Life's been tough lately. A lot of us are stuck at home, watching our hair get long and missing our friends, and even our families. Sure, our neighbors are cool, but it's the same faces every day.

We've tried the group online calls and that helps.

We never thought we'd get so excited about going to the grocery store.

Some of us need some encouraging words right now, a little more than, "We're all in this together."

So we thought, you know who is always good for words of hope and promise? Commencement speakers.

Hear us out, we know most speeches on graduation day follow a pattern. Famous person says, "I can't believe they have me up here." Famous person drops some humor about a campus icon they learned about since they flew in. Famous person talks about their life for 15 minutes.

But then there's that nugget, those wise and learned words of how that future will unfold and how we should go after it.

Here is some good advice we found from some famous folks. It might be for 22-year-olds about to make a huge life change, but we think it's good to think about these things as we navigate this pandemic.

"Nobody is going to take you to the front of the line unless you push your way to the front of the line. ... One of the biggest lessons that I've learned in life is that you cannot achieve success without failure.

"Either I was going to sit in that failure and give up or I was going to make a decision to step out of the darkness. You see when you in that darkness you want to sit there and wait for the light to come. When you in that darkness it feels uncomfortable, but you can't wait and sit in that darkness. The only way out is to step forward, to face your fears, to become your own light."

"So I hope you find the courage to decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong. And then, please, expect as much of the world around you. Try to make the world good according to your standards. It won't be easy.

"Get ready for my generation to tell you everything that can't be done -- like ending racial tension, or getting money out of politics, or lowering the world's carbon emissions. And we should know they can't be done. After all, we're the ones who didn't do them."

"(Philosopher Friedrich) Nietzsche famously said, 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' But what he failed to stress is that IT ALMOST KILLS YOU. Disappointment stings and, for driven, successful people like yourselves it is disorienting. What Nietzsche should have said is: Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you watch a lot of Cartoon Network and drink mid-price Chardonnay at 11 in the morning. ...

"In 2000, I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality."

"As each of you looks toward your future, always focus on finding that which you do well and that which you love doing. Do something that gives you satisfaction every day and makes our society a better place. Do something that helps your fellow citizens. Make sure you give a good measure of your time and your talent and your treasure in service to others. The need to serve others has never been greater in our nation. ...

"Whatever you think of the world right now, good, bad, better than it used to be, worse than it used to be, whatever you think of it, it is going to be yours to shape. It's gonna be yours to help bring the positive future, better future for all of our citizens of the world, and America has a vital role to play."

"Now, why are you here? I'll tell you why you're here. You've been put here because the universe exists. There's no use the universe existing, if there isn't someone there to see it. Your job is to see it. Your job is to witness. To witness, to understand, to comprehend, and to celebrate! To celebrate with your lives. At the end of your life, if you don't come to that end and look back and realize that you did not celebrate, then you wasted it."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much. You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what's happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.

"So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it. I'm saying, I'm the proof that you can ask the universe for it -- please! ...

"And when I say, 'life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you.' I really don't know if that's true. I'm just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as something beneficial so that I can deal with them in the most productive way. You'll come up with your own style, that's part of the fun."

"Abide in the space of gratitude, because this is what I know for sure, that only through being grateful for how far you've come in your past can you leave room for more blessings to flow. Blessings flow in the space of gratitude.

Everything in your life is happening to teach you more about yourself, so even in a crisis, be grateful. When disappointed, be grateful. When things aren't going the way you want them to, be grateful that you have sense enough to turn it around."

"America (is) the greatest democratic country so you should look (to the) whole world. ...

"So you see, you think on a global level now in order to create a sense of global responsibility. ... It is extremely important to develop a concept of oneness of humanity. Seven billion human beings, we are part of that. If the seven billion human beings are happy and also the nations' involvement positive then everybody gets a benefit."

"We cannot always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. ... Always just try. Because you never know.

"And so as you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in.

"Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get-your-hands-dirty way."

"Preparation is the key to victory in any game that you play. The prepared people win a lot more than the unprepared people. You can never spend too much time on preparation. The will to prepare to win is far more important than the will to win. ...

"And I think the ability to adjust, the ability to be able to see something and adjust to it, to change your approach because there's a better approach is going to be very important to each of you."

"I want you to remember that your sense of humor is your life preserver in what could definitely be a veil of tears.

"Relish it. Cultivate it. It will keep you sane in the midst of the madness you will encounter nearly, and I promise you, nearly every day of your life. It is vital to your existence. It's so important that people pay morons like me to make them laugh.

"I want you to remember that you are now entering a world that's filled to the brim with idiots. ... Since there are so many idiots out there you actually may start to think you're crazy. You are not. They are idiots."

Original post:
These commencement speakers have wise words for these times - erienewsnow.com

You probably know the story of the 917/30. You probably saw it run in all its Can-Am Cup-quashing glory back in 1973, with its engineer Mark Donohue at the wheel. You may think motorsports had never been so good nor produced a car so dominant. And youd be right.

A Porsche historical document described the advent of the 1973 engine:

Back then, the 917s dominance was so stifling that motorsport authorities decided to intervene. Porsche had won the manufacturers title at the World Sportscar Championship in 1970 and 1971. The 917 had racked up 15 endurance victories, including the brands first two overall victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, before its 5.0-liter, 12-cylinder engine was no longer permitted to compete in 1972.

It couldnt compete in Europe, but here in North America there was this thing called the Can-Am.

Canepa

Porsche found a new field of activity. North America had long since become the brands largest individual market, and the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am for short, became an attractive racing series. In order to be able to compete against the dominant McLarens and their 800-hp V8 engines from Chevrolet, the V12 (normal-)aspiration engine of the 917 was not enough. Performance improvement by turbocharging was still largely uncharted territoryone that Porsche explored.

Among the explorers was American Mark Donohue, a successful race-car driver and engineer. Thirty-four years old at the time, he was appointed developmental and factory driver. In 1972 the approximately 1,000-hp 917/10 TC Spyder (TC stands for turbocharged; Spyder refers to the now-open cockpit) won six Can-Am races and the title. As competitors got their vehicles ready for the 1973 motorsport season, Porsche presented its answer: the 917/30.

And we all know what happened after that, a dominant season so thorough, that it eventually killed the whole series. By 1975 Porsche used the car, with Donohue at the wheel, to set a closed-course speed record at Talladega that would stand for 11 years.

A 917/30 sold for $4.4 million in 2012

After that, Roger Penske owned the car for a while, sold it to LA collector Otis Chandler, who sold it to French collector Jackie Setton. Motorsports restoration mega-specialist Bruce Canepa found the car and sold it to its current owner, Rob Kauffman, who had Canepa restore the whole thing, including rebuilding both the 5.4-liter engine you see here and a spare 5.0 flat 12, both things of beauty to certain eyes.

But unless you worked on the team back in the day, chances are youve never seen a 917/30 engine out of the car. Well, feast yer eyeballs upon its magnificence presented here.

Canepas shop in Scotts Valley, California, just finished rebuilding the 5.4-liter flat-12 turbo engine from Donohues car, with help from original engineers Valentin Schaeffer and Gustav Nietzsche.

To have Gustav teaching us and Valentin teaching, it's been unbelievable. You know, retired factory guys helping out. And then Ed Pink Senior, all three of them helping, said Canepa.

Canepa

Before stuffing it back into the blue and gold Sunoco chassis, the Canepa people took some photos of it, which is what you see here. Look at it and ponder the engineering that went into it, back in the days before CAD, CFD, CAE and a bunch of other C acronyms. Back when all the German engineers and Donahue had were their enormous brains, some pencils and a slide rule. Canepa is still in awe of it all.

What's amazing is when you go back, now you're talking about the early 70s, when you look at the brainpower of those guys between (Hans) Mezger and Valentin Schaeffer and the guys building the engine, when you look at the brainpower, they didn't have computers telling them, there wasn't a program on how to build an engine. I mean, this is all in their heads. And to build that big an engineand it's a big engine, its size, it's a big thingto build that thing and have it run 8,000 rpm, which is a lot for a big engine, and make that kind of power boosted and reliable. I mean, that engine would run for 25, 30 hours without them touching it. Those guys were geniuses, period.

So it must have been kind of cool to be able to take one all apart and put it back together again. Canepa figures theyve done seven or eight rebuilds on 917 engines in the last three years, both the normally aspirated flat-12s that won the World Sportscar Championship and Le Mans in 1970 and 71, and the later turbo powerplants like this one.

Those engines were incredible. And when you see them all apart and you look at the pieces, and you just study the design of it, even if you don't even know what you're looking at, you're just impressed. Just in all the detail and all the things they were paying attention to.

If you ever get a chance to go to the Rennsport Reunion or anywhere one of these great race cars are shown, try and lean over to get a peek into the engine bay. You wont be disappointed.

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Gaze in Wonder at This Porsche 917/30 Flat-12 Fresh out of Canepas Shop - Autoweek

There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason, but for mystery not for penetrating clear thought, but for the whisperings of the irrational.-Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)

In the closing days of the Third Reich, when still-surviving Germans finally realized that they had been following a murderous charlatan,[1] it was way too late for any redemptive turnaround. But why had they been so wittingly deceived in the first place? After all, prima facie, the Fuehrers starkly limited education and wholesale incapacity to reason had been evident from the start. Had the German people somehow been influenced by a subconscious preference for whisperings of the irrational, that is, for the always-pleasing simplifications of mystery over any penetrating clear thought? And if so, were these nefarious influences more than narrowly or peculiarly German defects? Were they determinably generic for all peoples and thus effectively timeless?

Today there arise various other good reasons for analytic perplexity. These questions become even more bewildering when one considers that many true believers of the Fuehrer were conspicuously well-educated and also well acquainted with established textbook requirements of logic and modern science. In the end, of course, there are many additional, varied and predictable answers to factor in including cowardice, fear and presumed self-interest but most broadly coherent explanations must still correctly center on a populist loathing of complex explanations and a national surrender to mass.

Sometimes this source of surrender (mass is the term of preference embraced by Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung[2]) has been called herd (Friedrich Nietzsche); horde (Sigmund Freud) or crowd (Soren Kierkegaard), but all of these terms have essentially the same referents and reveal virtually identical significations. Above all, the discernible common meaning is that an easy to accept groupthink makes annoyingly difficult individual thinking unnecessary, and thereby renders feelings of individual responsibility moot or beside the point.

Now we may detect all this once again in Donald Trumps increasingly deformed and weakened United States. In this determinedly unreasoning presidents vision of resurrected American greatness, more conscious citizen thought is presumed to be not just extraneous, but also harmful. I love the poorly educated were the exact words Trump used during the 2016 campaign. Not to be ignored, these words were a near-exact replication of Joseph Goebbels favored National Socialist sentiment, one most famously expressed at the 1934 Nuremberg rally (Intellect rots the brain.). Though admittedly painful to accept, Mr. Trumps current know nothing vision endangers present-day Americans just as plainly and existentially as earlier Nazi deformations had corrupted Europe.[3]

While Germany ended with an incomparably grotesque Gotterdammerung in the spring of 1945 an apocalyptic consummation driving both Hitler and Goebbels (with Goebbels entire family) to commit ritual suicide in the Fuhrenbunker Americans now face a twilight of the Gods of their own making: at least hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 fatalities.

In fairness, US President Trump did not cause this plague of virulent disease pandemic. Nonetheless, his endlessly injurious manipulations of mass have repeatedly undermined myriad and indispensable contributions of science. To wit, in the year 2020, tangible portions of the civilized United States began to accept medical advice from Donald Trump that fully contradicted well-established medical orthodoxy, including promoting alleged medications that have subsequently proved useless at best or pernicious at worst. At the same time, authoritative, well-respected and capable professional scientists have been fired to make way for the next viscerally compliant batch of Trump sycophants and presidential lap dogs.

If these unprecedented affirmations of anti-Reason were not sufficiently endangering, they have been reinforced by a shameless battery of propagandistic deflections. As just one egregious example, in the middle of May 2020, Trump held a news conference to announce his successful launch of Americas Space Force and to laud its super-duper missile. One neednt be a deep thinker to recognize the utter irrelevance of any such crude military initiative to US security, or the obvious public relations intent of announcing such a program at this perilous time; that is, as a convenient distractionfrom a rapidly expanding disease plague, one taking cynical advantage of ordinary Americans usual and well intentioned patriotism.

Let us be even more precise. The United States is not becoming Nazi Germany. Thats not the problem. But this assessment ought not to become a simple all or nothing comparison. Then, as now, an irreversible social and economic decline arrived more-or-less indecipherably, effectively in generally hard-to-fathom increments. While there are abundantly vital differences between then and now, between the Third Reich and Trumps America, there are also several very disturbing forms of close resemblance. If we should wittingly choose to ignore these forms, we would also risk ending up in irremediably perilous national circumstances.

Or to continue with a useful metaphor, we would risk heading for our own separate and collective versions of the Fherbunker.

For America in a time of plague, a single core question must consistently remain uppermost, lest we forget how we even got here, to a point where an American president could say without embarrassment and without much public reaction: During the Revolutionary War in the United States, American military forces took control of all national airports, or to deal with the Corona virus, we should consider an internal body cleansing, perhaps even widespread ingestion of certain household disinfecting chemicals. How shall this massively ominous American presidency best be explained? Inter alia, we will need some purposeful answers here before we can be rescued. In part, at least, we can learn from the pre-Nazi German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This means that some correct answers should be sought in the paradoxical juxtaposition of American privilege with American philistinism.

For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one that he hoped would eventually become universal.

This creatively elucidating German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine.[4] To a significant and verifiable extent, this term underscores both the rise of German Nazism in the 1930s and the rise of populist support for then candidate Donald J. Trump in 2016.[5]

Naturally, there is much more. In all linguistically delicate maters, carefully-crafted language and penetrating clear thought are required. Accordingly, Bildungsphilister is a word that could shine some additional needed light upon Donald Trumps uninterrupted support among so many of Americas presumptively well-educated and visibly well-to-do.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had several-times commented: I love the poorly-educated, but in the end a substantial fraction of his actual voter support arrived from the not-so-poorly-educated. It had been very much the same story back in Germany in 1933. We can ignore this portentous commonality only at our own existential risk.

Always, anti-Reason is an existential threat, but never more menacing than during an active disease pandemic. And always, however we may find it discomfiting, truth is exculpatory. Incontestably, even by definition, uncomfortable truths are upsetting and bewildering, but they remain truths nonetheless. Apropos of this plainly unassailable conclusion, any ascertainable distance between I love the poorly educated and Intellect rots the brain is not nearly as substantial as might first appear.

In essence, and plausibly also in consequence, they mean exactly the same thing.

There remain markedly meaningful distinctions between German National Socialism and the current US presidential administration, most significantly in leadership intent, but these distinctions generally express more of a difference in magnitude than in pertinent demographic aspects. At one obvious level, a great many American citizens (tens of millions) remain wholly willing to abide a president who not only avoids reading anything, but who announces his indifference to learning with fully limitless pride. For a president who consistently claims that corona virus testing and contact tracing are overrated, and who simultaneously announces mindless and incoherent threats of starting a new Cold War with China, I love the poorly educated should become an easily recognizable mantra.

We may recall too that for negotiating successfully with North Korea,[6] President Trump had openly advised attitude, not preparation.[7]At any normal or Reason-based level of policy assessment, this advice was openly caricatural. But Trumps once-unimaginable comment was not actually intended as satire. Not at all.

The dissembling policy problem with President Donald Trump is not just a matter of bad manners, occasional foolishness or gratuitous incivility. More than anything else, it is the quality of a far-reaching derangement and incapacity, a particularly lethal fusion that recently led Donald Trump to punish the World Health Organization for imaginary wrongdoings, and at the very same moment that such perverse withholding of funds could only further impair critical worldwide Covid19 responses.[8] Now, substantially more penetrating clear thought is desperately needed to understand this countrys manifold Trump-era declensions,[9] including its seemingly endless violations of authoritative international law.[10]

Do many (or any) Americans actively object to a president who has never even glanced at the US Constitution, the very same allegedly revered document he so solemnly swore to uphold, protect and defend? Is it reasonable or persuasive to uphold protect and defend a document that has never even been read? Is it reasonable or persuasive for We the people. not to be troubled by such a vast intellectual and ethical disjuncture? How long shall we endure profoundly lawless presidential behaviors concerning almost every manner of public responsibility and public service?

While Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort are rewarded by this president for placing loyalty to Fehrerabove justice, tens of millions of poor Americans now being forced to work without proper disease protections can only make desperate personal plans to sleep in the dust.[11]

There is more. Key questions about pertinent historical analogies should not be skirted, obfuscated or ridiculed any longer. How, then, has the United States managed to arrive at such a portentous and dismal place in history? What have been the relevant failures (both particular and aggregated) of American education, most notably failures in our once-vaunted universities? Its an unsettling but sensible two-part question, especially as the Trump presidency assiduously transforms a merely self-deceiving country into one that represents a finely-lacquered collective corpse.

Once upon a time in western philosophy (a genre obviously unfamiliar to absolutely anyone in the White House[12]), Plato revealed high leadership expectations for his philosopher-king. Yet, even though we should no longer reasonably expect anything like a philosopher-king in the White House, we are still entitled to a man or woman president who reads and thinks seriously.

Even in Trumps grievously demeaned United States, true learning deserves its historic pride of place. Nietzsches Zarathustra warns prophetically: One should never seek the `higher man at the marketplace. But the suffocating worlds of business and commerce were precisely where a proudly know nothing segment of American society first championed belligerent impresario Donald J. Trump.

What else could we have possibly expected?

In the United States, a society where almost no one takes erudition seriously, we are all ultimately measured by one singularly atrocious standard. We are what we buy.[13] Accordingly, the tens of millions of Americans being shunted aside by the White House as presumptively extraneous to their political success are less highly valued (much less) than those who have managed to attain egoistically the conspicuous rewards of everyone for himself.[14]

There is still more, much more. This American president is not merely a marginal or misguided figure. Quite literally, he is the diametric opposite of both Platos philosopher-king and Nietzsches higher-man. Unambiguously, and at its moral and analytic core, the Trump administration now exhibits a tortuously wretched inversion of what might once have been ennobling in the United States. Even more worrisome, we Americans are rapidly stumbling backwards, always backwards, during an unprecedented viral pandemic, further and further, visibly, unsteadily, not in any measurably decipherable increments, but in giant or distressing quantum leaps of various self-reinforcing mortal harms.

In essence, these are historically familiar leaps of unforgivable cowardice, especially as evident in certain narrowly-partisan sectors of the Congress and federal government. How else shall we differentiate a now completely submissive attorney general or vice president or secretary of the treasury or secretary of human services or Senate Majority Leader from their manifestly hideous forbears in Munich or Berlin? Are they really all that different? Are they really any more upset by the prospective but possibly preventable deaths of several hundred thousand Americans from Pandemic disease than were Nazi officials Goebbels or Speer about then-suffering German families and workers?

A positive answer here would demand considerable leaps of permissible formal logic.

Among so many palpable deficits, Americas current president still does not begin to understand that US history warrants some serious re-examination. How many Americans have ever paused to remember that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were not expecting or imagining automatic weapons? How many citizens ever bothered to learn that the early American Republic was the religious heir of John Calvin and the philosophical descendant of both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes? How many successful US lawyers have even ever heard of William Blackstone, the extraordinary English jurist whose learned Commentaries formed the indispensable common law underpinnings of Americas current legal system?

Literally and comprehensively, Blackstone is the unchallenged foundation of American law and jurisprudence.[15]

Does anyone reasonably believe that Donald Trump has even ever heard of Blackstone? Is there a single Trump lawyer (personal or institutional) who could conceivably know (let alone read) about the seminal Blackstones unparalleled juristic contributions? If there were such a person, he would understand, ipso facto, what is so utterly defiled (and defiling) in this presidents Department of Justice.

It is therefore, a silly question.

There is more. Human beings are the creators of their machines, not the other way round. Still, there exists today an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate and potentially lethal pantomime between the users and the used. Nowhere is this prospective lethality more apparent than among the self-deluded but endlessly loyal supporters of US President Donald Trump. They follow him faithfully only because the wider American society had first been allowed to become an intellectual desert, and because they are most comfortable amid such reassuringly barren wastes.

Soon, we must inquire, will they also, like Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his entire family, follow him dutifully and unquestionably into the Fherbunker?

Epilogue

In an 1897 essay titled On Being Human, Woodrow Wilson inquired tellingly about the authenticity of Americans. Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine? he asked. This US and (earlier) Princeton University president had answered yes, but contingently, only if citizens would first refuse to cheer the herds or hordes or crowds of mass society. Otherwise, as Wilson had already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the biological decomposition of individual disease-ravaged persons.

In every society, as Emerson and other American Transcendentalists had already recognized, the scrupulous care of each individualhuman soul is most important. Looking ahead, there can likely still be a betterAmerican soul[16] (and thereby an improved American politics), but not before we can first acknowledge a prior obligation. This antecedent and unalterable requirement is a far-reaching national responsibility to overcome the barriers of a know nothing culture or remembering German philosopher Karl Jaspers apt warning whisperings of the irrational.

Though overwhelmingly lethal all by itself, the current Trump government of anti-Reason is as much a dreadful symptom of much deeper menacing harms. Similar to any other complex matrix of virulent pathologies, the proper ordering of therapeutics will ultimately require this government to accomplish more than just a cosmetic excision of visible disease symptoms. In the end, to protect us all from a future that would be finalized in the Fherbunker, Americans must finally learn to favor Reason and Science over stock phrases, shallow clichs, banal presidential phrases and barbarously empty witticisms.

[1] In this connection, notes Sigmund Freud: Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles art all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.

[2] Says Jung in The Undiscovered Self (1957): The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.

[3] Consider, for example, the stunning Goebbels-Trump commonality concerning approval of street violence. Said the Nazi Propaganda Minister: Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street. Much more recently, and in an almost identical vein, Donald Trump declared: I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad. See, by this writer: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/louis-beres-trump-violence/#

[4] The first language of the Swiss-born author, Professor Louis Ren Beres, was German. This is his own straightforward translation.

[5] Also appropriate here is the nineteenth century description offered by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death: Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[6] I dont think I have to prepare very much, said Donald Trump before his Singapore Summit with Kim Jung Un on June 11, 2018, Its all about attitude.

[7] The mass-man, says philosopher Jose Ortega yGassett in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh. This is exactly how President Trump learns. When asked on April 10, 2020 how he would create metrics for determining when the country could be safely opened up again, he pointed to his head, and exclaimed: This is my only metric. Always, this crudely primal method of understanding represents in his own flesh reasoning, his disjointed calculations spawned by raw instinct and revealed with demeaning frivolity.

[8] In stark contrast, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director General of WHO, spoke modestly, intelligently and purposefully: COVID-19 does not discriminate between rich nations and poor, large nations and small. It does not discriminate between nationalities, ethnicities, or ideologies. Neither do we, he said. This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy. When were divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us.

[9] Regarding US President Donald Trumps persistent and often egregious crimes involving the law of war and the law of human rights (e.g., Syria; Afghanistan; Iraq; Mexican refugees, etc.), criminal responsibility of leaders under international law is not necessarily limited to direct personal action nor is it exculpable by official position. On this peremptory principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb), 12 Law Reports of Trials Of War Criminals 1 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp., 1949); see Parks, Command Responsibility For War Crimes, 62 MIL.L. REV. 1 (1973); OBrien, The Law Of War, Command Responsibility And Vietnam, 60 GEO. L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. Dept. Of The Army, Army Subject Schedule No. 27 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907), 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders is also unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the act of state defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, art. 7.

[10] Though wholly disregarded by President Trump, international law is an inherent part of United States law and jurisprudence. In the words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)).Moreover, the specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[11] One should also think here of the countrys indigenous peoples, especially tribes such as the Navajo Nation. These vulnerable peoples are suffering disproportionate harms from this pandemic, harms that are effectively considered tolerable or even reasonable by US President Donald Trump.

[12] In this connection, Americans should also be reminded of the total absence of any cultural life or life of the arts going on in the Trump White House. Together with Trumps endless attacks on a life of the mind, this demeaning absence points toward the very worst imaginable case of Nietzsches Bildungsphilister or educated Philistine. See, by this author, at Yale Global: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/trumps-america-anti-intellectual-and-proud-it

[13] The rich man glories in his riches, says Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.

[14] The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself,' says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955), is false and against nature.

[15] Significantly, in this connection, Blackstone emphasized the importance of global cooperation between nations: Each state is expected to aid and enforce the law of nations as part of the common law, says Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Law of England (1765) by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law. Similarly, says Emmerich de Vattel, in his prior and classic The Law of Nations (1758), The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.

[16] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and to its corollary commitment to a dreadfully crude form of materialism. America, thought Freud, was very lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

View post:
Coronavirus: The Collapse of Higher Education -Or its Revolution? - Modern Diplomacy

But years before Burke and Pates latest success, the two were students at UNC, studying English and enjoying indie music.

Memories at UNC

Burke, who graduated in 1988, said he remembers his favorite study spot as the lounge of the eighth floor of Davis Library overlooking the Pit.

I swear I must have spent I almost spent more time there than anywhere else, Burke said.

On Franklin Street, Pate, class of 1992, said he frequented Pepper's Pizza and Cats Cradle before it moved to its current location in Carrboro in 1993.

There was such an unbelievable indie rock scene when we were there, like it was exploding, Pate said. It was often called the next Seattle.

Burke and Pate credited their English and creative writing professors for their support and mentorship.

I wouldnt be a writer if it werent for going to Carolina, Burke said.

They were so supportive and cool, and really madeyou believe that you could do it, Pate said.

Pate and Burke both majored in English. Despite receiving an unsatisfying grade on a paper about Nietzsche, Pate said professor Reid Barbour in the English and Comparative Literature department played an important role in his academic career.

Although he has not seen the show, Barbour said he appreciates how the show posits archival work as a part of the adventure.

To dedicate yourself to an English major when Josh was an English major was also to dedicate yourself to history, and to digging up history, Barbour said.

Creating Outer Banks

Pate said a photo of a power outage in the Outer Banks inspired the initial conversation between Burke and himself.

There was a photograph of all these darkened mansions at dusk, Pate said. It was such an evocative photograph I had grown up on the Carolina coast, and it kind of just spurred a little creative instinct.

Much of the inspiration for the setting stemmed from spending time in Wilmington, North Carolina, Pate said.

Even though the show is called the Outer Banks, and even though the show is not completely realistic, a lot of the way I would imagine scenes had to do with the area around Wrightsville Beach, Pate said.

While Burke and Pate were planning on filming in Wilmington, North Carolina, the show was filmed in Charleston, South Carolina, because of a standing policy at Netflix in opposition to the 2016 House Bill 2 and its replacement House Bill 142.

On set, Burke and Pate agreed it felt like a constant, chaotic party.

As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, people were throwing Frisbees and footballs and joking; it was sort of an ongoing happy vibe that you could see on screen, Burke said. That feeling between the actors, who all become friends and good friends, it sort of continued onto the set.

Connections to Chapel Hill

While the show focuses on life by the coast, Pate and Burke included nods to their alma mater throughout the show.

In one episode, a character is seen wearing a UNC hat. In episode four, the characters take a trip from the Outer Banks to Chapel Hill to visit the state archives, housed today in Wilson Library.

And yes, Pate and Burke know you cannot take a ferry from the Outer Banks to Chapel Hill.

Burke said the characters take the ferry to get from the island to the mainland, then an Uber from the mainland to Chapel Hill. The shot of them getting into the car was cut out, but when the characters arrive, they can be seen getting out of a car.

So its actually on-screen, and then we were still misunderstood, Burke said.

Other criticisms from geography trolls have pointed out how the show doesnt actually resemble the Outer Banks, Pate said.

Theyre like, It doesnt look like the Outer Banks, or, You cant take a ferry to Chapel Hill, Pate said. Im like, Its fiction, bro.

And believe it or not, a love for UNC basketball and a passion for the Tobacco Road rivalry made it into the narrative. Burke later said in an email that the show does acknowledge Duke subtly.

When we were naming our villain, we were having trouble with the last name, and we just decided to name him after the most hated place in (the) universe, Burke wrote. His name, if you remember, is Ward Cameron.

Rise to success

While creating the show, the team felt confident throughout the process. But Pate and Burke said they did not anticipate just how successful the show would be.

The story was dynamic and the kids were doing a great job, Burke said. Everybody seemed to be pulling in the right direction. You can tell when something is going wrong it felt like it was going right.

Pate described the shows success after its original release date as a gradual process.

It kept going higher on Netflix, and weird things started happening, Pate said. The cast started to text with Drake and stuff everything that just got weirder and weirder and weirder.

Weeks after its release, Burke thought, "Holy shit. This is a hit.

Although Netflix has not confirmed a second season, Burke and Pate are already working on the script for season two. They said they feel confident about the shows return.

And looking ahead to the UNC mens basketball, Pate said he hopes that next season will be better than the last.

@madelinellis

@DTHCityState | city@dailytarheel.com

The rest is here:
'Outer Banks' co-creators talk Netflix, the UNC-Duke rivalry and the ferry to Chapel Hill - The Daily Tar Heel

Spanish flu offers good lesson on bowing to politics while re-opening during pandemic

So let it be written

A little more than a century ago, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 killed more than 50 million people.

So what did we learn?

They say history tends to repeat itself, witnessed by the playing out of a 100-year cycle that saw a bubonic plague in Europe in 1720, cholera smite Asia in 1820, the Spanish Flu, and of course our present-day pandemic.

George Bernard Shaw instructs us that We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

Personally, I prefer Stephen Hawkings take on it: We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, lets face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.

T.W. Paterson column: 102 years ago the Spanish Flu met British grit

Read also: Is COVID-19 a sign of things to come?

Theres been evidence aplenty, during this our go-around, of foolhardy behaviour on our beaches, in grocery store aisles, along sidewalks, in parks, you name it. Masses of people recklessly thumbing their noses at social distancing and invading other peoples space.

Too many people simply lack the patience to stay put. Theyre bored with the pandemic, are moving on, and as a result of their negligence more people will be doomed to suffer from COVID-19, and more will die.

So what happened in 1918?

People were human, thats what.

In San Francisco, they thought they had the Spanish Flu licked. Driven, no doubt, by impatience, public pressure and economic necessity, the politicians prematurely re-opened the city for business. They celebrated its return to normality with a grand parade which resulted in the deadly flu returning with a vengeance.

Beware, the second wave.

Today theres immense pressure on governments to ease restrictions, considering they are unable to control the crowd thats already liberated itself from the ravages of common sense.

And when government starts talking about easing up, and returning to some semblance of normal, yet more people see that as a green light to drop their guard. People are waiting for a sign, and champing at the bit.

Theres no denying the fierce economic imperative to re-start the engine. Our catch-22 is staying healthy in the process.

Dr. Stewart Prest, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University, says there seems to be a broad understanding in Canada that opening up too much, too quickly, could really make things worse in the long run.

That some jurisdictions have chosen to open up while the first wave is still cresting, he says, seems terrifying, to be honest.

Im not an epidemiologist, I dont know if you can fully prevent a second wave, Prest says.

There are important lessons from history, and I think its fascinating that some jurisdictions seem to be better able to take those on board than others.

So let it be done.

Tom Zytaruk is a staff writer with the Surrey Now-Leader. You can email him at tom.zytaruk@surrey nowleader.com.

Coronaviruszytaruk column so let it be done

Excerpt from:
ZYTARUK: Beware COVID-19s second wave - vancouverislandfreedaily.com

At dawn last Tuesday morning, the police took a man named Andrs from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the countrys prime minister, Viktor Orbn, a dictator.

Andrs has a point. After winning Hungarys 2010 election, the prime minister systematically dismantled the countrys democracy undermining the basic fairness of elections, packing the courts with cronies, and taking control of more than 90 percent of the countrys media outlets. He has openly described his form of government as illiberal democracy, half of which is accurate.

Since the coronavirus, Orbns authoritarian tendencies have only grown more pronounced. His allies in parliament passed a new law giving him the power to rule by decree and creating a new crime, spreading a falsehood, punishable by up to five years in prison. The Hungarian government recently seized public funding that opposing political parties depend on; through an ally, they took financial control of one of the few remaining anti-Orbn media outlets. This month, the pro-democracy group Freedom House officially announced that it no longer considered Hungary a democracy.

Andrs was detained for hours for daring to criticize this authoritarian drift. The 64-year-old was ultimately released, but the polices official statement on the arrest noted that a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime. Andrs, for one, got the message.

I told [the cops] their task had achieved its result and would probably shut me up, he told the news site 444.

Andrss arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power. Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives, Orbn is not viewed as a warning.

Hes viewed as a role model.

Orbns fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the New York Post. Christopher Caldwell, a journalist widely respected on the right, wrote a lengthy feature praising the strongman as a leader blessed with almost every political gift.

Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America, traveled to Budapest to meet Orbn in his office, describing the Hungarian government as a model for American conservatives. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and right-wing cultural icon, also made a pilgrimage to the prime ministers office.

Chris DeMuth, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Orbn onstage at a conference, praising the prime minister in opening remarks as not only a political but an intellectual leader. The event was organized by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli intellectual widely influential on the American right and another vocal Orbn fan.

The Hungarian government has actively cultivated support from such international conservatives. John OSullivan, an Anglo-American contributor to National Review, is currently based at the Danube Institute a think tank in Budapest that OSullivan admits receives funding from the Hungarian government.

Pro-Orbn Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism: religiously minded social conservatives (Deneen, for example) and conservative nationalists (Caldwell, Demuth).

Religious conservatives find Orbns social policies to be a breath of fresh air. Orbn has given significant state support to Hungarys churches, officially labeling his government a Christian democracy. He provided generous subsidies to families in an effort to get Hungarian women to stay at home and have more babies. He launched a legal assault on progressive social ideals, prohibiting the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banning transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth.

Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union. During the 2015 migrant crisis, Orbn was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkels open borders approach; he built a wall on Hungarys southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering. He has repeatedly denounced the influence the EU has on its member states, describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungarys national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros.

For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent, Orbn is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be smart, politically savvy, and genuinely devoted to their ideals. Hungary is, for them, the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left: proof of concept that their ideas could make the United States a better place.

Yet while the Nordic countries are among the worlds freest democracies, Hungary has fallen into a form of autocracy. This presents a problem for Hungarys Western apostles, as they do not see themselves as advocates of American authoritarianism. Their encomia to Orbn tend to either overlook his authoritarian tendencies or deny them altogether, claiming that biased Western reporters and NGOs are unfairly demonizing Budapest for its cultural and nationalist beliefs.

Hungarys leadership ... is more democratic than most of the countries that lecture Budapest about democracy, Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New York Post. Hungarys leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage.

In reality, its not the Orbn regime thats being persecuted: Its ordinary Hungarian citizens like Andrs. The Western defenders of Orbn are so preoccupied by the culture wars over gender and immigration that theyre overlooking who, exactly, theyve gotten in bed with.

Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, is one of a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government. Hes met with Orbn and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyones lives.

While Dreher has a number of views that liberals find either kooky or reprehensible, hes a talented writer whos hugely influential on the religious and nationalist right. When I asked Dreher for the strongest possible version of the conservative case for Orbn, he sent me a series of lengthy and reflective notes on the subject.

I want to be clear that I dont want to be understood as approving of everything Orbn does, he told me. My approval of Orbn is general, not specific, in the same way that there are people who dont agree with everything Trump does, but who generally endorse him.

This general endorsement is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do. In Drehers analysis, the dominant mode of thinking in the West is secular and liberal a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing, cosmopolitan ideal.

He [Orbn] knew that in 2015, to allow all the Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Hungary would have been surrendering a Hungarian future for the Hungarian people...and all the traditions and cultural memories they carry with them, Dreher told me. Broadly speaking, the ideology of globalism presumes that those traditions and those memories are obstacles to creating an ideal world. That they are problems to be solved rather than a heritage to be cherished.

This sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities. This line of thinking animates many prominent Trump supporters and allies who are Christian conservatives, including Attorney General Bill Barr.

For people like Dreher, who has written that my politics are driven entirely by fear [of] the woke left, Orbn is Trumps more admirable twin. The American president is, as Dreher once argued, a small, ugly, godless and graceless man though one hed rather have in office than a progressive Democrat. The Hungarian leader, by contrast, is in his view both a true believer and a much more effective head of state.

What I see in Orbn is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment, he tells me. I find myself saying of Orbn what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbn is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.

What I find fascinating about Drehers take which largely typifies the pro-Orbn arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation.

Dreher doesnt admire Orbns more authoritarian tendencies; indeed, he admits that the man has made mistakes, including in Andrss case. I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams, he tells me.

But whatever his concerns about threats to basic democratic principles like freedom of the press and fair elections, they dont play a primary role in his thinking. His evaluation of Orbn centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life, an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary.

In our exchange, Dreher compared his admiration for Orbn to the way Hungarian conservatives hes met admired Trump. When he told his Hungarian acquaintances that he liked what Trump stood for in theory, but had serious issues with the man himself and the way he governs, they were incredulous: Whats not to like about someone whos so willing to stick it to the globalist liberal elites?

They read Trump through Hungarian ideological categories, not American reality and it showed.

Maybe Im seeing Orbn in the same way my Hungarian interlocutors see Trump. ... If I lived in Hungary, perhaps I would find a lot to dislike in his everyday governance, Dreher told me. But he and other European politicians like him are speaking to needs, desires, and beliefs about religion, tradition, and national identity, that the center-right politicians have ignored.

Yet when it comes to modern Hungary, the authoritarian devil is truly in the everyday details.

Orbns effort to cultivate Western intellectuals funding their work, inviting them to meet with him as honored guests in Budapest, speaking at their glitzy conferences is part of a much more ambitious ideological campaign. He describes himself as the avatar of a new political model spreading across the West, which he terms illiberal democracy or Christian democracy.

Advocates of illiberal democracy, like Trump and European far-right parties, aim to protect and deepen the specificity of each European countrys religious and ethnic makeup Hungary for the Hungarians, France for the French, and Germany for the Germans. Orbn frames this goal in precisely the culture war terms people like Dreher find so appealing.

Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture, he said in a 2018 speech. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.

This language is at once incendiary and misleading. The rejection of liberalism infuriates mainstream European and Western intellectuals, thus further convincing the right that Orbn is the enemy of their primary enemy. But by framing his struggle as a conflict between two subspecies of democracy between liberal and Christian democracy Orbn obscures the fact that his regime is not any kind of democracy at all.

This insistence on falsely referring to his authoritarian regime as a democracy is vital to both its domestic and international project.

Orbn and much of his inner circle are lawyers by training; they have used this expertise to set up a political system that looks very much like a democracy, with elections and a theoretically free press, but isnt one. This gives intellectually sympathetic Westerners some room for self-delusion. They can examine Hungary, a country whose cultural politics they admire, and see a place that looks on the surface like a functioning democracy.

When such observers travel to Budapest and see what looks like a democracy in action, it becomes easier to dismiss concerns about authoritarian drift from journalists, pro-democracy NGOs, and academic experts as mere cultural prejudice: the liberal elite smearing a right-leaning elected leader as an authoritarian because they dont like his cultural politics. Orbn isnt an authoritarian, in this view, but the avatar of what the silent majority of Americans and Europeans really want.

A staple of these arguments is to make the point that Orbns Fidesz party has won three consecutive elections.

One of the strange things about modern political rhetoric is that Viktor Orbn should so often be described as a threat to democracy, although his power had been won in free elections, Caldwell, the eminent conservative Europe reporter, writes in the Claremont Review of Books.

But after coming to power in 2010, Orbn rewrote Hungarys constitution and electoral rules to make it nigh impossible for the opposition to win power through elections. Tactics including extreme gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance rules to give Fidesz a major leg up, appointing cronies to the countrys constitutional court and election bureaucracy, and seizing control of nearly all media outlets have combined to render elections functionally non-competitive.

The mechanisms of control here are so subtle (who outside of Hungary cares about staffing choices at its electoral administration?) that its easy for an intellectually sympathetic observer to dismiss them as overblown. In Caldwells Claremont piece, for example, he challenges concerns about press freedom by pointing to Lajos Simicska a media magnate and former Orbn right-hand man who turned on him in 2015 and campaigned against him in the 2018 election.

When Orbns friend Simicska broke with him, he used his newspaper Magyar Nemzet to attack Orbn in the most vulgar terms, comparing him to an ejaculation, Caldwell writes. Orbns powerful mandate, his two-thirds majority, gave him power to amend the countrys constitution at will. This was not the same thing as authoritarianism there arent a lot of reporters in Beijing likening Xi Jinping to an ejaculation.

There arent that many left in Hungary, either. After 2015, Orbn used his unfettered powers to demolish Simicskas business empire, cutting off government contracts not only for his old friends media holdings but also for his construction and advertising firms. Simicskas businesses shrank and his personal fortune declined; the 2018 electioneering was a last-ditch effort to challenge a system that he himself described as a dictatorship.

After Orbns unfairly won 2018 victory, Simicska told allies that it is clear that they [Fidesz] cannot be defeated through democratic elections. He shut down Magyar Nemzet; a government mouthpiece currently publishes under its name. Simicska eventually sold his entire media empire to a Fidesz ally, including the popular television station Hr TV which, after the sale, openly proclaimed it would adopting a pro-government line.

Today, Simicska lives in an isolated village in western Hungary. His only remaining business interest is an agricultural firm owned by his wife.

This is obviously not a story about democratic resilience in Hungary: Its an instructive tale in the precise and subtle ways Orbn uses political patronage and the powers of the state to maintain political control. The Hungarian government is a species of authoritarianism just a less coercive and more elusive version of its Chinese cousin.

Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy, Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky, two leading academic experts on democracy, write in the Washington Post.

This subtlety is what allows his conservative fan club in the West to operate with a clean conscience. Its also what makes it so disturbing.

There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies. The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaws own egalitarian values. Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the defining libertarian economist, defended Augusto Pinochets murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the free market.

Orbns crimes, of course, pale in comparison to Stalins or Pinochets. If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy, its understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians.

But the fact that this tendency is understandable doesnt mean its excusable or without its own set of dangers.

In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.

Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors, packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily describe Fideszs techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within.

In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. Its not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.

Conservative intellectuals bear a special obligation to call attention to this dangerous process. Its always easier for writers and intellectuals to criticize the opposing side precisely because its less effectual: Your targets already dont pay attention to you, and your audience already agrees with your critique. When your team is crossing lines, criticizing it is much more likely to ruffle feathers but also more likely to change minds.

The Hungary situation has been a trial in this regard, a way of assessing conservative intellectuals ability to perform this vital form of self-policing.

I find Orbans attack on trans rights and treatment of migrants reprehensible, but I dont expect those on the broader right to agree with me. I do, however, believe they ought to have a baseline commitment to democratic norms: a sense that disagreement itself is not illegitimate, and that governments that use their powers to crush their opponents can never be fundamentally admirable.

Yet thats not what has happened. Much of the conservative leadership cannot break out of their sense of victimhood; the world is a struggle between righteous conservatives and oppressive secular progressives. It does not compute, to them, that a traditionalist regime might actually be the one mistreating its opponents and attacking democracy; they come up with excuses for whatever Orbn is doing, offering misleading half-truths that at times literally echo government propaganda.

If these thinkers continue to insist that Hungary is just another democracy despite copious evidence to the contrary how can we expect them to call out the same, more embryonic process of authoritarianization happening at home? If American conservatives wont turn on a foreign countrys leadership after it crosses the line, what reason would we have to believe that theyd be capable of doing the same thing when the stakes for them are higher and the enemies more deeply hated?

The admiration for Orbn has convinced me that, no matter how far down the Fidesz path the GOP goes, many conservative intellectuals will use the same culture war uber alles logic to justify its trampling over American democracy.

Hungary is a test for these American thinkers. And they flunked it.

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Excerpt from:
Why Hungarys Viktor Orbn is the American rights favorite strongman - Vox.com

Whether you are meeting up with a group of friends or looking forward to a night out with your significant other, the question of where to go and what to do can be a tricky one.

These days, the entertainment and leisure industry is a huge one, and there is no shortage of choice. Yet the pubs, clubs and restaurants can all start to look a little similar and formulaic.

Dublin is a city that is famed for its nightlife and Irish hospitality. But there is also nowhere better to be if you crave a night out that is truly out of the ordinary and will provide memories to last a lifetime.

Here are three quirky venues in the city that are like nowhere else on earth.

If you thought a night at the bingo was reserved for old ladies with blue rinses, prepare to have your preconceptions blown away.

The online age has brought new life to bingo Ireland and introduced it to a vibrant, younger audience. But if you want to play the game in the real world, there can be no better venue than Dublins most famous gay bar on a Sunday night.

Hosted by the most famous drag queen of them all, Bingo with Shirley Temple Bar has become a weekend institution that has been running since the late 90s.

Its a unique mix of bingo and cabaret, and the fact that its still standing room only after more than 1,000 shows should tell you all you need to know. The George is on South Great Georges Street at the Dame Street end, and the show starts at 9:30PM every Sunday night.

Address:South Great Georges Street South Great Georges Street, Dublin 2, D02 R220, Ireland

Looking for something a little more sedate? The Vintage Cocktail Club is a speakeasy-style bar hidden away on Crown Alley in Templebar.

Finding the place is all part of the adventure look for the black door with the VCC sticker above it.

Once inside, you are transported back in time, and the bizarre names of the house cocktails only add to the otherworldly experience of the place.

Its the perfect spot for an intimate table for two but if you are planning on visiting on a Friday or Saturday evening, book in advance to avoid disappointment.

Address:15 Crown Alley, Temple Bar, Dublin, D02 E229, Ireland

Dublin has plenty of excellent bars to choose from. But only one of them boasts movie nights, great homemade pizza and a big blue double-decker bus. The Bernard Shaw is quirkiness personified, and the perfect antidote to the chain bars that are taking over so many cities.

It might be a case of catching the bus while you can, however, as its future has been thrown into doubt by the local planning authority.

Residents have sought to have the beer garden, including the bus, permanently closed, while operator Bodytonic has vowed to resubmit plans in a bid to keep this unique venue in operation.

Address:11-12 Richmond St South, Saint Kevins, Dublin 2, Ireland

Visit link:
3 Quirky nights out in Dublin that you won't forget - Meanwhile in Ireland

While large concerts are still a long way off, some restaurants are booking socially distant shows.

ST. PETE BEACH With a cool breeze drifting in from the Gulf of Mexico behind him, John Barney strummed out a little Tom Petty, a little Bob Marley and a little Otis Redding on the dock of Jimmy Bs Beach Bar. The afternoon crowd of maybe 30, plus a steady trickle heading to the shore, sipped drinks beneath umbrellas, tapping their toes, nodding their heads and soaking in the music.

Oh man, we got a wild crowd here today, said Barney, who performs under the name Johnny B.

Laid back or not, any audience these days is a welcome one.

Its good to be out of the house, Ill tell you that, he said.

While the concert industry remains a long way from normal bars and venues are still closed, and large gatherings are still barred live music has begun trickling back into everyday life around Tampa Bay. Restaurants, especially those with outdoor seating, have resumed booking shows.

Jimmy Bs started booking daily performances in early May, around the same time KaTiki in Treasure Island started weekend shows. Saltys Beach Bar at the TradeWinds Island Grand has been hosting live music from 6 to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays, with performers lined up until mid-June.

I dont want anybody to get sick, said Barney, 43, of Largo. But man, we have to live. People have to live their lives. If we do what we need to do and keep to ourselves, wash our hands and arent stupid, I think well be alright.

The closest thing to a normal, ticketed concert came May 16 at St. Petersburgs Hideaway Cafe, a studio and event space that sells food and drinks. The cafe hosted Shaun Hopper and Christopher Barbosa in what was billed on Facebook as an exclusive semi-private all-inclusive show, complete with nibbles and sips" a dozen tables for two set at a safe social distance, with all staff in face masks and gloves. Theyll do it again Saturday, with table packages for Rob Tyre priced at $100. The show will be streamed live on Facebook.

I think its a very safe way for us to attempt to get some people in, said Hideaway Cafe owner John Kelly. Ive gotten, so far, really good support for it. People feel its a safe environment. The shows are quality, with these artists that were putting on. For getting back to it, its a really nice way to spend an evening.

Other places that regularly host local artists arent jumping back in yet.

The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, which hosts local musicians at several bars around its property, will not do so when it reopens to the public on Thursday. Some popular restaurants with stages, including Skippers Smokehouse in Tampa and Whistle Stop Grill and Bar in Safety Harbor, have no immediate plans to bring back live music.

I think about music every day, as you can well imagine, said Tom White, co-owner of Skippers Smokehouse, which reopened for limited business Tuesday. A lot of musicians need dough, and I will try to help the best I can, but dont want to create some situation where we have to have social distancing bouncers.

From what Barney has seen in his first three weeks back on stage, audiences these days dont act quite the same as they were before the pandemic. At Jimmy Bs on Tuesday afternoon, despite plenty of signs urging patrons to keep a safe social distance including one on each side of the stage three people came up to Barney to make a request or take a photo.

Im not going to lie to you, the people that are out are the ones that arent worried, if that makes any sense, he said. I dont want to use the word crazy, but theyre the ones that are ready to go. I really just try to play nice, easy, relaxing music for people sitting, that dont get up and dance.

St. Petersburg country singer Aubrey Wollett has shows Saturday at Hog Island Fish Camp in Dunedin and May 29 at the Tiki Tavern in Safety Harbor. She expects most of her gigs for the foreseeable future will likely be in spaces that can thread that narrow needle between restaurant and performance space.

All musicians are kind of scrambling for gigs right now, he said. Were all in the same boat, trying to look for gigs and make money. But Ive realized the schedule that I already had planned is not happening the way it was in my calendar."

Still, she needs the gigs to pay her bills even if shes only playing for tips.

From what Ive heard from other musicians, people are being really generous which I realized through my virtual shows, and people tipping generously, she said. It doesnt hurt to just put a little guitar case out and suggest, If anyone wants to donate... Thats our livelihood.

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Entertainment Critic

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As Tampa Bay reopens, live music slowly dials up the volume - Tampa Bay Times

By Bill LeConey, Brattleboro Reformer

BRATTLEBORO In this time of social distancing, restricted travel and forced isolation, there's no denying the appeal of a more expansive approach to music, opening up to new sounds from around the world and beyond, reaching out to the cosmos. That's the space which Aura Shards explores.

Aura Shards is a world fusion project formed by Jed Blume and Anders Burrows which utilizes the entrancing sound of the hand pan, a relative newcomer on the percussion scene, accompanied by a variety of rhythmic and tonal instruments, such as the didgeridoo, djembe, tabla and electro-organic a-frame drum.

Blume, 32, is a New Jersey native who first came to the area for the School for International Training graduate program. He is a new age and world music composer, percussionist and hand pan soloist. Burrows, 38, is a Brattleboro native who played piano and horns at an early age, attended film school in Boston, then returned to Vermont to play in local jazz and Afrobeat ensembles.

The duo has performed over the last six years at area farmers markets, festivals, restaurants and music venues, including Next Stage Arts Project and The Stone Church. In its all original compositions, Aura Shards blends a harmonic and rhythmically complex sound that is at once soothing and engaging.

On June 1, Aura Shards will release its first full-length CD, Rhythm in Totality, recorded mainly in Long Island City, N.Y., with tracking done by Phil Duke in New York and mixing and mastering done by Dan Richardson in Brattleboro. The album cover art is by Burrows.

With in-person conversations limited right now because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Reformer interviewed Blume and Burrows via Zoom about their music, the instrumentation and the new CD.

Q: What is a hand pan?

A: Burrows: The hand pan certainly has some of its inspiration from Caribbean-style instruments like the steel drum. But it was actually originally created in Bern, Switzerland, right around the turn of the century. It kind of looks like a metal UFO, or two woks melded together with some bumps on it. And you play it with your hands instead of sticks. It's very similar to that classic steel drum thing, only with a mellower kind of tone to it, and a little bit more range in tones, because it's not just the notes on the top of the hand pan that resonate, it's the whole pan itself that resonates as you play it. So really anywhere you hit, whether it's on a note or between notes, will have its own kind of unique sound and subtlety to it, which can all be worked into the songs and compositions.

Q: What is the process for writing songs using the hand pan?

A: Blume: I'm a percussionist, and we are both hand pan players, and what we do is we accompany each other's compositions. I write a song, and then Anders will play either djembe or didgeridoo to accompany that song, or he'll write a song and I'll play tabla, djembe or the a-frame drum to accompany his composition. It makes for a really interesting contrast, because I've been a rhythmic player my whole life and Anders has the jazz background and also plays the horn, and a handful of other instruments that are more melodic oriented. It's a pretty big range of stylistic ground that we cover between our two approaches and how we complement each other.

Q: How would you categorize or describe the music?

A: Burrows: That's one of the challenges we've had. A lot of the time we just kind of default back into saying it's hand pan music, because it is so centered around this very unique sound of the hand pan. It's rhythmic and complex but it's also meditative and tranquil. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the hand pan ends and the tabla begins. They're both very tonal and both very rhythmic. That was the original core of the group and we kind of expanded it out. Jed is quite a talented player on (the tabla). I also play the didgeridoo that creates a rhythmic drone, so these tones and rhythms marry together in complex patterns that are engaging but also very relaxing and mellow. This is one of the reasons why we've had so much success at farmers markets and whatnot, where we're kind of creating a mood or a scene which people can engage with as much as they want to or as little as they want to.

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Blume: All the instruments are part of the world fusion approach, but it's also like New Age fusion, because it takes these very new instruments such as the hand pans and the electro-organic a-frame drum and blends and balances them with very old instruments like the tabla, the djembe and the didgeridoo. We also explore a lot of odd meters, which is one thing that makes our music engaging. People listening to it can really relax to it, but if you kind of tune into the rhythm and try to count it out, you're like, "Oh, wait a second, they're in nine or something weird." We've had musicians approach us after some of our songs that are in odd meters, and they're like, "So, was that in 19, or am I just crazy?" And we're like, "Yeah, actually, you nailed it there."

Q: How does this music lend itself to live performance?

A: Burrows: It's pretty locked down at this point. The songs are sculpted, they are written out, they are played the same each time. Sometimes, depending on the gig we might extend a section a little bit, but it's definitely not like an improvised thing. It's definitely very written.

Blume: Generally the person playing the pan leads, so even if there are subtle variations, it's very easy for the accompanists to follow. We've really done pretty much every farmers market in our region, but we've also done a lot of fairy festivals, where we are really well received.

Burrows: They're like slightly less hardcore Renaissance festivals, with lots of cool costumes and stuff.

Blume: We do a lot of the outdoor open-air, busking style. And then we also do the Next Stage type of show where we put on our button-downs instead of our dragon shirts, and present the music in a chamber kind of approach as opposed to like a fun and festive environment.

Burrows: It's very different when you have 40-plus people sitting in chairs staring at you the whole time. That being said, that attention really accelerates the craft of the song to another level. And when we feel the energy, we give that energy back and that's where we've had some of our most amazing moments, where we get to the end of a song and hit the last note, and there's just a moment of dead silence, and then the applause. That's a pretty amazing feeling. You know you did something right when you get that kind of reaction.

Q: A lot of live performance plans were put on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic. What's next for Aura Shards?

A: Blume: We're going to do a digital release of the CD on June 1 through all the major online platforms, like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube and so forth. We have a band Facebook page where we post all the latest info, and you can also learn more about us at jedblume.com. We are planning to do a CD release event at Next Stage (in Putney), whenever we're allowed to have a concert there, potentially over the summer. Also as part of that concert, we're inviting local musician John Hughes to be part of the bill.

Q: One last thing: Where did you come up with the band name, Aura Shards? It's kind of mysterious.

A: Blume: The band name is an obscure reference to the greatest game ever made, let's leave it at that.

Burrows (laughing): It's kind of a good litmus test to see what your nerd creds are.

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Brattleboro duo Aura Shards taking a 'hands-on' approach to a new world of music - Brattleboro Reformer

At the moment, we're welcoming anything that will help us feel calm and alleviate stress. And as today, 21 May, marks World Meditation Day there's not better time to start this ancient Indian practice.

As previously reported by The Independent, the benefits of meditation have been explored in various scientific studies over the years, with recent research revealing that mindfulness can be effective for easing chronic pain.

Theres plenty of tools at your disposal too, some are free too, and can be as simple as a mindfulness app that will help you get into a comfortable meditation routine or a relaxing scented candle.

If youre feeling overwhelmed, stressed and anxious or just need some peace and quiet, heres how to get started.

You can trust our independent round-ups. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.

A mindfulness app to help you switch off and unwind, particularly if youre feeling anxious and many dont require you to be looking at a screen while you do it.

When searching to find the right app, its worth thinking about what you need as well as what you like. If you cant stand the narrators voice, for instance, then youre going to find it hard to relax.

If you want motivational messages sent through when you know youre going to be stressed, theres an app that will do that.

In our IndyBest round-up of the best mindfullness apps, we tested a mix of free and paying apps, all promising to soothe stressed minds. Coming out on top was the Calm app (Free one week trial, then 28.99 a year), which you can download for iOS here, download for Android here.

As soon as you open it up, youre greeted with the soothing sounds of the outdoors. As well as guided Daily Calm sessions, which help you unwind and refocus your attention, there are also programmes for intermediate and advanced users.

From bedtime stories read by Matthew McConaugheyto guided meditations, the Calm app is ideal for those looking for help switching off

If you fancy something a little different, you can pick from exclusive music tracks engineered to help you focus, relax or sleep, such as Calm Body a series of 10-minute guided videos on mindful movement and Sleep Stories, which are calming tales narrated by celebrities including Stephen Fry and Matthew McConaughey.

With plenty of content and at just 28.99 for a subscription that lasts the whole year (theres no monthly offer but that equates to just under 2.50 a month), we also think this app is great value.

Just Breathe is a free alternative that offers guided meditation with a teacher, music or timer in two, eight or 20-minute sessions. Its simple to use, easy to follow and wont take long before it becomes routine. Download it here for iOS and here for Android.

Lighting a candle with a relaxing scent can help you calm down before drifting off to sleep or simply make your environment calm and serene, ready to meditate.

Seeing as were in lockdown, its also the perfect opportunity to light that luxury candle you may have been saving.

Our favourites scented candle to help you relax is the Pure Thoughts meditation candle collection set of four (Pure Thoughts, 62).

Remember to burn your candle all the way across the first time you light it to prevent hollowing

Designed to fill your chosen chill out space with a different calming fragrance each day, you can choose from the energising lemongrass scent of gratitude, the soothing lavender of peace, the sweet geranium of love and the earthy patchouli of trust.

All its candles are handmade in Derbyshire in small batches using vegan-friendly soy wax, cotton wicks and pure essential oils and our reviewer found each one burns cleanly for 18 hours and throws its scent well for its size.

The Jo Loves pomelo candle (Jo Loves, 55) is an indulgent treat too, that when lit will transport you to sunny beaches and tranquil blue skies with its blend of grapefruit, vetiver and pink pomelo.

Unwind at home with a luxury scented candle that will fill your space with a relaxing aroma (Space NK)

Better yet, if you have a friend who is struggling to switch off, why not give them a candle to help them introduce a bit of calm to their days, especially if they're a parent juggling homeschooling and working from home or are looking after a vulnerable family member.

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Yoga and meditation are entwined together, so if you already practice yoga, you'll most likely be half way there when it comes to meditating.

One of the hardest parts of meditating is keeping still and sitting, or lying, in one place and being comfortable so a mat will help with encouraging you to do that.

Topping our IndyBest guide was the Liforme yoga mat (Liforme, 100) which had a grippy surface to stop you sliding around your floors and its right at the sweet spot for thickness (4.2mm).

What makes it so unique, though, is the grid system laid over the top to help you align yourself in poses without the help of a teacher guiding you in person. The lines are very slightly textured and they do take a bit of getting used to particularly if you have a set shape for downward dog, for example but its worth playing with.

Thesurface of this Liforne yoga mat is really grippy, even in the most intense hot yoga class our reviewer tried, so they'll suit classes in your living room just fine

And if you don't already do yoga, it can certainly help with feeling more calm. Regular exercise can be a great stress reliever, mood booster and aid in helping you sleep better, which is exactly what we all need in these uncertain times.

With just a mat, you can turn a room or corridor into your workout space.

If youre new to yoga, try following a session with Yoga With Adriene, one of the biggest yoga YouTube channels, fronted by instructor Adriene Mishler. She leads free, very straightforward sessions on her channel to her six million subscribers, creating challenges such as 30 Days Of Yoga or poses for specific needs like chronic pain or for cramps. Youll also find simple poses to imitate posted on her Instagram too.

Feeling well-rested and refreshed in the morning may feel like a distant memory during the pandemic, but getting enough rest is important to your physical and mental wellbeing.

Falling, and staying, asleep can be tricky and switching off at the end of the day isnt as easy as it sounds, no matter how tired you may be. Which is where a sleep app comes in to help you drift off and better understand your sleeping patterns. Many are free to download and use, so budget wont be an issue.

The best one we found in our round-up of sleep apps was Portal focus, sleep, escape. Its free to download or an optional 3.99 to unlock its premium content. From spring barley fields in Devon to Monteverdes cloud forest in Costa Rica, it transports users around the world, helping them drift off to sleep with the assistance of some of natures most relaxing sounds.

Whether we fancied a quick nap or just wanted to switch off after a long day, this was our go-to sleep aid and our reviewer found it helped them sleep no matter their mood.

Similar to a sleep tracking app, this Dreem headband (Dreem, 359) was a popular choice in our IndyBest guide to the best sleep aids.

It's soft, flexible and comfortable that contains nine sensors to measure movement, brain activity and heart rate, with breathing detection coming soon.

While a pricey investment, this tech headband gather stats on your night's sleep and offers consultations with sleep experts

You can look back over your nights sleep on the corresponding app on your phone, including stats such as how many times you changed position and how efficient your time in bed was.

But its not just about telling you whats wrong. Through the app our reviewer found, you have access to advice and consultations with sleep experts, and a whole library of meditation and relaxation techniques played to you through your headband

It is pricey, but if you're serious about improving your sleep, it's a worthy investment. Plus, there is the option to pay in instalments.

IndyBestproduct reviews are unbiased, independent advice you can trust. On some occasions, we earn revenue if you click the links and buy the products, but we never allow this to bias our coverage. The reviews are compiled through a mix of expert opinion and real-world testing.

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World Meditation Day 2020: Everything you need to find inner peace - The Independent