Category Archives: Personal Empowerment

Courtesy of lululemon

Kerri Walsh Jennings is featured in lululemon's new ad campaign.

This month, lululemon launched its first global ad campaign, "This Is Yoga," featuring seven inspirational stories of people from around the world. One of those stories is that of three-time Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings, who is also a lululemon ambassador. She is featured for her practice of self-discipline.

We caught up with her to talk about the ad as well as her own experience with yoga and the next steps in her career.

espnW: What does it mean to you to be involved in this campaign?

Kerri Walsh Jennings: In a nutshell, it means the world to me. Being part of "This Is Yoga" means being part of the lululemon team and what they stand for as a brand. I've come to learn that the concept and principles of yoga apply to my life even if I'm not doing yoga. I love it and respect how beautiful a practice it is and how yoga comes to life off the mat, whether you're painting in the studio, pounding on drums or on the court like I am. This is the power of yoga, of lululemon and the power of this campaign.

espnW: Do you practice yoga? If so, how did you get started?

KWJ: I do practice yoga and am newly inspired to practice more often. Before every volleyball practice I do a flow-style yoga on the shoreline to get prepped in my body, mind and spirit. It connects me to my breath and brings my feet back under me, which is important when my mind is racing. It was my husband who actually introduced me to yoga. He has this DVD that he loves and always goes back to practice. Knowing the stress we put on our body, the philosophy and decompression that comes from yoga is powerful. I'm a strong person and through practicing yoga, I've felt discomfort and vulnerability. By opening myself up to it, I've been able to grow and learn, which is a really powerful thing.

espnW: Can you talk about your practice of self-discipline?

KWJ: I really love what I do and I don't take anything off the table to get the job done, but to me, self-discipline is actually liberating. It allows me to prioritize my "ABC" fundamentals and create a strong foundation, which is empowering. As a person, those fundamentals are my mind, body and spirit. On the court, it's my attitude, ball control and footwork, and as a mommy, it's being present, patient and loving. As long as I have the freedom to focus on the fundamentals, no matter what I do or the setting I'm in, I'm empowered and prepared both on the court and in life.

espnW: What do you see as the next thing in your career?

KWJ: My mission throughout life has been very singular and my focus has been to make the most of everything I have been blessed with mentally, physically and spiritually. I want to keep growing and evolving as human. My platform is beach volleyball. I'm chasing my Olympic dreams for Tokyo and have a parallel mission to grow our sport. There are a number of tenets I really want to hit with wellness, community, personal empowerment, accountability and growth both on the court for myself and in the community taking my sport to the next level. Being part of campaigns like "This Is Yoga" and co-creating with powerful people supports my passion by showing people the beautiful principles of my sport.

Continue reading here:

Olympic beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings talks yoga ... - ESPN

Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at 9:10 a.m.

You might think karaoke is limited to cheap bars with crackling sound systems and slow Tuesday nights, but things are changing. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is starting to feel out of touch 25 years after its revival in Wayne's World.N'Sync and Britney covers stopped being cute and ironic long before they became just sad. And, hey, except for board games, karaoke is the whitest way to pass time at a bar.

So it's no surprise that Trap Karaoke is making its way to more cities.

The concept is simple: Create a user-generated experience in a concert setting with music that's playing on the radio right now. Throw in alcohol and the chance of celebrity appearances, and you have every hip-hop fan's karaoke hope, concert wet dream, and driver-seat Snapchat rehearsal rolled into the no-holds-barred expectations of a nightclub. As seen on the Trap Karaoke website: "The result?A platform on top of music; a backdrop for life; a nexus into cultural participation, personal empowerment, cherished moments, human connection, and community!"

In an interview with New Times sister paper Houston Press,Trap Karaoke founder Jason Mowatt likens the experience to going to church,while proclaiming at every opportunity that "we'renot party promoters; we're community organizers." An apt example of this sentiment can be found on the company's Instagram page. A post from February 2016 shows a concerned individual thinking there's more money in marketing to white kids in fraternities and sororities. The caption simply reads, "Nah we good lol."

In a world where black consumers are often erased (see Shea Moisture) and artists like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus adopt and discard black culture at will, that simple refusal is radical.

Then there's the music itself, which exists in an industry that isolates its listeners by pricing concert tickets out of their range: Tickets for Kendrick Lamar's show in September started at $75, and Rolling Loud tickets reached nearly $400. By comparison, Trap Karaoke costs $20 to $40.

But whatever Zeitgeist the company follows, the community is ultimately created not through marketing or social media, but by the people who show up to perform whatever songs they choose in their city. The crowd at the Hangar should be able to rap "Red Bottoms" backward and forward because this Friday's Trap Karaoke event will be in Trina's city. Beyond getting the chance to stunt on a Rick Ross, Zoey Dollaz, Drake, or Future track in front of 500 chanting partiers, people will be there to celebrate what they love.

This is why a deceptively simple party is catching on. In a time when "community" is so often about what is sold to us based on what we're told is important, Trap Karaoke simply asks us to show up and do it ourselves.

Trap Karaoke 8 p.m. Friday, May 26, at the Hangar, 60 NE 11th St., Miami. Tickets are sold out, but, hey, show up anyway: Who's gonna stop you from singing on the street?

Here is the original post:

Trap Karaoke at the Hangar: Just Show Up, Please - Miami New Times

InsideHalton.com

Oakville author writes about hope and resilience InsideHalton.com Her newest book is called MEMOIR OF HOPE AND RESILIENCE: Passionate Late-Bloomer Talks Life, Literature, and Personal Empowerment. Her books are available at the Oakville Public Library and on Amazon. Her work-in-progress is a novel called The ...

Read more from the original source:

Oakville author writes about hope and resilience - InsideHalton.com

When Ahmed Badr was 8 years old, his family fled Baghdad in the midst of the Iraq War. Writing helped him process his experience, so he started the website Narratio to give other young people the same opportunity. Ariel Edelman hide caption

When Ahmed Badr was 8 years old, his family fled Baghdad in the midst of the Iraq War. Writing helped him process his experience, so he started the website Narratio to give other young people the same opportunity.

When Ahmed Badr was 8 years old, his family's home in Baghdad was bombed in the midst of the Iraq War. The family was uninjured. They moved to Syria, which was peaceful then, and in 2008, they came to the U.S. as refugees.

Writing helps Badr deal with what he's been through, and he wants to give other young people the same outlet. Now a student at Wesleyan University, Badr founded the website Narratio to empower others to tell their stories.

Badr used writing to figure out what it meant to be an Iraqi-American kid. His life had dramatically changed since coming to the U.S. in Baghdad, his parents were civil engineers; in the U.S., they worked minimum wage jobs at Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

Overtime, Badr realized that writing on his personal blog helped other people understand who he was and where he came from.

Ahmed Badr was 8 years old when a bomb hit his family's home in Baghdad. They came to the U.S. as refugees in 2008, and Badr used writing to understand his experience. Courtesy of the Badr family hide caption

Ahmed Badr was 8 years old when a bomb hit his family's home in Baghdad. They came to the U.S. as refugees in 2008, and Badr used writing to understand his experience.

"There was this feeling of empowerment that was just overnight, all of sudden people were interested in my story," Badr says. "... And so with that in mind, two years passed, and I thought, 'OK, well this was great, but this is only helping me. This is only helping my own expression. So how about I take that feeling and that space that I created for myself and turn it into something that allows youth, refugee or otherwise, all over the world to do the same exact thing.' "

So Badr created Narratio, where young people from around the world submit poems, essays and stories. Badr curates them, and he's expanded the program into workshops to help young people learn how to express themselves.

Badr tells NPR's Ari Shapiro they are looking for pieces with a theme of empowerment.

"You're telling your story. You're expressing yourself through your own experience, and it's very very hard to dispute that," he says. "It's very hard to denounce someone's own personal experience. I think that's something that's incredibly beautiful about storytelling is that storytelling doesn't have to be divisive. Storytelling is meant to bring people together."

When Badr returned to Iraq for the first time two years ago, he says he felt guilty around his cousins who still live in Iraq. He says he feels personally responsible to give Iraqi youth 18 million of whom are younger than 19 an outlet to express themselves.

"I want to be able to turn that guilty feeling that I had when my cousins asked me, 'What are you up to?' into a responsibility ... and make it possible for them to be able to answer that question as freely as they would like to," he says. "And so, if I can do that by giving them a website that they can share their stories on, that's a step in the right direction."

Visit link:

Iraqi Refugee Empowers Youth To Share Their Stories With 'Narratio ... - NPR

Largest organization for women in NH celebrates 10th anniversary

BRISTOL, NH What started out as a creative spark by Women Inspiring Women Founder Leslie Sturgeon, grew into the largest organization in New Hampshire for women's empowerment, personal development, business resources, networking and fun!

Since starting her first business at the age of 22 in 1989 in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, Sturgeon surrounded herself with other professionals to discuss business, career success, life/work balance, dreaming big, challenges, opportunities and personal growth. Because of her appreciation for the difference women can make in one another's lives, she had a desire to create an organization where other people could experience on a regular basis what had been so influential in her life. After the launch of WIW in Meredith in May 2007, the organization grew rapidly and expanded throughout New Hampshire and also added in the NH Conference for Women and Inspiring Women in Business day-long events. Women Inspiring Women will commemorate its 10th anniversary with an event back in Meredith at the Chase House Inn on Thursday, May 25, 2017. Exhibitors and socializing will be from 5:30 to 6:30 followed by dinner and a special presentation. Featured speakers will be Emily Clement of Emily Clement Coaching and Leslie Sturgeon. "Bloom Where You Are Planted" will include insights into how to grow from right where you are to the best version of yourself and tips for uprooting if that leads to better ground.

Leslie Sturgeon

See the original post:

052517WomenInspiring10thAnniv (235) w/pic - The Laconia Daily Sun

U.S. first lady Melania Trump (2nd R), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (R), Ivanka Trump (L) and her husband, White House senior advisor, Jared Kushner (2nd L) take their seats before U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his remarks to the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 21, 2017.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The whole world was watching as Melania and Ivanka Trump joined the most important man in their lives and ours in Saudi Arabia this week. The U.S. president thinks a womans place is either on the beauty-pageant catwalk or behind a stroller containing his heir. Saudi Arabia forbids women from attending public events where men will be present or getting medical care without a male relatives permission. How would the women of Americas first family conduct themselves?

Christina Cauterucci is a Slate staff writer.

As very attractive role models, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker tells us. Preternaturally beautiful, they seemed to glide as apparitions above the sea of dark suits and white robes and must have struck fear in the hearts of men whose culture demands that women be publicly invisible, Parker writes in a piece published Tuesday night. With their very expensive attire and their symmetrical bone structure, Melania and Ivanka made a lasting impression on Saudi women with their feminine power.

Id like to personally thank Parker for sharing this recipe for feminine power, which Ive been trying to work out for decades with middling results. I think Id assumed it was some proprietary blend of money, menstrual regularity, and a wide-legged stance, perfected only by Sheryl Sandberg and ladies in deodorant commercials. It is a relief to know that all it takes is cheekbones, a well-fitted maxi dress, and a male family member in a position to insist that you be allowed to sit quietly in a corner while the men talk oil. Parker notes that other foreign women have, like Ivanka and Melania, met with Saudi officials without wearing headscarves. Michelle Obama and Laura Bush both did it, she writes. Id add to that list Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May. Reader, you may be wondering what the difference is between these women and the Trump ones, the latter of whom can make men in dark suits and white robes quiver with their very presence. The answer is simple: the Trumps are pretty, and whoa, get a load of their dresses! Watch out, Saudi fundamentalists. Pursed, exfoliated lips are in the house.

Even in their silence, Parker tells us, Ivanka and Melania spoke loudly through the existence of their human bodies and the fabrics with which they were covered. Wordlessly, they projected strength, intelligence, graceand a timeless wisdom that all women share, she writes. Women everywhere should be reevaluating their major life choices right now. They dont need to develop and defend informed opinions to be strong. They dont need to be able to read and synthesize information to be intelligent. They dont need to say a single word to have grace. By subtly refusing to hold her husbands hand on an Israeli tarmac, Parker writes, Melania became every American woman who donned a pink-kitten hat to protest the then-new president.

We knew the personal was political, but I certainly did not know that what might have been an involuntary hand spasm or a case of sweaty palms was political on the scale of the largest protest day in world history. And its news to me that sitting noiselessly in a room while being gorgeous could constitute a statement of liberation. This is a revolutionary realization! Women can literally just exhibit basic vital signs in the presence of men who consider women fragile, lesser beings, and as long as they dont fall asleep or melt into an oozing subhuman puddle la Alex Mack, they are feminist heroes! It is so easy. Every woman can do it! Provided she has nice skin, a former career in modeling, and the capacity to zip her lips around misogynist dignitaries.

I wish Parker had elaborated on the timeless wisdom that all women share, which I am not sure I share but would surely like to know about. Is it be pretty and fade into the background? Be pretty and look alert? Be pretty and dont make a peep? Parker writes that the Trump women stood as beacons of light in a part of the world that remains cloaked in the darkness of religious fundamentalism and oppression. This, despite their apparent ornamentalism. Those Saudi women must feel super grateful for these examples of how women can be at once beautiful, silent, and ornamental, a vision of womanhood they never see at home and only America can provide.

When Ivanka did speak in Saudi Arabia, it was to thank the nation that doesnt let women drive for donating $100 million to her burgeoning womens empowerment fund. Such strength, such intelligence! Parker doesnt opine on how this verbal statement figured into Ivankas wordless feminist advocacy in Saudi Arabia. But it does seem to align with the behavioral mores expected of a modest, decorative woman in the country. No matter that the women of Saudi Arabia, who can't open a bank account without the consent of a male guardian, will benefit little from a fund meant to support female entrepreneurship. Ivankas speech was appropriate and fine, because her father and husband, who do the real work around here, lent her permission to give it.

See original here:

Ivanka and Melania Were Beautiful and Silent in Saudi ArabiaShining Examples of Empowerment! - Slate Magazine (blog)

Mothers Day was created when, in 1908, Anna Jarvis invented the holiday as a gesture to honor her own mother. Her idea caught on quickly: By 1914, in large part because of a campaign Jarvis waged to have her celebration of motherhood more widely recognized, Congress gave the day status as an official national holiday. Companies, as they do, did their part to further institutionalize Mothers Day, marketing flowers and candies and greeting cards as the proper ways to celebrate Mom.

Soon, Jarvis came to regret the holiday she had put on the American calendar. In 1920, she wrote a press release declaring florists and greeting card manufacturers to be charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations. And, as Nicole Russell wrote in The Atlantic in 2013, she spent the rest of her life trying to abolish the holiday she founded. This time, of course, Jarviss powers of persuasion failed her. Mothers Day would remainnot just a Hallmark holiday, but a Teleflora one.

Galentine's Day: How a Beloved Fiction Became a Beloved Tradition

I thought of Jarvis when I saw, on Amazon, the section of that massive marketplace that is currently devoted to Mothers Day. The section, backgrounded in pastel pink and decorated at the edges with origami roses rendered in muted corals, offers in one way pretty much the stuff youd expect a Mothers Day-devoted page to put on display: gadgets organized under headings like Food & Kitchen, Style, Spa Days, Creative Hobbies. Commercial goods that range from the practical to the whimsical and that are, all in all, pretty much the stuff of Jarvisian nightmare.

Amazons Mothers Day offerings, however, contain a newer addition to the traditional gift selections: a section claiming to offer Empowering Keepsakesfor the mom, the section explains, who loves feeling inspired. Empowering Keepsakes links to items on offer at Amazons Girl Power and Sorry Not Sorry boutiques; through them, you can order Mom a hardcover copy of Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In, or a silver necklace with fearless etched in a pendant, or a Rosie the Riveter cuff bracelet, or a plastic iPhone cover scrawled with the intriguingly punctuated phrase im not Bossy im The Boss, or a mug printed with an all-caps reminder to GET IT GIRL. You can order your mother, basically, some cheerfully commercialized feminism.

Its an old story that feminism itself has been co-opted by consumerism (you can buy that book on Amazon, too, for $16.06 plus shipping); here, though, through Amazons massive online marketplace, is an everyday reminder of that co-optation, rendered in mugs and mousepads and slim-fit t-shirts with BELIEVE IN YOURSELF silkscreened onto their surfaces. Here is Empowerment, transformed into a Keepsake. Empowerment got its start, as a political ethos, in the social work of the American 1970sa term meant to encourage marginalized communities to fight against paternalism, in the ways they saw fit for themselves; in the early 1980s, Jia Tolentino notes in The New York Times, the psychologist Julian Rappaport broadened it into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitlessone that placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.

Compare that to Empowering Keepsakes, which is not at all about moral libertarianism and only in the most superficial sense about power, personal or otherwise, at all. Amazon is selling its Empowering Keepsakes against a political backdrop of wage disparities, rampant misogyny, and structural forces that make it exceedingly difficult for all women, mothers or not, to GET IT GIRL.

The rhetoric of commercialized empowerment is also striking in the context of Mothers Day itself, which is not merely a celebration of motherhood, but which is also coded as a celebration of extremely traditional femininity. There are the pinks and the petunias, yes, but there are also the (slightly) subtler genderings: the fact, say, that Food Networks advice on throwing the perfect Mothers Day brunch involves recipes for light frittatas and sweet baked goods, while its Fathers Day offerings will inevitably involve tips for grilling cuts of manly meat. As Jill Filipovic points out in her book The H-Spot, the association of light food with women, and of substantial food with men, has a long historywith, among other things, smaller-is-better assumptions about womens bodies, and notions that women, as the weaker sex, should save the meat for the strong men and growing kids while they make do with whats left over.

Theres nothing wrong with an omelette, of course. But taken together, the commercialized offerings of Mothers Day suggest how conflicted American culture remains when it comes to feminism, and motherhood, and womanhood itself. Mothers Day, as observed in 2017, remains, technically, what it was back in 1914: a celebration of motherhood, its joys, its sacrifices. In practice, however, the holiday functions much as Valentines Day does, as a commercialized endorsement of traditional femininity. All those flowers. All that chocolate. All that Food & Kitchen. All that pink.

And: All that money. The Baltimore Sun, examining data from the National Retail Federation, reports that Mothers Day now ranks third out of all yearly holidays when it comes to consumer spendingjust below the Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations and the fall back-to-school season. (And just above Valentines Day.) This year should be a record-breaking one for Mothers Day spending: American shoppers are expected to spend around $186 on average on the mothers in their lives, for a total of nearly $24 billion nationally. Some of those billions will be devoted to gifts that profess to celebrate womens empowermentall in a political and economic environment that finds womens actual power to be under threat. Anna Jarvis, on some level, realized what shed started; she simply realized it too late.

Here is the original post:

When Mother's Day Is 'Empowering' - The Atlantic

In this excerpt from our new Digital Privacy initiative, Neil Richards from Washington University School of Law tackles the issue of secret government searchesnamely, instances of government surveillance that remain secret to the search target.

You can read the full text of Richards white paper at our special section, A Twenty-First Century Framework for Digital Privacy, at https://constitutioncenter.org/digital-privacy

Perhaps surprisingly, the most compelling moment in Oliver Stones Snowden biopic is the sex scene. Halfway through this movie about government surveillance and whistleblowing, the audience is shown a graphic and seemingly gratuitous sexual encounter involving Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon Levitt) and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (played by Shailene Woodley). In the midst of their passion, Snowdens eyes rest on Lindsays open laptop, the empty eye of its camera gazing towards them. In a flash, he recalls an earlier event in which NSA contractors hacked laptop cameras to secretly spy on surveillance subjects in real time. Edward and Lindsays mood was ruined, to say the least, by the prospect of government agents secretly watching their intimate activities.

The scene evokes George Orwells famous warning about telescreens, the omnipresent surveillance devices in Big Brothers Oceania, by which the Thought Police could secretly watch anyone at any time. It also has grounding in reality. The use of millions of hacked webcams as monitoring devices was a program known as Optic Nerve, which was part of the Snowden revelations. Another program leaked by Snowden involved the surveillance of the pornography preferences of jihadi radicalizers (including at least one U.S. person), with the intention being the exposure of their sexual fantasies to discredit them in the Muslim world. Snowden himself famously appeared on John Olivers HBO show Last Week Tonight, humorously but effectively reducing unchecked government surveillance to the basic proposition that secret surveillance allowed the government, among other things, to get your dick pics.

Sexual surveillance may get our attention, but in our digital networked society, in which many of our documents are stored in the cloud, secret government surveillance powers are vastly broader than the power to be an electronic Peeping Tom. Today, the U.S. government has a wide variety of means of secretly watching and searching the people who live in the United States, whether they are citizens, permanent residents, or visitors.

How did we get to a place where secret government surveillance seems both omnipresent and unavoidable? It may be hard to believe these days, but when the Internet first jumped into the public consciousness in the mid-1990s, it was touted as a realm of anarchy and personal empowerment, a tool of freedom rather than of oppression. At the time, the specter of always-on secret surveillance was unthinkable for a variety of technical, political, and legal reasons. Such surveillance was technologically impossible in a pre-broadband world of modems and computers that were usually not connected to the network and in which the Cloud was a dream of technologists and science fiction writers. It was practically impossible, because of the high costs of in-person surveillance. It was politically impossible, too, with many politicians having first-hand memory of the totalitarian regimes of the Axis Powers. Legally, too, the law was settled that the government needed to get a warrant before it tapped a phone, searched papers, or intercepted an email.

How times have changed. These well-established technical and political roadblocks to widespread secret surveillance vanished rapidly in the early months of the twenty-first century. When Al Qaeda terrorists turned four commercial airlines into missiles and attacked New York and Washington, D.C. in September 2001, a stunned American President without a strong commitment to civil liberties began to authorize unprecedented levels of digital surveillance. From a technological perspective, the attacks occurred just after the mass adoption of the Internet, and just before the social media and smartphone phases of the digital revolution. These advances and adoptions, running on a stream of previously uncollected personal data, made it technically possible for the government to read a persons emails or documents stored in the cloud, or obtain a minutely-detailed transcript of their location logged from the GPS chip in their phone. At the same time, these new technologies started to blur the lines between public and private, destabilizing settled legal understandings of the boundaries between what was private and what was not. In this environment, law enforcement often took the position that in doing their job of promoting security, it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission in attacking the newly-available digital evidence.

Yet despite the growth of the surveillance-industrial complex, there are hopeful signs. Apple and Microsoft, among other technology companies, have engaged in high-profile litigation with the federal government on behalf of their users privacy, including litigation over the security of iPhones and the governments ability to place gag orders on its searches of Microsofts cloud and email services.

The result of these changes is the rise of a phenomenon I shall call the secret government search. This is, as the name suggests, a search by law enforcement of information relating to an individual. Secret government searches can be diversethey can be physical or increasingly digital; they can be executed under a warrant, under no warrant, or under some intermediate authorization; they can be unknown to all, or served on a trusted digital service accompanied by an injunction forbidding notice to the target; and the target may get delayed notice of the search or no notice ever. Different kinds of secret government searches can raise different problems, and these problems may require different solutions. But at bottom, secret government searches share the essential characteristic of being government surveillance of which the target has no notice at the time of the search.

In this essay, I attempt to put the rise of secret government searches into contexthistorical, technological, and most importantly constitutional. My argument is straightforwardthe current state of secret government searches is a dangerous anomaly in our democratic order. It is unprecedented as a technological and historical matter, and it is inconsistent with what I believe is the best reading of our constitutional traditions protecting freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. If we are to faithfully translate our hard-won civil liberties against the state from the physical realm to the digital, we need to do better to limit the ability of the government to peer into the lives of its citizens in ways that are not only secret but also relatively unconstrained. It is important to recognize, however, that this is not a question of civil liberties in cyberspace, as if the digital realm is somehow a separate one. While the fiction of separate physical and virtual worlds may have been a useful one twenty years ago, in todays networked, mobile era of ubiquitous personal computers, the overwhelming majority of ordinary people use digital platforms and technologies to live their everyday lives. Recognition of this fact must also cause us to recognize that there is not really any such place as cyberspace. On the contrary, there is only space, and humans in that space trying to live their livessometimes using digital tools, sometimes using pre-digital ones, and frequently using a combination of the two. Yet if we fail to fully extend our hard-won rights in traditional activities to digital, networked activities, those rights will be substantially and perhaps even fatally diminished. If that were to happen, we would all be less safe as a result.

This argument proceeds in four steps. First, I will describe the lay of the land with respect to secret government searches, a phenomenon I term the secret search epidemic. I argue that it is impossible to fully understand the constitutional issues these searches raise without an appreciation of the essential technical and other roles played by the technology companies whose businesses enable the creation of this data in the first place. Second, I examine these secret searches as searches, and consider them from the perspective of Fourth Amendment law. This focuses our attention on the search part of secret government searches. I argue that the best reading of the Fourth Amendment in this context is that secret searches are unreasonable, and that if we permit them, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past with respect to the Fourth Amendment and new technologies. Third, I consider whether secret searches are a threat to First Amendment values, either by virtue of their secrecy or by the fact that in the digital context they are often served on cloud providers and accompanied by injunctions forbidding those companies to ever tell their customers about the governments accessing their data. I conclude that secret, unconstrained searches of this kind represent a serious threat to our First Amendment values. Finally, I chart a path forward for secret surveillance law, offering four principles that should govern the delicate task of translating our civil liberties into the digital society.

Read more at: https://constitutioncenter.org/digital-privacy/secret-searches-and-digital-civil-liberties

Filed Under:

Read more here:

Secret Searches and Digital Civil Liberties - Constitution Daily (blog)

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Laughter has a long history in human culture. Ancient Greek physicians prescribed their patients visits to the hall of comedians and the theater as part of the healing process. Early Native Americans had clowns who worked in conjunction with witch doctors. The 14th century surgeon Henri de Mondeville told jokes to his patients in the recovery room. In the 16th century, Martin Luther used humor therapy as part of pastoral counseling of depressed people. President Abraham Lincoln was adept at using humor to ease his pain and stress.

Through the ages, laughter has been recognized for delivering joy as therapy. It speeds recovery from surgery. As therapy and counseling of the depressed it also relieves one of excess stress and tension. It is a vital factor in the treatment of the sick and dying. Laughter helps regain ones emotional equilibrium after trauma and crises.

The most significant recording of the benefits of laughter come from Norman Cousins in his book Anatomy of an Illness. In 1964, Cousins, Senior Editor of the Saturday Review, was diagnosed with a crippling and extremely painful inflammation of his body, Ankylosing Spondylitis. Doctors gave him little hope of survival. He refused to accept the diagnosis as a death sentence, checked himself out of the hospital, hired a full-time nurse and moved into a hotel suite. Along with mega doses of vitamin C, he watched Candid Camera, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and laughed constantly. Soon observing, I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

Digging deeper, Cousins discovered a surprising number of recorded incidents in which patients have laughed themselves back to health, or at least used laughter as a positive response to their illness. His anecdotal account of his self-styled healing became the bestselling book. He was hired by the University of California medical school where he taught and researched for twenty years the merits of laughter in healing.

In a study of mid-life wellness factors by Harvards eminent physician, George Valliant, laughter was singled out as a major stress-coping mechanism among healthy men. Laughter diffuses anxiety and anger, while acting as a blocking agent against the ravages of panic.

There is anesthetic effect of laughter lessening pain with the release of endorphins and easing anxiety and depression for those in chronic pain. Laughter charges our energy, provides relief from our problems and even helps us find solutions to them. Laughter radiates through us, helps us feel happy and provides us with a joyful illumination as we deal with the disharmonies of life.

World Laughter Day, this year, May 7, originated in 1998 with Madan Kataria, a physician in India, who founded the worldwide Laughter Yoga Movement now operating in 105 countries through over 6000 Laughter Clubs. The celebration of World Laughter Day is a positive manifestation for world peace and intended to build up a global consciousness of brother/sister hood and friendship through laughter.

How can you use the power you have been born with laughter to increase your quality of life? The first thing to do is get a laughter buddy. Typically, someone you already joke with and who also wants to have a better lifestyle incorporating the power of laughter. Then simply commit to meeting regularly to laugh.

Bill Baker is co-founder of the Roanoke Laughter Lab, which meets monthly at the South County Library.

Read more from the original source:

Opinion: Laughter, healing and personal empowerment - The Daily Progress

Michronicleonline

The Single woman's checklist: 8 essentials for the powerful woman Michronicleonline Entrepreneurship, for Sh'Lene, is a major part of her personal empowerment. She received the Motor City Match Business Planning Award to launch the Single Woman's Power Network, to equip single women with the knowledge and resources that will ...

Continue reading here:

The Single woman's checklist: 8 essentials for the powerful woman - Michronicleonline