Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

High air temperatures are unbearable for workers who do outdoor work. According to the scenes from the construction site, employers do not care about employees who can put themselves in a life-threatening condition by stayingon hot concrete for a long period.

Construction sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH)are often places where violations of regulations are visible, and itis evident even these dayswhen air temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius.

Health workers have long warned that much more attention should be paid to this profile of BiHworkers, primarily by adjusting working conditions and shortening working hours, but many employers obviously do not care about their health.

Few constructionsites are currently active in the Tuzla area, and visibly exhausted from the heat, workers are unlikely to talk to reporters.However, on the hot concrete, through a conversation with one of the builders, journalists found outthat these days are unbearable for his team.

It is difficult, sincewe are in the sun all day, but a person gets used to absolutely everything. The sun, heat, winter,and snow are what accompany our work. The job needs to be done, and we are required to meet deadlines. You know it yourself, this is the situationin BiH, work is very important for all of us in order to feed our family, pay off the loan installment, the interlocutor pointedout.

At the beginning of July, the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Policy issued a recommendation to employers on the implementation of measures for protection against high temperatures, while the unions proposed the abolition of working hours in the hottestpart of the day, which meansfrom 12p.m. to 4 p.m. But, for employers, it is not worth the paper it is written on.

Inspections have themost importantrolein this whole storybecause they would contribute the most to compliance with all existing regulations. However, it is obvious that they do not make enough effort to change the current situation. They must act more repressivelybecause without that improvements intheconstructionfield and implementation ofmore humane working conditions,will certainly not bepossible, Skamo emphasized.

As it was confirmed, fortunately, inhumane working conditions to date in Tuzla and Sarajevo Canton have not resulted in heatstroke and other threatening conditions when it comes toconstruction and workers in other industries, which are forcedtowork outdoors.

Contrary to the recommendations of the federal ministry, the newFederation of BiH (FBiH)Law on Occupational Safety is good for the union on paper, but it needs to be put into practice in order to reduce injuries and deaths intheconstruction field.

This could follow only at the end of this yearbecauseemployers haveadeadlineuntil November this year to adjust the regulations and acts intheircompanies, Klix.ba writes.

E.Dz.

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Difficult Conditions for Construction Workers in BiH: Work has to be done, no one thinks about Health - Sarajevo Times

(Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

At only a few American colleges and universities will students not encounter some degree of leftist indoctrination from faculty and administrators who think it their mission to breed new change agents. Of course, it doesnt always work many students tune out the politics and concentrate on their studies (or just on college fun). But at the margin, the drumbeat of leftist propaganda has an impact. Some students who were previously middle-of-the-road are drawn into the orbit of statism and some who were already in that orbit are turned into ferocious Social Justice Warriors.

Still, this state of affairs is deplorable. What can be done?

In todays Martin Center article, Anthony Hennen surveys the landscape of ideas for saving American higher education, or at least saving students from it.

We could create new colleges and universities, and attempt to protect them against hostile incursions by leftists who can never leave anything alone. We could provide more funding and moral support for promising grad students who might eventually enter the teaching ranks. We could support non-leftist programs on our campuses and start new ones. Alumni who are unhappy about the leftward drift of their schools can complain and, more significantly, stop giving money. We can pressure state legislatures to use the power of the purse to cut funding for schools that allow politics to dominate. We could encourage students to forego college in favor of getting on with their lives.

Hennen sums up: For all the college reform ideas (aside from the moonshot of abolition), theres a guiding light: Change happens locally. It starts with making connections with young people, like-minded reformers, and community leaders. Higher ed is too sprawling, decentralized, and diverse for one approach alone to renew the academy. What will be key is building public support and taking initiative to right the current wrongs.

There is no one answer, but people who care about the politicization of higher education have a lot of options in battling it.

Link:

Numerous Strategies for Countering the Leftism of Higher Ed - National Review

A conversation with Claire-Louise Bennett is a dizzying experience: one minute as rowdy as a fairground, the next more like a reflective walk through woodland. She laughs a lot, and raucously, to the point where the ends of her sentences often disappear; and then she might pause for long enough for you to wonder whether the Zoom connection has failed. Our chat extends, but is not limited to, Beckett, suitable paint colours for bedrooms, the abolition of the monarchy, Heidegger, why theatre would be better in the morning than the evening, avant-garde writers Ann Quin and Annie Ernaux, writing on the dole and the difficulty of finding summer reading (You cant be reading Gombrowicz all the time).

Oh, and banana bread, on which I intuit that Bennett had no fixed opinions until everyone started talking about it: Im not making any fucking banana bread ever now, she says. Youve ruined it for me. She isnt opposed, though, to lockdown pastimes, at one point brandishing a terracotta pot that she has painted to look like a lion: probably not very sophisticated, but I enjoyed it immensely.

But her main achievement during the pandemic is Checkout 19, a fantastically various novel consisting of seven sections in which we loosely follow a narrator sometimes an I, sometimes a we, at different ages and in different places through an intricate collage of ideas, sensations and emotions. It runs to 224 pages, but at times feels like dozens of interwoven and overlapping stories. Included in them are a deep dive into the secret world of reading (The books looked back at us and something inside of us stirred) that juxtaposes EM Forster with Anas Nin, Clarice Lispector with Sidney Sheldon; the fable-like story of a man named Tarquin Superbus, a sort of aristocratic dilettante from an unspecified previous era who conjures up images of commedia dellarte, Shakespeares Malvolio and a figure from a Goya painting; and the story of a woman from her schooldays to an ambivalent, rootless adulthood.

Checkout 19 follows Bennetts acclaimed 2015 book of short stories, Pond, which presented the reader with 20 vignettes of a solitary womans life in a coastal town in Ireland (Bennett herself lives in Galway, and emigrated from the UK to Ireland two decades ago). Two years prior to Pond, she had won the inaugural White Review short story prize, after many years of what amounted to writing for herself; in her early 20s, she tells me, she decided that she wouldnt try to get published for another 10 or 15 years, until she had figured out how to create and structure a piece of work that would produce a meaningful and fulfilling and enjoyable reading encounter.

It was, she thinks, her involvement in theatre that provided a breakthrough. She had worked on performance pieces and installations and had originally conceived of Pond as a theatre piece, but then I realised that it actually could stay flat on the page and didnt need to be performed. It sort of performed enough on the page. The switch from one medium to another was tricky, she says, because I was interested in theatre. But I hated plays, which is a bit weird. And I hated actors. She roars with laughter. What did she hate? Just this sort of thing that happens: youre sitting in the audience, and then an actor comes stomping on and they start talking straight away, and you just think: Shut up! Its too much all at once, and its all very loud. And then someone else says something, and its all chat, chat, chat. And you just have to go with it.

The exception is, she adds, Beckett, probably the only person I can really think of who manages to subvert that very, very well. She is drawn in particular to the way Beckett represents our physical selves: You dont get this whole thing just landing in on you; you might just get the mouth or them from the waist up. Thats a bit gentler, youre kind of like: OK, I can handle that. And then in other ways, hes able to fragment or tap into a different frequency of being here.

The frequency of being here is both what Bennett responds to in others Quins work, she says, doesnt feel just like experimentation. That feels like someone really trying to get at what being alive at that moment feels like and is like and what she tries to represent in her own work. Shes been writing since Pond came out, she explains, but for a time perhaps in part because of talking about the book so much in interviews and at events, and feeling herself pinned down by others descriptions of her work she struggled to come up with something that felt like a book.

Oh God, I wrote some awful shit. Really very bad! At least Im able to tell, thats something. But its a horrible feeling when you keep on doing it. How did she know that it was no good? I felt my flesh was all sort of crawly and grey. And I wanted to get away from myself, really. I remember being in Madrid and just writing, oh, it was such horseshit. The answer, in Madrid, was unexpected: she went to see an exhibition of the surrealist Dorothea Tannings work, and found it so powerful that she wrote a short book about her, A Fish Out of Water, which was published last year by Milan-based Juxta Press.

Lockdown also produced a more conducive atmosphere for writing, quietening down daily life and allowing Bennett to stay still. She began to incorporate pieces of writing shed done nearly 20 years previously, and liked the different temporal textures that created, the different tones and registers and emotional intensities. She made few changes to those older pieces, and it becomes clear from talking to her that she dislikes things becoming too fixed, or perfected. She describes the experience of reading Beckett as giving her a sense of space and a kind of an ease, almost; you know, I dont know if there is any kind of meaning and I dont like to get too attached to ideas anyhow. Im quite able to sort of just hang in a way.

Bennett identifies herself as a writer when shes writing, and resists the label at other times; she is wary of the they that seems to crop up repeatedly in contemporary discourse, and alive to the idea that language itself has been shaped by the dominant classes throughout history, with particularly scorching effects for the working class and for women. Asked recently to write about a book that changed her life she says she realised that Marx and Engels The German Ideology, which she studied at A-level, had had a profound effect. After that, I just thought: Oh, my God, everythings just made up. And its made up by the ruling class, and there isnt such a thing as reality. Its all just ideology, and its there to suit them, and were all a load of plebs. And Im not. And they can shove it!

This is, she says now, a very concise and strong version of how she felt, but that was the upshot, and after that she felt the impulse to hoe her own row. She could well, she adds, have called Checkout 19 Im not going along with this.

If Bennett appears wedded to artistic flexibility, she says she is more emphatic on a political level; she is firmly opposed to the systems of privilege that enable a monarchy, for example, or the election of a complete buffoon such as Boris Johnson. Theres no ambiguity on that. If there was a revolution, Id be there. In Ireland, she praises the practical support offered to, among others, artists and writers; she received benefits when she was writing Pond, having explained to the authorities what she wanted to do, and I just cant imagine anything like that ever happening in a million years in the UK. I dont imagine shed think of her books in such a transactional way, but it seems to me that the authorities have had a pretty good return on their investment.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett is published by Vintage (14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Claire-Louise Bennett: If there was a revolution, Id be there - The Guardian

Sports is about moments. And these moments can change the face of an entire game, country, or race. For cricket in India, it was the 1983 World Cup win. For the Black Americans, it was Jesse Owens' win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The US Ice Hockey team's victory over USSR at the 1980 Olympics redefined the word underdogs and how fans saw them.

The question arises why did it take so long? Did we just get lucky? Will we have to wait again for so long? Let's start from the beginning...

There are two contrasting stories at play here. The first story is about dominance and invincibility from 1928-1980. India won six consecutive gold medals from 1928-1956, one Silver in 1960, and another gold in 1964. The statistics speak for themselves.

KD Singh, "The Wizard" Major Dhyan Chand, and Balbir Singh Sr. are just a few legendary names that immortalized Indian Hockey during that period.

The Long Fall

The second story, though, is about agony, defeat, and hopelessness.

Ashwani Kumar, the then Indian Hockey Federation president, resigned in 1973, and all hell broke loose. PN Sahni took over when the game was divided between Northern and Southern blocs.

MAM Ramaswamy was the man from the southern bloc who eventually succeeded in gaining the presidency. But all these incidents took away the attention from the actual game, and India couldn't keep up with the world.

The International Hockey Federation introduced AstroTurf in the mid-1970s. The decision to play on Synthetic Pitches instead of grass was the beginning of the fall.

The grass pitches suited the game of Indian players who were known for their passing and dribbling abilities. AstroTurf, however, favoured the physicality of European and Australian players.

These grounds are expensive to maintain. The Indian Hockey Federation did not have enough funds. In preparation for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, authorities shaved off the grass and plastered the field with cow dung.

No doubt it didn't work, and we returned empty-handed. India did win a Gold at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but the West did not participate in the Tournament to protest the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

Kapil Dev's Indian Cricket team won the World Cup in 1983 and started a revolution. From the sponsors to the politicians, everyone wanted to be part of the madness. That further took the attention away from hockey.

Rule changes like the abolition of the offside play in 1992, allowing overhead shots, no cap on rolling substitutes, among others, further contributed to the decline, and the players took time to adapt. The game became fast-paced. Fitness and tactical play became much important than individual brilliance.

It all came boiling down to 2008 where India couldn't even qualify for Olympics for the first time in 80 years. The Jothikumaran scandal further rocked the game and lead to the suspension of the Indian Hockey Federation.

The Comeback

Hockey India took over, and that is when things started to change. The authority recognized the importance of fitness and world-class training. But, considering the mess the Indian Hockey was in, the comeback was always going to take time.

And then came the major push in the form of the Naveen Patnaik-led Odisha government. In 2018, they became the only state government to sponsor a national team. Even before that, the Odisha government hosted the 2014 Champions Trophy and the World Hockey League Finals in 2017.

Odisha Naval Tata Hockey High-Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar at the Kalinga Stadium is a prime example of the efforts put in by the Government. The centre was built in collaboration with the TATA group to provide world-class sporting facilities to all the athletes.

Both the men's and women's teams showed that they belonged right there with the big boys and girls.

What does the future hold?

The future looks bright. The results we got at the Tokyo Olympics from both teams weren't just one-off. A lot of work still needs to be done at the state level, and hopefully, this Olympics has managed to garner the right kind of attention.

In another project under the leadership of Naveen Patnaik, Rourkela is set to be home to the country's biggest Hockey stadium. Odisha will also host the Men's Hockey World Cup in 2023 for the second time. The Government also plans to lay 17 synthetic turfs in the Sundargarh district.

All this is bound to bring in more exposure and experience.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha, Pradeep Suresh)

First Published:Aug 16, 2021, 08:19 PM IST

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Indian hockey: The resurgence and rebirth - CNBCTV18

Right now, Rodrigo Ochigame is reading Russian science fiction, Yugoslav art history, Indian philosophy, and Afro-Caribbean political theory. They are listening to Belgian electroacoustic music, Mongolian experimental rock, and Ethiopian jazz. Occasionally, the PhD student in the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) even throws dice to select a new MBTA stop to explore. More often, they apply this practice on the MIT campus, randomly attending departmental seminars on topics ranging from astrophysics to macroeconomics to neurobiology.

Ochigames freewheeling curiosity actually stems from a deep conviction about disrupting cultural assumptions especially their own. Thats something Im trying to do with myself in everyday life. Whether its about reading literature or walking around new neighborhoods or attending research seminars in different disciplines, its a practice of intentionally unsettling yourself, of continually exposing yourself to divergent perspectives, so the ideas that are most familiar to you are disrupted, they say.

In fact, Ochigame discovers many of the literary and musical works they are interested in through alternative search engines that they designed. For example, Search Atlas, a platform Ochigame developed in collaboration with computer scientist Katherine Ye, broadens a users search terms into a worldwide search for content. In so doing, the site reveals the geopolitical information boundaries embedded in conventional search engines like Google boundaries that are invisible to most.

Searching for multiplicity, for a plurality of intellectual traditions and for possibly marginalized perspectives, is the key principle behind the alternative search engines that I design. I want to expose people to ideas they wouldnt find otherwise. That principle permeates all aspects of Ochigames life.

Artificial separation

Ochigame grew up in a family of Japanese immigrants in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, a region close to Bolivia, Paraguay, and the Pantanal tropical wetland. They describe Mato Grosso as a highly syncretic environment, where many different cultures, languages, and beliefs interweave.

Its really a place of cultural and linguistic syncretism. My own family had a mix of Buddhism, Christianity, and atheism. And in the border region, you also grow up amid many other influences, not only Portuguese and Spanish but also Lebanese, Okinawan, Guarani, Kaiow, Terena, Afro-Brazilian. From an early age, I suppose, Ive always been very puzzled by the diversity of available ways of understanding the world.

Just as the seeds of their epistemological bent were sown in their hometown, Ochigames blossoming interest in computer science took root on the streets of Mato Grosso. One day while out walking, at age 13, Ochigame happened upon some other kids playing with an educational robotics kit. Captivated by the activity, which was expensive and unavailable at school, Ochigame began to learn about programming and engineering on the internet, largely through free video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare. They built robots from cheaper microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators, ultimately gaining national recognition in Brazilian robotics competitions. By college, Ochigame was committed to studying computer science.

But soon after arriving at the University of California at Berkeley, more philosophical questions began to sprout in Ochigames mind. They enrolled in courses in the humanities and social sciences, and came to question the dominance of Western epistemological frameworks in computer science. The classes inspired them to unmask the implicit assumptions embedded in the supposedly universal formal models that computer scientists rely on.

Algorithms encode the cultural assumptions of their designers, Ochigame explains. Computer scientists tend to think of their formal models as universal, but I see those models as products of particular cultural assumptions, economic conditions, and historical contingencies. Because of a false impression of universality, the orthodox models are rarely questioned.

Such dogmatism, according to Ochigame, marginalizes important ideas. For example, their historical research uncovered that after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuban information scientists developed library systems that sought to give visibility to marginalized points of view a principle Ochigame now employs in their alternative search engines.

A broader view

When they considered graduate school, Ochigame sought a hybrid space where they could train in the humanities and think about computing from this different lens. The HASTS program at MIT has been a perfect fit. Under the guidance of Stefan Helmreich, the Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Ochigames graduate work has incorporated reading hundreds of books in anthropology, history, philosophy, and computer science, as well as traveling around the world to visit archives and conduct interviews with mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. The flexibility of the curriculum has allowed their ideas to mushroom.

Even the most universalistic formal models of computation, like mathematical logic or Turing machines, encode particular cultural assumptions. Im interested in how researchers from around the world have developed unorthodox models based on different assumptions. For example: nonclassical systems of logic from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, nonlinear electronic circuits from Japan, socialist frameworks of information science from Cuba. All over the world, people have imagined radically different ways of computing, Ochigame says.

Beyond their research, Ochigame has found space at MIT to disrupt universal truths. As a teaching assistant for the popular course 21A.157 (The Meaning of Life), Ochigame led students in questioning cultural assumptions around topics like family, sex, and money. They also contributed to 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning), for which they co-designed the curriculum around ethical and social issues in computing and artificial intelligence.

On the intellectual side of things, I couldnt have asked for a better place than MIT, Ochigame says. It is, in fact, the only place Ive ever felt a certain sense of belonging. The HASTS program is both supportive and transformative. My advisor is a model teacher who has incessantly disrupted my assumptions. Ive had a wonderful time. They add, But, politically, Im critical of the Institute. Going around multiple departments, Ive become intimately aware of how funders shape research agendas. Im worried by the Institutes dependence on military and corporate sponsorship, because this dependence restricts the questions we ask. For Ochigame, keeping a broad perspective should be not only a personal endeavor, but also a community and institutional one.

Reflecting that perspective, Ochigames living situation cooperative housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts comprises a multigenerational community of cultural and professional diversity. They enjoy the variety of guests that pass through, from street musicians to traveling monks, and can often be found chatting in the common areas and learning about those around them. Despite this plurality, the community is also one of shared values. As a co-op, we make decisions democratically. We dont have landlords. We strive to be a meeting place for diverse political struggles: prison abolition, queer and trans liberation, immigrant rights, and more, they say.

Ochigame sees vast landscapes of perspectives where some may see neat gardens. But how does one see the forest through the trees?

How do you make sense of multiplicity? Its tempting to say that a single model of the world is the correct, rational, or scientifically valid one, while the others are not, they say. But another approach is to just take a step back and appreciate the variety of possible ways of making sense of the world out there.

Link:

Searching for multiplicity, in computer science and daily life - MIT News

Seoul (AFP)

Condemnation of quotas for women, vilification of a short-haired Olympic gold medallist, and calls to abolish the gender ministry itself: a backlash against feminism is on the rise in South Korea -- with even presidential candidates joining in.

While South Korea is the world's 12th-largest economy and a leading technological power, it remains a male-dominated society with a poor record on women's rights.

That has been challenged in recent years, with young women fighting to legalise abortion and organising a widespread #MeToo and anti-spycam movement that led to the largest women's rights demonstrations in Korean history.

At their most militant some campaigners have vowed to never marry, have children, or even have sex with men, while others have gone viral smashing up their make-up products on video in protest against the country's demanding beauty standards.

- Ferocious online campaigns -

Now a fierce reaction is spreading online.

Members of anti-feminist groups, often right-wing, have even bullied triple Olympic champion An San during the Tokyo Games for having short hair, and demanded she hand back her medals and apologise.

One such group's YouTube channel has drawn more than 300,000 subscribers since its foundation in February, and their online campaigns can be ferocious.

They have extracted apologies from companies -- and even a government ministry -- for using images of pinching fingers in advertising, which they claim "extreme, misandrist feminists" use as a symbol for small penises.

And leading mainstream conservative politicians -- including two presidential contenders -- have seized on the wider anti-feminist sentiment with pledges to abolish the gender ministry.

Critics accuse the department of "deepening" the country's social tensions, with young men claiming equality policies fail to address issues that affect men.

They say it is especially unreasonable that only South Korean men have to perform near two-year compulsory military service, delaying their career starts in a highly competitive society, while women are exempt.

Lawmaker Ha Tae-keung, who is seeking presidential nomination by the conservative opposition People's Power Party (PPP), says the ministry is obsolete and told AFP that it needed to be disbanded to reduce the "enormous social cost caused by conflict over gender issues".

In an earlier television appearance, he told broadcaster MBC: "It's like a zombie -- the ministry's still around although it's already dead, and that's why it's only creating adverse effects."

- 'Backlash to progress' -

Sharon Yoon, a Korean studies professor at University of Notre Dame in the US, said: "What we are seeing now is a very powerful backlash to all of the progress that feminist movements in Korea have made in the past few years."

Lee Jun-seok, the PPP's 36-year-old leader, has established himself as one of the most popular politicians among the country's young men.

He has repeatedly said he is against gender quotas and "radical feminism", and that the gender equality and family ministry needs to be scrapped.

Lee, who has been compared by some to former US president Donald Trump for his at times divisive rhetoric, insists the country's young women no longer face discrimination in education, nor in the early career job market.

"Through novels and movies women in their 20s and 30s have developed an unfounded victim mentality that they are being discriminated against," Lee told the Korea Economic Daily.

Jinsook Kim, a University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral fellow, said politicians were exploiting the resentments of frustrated men to try to secure their votes.

Nowadays, she added, "some of these men see themselves as victims of feminism", for example because of affirmative action.

- Loss of privileges -

The reaction comes against a backdrop of stuttering economic growth, rising inequality and soaring housing prices leaving many Koreans despairing of ever buying a home of their own.

Oh Jae-ho of Gyeonggi Research Institute pointed out that female participation in the workforce -- and hence competition -- had risen over recent decades while military service remained men-only.

"Young men feel that they are being unfairly asked to compensate for the sexist privileges enjoyed by men in the older generation."

Those privileges are longstanding: the South has the highest gender wage gap in the OECD club of developed countries, while women do 2.6 times as much unpaid domestic work as men. Only 5.2 percent of Korean conglomerates' board members are female.

- Spycams, revenge porn -

The country has also witnessed a disturbing rise in spycam and revenge porn crimes.

But women's activist Ahn So-jung said that politicians were "denying institutional discrimination exists against women".

"And they are dismissing women who voice concerns about women's rights as a source of gender conflict," she added.

Founded in 2001, the gender ministry has played a role in the abolition of the South's discriminatory hoju system, which saw children registered exclusively under the patriarchal line.

It has also set up an agency to help single mothers collect child support, and implemented programmes for working mothers and immigrant wives.

Minister Chung Young-ai pleaded for it to continue: "The improvement of women's rights so far has been possible because our ministry existed."

2021 AFP

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Anti-feminism backlash on the rise in South Korea - FRANCE 24

The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family. Lee Iacocca

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mothers sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple, Here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. Bible (John 19:25-27)

Melanie Phillips, a journalist for the Times of London, authored a book titled Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain. In it, she writes, And when I started writing about family breakdown, I was also called an Old Testament fundamentalist. At the time, I shrugged this aside as merely a gratuitous bit of bigotry. Much later, however, I came to realize that it was actually a rather precise insult. My assailants had immediately understood something I did not myself at the time understand, that the destruction of the traditional family had, as its real target, the destruction of biblical morality.

An article about Ms. Phillips goes on to say Writing as one of Britains most prominent journalists, informed by dozens of contacts, digging into thousands of statistics, Ms. Phillips found that family unity caused national stability (whereas) family breakdown caused national instability. That is just what the facts showed. And even though she did not realize it at the time, accepting the real-world evidence supporting traditional family brought her thinking in-line with the ultimate source of traditional family: the Holy Bible.

Dennis Rainey, formerly with FamilyLife Today, published a book in 1989 titled "Staying Close." The following extensive quote comes from this book:

Today there is a war being waged against the family. Our nations marriages, specifically our children, face their own particular Dunkirk, but families can hope for little help from Washington or the legislators of their state capitals the problem is too large for them. Trained psychologists and counselors can assist only a comparative handful of the thousands of families that need guidance and direction. Mighty voices in church pulpits and on television and radio can provide influence, but if the war is to be won, it must happen with lay people like you and me.

Our nations families hang in the balance. With over five billion people inhabiting our planet today, your family, like mine needs to feel it is significant. Everyone in your family should realize it is part of something that will outlive all of them. What greater investment could there be that to learn to make your own marriage and family work, and then begin to reach out to help others do the same? Thats how you can build a heritage of destiny.

The choice is yours. I want to challenge you to help rescue Americas broken and bleeding families.

When Nehemiah directed the rebuilding of the wall at Jerusalem, he made each man responsible for the section of wall that was in front of his own home. Nehemiahs strategy was brilliant. Each man was highly motivated to rebuild the wall high and well-fortified in front of his own home. Why? If the wall were low or weak, that would be the first place where enemies would burst through to overwhelm everyone in their path.

The parallel for today is clear. The family is for a nation what the wall represented for Jerusalem our countrys protection. We need Christian families who will first begin building strong walls for themselves. Then we need you to reach out to help your neighbors build.

Over 30 years later, the problems Dennis Rainey cited have become significantly worse. We see socialism and its spinoff, communism, raising their ugly heads today. The Communist Manifesto has one of its primary tenets the abolition of the family. The question is do we care enough to do anything about it? Its up to you and me. We can watch Rome burn or we can get involved with our churches and otherwise to make a difference.

The Family & Marriage Coalition of Aiken, Inc. (FAMCO) was created to provide resources for you to succeed in your marriage and families. Roger Rollins, Executive Director, FAMCO, 803-640-4689, rogerrollins@gmail.com, http://www.aikenfamco.com/

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FAMILY AND MARRIAGE: The family is in trouble - Charleston Post Courier

Facebook event coverage.

LIVERMORE, Calif.This year, at the gates of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, commemoration of the solemn 76th anniversaries of the U.S. nuclear devastation of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during World War II linked together two existential threats all humanity faces today: the escalating development of new, ever-more lethal nuclear weapons and the rapidly accelerating consequences of climate change.

The theme of the hybrid in-person and virtual gathering Nuclear Weapons & Climate Change: Shine a Light, Stop the Hate, Lower the Heat highlighted the paths to avert disaster as well as the rapidly intensifying threats.

Opening the program, Marylia Kelley, executive director of the Livermore-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (Tri-Valley CAREs), told participants that President Biden, in his first budget request to Congress, is proposing to fully fund the continued development of all the new warheads former president Donald Trump had included in his Nuclear Posture Review.

With more than 85% of its Department of Energy funding earmarked for nuclear weapons activities, Kelley said, Livermore Lab one of two locations designing every new nuclear warhead and bomb in the U.S. stockpile plays a central role in enabling todays arms race.

Kelley listed five new weapons the lab is developing:

Overall, she said, as we as a country debate funding for human needs and infrastructure, we are poised to spend $2 trillion on new warheads, bomb plants to build them, and delivery systems to use them over the next 30 years.

Meanwhile, over many years, Livermore Lab has released over a million curies of radiation into the atmosphere from its main facility and its experimental explosive test Site 300, and both lab employees and children in the Livermore area have experienced high levels of cancers and other radiation-linked illnesses.

Kelley urged all participants to join in effective actions to change the future including pressing their members of Congress to slash funding for nuclear weapons, joining protests at nuclear weapons sites, and other creative nonviolent actions to put a stop to the U.S. governments role in developing and producing nuclear weapons.

The Reverend Nobuaki Hanaoka, a retired Bay Area Methodist minister who as an infant was living with his family near Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, described the horrific impact of the weapons used to devastate the two Japanese cities.

Though his family did not experience the violent shock waves and enormous fireball that incinerated the city, his mother and sister both died of leukemia and his brother died of premature aging associated with radiation exposure.

A quarter of a million people died as a result of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hanaoka said, but todays nuclear bombs are designed to kill billions and to cause a nuclear winter around the globe.

Though in 2017 the United Nations General Assembly passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the treaty entered into force in January, the nine nations that already have nuclear weapons, including the U.S., Russia, and China, have so far ignored the treaty and are maintaining their nuclear programs.

Hanaoka has written to President Biden, urging him to convene a conference of the nine nations to start discussing the dismantling of all nuclear weapons.

John Burroughs, senior analyst with the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, discussed the treaty in the context of legal documents dating back to the United Nations Charter that have found the threat or use of nuclear weapons violates international law.

Though the U.S. and the other nuclear-armed countries didnt participate in negotiating the TPNW, and the U.S., UK, France, Russia, and China have jointly declared their opposition, Burroughs called the treaty a strong and visible declaration of the illegality for all states of the threat and use of nuclear weapons.

But, he said, while the document sets out a general framework for the global elimination of nuclear arms, it lacks the specificity, targets and timelines set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change. It is imperative to create an effective process for global nuclear disarmament paralleling that for climate protection. And it is imperative to actually accomplish, in both the nuclear and climate spheres, the safeguarding of the earth and civilization for future generations.

In a gripping account linking the two crises, Marcina Langrine and Benetick Kabua Maddison of the Marshallese Educational Initiative described the devastation of their ancestral Marshall Islands home by radiation from 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted on the archipelagos Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958, including the massive Castle Bravo test in 1954, with disastrous health and economic consequences that continue today.

Maddison described how the radioactive debris left behind on Enewetak Atoll, where most U.S. nuclear tests took place, was concentrated under the Runit Dome, a huge structure created in the 1970s by U.S. military personnel sent to clean up the immense accumulation of nuclear waste. Instead, he said, they pushed the waste into the dome and covered it with an 18-inch cap of concrete.

Now, with radiation leaking from the dome and sea levels rising because of climate change, the Runit Dome could be sunk into the ocean, further impacting an already devastated environment.

We stand in solidarity with the people of Japan, Maddison said. We share a history that is horrific for our people. It is urgent that we continue to educate the world about the impact of nuclear weapons and why we shouldnt have these weapons in the 21st century and beyond.

Founding member of the Pacific Asian Nuclear-Free Peace Alliance Tsukuru Fors extended those concerns to the issue of nuclear power, citing the 2011 earthquake-triggered disaster at Japans Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and noting that area residents had been told lies both before and after the disaster by capitalism and government who were desperate to keep the system at all costs.

Fors also cited the profound environmental damage suffered by San Franciscos Bay View-Hunters Point neighborhood after the area suffered radioactive contamination from the Navys nuclear defense laboratory and its facilities to clean ships exposed during nuclear weapons tests in the years after World War II.

Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers helped speed the end of the Vietnam War, compared the positions taken by todays nuclear-armed countries with those taken by the commanders of the ocean liner Titanic as the ship faced doom from icebergs more than a century ago.

We as a species are on the Titanic, he said. And what is at stake is not just mutual destruction, lets say, of the U.S. and Russia horrific as that would be but the annihilation of most of the species, a totally wicked gamble.

Citing the Poor Peoples Campaigns Jubilee Platform program to end poverty, dismantle the military economy, and address the climate crisis, California PPC co-chair Nell Myhand called for cutting military spending by at least $350 billion. She reminded rally participants that in late May, U.S. Representatives Barbara Lee, D-Calif. and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., introduced the PPC-inspired Third Reconstruction Resolution to Fully Address Poverty from the Bottom Up, demanding an end to the forever wars, repealing existing authorizations for use of military force, and restoring Congress war powers including those over limited uses of force like air and drone strikes.

Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, called on all participants, in-person and virtual, to tell their representatives in Congress to cancel replacement of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and instead, spend those funds on human needs and the environment, and to press Congress to embrace the Ban treaty and work for a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. She urged support for the Third Reconstruction Resolution, calling it a historic omnibus vision to center the needs of the poor with moral laws and policies, including abolishing nuclear weapons and embracing a bold climate agenda.

Also presenting were Bay Area singer/songwriter Betsy Rose; composer/song leader Benjamin Mertz; soprano saxophone soloist Francis Wong; and MCs Patricia St. Onge and Wilson Riles Jr.

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On Hiroshima, Nagasaki anniversaries, activists demand abolition of nuclear weapons - People's World

A choir of Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) sing "Never Again." Hiroshima-Nagasaki 2012. Credit: The Official CTBTO Photostream. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

As in past years, speakers at this years peace memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembered atomic bomb victims and pledged to work for world peace. One difference this year and last, however, was that the ceremonies took place amidst the coronavirus global pandemic, including a surge in the delta variant that amplified fear and concern this year. Even in a pandemic, individuals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki labor to remind the world that nuclear weapons remain an existential threat to humanity.

Education is a powerful tool for making progress toward a nuclear-weapon-free world. To this end, I am organizing the Critical Issues Foruma disarmament and nonproliferation education program for high school students in the United States, Russia, and Japanat the Middlebury Institute in Monterey. By fostering an appreciation for different cultural perspectives on complex international security issues, this program empowers students to grow into individuals who can contribute to international peace, security, disarmament, and other social justice work.

In one Critical Issues Forum online event this year, we invited a hibakushaatomic bomb survivorfrom Nagasaki to reboot memories in an effort to promote empathy and understanding. In another event, members of the Youth Champions for Disarmamenta program of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairsshared experiences and ideas for a nuclear-weapon-free world.

Youth from diverse backgrounds bring unique perspectives for shaping an inclusive, collaborative dialogue on global challenges. As the total elimination of nuclear weapons may not be achievable in our lifetime, cross-generational opportunities to learn from courageous hibakushas are essential. Youth also need opportunities to hone critical thinking skills necessary to engage in dialogues aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons. Young people have great potential to act as key change agents.

As the average age of hibakushas is now 84, the need to convey to youth the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapon use is urgent. Approximately 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 people in Nagasaki were killed by the atomic bombings, according to the cities records. Any nuclear disarmament discourse must include an understanding of what happened under the mushroom clouds in these two cities 76 years ago.

The basis of peace is for people to understand the pain of others, said Katsuji Yoshida, a now-deceased hibakusha. Through empathy, people can understand the suffering of atomic bomb survivors and victims. They can also see the inhuman nature of nuclear weapons.

True goodbyes arent being unable to meet again; they are when their existence is forgotten, said two sixth-grade representatives of the Childrens Peace Assembly at this years Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 9. We cannot forget those who became victims on that day, ever. We cannot allow our tragic past to be repeated. What we want is peace, not just in Japan, but in every country of the world.

Current public awareness of nuclear threats is awfully low. As long as nuclear weapons exist, they may be used, either accidentally or intentionally. The only guarantee against the use of nuclear weapons is their total elimination, UN Secretary General Antnio Guterres stated in his message to the ceremony.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted humanitys interdependence. If world citizens want to succeed in tackling multiple existential threats, including nuclear weapons, all citizens, especially youth, must engage. Youth hold potential to accelerate disarmament efforts.

At the Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony, held three days after the Hiroshima ceremony, 92-year-old Nobuko Oka read the Commitment to Peace, becoming the oldest atomic bomb survivor to do so. While each individual hibakushas voice may be small, she said, their collective powerful cries for nuclear abolition have moved the world. Citing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that entered into force in January, she declared that younger generations have now inherited the task of advancing efforts for a nuclear-weapon-free world. Yet she is determined to reach out to people who have little knowledge of the atomic bombing as well as young people for as long as she is alive.

In the near future, the voices of hibakushas will sadly no longer be with us. I have been privileged to listen to many atomic bomb survivor testimonials in native Japanese. Their cries bequeath the pursuit of a nuclear-weapon-free world to the next generation. But the work of preserving their memories and commitment to nuclear-weapon elimination belongs to everyone.

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As atomic bomb survivors age, they're motivating the next generation on disarmament - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Opposition parties have highlighted examples where Nicola Sturgeons party has failed to meet pledges in its plan for the first 100 days of government such as setting up an inquiry into Covid-19, the lack of an NHS Recovery Plan and vaccinating all adults.

However, the Scottish Government has branded such criticism as nonsensical, arguing the 100 days began when Ms Sturgeon was elected First Minister by MSPs on May 18.

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This would see the 100 days end on August 25, the government claims, not on August 14, which is 100 days since the election.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said there was no sign the SNP had begun to focus on recovery and claimed the government was defined by delays, broken promises, and a gulf between their spin and their action.

He said: In the final days of the campaign they put forward a weak imitation of Scottish Labours message, vowing to work in the national interest but in just 100 days they have broken promises on everything from tackling Covid to rebuilding our NHS to delivering green jobs.

"The failure to set up a public inquiry into Covid-19 is a particularly shocking dereliction of duty. We shouldnt be waiting for Boris Johnson, we should be desperate to learn the lessons of the last year and a half not hiding from them.

As each day passes, their arrogance grows and they continue to lose touch with communities across Scotland as they abandon the pledges they were elected on just months ago.

Stephen Kerr, the Scottish Conservatives chief whip, said voters were tired of hearing the same old excuses, adding the SNP failed to deliver on the issues that matter and that promises from the party had simply failed to materialise.

He said: Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers promised to make Covid recovery their priority, but they have taken their eye off the ball once again. We know they have already put a push for a divisive indyref2 at the top of their conference agenda.

Championing independence once again is a dereliction of duty from the SNP Government as Scotland aims to accelerate its recovery from the pandemic.

No matter how they try and spin it, this is another series of SNP broken promises that are letting people down all over again.

The Scottish Liberal Democrat leadership hopeful and health spokesperson, Alex Cole-Hamilton, demanded an apology from the SNP to healthcare workers due to the failure to produce an NHS recovery plan.

He said: Both the public and opposition parties recognise that this is a substantial piece of work to undertake, but it is also important that we know that the health secretary is committed to driving progress on their behalf.

An apology would demonstrate that the health secretary recognises that his government have not yet fulfilled this promise and avoid him getting off on the wrong foot with patients and staff.

Responding to the criticism, a spokesperson for the deputy first minister and Covid-19 recovery secretary John Swinney labelled the claims nonsensical.

He said: The opposition attacks are ridiculous. We have always been clear that our plans were to be implemented 100 days from forming the new government not from the date of the election, which would be nonsensical, given that at that time there were not even MSPs to vote in the new government to carry out its programme.

The SNP was returned office because people across Scotland know they can depend on this government to deliver, in contrast to the constant carping from Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems.

"We are immensely proud of what we are delivering, including a pay rise for our hard-working NHS staff, the abolition of dental charges for 18-25-year-olds, and completing the transformational expansion of free childcare across Scotland.

We are continuing to work to our timetable to implement the remaining commitments, including the NHS recovery plan.

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'100 days of SNP failure', claim opposition as criticism branded 'nonsensical' - The Scotsman