Monthly Archives: March 2017

Violence on Facebook Live presents censorship dilemma – CBS News

Posted: March 8, 2017 at 12:46 pm

A person armed with a gun is seen on a live video posted to social media onApril 31, 2016 in Chicago.

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Facebook Live gives people an easy way to broadcast live video, but it has also reportedly given Facebook a real live headache: how to decide when to censor video depicting violent acts.

In the year since its launch, the feature has been used to broadcast at least 50 acts of violence, according to theWall Street Journal, including murder, suicides and abeating of a special-needs teenagerin Chicago earlier this year. One of the problems is that Facebook didnt grasp the gravity of the medium during the planning process for the feature, an unidentified source told the newspaper.

Facebook Live, which lets anyone with a phone and internet connection live-stream video directly to Facebooks 1.8 billion users, has become a centerpiece feature for the social network. In the past few months, everyone from Hamilton cast members to theDonald Trump campaignhas turned to Facebook to broadcast in real time.

Soon, we believe a camera will be the main way to share, instead of the traditional text box, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an earnings conference call last November. We think its pretty clear video is only going to become more important.

But the focus on video has prompted some tough philosophical questions, like what Facebook should and shouldnt show.

In July, a Minnesota woman named Diamond Reynolds used the service tolive-stream her fiance Philando Castileafter he was shot by police. The next day, Facebook Live captured the scene as five Dallaspolice officers were gunned downduring a peaceful demonstration.

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Police are searching for the gunman who fatally shot two people and wounded one more in a Chicago alley. The incident was captured in a Facebook ...

Both the Castile and Dallas videos were initially streamed unedited and uncensored. The Castile video temporarily disappeared from the social network because of a technical glitch, according to Facebook. It was restored later with a warning about its graphic nature.

Zuckerberg addressed this issue last month inan open letter to the Facebook community, conceding that errors in judgment were made.

In the last year, the complexity of the issues weve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community, he wrote, referencing how some newsworthy videos were handled.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared onCNET.com.

2017 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

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Music, censorship and the industry – Quad (subscription)

Posted: at 12:46 pm

Musicwe all love it, in various forms and degrees. Some just enjoy a casual radio buzz in the background, while others need to listen to albums in their entirety to get any pleasure. This broad spectrum has led to a wide variety of music, from introspective concept albums to simple, catchy, so-called radio tunes, crafted to set an upbeat mood and stick in ones head.

Its very easy for these paths to cross. I mean, radios second purpose is to introduce the listener to new, interesting songs and bands that the station thinks they will enjoy, as fans of the stations repertoire.

So its natural that you find, every so often, an unconventional piece of music garnering radio time. No one would say that this is a problem; radio is good for the artist, good for potential fans and good for the already present fans, glad to see their favorite band getting the recognition that they deserve.

The problem, I feel, is when the song is viewed as unpalatable by either the FCC, the radio station or even the record label. With the rise of rap in popular culturea genre founded on the plight of the disenfranchisedas well as a push for artistic integrity and free speech, vulgar language is at its peak in music.

However, radio still finds the need to censor this music. This censorship ranges from the changing of lyrics (Cee Lo Greens claim to fame, Forget You, comes to mind) to the outright removal of words deemed inappropriate (as in the chorus of Starboy, by The Weeknd). This is done for one reason: to sell the song to radio, and to people who feel that foul language is a legitimate sign of immorality.

Those who deem vulgarity to be a negative aspect of music do it for a multitude of reasons, but the two most common appear to be:

While both of these points come from a place of real worry, I do not feel that they are effective arguments for the censorship of music. Lets address each point individually, and then answer the question of censorship as a whole.

Children are the pride of American culture. We view children as fragile tokens of youth and innocence, unable to understand the nuance of humanitys interactions with itself. Thus, we must shelter them from anything that could corrupt that innocence.

In protecting from that corruption, we do things like censor media. However, in the digital age, this censorship does not work as we want it to. Most children have access to the internet, and the idea that they will be able to avoid the uncensored media is laughable.

Censoring radio merely piques the interest of these children, who will then search for the naughty words, sidestepping their parents attempt at protecting them and avoiding any positive dialogue on the use of adult language.

The second issue is a more complex one. Class issues throughout the centuries have led to a demonization of bad language, and is why we as a culture do not feel that it is a proper thing to do.

The problem with this stance, especially in media, is that media defies culture. Rock, punk and rapthese movements started as counterculture, before evolving into fully fleshed out genres that became adopted by the mainstream.

These movements were born out of cultural defiance, taboo behavior and the freedom of expression. Censorship kills this freedom of expression, as well as defanging any relevant criticism that the movement has against the mainstream.

But then, keep the vulgarity out of the mainstream and separate the counterculture from the popular movements, you say. The issue with this is twofold:

There is nothing to gain from separating the subversive elements of a musical movement from its appealing ones, and any attempt to do so should be viewed exclusively as a controlling form of censorship.

Music has become a product. Art for arts sake, while existent, is hard to come by in the mainstream these days. The industry, in fear of losses, allows for the perverted censorship of an art form to be maintained.

Filler does not exist in art. Artists pick lyrics with purpose, to convey emotion, make a point or satirize an establishment. The censorship of these artists takes the power that they have over their own creation away, and reduces them to nothing more than a vessel for public appeal, the antithesis of art as a whole.

Dean Cahill is a first-year student majoring in English literature. He can be reached at [emailprotected]

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Arizona …

Posted: at 12:45 pm

History shows that, if individuals have the freedom to choose what to use as money, they will likely opt for gold or silver. Of course, modern politicians and their Keynesian enablers despise the gold or silver standard. This is because linking a currency to a precious metal limits the ability of central banks to finance the growth of the welfare-warfare state via the inflation tax. This forces politicians to finance big government much more with direct means of taxation.

Despite the hostility toward gold from modern politicians, gold played a role in US monetary policy for sixty years after the creation of the Federal Reserve. Then, in 1971, as concerns over the US governments increasing deficits led many foreign governments to convert their holdings of US dollars to gold, President Nixon closed the gold window, creating Americas first purely fiat currency.

Americas 46-year experiment in fiat currency has gone exactly as followers of the Austrian school predicted: a continuing decline in the dollars purchasing power accompanied by a decline in the standard of living of middle- and working-class Americans, a series of Federal Reserve-created booms followed by increasingly severe busts, and an explosive growth in government spending. Federal Reserve policies are also behind much of the increase in income inequality.

Since the 2008 Fed-created economic meltdown, more Americans have become aware of the Federal Reserve's responsibility for America's economic problems. This growing anti-Fed sentiment is one of the key factors behind the liberty movements growth and represents the most serious challenge to the Fed's legitimacy in its history. This movement has made Audit the Fed into a major national issue that is now closer than ever to being signed into law.

Audit the Fed is not the only focus of the growing anti-Fed movement. For example, this Wednesday the Arizona Senate Finance and Rules Committees will consider legislation (HB 2014) officially defining gold, silver, and other precious metals as legal tender. The bill also exempts transactions in precious metals from state capital gains taxes, thus ensuring that people are not punished by the taxman for rejecting Federal Reserve notes in favor of gold or silver. Since inflation increases the value of precious metals, these taxes give the government one more way to profit from the Federal Reserves currency debasement.

HB 2014 is a very important and timely piece of legislation. The Federal Reserves failure to reignite the economy with record-low interest rates since the last crash is a sign that we may soon see the dollars collapse. It is therefore imperative that the law protect peoples right to use alternatives to what may soon be virtually worthless Federal Reserve notes.

Passage of HB 2014 would also send a message to Congress and the Trump administration that the anti-Fed movement is growing in influence. Thus, passage of this bill will not just strengthen movements in other states to pass similar legislation; it will also help build support for the Audit the Fed bill and legislation repealing federal legal tender laws.

This Wednesday I will be in Arizona to help rally support for HB 2014, speaking on behalf of the bill before the Arizona Senate Finance Committee at 9:00 a.m. I will also be speaking at a rally at noon at the Arizona state capitol. I hope every supporter of sound money in the Phoenix area joins me to show their support for ending the Feds money monopoly.

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Trump’s ‘libertarianism’ endangers the public – CNN

Posted: at 12:45 pm

President Trump's recent executive order, titled "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost," speaks the language of the principled libertarians, but its beneficiaries are likely to be the thugs.

The order prohibits any agency from issuing any new regulation unless it also repeals two regulations that cost as much as the new one. "Costs" mean the cost of complying with the regulation. The harms that were the reason for the regulation don't count at all.

David Dana and Michael Barsa observe the implications of Trump's order. The Department of Interior created a set of new regulations in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which BP spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, and, Dana and Barsa wrote, it cost "nearly $9 billion for lost fisheries and $23 billion for lost tourism, not to mention the catastrophic effects on marine life and birds. Yet under the president's order, the only costs that matter are those to the oil companies. Costs to the public and to the environment are completely ignored." The regulations aren't cheap; the cost to the industry has been estimated at hundreds of millions. But that's peanuts compared to the costs of another spill.

Trump is a big fan of Ayn Rand. Like her fictional hero John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged," he wants to free business from the heavy hand of government. But this is an oddly distorted libertarianism, in which Rand's villains masquerade as her heroes: those who talk most of liberty are the looters and moochers.

Conservatives worry about "regulatory capture": the danger that regulators will abandon the public interest at the behest of regulated industries, keeping prices high and stifling competition. The solution is to get rid of regulation: the state should butt out and let the market operate. There's no doubt that capture has sometimes happened. A notorious example is the Civil Aeronautics Board: after it was abolished in 1985, airline competition intensified and prices plunged.

There is, however, another way in which unworthy special interests can seize control of government. They can work to cripple regulation, so that they can hurt and defraud people. Libertarian rhetoric has turned out to be a rich resource for them.

Barack Obama is actually a better libertarian than Trump. He spent years teaching at the University of Chicago, where the idea of regulatory capture was developed. That had an impact: when he was President, he demanded (following a principle laid down by Ronald Reagan!) that any new regulations survive rigorous cost-benefit analysis. That immunizes regulations from capture, and makes sure that regulators take account of just what worries Trump, the cost to businesses. The overall net value -- benefits minus costs -- of Obama's regulations was upward of $100 billion.

Trump, on the other hand, has replaced cost-benefit analysis with cost analysis. Benefits are ignored. This isn't even business-friendly. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill destroyed hundreds of well-functioning businesses. On the other hand, the businesses that were crushed were small and had nothing like BP's political connections.

There's room for reasonable disagreement with Obama's regulations. The calculation of both costs and benefits inevitably involves some guesswork. The cumulative effect of regulation can hamper businesses. The big difference between Trump and the standard conservatives' critique of Obama is that Trump's executive order holds, as a matter of principle, that benefits don't matter. Consumer fraud, tainted food, pollution, unsafe airplanes and trains, epidemic disease all have to be put up with, if stopping them would increase the costs of regulation.

Trump's new "regulatory reforms" show a persistent pattern. One targets a rule that requires retirement advisers to put clients' interests ahead of their own. Conflicts of interest in retirement advice, for example steering clients into products with higher fees and lower returns, costs American families an estimated $17 billion a year. You can understand why some parts of the financial industry hated the rule. That $17 billion was going into someone's pocket, and that someone finds libertarian rhetoric right handy.

The Libertarian Party, which got more than 4 million votes in the last presidential election, is enthusiastic about the order. It shouldn't be. The order is a deep betrayal of libertarianism, which holds that people should do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Freeing businesses to hurt people is not libertarian. The libertarians -- at least, the ones who don't see through Trump -- are being played. If the crippling of the state allows economic behemoths to do whatever they like to others, then what libertarianism licenses, in the garb of liberty, is the creation of a new aristocracy, entitled to hurt the commoners. This is just a different kind of mooching and looting.

It is a new road to serfdom. It reinforces the prejudices of those on the left who repudiate capitalism. The libertarians who embrace it, thinking that they are thereby promoting freedom, are useful idiots, like the idealistic leftists of the 1930s whose hatred of poverty and racism led them to embrace Stalin. John Galt is a sap.

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Could This Transhumanist Be the next Governor of California? – Big Think

Posted: at 12:44 pm

Its a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an 'outsider' role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, hes making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

As a libertarian, Istvan believes in promoting maximum freedom and personal accountability, a sentiment that gels well with his championing of human enhancement technologiesand robot and cyborg rights.

Like all transhumanists, Istvan believes in using science and technology to enhance human capabilities and transcend current biological limits. He wants to be smarter, live longer, and eventually merge with advanced technologies to become a posthuman beingone that is impervious, or at least resilient, to aging, and most mortal risks.

jason-silva-on-transhumanism

All Aboard the Immortality Bus

The primary role of transhumanist politicians and parties at present is not to win elections, but to spread awareness and garner political clout. Istvan acknowledges this, and he plays the role well.

When running for president in 2016, he drove around the country in a coffin-shaped Immortality Bus spreading the word that death should be conquered. He got a lot of media attention and helped to generate awareness about transhumanist ideas and technologies. He also seemed to be the only candidate actively desiring to be superseded. Eventually, Istvan hopes that an artificial intelligence will become president, as he thinks it will do a better job.

In 2017, the political newcomer set his sights on a smaller goal: California. He also made the pragmatic decision to switch to the Libertarian Party, which has a larger support base than his own Transhumanist Party. But Istvan hasnt abandoned transhumanism. Many transhumanists are libertarians, or have libertarian sympathies, and Istvan believes that he can promote libertarian and transhumanist interests in tandem.

Henotably opposes federal regulations that could hamper the development of advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and gene editing, which have many marketable applications, from driverless cars, to the broad and growing field of personalized medicine. These industries are big in California, and Istvan believes they will be instrumental in promoting economic growth.

But what if robots end up taking all the jobs? As a left-leaning libertarian, Istvan thinks that some form of basic income will eventually be necessary to solve this problem.

The gubernatorial candidate is also a passionate defender of the joint transhumanist-libertarian view that the individual should have the right to choose what they do with their own body. The principle ofmorphological freedom,as its called in transhumanist circles, includes basic forms of DIY biohacking (Istvan has an RFID chip implanted in his wrist, which opens his front door)and extends to much more ambitious forms of body modification, like gene therapy, and other biomedical interventions that could stop or reverse aging, enhance physical and cognitive prowess, and even delay death.

Like many transhumanists, Istvan is also adamant that the government needs to classify aging as a disease. He views the fight against aging and death as a (trans)human rights issue, a stance he explained in a 2017 interview:

My entire goal, and one of the things I'm standing behind is that we all have a universal right to indefinite lifespans. That's something I can promise you in the 21st century will become one of the most important civil and ideological rights of humanity. That everybody has a right to live indefinitely.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Apparently, quite a few people. Billions of dollars are being spent by tech corporations and entrepreneurs to unlock the secrets of human biology, reverse aging, and cure disease. Googles Calico Labs, a $1.5 billion initiative,focus purely on anti-aging and life-extension research, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan havepledged $3 billionto cure all diseases by the end of the century.

PayPal co-founder and prominent libertarian transhumanist Peter Thiel is another keen investor in life-extension initiatives. He famously expressed interest in"parabiosis"an experimental procedure in which individuals over 35 receive blood transfusions from those under 25 in the hope of experiencing regenerative effects. Thiel hassaid of death:

You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has also donated in excess of $430million to anti-aging research, and is similarly outspoken about the tragedy of death:

Death has never made any sense to me Death makes me angry. Premature death makes me angrier still.

But the question remains, is life-extension actually possible? Biogerontologist and co-founder of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence (SENS) Foundation, Aubrey de Grey, thinks so.

aubrey-de-greys-plan-to-stop-aging

De Grey believes that aging, and age-related diseases should be thought of as the various types of molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself as a side effect of its normal metabolic operation. De Greys research focuses on figuring out how to repair that damage and prevent it from developing into a pathology of old age.

Other scientists, like the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, and the Harvard geneticist George Church are also optimistic that cheap genomic sequencing, gene-editing techniques like CRISPR-Cas9, and the explosion of genetic and lifestyle data will help us to unlock and reverse the biological mechanisms of aging in the near future.

Is Life Extension Ethical?

Of course there aremanywho think that living indefinitely is infeasible, or just plain wrong. Like the Jewish historian Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, whobelieves that death gives life meaning and that without it we would be less human. She also wonders: What will people live for, if they live indefinitely? and notes that in the Jewish tradition:

The ideal of indefinite postponement of death is the highest form of human hubris, one more example of human rebellion against God who created humans as finite beings whose life narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Other common concernsare population growth, resource scarcity, the fear that the old will refuse to make way for the young, and the worry that only the rich will benefit.

In a more philosophical vein, the American astronomerSeth Shostakhas mused that if we radically extend our lives but remain biological we could become ultra risk averse and avoid doing everyday things like getting into a car. With so much potential ahead of us, even a small probability of dying would seem unacceptable.

Yet when it comes to upgrading the human condition, Istvan thinks we should go for broke. When asked what he thought about a posthuman future he declared:

Oh I'm totally embracing it! I have called for the end of humanity as we know it. The reality is that I think the human body is frail. I don't want to say the human body is evil, but I don't like it. I'm not a fan of the human body. I think it's something that is designed to be replaced and replaced as quickly as possible.

He makes a bold statement. And, like any politician, he argues (in line with Aubrey de Grey) that it will be good for the economy.

the-economics-of-immortality

But just how open minded is California? It's previously embracedthe Governator, butifIstvan were elected it could end up with a real-life cyborga human who gets upgraded to be more like a machine. For his part, Zoltan Istvan thinks that this is exactly what California, and humanity, needs.

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The human toll of suicide bombings in Afghanistan – Washington Post

Posted: at 12:43 pm


Washington Post
The human toll of suicide bombings in Afghanistan
Washington Post
Such shocking acts of violence are hard to visualize in remote locations whether at a desert police post or on a snow-covered highway. Often there are few witnesses and no television coverage; the victims remain nameless and faceless. But when ...

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A human pinball in a germ warfare experiment – Varsity Online

Posted: March 7, 2017 at 10:53 pm

Alex Nicol reminisces about his first time in a club

To prink (verb): The art of pre-drinking at a friend's house in order to save money on a night out.

Got it. Definitely a better idea to look that up on Urban Dictionary than out myself as that one guy in college whod never been clubbing before. Coming from a rural backwater where the average (usually retired) resident takes walks in muddy fields for excitement, the closest Id ever got to a club was an overcrowded pub. But come my second night at Cambridge, I was determined to give it a go. I felt Id kind of be failing Freshers Week if I didnt. I was going to be a normal teenager with a vengeance.

So I zeroed in on the hyperactive hum of human voices leaking through the walls of one of the rooms just down the corridor from mine. This was it, then: the prinking arena. And I was its biggest lightweight. As I sipped timidly on my tame 3.5 per cent beer, the professionals were steadily downing their vodka shots, stoically seeing off anything that came before them. For a few brief moments, their facial muscles would squirm, wriggle and ripple in what could have been a guilty betrayal of pain. Then they settled, gracefully recovering their composure. These were the hardened veterans of the big cities, reflecting only the slightest glint of weakness before they reached towards the next shot with a steely resolution that, I have to admit, was kind of impressive. Maybe Urban Dictionary was right this was a weird kind of art form in its own way.

I was confronted with something that looked like a nuclear bunker and smelt like a germ warfare experiment.

They were really nice people, I soon learned. One of them even offered me one of the Frankenstein cocktails he had concocted for himself. If it wasnt for the way each individual droplet grated the inside of my throat like a molecular razor, it probably would have tasted decent. Did I want another? My tongue would only clumsily splutter a few garbled syllables before it let me choke out what I hoped was a polite refusal. Fair enough, no problem. We were all about to make a move towards the actual club in a minute anyway.

Soon enough, we were lined up outside this so-called Life. Well, sort of lined up. Whoever said that the British were good at queuing had clearly only visited Waterstones in daytime. But wed stood our ground in the scrum for a good three quarters of an hour, so whatever was in there had to be good, surely.

It was actually a bit of an anti-climax. I was confronted with something that looked like a nuclear bunker and smelt like a germ warfare experiment. As I got knocked around the room like a human pinball, I couldnt help wondering whether Id basically just paid 4 to spend the night in the London underground, stuck in some kind of time loop of the rush hour. As for the music, the only other place Id heard that kind of electronic diarrhoea was probably in one of those old-fashioned arcades you still sometimes get outside bowling alleys. It was like someone had taken all the sound effects from Mario Kart and mashed them all together as a joke. Then the Lion King theme started playing, which I decided actually had to be a joke. That was genuinely quite funny. What I wasnt so amused by was some random, sweaty six-footer deciding to use my collarbone as a pivot to pump himself up and down to the beat like a piston. That was when it clicked. You dont go to the party to get smashed, you get smashed because youre at the party.

Even the margarita maestro whod offered me one of his cocktails earlier was flagging. Im so not drunk enough for this, mate, he informed me. What, like not having enough anaesthetic before an operation? For anyone as luridly lucid as I was, this was getting a bit much. It certainly was for at least one of the other freshers, her gaze surreptitiously flickering towards the exit. We skulked towards it and, with a few others in our wake, slipped out into the open air.

How to make sense of (almost) everything: why is Cambridge clubbing so expensive, sweaty and beloved?

A colourful cast of characters emerged: a surfer apparently suffering from Tourettes syndrome with the word dude, a self-proclaimed magician and a Polish Anglophile who was fascinated to know exactly what I thought about Radio 4, for some reason. Chatting, laughing, and joking as we drifted back home, the fact that we would have had nothing to do with each other in any normal situation didnt matter. The very fact that it wasnt normal was, I began to feel, what made it special.

So that was it: the rite of passage. I had finally been initiated into that teenage twilight: floating between freedom and responsibility, opportunities and commitments, childhood and adulthood. Its a psychological limbo which doesnt offer its travellers much to hold on to save each other. Maybe thats why, when I eventually returned home, I found myself missing that soothing buzz of chattering voices filtering through to my room. There was that reassurance that, just a few paces away from you, there was a hive of human activity where anyone, even someone as classically uncool as me, was always welcome. I think Ill miss it more when weve all finally grown up for good.

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Dalai Lama Interview Fuels New Fire in China-Tibet Spat – Foreign Policy (blog)

Posted: at 10:53 pm

The Chinese Foreign Ministry traded a new round of barbs with the Dalai Lama over the Tibetan spiritual leaders interview with U.S.-based comedian John Oliver.

The Dalai Lama said hard-line Chinese officials have parts of their brains missing in an interview with Oliver for his HBO show, Last Week Tonight. The Dalai Lama also reiterated he could be the last Dalai Lama in line, ending the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual succession process that the Chinese government worked to supplant.

In his interview with Oliver, the Dalai Lama said in broken English that Chinas plan is a foolish act shortsighted, without using human brain properly. He added common sense was missing from the brains of Chinese officials. The Chinese hard-liners, in their brain, that part of [the brain] is missing, he told Oliver.

You can watch the full segment of Olivers interview with the Dalai Lama, which aired Sunday, here:

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government wasnt too thrilled with his remarks. So on Tuesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry fired back. The Dalai Lamas comments in the interview perhaps appeared humorous and funny, but these words are all lies that do not accord with the facts, said foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang.

We often say that the 14th Dalai Lama is a political exile who wears religious clothing to engage in anti-China separatist activities, Geng added. Now it seems he is an actor, who is very good at performing, and very deceptively.

By tradition, the Dalai Lama chooses another religious figure, the Panchen Lama, to select his spiritual successor. Tibetan Buddhists believe the Dalai Lamas soul is reincarnated in the body of a young boy upon his death.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama selected a six-year-old boy to be his Panchen Lama. Three days later, the boy and his family were kidnapped by the Chinese government. The Chinese government then chose another six-year-old as their own replacement, supplanting the Dalai Lamas reincarnation. The boy the Dalai Lama chose hasnt been seen or heard from in the 22 years since his kidnapping.

In 2014, the Dalai Lama suggested he could be the last one, prompting outrage from China, which said ending the reincarnation line betrayed and disrespected Tibetan Buddhism. One Chinese government official said the Dalai Lama was a wolf wrapped in monks robes.

The Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, fled to India in 1959 after a failed Tibetan revolt against Chinese rule. He pushed for full Tibetan independence from China for decades amid harsh crackdowns from Beijing, but has since walked back his stance to autonomy under Chinese rule. Nearly 150 Tibetans have self-immolated to protest heavy-handed Chinese government oppression in the past eight years, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. The spat comes amid an annual meeting of Chinas political elite to hash out new policies and pass legislation. Tibets delegation to the annual meeting is expected to hold a news conference on the Tibet-China dispute this week.

Photo credit:SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images

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Letter to the Editor: Not in my name – Kentwired

Posted: at 10:53 pm

As a Jewish student, I have to raise an objection to the equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and attempts to quiet criticism of Israel.

A resolution by Undergraduate Student Government (USG) has recently been put forth to brand anti-Israel and anti-Zionist as speech anti-Semitic, serving as a blatant means of silencing a portion of the population speaking out on issues relating to Palestinian rights. While its expected that the anti-Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) language will be removed, it is troubling that this effort to silence free speech received any legitimacy at all.

The state of Israel is well known for its oppression of the Palestinian people by various means. These include, but are by no means limited to: depriving their communities in the West Bank of natural resources, such as water and land, destroying the homes of innocent people, establishing illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the unlawful detainment of children.

This is what organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine are fighting against. No other organization on campus is explicitly dedicated to Palestinian rights.

To equate criticism of oppression with the acts of hatred that have occurred at Kent State, such as the painting of a swastika on the Rock on Front Campus, is blatantly ignorant of the nature of the BDS movement as well as the Jewish community as a whole. Over half of Jews under the age of 30 are critical of the politics of Israel, and organizations like the Jewish Voice for Peace are dedicated to raising awareness about the plight faced by Palestinians living in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Attempts within our government and our university to silence criticism of Israel by branding it anti-Semitic must be put to a stop.Per the U.S. Department of State, Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

This can occur on and off campus and has but the rhetoric used by the BDS movement and Students for Justice in Palestine does not fit this definition. This is about human rights, not anti-Semitism.

If a government is built for one people and allows for the subjugation of another, it is impossible for an equal society to exist. There are millions of Palestinians that are ultimately under Israeli rule, all without voting rights or representation. Millions of homes are destroyed, cities walled off, and the right to movement restricted by checkpoints and segregated roads.

I am a Jew, and I cannot remain silent on issues of oppression, especially when theyre done by other Jews in my name. I urge Jewish students in particular to not run from discussions of Israel that make them uncomfortable.

While we may be uncomfortable, families are being torn apart and being forced to live in miserable conditions in the name of a Jewish state.

Im Willemina Davidson, and I say, Not in my name.

Willemina Davidson is a guest columnist, contact her at wdavids3@kent.edu.

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Letter to the Editor: Not in my name - Kentwired

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Trump Signals That He Wants to Restart the War on Drugs – TheStranger.com

Posted: at 10:52 pm

Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction? george pfromm

Richard Nixon and Ronald and Nancy Reagan would be watching this White House with a smug sense of satisfaction. Not because of President Donald Trump's coziness with Russia, or his cavalier attitude about sexual assault, but because of the Trump administration's views on drugs and criminal justice. It's hard not to imagine all these old white people in a chorus line together celebrating locking people up for using cannabis.

Trump has not spoken explicitly about cannabis policy since he took office in January, but he told a joint session of Congress last week that "drugs" are "poisoning our youth." His administration has shaken the confidence of the legal weed industry with statements suggesting punitive action toward recreational weed. White House press secretary Sean "Spicy" Spicer told reporters two weeks ago that the Trump administration saw medical marijuana as a "very, very different subject" than recreational marijuana. Subsequently, he said the Department of Justice would start a "greater enforcement" of existing federal cannabis laws. Asked for specifics, Spicer referred reporters to the Department of Justice.

The head of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, spent his first two weeks as the nation's top law-enforcement official expressing an interest in restarting the war on drugs. He has reportedly told some senators in private that he won't crack down on legal weed, but his on-the-record statements have been consistently threatening toward states with recreational cannabis. He told attorneys general from around the country last week that he found it "troubling" that from 2010 to 2015, federal drug prosecutions declined by 18 percent. He promised that "under my leadership at the Department of Justice, this trend will end." He also said last week that "experts are telling me that there's more violence around marijuana than one would think" and that he was "definitely not a fan of expanded use of marijuana."

Let's be clear here: "Greater enforcement" of federal drug policy and a resurgent war on drugs means locking people up for drug use, including weed use. While states like Washington have spent the last two decades slowly relaxing weed laws, the Trump administration's views on weed have not advanced passed the Reagan era. Current federal law has a 15-day mandatory minimum jail sentence for someone convicted of their second misdemeanor possession charge. Get convicted of having one gram of cannabis twice, and a federal judge is forced to send you to jail for at least 15 days.

The effects of such policies, which Sessions praises with a small smile and his Southern drawl, are well documented. From 1980 to 2008, the US prison population quadrupledit went from about 500,000 inmates to 2.3 million. Our country's incarceration rate is not only the highest in the world, it's a statistical anomaly. We imprison people at five times the world's average incarceration rate, and African Americans are jailed at nearly six times the rates of whites. A study in 2012 showed that black people in Washington State use less marijuana than white people and yet are arrested for marijuana at 2.9 times the rate of white people.

There are still 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions and 10,765 felony cannabis convictions in the Washington State Patrol's database, according to records obtained by The Stranger.

Almost 30 years after Reagan left office, we are only just starting to dismantle the racist drug policy system's legacy. President Barack Obama's administration worked at the federal level to reduce drug chargeshence that drop in drug prosecutions that terrifies Sessionsand Washington State's passage of I-502 legalizing weed in Washington in 2012 certainly helped, eliminating future weed arrests in this state. But it did nothing to address the decades of harm caused by our state's cannabis laws of the past.

Some Washington State lawmakers are trying to change that, and they introduced a bill this year to make it easy for anyone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession conviction to clear their record of that crime. After all, misdemeanor possession is no longer against state law. Oregon passed a similar law two years ago, but Washington's version has an uphill fight in Olympia.

While the federal government appears emboldened by the idea of locking more people up for using cannabis, it's worth wondering: Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction?

***

Washington State governor Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson have put themselves on the national stage in their opposition to Trump's agenda. Their lawsuit against Trump's ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries effectively knocked out the president's executive order after it prevailed in US District Court and Appeals Court.

Inslee and Ferguson are also fighting to preserve local laws when it comes to cannabis. They sent the Trump administration a letter in February making the case for our state's legal pot industry. Within hours of Spicer's threat of "greater enforcement" of federal cannabis laws, Ferguson issued a statement vowing to "use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the federal government does not undermine Washington's successful, unified system for regulating recreational and medical marijuana." That's a strong statement from an attorney with a 20 record against the Trump administration, but the only problem is, this time the law is not on Ferguson's side.

If Sessions or Trump wanted to start enforcing federal weed laws today, they could immediately start charging the cannabis industry's growers, retailers, budtenders, bankers, accountants, and casual smokers with federal crimes.

US representative Adam Smith, who represents parts of Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma, said that fact is worrying. "In the plain language of the law, if the federal government wants to come in and start busting marijuana shops, we are somewhat at their mercy," he said. "And that is very, very concerning."

Obama's Department of Justice issued the Cole Memo and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a guidance, both aimed at placating nerves in the legal weed industry. The Cole Memo, signed by US deputy attorney general James Cole, told states with legal weed that the federal government would adopt a hands-off approach to federal cannabis laws if states followed a few guiding principles, namely keeping weed out of the hands of kids and profits away from organized crime. The FinCEN guidance, issued by the Department of Treasury, told the banking industry that banks would not be prosecuted for money laundering if they opened accounts with cannabis businesses, as long as those businesses were compliant with the Cole Memo.

But those are guidance memos, not laws. They establish no legal precedent and can be rescinded at any time by the current administration.

Sam Mendez, the former executive director of the University of Washington's Cannabis Law and Policy Project, said it would only take a simple injunction, a legal order to cease activity sent from Sessions to Washington State, to shut down the I-502 industry.

"They could just shut it down by legal means. This is an industry and state regulatory system that at its fundamental level is based on an illegality," Mendez said. "So that's their legal mechanism right there."

There is one law protecting medical cannabis businesses from federal action. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment to the federal budget bars the Department of Justice from spending any money investigating medical cannabis businesses, but a 2016 federal court ruling narrowed the protections of that amendment to strictly medical transactions. It's unclear whether it would apply to Washington's pot industry, where the medical and recreational systems have been combined into one.

"The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment doesn't offer much help to most 502-licensed businesses because few of those businesses are likely to be limiting their sales to medical purposes," said Alison Holcomb, the former ACLU attorney who wrote the text of the I-502 law. "As long as a business is selling cannabis to a person using it for nonmedical purposes, it is fair game for a DEA investigation."

Trump has the law behind him if he cracks down on legal pot, but there are still daunting challenges standing between Trump and a wholesale attack on our legal weed system. To start, weed has never been more popular in America than it is right now. A recent poll found that 71 percent of Americans think Trump should not go after states that have legalized cannabis, and 93 percent of Americans support medical cannabis laws.

Since Trump is already on the line to deliver an unpopular border wall and repeal an increasingly popular health-care law, most people don't see this as a fight he would want to pick.

"It's hard to predict what Trump does around politics and policies given how inexperienced he is, but we do know that he cares a lot about public image and public opinion. This is not going to be something that is going to look very good," Mendez said.

And weed's popularity has generated a huge industry around it. There are thousands of pot farms and pot retailers operating in the 28 states where weed has been either recreationally or medically legalized, and prosecuting that many individuals and firms would require an immense number of lawyers and law-enforcement personnel. The federal government relies heavily on local law enforcement to carry out drug-enforcement raids, but because cannabis is legal under state law, local cops can't be used to shut down the industry.

"Think of how many hundreds or even thousands of businesses are out there operating. If they were going to go after all of those businesses, that would take thousands of pages of paperwork," Mendez said.

It would be much easier for Sessions to investigate individual businesses that he believes have violated the parameters of the Cole Memo. Aaron Pickus, a spokesperson for the Washington CannaBusiness Association, said the trade group is advising its members to closely follow the state's laws.

"Right now, we are emphasizing how important it is to make sure you are following the rules as set by Washington State," Pickus said. "Make sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's and following best practices to make sure that minors aren't getting into your store."

Individual enforcement against certain businesses would be better than wholesale destruction of the industry, but the Department of Justice would still be picking a fight with some well-connected individuals. In this War on Drugs II, the dealers aren't marginalized people operating in the shadowsthey are mostly white, male, wealthy businesspeople. It's probably easier for Sessions to lock up a poor person who doesn't look like him than to lock up a bunch of rich guys with millions in their bank accounts. And Congress, never one to miss out on a wealthy constituency, recently created the nation's first Congressional Cannabis Caucus to stand up for common-sense weed laws.

Plus, if state leaders and industry leaders and weed's powerful allies in Congress can't team up to scare Sessions away from touching our legal pot, our state could push the button on the so-called "nuclear option." As we previously described in The Stranger, we could technically erase any mention of marijuana from our state's laws, effectively legalizing and deregulating pot, and giving Trump a huge nightmare when it comes to keeping drugs away from kids and cartels.

That's all to say, it's unclear what will happen. The path forward for Trump shutting down legal weed is as clear as Spicer's response to a follow-up question on what he meant about "greater enforcement" of cannabis laws. He said, and I quote: "No, no. I know. I know what II thinkthen that's what I said. But I think the Department of Justice is the lead on that."

Got that?

He added, "I believe that they are going to continue to enforce the laws on the books with respect to recreational marijuana."

***

If you ask Holcomb, who is often called the architect of I-502 because she wrote the successful initiative, why we need legal weed, she will point to one issue.

"The point of I-502 was to stop arresting people for using marijuana," Holcomb said. "And I-502 was the right vehicle at that time to move us in that direction, and depending on what happens now, we may have to move in an entirely new direction. But the North Star is the same North Star: Don't arrest people... because they use marijuana or grow it and want to share it with others."

Thanks to Holcomb's initiative, the state has spent the last five years doing exactly that: not arresting people for cannabis crimes. But bad laws take a long time to stop affecting people. Punitive Reagan-era laws still haunt people who were caught in the war on drugs dragnet, and I-502 was a proactive law, meaning it did not address any of the thousands of people who were previously charged with cannabis crimes. As for those 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions mentioned earlier, the ones still in the Washington State Patrol's database, each one of those drug convictions continues to haunt the people carrying them, according to Mark Cooke, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington.

"Criminal conviction records allow others to discriminate against that individual in different contexts, including employment, housing, and education," Cooke said.

It may seem like in this modern, weed-friendly world, a misdemeanor possession charge doesn't mean much, but that is not the case. The types of background checks that many employers or landlords use lack specificity. Applications often ask if you have been convicted of any drug charges, according to Prachi Dave, another attorney for ACLU-WA.

"Frequently the question is 'Do you have any drug related activity convictions?' So a prior marijuana conviction could certainly fall into that category, which means a lot of people could be excluded from housing or employment," Dave said.

Someone carrying a misdemeanor possession charge can ask a court to clear their record, but there are a number of different reasons a judge could deny that request. Representative Joe Fitzgibbon, who represents West Seattle and Vashon Island in the state legislature, wants to change that. He introduced a bill in Olympia this year that would require courts to automatically expunge a person's misdemeanor marijuana conviction upon request.

"Currently, there are a bunch of caveats, but even if they meet all of the caveats, the judge can still say no," Fitzgibbon said. "The bill would make it much easier for someone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession to vacate their record."

Oregon passed a similar law in 2015, but Fitzgibbon's bill failed to make it out of committee in Olympia this year. He's introduced a version of this bill every year since 2012, when voters legalized adult possession of cannabis here. The current bill won't get another chance until next year.

Fitzgibbon said he will keep fighting for the law. "I think it's about fairness and about second chances. The voters of the state very clearly said that they didn't think possession of marijuana should be a crime," Fitzgibbon said.

Kevin Oliver, executive director of the Washington chapter of NORML, said his organization plans to step up its lobbying for the bill. "We have a lobbyist on the ground full time, our new PAC is raising money and we're going to start throwing it at these legislators, and I think that might make a difference," Oliver said.

If they act quickly, they might be able to clean up the beach before this second war on drugs sweeps in.

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Trump Signals That He Wants to Restart the War on Drugs - TheStranger.com

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