Saturday, July 15, 2017

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Behind The Scenes


Go behind the scenes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In theaters December 15. 

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Maryam Mirzakhani, groundbreaking mathematician and Fields Medal winner, dies at 40


July 15, 2017 at 2:52 PM EDT


Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, the recipient of the 2014 Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics. She was the first woman in the prize's 80-year history to earn the distinction. Photo courtesy of Stanford News Service.

Maryam Mirzakhani, who in 2014 became the first woman awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics, has died at the age of 40.

The world-renowned Iranian mathematician and Stanford professor died from breast cancer at a hospital in the United States.

"Maryam is gone far too soon, but her impact will live on for the thousands of women she inspired to pursue math and science," Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement. "Maryam was a brilliant mathematical theorist, and also a humble person who accepted honors only with the hope that it might encourage others to follow her path."

Her friend Firouz Michael Naderi, an Iranian-American NASA scientist, said on Instagram, "A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart…gone far too soon."

Born in Tehran in 1977, Mirzakhani won two international math awards as a teenager. Despite an auspicious start, she said that she had no intention of pursing mathematics. She liked to read and thought that maybe she would become a writer.

"My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find," she said in a 2014 interview with The Guardian.

It was at Sharif University of Technology in Iran, where she received her Bachelor of Science, that she discovered her passion for mathematics.

"The more I spent time on mathematics, the more excited I became," she told The Guardian.
Mirzakhani completed her PhD at Harvard in 2004, then accepted positions as a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute and an assistant professor at Princeton, accruing awards and acclaim along the way. In 2008, at 31, she became a professor at Stanford.

And then, in 2014, she received the highest honor in mathematics: 80 years after the award was established, Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. She was also the first Iranian to receive the prize, which is given every four years to exceptional mathematicians under the age of 40.

According to the awarding committee, Mirzakhani's genius came from her "rare combination of superb technical ability, bold ambition, far-reaching vision, and deep curiosity."

She won the prize for a 172-page paper on the trajectory of a billiards ball around a polygonal table that has been hailed as a "titanic work" and the "beginning of a new era" in mathematics. Mirzakhani studied the complexities of curved surfaces such as spheres, doughnut shapes and hyperbolas. She said in interviews that she liked the interdisciplinary connections and implications of her work.

"I find it fascinating that you can look at the same problem from different perspectives and approach it using different methods," she said.

Mirzakhani, who described herself as a slow mathematician, was drawn to big, difficult questions in her field, a trait that made her a revered figure within the mathematics community.

In 2014, she told Quanta Magazine, a science publication, that she thought about mathematics in pictures, doodling her ideas on giant sheets of paper scattered across her office. A colleague speculated that perhaps she organized her thoughts like this because the "problems she is working on are so abstract and complicated, she can't afford to make logical steps one by one but has to make big jumps."

As a professor and scholar, Mirzakhani's pictures helped her write stories with her math. In a way, she told Quanta, working on mathematics is a lot like writing a novel.

"There are different characters, and you are getting to know them better," she said. "Things evolve, and then you look back at a character, and it's completely different from your first impression."
She is survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and their daughter, Anahita.

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A Wrinkle In Time Official US Teaser Trailer


A Wrinkle In Time opens in US theatres March 9, 2018.

The film, which is an epic adventure based on Madeleine L’Engle’s timeless classic which takes audiences across dimensions of time and space, examining the nature of darkness versus light and ultimately, the triumph of love.

Directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee based upon the beloved novel by Madeleine L’Engle, “A Wrinkle in Time” is produced by Jim Whitaker and Catherine Hand with Doug Merrifield serving as executive producer. The film stars: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peňa, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, André Holland, Rowan Blanchard with Zach Galifianakis and Chris Pine and introduces Storm Reid.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

LONDON, ENGLAND Green Day Crowd Singing Bohemian Rhapsody



Only Queen can rock an entire stadium without even being there.

Fam, I’m Not Here for your Millennial Shaming / A Teacher's Evolving Mind


Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 1946, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born. The planet may never recover.

The Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation defeated fascism, built the interstate highway system, and most of our modern infrastructure. They electrified Appalachia, ended Southern Jim Crow de jure segregation, rebuilt a third of the planet via the Marshall Plan, and artfully avoided vaporizing the planet in a nuclear holocaust in the Cold War.

In contrast, the Boomers still can't get over Vietnam.

I was born in 1979, the tail end of Generation X and Boomers have dominated American politics my entire adult life. They've waged a pointless, polarizing, five decade long culture war. Boomers wasted billions in a racist and classist war on drugs that has militarized local law enforcement, and fueled mass incarceration. They've delayed maintenance on the infrastructure they inherited to the point that bridges are literally falling down and our rail system falls somewhere between Poland and Morrocco's. They have poisoned our politics through congressional gerrymandering, corporate media consolidation, and dumbed-down-cable news-soundbite politics. Most damaging, they killed the idea of "Americans as Citizens" -- people with a sense of shared obligation and ushered in the period of "Americans as Taxpayers" -- atomized, lone wolves with no appreciation of history, civics nor the common good.

The evidence of decline is all around us. Our most beautiful and important bridges and infrastructure were all built decades ago. I recently returned from a trip to Eastern Washington where I visited the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph Dams. While standing in their respective visitors' centers, I realized that they, like almost every Park Service or Interior Department facility that I've visited, are frozen in amber relics from the 1980s. This is about the time Congress started taking a hatchet to the non-defense discretionary budget in order to pay for endless waves of tax cuts for Boomers.

The Laffer Curve could only come from and could only work on this silly, selfish generation. They have lavished benefits on themselves: Medicare Part D, mortgage interest deductions, and decades of war abroad -- all while demanding tax cut, after tax cut, after tax cut. This is the essence of Boomer economics: after benefiting from more taxpayer subsidies than any US generation, they've hollowed out of the commons in order to provide tax breaks to themselves, and debt & deficits in perpetuity for us.
From Bakersfield Observed

I am a part of the last generation of Americans who could feasibly work their way through college and graduate debt free. Somewhere in the late-aughts driven by stagnated wages and skyrocketing tuition costs, working your way through college became nearly impossible. In half a lifetime, college tuition costs have risen from under $500 per year to their current levels, where the typical graduate crosses the stage with +$37,000 in debt. Rising tuition costs are driven by declining state support for universities, which is driven by tax cuts. Boomers are the worst.

Boomers have waged inter-generational financial warfare on future generations, all the while calling them lazy, undisciplined, and impractical. How exactly do we build a future middle class if higher education is out of reach for those who need it most -- the working poor? This is a problem the Boomers lack the capacity, willingness, and empathy to solve, but it is one we must confront in the near future.

I've had my fill with Millennial shaming.
The business press concern trolls debt-ladened Millennials (and soon Gen Z kids) with petty, hot-take articles about them destroying the diamond industry (good riddance to De Beers), bar soap (because it's gross and unsanitary), Applebee's (it won't be missed), and my favorite -- the housing market (spoiler: they're delaying buying homes because of low wages and the aforementioned $37k average student loan debt).

I've met with and lobbied Boomer policymakers at every level of government. It's an exhausting exercise. But, in my 9-5, I've spent the last eleven years teaching Millennials and now Generation Z kids. It's not even a contest. The kids are more empathetic, less judgmental, more collaborative, and more justice-oriented than the folks running our country today. They're less ideologically rigid and think the current era of partisan gridlock is dumb (which it surely is). The kids are alright. A future built by Millennials and Generation Z kids will be far brighter and egalitarian than the present. I pray I live long enough to see the world they'll create, if the Boomers don't destroy it all first.

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Brando Speaks Up for Native Americans

Monday, July 10, 2017

The Final Wave of Souls is Here And It's Going to Change Everything


Since time immemorial right down to the spiritual science fiction novels of Arthur C. Clarke, mankind has been pondering the great question of the nature of consciousness. From the theories of psychologists such as Erich Fromm, we know that an archetypal and primordial collective consciousness is present within humankind.

This article will explore how that consciousness might develop further in the course of the Third Millennium. What we mean by that is that the ultimate consciousness of the 'Singularity' is at hand. It will be a time of true soul communion and the long awaited reincarnation of the 'Virgin Souls' is the sign that the hour is nigh.

Even old philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson had seen this coming. His ideal of Transcendentalism had imagined an 'Over-Soul' or 'Over-Mind'. Spiritual Union with Great Absolute is what humanity will achieve through our preordained species' destiny. This does not mean that the road ahead is not without its fair share of traps.

In fact, most Souls incarnating today are Third Wavers or their forerunners, to help accommodate for the next step in the evolution and expansion of the human consciousness.

The First few forerunners started to arrive roughly 100 years ago as scouts to make preparations for the Third Wave. Their talents were many and varied and appropriate for the task.

From about 1940 onward, these Souls with their special talents became known as the Indigo Children and began to arrive in larger numbers. Does that ring a bell? Think about it, the fact that these special forerunner souls had the grit, guts and gumption to change the world is fairly evident.
Take a look around you and see the amazing journey that we have charted over the course of merely 100 years; which is less than a blink on the cosmic time scale. The Indigos came to prepare for the arrival of the Third Wave of Virgin Souls who had never been to earth before. All Indigos have only little Karma from previous lives to deal with and they have guts and many talents.

This paved the way for the arrival of the long awaited Star-Seed Children or the Rainbow Generation. By the 1990s they made their first appearance and the human spiritual evolutionary cycle moved into high gear.

The Third Wave has no karmic burden or accountability to the earth dimensions or other earthlings, whatsoever — they are all Virgin Souls.

They are angels incarnated, just like both the first and second wave where when they first arrived.
However, they are all born with a built-in moral compass, because the "veil" of Forgetfulness that other Souls have, is "torn in twain". Ancient Oriental myths and philosophies also talk about the importance of the collective memory for the spirit. The ancient Sanskrit scriptures confirm this by talking about the concept of 'smriti' (which literally means memory), and how it can break the cycle of rebirths to create Moksha. Similarly the veil of 'Forgetfulness' allows them to view the Earth as dispassionate.

These gifts are usually revealed as they grow older. Their enthusiasm is demonstrated in their creativity.

The Rainbow children are to be the builders of the New World, using Divine will. They are fearless and are pure givers ready to fulfill mankind's needs. They will be the ones to bring about the fabled 'End of Childhood'. By this we mean the end of the Spiritual Childhood.

The banishment of self-alienation will take humanity closer to a union with the Primal Cause (we call God) and finally evolve us to be beings of the fifth dimension.

The Higher Beings exist in the place of the great so-called 'Ultra-Brockian' Realms, which would make their existence perpendicular to reality as the uninformed observer in the time-space continuum would see.

Humanity's destiny may be fulfilled in the course of the next generations, something that the ancient texts of the primordial civilizations (think Atlantis) had always foretold. We have reached for the spiritual stars as a species. It is time to embrace our destiny. There is no turning back now!

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Poll: Majority Of Republicans Now Say Colleges Are Bad For America


A Pew poll released Monday shows that Republicans' views of higher education institutions have taken a dramatic turn for the worse since 2015.

In September 2015, 54 percent of Republicans told Pew that they had a positive stance on college and universities, while 37 percent felt negatively toward them.

Today, their attitude seems to have taken a complete U-turn, with 58 percent of Republicans saying that colleges and universities had a "negative effect on the way things are going in the country." Only 36 percent maintained that they're good for the country.

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Meanwhile, 72 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democrat have a positive attitude toward the institutions. According to Pew, this stance hasn't changed much in recent years.

This striking switch among Republicans echoes a trend among conservatives of blasting "PC culture" and "censorship of free speech" on college campuses and taking legislative action against it.
On June 20, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) held a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on free speech on college campuses titled "Free Speech 101: The Assault on the First Amendment on College Campuses."

According to the Washington Post, Grassley charged that free speech "appears to be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness."

Also present was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who lamented, "It's tragic what is happening at so many American universities where college administrators and faculties have become complicit in functioning essentially as speech police."

Two days after the hearing, the Wisconsin State Assembly passed a GOP-backed bill allowing college administrators to expel students for "disrupting" college speakers, according to NBC.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) applauded the move:

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Nevada Declares State of Emergency After a Week of Legal Weed


This is what you get, Las Vegas!

You know what's chill? Smoking weed in Las Vegas. You know what's decidedly unchill? Going to Las Vegas hoping to score some legal, locally grown marijuana, only to find out the whole state has completely run out of bud.

The state of Nevada legalized the use of marijuana for anyone older than 21 in November 2016, but recreational cannabis sales officially began July 1. On Monday, however, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval declared a state of emergency, citing the state's low weed supply and urging his constituents to adopt some new regulation to encourage more production. Lawmakers and stoners alike can now predict responsibly that high demand and low supply will be a problem for each state that legalizes marijuana. In order to keep "emergencies" like Nevada's from happening, we're going to have to develop a smoother plan of attack for rolling out legal, recreational weed.

Nevada state spokeswoman Stephanie Klapstein told USA Today, "Based on reports of adult-use marijuana sales already far exceeding the industry's expectations at the state's 47 licensed retail marijuana stores, and the reality that many stores are running out of inventory, the Department must address the lack of distributors immediately."

Local Reno publications have estimated that the state raked in over $1 million in sales tax on weed alone this week, which bolsters the argument made by weed legalization advocates for decades that the process will help the American economy.





Running out of weed isn't groovy, man.

Of course, it's difficult to talk about the upside to marijuana legalization without mentioning the disturbing number of Americans who are currently serving prison sentences for weed distribution. In fact, more than half of drug-related arrests in the U.S. in 2010 were based solely in weed. The system is related to race as well; black Americans are almost four times as likely to be arrested and thrown in prison for possession or the intent to sell marijuana. The state of Nevada is trying to remedy that fact in small ways; in March, the Las Vegas Sun reported that those previously arrested for marijuana-related charges would be eligible to have their records wiped clean of the offense under new laws.
As for the state's "emergency" shortage, the dispensaries are currently under more demand for product than their suppliers can keep up with, mostly because it takes a lot more time to create and foster a legal, natural supply of marijuana than it does to open a dispensary. Until folks in Nevada are able to close the gap, the best places to buy legal weed in the United States are still Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.

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Mahavishnu Orchestra / Vision is a Naked Sword





Sunday, July 9, 2017

Study Theology, Even If You Don't Believe in God


This lost liberal art encourages scholars to understand history from the inside out.

The Evangelist St. Matthew with his symbol, the angel The National Library of the Netherlands / Wikimedia Commons

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When I first told my mother—a liberal, secular New Yorker—that I wanted to cross an ocean to study for a bachelor's degree in theology, she was equal parts aghast and concerned. Was I going to become a nun, she asked in horror, or else one of "those" wingnuts who picketed outside abortion clinics? Was I going to spend hours in the Bodleian Library agonizing over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin? Theology, she insisted, was a subject by the devout, for the devout; it had no place in a typical liberal arts education.

Her view of the study of theology is far from uncommon. While elite universities like Harvard and Yale offer vocational courses at their divinity schools, and nearly all universities offer undergraduate majors in the comparative study of religions, few schools (with the exceptions of historically Catholic institutions like Georgetown and Boston College) offer theology as a major, let alone mandate courses in theology alongside other "core" liberal arts subjects like English or history. Indeed, the study of theology has often run afoul of the legal separation of church and state. Thirty-seven U.S. states have laws limiting the spending of public funds on religious training. In 2006, the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible College.

Even in the United Kingdom, where secular bachelor's programs in theology are more common, prominent New Atheists like Richard Dawkins have questioned their validity in the university sphere. In a 2007 letter to the editor of The Independent, Dawkins argues for the abolishment of theology in academia, insisting that "a positive case now needs to be made that [theology] has any real content at all, or that it has any place whatsoever in today's university culture."


Such a shift, of course, is relatively recent in the history of secondary education. Several of the great Medieval universities, among them Oxford, Bologna, and Paris, developed in large part as training grounds for men of the Church. Theology, far from being anathema to the academic life, was indeed its central purpose: It was the "Queen of the Sciences" the field of inquiry which gave meaning to all others. So, too, several of the great American universities. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alike were founded with the express purpose of teaching theology—one early anonymous account of Harvard's founding speaks of John Harvard's ,"dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches"and his dream of creating an institution to train future clergymen to "read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically."

Universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton no longer exist, in part or in whole, to train future clergymen. Their purpose now is far broader. But the dwindling role of theology among the liberal arts is a paradigmatic example of dispensing with the baby along with the bathwater.

Richard Dawkins would do well to look at the skills imparted by the Theology department of his own alma mater, Oxford (also my own). The BA I did at Oxford was a completely secular program, attracting students from all over the religious spectrum. My classmates included a would-be priest who ended up an atheist, as well as a militant atheist now considering the priesthood. During my time there, I investigated Ancient Near Eastern building patterns to theorize about the age of a settlement; compared passages of the gospels (in the original Greek) to analogous passages in the Jewish wisdom literature of the 1st century BC; examined the structure of a 14th-century Byzantine liturgy; and read The Brothers Karamazov as part of a unit on Christian existentialism. As Oxford's Dr. William Wood, a University Lecturer in Philosophical Theology and my former tutor, puts it: "theology is the closest thing we have at the moment to the kind of general study of all aspects of human culture that was once very common, but is now quite rare." A good theologian, he says, "has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides." In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, "Queen of the Sciences," but at least, as Wood terms it, "Queen of the Humanities."

Yet, for me, the value of theology lies not merely in the breadth of skills it taught, but in the opportunity it presented to explore a given historical mindset in greater depth. I learned to read the Bible in both Greek and Hebrew, to analyze the minutiae of language that allows us to distinguish "person" from "nature," "substance" from "essence." I read "orthodox" and "heretical" accounts alike of the nature of the Godhead, and learned about the convoluted and often arbitrary historical processes that delineated the two.

To study theology well requires not faith, but empathy.

Such precision may seem—to the religious person and agnostic alike—no more useful than counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. But for me, it allowed me access into the fundamental building blocks of the mentality, say, of a 12th-century French monk, or a mystic from besieged Byzantium. While the study of history taught me the story of humanity on a broader scale, the study of theology allowed me insight into the minds and hearts, fears and concerns, of those in circumstances that were so wildly different from my own. The difference between whether—as was the case in the Arian controversy of the fourth-century AD—the Godhead should be thought of as powerful first, and loving second, or loving first and powerful second, might seem utterly pedantic in a world where plenty of people see no need to think about God at all. But when scores of people were willing to kill or die to defend such beliefs—hardly a merely historical phenomenon—it's worth investigating how and why such beliefs infused all aspects of the world of their believers. How does that 12th-century French monk's view of the nature of God affect the way he sees himself, his relationship with others, his relationship with the natural world, his relationship with his own mortality? How does that Byzantine mystic conceive of space and time in a world he envisions as imbued with the sacred? To find such questions integral to any study of the past is not restricted to those who agree with the answers. To study theology well requires not faith, but empathy.

If history and comparative religion alike offer us perspective on world events from the "outside," the study of theology offers us a chance to study those same events "from within": an opportunity to get inside the heads of those whose beliefs and choices shaped so much of our history, and who—in the world outside the ivory tower—still shape plenty of the world today. That such avenues of inquiry have virtually vanished from many of the institutions where they were once best explored is hardly a triumph of progress or of secularism. Instead, the absence of theology in our universities is an unfortunate example of blindness—willful or no—to the fact that engagement with the past requires more than mere objective or comparative analysis. It requires a willingness to look outside our own perspectives in order engage with the great questions—and questioners—of history on their own terms. Even Dawkins might well agree with that.

About the Author

  • Tara Isabella Burton is a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, where she is working on a doctorate in theology and literature. She has written for Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Salonand The New Statesman.

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Dismantling Power: The Zapatista Indigenous Presidential Candidate's Vision to Transform Mexico from Below


"Patricio's candidacy and radical vision for Mexico challenges conventional politics and marks a new phase for the Zapatista and indigenous struggle in the country."



"As a presidential candidate chosen by the CNI and Zapatistas, [María de Jesús Patricio Martínez] is not interested in winning votes, but in grassroots organizing and resisting the destruction that so many communities in Mexico are facing," writes Benjamin Dangl. (Photo: Montecruz Foto/Flickr/cc)
The Zapatistas and National Indigenous Congress (CNI) held an assembly in May in which they chose María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, a Nahua indigenous healer, as their spokesperson and presidential candidate for the 2018 elections in Mexico.

"Patricio's candidacy is based on a model of politics that is far removed from the dominant political parties in the country. Indeed, her position is part of a horizontal, communally-organized structure that relies on democratic decision-making and governance from the bottom-up."Patricio's candidacy and radical vision for Mexico challenges conventional politics and marks a new phase for the Zapatista and indigenous struggle in the country.

The 57-year-old traditional Nahua indigenous doctor and mother of three from western Mexico is the first indigenous woman to run for the presidency in Mexico.

Patricio joined the struggles related to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1996, when she was involved in the formation of the CNI, a network of indigenous communities in the country. She began helping out sick members of her community with herbal remedies when she was 20-years-old. Her skills as a healer were passed down to her from elders in the community, and are based on a close relationship with the local ecosystem.

"Back then, there was a shortage of doctors and medicine and the health department had no answers," Patricio told the Guardian. "But we have so many plants and so much knowledge from our elders. My grandmother would give us special teas to cure stress, coughs or diarrhea, and they worked. So I thought: why not give herbal remedies to those who can't afford medicine?" Her work as an herbalist has influenced her political views: "The political class only see the earth and our natural resources as means of making money, not things that benefit the community and need protecting."
As a presidential candidate chosen by the CNI and Zapatistas, she is not interested in winning votes, but in grassroots organizing and resisting the destruction that so many communities in Mexico are facing.

"Our participation is for life," she explained at a press conference in Chiapas. "It's to bring together our communities that have been hit hard for years and years and that, I think, right now need to look for a way to keep on existing." Her goal is for Mexicans to "to join forces to be able to destroy this system that is generally finishing us all off."

A Different Way of Doing Politics
Patricio's candidacy is based on a model of politics that is far removed from the dominant political parties in the country. Indeed, her position is part of a horizontal, communally-organized structure that relies on democratic decision-making and governance from the bottom-up.

Though seeking office, Patricio is less of a candidate and more of a spokesperson for the CNI and Zapatistas. She reflects and represents the democratic indigenous governing council, its consultations with communities, and local indigenous customs. One goal of her candidacy is to expand this network and governing model while rejecting the Mexican political system.

This grassroots political structure was described in a communique released by the Zapatistas and CNI released in October of 2016, titled "May The Earth Tremble at its Core." The statement announced the groups' decision to participate in the elections with an indigenous woman candidate, and described the communal organization which forms the basis of their political vision, one carried out "collectively" and "from below and to the left."
We build rebellion from our small local assemblies that combine to form large communal assemblies, ejidal assemblies, Juntas de Buen Gobierno [Good Government Councils], and coalesce as agreements as peoples that unite us under one identity. In the process of sharing, learning, and constructing ourselves as the National Indigenous Congress, we see and feel our collective pain, discontent, and ancestral roots. In order to defend what we are, our path and learning process have been consolidated by strengthening our collective decision-making spaces, employing national and international juridical law as well as peaceful and civil resistance, and casting aside the political parties that have only brought death, corruption, and the buying off of dignity. We have made alliances with various sectors of civil society, creating our own resources in communication, community police and self-defense forces, assemblies and popular councils, and cooperatives; in the exercise and defense of traditional medicine; in the exercise and defense of traditional and ecological agriculture; in our own rituals and ceremonies to pay respect to mother earth and continue walking with and upon her, in the cultivation and defense of native seeds, and in political-cultural activities, forums, and information campaigns. 
This is the power from below that has kept us alive. This is why commemorating resistance and rebellion also means ratifying our decision to continue to live, constructing hope for a future that is only possible upon the ruins of capitalism.
Considering this struggle, the CNI and Zapatistas decided to organize a process of consultation with their communities and choose an independent candidate for the presidency. "We confirm that our struggle is not for power, which we do not seek. Rather, we call on all of the originary peoples and civil society to organize to put a stop to this destruction and strengthen our resistances and rebellions, that is, the defense of the life of every person, family, collective, community, or barrio. We make a call to construct peace and justice by reweaving ourselves from below, from where we are what we are." They concluded, "This is the time of dignified rebellion, the time to construct a new nation by and for everyone, to strengthen power below and to the anti-capitalist left…"
"We do not seek to administer power; we want to dismantle it"

After the May meeting of this year which chose Patricio as the spokesperson and candidate, the Zapatistas and CNI released a communique outlining their vision and strategy.

"We do not seek to administer power; we want to dismantle it from within the cracks from which we know we are able," they stated in the communique, entitled "The Time Has Come." They explained that their goal was to "deepen the cracks" that workers and activists have made in the political system and Mexican society, and to dismantle "power from above from the smallest level to the largest. We want to make so many cracks that they become our honest and anti-capitalist government."
"The political class has dedicated itself to turning the State into a corporation that sells off the land of the originary peoples, campesinos, and city dwellers, that sells people as if they were just another commodity to kill and bury like raw material for the drug cartels, that sells people to capitalist businesses that exploit them until they are sick or dead," the statement explained. "In the midst of this revulsion they continue to tell us to vote for them, to believe in the power from above, to let them continue to design and impose our destiny."
They denounced the myth of democracy in Mexico and pledged to transform the country from below:
No demand of our peoples, no determination and exercise of autonomy, no hope made into reality has ever corresponded to the electoral ways and times that the powerful call 'democracy.' Given that, we intend not only to wrest back from them our destiny which they have stolen and spoiled, but also to dismantle the rotten power that is killing our peoples and our mother earth. For that task, the only cracks we have found that have liberated consciences and territories, giving comfort and hope, are resistance and rebellion.
Echoing this vision, Patricio spoke at a meeting this year in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas of the centrality of women in Mexico's grassroots movements, "the woman who struggles, who organizes, who is invisible and whose voice is not heard, but who has been present during the long history of struggles that we have had, in Mexico as well as in other countries."

She discussed the various women's struggles across Mexico, in Acteal, Yucatan, Veracruz, Michoacan, and Oaxaca, where women are on the front lines against mining, for the liberation of political prisoners, and in search of disappeared family members.

"This is the power from below that has kept us alive. This is why commemorating resistance and rebellion also means ratifying our decision to continue to live, constructing hope for a future that is only possible upon the ruins of capitalism."

"In spite of everything," she continued, "women have been participating in the process of reconstruction of our communities in a struggle alongside men, alongside children. Sometimes they have been invisible and have been silenced by those in power."

Patricio placed her role as spokesperson and candidate within this wider women's struggle, explaining that her goal is not to win the presidency, but to win "unity below, the unity between communities and other sectors that are tired of this structure that we have, and want to build a new structure from below."

Originally published by TowardFreedom.com

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All-girl engineer team invents solar-powered tent for the homeless


The DIY Girls
How 12 teens invented a solar-powered tent for the homeless
by Brittany Levine Beckman

As Daniela Orozco picks off excess plastic bordering a 3D-printed box, she recalls how many homeless people she saw on her way to school when she was a high school freshman.

Just one.

Four years later, the number has multiplied. People live on a main thoroughfare near the school, at a nearby park, and below the off-ramps and bridges in her hometown of San Fernando, which is about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. In the San Fernando Valley, homelessness increased 36% to 7,094 people last year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency's annual count. Daniela and her friends wanted to help, but giving money wasn't an option.

"Because we come from low-income families ourselves, we can't give them money," the high school senior says.

"We wanted to offer something besides money," her classmate, Veronica Gonzalez, chimes in.
That was the starting point for their invention: a solar-powered tent that folds up into a rollaway backpack. The girls and 10 others from their high school had never done any hands-on engineering work before, but with the help of YouTube, Google, and trial-and-error, they got it done.

They hope that one day, their tent will improve the lives of people experiencing homelessness in their community.

Paulina Martinez zips up the solar-powered tent as the team works on final sewing touches.

Left to right: Kassandra Salazar, Paulina Martinez, and Paola Valtierra, help DIY Girls Executive Director Evelyn Gomez set up the solar-powered tent.

The teen girls from San Fernando High School worked on their invention over the course of a year. Come June 16, they'll present it at MIT as part of a young inventors conference. The teens, none of whom had coded, soldered, sewn, or 3D-printed before they joined forces, won a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program to develop the invention.

They were recruited by DIY Girls, a nonprofit that teaches girls from low-income communities about engineering, math, and science, to go after the grant.

"I knew I wanted to apply for it, but I needed a team," says Evelyn Gomez, 29, the executive director of DIY Girls. "I went back to my calculus teacher at my high school and did a hands-on recruitment activity."

Most of the girls didn't know each other before, but they quickly became close friends. 
When DIY Girls was founded in 2012, the nonprofit worked with 35 girls in one elementary school classroom. Last year, it served 650 girls in elementary, middle, and high schools throughout Los Angeles County. The small nonprofit even keeps a waitlist because demand for its services is so high.

Hands-on STEM education at schools, especially for girls in low-income communities, is severely lacking, Evelyn says. Women make up just 29% of the science and engineering workforce, according to the National Science Board, a federal agency. Around 6% of female working scientists and engineers are Hispanic or Latina.

Prinsesa Alvarez shows off the solar-powered tent in its rollaway backpack.

When packed up, the tent looks like a "big blue sun," Prinsesa Alvarez says. A clear opening on the backpack lets sun shine through to charge the solar panels.

I was often the only girl in the class and definitely the only Latina in the class. It felt like kind of imposter syndrome.

"I studied aerospace engineering. When I was getting my master's degree, I was often the only girl in the class and definitely the only Latina in the class. It felt like kind of imposter syndrome," says Evelyn, who got her master's from UCLA. "It's such a farfetched idea: You're going to represent the Latina community in a bad light if you ask a stupid question or you're going to represent women in a bad light if you ask a stupid question, and of course that's not true. But I felt that."

And she doesn't want the girls working on the tent to ever feel that way. None of their parents are engineers. Some of them will be the first in their families to go to college.

Top image: Daniela Orozco uses pliers to pick off excess plastic from a 3D-printed box that will house wires for the solar panels. Bottom image: Left to right: Paulina Martinez, America Hernandez, and Maggie Mejia, check out the teams' social media channels.

In the beginning, the team depended on Evelyn for guidance, but they quickly started doing everything on their own. If they had an issue with a solar panel not functioning properly, they watched YouTube videos. If they couldn't figure out a stitch pattern, they Googled it. The girls even developed their own inspirational hashtag: #wegetitdone.

If your parents miss X amount of bills, you can fall into homelessness, too.
"You're learning new things you've never even heard of or even thought of," says Chelly Chavez, who learned the programming language C++ to get the technical aspects of the tent to behave. The tent has button-powered lights, two USB ports, a micro-USB port, and the girls have even tested a sanitizing UVC light on a countdown timer.

"We're just like, 'how do we do this,' 'how do we do this,'" notes Prinsesa Alvarez as she helps Chelly with a mess of wires during a recent team meeting.

The girls work on their project six days a week, getting together even through their winter and spring breaks. They often come home after hours of sewing to find loose needles falling off their clothes. They made two prototypes of the tent, but the first one is now in shreds. They put it through the ringer during quality control tests, tearing it with a knife, dousing it with water, and stomping on it.
"When they were hitting it, my heart dropped," says Paulina Martinez as she stitches one of the tent's edges. They destroyed their finished product, just to start again. It was yet another tough engineering lesson the girls would learn.

Left to right: Wendy Samayoa and Prinsesa Alvarez chat about the project over their laptops.

The LED lights the team has been testing before finishing their final product.

Paulina Martinez sews material for the tent.

Left to right: Patricia Cruz and Veronica Gonzalez inspect a 3D-printed box.
Before settling on their tent idea, the team had tossed out other options. They wondered: What could they do about pollution or water quality? But they realized they wanted to invent something that would help their community more directly.
"Because we live here, we see it growing constantly," Maggie Mejia says of the homeless population. For her, it even hits close to home: "If your parents miss X amount of bills, you can fall into homelessness, too."
Maggie and the others don't have concrete plans for the future of their invention after the MIT presentation, but they hope it could eventually be mass-produced.

Maggie Mejia explains why she joined DIY Girls.

The team tested several materials before deciding what to use in their solar-powered tent.
The $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program could only be used on the invention itself, not traveling to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to present the award. So DIY Girls fundraised an additional $15,000 to send the team to MIT, an expense the girls' families couldn't otherwise bear.

But they've made it, and it's a success story that could make a really big impact. Already featured by local TV stations and Ryan Seacrest on his morning radio show, the team wants their accomplishment to encourage other girls to pursue STEM careers.

"Me and her, we're the only two junior girls in our AP Calculus class, which has way more guys than girls," says Paola Valtierra, pointing to Kassandra Salazar, who dreams of being an astronaut and has a tiny, metal one on her keychain. "But we're gonna change that."

The team won a $10,000 grant to invent the solar-powered tent.


  • Author
    Brittany Levine Beckman
  • Social Good Editor
    Matt Petronzio
  • Deputy Managing Editor
    Kate Sommers-Dawes
  • Photographer
    Scott Witter
  • Photo Editor
    Haley Hamblin

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Prog Rock Gets Some Respect In 'The Show That Never Ends'


7:00 AM ET
Jason Heller


The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
by David Weigel
Hardcover, 346 pages |
purchase


David Weigel is known primarily as a political reporter for The Washington Post and a regular commentator on MSNBC. In 2012, though, he indulged in an entirely different passion for Slate: He wrote a five-part series of essays about progressive rock called Prog Spring, chronicling the rise and fall of prog in the '60s and '70s. Weigel focused on the genre's major players — bands like Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer — while giving an engrossing account of why and how a generation of rock musicians decided to ditch primal simplicity in favor of ornate, brainy compositions that owed more to classical and jazz.

He's since fleshed out Prog Spring into a book, The Show That Never Ends, and it comes at a curious time. Prog luminaries like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fill stadiums year after year, but the music itself is still a cult concern, mostly irrelevant to popular music in 2017. That, however, is Weigel's whole point: While prog experienced its heyday way back in the '70s, it embodies a push and pull between pop and innovation, between commerce and art, that persists today.

Weigel sets the stage for this conflict by tracing the origins of heavyweights like ELP's virtuoso keyboardist Keith Emerson, who grew up as enamored of big bands in post-World War II England as he did the cruder gyrations of the rock revolution. As the '60s came to a close, the strange, swirling sounds of psychedelia emboldened Emerson, Phil Collins of Genesis, Robert Fripp of King Crimson and many others to expand rock's rudimentary template into something far more elaborate and symphonic in scope.

The Show That Never Ends doesn't skimp on detail. The '70s saw prog become extremely popular, then swiftly drop off after the advent of punk and new wave, and Weigel weaves the stories of platinum-selling bands like Pink Floyd and Rush into a broader portrait of a rapidly shifting musical landscape. His training as a journalist is everywhere, from the crisp reporting to the deeply researched quotes. His knack for lean, efficient music analysis is refreshing — a lot of writing about prog tends to be as baroque as the music itself — and his obvious passion for the music elevates the narrative without spilling over into fatuous flag-waving.

Prog has been knocked by wave after wave of music critics from the '70s on, and it's hard not to hear a slight tone of defensiveness in Weigel's book-length argument. Prog's perceived weaknesses, he argues, are its actual strengths: Its so-called pretentiousness forced rock to evolve in the post-Beatles era, and its ambition gave many talented musicians space to write songs about far more than love or politics. Escapism was part of the appeal, but prog, Weigel argues, is just as rooted in the traditions of literature and the history of Western music as a whole. He makes a convincing case, and he's wise to balance his coverage of prog's big stars with the a careful selection of the genre's more obscure practitioners, from Soft Machine in the late '60s to Marillion in the early '80s.

Marillion marked a small prog revival in the '80s, and the genre has never completely gone away. Today, a thriving underground exists — which Weigel discusses fairly and with just a hint of self-effacing humor, framing his story by recounting his experiences on a prog-themed ocean cruise and a present-day concert by one of prog's most beloved pioneers, Van der Graaf Generator. Weigel is an astute observer, and he knows full well how ridiculous prog can seem to anyone who doesn't regularly listen to ten-minute, orchestral rock songs about extraterrestrial travel. But he authoritatively, engagingly drives home the point that prog has never received a fair shake — and that its restless experimentation makes for both intriguing music and high art.

Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

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