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Forensics debate team captures 2nd place
By Clark College Foundation
Forensics debate team captures 2nd place2014-03-192014-03-19https://www.clarkcollegefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/clark-college-logo-2.pngClark College Foundationhttps://www.clarkcollegefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/clark-college-logo-2.png200px200px
Tamara Gage and David "Jidy" Chitta celebrate their 2nd place award from the Regional Designated Tournament held at Pacific University.
For the third consecutive time this season, the Clark College Penguin Forensics team marched straight into the final round of a debate competition. This time it was at the Northwest Junior Parliamentary Debate Championships held at the University of Washington campus in Bothell during March 8-9.
Andrew Forrest and Jeremiah Barnes became the fifth and sixth students from Clark to debate in a final round this season. Unfortunately, Clark lost in a 2-1 decision to the University of Montana in a debate about U.S. aid to Uganda, according to Adjunct Professor Aaron Donaldson, director of Forensics.
Forrest was the second-best speaker at the tournament, along with Running Start student and team captain Kaitlyn Metscher who took 4th. Forrest ranks among the very best community college debaters in the Northwest, a region which is nationally recognized as a hotbed of debate activity.
This is the second time Clark College has taken second place this year. The first was when Running Start student David "Jidy" Chitta and his partner Tamara Gage took second at Pacific University in January. Metscher and her partner Kaylene Lamb won junior division at Whitman College over the winter.
Up next is the National Parliamentary Debate Association National Championship tournament in Flagstaff, Ariz., which will be held over the first weekend of spring break.
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Email marketing is still worth taking seriously. The aim of this guide is to showcase some of the latest email marketing and marketing automation techniques deployed by brands to engage their subscribers and develop purchase intent. It pays to keep up-to-date with the latest approaches to email marketing techniques given its importance to all types of business.
Creating this report would not have been possible without the time of the contributors to give their examples and guidance. Many thanks to all of the email marketing experts from several countries we consulted with to share their opinions of the latest trends.


A Virginia company says its technology can tap smart meter data to significantly increase the grid's capacity to host wind and solar power.
Dominion Voltage Inc.'s new voltage stabilization system greatly increases the ability of utility circuits to handle the voltage fluctuation problems created by variable solar and wind power. That opens the door to a much greater penetration of renewables, DVI executive director Todd Headlee said.
"Our goal is to move solar hosting ability from 20 percent of capacity, or peak daily demand, to 80 percent," Headlee said.
DVI was founded in 2012 as the grid optimization subsidiary of Dominion Resources Inc. (the parent company of Dominion Virginia Power) in Richmond, Virginia. DVI began offering its optimization software platform, Energy Distribution & Grid Efficiency (EDGE), the same year with voltage optimization for energy efficiency.
Twelve utilities in the United States and Canada currently use or have run pilots of some portion of the four-part software platform. The voltage stabilization system, which was awarded a patent in April, is the newest addition.
"Up until very recently, the cost of solar has been the biggest barrier to widespread adoption," Headlee said. "Now that costs have come down and we have reached grid parity in some markets, the next greatest barrier to overcome is increasing the grid's hosting capacity.
In markets where renewables are gaining traction, new technology is needed to keep fluctuating voltage within safe, regulated parameters without upgrading grid equipment.
For instance, if clouds are approaching an area with high solar production, "We hedge the voltage high so it doesn't dip too low," Headlee said.
Major utilities "have sophisticated weather departments and can forecast weather down to the city and even the block or square kilometer level," he said.
Instead of model-based optimization software, EDGE uses smart meter readings to control voltage in real time, he said. EDGE requires smart meters and can work with or without smart inverters, he said.
"There are other ways to do what EDGE does that aren't as sophisticated," Headlee said. "The game changer for this is AMI (advanced metering infrastructure). Half the country has a smart meter on their home. Using the smart meter data, the utility has visibility and voltage at every meter point.
As both solar and smart meters become more widely used, demand will grow for technology such as EDGE, Headlee said. As a side note, Virginia—where DVI is based—to date is not a leader in either area. Just 15 percent of all of Dominion Power's meters are smart meters and the state ranks 30th nationally in percentage of home solar installed.
Another driver is the EPA's limits on greenhouse gas emissions, currently on hold as the U.S. Supreme Court considers the issue. But some utilities are proceeding as if those limits will eventually be implemented, he said.
Both Hawaii and California have set high targets for the percentage of renewables on the grid.
Such voltage stabilization technology is needed, not just to meet future goals but also to address today's demand, especially when home solar owners want to save money by exporting excess power back to the utility. In Hawaii, which has the highest percentage of home solar in the United States, the Public Utility Commission has set limits for home solar systems that export power to the grid.
"HECO had to stop all the solar going into some neighborhoods because the voltage was so erratic," Headlee said.
Not surprisingly, utilities in California and Hawaii have been quick to see potential benefits from EDGE. California utility PG&E is currently in a large, five-year pilot project involving DVI's voltage stabilization system, Headlee said. HECO has signed a contract to use the voltage stabilization system, he said.
Duck River Electric Membership Corp., based in Shelbyville, Tennessee, has been using the EDGE voltage conservation system since November 2015, said Patrick Jordan, the co-op's director of operations.
Duck River EMC spent about $1.5 million on the DVI software and additional communication equipment to run EDGE, Jordan said. In the first year, the electric co-op has saved about 8,500 MWh, which would cost $850,000 at the retail electricity rate, he said. Each co-op member customer saves about 35 kWh, or $3-$5, per month, he said.
The co-op offsets about 1.5 MW of demand each month and saves $15,000 a month via the conservation program. Duck River also benefits from an energy savings program with energy supplier TVA, which pays Duck River for each kWh saved using the CVR system, he said.
Before EDGE, Duck River EMC relied on upgraded equipment installed in the 1990s for voltage conservation, Jordan said. The co-op couldn't adjust voltage as low since the readings weren't as specific as with EDGE.
"EDGE gives us the feedback to control it tighter," Jordan said.
Duck River is squeezing benefit from EDGE with a small number of smart meters as opposed to the full deployment intended by DVI. When the co-op purchased the system, engineers targeted key locations and installed a representative sample for each substation.
Duck River plans to have full deployment of 73,000 smart meters by July 2019, which will enable the co-op to lower voltage further and save more, he said.
Although Duck River is selling less energy to its members, it deems the program a win.


Northamptonshire Healthcare Foundation Trust . Northamptonshire COPD Guidelines . Ratified by NPAG (October 2014)... Subscribe to NPAG news. Your Name (required) Position. Organisation. Your Email (required) Twitter Follow; LinkedIn Follow; Upcoming Events. Security Network. October 11.
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The mere sight of a well-marbled otoro thrusts me into a visceral foodie frenzy. What prevents me from leaping over the counter for the unctuous tuna belly, besides manners and lack of coordination, is the cost factor. Especially when I consider that my sushi-loving wife could potentially uni us into debt.
Fortunately, there are sushi counters in Honolulu with omakase courses that boast delicious neta (topping), shari (sushi rice) and prices that don't break the bank. Here are my top picks, in order of price. Remember, the more you consume beyond what is included in the omakase course, the higher the price, so eater beware. All these recs are for omakase menus.
A renowned fishmonger who gets first dibs at some of the finest seafood out of Japan, Morio crafts an incredible 12-15 course omakase featuring five or six nigiri. He offers basics like a sashimi moriawase (assortment) and includes a grilled dish such as hamachi kama (collar). A fried course of flounder or moi precedes the sushi, which features more exquisite finds such as Japanese toro, shimaaji (striped horse mackerel), and a lobsterette, a crustacean that resembles an oversized amaebi.
Ryuji Murayama is known for oversized slices of fish draped over vinegared pats of locally milled Tsuyahime rice from Yamagata. His nine-course omakase may include hamachi-zuke (marinated raw amberjack), maguro-zuke (marinated tuna) or a spicy tuna handroll; an assortment of tempura including shrimp, whitefish and/or snapper; an oyster shooter or salmon with ikura, and about six pieces of nigiri such as nodoguro (blackthroat sea perch), hirame (flatfish), geoduck and uni. If size matters, at least for the neta, then this place is for you.
The nigiri Katsumidori Sushi is most famous for, chutoro.
Although technically not a true omakase, the tasting menu at the hybrid kaiten sushi restaurant/sushi counter in the Hawaii Prince Hotel includes an appetizer, steamed dish, grilled dish, sashimi, tempura and four to six pieces of nigiri. Dishes such as cream cheese in seaweed, cured mackerel, misoyaki butterfish and sweet potato with ankake sauce could precede the voluptuous slices of maguro, chutoro and otoro for which the restaurant chain is well known. Not everything in the nigiri portion of the omakase is tuna: Well-portioned pieces of amaebi and tako atop rice pats seasoned with a proprietary blend of vinegars are included and go just as beautifully when dipped in the restaurant's house soy sauce.
The shirauo gunkan at Maguro-ya.
Originally from the Kansai region of Japan, owner/chef Goro Obara brings over 40 years of sushi experience having worked the circuit in Osaka and Hiroshima before spending some time in Tokyo. The 12-seat counter in his eponymous Japanese restaurant specializing in Hawaii's longline catch is frequented by locals as well as Japanese transplants. Goro-san offers an omakase boasting about a dozen nigiri along the lines of hamachi, ikura, shiromi (white meat fish, such as tai or hirame), hikarimono (fish with silvery skin, such as saba or aji), seasonal local or Japanese catch (such as moi, hamo, or hotaru ika), and of course, maguro. If you do not mind "chopsticking" up a few more bucks, ask to try some kinmedai (splendid alfonsino or golden eye snapper), sayori (Japanese halfbeak), kue (grouper), or shirauo (icefish), which are not commonly found at many other sushi bars in town.
Uni and ikura gunkan at Natsunoya Tea House.
The nearly century-old teahouse is home to a 16-seat sushi restaurant. Patrons enjoy a genuine sushi bar experience dining on 10-12 nigiri that, averaged out, comes out to $3-4 per piece. Chef "Sho San" worked in Japan at his family's fish market and gained extensive experience in preparing the various components of fine sushi, including the blending of his own vinegars and shoyu.
With the likes of maguro, hamachi, ikura, amaebi, King salmon and uni on the omakase, it is no wonder that the popularity of this hidden sushi bar is growing. To accommodate the crowds, the owners now dedicate a private room for groups up to 15 people and offer outdoor seating. What could make this place any more attractive? Its BYOB policy, of course.


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All posts filed under: Page Views
Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: A Conversation with Jaimie Baron
Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná interviews Jaimie Baron about her new book, Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era.
Sporting Blackness: A Conversation with Samantha Sheppard
A Black man wearing a noose around his neck, filmed from a low angle. This brief, cryptic shot opens Haile Gerima's short film Hour Glass (1971). A cut, and the character is reintroduced as a college basketball player, first at practice, then in a game, surrounded by other Black athletes. They work the ball while, as Umar Bin Hassan—member of the legendary Harlem collective the Last Poets—recites on the soundtrack, "The white man is cuttin' off their balls." Glancing toward the white spectators in the bleachers, the ballplayer seems to experience an epiphany, comprehending his objectification and commodification as an athlete.
Paris in the Dark: A Conversation with Eric Smoodin
If you had happened to attend the December 8, 1929, screening of Fox Movietone Follies (David Butler and Marcel Silver, 1929) at the opening of the Moulin Rouge cinema in Paris, you would certainly remember the raucous audience that surrounded you. If reports are to be believed, you might have been among the patrons outraged by the poorly written French subtitles—"deplorable" French, really. You may have joined others that night or the following weekend in vandalizing chairs and throwing pieces of furniture at the screen, with shouts of "Shut up" or "In French!" But maybe you were there for a romantic rendezvous, in which case the film and the music and the subtitles mattered a lot less than having your evening marred by unhappy, snobbish viewers. Whatever the hypothetical situation, imagining yourself as a willing participant in Parisian film culture from the era of early sound cinema to around 1950 is nearly inevitable while reading Eric Smoodin's Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950.
Martial Law Melodrama: A Conversation with José B. Capino
In Lino Brocka's Bona (1980), Filipina star Nora Aunor plays the titular character, who grows infatuated with Gardo (Phillip Salvador), a B-movie actor and stuntman. Bona gives up the comfort of her middle-class home, leaving behind her family and boyfriend, to live with Gardo in a Manila slum. She dedicates her life to serving Gardo full-time, in spite of the many abuses to which he subjects her. Illustrating the imbalance of their relationship, Bona bathes her lover every night, ensuring the water is always warm enough for his liking, even after he brings other women home for his sexual adventures. At the end of the film, after being told by Gardo that she should leave his home, Bona gives him one more bath—this time with boiling water. Bona watches her lover scream in agony as she carries out her vengeance with the same serenity with which she had formerly carried out his bidding. Balancing highly emotional scenes with a quasi-documentary depiction of decaying Manila streets, Brocka reconfigures film melodrama into a defiant political act.
Cinematic Archives of the Present: A Conversation with Gustavo Procopio Furtado
On the morning of August 20, 2019, a man hijacked a bus with thirty-five passengers in Rio de Janeiro, causing a standoff with the police on the bridge that connects that city with its neighbor to the east, Niterói. As the hijacker threatened to burn down the bus with gasoline, helicopters hovered over the scene, and news channels recorded every move they could capture from both parties. A few hostages had been released by the time the hijacker was shot—and killed—by a sniper in the police force.
Scouting the Past: A Conversation with Priya Jaikumar on Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space
The tropics really pop in Jean Renoir's The River (1951), the first film to be shot in Technicolor in India. The film's photographic depiction of a wet, verdant Bengal prompted Rumer Godden, author of the novel on which Renoir's film is based, to complain that the film's backgrounds had "swamped" its narrative with an "overabundance of Indian life and color."1 In his memoirs, Renoir refers to scouting locations along the banks of the Hugli with his production designer, Eugène Lourié. There, Lourié discovered a palace that belonged to the maharaja of Gwalior, but its grounds were deemed insufficiently green. The lawn, yellowed somewhat by the summer sun, was torn out and a new one sown. Yet even the freshly grown grass wasn't green enough for Renoir: on the day of filming, Claude Renoir (the director of photography and the director's nephew) could be seen splashing the grass with green paint.
Moving Hollywood: A Conversation with Daniel Steinhart on Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting
Paramount was so nervous about the on-location production of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1956) that dailies filmed in the South of France were flown first to London for processing at the Technicolor lab and then to Los Angeles. After executives had reviewed the footage, a cable was dispatched back to France: Hitchcock's shallow-focus closeups were playing to the weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of the studio's new and expensive wide-screen format, VistaVision. It fell to the local production manager, C. O. "Doc" Erickson, to mediate the request for wider shots and sharper focus, which would also allow the camera to take in more of what they were all there for: the sunlit French Riviera.
Fraught Viewing: A Conversation with Editors Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen on Unwatchable
Let there be no ambiguity: the world has turned into a horror show, a modern-day political Grand Guignol of global proportions with an emerging Axis of Evil (Trump, Putin, al-Assad, and now, Bolsonaro in Brazil, to name only a few). Their bases are the virtual spaces of social media, their proscenium the many screens blanketing the planet with news alerts of the latest mass murder, police shooting, war-related atrocity, or xenophobic government policy. It has become all too common to see people look up from their laptops or phones and, with a hand clasped over their mouth, let out a guttural "Oh, my god."
The Liberal Sexual Subject: A Conversation with Damon R. Young
In 1998, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner published an essay entitled "Sex in Public," which now appears as the utopian vision of a bygone era. Drawing from Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Berlant and Warner called attention to the public mediation of sexuality in the United States and critiqued the heteronormative ideologies and institutions that hinged on a structural delineation of "personal life." Where a hegemonic public sphere had been constituted by "a privatization of sex and the sexualization of private personhood," so they argued, queer culture represented a world-making project involving the development of ephemeral, promiscuous, and often-criminal forms of intimacy—ones "that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation."
Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution: A Conversation with Nadia Yaqub
The terrain of history is perhaps nowhere more fraught than in the Israeli/Palestinian context, a highly charged force field of ethno-religious identities, political ideologies, and conflicting territorial claims. Overlaid with collective memories and symbolic meanings, the landscape has borne witness to war and imperial conquest, shifting regimes and borders, perpetual occupation and injustice, and overlapping yet seemingly irreconcilable narratives of past experience. Take 1948: celebrated by Zionists for the establishment of the State of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, the year is remembered by Palestinian Arabs as the Nakba ("catastrophe"), given the forcible dispossession and expulsion of an estimated 750,000 native inhabitants. And where many Israeli Jews have cast their nation's founding as a return to political sovereignty after nearly two millennia in the diaspora, Palestinians have sought to assert a counterhistory in a condition of subjugation and exilic dispersal from their land.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Buzzing Bits of Memory: On Omar Robert Hamilton's 'The City Always Wins'
Feroz Rather September 12, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
"All good novelists have bad memories."
Omar Robert Hamilton's debut novel, The City Always Wins, capturing Cairo in the convulsions of the revolution, brought back a bad memory of Srinagar. In the summer of 2010, one still, sickly hot evening in the capital city of Kashmir, I found myself in the working-class neighborhood of Batamalyun. The modestly built house of bricks formed the dead-end of the dust street. I went inside and found Fayaz Rah, the 39-year-old fruit vendor who I wanted to interview. A solidly-built man, he sat cross-legged in the sitting room, his back pressed to the wall. "At eight," he said, "one does not understand what protests during a curfew could mean." Two weeks ago, on the afternoon of August 2, his eight-year-old son, Sameer, had left the house to play with his friends. In a back alley, Indian paramilitaries, angry that since 2008 Kashmiris had been protesting and hurling stones and slogans of aazadi, independence, at them, caught Sameer and beat him with bamboo sticks.
Inside, Fayaz continued to narrate the story. Outside, the night began to fall. His quiet voice floated in the long, darkened room. I became restless and fidgety. I wanted the roof to fall down; and I wanted the walls to crumble. I wanted him to stumble or stop altogether, because in my mind I was already stumbling and failing to write the essay I so badly wanted to write. "He had bought a candy…," the father cried. "I'd not know. But when the ambulance [van] brought Sameer home and I held his dead body in my arms, I found the candy in his mouth. It was half-broken and stuck between his upper teeth."
The City Always Wins follows Khalil, an American-born young man of Palestinian origin. A lover of revolution and jazz, he, and a group of lefty friends, tirelessly film videos and record interviews of the revolution to upload a website called Chaos. Hamilton, a film maker by profession, arrests readers with auditory and visual details of the city flooded with democratic rage against Hosni Mubarak's protracted presidency. But the novel is not just an intimate act of witness to the outpourings of the people protesting in Tahrir Square and the military brutalities and massacres that followed; the novel's strength lies rather in the moments that unfold within the quiet of houses rather than the roar of the street, for instance, when Khalil, accompanying a French documentary crew talks to the father whose son has been killed.
Abu Bassem's dignity is somehow unbearable. He doesn't cry or curse or swear vendetta. But he is not defeated. Khalil feels somehow animal in contrast to the older man, his stillness, that he must be enraged for him, that he must do the crying, the stumbling.
During the interview, the French director, a technology-laden neo-Orientalist, gets impatient and irritated while Khalil and Abu Bassem speak in Arabic, leaving him out of the conversation. Kahlil feels "suddenly, burningly foreign, a tour operator cashing in on other people's misery, a cheap Virgil to guide foreigners through the city's labyrinth of martyrdom."
Journalism and reportage are arguably more suited to the act of witnessing, while fiction is a place for quieter recollection and contemplation of the self and what has become of it through said witnessing. Throughout the book, Hamilton's voice has two distinct and somewhat conflicting tendencies. One is the desire to be a direct witness to the revolution, to report the street without the façade and filter of characters. The other is to analyze the act of witnessing by measuring the impact it has had on the lives of the characters and the decisions they make. With its quickly shifting points of view, its staccato vignettes and serrated phrases soaring into lament and lyricism, City reads best in those sections where the intensity of witnessing is informed by the mood brought about by the psychological transformation: the opening passage, for instance, wherein Khalil's girlfriend, Mariam, grapples with the bodies remorselessly "crushed under tanks" during the march to Maspero. The urgent rendering of sensual details hits one like the miasma of death hanging in the morgue.
She stopped counting the dead an hour ago. These corridors are so compressed with bodies and rage and grief that something, surely, is going to explode. Everywhere are the cries of a new loss, a shouted question, a panicked face, a weeping phone call…Blocks of ice are melting between the bodies of the fallen, vapors whispering off the flesh of the silenced.
Hamilton has channeled the effusive energy of the revolution to create a narrative of stunning fragments. But because the desire to be a witness outweighs the desire to put the witness to a novelistic examination, the fragments hardly coalesce to constitute a novel. The joy lies in reading the vignettes individually, lucent and often phantasmagorical, which fail to string together to make a seamless sustained narrative in which one could follow Khalil's physical and psychological journey through the potentially hurting landscape of the city. The result is that Khalil, though unhinged, dispossessed and selflessly utopian, is not realized to the full arc of his rage.
With the rise of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to power, the energies of the revolution are frustrated. But as the need to replace Morsi becomes clearer and Cairo begins to cheer for Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Khalil feels lost and misdirected. After breaking up with Mariam and witnessing the death of a close friend, he returns to New York.
Hamilton recreates chunks of Khalil's beleaguered consciousness with the fidelity of an impressionist, and one's knowledge of Khalil at the end is almost the same as it was at the beginning. Between him and the reader are the smoke-blurred, blood-spattered streets of Cairo longing for liberation, the city itself the most vocal of all the characters. Khalil's voice is interchangeable with the voice of other characters. It is the authorial voice that dominates and diminishes him. At times, the dialogue is too dramatic to be credible.
Novels make certain demands as to how to properly employ memory. To fictionalize a bad memory like the one recounted at the beginning of this essay, mere impressionistic rendering of how the boy was bludgeoned to death will not do. One must put to the novelistic scrutiny the complex churning within the self (of the father) the killing set in motion and find ways to trace the transformation over a period of years in the language of gestures, human, silent and concrete. One must dwell in the darkness of the sitting room that'll haunt the narrator, his horror and shame untold, as he walks the roads of the city on which Sameer once walked and played.
The artist, unable to tolerate reality, forgets long and forgets strong. The mind with its uncanny mechanisms, buries the bad memory under consciousness, until a familiar color or caress, a smell or a tone calls it all back again, unwarranted, and in the febrile beehive of imagination, the bright buzzing bits of memory curl into the shape of the novel. Hamilton does not forget enough what he has witnessed recently and literally. It is the memory itself that is so visceral and brutal and excessive that, in its ethereal rendering, he succeeds to shock and harangue, creating a vivid illusion of fiction.
Feroz Rather is a doctoral student of Creative Writing at Florida State University. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Southeast Review, Berfrois, Caravan, and in Mad Heart, Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali published by Michigan University Press. The Night of Broken Glass, his novel in stories, will be published by HarperCollins in 2018.
Rising Waters: On Omar El Akkad's 'American War'
Nicholas Cannariato April 21, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 11 4 min read
A Brief History of the Future: On James Gleick's Time Travel: A History
Jonathan Russell Clark October 28, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 2 9 min read
"Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you."
—Susan Sontag, quoting "an old riff I've always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy," but part of which (i.e., the first half) is often attributed to John Archibald Wheeler (who "admitted to having found it scrawled in a Texas men's room"), Woody Allen, and Albert Einstein, but which actually appeared before all of these figures were supposed to have said or written it in a novel by Ray Cummings from 1922 called The Girl in the Golden Atom and is spoken by a character named Big Business Man, so I guess one can only really credit Sontag (or, I suppose, the "old riff" to which she refers) with the part about space (which, admittedly, is a totally brilliant and enriching addendum; really makes the phrase, don't you think?), and if you think this quote attribution is convoluted and confusing well then hold onto your hats, there, buddy, because shit's about to get real weird
Tom Robbins, in his 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, abruptly interrupts the narrative and briefly expounds on the nature of time in literature. "Even though we agree that time is relative," he writes, "that most subjective notions of it are inaccurate just as most objective expressions of it are arbitrary…even so, we have come to expect, for better or worse, some sort of chronological order in the books we read, for it is the function of literature to provide what life has not." He has interjected, he explains, to inform the reader of some reordering of certain events — i.e., that the events of Parts I and II occurred after the events currently being described in Part III. "The author apologizes" for any confusion but "does not, however, disavow the impulses that lead to his presentation…nor does he, in repentance, embrace the notion that literature should mirror reality." Moreover, he continues:
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves — all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
This passage — one of my very favorites — drifted into my mind (a psychological phenomenon referred to, I now know, as "involuntary mental time travel") as I read through James Gleick's fascinating new book Time Travel: A History, as Robbins's quote seems to have anticipated (or, maybe, pre-emptively challenged) just such a work. What could any book, a mere vessel of subjective interpretation, tell us about time, an invisible system of measuring change? I suspected that by the end I'd either feel tricked or confounded.
It turns out that I felt neither deceived nor confused — or, rather, I did feel those things, but about the subject and not the book. Gleick's hybrid of history, literary criticism, theoretical physics, and philosophical meditation is itself a time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey, and it works so well. Even though Gleick can elucidate complex ideas into accessible language, he's even better at explicating notions that remain perplexing. That is, he's good at explaining paradoxes — itself a sort of paradoxical phrase, paradoxes supposedly being logical contradictions that defy common sense and are thus difficult — if not impossible — to comprehend. But a subject like time travel, as we savvy citizens of the 21st century well know by now, is rife with paradox, and any account of its history must not only engage with those incongruities but transcend them in some powerful way. There has to be, in other words, more insight than one would find in a given episode of Doctor Who.
That's not to say that elements of popular culture are out of the time-travel historian's reach (Doctor Who, for instance, is fruitfully used by Gleick in Time Travel), but rather that such an enterprise's primary subject must only ostensibly be time travel but that it's truly about why we're so interested in the subject and what that means about who we are. The infinite intricacies of moving forward or backward in time have been so thoroughly dissected by popular culture that, quite amazingly, these meta-cognitive and entirely theoretical ideas have become clichés. In her fun and insightful new book Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies, Hadley Freeman notes a plot hole in 1985's Back to the Future: "But complaining about credibility issues in a movie about time travel is surely the definition of carping." And to think that humanity, as a species, didn't even consider the concept of time travel until a little more than 100 years ago, and already such innovative and cerebral ideas have grown so banal they're barely worthy of comment. It is amazing what human beings can become bored with.
Gleick is particularly suited to the task of writing a history of time travel. His previous books include Genius, a rich biography of physics bad-boy Richard Feynman; The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, which traces the origins of the information age; and Chaos: Making a New Science, a work that tackles chaos theory and that made "the Butterfly Effect" a common term. Gleick was also the founder, with Uday Ivatury, of The Pipeline in 1993, one of the earliest Internet service providers. Time travel, for such a writer, must be almost bromidic. And to be sure, there is a slight trace of disdain in Gleick for his subject here, almost as if he's getting annoyed having to explicate ideas he knows are hogwash — e.g., his takedown of "time capsules," which he refers to as "a special kind of foolishness," — or having the irksome duty of assembling such declarations as, "In point of fact, time is not a river."
But by the end of the book I too developed a frustration with the myriad arguments surrounding time — not at any of the arguers but of the flimsiness of my hold on it as a subject of speculation. Every time I felt I had a grasp on a particular way of thinking about time, some new theory threw my understanding out the window. For example, Gleick begins his history with the creator of time travel, H.G. Wells, and his monumental work of science fiction of 1895, The Time Machine. In its early pages, the protagonist, the Time Traveller, Socratically explains the basics of his invention with some skeptical (and similarly ersatz) characters:
'You know of course [said the Time Traveller] that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.'
'That is all right,' said the Psychologist.
'Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.'
'There I object,' said Filby. 'Of course a solid body may exist. All real things-'
'So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?'
'Don't follow you,' said Filby.
'Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?'
Filby became pensive. 'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in four dimensions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and — Duration."
Gleick calls Filby a "poor sap" for putting up such a "feeble resistance" to the Time Traveller's points, but for me such a basic explanation was revelatory — to consider duration as a necessary component to existence seems not only true but rather obvious once you've learned it.
But it quickly becomes clear that the validity of time as the "fourth dimension" wasn't going to last too long in the rapid development of subsequent time travel theorems and the physics and quantum mechanics that eventually joined the party. Just as my brain congratulated itself for its keen comprehension, it was thrown for a new loop. Not that this is Gleick's fault, of course — the very subject of time travel invites headaches if pondered longer than a few minutes, and Gleick's book totals 336 pages of mind-bending conundra: some mental pain is inevitable, both for author and reader.
Gleick, though, through his years of scientific authorship, has become an artful writer who clearly has a deep love for literature, consequently employing fictional techniques in his nonfiction work. He repeatedly opens sections with the mise-en-scène of novels or TV show episodes that feature time travel, as in this description of the opening of La Jetée, a film by Chris Marker from 1962 that is made up of only still images, and which was the inspiration for the 1995 Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys:
We begin again. A woman stands at the end of "pier" — the open-air observation platform at Orly Airport (la grande jetée D'Orly), over-looking a sea of concrete on which the great metal jetliners rest, pointed like arrows toward the future. The sun is pale in a charcoal sky. We hear shrill jet blasts, a ghostly choir, murmuring voices.
There is a ton of rhetorical work going on here, the kind usually associated with fictional narratives, from the thematic reference of the jets "pointed like arrows toward the future" to the asyndeton in the final sentence. Or consider Time Travel's opening sentence, introducing Wells's Time Traveller: "A man stands at the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods — a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials." Notice how subtly Gleick takes us from literal description ("A man stands…") to metaphorical commentary (the 19th century as "a drafty corridor") to literary criticism ("…the poor reader…") to cluing us into the fact that he's talking about a novel ("despite the listing of parts…"). Gleick may have a little of the frustrated novelist in him, but he's certainly learned well how to exercise (and exorcise) that frustration advantageously. Time Travel is as elegant and eloquent as it is edifying.
This love of literature manifests in other ways in the book, too, also beneficially. Though Gleick runs the gambit of physicists and philosophers and theorists (from St. Augustine to Stephen Hawking), he's most fruitful and fun and alive as a writer when he dissects novels and films and television — which is more than fitting considering that time travel itself was the invention of a fiction writer; Gleick, by featuring more fiction than theory, as it were, is merely staying in the tradition that originated the notion. For instructive tools, Gleick takes the reader through, e.g., Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and William Gibson's The Peripheral and, most interestingly, E.M. Forster's bleak and just fucking weird novella The Machine Stops. But perhaps my favorite is that episode of Doctor Who Gleick discusses (which I at first wanted to summarize here to grapple with a bit but which proved way too elaborate to do in anything fewer than like seven or eight sentences, and this is already getting too long as it is). Part of the fun of these sections is the various ways Gleick uses them to demonstrate certain abstractions or murky concepts, but what really makes them sing is how richly palpable Gleick's love for sci-fi is — for its inventiveness, yes, but more so for its playfulness, the way it can positively relish the paradoxes and the moral dilemmas and the general confusion of it all. (Best example: Robert Heinlein's short story "By Your Bootstraps.")
And his love is particularly noticeable when set against his growing irritation at now commonly accepted views of time — most of which he so obviously disagrees with. "Timelessness, eternity, the four-dimensional spacetime loaf," he concludes, "These are the illusions." Time, for Gleick, no matter how skillful the rhetoric or how tempting the logic, simply cannot be denied its reality (or at least our illusion of its reality), because of how completely it situates our experiences of everyday life. It is, rather, space that is the illusion.
By the end I found I concurred with Gleick about time's irrepressible existence, which might have warranted more examination of our psychological perception of time, as in Claudia Hammond's 2013 engaging work Time Warped, which mostly ignores those dusty arguments over whether or not time exists and instead focuses on the way we experience it as a phenomenon. She notes, for instance, that as humans we're not only organized by time but also exceptionally skilled at it (though, Hammond notes, citing Jean Piaget, the "father of developmental psychology," that as children, we "find it hard to distinguish between size as it relates to time and size as it relates to space"). Hammond shows how time affects more aspects of our lives than we might assume, like conversations:
To produce and understand speech, we rely on critical timings of less than a tenth of a second. The difference between the sound of a 'pa' and a 'ba' is all in the timing of the delay before the subsequent vowel, so if the delay is longer you hear a 'p,' if it's short you hear a 'b.' If you put your hand on your vocal cords you can even feel that with the 'ba' your lips open at the same time as you feel your cords start to vibrate. With the 'pa' the vibrations starts a moment earlier. This relies on timing accurate to the millisecond.
If the abstract debates over time are inadequate at worst and irrelevant at best, then shouldn't these be the kinds of ideas we focus on? If time (and not space) is fundamental to nature, and we're stuck with its effects no matter how much of an illusion we "prove" it to be, then our clever excursions through the epochs in science fiction might not be the most productive use of our intellectual attention.
But what the hell do I know? With each thought regarding all these pitfall-ridden concepts, I second-guess myself, and I begin to relate to Tom Robbins's meditation in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. After his apology for mucking up the chronology and noting that books don't actually reflect reality, he adds that he's got a repertoire of sentences at his disposal, to do with what he wishes. "This sentence is made of yak wool," he writes, while another sentence "has a crush on Norman Mailer." "This sentence went to Woodstock" goes another, and "this little sentence went wee wee all the way home." It's a fun bit, but the one I really relate to is the final one: "This sentence is rather confounded by the whole damn thing."
Jonathan Russell Clark | 1 book mentioned 2 9 min read
Unchecked Complacency and Privilege: On Prayaag Akbar's 'Leila'
Aditya Singh February 16, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 7 min read
Read as political and social allegory, Leila is a powerful commentary on the inherently unstable foundations that India's societal setup rests upon, where progress predicated on economic growth has led to widening economic inequality.
Aditya Singh | 1 book mentioned 7 min read
The Sublime and the Odious: On Joseph Luzzi's My Two Italies
Hannah Gersen August 13, 2014 | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
My Two Italies is a hybrid memoir, both a recollection of personal experience and growth and also a scholarly look at the long-standing divide between Italy's north and south -- the north characterized by wealth and culture, and the south by poverty and crime. For Luzzi, the divide is personally felt.
Hannah Gersen | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
Resurrected from the Dead: Gary Lutz's I Looked Alive
Shannon Elderon November 17, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 1 4 min read
Partnerships in this collection are never just a matter of "me" and "you." There is me and you, but there's also the person I'm channeling through you, the person you're using me to forget about, the person I'm imagining you to be.
Shannon Elderon | 1 book mentioned 1 4 min read
Newspaper Violence
C. Max Magee February 26, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
It seems likely to me that a few readers will not get past the introduction of Pete Dexter's new book, a collection of newspaper columns and magazine articles called Paper Trails. In it he lets us know that he had little interest in collecting his columns in the first place. He tells us that the 82 columns and articles we are about to read will lack dates and any indication as to where they first appeared because, basically, he and his editor Rob Fleder didn't want to dig them up. He also calls the venerable Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley a "worn-out old whore."The people who don't appreciate any of this, of course, are probably the same people who wrote to him over the years outraged by the way he treated his wife. For those who get Dexter, however, all of this is brilliant. Dexter is adamantly self-deprecating and willing to step on plenty of toes. He also used thousands of column inches to mercilessly tease his wife, as any reader of this collection will quickly discover. Naturally, to those with a sense of humor, it's clear that Mrs. Dexter is just the foil for his antics.Though Dexter the newspaperman often comes off as brash and insensitive, compassion is Dexter's most irrepressible quality in this collection of columns. Written primarily for newspapers in Philadelphia and Sacramento, Dexter's columns evince a keen eye for people wronged by the system, and in them he slays corrupt cops, sleazy lawyers, and crooked politicians deftly with his pen. However, and this was a surprise to me, he also devotes plenty of ink to animals, his cats and dogs mostly, but there was also his memorable encounter with a peahen.Columns like these, 1000-word missives shot out of a cannon, are not seen much these days. Nowadays, local newspaper columnists aren't the advocates they once were, instead getting caught up commenting on whatever was featured on CNN that day or hammering on petty controversies. It seems less likely that Dexter fell prey to those temptations during his newspaper career, and these 82 columns, stripped of their context and years or decades old, are no less affecting for it. It is a book that will make you laugh and cry nearly 82 times over.The central thread running through the collection, of course, is Dexter himself, sometimes the comic hero, other times carrying the weight of human depravity – the murders, the missing bodies, the broken families, and the drunks – on his shoulders. The urban decay of the 1970s, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, is the backdrop to this book. He wrote about the violent city, and violence would help end his newspaper career when he was beaten nearly to death by a mob in South Philly in 1981. As Pete Hamill explains in the forward to Paper Trails, Dexter had gone that day to make peace with brother of a man who had died in a drug deal and who Dexter had written about, but the man turned on him. Dexter would move on and wrote novels and screenplays – and this collection includes some of Dexter's writing from that era, too – but even if Dexter hadn't achieved his late career success, one suspects he would not have been bitter about it.Bonus Links: My review of Paris Trout; My review of Train; My review of Brotherly Love; The day I met Dexter.
C. Max Magee | 1 book mentioned 2 min read
'Conference Room, Five Minutes' Is Shea Serrano's Love Letter to 'The Office'
Nic Dobija-Nootens August 22, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 4 min read
Conference Room, Five Minutes is by all means a passion project. It's an expression of love for The Office, both in its motivation and end result.
Nic Dobija-Nootens | 1 book mentioned 4 min read
The Past as Destiny, The Place as Self: Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
Lacar Musgrove July 28, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 4 min read
Lacar Musgrove Lacar Musgrove is the associate non-fiction editor of Bayou Magazine, published by the University of New Orleans, where she is pursuing an M.F.A. She has a B.A. in English from Boston University.Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City is a strange and fascinating self-portrait.The first time I read Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul was on a train from Istanbul to Bucharest at the beginning of a two month journey through southern Europe. I'd been living in Istanbul for a year and a half and was interested in the book not as a memoir but as a book about Istanbul. It's a strange way of writing a memoir, as entire chapters are dedicated not to Pamuk's life but to Western and Turkish writers and artists who have depicted Istanbul though painting and writing. Pamuk writes of viewing himself and his city through Western eyes, sometimes borrowed, sometimes, he suspects, his own, recognizing his education and intellectual life as westernized.I was delighted to find many of Pamuk's observations of Istanbul echoing what I had perceived through my Western eyes. I was particularly amused by this:It snowed on average between three and five days a year, with the accumulation staying on the ground for a week to ten days, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first.I cannot tell you how true this is. When it snowed my first winter there and my students refused to come to class, I thought it odd. But the next year it happened again, and the people of Istanbul reacted with the same surprise. It happens every year, and every year they are unprepared.The second time I read Istanbul was for a graduate non-fiction survey course, and it was the inclusion of this title on the reading list that solidified my decision to take the course. Upon deeper study, Istanbul revealed itself as an intricately woven portrait of place, memory and self. Pamuk's narrative of his childhood and adolescence is confessional and his tone humble as he guides the reader with exquisitely subtle steps through this portrait. He handles the portrayal of his adolescent self in crisis with the same clarity and compassion with which he depicts a fallen empire city struggling with decline. Pamuk invites you into the hüzün, the collective melancholy of the city's people, but does not break your heart with tragedy. Rather, he allows you to bathe in the comfort of it, to feel the resignation, the longing for a more glorious past as he describes old houses one by one going up in flames, the wealth of the city flowing from the old Istanbul families to the newly rich, a city unable to cling to the past but also incapable of defining a future: paralyzed.So what does this book have to offer one who has never been and may never go to Istanbul? You'll have to look deep to find it. This is a book about extracting one's identity from the world, about finding the line between self and society and occupying the place where each is served, finding stasis. In a self-portrait in which self and place are inseparable, Pamuk's struggle is that of reconciling the two. The history, the geography, the buildings, the people tell him who he is. He recognizes himself as, rather than a unique individual, a character shaped of the collective experience. The habits and possessions of his family are not unique, his hüzün, his melancholy, is not his own but the collective hüzün of Istanbul, his life is not only his life but the life of the city. Young Orhan, however, occupies not only Istanbul but a secret inner world, the solitary world of his daydreams, which he expresses, in childhood and adolescence, through drawing and painting. He is tormented by anxiety and guilt over the separation of this inner world, and when painting no longer serves his need to bring the inner world to the outer, he hits a crisis which is only resolved when he learns to occupy both worlds simultaneously through writing, a moment in which he, unlike Istanbul, manages to disentangle himself from the past, "warmed by the flame of my brilliant future."Through its theme of inner and outer worlds, the text explores the tension between our sense of self and our sense of how others see us. "Once imprinted on our minds, other people's reports of what we've done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember." We know ourselves through our own memories as well as the memories of others. At the beginning of the opening chapter he writes, "This book is concerned with fate." Pamuk fancies himself unique in his struggle, but I would say his metamorphosis is common if not universal, at least in modern Western societies in which the individual is expected to cultivate a discreet identity and is responsible for harnessing his "true" self in order to fulfill a destiny.I understood Pamuk's point of view through my own experience, not with Istanbul but with returning from Istanbul to Louisiana, my home and my family and grappling with my claim to this place and its claim to me. Having come to view Louisiana through the eyes of an outsider and myself as separate from it, I found myself confronting the truth of my own identity's inseparability from place and my need to not only claim but defend it. I empathize with Pamuk's sense of shame knowing how the rest of the country views our poverty, the ignorance of our citizens, the corruption of our government, the state of our infrastructure. Through confronting the connection between my identity and this place, I can accept this melancholy and embrace and the promise of the past's claim on my destiny.
Lacar Musgrove | 1 book mentioned 4 min read


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Innovate Lanka concludes with Demo Day and Finale
Sri Lanka to use waste plastic to carpet highways
Published by AGC Administrator on December 19, 2022
Innovate Lanka recently concluded with its 2022 Demo Day and Finale, where 10 finalists pitched their exceptional ideas to a high profile panel that encompassed Corporate Leaders, Domain Experts and Angel Investors.
Adjudged this year's winner, AGC Innovate is a sustainable initiative pioneering technology to convert non-recyclable waste plastics into an industrial raw material called Plastic Modified Asphalt Concrete (PMAC) in Sri Lanka, which will be used for paving roads, car parks and yards. Since its inception in 2018, the company has already completed more than 15 projects, including for RDA, PRDA, Cargills (Ceylon) PLC, John Keells Holdings (Cinnamon Life and Crescat), CBL, French Embassy, etc.
The runner-up for 2022 was DirectPay, which connects everyone digitally, bringing them one step closer to a cashless society, by introducing modern payment methods for the financial and telecom industries. DirectPay is a FinTech application that provides direct debit facilities, Internet Payment Gateway and LankaQR and JustPay (National QR) technologies to enable customers to make payments across any boundary.
Also awarded was the "Best Female Entrepreneur" title, which was handed out to Bluefish Ceylon. This fish food manufacturer is dedicated to providing ready-to-eat, flavourful, and nutrient-dense fish products made with hand-picked natural ingredients with an authentic and distinct taste, while adhering to 100% hygiene standards.
A national initiative bringing together Sri Lanka's main startup and SME ecosystem partners, Innovate Lanka is a programme initiated by the Council for Startups (CFS) of The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC), the Lankan Angel Network (LAN) and Sri Lanka Association for Software Services Companies (SLASSCOM). This programme will ideally also serve up the systematic change required to rebuild Sri Lanka, by providing personalised support for every entrepreneur while offering a one-stop-shop for incubation and acceleration, until exit, at the global level.
In addition to the winner, runner-up and "Best Female Entrepreneur" title holders, the Innovate Lanka Demo Day and Finale also offered up presentations by other top 10 finalists. These included WorkXFlow, EDUS Lanka, INGROW Holdings, Ceylon Dhee Ayurved, Stag Space, Edutoys and CrossBorder Payments.
Garnering an exemplary 70+ entries during its initial, applications stage, Innovate Lanka later went on to thoroughly vet these submissions, ultimately whittling down its pool of startups and SMEs to just the top 10. This was achieved via an intensive pitching and evaluation process, which was facilitated by LAN.
LAN Chairperson Chandi Dharmaratne said: "We at LAN, along with our global, national and eco-system partners, and the many incubators and accelerators that participated, are committed to supporting SMEs and entrepreneurs during the tough economic times ahead. Programmes such as Innovate Lanka will keep dreams of scaling alive, until such time as our economy recovers and more startups and SMEs can bootstrap themselves into the global marketplace."
Commenting further, CFS Chairman Prajeeth Balasubramaniam said: "Entrepreneurship is critical to stimulate long-term economic growth and national prosperity. As an entrepreneur, today there is no one private sector body representing them to help in all spheres of growth at the different stages. Innovate Lanka platform was created with this in mind as a national initiative that brings all the start-up and SME ecosystem partners together".
Adding to this, SLASSCOM Chairman Ashique Ali said: "We were happy to partner in this programme as start-ups play a significant role in innovation, creating social, economic, and environmental impact, and generating export revenue. There are a significant number of start-ups which have the potential to scale regionally and globally. SLASSCOM together with other ecosystem partners aim to support these startups through their incubation to scale up journey, realising SLASSCOM's goal of catalysing 1000 startups by the year 2025."
Those designated by Innovate Lanka's high profile panellists will now go on to access the following stellar opportunities:
1. Participating in the GEN (Global Entrepreneurship Network) Entrepreneurship World Cup 2022 boot-camp programme
2. Gaining entry to Accelerators and Incubators such as Venture Frontier, Hatch, Lanka Accelerator, Indian Accelerator, Good Life X, Centre for SMEs of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and Youth Business Sri Lanka (YBSL)
3. Go-To-Market (GTM) advisory services facilitated by the Council For Startups; and
4. Funding, Mentoring and Coaching support via LAN and SLASSCOM.
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In light of the recent furore* over CFI's bafflingly vacuous response to Ron Lindsay's behaviour, some prominent members of the freethinking community have decided to pull back their participation in an organization that they see as not adequately representing their values. Some have even gone so far as to encourage others to do the same. This is pretty much boilerplate activist behaviour: someone says or does something unacceptable, you don't patronize or support them anymore. We applauded it when Chick Fil A's Dan Cathy made homophobic statements and people stopped buying his chicken. We applauded it when Rush Limbaugh said… well, basically the stuff he always says, but this time we paid attention.
And yeah, maybe boycotts don't always work, and maybe they're often impractical what with megacorporate ownership of pretty much everything, but they're a pretty non-controversial method of expressing displeasure with someone or some entity whose actions you strongly disagree with.
Unless, of course, you're criticizing CFI and Ron Lindsay, in which case it's a "witch hunt".
Now, to be sure, this is not the only circumstance under which I've seen this comparison dredged, unwillingly, into a place it doesn't belong. It is, however, a distressingly common circumstance to see people decry any and all criticisms of or actions taken against someone who is on 'their team' as a "witch hunt". Oftentimes they will invoke the ghost of old Joe McCarthy, and generally bloviate about how innocent people are being dragged through the muck by (fill in the blank). [Read more…]
critical thinking, crommunism, forces of stupid, freethought community
Right now, as you read this, some well-intentioned white kid on the internet is posting a link to this video. In it, the actor Morgan Freeman states that the way to solve racism is to stop talking about it. Specifically, Freeman says that if the host stops seeing him (Freeman) as "a black man", then he will stop seeing the host as "a white man" and they can presumably just be man-friends and hold hands under a double rainbow or something. Needless to say, I am far from impressed by both the content and the ubiquity of this clip, as it serves more to confirm the "I don't need to do anything" impulses of white people who haven't given much thought to the matter beforehand.
For my part, I much prefer John Legend's response to a very similar question. And I think there's something to be gleaned from the age difference between Messrs Freeman and Legend. The former is a man who came up in a world where the consequences of anti-black racism were dramatically self-evident: vicious racist slurs coming out of the mouths of police officers and judges, blatantly and unashamedly racist laws and policies, frequent acts of race-motivated physical violence with a blind eye turned toward it by an indifferent society*. The latter is a man who came up in the world of 'polite' racism and "post-racial" politicking, where the fashion is to find an endless string of euphemisms to disguise racist attitudes and behaviours that, minus the drama, haven't changed much.
Which isn't to say, incidentally, that the kind of racism that Morgan Freeman experienced isn't still very much alive and well today; it's just less common. [Read more…]
critical thinking, politics, race, racism
Religious Islam vs. Political Islam
There's one final point I need to explore before I launch into a longer discussion of the events of last month, and that's a debate I had in the comments about the difference between Islam as a religion and Islam as a political force. The former refers explicitly to Islam as I have described it up to now – the scripture-based, dogmatic, supernaturally-connected philosophy that all Muslims claim to be following (although arguably none actually do). The latter is the sense in which we have "Islamic countries" – a fusion of religion and politics and culture and history that is broadly referred to as "Islam".
This difference is not semantic, and it is (I imagine) the latter type of 'Islam' that the most vociferous critics think of as they alight their soapboxes. That is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you – cultural criticism is important, even if it's someone else's culture you're criticizing. The problem arises when criticisms of a culture fail to take all the relevant elements into account and fixate on a single one. So, for example, there are legitimate criticisms to make about "black culture"*, and black critics make them all the time, but when those criticisms focus on race and fail to factor in things like racialization, poverty, historical exclusion, and a litany of other relevant factors, the crticisms land far wide of the mark.
Indeed, it is usually this exact thing going on when members of majority groups complain that it's only ____-ist when they do it. That's maybe a conversation for another time, but the double standard is only true in a very superficial and inaccurate way. [Read more…]
critical thinking, politics, religion
Is criticism of Islam racist?
Now let me explain why it's not that simple.
In any dispute among atheists (or non-atheists) about Islam, the chances are pretty good that someone will make some kind of off-side claim about what "Muslims" do or do not believe, or that we need to curb the civil liberties and human rights of Muslims to protect "Western society" from "Muslims". In many of these cases, the rejoinder will come back that such policies or beliefs are racist.
In these moments, the accused will oftentimes develop (almost supernaturally) an encyclopaedic knowledge of what racism is and how it works, or at least ze will behave as though ze has that knowledge. "Muslims come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds," they say "so they're not all the same race. Therefore it can't be racist!" That brand of dismissal has become so commonplace that it is, more often than not, run through with a vein of long-suffering annoyance, not entirely dissimilar from the one heard immediately before the words "race card" or "political correctness police" are uttered. It is the reflexive, elusive, near-thoughtless evasion of the issue, so that one can stand behind the original criticism, regardless of its quality or accuracy.
There are two principal issues I have with this evasive response: [Read more…]
critical thinking, race, racism, religion
Islamic criticism vs. Islamophobia
The freethinking community periodically finds itself in the paroxysms of indecision and self-recrimination for its inability to consistently address a simple question: what is the difference between "criticism of Islam" and "Islamophobia"? Whenever we seek to draw attention to atrocities committed in the name of Islam, we are caught in a firestorm of criticism on a variety of fronts. The most recent example was the fracas surrounding prominent atheist spokesmen Sam Harris and, to a lesser extent, Richard Dawkins, for comments they have made about Islam.
There are two extreme responses to this issue. The first, favoured by many within the atheist community, is to deny the very existence of Islamophobia – to claim that the term is political jargon that is used exclusively to deflect legitimate criticism by painting all critics as bigots. The second is to make the converse claim that all criticism of Islam is indeed Islamophobic, and that people's religious beliefs ought to be off-limits. While these two positions are extreme, and while I am far more sympathetic to the former than the latter, I would imagine most people would agree on the following statement:
Bigotry is morally reprehensible, but we should be allowed to criticize bad ideas regardless of the social characteristics of those who hold them.
critical thinking, religion
Lessons to be learned from the Boston tragedy
I have just returned from a trip to Boston. These posts have been waiting for a while to publish, and this is as good a time as any.
Over the past month*, I have repeatedly found myself in the odd position of defending Islam and Muslims from fellow atheists. As an atheist, I am certainly strongly antagonistic to Islam, as I am to all religions. It is, therefore, unusual and counter-intuitive for me to step up in its defence. After all, the critics and I share a fundamental belief that the world would be a better place if fewer people adhered to Islam. We share the belief that Islam is false, that it holds up dangerous beliefs in such a way as to preclude criticism, and that it is a major contributor to human suffering worldwide.
My departure from the opinions of anti-Islam critics happens when I perceive those criticisms to be grounded not in factual appraisals of the damage caused by Islam, but in a lazy conflation of 'Islam', 'Islamism', and general distaste about brown foreign types. These criticisms come quickly in response to any circumstance in which Islam is implicated. Even in cases where Islam is not explicitly mentioned, like in the case of so-called "honour killings" where the murderers are most often operating within cultural norms grounded in extreme patriarchial entitlement, Islam gets the credit by diffusion.
In the case of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers in Boston, the anti-Islam screeds began to pour in well in advance of the suspects even being identified, let alone their motivations being known. When the news broke that the bombers did indeed profess Islam, I could almost hear the sound of a million Islamophobic cocks standing immediately to full attention. Finally, some vindication of the facts they had "known all along" – that a random act of terrorism was in fact religiously-motivated by the worst religion in the world, and there was no need to stop stigmatizing any and all people who are Muslim (or 'Muslim-looking'), or to examine our own policies and behaviours – it's because Muslims. Full stop. [Read more…]
critical thinking, crommunism, news, race, racism, religion
Islamophobia, a discussion
Depending on who you read or listen to, either Islamophobia simply isn't real, or it's not as pervasive as people think it is, or sometimes it's a legitimate criticism, but it's often used incorrectly to shut down someone legitimately criticising Islam, or else it's just some word (without any legitimate meaning) that people use to shut down conversations. To which I say: bullshit. I have to grant, of course, that there is possibly some people out there do these things, but I have to admit that I haven't actually seen any of them. Even in articles where these claims are made, no evidence is provided.
Most often, people who haven't 'picked sides' in this particular debate are left wondering what this term means, exactly. So I'm going to sketch out what I think it means, and how I see it used (which are, oddly enough, the same thing). Note that 'what the term means' isn't the same as 'what the word is defined as'. [Read more…]
Brian Lynchehaun, critical thinking, culture, freethought community, philosophy, religion
Possibly foreign
As you've no doubt heard from countless media sources, two devices exploded yesterday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing two and wounding dozens. No group or individual has claimed responsibility for what appears to be an attack. I am trying to cage my language as much as possible here, for reasons I will make obvious over the course of this post.
Boston is my favourite city in the United States. It is also home to my closest friend, who was thankfully nowhere near the site when the explosions happened (although he had biked the route earlier in the day). Obviously there are no words sufficient to the task of expressing the shock and grief that Bostonians and Americans are feeling today, so I won't waste much time in trying.
I did get a bit of a taste of it yesterday though, when I wasn't sure if my friend was okay – standing at a marathon finish line sounds like something he'd be into, and when he didn't answer his phone a part of my brain decided, despite having zero evidence, that he had been killed. The next half hour was black hell for me, as the thought refused to be shouted down by the voices of reason detailing the 90,000 other places he was more likely to be than at the epicentre of a bomb blast. He was fine. Working in his lab (a logical place for him to be on a Monday), with no phone reception.
That fear, that grief, that terror that was rampaging through my brain and playing fun percussive tricks with my autonomic nervous system, is not something I would wish on anyone – not even whoever is responsible for engendering it in me. [Read more…]
critical thinking, crommunism, news, racism
"Accidental" racism and intentional brilliance
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows what my position is on "intent" when it comes to things like racism and misogyny. Intent lies on an orthogonal axis to racism – someone doing something intentionally racist just adds bad intent to bad action. If we are of the opinion that racism is harmful in and of itself, we have to identify something as 'racist' or 'not racist' based on its own merits, regardless of whether the person "meant to".
This appears to be a major sticking point for people. They have bought, either consciously or unconsciously, into the myth that racism is something perpetuated by "racists", and that if someone didn't mean to do it then it can't really be racist – just "ignorant" or "an accident" or whatever euphemism they prefer. This myth has a lot of popular currency and is fairly ubiquitous within North American discussions of race. The problem, of course, is that people can be and are discriminated against based on their race in ways that have nothing to do with ill intent all the time. Demanding that intent be consubstantial with racism precludes us from taking any action against these kinds of racism.
In a stunning display of well-intentioned cluelessness (and what could be called willful ignorance), country star Brad Paisley has decided to step into the fray by teaming up with LL Cool J in a ballad called "Accidental Racist". Here's a sample: [Read more…]
black history, critical thinking, forces of stupid, history, music, news, race, racism
Rose DiManno, rape culture ambassador
I had an MRA show up in the comments yesterday. In between the bluster and the self-aggrandizing and the laughable talking points, he did manage to slip in the kernel of an actual point (I know – nobody was more shocked than I was). He reminded me of the claim that I made a couple of weeks ago about the role that male feminists ought to play:
The task falls to male feminists to learn to identify and advocate these ideas, pulling from our own experiences as the above authors have. Like religion, the entire philosophical edifice of gender needs to be critiqued and pulled apart in order to rob it of the power to hurt us in the many ways it does. Not in exclusion to discussions of how patriarchy hurts women, but in addition to it.
Male feminists have a duty to support our female and gender-queer allies, and to use our male privilege as a method to amplify their voices. Beyond that, however, we also have an opportunity to vocalize, perhaps better than anyone else (and certainly better than MRAs), the ways in which our understandings of gender not only hurt women, but hurt men too. There are a variety of experiences and emotions and ways of living that rigid gender roles make socially unacceptable for men, and a number of unacceptable situations that men are forced into for the simple fact of their (our) gender. There is no valid reason for such prohibition, and therefore no justification for its associated harms.
The specific form of the reminder from the commenter was regarding this story (TW for sexual abuse): [Read more…]
crime, critical thinking, feminism, news


Be kind to yourself. You will make mistakes. We all do. Give yourself some grace, because this is what God does.
Do your part to stay true to God and to who He created you to be.
Stop and smell the roses. Get out in the fresh air. Breath deeply. Go for a walk or a ride.
Limit your sugar and unhealthy fats.
Eat your veggies. Drink water. And move, move, move your body enough to rev up your circulation..how often? Several times throughout the day.
Laugh. Even if nothing's funny. Regardless of the humor element, your brain will think you're laughing and will release health producing chemicals into your bloodstream.
Read the New Testament slow enough to think about it. Pray. When you sin, confess your sins to God (and, if needed, to a trusted friend).
Don't hold grudges. Forgive. This includes yourself.
Be a friend. Spend time with an old friend or make a new friend.
Learn something new. With the internet, there are hundreds of classes available for you to take in your home. Classes can also be found at local churches, the YMCA, colleges, and community centers.
Get 6 to 8 hours of sleep a night.
Don't spend all of your time working. Include fun in your life…clean and healthy fun.
Give to others. Give in order to help someone or to help a worthwhile organization with their mission of helping others. If you don't have money to give, re-gift something that you don't use, or donate your time.
Show others the same grace and kindness that you want God to give to you. And Show this same grace and kindness to yourself.
God has given you life…go and live it!
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Christianity, finding happiness, How to be happy, Overcoming depression, self help. Bookmark the permalink.
← Livestream Class with Pamela Koefoed and friends, 02-01-2018. How to Know when God is Speaking to You. How to recognize His Voice.


I got to watch this on YouTube this week and I found myself liking this catchy song. The lyrics are simple but powerful, especially for the young set. I like that they brought these tween/teen idols together to come up with a song that encourages people to make a difference. Definitely something for your children or your younger siblings/cousins/nephews/nieces!


A spiritual principle I take to be true is this: The more beneficial something is spiritually, the more pushback you will experience. For example, whenever I plan on going to Confession — even when I am really sure that this time I will make it — I somehow develop temporary amnesia and don't remember to go until an hour after it is finished. Likewise, when I plan on going on a faith-based retreat, all sorts of petty problems crop up: the car gets a flat tire, I get a cold, the sitter can't make it.
And that's when I know: whatever it is I am trying to do must be really, really beneficial. It must pack a lot of spiritual power.
I so believe in this spiritual principle that sometimes I think it is possible to realize how spiritually powerful something is by how hard it is to accomplish it. Based on how hard the devil works to tell us otherwise, I have come to believe that the Little Things of the spiritual life must really matter.
How often are you also tempted to brush aside daily prayer with children (I just want them in bed!), your own set time for daily prayer (I'll just pray throughout the day), regular Confession (I went not that long ago), spiritual reading (I really need to plan my kid's birthday party), Adoration (it's on the only night we have at home), Bible-story reading (they hear about it at religious education), and so on? The list of excuses is endless.
Father Jacques Philippe, a renowned spiritual author, was at the campus of Notre Dame last month. I attended his presentation on the Beatitudes and family life. He said that all of the little efforts we make in the family — teaching our children to pray, forgiveness, caring for one another, self-sacrifice, and so on — have immense spiritual value for the whole Church, her priests, and for the whole world.
They will change us, and they will change the world. Wasn't it Saint Teresa of Calcutta who said that if you want to change the world, go home and love your family?
Father Philippe cited a French priest who makes the claim that throughout various ages of Church history, there are privileged vocations vis-à-vis assuring (or reinstating) the sanctity of the Church. Although all vocations are occasions of holiness, some vocations are, for that point in time, privileged in terms of helping to sanctify the Church. For example, the blood of the martyrs in the first centuries watered the ground of the church, as did the desert fathers later, the monastic orders in medieval times, and the great missionaries afterward. In this age of the Church, the author believes, it is the vocation of family that is the essential and privileged vocation in assuring the holiness of the Church.
How do we, mothers and fathers and children, live out this great call to fight for the Church and for our world? The answer is … in the little things. We can't see their effects — in this we are like those who have not seen and yet believe (John 29:20). We are called to believe that faithfulness in the little things matters. Teaching our children to pray, getting up in the middle of the night again, calling forth the best in our children again and again, forgiving one another, caring for the weakest member of the family: These are not acts just for us, and not just for our families, but for the whole world.
And judging from the fact that we are so tempted to abandon these little things, I am inclined to believe that Father Philippe and the author he cites are correct. This is all the more reason to ask for the grace to be faithful to the details of the spiritual life.


Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Josh Mickelson, Apr 30, 2017.
I'm a young magician who loves the art of magic and I want to develop my skills, but I've been so far unable to find a magic community in Utah. Are there any fellow Utahns in the forums that can help me out in finding a group?
Josh Burch and Lindel like this.
Hey, I'm in Utah! I haven't found any evidence of an active magic community around here either. Maybe between the two of us we can get something started?
CWhite, Josh Burch and Josh Mickelson like this.
Oh nice, I didn't know that! I'm in Utah Valley, you?
I live in Sandy, so not too far away.
Cool, cool. You said Josh Burch is in Utah as well, I wonder if he knows of any local magic communities that may or may not already exist? It'd be cool to meet up with some other magicians in person.
@Josh Burch I believe you are still out that direction, yea?
Hey guys! Utah has a really active magic community! There are 2 SAM assemblies, an IBM club as well as private clubs in Ogden and in Cache Valley. This last year we had our first of what may become a yearly convention in Salt Lake.
This is a formal club meeting in a home theater, it is one of Utah's largest clubs. Dan Sperry will be lecturing this next month. Marcus Eddie is coming later this year as well.
This is another formal club that pulls in huge groups of magicians. I think it is the largest club in Utah.
The Ogden Magic Guild (SAM 300) meets at 6:30 every second Tuesday at Weberstate University.
This is Utah's newest National affiliate.
Paul Draper is probably Utah's most famous magician. He has a home in Salt Lake as well as Vegas. If you want to ever meet up let me know. I live in the Ogden area. There are also casual magic events weekly at Hatch Family chocolates in Salt Lake, and the Two Bit Street Cafe in Ogden is owned by one of Utah's best mentalists.
Lindel and Josh Mickelson like this.
@Lindel and @Josh Mickelson , with all of the mentioned clubs there are young guys and old guys. I'd love to introduce you to the magic community!
Dang, I didn't realize there was that much going on around here! The Utah Valley Magic Club would be the easiest for me to get to, personally. I'm not that familiar with these organized clubs, do they require a paid membership? Thanks for the info. It'd be cool to meet up in person at some point!
With so many magicians some are better than others and some are old grumps that hate newbies. PM me if you'd like to meet up or if you have any questions. All of the clubs have competitions on a yearly basis as well as club performances. You can see live magic as well as have opportunities to perform.
Initially, when you attend the meetings the annoying guys will stand out. If you keep going you'll find the people who think more like you and whose company you will enjoy more.
Lindel, RealityOne and Josh Mickelson like this.
Hi Guys! I'm the current president for the Utah Valley Magic Club (Society of American Magicians Assembly #188) in Provo, Utah! We love having new people come and join us! Looks like Josh Burch already posted our time and place of meetings! For our July meeting, we are having a lecture by Trevor Duffy who will be visiting our club. The cost for the lecture is $20 per person. It's going to be Awesome! Other than lectures, there is currently no cost to come to our meetings! I can add you to our club e-mail list if you guys want...I just need your e-mail address! Hope to see you guys at a future club meeting! We have a great group! Let me know if you have any questions!
Oh, I'd almost forgotten about this! I've been meaning to get out to a meeting, I've just been really busy lately. I'll PM you my email address.
Just added you to the email list, Lindel...We also have a Facebook group...it's called Orem S.A.M. Assembly 188 if you want to look it up.


text:
Taylor Swift 'sad and grossed out' after Scooter Braun acquires back catalogue
July 1 2019, 5.23am Updated: July 1 2019, 8.31am
Taylor Swift (Ian West/PA
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Taylor Swift has said she is "sad" and "grossed out" after entrepreneur Scooter Braun acquired her back catalogue – accusing the 38-year-old of being behind "incessant, manipulative bullying".
Braun, manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, owns Ithaca Holdings which purchased Big Machine Label Group at the weekend.
Swift signed for Big Machine, founded by former Universal executive Scott Borchetta, in 2005 and moved to Universal Music Group in November last year.
Lover, album out August 23. Cover shot by the artistic genius that is @valheria123 💗 Pre-add, pre-save, pre-order (all the pre stuff you feel like doing) Can't wait for you to hear this.
A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jun 13, 2019 at 2:19pm PDT
Writing on Tumblr, she said: "I learned about Scooter Braun's purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world.
"All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I've received at his hands for years."
Braun's wife Yael Braun said he was "anything but a bully", adding: "Interesting that the man you're so 'grossed out' by believed in you more than you believe in yourself."
@taylorswift, I'm here to talk privately anytime.
A post shared by Yael Cohen Braun (@yael) on Jun 30, 2019 at 3:53pm PDT
The singer-songwriter, whose new album Lover is released in August, said: "I am now signed to a label that believes I should own anything I create.
"Thankfully, I left my past in Scott's (Borchetta, founder of Big Machine) hands and not my future.
"And hopefully, young artists or kids with musical dreams will read this and learn about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation.
"You deserve to own the art you make."
Borchetta said he wanted to "set things straight" in a post entitled So, It's Time For Some Truth on Big Machine's website.
He wrote that Swift's father Scott Swift was a shareholder in Big Machine and was alerted about the pending deal on June 25.
He added: "We then had a final call on Friday, June 28th in which the transaction passed with a majority vote and 3 of the 5 shareholders voting 'yes' with 92% of the shareholder's vote.
"Out of courtesy, I personally texted Taylor at 9:06pm, Saturday, June 29th to inform her prior to the story breaking on the morning of Sunday, June 30th so she could hear it directly from me.
"I guess it's possible that she might not have seen my text. But, I truly doubt that she 'woke up to the news when everyone else did'."
A spokesman for Swift said: "Scott Swift is not on the board of directors and has never been.
"On June 25, there was a shareholder phone call that Scott Swift did not participate in due to a very strict NDA that bound all shareholders and prohibited any discussion at all without risk of severe penalty.
"Her dad did not join that call because he did not want to be required to withhold any information from his own daughter.
"Taylor found out from the news articles when she woke up before seeing any text from Scott Borchetta and he did not call her in advance."
More from The Courier
Taylor Swift's Netflix documentary gets a release date
Taylor Swift has 'most aggressive holiday party known to womankind' for her 30th
Taylor Swift celebrates her 30th birthday with New York performance
Taylor Swift turns 30: Seven facts about the pop star to know on her birthday


text:
Inside Barricade. San Cristobal Uprising
San Cristobal city located in Tachira State and on the border with Colombia is a place where distinctive geographic, economic and social conditions come together A place that has been affected by drug trafficking, paramilitias, guerrillas and smuggling for years, is now the forefront of a political struggle and scenery of clashes between the government forces and opposition activists.
"Gochos" (name given to the people from this area), have shown an impetus rarely seen in contemporary Venezuelan society, a verve to keep fighting and not settle with the country's current situation, a fight that, unfortunately, has been accompanied by a lot of violence. Although, it is not a "popular revolt", there is definitely a wide and organized movement that, according to some of them, is not actually looking to overthrow the government, but to get media attention on what is happening in the country and show Venezuelans that things are far from normal.
The cohesion of Venezuela's opposition is, most of the times, illusory; once their ideas and positions are on the table, their proposals and speech are evidently different from each other. San Cristobal city, focus of the protests in Venezuela in the beginning, is no stranger to this "all-in-one" mix followed by the Venezuelan opposition. Libertarian students, organized neighborhoods, right-wing political activists, and even unemployed young people from the lower classes come together and fight for a cause that everyone seems to interpret differently making it really difficult to come up with proposals for what it may come after.
The spark that ignited the riots was a group of students protesting for security after a rape attempt against a girl on a campus took place, that was repressed by the police forces which later led to a series of protests that have extended to this day and spread to several cities in the country and sum least 37 murders, to date, in different events that involve protesters, civilians, public forces and pro-government paramilitary groups.
The situation in San Cristobal has gone from bad to worse; the high areas of this Andean city are completely blocked by a solid system of barricades that can reach up to three meters high (almost teen feet). The protesters are organized in several teams to defend their "free zone" of military intervention or militia groups allegedly armed by the government. With stones, Molotov cocktails and homemade explosive devices they spend all night on strategic vigilance areas on the streets while the neighbors keep an eye for the slightest signal to take the roads and face the national guards.
Day by day in an isolated area, everyone (some voluntarily, some forced by the situation) has adapted their lifestyle to what has become something common: closed streets and clashes with the armed forces. People support the movement however they can, some of them are directly involved in the protests, while others bring them food, clothes and other supplies, or help them make Molotov cocktails or build barricades, others just praise them, the rest, more than just a few, who don't support the government or are in the borderline, simply complaint about what it is to live surrounded by barricades and on a schedule imposed by radical groups.
The repression has grown stronger because of the protesters' resistance; the police forces thought they could easily control the key areas of agitation; however local opposition and students' movement have improved the confrontation strategies, making it more difficult for the government to score a victory.
The recent imprisonment of San Cristobal's mayor, Daniel Ceballos, member of an opposition party and accused of supporting the protests, triggered new clashes, opposition supporters see this as a systematic attack to their members elected by popular vote for public offices, like the mayors of the most important cities in the country such as Valencia, Maracay, Maracaibo or Caracas, among others.
In addition, the violent deaths have increased the resentment and the division. One of the victims, Jimmy Vargas, who in the middle of a confrontation, fell from a rooftop after being hit by a tear gas grenade, witnesses said. According to another version, he lost his balance because dazed by tear gas. Daniel Tinoco, a young member of the student's movement who died after being shot by a group of hooded men, allegedly supporters of the government, while he was on one of the barricaded areas.
On the other hand, Rafael Castillo Castillo, a national guard, was killed when he was taking apart a barricade, this death provoked a more repressive response by the government when they realized that some of the most violent groups within the opposition can be deadly.
Between the high politic and economic interests and violent actors commanded in the dark, there is a group of young people, some of them practically kids, who reclaim social progress and who are fighting, with little guidance or orientation, for a change which goals they don't completely understand. Many of them have the conviction, the motivation and even the strategies for a hand to hand combat, at the time they feel hopeless and with a government that sees them as the enemy, nevertheless, they continue fighting, in complete disadvantage, only for their right to raise their voice. More dialogue and less radicalism may be the equation the country need to solve in order to build a more thriving and solid future that is not only made of strong barricades.


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Q: Joomla forwarding code to the View...is this the correct way to do it? Here are some sample methods from my Controller class.  Now when the user clicks the New button $task=add is sent to the Controller and the add() method is called.  As you can see it does not really do anything, it just creates a url and forwards it off to the correct view.  Is this the correct way of doing things in the MVC pattern?
    /**
 * New button was pressed
 */
function add() {
    $link = JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_myapp&c=apps&view=editapp&cid[]=', false);
    $this->setRedirect($link);
}

/**
 * Edit button was pressed - just use the first selection for editing
 */
function edit() {
    $cid = JRequest::getVar( 'cid', array(0), '', 'array' );
    $id = $cid[0];
    $link = JRoute::_("index.php?option=com_myapp&c=apps&view=editapp&cid[]=$id", false);
    $this->setRedirect($link);
}

A: I don't believe this is the correct way.  I would suggest looking at some of the core Joomla! code to see how it's done.  A great, easy example that I always look at is Weblinks.  Take a look at what they do in the edit function of their controller:
.../components/com_weblinks/controllers/weblink.php
    function edit()
    {
            $user = & JFactory::getUser();

            // Make sure you are logged in
            if ($user->get('aid', 0) < 1) {
                    JError::raiseError( 403, JText::_('ALERTNOTAUTH') );
                    return;
            }

            JRequest::setVar('view', 'weblink');
            JRequest::setVar('layout', 'form');

            $model =& $this->getModel('weblink');
            $model->checkout();

            parent::display();
    }

They set the view and layout variables and then call parent::display to let Joomla! go out and display that view/layout.

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