The Melting Pot is a quaint notion now perhaps (and no longer widely taught to curious young boys and girls), but I find it useful as a basic counterimage to the sophisticated, academic concept of Critical Race Theory now being taught.

Sometime during my elementary school education in rural Pennsylvania, I was introduced to the then-common concept of the United States as the Melting Pot. In my innocent farm boy imagination, I saw people from all over the world jumping into the type of big, black belly pot hung over a wood fire that was used by cannibals in cartoons and occasionally by Bugs Bunny to cook Elmer Fudd. I saw all of the many different types of people in the worldfarmers, elementary school teachers, and county sheriffsbeing melted together like my toy soldiers and emerging as shiny, new Americans.

The idea made me proud. It made me happy. It made me feel that I lived in a happy place, where everybody in the world wanted to all jump into the pot and become an American. It assured me beyond my understanding that I lived in an important and proud society where everyone voluntarily surrendered their differences in the common pursuit of happiness.

The Melting Pot is a quaint notion now perhaps (and no longer widely taught to curious young boys and girls), but I find it useful as a basic counterimage to the sophisticated, academic concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT) now being taught. Where the Melting Pot proposes a unified and cooperative America, CRT proposes a divided and competitive one.

It is said that bad news can run around the world while good news is still putting its pants on. This certainly seems true for CRT, the child of postmodernism. And this is where the trouble starts. CRTs parent philosophy of postmodernism ran around the world from Paris in the 1960s while the good news of capitalisms superiority over communism was still looking for its pants. While the world had begun joining together for nuclear non-proliferation, postmodernism arrived to divide the world back into warring tribes.

Postmodernism is a philosophy based on nihilismthe belief that human life is meaningless, truth is unknowable, and morality is relative. Postmodernist pioneer Jacques Derrida said that what was real could never be known because we all have different ideas about reality. Perhaps because Friedrich Nietzsche had pronounced God dead, Foucault panicked and claimed then that all bets were off and everyone would have to become their own bermensch (Nietzsches term): a higher overman that provided his or her own values. It was nonsense, of course, but Derrida dined out on this idea for decades. Here he is responding to an interviewers question about his theory of postmodernism that was leading to the deconstruction of traditional Western values. This new word deconstruction meant the same thing as the old, shorter worddestructionbut indicated that the postmodernists need to destroy the common language as well as truth, morality, and values:

Before responding to this question, I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial nature of this situationI want to underline rather than efface our surrounding technical conditions, and not feign a naturality that doesnt exist.

Naturality? This gibberish goes onseemingly for several weeksand gets much worse. I will spare you. Feminist scholar Camille Paglia described this as thrashing the language and concluded that the postmodernists she had known were frauds. Yet, this was the bad news that quickly ran around the world. There was no more realityonly my reality, no more truth only my truth. There were no more Melting Pot Americans unified in the pursuit of happiness, only nihilistic tribes of strangers competing for the American Dream.

Into this jolly mix arrived the squalling newborn of CRT. In the early 1980s, the high holy days of postmodernism at Harvard University when whiteness was identified as the original and irredeemable sin, CRT was immaculately conceived in a conference of law professors and students as a perfect mimic of Orwells newspeak and groupthink and born of a woman: Kimberl Williams Crenshaw, Harvard Law School class of 1984.

Shazam! Crenshaw created categories of oppressed people (by race and sex) and theorized that a white, male supremacist patriarchy existed to maintain this oppression. The academy looked on in awe at this young, black woman who had uncovered the Rosetta Stone of the oppression they all knew existed. Then, Crenshaw imagined an even finer interpretation and coined the impressively thrashed term of intersectionality. This was essentially a cumulative point system of oppression with unlimited categories including gender, class, religion, disability, physical appearance, and its sub-category: height. Yes, people are oppressed if they are too short or tall. Aside from instantly destroyingor, rather, deconstructingalmost all forms of comedy and ridicule that were thrashed into micro-aggressions, it was a stroke of postmodern genius. Everyone was oppressed, even though nothing was real and nothing was true.

Of course, intersectionality as the cornerstone of CRT took off running and quickly outpaced postmodernism in the race of bad news around the world. By the early 2000s, law schools began featuring CRT courses. Today, CRT and intersectionality are essential parts of hundreds of university courses in education, political science, womens studies, ethnic studies, communication, sociology, and American studies.

CRT enthusiasts have expanded their truth(s)(?) to include the thoroughly thrashed conceptual triad of diversity, inclusion, and equityreferred to in the hushed tones of micro-aggressors appropriately as D.I.E. This toxic soup cooked up by academic court jesters has now even invaded the sciences and the federal government of the United States.

Reporter Christopher Rufo of the Discovery Institute and City Journal recently spoke about his investigation into CRT and the federal government. Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonightat the beginning of the month, Rufo explained:

I broke the story on the Treasury Department which held a seminar earlier this year from a man named Howard Ross, a diversity trainer who has billed the federal government more than $5 million over the past 15 years conducting seminars on Critical Race Theory.

He told Treasury employees essentially that America was a fundamentally a white supremacist country and I quote, Virtually all white people uphold the system of racism and white superiority and [Ross] was essentially denouncing the country and asking white employees at the Treasury Department and affiliated organizations to accept their white privilege, accept their white racial superiority, and accept essentially all of the baggage that comes with this reducible essence of whiteness.

Second, this is not by any means limited to the Treasury Department. Critical Race Theory has actually now infiltrated our criminal justice system. Just this week, I released a story that the FBI is now holding weekly seminars on intersectionality, which is a hard left academic theory that reduces people to a network of racial, gender, and sexual orientation identities that intersect in complex ways and determine whether you are an oppressor or oppressed.

Oppressor or oppressed, that old chestnut of Karl Marxoppressed workers against oppressive capitalists. Crenshaws Rosetta Stone of oppression was really just a postmodern thrashing of Marxs old Communist Manifesto. Of course, everyone present at the time knew this was true, but the truth being what it wasor maybe was notthey were happy to overlook Crenshaws cribbing without public credit being paid to the originator: old Karl Marx.

But it seems to me to go back even further, even before God was found dead. Isnt it all just a retelling of the jealousy of Cain for his brother Abel? Wasnt Cains killing of his favored and therefore oppressive brother simply the attempted overthrow of Gods patriarchy? Havent we all seen this movie before, back when there was truth and before reality was cancelled? Does this mean that Harvard and dozens of other institutions of higher education offering CRT are neither higher nor education?

Recently a presidential executive order was issued through the Office of Management and Budget in response to Rufos public challenge to end the flow of taxpayer dollars to CRT trainers teaching inclusion and diversity to scientists, soldiers, and executives working in the federal government. In summary, the order concludes:

The President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States. The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed. The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government..

Jim Proser is the author of Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization and No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy: The Life of General James Mattis.

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In Gratitude for the Executive Order on Critical Race Theory - Merion West

Wagner gave his name to a movement that is also a contagious malaise and in surveying a Wagnerised world Alex Ross looks far beyond the composers musical legacy. True, the pining dissonance at the start of Tristan und Isolde disrupted tonality for ever, but Wagners sonic sorcery has cast an equally decisive spell on those Ross calls the artists of silence novelists, poets, and painters, as well as on some noisy and unmelodious politicians. The harmonies of Orpheus supposedly soothed emotional distress and kept the cosmos in tune. Wagner achieved the opposite: his operas unsettled the sanity of his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche and later provided the besotted Hitler with a preview of fiery apocalypse.

For more than a century, this music has been a drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans, goaded to overcome humane qualms as they surrender to a Dionysian excitement. Ross likens the overwrought emotional state of the typical Wagner devotees to the Greek agon, a state of conflict or self-contradiction. Casualties abound. Nietzsche, the first of the books antagonists, vaguely blamed Wagner for his headaches, eye strain and vomiting attacks; the poet Stphane Mallarm said that Wagner disgusted but irresistibly enslaved him. The tenor who sang Tristan at the operas premiere dropped dead soon afterwards, then with the intercession of a medium informed his widow, the first Isolde, that the mental strain of the music had done him in.

Mostly, the combat takes the form of cultural contestation, as reverence for the holy German art extolled in Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg has often required other nations to pay homage to Germans as the master race. Once or twice, the agon descends into violence. Ross reports on duels between Wagnerites and non-believers and there is even a boozy altercation with weaponised beer mugs.

The story diverges and digresses and soon gets out of Rosss control. Like Wagner with his repeated orchestral motifs, he tends to go round in circles: I dont mind Nietzsches eternal recurrence in music, but a historical narrative needs to move ahead. In this encyclopaedic book, the plethora of interpreters makes Wagner mean anything at all, which ultimately makes him mean nothing in particular. Decadent enthusiasts such as Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde were thrilled by the orgiastic revels in Tannhuser, yet the nuptial march from Lohengrin became compulsory at sedate Victorian weddings. For Shaw, Wagners Ring exposed the greedy iniquity of capitalism, while for Hitler it unearthed the racial roots cultivated by fascism. Can it do both or is Ross just amassing opposed opinions? At its most undiscriminating, Wagnerism lapses into a game of Trivial Pursuit: if you need to know how many US cities have streets named after Parsifal, the answer is somewhere in here.

On American turf, Ross writes well about the novelists Willa Cather and Owen Wister, who found an equivalent to the raw, wild landscapes of the Ring in the geysers of Yellowstone, the Wyoming prairies and the New Mexico desert, and he uncovers a suppressed tradition of African American Wagnerites. Yet in his desperation to be all-inclusive he straggles off in quest of such exotic aficionados as the Sri Lankan Theosophical leader Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa and Horacio Quiroga, a Uruguayan epigone. Worse, the abstruse rightwing philosopher Martin Heidegger and the structural anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss lure him up blind alleys of speculative theorising.

The occasional obscenity adds a much-needed fillip. A poem by Pierre Lous filthily fantasises about the lusty appetite of Senta, the chaste redeemer from Der Fliegende Hollnder, while Aubrey Beardsley places the wayward Tannhuser in an all-male Venusberg where he descends to the passive attitude and is rogered by a priapic servant. Theres even a detour to a Greenwich Village leather bar in which a sign once enjoined patrons to concentrate on having sex rather than loitering in corners to discuss Wagner. However when Yukio Mishima spills his entrails with a samurai sword in his film Patriotism to the rapturous accompaniment of Tristan und Isolde, the effect is merely repellent.

Wagner is finally absorbed by pop culture, that fecund compost heap where the classics are mulched and pulped. The napalm-spewing gunships that blast the Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now remind us that the operas shrieking female warriors are out to scavenge corpses from the battlefield, although the cartoon in which Elmer Fudd pursues Bugs Bunny to the same score while yelling Kill da wabbit! reduces Wagners ecstatic whirlwind to muzak. Ross smiles on such kitschy appropriations: he calls Tolkiens Lord of the Rings a kinder, gentler version of Wagners Nibelungen tetralogy, populated by peaceable garden gnomes, not tragic gods and stricken heroes.

At the end, Ross performs a cleansing ritual. Taking up the spear with which Parsifal closes the wound of Amfortas in Wagners last opera, he uses it to heal his own psychic scars, which, as he somewhat creepily discloses, include being dumped by a boyfriend after a performance of Die Walkre and an ensuing alcoholic slump. My long slog through his book was not so cathartic. After Rosss hungover postlude, I recalled his claim, made 700 arduous, enfevered, over-charged pages earlier, that Wagners influence was actually less extensive than those of Monteverdi, Bach or Beethoven. Its good to be reminded that music does not always leave us with an aching libido and shredded nerves or threatens the universe with extinction.

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross is published by HarperCollins (30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15

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Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross review - The Guardian

Cultural Marxism is a term favoured by those on the right who argue the humanities are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Australia.

The criticism is that radical voices have captured the humanities, stifling free speech on campuses.

The term has been used widely over the past decade. Most infamously, in former senator Fraser Annings 2018 final solution speech to parliament he denounced cultural Marxism as not a throwaway line, but a literal truth.

But is cultural Marxism actually taking over our universities and academic thinking? Using a leading academic database, I crunched some numbers to find out.

The term cultural Marxism moved into the media mainstream around 2016, when psychologist Jordan Peterson was protesting a Canadian bill prohibiting discrimination based on gender. Peterson blamed cultural Marxism for phenomena like the movement to respect gender-neutral pronouns which, in his view, undermines freedom of speech.

Read more: Is Jordan Peterson the philosopher of the fake news era?

But the term is much older. It seems first to have been used by writer Michael Minnicino in his 1992 essay The New Dark Age, published by the Schiller Institute, a group associated with the fringe right wing figure Lyndon LaRouche.

Around the turn of the century, the phrase was adopted by influential American conservatives. Commentator and three time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan targeted cultural Marxism for many perceived ills facing America, from womens rights and gay activism to the decline of traditional education.

The term has since gone global, sadly making its way into Norwegian terrorist Anders Breviks justificatory screed. Andrew Bolt used it as early as 2002. In 2013, Cory Bernardi was warning against cultural Marxism as one of the most corrosive influences on society.

By 2016, the year the Peterson affair unfolded, Nick Cater and Chris Uhlmann were blaming it for undermining free speech in The Australian. The idea has since been adopted by Mark Latham and Malcolm Roberts.

Insofar as it goes beyond a fairly broad term of enmity, the accusers of cultural Marxism point to two main protagonists behind this ideology.

The first is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Writing under imprisonment by the fascists in the 1920s, Gramsci argued the left needed to capture the bureaucracy, universities and media-cultural institutions if it wished to hold power.

The second alleged culprits are neo-Marxist theorists associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research. These critical theorists drew on psychoanalysis, social theory, aesthetics, and political economy to understand modern societies. They became especially concerned with how fascism could win the allegiance of ordinary people, despite its appeals to aversive prejudice, hatred and militarism.

When Hitler came to power, the Frankfurt School was quickly shut down, and its key members forced into exile. Then, as Uhlmann has narrated:

Frankfurt School academics [] transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.

While Soviet communism faltered, the story continues, the cultural Marxist campaign to commandeer our culture was marching triumphantly through the humanities departments of Western universities and outwards into wider society.

Today, critics argue it shapes the political correctness that promotes minority causes and polices public debate on issues like the environment, gender and immigration - posing a grave threat to liberal values.

Read more: How a fake 'free speech crisis' could imperil academic freedom

If the conservative anxieties about cultural Marxism reflected reality, we would expect to see academic publications on Marx, Gramsci and critical theorists crowding out libertarian, liberal and conservative voices.

To test this, I conducted quantitative research on the academic database JStor, tracking the frequency of names and key ideas in all academic article and chapter titles published globally between 1980 and 2019.

In 1987, Karl Marx himself ceded the laurel as the most written about thinker in academic humanities, replaced by Friedrich Nietzsche revered by many fascists including Benito Mussolini and Martin Heidegger, another figure whose far-right politics were hardly progressive.

Over the past 40 years, the alleged mastermind of cultural Marxism, Gramsci, attracted 480 articles. This compares with the 407 publications on Friedrich Hayek, arguably the leading influence on the neoliberal free market reforms of the last decades.

The Frankfurt School featured in less than 200 titles, and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (identified by Uhlmann as a key transmitter of the cultural Marxist virus in the US) was the subject of just over 220.

Over the last decade, the most written about thinker was the neo-Nietzschean theorist, Giles Deleuze, featuring in 770 titles over 2010-19.

But the notoriously esoteric ideas of Deleuze - and his language of machinic assemblages, strata, flows and intensities - are hardly Marxist. His ideas have been a significant influence on the right-wing Neoreactionary or dark enlightenment movement.

The last four decades have seen a relative decline of Marxist thought in academia. Its influence has been superseded by post-structuralist (or postmodernist) thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Deleuze.

Post-structuralism is primarily indebted to thinkers of the European conservative revolution led by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Where Marxism is built on hopes for reason, revolution and social progress, post-structuralist thinkers roundly reject such optimistic grand narratives.

Post-structuralists are as preoccupied with culture as our conservative news columnists. But their analyses of identity and difference challenge the primacy Marxism affords to economics as much as they oppose liberal or conservative ideas.

Quantitative research bears out the idea that cultural Marxism is indeed a post-factual dog whistle and an intellectual confusion masquerading as higher insight.

A spectre of Marxism has survived the cold war. It now haunts the culture wars.

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Is 'cultural Marxism' really taking over universities? I crunched some numbers to find out - The Conversation AU

Those who read me regularly at The Week and on Twitter have probably noticed an occasional tendency toward nihilism. I don't mean that I sometimes act as if everything is permitted in a godless universe. I mean that I sometimes become tempted by the same knowingness and spiritual lethargy with a positive spin, you could call it resignation that inspires so many during the Trump era to shrug their shoulders and pronounce "lol nothing matters."

I'll admit this is how I greeted news on Wednesday that Trump spoke to journalist Bob Woodward in February about the looming pandemic and disclosed that he understood as well as anyone back then how dangerous and deadly it was even as he was preparing to discount the risks before all the world over the coming months. Which was of course followed by him careening between sounding grave about the risks and then dismissing them, sometimes within the same news conference, and occasionally within the same sentence.

So Trump knew the truth, but he deliberately lied about it (most of the time). And here we are six or so months later with the country about a week from reaching the morbid milestone of 200,000 dead of COVID-19. We also just passed Italy in per capita deaths and are poised to rise above the U.K. and Spain within the next month, leaving only Belgium with a worse outcome in the developed world.

No wonder, then, that Trump is on track to lose in the biggest landslide in decades. Unless, of course, he only loses the popular vote by 3-4 million or less, in which case he might win. Because the United States, self-proclaimed beacon of democracy, has an electoral system that now routinely bestows presidential power on the candidate who wins fewer votes.

So yeah: lol nothing matters.

Except when it does. Which is most of the time.

Things certainly mattered last week, when The Atlantic published a piece in which four anonymous sources confirmed that Trump referred to American soldiers killed in the line of duty as "losers" and "suckers." After I read the piece, I permitted myself a public outburst on Twitter: "What a thoroughly repulsive human being." It took only a few minutes for me to regain my composure enough to think, "I'm going to regret that." Not because I'd begun to doubt my judgment of the president. And certainly not because I was tempted to embrace the situational skepticism of the president's defenders, who treated the Atlantic story as the greatest opportunity in hours to rail against the dishonest liberal media for relying on anonymous sources in order to spread lies that echo things that the president has said publicly on multiple occasions.

No, I regretted it because I'd allowed the mask of world-weary knowingness to slip. I'd taken the bait, reacted with anger and disgust to an example of the man who holds the nation's highest office acting like a thoroughly disgusting human being instead of responding with something more cynical, like "we knew this already, it won't hurt his polling or prospects on Nov. 3."

In other words: lol nothing matters.

But here's the thing: Both reactions (disgust and indifference) express part of the whole truth a truth that is actually more shocking than either part alone. Trump is in fact a thoroughly repulsive human being, and we all know that it won't matter because a sufficient number of Americans actively like or just don't care that he's a repulsive human being. Some of them probably like it because it triggers liberals like me, which is both entertaining and politically satisfying. Others probably like it because they are pretty repulsive themselves and enjoy having a champion in a position of power and influence who can truly represent them. Still others may not exactly like his repulsiveness but are perfectly willing to tune it out in return for getting concrete goodies in return: cuts to taxes and regulations, right-wing judges appointed to the courts, and so on.

But what am I supposed to do with this information about my fellow Americans? How should I respond as a citizen, as a human being to the knowledge that more than two-fifths of likely voters are cheered by or indifferent to the fact that the commander in chief thinks soldiers are chumps for giving their all for their country in acts of sacrificial valor?

Or that he was more concerned last winter about propping up the stock market than with protecting the country from a far greater danger than any of the ersatz threats he routinely hypes for political gain?

Or that so few appear to care that a significant portion of the country is on fire, turning its skies the color of blood and rust, and rendering the air a toxic fog of soot and ash a vivid glimpse of the kind of world that awaits all of us if we continue to deny the reality of climate change?

What's the right response to this knowledge? The options often appear to be a stark either/or: Either a constant primal scream or a cynical shrug of the shoulders. "Lol nothing matters" is the latter, and it's immensely tempting.

It's tempting for the same reason that mindfulness meditation is gaining in popularity. Both grow out of a desperate need to disconnect from the circus. To soothe the anxiety. To stand with composure before the uncertainties that encircle us. To stop caring quite so much, if only for a brief time, about a world that seems to be coming apart.

The problem is that the flip side of achieving composure before the whirlwind is hopelessness a surrender to forces and trends we feel powerless to master, control, or tame. Equanimity can be indistinguishable from spiritual exhaustion. It can feel just like achieving peace by giving up.

That's why "nihilism" is the right word to describe it, at least if it's understood in Friedrich Nietzsche's sense, to mean moral and creative enervation. Maybe you're like me and you've found yourself every so often exclaiming to no one in particular, "I'm so tired." Tired of what? Tired of standing up straight before the onslaught of B.S. that's now flung in our faces every single day. Just getting out of bed to face it again every morning can feel like it takes too much energy. How much easier it would be to slouch into the gutter for a day-long nap.

Why is it all so draining? What produces the pervasive feeling of entropy? Answer: The instinct to care about a world that shows so many signs of coming unhinged.

What isn't exhausting is laughter, which is life-affirming, renewing. But laughing at our world takes detachment caring somewhat less. That's why we've come to pair laughing out loud with the assertion that nothing matters.

But maybe there's a mean to be found between the extremes of giggling in giddy indifference and gaping in exhausted horror at the world. Maybe we can love the world, mourn our losses, and recognize the awfulness of so much of what swirls around us while also striving to place it in a perspective that makes some space for wry smiles. In dark times, a little irony can go a long way transforming a tragedy not so much into a comedy as into a chapter with a mixture of darkness and light and an indeterminate end that leaves a little room for hope.

Yes, Trump is awful, but he's not a demonic figure. He's a buffoon, a fool, a portrait in ignorance, rapaciousness, and groundless self-regard. That an entire political party, from grassroots voters on up to leading officeholders, bow down before him and parrot his bilious lies is pathetic and alarming. But it's also ... a little funny. Not because nothing matters, but because lots of things do and this is something that Trump and his ridiculous party appear not to understand. Like a man convinced he's Superman running headlong into a brick wall he's sure will crumble on impact, allowing him to crash through unscathed to the other side, Trump acts like he can conjure a re-election out of thin air and positive thinking, even as he consistently trails his opponent by nearly eight percentage points.

Could it work? Possibly. But probably not. And that's kind of funny, too. So go ahead and laugh out loud from time to time at the Trump travesty. Just don't think it's because nothing matters.

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Lol nothing matters. Or does it? - The Week

Throughout the years, Line of Duty fans know exactly what's about to happen when those doors close, the tape recorder is switched on, that long ominous beep rings out, and the members of AC-12 sit down to do their thing.

During five seasons of Jed Mercurio's beloved police drama, we've seen countless bent coppers and crooks breakdown and confess after being examined by Ted Hastings, DS Steve Arnott, and DI Kate Fleming.

For example, DCI Tony Gates, Lindsay Denton, John Corbett, DIMatthew "Dot" Cottan, and DCI Roz Huntley have all experienced the pressure-cooker of the famous glass box, but with the new season currently filming, it's time that we meet our new antagonist.

As always, the next season of the hit police thriller will feature a brand new case for AC-12 to investigate and this time around, they're pursuing DCI Joanne Davidson (Kelly Macdonald), the senior investigating officer on an unsolved murder case.

Taking to Twitter, the show's writer/creator Jed Mercurio gave us our first look at the star of Trainspotting and No Country For Old Men facing off against AC-12.

In terms of an official synopsis, Davidson has been described as an enigmatic" senior investigating officer on an unsolved murder case, where she quickly becomes a new suspect.

Welcoming her to the series, Mercurio said, DCI Joanne Davidson will prove the most enigmatic adversary AC-12 have ever faced.

Here's the first look at her on set.

Elsewhere, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Perry Fitzpatrick, Andi Osho and Prasanna Puwanarajah have also been added to the cast for Season 6, which is set for release in 2021.

These new characters join series favourites Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) and Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) in the new season.

Speaking about the show's return, showrunner Jed Mercurio said: "We know Line of Duty fans are desperate for Series 6 and we hope we can get it on air as soon as possible. Thanks so much for your patience in these difficult times."

Mercurio has also teased fans with some other images of the cast and crew on set.

Martin Compston (DS Steve Arnott) echoed Mercurio's statement when he said: Its been a long few months and it will be a different way of working from when we stopped, but Im delighted to be back on the case with the Line of Duty team!

Now that production on the new episodes has resumed, Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) says: We've been sitting on these incredible scripts for some time now, so Im really looking forward to getting back to it and seeing the Line of Duty family.

Season 6 had already started production in Belfast before it had to be shut down due to COVID-19.

A few months ago, Mercurio said that the delay may result in his scripts having to be re-written to accommodate social distancing guidelines.

Simon Heath, the Executive Producer for World Productions, says: Its been almost six months since we stopped shooting, but following our implementation of all the industry COVID protocols, were delighted to be able to resume filming series six safely.

"Together with independent health and safety consultants, in full consultation with industry partners, and in accordance with all current government guidelines on Covid-19, the Line of Duty production team will adhere to comprehensive protocols to ensure that the new series is produced in a safe and responsible manner."

We'll leave the last happy words to the gaffer, Adrian Dunbar (Supt. Ted Hastings).

Even with the imposition of COVID restrictions, I can't hide my excitement at getting the team back together. So many people wonderingwhat happens next?" he said.

We're just one of them.

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First Look At The New Season Of Line Of Duty Has Been Released - Balls.ie

Empower, Jesper Sehested, Pluslexia.com

September 8, 2020; Washington Post

Writing in the Washington Post, Gillet Gardner Rosenblith, whose doctoral thesis traces the history of public housing policy, highlights the shifting meaning of the word empowerment, showing how a term once used by tenants to claim rights of self-governance has, over time, come to mean being subjected to the market.

This shift is not just of academic interest. In fact, its a contributing factor to the nations current housing crisis. As Rosenblith observes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order to stave off evictions for most renters through the end of the year came about due to tenant advocacy groups calls for eviction moratoriums, even if the measure fails to address the need for rent reliefin a sense, just delaying a potential eviction wave for a few months.

More fundamentally, Rosenblith writes, The order does nothing to address the root cause of this eviction crisisa half-century of federal retrenchment from providing low-income housing and the rejection of traditional multifamily public housing as a viable and effectual anti-poverty program.

What led to the push for tenant empowerment in the first place? As Rosenblith explains, Public housing always had flaws. Its placement often worsened racial and economic segregation, separating low-income, disproportionately African American tenant families from centers of economic and political activity, public transportation, jobs, and more.

What public housing residents were calling for in the late 1960s was fully funded public housing in which residents played a decisive role in decision-making, rents stayed affordable, and the housing itself would be augmented by initiatives designed to help people out of poverty including job training, day cares, health centers, and more.

This may seem a pipedream. Yet for a brief moment, it appeared possible. As NPQ noted a couple of years ago, back in 1968, Congress did not just pass the Fair Housing Act. It also passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which funded housing with a goal of producing six million units of affordable housing in 10 years; by 1970, the federal government was getting close to that 600,000 units a year goal, producing 366,100 units and rehabilitating another 79,700.

And then, funding quickly disappeared, and with its absence came a shift in the language of empowerment. What once meant tenant power and community control became, as Rosenblith puts it, the empowerment of individual tenants, often couched in narratives of personal responsibility or self-sufficiency.

The shift, she notes, was perfectly bipartisanand extended beyond housing to education, healthcare, and welfare policies.

Occasionally, Rosenblith notes, some sought to meld old and new forms of empowerment. One notable example was Jack Kemp, who served as Housing and Urban Development Secretary for President George H.W. Bush. Kemp promoted demonstration projects involving resident management and resident ownership of their units. But, Rosenblith points out, when tenants assumed primary responsibility of day-to-day management duties over their housing, they did so without access to or power over the federal funds allocated to their housing authority. Accordingly, tenant management groups often struggled to effectively implement their vision for management.

By the mid-1990s, Rosenblith writes, a strong bipartisan consensus for empowerment was evident, but the term had become completely divorced from its original intention of promoting significant structural reform and providing adequate resources to help lift Americans from poverty. The budget for public housing, she notes, was cut by $17 billion during President Bill Clintons administration.

It gets worse. Under Clinton, the war on drugs had a public housing corollary. The One Strike Act, notes Rosenblith, claimed to empowergot to love that wordthe good tenants by evicting the bad. But it often led to whole families, including good tenants, losing their housing.

Bottom line: in the name of empowerment, federal housing policy made a mockery of the term.

As Rosenblith concludes, Instead of listening to public housing tenants, politicians made top-down determinations about what was good for them. The result was a far cry from what the tenant power movement had envisioned: the federal government retreated from providing safe, affordable housing, leaving more low-income families at the mercy of private rental companies and landlords.Steve Dubb

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What's in a Word? Housing Policy and the Shifting Sands of Empowerment - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

Survey from TransUnions public sector business finds expectations are high for government agencies to provide secure yet convenient experiences

CHICAGO, Sept. 10, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- More than eight in 10 U.S. adults (83%) are concerned about having their identity stolen and the level of distress of this crime occurring has increased for nearly one-third (32%) of Americans since the COVID-19 pandemic began. More alarmingly, since the onset of the pandemic, 10% of U.S. adults report being a victim of identity theft. The findings are part of a new survey conducted by the public sector business of TransUnion (NYSE: TRU) released today during the FedID 2020 virtual conference.

The survey of 2,108 U.S. adults on August 11, 2020, also observed types of fraud that are impacting both government agencies and consumers. Unemployment benefits and tax return fraud, among others, are challenging for government agencies because consumers have high expectations concerning the security of their accounts.

More than 43% of survey respondents said both security and convenience are equally important to them when accessing their government accounts. Approximately 26% said security is more important and 22% had convenience as being more essential.

As federal and state government agencies support millions of consumers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, its apparent that fraudsters are gaining access to accounts and funds that are meant to help individuals in need, said Jonathan McDonald, executive vice president of TransUnions public sector business unit. During these difficult times, its critical for government agencies to provide secure, friction-right experiences to ensure citizens are equipped to safely access their accounts or much-needed benefits.

Government fraud impacting youngest generations most

Besides the respondents who said they were a victim of identity theft, 11% said they were not sure if they have or have not been a victim of identity theft. Gen Z (born 1995 or after) topped all generations with almost 16% stating theyve been an ID theft victim. Gen Z also reported the highest propensity of government accounts being taken over by someone else (15%) compared to 7% for all generations.

While 7% of respondents said theyve been a victim of unemployment benefits fraud in 2020, the youngest generations once again faced the greatest challenges. More than 16% of Gen Z respondents said theyve been a victim of unemployment benefits fraud followed by Millennials (born 1980 to 1994) at 8%. The vast majority of respondents who have been a victim of unemployment benefits fraud have not resolved the problem.

Furthermore, a small percentage of respondents have either had their 2019 tax return fraudulently filed (7%) or had their stimulus check stolen (6%). However, Gen Z once again was an outlier with 13% having tax returns fraudulently filed and 12% having stimulus checks stolen.

Our findings make it abundantly clear that the youngest adults are being targeted most by fraudsters. This is also one of the most vulnerable populations with many just beginning their careers. At the same time, these individuals also are tech savvy with the most substantive online profiles, and thats why its critical for government agencies to provide secure, yet convenient opportunities for this population to confirm their identity accurately, concluded McDonald.

TransUnions public sector business supports federal, state and local agencies by providing mission-critical solutions to improve citizen safety, manage compliance and boost services for constituents. TransUnions fraud solutions unite both consumer and device identities to detect threats across markets, fusing traditional data science with machine learning to provide businesses and government agencies with unique insights about consumer transactions.

To access more information about the public sector survey, please click here.

About TransUnion (NYSE: TRU)

TransUnion is a global information and insights company that makes trust possible in the modern economy. We do this by providing a comprehensive picture of each person so they can be reliably and safely represented in the marketplace. As a result, businesses and consumers can transact with confidence and achieve great things. We call this Information for Good.

A leading presence in more than 30 countries across five continents, TransUnion provides solutions that help create economic opportunity, great experiences and personal empowerment for hundreds of millions of people.

http://www.transunion.com/publicsector

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One in 10 U.S. Adults Say They Have Been Victims of Identity Theft Since the COVID-19 Pandemic Began - Yahoo Finance

How many of you got into auditing because you love filling out forms? Consider for a moment: The staff who stay are the ones who acquiesce to filling out endless checklists, but those who want to broaden their perspective and depth of knowledge about the client and the industry leave. Scary, isnt it?

We need to set up our firms to keep those who know what the bottom line was on their last audit, and especially those who know how their client makes money. We need to keep the people who will move us from audit and accounting to assurance and advisory.

We have so much untapped potential in our firms to move the audit into the future, but we cant access that without a culture of empowerment. Empowerment is one of the five attributes of a framework for audit leadership weve observed in successful firms over the years. The other attributes are relevance, business-mindedness, quality, and innovation.

Empowerment means that teams feel like they have ownership over the outcome, outputs and the process of what they are doing. They need to feel its OK to try doing things differently and even to make a mistake and learn from it. The quality of everyones work improves when they have the confidence to present new ideas, and to push back when they think theres a better way to do something. And empowerment delivers results especially when it is partnered with owned accountability.

Empowered teams are engaged

Theres an old story of an architect and two stone masons. The architect asked the first stone mason what he was doing. The mason said, Every day is the same. I cut heavy blocks and put them in place to build a wall. The architect saw another stone mason who was doing the same work as the first one, but this one was visibly more animated. The architect asked him the same question, and this one said, Im building a cathedral! Isnt that wonderful?

Our culture of filling out checklists means audit firms are filled with people building walls, not cathedrals, hardly an empowered group. But an empowered team is all-in. Theyre engaged. Theyre looking for ways to add value with each audit and believe its their right and responsibility to do so. Theyre not afraid to innovate, and theyre actively thinking about ways to help the bottom line for their clients. They see and own the end game: protection of the public interest, successful clients and a healthy firm.

In the current COVID-19 environment, engagement might seem like a luxury, when some audit firms are needing to lay people off just to survive another day. But according to a recent meta-analysis of global business data performed by Gallup, engagement is even more important in times of crisis. According to Gallups analysis, which covered both the 2001 and the 2008 recessions, Business units are at an increased advantage and more resilient than their peers if employee engagement is strong. And they are at an increased disadvantage and less resilient if employee engagement is weak during a recession.

So what should leaders do to create that advantage? Heres a hint we dont just point the team at piles of stone and walk away, assuming it will become the cathedral.

Four connections you need

Leaders and managers need to set the stage and be present and available along the way to enable empowered team members who are connected to their work in four distinct ways:

Without these four connections, you have a disconnected group of people who will be ready to join another firm for a higher paycheck. Why not, when most every firm has the same checklist mentality of building an endless wall? You can make your firm attractive to the great auditors when youre building a cathedral.

A culture of empowerment

Building a culture of empowerment doesnt require investment in expensive training. You can build it with small changes, but those small changes make a powerful impact:

Leave audit in a better place

Audit is rapidly becoming a commodity, and there are rumors that blockchain will make audit obsolete. But we honestly believe it's not too late.

There is so much potential in the talents of our people at every level in the firm that the power of all of us working together can make a huge positive difference for the future of A&A. When we empower our people to play all in and we guide them to understand that audit is more than a forms-filling exercise, we can move the profession to a place where team members want to learn, grow, stay, help their clients be successful, and to eventually lead the firm.

To get there, right now we have to work to make audit relevant to our clients. An attitude of business-mindedness means were protecting the interests of our firm and looking for ways to help our clients be more successful. Striving for first time right means quality isnt something measured by the number of checklists and isnt something that we hope quality control will fix at the end. We need to embrace innovation as not just adding more technology, but looking for different ways to do things, and doing different things. And lastly, we need to empower our people to apply their curiosity and intellect to take A & A into the future.

If we do all of that, the future of audit will be better than the present.

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Empowerment in audit - Accounting Today

Niti Aayog seeks suggestions and comments on Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), which aims to empower individuals with control over how their personal data is used and shared

Topics Niti Aayog|data protection

Peerzada Abrar | Bengaluru Last Updated at September 4, 2020 23:18 IST

The government is all set to launch a Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) that will let citizens have control over how their data is used or shared while ensuring privacy. The framework aims to be a public-private effort for a new and improved data governance approach, and policy think tank NITI Aayog has already sought suggestions on the DEPA draft document before October 1.

The on-ground implementation of the framework is set to launch this year. Nandan Nilekani, Aadhaar architect, and Infosys co-founder, in a Tweet on Friday said: The DEPA draft is out ...

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India to empower citizens with control over use of personal data - Business Standard

4 min read184 views and 17 shares Posted September 10, 2020

Girls on the Run of Lancaster and Lebanon counties (GOTR) have organized a plan to set in motion a revamped version of their fall season programs.

Read More: Girls on the Run is helping local students learn life lessons through physical activity

The GOTR staff and volunteer coaches have included necessary changes to the programs to be able to still provide girls in third to eighth grades with ways to take care of their physical and emotional health during the COVID-19 era. GOTR is aware that the COVID-19 pandemic may have placed additional stress on many childrens lives.

Several of the revisions that have been made to both the GOTR (third to fifth grades) and Heart and Sole (sixth to eighth grades) programs include smaller team sizes for limited physical exposure, a program duration shortened from ten weeks to eight weeks for a later start date, and increased flexibility regarding the times and days of practices.

GOTR has made several modifications to the program to ensure the health and safety of coaches and participants, said Carrie Johnson, Executive Director of Girls on the Run of Lancaster and Lebanon. By following current COVID-19 guidelines, GOTR is confident girls will be able to join a team and experience the much-needed positive encouragement from their peers and trained coaches. Serving girls and meeting their social, emotional, and physical needs are so important to their futures, especially during this time when it is needed most.

The two choices for the fall 2020 programs are in-person/virtual hybrid teams or virtual-only teams. For in-person/virtual hybrid teams, locations such as parks, community centers, churches, and schools will be used as meeting places for social distancing purposes. The teams will meet two times per week and can choose to meet up to four times per week. The team sizes have been minimized to only six to twelve girls per team with two coaches. There will be 16 GOTR lessons during the season.

Read More: Girls on the Run launches GOTR at Home

Virtual only teams give participants the chance to meet virtually through video conferencing. Both school-based virtual teams and open enrollment virtual teams are offered. The teams will be limited to 12 girls per team with two coaches and will meet twice a week for eight weeks. The meetings will last 45 minutes and will include games referring to the lesson, team discussions, activities in the Girl Journal, and physical activity.

Each participant will receive their own bag to carry a Girl Journal for the practices, as well as hand sanitizer, markers and pens.

In the event of unexpected or planned closures, GOTR will be able to quickly shift in-person program to virtual practices, Johnson said. Coaches will be provided with specific resources, training, and support to prepare them to seamlessly deliver the program virtually. With alternative and flexible programming now available, we continue the GOTR commitment to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy, and confident.

This years fall virtual 5K is presented by Orthopedic Associates of Lancaster. The 5K will take place on Nov. 20, 21, and 22, and will involve both smaller events in-person and virtually. For more information on the race and to register for the 5K, click here.

Registration is now open for the fall programs and the season starts on Monday, Sept. 21. To register, click here.

In addition to the fall programs this year, GOTR plans to offer a free virtual screening and post-viewing dialogue of the 2017 documentary, Angst: Raising Awareness Around Anxiety.

Angst is a film that focuses on what its like to have anxiety and the struggles that go along with the symptoms of it in everyday life. Angst presents interviews with young people who suffer, or have suffered, from anxiety and what their personal experiences entail. The film also includes an interview with the famous athlete, Michael Phelps.

This film and subsequent panel is for everyone, we all have some level of anxiety in our lives and can learn so much from this documentary, Johnson said. The film helps normalize the conversation and gives us a platform for talking about our own personal experiences with anxiety. At GOTR we provide a safe space for girls to connect emotionally, socially and physically.

The 56 minute screening will be available from Thursday, Oct. 8 at 7:00 p.m. through Sunday, Oct. 11 at 11:30 p.m. On Oct. 8 from 7:00 p.m to 8:45 p.m., a screening will take place and afterward there will be a virtual dialogue with psychologists and experts.

With the limitations the pandemic has put on gathering and thus, meeting in-person with many of our girls, we feel strongly that providing the platform for conversation around anxiety and what all children and adults are feeling right now is one of the most impactful things we can do as an organization, Johnson said. Anxieties of the uncertainty and unknown are running high for both adults and children.

The sponsors who made this event possible include The Ellenberg- Herr Team at Merrill Lynch, Jay Group, Hershey Retirement Solutions, Kreamer Funeral Home, LCCF, Hinkle Insurance, and Eden Park Pediatric Group The screening tickets are free and are now available. For more information about the event and to register for tickets, click here.

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Girls on the Run initiates fall season programs with accommodations for health and safety guidelines - LebTown