with - I still don't know if they are alive or if they are dead.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I'm hoping for a better future, to learn, to support my family and to get them out of this difficult life. And I'm hoping for a future where there is no war.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Naveed lost his leg when he stepped on a mine aged just 8-years-old. He was herding the family's sheep in the mountains near their home when he triggered a landmine

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

After months of medical treatment his right leg was eventually amputated. He received physiotherapy and a prosthetic leg from the International Committee for the Red Cross in Mazar

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Now enrolled in school, Naveed is being given vocational training by Save the Children. For around a year I felt and dreamt that I still had my leg. But when I woke up and saw, there was no leg. Sometimes Id feel with my hand to check and find it wasn't there.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

If someone has loses their leg, it does not mean that they have lost their mind."

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"With the help of our minds we can continue to study, learn, and work to make the future of our families brighter.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Several years ago Neveed's father, Mahboob, was brutally beaten with rifle butts by armed groups after, he says, he failed to provide food for them while they were stationed in the family's village. He suffered brain damage which affected the right side of his body, speech and his brain function

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Habiba and Arezo were injured with their mother three years ago in a suicide bombing in Kabul. Arezo is still traumatised from what she saw and has become completely withdrawn

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Arezo's younger sister Habiba cares for her, takes her to lessons and anywhere she wants to go. They are both in school through Save the Children's 'Steps towards Afghan girls' education success' (STAGES) programme, which helps the most marginalised girls get access to education, stay in school and learn.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Habiba says: When I woke up and I opened my eyes I saw lots of bodies and I thought I was not alive any more. It was horrible. I'll never forget that. Whenever there is a big sound she gets scared because she was traumatised by the sound she heard during the attack. I love my sister, and I help her with her lessons, I take her anywhere."

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"She's older than me but I feel like the older one because I support her. I hope for a better future for me and my sister.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Two years ago Khalida lost her 18-year old brother when he was killed in an explosion in Kabul. She misses him every day and says the family are still carrying the grief of his loss

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

"Two years ago, my brother was going to Kabul when an explosion happened and he lost his life. We are still carrying the grief and are crying over him. At the time we were happy, everyone was happy. Now no-one is happy in the family. When I remember him, I cry and feel so bad. I hope for peace and that war will stop, and that nobody loses their brother

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I want to get education to become a teacher. I want to teach others who have never been to school

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Sema recalls coming home from her aunt's house and being told that her father had been killed in a suicide attack

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

Sema still thinks about him every second and likes to look at his prayer beads (Tisbeh) to remember him. They hang from the curtain in the family home. She loves school and wants to become a teacher one day. Sema says she wants peace in her country to stop other children losing their fathers. We still have lots of his belongings, like his car, his clothes, his watch, his shoes. Whenever we see them we cry. He gave us all so much love every moment and he is on our minds. I want for the powerful people around the world to stop the war and bring peace, because I don't want other children to lose their fathers.

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

I want to become a teacher to serve the country and I don't want any girls to be illiterate. I want to teach all the girls, so they have access to education.*Names have been changed to protect identities

Andrew Quilty/Save the Children

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Ive had to grapple with a lot of different aspects of myself, at times I find I am still coming to terms with myself. The British side of me is over-polite, loves roast dinner, and frequently engages in banter. Growing up, Afghan culture taught me to become a gift-giver, Afghans have a tradition where they do not visit the home of another person without bringing a gift, whether its fruit or clothes. I still find myself giving gifts to people randomly at work for no particular reason, or to my friends, not knowing how to explain to them that it is a programmed response.

There are more sinister parts of my identity. For example, I wouldnt dare to disclose to another Afghan that I am an atheist. In fact, I would rather say that I am from another country just to avoid the conversation altogether. It is a fear that I have, being attacked for my belief system, or lack thereof. Once I realised at age 17 that I was an atheist, I began to understand my purpose a lot better. I no longer felt lost or at war with the nature of reality. Now when I experience the first few stages of lust, for example, I dont see it as magic, I know its evolutionary biology prompting a cascade of chemicals. When I centre myself, I dont feel I am connecting to a higher power, instead I know that neural network integration is at work. Or if I ever experience bad luck, I can take accountability and put it down to my own actions, not superstition. Atheism helps me achieve equanimity amid the flux. More importantly, it has allowed me to seek explanations of the natural world through science, to refine my facilities by learning and debating and it has given me the groundwork to insight into the human condition.

Another factor that can be quite tricky to manoeuvre is coming to terms with the fact that being a child of immigrants makes me extremely vulnerable. There is no safety net if something were to go wrong, no strong family lineage to fall back on, no real support system. This has made me particularly mentally strong.

Its weird, the things which ought to ostensibly cause disturbance within me have actually spurred me to become more motivated than ever. For example, knowing that I have nobody to fall back on, to rely on or carry me, is probably the reason why I am a self-starter. I got into my masters program at the age of 21 after graduating with a first-class honours. I had lived in three different continents by the time I was 25. I wonder if any of this would have happened if I was notan outsider, a child of immigrants, a woman; I always felt I had more to prove than others.

Every day I am grateful for encountering science, humanism, reason and the grace of literature. My life would be completely different had my parents chosen to settle in Kabul. I would likely be illiterate, prohibited from working, sadder even I might never have encountered Bukowski, neuroscience or stoicism.

I cant begin to describe how much I adore the little parts of living in London. Every time I pick up free newspapers, I think about how much it means to have access to knowledge so readily, it is truly a luxury that we take for granted. I can walk for five minutes and find my local bank, buy a fresh croissant with a contactless card and enter one of Londons many public libraries. We take employment laws for granted too. Having lived and worked in China, I was overworked, mistreated and subjected to gross employment abuses that I couldnt report, as it is considered disrespectful to dispute orders in China. And this all happened to me while I was working at one of the most prestigious private Universities in Guangzhou. But these experiences remind me of the beauty of rule of law. Upholding democracy is our strength in the west, and we need to stop shying away from being vocal about our triumphs.

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Nonetheless, while British citizens have access to a number of privileges that they often take for granted, challenges to democracy do exist. There is still a crisis in our polity the norms of our political and electoral culture that has parties at its centre. Many would argue that it is now approaching full-scale collapse in the midst of Brexit. While parliament insists on a bill to stop a no-deal Brexit, there are some who describe our nation as broken.

The overall point here is that we all benefit from democracy, those of us in the western world, and to overlook the little luxuries is the cause of a lot of discontent within most people. One of my favourite Stoic philosophers, Epictetus, once said Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. I really believe that to be happy means to live in eternal gratitude for everything, even the little stuff. When did it become fashionable to be a cynic? I find nothing noble or admirable about constant complaint and judgement. If only we spent more time rejoicing and celebrating the richness of life.

Life in the west is truly a marvel, it took me travelling to the ends of the earth to really learn this, and it will take a lifetime to truly embody it, but the philosophy remains the same: he is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

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As an Afghan immigrant, Britain and atheism showed me the bright side of democracy - The Independent

Why Did America Lose Its Religion? Thank the Internet. – Patheos

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In an article for The Atlantic, writer Derek Thompson recognizes the rise of the non-religious. In 1990, we were roughly 8% of the U.S. population. By 2000, we were 14%. By 2010, 18%. Its about 23% now. It keeps going up and theres no sign of the trend slowing down.

What Thompson wants to know is what happened around 1990 thats the year he pinpoints that caused the percentage to begin its upward trajectory.

According to Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at the University of Notre Dame, Americas nonreligious lurch has mostly been the result of three historical events: the association of the Republican Party with the Christian right, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11.

Thompson goes in more depth about each of those theories and theres validity to all of them. He also points out, correctly, that religious institutions in general have shot themselves in the foot. The Catholic Church became mired in sexual abuse scandals while evangelicals were continuing their high-profile financial ones.

But the way Thompson phrased his question may be why he missed the most obvious answer. He asks, What the hell happened around 1990? But if you look at the graph, the answer is nothing significant. The number went up but barely. If youre looking for when the rise really began, you have to look to at least the mid-1990s.

Nor does Smith rule out the familiar antagonists of capitalism and the internet in explaining the popularity of non-affiliation. The former has made life more precarious, and the latter has made it easier for anxious individuals to build their own spiritualities from ideas and practices they find online, he said, such as Buddhist meditation guides and atheist Reddit boards.

Thats quite the understatement. Google has done more to create atheists than any force in history. Its not just the ability to learn new ideas. Its the ability to connect with like-minded people. Its the way you can get your theological questions answered without having to go through a pastor with an agenda. (I swear, it blew my early-teenage mind to see people saying God didnt exist with confidence, without fear, and with plenty of justification.) Just have faith was no longer an acceptable response to tough questions about religious mythology. Also, people were exposed to atheism for the first time; they were no longer constrained by a church-created bubble.

For me, all that kicked in around 1997 and I was a latecomer to the internet. For people like me who transitioned into the digital age, there was no force more powerful than those free AOL CDs when it came to exposing me to new ideas.

(Featured image via Shutterstock. Image via PRRI)

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Why Did America Lose Its Religion? Thank the Internet. - Patheos

What religion meant to the Mahatma – Hindustan Times

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Though raised in a devout Vaishnava home, Mohandas was an atheist in his final years at Rajkots Alfred High School. In the words of his autobiography, he crossed the Sahara of atheism during three subsequent years (1888-91) in London where, in addition to studying law, he read, for the first time, the Gita, the New Testament and texts about the Buddha and Islam.

For the rest of his life, including as the leader of Indias national movement, Gandhi remained a believing, questioning and tolerant Hindu. In due course he was blessed with a team of brilliant colleagues of varying religious hues. These included the visionary agnostic Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinoba Bhave the scholar-ascetic, and Vallabhbhai Patel, the realist who prayed silently but stayed clear of godmen.

Plus the scholar, Koran translator and fighter for Hindu-Muslim partnership, Abul Kalam Azad. Plus C Rajagopalachari, who retold the Ramayana and Mahabharata stories and simplified the Upanishads.

And Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the devout Muslim with loyal Hindu and Sikh comrades, Charlie Andrews, the Christian who put the deprived first, Gora the staunch Andhra atheist, the poet Sarojini Naidu, the young United States-educated revolutionary Jayaprakash Narayan, and many more.

Some of Gandhis core views were shared by his colleagues and by many Indians. One was that a person of any religious belief a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Sikh, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, a Jain, a Buddhist, an atheist, an agnostic, whatever had an equal right to India. Religion was one thing, nationality another.

To this, Jinnah said, No, in 1940, although earlier he had agreed with Gandhi. Muslims and Hindus are two nations, Jinnah now insisted.

Hindus like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar agreed with Jinnah. Three years before Jinnahs Pakistan call, Savarkar had declared in Ahmedabad that Hindus and Muslims were two nations.

Another core Gandhian view was about the Almighty. While human beings called God by different names, all, claimed Gandhi, were addressing the same Supreme Being. As the line sung by him and millions of Indians put it, Ishwar Allah tere naam.

Composed before his time, the line became synonymous with Gandhi. In April 2000, when I asked Bangladeshi villagers in Noakhali what they knew about Gandhi, they responded by singing Ishwar Allah tere naam to me. This was more than half a century after Gandhis peace trek in Noakhali.

Gandhi turned to religion to cope with lifes sorrows and shocks, not to find a political rallying cry.

In the midst of death, he wrote in 1928, life persists. In the midst of untruth, truth persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good. (Young India, 11 October 1928)

Gandhi did not fret over why a God of mercy and justice allows all the miseries and sorrows we see around us. Not being co-equals with God, we cannot solve such mysteries, he concluded. (Harijan 13 Jun 1936)

In any case, each day seemed to bring its mercies. God is with us and looks after us as if He had no other care besides. How this happens I do not know. That it does happen, I do know. So Gandhi wrote for a young associate, Anand Hingorani. (Hingorani, God is Truth, p. 80)

For an American journalist, Vincent Sheean, who called in January 1948, Gandhi translated one of his favourite Upanishad verses: Renounce the world and receive it back as Gods gift. And then covet not. Gandhi explained that the last four words were crucial, for a renouncer was often tempted, after surrender and acceptance, to covet again. (Sheean, Lead Kindly Light, 1949, pp. 190-3)

The notion that nationality was independent of religion had, we saw, its foes. The same was true for the idea that the variously named God was one. Even today, your God, my God, the Hindu God (or Gods), the Muslim God, and the Christian God are common phrases.

But Hind Swaraj contained these lines: Is the God of the Muslim different from the God of the Hindu?... There are deadly proverbs as between the followers of Siva and those of Vishnu, yet nobody suggests that these two do not belong to the same nation [T]he Vedic religion is different from Jainism, but the followers of the respective faiths are not different nations.

In 1947, against his advice, Gandhis colleagues, led by Patel and Nehru, opted for Partition, which seemed to them the only route to independence. The people too seemed resigned to Partition, and Gandhi acquiesced. Yet neither Gandhi nor Nehru nor Patel nor the bulk of the Indian people conceded that Hindus and Muslims were two nations.

Partition having been accepted, Gandhi challenged Jinnah (June 7, 1947) to build a Pakistan where the Gita could be recited side by side with the Quran, and the temple and the gurdwara would be given the same respect as the mosque, so that those who had been opposing Pakistan till now would be sorry for their mistake and would only sing praises of Pakistan. (Collected Works 88: 99-100).

Six days later, he said: I [ask] whether those calling God Rahim would have to leave [India] and whether in the part described as Pakistan Rama as the name of God would be forbidden. Would someone who called God Krishna be turned out of Pakistan? Whatever be the case there, we shall worship God both as Krishna and Karim and show the world that we refuse to go mad (CW 88: 144).

Asking himself and everyone else to learn from disappointments, he said on June 24, 1947: Had Rama been crowned a king, he would have spent his days in luxury and comfort and the world would hardly have heard of him. But the day he was to be crowned, he had to put on bark clothing and go into exile. Isnt it the limit of unhappiness? But Rama and Sita turned that sorrow into joy. (CW 88: 203)

To give minorities in India and Pakistan a sense of security, Gandhi spent much of August 1947, including Independence Day, in a dilapidated Muslim home in a Hindu-majority locality in Kolkata. When, three days later, Eid fell, half a million Hindus and Muslims attended Gandhis prayer-meeting.

But both halves of divided Punjab were in flames and Delhi itself was vulnerable. Stopping in Delhi on the way, so he imagined, to Punjab, Gandhi was asked by critics to retire to Kashi or go to the Himalayas. He replied: I laugh and tell them that the Himalayas of my penance are where there is misery to be alleviated, oppression to be relieved. There can be no rest for me so long as there is a single person in India whether man or woman, young or old, lacking the necessaries of life, by which I mean a sense of security, a life style worthy of human beings, i.e., clothing, education, food and shelter of a decent standard. (CW 88: 51)

Gandhi thought his India for all to be crucial to humanity as a whole. On January 12, 1948, wounded by malice in the subcontinent, he fasted and prayed for the regaining of Indias dwindling prestige, saying: I flatter myself with the belief that the loss of her soul by India will mean the loss of the hope of the aching, storm-tossed and hungry world. (CW 90: 409)

When he was killed, Sarojini Naidu pleaded in a radio broadcast, My father, do not rest. Do not allow us to rest.

Even if, 150 years after his birth, Gandhis spirit is entitled to peace and quiet, the rest of us might ask if there is no misery to be alleviated, no oppression to be relieved.

Rajmohan Gandhi is a noted historian, biographer, and Gandhis grandson

The views expressed are personal

First Published:Oct 02, 2019 17:55 IST

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What religion meant to the Mahatma - Hindustan Times

Dravidian atheism on a wing and a prayer – Times of India

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In a recent interview with TOI, DMK Youth Wing leader Udayanidhi Stalin gave an interesting reply when asked if he visited temples. When we, as children, played cricket in front of our Gopalapuram house, the ball would often land on the premises of a temple opposite the house. I would go in to fetch the ball, he said, asserting that he is a rationalist.

Last week, Vaiko bowled a full toss for Udayanidhi to go over the fence when he said the Dravidian parties should revise their strategy and drop their criticism of religious faith. Crores of people visit temples, Vaiko said. If you are not a believer dont go to temples, but dont ridicule believers who do.

It was one of the sanest things Ive heard Vaiko speak. Some analysts think Vaiko shouldnt have made such a statement in public, that he couldve discussed it in a closed-door strategy meet. But Vaiko chose to make it a public statement with a double intent: He wanted to be both the medium and the message. The message was something waiting to be delivered. And it makes M K Stalins and his son Udhayanidhis job easier. Vaiko was merely being a friendly facilitator, in the process buttressing his utility as the home-againthough-estranged son of the DMK.

Vaiko was not telling anything new to Stalin, who has long realised the need to go slow on rationalism in the changing times of religious polarisation where the prime beneficiary is the BJP. He set tongues wagging in September 2015 when he visited the Sowmya Narayanaswamy temple in Sivaganga. Dravidian purists frowned again in June last year when Stalin accepted honours from Hindu priests at the doors of the Sri Ranganathaswamy temple. Those were definite attempts to erase the anti-Hindu blot the DMK has been carrying from its previous avatar of Dravidar Kazhagam that broke idols on streets and cut brahmins sacred threads.

The AIADMK, right from its birth, had no rationalist pretensions. MGR made no effort to hide his belief and, in fact, reminded believers that Karunanidhi had called them fraudsters. Jayalalithaa revelled in public display of Hindu rituals, often kickstarting her election campaigns from temples. Periyars atheism that celebrated insults of the faithful stemmed from his belief that the Hindu religion was the root of casteism that gave minority brahmins the upper hand. It served its limited purpose, as Stalin & Co have realised, and its time to be inclusive. To justify this inevitable change, Vaiko rightly offered the argument that how DMK founder C N Annadurai has altered his stands with changing social realities.

Probably the first atheist Indian politician who spoke openly about the need to respect someones faith was communist leader E M S Namboodiripad. His cerebral take on secularism and religion was ahead of its times and god-fearing communists took a long time to visit temples without a towel to hide their face. There was a time when Karunanidhi asked one of his party leaders wearing a saffron tilak on his forehead if he was bleeding. It will be a while before DMK leaders would wear their belief on their sleeves, but Stalin is unlikely to chide if any of his comrades dares to do that.

M Karunanidhi just loved to make fun of Hindu rituals. The master of repartee could not resist the temptation to take an occasional dig at Hindu gods, but he notes in his autobiography Nenjukku Neethi his visit to the Srirangam temple where accepted the parivattom (religious headgear). The son may go the extra mile and show respect for the faithful. And the grandson could well get into temples for reasons other than fetching the cricket ball.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Dravidian atheism on a wing and a prayer - Times of India

The atheist revolution – Hot Air

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Third, Americas next geopolitical foe wasnt a godless state. It was god-fearing, stateless movement: radical Islamic terrorism. A series of bombings and attempted bombings in the 1990s by fundamentalist organizations like Al Qaeda culminated in the attacks of 9/11. It would be a terrible oversimplification to suggest that the fall of the Twin Towers encouraged millions to leave their church, Smith said. But over time, Al Qaeda became a useful referent for atheists who wanted to argue that religion was inherently destructive.

Meanwhile, during George W. Bushs presidency, Christianitys association with unpopular Republican policies drove more young liberals and moderates away from both the party and the church. New Atheists, like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, became intellectual celebrities; the 2006 bestseller American Theocracy argued that Evangelicals in the Republican coalition were staging a quiet coup that would plunge the country into disarray and financial ruin. Throughout the Bush presidency, liberal votersespecially white liberal voters detached from organized religion in ever-higher numbers.

Religion lost its halo effect in the last three decades, not because science drove god from the public square, but rather because politics did. In the 21st century, not religious has become a specific American identityone that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, Evangelical right.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/atheism-fastest-growing-religion-us/598843/

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The atheist revolution - Hot Air

AI, The Great Depression And Satoshi Nakamoto: Robert Shillers Narrative Economics Is A Cautionary Tale For Our Times – Forbes

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Yale Universitys Nobel laureate professor of economics Robert Shiller has published a provocative new book advancing the idea that stories or narratives that spread like epidemics have a bigger impact on our economy than most in his professionwho are typically constrained by rigid quantitative techniquesconsider in their theories. He believes that the so-called dismal science should be taught with a bigger dose of the humanitiesnamely history and psychology. Many successful investors have long known that a good story can move markets, and in fact, many of the manias of recent years, like the housing bubble of the early 2000s and the bitcoin craze of 2017, as Shiller points out in his book, relied on narratives that had a significant impact on economic activity. Shiller, of course, is well known for a previous bestseller, Irrational Exuberance, which essentially predicted the dot-com and housing bubbles (in its first, then second edition) and for his Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.

Shillers new book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton University Press, 2019), is especially timely in the current social media-obsessed era, because narrativesboth real and falsecan spread globally with just a few swipes, affecting not just economic activity but ultimately the balance of geopolitical power.

Below is a transcript of a recent discussion with professor Shiller where we hit on topics ranging from bitcoin and the French and Indian War to artificial intelligence and Karl Marx.

Nobel laureate Robert Shiller of Yale

What made you write Narrative Economics?

When I was 19, I was taking both economics and other courses, I think a history course. The professor assigned a book about the 1920s published in 1931, about the beginning of the Great Depression. And I thought, theres something here Im not hearing in my econ courses. There is something about how people think, observations of how they think. And sometimes they have ideas that look a little silly, but maybe theyre not. They dont look respectable, but it might affect their thinking. And all my life, since then, Ive been a little bit disappointed. I like economics, and I like mathematical economics, but I felt a little disappointed. You never talk about what people are saying or thinking. In trying to analyze events like the Great Depression. It seems like youre missing something. And then, the next thing is to read about epidemiology. Theres a big medical literature, so ideas spread like epidemics.

It goes back in my lectures. I taught a course called Behavioral and Institutional Economics, a graduate course, for many years. And I got students from all over the university. It was more of a humanistic [approach]. I guess I was influenced by C.P. Snow. He wrote an essay, a short book, in the 1950s called Two Cultures. In that book he argued that academia is split between the scientists and the humanists, and they cant comprehend each other. And thats kind of what I was getting at; that historians are humanists. Although now there are some experts in cliometrics. Clio is the goddess of history, so they invented cliometrics, which is quantitative history. They look for numbers and do statistical analysis, which is fine, but I was looking at another aspect of history. That the world is viewed differently at different times in history and in different cultures. And I think you do better as an economist if you take that into account.

So you think that economics has leaned more towards the metrics, the science, the numbers?

Especially when I was in graduate school, in the second half of the 20th century, mathematical economics of a very pure type was very prestigious.

Was that Samuelson?

Yes, I had Samuelson as my teacher, and I liked him a lot, and he wasnt doctrinaire at all. There was a behavioral economics revolution, which started around 1990, that was bringing in psychology. So maybe my book is part of that revolution. On the other hand, it suggests a different research in general. The typical behavioral economist will do some experiments, hell put 20 students at computers and ask them to trade, and theyll manipulate something to reveal something about human nature and how people play games. That is really good, but its not exactly what I call narrative economics.

Im thinking that narrative economics will come into its own in the coming years because it can exploit digitized text. And its already becoming a fad, in a sense. A lot of it is aimed at marketing or stock picking, but I think it could be more thoroughly blended into economics. So I actually, with George Akerlof, had a series of seminars called Behavioral Macroeconomics. Youd think that psychology would matter for business cycles, but it hasnt taken off yet. But I think it will.

Has social media and the ubiquity of instant information had an impact on your decision to write the book now?

Yes, social media couldnt be more prominent. With our tweeting president, for example, and the immediate responses. It speeds things up. But Im arguing in my book that the epidemic quality of narratives goes back thousands of years. Its not new. It did move history even thousands of years ago. But one thing thats different now is that with social media, people find like-minded people to befriend more easily, so it involves more splinter groups that have more idiosyncratic views. Because you can choose to associate with people who share a fascination with something, it can cause radicalization. So I mean the obvious example right now is mass shootings.

How do you determine which narratives actually will have significant economic impact and which ones are just noise?

Im working on that. What Im doing now is studying history and looking at things that were often mentioned. And to get the actual causal link, so what caused the Great Depression? Im inspired to not give up because I dont think people know. Theres been so much written about the Great Depression, but what caused it? There are theories, but theyre no more convincing than my theories.

Do you suspect that the Great Depression might have had a narrative that may have contributed to the Great Depression?

Multiple narratives. See, the Great Depression was great because it was like a perfect storm, a number of narratives all encouraged people to cut back on their spending. So I talk about some of them in the book.

Was the Great Recession also narrative-driven?

I think so. In both the cases of the Great Depression and the Great Recession, the preceding decade had a bubble narrative that eventually collapsed. There were skeptics who werent heeded during the 1920s and the 1990s, up till 2007. But then they eventually got contagious enough. Its not possible to just be a skeptic when youre talking to true believers in the economic new era. They may just not be interested, you cant get their attention. You need a concrete narrative that is viable. Those things are inventions. So talk of the housing bubble in the case of the Great Recession began around 2005, a couple of years, and it took a while to take root, I should say, to become fully contagious.

The difficult thing, especially for policymakers or market players, is to determine when a narrative should be taken seriously or when to take action based on a narrative?

Right. Well, I think there was some intuitive feel for that. In the Great Depression it generated narratives about bank runs. People thought bank runs were cured by the Federal Reserve (established in 1913); the Federal Reserve wouldnt let it happen. But here it was happening in the 1930s again, so it brought back an older, 19th century narrative. And it was catastrophic in 1933 when the bank holiday had to be declared. And then they created deposit insurance, and that was supposed to cure these things. But then people noticed there was a maximum amount that was insured. If you had more than that you could still lose in a bank run. So thats the kind of thing you had with Britains Northern Rock in 2007 and then in other banks in the United States in 2008. It was the old narrative coming back. They tend to recur. You can forget about them for a while, but theyre in the background, and something happens and it looks plausible again. So we almost had a bank run, then the Fed had to take extreme measures, and to justify these measures they had to talk tough about a possible depression. And thats what happens when the narrative of the Great Depression was brought up again sharply in 2007. People didnt know all about the Great Depression, they just remembered people that were destitute, they were selling apples on the street corner, they made a bare sustenance living. They remember that ... Apples 5 Cents. They had a little sign that said Apples 5 Cents, help me Im unemployed I need help. That was a visual image. So that had a lot of contagion.

Its just like the visual image we have of people jumping out of buildings during the Great Depression. The thing is now we have false narratives and memes reinforcing them. Narratives can take hold, and it seems like our president is a master of narratives.

How do you create policy or deal with something like that?

The problem is that a narrative that has taken flight that the mainstream media is lying and deceitful and is controlled by the deep state, who tells them what to say. This narrative already has different forms, but it encourages skepticism at the same time that we have alternative news media that appeal to narrow groups.

In your book you discuss Keynes theories, where fiscal stimulus creates the multiplier effect of economic activity. Is Narrative Economics a revision of this theory, instead of say, fiscal stimulus, the stimulus is in the form of a widely accepted narrative or idea?

Yeah, I talk a little bit about this in my appendix in the book. The multiplier theory was part of Keynes General Theory. Economists liked it because it involved no psychology. Its just mechanical re-spending, multiple rounds of expenditure. It obviously has an element of truth to it. Many times. But its a feedback loop, thats the Keynes theory. If the government spends money, it creates income for some people who are using the services. And then they spend money and that becomes income for someone else, it multiplies up. But I think there are other kinds of multipliers, or feedbacks. An epidemic model is a kind of feedback model. Somebody gets sick with a rare illness and then conveys it to someone else, and then theres a second round of sickness that is then conveyed. So I use the term pro-epidemic, a term from epidemiologists. There are also disease epidemics that feed back into each other. So if you catch AIDS, that makes you vulnerable to tuberculosis. And so you start spreading tuberculosis, and now you have two epidemics interacting with each other. And I think thats kind of the way macro events are. So if the government creates some fiscal policy for a depression, they have to announce it and they have to say something. Unfortunately, what they say matters, Im arguing. If they say, we are panicking because it looks like a coming depression so were trying to stop it, that might actually offset the advantage of the new policy. People who are getting the round of expenditure wont spend it.

So its almost like the economics of spin. In what way do you foresee economic narratives as being a tool for the prediction of major market developments, including recessions? How reliable is the data, given that news often follows events.

I wrote a paper in the Brookings Paper in 1984 called Stock Prices and Social Dynamics. And in that paper, I was already talking about epidemics. I dont know if I used the word epidemic, but it was sort of in there. And I was confronting the idea that market efficiency shows that markets are not bubbly. That they are responding, that they are incorporating information. I had an idea that it could be, in fact, that markets are not responding to information about anything fundamental, they are reacting to information about people and their psychology. And it was still hard to predict the market in the short run. So that was an important element in my thinking.

Is there work being done on models to use your Narrative Economics to either help predict economic moves or as a policymaking tool possibly?

Well, there are a lot of people, its hard to summarize all of them. Theres a lot of statistical analysis of digitized text, and often these people are trying to predict the markets. I think thats great. I do that too.

Because hedge funds, for example, will now monitor Twitter and monitor narratives. Theyll trade off those narratives, and they have been for a long time. It just seems like now more than ever there is a lot of risk of certainly false narratives given these, as you say, echo chambers that are established.

I think that what Im trying to do in this book is describe whats happening in the future in economics. That there will be more of this, and I think it should be, and probably will be, not so focused on stock picking and marketing, because it infects all of economics. The economists like to use the paradigm actually first clarified by Samuelson. That well describe people as intertemporal utility maximisers, with a consistent utility function and never change their mind about it. Part of what happens is that they even change their case in response to narratives. So in the book I talk about the Great Depression, and I quote various people from back then. And I say that in the depression it just didnt feel right to consume a lot of luxury goods, even if you could afford them. So new car sales in the Great Depression fell catastrophically. Between 1929 and 1932, I think it was. In the book, there was an 86% drop in Ford car sales, new Fords. And I think the reason is, if you live in a neighborhood where next door there is someone who is out of a job and they are having trouble feeding the kids, you dont buy a shiny new car and park it in your driveway.

Its the conspicuous consumption dilemma?

Yes, so Therstein Velben wrote a book in 1899, called the Theory of the Leisure Class. By 1930, he had become radicalized. But the original book was influencing a lot of peoples thinking. People will view consumption as show-offy. But it kind of was not so prominent in the 1920s. You could show off. The Roaring 20s. Everyone was having fun, a great time. Not everyone though.

Our president has a history of showing off his wealth. So perhaps there will be a return to that?

He wrote about it. He and his coauthors wrote about it in various books. He advises its good business sense to show off. I found an essay in the ancient world, in Greece, by Lucian. A professor of public speaking. Second century. And he tells you to behave like Donald Trump, its amazing. He says, when you show up at a Forum to give a speech, always show up with a retinue. You dont just go in by yourself, and he said, you want to make it look like women are fawning over you. Keep that image going. So it worked in ancient Greece.

Do you think that these narratives could also be used as a policy tool going forward?

Yes, I think they already are. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, when there was a first bank run in the United States (during the financial crisis), was aware that the narrative would come back in the economic contagions. Narrative economics is not something that he espouses, but on the other hand he does take a look at history. He wrote a whole book on the Great Depression, and he does have some appreciation of the effect of narratives. Its kind of common sense that you dont want people to panic. And so if you are panicking, you want to be reassuring. So unfortunately youve also got to, in order to justify what youre doing, paint a picture of danger, dont worry. But you want to be reassuring about it.

How are policymakers influenced by economic narratives? Do you believe that they tend to follow them in order to appeal to voters?

Yes, thats a problem.

Theyre not just policymakers, theyre politicians.

They have to be. Another theme is that the famous names that we have, the celebrities, are products of epidemics. There is something contagious about what they do and what their story is. So, for example, a story has to be just right to be contagious. A Congressman in 1896 gave a speech in Congress, and there were reporters there, and William Jennings Bryan was in the audience, its known. And he made this dramatic statement in his speech about the gold standard and he said, Thou shalt not crucify us on a cross of gold, referring to the gold standard. Nobody paid any attention to that quote. But WJBalready known for his orationson his accepting his Democratic nomination for president at a Democratic Convention in 1896, at the very end of his speech he rose his arms like this in some sort of religious symbol: Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a cross of gold, and the audience, reporters and convention looked stunned and silent for a minute, and they broke into a round of cheers and they carried him off the stage like a hero. That was a contagious story. And people still remember that quote today. Its not just enough to say it; it has to be said by the right person at the right time and part of a story. He didnt win the election. It wouldve changed history if he did.

What narratives are going to shape the future? What big narratives will change economic activity?

This is the real question, how to predict that. One such narrative that strikes me as possibly important if we do have a recession is the technological unemployment narrative thatIm using the name for it that prevailed during the Great Depression. The idea is that machines are replacing jobs at such a pace that only a few lucky people will be able to have employment. There is a lot of talk now about artificial intelligence and about rising income inequality. But it hasnt really gotten people scared yet. Consumer spending is good. Theyre not afraid to buy a new car.

People are thinking about their own prowess in playing computer games or something. So it feels empowering. Im just saying I cant predict what the next big narrative, damaging narrative will be, but it could take a turn.

Princeton University Press

What about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin narratives?

Cryptocurrencies are a fascinating invention. They create a temporary, at least, equilibrium of created value out of nothing. The question is where is it going? I dont answer that question in the book. I think that computer scientists and certainly passwords, if you think about crypto-something, is unfortunately a very large part of our lives. I dont know if bitcoin will ever be used as a currency. But what I talk about in the book is the reason for the excitement about it, and why did it create so much value?

You would think the original paper by Satoshi Nakamoto would be a kind of nerdy, technical paper that didnt interest anyone. But people are fascinated by it. I think its because the story links into some deep fears, or emotions, and also because it has good story quality. The story quality is that nobody can find Satoshi Nakamoto. It becomes a mystery story. Why did he do it? Where is he? Is he one of the richest people in the world? And why doesnt he show himself? People like mystery stories. Its a genre.

Like religious narratives are often mysterious.

Right. That was emphasised by Pascal Boyer in his book Religion Explained. Dont read it if youre religious. He says that things that sound impossible actually propel religion because people like to tell controversial stories.

In your biography, you talk about your love for science from an early age. Does your theory of narrative economics have good science in it? Does it satisfy your need for scientific rigor?

It is a little bit on the humanistic side. Its arguing against pseudoscience. You know, people want to pretend that this is theoretical physics and theyre finding that its not. I dont want to use the term pseudoscience too aggressivelya lot of it is very good, I like it. Its just that we have to recognize it doesnt quite fit the information. I thought as a core premise of science that youre going for the truth. And you do have to make simplifications, and youll test models that dont fare out completely. Still there has to be some impulse towards accommodating facts into your models. And so there is still work to be done. And it seems that professions develop a professional esprit that diminishes other fields too much.

How has the academic community responded to Narrative Economics?

Well, I believe Im getting a positive response. It seems that people are interestedand even though I havent created a groundswell of new research yet. But I think people have already been doing research, and it legitimizes itself. Im encouraging them also to think less mechanically. Somehow, it seems to me like narratives in this stage in history still have to be a bit of human judgement. About whether it might be motivating people. So why did consumption crash after the 1929 stock market crash? Christina Romer has a famous paper about the 1929 crash that found that October 28-29, 1929, and she found that retail sales cut off almost immediately. And she said that cant be the multiplier effect because their income hadnt fallen yet. So it seems like there was a directI looked up why would it fall after Monday and Tuesday of that week or the next week or the next week. So I looked up church sermons, and they tend to be moralizing and interpreting it as the day of judgement or something. So [if] there was anyone who didnt listen to the radio, and didnt hear about the crash, would be warned about it from their church.

And then there was a widespread pullback in spending?

There was a widespread pullback right away. And I interpret that as also partly the building of a counter-narrative that was taking place already in 1929. So there was talk of high unemployment already before the 1929 crash, it was starting to come up. It was commonly attributed to technological unemployment.

When researching the book, what was most fascinating/interesting/surprising narrative you came across?

What fascinates me, what comes to mind, is I found a letter to the editor, it says, letter to the printer of a newspaper in 1765 by a manI think its a pseudonym Alexander Windmill, about all the talk that was going on in 1765, and that was a recession year. Its not in the NBER list of recessions because they dont start until 1854. This was almost 100 years earlier. And it took place, that the recession was caused as the aftermath of the French-Indian war, also called the Seven Years War. Which you may have never heard of. Anyway, there was a recession after the war. You heard this expression There is no money so many times, everyone must be saying this. And he described how a person was saying it. He said in the colonies, before the United States of America, he estimated that this phrase is repeated 50 million times a day. I was impressed by that, that he would come up with a number that big. Because I think there were only about 3 million people in the Colonies. So they would have to be saying it an awful lot. I think maybe he exaggerated. It was, in my mind, kind of vivid, that when you think of pre-revolution America, you think of the Pilgrims. But actually they didnt have social media for sure, but they could talk and ideas could spread. Maybe it was only 1 million times a day. And I dont know what they meant, but There is no money. Some monetarist theory.

Are the implications of narrative economics that the biggest and strongest of storytellers are most effective at spreading ideas will have the most impact on economic activity?

I dont want to be too pessimistic, you know, we do have modern society which does respect it. And Im thinking of the medical profession. How often do they do worthless stuff? Someone wrote a book, I cant remember who it was, explaining that the good stuff physicians do began to outnumber the bad stuff around the middle of the 19th century. Before that, youd be better off not going to the doctor. They would not use sterile equipment. But now its pretty clear that medical physicians expanded life spans, and you trust them when they say you need an operation. You just do it. And thats a sign that there is an element of truth that is recognized, even if they cant explain to you why you need this operation. Its subtle. But on the other hand, there is, especially when you move away from the professions and you get to things people dont know much about, they certainly are vulnerable to fake news.

So youre saying that eventually the narratives become more truthful? And that the risk of negative consequences is less or the way of verifying will get better?

Well, I dont have any optimistic tone that things will get better. Im a little worried at this time of the proliferation of social media that we may be going in a bad direction.

Is that part of the reason you chose to write the book?

Why did I write the book? It came out of a book I wrote with George Akerlof called Phishing for Phools. It also came out of another book I wrote in 2000 called Irrational Exuberance. Its broader. I call it an adventure in consilience. Theres a chapter on that. Consilience is the unity of knowledge. Im thinking that the perceptions of the economy take into account information from a number of fields.

Irrational Exuberance was prescient in terms of predicting two bubbles. What bubbles do you see now, that narrative economics might affect?

Well, the bond market has been especially salient these past few days. The yields have gotten very low. And so that could burst. Theyve [interest rates] been going down since 1981, but there is a zero lower bound, maybe go a little bit below zero.

Cryptocurrencies might be another bubble, I suggest that. Maybe theyll find Satoshi Nakamoto, and he wont be an impressive guy at all. Or maybe he will be, I dont know.

Given your research, what are the most important factors shaping narratives that drive change or markets?

Well, this is a question for the people in the literature department. But what comes to my mind is a visual image, like in the case of the Laffer curve, of a man writing in on a napkin. I dont know why its so powerful an image. Or the visual image of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree. Why is that such a famous narrative. Ill never understand, except it has a visual of a little boy chopping down a tree. And other things are celebrity attachment. You can take an old narrative and attach a celebrity to it, and it becomes more viral. I mentioned the example of Williams Jennings Bryan. But there are other examples in the book. Well, Karl Marx is often quoted as saying, For each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, but in fact he was quoting Louis Blanc, a philosopher already famous for that quote. But Blanc got shoved aside as he wasnt famous enough. Also, Louis Blanc was not an impressive looking man, he looked like a little man.

Karl Marx was [more impressive looking.] According to historians, Karl Marx received a gift of a bust of Zeus. So Karl Marx was a little bit famous. He had a beard. A friend of his said, You know, you look like Zeus, the Greek god, the king of the gods, and he gave him the bust of Zeus and said, look at that, isnt that you? And the story is that Marx was thinking, I do look like the king of the gods. Hes a big, tough man. And he grew his beard out even bigger. So it was really an obnoxious beard. And that visual image still lives today.

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AI, The Great Depression And Satoshi Nakamoto: Robert Shillers Narrative Economics Is A Cautionary Tale For Our Times - Forbes

John McAfee on Libra, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the Binance Ban [BeInCrypto Interview] – BeInCrypto

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If you were wondering whether or not John McAfee is still going to eat his you-know-what following a sub-$1 million Bitcoin in 2020 well, he is.

BeInCryptos Partnerships Manager, Max, sat down with McAfee live from his top-secret communications bunker to talk about some of the most frequently-discussed topics in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space for our new [IN]sider series.

Aside from expressing his thoughts on what freedom means and updating us on the development of his official McAfee Freedom Coin, the enigmatic businessman is confident in Satoshi Nakamotos true identity, skeptical about the launch of Libra, and vocal about Binance CEO Changpeng Zhaos decision to ban customers in the United States from using Binance.

All this and more much more in our exclusive interview!

Let us know what you think of our exclusive interview with John McAfee in the comments below!

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John McAfee on Libra, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the Binance Ban [BeInCrypto Interview] - BeInCrypto

Block.ones SEC settlement over EOS ICO is shockingly weak say critics – Decrypt

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The SECs meager $24 million settlement with Block.one over its $4 billion ICO has shocked the crypto industry. An agreement that sees one of the biggest ICOs ever end up paying less than 1 percent of the token sale as a fine, an amount smaller than it paid for a single web domain.

This is the same SEC that drove ParagonCoin into the ground with millions of dollars in legal fees over its ICO and is currently warring against messaging app giant Kik for its ICO of the Kin cryptocurrency, a fight that has resulted in the Kik platform shutting down with 80 percent of its workforce set to be laid off. So, after being so determined that all ICOs are securities, and pushing so hard on countless other projects, it remains to be seen why the fine was simply so low.

It's entirely unclear how a $24 million settlement effectively penalises a $4 billion offering, blockchain critic David Gerard told Decrypt, adding, The order against EOS is very short, compared to every other SEC order on an ICOit's only seven pages, and without a section setting out the SEC's legal reasoning. These are curious omissions.

Even Nic Carter, a Bitcoin bull and partner at Castle Island Ventures, thought the SEC should have gone further. He said the settlement was, Shockingly weak. Im surprised the SEC went for the easy win on this one. So much so that I wonder if theres not another agency waiting in the wings that the SEC handed the baton to on this casebe it [the Department of Justice] or [the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network].

If this is the totality of it then Im a little disappointedthe SEC has insisted that a standard exists and has failed to follow through on their warnings. It makes them look weak and opens up lots of moral hazard, he said.

Ever the contrarian, ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorheesand long-time libertarianargued just the opposite. He tweeted, Really sad to see so many in the crypto world upset that Block.one wasn't fined even more by the SEC. They had $24 million taken from them. Some of y'all are more like Elizabeth Warren than Satoshi Nakamoto.

Crypto advocacy group Coin Center, on the other hand, took the middle ground, praising the SEC for its decision not to deem EOS a security in its action against Block.one: While some may be vexed by the size of the fines involved, the policy here is sound. We are very gratified that the SEC continues to take a reasonable approach to providing investor protection in this space, Coin Center Research Director Peter Van Valkenburgh wrote in a blog post today.

Its possible that the deal was a result of long drawn-out negotiations between Block.one and the SEC; Decrypt reported a year ago that negotiations with hundreds of ICO-funded startups were underway behind the scenes. But whats unclear is how Block.one managed to achieve such a small settlement. And more, does it provide carte blanche for a new wave of EOS-like ICOs?

The EOS token sale had one key difference from your typical ICO (apart from being one-year long). Block.one had a cunning maneuver to run the ICO with one set of tokens before swapping them all for another set of tokens. And, like a magicians trick, after it raised the money, nobody was left holding any of the original ERC-20 tokensthe ones tainted by the ICO.

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Instead, they now hold EOS tokens, which the SEC did not address and avoided making any judgement as to their potential status as securities. Could this bring the ICO back to life (again)?

Blockchain legal expert Stephen Palley doesnt think so. The only precedent that the EOS settlement sets is that you might get a better deal if you don't kick the SEC in the shins, start a settlement fund online and say sue me, he said, in reference to the Kik ICO.

He tweeted, If you think it's a sign that ICO's are green-lit in the US you're wrong.

Preston Byrne, a partner at Byrne & Storm, echoed Palleys sentiment, telling Decrypt that This is not a green light to other companies to begin printing tokens in the U.S. with abandon. Any entrepreneur considering doing so is more likely to share the fate of Paragon or Protostarr, or worse, than of EOS.

Entry into this settlement will make it difficult for EOS to argue that what it did in 2017 wasn't an offer and sale of securities in subsequent litigation, said Byrne.

But given that ICOs brought in $22 billion in their existence, and that the second wave of ICOs (the IEO) raised $1.6 billion, you can see why some people are hoping for a new chance at a fast track to millionaire status.

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Block.ones SEC settlement over EOS ICO is shockingly weak say critics - Decrypt

Bitcoin has a massive carbon footprint. This clever new cryptocurrency doesnt – Digital Trends

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Bitcoin is undoubtedly exciting, but, as much as it might promise to solve some of the problems associated with global finance, its also responsible for creating problems of its own. The most concerning of these is the environmental impact of mining cryptocurrency due to the huge amounts of electricity it requires. This, in turn, results in tens of millions of metric tons worth of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.

Thats a big cause for concern, and its something that researchers at Switzerlands Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne have been working to come up with a solution for. In contrast to the large electricity consumption and carbon footprint of Bitcoin, they are developing a new approach to cryptocurrencies they hope could lead to a near zero-energy alternative.

We developed an algorithm that enables payment in a secure and efficient manner, Guerraoui Rachid, a professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, told Digital Trends. Essentially, unlike Bitcoin and its alternatives, the algorithm we propose does not require reaching global agreement about the ordering of all transactions.

But how does it do this? The answer involves a fundamental rethink of the traditional Bitcoin model, first described more than a decade ago by mysterious Bitcoin pioneer Satoshi Nakamoto. That approach involves a consensus distributed system in which all players must agree on the validity of transactions, which involves the execution of complex and energy-intensive computing tasks.

The alternative approach, called the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast, works by assuming participants in the system are good actors and only ignoring them if they are seen to be abusing it. In doing so, the researchers behind the project think safe cryptocurrency transactions could be achieved with just a few grams of CO2 rather than an estimated 300 kg for a current single Bitcoin transaction. Thats more like sending or receiving an email.

The problem we are solving is called double payment, and it is the main problem posed by Nakamoto in his seminal paper defining Bitcoin, Rachid explained. We basically looked carefully at the problem and realized that you do not need a heavy consensus-based solution. If, hypothetically, Alice wants to send money to Bob, it is enough for Bob to ask around if Alice was not trying to cheat and give the same money to somebody else.

The work was selected as the best paper at the International Conference of Distributed Computing (DISC). Theres still a long way before this work ever gets turned into an actual cryptocurrency approach, however if, indeed, it ever does.

Im not sure whether Id do that, Rachid continued. I would rather open-source it and have people use the algorithm for exchanging goods in a frugal manner.

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Bitcoin has a massive carbon footprint. This clever new cryptocurrency doesnt - Digital Trends

Bitcoin Price to Hit $90,000 After May 2020 Halving, Predicts Germany’s Top… – Coinspeaker

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One of Germanys biggest banks has joined the already bullish Bitcoin community, with a forecast which puts BTC price at a record high by next year. Bayern LB believes the upcoming halving will be the catalyst.

One of Germanys biggest banks, Bayern LB, has just published a report where it pitched Bitcoin against gold, with a very bullish conclusion. According to the Munich-based bank, Bitcoin price will hit $90,000 by 2020, more than 4 times its current all-time high and per the report, the bank believes that Bitcoin will do much better than gold, especially after the upcoming halving next year.

In the report titled Is Bitcoin outshining gold?, Bayern LB considers the stock-to-flow (SF) ratio. The SF is simply a method used to analyze certain assets to determine its scarcity or hardness. This specifically calculates how much of an asset is available in circulation, compared to how much was produced in its entirety in the first place. Based on this, assets with a larger SF are usually considered a lot more worthy than others.

Historically speaking, it has invariably been the commodity with the highest stock-to-flow ratio at that juncture which has been used as money because this enabled the best value transfer over time.

Even though both Bitcoin and gold cannot be produced arbitrarily, gold has been available for thousands of years and has been able to achieve a high SF over that period. However, Bitcoin is a lot more finite than gold and right from the beginning, everyone knew that the coin was created to function as money, but more importantly to have an extremely limited supply which can be exhausted. Because of this, Bitcoins SF has jumped much quicker than any other asset.

Bitcoins halving is also another factor to be considered. Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin creator, programmed the network to produce a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins, after which it will be impossible to continue mining. Until then, the network will halve rewards received by miners after every 210,000 blocks are mined and this takes about 4 years each time. Bitcoin becomes a little more scarce each time this happens and prices usually respond favorably, especially if the traditional laws of supply and demand are considered.

However, the Bayern LB researchers have noted in addition to the expected scarcity, that the Bitcoin halving will do wonders for the coins SF. At the moment, gold has an SF of 58 with Bitcoin less than half, at 25.8. Bayern LB suggests that after the halving expected sometime in May next year, Bitcoins SF will hit 53, pushing it very close to golds and shooting up its price.

If the May 2020 stock-to-flow ratio for Bitcoin is factored into the model, a vertiginous price of around USD 90,000 emerges. This would imply that the forthcoming halving effect has hardly been priced into the current Bitcoin price of approximately USD 8,000.

The report, however, ends with a bit of a warning about predictive analysis, suggesting that next years Bitcoin price could disappoint their suggestions.

One knows only too well that even the best statistical model can fail miserably when attempting to predict the future.

Ultimately, Germanys seventh-largest bank believes the only certain determining factor for Bitcoin would be the upcoming halving. This is probably because even though all markets are known to have some level of volatility, cryptocurrencies (especially Bitcoin) are known to swing quite wildly. Recently, Bitcoin shockingly shed 20% of its valuation and dropped from its price above $10,000 all the way down below $8,000.

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Bitcoin Price to Hit $90,000 After May 2020 Halving, Predicts Germany's Top... - Coinspeaker

How to think about the future of digital currency – The Next Web

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Its a common trope that cryptocurrency, digital currency, or digital assets are disrupting the financial industry and will usher in a new future of financial inclusion. Thats all well and good, but how can we imagine this future?

If youre interested in tackling questions like this, join us next month at Hard Fork Summit, TNWs dedicated blockchain and cryptocurrency event. But until then, lets take a look at a method to help us consider what the future of digital currencies might look like.

Theres an economic concept by Jens Beckert called Imagined Futures. Basically, he says traditional economic theory, where decisions are based on history, isnt entirely fair. Rather, people also make decisions based on what they believe will come true in the future. Everyone has the power to imagine and decided whatever they want.

Importantly, Beckert also talks of how these visions are important, even if they dont come true. Regardless of their manifestation, they coordinate groups of people toward a collective future that we all must share. They should be taken seriously, for their ability to do this and not necessarily for what they promise specifically.

Everyday, in the world of crypto and blockchain, we are sold a new imagination of the future. Yet, theres nothing to say that one will succeed, where another will fail.

Even thoughBitcoinis often credited as being the catalyst that started thecryptocurrencymovement, most cryptocurrencies and digital currencies are now very different from what Satoshi Nakamoto set out to create.

To put Bitcoin in the same basket as Ripple is convenient, but its misleading. In these two cases, the coins are based on very different technologies, use different consensus mechanisms, and occupy very different places in the market.Digital tokens like Facebooks Libra and Telegrams Ton muddy the water even further. Industry newcomers will often struggle to tell the difference.

Take Libra for example. Reports said Libra would be Facebooks Bitcoin, but this couldnt be any further from the truth. Much has been said about the supposedly decentralized consortium of companies that will run Libra, and in reality its not that decentralized at all.

Its important then to recognize this industry is composed of a broad spectrum of projects, making a broad spectrum of promises. Cryptocurrencies, tokens, and digital assets all appear to be fighting over the same market, but they are all taking very different approaches. It cannot be overstated how important it is to understand how one approach differs from another.

By understanding that the future is subjective and that projects, regulators, and, ourselves perceive and create different visions of it, we can begin to understand what it might look like as a whole.

Well be exploring what the future holds for cryptocurrency and more atHard ForkSummit. Join us in Amsterdam on October 15-17 to discussblockchainandcryptocurrencywith leading experts.

Published September 27, 2019 10:07 UTC

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How to think about the future of digital currency - The Next Web

Regulators Must Have Died and Made Crypto Exchanges King – CCN.com

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The battle cry of the cryptocurrency industry has been one of decentralization, or one without any centralized authority. It is this distinguishing feature that sets the blockchain space apart from other sectors and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin from other assets. No central bank, bankers, or government controls it, and unless your Nouriel Roubini it's hard not to appreciate this push toward democracy and decentralization. When the industry begins to compromise, that's when the crypto waters and Satoshi Nakamoto's vision begin to get muddied. It's possible that crypto market leaders moved one step closer to muddying that vision today.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, leading crypto exchanges including but not limited to Coinbase, Circle, Kraken, and Bittrex have decided to band together and create a system that ranks digital currencies based on their likeness to securities. They even have a catchy name the Crypto Ratings Council. While it may have a nice ring to it, this consortium is nothing more than Libra Association 2.0, a group of entities influencing at best and controlling at worst the fate of "decentralized" digital currencies.

Crypto exchanges are no doubt looking to fill a void left by inadequate regulation that coupled with an SEC that remains ready to pounce on blockchain startups has threatened to cripple industry growth. They have arguably crafted a Howey Test of their own while regulators sit on their hands about developing an updated version of the archaic securities formula.

On the one hand, you might be tempted to commend the exchanges for doing something so more blockchain startups such s Kik don't have to deplete their own resources and get a black eye trying to fight the SEC. But on the other hand, it's difficult to ignore the irony of the situation.

Marco Santori, president and chief legal officer at Blockchain.com, chalks it up to a "series of legal conclusions, devoid of reasoning...a scattershot blast of facts aimed haphazardly out of Howie's four short barrels." Santori falls short, however, of dismissing the concept. He tweeted:

"Worse, the Council consists of many of the major custodians: Kraken, Coinbase, Circle, etc. who do business in the US. These mostly hollow ratings are very likely to be persuasive across the industry. A powerful black mark on your asset, or an undeserved seal of approval."

Santori, however, goes on to suggest that the crypto industry should "applaud their effort" because it's the "best we've got." Sadly, without any trace of Satoshi Nakamoto, he may be right.

Last modified (UTC): September 30, 2019 7:26 PM

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EPFL Researchers Invent Low-Cost Alternative to Bitcoin | Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – Fintechnews Switzerland

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The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is limited by its astronomical electricity consumption and outsized carbon footprint.

A nearly zero-energy alternative sounds too good to be true, but as School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) Professor Rachid Guerraoui explains, it all comes down to our understanding of what makes transactions secure.

To explain why the system developed in his Distributed Computing Lab (DCL) represents a paradigm shift in how we think about cryptocurrencies and about digital trust in general ProfessorRachid Guerraouiuses a legal metaphor: all players in this new system are innocent until proven guilty.

This is in contrast to the traditional Bitcoin model firstdescribed in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, which relies on solving a difficult problem called consensus to guarantee the security of transactions. In this model, everyone in a distributed system must agree on the validity of all transactions to prevent malicious players from cheating for example, by spending the same digital tokens twice (double-spending). In order to prove their honesty and achieve consensus, players must execute complex and energy-intensive computing tasks that are then verified by the other players.

But in their new system, Guerraoui and his colleagues flip the assumption that all players are potential cheaters on its head.

We take a minimalist approach. We realize that players dont need to reach consensus; they just need to prevent malicious behavior when it manifests,

he explains.

So, we assume everyone is honest, and if players see someone trying to do something wrong, they ignore that player and only that player.

With the consensus requirement out of the way, the DCLs new system, dubbed Byzantine Reliable Broadcast, can achieve safe cryptocurrency transactions on a large scale with an energetic cost of virtually zero roughly equivalent to that of exchanging emails, Guerraoui says and just a few grams of CO2 compared toan estimated 300 kgfor a single Bitcoin transaction.

That could be a big advantage over Bitcoin, which has been reported to have a global electricity consumptionapproaching that of Austria, and a global carbon footprintcomparable to that of Denmark.

So, how can users be sure that cryptocurrency transactions are secure if they are not sure who the malicious players are? Guerraoui says: players just need to communicate with each other.

If a malicious player wants to make a payment, for example, this system would not allow anyone to accept money from that player until a randomly chosen sample has confirmed the player has not sent money to anyone else; otherwise, the payment will not be accepted,

he explains.

Basically, were saying that you only need to exchange information with a sample of players to implement a cryptocurrency.

The central element of communicating, or broadcasting, information is what gives the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast system its name. After firstpublishingthe theoretical results behind the system earlier this year in the proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (ACM PODC), one of the two most prestigious conferences in the field, Guerraoui and his colleagues have recently publisheda second paperdescribing the implementation and scale-up of their algorithm.

For its description of the first scalable solution to a consensus alternative, the second DCL paper has already garnered interest from industry, and won the Best Paper Award at the fields other top conference,DISC 2019(the 33rdInternational Symposium on Distributed Computing). The award will be presented in Budapest, Hungary in mid-October.

From banking to bikeshares

In addition to its lower cost and energy expenditure, the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast system sacrifices nothing in terms of transaction security. While it has a narrower range of applications than Bitcoin being suitable only for cryptocurrencies, and not for more complex transactions like smart contracts the system can manage other forms of currency besides money.

It could be used for an abstract cryptocurrency for exchanging goods, like bikes in a bike-sharing program for example,

Guerraoui says.

He and his colleagues plan to release their new system as an open-source code for anyone to download and use by the end of 2020.

This research is being carried out as part of an ERC Proof-of Concept Grant won by Guerraouiearlier this year, aimed at putting a new class of consensusless algorithms into practice.

Featured image credit: EPFL

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EPFL Researchers Invent Low-Cost Alternative to Bitcoin | Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News - Fintechnews Switzerland

Donald Trump or Prince William? New Bitcoin Father Theory – Coin Idol

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Sep 27, 2019 at 11:06 // News

As the day goes by, new people claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto the real maker of bitcoin emerge, and this time around, another instance has happened on Thai TV. The videotape displays an outstanding event at the Wat Phra Dhammakaya, where a prominent monk resembles Dorian Nakamoto. However, Dorian has refuted all the allegations saying he is the developer of Bitcoin. His epochal face has been frequently used to illuminate the unknown Satoshi.

Obviously, the sporadic advent of Bitcoins creator was adorned by world leading light. Cavernous phony mystic made Nakamoto socialize with the US President Donald Trump and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

The videotape again had a favorable mention for the Durov Brothers, who are soon testing Bitcoins headship with the blockchain network system developed to be fast, safe, scalable and able to handle thousands and millions of transactions per second, Telegram Open Network (TON). The remaining part of the report was just a perplexing mix of rational bounds and a faltering-looking resemblance between Dorian & a sect leader.

So far, this is among the most bizarre claims the industry has ever heard of someone pretending to be the actual BTC architect. Just recently, another prominent person by the name of James Bilal Khalid Caan, a British NHS worker, made a big statement when he said he was the man behind Bitcoin.

Khalid even lengthened his prerogatives with Chaldean numerology, but he appeared to be somehow uninformed of how exactly is own formation functioned. At the end of it all, Khalid-Nakamoto performed like a jester, and lost the wallet.dat dossier to all his BTC in a hamper containing a worn-out hard drive which was later dropped into a landfill with no any hopes of retrieving the lost data.

We have seen a lot of prominent people and companies posing as Satoshi Nakamoto, but no one has ever come out with the clear evidence supporting his or her claim. Among the individuals that have tried to produce half-cooked evidence include an Australian computer scientist and owner of Bitcoin SV Craig Steven Wright.

Recently, anonymous person, bought Loser.com, a domain worth over $21K to abuse and mock Craig, as Coinidol reported. Also, In May, a popular cryptocurrency artist used an argumentative portrait made of pink and white toilet papers to attack the Bitcoin SV owner for his continuous claims on Bitcoin.

Some other individuals pretending to be the real designer of BTC include; CIA Project, Bram Cohen, Nick Szabo, Gavin Andresen, Hal Finney , Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux, and others.

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Donald Trump or Prince William? New Bitcoin Father Theory - Coin Idol

NSA on the Future of National Cybersecurity – Security Boulevard

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Glenn Gerstell, the General Counsel of the NSA, wrote a long and interesting op-ed for the New York Times where he outlined a long list of cyber risks facing the US.

There are four key implications of this revolution that policymakers in the national security sector will need to address:

The first is that the unprecedented scale and pace of technological change will outstrip our ability to effectively adapt to it. Second, we will be in a world of ceaseless and pervasive cyberinsecurity and cyberconflict against nation-states, businesses and individuals. Third, the flood of data about human and machine activity will put such extraordinary economic and political power in the hands of the private sector that it will transform the fundamental relationship, at least in the Western world, between government and the private sector. Finally, and perhaps most ominously, the digital revolution has the potential for a pernicious effect on the very legitimacy and thus stability of our governmental and societal structures.

He then goes on to explain these four implications. Its all interesting, and its the sort of stuff you dont generally hear from the NSA. He talks about technological changes causing social changes, and the need for people who understand that. (Hooray for public-interest technologists.) He talks about national security infrastructure in private hands, at least in the US. He talks about a massive geopolitical restructuring a fundamental change in the relationship between private tech corporations and government. He talks about recalibrating the Fourth Amendment (of course).

The essay is more about the problems than the solutions, but there is a bit at the end:

The first imperative is that our national security agencies must quickly accept this forthcoming reality and embrace the need for significant changes to address these challenges. This will have to be done in short order, since the digital revolutions pace will soon outstrip our ability to deal with it, and it will have to be done at a time when our national security agencies are confronted with complex new geopolitical threats.

Much of what needs to be done is easy to see developing the requisite new technologies and attracting and retaining the expertise needed for that forthcoming reality. What is difficult is executing the solution to those challenges, most notably including whether our nation has the resources and political will to effect that solution. The roughly $60 billion our nation spends annually on the intelligence community might have to be significantly increased during a time of intense competition over the federal budget. Even if the amount is indeed so increased, spending additional vast sums to meet the challenges in an effective way will be a daunting undertaking. Fortunately, the same digital revolution that presents these novel challenges also sometimes provides the new tools (A.I., for example) to deal with them.

The second imperative is we must adapt to the unavoidable conclusion that the fundamental relationship between government and the private sector will be greatly altered. The national security agencies must have a vital role in reshaping that balance if they are to succeed in their mission to protect our democracy and keep our citizens safe. While there will be good reasons to increase the resources devoted to the intelligence community, other factors will suggest that an increasing portion of the mission should be handled by the private sector. In short, addressing the challenges will not necessarily mean that the national security sector will become massively large, with the associated risks of inefficiency, insufficient coordination and excessively intrusive surveillance and data retention.

A smarter approach would be to recognize that as the capabilities of the private sector increase, the scope of activities of the national security agencies could become significantly more focused, undertaking only those activities in which government either has a recognized advantage or must be the only actor. A greater burden would then be borne by the private sector.

Its an extraordinary essay, less for its contents and more for the speaker. This is not the sort of thing the NSA publishes. The NSA doesnt opine on broad technological trends and their social implications. It doesnt publicly try to predict the future. It doesnt philosophize for 6000 unclassified words. And, given how hard it would be to get something like this approved for public release, I am left to wonder what the purpose of the essay is. Is the NSA trying to lay the groundwork for some policy initiative ? Some legislation? A budget request? What?

Charlie Warzel has a snarky response. His conclusion about the purpose:

He argues that the piece is not in the spirit of forecasting doom, but rather to sound an alarm. Translated: Congress, wake up. Pay attention. Weve seen the future and it is a sweaty, pulsing cyber night terror. So please give us money (the word money doesnt appear in the text, but the word resources appears eight times and investment shows up 11 times).

Susan Landau has a more considered response, which is well worth reading. She calls the essay a proposal for a moonshot (which is another way of saying they want money). And she has some important pushbacks on the specifics.

I dont expect the general counsel and I will agree on what the answers to these questions should be. But I strongly concur on the importance of the questions and that the United States does not have time to waste in responding to them. And I thank him for raising these issues in so public a way.

I agree with Landau.

Slashdot thread.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Schneier on Security authored by Bruce Schneier. Read the original post at: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/nsa_on_the_futu.html

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