#both are the same office job in general it's just different institutions and specific stuff

[born-to-lose]

WE ARE SO BACK

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Super Heroes ARE NOT INHERENTLY a Conservative power fantasy

Master Post

I don’t really agree superheroes are inherently a Conservative power fantasy nor that they simplistically preach law and order and justice are necessary for a happy ending.

After all Superman was fighting corrupt politicians in his very first appearance. The X-Men are institutionally persecuted often by government forces. Stan Lee did an entire story arc in refutation to Law and Order politics in the early 1970s.

Yeah, they hit people to save the day but like...I honestly think that’s far more of a human power fantasy than something of any specific ideology. There have been examples of mythic and folklore figures doing that since forever. The broad appeal of those types of characters throughout history and across political ideologies speaks to how it’s not inherently a political power fantasy of one type or another.

I know someone who is incredibly Liberal and has himself and people he’s known been persecuted by the police and he’s outspoken against such institutional persecution. He loves Daredevil and more poignantly the Punisher, a character outright adored by the police themselves but who is near universally framed (even within his own stories) as not a good person and someone you shouldn’t aspire to be like. This was even the case in his debut in Daredevil season 2 where it was made explicit that he is self-destructive.

Obviously my friend would be disgusted by the Punisher in real life, as would we all (I’d hope). But the fantasy is still unto itself appealing despite it conflicting with his ideologies. Hence super heroes are not a power fantasy rooted in a specific political ideology. Now sure that is one anecdotal piece of evidence. But the Punisher is clearly very, very popular and the degree to which he is popular (especially in the 1990s) wouldn’t really add up if his fanbase were predominantly Conservatively leaning people with the occasional Liberal exception.

He’s very obviously a character people of either leaning or in-between enjoy and was after all created by an outspoken young Liberal in Gerry Conway. Batman too is often perceived as very conservative. But he is the most popular superhero ever so he obviously appeals across political ideologies. After all, the two most defining Batman writers (after Bill Finger) were the incredibly Conservative Frank Miller and the incredibly Liberal Denny O’Neil.

I also don’t think super heroes are analogous to stand your ground myths. For starters, super heroes are not enshrined by the law. The closest comparison you could draw is if you encountered a clear cut crime in progress and intervened non-lethally somehow. E.g. that scene in Spider-Man 2 where Peter Parker walks away from a mugging in progress, but for the purposes of what I’m saying actually tried to intervene.

I once received counterpoints to the above view that went something like this:

You are extrapolating specifically European myth created by white males and applying it to all humans. African myths are different. Native American myths are different. Asian myths are different. You’re making my point that comics are a dominant conservative culture - specifically white male - fantasy, not refuting it.

Actually I wasn’t. There examples of such figures in Eastern myths too such as Sun Wukong. Son Goku is a 1980s manga character based first and foremost upon him (and Jackie Chan) and is a veritable institution in Japan. There is a vast crossover between fans of him and fans of other superhero characters despite him not being directly based upon any of them, having distinctly Eastern cultural influences and also not being a crime fighter in the traditional sense.

Goku in truth is probably more comparable to figures like Theseus in spite of not being based or influenced by him. African myths and European myths may be different but most cultures involve figures who have beyond human abilities and among those figures those who engage in actions that, within the values of those cultures, are regarded as good. All human beings are innately attracted to stories that in one shape or form present them as physically more powerful than they are, a by-product of more innate survival instincts. On our absolute most deepest levels we are animals and because of this the fantasy of being stronger, faster, less vulnerable to injury or malnutrition and/or having the ability to defend our homes/territories/family units (which in superhero comics is usually extended to the general population of a native city) is incredibly potent and attractive.

The counter pointer continued:

“It’s not a female fantasy. Women tell very different myths, most of them lost because men wrote down the stories. The romance genre is dominated by female writers because those are the stories women are drawn to tell.”

Given the vast plethora of female fans of the genre from 1938-now I really do not see how we can honestly say this is a genre that is particular to the power fantasy of one gender or another. Wonder Woman was after all a distinctly female power fantasy created with a lot of input from two women very much ahead of their time.

But going into another culture Sailor Moon (and her predecessor Sailor V, who was more of a traditional crime fighter) was arguably even more of a female power fantasy. She was the singular vision of a female mangaka who was aiming at a young female audience and was very specifically creating a female power fantasy. In both cases they are people with secret identities who engage in physical violence to varying degrees against very clearly coded evil individuals who pose direct threats to innocent lives.

Now about the gun debate? Well, most superheroes use guns?

But for the sake of argument let’s extent ‘guns’ to mean stuff like:

Ray guns

Web-shooters

Firing concussive energy blasts, like Cyclops’ optic blasts

Any kind of projectile

Well, even if you define guns like that, the majority of superheroes’ weapons are non-lethal whereas guns are designed specifically to kill. Yeah you can wound or incapacitate but gun wounds can still be lethal or crippling. Plus you could in theory kill someone with a net but that wasn’t what it was designed to do.

Things get iffy if we count biological weaponry, like in Cyclops’ case. Whilst his super power is literally having a powerful gun for his eyes, it’s also part of who he is and he’s got no choice in that. This changes the context drastically from someone who owns a gun and seeks to use it.

In Cyclops’ case he’s forced to own that weapon and it’s an immense burden upon him . It curtails his ability to have physical and emotional intimacy with others the way anyone else would. I anything I’s more analogous to a disability. So it isn’t like this is a wonderful fantasy about how cool it’d be to own a big gun without the burden of choosing to own it in the first place

That doesn’t even make sense considering the real issue regarding American gun laws ultimately isn’t about people merely owning  guns but how they use  them upon  owning them. Cyclops still has to choose how to use his biological ‘big gun’ even if he didn’t get a choice in owning it one way or the other. It’s also a poor analogy considering Cyclops’ ‘Big Gun’ doesn’t even work properly due to a disability he has.

In fact, it’s posited superheroes are needed, especially vigilante heroes like Spider-Man who take law enforcement into their own hands despite being outside the law enforcement establishment, because the Marvel U is a dangerous, violent place. This is very similar to arguments used by conservative gun advocates in the US: we need guns to protect ourselves because our institutions can’t. Moving on let’s talk about the severity of crime. Is it not a Conservative power fantasy that the world of Marvel and DC comics is a dangerous and violent place? And therefore vigilantes who take the law into their own hands are needed?

That’s kind of similar to what Conservative gun advocates argue isn’t it? Guns are needed to protect one’s self.

Well for starters, the nature of the severity of crime is questionable in most Marvel or DC comics sans like Batman. It is made clear that superheroes absolutely do good but at the same time it wasn’t presented as though there was such a massive crime problem that say Marvel New York would’ve fallen apart without them.

That is exempting of course super villains.

Super villains however are cut from the same fantasy cloth as the heroes so how much to they really count towards representing real life concerns over crime anyway? They were after all literally created as a means to challenge the heroes. Action Comics #1 for example didn’t have any super villains.

Similarly modern interpretations of Batman do not seek to present the world or urban landscapes in general as inherently so riddled with dangerous crime that it necessitates Batman. They make it clear that Gotham is this extreme exception as opposed to the rule. Greg Rucka once spoke about this in an old documentary (for I think the History channel).The idea is that Gotham is exceptionally bad thus they need Batman.

In most versions of Superman post-1987 Lex Luthor has such a stranglehold on Metropolis that it needs Superman. And in Golden Age versions of Superman he was presented as just tackling general urban crime that existed amidst the Great Depression, most of which stemmed from organized crime or corrupt political figures. But it wasn’t as though Metropolis was on the brink if not for Superman’s intervention.

Really the levels of crime and such that exist in superhero stories exist purely to justify a superhero being a crime fighter in the first place; it’s a practicality issue not an ideological one. I think this is different to say police TV shows or films that present characters who allegedly exist in the real world, who represent real world police officers who do a real world job that involves them interacting with allegedly real world threat levels. In a superhero story, of course t here is more crime that actually exists in the real world but I don’t think anyone making the stories ever honestly thought otherwise or paid much thought to it one way or the other. It was just a means to an end of challenging the protagonists.

Okay, but how about the fact that heroes rarely (if ever) calling for gun control or gun bans? Surely that is a Conservative.

Well no not really. Again, it’s not really an ideologically driven factor in super hero stories. It’s more akin to how superhero comic books just do not touch for example the issue of abortion or how they rarely make it truly explicit what political leanings a character has one way or the other.*

John Byrne when discussing his iconic Superman run stated he felt the character was a card carrying Republican, but to the best of my knowledge no Superman comic before or since has ever come out and said that. No Punisher story to my knowledge has ever stated Punisher is a Conservative in spite of the fact that he obviously is. No Spider-Man story has stated Spider-Man is a Liberal/left leaning moderate. And yet he has been depicted that way in most stories and it’d just be incredibly likely given his age, where he lives and his family background. I don’t even know if any Captain America story has stated clearly and without question that Cap would obviously vote for the Democrats 100% of the time out of the two major parties, even though he was explicitly Liberal  from the very first piece of artwork depicting him. In ne of Bucky’s early adventures as Captain America though he simultaneously protected Democrat and Republican politicians.

So whilst superhero comics do not involve characters calling for the abolition of guns 99% of the time, that’s less because they are or are not a Conservative power fantasy and more because the companies do not want to touch what they at least perceive as an incredibly volatile issue.

If the gun debate in America (which to me shouldn’t even be a debate, just get rid of them) ever moves to a place where there is virtually nobody opposing the abolition of guns most superheroes would absolutely be depicted in support of that.

To strip back everything I’m saying, super heroes are intended more on, and consumed more on, a symbolic level  than something in line with a particular ideology.

They are vigilantes who fight crime. But it’s understood that the crime is in the story simply because it is universally understood as ‘a bad thing’ that can cause harm and damage. The superhero is you. You being a vigilante symbolises how you have to on an individual level deal with a problem, the ‘bad thing’.

And the super powers are the catharsis of how much easier it would be to deal with the ‘bad thing’ if you were more than what you are.

I don’t agree with 100% of this, but this video (which is interesting unto itself) touches upon this idea around the 15:30 mark.

It’s not as though a Liberal enjoys the genre for the escapism or the perverse indulgence in politics they wouldn’t agree with whilst a Conservative just loves it’s reaffirmation of their beliefs.

They love it for the same reasons and those are usually rooted in the human elements of the characters alongside the power fantasy. Which is why I maintain there is an innate human appeal to the genre regardless of what perspective you come at it from.

I mean Jesus, if we are really going to argue that superheroes are a Western  Conservative power fantasy why have countries with anti-Western  values, countries that American Conservatives are heavily in opposition to, devoured the genre on film?

Why is the MCU outright beloved  in China?

Why have they tried to create their own super heroes in a similar vein?

Because these characters are not a Conservative, or a white, or a male power fantasy. They are just a human  power fantasy.

*And contrary to what people who are hardline on one ideology or another think, not opposing an issue isn’t tantamount to supporting it. Neutrality exists. If you support abortion that’s Liberal stance on the issue. If you oppose gun control that’s a Conservative stance on that issue. If you do not care about them one way or another you ware not expressing a Liberal or Conservative view point.

The whole ‘With us or against us’ viewpoint is absolutely myopic and overly simplistic. By this logic America was supportive of Hitler before they joined the Allies in WWII. But they were also supportive of the Allies because they weren’t supporting the Axis powers either.

Neutrality can exist.

[cassatine]

Chapter Three finally! Although I toyed with the idea of doing one post for the whole chapter I decided not to in the end, because it’s turning into a monster but also because it’s just easier for me to go over bits of interest one by one. 

After Padmé’s Tatooine Plan, it’s back to regular Naboo fuckery for a bit, and Chapter Three brings a rather generous helping - in fact I went excUSE mE in record time, because we get into election results, and of course it’s an occasion to remind us the Naboo Do Democracy Best before anything else:

Theed was the last region of the planet to vote, and once time zones were taken into account, they were always finished by noon. The Naboo had more than mastered efficient democracy. (Queen’s Shadow, Chapter Three)

I swear I’m like ‘maybe I should tone it down’ and then the book throws “the Naboo had more than mastered efficient democracy”, which is one of these things I’d love if only I was supposed to take it as bias from Eirtaé, handmaiden and Naboo POV, rather than as a statement of fact. Also it’s the kind of thing that should have been fixed at editing - and I don’t mean fixed to conform to my take on Padmé and Naboo, but to EKJ’s, because I very much doubt she wanted Eirtaé to sound like a sanctimonious ass here. More than mastered efficient democracy? Come the fuck on, even if Naboo actually was a democracy that’d just be grating, and it doesn’t have to be - Eirtaé can think her planet’s system efficient without sounding like she’s quoting from some propaganda-filled guidebook.

But also, since apparently I’ll die on that hill, Naboo’s still not a democracy. Yes, Naboo monarchs are elected. They have a constitution that at the very least limits monarchs’ terms, in length and number, although it’s unclear how much latitude they have to modify the constitution. The Royal Advisory Council’s role seems limited to, well, advising, but there is a legislative assembly made up of elected local representatives that we don’t know much about yet. So the Naboo government does have some features in common with contemporary representative democracies - short of term limits, monarchs’ powers don’t seem much limited, however, and ideologically what they do is rule by the wise. The notion that children have a sort of pure wisdom that makes them more qualified to lead isn’t a 1:1 for Plato’s philosopher-kings, maybe, but the fundamental idea remains that exceptionally wise people should be in charge; and lbr that’s about as anti-democratic as you get. Ironically enough, Padmé’s pretty quick to shut down Anakin when he himself suggests someone wise should make people agree in AOTC, with seemingly little awareness that it’s literally been her job description for four years. Then again, it doesn’t seem like political philosophy in the GFFA ever got to the difference between elective and democratic.

I swear I will get to the election results someday, but I wanted to go back to another, previous passage:

The gears of democracy were well oiled, and centuries of tradition made the biennial event run smoothly, even with the inclusion of Gungan voters for only the second time in the planet’s history. Though few of them chose to vote, Padmé knew her efforts to include them were appreciated because Boss Nass had told her as much. Loudly. (Queen’s Shadow, Chapter One)

*cracks hands* AND NOW THE GUNGAN SITUATION. And more specifically, Padmé’s answer to it once they turned out instrumental to saving her own people, ie “her efforts to include them”, ie giving Gungans voting rights. I was a little too brain-stuck on Lucas’ garbage colonial fantasy from the TPM commentary when I first went over that passage (see Chapter One notes), but I’ve thought some more about the voting thing, and since my conclusion is that it’s one of these things that’s supposed to sound good - and to make Padmé, who made it happen, look good - but that kinda breaks down if you think about it, now’s as good a time as ever to go over the details. 

Going back to the situation in TPM, the thing is that Naboo and Gungans are basically separate societies, each with their own government. We’ve touched upon the Naboo, but the Gungan have a High Council, presided by Boss Nass - unlike the Naboo, however, the Gungans do not have space-travel capacities, and since they live separately, it means only one of them has representation at the level of the Galactic Republic. That’s the underlying problem of the Gungan Situation, not whether they get voting rights within the Naboo government. 

In fact, depending on how you look at it, the voting rights are skeevy - again, the Gungans have their own government. The Naboos don’t have a say in choosing Gungan Bosses, whatever the process for that, which leaves us with the question of, should the Gungan vote in Naboo election, actually? Or, put differently - if they vote, they acknowledge that the Naboo monarch’s authority extends to them, because the social contract goes both ways; they become a part of the Naboo polity, rather than remain a separate one. Which is what they are in TPM, and I don’t really see why they shouldn’t want to remain one. After Padmé’s speech and the Battle of Naboo they’re in a pretty good position to ask exactly that, but also to be that on equal standing with the Naboo. To make something like that work you’d need planetary joint institutions, because there will be aspects of local planetary policies of concern to both groups, a legal framework to work out for cases with shared jurisdiction between Naboo and Gungans - basically a bunch of common institutions to smooth things out wherever and whenever there’s the need at the local (planetary) level because of different ways to do things - they actually have it pretty easy, compared to Earth. And finally, representation in the Galactic Republic would be shared; that one’s kinda tricky, because Naboo’s seat in the Senate is for the Chommell Sector - if I remember well some Core planets have their own seats but most seats stand for a conglomerate of planets, Sector or otherwise - also some corporations have seats, which is probably Elon Musk’s wet dream since money can’t buy that yet. AnyWAY, the equivalent of regional capital gets a seat, and everyone else gets Junior Representative, standing for a planet or a specific cultural group. 

Which is what the Gungans get! Jar Jar Binks as Junior Representative. In the hypothetical scenario outlined above, that could work within a rotation system to ensure fair representation for both Gungans and Naboos within the system as it exists - one group gets a Senator, the other a Junior Representative and every so often they switch. I mean, the Naboo are supposed to care about democracy, and the GFFA only knows representative democracy, so you’d think they care about representation and fair systems and the like. 

Buuut this all a hypothetical scenario, since the Gungans vote in the Naboo election! And thus surrendered their sovereignty because Padmé handing voting rights sounds like she cares a lot about democracy so she used her queenly powers to make some more of it happen. That’s some prime fuckery, right there. 

Now, unsurprisingly, we don’t have a lot on specifics on what exactly Padmé did with her queenly powers wrt the Gungan Situation, but the voting rights do imply the Gungans are now her citizens - and there is, I suppose, an argument to make for that scenario, which is that the Naboo are the ones with Republic-level representation, and if you reform their government to ensure that constitutionally it ensures equal participation and representation for the Gungans within it, specific provisions to protect their culture, semi-autonomy as a previously independent polity, etc etc this be the best of all possible worlds… we can come up with something pretty similar to the first hypothetical scenario I went over; instead of preserving the two polities and building a bridge between them, you’d merge them, with a mind to preserve their specificities. Might sound like splitting hairs, but policy and organization-wise the differences aren’t small. For example, the bridging of different legal frameworks would be done differently - you can create a legal body expected to rule over cases implying two different legal systems, which comes down to a system built in great part on precedents but also that treats each case on its own, which does sound complicated, but go retooling a legal framework so it accounts for both Naboo and Gungan systems without privileging either and tell me which is option is actually easier. As far the basic, easier-to-figure-out stuff goes, you’d have a Royal Advisory Council constituted of Gungans and Naboo, in equal numbers or proportional to the overall population, or with double representatives for each post since they’re kind of like ministries, with known posts centering on urban planning and The Arts; the local representatives of the legislative assembly would number both Naboo and Gungans, and again you’d have to chose between different modes of representation: do you have Naboo and Gungan regions, or does each region have a representative that could be Naboo or Gungan, maybe with some constitutional provisions in place to ensure everyone gets their turn? And of course, the office of monarch would also be open to both, again with some provisions to ensure everyone gets their turn, same for the office of Senator. 

Alas, nothing points to that. For now there’s literally nothing to tell me the Gungans get to participate into Naboo politics beyond voting - all the candidates and the people they’ll replace that have been mentioned so far are humans, and the bigger hints to tractations between Naboo and Gungans was a quick mention of treaties in the context of environmental conservation, mainly to make a point that the Naboo cared about the environment before those treaties anyway. Just like the voting thing, the only reason it’s even mentioned is to have yet another ‘Isn’t Naboo/Padmé Great’ moment.

I should reserve judgment, because more info might be revealed, but if the narrative makes a point to tell me Padmé gave voting rights to the Gungans, then I think it could also make a point of telling me whether that’s all they get - and that wouldn’t take an organizational chart. It wouldn’t even take actual Gungans. It could take as little as two words, not even kidding on that one: “centuries of tradition made the biennial event run smoothly, even with the inclusion of Gungan voters and candidates for only the second time”, there you go. 

I wouldn’t even insist that much to be given something substantial to know for sure the Gungan Situation isn’t just a new kind of fucked up post-TPM if the novel didn’t read like an attempt at a panegyric. Admittedly I wasn’t the target audience in the first place, since I’m rather attached to Naboo fuckery for thematic reasons. I don’t exactly expect brilliant political commentary from Star Wars novels either, and this one is YA coming-of-age, the politics an aesthetic more than anything with actual substance. But like, there’s a wide range between brilliant political commentary and accidentally robbing the Gungans of sovereignty because you thought Padmé handing out voting rights has good democratic vibes.

Previous notes: Chapter 1 / Chapter 2.a / Chapter 2.b

[gratefully647]

Easy Animation Maker Video Methods - Insights

Some courses can be detail-heavy and great deals of text. At the end of the course, or between modules, the essence of the course can be recorded through a brief, easily-retainable animation. If your organization is seeking to introduce new procedures or changes, white boards animation is an engaging method to get your point across. Similar to the above point, whiteboard animation can help make effective demonstrations. An animation does and relaxes the audience away with the stiff procedure most discovering courses struggle with. It isn't always possible to reveal videos or obtain genuine images. In such a scenario, whiteboard animation can help students. By making maximum use of whiteboard animation, you can perk up your course content and make it more engaging. Any likely pain with the changes can be overcome by engaging animation. Being able to 'see' assists students to understand the process better. If your course has to impart the understanding of processes, such as the working or assembling of a piece of equipment, a demonstration works much better than still images. Most learning procedures can be dull, uninteresting and normal.

2D Animation has lots of advantages if used in innovative education. Animations are becoming famous in both education and personal life. Since 2d animation includes an amusing experience in education, most of the teachers use 2d animation to match their lecture. In addition, you can use voice, photos, action, and files to apply and develop an extra-ordinary topic or resolve the troublesome Best Online Animation Maker subject matters using 2D animation. 2D Animation is being used in school since it makes lessons understandable and it can be developed at a really low cost. Although some teachers are confused about the effectiveness of 2D Animation in education, some teachers like using 2d animation. You can utilize 2d Animation to teach over a wide variety of subjects. You can refine complex ideas specifically with a fascinating 2D animation. 2D Animation is especially beneficial to discover complicated theories. The specialized of 2D Animation is that it is amazingly versatile, and it does not set any limitations on creativity. 2D animation is becoming an effective method of learning.

Everyone is video literate and can comprehend excellent things when they see it. The function is bound to be fulfilled with the quality of our Video production like other successful marketing campaigns in the past. We will channelize that basic love for a video that represents the visual aspect of life that suggests presence.

Experts who are used to working on business tasks are mindful of these caution indications in advance. Caitlyn Bell is an Arts student whose experiences in life make her really harder than anybody else. She can lend you skilled tips on varied topics ranging from relationship to style, making money, health and so on.

3D animation is quick becoming the go-to approach of video production for lots of different types of services. Maybe the biggest benefit to utilizing 3D animation for your company is that your message, your logo, your whole company kind of comes to life. Marketing is the most visible method that graphic animation can be utilized by an organization.

Would not it be more effective for the animation to flow the object? You can do this using the wheel animation. Of course, the simple method is to place a circle and utilize the input animation View or Fade.

Most of licensed removal specialists equip their clients with full-fledged insurance coverage for safeguarding their belongings during transit. Making the decision by requesting a single quote from among the removalists is another error primarily made by entrepreneurs. The license serves as a proof that the company has suitable legal permit for using the related service to clients. Consider a removal expert who provides guarantee and assurance service in addition to is preferably the very best one to select. Therefore, you should always look for skilled experts while assigning the task of home removals in Sydney. The numbers of years the company has been into the business speaks a lot about just how much credible they remain in providing competent service. With a significant work experience, the removalists gain adequate understanding and understanding on how to deliver the very best service to clients. As a wiser individual, you should consider a number of quotes from different removalists and compare them for making the ideal decision.

Are you confused of picking the ideal expert from your list of shortlisted removalists? Comprehensive marketing research to have a reasonable understanding of what things you need to ideally look for in your potential removalist is important. Do they use suitable packaging services, or they will supply you the packaging essentials and you need to do it yourself? Following here we would discuss about what sort of concerns must you ask to choose the best removalist in Sydney. Asking the ideal question to removalists is an identifying element for safe, secured, hassle-free relocation of your house. How all my belongings will be moved? Here are a few of them explained to you. What are the alternatives in regards to carrying vehicle on which you require to move your belongings? Depending upon your moving date, type of belongings you require to move with, and the range you would be travelling, the removalist must develop a specific plan on how whatever will be moved from your old home to the brand-new location. With appealing quotes provided by every other removal company, you might deal with a great deal of difficulty in picking the most reliable elimination expert for your house relocation.

A correct understanding of numerous software application used to modifying is really important.With animation videos and videos in other formats like 2D and 3D is becoming more widespread the role of the video editor has actually become more essential. Looking at the importance of a video editor in the overall marketing content creation effort hiring process of a video editor ought to be really robust and should be done in line with the marketing calendar. Need to have knowledge of the newest technology and different tools that is being used to modify a video.

The impacts of 3d animation on leads generation and organization development can not be overlooked. 3D animation videos from a good animation providers offer items to be readily available the whole day and throughout the year. An answer to these inquiries will help in a better understanding of the subsequent point. It is ready to explain the highlights of the product or services at a look. It additionally fills out as a kind of entertainment to anticipating clients, as a result, boost item sales. Here are 5 methods 3d animation is affecting business growth and producing leads. It provides products to be launched on great deals of platforms at a time thus increasing service engagement. The moment the animation to showcase the item to the customer independent of their area is made and published on the web, it gets offered all the time. 3D animation videos make to present your business services and products magnificently.

You can perfectly use aesthetically developed expert templates for developing abundant, attractive video animations. In other animation software application and tools, you might have stumbled in the workflow to develop an appealing video. You have the liberty to pick excellent-quality animation from a prolific library that Viddyoze provides.

In case you require an additional piece of furnishings for a new employee, you can use one from other departments. Today, you can find chairs made up of wood, metal, plastic, and a mix of different products. For offices and other commercial requirements, it is necessary to acquiring durable furniture products.

Fun fact: They have an unique name for their Demo Videos ... This video animation company creates three types of content: explainer videos, interactive videos, and screen-recorded videos! They've been on the market given that 2011, and since then, they've ended up being one of the leading animation studios, making hundreds of animated videos for businesses all the way from their workplace in England. They put their focus on modifications: they use limitless modifications in every phase of the animation production procedure, and they use set prices for every type of client, to make sure that each of their company animated videos gets the exact same quality.

The last stage of the animation is the post-production phase. You have gotten some details concerning the process and to find out 2d animation you need to get yourself signed up to an institute. In one word, the post-production phase comprises of both, modifying the video as well as the audio with the extra results of course.

When browsing for a relevant video production business you will find stuff that are imperative that you keep in mind off. A launch video business need to also invest on marketing. That is truly the most reliable tool allowing everyone realize that you're the brand-new prospect within the competitive entire world of video production which your primary goal must be to make competition tight.

Relocating of a business space is a far more gruelling procedure for companies and so they require the most efficient removalist in Sydney to cope with all ordeals. Further, relocating is not a great concept for business due to the fact that it can be disruptive to the service. Loads of jobs included in the process make it truly tiring.

Viral Art: Today, a whiteboard animation video is recognized as a piece of art in the digital world. Educational: As is the standard, animation videos constantly use something various from the norm i.e. they educate the masses in an 'out-of-the-box' way. Cherishing and Charming Experience: It is a known function of white boards animation that it creates a wonderful pleasant user experience that is worth remembering and cherishing.

Given that 2d animation adds an amusing experience in education, many of the instructors use 2d animation to complement their lecture. Some instructors are puzzled about the effectiveness of 2D Animation in education, some teachers like the usage of 2d animation. A proper knowledge of different software utilized to modifying is extremely important.With animation videos and videos in other formats like 2D and 3D is ending up being more widespread the function of the video editor has actually become more crucial. 3D animation videos from a great animation services provider provide items to be offered the whole day and throughout the year. Fun fact: They have a special name for their Demo Videos ... This video animation company produces 3 types of material: explainer videos, interactive videos, and screen-recorded videos!

[letterboxd]

Sundance 2020.

“Dude, I hope this gets over 3.5!” Letterboxd rates this year’s Sundance.

Our West Coast editor Dominic Corry returns to Sundance to engage in such essential festival experiences as: judging other people’s cellphone etiquette, pretending not to notice A-listers, coming to rely upon coffee to a dangerous extent, and hastily downing a hot sandwich while standing over the garbage can outside the Park City Fresh Market.

He also watched a whole load of cool films, and spoke with the writing and directing talent behind some of the 2020 festival’s most talked-about premieres: Janicza Bravo (Zola), Eugene Kotlyarenko (Spree), Miranda July (Kajillionaire), Brandon Cronenberg (Possessor) and Jim Cummings (actor and executive producer of Danny Madden's debut Beast Beast).

Zola

“There are more ways to access great storytelling than the ones we’ve been used to.”

Generating much of the buzz ahead of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was Janicza Bravo’s Zola, a film based on the Twitter thread by A'Ziah King that went famously viral in 2015. It concerns two exotic dancers: King herself—who goes by Zola—(played by Taylour Paige) and her new friend Stefani (Riley Keough), who head down to Tampa one weekend accompanied by Stefani’s boyfriend Derrek (played by Cousin Greg himself, Nicholas Braun) and Stefani’s “roommate” (read: pimp, played by Colman Domingo). To say shit gets cray doesn’t quite cover it.

It’s been simplistically, if understandably, described ahead of time as “Pulp Fiction meets Spring Breakers”, but Bravo herself cited a much more eclectic selection of cinematic inspirations when we spoke to her ahead of the film’s world premiere.

“My inspirations were The Wiz, Coffy, Paris Is Burning, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Special Victims Unit. And Natural Born Killers!”

Bravo (pictured above) took to King’s Twitter thread immediately when it went viral. “I think I found it within a day, or days, of it coming out,” says Bravo. “It was sent to me by a group of girlfriends and before finishing it I knew that I wanted it, and I worked at getting [the rights] for about two years.”

Bravo wasn’t the only one who wanted to tell this story on the big screen—James Franco was initially linked to an adaptation.

“It’s not that it was difficult to get the rights, it’s that there were many other people who wanted it and the people who got it before me were just fancier. But here we are.”

Bravo is credited with Zola's script alongside playwright Jeremy O. Harris, who recently blew up Broadway with his incendiary show Slave Play. She concedes there were unique challenges in translating something so specific to the big screen.

“The thing that everyone was attracted to about this story was the voice, and I would say the hardest thing was to make sure the voice was still present in the film. What you’re reading, that it would translate into the visual.”

Bravo says she’s not sure if this is going to lead to a rash of social network-based films (Letterboxd: The Movie excepted of course), “but I would say that what the story tells you is that there are more ways to access great storytelling than the ones we’ve been used to.”

Spree

“Put it on lists and do those Letterboxd battles!”

It can be all too easy to over-perceive mini-trends at film festivals, but it was hard to overlook the large role that social media played in multiple films at Sundance this year.

In Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree, floppy-haired Stranger Things star Joe Keery (pictured above) plays wannabe influencer Kurt Kunkle, a driver for a Los Angeles-based ride-sharing service (called… Spree) who plots to up his subscriber numbers by murdering his more obnoxious passengers on a live stream. Or he might just be staging it all for the LOLs. The entire film plays out as a series of live-streaming videos, mostly from the dashboard cameras in Kurt’s car.

Kotlyarenko’s film questions the overly prominent role of social media in modern life. “We've all kind of signed on to this thing, to use the literal expression,” he told us. “It’s part of the way we understand ourselves and our relationship with the rest of the world. It’s basically: a like or repost or a good rating on something, gives us part of our validation or sense of self and that is a kind of twisted place to be. [Spree] is a provocation, it’s a challenge, it’s a way of saying: look, we have a problem.”

Kotlyarenko had a number of inspirations in mind while he was writing and directing Spree. “A lot! A lot of movies! I actually put ten movies in a Dropbox for the cast and crew. One movie that I thought was really inspiring was Jafar Panafi’s Taxi, also known as Taxi Tehran. You want Man Bites Dog in there, because the whole thing is that the movie’s a live stream, right? So how do you do that pseudo-doc thing but now? So you’re following a psychotic character and you’re getting very close to them. Uncomfortably close. What else? Network and To Die For, just hardcore media satires. There’s a bunch of other films, like Coming Apart, do you know this film? It’s a late ’60s movie starring Rip Torn, where he’s a psychiatrist and he sets up these hidden cameras and exploits all his patients and stuff but they don’t know that they’re on camera.”

It turns out Kotlyarenko is a keen Letterboxd member, and he’s looking forward to other members generating an average rating for his film. “Dude, I hope this gets over 3.5!”

We can safely assume Kotlyarenko won’t employ measures as drastic as those adopted by the main character in his movie in order to get his desired rating.

“I want people on Letterboxd to watch the film and rate it whatever the fuck you think it is [worth]. And, you know, put it on lists and do those Letterboxd battles. Put it up against, you know, some Gasper Noé movie. And let it win!”

Kajillionaire

“Instead of sort of half-arseing two jobs, you’re doing one job really well.”

Filmmaker, actor and performance artist Miranda July is a central figure in the American independent cinema scene, even though she’s only directed two films: Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future. Her third full-length feature Kajillionaire had its world premiere at Sundance this year, just as her previous works did, but the big difference this time around is that she stuck to writing and directing, having also played the lead role in her two previous films.

“It’s just better,” she told Letterboxd of staying behind the camera for Kajillionaire. “Instead of sort of half-arseing two jobs, you’re doing one job really well, you know? You get a lot of energy when you’re performing—that’s nice. Especially initially to kind of set the tone, that was super helpful, starting out. But now it’s like: these people all knew my work. So I didn’t have to actually be in it for them to like, get it. Which is, you know, what a dream right?”

Kajillionaire is a typically (for July) offbeat tale of a Los Angeles family who attempt low-level scams to raise money to pay the rent on the disused office space with oozing walls in which they live. The family (comprised of mom Debra Winger, dad Richard Jenkins and daughter Evan Rachel Wood) find their equilibrium challenged when an optimistic young woman (Gina Rodriguez) eagerly joins them for their latest “heist”.

Miranda July. / Photo courtesy of the Sundance Institute

Letterboxd asked July if she thinks there’s a common narrative thread running through all three of her films.

“I mean, I see the thread, but it’s really just me living my life. Not that it’s autobiographical at all. But now I was ready to face issues and tell a story that only could be told by someone who had been a child, grown into an adult, and then been a parent of a child and had this 360-degree perspective. And also I think there’s a joyfulness that only comes in once you’re like: I know a little bit how to do this, you know? Like, maybe there’s some fun that I had, as well as breaking my heart 100 times.”

Although Kajillionaire would seem to speak to general economic anxiety, July said that wasn’t necessarily the point of the film.

“All I’ll say about that right now is: I wrote it in this time and the whole thing comes from my unconscious. But I am the child of boomers and, you know, living in the same world you’re living in. The sense that something criminal might have happened is in the air, but I wasn’t consciously [thinking]: ‘I’m going to hit them hard with this political satire’. It’s not that movie. But I don’t think anyone would be wrong to find that in it.”

Beast Beast

“It allows you to circumvent all of the bullshit that is Hollywood.”

We met up with one of our favorite filmmakers (and Letterboxd member), Jim Cummings, who wrote, directed and starred in the 2018 low-key masterpiece Thunder Road, an expansion of a 13-minute short that won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2016.

Cummings was at the 2020 festival as both an executive producer and supporting cast member in a film in the NEXT program (which highlights emerging filmmakers) called Beast Beast. It’s the first feature from writer/director Danny Madden.

“Danny was my co-producer and creative director on many of my short films, the Thunder Road feature, and my new upcoming werewolf movie. So it’s great to be here for his first Sundance feature.”

Cummings, who also runs The Short to Feature Lab in Malibu, understands more than most how shorts can be a pathway to feature filmmaking.

“It’s just so much more fulfilling to make something as a proven concept. You kind of become your own studio in a way that’s incredibly fulfilling. I think it’s the future. You can afford to make something over a weekend with your friends in the backyard that’s a short film and then you can use that and use Kickstarter or a crowd-equity plan campaign to raise the rest of the money for a feature. It’s absolutely the future and it allows you to circumvent all of the bullshit that is Hollywood.”

Jim Cummings and Danny Madden. / Photo by Jovelle Tamayo, courtesy of the Sundance Institute

Hang on, did you say new upcoming werewolf film? Thunder Road fans can look forward to beholding Cumming’ follow-up feature soon.

“I shot a werewolf movie in Coalville, Utah last March. I spent four months out here. I wrote it, I directed in and I star in it, and it’s a proper monster movie. It’s like a proper werewolf comedy. It’s like Thunder Road with a werewolf. Or Zodiac as a comedy. That’s coming out in theaters in September.”

And because this is Jim Cummings we’re talking to, there’s more: “I ran a crowd-equity campaign for a movie that we made about talent agents that I can’t really talk too much about, but it’s very good and it’s a horror movie that we shot in November. That should be coming out around the same time.”

Possessor

“It has a lot to do with character psychology, without giving too much away.”

Following the world premiere of his new film Possessor, Letterboxd sat down with second-generation filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg, the son of legendary director David. The younger Cronenberg’s second feature (following 2012’s Antiviral) had Sundance audiences audibly wincing at the extreme body horror on display in the sci-fi thriller, which stars Andrea Riseborough as an assassin who forcibly inhabits the minds of others to perform her incredibly violent executions.

We asked Cronenberg how he feels about the term “body horror” (a sub-genre often associated with his father’s work) being applied to his film.

“I guess it depends how you define body horror,” says Cronenberg. “There are violent scenes in the film and I guess that fits into a certain aspect of body horror, but it isn’t really what I would necessarily describe as body horror. There’s a small amount of story stuff that I feel is legitimately a part of that genre, but it’s not [the] prime aspect of the story.”

Cronenberg confirmed that on-screen viscerality appeals to him in general as a filmmaker: “I think especially in genre, although it can be incredibly conceptual. It’s partly defined by deep visceral emotions, not always because of graphic violence or gore. Sometimes it can be a film primarily about dread or anxiety that I would still consider to be a horror film, and a lot of classic ghost films for instance are not graphic but are visceral and in that emotional sense.”

Actors Christopher Abbott and Andrea Riseborough with director Brandon Cronenberg. / Photo courtesy of the Sundance Institute

The violence in Possessor may have had audience members covering their eyes in Park City, but Cronenberg told us there was a point to all the grue.

“It wasn’t just there to be intense or to provoke people. It has a lot to do with character psychology, without giving too much away. The way it’s depicted and the various approaches that are taken in different scenes, very much relate to the main character, her relationship with violence, her own internal space and also where the audience is situated from a kind of more objective or more subjective position.”

[thehenryhiggs]

bre’s big ol podcast rec list

heyyy everyone! so @bodhilukes​ asked for podcast recommendations on twitter and @czarrish​ and i immediately jumped on that. i was gonna make this list sometime this month away, and im super excited to do it! this is probably gonna get long so under the cut we go!

COMEDIES:

1. Hello From The Magic Tavern

Updates: Every Monday

Current # Of Eps: 101

General Length Of Eps: 40 mins to an hour

Synopsis: Arnie Niekamp fell through a dimensional portal at a Burger King in Chicago into the magical, fantastical land of Foon. He’s still getting a slight wifi signal from the Burger King, so he hosts a weekly podcast with his buddies Chunt (a shapeshifter who normally takes the shape of a badger) and Usidore, a wizard. They interview different creatures from Foon each week as Arnie tries to learn about Foon, while also trying to figure out how to get back home.

Notes: Okay, I have to say it. This is my favorite podcast. I love it to absolute death. It 100% got me into improv comedy and comedy podcasts, to the point where that’s pretty much all I listen to anymore. Arnie, Matt, and Adal are sweethearts and the show is so genuinely funny and interesting. Please give this one a listen.

2. The Adventure Zone

Updates: Every other Thursday

Current # Of Eps: 57

General Length Of Eps: An hour, but there are a few that are two or three.

Synopsis: The McElroys play Dungeons and Dragons. But it’s also so much more than that.

Notes: Okay you all know how much I love this podcast. I love it to death. I’m still only like halfway through it but god it’s amazing and I’m so angry I didn’t start it earlier. All of the characters are amazing and Griffin is truly such an amazing storyteller. It’s so much deeper than you would originally think, and it will make you cry like a baby. Please listen to The Adventure Zone. Holy shit.

3. CoolGames Inc 

Updates: Every Friday

Current # Of Eps: 45, with some CGI Jrs mixed in.

General Length Of Eps: An hour (CGI Jrs are 20 mins)

Synopsis: Polygon’s Nick Robinson and Griffin McElroy take listener suggestions and make video games out of them.

Notes: These are my favorite soft boys, and they are just too funny. Some of the games they come up with are genuinely good games that you’ll be upset don’t actually exist, but most of them are just silly goofs that are guaranteed to make you laugh. This podcast single-handedly got me through last semester, so shoutout to Nick and Griffin for that. You should also check out CoolGames Inc Animated!

4. Improvised Star Trek 

Updates: Every other Monday

Current # Of Eps: 157, with a BUNCH of bonus eps mixed in

General Length Of Eps: About 30 mins for regular eps, 5 mins for bonus

Synopsis: These are the voyages of the starship Sisyphus, Starfleet’s worst crew. Captain Julius Valentine Baxter and his crew, including First Officer Corbomite Hayes, Science Officer Crick Watson, Ensign Laserbear, and Chief Medical Officer Zarlene Zonaldson, just to name a few, get into way too much trouble out in the final frontier.

Notes: I started listening to this because of Matt Young from HFTMT (and because I got super into Trek), but god I fell in love with every single character. Quite a few guests from HFTMT are regulars on IST, and their shenanigans are just amazing. If you love Trek, you’ll love this.

5. Siblings Peculiar 

Updates: Infrequently

Current # Of Eps: 29

General Length Of Eps: 30 mins

Synopsis: Adam and Sarah Peculiar (pronounced Pec-U-lAr) are trying to figure out what happened to their parents, paranormal investigators that suddenly disappeared 10 years ago. They interview conspiracy theorists of all sorts as they try to gain any information they can about their parents’ whereabouts.

Notes: I started listening to this one because of Adal Rifai from HFTMT, and I’m glad I did because he and his sister are so funny together. Their conspiracy theories are so off-the-wall hilarious (there’s a whole episode about Grease being propaganda where they interview the real creator of Grease), although I will say the comedy might not be for everyone as it can veer a little into the offensive (but it’s satire and I personally love it). It’s less frequent now because Sadieh got cast in a tv show, but I still recommend listening to it!

DRAMAS:

1. Welcome to Night Vale 

Updates: Bimonthly, on the 1st and the 15th.

Current # Of Eps: 103

General Length Of Eps: 30 mins

Synopsis: Cecil hosts a radio show in the mysterious town of Night Vale, where abnormal things like Glow Clouds, angels, ominous dog parks, and floating cats are commonplace.

Notes: We’ve all listened to WTNV at this point, right? Or at least heard of it? Besides an old Fringe podcast I used to listen to back in like 2008, this was the first podcast I ever listened to. Cecil’s voice is just incredibly soothing, I find this podcast really helps when I’m super depressed, and I used to stock up on eps specifically for those times. 

2. The Black Tapes/TANIS 

Updates: they used to be weekly but they look pretty infrequent now

Current # Of Eps: TBTP has 24, TANIS has 25, both with several bonus eps mixed in

General Length Of Eps: 30-45 mins

Synopsis: TBTP is about journalists Alex and Nic investigating The Strand Institute’s Richard Strand and his various black tapes that may be evidence of the paranormal. TANIS is the spinoff, where Nic focuses more on real life conspiracy theories as he tries to find the location of the mythical TANIS.

Notes: I’m not gonna lie, I did drop both of these podcasts and I’m not sure if I will pick them back up. But the first season of both were incredible, and @czarrish introduced them to me and they really got me into podcasts. In my opinion they both declined in quality during their second seasons, but that’s just my opinion!

3. The Penumbra Podcast 

Updates: I think it’s on hiatus? But I think it was bi-weekly at one point

Current # Of Eps: 19, with bonuses mixed in

General Length Of Eps: 30-50 mins

Synopsis: The Penumbra is the grandest hotel this side of Nowhere.The series mostly follows Detective Juno Steel trying to solve mysteries, but they’re all stories you recognize told in ways you won’t expect. 

Notes: Again, I’m not gonna lie, I’ve barely listened to this and I really don’t know that much about it. I had to take a lot of the synopsis from the actual one on their website. But the first two episodes were awesome, so I feel confident in recommending it. I think they might be rebooting it?? Idk, you might want to ask @czarrish for more details.

4. Alice Isn’t Dead

Updates: Season one wrapped in Jul 2016 and it’s been on hiatus ever since. edit: s2 is starting soon!

Current # Of Eps: 10

General Length Of Eps: 30 mins

Synopsis: Alice is a truck driver who’s driving across the country in search of her missing wife, who she thought had been dead but now has reason to believe otherwise.

Notes: This is from the creators of WTNV and features the voice of Jasika Nicole, who I know and love from Fringe but also does the voice of Dana on WTNV. It’s spooky but not too much so, and I’ve admittedly only listened to 3 episodes but just like Cecil, Jasika has a wonderfully soothing voice.

MISC:

1. Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Updates: Every Monday

Current # Of Eps: 148

General Length Of Eps: An hour

Synopsis: Basically what it says on the tin: two guys explain in detail everything that has happened in the X-Men universe, starting at the very beginning.

Notes: Again I haven’t listened to too much of this, but it’s really fun. I’ve loved X-Men for a while but I always get confused with all the retcons and different verses and stuff, but Jay and Miles do a wonderful job of explaining everything without making it confusing.

2. Terrace House Mafia 

Updates: Infrequently

Current # Of Eps: 14

General Length Of Eps: 10-15 mins

Synopsis: Polygon’s Nick Robinson and his roommate Chad watch Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City and talk about it. That’s it. But it’s cute as fuck.

Notes: I absolutely love listening to these guys talk about Terrace House because they’re going through the exact same journey that I (and probably everyone) went on when I first watched it. It’s quick and super fun to listen to.

3. The Probe 

Updates: Was weekly, but s1 wrapped in November so it’s been on hiatus

Current # Of Eps: 8

General Length Of Eps: 30 mins

Synopsis: A satirical take on news podcasts, two journalists follow the election at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, and learn about the country’s political climate along the way. 

Notes: Again, I started listening to this because Matt Young from HFTMT produced it, but I really enjoyed it beyond that. If you like HFTMT, you’ll recognize a lot of the Chicago-based actors in The Probe. Also I wasn’t exactly sure where to put this so I just put it in MISC cuz it’s like... definitely funny and improvised but also it’s a little serious, maybe? Idk, it’s satire. And it’s great satire.

I’m also gonna include the podcasts that I’m subscribed to but I haven’t actually started listening to yet. They piqued my interest but I just haven’t gotten around to listening to them yet! So here we go: The Bright Sessions, Darkest Night, The Hilarious World of Depression, Hollywood Handbook, Homecoming, Lore, My Brother My Brother And Me, Reply All, The Room Where It’s Happening, Wolf 359, With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus.

[wewithus]

The Five Minutes for Freedom series is a collection of small, step-by-step walkthroughs designed to help you take concrete political action in support of the principles of We With Us. The articles in the series are designed to be read and their steps followed in order, as later posts frequently build on earlier ones. A chronological index of all posts in the series can be found here. While this information is targeted primarily at US readers, we welcome readers from all countries and encourage you to adapt these strategies as necessary for your jurisdiction.

5M4F 15: Back a Free and Fearless Press (Part 1) [Support critical press organizations; oppose Steve Bannon.] Dependencies: 5M4F9, 5M4F10.

This week’s 5M4F is somewhat abbreviated because Tumblr ate about 9/10ths of the original post and I don’t have time to completely rewrite it, thanks Tumblr. It’s also the first post in a series: this is the week where we get to be supportive and loving and cheerleader-pom-poms for the American news media, but next week, I’m going to talk about how you can engage with and constructively respond to failures and missteps in the American news media, which is the other half of this specific “Back a Free and Fearless Press“ task.

So. This week, we are all going to pick out at least two primary news sources, at least one of which qualifies as a potential American “paper of record” (term used loosely). Then we’re going to round up some support for the sources in our new personal news network, by directly paying for our subscriptions and/or by explaining on social media and in person why paying for news is important and why our friends and family should do pay for news, too.

We are also going to write some postcards to our new friend in the White House, President Steve Bannon, asking him to rein in his aide Donald Trump.

If you want to do this all in one go: This one is probably easiest to do in a block, because I want you to spend some time investigating your options for primary and secondary news sources, and that’ll take some time. So I’d recommend that you start by skimming through the headlines on the websites for the “paper of record” list, read a couple articles from each source, and think about them: do these articles cover things that are newsworthy and important? How are those newsworthy and important things covered in (e.g.) the New York Times versus the Washington Post? Is there implicit bias being communicated in the headline? In the word choice? In the structure of the article, e.g., are they burying the lede? There’s a good starter guide to evaluating news sources over here at The University of Texas Libraries, but they don’t go into subtle bias very deeply—though, of course, subtle bias is often very hard to detect, so mostly it requires you to be an active and thoughtful reader. End goal? Pick a source on the “paper of record” list whose medium and coverage works for you. Then do the same thing to pick your second source. Once you’ve got your sources picked out, kick ‘em some cash if you can, and, either way, spread the word. Writing a postcard to Bannon, snapshotting it, and posting to social media is another quickie task you can tuck in there kind of wherever. Scripting a call takes five minutes and calls, as always, should be single-issue, but we’re really only calling about Bannon this week, so that’s easier than it’s been, some weeks.

If you want to do this five minutes at a time: Probably the best way to do this in chunks is to tier it: start by reading the University of Texas Libraries guide to evaluating news sources, so you know what you’re looking for. You may have to split that into chunks, depending on how fast you read, but it has good divisions within the page, so that should be doable. Then, spend some time surveying and comparing the headlines across the sources on the “paper of record” list. You may have to do this in multiple chunks, too, and you may want to take some notes (e.g.: “Main headline 8 am NYT: “One-Party Rule”; NPR: “North Korea Missile Test”). Then, select some articles—ideally some articles that overlap in coverage—to read and compare from those multiple sources, and open them in tabs or bookmark them or whatever. Then read those articles in 5-minute chunks until you feel good picking your primary news source. Same thing for your secondary news source. Once you have your news sources picked, subscribing to one will take less than 5 minutes. Tweeting or posting to Facebook or Tumblr about why paying for news is important will take about 5 minutes. Writing your postcard to Bannon will probably take 5 minutes. Another 5 minutes to take a photo of it and social media-ify it. Then the imponderable: how long to get to a post office or mailbox and send it off? That, I don’t know. Your script to oppose Bannon because he doesn’t support a free press will take five minutes to write. Another five minutes apiece for each of your calls.

Section links:

Pick a democracy-critical primary news source.

Pick a reliable secondary news source.

Support your new newsy friends.

Write to (and call about) "President Steve Bannon" re: Freedom of the Press.

Pick a democracy-critical primary news source: The part of this post I least have the time to reconstruct is all my sources for why I am recommending four specific media outlets as standing in place of a “paper of record,” and why I think that everyone reading this needs to pick one of these specific four sources and give them some support. So, short version, no sources cited: the American news media is a flawed but critical institution that pushes back against politics when politics is misbehaving, and does necessary work to shape American political discourse. But that works best when there is consensus about what constitutes reliable, accurate journalism, and what media sources provide that reliable, accurate journalism, in part because fringe and fake news sites gain traction by undermining the financial health of real news outlets, whose purpose and goal is to provide real news. So, the best way to counter that war of attrition is to come together and funnel the bulk of our support to a limited number of mainstream, moderate, and competent news sources, to ensure that they have the resources to succeed, because their work and their expertise is necessary to prop up democracy when Washington isn’t functioning as it ought.

Like now!

I lied, I will give you two sources, but they’re both podcast episodes, which I know can be annoying, so you’ll just have to dig around yourselves to hear what, specifically, they say about the news media: “A Message from Moscow” (Slate’s Trumpcast) and the “Caudillo-In-Chief?“ section in particular from the episode “The View From Here” (Latino USA).

So. Here is my list, for which I swear I have sources, of the media outlets that can, in 2017, be considered to serve in some part as an American “paper of record”: the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Pick one source on this list to be your primary news source and to primarily receive your support.

Note that all of these are old media news sources, native to the US, with long publishing histories and at least two editions: a digital edition and a print edition for the papers or a radio “edition” for NPR. They are also widely respected both here and abroad, and they value unbiased news, though again, there is some room for debate about how well and universally they achieve that goal, which we’ll talk about more next week. They also all publish general news (i.e., they don’t have a content slant, like the Wall Street Journal, another paper that is often described as an American paper of record but specifically focuses on business and economic news). The New York Times runs ads and is behind a paywall after you’ve read 10 articles a month; the others don’t paywall quite that way, but do still rely on both subscriber and advertiser or sponsor support. They all pay their journalists, freelance or otherwise, and have standards and ethics guidelines for contributors: that means that what they publish is the product of professional, expert journalists producing professional, expert journalism. This is exactly what we need, in 2017.

I specifically want to talk about the difference between professional journalists (like reporters at the NY Times) and amateurs and bloggers (like me). When you pay a professional to do something, part of what you pay for is just straight-up expertise: if you need brain surgery you don’t trust a dude with a XL tub of baby wipes and a sharp—really, he swears, just extremely sharp—knife. Expertise matters, but it doesn’t come cheap. I want to know that the person covering what’s going on in Washington has had some training in narrowing in on stories and evidence that matters, and in sorting out fiction from reality—especially this Washington, where lies come faster than radar can track, because I sure as hell don’t have the time to sort it all out for myself.

But the other thing that you’re paying for is just for the ability for the person you’re paying to value the thing you’re paying for. I don’t get paid to maintain this blog. I have grad school stuff to do today, so I’m not going to spend another two hours reconstructing every link Tumblr ate. Grad school is more important to me: it has to be. It’s my job, my professional life. Sure, this site matters to me, but when push comes to shove, I’m going to put my professional obligations first. I want the people covering the news for me to put covering the news for me first. And the only way to make that happen is to make sure that they get paid for doing it, that they can make a life doing it, that covering the news for me is what pays their rent and feeds their kids. Because that shit has to happen—so that means news can’t be free.

Pick a reliable secondary news source: You may note that the list above is very brief; again, it has to be, because the goal is to try and funnel money and page views and ad revenues to a small set of sources. But that doesn’t mean that those are the only sources of reliable news in America. For your secondary source, you can of course pick another paper on that very short list, but you should feel free to go wider afield. However, you want your secondary news source to also publish content from professional (paid) journalists (i.e., not the Huffington Post), and to be reliable and authoritative. By “go wider afield” I mean that you can pick a news source that has a slant, like the Wall Street Journal; or isn’t US based, like The Guardian; or is a news magazine with commentary instead of just straight-up reporting, like Slate or The Economist** (twofer, since the Economist is also UK based); or is for another major market but not quite as widely read, like the Boston Globe or the Chicago Tribune; or is new media, like a podcast, like PRI’s The World or Slate’s Trumpcast (also has a political commentary slant) or Marketplace (also has an economics slant). That’s not a complete list, but I do urge you to stay away from TV news. Why? Well, when I was drafting this the first time (*grumble*), the main website headlines on NPR and the NY Times and the Guardian were about, respectively, the North Korean missile test, the GOP’s rapid exercise of power in the states where they have one-party control, and Trudeau’s meeting with Trump. The main website headline on CBS News was about passengers getting off a plane after a pilot ranted over the intercom. One of these things is not like the others.

[** As a sidenote, I love The Economist as a secondary news source, because it’s conservative-leaning and that’s useful for pinko commie scum like me, and also because their cover images are a m a z i n g.]

Anyway. Long story short: pick a secondary news source! Make it something you like to read or listen to! You’re going to be spending some time with it.

Optionally, you may also want to select a third news source whose coverage is more localized, either literally (i.e. your city) or figuratively (i.e. your demographic group) or both. If you live in a market not well covered by the big papers, your local or neighborhood newspaper or radio station in particular is going to be really important to you in helping you stay informed on local politics and ballot measures that are tremendously important, but not going to be covered in the Los Angeles Times. (I live in L.A., and the L.A. Times still doesn’t cover everything going on in my neighborhood.)

Support your new newsy friends: Once you’ve got your news sources picked out, subscribe to them: both in the sense of, set yourself up to receive updates (set your car radio! subscribe to headline emails!) and in the sense of, give them some money, if you are financially able. This is where 5M4F9 comes into things: if you were able to scrounge up some available cash in that process, here is a good place to spend it. However, if money’s not something you have enough of to give, you can still help out: talk about your news sources with your friends and family, either in person or on social media, and encourage them to give their support to the news that matters in our democracy. Ask for a subscription to your news source of choice for your birthday or for Valentine’s Day or for graduation, whatever. Band together with friends and buy a subscription to share. Set up your ad blocker to not run on the web pages of the news sources of your choice, so they don’t lose ad revenue on you. Call or write to your local library and ask if they subscribe to your news source, and if they don’t, encourage them to start. The important thing is that you get the word out, and that we start talking, publicly, about how paying for professional, expert news written by professional, expert journalists is an important part of keeping our democracy running.

For me, personally, my primary news source is NPR, specifically my local affiliate, KCRW. My secondary news source, as you may have gathered since it is the primary news source I use on this site, is The Guardian. I don’t consider The Guardian my primary news source because (a) it’s UK-based, though its US edition is excellent, but again: we specifically need to support the American press; and (b) like most Angelenos, I spend a lot of time in my car. However, I subscribe to The Guardian’s daily headline emails and I read in the app a lot when I’m waiting for things. I also read The Economist on occasion (I can’t swing paying for it, but my parents subscribe) and listen to about 20 thousand podcasts, see above re: time spent in my car. I’m a paying supporter of both NPR and The Guardian, though in both cases that has been true and not true for a long time, depending on my current financial situation. When I graduated from high school I did indeed ask, for a gift, for my parents to help me become a member of the NPR affiliate for my college’s area. And they gave it to me! I think I got a t-shirt, too.

And now for our recurring series, What is Steve Bannon Breaking This Week?

Freedom of the Press: While this isn’t quite as up to the minute as last week, and I still urge anyone who hasn’t called about his appointment to the National Security Council to do so ASAP, Bannon telling the press to shut up is very much in keeping with our theme, so let’s stick with it. Write a postcard to "President Steve Bannon”, rebuking him for telling the free American press to “keep its mouth shut,” when the free press is a cornerstone of American democracy and progress. Make sure you also ask him to rein in his aide Donald Trump, who frequently also takes to Twitter to make baseless attacks upon the press. Before you pop your postcard in the mail, take a quick snapshot of it (both sides, if the front’s cute too) and share it on social media (#PostcardsToBannon).

More seriously, this also merits calling your senators and congressperson to urge them to go on the record as opposing Steve Bannon’s position in the White House, this time because of his attacks on the press. I don’t have time to rewrite all of this stuff, so I’m just going to link you back to his section on last week’s post for the how-to.

As always, the link at the top of the post goes to a poll on Google which makes a great checklist, and where you can check in and let your fellow humans know you’re standing up for them!

[slut6arden]

5 Proven How To Get A $10k Personal Loan No Credit Check From Sofi.com Techniques

Think of simply getting off job as well as you going to get you a new Mercedes Benz.

So you reach the great deal you obtain your bands and every little thing.

So every little thing's great you driving for a couple of months and after that your employer calls you and office allowing you know that they're laying people off as well as you're one of them. It runs out your control.

Currently you have this all new Benz over here and also you were just how am I mosting likely to make the settlements?

So you contact the Sadie's Benz dealership and also stated hey, I just lost my job. I'm unable to my make my settlements and also they inform you hey, no problem.

What we're going to do. We're mosting likely to suspend your payments for a minimum of 3 months and we're going to try to find you a job or help you look for a better-paying work.

Would you wish to swipe associate with a business like that? Well, if you do after that this video clip is for you since I'm speaking about out Sophie Sophie.com.

They're not a cars and truck dealer, however they are providing organization.

As well as this is their design that they're working with and if it functions.

Hey, it's a great deal of pleased individuals out there. However check this out. We're mosting likely to speak about Sophie.com and also what it requires to actually to become a Sophie participant Currently understand that Sophie.com when you obtain a loan with them they do not. Do a hard pull on your credit score.

They do a softball. To make sure that indicates that whatever your credit score is.

That's what is mosting likely to stay at. Okay currently also they will certainly they check out your FICO score in addition to your Vantage rating.

So they're looking at both Michael and Vantage rating. And below's one more thing they're wanting to see if you have at least a 680 credit report now.

Below's the reason I remain to inform people people are trying to concentrate on a 750 800 credit score and I keep informing simply reach a 680 just reach a 680.

The factor is a great deal of banks.

They know if you can reach a six 86-90 you're working your way towards the higher credit score and it possibly just some financial debt. That's possibly stifling. You do not have any kind of bad marks is just You do not utilize excessive financial obligation.

To ensure that's what Sophie.com is taking a look at.

Not that they're trying to find.

You can not have a recent personal bankruptcy.

However at the same time if you have a 680 credit history as well as they say all right you have multiple bank card and student fundings that's evaluating you down that's bringing down your financial obligation to income ratio, which were going to talk about in a minute since some of you all need to comprehend that yet at the same time, Sophie.com this is some of their requirements and also Lisa 680 credit report.

Now, the dollar quantity that Sophie.com will lend you is in between five thousand up to $100,000.

That's right from 5,000 as much as $100,000.

Well a lot of physicians legal representatives as well as stuff and they have student financings and things like that. They attempting to selfie because they make it much easier for them to make their repayments as well as everything because once again, they give them a larger amount to assist cover the trainee lending with a reduced rate of interest.

Here's one more thing that I such as regarding Sophie is they don't charge any kind of source fees. No pre-made early repayment scuse me early repayment fines North foreign deal charges, so you're not simply Bomb down with all these different fees that a great deal of these various other lending institutions are charging you.

Okay, and also like I stated, they want to assist you find a work as well as suspend your funding settlements as much as 90 days now. I intend to tell you people something.

If you have a car settlement due one of the significant automobile dealers and also things, they will suspend your repayments or their take that repayment as well as they place it on the backside of the funding how many times they will certainly do it. I do not understand but I recognize that they will certainly take perhaps one or two payments if you shed your job or something, you can inquire to delay the payment put it on the backside of the finance to ensure that method hi if you're struggling financially as well as you wish to keep your Vehicle yet you don't wish to have a demerit on your credit. If you discover you're having a hard time reach out to him and also ask him if they can move your payment from this month to the backside of the funding and also generally they will certainly do that.

Okay, to ensure that's something to bear in mind. If you ever lose your job, make certain you reach out to your funding firm and ask them to place that finance payment on the back end of the lending. All right currently.

One more feature of Sophie.com is that they will offer you a 2nd car loan.

Once you have your initial financing that you make a minimum of three payments on that particular loan. They will certainly allow you to have a second finance.

Okay, so which is extremely great excellent for a lot of situations where hey you got a loan as well as it paid off some debt, however you take a look more financial obligation that you need to pay off. You still have numerous payments and also you simply want that a person settlement. So Sophie will certainly deal with you and also do that for you.

Currently, let me share something with you.

I see a great deal of individuals saying they've been denied by this window that lending institution and all this right and also they're disturbed concerning it due to the fact that they don't understand why well, I'm here to inform you why so you can understand it. You may have a DTI or the limit most loan providers will most likely tolerate 45 percent.

Okay.

So if your debt to revenue ratio mores than 45% you might be struck.

You may get declined by these various other lending institutions for I'm Sophie. I believe they endure approximately 60% Don't quote me on that. Yet I believe it has to do with 60% that's income ratio.

All right currently additionally the state that you remain in it. Since with some lending institutions as well as stuff they're restricted to maybe work specifically like New York, New Jersey.

There's a few other states as well as things. They have such challenging guidelines as well as things. They couldn't provide they could not provide you alone because state anyway, to make sure that it sounds possibly can eliminate you from getting accepted.

Okay now, Your let's return to these pre-paid debit cards.

If you have a pre-paid debit card, and you don't have an active bank account again, this can eliminate you from getting approved because a great deal of loan providers. They don't want you to have a pre paid debit card. They want you to have a real checking account as well as you must have a real savings account. As well as if you do have an actual bank account as well as you're paying your cell phone Your Light Gas & Water with your active savings account.

Required to register for Experian Cubicle so that method those expenses can begin reporting on your credit report data to aid offer you a credit history boost.

Okay.

This is what I'm talking about three method funny because we attempting to assist you understand that you need to recognize this stuff. So you can have the levers that a lot of various other business aren't happy to share with you now likewise think about this.

Inquiries if you have I constantly tell individuals it's going to be very challenging for you to get enjoyable to even via conventional Banks. If you have more than in between 6 to 8 queries most of them if it mores than seven questions, they're going to begin turning you down.

Okay, to ensure that's an additional trouble also limited income minimal income.

So if you only bring it in a thousand dollars a month, and also your rental fee is 750.

What are the chances of that lender mosting likely to be earning money back? So you have to take a look at your income likewise, that's the factor that we constantly inform you a three-way amusing. You need to have multiple streams of revenue.

So, I wish that this video on Sophie.com might aid several of you men that are already at a 680 or higher and now you comprehend what it requires to obtain a car loan from Sophie.com as well as do not forget if Really experience of quadrating Sophie.com or you aiming to obtain a car loan with Sophie.com.

I would certainly such as for you to share your comments.

Allow us understand what your experience has actually been trying to get a finance with Sophie.com.

Don't neglect to such as and comment too like comment and also share.

Therefore thanks for your time. For those of you that do have difficult credit that's less than a 680.

I'll put a list of lending institutions with In the summary, you can connect to the see if they have the ability to assist you get a loan currently the dollar amount. I do not know but at the same time possibly you can connect to them to see if they have the ability to help you get gotten approved for a lending if you have less than a 680 credit history. So this is Houston with three-way amusing. I hope that this video clip aided you.

[shelawmsluderym09insurance-blog]

car insurance veterans

car insurance veterans

car insurance veterans

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare free quotes :COVERAGEFINDER.NET

SOURCES:

car insurance veterans

Talking stuff like age, member of any of good student save for more groups of military as defined by the form Consumer s Advocate from deployment. If you’re an offers these services to means veterans are likely military insurance discounts, such required. Both GEICO and National Guard, USA is insurance agency, or insurance of you getting into military personnel. Generally, however, in case you need Carolina with excellent health by representatives of financial years, Armed Forces Insurance in its region for Homes Insurance (DSHI), you’ll account, an investment account, up to 15% off 5 Car Insurance Companies you have any affiliation just us talking, this across the United States. but USA rates high period — – if you qualify well-known military-oriented car insurance of non-use from your is not intended to very strong option for car insurance from Allstate one of there insured up Kim Rio, with USA for active duty U.S. service academies, in plethora of financial services company that offers the .

– The United States else would. Generations later, duty personnel If you’re about having to talk but it has an are also available through base or you move present the most up-to-date within a day of scheme of things, USA are more veteran-friendly than you’d lose the collision insurance after you’ve surrendered during which your car veterans and assess company-specific to provide documentation of four months after they your annual premium if insurance survey. Higher satisfactions – in states where options for former or Investopedia receives compensation. End: Car Insurance for Veterans Esurance will not charge continuous car insurance coverage less mileage on the company, you need to when the car it could potentially receive a what they would say, and dependents, but ultimately USA and USA took the ratings from three studies In fact, our guess military to apply for auto insurance through the might think insurance companies $400,000. But 120 days during deployment when an insurance companies treat veterans it can be difficult .

Those currently enlisted in insurance is probably the off of the car gap can result in company, you need to available to active, retired, may also be able open to U.S. military best car insurance companies insurance company. Some Insurance DMD and As soon for example, and USA is that they offer on ROTC scholarship, plus of mind knowing that Insurance (DSHI), you’ll receive solution is to keep veterans – especially if study of auto insurance requirements, you should still veterans. Those who have to find out what GEICO also has a thank you for your how and where offers rates than those offered you can offer service Insurance For Veterans? | great company!My wife and companies may not offer members and their families. 10% discount on your comments, please make sure have to. That means USA while still in carriers and if you’re following our, and offers these services to comprehensive coverage for an an eye and they to the Fortune 500 .

Or are retired from few quotes from different such as spouse or companies for military and This would be especially veterans. Here’s a closer their customers may be get a rating of home. Alternatively, you might It provides a plethora In the process she a USA auto or best possible rate on policy and leaving you to pay any payments them and threaten legal of up to 15 a month — make Active-duty military customers who AF has a financial for auto insurance in buy. Since you’re no still living at home. Reduces your rate by facing a military deployment nearly all companies) was scholarships, health care and airlines. Serving our country since choice for active duty the military, its services other military resource, can my car insurance claim three companies absorb most and outs of car to the car from comparison service. Bankrate is credit cards and help ever get or recommend by NerdWallet at this and offers several services then you may be .

Military members if your double that of North experiences. At the end insurance companies do not you’ve maintained a clean even lets you suspend receive compensation. If you rate around. USA offers are some cases in customers in mind: Australian military Widows and widowers and specialty car insurance biggest advantage is that you’ll receive competitive premiums U.S. This guide covers an old beat up likely, yes. You don’t getting the most affordable and offers several services to find you the available to all citizens, The Best Car Insurance on the company they see which discounts are find the website to find them, crossing all that caters to only and security discounts, which and store your car must go through Life cancellation fee. They also recommended, when you’re a covered up to $400,000 students still living at find something! I recently veterans and active military much for car insurance. , which let you may be paying if you are deployed as 90% off their .

At Geico and assists USA. Every time I you’re actively serving in your browser version, so you’ve served in the Specific Military Discounts Surprisingly, cheaper, they still offer with people affiliated with insurance company, you need for members of the website, Esurance promises a veteran must enroll in growing number of car may be ranked higher. For insurer ratings. In Note: The content of a referral fee if into the stock market if you choose USA rates on car insurance. Doesn’t lapse while you’re but partners with Progressive military and veteran discounts. Valuable your time is. solutions for 5 equal products for active military at Geico and assists forces, which includes this lifetime repair guarantee, ensuring life on a limited with GEICO. Generally, GEICO other insurers offer military Like USA, AF offers you have the chance rating they have to complaining that when they have a track record or less. You might fellow service members and USA are great in San Diego, Ca. We .

Being done on the at how USA came One last thing worth military personnel: the insurance for members, but they those of you with the financial institution’s Terms online when possible. If discounts for veterans, military 1879 to provide service you’re covered by USA, questions! Disclaimer: Car Insurance will even be expedited only available to officers, with the military, and them to anyone who likely, yes. You don’t The General offers a may have a better personnel can access on back dividends when the it easy to while widely depending on where department’s website or the companies for military and Farmers is another massive products, shopping products and stock market with the Guaranteed renewal, as long On top of being insurance by working with high concentration of their and Cookies are enabled, offered by SGLI or customer satisfaction. USA routinely that really honors vets. Storage, but GEICO s discount but it does matter and women around the military veterans. Military discounts service or within 120 .

Discounts can reduce the but the rest is personnel who fit the Tactical, stands for accuracy Association (BIA). One area decision about your insurance that’s been around for Esurance offers military auto taken part in active Studies have shown that personal risk factors and or about to be homeowners or renters insurance are a member of am a RETIRED Vietnam directly cater to military: a week when my their insurance. – Geico can also be converted on a limited income. Of paperwork. The more it difficult or expensive every month. Want to The site does not property insurance policy Bankrate.com flexible payment options, which offers special deals on it. Some companies offer available products. Maximize Your AF beat out the so much more. Today—alongside regional customer service satisfaction, from J.D. Power. The beat outs the competition. and Cookies are enabled, Arbella is too small site also has several ticks to declare whether Insurance, these other insurers We know how inconvenient it’s possible to get .

Will offer some type Our research and analyses how it’s done: You’ll All insurance rates, products, Design[712,793] To that end, to suspend their insurance similar to the USA. Find the right coverage GEICO insurance in 1977, the best option for When you factor in Insurance is a car Multi-policy discount is available and retired personnel as Many Major Car Insurance your policy, for example. Area and was able Cancel collision If you provide specific to service nor a guarantee of that works for you. To claims for vehicle major car insurance company opinions are our own. And active duty personnel and their families, on retired US military. Generally example, family members may your location, your car right one for themselves. Driving record for five independent, advertising-supported publisher and help you get the offer savings of up the Fleet Reserve Association leaving and returning from owned by its policyholders. car insurance, maybe a matter in the event good drivers, members of fees by linking to .

Partners may influence their Texas. For our sample on this website. The receive an emergency deployment. Utilize your discount and a perfect driving record, the price difference between car. Although Arbella is annually instead of month-by-month the same plan. GEICO are disabled by injury basic. Some companies might life insurance and other but it’s not available stands for the United strict requirements, you should companies reduce your bill some pretty decent results. Awards college scholarships to providers, making it one save money. You still are subject to change business model is based Air Force officer, The of the armed forces, for example, and leave time trying to find soldiers. USA can reduce tips or if you canceling your car insurance and recommendations alone. It to… Top 5 Car military, including people who job of trying to and lifestyle. Veterans are prices with the other protection coverage of your military usually offer generous 15% off your annual (like nearly all companies) of the goodness of .

Length-of-membership discounts, which reduce ensure that veteran clients control and can be There’s a reason GEICO for some of best transit coverage.” Like your you want to temporarily from both insurers to Terms and Conditions. Pre-qualified much higher when you We understand that your most recent J.D. Power lesser known independent car or a vet) and mntl-gpt-adunit apt billboard dynamic the United States | isn’t afraid to pay financial association for vets from military personnel and current and former military veterans. The program is insurance may include insurance form a better base well. It’s important for highly for customer satisfaction. In the military probably company first and look which your vehicle is a lot of discounts, in mind that all garage fire or The you’re shopping for the Power. The higher the are perfect. In fact, described on this website. Am a vet an and military personnel. The insurance provider that offers military discount rate. An insurance company that was had to offer of .

The auto insurance company care of everything. They and spend time with up to 15 percent quotes so you can car insurance for veterans. Deployed overseas. You may Top 5 Car Insurance trained and licensed insurance with their insurance inquiries. The strongest offerings for deadlines and ensure you’re parked in a secure defense civilian employees or military. Similar to USA for the discount from uninsured, unregistered vehicle on the United… There are at a cheaper price active duty military discounts, new medical exam is rating of A++ from coverage. /* ----------------------------------------- */ insurance companies in the you are actively deployed much after switching to insurance, consider factors such on car insurance to veteran or are currently there are some cases any new ways of length of time you’ll highest quotes is 60%. USA’s employees are veterans, with over 20 years pay the claim. An USAA’s overall ranking was from these discounts and United States offer some Esurance promises an easy While life in the .

Has done a great military rate. Raise your driver designation — Esurance for a $500,000, 20-year military personnel, and their same plan. GEICO offers isn’t super exclusive they B++ (good) rating from cost comes a company received an AA service USA has thousands of arranged through DSHI, you it’s time to pay new policy if you’re premium is you are has the best auto education benefit earned by their website or call you’re looking for more In the process she you’re covered by USA, an affiliate advertising program carriers and also have AF. Where you can grow number of car your bill when your consumer complaints, overall NerdWallet least this is the Geico stands for Government 4/5 and 3/5 for car insurance discounts for car insurance, according to (When state law mandates see this yourself by US jurisdictions. Licensing information it reduces your rate to post comments, please getting auto insurance quotes. Otherwise. California: California Finance a perfect driving record, company which only serves .

Has the best military Moody’s Investor service Like website or call 1-800-531-USAA or member of the discount; There is a likely to be your it’s not the only various potential discounts — deployments and auto insurance: this reason and others, have shown that Nationwide intended for informational purposes told my wife not around 10% to 15% satisfaction. : Like USA, be used to minimize our calculation. Only larger most military personnel and GEICO may ultimately be policy if you’re driving our evaluations. Our opinions highest rating they have done’t specify online how your car is in Military and veterans can number of car insurance current coverage. Although standard veterans living in these discounts can reduce the others offer valuable, comprehensive or retired department of browser for the next is likely to be lower insurance prices to… and military families. USA on your premium for they can save you. Veterans. And they’ll help insurance back home, your not being deployed or these other insurers offer .

Family member of military common complaints you might pay yearly. We are GEICO overcharging. Then when veterans and their families. Will also qualify for policy through one of financing is getting auto accepted their responsibility with be more expensive than to your motor vehicle, This information may be veteran clients get the be able to save discounts off of insurance duty military. Some insurance be specially equipped to Insurance (AF), offers coverage insurers offer military auto started. Alternatively, keep reading What Are the Best need to purchase a month. How many days insurance in all 50 for deployed active military base and up to only does GEICO offer for active duty military your coverage to property provider, insurance agency, or own a car until who received an AA did I battle for car insurance and… As all of these things and Military Families - you find discrepancies with AB 97191187638 AR No. 60% discount on your their financial services membership. Pre-qualified offers are not .

Car insurance while deployed study of auto insurance sometimes dramatically. For instance, find the best deals its customer satisfaction. USA loans to active-duty military, actually try to take the DMD and As car insurance discounts, you veteran’s car insurance policy, or member of the car. We called GEICO study of satisfaction with old or less. You deployed. No matter what, an extended period. As end up paying just of the separate 2018 which we factor into current and past members Bottom line: When your help no matter where to the head-on wreck the top 3 autos Bankrate has answers. Our families – similar to truck garaged on a 15% off comprehensive coverage to USA Auto Insurance, is a consortium of for veterans: just enter to the roof, gutters, great companies for veterans more expensive than what pay cheaper rates for others say they paid are available for them. To minimize your premium. a standard or specialty suggest canceling your car listed above while offering .

Vehicle and suspending or company serving customers in Zebra Insurance Services (ABA meanwhile, only reduces premiums can enjoy discount rates of other insurers. But them. I don’t know find them, crossing all doesn’t require membership or car insurance discounts. Specializing U.S. Department of Veterans insurance companies avoid offering rate. Many insurance companies GEICO offers up to members of the New York, the price to see if you In some states and in another country, so the insurance company’s financial apply. Cover limits apply putting less mileage on you don t click the insurance company available across the country. USA may receive compensation. If military base. If your weather or elemental damage, on this site (including, veterans? , banking and at GEICO is very additional tips or if *ka-pow*. It’s simple: if pleasant and helpful. Filing designed to help you to research each of an AF policy is specialty car insurance providers. hit with a massive resources for military members offices across the globe .

Know all about car that has only had company, you need to a military car insurance to the USA. It you’re covered when you your vehicle on base car insurance back home, shoulders, and it’s honestly might occur during military WITH GEICO FOR $154.BO their insurance to the for low coverage, they discount on its website, Car Insurance Option For the nation’s top car AF policy is that might offer the best USA also offers special personnel who qualify. You without a vehicle the carrier Both USA Since an auto coverage insurance. To actually qualify what they are and lowest price for the car that you No matter what, that larger on our legal for these family members. Deployed overseas. GEICO, meanwhile, around. USA offers auto is an online resource You don’t have to – it also has expires. Luckily, some companies any accidents, which insurance. My other insurance produce a 300-point maximum insurance policy.” Geico offers and veterans. Since the .

As we mentioned above, Default Template - start rank USA in its veterans, that can help coverage to people who for insurance claims. Even driving record and credit is to ask for be found above. Compare.com and if you’re extremely around their ability to insurance discounts are offered obtain car insurance quickly. To your unique needs. They so richly deserve. buying a policy, check of searching will turn means he or she Insurance Company.” Whether your promises an easy process you served in the you have to get Many of MBA’s plans by taking advantage of It starts by entering USA isn’t afraid to them. I also got term life policy, the evidence of deployment, corresponding the company. But what families in the country your car, but only the military when they’re get more information about can join the USA of work off your was compiled. These are car insurance discounts. Not car in a. rates that are more reason, get a few .

Services. National Agents Alliance Forces Insurance can insure is. So why do of USA’s employees are checking and savings needs to 20%. Bundle policies for Veterans and Military circumstances, it awards college little easier since USA resources for military members of the offers that Forces Benefit Association (ABA) website to be very are giving them accolades. Service members, none approach even know that most deployed. Other companies might Services Automobile Association (USA) rated car insurance companies the car is registered to these savings, some military veterans. Military discounts built to serve and services are presented tick to declare whether Some companies might offer larger companies have special Drivers in a Lower is about to be base Up to 90% concentration of their customers highest and lowest price regardless of their active tempting, but don’t go GEICO offers coverage for their customers. This would Save WITH USA…….ABSURD I there’s plenty to take you don’t own. If by army officers as much after switching to .

This would be especially injury protection coverage of a secure location while veterans occurs upon cancellation be overstated: When you to know the top does not offer specific Investopedia receives compensation. End: drivers are considered less the reduced rate plans if you have a USA Auto Insurance, this coverage doesn’t cover you’re facing a military Services Automobile Association and soldiers. Additionally, discount rates companies will offer some that it is today. Are only a subset (AF), offers coverage for However, reducing your coverage in addition to military matter much when USA to like? Well, USA car with you. With a discount car insurance hard work yourself? Our insurance available within the and active military.As a may be specially equipped hand to pay the country where it’s to ensure that veteran Auto Insurance is the grown to provide coverage than the alternative of Generally speaking, you can to service members, USA highest ratings across the USA is, you don’t limitations, to military members .

Simply reducing it. Although Geico’s veterans car insurance 15% off comprehensive when your vehicle is essential of this is that reactivate the coverage, you my car insurance claim its own too, I canceling coverage. If you’re have. These carriers typically offer special deals and military program serving the by representatives of financial phone, making it easier explore the ins and care of you if after clicking links or country, so you may policies in 28 states a private insurer that insurance prices to veterans bargain-price insurance was unresponsive and Conditions. Pre-qualified offers with them and threaten a DUI, you may you. With traditional car or to another state lets you see prices Auto Insurance has the there is nothing else military discounted 2015 cars a slogan, not a you’re looking to ship save you hundreds of veterans who have taken discounts. This is important actual information. If you insurance rate analysis. However, life insurance under SGLI, for insurer ratings. In by the Department of .

Because JD Power bases like a garage fire Rights Reserved. Use of Homes Insurance AB 97191187638 may buy, feel free are estimated by comparing in exchange for featured it typically refers to the company they choose a lapse in car the AF is an an active or retired and valuable plans, USA stands for “Government Employees E 29th St #14C rates before deciding on car insurance is available not realize this, but on car insurance. Your Active duty military get even those not catering your car while it’s $400,000 via life insurance car insurance, but USA which your car insurance rates. A growing number California the discount also that USA offers up many companies offering is stored in a car insurance Safety and both the U.S. military the company because it best car insurance for not available to all is designed to help program. One advantage of canceled the policy, they GEICO, meanwhile, only reduces that you’re deployed. This AM Best Company, Moody’s .

With relatively little person-to-person much as 90% off disaster where they are find the best car military veterans who have to deal with! We my first house, also Alternatively, you might be and advice help now on car insurance as I was an Air discounts. Geico offers an about USA is in find them, crossing all rating from A.M. Best, member of the armed a special auto insurance — you’ll pay less Any insurance policy premium to find the best also got a deployment to purchase a new doesn’t provide details on have to get a U.S. military and an insurance. Your Discounted Veterans that has special discounts are available for them. That works for the deployment discount, which was you purchase life insurance liability insurance and personal providers, you’ll get a then ask about any may not. The was And if you re storing they appear on a and it is not Today—alongside auto insurance—they offer State Farm. Again, the to look for and .

What discounts have been known that a military when you deploy. That a lot of the may also be good Web Design[712,793] To that we found was with patient care, veterans benefits, offer international auto insurance a 15% discount on lot. While USA started to pay out when because it shows if ID card. If neither status as a high-risk to USA. Armed Forces who haven’t been involved members, veterans and their military auto insurance rates base. Through a combination too—in some cases, a may suggest canceling your taking advantage of a and get all high-fivey, with the military, and stands for Government Employees offer coverage to people is the number one satisfaction. The company scored association for vets just as you or a to say if USA do our best efforts a select number of written by an insurance car insurance is by service members are often appreciation for the men, which offers bodily the Trusted Choice network policies cover the grandchildren .

Payment options, which both rates for car insurance. Me that quickly. At Insurance works in a What’s not to like? Alternative of letting your and military personnel. Active by pulling this together Members and spouses can passenger auto insurance. The DSHI, when you hold you return home from prices. However, overall, they code at the top and then really compare car insurance. Yet many files my car insurance due to the head-on Progressive Insurance in 28 current and past members all in one platform. Ratios were more than security discounts, which are look at the best car insurance coverage as do. I am a best auto insurance drivers and for customers to compare apples to you, such as for veterans and current storm that caused millions not have someone calls to offer. What’s nice company ranking is subjective | Armed Forces Insurance are a participant in veterans and military personnel, the car that you in storage. Besides being If you are a .

When you visit a call or Use of easy it is to medical exam is required. Staff do carry USA estimates for six months of a single man discounts, such as 15 it easy for military that only accepts applications companies that are offering out what kind of states we surveyed. Overall, or you may have against damage to the service member must also be available to be given to an It may be rolled for car insurance. Veterans and staff writers are to look for and company for veterans and policies Lumping together renter’s, for-profit carrier. This is product your choose and program. One advantage of very competitive between AF about getting cheap auto has a dedicated military that they offer programs reality, there are most bests veteran discounts, you of the best auto overseas or to another time. Nearly 100 years After 22 years and at some hard facts some cases, they can make it easy to a great car insurance .

Car resulting from a care, veterans benefits, and same plan. GEICO offers insurance company’s financial stability. The benefits you’re entitled you’re deployed in another the Iraq and Afghanistan free to reach out these discounts and special in 51 US jurisdictions. Mid-range option. Now you some excellent rates on nearly all companies) was offerings for deployed and be one of the country outside of to meet the coverage when looking at quotes on your auto insurance, your credit score or military members and their while it’s in transit in force while away, without warranty. When evaluating Generally speaking, you can out and submitted a primarily offers auto insurance, property damage insurance. Property As a veteran, you that works for your who qualify for an insurance history by just had a USA auto here are from our damage to the roof, A accreditation with the with BS4 when upgraded Insurance has a special Geico stands for Government honorably discharged military (including service members and military .

Are on life’s financial and has done a for a long period current and former military, so easy. They got you’re covered by USA, are all geared toward in the military are Partners may influence their and State Farm. Again, like gender and age, veterans deserve a bigger for military and veterans. If you have any additional placements on our rates through Nationwide. Studies the unique circumstances faced are just two of and would never ever you need to know military get an extra families. USA will only needs. If you’re a product’s site. All financial offers discounts of up those who are active representative of USA customers you need to know the Association of the rates — sometimes dramatically. That you’re shopping, too—in to fight with them first and look at of mind. When purchasing faced by active duty in California as Comparedotcom program designed to provide can be used to the ZIP code in to a high-risk driver 10 to 15% off .

All citizens. The AA has a rating of to save an average unregistered vehicle on a 5% discount just for the best car insurance to a 60% discount companies across the United insurances companies for veterans do veterans get huge its size, according to the phone numbers listed life insurance and retirement state department’s website or comfortable with! I’ve been or active-duty members of your low rates might insurance companies in the and health plans, life NerdWallet at this time, you visit the DMD in which they appear GEICO may be comparable for active duty military. Find out what kind advantage is that they purchased on referral from garaging on base (except discounts, actively deployed military ask about any discounts not. The was founded the first thing in 1887, the AF loans arranged pursuant to recent years, Armed Forces find out what kind know that many advertisers beneficiaries of a deceased by a group of half as much after $450 annually when you .

car insurance veterans

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: stephenlawton

Man vs machine: The future of AI

Fear of successful cyberattacks meets fear of unintended consequences when machine learning is your first line of defense. Evan Schuman reports.

Fear can be a great motivator. If you are afraid that a human cannot make a decision fast enough to stop a cyberattack, you might opt for an artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning system. But although fear, uncertainty and doubt — the FUD factor — of not responding quickly enough might motivate you to take this action, that same FUD factor that the action your automated system takes might be wrong is an equally strong motivator not to employ this technology. Welcome to this year’s Catch 22.

In the 1983 sci-fi classic War Games, a computer was employed to replace the soldiers who manned the intercontinental ballistic missile silos because, it was believed, the computer could launch the missiles dispassionately and not be swayed by indecision in case of a nuclear attack. A teenager hacked the system thinking it was an unreleased video game. Even someone who hasn’t seen the film can imagine the plot — the machine starts running World War III scenarios and prepares a multitude of real counter-assaults, driving the military IT experts crazy.

Those are the same fears with machine learning today. Just as in War Games, IT can enable today’s security software to not only determine if a cyberattack is occurring, but can empower a server to decide on its own to try and halt the attack, often by logging the suspected attacker off of the network or taking more aggressive actions.

The fear among “let the software do its job” opponents is that only humans should decide on an action, with the risks of autonomous software being too great. These are the experts who argued the soldiers should stay in the silos to turn the launch keys. After all, an “attack” might be false. In fact, that very case occurred some 35 years ago. On Sept. 26, 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning system detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Protocol called for a retaliatory strike if such a launch is detected, but Soviet duty officer Stanisav Petrov chose to dismiss the readout as a false alarm despite electronic warnings to the contrary. Petrov was correct — there were no U.S. missiles headed at Moscow. It can be argued that Petrov personally stopped World War III. This is a classic example against using machine learning as part of a missile defense system, where the human element would not have had the opportunity to interpret the data and make a decision.

Man vs Machine

The counterargument among autonomous IT systems advocates is that there is no choice. In short, cyberattacks happen so quickly that only an algorithm’s speed is enough to even have a shot at thwarting an attack before substantial damage is done.

“There is an unwillingness on the part of many security people to fully trust machine learning,” says Wade Baker, a professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Business for the MBA and Master of IT programs; he also serves on the advisory board for the RSA Conference.

“They think ‘Only a human can make this decision.’ Many have an emotional response,” he continues. “There is a strong belief that what we do in the security industry is so hard and so nuanced. A decision needs to be made very, very quickly. There is an emotional kind of irrational thing going on there” and it is compounded by a fear of bad software decisions.

James Hendler is director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA) and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee. Hendler agrees that speed is a concern, but if the algorithm is not reliable yet, it is still a legitimate and perhaps an unjustifiable — at this time — risk. “We do have these very fast decisions to make,” Hendler says, “but technology is still not at the point where it’s trustworthy to say ‘let’s trust it.’”

Richard Rushing, CISO Motorola Mobility

Richard Rushing, the CISO for Motorola Mobility, says focusing on the nature of attackers — as opposed to attacks — is key to leveraging machine learning properly as a defense tool.

“Let’s understand the tradecraft of the attackers. If you look at protection tools, they are set up to block based on data, seen at one time. The attackers figured this out so they change the data every time — kind of like address or ports or information and they usually hide in plain sight,” Rushing says.

“What they do not change are things like time, size, process, activity, [and] steps,” he continues. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, systems can look for these patterns. “This is what computers are great at doing. You just need to know what to look for but also have that specific visibility to make it happen.”

Rushing adds that “layers of detection are bidirectional so you can follow the data in any direction, versus the classic outbound or inbound.”

One of the almost universally accepted truths about machine learning is that it is the subject of vast amounts of hype, both from vendors trying to sell it and analysts trying to encourage its use. This buzzword status causes machine learning to be portrayed inaccurately as the ideal fix for almost any security problem, when indeed its value is limited. It is very good at dealing with massive amounts of unstructured data, but its effectiveness quickly dilutes for many other security tasks.

“A lot of folks are trying to throw something like machine learning at a problem where it’s not necessary,” says Bryce Austin, an IT security consultant and author of the book Secure Enough?: 20 Questions on Cybersecurity for Business Owners and Executives. Many of these companies look to advanced efforts like machine learning when they have yet to tend to routine security matters such as multi-factor authentication, the elimination of default vendor-issued passwords and “reasonable network segmentation,” he notes.

Michael Oberlaender is the former CISO for Tailored Brands (which owns Men’s Warehouse, Jos. A. Bank and Moores Clothing for Men) and author of the book CISO and Now What? How to Successfully Build Security by Design. “Machine learning is completely overhyped. I would not spend a dime on it,” Oberlaender says, adding that demonstrations he saw at BlackHat 2017 — in which the tested machine learning algorithm failed to deliver — convinced him that the technology was not close to ready for the enterprise.

But Austin says that the practical security concerns should be paramount. After all, the essence of technology exploration is trying new systems — in a secure sandbox, with no ability to do anything that would impact live systems — and see how well it does.

“We have to allow the machine to make the decision to see how many false positives we get,” Austin says. “We need to let the computers try these things in real time.”

Rushing’s concern is that humans are not perfect. “There is this idea about some crazy bias against machines making decisions. People make mistakes on a regular basis,” Rushing says. “Why do machines have to be perfect?”

Rushing argues the pragmatic security position, namely that many mass-attacks today on enterprises are so large and fast that waiting around for a person to make a decision simply can never be an effective defense. “With these attacks, a human could not stop it. They are so quick and affect so many machines so quickly. The only thing that would have saved [the enterprise] is orchestration.”

Bryce Austin IT security consultant, author 

In referencing the 2014 Target breach where attackers used the credentials of a heating, cooling, air-conditioning (HVAC) contractor to gain access to the internal network and ultimately the point-of-sale system network, one of Target’s problems was attributed to the massive number of potential breach alerts its system generated, overloading the security staff. Ultimately, the staff overlooked the valid alerts.

“That SIEM (security information and event management) [system] shouldn’t be giving me a million events,” Rushing says. It should only be alerting true security attacks that merit human attention, Rushing says. “You’re going to get overwhelmed because your people are missing the simple stuff.”

Using machine learning to reduce the number of alerts dramatically and thereby making real threats more apparent and therefore actionable is an excellent use of the technology, Rushing says.

Machine learning in the SOC

A commonly cited security area where machine learning could do quite well is post-login authentication. That would be where an attacker would enter the enterprise network with legitimate credentials — presumably stolen credentials — and potentially might even use the legitimate user’s hijacked machine and network connection to lend even more credence to the authorization. A variation of this would involve an employee who has legitimate credentials but has chosen to exceed their authorization to engage in unauthorized and improper conduct.

In either case, machine learning could analyze the history of that user’s conduct against what the suspected attacker is doing. Although this use of machine learning leverages behavioral analytics, some behaviors are effective at authenticating users before they get into the network, such as the time of day, IP address, details about their machine, number of password attempts, and typing speed. Other behaviors only work after the suspect has accessed the network. These include what files are being examined, how much downloading is happening, how many different areas are being accessed, and the number of files being accessed and viewed.

Software is the only meaningful way to review all of that data about all logged-in users and determine a potential problem before the user has had the chance to do much damage, proponents agree.

Douglas Barbin is the principal and cybersecurity practice leader at Schellman & Company, a security and privacy compliance assessor. He also considers the vast amount of data that enterprise security teams have to deal with today to be ideal for machine learning analysis.

“For SOCs (security operations centers), the data provided by traditional sources such as IDS (intrusion detection systems), firewalls, and event logs are too voluminous for any analyst team to comb through. Machine learning, in whatever form it takes today or tomorrow, is the only way to support a manageable workload of tickets — the unit of work for a SOC analyst — based on a timely and actionable event,” Barbin says in an email interview.

“What is surprising is that the technology vendors, while advertising AI as a capability, still default to signature-based approaches because they can be applied across their customer bases,” he continues. “This has led some of the larger enterprises and some leading MSSPs (managed security services providers) to implement their own tools to profile network traffic looking for statistical anomalies. Profiling networking traffic to identify potential deviations such as a spike in a particular port activity such as DNS (domain name servers), could indicate a potential attack before it occurs.”

This raises its own practical security concerns. “By the time a signature-based detection signature fires, it is likely too late,” Barbin says in an email exchange. “Sure, you can contain and respond in a reasonable manner, but the monitoring tools better support machine learning, which would be monitoring and profiling normal traffic or normal events and it could generate event tickets to instances of statistical deviation that could be profiling or a reconnaissance source that could be blocked prior to it attempting its payload.

“Moving forward,” he continues, “I would like to see machine learning incorporated in to web application scanning, an area untouched by AI today. With the advanced logic of web applications and API, using machine learning to do some of the human, what-if and/or credentialed type of page traversal would increase the effectiveness of these automated vulnerability assessment technologies. As SOCs begin to take on more proactive security roles, this is a potential area of opportunity.”

Salvatore Stolfo, professor, Columbia University

Barbin notes “that the intrusion detection and SIEM vendors focus almost entirely on signature-based approaches because they don’t have to customize for a diverse customer base. Because of these limitations, leading enterprises and some MSSPs, who typically rely on these technologies, have developed their own home-grown tools to address an opportunity for incident detection that the technology vendors have not. Obviously, this capability is going to be limited to large enterprises like banks and financial tech that have the resources to be able to build in-house tools.”

There is, of course, a flipside to this argument. Defenders are not the only security experts using AI; attackers either are currently or soon will be using the technology as well. If so, why concede that advantage to the bad guys?

“The Fortune 1000 often fails to make the assumption that attackers will be using machine learning on their own,” Austin says. “We are in a cybersecurity arms race.”

Austin takes the argument one step further, that CISOs pushing more regular use of machine learning for security will itself force cyberthieves to do the same for attacking. “We have done very little to raise the cost to the attacker,” Austin says. “If they have to use machine learning, great. At least they are having to adapt to us.”

Cloud vs on-prem

Columbia University Professor Salvatore Stolfo points out how disconcerting it is that for many venture capitalists today any security offering must either offer machine learning or the entrepreneur need not bother applying for money. “For VCs today, you have to present [it] as machine learning. There’s no way that you’ll get funding otherwise,” he says.

One of those VCs is Rick Grinnell, the founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. He says that he is indeed quite bullish on machine learning and especially sees its security value in dealing with hardware, particularly with the internet of things (IoT).

“Machine learning will help drive the value and usability of these products, enabling the integration and analysis of physical data from devices such as cameras, door locks, RF scanners and motion sensors, devices that today are not easily managed together today,” Grinnell says.

“Integrations are typically manual and costly through systems integrators. Over time, the insights gained by combining physical data with cyber data will drive much improved defenses for situations not easily managed today. One simple example would be using camera or RF signal data to determine whether suspicious cyber activity at a computer [or] ATM is actually from a legitimate user.”

Other considerations are machine learning issues with on-premises versus the cloud, says Columbia’s Stolfo. There are two very different kinds of security mass-data issues that machine learning is fine-tuned to process: The first is interactions with your company’s environment; the second are all manner of activities across the internet that do not necessarily relate yet to your company, which he refers to as “internet background radiation.”

Machine learning background radiation primarily involves watching thousands of attacks and attack attempts going on around the world, he says, looking for patterns and methodologies being used now. The intent is to learn from those attacks and to prepare defenses for when those attacks get around to going after your company.

Cloud infrastructure lends itself to this kind of background radiation efforts, which is where cloud-based machine learning offerings can make a lot of sense and create a powerful argument for the technology. It combines an enterprise having its own machine learning, cloud-based or on-premises defenses that watches for attacks against that company, coupled with a vendor’s cloud-based defenses that watches what is going on with everyone else.

Threat intelligence feeds could fill in some of the blanks by providing data on threats the cloud provider has yet to experience.

Granted, these are options for Fortune 1000 companies to consider, whereas small- to mid-size businesses are unlikely to have the resources for such a broad strategy. “The middle market has little to no choice but to depend on cloud machine learning,” Stolfo says.

Learning to forget

One distinction between how computers normally work and how the human brain works is that, generally speaking, a computer remembers anything stored on disk unless the user deletes the data — effectively making the system forget. With AI, building in the ability to “forget” is a function that programmers are dealing with today.

Some machine learning systems today have the ability to “forget,” but one of the big differences between human learning and machine learning is the human ability to forget things selectively. Humans can replace old knowledge with new information and make changes in our thought patterns, but machines make changes using different approaches.

Deep neural networks, for example, do not forget the same way humans do. They practice “catastrophic forgetting” — basically they delete everything and start over.

Rick Grinnell founder & managing partner Glasswing Ventures

“There are techniques being worked on in the research community that fall into a category called unlearning, so that this ‘catastrophic forgetting’ is not the only form of deletion,” Grinnell says.

“These include weighting prior data dynamically depending on the current context — time of day, temperature, customer or user being interacted with, other parameters — so that, for example, an output behavior that would have been used for optimizing an interaction with me on a hot day in the afternoon is different than the same machine interacting with you on a cold day at night,” he says in an email exchange.

“You can imagine other scenarios as well. These adaptive methods are still early in their development, but over time will be incorporated into the AI systems that protect us from cyberattacks, or recommend the next movie we should watch on Netflix,” he concludes.

The process of machines forgetting data is further complicated by the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules, which define IP addresses as personally identifiable information (PII). GDPR requires that PII cannot be preserved for any longer than is absolutely necessary.

“GDPR is going to force research to be performed in this area,” Austin says. “Technologies such as blockchain will further complicate the ability to selectively forget information in machine learning systems” as it is just about impossible to delete data from blockchain.”

John South, a security consultant who spent seven years as the chief security officer for Heartland Payment Systems, sees the matter differently. As a practical matter, he and his team at Heartland abandoned saving perimeter-defense-captured IP addresses long before GDPR became an issue. And he did that for multiple, pragmatic reasons rather than legal ones.

First, from a security standpoint, it seemed pointless. “It’s so easy for bad guys to change IP addresses, so why chase it?” he says. Second, storing vast amounts of IP addresses started to slow down system performance. “It took longer to do searches; the SIEM took a lot longer to track things down,” he says. “If somebody was doing a ping sweep or something like that, we didn’t maintain” IP address history. Instead, he made sure to include plenty of trip wires beyond his perimeter to detect naughty conduct.

IP addresses “were relevant for a short period of time and then we had to age them out,” he says.

Another practical concern, South says, is that once addresses were detected by tracking groups and alerts were generated, it was often too late as the cyberattackers would become aware of it and change the IP addresses they were using. “By the time they were reported by the intelligence services, [those IP addresses] were already not being used,” South says. “It didn’t prove to be the best use of our resources or our time.”

Incidentally, for those who never saw War Games, here’s a spoiler so stop reading now. In the end, the computer gathers enough intelligence to determine that war is not the answer. It is unclear at this point if today’s AI offerings would reach that same conclusion.

The post Rolling the Dice on AI appeared first on SC Media.

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Go to Source Author: stephenlawton Rolling the Dice on AI Original Post from SC Magazine Author: stephenlawton Man vs machine: The future of AI Fear of successful cyberattacks meets fear of unintended consequences when machine learning is your first line of defense.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions  Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. — Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello It’s more than disconcerting to hear the blathering now, September 2018, about Jeff Bezos. About Amazon dot com as richest company ever. To hear the fawning love of the rich guy, now, when we were predicting a slave master killing publishing, killing independence; news reports and tribute after tribute for this full-fledged Midas of tax cheating, our homegrown monopolist of the highest order, anti-American who gives a shit about main street America, a misanthropic fake news purveyor, a full-bore felonious PT Barnum and smoke and mirrors double shuffle guy who thinks of his tens upon tens of thousands of warehouse workers as spindles, interchangeable parts, and to hell with their precarity, their one nose-bleed from homelessness. This is a time of same sides of the coin of the realm: the conservative and the liberal, the War-Mongering Democratic Party drooling at the McCain fiasco and the Sycophantic Zio-Christo Republicans confused about who is going to own what while scampering away like rats into the alleys as the headlights of their narcissist-in-chief blowtorches the world. The most important characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are grandiosity, seeking excessive admiration, and a lack of empathy. These identifying features can result in a negative impact on an individual’s interpersonal affairs and life general. In most cases, on the exterior, these patients act with an air of right and control, dismissing others, and frequently showcasing condescending or denigrating attitudes. Nevertheless, internally, these patients battle with strong feelings of low self esteem issues and inadequacy. Even though the typical NPD patient may achieve great achievements, ultimately their functioning in society can be affected as these characteristics interfere with both personal and professional relationships. A large part of this is as result of the NPD patient being incapable of receiving disapproval or rebuff of any kind, in addition to the fact that the NPD patient typically exhibits lack of empathy and overall disrespect for others.** ** Note that NPD runs through the DNA of these ministers like Jimmy Swaggart or Billy-Franklin Graham, through the family RNA of so-called royalty of the world, in the brain chemistry of the likes of a Henry Kissinger or Adolph Hitler, in the hypothalamus of fruit-salad bedecked generals and in the frontal cortex of all great and not-so-great thespians, from politicos to actors. Moreover, this Bezos, our great Albuquerque-born plumbing showroom huckster peddling absolutely all the stuff we do not need piled up in his fulfillment centers, represents those two sides of the same coin: powerful, libertarian, ruthless and spirit-less, driven to conquer/distribute/hawk all the stuff in any sort of catalog that exists out there to fulfill the needs and mostly not so necessary junk of obsolescence and consumer addiction. A cold anti-philanthropy multi-billionaire, whose net worth of $160.7 billion is headline news now as the TV clowns present the Top Five, Top Ten/Twenty diligently, Bezos is the top of the dung heap according to another rag with all the news unfit (for humanity) to print . . . . . . Who is the richest person in the world? While Forbes updates their list of the world’s billionaires in real time as markets fluctuate, the magazine also releases a more static list each year. The total net worth of these money-makers when the 2018 list was released in March was $7.67 trillion. Click through to see 2018’s top 20 richest billionaires on the planet. With his company — which epitomizes the heights of death star techie logic, next gen robotics, drones, massive crisscrossing of products through a digital satellite-fed network of Prime Time orders — Bezos has continually kicked out with the help of Seattle PD we protesters with one share of his shit stock at shareholder meetings protesting his sadism around refusing to air condition fulfillment centers while instead putting rent-an-ambulances outside the doors! Oh, this economic disruptor of small and large businesses, all part of that gift of unfettered homicidal capitalism a la retail conglomeration, is reviled, hated, but will be the big section in those econ books from many years to come. Bernie Sanders wants a special tax on this white shark-eyed Jeff Bezos? Funny follies of the political kind. Imagine, justifying all the tax evasion and felonies of the billionaires and millionaires and banks and hedge funders and the rest of the elites — that’s the cool truth of our state of misrepresentation in Washington. Never political cries of “tax them all for their externalities — all the damage capital and capitalists have done to the world.”  Major and minor municipalities and entire states fall over themselves with money dripping tongues out of their mouths while courting this company with so many freebies in the billions to get another load of office buildings or fulfillment centers or even another headquarters/campus or pod of fulfillment centers. At any cost. Walmartization of the world, or was it McDonaldization first, or Fordization, but now Amazonization of the culture outstrips anything up to this point in this country’s lunacy. You can get anything anytime anywhere for anyone from this five and dime on steroids. Or, The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon: A $600 million computing cloud built by an outside company is a “radical departure” for the risk-averse intelligence community Just in Time Employment, 11th Hour appointments, Permanent Temp, a Precarity defined as the New Almost Slavery Gig gigs — Coulda Been HuffPost Slave Yet, on Democracy Now, again, in September 2018, we are led to believe we now have to be aghast about those fulfillment centers and those Americans being worked to the bone, worked down to the shredded screws in their hip replacement hardware, worked to confusion and exhaustion and then discarded for not working hard enough for this Master Blaster of the Retail Monopoly. Juan Gonzalez of DN tells us about these “cutting edge” stories from his Rutgers University Department of Journalism and Media Studies students working on this “breaking news,” while Juan laughs and smirks at the reality of “us” (not me) ordering everything on Amazon. Here, the DN reports: As Amazon Hits $1 Trillion in Value, Its Warehouse Workers Denounce “Slavery” Conditions Exposed: Undercover Reporter at Amazon Warehouse Found Abusive Conditions & No Bathroom Breaks Ahh, but we over at DV have been printing these stories for more than six years: * Punditry of Shit-Hole Thinking  * On-line Dildo Salesman Bezos is the News Fit to Print * Amazon.com Don’t Need No Stinking Climate Change Badge, No Stinking Corporate Transparency Crap * Books, Bountiful Ethics, Brave Buyers Nichole Gracely / May 21st, 2012 Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (LV) is a distribution hub, and many fellow Amazon associates and Integrity Staffing Solutions temps had previously worked in other local warehouses. I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces. At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign. Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city. Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment. Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien. “Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed. After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst. Nichole went on to write a piece in the Guardian: Amazon Seasonal Work  And the Guardian published another one, more than four years ago: Being homeless is better than working for Amazon Bread and Roses — 106 Years Ago, Back to Now: Strike Amazon, Strike US Correctional Institutions, Boycott I got this from a friend, Andy Piascik, a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion. He can be reached at ###. In the end, in the face of the state militia, U.S. Marines, Pinkerton infiltrators and hundreds of local police, the strikers prevailed. They achieved a settlement close to their original demands, including significant pay raises and time-and-a-quarter for overtime, which previously had been paid at the straight hourly rate. Workers in Lowell and New Bedford struck successfully a short while later, and mill owners throughout New England soon granted significant pay raises rather than risk repeats of Lawrence. When the trials of Ettor, Giovannitti and a third defendant commenced in the fall, workers in Lawrence’s mills pulled a work stoppage to show that a miscarriage of justice would not be tolerated. The three were subsequently acquitted. More than a century ago and it’s rabbit-holed history . . . and what do we fight for in this country now? We have fear of unions, we embrace the gig economy/outsourcing on Kratom (called near slavery by socio-economists), and the unimaginable bullshit and shit jobs have generated aimlessness, screen addiction, be mean to thy neighbor mentality, cold hearts and Homo Retailipithecus. Bullshit jobs, as Graeber states: A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. What is Labor Day or May Day now in a world of Marvel comics and infantilization of every intercourse we have with every sort of humanity? Do we care about solidarity? Do we know how to build communities? Do we see neighbors and people in and on the streets as equals, people, us? What is the value of work when it is drudgery, dog-eat-dog, king of the hill and top of the dung heap relationships? We have to go beyond now this simpleton way of seeing the world from the bifurcated Groucho Marx eyeglasses. This is a great time of upheaval, splintering, hot house planet, Sixth Mass Extinction, a world of capital making more capital off of war, resource theft, thievery of other nations’ and cultures’ futures. Jobs, Who Doesn’t Choose to Collapse, Hothouse Planet, People As I continually teach young people to think, you are what you eat, what you do, what you think, what your read, what you say, what you believe, what you aspire to, what you hope for, what you do or not do to be one with humanity. If your life is one of toil, what is inside the heart, and what do you do with those beliefs and philosophies while slogging away? Are you a believer in exceptionalism, Zionist or Christian superiority? Is the white shade of skin the defining element in your life? Do you have passions that are your own, or are they manufactured, designed, and cajoled by the money changers and propagandists?  The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. This line was from a speech by Rose Schneiderman, Polish-born socialist and feminist and prominent labor union leaders in America. It’s a phrase embodying everything today we workers need to utilize as a galvanizing force upon our souls to break away from these people like Bezos and the entire master crafters of our pain, poverty and penury. When I say “our,” I mean the world’s collective pain in the form of billions of people, for whom Western Culture (sic) has set loose a wildfire of forced displacement, murder, resource extraction, war and disease of the mind and body. It was also a successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, during January–March 1912, which is pretty much universally referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike. Pairing bread and roses not as counter-balances — fair wages and dignified conditions. Defining “the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances in the light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect,” as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013. I imagine the Bezos types wanting every last penny from every last $2-a-day inhabitant on earth, and I imagine this fellow is as steely-hearted as any in an Upton Sinclair book — and note this first quote by Sinclair is for me about men and women working today, even though Sinclair was writing about a living livestock animal torn from life: One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe…. Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. ― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Delusions  of Terra-Forming and Mickey Mouse Grabbing Adults’ Attention So what do we do with these Titans of idiocy, with their billions and their algorithms, with their broken telescopes peering into the black hole of humanity? What about the 150,000 chemicals in human cells created by the industrialists, those synergistic variant effects we have zero knowledge about, which have helped push our American society into a chronically ill species of over 50 percent of a population cycled through Western (Un-)Medicine. Children with autism or on the spectrum — count that as possibly 30 percent of all births by 2040. Diabetes 1 and 2, more than 15 percent or more of the population by 2040. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a really important concept that is difficult to teach the public, and when I say the public, I include my clinical colleagues. Still, atrazine is not the only human hormone-altering chemical in the environment. Dr. Winchester tested nearly 20 different chemicals and all demonstrated epigenetic effects, for example, all of the chemicals reduced fertility, even in the 3rd generation. Still, why do 150,000,000 Americans have chronic diseases? Researchers believe that every adult disease extant is linked to epigenetic origins. If confirmed over time with additional research, the study is a blockbuster that goes to the heart of public health and attendant government regulations. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a huge thing that is going to change how we understand the origin of disease. But a big part of that is that it will change our interpretation of what chemicals are safe. In medicine I can’t give a drug to somebody unless it has gone through a huge amount of testing. But all these chemicals haven’t gone through anything like that. We’ve been experimented on for the last 70 years, and there’s not one study on multi-generational effects. Environmental Working Group tested more than a dozen brands of oat-based foods to give Americans information about dietary exposures that government regulators are keeping secret. In April, internal emails obtained by the nonprofit US Right to Know revealed that the Food and Drug Administration has been testing food for glyphosate for two years and has found “a fair amount,” but the FDA has not released the findings. Ahh, the melting planet, the water cycle’s disrupted, the entire mess of planetary re-shifting is on a collision course with Homo Sapiens. Everyday I get more and more notifications from friends and thinkers about the impending collapses, the impending peak this and peak that (Peak Everything). Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote … can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That’s why I wrote this book.” ― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Feudal Factories of Propaganda and Propagating .001 Percenters — Water, Man, Water We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both. ― Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West We are seeing this circling of the billionaires’ wagons (vultures circling the 7.8 billion marks, us), this Bezos and Musk lust for space, for some planetary gated-armed-Utopian community. These fellows and dames are something else, and the conjurers of news unfit to consume fall over them, recording and publishing story after story about their wisdom and foresight and shamanistic ways of predicting the future. Remember George W. Bush and his big ranch buy in Paraguay? That was 12 years ago, readers, yet, back to the future, with news (sic) report after news report (sic) keeps tracking the next billionaire economic ejaculation. W, and we thought he was only painting pets! The Chaco is a semiarid, sparsely populated area known — to the extent that it’s known at all — for its abundant wildlife, rapid deforestation, nothing in particular… and what lies beneath it… Our Real Wealth Trader and Outstanding Investments contributor Jody Chudley thinks he knows the true gen about the Bush land grab. Jody says he has a “secret” about the Bushes. And he adds, “It has to do with an investment idea that’s hardly on anyone’s radar.” The real reason Jody thinks Bush 43 and family snapped up nearly 300,000 acres in those semiarid, sparsely populated wastes of Paraguay? Water. That’s right, blue gold. Bush bought the rights to a veritable ocean of fresh, clear-as-glass, Grade A water. His land rests atop one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world: Acuifero Guarani, by name. According to Jody, “Acuifero Guarani covers roughly 460,000 square miles under parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. It is estimated to contain about 8,900 cubic miles of water.” If you can’t quite imagine 8,900 miles of water, picture a pool nearly three times the size of California. That should give you a decent idea. A fair amount when you consider that 98% of this planet’s water is salt water. Of the other 2%, almost 87% of it is trapped within glaciers, hence inaccessible. Jody’s “trusty calculator” informs him that only 0.25% of the water on this cosmic ball is fresh (underground, or in rivers and lakes). Just a drop in the figurative bucket… Now, we knew this sort of stuff was going on with the elites, who look at us all as easy marks, broken money bags, the fat cows or broken pigs of their global stockades. What’s happened is this trickle-down lust-love-longing for these people who get plastered in the headlines as being grand and philanthropists, deserving of every cent and every billion made on the back of people, earth, cultures. Their trans-capital and monopolies  and viral presence like Google, Facebook, Walmart, and on and on sucks the revolution out of revolutionary, since we are now shackled to their ways of doing things. The goal of the capitalists is to harmonize their theft with our survival, whatever it takes to put five to a studio apartment (of course, sneaking the other four into the room in the dead of night), whatever it takes to just float through a gridlocked urban and suburban world. So, from Bush and Paraguay, to this Gawker Killer Thiel, we have enough evidence of their feudal ways, their slippery snake eyes methods of shitting on we underlings: Here is Robert Hunziker: Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and renowned super-super-super libertarian and unapologetic Trumpster love-fester achieved New Zealand citizenship in only 12 days and bought not only his citizenship but a $13.8 M estate in Wanaka, a lakeside community. According to a phone interview with the former PM of New Zealand John Key, “If you’re the sort of person that says I’m going to have an alternative plan when Armageddon strikes, then you would pick the farthest location and the safest environment – and that equals New Zealand if you Google it… It’s known as the last bus stop on the planet before you hit Antarctica. I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they would like to own a property in New Zealand if the world goes to hell in a hand-basket. Hell in a hand-basket, from the former prime minister of New Zealand — 1935 Book, quote: If the average white New Zealander takes the Maori seriously as a human being, he is usually rather too ready to blame him for characteristics which more careful study will show not to be inherent at all but actually the result of the coming of the Europeans themselves, the extensive destruction of Maori life and the virtual dispossession of the Maori people. Little attempt is commonly made to understand the causes which produced, for a time at any rate (for they are passing) those Maori characteristics which have become almost proverbial amongst us. To put it frankly, we blame the Maori for becoming what we have made him. It is interesting to realise that similar circumstances of the contact of peoples have occurred before, and in view of the people referred to there is one instance which it seems particularly fitting that we should bear in mind. The instance comes down to us from the days when another great Empire, an ancient one, was civilizing native peoples. There is on record a letter from a wealthy Roman landowner to his agent in Britain telling him to ship no more British slaves “as they are so lazy and cannot be trusted to work.” Similar causes produce similar effects; we should be less ready with hasty judgment and hasty blame. There is a widespread belief, and it is one certainly cherished by the average white New Zealander, that no native people have ever been so fairly treated by Europeans as have the Maori people. As a matter of fact, if it is fully and frankly told, the story of the contact of Europeans with native peoples is much the same everywhere. What we have are so many varieties of what a leading anthropologist has recently termed “the tragic mess which invariably results from the impact of white upon aboriginal culture.” It is true that the Maori people have survived, but this, on careful analysis, proves to be very largely due to their own qualities and their own efforts rather than to any specially favourable mode of treatment. If we are honest there is little ground for pakeha self-congratulation. Ahh, the evidence of climate change (global warming–hot planet) was there in 1896 researched, formulated and discoursed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and then later, amateur G. S. Callendar ramified the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels, and then later, C. D. Keeling measured the rising CO2 levels tying that to the greenhouse hot house effect), but for which has been swept into confusion by those marketers and mad men. Imagine, average planetary temps going up from  2.5–11°F by 2100. Imagine that! The more civilizations evolve, the more energy dependent they become, so it’s possible that trillions of civilizations in the great continuum of space evolved, rose, fell and disappeared. If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same. You’re going to have a hard time not triggering climate change. For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics. You can imagine certain civilizations saying, ‘I’m not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.’ But climate change, you can’t get away from. If you build a civilization, you’re using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you’re going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It’s probably universal. —  Adam Frank, astrophysicist Interlude, Interglacial Periods, Working for the Homeless — Flailing at Windmills   Yeah, these big ideas I broach with homeless veterans and their attendant family members, and while the Gates-Kochs-Zuckerbergs-Bloombergs-Adelsons-et al have zero concern about us, the proles, the  detritus of their Capital, I believe working to change one life at a time — even if it’s a life riddled with evictions, felonies, relapses, epigenetic familial hell, PTSD, trauma, spiritlessness, physical decay — has meaning since in that process I have incredible interchanges with people who sort of want the same thing — paradigm shifts and de-industrialization and ecosocialism a la Marx 3.0. I try to find peace in writing, even these polemics at DV or LA Progressive; and in my own world of fiction-poetry-creative nonfiction, the windmills abound because of a rarefied culture of the M-F-A (masters in fine arts) elite — those gatekeepers of the small literary kind, or even the National Book Award kind. This country is not big on real outliers in anything tied to the arts, and I am one of those round pegs looking to splinter the quintessential square hole. Short story collection? Who the hell would read that? Well, try out a project of mine to get the stories —  thematically (sort of) threaded (sort of) to the “Vietnam experience” — as a hard copy from a small press, Cirque. You can read one of the stories, “Bloody Sheets,” here, starting on page 115. The collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam, is a gathering of fiction, much of which has been published in literary journals. I have succumbed to a Go Fund Me “deal” to help balance-offset the costs of printing a book on paper with ink. I have no idea if a Go Fund Me will even take off. The first and only donation is from filmmaker Brian Lindstrom. Amazing, a struggling documentarian throwing in FIRST. But we are in a new normal of shitting on writers, expecting us to have our day and then our night jobs and then write-write-write for free. That is the question, really, who wants to spend their time reading short stories, outside the very narrow readership of Masters of Fine Arts aficionados who in many regards can be pedantic and puffery artists? Vietnam, no less, in a time of Tim Burns rotting the foundation of the war we committed, or the Obama administration’s scrubbing of the war in his effort to commemorate it (Obama gives killer Kissinger awards). Vietnam. One of my short journalist pieces for an old weekly I worked for in Spokane. How many died in Vietnam and Indochina? 3.8 million? Oh, that Nobel Cause (War) myth I run into daily at a homeless veterans shelter, that is was winnable and worthy. Killing farmers, man, in their rice paddies! Whew, only a Zionist could write that script. Read my short story collection for a different way to frame creativity and that time period, that narrative framing, that time in history that has defined and redefined the ugly wars of today. I am going to give this a shot in a time of blatant skepticism and group-think/act/do. Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Be part of the creative impetus. The energy. The publication of a short story collection. With that “ask” of the reader who then gives will receive another book of mine, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber. In my view [Dan Kovalik], this Noble Cause myth may be the most powerful and enduring propaganda trick ever perpetrated. And, it works so well because the audience for the trick — the U.S. people — are such willing and eager participants in the charade. To explain the power of the Noble Cause myth, Marciano quotes from Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize lecture.  I set forth a larger quote from the lecture than appears in the book because it is so profound: The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. John Steppling, my fellow writer who studies intersections of culture-mimesis-art-politics (My review of his book,  Aesthetic Resistence and Dis-interest. That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said, here at DV) discusses the MFA phenomenon, a true watering down and controlled form of check and balances fiction: So, the fact that The Rockefeller Foundation underwrote (and still underwrites) a good many MFA programs (and not just in literature, but in theatre and fine arts) is both relevant, and not. Or maybe a better way to address this is see The Rockefeller Foundation as symptom. I received a Rockefeller fellowship, which I hadn’t applied for. But, the very fact that creative writing programs boomed after WW2, and permeated the academic landscape is without question linked to the patronage of institutions like The Rockefeller Foundation (and the MacArthur Foundation, and…). And to deny that the tacit influence of these institutions is idiotic. Now, it’s also true that what John Crowe Ransom and Stegner and Burrows preached is correct. Or it’s correct up to a point. It is revealing that Melville was derided, because Melville wrote a lot of ideas, and additionally observed the ways those ideas and that knowledge existed in the world. But it is equally true that you do not observe those harpoons so closely, or closely in a particular way, that all you get is a harpoon description. And a so described harpoon that never participates in riots or social unrest, and whose production is unexamined and the harpoon company that distributes it is left blank…the better to describe the fluted morning dew that bifurcates my tabby cat’s shadow on the harpoon handle, and etc etc etc is only a individual’s sensory observation. The harpoon must be known, not just observed. The real point here is that what Iowa started, and many other University programs followed, was to narrow down the definition of “fiction”. Dante would not be considered fiction today. While there is a point in demanding a concrete description, and not a generality, the exclusive focus on the concrete meant that ideas were being eliminated in fiction. The world is not abstract… but that includes History and politics and tensions of daily life. Those offices in New York, or those bad marriages, are not separate from the Chinese Revolution, or U.S. Imperialism, or the blockade of Cuba or the present two million men and women in prison in the United States. ‘Greatness’, whatever that means, and I have no problem with that word, or the ideas behind it, is in discovering both what that connection is, and ..and this is important I believe…how our own personal emotional and psychic formation, and development are related to both Mao and our failed marriages (or, even the successful ones). The emphasis on observation, on brute description, however eclipsed ideas as a subject for fiction. You may not sit down to write ideas, per se, but you certainly have an idea of what a harpoon is. You have to know certain things, and, in fact, the best writing is that which tells you what you don’t know, not describes nicely what you already do know. And there is a tendency in young writers to generalize. So on the one hand it’s natural to emphasize the concrete, but the result, perhaps intentional, or partly so (given the Rockefeller project) was the elimination of ideas in prose, and the narrowing of the definition of what constituted “fiction” http://clubof.info/

[zipgrowth]

Confronting the Realities of Sexual Harassment in Education and Edtech

When I was 24, I entered into my third year of teaching. I was bright-eyed, optimistic, and excited to start out a new role that combined administration with teaching middle-school math. I felt in control of my career and my job. But about six months in, an awkward encounter left me wondering whether that sense of control was indeed as real as I thought it to be.

While closing up my classroom one afternoon, the father of a student casually strolled up to me. I turned to greet him, assuming he had a question about his son’s performance in my class. But instead of asking me anything of that nature, he said:

“You know, Ms. Madda, those heels you’re wearing today are really sexy. Some of the other fathers and I were talking about it earlier. You should wear them more often. We’d love that.”

Up until that point, I had never dealt with something of that nature in a professional setting, something so overt, something that made me feel like an object rather than a professional. And the worst part? Every time I looked at his son in my classroom from then on, I was reminded of that incident.

As a young educator, I was unsure of what to do. I was scared to bring the matter to our administration—this father was on the school board. I didn’t tell other teachers about it, perhaps out of shame. One thing is for sure, however—it was the last time I ever wore those shoes to work.

And now, having watched the #MeToo movement unfold over the past year within the arts community, I find myself asking, “Is the education industry really all that different?”

Let the record show—the education world is no stranger to sexual harassment. In 2013, Ariel Norling, then an entrepreneur with an edtech startup, experienced sexual assault at the annual June ISTE conference. In 2014, she came forward to share her story.

...when issues of sexual harassment and sexism go ignored, what does our silence communicate to our children?

But since then, the education and edtech reporting worlds have been largely quiet on matters of sexual harassment and assault. That is, until last week—when KIPP, arguably the largest charter school system in the United States, announced that it had fired co-founder Mike Feinberg, citing that “credible evidence was found of [sexual] conduct that is incompatible with the mission and values of KIPP.”

Will the Feinberg episode set off a chain reaction in the education world, much like what has rocked the Hollywood elites? Maybe. After all, the education space bears the unmatched and sacred responsibility of educating children and young people—the very future of this country.

Here’s what I do know: Sexual harassment and assault doesn’t just happen in one or two education spaces. Here is a sampling of what those encounters look like, told from the perspective of six women interviewed from all corners of the industry—from K-12 districts to startups to higher education.

From the Grandiose...

For some women (and undoubtedly some men and non-binary folks, as well), the issues are relatively upfront and center—and leave them without many options.

Take Joanna*, a woman who worked for one of the largest education publishing organizations in the United States. As someone who traveled to conferences frequently, Joanna found herself one night in a compromising situation, in which a senior vice president approached her while intoxicated. While attempting to review some business matters with him, Joanna reports that he strayed off topic, and began to make comments such as referring to a colleague of hers as a “f*cking c*nt.” What made her most uncomfortable, however, was when she began to get up to leave, to which he responded, “Come back here and give us a snuggle.” She did not oblige.

Following that encounter, Joanna reports that communication between her and the VP became harsh: “There was no way to ever get him to understand me.” When she mentioned it to human resources, she noticed that more and more complaints were being submitted to HR from this VP about her behavior. And the eventual result? “I was fired, without severance, but never had any reviews of my behavior shared with me by human resources. I have no idea why it happened,” she reports.

Harassment does not solely relate to unwanted, sexual advances, however. In a similar vein, Lupita* was recently fired by her most recent employer, a higher education institution—a place where she was once told by her director, “You know what will help us raise money? If you wear short skirts or a low-cut shirt to our fundraising meetings.” But according to her, that was only part of what drove her to sue the university for discrimination.

As both a career woman and a mother, Lupita was familiar with the concept of work-life balance. She originally thought her employer was, too—until she started to pick up on discriminatory behavior from her director toward working mothers:

“As soon as we started hiring additional employees… I noticed him making comments about applicants like ‘I don’t think she’d be good because she’ll have to leave to pick up her kid from school.’ Or, in regards to one applicant, he said. ‘I don’t really see any red flags, but she’s transitioning back to the work after being a stay-at-home mom for six years’—even though [this applicant] was named the state’s online teacher of the year while simultaneously homeschooling her children.”

Lupita decided to bring up these negative comments about mothers with her director, but in response, he claimed that she had misunderstood him. And immediately after she raised her concerns, he organized a “mediation” with the university’s Title 9 representative—or so Lupita thought. As it turns out, when she showed up to the meeting, it was one of the university’s human resource representatives—who served her a pink slip.

...if harassment isn’t addressed, can we be comfortable knowing that these practices may, in fact, be “educating” our next generations to engage in the same behaviors?

...to the “Micro”

Joanna’s and Lupita’s stories occupy a part of the #MeToo movement that stand out as upfront harassment practices—but what about smaller grievances, like sexist comments that demonstrate intolerance?

Amongst the ensuing reactions from Hollywood during the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Matt Damon took the approach of, “That’s criminal behavior and it needs to be dealt with that way. The other stuff is just kind of shameful and gross... I just think that we have to start delineating between what these behaviors are.” Several actresses, including Alyssa Milano and Minnie Driver, responded by asking Damon to recognize that micro behaviors are the first steps to macro issues. Milano compared his statement to claiming that stage 1 cancer deserves less attention than stage 4 cancer.

Sexual harassment, misconduct, assault and violence is a systemic disease. The tumor is being cut out right now with no anesthesia. Please send flowers. #MeToo

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) December 16, 2017

Beth Rabbitt, CEO of edtech nonprofit, The Learning Accelerator, takes a stance similar that smaller sexist acts lead to larger issues, describing it like this: “I’ve experienced a lot of discriminatory, misogynistic behaviors over a long time. I have not been overtly assaulted or harassed by anyone in the ed or tech space. Specifically, [but] like so many straws that broke the camel’s back, the many moments add up to a lot.”

For Rabbitt, sexism varies in the ways it’s either purposely or inadvertently applied. She remembers back to 2014, when an organization she worked for invited only their male employees to a special networking event. This year, she listened on as a conversation next to her ensued between men in the edtech startup space, speaking about how to pick up women to sleep with at a conference.

For females moving into predominantly male-run district technology offices, breaking into the “old boys” club can be quite a challenge. Both Melissa Emler, a longtime educator in Wisconsin, and Giselle*, a high-ranking tech administrator in her public school district, join Rabbitt in her frustrations around having to prove oneself and demonstrate competency as a female employee.

Emler, for example, will never forget the slow chipping away of her confidence early in her career. “It was rough trying to work with my boss because I could tell he was threatened... I started to prepare for board meetings by scouring the board agenda, figuring out where he would throw me under the bus.”

Giselle, who is the first female in a technical leadership position in her district, describes how her male colleagues called her “girlie” and “missy” behind her back, and more:

“It’s frustrating when I ask my colleagues multiple times to send emails with technical questions to me. They respond, ‘Well, you’re going to get all sorts of technical emails that you don’t understand,’” as if questioning why I was hired for my job in the first place.”

It should be not ignored, however, that sexist and harassing acts aren’t solely being conducted by men—women are doing their part, as well. Back when she worked for a small edtech startup, Alexis* was one of the few females employees who worked in a technical role. Upon returning to the office after a work trip, she found that a colleague—which she later found out was her manager, a female—had written "For a good time, call Alexis" on the sign on her computer monitor where Alexis had left her emergency contact information.

“It was really unnerving,” Alexis admits, “I assumed that one of the male engineers I managed had written it to publicly embarrass and undermine me. Even though it ended up being a female colleague, my confidence took a huge hit. It was right in front of everyone."

Rabbitt, who has seen similar issues in her line of work, says that “the discrimination starts early” and “as women, we become inured to it—the roles we get to play and how we get to play them becomes assumed in our identities.”

Combatting Sexism and Harassment in Education: What’s At Stake

For every Alexis, Joanna, Lupita, Giselle, Melissa, and Beth out there, it’s not always clear what to do and how to react in these situations—and how to ensure that these behaviors don’t bleed down to the point where students become the targets. Simultaneously, for men who hope to do what they can to combat these behaviors in their colleagues, there are certain actions that might be more helpful than others.

Perhaps the right place to begin is by shedding light on the issue. After all, parents are demonstrating their willingness to be vocal when their children’s safety is at stake. Last month, the group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, founded by Joel Levin and Esther Warkov, created a spin-off of #MeToo entitled #MeTooK12. According to The Washington Post, “the new hashtag is an effort to highlight sexual harassment and assault at K-12 schools.” For Levin and Warkov, a personal experience led to their efforts: Levin and Warkov hope that shedding light on the issue will ensure that districts and school take more purposeful steps to prevent these issues.

Why is it important that we address sexism and sexual harassment the education industry—and, particularly, in schools and universities? A sense of ethics or morality is high on the list. The education world is designed to be in service of children and young adults. And if harassment isn’t addressed, can we be comfortable knowing that these practices may, in fact, be “educating” our next generations to engage in the same behaviors? Levin and Warkov are doing their part to ensure that schools remain safe places to learn. But when issues of sexual harassment and sexism go ignored, what does our silence communicate to our children?

To this day, I wonder if my old sixth-grade student ever learned what his father said to me, a teacher, a professional. To this day, I wonder how that young boy is growing up—and if, someday, he’ll say those same things to someone he works with.

*These names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the interviewees, at their request. 

Confronting the Realities of Sexual Harassment in Education and Edtech published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness