Available worldwide on Vimeo

SURREY,BC, May 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -The American Way. Connecting the dots isa new documentaryreleased worldwideon Vimeoby the Center for introspection & enlightenment Foundation, a non-profit based in Canada.

What makes the USA the richest nation in the world? How does it create & retain wealth? The American Way provides a roadmap for developing nations (CNW Group/Center for introspection & enlightenment)

The American Way is an initiative by the Center to inspire Americans and reboot the American and the global economies.

The Covid 19 pandemic and the drop in oil prices have created a global economic crisis and pushed the United States to the brink of recession.

The Center feels that a quick boot strapping of the US economy is vital to revive the global economy,create employment and foster livelihood not only for Americans but for millions of people around the world.

The American Way provides a panoramic view of the US economic engine. The documentary outlines all the critical elements that make the USA the richest nation in the world. The documentary describes how the US creates, retains and distributes wealth. It explains the role of the US government, businessmen and consumers in the American wealth creation process.

The American Way. Connecting the dotsalso provides a Holistic solution and a road map for poor and developing nations to eradicate poverty through "Systemic Changes". The film identifies the key Macro elements that trigger the cycle of American wealth creation.

The documentary is meant for lawmakers, bureaucrats, business leaders and citizens of nations.

According to Mr. Ramesh Kulkarni, Founder of the Center and author of the documentary, "Aid and donations cannot be a long term solution. Global poverty can be eradicated only through 'systemic' changes. Key and critical laws and systems need to be implemented. The American way identifies and elucidates these key structural changes for poor and developing nations."

Aboutthe Center for introspection & enlightenment Foundation - Canada A non-profit organization, the Center had recently launched 'Initiatives for a utopian world based on Science & Technology' and released a documentaryEverything is One.

Ramesh Kulkarni, Founder of the Center and author of these films, has worked in theIT industry for 25 years.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cie-releases-new-documentary-the-american-way-connecting-the-dots---to-inspire--reboot-the-global-economy-301065598.html

SOURCE Center for introspection & enlightenment

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CIE releases new documentary "The American Way. Connecting the dots..." - To inspire & reboot the global economy - Yahoo Finance

by Kent Sterling May 31, 2020

this protest by Colin Kaepernick bothered me. I am more bothered by the obvious and odious issue he was bringing attention to.

Racism has always baffled me, so I ignored it.

Thats what I do when I am confrontedwith humanitys insistence upon making our world less pleasant and loving. Its as though we want to make our lives more challenging through self-imposed trials and challenges.

Racismdoesnt make sense, so while I was horrified by the killingof George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, I have not acted. When I hear of blacks being targeted by police, I grieve for the loss of their hopes forfair treatment. The riots that followed are tragic expressions of righteous anger by some and a thirst for anarchy by opportunists.

Click herefor your copy of Oops the Art of Learning from Mistakes and Adventures by Kent Sterling

For many whites, the source of racism isnt simply a need to hate. People are insistent upon succeeding whatever that means to them and elevating themselves by standing on the backs of others is one strategy to gain an advantage. From a pragmatic perspective, racism appears to be little more thanthe race of the majority suppressing aminorityrace to liftitself. Its a morally bankrupt ideology, but it continues to be expressed and felt in a variety of ways.

White people are at a distinct disadvantage when discussing racism because we have no idea what it feels like to be preyed upon in the way African Americansare. Efforts to empathize are well-intended but ultimately fail becauseimagining what its like to be discriminated against and actually being someone is fundamentally different.

My strategy in dealing with racism has been to quietlyreject it. I try to treat all people equally, believing that racism is best fought on a micro level, one person at a time. Obviously, thats not getting the job done. Racism is not going to fade because non-racists continue to treat all people as equals. Its the racists that need to change.

So the question becomes, how do we compel racists to alter their core belief that blacks are a sub-class rather than part of humanity? Weve tried shame, logic, and occasional moments of enlightenment when racistswere prosecuted for crimes driven by their hatred or pragmatism. We wind up with an unending series of atrocities and protests/riots.

Furious riots in Ferguson, Watts, Detroit, and Minneapolis have exploded, been extinguished,and nothing has changed. Blacks are still targeted, persecuted, and killed because of the color of their skin. Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X led movements against racism and were assassinated. Great thinkers and writers like James Baldwin and Alex Haley have made us think. Athletes like Colin Kaepernick, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith made us angry before weunderstood that the only thing that gets our attention is what pisses us off.

Nothing has changed.

The time has come for us to take racism as a personal affront an expression of extreme narrow-mindedness and stupidity that requiresan immediate and loudresponse. When people insult our wives, mothers, and children, our emotions flare and defensive reflexes are engaged. Whether through physical or loud verbal confrontation, we bring a consequence upon those who enrage us.

We need to engage with those who express hatred toward minorities with the same zeal we reserve for our family and friends. If we are all brothers, then letssafeguard one another as we would family members.

Not sure punchingracists would change minds, but at this point its more important to not repeat mistakes than to coddle these fools, and white people dismissing racism as not my fight has been an American mistake dating back to the 1600s.

I used to think that racism would certainly cycle out of our society during my lifetime, despite 400 years of history that screamed the opposite, so now Im going to do something about it in the small way I can. Racist yammering and actions I witness will be met withgreat vengeance andfurious anger.

In the past, racists believed they had safe harbor in my presence because Im white. Those days are over. Im done editing out racism from conversations rather than confronting it.

.

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Time for whites to be as angry as African Americans about the stupidity of racism - Kent Sterling

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Dairy Food Market 2020: What Is Creating Robust Demand In Market? - 3rd Watch News

In a state perennially given to fruitless political strife, ingrained bureaucratic arrogance and rampant corruption, the sheer earnestness of Keralas recent face-off with Covid-19 surprised Malayalis more than anyone else. In the post-Independence history of governance in Kerala, nothing similar had ever happened: The government actually made moves in a consistent manner to attend to the well-being of people. The handling of the massive floods in August 2018 had elements of this, but that was essentially an area-focussed, intensive rescue effort. The adversary, water, was right there under ones nose. The coronavirus, however, had put the whole state under its alien shadowand it was invisible.

The response of the LDF government to the virus threat was remarkable in its determination and zeal. It is possible to argue that sheer existential terror brought about the shift from lethargy, incompetence and indifferencewhich has characterised governance in Kerala ever since the state came into existenceto committed involvement. There certainly could be truth in it. But even to channelise fear into a combat mode, a spark is needed. However much one may dislike to say it in times of totalitarian dreams sprouting everywhere including India, that spark could be leadership. The state everywhere is a leviathan with a hazy mind. It cannot be a leader. A person becomes the face of the state.

One can say emphatically that in the corona crisis, Keralas CM Comrade Pinarayi Vijayan represented that leadership. He became the face of Keralas corona resistance. His daily press conferences came to be more eagerly watched than The Ramayana reloaded. The person directly in charge of the Covid battle, Comrade K K Shailaja, the health minister, complemented Vijayan in her own unadorned but firm style. She is a natural leader minus the weight of seniority and patriarchal authority that Vijayan commands. In a Kerala thats slowly but inevitably shifting from its male supremacy paradigm, being a woman has only worked in her favour, if that mattered at all.

What sets both these communists apart from the usual politician, communist or non-communist, is a simple trait: a grave, no-nonsense approach to issues. If Vijayan is ponderous and magisterial, Shailaja is sprightly and unpretentiousand tough. Vijayans style, along with obedience, triggers fear and caution. He has the additional advantage that he controls both the party and governmentwith an iron hand. That goes a long way in the smooth transmission of the processes of decision-making and implementation. You could call him a dictator if you wish. But the description wouldnt exactly fit, either. Shailajas leadership has a feminine forcefulness that inspires teamwork. Both are communists first and communists last. Virus or no virus, the party comes first.

Theyve worked hard. And considering the corona predictions for the immediate future, its going to be a long haul for them. Surely they must be enjoying the rewardswords of appreciation that rarely come a politicians way. Both Kerala and Shailaja hit international headlines several times. One suspects it was not just the spirited fight Kerala put up against the virus that attracted media attention. The capitalist media seems to have been fascinated by the fact that communists were accomplishing such a feat. And that a lady comrade was the field commander.

Ranged behind these two were the government personnelthousands of officials, health workers and police who didnt go by the clock and often risked their lives in the physical handling of patients. In the no-mans land of Keralas bureaucratic quagmire, health professionals had always stood apart as a different breed who, in general, stayed committed to their responsibilities to the people. They were the foot soldiers leading the corona fight from the front. The participation of thousands of women, in various capacities, gave the battle a different synergy. Platforms of womens empowerment like Kudumbashree and ASHA delivered priceless service. The police, not always extolled for humanitarian concerns, was exemplary in carrying out their new role as guardians of public health. Add to it over 2,00,000 volunteers who provided hands-on support at the grassroots.

That is only one part of the story. The other part derives from Keralas historical tryst, in the sixties and seventies, with a development model born out of socialist ideals and democratic convictions. Arising from a humanist perception that could be described as Left and Gandhian, it sought to directly touch the lives of the people in key areas like education and health. That was how a multi-level healthcare network was created which, in a poor society like Kerala, produced results equalling developed nations in the human development index. Equally radical was the broadening and strengthening of democratic institutions at the ground level through a process of decentralisation in which women, for the first time, occupied key roles. These two networks of democracy, despite being battered by vested interests both inside and outside successive governments, have precariously survived and today they are the backbone of the fight against corona.

The success of Keralas corona battle is much more than the sum of its parts. In the final analysis it was underwritten by the progressive values infused into the Malayali psyche by Keralas historic Enlightenment spearheaded by great humanists like Narayana Guru and Ayyankali. Those values have survived murderous onslaughts by sectarian forces and underlie all civilisational leaps in Kerala. The corona fight was such a leap. it was an expression of Keralas democratic commitment, however flawed; secular credentials, however bruised; communal harmony, however besieged; scientific temper, however cornered. Thats why to each one of those women and men be they SC/ST, BC, Dalit, Hindu, Moslem or Christian who fought the corona war, it was beyond the pale of imagination to segregate hospital beds on a religious basis as happened elsewhere in India.

Paul Zacharia

Award-winning fiction writer

(paulzacharia3@gmail.com)

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Keralas successful battle against the virus - The New Indian Express

Today, I am going to do something I never, ever thought I would do: Rise to the defense of Twitter. Call me guilty of moral relativism, but I find myself inclined to support almost any person or thing that President Donald Trump attacks, even if I have long harbored my own concerns about that person or thing.

Last week, Trump signed an executive order that strips social media outlets like Twitter of some of their liability protection. Except that the relevant statute, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, does not give the president any special powers to narrow or expand the liability provisions contained in the law beyond his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully enforced. Just as he did the week before when he demanded that churches be reopened without any real legal role in opening or closing churches, Trump is singing from the King Canute hymnal, ordering the waves to recede.

When the president signed the faux executive order in the Oval Office, he was flanked by Attorney General William Barr. Barr functions like a big brother to the president, willing to fend off legal bullies who might obstruct his expansive understanding of Article II of the Constitution, which establishes presidential powers. "I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president," Trump famously said last year.

Barr seems unwilling to explain to his chief that his understanding of his executive powers is not exactly correct. The attorney general is a fan of executive power, so maybe he just wants to see how far down the field Trump can carry the football. But Barr could at least point out, as his own oath of office compels him to do, that when Trump says "I have an Article 2," he misunderstands the nature of the document, that Article 2 belongs to all of us, as do the other articles, that the opening words of that document are "We the People" not "I alone can fix it."

When George Orwell penned his classic 1984, he did not have Barr in mind when he referred to Big Brother. His concern was totalitarian influence. While the world witnessed the horror of state control in the 20th century, we have also become increasingly worried about corporate control. This is not new. In the 1950s, social critics were deeply concerned and very vocal about the need to resist corporate-sponsored conformism and they celebrated a highly individualistic understanding of freedom. (Corporate marketeers took note!) Historian George Marsden wrote brilliantly about these critics in his book The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, which I reviewed here, and those critics were writing long before there was an internet!

Now, many Americans are as worried about corporate Big Brother as his governmental sibling, and that worry is very much focused on Big Tech. I remember the first time I searched online for a consumer purchase and soon found pop-up ads from companies I had never heard of flooding my inbox. It creeped me out. It still does, so I try really hard not to do any online searches for consumer products.

The irony of all this is that the concern Trump raises is not entirely wrong-headed, but he is the last person on the planet to champion the issue. If the premise for the conferral of liability protection is that social media platforms only serve as conduits for other people's information, then they really should not have to spend millions of dollars monitoring what is said on their platform. If you do not like what is said on the street corner, you can't sue the street, or the corner. But, then, on what basis should social media platforms be marking some items as suspicious and others not? On the other hand, if they had an especially prominent client routinely spreading misinformation, how can they justify ignoring that fact?

Back in 1996, who would have thought a public figure, let alone the president of the United States, would be the one whose conspiracy theories were so outrageous they needed to be flagged by Twitter? They flagged his false claims about voter fraud, but even more morally worrisome were the tweets that trafficked in the conspiracy theory that "Morning Joe" host and former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough is guilty of murder. Sadly, that is where we are, and now that same president raises a worthwhile concern not because he thinks it has any merit, but because he worries some of his more than 80 million followers might begin to question his infallible utterances if Twitter places its red flag, inviting readers to check the facts.

Through the looking glass, Alice!

The president's behavior and comments are so untethered from reality, no one should be terribly surprised that the irony of his executive order is lost on him. But what is Barr's excuse? Has he also abandoned any concern for truth? Has he become that particular kind of sycophant who convinces himself that, without his presence, the unhinged principal would be even more reckless? He is not a former reality TV star. This is his second stint at the Justice Department. What moral calculation is he making to justify his involvement with this nonsense?

The problems with Twitter are many, and almost none of them would be solvable by executive order or legislation, even if it were put forward in good faith by a morally serious president. Twitter is a mirror that also accelerates our human capacity for reflexive vindictiveness. As if that ugly character trait needed acceleration! There is a reason I do not tweet but only use this medium for providing a link to my articles, putting them into the bloodstream of the commentariat. The fact that I sleep on a column, and that other eyes see it before publication, is no absolute guarantee that my opinions are judicious, but it helps.

What does not help is a president who rode Twitter to prominence, used it to dominate and divert and degrade the nation's political discourse, and now complains that it demands a sliver of accountability for his reckless tweets. And more than complain, he signs an executive order that will have no concrete effect but is a rallying point for his mobs and a threat to his enemies. Maybe it is not only Alice who slips through the looking glass, maybe it is the American Il Duce too. And the larger question is whether or not he will drag the rest of us with him as he has already dragged Bill Barr.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

Editor's note:Don't miss out on Michael Sean Winters' latest.Sign up and we'll let you know when he publishes newDistinctly Catholiccolumns.

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The Trump and Barr un-reality Twitter show - National Catholic Reporter

Radical Repair: Log 48 in Conversation with Mabel O. Wilson

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The center of architecture is shifting and cannot hold, writes guest editor Bryony Roberts in Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice. This moment of change, in which issues of inequity and intersectionality are coming to the fore, represents an invitation to think differently, a chance to reask the questions that haunted the 20th century. To that end, Roberts conducted a series of interviews with experimental architects exploring new forms of practice, including this conversation with Mabel O. Wilson.

Mabel O. Wilson is a scholar and designer who has become a leading voice in discussions on space, politics, and memory in black America. She is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, as well as a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies and the associate director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Her books include Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and CultureandNegro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums. Her interdisciplinary practice Studio & is part of the architectural team that designed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is also a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture?, a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. We talked at an outdoor cafe near Columbia on one of the last warm days in fall 2019.

Bryony Roberts: The catalogue for Torkwase Dysons show 1919: Black Water, which opened at Columbias Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in September, includes a great conversation between you and the artist. You talked about the importance of decolonizing the tools of creation and listed some as the book, the argument, the essay, and the memorial. This was after a longer conversation about decolonizing form. Could you talk more about how you approach decolonizing these tools in your own practice as someone who makes books, forms, and arguments?

Mabel O. Wilson: Well the root problem is decolonizing knowledge. There is a Peruvian sociologist who recently died, Anbal Quijano, who said we have to decolonize the episteme.

The Western body of knowledge that everyone takes for granted as universal actually isnt. It has multiple histories and origins, and there are other bodies of knowledge ways of knowing and naming and understanding subjectivity in the world that are not Western at all. They were not necessarily centered on the individual, on the human body, on the subjectivity of liberalism. Even in the so-called West Europe or pre-Europe there were other ways of being in the world.

But the trick about the Western episteme, and you see this meticulously analyzed in Foucaults writings, is that it becomes universal. Thats its trick. It absorbs all other bodies of knowledge and posits that theres only one body of knowledge and one way of being in the world. Architecture is part and parcel of that its the Western practice of building. Ive come to the realization that the art of building is part of the formation of the Western episteme.

We can see how other cultures built the Incans, the Chinese dynasties, Mori tribespeople in ways that werent necessarily the Western methods of architecture. Im talking about conceptualization and modalities of representation, like drawing, that rely on paper, ink, and geometric projection. Europeans did not invent geometry per se but borrowed concepts from ancient Greece and Islam. These tools were combined into a discourse and a discipline of architecture, which solidified by the 18th century. In the 19th century, architecture was a body of knowledge that was institutionalized within both a profession and modern universities. This all emerged alongside colonialism, which fueled the wealth of Europe and enabled the construction of museums, theaters, and government buildings. Architectures function was, in part, to house the modern nation-state and modern liberal society.

So those tools are what we inherit. Thats what we teach. Thats what we practice. But they have a very particular history.

BR: So, how do you think about your own process of writing, researching, and designing?

MW: I found early on, when I kept trying to explore black neighborhoods, spaces, and histories, that the language, tools, and techniques of architecture were completely inadequate because theyre not made to register and give meaning to those things. So, I was constantly developing new techniques, hybridizing them, turning things inside out, questioning, and renaming in order to begin to even record those spaces and imagine what those spaces could be. I looked at literature, art, and other creative ways that people have done work on these subjects and then tried to translate them into architecture.

BR: Torkwase Dyson describes black compositional thought as a way of improvising spaces and objects of liberation in an oppressive system. That resonates with what you describe in your book Negro Building and also with what you and I researched in our project Marching On. But alongside these ways of appropriating and manipulating a found system, there are recent moments of visible institution building, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which in some ways takes on the monumentality of the colonial system. Do you see the improvisational techniques as being replaced by institution-building or as a means of creating alternative kinds of institutions?

MW: I think that there are two trajectories. One is Afro-pessimism, which argues that the Enlightenment project, including its institutions, is bankrupt given the contradiction of the presence of freedom alongside slavery, so there has never been a place for people of color to find liberation within it. Were never going to survive in that system. And I think theyre right. But Im more aligned with the optimistic position that were going to have to survive somehow. Were going to have to make some way of being human in the world intellectually, in the mind, and also in the body, materially. So the optimist in me believes that to do that were just going to have to make do and rework what we have.

Thats why I think challenging and changing institutions is important, and the new African American museum is the perfect example, because it took 100 years to come into fruition. Different generations kept trying and trying again. It didnt happen overnight. That was primarily because the archive was never meant to collect the culture of black peoples because the belief was that if you were African or of African descent, you had no history.

Thats what Kant argued, Hegel expanded, and European intellectuals debated, and the concept spread. So, often theres little black history in the institutional archives. The Smithsonian collected almost nothing of black people from its founding in the mid-19th century. The project of the African American museum was not only to build a museum but also to build a collection. They had to make an archive of black life in America because there wasnt one. So institutionally, its a really radical proposition.

BR: So is it useful to work with the normative conventions of institutions to gain a place in a canon? Or is it important to just create new methods and new forums that dont follow those rules?

MW: I think you can do both. At some point, there are certain things concepts, practices, or methods that are just going to be exhausted, and you have to leave them behind. But there are also ways of working with what exists. For the Smithsonian to take on a project to build a black museum, particularly at this moment of such division, was a radical act. And now the museum is in a position to help a lot of other institutions, smaller black museums, and to transform other Smithsonian museums as well. So it is impactful.

BR: Youve talked about how the institution of architecture has served as an instrument of oppression. For example, at the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson used elevational changes in section to obscure slave labor. Can you expand on that?

MW: An article could be written about Jefferson and the way he uses the section to hide what he knows to be a disavowal of his fundamental Enlightenment values. With Monticello, he develops all the dependencies below ground. The best signifier of that is the dining rooms dumbwaiter. The enslaved waiter remained unseen because he would just place the bottle on the dumbwaiter and pull it up. The other bodies in the intimate spaces of the main house were kept at bay or kept outside.

Jefferson did the same thing at the University of Virginia. All of the areas where the enslaved people worked were below the pavilions or in the gardens that everyone thinks were formal gardens but were actually work yards. Those areas werent meant to be seen. If you did happen to walk through that zone, your eye was delighted by the serpentine walls, right? So the aesthetic beauty of the brick wall shields the brutal labor of the enslaved just on the other side.

BR: A lot of your work is to bring history into the present and to wrestle with stories that werent fully told or werent recorded. Im wondering how you work with someone elses personal history or the reconstruction of someone elses memory. How do you approach telling stories of people who are not here and can no longer speak for themselves?

MW: Part of it is personal not knowing my family history, for instance, and trying to understand why that information was unknown. Ive been piecing it together through genealogical research over the years, which has been fascinating. I had a white friend in college who said once, I can trace my family back to 12th-century France. He had the evidence to show a famous poet in his family lineage. By contrast, I didnt know much about my family before my grandparents. Black folks just dont talk about those painful histories. So Ive always been curious.

When I studied architecture as an undergraduate, I learned canonical history, primarily European history, but I sort of felt like an outsider not seeing myself in these narratives. Why should I care about the Villa Lante, for example, which is absolutely beautiful and its proportions are perfect, but in the end the heritage of the Italian aristocracy was somewhat meaningless to me. Now, of course, I find it utterly fascinating through its social history, its connection to the development of mercantile capitalism in Italy, and what it means to own land outside the city. But thats not how architectural history was being taught at the time as a social history.

The first opportunity that I had to consider black history and architecture was in a studio as an undergrad at UVA. We had a site named Oregon Hill in Richmond, Virginia, next to a very famous cemetery with a large pyramid that was a Civil War monument to the 18,000 Confederate soldiers buried there. On the cemeterys other side was a black community, in the Randolph neighborhood. I was interested in the black community too, so I just expanded my site across the cemetery and into Randolph. That move in my project engaged the racialized spatial politics and histories of Richmond.

When I came to Columbias GSAPP to do my masters degree, I was interested in probing these questions. My final project looked at race head-on through the lens of a single-family suburban house. I examined how the history and spaces of the house had been racialized by covenants and redlining. Levittowns exclusivity no blacks or Jews was produced by those restrictions. So my project unpacked the racial exclusions buried in suburban domestic spaces and construction. Aunt Jemima, after all, still lurks in the kitchen cabinet!

In my project, I was extremely interested in how history and, more specifically, methods of drawing can dissect and transform the meaning of architectural representation and architectural history. That became a long-term project, one that has nonetheless been challenging because studying race, racialization, and racism in the disciplines of architecture and architectural history has made people uncomfortable.

Currently, Im wrapping up a collection of essays with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis called Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, and, in a way, its the project that I really wanted to undertake as my dissertation. But now, instead of just my voice, its 18 voices that explore race as part and parcel of the formation of modernity and modernism.

BR: Who are some of the people now, both in writing history and in design practices, who are inspiring to you?

MW: I think the work of Charles Davis, my coeditor, is really timely and thorough. Its been great working and thinking with him about how the racial shapes modern bodies of knowledge. Darell Fields did a lot of the early work that was really impactful, and Irene Chengs work is also brilliant and probing important histories. We have some great people in the book: Dianne Harris, who wrote an important history titled Little White Houses, which explored how architecture helped build the whiteness of American suburbia in the 1950s; Mark Crinsons scholarship on imperialism and the racial made important strides; Reinhold Martin, my colleague from Columbia, who has been thinking through the implications of racial difference in his work on American universities. We want the book to serve as a primer that can be foundational to future research. We want our proposition to be debated.

But I also look at artists like Torkwase, who explores blackness through space and the language of architecture. This semester my studio is framed by concepts from the artist Kader Attia, who posits radical repair through reappropriating and transforming modernist architecture.

BR: Your work with Columbias Global Africa Lab also opens up other modes of representing these histories, can you talk about that?

MW: Along with my codirector Mario Gooden, weve been developing data spatialization techniques to look at complex landscapes, like post-apartheid Johannesburg, to ask if its really no longer divided. In some ways, it is unified. People move more freely. But in other ways, economic inequalities and racial stratification remain embedded. Working with data spatialization has helped us show that despite media images representing the city as world-class, neoliberalism and globalization are nonetheless reproducing precisely the same inequalities as apartheid.

BR: How do you work with these representational tools in a studio context? How do you transition from analysis into the design process?

MW: In terms of pedagogy, Ive always found it helpful to show how representational techniques have their histories and their limits. You have to understand what the tools actually produce so that you could use them to produce not what you already know but new knowledge new ways of working.

To spatialize data we used Rhino for the last six years, with software plugins developed by Carson Smuts, a researcher in the Global Africa Lab, to scrape and spatialize data from social media feeds like Twitter. We used it to trace how people move through and occupy the city. These types of mappings prompted a radical rethinking of the tools and techniques. But also, these tools and techniques document the transformation of cities over time, animating daily life as well as history in the making.

For my current advanced studio at Columbias GSAPP, were looking at the theme of repair and reparations. Students have worked on an object of radical repair, where they take two objects and try to use one to repair the other. Weve looked at the artist Jan Vormann, who patches stone and brick walls around the world with LEGO bricks. It produces this playful but also incongruent landscape attentive to the everyday. Weve also been interested in the artist Yeesookyung, who breaks apart beautiful ceramic vases and then reconstructs them in these crazy monstrous ways with gold adhesive.

The studio asks what would those techniques produce when you start to think about repair at the urban scale. My students examined the Cross Bronx Expressway, which forms a gash in those Bronx neighborhoods. So what would a protocol of repair do for the inequalities that are rampant in the South Bronx, how do we give them a stronger voice in the public sphere of the city? We arent interested in restoration to return it to the thing that it was but instead we are asking students to engage in actions of radical repair that recognize the transformation of time and the violent acts that have produced disruption and social divisions.

BR: How do you see the agency of design in the face of this historical violence? What might the design of radical repair look like?

MW: We need to delve into all aspects of architectures frameworks its historical formation, its tools of representation, its academic structure, and its professional organization. All of these facets of the discipline emerge from the Western episteme and are thus just as entangled with the racial, racialization, race, and its legacy as they are with capitalism, another parallel modern formation. When it comes to radical repair, I like to rework Audre Lordes declaration on power and institutions in the form a question, can the masters tools dismantle the masters house?

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Radical Repair: Log 48 in Conversation with Mabel O. Wilson - ArchDaily

The answer is yes but it needs to toughen up.

At heart, Australian multiculturalism is a post-modern phenomenon. It is the ultimate manifestation of global psychology and the death of God. Only in a world in which secularism dominates can such a society exist.

That is, AM is a figment of enlightenment thinking. It is a pure social expression of hundreds of years of rationalist doctrine culminating in a liberal state in which all faiths and identities can co-exist peacefully.

The problem is, it now faces a pre-enlightenment system launching a sustained assault to control it. The Chinese Communist Party is pre-modern and fascist, preaching a rubric of total social control, obedience to a god-like emperor, equipped with cults of personality, technology surveillance and terror.

It is unabashedly pre-enlightenment.

Victoria is the test case today for this clash of post- and pre-modern. It is the most progressive, read post-modern, state in Australia. It has a leader steeped in this value-system such that he is happy to court all comers, via The Australian:

Meet Jean Dong. She is the 33-year-old Chinese-Australian businesswoman who by her own description is on a global journey of influence.

A professionally filmed and edited YouTube biography provides an extraordinary insight into the life of the young woman who is emerging as a key player in the unfolding political row over Victorian Premier Daniel Andrewss controversial decision to sign up to Chinas Belt and Road Initiative.

In the short promotional film, Ms Dong claims to have played key roles in bringing about the China-Australia free-trade agreement, and Victorias Belt and Road Initiative deal, telling the story of her journey from student journalist in Beijing, to rubbing shoulders with Australian prime ministers and premiers and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Even his own party cant hold a candle to the embrace, also at The Australian:

Anthony Albanese says Australia will not join Chinas Belt and Road Initiative if he wins the next election, after Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was criticised for his governments agreement with the Asian superpower.

It was the first time the Opposition Leader has confirmed a future Labor government under his leadership would not support Chinas controversial global infrastructure and trade strategy.

When pressed several times if he supported Mr Andrewss BRI deal, Mr Albanese said he never backed it and would not support a similar agreement with China if he became prime minister by 2022.

There is nothing intrinsically pre-modern about Australian Chinese. They have taken to, and contributed to, the Australian multicultural phenomenon as well as, if not better, than many ethnicities.

But the community is also claimed by the pre-modern state from which they come. And they are vulnerable to its manipulations and intimidation, if for no other reason than many still have family trapped within the clutches of the fascist state.

This opens up a difficult and perhaps irreconcilable question for AM. Dan Andrews does not mind exploiting the Australian Chinese community, indeed as a pollie, thats his job, via The Age:

The Victorian Labor Party used the politics of the states controversial Belt and Road agreement with China as an electoral weapon to help the Andrews government win votes in three seats with a high number of Chinese-Australians in its 2018 election victory.

As the Labor government continues to shrug off pressure to walk away from its memorandum of understanding with China, a prominent Australian China-watcher has highlighted how Premier Daniel Andrews and his colleagues used the relationship with China to win votes.

A senior manager with Labors election campaign told The Age on Monday that the agreement, and the controversy it sparked, helped Labor gain the winning edge in three eastern suburbs seats with high numbers of voters of Chinese descent.

Mr Andrews signed the first Belt and Road MOU in October 2018, just a month before the first-term Labor government faced voters at the election.

In doing so, Victoria became part of the Chinese governments $1 trillion global infrastructure investment program that its critics say is an attempt by the Communist nation to exert economic and strategic influence around the world.

News of the deal sparked a storm of criticism from the Coalition at state and federal levels, with Victorian Liberals demanding to see what was in the text signed by the Premier. Mr Andrews eventually bowed to pressure and published the document.

A senior Labor operative said the signing of the agreement itself was not a vote driver in the Chinese community but that the the oppositions vitriolic response handed Labor the material for a negative campaign against the Liberals in the seats of Box Hill, Burwood and Mount Waverly.

Deputy campaign director Kosmos Samaras said the ALPs culturally and linguistically diverse campaign unit swung into action, deploying Chinese-language media adverts, videos posted on Facebook and the popular messaging app WeChat, all painting the Liberals as hostile to the Chinese community.

Chinese language phone banks were also used to speak directly to voters, spruiking Labors messages.

And so we find ourselves at a paradox and impasse. Post-modern AM welcomes all. But the pre-modern CCP abuses that very liberalism to undermine itself with the long term result that freedom itself dies. Yet, if we cut off the flow of Chinese immigrants, the principle upon which AM is based is debased.

Moreover, the Chinese Australian community itself requires protection from this menace.

The obvious and brute answer is to import no more ethnic Chinese. But that is a hypocritical outcome that fundamentally alters the compact of AM: that if you come to Australia then you will be an Australian welcomed to practice whatever notion of divinity or truth that you choose to believe in.

A better solution is to cut all immigration. Theres no need to go to zero. Halving it will take it back to a pace that bulwarks our society against CCP encroachments.

We are not helpless in this fight. We can and are pushing back to protect our marvelous post-modern system. But it needs to be protected from a pre-modern state that would impose its will upon the entirety of our little Nirvana.

He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.

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Can multiculturalism survive the new Cold War? - MacroBusiness

Of all the conspiracy theories to spiral out of control with baseless rumors to support its existence, the Illuminati has to be at the top of the list. Prior to some crazy chimera about a devil-worshipping cult and satanic rituals associated with its operations, the Illuminati used to be a very real group and even had some specific ambitious goals. When it seeped into popular culture is still a mystery, but the fact is that it does not exist anymore.

People, however, continue to churn factless stories and live in paranoia passing off anything unconventional as the work of the Illuminati. Then there is the endless claims that Beyonce, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Madonna, even Ariana Grande are a part of it. However, only one of the several unfounded claims about the Illuminati stands true it was a secret society. And influential intellectuals and free-thinkers of the 18th century were a part of it.

In the historical sense of the term, 'Illuminati' referred to the Bavarian Illuminati which was a secret society that was in operation for only a decade, between 1776 and 1785. It was founded by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. He founded it as the 'Order of the Illuminati' and strongly believed in Enlightenment ideals. The organization opposed the Roman Catholic Church's influence on philosophy and science and sought to break religious control over society as well as the abuse of power by the state by enabling a space for critique, debate and promoting freedom of speech.

Inspired by the Freemasons and French Enlightenment, it also encouraged education for women and equality among all, and also aimed to 'enlighten' people tp free them from superstitious beliefs and prejudices. Initially, it began with six members after Weishaupt hand-picked five of his most talented law students and went on to expand from there. The members set out to disseminate Weishaupt's radical teachings and in its 10 years of existence, housed 2,000 members throughout Eastern Europe.

In retrospect, it is understandable why the conspiracies that have surfaced over the years point at the Illuminati being unusual. They had odd rituals, ideals and symbols. The members of the society would use symbols such as that of an owl as an emblem and pseudonyms to avoid being identified by authorities. They also had a very complicated system of hierarchy distributing divided ranks and an initiation ritual, as well.

While they were increasingly paranoid of their identities being discovered, they also went the extra mile to protect other members' secrecy. Their worldview endorsed Enlightenment ideals like rational thought and self-rule, and their motive was based more on revolution than world domination.

The Illuminati had some influential members including many dukes and leaders who with their contacts and power, managed to garner more people's attention and initiated them into the organization. Some Freemasons also became members of the group deepening their prominence.

However, the Illuminati was only mildly successful at being revolutionary before the Bavarian authorities sniffed them out due to their growing numbers and fully put a stop to the society. In 1785, the Duke of Bavaria, Karl Theodore Dalberg, banned all secret society and instilled serious punishments for anyone who became a member which included the death penalty. He went as far as to associate the Illuminati with branches of Freemasonry, which was an illegal organization at the time. The government then began to scour out and eliminate members of the Illuminati, which caused Weishaupt to flee Bavaria, and maintain long-distance contact with leaders of the order or Areopagites through letters.

The government searched the home of one of the Areopagite and seized documents that had more than 200 letters between Weishaupt and Illuminati leaders that detailed all of the orders' secrets. They immediately published the documents and made their information public knowledge.

Conspiracy theories sprang up as soon as the Illuminati was discovered and included accusations of infiltration by the Freemasons and even claims of the French Revolution being the organization's brainchild. In the later years, some Founding Fathers also managed to fuel the interest in the Illuminati in the US. George Washington for that matter, wrote a letter to address the Illuminati threat, saying he believed it had been avoided but nonetheless it only aroused the myth. Thomas Jefferson was also accused of being a member of the Illuminati.

Even so, the Illuminati still lingered in the background of popular culture. However, it made a full-blown comeback in the 1970s when a literary trilogy introduced the 'triangle and the eye' symbol that it holds today. 'The Illuminatus Trilogy', by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, depicted the Illuminati with ironic detachment. This trilogy became a countercultural touchstone, and its intermingling of real research Weishaupt is a character in the books with fantasy helped put the Illuminati back on the radar", writes Phil Edwards for a Vox article.

Then it was featured in popular cultures, like in Dan Brown's best-selling novel 'Angels and Demons', and other subcultures where it is often linked to Satanism, alien myths, and other ideas that were in stark contrast to the real Bavarian Illuminati's beliefs.

But are Jay Z and Kanye West a part of the Illuminati? For years conspiracy theorists have associated the two rappers to be Illuminati but they've both addressed these unfounded rumors before. Jay Z called the gossip revolving around his Illuminati membership "stupid", and Kayne West said it was "ridiculous". But then again, according to conspiracy theorists, that's exactly what a member of the Illuminati would say secret society and all, remember?

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Illuminati: Do Beyonce, Kanye West go to 'satanic cult' that originally was a revolutionary order opposing chu - MEAWW

Bill Kilfoil muses on missing his and his buddies Irish Poker club. - J. R. Roy

BILL KILFOIL

During Scotlands 18th century, when the Scots were busy inventing the modern world, several social/intellectual societies were at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1762 in Edinburgh, the remnants of The Select Society formed a group called The Poker Club, whose commission it was to meet weekly, sit civilly, drink all the available claret and exchange ideas in a cordial atmosphere. Their stated mission was to improve themselves in reasoning and eloquence and by free debate discover the most effective ways of promoting the common good. Membership, which included the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume, met weekly at Thomas Nicholsons Tavern in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Their Poker Club had nothing to do with card games. It was so named to encourage members to stir up the controversies of the day as a fireplace poker stirs hot coals to flame.

In our neighbourhood, back in pre-covid days, a bunch of us had a poker club of our own. We met every Thursday from 7 until 10 (facially unmasked, digitally unwashed and socially un-distanced) to play Irish Poker and tell lies. At these card games, during those carefree days before the plague, the principles of hygiene were routinely violated. We dealt the same cards with greasy hands, passed around the same stale potato chip bowl, circulated slabs of cheese and pepperoni sticks and breathed the same stale hoppy air.

The cards have not been dealt since Thursday, March 5. Our pious congregation is dispersed, our noble tradition deceased, one of the petty casualties of the pandemic. Interruptions such as these, in the grand scheme, are trivial and inconsequential. But as advanced thinkers have suggested, for our general well-being, even frivolous and gratuitous occupation should not be discounted. We miss the little things more than we thought we would. Something is lost.

Needless to say, our Thursday night poker club is nothing like the Scottish version (those guys in Edinburgh were smart); no deep thoughts for us, nothing high-minded about what we do, no extravagant talk, no highfalutin nonsense, no high-horses got on. We may debate the urgent questions of the day or express vigorous opinions, but the conversation was neither eloquent nor enlightened. We know that our views are not necessary for the survival of western civilization. From time to time, we used words that are not part of the Christian tradition.

Mostly retirees, we go through the entire evening and nobody checks their cellphone. A couple of guys who are still working claim to pay the pensions collected by the rest of us. They recommend we show a little gratitude. To this suggestion no attention was paid. We all understand that the purpose of our aging is to introduce us to a variety of mental and physical deficits.

At these gatherings, the prattle is sustained without effort most of the time it involves ridicule, whining, insulting, or commentary on political alliances and pulmonary disorders. Pearls of wisdom and erudition are rare. There is no place for delicacy of thought or feeling. Anyone taking things too seriously doesnt really belong at the table. All the card players know that sombre, humourless dialogue should be avoided if it goes on too long, someone might send for a doctor.

Most of us are beer drinkers except for the senior ex-military statesman among us who sips Protestant whiskey from a small flask Bushmills Black, from the North of Ireland. Moderate for the most part, we drink just a few beers over the three hours. And when the seal is broken, we get up every 10 minutes to pee. These bathroom visitations are frequent, flatulent and weak-streamed.

Although one among us (a Scottish immigrant) relentlessly attempts to enliven the conversation by poking and fanning the flames of argument, we are, for the most part, well behaved. A range of opinions hardly ever leads to violence, property damage or legal action.

Our game is a version of Liars Poker, renamed by members of our group as Irish Poker because some players believe (in an attempt to irritate me) that when Irish eyes are smiling, theyre usually lying as well, and the Irish (with their celebrated history of blarney) have an unfair advantage in a game whose outcome depends on the ability to persuade others that you might be telling the truth. Where some see prevarication, the Irish see creative genius. Its all part of the craic.

To be successful, each successive player doesnt have to be able to make the hand theyre claiming, they just have to convince the guy on the left that they might. A prudent player needs to be careful. Knowing that the next guy can challenge your claim, he can choose to tell the truth, perpetrate a previous lie or fabricate a shiny new one. Lies need to be told with the voice and intonation required for credulity. This behaviour is not distinguishable from that of a seasoned politician or car dealer.

When the clock strikes 10, one of the guys (the Scot, of course) discharges his fiduciary responsibilities, doling out the dividends of the evening. Little heed is paid to the redistribution of wealth; no fortunes are won or lost. The proceeds might buy a double-double and a donut. No one counts their money while sitting at the table, and when the dealings done, well have a wee deoch-an-doris and then go home. We all live within walking distance.

It has been a couple of months since we enjoyed the poker and the lies. We dont know when the prohibition will be lifted. We fear we are in danger of losing the requisite poker skills. Prevarication is an acquired talent if not practised and polished, it may be lost just ask any Republican.

Recently, Premier Stephen McNeils relentless chin has been wagging about easing restrictions on parks, fishing and golf, but there hasnt been a peep out of him about re-opening the Irish Poker economy. I guess its no big deal. Everyone has to play with the cards theyre dealt. For now, its solitaire.

Returning to 18th century Edinburgh, those learned Scots (busy conceiving capitalism and democracy) appreciated the sedentary and restorative nature of their Poker Club. Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (understandably depressed thinking about the powers of human reasoning) found his Poker Club a relief and a remedy, where he would ... be merry with my friends and after three or four hours amusement, return to my speculations.

See what I mean?

William J. Kilfoil lives in Mineville.

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BILL KILFOIL: The plague: Playing the cards youre dealt - TheChronicleHerald.ca

Adam Chodzko, O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020), screen 2, two-channel video, Hildegard von Bingens lingua ignotae, and image recognition algorithm (image courtesy the artist)

In the last few years, the humanities have seen a marked shift in interest towards nonhuman forms of intelligence. The recent vegetal turn in eco-philosophy and curatorial practice, for example, attempts to recognize the central but overlooked cultural and ecological presence of plants and to find imaginative ways of engaging with them. The upcoming exhibition The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree at Camden Art Centre, London, looks likely to be a high point on this trajectory towards using creativity and criticality to reveal and correct a modern tendency towards what scientist Monica Gagliano has called plant blindness.

The show was scheduled to open in mid-April, but when the ongoing coronavirus pandemic caused its postponement the Camden Art Centre team worked to create alternative ways of accessing the ideas and imagery touched on in the exhibition. The result is The Botanical Mind Online, a dedicated website exploring the key themes of the exhibition combined with new commissions by artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers.

The Botanical Mind Online opens with an introductory video narrated by curators Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark, offering an impressively succinct summary of the projects journey through a series of complexly interconnected topics including plant intelligence, patterns and geometry, music and harmony, psychedelia, and the notion of the tree as an axis mundi. Together, they suggest, these aspects point to an encoded intelligence in the patterns of nature a botanical mind.

The online platform draws on perspectives that offer alternatives to Western rationalism: outsider artists and philosophers, Indigenous cultures from the Amazon rainforest, and recent investigations into plant sentience. As such, it hints that an understanding of the vegetal can help to challenge the destructive dualistic divides that characterize much Western post-Enlightenment thought.

Moreover, The Botanical Mind is a laudable attempt to achieve what eco-philosopher Michael Marder describes as encountering plants on their own terms while maintaining a recognition of their radical alterity. This can be seen in Adam Chodzkos new digital commission O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020). The film uses an algorithm to scan footage of a forest for ciphers visual traces of a secret language created by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Chodzko has assigned the ciphers a sound from Hildegards choral compositions and uses them to spell out the names of plants both real and imagined. The website features a clip from the work which, in the curators words, attempts to become an idea of botanical transformation at once both a process and its experience.

Elsewhere on the site, ideas and imagery are collected under a range of tantalizing headings, such as Sacred Geometry, The Cosmic Tree, and Astrological Botany. The chapter on Indigenous Cosmologies explains how the patterns found in nature are the basis of sacred geometries found in the visual cultures and music of Indigenous Amazonian communities, many of whom believe these patterns weave the universe together. There is a particular focus on the Yawanaw people, a group of whom Camden Art Centre had been working with to develop a new artwork for The Botanical Mind in collaboration with Delfina Muoz de Toro, an indigenist, visual artist, and musician from Argentina. As the Yawanaw collaborators are currently self-isolating in their village (Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to foreign diseases), The Botanical Mind Online presents artworks related to their community. These include two experimental ethnographic films and a series of atmospheric sound recordings by Priscilla Telmon & Vincent Moon, which are presented alongside photographs and musical compositions by Muoz de Toro.

Meanwhile, the chapter on Vegetal Ontology picks up on the theme of patterning and applies it to the biological functions of plants. Gemma Andersons Relational process drawings, for example, are made in collaboration with a cellular biologist and a philosopher of science. They re-imagine the dynamic patterns of plant life by expressing the relationships between processes on molecular, cellular and organismal levels as musical compositions or dance choreographies.

Much has been made of recent research which shows that plants send each other electrical signals and nutrients through strands of symbiotic fungi, dubbed the wood wide web. The Botanical Mind Online effectively makes use of this parallel between plant communication and the internet, using the branching nonlinear structure of a hyperlinked website to subtly hint at plant forms and create a resource rich in multidirectional thought. During this period of enforced stillness, the curators argue, our behavior might be seen to resonate with plants: like them we are now fixed in one place, subject to new rhythms of time, contemplation, personal growth and transformation.

The Botanical Mind Online continues at http://www.botanicalmind.online/. The online platform and related upcoming exhibition at Camden Art Center, London, are curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark.

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Artists, Writers, Musicians, and More Explore the Intersections of Art and Ecology - Hyperallergic