The Liberty win for local school students – Amsterdam News

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First-grade and second-grade students from the Storefront Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, were treated to New York Liberty basketball game ticketsSundayafternoon with help from the YES, Inc. program, headed by Harlem resident Russel Shuler, one of the Libertys community partners.

Except for second-grader Delante Lee, it was their first pro game. It was Lees fourth Liberty game, and he looks forward to going back. It was good game, he said after their defeat of the Seattle Storm, 94-86. I knew they were going to win.

With all of the things going on during the weekend, school coordinator/teacher Nannette Simmons, a devout New York Yankees fan who planned the schools excursion, took time out from her weekend off to accompany students, their parents and staff to Madison Square Garden.

I liked seeing Maddie, said first-grader Jordyn Chaplin of the Liberty mascot. She was there with her mom, who took lots of pictures and brought them hot dogs and stuff.

It was fun, said Korey McPhatter, a Storefront Academy second-grader who really enjoyed the game.

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The Liberty win for local school students - Amsterdam News

Liberty longevity: Downtown Auburn clothing store celebrates over 100 years in business – Auburn Citizen

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Marty Goldman still remembers his first day on the job at The Liberty Store.

At 12, he and his older brother began in the basement of the menswear shop on the corner of East Genesee Street and Seminary Avenue in Auburn, cleaning rubber footwear with turpentine.

"There was no ventilation down there," he said, smiling as he recalled the strong smell of pine. "I remember it like it was yesterday."

From there, Goldman worked his way upstairs, learning his way around the store, and eventually he started selling its clothing. Then, after a brief stint in college, he decided to take over, buying the business from his father, Charles, in 1985.

Now, three decades later, Goldman still owns The Liberty Store a fourth-generation family business celebrating more than 100 years.

The men's clothing store opened its doors in May 1915 as The Liberty Underselling Store, Goldman said. His great-grandfather, Israel, launched the business after emigrating from Poland.

"(Israel) originally owned a dry goods store on State Street," Goldman said. "My grandfather Sam worked for my great-grandfather but wanted to branch off on his own, so he opened up the clothing store on Genesee."

For the grand opening, The Liberty Store advertised a sale in The Citizen-Advertiser, and promised to provide a full refund if its prices were not lower than the competition's. Men's work shoes sold for $1.98, boys' knee pants for 43 cents and socks in all colors for 6 cents.

Within a year, the shop had expanded to the adjacent storefront space. In 1977 when Goldman's father, Charles, owned the store it nearly doubled in size, obtaining 20,000 square feet from the Speno Music store next door.

"It's always been at this location ... and it's always been in the family," Goldman said. "My older brother and older sister we all worked here over the years. And I chose to stay with it."

While The Liberty Store grew in size, it also grew in sales, expanding its merchandise from workwear to tuxedo rentals, dress shirts and casual clothing. In the 1960s, Goldman said, business really took off when the store was asked to handle a large order for inmate clothing at Auburn Correctional Facility.

"For years, we carried everything in menswear ... everything a man could wear on his back or on his feet," Goldman said. "Then, we began working a lot with fire, police, law enforcement and jails and we covered 30 states online, so it kept us really, really busy."

Now, one month after quietly observing its 102nd anniversary, The Liberty Store is beginning to downsize not because of a lack of customers, Goldman said, but because of a lack of time.

Goldman's wife, Wendy, said she and her husband first began thinking about downsizing last year. The couple who have no children immediately dismissed the idea of selling the store, but agreed that something needed to change.

"We just wanted more time for ourselves," Wendy said.

"People think it's a 9-to-5 operation, and it really isn't it's so much more than that," Goldman added. "When we get home at night, my wife is sewing emblems and doing paperwork and I'm online trying to find more bids or reconciling the ones we already have."

That's why Goldman said the store is limiting its retail hours to daytime during weekdays only: The Liberty Store is now open from10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

In addition, he said the store will no longer sell dress clothes or rent tuxedos, focusing on work-related items and competitive bid contracts instead.

Still, despite the downsizing, Goldman said the store will stay on the corner of Genesee and Seminary for the foreseeable future.

"We're not going away and we're not closing our doors," Goldman said. "We're still taking care of the people of Auburn and surroundings, just as we have for the last 100 years."

Staff writer Megan Blarr can be reached at (315) 282-2282 or megan.blarr@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @CitizenBlarr.

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Liberty longevity: Downtown Auburn clothing store celebrates over 100 years in business - Auburn Citizen

Connecticut Sun Defeat New York Liberty, 96-76 – Hartford Courant – Hartford Courant

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Trying to play without a full deck doesn't get you far at a casino. But that's the hand the Connecticut Sun have been forced to play, beginning with the season-ending Achilles tendon injury that cost them Chiney Ogwumike.

Since then, the Sun have also had to deal with a number of other injuries, and in the case of guard Alex Bentley, a three-week sabbatical to play with the Belarus national team in the EuroBasket women's tournament.

Despite these shortcomings, the Sun have been playing well, their lopsided with over Atlanta on Saturday a fine example. And then on Wednesday, they scored the first basket of the game and never looked back on the way to a decisive 96-76 win over the New York Liberty at Mohegan Sun Arena.

The win snapped New York's nine-game winning streak against the Sun that dated to 2014.

"We are competing," Sun guard Courtney Williams said. "It doesn't matter who is in front of us."

The Sun (4-5) now hit the road again for three games, beginning Sunday at Minnesota. They do not return home again until June 27.

The Sun were again led by guard Courtney Williams, who scored 22 points with six rebounds. Center Jonquel Jones had 19 points and 12 rebounds. Alyssa Thomas had 18 points and Jasmine Thomas added 14 points and eight assists.

The Liberty (6-4) were led by Tina Charles, who scored 17 but was on the bench for most of the tail end of the fourth quarter and played only 26 minutes.

Along with Bentley, the Sun were again without Morgan Tuck (knee contusion) and Lynetta Kizer (back) and that threatened to put a serious crimp in the plan to deal with the Charles and Kiah Stokes. Tuck missed her fourth straight game. But Alyssa Thomas more than compensated with her fine work on Charles, the league's former MVP.

"Whoever coach calls out we're going to compete," Williams said. "It's tough being down three players, but those of us out there are going to play hard."

The Sun carried a 45-32 lead into the second half and managed to keep the Liberty at arm's length for most of the third quarter, matching baskets with every one the Liberty would score.

"We come out early and get opponents down and use that flow to take us through the rest of the game," Jones said.

And when the Liberty closed the gap to nine on a three-pointer by Charles, the Sun rolled off a 9-0 run to take their biggest lead of the night (74-56). A pair of three-pointers from Rachel Banham immediately increased the lead to 24.

The Liberty had been rolling, winners of their last four games on a five-game homestand before embarking on a trip where they will play six of their next seven games on the road.

Particularly spot on had been Charles, the former UConn All-American and Sun star who averaged 19.5 points, 14.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists in two games last week to collect her 23rd player of the week honor with a pair of double-doubles.

The Liberty were coming off a 94-86 victory over the Seattle Storm at Madison Square Garden. Charles scored 21 points with 14 rebounds.

Truth is, the Liberty have had their own personnel issues this season. They have been winning without Brittany Boyd (Achilles tendon) and Epiphanny Prince and Kia Vaughn, who are both attending to national team duty in the FIBA tournament.

The Sun started off quickly, taking a 9-2 lead, which increased to 12 when Jonquel Jones sank two free throws with 2:16 to play in the first quarter. Jasmine Thomas and Jones led the Sun with six points and Alyssa Thomas had five.

"I am really proud of our team tonight," Sun coach Curt Miller said. "Our great start set the tone. We were fast out of the gate. Our defense really made them work. We stayed in attack mode. They are excited. I'm really pleased with the way we've played our last five games and I want to keep the momentum going."

Williams scored 15 points in the first half and it was her three with 7:15 to play in the half that staked the Sun to their biggest lead of the half, 35-20. They eventually headed to the half with a 45-32 lead.

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Connecticut Sun Defeat New York Liberty, 96-76 - Hartford Courant - Hartford Courant

The Rise and Fall of Prog Rockand of Libertarianism [Reason Podcast] – Reason (blog)

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"There's not a-vote-for-this-party type of politics" in progressive rock, says David Weigel, author of The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, "There is a utopianism about it....'Let's create a new world....It was very much a music and lifestyle where you tuned out, where you went to a festival, where you got into an arena. And a time where there were fewer distractions, as well.

Weigel's history of a musical genre that includes bands such as King Crimson, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and more is a rich journey into one of rock's least-appreciated moments. The former Reason staffer (archive here) who now covers national politics for The Washington Post argues that many subsequent forms of music owe significant but often-unacknowledged debts to the organ-centric sounds of prog rock.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Weigel weighs in on politics in the Trump era. "There is not a lot of space for libertarianism in politics right now...except on the issues where libertarianism intersects with the donors who have done the most for Donald Trump. I feel like my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are pretty happy about Trump's positions on climate. [CEI's] Myron Ebell [has] literally joined the administration," he says. "But the criminal justice reform side of libertarianism has kind of retreated to the states, where it's doing okay but has no clout in DC anymore."

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED RUSH TRANSCRIPT. PLEASE CHECK AGAINST AUDIO FOR ACCURACY BEFORE QUOTING.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie, and this is the Reason Podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Today we are talking with David Weigel, he's a politics reporter at the Washington Post, a former Reason employee, but the reason that we're talking today is he's the author of the incredible new book, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. Dave Weigel, thanks for talking to us.

Dave Weigel: Thank you for having me to talk about it. Appreciate it.

Nick Gillespie: All right, well let's get right to it. The rise and fall of Prog Rock, of progressive rock. What is the thesis of The Show That Never Ends?

Dave Weigel: It's that rock history, which I take pretty seriously, which honestly occupied a lot of my mind before I got into covering politics like I do now. That rock history had cut out what I thought was actually really dynamic, important, informative music, the progressive rock movement. And I also, I kind of lean in...right, the book in arguing that the progressive musicians, Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel. These people invented a lot of stuff that was happily taken by more let's say critically approved bands. You know, the stuff that is credited to electropop or to punk, I mean a lot of that these guys did first, and they did it in a very popular and arena-filling way that was left out once people said, actually that was garbage, we're going to go with punk. And by people I mean like...it's a really clear decision by the record industry and critics. We can get into that.

Nick Gillespie: Well, define...what are the core elements of progressive rock? You know, how do we...and throughout the book you kind of talk about how like Led Zeppelin, which in many ways certainly, probably the biggest selling band of the period from about '68 to '78 or whenever they broke up. But it's true that ELP, Emerson, Like, and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, they could fill stadiums as well, they were gigantic. But you point out that Led Zeppelin is not progressive rock. Even though they've got multi-instrumentation, a lot of experimentation, really long solos. Jimmy Plant using one of the other band members to play the bow on a cello or something like that. So what is progressive rock in its essence?

Dave Weigel: You mentioned Led Zeppelin soloist who I think a lot of people broke them in with progressive because lyrics about fairies and Tolken and stuff, and people think, oh that's what prog is, right? Not really. The way that I was happy defining it because people who played it and critics who wrote about it defined it is just extremely ambitious music that kind of started in western sixties garage rock forms, and expanded to include classical influences, eastern influences, electronic music, discordant music, but basically ambitious and technically proficient music based on rock. And so, it is a loose definition, as the last person who still organizes an iTunes and CDs, and you have those struggles, like is this post-punk, is this punk?

With progressive there are bands that also morphed during their lifetimes. Marillion started as a very progressive revivalist band in the early eighties, and by the nineties were something a lot more akin to alternative rock, although they were branded so they weren't really considered part of it. It's changeable, you can dip in and out of it, but I think it's just basically this music that was ambitious and it's defined in the book by other writers. These guys from the sixties and seventies who lifted this stuff up. Because this London scene, Hanneberry scene, little bit later western Europe. These bands coming out of these all-night parties and these festivals where writing extremely complicated music, where incorporating quotes from Brahms and Bach into it, were not just soloing, but trading off technical solos that were not just like ... there are solos in all of rock that are just, watching go up and down these scales. But solos that were moving from form to form, and style to style in a way that ... the whole thing is that music had not done that before then. Pop music had not done it before then, and pop music hasn't really done it since.

Nick Gillespie: You talk a lot about how progressive rock is fundamentally a British phenomenon. It seems ... and to put it in a time context, in all of this stuff you can go back to ... find earlier and earlier antecedents, but it really kind of explodes in the late sixties with bands like Soft Machine, and then especially King Crimson, and Yes, and Genesis. ELP. But talk a bit about the Britishness of it, and also the way that it departed from traditional rock and roll as a kind of rebellion against your father's music. Because this was kind of as you were so saying, there's quotations from Brahms and Yes would enter the stadium to strains from the Firebird Suite and whatnot. ELP actually put out a version of Pictures at an Exhibition. They were rebelling, I guess, against maybe the Animals, or Simon and Garfunkel, maybe, but they were also embracing their great-grandfathers. What's the Britishness element about in all this?

Dave Weigel: The thing that you hear the first when you're listening for it is the influence actually of Anglican church music. And just ... and these big sweeping chords you hear in Yes music, in a lot of what ELP does, you hear this classical English hymn is played on a pipe organ, piped through stuff like Hammond's and Mogue's. There's just this very ... I don't want to use the word pompous because it's negative, but pomp.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah ...

Dave Weigel: Music that contains pomp that these guys listened to.

Nick Gillespie: So this is Elgar on acid, basically.

Dave Weigel: Yeah. That was there. A lot of these guys ... I start the book pretty early in the nineteenth century with the classical music that introduced mania and spectacle to popular music.

Nick Gillespie: And this is particularly Franz Liszt who Ken Russell obviously did that. You know and had Roger Daltrey play Liszt and Lisztomania and ...

Dave Weigel: They had Rick Wakeman play Thor ... I go to the mid-sixties because these guys were just a little bit younger than the Beatles. The same generation, same cohort, so they're all listening to music and ... Against the stereotype, they're not all going to private schools. Or as they're confusedly called in Britain, public schools. They're usually pretty working class, coming out of the austerity of the ... of World War II, and they have a record player. They have church. They have these limited influences. Yeah, talk about Greg Lake rushing to ... well he might have over hyped a little bit because of the drama. The new records that the GIs brought back, things like that. So these same influences, but starting a little bit later. I mean, they go through a journey that's pretty similar to what the Beatles did, and the Beatles, Joseph Campbell's story is pretty ... has been parodied a bunch of times now. With the Vans discovering drugs and religion and sitars. But ...

Nick Gillespie: But it is fascinating ... you know, putting this in a historical context, which for those of us, even people who grew up in the United States, during World War II or the Depression had it easier than the Brits. Because on top of everything else you had actual bombing and wartime destruction of everything. It's kind of fascinating and it di remind me of books about the Beatles and early rockers in England in the fifties of just how hard it was even to get instruments. And that's a constant constraint, it seems for these guys because mellotrons and synthesizers were really expensive. So it's partly the church stuff, right, because the organ seems to be a vary ... organs and keyboards seem to be front and center in progressive rock in a way that they are certainly not generally in regular rock bands.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, and they just carry this sort of importance that ... it wasn't obviously there in the more derivative music I like a lot, but the more garage rock stuff that some of these bands were part of. Listen to Tomorrow or Sin or these first bands, really early Procul Harem and Moody Blues. They were pretty happy covering Motown sounds and just adding fuzz bucks to them. Like the who were.

And I leave ... I deal a little bit with the Who in here because they just ... these guys in their early and mid-twenties were having more fun taking their technical knowledge and saying all right, we've kind of mastered how to cover Martha and the Vandellas, and add some fuzz to it. So what if we're covering Rondo, what if we're covering classical musicians, what if we're covering Bolero, in the case of King Crimson. And finding that there's just ... one thing that I try to emphasize ... there's this idea of music being really gossamer, and impenetrable and too noodly to get into, but no it's always pretty anchored in melody and what the members found compelling.

It's also ... I don't deal a lot with drugs, except for later in ELP's career, because I asked them, and they really weren't on them. With the exception of some guys like David Allen and Soft Machine and Gong, they're mostly just pounding beer. I mean, I talk about Mike Oldfield writing Tubular Bells, having filled the champagne magnum with Guinness, and just pounding it. Like they were ... the style of creation that you would see when the Ramones were writing two-minute songs. Which I also like a lot, but it was just the way their heads went, where I am bored with the simple forms. I'm going to rebel against the three-minute pop structure and I want to write pop symphonies. Kind of in the way Brian Wilson did, but I think even with a greater ambition, and a little bit, obviously less burnout. Because these guys did it for years.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, you know speaking of beer as the kind of drink of choice, or the drug of choice, I remember ... I got into progressive rock. Mostly my brother, who's older than me, came home from college in the late seventies with Yes songs, the triple album, and we would always laugh because there's a picture of Rick Wakeman, who has like eight hundred keyboards around him, and there are beer bottles everywhere. Like where he can't swing one arm of his cape without knocking over a case of empty Millers. Or something. Or Schmitty tallboys. King Crimson really occupies the place of pride in the book. Explain what is so important about King Crimson.

Dave Weigel: They're a wellspring for a lot of what came in the late sixties, and then what comes important later. I mean decades later when progressive rock is just influencing music that sounds nothing like it. Like electronic music, heavy metal, things like that. It starts with Robert Fripp, the guitarist who kind of putting together a larger band from a smaller band with these two brothers, Michael Giles and Peter Giles, the drummer and the bassist. He adds woodwinds and keyboards in McDonald. He adds a full-time lyricist and lights manager, Peter Sinfield. And adds Greg Lake, who is a kind of barrel-chested, classic rock star signer on bass. And they become just for a very short moment, this enormous, big-next-thing band. One of those bands where the first album really is a statement that can stand on its own. Even though they did everything else ...

Nick Gillespie: And that is the In the Court of the Crimson King. With the ultimate rock album Nostril Shot, as I recall this.

Dave Weigel: This first song on the album, 21st century Schizo Man, there are metal elements to it. There are jazz elements that McDonald had kind of goofed around with when eh was playing woodwinds in the army. There are all these things just colliding against each other, and it's a popular album, and the band immediately falls apart. Just for the normal reasons that bands break apart, Greg Lake leaves pretty soon, Emerson, Lincoln Palmer, other members start dropping off. And the band becomes basically whatever Robert Fripp finds interesting at that moment.

And I spent a lot of time on Fripp because he just ... he's one of these characters you find sometimes in any kind of history who is extremely loquacious and so arch about his place in the moment. He's almost like a Lewis Carroll character. He's very good at analyzing his own sex appeal, and analyzing why he hates crowls, and whether the music he just produced is interesting and worth promoting or not. Just because reassembling the band so they ... through the seventies, just for the short period of five years, changed their sound multiple times. They break up with Red, which is a much more metal sounding album. And for that reason, very influential for bands like Tool and Perfect Circle, people like that.

He leaves and Fripp basically goes into seclusion in a ... what I will not call a cult, but it was sort of a religious tendency he picks up. Returns to becoming a much more avant garde performer and through that ... and also not somebody who likes the term progressive rock. He really ... he hates being classified as prog ... he's very happy to see punk come along and obliterate all this. And I have the scene in the book where he sees ELP at kind of the height of their ridiculousness, when they're touring with an orchestra in Madison Square Garden and just has it out with Greg Lake so much. Years after the guy had clearly succeeded beyond what King Crimson could ever do, that he just gets kicked out of his limo.

But he is much happier with looping experiments, with ... he produces a folk band, The Roaches, and opens up their sound. He's the guitar player on the song Heroes, which is I think a tone ... one of those songs where anything that sounds even a little bit it sounds like a rip off. Like a truly unique song that he plays. And then restarts in the eighties, bring in Adrian Belew who kind of sounded like him when he was playing with Talking Heads for a kind of art rock band. Several times over the decades, King Crimson just keeps inventing a different version of this music, which is never ...

And again, people who are not always comfortable calling it progressive rock but which is always taking ... okay, I guess the inspiration each time being okay, there's this music. We're pretty bored by that. How can we play with this, how can we structure our guitar solos so that they're interlocking, how can we ... stuff like that I cut out of the book because I just got so into writing about it. This whole album of tape loop experiments with David Byrne reciting the names of different philosophies over it. He becomes a very art rock guy.

And then ... he today, Robert Fripp is still touring with this band with a three drummer line up. Again, something he never did ... and I just, whatever they're in, if they're in politics, which I cover mostly. If they're in film, in they're in music, especially, just people like that who clearly just need to do the next thing and don't want to go back and play the hits. Like King Crimson will play songs they wrote 50 years ago, but they completely rearranged them because Fripp is not about to sit there and just bang out like the rift Satisfaction and have ... he sees the music needs to be fresh wherever it's played. And I think that is kind of the attitude that some of the classical composers that I write about in the very beginning. The book had ... it is got to be music that you can reinterpret. He can't just be a pop song for quick radio consumption that talks a little bit about how great it is to fall in love and to make love, and you're in and out.

Nick Gillespie: At the same time, and I agree that's an interesting way to put it. You talk about this in the book, The Show that Never Ends, which of course comes from an ELP opening track. But it's a time where rock music and it was obviously aping progressive jazz on a certain level. But it was like, okay we need to move beyond the ... it was really more like a two-minute pop song, and then it had merged by the end of the sixties into a three-minute pop song. We need to talk about stuff more than simple love and puppy love, and that type of stuff. Would you agree though that there is also an epic amount of silliness in the form, which is kind of entwined with it's seriousness? And I ... Keith Emerson's early band The Nice had an album called The Golden Apples of Emerless Daft Jack, which is anagram ...

Dave Weigel: their names, including a member they would soon kick out of the band because he kept getting hi on LSD and passing out during concerts.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah and I mean, there's so much silliness in, you know ... you describe ELP in a lot of ways I guess may have been the most successful in that the band toured the biggest possible stadiums, the name of the band was simply the letters of the last ... first letters of the last name of the band. Each of them was a virtuoso. I think of a song like Lucky Man, which was I guess their biggest single hit, which starts out as kind of a pirate-y song about channeling ... like a Paul Simon lyric about a man with white horses and ladies by the score. And then it ends in this totally inappropriate, to my mind, synthesized ... twenty minute, it sounds like synthesizer solo that has nothing to do with pirate ships. Pirates had nothing to do with it. I mean, what ... how does the silliness and the kind of you know baroque overexaggeration, how does that fit in with the seriousness of the music for you?

Dave Weigel: Well, they were aware of the silliness. Like that song ... I tried to explain in the book, the interplay ... how ELP got along. And it was not always well, I mean they were three very talented people. Palmer, the drummer, the most easy to get along with. But Emerson and Lake with gigantic egos, and Emerson had said explicitly several times through his life, Lake was bitter because he was playing with two virtuosos, and he was ... his name was in the same lights, but he clearly wasn't as good as they were.

And so this was a ... Lucky Man was almost a doggerel that Keith Lake wrote when he was a teenager, and Lake, Emerson threw this experimental Moog solo on it because he thought, I have a Moog, let me tool around with it. It was, not just experimental, but it was not pompous. It was fun, and with Yes. As serious, so John Anderson's lyrics by far are the most ... the most high-minded peace about Yes. John Anderson writes lyrics like he's writing the Bhavagad Gita every night, if you open up Tales from Topographic Oceans, for any of them. After listening to a lot of his music, one of the guys I find it hardest to place which lyric is from what song. So he takes it very seriously, but everyone else in the band was just basically a good rock musician who just thought this stuff was fun.

And you saw it when they break off in their solo careers for a couple of years in the 1970s, you know Steve Howell was playing classical guitar because that was ... that's what he wanted to get to from all this. So they were basically ... it was not we're going to ... There's forms of music I find a lot more pretentious. I mean, there's a lot of punk, like Crass and the Adverts that were trying ... Or even John Liden who always did this, in I think a really calculated way. They were trying to make their music the focal point of a better way of living. Better philosophy. We're going to take ... break down the system. And progressive rock was rebellious, but it was basically fun. And so yeah, they're very aware ... like even there are bands like Jade Warrior where their whole gimmick is everything sounds like everything is influenced by Japanese instruments. There's Gryphon, everything sounds like it's at a Renaissance fair, who had opened for Yes sometimes. Gentle Giant, they were all basically normal people who just ... this was fun to them. They'd be bored playing something less ambitious.

Nick Gillespie: Talk about ... yeah, that dimension of kind of pleasure and of self-challenging, and of also ... one of the things that I love about rock music in general, and by that I guess I mean more pop music in general, is that there are clearly rules and there are both aesthetic rules, that certain sounds and certain chords and whatnot work better in unison, but then there are also rules about ... it's all a business. And you're not supposed to have whole album-length side cuts, you know there's no air play for that. There's no play for that, and these guys all pushed all sorts of expectations and whatnot. Is there a politics to it, I mean you started out as a ... in a way, not quite but early in your career you wrote for reason, you identify as Libertarian leaning, at the very least. You were a self-conscious conservative in college. Is there a politics to progressive rock? And if so, not a partisan politics. And is there ... what ... how do you map the energy or the kind of impulses in it onto politics?

Dave Weigel: There's not a vote for this party type of politics. There is a utopianism about it. And I didn't say, let's create a new world, but these were generally artists in the 1970s in the time of greater environmental awareness, and that was ... when Yes wrote any kind of song, politics, I'm laughing because you've probably also heard, Don't Kill the Whale, their classic environmental funk-based ballad. When they got into politics at all, it was that. The big exception is Rush, who and I cut out this ... I talked to Rand Paul about Rush because they had condemned him for using his music and it really pisses him off.

Yet Rush basically when they were in their early twenties, and breaking big in the UK, did an interview with ... I keep going back to how good the British music press was. British music press analyzed and sometimes lionized and sometimes tore down these bands, with just tremendous aplomb. Lester Banks doing the same thing in the states. British press had a ton of those people. And they just got Neil Pert rolling about how great Iron Rand was, and how she influenced the lyrics like the trees, and 2112, they got away from that. They got more ... these bands all go pretty. So they were like many artists, annoyed with Britain's super high-tech race, but they were not super political. And they did have ...

Nick Gillespie: Although they were very individualist. I mean they were Byron-esque. They were breaking artistic form, breaking audience expectations and trying to create something bold and new. Not necessarily ... like you were saying, not to change the world. They didn't want a five-hour work week or something, but they did want to blow people's minds.

Dave Weigel: They did, and so they ... I kind of looked because I was interested in that. If there was any sort of big movement they got involved with, or benefit concert. You had Peter Gabriel a bit later get involved in some of that after he leaves Genesis. And Genesis themselves, Peter Gabriel himself becoming involved with Live Aid, but those are big classic celebrities...

Nick Gillespie: Well and also I always think of Gabriel as well with Steven Biko and calling attention to apartheid in South Africa and whatnot. I think a generation of Americans, certainly people my age in their fifties or older. The reason we knew who Steven Biko was was because Peter Gabriel had written a song about him.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, they took on these causes and ... at the same time a lot of other musicians were. But progressive music itself was just not ... a lot of it existed in this ... some of the European bands that I get into came from much more troubled politically countries in the seventies than the UK, from Italy, from Greece. They got a little bit more really about it. But the music was ... this was kind of before a lot of pop music felt comfortable getting directly involved in politics. It was kind of heartening. The period I'm writing this book in, and researching it is 2013 to 2016, which is even more tumultuous, than a lot of people thought the election could be. And there is a sense that a lot of this music was being created, we all now know is a period of Western decline. Right? There were the 25 good economic years after World War II, and then people are kind of starting to pick over the scraps, the pound sinks, the oil crash happens, etc., etc. so that's, I think ... those are among the factors why some of this music

Nick Gillespie: So it's kind of ... it's almost hedonism. I mean it participates in a seventies hedonism, but it's not ... it's really interesting that it's not about fucking. You know, per se. I mean the Rolling Stones become hedonists. You know, Bob Dylan disparages hedonists at the end of the seventies. And these guys are just trying to create kind of interesting new worlds that they can escape to.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. But always ... music was half happening on Earth, it was just not ... it was happening during a period of political tumult and economic decline and the music was pretty disconnected from that. Even Robert Fripp who was writing some of the most, I think musically dark and disturbing of it was ... it was pretty inward looking and pretty personal, pretty ... both personal sometimes and more often abstract. Like I said, I don't even think ... song like Starless or Fallen Angel is coming at a period ... America's going through Watergate has very little to do with that.

And so I think that's another reason why some of this music has not factored very large into music history, because there are bands and musicians who got involved in ways that you tell their story when you're telling the story of the seventies. It's one point I make in the book, I mean you tell the story of this period and if you're doing it in a movie or TV show you throw in disco or you throw on singer songwriters, maybe you throw on protest music. And they just didn't do protest music. It was very much a music a lifestyle where you tuned out, where you went to a festival, where you got into an arena. And a time where there were fewer distractions, as well.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. What ... Talk about how part of what the book is addressing really is that ... and you've mentioned it, that the critical contempt for a lot of progressive rock ... and you know they had their champions in the day and they still do, but in general you're right that people tend to write about rock music like a loose term for a lot of pop music. But as a means of social expression and dissatisfaction with the status quo and so you know Elvis disrupts the bland gray Eisenhower era. The Beatles bring something new and exciting to a post-Kennedy assassination America. And then blah, blah, blah. And Punk obviously, Johnny Rotten never misses an opportunity to talk about how he would doctor Pink Floyd tshirts and write I hate above them and walk down Carnebie Street and get attacked by people, and he ...

Dave Weigel: As soon as he can, he's playing like experimental bass music with Bill Laswell and stuff.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah well this is ... part of what's interesting ... yeah I agree completely, or the band The Germs. The LA post-punk band or late punk band opens their song No god with a snippet from Yes's Roundabout. You know there's clearly many more connections and according to if you read journalists like Nick Kent, the Sex Pistols in their early days, all they were doing basically were covers of The Who and of a couple of other bands that they publicly denounced. But ... the argument of the book is really that progressive rock ... it persists in a lot of ways that it's not recognized. And you talked about some of them there. And then it was that the critics really wanted to trash it after a certain point. And is it ... why these albums, certainly groups like Jethro Tull, Genesis, Yes, were selling millions of records. Was it simply that critics didn't like popular music, if something was really popular it couldn't be good? Or was it that they were turned off by this was a different type of rock and roll than they were comfortable celebrating.

Dave Weigel: Well I think some of it was that the music was getting less interesting. The Yes of I think Going for the One is kind of the last gasp of super interesting Yes music. By late 1977, 1978 it so happens that what is being offered to the market by some of these bands. If it sounds like the early 70s it is played out. They have run out of ideas, they're older, they're doing less. That's why the bands that make it into the 80s both commercially if you're talking about John Wedden performing in Asia or artistically if you're talking about King Crimson, they don't sound like they did at the end of the 70s. So part of it's the quality. Although as we all know, that's not necessarily determinative of whether something's popular or not. Part of it really is ... the artists I talked to, and the radio folks I talked to really do say this was a conscious decision of labels who just ... They had a different younger group of AR people. They found this music boring and they found punk exciting, so they elevated it...

Nick Gillespie: Punk in the US never sold many records. And I mean there were one-offs and things like that, but it's interesting ...

Dave Weigel: I'm thinking more the British ... the British side of this was much more direct. Where you had Harvest Records, which is producing all this, and Island, the guys who had been selling huge

Nick Gillespie: And in fact you mentioned Mike Oldfield, and obviously people know Richard Branson, but I don't think ... it's hard to appreciate the full measure of how Richard Branson has enhanced the 20th and 21st centuries. He both brought Mike Oldfield to a mass audience and in many ways progressive rock and then eh was the person who put out the Sex Pistols only a few years later. So it's kind of interesting to see even within that label the quick turnaround.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, they've been doing the quick turnaround ... at the same time, this music is more possible than punk in a lot of ways. I always go back to I read I think every issue of Sounds and Express, these British magazines. And end of the year polls in 1977, people still say their favorite keyboard player is Rick Wakeman, their favorite guitarist is Steve Howe. The concerts were bigger, the other side of everyone saying, well that one Sex Pistol Show, everyone who went to it started a band. Well the Yes show down the street had people at it. Those people didn't stay invested in music. They grew up and did something else.

It was I think the music was a little bit less good, some of the bands tuned out, and there was a decision by critics and labels to focus on other music. And it was really hard, going back for the research for the book, I have rarely seen a heel turn like this, where critics really were ready to praise the music and then six months later, say this was the problem with everything. That's why ... I think I could quote pretty liberally from Rolling Stone, and from magazines that eventually as part of their creation methos for rock had to condemn this stuff. They were like, oh Emerson, Lake and Palmer's as interesting as anything you're going to hear to they ...

Rolling Stone has a giant feature on Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1977 when they're kicking off they're world tour as a big important band with a following that needs to be understand. And by the end of that tour, their supposed to be a laughingstock. So ... some people know that different than others. As I said, Robert Fripp was really happy that all that stuff imploded. Greg Lake never really got over it. Greg Lake, who passed away last year always resented what he found to be interesting music was shoved aside for more basic rock music and punk and that. He thought it was just a really cynical and stupid and as you were saying, it didn't even sell that well so why'd they do it so

Nick Gillespie: I just wish Greg Lake had buttoned up on the cover of Love Beach. That image still haunts me of his kind of human veal physique. Nonetheless felt totally free to inflict on the record-buying public.

Dave Weigel: That's one of these albums, I looked at that and said I bet there is a story of drug use and decay and failure behind this, and indeed there was. That is like one of the more Spinal Tap-y albums in the book

Nick Gillespie: What ... I'm also thinking ... you interview a lot of people in the moment, which is great and this is great rock history because of the research that you've done but also the reporting that you've done. You talk a lot to Roger Dean, who is important. He's not a musician, but he's the guy who did the Yes covers in particular. And I just want to get this in because it cracks me up. And it may not to anybody else but you now Roger Dean's landscapes are constantly of planets that are being overrun by water and melting icebergs and things dripping and yet he's a global warming skeptic, right?

Dave Weigel: He is. I forget how we got into that, but I did some

Nick Gillespie: I'm sure he brought it up.

Dave Weigel: I think it was in the news, but I did some reporting that was in person where I went on the cruise, which I talk about at the beginning of the book. Which I actually ... the thing that I think David Foster Wallace gets wrong ... having written one book and criticize a legend. If you go onto a cruise with a theme actually it's very different from just bumping around with people who want to eat all day and pass out in front of the pool. The

Nick Gillespie: So tell the story. This the Yes cruise, right?

Dave Weigel: This is the cruise to the edge. Which was put on by the guys who did Monsters of Rock, and discovered that ... and a cruise based around the Moody Blues, and then they discovered that they should just around progressive music. There was a similar fan base to the rock one. They're pretty explicit. I talked to them at the beginning about how easy it is to commodify this. But I went to that for a week in the Caribbean. I went to a much smaller scale but really fascinating series of concerts called Near Fest in the Allentown area. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And that's where I think I talked ... I talked to Roger Dean at both. We actually had decent conversation at both of these. But this is the one in Pennsylvania where something stuck in his craw and he really wanted to talk about it.

Nick Gillespie: Oh yeah, it's coal country. Right, look what Al Gore hath wrought.

Dave Weigel: And I followed up the first article about that guy, so there are people who might be interested in what you have to say about global warming. I think he realized it's beyond being off-brand. Everyone who has a Roger Dean painting in their portrait room disagrees with him about this.

Nick Gillespie: I thought he would be in favor of global warming. Because you look at the cover of Fragile, it's water water everywhere. What's ...

Dave Weigel: Are you going to fly to ...

Nick Gillespie: Who was the most interesting person beyond Robert Fripp? And it is ... I go back and forth when I think about ... He's on one end of the spectrum of kind of performers who ... on the other I remember years ago seeing an interview with Neil Diamond where ... it was on CBS Sunday Morning or 60 minutes or something, and the interviewer said, do you ever get tired of playing your hits? And Neil Diamond looked totally befuddled. And I think it was genuine. And he said, why would I be tired of playing my hits? That's what the audience comes for. And of course Neil Diamond and I think a lot of rock performers have come over to his side of the equation, where instead of saying, I'm not playing that song anymore. Or I'm going to make it unrecognizable. They really in a way 20, 30 years ago rock stars didn't give a shit about their audiences. They would show up late, they would show up drunk, they would show up out of tune. They wouldn't have rehearsed. And now they're more like they want to give a great experience. Every night, each night, each concert. And then there's Robert Fripp. Beyond Robert Fripp, who was the progressive rock god that surprised you the most as you toured through this material?

Dave Weigel: Well I had never spent that much time talking to and then reading interviews with Keith Emerson who was just fascinating to me because he really was innovative and virtuosic performer who was seen like that for years and then dropped out of relevance pretty hard for decades. I remember even talking to somebody who was grimly noting a couple years ago how depressing it was to watch him scoring video game music. And he was right in this nether zone where he was very aware that he was famous for something that happened a very long time ago. Kind of quote him going around Moog Fest, which where he was sort of god, but it's weird that he's being worshiped for something where all the new interesting music is written by other people.

And so I thought he was ... without being terribly ... he was very English and not super interested in being introspective. He wrote in his autobiography. But he was who clearly wanted this ... if he didn't want the jet set lifestyle forever, wanted this music to keep evolving and it didn't. I think it was stuck in a between space for the last couple of decades of his life. Was pretty unhappy when ELP would have to reunite and go on tour. It was always done with just a label pressuring them to do it. Right, it was the label saying you'll make a lot more album if this is an ELP album versus a Keith Emerson album. They said fine. But watching someone with that much talent go along with these commercial instincts just because he had to was ... I wasn't entirely surprised but sad as I reported on it and wrote about it.

And then I think David Allen was kind of the other end of the spectrum. This guy who was Australian musician who literally hitchhikes on a boat across the oceans, gets to the UK. He friends much younger musicians, gets kicked out of the band because ... this is Soft Machine. He gets kicked out of Soft Machine because he has a drug record and won't ... can't reenter the UK. And then just starts a different French band which becomes ... Gong is a ... once I listen to more fusion and more kind of Herbie Hancock and stuff. I saw everything is ripping from there but this guy was making that kind of music and being completely blissed out about it right up until he died. A couple days before he dies of cancer. And so he was another one I didn't know what to expect. Two different extremes I'd say where one guy was deeply unhappy about what had happened to this movement he was part of. And the other guy said oh movement's gone, that's fine. I'm still singing about potheaded pixies and doing weird glissando noises on my guitar, so this is great. As long as there's ten people listening to this in a pub, I'm happy.

Nick Gillespie: Is progressive rock and this might have something to do with it's kind of fall from grace. But it is fundamentally a male thing? You know there aren't a lot of ladies in the book. There's a few who show up. But they're mostly ... to be honest they're the ones singing an alto soprano or a soprano talking about sea carpets. Or sun carpets of the sea and things like that. What was the role of women in progressive rock?

Dave Weigel: There wasn't as much of it. I've mentioned Annie Haslam from Renaissance, Sonja Christina from Curved Air, again if you read these magazines in the seventies, you're seeing them all being put on the same pedestal. Like check out the new music that's coming out of Curved Air. Check out this three-page spread about Sonja Christina. There wasn't a lot of it, and I think it was basically a function of who formed the bands. The bands that came together out of the London scene, there simply weren't that many women in it. Except for Hawkwind having a six-foot model covered in paint walking around during their shows.

Nick Gillespie: And Hawkwind of course is one of those great odd junctures or notes of history because out of Hawkwind also comes Motorhead of all things, and then they made a bid for popdom in the eighties with songs like Sigh Power and whatnot. You know traditional pop songs.

Dave Weigel: As did Jethro Tull,, I spent a little time on the Bid for Pop stuff, but I didn't want to make the book a mockery at all. When something is generally funny I was writing about it, sure. But when life gives you Spinal Tap, they smell the glove.

Nick Gillespie: Or when Yes gives you Tormado or yeah.

Dave Weigel: But I generally tended to back away and look at what the newer revival stuff like Marilion and Porcupine Tree. But no, not a ton of women in this. And I don't know how that affected the way they were viewed in history because they were ... select women you could point to but also not a ton.

Nick Gillespie: Rock in general is very much ... the audience is different. And certainly the Beatles had as many women or more women fans than they had male fans, but they were Liverpool lads, not lasses. It's a strange creative ... medium of creative expression.

Dave Weigel: Although you've got this character who ends up being like a creation figure and, because PP Arnold is the soul singer who brings together Nice as her backing band. And then they break off and do their own thing. So various points there are female artists who are important to this, but it is basically a story of men and their organs. To put it one way.

Nick Gillespie: Now that male organs have been exposed, let's talk a little bit about politics. You're the ... you cover national politics for the Washington Post. You got into political reporting partly at Reason and then you had gigs at Slate and a number of other places. What happened ... you came into this at the height of the Ron Paul experience. Where is Ron Paul and Rand Paul now? I mean Rand Paul is so unpopular that he can't ... with Rush that they won't even let him play the Trees for God's sake. Which, for people who don't know is essentially a story about a bunch of maple trees form a union to block the oak tree from growing taller than it.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, it's basically sake Rand's animal farm.

Nick Gillespie: But set in trees and I'm assuming. I always read the maples being bullies because that's Canda, and Canada is somehow anti-individualistic. And Rush are the oaks that want to grow taller than the rest of the forest.

Dave Weigel: There is not a lot of space for libertarianism in politics right now except for I think, being honest about it, the issues where libertarianism intersects with the donors who have done the most for Donald Trump. I feel like my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are pretty happy about Trump's positions on climate. Myron Ebell, especially is ... literally joined the administration. But the criminal justice reform side of libertarianism is kind of retreated to the states. Where it's doing okay but has no clout in DC anymore. The drug reform side of it ... I interviewed Rand right before Jeff Sessions was officially, right after and asked him a couple questions about why he disagrees so vehemently with Sessions on drug policy, to vote for him.

And his answer was honestly the Democrats forced his hand by being so cruel and by portraying him as a racist so ... doesn't have a lot. That was kind of a key answer because what we're finding a lot of politics right now is that you can't get the conservative voter base active not really around an issue but around being angry at the left. And libertarian policies by the balls is so idea based and you're angry in an elite that's failing the country, but you are not angry at how gross Hilary is or anything simple to mobilize against. And depressingly that's ... found that politics moves fewer bodies than getting people to laugh at Leonardo DiCaprio for using a plane or to be annoyed with Black Live Matter for blocking an intersection.

There's just a much lower quality sort of politics that replaced libertarian stuff. And the fatal thing is, I asked Rand this too, he said he was wrong. He thought that in order to win again, the Republican party ended to attract young voters and non-white voters who were giving up on hardcore nationalism and Trump proved that he can eke together a majority if he had just enough nationalists. And why would you go back? I think the only thing that would change ... give libertarians another moment is Trump being defeated, or Republicans being defeated in a massive way. It's not happening right now. I keep ... I make fun of how Trump unlike most presidents, has press corp ready to go to voters that voted for him, and say, "you're still with him right?" There are these stories, even he does his decisions that 70% of people oppose, stories about how he's doing it for his base. He's delivering. And so as long as you kind of prioritize the easily angered, easily activated nationalist base, then yeah libertarians don't have much of a place in politics.

Nick Gillespie: How do you ... as somebody who is in the main stream media. You're at the Washington Post that fears that democracy dies in darkness. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who owns the post is also a contributor to Reason at times, you know has been singled out by Donald Trump. The Washington Post, you're the fake news and all of that. How is that affecting you and your colleague's coverage? Because ... do you feel ... is the mainstream media giving Donald Trump a fair shake? Or are they, like a lot of people in America, so overwhelmed with their contempt or disgust for how he appears, the way he phrases things. Some of his policies but not all of them. Is it difficult to cover him fairly do you thinK?

Dave Weigel: I think factually you have to be tough on him because he will make a speech and make stuff up. He always has. When he was saying ... I think factually if you were writing aobut him when he was selling you on the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and ... factually you have to say that was a failure. He was lying about his finances. And he knows that now and so I think there's this trap I'm kind of worried about where there's ... I worry about it all the time when I see one of these studies where it's 90% of coverage of Trump has been negative. If you burrow into it, a lot of that is coverage of Republicans criticizing him. Not so much Democrats. It's not news when Nancy Pelosi doesn't like him. It's news when

Nick Gillespie: John McCain or Jeff Lake or something.

Dave Weigel: So that or it's him misstating something, or being embroiled in a scandal. And they're really not Democrats scoring any points on him. So it's not like we're slanting it to one party. But it's difficult ... I would argue that especially in the early years of Obama, and I worry that I was part of this. That there was coverage of the first black president a little bit too gauzy. And looking for ways in which he was inspiring people and looking past mistakes that were being made. And there's ... that's gone, but I feel like it's two factors colliding. One is that Obama had unusually good coverage, and the absence of Obama you're getting back to what you would have with Bush or with Clinton. With the first Clinton, the one who won. And that's colliding with objectively Trump just lies more than most presidents. It's been part of his strategy for years, and won him an election. And. But I do fret about people who are told by him not to trust the media and see us say, hey this is false what he just said. And say I don't believe you any more. I don't know how we unwind that.

Originally posted here:

The Rise and Fall of Prog Rockand of Libertarianism [Reason Podcast] - Reason (blog)

Peter Espeut | Libertarianism or the common good? – Jamaica Gleaner

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The LGBT lobby has its allies in the pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, pro-euthanasia, pro-drug-use advocacy groups, and its members have joined together in common cause to assert their 'rights', and they call upon the government to decriminalise, legalise, and normalise their favourite pastimes.

Philosophically, they are all in the same camp: they are libertarians, promoting the idea that consenting individuals should be free to do whatever they choose as long as it does no harm and does not infringe upon the 'rights' of others, but these 'others' and their 'rights', and any possible harm involved, are usually defined in a very narrow and often perverse way.

For abortion to be defensible, the existence of a human being in the womb has to be denied (despite scientific evidence to the contrary), otherwise their right to life would have to be defended. For prostitution to be defensible, sexual intercourse has to be defined as a commodity to be repeatedly bought and sold, implying no emotional involvement and causing no emotional harm. For euthanasia to be defensible, human life itself has to be devalued, especially the lives of the disabled and the terminally ill.

Libertarianism glorifies the freedom of the individual to choose what is good (and pleasurable) and convenient for himself or herself without any regard to the common good.

It suits the libertarian lobbyists to posit that libertarianism and the philosophy that underpins it are the most logical and sensible way to organise modern society, and that organised religion, whose principles, based on scriptures dating back several millennia (which are in profound conflict with libertarianism), are outdated and are holding back progress. Fundamentalist Christians play into their hands by thumping their Bibles even harder! Asserting the authority of a text Libertarians reject can advance the argument no further, and I wish fundamentalists would stop it.

It does no disrespect to the Bible or the Holy Qu'ran to use well-authenticated, wholly secular philosophical arguments to refute and discredit libertarian philosophy as being pathologically individualistic and selfish, and operating contrary to the common good, which is the end towards which society is to be organised and governed.

To speak about ethics is not automatically to speak of religion. Secular Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote his book, titled Ethics, around 350 years before Christ was born. Aristotle argued that political constitutions were right if they were in the common interest and wrong if they were in the interest of the rulers.

These ancient ideas were developed over the centuries by other secular political philosophers. John Locke declared that "the peace, safety, and public good of the people" are the ends of political society. David Hume contended that social conventions are adopted and given moral support by virtue of the fact that they serve the public or common interest. Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood the common good to be the object of a society's general will and the highest end pursued by government.

The fundamental building block of the society is the family. This is not a religious principle, but a socio-political one. Weak families lead to improperly socialised children, lowering their potential to benefit from education and increasing their potential for dysfunctional behaviour and the development of an unbalanced personality. Anything that strengthens the family strengthens society as a whole; and anything that undermines the family, undermines the integrity of society.

The common good is the good of all people and of the whole person. No group within society is to be excluded from its benefits, and integral human development includes the intellectual, physical, artistic and emotional facets of the human person. The task of the State is to work for the development of the whole person, and of all the people, and in doing so, the virtues of temperance, honesty, fairness, openness, and justice are brought into play.

The fundamental question we need to answer is, which of these two moral philosophies should we employ to govern Jamaican society? Libertarianism, which is directed towards satisfying the cravings of individuals or the philosophy of the common good?

If we choose libertarianism, how can we blame politicians for taking decisions that line their pockets? They would, after all, be taking decisions that are in their best interests rather than the common good.

The arguments being put forward by libertarians to legalise buggery, prostitution, and abortion should be rejected, not because they run against religious norms, but because they do not serve the common good.

- Peter Espeut is a sociologist and Roman Catholic deacon. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

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Peter Espeut | Libertarianism or the common good? - Jamaica Gleaner

Shortcuts & Delusions: Puerto Rican Statehood Is White Genocide – Being Libertarian

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I have a co-worker who is of Puerto Rican descent. His name is Luis. Were about the same age. Hes been married 20 years. He and his wife work, and their eldest son has just started college. We were both raised Roman Catholic. Were both concerned about terrorism. Were middle class; we have good incomes, but there are times when we have more expenses and have to balance earnings with costs. We both try our best to be financially responsible for ourselves for retirement, our property and our dependents. We work a lot during the week, and spend the weekends maintaining our homes and property, and when we have a few free hours, spend them with family and friends. Were both New York Mets fans. Neither of us collects welfare. Our parents are getting older, so we try to make their lives a bit more comfortable. We love our wives, though they drive us crazy sometimes!

I wish Luis would take his goddamn family back to Puerto Rico and stop subverting white values and raping my wife, in that order.

***

Puerto Ricans have voted to force America to accept Puerto Rico as the 51st state. Americas 20 trillion dollars of debt will have reached its tipping point when we white Middle Class workers are forced to absorb Puerto Ricos 70 billion dollars of sovereign debt; it is the straw that will break the backs of white American taxpayers, and it is enabled by GOP establishmentarians, Jewish internationalist banksters, the Deep State, feminazi enviro-fascists, and Zionist globalist accountants.

What will be the effect of Puerto Ricos brazen decision to sew another star onto Old Glory? What is all this in service to?

Its so Puerto Rico can increase the Democratic Partys share in government thereby leading to a further rejection of property norms. Its so that Jew Chuck Schumer can ensure white voters can never vote him out of office. Its so that trisexual, trans councilman, abortion coercive Nancy Pelosi can remain in power. Its so that Chicago Bears linebacker, veganist, Bolshevik MicHELLe Obama can force our children to eat asparagus.

Do all of you, dear readers, want to live in a world dominated by Marxist Islamist Mexican deconstructionist Communist post-structuralist Central American post-modern social architects?

No. No, of course you do not.

I know Im preaching to the converted, but Ill state this as explicitly as possible: Puerto Rican statehood will literally result in the eradication of the white race, and white, anglo-saxon, heterosexual, Protestant, capitalist, collectivized commons subsidizing married couples have a moral obligation to produce one child per year until joint-fertility is no longer possible.

***

Oscar Lpez Rivera of theFuerzas Armadas de Liberacin Nacional Puertorriquea is an American hero. If it wasnt for him, Puerto Rico would have been a state when our fathers wore a younger mans clothes.

Rivera, in case you dont live in the New York metro area, was told he couldnt be honored in this years Puerto Rican pride parade because he committed only over a hundred bombings in American cities. Rivera is a freedom fighter who wanted Puerto Ricans to own their own means of production instead of be exploited by interloping Zionist homosexual corporate special interest Bilderbergers, and in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Locke, Richard Spencer and Arnold Schwarzenegger, stood up to corporate job offshoring autocratic tyrants and fought for liberty for Puerto Ricans so they wouldnt be Americans and further denigrate apple pie, baseball, the Constitution, Walter Cronkite, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

If it wasnt for Rivera, Puerto Ricans would already have access to white wealth.

***

Puerto Ricos invasion of safe American spaces shows its time, now more than ever, to reassert white hegemony and to enforce peaceful ethnic cleansing. It isnt fair for unborn white Americans to suffer the burden of Puerto Ricans who will take advantage of established markets, debt-free infrastructure and publicly owned private commons. Our markets cant absorb more consumers who reject white American values. Call your elected representatives and demand they send Puerto Ricans back to Uruguay, where they belong, and where they are better off, for their own sake, as well as ours, and theirs, but mostly ours, and equally theirs.

***

And thats the way it is, as far as you know.

Image: Terry Sparkman

This post was written by Dillon Eliassen.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Dillon Eliassen is the Managing Editor of Being Libertarian. Dillon works in the sales department of a privately owned small company. He holds a BA in Journalism & Creative Writing from Lyndon State College, and needs only to complete his thesis for his Masters of English from Montclair State University (something which his accomplished and beautiful wife, Alice, is continually pestering him about). He is the author of The Apathetic, available at Amazon.com. He is a self-described Thoreauvian Minarchist.

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Shortcuts & Delusions: Puerto Rican Statehood Is White Genocide - Being Libertarian

Comics and Liberty: How Basic Libertarian Principles Parallel Comic Lore – The Libertarian Republic

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By Chris Massari

There is a largely missed connection between the comic medium, particularly the superhero genre and stories from the two big publishers Marvel and DC, and the philosophies associated with libertarianism. Everything from the non-aggression principle (NAP), individualism, civil liberty, voluntary action and in some cases/stories to individuals versus the State. In fact, one could say that the parallels between the two are almost too spot on.

Anyone with a basic understanding of pop culture can easily identify the very nature of volunteer action and connect that with superheroes. Id be surprised if youve never heard the phrase With great power, comes great responsibility and not instantly know what its from and what that quote is presenting. You dont even have to just use Spider-Man to present the idea of voluntary action. Use Batman, use Superman, use Wonder Woman, The Flash or Daredevil, and really any of the majority of comic heroes can easily be substituted in and out as examples for voluntary philosophies. Voluntary action is in the very nature of the mediums stories and individuals using their unique abilities towards a public good, doing a service voluntary of the state through individual actions.

To take it one step further withcomics and libertarian ideals, one could explore the vast history of Superman following a non-interventionist foreign policy when it comes to handling situations outside of the United States, not including Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns. This one example doesnt even include the deeper and more complex philosophical parallels in major or even minor story lines. This is just one character that consistently follows a particular ideological stance that falls right in line with the libertarian model.

Now, if you were trying to best convey libertarian philosophies in a comic, I think the perfect introductory look would be Marvels Civil War arc in 2006 by Mark Millar. This story was even repackaged recently to fit Marvels cinematic universe in Captain America: Civil War. While the film is much less complex than the comic version, the core principles remain the same. Individual versus State, where comic heroes are being forced by the government into mandatory registration of their abilities and identities. If they dont register, they cannot legally be heroes or engage in hero related activities. It kind of reminds me of that meme going around on the internet where someone feeds the homeless, only to be arrested for feeding the homeless, only to be forced into doing mandatory community service. Here, its acts of heroism being condemned by the State.

In both the comic and film, the ideological battle of Individual versus State is represented by Captain America, the individualist and Iron Man, the State advocate. Anyone familiar with the film will recognize this dialogue:

Tony Stark: Oh, thats Charles Spencer by the way. Hes a great kid. Computer engineering degree. 3.6 GPA. Had a floor-level gig at Intel planned for the fall. But first, he wanted to put a few miles on his soul, before he parked it behind a desk. See the world, maybe be of service. Charlie didnt want to go to Vegas or Fort Lauderdale, which is what I would do. He didnt go to Paris or Amsterdam. Sounds fun. He decided to spend his summer, building sustainable housing for the poor. Guess where Sokovia. He wanted to make a difference, I suppose. I mean, we wont know because we dropped a building on him while we were kicking ass. Theres no decision-making process here. We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, Im game. If we cant accept limitations, were boundaryless, were no better than the bad guys.

Steve Rogers: Tony, someone dies on your watch, you dont give up.

Tony: Who said were giving up?

Steve: We are if were not taking responsibility for our actions. This document just shifts the blame.

Col. James Rhodes: Sorry. Steve, that, that is dangerously arrogant. This is the United Nations were talking about. Its not the World Security Council, its not SHIELD, its not HYDRA.

Steve: No, but its run by people with agendas and agendas change.

Tony: Thats good. Thats why Im here. When I realized what my weapons were capable of in the wrong hands, I shut it down and stop manufacturing them.

Steve: Tony. You chose to do that. If we sign these, we surrender our right to choose. What if this panel sends us somewhere we dont think we should go? What if its somewhere we need to go, and they dont let us? We may not be perfect, but the safest hands are still our own.

Tony: If we dont do this now, its gonna be done to us later. Thats a fact. That wont be pretty.

This conversation highlights the crux of the ideological argument presented in the story and can be perfectly applied to the libertarian platform as a palatable and understandable representation of what the party values to a mainstream audience.

I say this because its no secret that entertainment generally leans Left and recently, leaning to a Regressive rather than Progressive atmosphere. People gravitate towards entertaining things and if a particular ideology can be presented in a fun, easy to digest fashion, its not difficult to push your narrative whatever it is. Now, I need to add this isnt a Down with the Liberal Media statement but, more an observation of presenting ideas to a wide stream audience, something I, unfortunately, feel the Libertarian party hasnt quite gotten right just yet.

What I do find interesting is that when certain ideas, like the Libertarian philosophies presented in Civil War, are shown in entertainment, people agree with them and can even become passionate about it. Do a little google research and you can see how adamantly people argued over who was right in the original Civil War comic run. Fighting vehemently over who was right, Captain America or Iron Man. However, when applied to real life actions and politics, the Libertarian Party can be viewed as a three-headed monster or laughing stock depending on who you ask. There are obvious reasons for that from lack of education in the mainstream, the various factions within the Party, the two-party system and of course, the saying that getting Libertarians in order is like leading cats to water.

That said, I think if the Libertarian Party can learn to take these easy and palatable parallels in comics or other entertainment mediums, it can help to better present these ideas, principles, values, and philosophies in a manner that people like, enjoy and might even take part in down the road. I believe exploring the vast amounts of stories in comics that directly present Libertarian values so often and easy to understand, could be a great way to present the values of Liberty and individualism to a wider audience.

So, read a comic and support Liberty and the individual or something like that.

Captain AmericaCaptain America Winter SoldierCaptain America: Civil Warcomic bookComic Book Moviescomic bookscomicsdc comicsMarvelmarvel comicsMarvel Studiosopinionphilosophypolitical opinionpolitical philosophy

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Comics and Liberty: How Basic Libertarian Principles Parallel Comic Lore - The Libertarian Republic

Links and quotes for June 15, 2017: Job offshoring, libertarian solutions to climate change, apprenticeships, and more – American Enterprise Institute

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The Exporting Jobs Canard WSJ

Mr. Trump assumes that when U.S. multinationals expand abroad, it necessarily reduces the number of people they employ in the U.S. But this assumption is wrong, and tariffs would hurt American workers, not help them.

Academic research has repeatedly found that when U.S. multinationals hire more people at their overseas affiliates, it does not come at the expense of American jobs. How can this be? Large firms need workers of many different skills and occupations, and the jobs done by employees abroad are often complements to, not substitutes for, those done by workers at home. Manufacturing abroad, for example, can allow workers in the U.S. to focus on higher value-added tasks such as research and development, marketing, and general management. Additionally, expanding overseas to serve foreign customers or save costs often helps the overall company grow, resulting in more U.S. hiring.

The ultimate proof is in the numbers. Between 2004 and 2014, the most recent year for which U.S. government data are available, total employment at foreign affiliates of U.S. multinationals rose from nine million to 13.8 million. Yet the number of jobs at U.S. parent companies rose nearly as much, from 22.4 million to 26.6 million

President Trump is right that America needs millions more good-paying jobs. But he does not seem to realize they can be created by U.S.-based multinationals that know how to invest capital, operate globally and create knowledge. In 2014, U.S. multinationals undertook 45.4% of all private-sector capital investment, were responsible for 49.5% of all U.S. goods exports, and conducted a remarkable 78.9% of total U.S. private-sector research and development

Limit the ability of U.S. multinational companies to flourish abroad and you limit their ability to create high-paying jobs in America. Washington should base its policies on data and research, not anecdotes and assertions.

The Case For and Against Policing Todays Tech GiantsAxios

The Choice Facing Americans, According to Tyler CowenLibrary of Law and Liberty

Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and director of George Masons Mercatus Center, has best escaped the boundaries of his discipline to become a public intellectual who examines his assumptions as an economist by the light cast by other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Such an approach gives his work an admirable breadth, not to mention making it remarkably accessible to non-economists.

His new book is no exception. The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream has nine chapters. The first four draw mostly from economic and other social scientific data to try to explain an unhealthy trend that Cowen detects in our society, and even in the American character: a loss of flexibility and concomitant embrace of the status quo that were never, he argues, as pronounced before as they are today

Complacency runs contrary to what the author regards as the central trait of the American: her restlessness. Restlessness is a good thing, in Cowens view. It signifies the successful pursuit of economic opportunities, a dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the constant effort to innovate. The choice facing Americans, then, is either a kind of desperate preservation of the status quo and, with it, a rapid shrinking in opportunities; or the return to restlessness, with all of its risks, its violence, and its mobility.

Canada to Teach Computer Coding Starting in KindergartenPhys.org

A Market-Friendly Approach to Combating Climate Change Slate

Ultimately, the only way to combat American automobile dependency is to reform the way we build, and in particular, to help avoid low-density settlement patterns that make it impractical or impossible for Americans to get anywhere without a personal car

But even in Berkeley, liberals have a blind spot when it comes to housing policy and the transportation choices it requires. As a councilman in 2014, Arreguin pushed a ballot measure putting superstrict conditions on new development. It failed, but his elevation to mayor in November was seen as a reproach of his opponent Laurie Capitellis pro-development record.* It was a very clear choice between me and my opponent, who has literally rubber-stamped every [real estate] project that came before this council, Arreguin told the San Francisco Chronicle last fall.

At Tuesday nights City Council meeting, which touched on a number of housing issues, this dissonance was on display in a residents complaint about a proposed new building that would cast shadows on her zucchini plants. The project was returned to the citys Zoning Adjustments Board. The zukes live another day

That overturning housing restrictions is part of the fight for economic and racial justice is well-established. But in a moment of all-in activism and outrage over climate change, its worth reflecting on the degree to which the prohibition of infill housing is an environmentally reactionary policy.

The fewer people live in Berkeley and other job-rich, close-in Bay Area cities and suburbs, the more people have to drive. More than half of Berkeleys greenhouse gas emissions come from cars and trucks

Infill housing production is the municipal equivalent of driving a hybrid: If youre serious about fighting climate change, its no longer up for debate.

Why the Tighter Labor Market isnt Generating Better Pay WSJ

Janet Yellen and the Case of the Missing Inflation NYT

Inflation has stubbornly stayed lower than the Federal Reserve has desired for the past eight years, and it has been falling in the last few months. In a move that could well define her chairmanship of the central bank, Janet Yellen is betting that falling prices are a temporary blip that will soon be forgotten.

If her forecast is right, the Fed policy meeting on Wednesday will turn out to be a nonevent in a gradual return to normal policy. If shes wrong, the June 2017 meeting will look like a giant unforced error that unnecessarily prolonged an era in which the Fed proved impotent to get inflation up to the 2 percent level it aims for and lost credibility needed to fight the next downturn

What is worrisome is not direct economic damage, but the fact that the Fed has missed its (arbitrary) 2 percent target in the same direction undershooting year after year. If its not a drop in prices for cellphone plans, its a falloff in oil prices, or cheaper imports because of a strong dollar.

That in turn implies that the low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate economy since 2008 isnt going anywhere. This would prove especially damaging if the economy ran into some negative shock; a lack of Fed credibility could leave it less able to prevent a recession.

Preparing for Brexit, Britons Face Economic Pinch at Home NYT

How Trump Can Make Apprenticeships a Hit Bloomberg

Replicating the German apprenticeship model in the U.S. would require nothing short of a revolution. For one thing, it would be expensive: The U.S. federal government spends $90 million a year on dedicated apprenticeship programs; accounting for both education and training, the German system costs $27 billion.

A more immediate challenge is to persuade U.S. employers to sign on. Few companies have the time or resources to educate, train, pay and certify apprentices. Thats especially true in industries without a track record of employing apprentices, such as technology, health care and finance. Many businesses leaders remain skeptical of the preparation that prospective apprentices receive from public high schools and community colleges. If the scale of a U.S. apprenticeship program is to come anywhere close to Germanys, apprentices will have to become easier for businesses to manage and public-education systems must be more responsive to the job requirements of local industries.

It can be done.YouthForce NOLA, a partnership of political, business and education leaders in New Orleans, places 1,200 high-school seniors from local public high schools in paid internships in fields such as software development and advanced manufacturing Another successful model is the state-run Apprenticeship Carolina program in South Carolina, which serves as an intermediary between businesses, workers and educational institutions.

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Links and quotes for June 15, 2017: Job offshoring, libertarian solutions to climate change, apprenticeships, and more - American Enterprise Institute

Libertarians and the Idyllic Island Nation That’s Running Out of People – The Weekly Standard

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If you're interested in curious cultural phenomena, you may have taken notice of the tiny Pacific nation of Niuean idyllic Polynesian Eden, which is depopulating itself so dramatically that it will soon turn spontaneously into a wildlife refuge.

By population, the smallest country in the world is the Vatican. Niuepronounced "new way"is the smallest republic. According to its most recent entry in the CIA World Factbook, which was made in 2014, Niue's population is 1,190. It has an area of about 100 square miles, which makes it a little less than half the size of Guam; a little less than one-fourteenth the size of Long Island. Niue has a lower population density than Russia, and one 55th the population of Yankee stadium with a capacity crowd.

Despite being a beautiful, tropical paradise, Niue's population is dropping by about 3 percent a year. In 2000, its population was 1900; in 1990, 2,332; in 1980, 3,402, and in 1950, nearly 5,000. The reason for the plummet, as you can probably guess, is the absence of jobs. Niue is unfathomably remote; 1,700 miles northeast of New Zealand; 2,800 southwest of Hawaii, 3,600 miles east of Australia. Few people see a future on the Island. Niue is an independent Republic in free association with New Zealand, and as part of the deal, Niue's citizens are also offered New Zealand citizenship. New Zealand's annual gross domestic product is $186 billion. Niue's is a little less than $25 million; by far the lowest of any country in the world (though not unimpressive for a country with only 1000 people in it). Its three main industries are tourism, fishing and agriculture; subsistence farming is common. The government is in debt, and receives considerable sponsorship from New Zealand, which is also, at Niue's request, responsible for Niue's national defense. The upshot of all this is that New Zealand is slowing siphoning off Niue's remaining Niueans. Unless something changes, the remaining, aging Niueans will die-off or move. Inevitably, before long, Niue will be empty, and that will be that.

By area, the smallest country in the world, is the Vatican. Monaco is second. The third smallest country in the world is Liberland, which is 2.7 square miles on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. Liberland's tiny patch of territory was, prior 2015, terra nulliusCroatia said it belonged to Serbia and Serbia said it belonged to Croatia. Noticing this, libertarian activist Vit Jedlika claimed it, and established the pure libertarian Free Republic of Liberland. However, It's a country recognized by no one. The legal situation is this: Serbia claims the Danube as its north-western border with Croatia. Croatia says some of the land on the Serbian side of the Danube belongs to it, and some of the land on the Croatian side belongs to Serbia. This left a microscopic parcel of land on Croatia's side claimed by neither of the two.

As regards Liberland's claim, Serbia says it doesn't care. Croatia, however, has blocked Liberlandians from entering the area, fearing that if the land isn't accorded to Serbia, it will weaken the Croatian claims to the disputed land on the Danube's other side. So for the moment, Liberland is a stateless state.

But I admire it. Most Americans will, once they've had a look at it. Liberland's constitution, written in English and available on its website, borrows liberally from oursmost importantly, in its Bill of Rights. The problem with most almost-free countries is a lack of protection against an overbearing government; too many republican governments have been formed under the assumption that so long as a government is of the people and by the people, it is free to do whatever it wants for, or to, the people. Liberland preempts this problem with strict and explicit limits on the powers of government, and the most iron-clad and extensively detailed Bill of Rights ever written. The Bill of Rights broken down into sections on freedom of speech and information, property rights, privacy rights, the rights of the accused, rights of "physical liberty," equality before the law (including freedom of religion), and "the right to self-defense and defense of one's rights and property," including against the government. The primacy of Liberland's Bill of Rights is enshrined in its Constitution's preamble (which, keep in mind, was written by people for whom English is a second language): "Being aware of a long and shameful list of governments' trespasses to the Rights of the sovereign Individuals, we hereby declare that the Public Administration governing the Free Republic of Liberland shall first and foremost respect the Bill of Rights and exercise only such functions as have been delegated to it under this Constitution. Therefore, we declare that whenever the Public Administration becomes an obstacle to, rather than a guarantor of, our Rights, it shall be our duty to alter or abolish such government, and to institute a new government for the restoration of the Rights which we consider inherent in all human beings."

If you have some time, read the whole Liberland constitutionit's inspiring, even though it lacks the poetry of the American constitution. Though I should point out, the first draft of Liberland's constitution, from 2015, began very poetically: "We, the Citizens of the Free Republic of Liberland, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and future generations, do ordain and establish the Constitution of the Free Republic of Liberland."

Liberland is the republic that would have been created by John Locke and Milton Friedmanand Thomas Jefferson, et al, if they had been free of the obligation to compromise. It lacks land, but it has citizensor at least perspective citizens: according to the Guardian, in the week following its 2015 declaration of independence, Liberland received 200,000 applications for citizenship.

Niue, on the other hand, has land: 100 square miles, 40 times as much as Liberland has claimed in the Balkans. But of course it lacks peoplenearly the entire population could fit on a single Jumbo Jet. Citizens of Niue who wish to stay need an infusion of people, enough to create an economy with jobs and prospects for their children. Ideally, they want an infusion of people who won't interfere with their life style. In other words, they need libertariansand as it happens, libertarians needs them.

It takes 3 years of residence to become a citizen of Niue. If a few thousand Liberlandians were to move there, they would save the island and the nation, and the remainders of Niue culture (only about 650 Niuean citizens are ethnically Niuean; only about 500 of those speak the Niueain language). After a few years, the libertarians could vote to amend the Niue constitution and institute their policies of pure freedom, none of which would encroach in anyway on the surviving Niuean traditions. The Liberlandians would have land on which to enjoy their utopian ideals, andvia the accompanying guarantees of free trade, a free market and businesses free from government interferencethe Niuean economy would likely see "Asian Tiger" type economic growth (being so far off the beaten path, though, this would primary start as tax-haven growth).

Most importantly, the world will have a chance to see the success of a country based on unadulterated liberty, andas a bonuscome to understand that America's strength and prosperity are not accidental.

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Libertarians and the Idyllic Island Nation That's Running Out of People - The Weekly Standard

Smith Island Cultural Center Ewell, MD

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Smith Island lies in the Chesapeake Bay twelve miles west of Crisfield, Maryland.

Captain John Smith first charted the archipelago in 1608, but seasonal occupation by Native Americans goes back more than 12,000 years. Most Smith Islanders descend from 17th-century settlers, most of whom arrived in Maryland and Virginia from southwest England and Wales. Surnames indicate a smattering of Scotts and Irish soon followed. Both Maryland and Virginia claimed Smith Island until the dispute was finally settled in the 1873. The Maryland-Virginia state line runs through the island chain, a fact that played a key role in the bloody Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake.

Smith Island is so closely associated with the maritime activities of crabbing and oystering, that few know that the first permanent residents were farmers. Islanders turned from land to water after the Civil War in an economic restructuring resulting from skyrocking demand for seafood and wildfowl, at a time when erosion and rising water levels made farming increasingly challenging.

The three-by-five mile island chain has three villages with a total population of about 350 year-round residents. The Cultural Center is in Ewell, which is the largest village. Ewell joins Rhodes Point by bridge, while Tylerton is on a neighboring but unconnected island. Most everything and everyone that comes to Smith Island arrives by boat. The cruise and passenger ferries offer roundtrip passage daily throughout the summer and early fall. The passenger ferries also provide limited passage during the off-season. The cruise boat affords you the comfort of air conditioning and bathrooms on board along with a light narration of the passing scenery. Locals and their supplies travel on the three passenger ferries (two serving Ewell and Rhodes Point, and one Tylerton). This transportation option provides narration of a different kind, in the form of the distinct dialect of the locals you will meet aboard.

Bring along your kayak (for an additional freight fee) to take advantage of the various water trails and beaches. Bikes and golf carts are available for rent. Photo opportunities abound as you tour the island and meet the people. Youll also want to catch a peek of the many waterfowl, wading birds, shore birds, herons, and other wildlife that inhabit the island.

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Smith Island Cultural Center Ewell, MD

Opposition grows to Egypt’s plan to cede islands to Saudi Arabia – Reuters

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CAIRO Prominent Egyptian political parties on Thursday criticized President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's plan to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia and urged people to take to the streets in protest.

Parliament voted on Wednesday to back a treaty to hand over the two uninhabited islands of Tiran and Sanfir and Sisi is expected to ratify the decision soon.

The plan to cede the islands to Saudi Arabia, which has given Egypt billions of dollars of aid, was first announced last year and has since become mired in political protest and legal action.

The Social Democratic Party, along with several other parties and groups, called for protests on Friday.

Thousands of people backed a Facebook page named "Giving up land is treason," which urges people to protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, birthplace of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. It shows a box full of Saudi cash, which it describes as the title deeds for the islands.

Opponents of the plan say Egypt's sovereignty over the islands dates back to 1906, before Saudi Arabia was founded.

Small demonstrations have taken place over the past couple of days, despite a state of emergency imposed by Sisi in April following church bombings that killed at least 45 Christians.

At least eight were detained for 24 hours on suspicion of illegally protesting and insulting the president, according to the state news agency MENA.

"Those who kidnap our youth from their homes because they are defending their land, shouldn't they be called the Occupation Authority?" Zyad el-Elaimy, a liberal politician and a member of the social democratic party said on Twitter.

Elaimy said at least three members of his party had been arrested following a protest after a meeting at party headquarters on Wednesday. Security forces broke up the demonstration.

Sisi is losing much of the popularity he enjoyed when he overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 and was lionized as the savior of the nation.

He is facing mounting criticism over the struggling economy and is seen by many Egyptians as a traitor for giving up the islands. A popular Twitter hashtag is "Sisi is a traitor."

The Free Egyptians Party, usually supportive of Sisi, issued a strong denunciation of the treaty.

"Our patriotic and historic responsibility requires us to confirm that Tiran and Sanfir islands were and continue to be under Egyptian sovereignty," the statement read.

The statement had also backed a court ruling which blocked the islands deal earlier this year. As legal action rumbles on, the matter will next be taken up by the Supreme Constitutional Court.

Saudi and Egyptian officials say the islands belong to the kingdom and were only under Egyptian control because Riyadh had asked Cairo in 1950 to protect them.

(Reporting by Amina Ismail; editing by Giles Elgood and Pritha Sarkar)

MARAWI CITY, Philippines When Philippines troops advanced on positions held by Islamist militants in a southern city last Friday they were caught in a kill zone.

SYDNEY The United States will tell dozens of refugees held in an Australian-run offshore detention center whether they will be offered resettlement in America within six weeks, two detainees told Reuters on Friday.

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Opposition grows to Egypt's plan to cede islands to Saudi Arabia - Reuters

Iowa’s Cayman Islands Classic bracket revealed | The Gazette – The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines

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Jun 15, 2017 at 6:27 pm | Print View

IOWA CITY The Iowa mens basketball team knows its opening round opponent for the 2017 Cayman Islands Classic. The Hawkeyes will face Louisiana to start the non-conference tournament Nov. 20 at noon. Television information is yet to be announced.

Iowa and Louisiana are joined in the tournament by Cincinnati, UAB, Wyoming, South Dakota State, Richmond and Buffalo.

For the full news release on the tournament, and the full bracket see below:

Game matchups for the inaugural 2017 Cayman Islands Classic were announced Thursday by tournament officials.

Eight teams will compete in the tournament, including the University of Iowa, held Nov. 20-22, at in the brand new John Gray Gymnasium, just minutes away from world famous Seven Mile Beach. Television information will be announced at a later date.

The Hawkeyes will face Louisiana in the opening game at noon (EST) followed by South Dakota State meeting Wyoming at 2:30 p.m. This will be the first ever meeting between Iowa and Louisiana.

In the first game of the evening session, Richmond plays UAB at 5 p.m. Buffalo and Cincinnati will conclude opening-day action in the final matchup starting at 7:30 p.m.

Semifinal round games are slated for 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. the following day, Tuesday, Nov. 21.

Losing teams will compete in their second game Nov. 21 with tip offs at noon and 5 p.m.

The seventh-place game will open the final day of competition on Wednesday, Nov. 22 starting at noon, followed by the fifth-place game (2:30 p.m.), third-place game (5 p.m.) and title game (7:30 p.m.) to crown the Cayman Islands Classic champion.

Each of the eight teams will play one preliminary home game prior to competing in tournament play.

The Cayman Islands Classic is being sponsored by the Mountain West Conference.

Five of the teams competed in postseason play in 2017 with Cincinnati, and South Dakota State advancing to the NCAA Tournament, while Iowa and Richmond participated in the NIT.

Wyoming went 23-15 last season en route to winning the College Basketball Invitational - the schools first major postseason title since winning the 1943 NCAA Championship.

Cincinnati was ranked No. 18 in the final 2017 Associated Press poll, posting a 30-6 record while making its seventh straight trip to the NCAA Tournament.

Iowa had a 19-15 record, advancing to the second round of the 2017 NIT. The Hawkeyes return four starters from last years squad, along with eight other letterwinners.

South Dakota State, which plays in the Summit League, made its fourth appearance in the last seven years (2012, 2013, 2016) in the 2017 NCAA Tournament facing eventual national runner-up Gonzaga. The Jackrabbits will feature the nations top returning scorer in 6-9 forward Mike Daum who averaged 25.1 points.

Richmond, a member of the Atlantic 10 Conference, posted a 22-12 record last season while advancing to the quarterfinal round of the 2017 NIT.

UAB owned a 17-16 mark last season. Louisiana Ragin Cajuns, which competes in the West Division of the Sun Belt Conference, had a 21-12 record last season.

Buffalo went 17-15 last year. The Bulls captured its first outright Mid-American Conference championship in 2015, while advancing to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history.

The remainder of Iowas 2017-18 schedule will be released later this summer.

l Comments: (319) 368-8884; jeremiah.davis@thegazette.com

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Iowa's Cayman Islands Classic bracket revealed | The Gazette - The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines

How urban ‘heat islands’ threaten public health – Grist

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If heat is the enemy, Marcela Herrera thought she was ready for battle last summer at her familys north Los Angeles apartment.

Old air conditioner units chugged away on windows in three rooms. Extension cords snaked into box fans on the floor, positioned along a hallway to push cooler air towards warmer spots. Bamboo shades, bent blinds, and curtains beat back the sun.

But none of that prevented her eldest son, Edwin Daz, from getting a nosebleed each time a heatwave crested over the familys dense working-class neighborhood. And as outdoor temperatures climbed into the 90s, the 17-year-old suffered painful, debilitating migraines. The family doctor recommended that he try to stay cooler for the sake of his health.

Western communities, including Los Angeles, are aware that urban heat is a serious and growing threat to public health, and the warming climate only increases the problem. Its not as visible as other catastrophes, but the implications can be far reaching, says Elizabeth Rhoades, who works on climate issues in Los Angeles Countys Department of Public Health.

Predictions are for longer, more frequent, and more severe heat events throughout the Southwest, especially in Los Angeles and Phoenix. Studies in the last decade suggest that heat especially impacts very old and very young city dwellers, poor neighborhoods, and those without central air conditioning: people like Edwin Daz and Marcela Herrera. But researchers are still learning about how people are affected by excessive heat in the places where they spend most of their time inside their homes. Few policies exist to protect the most vulnerable, and doctors say the conditions are poorly tracked.

Heat is sneaky. It worsens pre-existing conditions, such as heart and lung disease, kidney problems, diabetes, and asthma, more often than it kills directly. People end up going to the hospital because heat affects their health, makes their asthma worse, or something worse, says David Eisenman, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA. But its not technically coded as that in the records. Its coded as worsening asthma. So we really undercount the number of cases where heat is a factor.

And urban heat is layered. Los Angeles is as much as 6 degrees F hotter than surrounding areas because of whats called the heat island effect. Sprawl defines not just heat islands but what some call an archipelago of high temperatures across modern urban areas. Geography, wind patterns, tree cover, and concrete all work to create hotspots where temperatures are higher and air pollution is worse. In fact, climate models suggest that Herreras San Fernando Valley neighborhood, far from ocean breezes, will warm 10 to 20 percent faster than the rest of Los Angeles.

Theres been this assumption that we can all cool off somehow. And in some ways that might have been true 100 years ago, Eisenman says. We dont have access to the natural cooling environment like we did before.

The landscapes cooling elements disappeared long before Edwin Daz and his mother arrived in the valley. Their Pacoima neighborhood derives its name from the Native Tongva word for a place of running water. (These days, the now concrete-locked Pacoima Wash, a flood-control channel, is often dry.) After World War II, the neighborhood boomed when developers marketed boxy homes to African Americans shut out of other parts of the valley by racial covenants.

Today, Pacoima is overwhelmingly Latino. And its single-family homes have produced a complex urban density, says Max Podemski, planning director for the community advocacy group Pacoima Beautiful. Lawns have given way to paved-over yards. Second-dwelling units, divisions within ranch homes, and modified garages can house several families together.

Thats just totally ubiquitous here, Podemski says. And these converted dwellings, uncounted and unpermitted, may or may not have insulation or air conditioners or windows to catch a breeze: The city just doesnt have data about it.

To understand more about how heat moves through Pacoima housing, last summer I built small electronic sensors to record dozens of heat and humidity measurements an hour, during parts of August, September, and October: the hottest months in Los Angeles. One sensor went in Edwins bedroom.

In early afternoon, that sensor recorded temperatures equal to those recorded outside, at the weather station at Van Nuys Airport. Evening temperatures in Edwins room were up to 9 degrees F higher than outside.

Those results tell a similar story to what a group of researchers, community activists, and scientists found in about 30 homes equipped with similar sensors in New Yorks Harlem last year. Buildings have a memory for heat, says Adam Glenn, the founder of AdaptNY and a member of the community climate change observation project, ISeeChange. In New York, old stone buildings hold onto thermal radiation, especially on higher floors, late into the night. So the danger to people continues even when the heatwave is over.

But the ways buildings respond to climate vary. In Herreras apartment, a lack of insulation, common in older California houses, may be the key factor. In the evening, she says, We can feel the warmth in the walls.

The blanket of heat smothering L.A. hasnt escaped City Halls notice. Mayor Eric Garcetti has set an ambitious goal to lower the citys overall temperature 3 degrees in 20 years. L.A.s Office of Sustainability is studying where and how to deploy landscape-level cooling strategies, such as planting trees and developing cooler pavements. But it will take years to even know whether the goal is achievable.

In the meantime, renters like Herreras family battle excessive heat mostly alone. According to the Census Bureaus National Housing Survey, half as many rental properties in Los Angeles have central air as do owner-occupied units. Coping costs money. In summer, Herreras power bill can be as high as $200 a month.

As temperatures rise in the Southwest, so do the stakes for city dwellers. In Phoenix, the Maricopa County Health Department has closely tracked heat-related death for more than a decade, producing an exhaustive report each year breaking down cases by age, ethnicity, economic background, and other risk factors.

Arizona State University researchers are working with Maricopa and Los Angeles counties to better understand how heat causes sickness and death, and how to counteract it.

Many of us believe that no one should die prematurely because of heat, and there are significant public costs associated with heat just in the health-care sector alone, says David Hondula, an ASU climatologist who studies heat impacts. Heat-associated deaths are climbing in Phoenix, but the reasons remain unclear. If we cant even answer that question, figuring out the best strategy to keep Phoenicians safe, or residents of Los Angeles safe, in a future that is expected to be warmer than it is today, would seem almost impossible, Hondula says.

With summer coming, the Daz-Herrera family has made some changes, insulating the ceiling of Edwins room and adding more air conditioners.

Paying for this has meant skimping elsewhere: fewer outings, no new clothes. Herrera worries that tight finances will force them to turn the air conditioners off. Still, all the changes weve made are helping us, she says. Its better to invest a bit more because health comes first.

This story was made possible with support from the Center for Health Journalism at The University of Southern California, while iSeeChange contributed heat sensor data.

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How urban 'heat islands' threaten public health - Grist

Despite Public Outcry, Egypt to Transfer Islands to Saudi Arabia – New York Times

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New York Times
Despite Public Outcry, Egypt to Transfer Islands to Saudi Arabia
New York Times
Since Mr. Sisi announced a plan to hand the islands to Saudi Arabia last year, he has faced an unusually virulent backlash. A top court ruled against the transfer, there were rare public protests, and an opinion poll found that a large majority of ...
Egypt's parliament approves islands deal to Saudi ArabiaBBC News
Egypt's parliament approves Red Sea islands transfer to Saudi ArabiaReuters
Egypt okays transfer of Red Sea islands to SaudisThe Jerusalem Post
Aljazeera.com -Bloomberg
all 114 news articles »

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Despite Public Outcry, Egypt to Transfer Islands to Saudi Arabia - New York Times

San Juan Islands archaeological dig postponed after islanders have their say – KUOW News and Information

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The Bureau of Land Management will not allow an archaeological dig at Iceberg Point in the San Juan Islands this summer after officials got an earful from residents concerned about possible impacts to the popular area.

The federal agency announced Wednesday that it needs more time to evaluate the 80 or more substantive comments it received in May on a proposed archaeological field school at the southernmost point of Lopez Island.

For the past four years, Iceberg Point, a coastal hiking spot with sweeping views of Puget Sound, has been part of the San Juan Islands National Monument. The BLM has called it an Area of Critical Environmental Concern since 1990.

For centuries, theLummi andSamishtribes cultivated lilies and other edible plants there.

Federal officials awarded a contract to Central Washington University archaeologist Patrick McCutcheon in August to survey Iceberg Point for artifacts.

McCutcheon and up to 25 students would dig 100 or more small test pits scattered across the landscape during the three-week field school.

In May, BLM, a division of the Interior Department, concluded the project would have no significant environmental impact and asked for public input.

The proposal had the support of local tribes.

Critics of the project said students' digging and walking the area in the dry Northwest summer, when island plants and lichens are withered or brittle, could spread weeds and threaten rare species.

Tribes and other supporters said the impacts would be minimal, with a tiny fraction of the area to be dug up.

Surveys of the area for both rare plants and archaeological artifacts are required before any ecological restoration of its shrinking and increasingly weedy meadows can begin.

San Juan Islands National Monument manager Marcia deChadendes said in a note to the Lopez Island community that a decision on whether to allow the project at some future date has not been made, but "we have decided to not hold it this summer."

Its a great thing to have such an invested community, she said of the unexpected volume of comments on the proposal.

John Ryan loves getting tips and documents. He can be reached atjryan@kuow.orgor on the encryptedSignalorWhatsAppapps at 1-401-405-1206 (whistleblowers, never do so from a work or government device, account or location).For greatest security, useKUOW's SecureDrop portal. Snail mail is also a safe way to reach him confidentially:KUOW, 4518 University Way NE #310, Seattle, WA 98105. Don't put your return address on the outside.

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UPDATE: Police investigate crash on Islands Expressway – Savannah Morning News

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UPDATE: Police have identified the westbound driver as Michael Holmes, 44. Holmes is in critical but stable condition at this time.

FROM EARLIER:

Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police officers responded to a report of a crash near the intersection of Islands Expressway and Causton Harbour Drive, at approximately 9:10 p.m. on June 13.

Both drivers were traveling on Islands Expressway, one eastbound and the other westbound, in their respective lanes. The eastbound driver reportedly attempted to make a U-turn at Causton Harbour Drive, and was struck by the westbound driver, said Cpl. Hillary Nielsen. The westbound car then left the roadway and flipped. The driver was ejected from the car.

The westbound driver sustained life-threatening injuries and is in critical condition at this time. The name of the driver will be released upon notification of next of kin.

The eastbound driver suffered minor injuries.

This investigation is ongoing. At this time, investigators do believe speed to be a factor in this crash.

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UPDATE: Police investigate crash on Islands Expressway - Savannah Morning News

Driver with life-threatening injuries after Islands Expressway crash … – WSAV-TV

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SAVANNAH, Ga. (SCMPD): Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police officers responded to a report of a crash near the intersection of Islands Expressway and Causton Harbour Drive at approximately 9:10 p.m. on June 13.

Both drivers were traveling on Islands Expressway, one eastbound and the other westbound, in their respective lanes.

The eastbound driver reportedly attempted to make a U-turn at Causton Harbour Drive and was struck by the westbound driver. The westbound car then left the roadway and flipped and the driver was ejected from the car.

Michael Holmes,44, driving westbound sustained life-threatening injuries and is in critical, but stable, condition at this time.

The eastbound driver suffered minor injuries. Their name will be released upon next of kin.

The Traffic Investigation Unit (TIU) responded to the scene. This investigation is ongoing. At this time, investigators do believe speed to be a factor in this crash.

Savannah, GA (WSAV) Savannah-Chatham Metro Police tell us Westbound Islands Expressway is closed at Causton Harbour Drive after a 2-car crash.

One victim is suffering from serious injuries right now. Police ask that you seek an alternative route.

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Driver with life-threatening injuries after Islands Expressway crash ... - WSAV-TV

Possible whale sanctuary in the Vestman Islands – IceNews

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The municipality of the Vestman Islands and Merlin Entertainment are looking into the possibility to establish a Whale sanctuary for captive whales by the islands.

Merlin Entertainment supports practical local projects to protect marine wildlife and their habitats, alongside working on conservation campaigns to effect long lasting change on a global scale. According to Eyjar.net, the idea for the sanctuary in the Vestmann Islands revolves around moving three Beluga whales that currently are held captive in a Chinese marine park. Merlin Entertainment bought the park where the Belugas are held. The company is firmly against wild animals performing in captivity and quickly started looking for a way to re introduce the animals into the wild or give them a more humane life in partial captivity under observation. They contacted the municipality of the Vestman Islands who are looking into the possibility of hosting the three whales and opening up a marine education center with conservational emphasis. The project is in its early stages but both the municipality is not apposed to the idea. They are looking into collaborating with parties in marine biology, universities and the tourist industry. One of the goal would be to educate the public about the welfare of marine life and respectfully portray the life story of those three animals and work towards the welfare of the species as a whole as well as for the greater good of captive marine life world wide.

Beluga whale at the Atlanta aquarium. Photo by Greg Hume

The islanders of the Vestman Islands, which are located south of Iceland,are no newbies when it comes to habituated marine life. Keiko the Orca was famously reared back into the wild off the Islands in 1998. Keiko, whose name means lucky one in Japanese was captured on the east coast of Iceland in 1979 and sold around between aquariums until he ended up in Marineland in Ontario where he first started performing for the public and developed skin lesions indicative of poor health. He was then sold to Reino Aventura, an amusement park in Mexico City, in 1985. Keiko was the star of the movie Free Willy in 1993 and in the wake of the film and the publicity afforded to the orca Warner Bros. Studio led an effort to find him a better home as his health, both physically and mentally, was deteriorating in Mexico.

Keiko the Orca and star of the film Free Willy as he swims around in his tank prior to being moved from Newport, Oregon to Westman Islands, Iceland.

In 1998, after much preparations and controversy, he was relocated to a pen just of the Vestman Islands in an effort to re introduce him to the wild. Keiko left his pen in 2001 and migrated to Norway under close observation of a team of caretakers and in 2003 Keiko died just of the shores of Norway. Films and documentaries have been made about the effort and since then there is much more awareness about the treatment of marine life in amusement parks.

(Featured image shows the municipality of the Vestman Islands and its harbor)

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Gut bacteria might one day help slow down aging process – Baylor College of Medicine News (press release)

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Slowing down the aging process might be possible one day with supplements derived from gut bacteria. Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have identified bacterial genes and compounds that extend the life of and also slow down the progression of tumors and the accumulation of amyloid-beta, a compound associated with Alzheimers disease, in the laboratory worm C. elegans. The study appears in the journal Cell.

The scientific community is increasingly aware that our bodys interactions with the millions of microbes in our bodies, the microbiome, can influence many of our functions, such as cognitive and metabolic activities and aging, said corresponding author Dr. Meng Wang, associate professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor and the Huffington Center On Aging. In this work we investigated whether the genetic composition of the microbiome might also be important for longevity.

This question is difficult to explore in mammals due to technical challenges, so the researchers turned to the laboratory worm C. elegans, a transparent, simple organism that is as long as a pinhead and shares essential characteristics with human biology. During its 2 to 3 week long lifespan, the worm feeds on bacteria, develops into an adult, reproduces, and progressively ages, loses strength and health and dies. Many research laboratories around the world, including the Wang lab, work with C. elegans to learn about basic biological processes.

We think that C. elegans is a wonderful system in which to study the connection between bacterial genes and aging because we can very fine tune the genetics of microbes and test many genes in the worm in a relatively short time, Wang said.

Testing thousands of genes, one at a time.

To study the effect of individual bacterial genes on the lifespan of C. elegans, Wang joined efforts with Dr. Christophe Herman, associate professor of molecular and human genetics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor, and other colleagues who are experts in bacterial genetics. They employed a complete gene-deletion library of bacterium E. coli; a collection of E. coli, each lacking one of close to 4,000 genes.

We fed C. elegans each individual mutant bacteria and then looked at the worms life span, Wang said. Of the nearly 4,000 bacterial genes we tested, 29, when deleted, increased the worms lifespan. Twelve of these bacterial mutants also protected the worms from tumor growth and accumulation of amyloid-beta, a characteristic of Alzheimers disease in humans.

Further experiments showed that some of the bacterial mutants increased longevity by acting on some of the worms known processes linked to aging. Other mutants encouraged longevity by over-producing the polysaccharide colanic acid. When the scientists provided purified colanic acid to C. elegans, the worms also lived longer. Colanic acid also showed similar effects in the laboratory fruit fly and in mammalian cells cultured in the lab.

The researchers propose that, based on these results, it might be possible in the future to design preparations of bacteria or their compounds that could help slow down the aging process.

Colanic acid mediates crosstalk between bacteria and mitochondria

Interestingly, the scientists found that colanic acid regulates the fusion-fission dynamics of mitochondria, the structures that provide the energy for the cells functions.

These findings are also interesting and have implications from the biological point of view in the way we understand host-microbe communication, Wang said. Mitochondria seem to have evolved from bacteria that millions of years ago entered primitive cells. Our finding suggests that products from bacteria today can still chime in the communication between mitochondria in our cells. We think that this type of communication is very important and here we have provided the first evidence of this. Fully understanding microbe-mitochondria communication can help us understand at a deeper level the interactions between microbes and their hosts.

Other contributors to this work include Bing Han, Priya Sivaramakrishnan, Chih-Chun J. Lin, Isaiah A.A. Neve, Jingquan He, Li Wei Rachel Tay, Jessica N. Sowa, Antons Sizovs, Guangwei Du and Jin Wang.

Financial support for this project was provided by the National Institutes of Health grants R01AG045183, R01AT009050, DP1DK113644, R01HL119478, R01GM088653, R01GM115622, R01CA207701 and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar Award.

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Gut bacteria might one day help slow down aging process - Baylor College of Medicine News (press release)