E: "Hey you." S: "Hey, so I was thinking about checking out that Casbah art museum. They have a new showing all about musicians. D'ya wanna come with?" E: "I'd love to, really, but there's this basic psychopath editor who wants me to cut down my article about the best place to get falafel down to three places. SanMy has at least twenty really good falafel places! I could see maybe cutting it down to 15, maybe even as low as 10, but three? How? What kind of monster thinks you can choose between three falafel places when there are at least 6 that are equally amazing when compared to one anoth-" S: "Huh, wow, okay, I'll leave you to it! I'll be back in like two hours?" E: "yeah, and maybe I'll have cut it down to 17 by then. What an absolute sadist, I swear..."

Bucky’s dual-era dog tags in TFATWS (and when & where he decides to wear them) are giving me some SamBucky-related vibes...

...in addition to the just interesting stuff related to Bucky’s various identity issues. So let’s talk the dog tags. 

First things first, these really do not seem like they’re Steve’s dog tags-- they’re Bucky’s own. Why? Look at the promo still below which is the best view I’ve seen of them in TFATWS. Notice that they are not of the same era. One of the dog tags is a WW2-era tag-- the darker, wider one is not only period-accurate for WW2, it’s identical to the ones Bucky was wearing during WW2 in the movie canon already, most visibly in the ���let’s hear it for Captain America!” moment. The *other* dog tag Bucky is wearing in TFATWS, though, is of a more modern issue. It is the kind that would be made for soldiers now and over the last couple of decades. So, how does that mean that they’re Bucky’s and not just Steve’s and what does this have to do with Sam? 

Dog tags are only meant to be separated off the chain in the case of death, as everyone probably knows. Soldiers wear two tags with the same information on them into battle so that one remains on them if they die and the other can be pulled off the chain as proof of a fallen soldier during battle, with the army then usually passing the single chain to next of kin. If Bucky were wearing a pair of WW2-era dog tags in TFATWS, I’d say it was more possible that he was wearing Steve’s tags because Steve didn’t actually have them on when he went into the ice so, somewhere, Steve’s pair of WW2-era dog tags exist as a set, still on the chain. They probably wound up in the Smithsonian at some point but back to Bucky-- his, based on the canon we know, would have been separated after the freight car. 

Bucky was wearing his dog tags when he fell off the train car because he was at war. We know that the Russians found Bucky and then handed him back over to Zola. The Russians, to cover this up, would have taken one of Bucky’s dog tags and given it to the U.S. Army, claiming that they had found them washed up on the shore near where he fell or something. What did the U.S. Army do then? They didn’t know what Zola had done to Bucky beforehand that would enable him to survive the fall so they wouldn’t think to question the Russians on this-- they’d just be like hey, thanks for this and we’ll continue to do the same for you. They would have taken the dog tag and marked Bucky off as dead and then done the next thing, which is to give the dog tag to the soldier’s next of kin. 

Bucky died during war time and everyone knew he and Steve had been friends before the war so whatever general got the dog tag probably just gave it to Steve. Steve *could* have given it to Bucky’s sister at some point-- and we know she exists in the MCU because Bucky briefly mentioned her in TFATWS but we don’t know if he’s gone to see her yet-- but we also have no idea what she’s like in the MCU or if Steve might have just decided to keep the dog tag for himself. Given the trauma Steve went through of witnessing Bucky’s death and them not finding Bucky’s body, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that even if Steve was the one who told Rebecca about Bucky’s death and all that, that he kept Bucky’s dog tag. The other one, that was on Bucky at the time when he was given back to Zola, was destroyed by Zola during him being brainwashed into The Winter Soldier. 

So, maybe through seeing Rebecca but probably really through Steve, Bucky gets one of his WW2 era dog tags back. Given that he isn’t seen wearing dog tags again until TFATWS, it’s likely that Steve gave it back to Bucky sometime in the Endgame aftermath before Steve went back in time. Let’s unpack how Steve’s heart was in the right place but that was a bit of a loaded gift here...

Free from being brainwashed-- as free as he’s been *since* WW2 anyway-- Bucky is essentially handed by Steve the symbol of what he just can’t be anymore-- that guy that Steve used to know. He’s still somewhat that guy but he’s been through so much that he’s not going to ever go back. Steve is into going back-- back to the same girl, back to the same era, back to a time when things felt less confusing and safer to him, where things will hurt less. Bucky has always been the absolute opposite of this-- while Steve was always desperate to fit the mode of the model man of the WW2 era, Bucky-- a good-looking, able-bodied soldier who can hot-blooded American male with the best of them-- was never a man of his time, always a bit ahead of it. Steve is Captain America-- Bucky is Captain World of Tomorrow. He’s more realistic about what America is because as a guy putting on a show for the world to pass in the society that Steve worships, Bucky has a very different perspective on all of it than Steve did. (See also, obviously, why Bucky and Sam understand one another and are better for one another than either of them with Steve.) Bucky is touched that Steve had this and is trying to do something nice by giving it back to him but it’s the singular dog tag bearing ‘James Buchanan Barnes’ like it’s literally being his own next of kin at this point as Steve’s about to go back into time-- it’s being handed a reminder of the demise of his sense of self and his *literal almost actual death* right when he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to view himself and what he’s going to do in this world now that he’s going to stay in the present. 

So, he’s not wearing it. He doesn’t really know what to do with it. He’s with Sam at the time (maybe not *with* Sam but I mean they’re sharing a lot of the same space, either at the Avengers compound or Sam’s apartment, in the whole Endgame aftermath time period but pre-TFATWS) and Sam sees it and Bucky tells him he’s putting it away because he can’t wear it. Steve was trying to do a nice thing but Bucky’s like I can’t wear one of these things, my old WW2 one-- it’d be like I was a walking corpse. Sam agrees. So, from here two things could have happened...

One is that Bucky could have made the decision to just get himself a modern secondary tag but keep in mind that Dr. Raynor actually had to clear Bucky for active duty and that wouldn’t have happened right away. More importantly, some military guys basically never take off their dog tags but we have evidence that Bucky used to actually *not* be like this so much. While he had them on during the war, much has been made (and should be made, for sure) about how Bucky’s wardrobe changes after his first encounter with Zola compared to when he first left for war. The Bucky in uniform on the double date with Steve is spiffy and spotless; the Bucky in the bar with Peggy and the Howlies is barely hanging on. The most major difference is how much he pushes his uniform away from his neck and stops wearing a hat-- some have theorized that Zola was trying an early version of the mind crown on Bucky before Steve found him, prompting Bucky to develop a trauma-induced need to have things away from his neck. 

This actually doesn’t change that much after Civil War, when he’s free from his handlers and on the run. By necessity, there’s a baseball cap at times but he wears a lot of henleys and there’s not actually any necklaces or dog tags until TFATWS. So, what changes? The addition of the modern tag and his reclaiming of the idea of being a soldier. So, the two options for how Bucky got the modern dog tag are really either a) he went and had one made for himself or b) Sam gave it to him. Let’s look at why the former would be kind of a healthy choice for Bucky but why it’s probably not likely to be what happened. 

One scene that stands out for me is the single scene in TFATWS where it’s really obvious that Bucky is *not* wearing the dog tags. They show up all over the place-- he has them on for basically the entire series. He’s even *sleeping* in them, waking up with them on during a nightmare where they’re prominent in the scene and then also in its contrasting scene, on the couch in Delacroix. So, the one scene we don’t see Bucky wearing them? His first therapy scene with Raynor. 

It’s made pretty clear that while Bucky got a thing or two out of his time with Raynor, it’s not really because of Raynor herself, who is basically a terrible trauma therapist. It’s also clear that Bucky doesn’t trust her and for good reason. We see that he really shouldn’t-- she’s forcing him into rules he can’t actually live by instead of helping him find ways through those scenarios when they invitably pop up (“don’t hurt anyone” is a recipe for failure) and she’s treating a man violated in every way under the sun in a way that’s invasive. She’s monitoring his phone. She threatens his compliance by *bringing out a book that she’s writing his secrets in* like... this isn’t the healthiest scenario here. What we also see is that Bucky subtly rebels against her. He somehow got himself cleared for active duty by her so he’s been b.s.ing her. He is later seen with a smart phone he knows how to use at Zemo’s (and had to have something on which he was online dating profile perusing) but Raynor thinks he just owns an old flip phone. So, it’s something really interesting that this is the one scene where we can’t see the chain of his dog tags. Why? Why doesn’t he want Raynor to know about them? 

Because he’s hiding what they mean to him. If he wore them in, he’d have to talk to her about them. The dog tags represent his real efforts to reconcile his identity and what he wants that to look like-- he’s vulnerable about them because they represent what little hope he has left. If Bucky had gone out and gotten that modern dog tag for himself and began wearing them, it’d be something healthy to share with Raynor. He’d want to show it off, all eager to show the doc the decision she’d see as healthy and let her analyze it with him. We know that Bucky is struggling to reconcile his identity-- it’s literally his whole story arc in TFATWS-- and yet, he’s wearing dog tags that cut to the chase of it, in a lot of ways. Which is why those dog tags were on in New York all the time except for with Raynor-- why he wore them to bed, even-- and why he leaves them on when he goes to see Sam. 

Sam got Bucky that newer tag. Probably when Raynor cleared him as a congratulations thing or maybe just when he saw Bucky left with a friend who went back in time and left him with nothing but a notebook of things to check out and a corpse necklace and felt for him. In essence, Bucky is wearing around another pair of dual identities in TFATWS-- the Bucky who died in WW2 and the Bucky who is still alive again now in the present-- as given back/given to him and represented by the once and future Captain Americas, who also happen to be the guys he’s loved (in different ways) the most in his life. That he’s wearing them is a sign that he wants to be Sgt. Barnes again-- this newer version of himself. It’s progress from the man who shuddered at stuff around his neck and TFATWS shows us that in other scenes as well, in other ways (his hoodie & jacket combo when they go to talk to Zemo; his signature jacket with a higher collar than we’ve seen him in since he left for war.) The wardrobe choices show an evolution-- a willingness to try to a new place of managing what he’s been through. 

But wearing those dog tags around Sam in TFATWS? (And wearing them when he and Sam weren’t really communicating ahead of it?) Yeah. The parallel to Bucky showing up in Delacroix with a whole new outfit for Sam’s new identity as Captain America is that it was Sam who gave Bucky the modern half of his dog tags (and the chain, which is lighter silver and from the present era) and that’s why Bucky has been wearing them. Steve gave him a reminder of the guy he used to be, even if that guy was still pretty dead but Sam gave him a duplicate-- one that represented the guy who belongs to more modern times and is alive. One tag is death; two is life. 

Republicanism

The attached proposed op/ed article is hereby submitted to every print media organisation in Britian and Ireland with a view to getting it published. No fee is sought. ===== Republicanism. A Normative Definition. "If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth". (Epitaph of John Locke). After all the recent talk of reclaiming 'republicanism' for the Irish people, I argue that we must first describe what we mean by that term before we can have any meaningful insight into what in fact we are 'reclaiming.' Traditionally, in an Irish context, 'republicanism' has been identified with opposition to 'monarchy,' but it is more. The word comes from the Latin term 'res publica' meaning 'things public' or alternatively 'public affairs.' Plato's 'Republic' is something of a misnomer in that the original title ' politeia' more closely relates to the concept of politics or citizenship. Likewise Cicero's 'De republica' is not taken to accord to any modern definition of republicanism although he did say that 'some sort of free-state' is the necessary condition of a republic. The modern idea of the Republic (in the sense that is widely understood) is drawn from ancient Greece and Rome but it was truly created during the Renaissance when scholars developed what is known as 'classical republicanism'. Classical republicanism rejected monarchism in favour of 'rule by the people' and writers like Machiavelli proposed various versions of such a system of government. However, during the Enlightenment men like John Henry, Thomas Paine and John Locke paved the way for a new understanding of republicanism that ultimately came to fruition in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in 1776. Familiar from before was Jefferson's call that 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' However, freely elected governments could still lead to the 'tyranny of the majority' where democracy was "nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Thus, according to Jefferson, democracy was a necessary but not sufficient factor for republicanism. Necessary too was the concept that each individual (however in the minority) had 'certain inalienable rights.' In order to prevent pure democracy endangering individual rights therefore, Jefferson advocated a republic where individual freedom was protected from democratic rule by a set of laws enacted in a Constitution. Expanding on the concept of the 'sovereignty of the people' Jefferson wrote that the mother principle of republicanism was therefore that 'governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.' Citizens likewise had responsibilities. Implicit here is the idea of active citizenship which stresses the moral duty of 'republicans' to act in the interests of the republic or to be 'patriotic.' The opposite of patriotism consists of the corruption often referred to by such classical republican thinkers as Aristotle and Machiavelli, in which citizens are more concerned with their personal and group interests than with the common good of the political community as a whole. So what has the term 'republicanism' come to mean in an Irish context then? Some years ago while on a J1 visa on Nantucket a friend remarked on the fact that every house on the island seemed to have a US flag flying proudly in the front garden. 'If we did that people would just think we were RA' he remarked. I don't think you would struggle to find somebody of my generation in Ireland today who hasn't been inhibited in expressions of pride in Irish republican values as a result of the uniquely Irish connotations of the term 'republicanism,' even if perhaps they wouldn't have put it quite that way. Consider this from Queens's historian Feargal McGarry; 'the ideological vagueness of modern Irish republicanism, a distinctive political tradition rooted more in an incoherent blend of Fenianism, Catholic nationalism and Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism than the republican principles of the American revolution.. It is only in this sense that figures as diverse as Wolfe Tone (a product of the French Enlightenment) and Patrick Pearse can be brought together in a seamless pantheon of martyrs to sustain and legitimise present day republican objectives'. Tom Gavin has also noted that 'the term republicanism is generally understood in Ireland as a sort of shorthand for insurrectionist anti-British nationalism rather than any particular ideological or philosophical principles'. On this question there can be little doubt, although I have yet to hear a single commentator in the Irish media make this point. Yet the importance of this question is central to the whole debate. Surely we must know what we are 'reclaiming' if we are to have any chance of a legitimate choice with regard to whether we want to 'reclaim' it or not. Suppose as an experiment we took to agree on Jefferson's principle that politicians or governments are 'republican' 'only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.' How would modern-day Irish 'republicans' score on this metric then? Sinn Fein/IRA would surely not score well. Never since the 1920's did the 'struggle' command popular support, so their compliance with the 'will of the people' or even basic democratic principles is surely in single figures. On the personal and ' inalienable rights' of individuals they must score zero by default such has been their callow disregard for innocent life. Ironically, until the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Fein/IRA have repeatedly been defined and shaped by their opposition to political compromise, and the most inflexible of them have always succeeded in representing themselves as the authentic voice of 'republicanism.' How about the 'republican party' Fianna Fail? How do they score on embodying the 'will of the people?' Well, recent evidence is not encouraging. On February 15th 2003 an Irish Times/MRBI opinion poll showed that without a new UN resolution (which never came) just 21% of the Irish people would approve of allowing Shannon airport to be used by the US military, with 68% disapproving. A republican government therefore would have disallowed the use of our sovereign territory in such an illegal war in accordance with the wishes of 2.8 million of its citizens. 'The Republican Party' in government did the opposite. However, any attempt to assess the extent to which Irish politicians 'embody and execute' the will of the Irish people however is subject to one serious restriction. Even if data on wider citizen preferences were available (which is infrequently the case), such an analysis presupposes that each citizen has all the information at hand required to form an informed opinion. If this is not the case then surely no degree of public acquiescence can confer 'republicanism' on any politician, political party or government. As Jefferson said, 'only when the people are well-informed can they be trusted with their own government.' It may come as cold comfort to those of us who view Irish 'republicans' as having abrogated their political responsibilities to the Irish Republic to say that in the United States the situation is even worse. There, the 'Republican party' was long known for its adherence to balanced budgets, constitutional government, a non-interventionist foreign policy and for keeping government out of peoples personal lives. Today that country has unprecedented deficits, the Bill of Rights has been eviscerated, the army is bogged down in two (and potentially a third) Asian wars and well, in a word, Schiavo. It is perhaps symptomatic of the age that nobody seems to realise that here in Ireland or in the United States we are led by 'republicans' who only seem to share one thing in common, a distain for basic republican values. This can be expressed in terms of democratic values, respect for the individual or advocacy of an informed public. Axiomatically, we don't realise because we are uninformed. We are uninformed (in both jurisdictions) primarily because we live in corporate controlled media environments where the objectives of corporations (legal citizens?) and citizens shall never the mark twain meet. Almost one hundred years ago that Irish patriot James Connolly stated that the struggle for Irish freedom had two aspects, national and social. Were he to analyse the state of Irish freedom in 2006 he would surely have a different focus. Yet if we can agree that a republic is such 'only in proportion as it embodies the will of their people' and that the people 'can only be trusted with their own government when they are well-informed' can we not say that 'republicanism' in 2006 can be interpreted as the degree to which public opinion is informed? I believe we can and we should. Perhaps only then is our true august destiny possible. ===== Morgan Stack is a lecturer at the Department of Accountancy, Finance and Information Systems at University College Cork. He is co-founder of the Irish 9/11 Truth Movement and an independent candidate at the next general election in the constituencies of Kerry North and Cork South Central.

Has the Church Lost Its Purpose

Matthew 16:18 “..and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

If you’re like me, you are probably pretty fed up with Covid-19 and all the ever-changing rules and regulations thrust upon us in our government’s efforts to control it—by controlling us!  When will we get past this and back to normal is the question uppermost in many minds but no one is giving any definitive answer and by the looks of it, whatever answer there is, is still a long way off.   So we stumble on trying to remember to put our masks on, squirt our hands with another dose of hand sanitizer and then go home to watch the riots and mayhem in the city streets of downtown USA.  Where is all this headed and how does the Church fit into this scenario?  The Shorter Westminster Confession tells us the chief end of man is to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever” but in these days of closed, or partially “open” churches where singing is forbidden and masks must be worn, the question is: “What is the chief end of the Church of Jesus Christ?” and we can also tack on a second question: “Why does our government think the Church is non-essential when the casino’s and liquor stores are open and the rioters and protesters are given a free hand to assemble?.  How we answer these questions very much depends on our view of the Church’s purpose in this time of world pandemic and social unrest.  All of us who have committed our lives to Jesus Christ already know that the Church is the body and bride of Christ whom the Lord Himself will return to earth to “present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27).  It is not an organization but an organism which Jesus continues to nurture and grow through the revelation of Himself by His Spirit (Matthew 16:18) and that this present age will come to an end at the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9) when the old earth and Heaven will pass away and a new Heaven and a new earth will be created. These are great, all-encompassing statements describing our final destiny to “be ever with the Lord” but there’s a more pressing question that demands an answer at this current moment: “Has the Church lost its purpose in the middle of this Covid-19 pandemic in its compliance with government closures and restrictions, its social distancing rules, job losses, political uncertainty and a host of other issues like suicides, drug abuse, etc.?  How is the Church meeting these situations and challenges? One thing for sure is it has not been able to carry on as usual.  There is nothing “usual” about being forbidden to assemble together with fellow believers in our homes and churches, about being forbidden to praise God together in song or about having to wear a mask and distance ourselves from one another to avoid all physical contact during our services, but if these are the only things we miss then the “new normal” is really little more than an inconvenience.  Perhaps this is the reason most churches around the world have so easily accepted the mantra of the media and the government “It’s all for the common good” and agreed that the Church must do its part along with the rest of humanity to curb the spread of this deadly virus that supposedly is threatening to engulf the entire world in a holocaust of death.  Who would dare gainsay such common sense?  (I think it was Albert Einstein who declared that common sense is very uncommon!)  Let’s re-examine what the Church is and what it represents and then decide what its true purpose is.

Post Modernism

To the post-modern world in which we now live where your “truth” and my “truth” are equally acceptable and tolerable, the Church of Jesus Christ appears to most as little more than a social gathering of like-minded people enjoying each other’s fellowship on Sunday mornings in buildings called churches where we sing praises to God accompanied by an organist or pianist or even a full blown band with drums, guitars and sometimes even laser lights and smoke generators to create the “right” atmosphere.  We listen to sermons from the bible about how to be good and afterwards go to the local restaurant for lunch. Beyond that, the world is largely uncertain as to what the purpose of the church is and what it actually does and most are content to leave it to itself with no desire to get involved, especially if (not always when) it talks about things like “sin”, a word no longer acceptable in polite company.  Is it any wonder that governments have deemed church gatherings to be “non-essential” and almost all churches have quietly agreed to their banishment “for the common good” because the bible tells us to be “subject to the authorities” (Romans 13:1) while forgetting that Peter resisted those same authorities because “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)?  Objections from the Christian community to church closures has been tepid at best and supportive at worst. This is understandable from a point of view that sees church meetings as an unnecessary opportunity for the virus to spread.  This may have been OK for the purpose of “flattening the curve” but those days are long past and the current fear of a second and possibly a third wave of the virus is making the long-term outlook for a return to normalcy very uncertain indeed!  There’s now plenty of evidence to show the damage being done to the Church by its obedience to these rules.

The Church is Suffering Damage

The harm done to the church by its complicity in its own closure is appearing in the form of a dramatic drop in attendance.  A Barna Group poll in the US taken in May of this year shows that one third of “practicing Christians” (I take that to mean those who attend church regularly) have completely quit attending any church—either on line or in person—and half the millenials (young people) have done likewise!  Barna’s latest poll, announced this week carries the headline: “1 in 5 Churches Facing Permanent Closure Within 18 Months Due to Covid-19 Shutdowns.”  The reason for this is quite simple: one in five churches do not have enough income to keep their doors open even as the restrictions have been eased and partial services allowed!  These figures lead me to ask, “What kind of commitment to the local body of Christ do those have who so soon walked away?” This is not encouraging news but my real concern is not church finances or even church attendance, it is the failure of many in the Church to recognize what the Church is, a living body, spiritual in nature and determined in its purpose to reach a dying world with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ who died for it, rose again to empower it with His Spirit and is coming again to receive it to Himself at the end of the present age.  Each born again believer is a member in particular joined to every other member by the “joints and ligaments” (Colossians 2:19) that connect us to the Head, Jesus Christ and to each other. The “joints and ligaments” are the relationships between us and the Head that hold the body together and these suffer damage when members cannot assemble together to pray together, worship together and minister to the world around them together.  It is very difficult to maintain real relationships through a mobile phone.  It is impossible to visit the sick at home or in hospital to lay hands on them or anoint them with oil. It is impossible kneel by the bedside of a dying saint to hug them one last time or wrap your arms around a grieving saint from six feet away and it is impossible to encourage anyone with a smile while wearing a mask.  These are not trivial issues, they go to the heart of Christian ministry.  How many church members have and will forsake the faith and wander off into the world because their church was obedient to their civic duty and closed its doors?  Church gatherings are far, far more than a social event, they are a critical function of the Church to further the gospel in the lives of believers and unbelievers alike.  I was not saved by watching a video but by attending a meeting where I went forward before thousands of others to commit my life to Christ.  Yes, of course God uses videos to reach others but He doesn’t leave us there, alone in our basement wondering where do I go from here.  He joins me to the rest of His body in personal, human, on-going contact with other believers. If the Church is not meeting, lives are being lost!

The Lord is Shaking His Church

Why has the Church been so afraid to disobey the government and so unafraid to disobey the Lord who has told us to “forsake not the assembling of (y)ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25); to “lay hands on the sick” (Mark 16:18); to gather together to pray and sing; to baptize; to go into all the world and preach the gospel.  Can you ever imagine Jesus saying to the leper, “Sorry, I can’t touch you because I may get what you’ve got and besides, it’s against the law for me to touch you”?  What kind of gospel is that?  It is the gospel of fear, not love, of weakness, not strength.  Father Damien of Molokai was a Belgian missionary to the lepers in the Pacific who willingly lived among them and became one of them for the sake of the gospel.  Countless others have done likewise throughout the history of the Church and have “counted it all joy” (James 1:2).  I believe the Lord Jesus is using this present pandemic to shake His Church awake from its slumber.  He is removing the old normal and replacing it with a whole new church experience of the power of the Holy Spirit at work through its members to reach the world.  The old order with the pastor and the platform team doing all the work while the congregation waits to be led (and entertained?) will be replaced with God’s order as described in 1 Corinthians 14:24 - 26 showing how the early church ran its services: “if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an uninformed person comes in, he is convinced by all, he is convicted by all. And thus the secrets of his heart are revealed; and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God and report that God is truly among you. How is it then, brethren? Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation.”   The world wants evidence that the gospel we preach is real and the only way to show it is real is to do as Paul did, “not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:4).  How exciting and challenging it will be to go to church knowing that the Lord wants to use you in the service to bring something besides your bible and your tithes, (although many bring neither). If you feel you don’t have a psalm, a teaching, a tongue, a revelation or an interpretation to offer and if you feel you are unable to demonstrate the Holy Spirit and His Power, then go to Jesus and ask Him first to baptize you in His Holy Spirit and then open your mouth and let Him fill it as He gives you the utterance.  Expect the Lord to give you something to add to the service besides your presence and your praise (but first pray that the elders will make room for your ministry and wait until they do). This may seem all too far-fetched but it is clearly biblical and in the coming time of testing for the Church, clearly necessary.

The days ahead are filled with uncertainty but God is faithful and we will not be deserted by Him or left to figure it all out by ourselves.  He loves us intensely and will carry us through as long as we hang on to Him.  More than that, He will reveal how great His Power is in us if we will but trust Him to use us for His glory. That’s the kind of Church He is building.  If you are still uncertain as to the purpose of the Church, pray for God to reveal this to you that you may function as a healthy member.  I sense that God is about to judge the earth but first He will judge His Church and cleanse it from every spot and wrinkle.  “He that endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13) and as I said in my last blog, endurance may not be pleasant but it is necessary to get through what lies ahead.  The initial acceptance of the closures by the churches is understandable in human terms but given the great damage being caused to the Church (and to society) as it continues, this issue must be faced prayerfully and determinedly.  If the Barna polls are correct---and I believe they are---we must decide whether to continue in obedience to man or God!

“Crying Out” based on Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29 & Luke 19:28-40

I long thought that Palm Sunday was a big Yay-Jesus parade, where people shouted Hosanna to say “YAY God!” and it was clear that everyone got how great God really is and how God was working through Jesus.  I thought that the enthusiasm for God and Jesus was just so big that the stones themselves were on the brink of crying out.  Then I read John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg's book “The Last Week” and learned that wasn't it.

The story of Palm Sunday is so much bigger, so much deeper, and so much BETTER than what I originally understood.  It was, indeed, a Yay-Jesus parade, and it did, indeed, reflect people celebrating their excitement over God's acts in the world.  But a WHOLE lot was happening underneath and around it, and to understand that, we need to look at the Jesus movement itself, the thing that was being celebrated.

I'm working today largely from John Dominic Crossan's book “Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus.”  When he was here last fall for a Carl lecture we learned that he goes by “Dom.”  As he often does, Dom manages to get into the heart of things by explaining the context.  Context is what makes his scholarship so awesome.

Jesus was a Galilean, whose ministry was centered in Galilee, right?  What was Galilee?  Galilee was a colony of the Roman Empire, and it was a part of what had been the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  We talk about the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judea because under King David and his son King Solomon there had been a single united Jewish country, Ancient Israel, for about 80 years after 1000 BCE.  It then had a civil war and split into two – north and south.  The Northern Kingdom of Israel lost a war to the Assyrians in 722 BCE and its leadership was taken into exile.  The Assyrian empire took over the land and imposed their customs.  The Southern Kingdom did better, it didn't lose and go into exile for another 150 years, AND the Southern Kingdom also got the chance to  return from exile and rebuild. Afterward, it became extra judgmental of its secessionist northern neighbors, both for the differences that had been present in the civil war AND for the fact that they were no longer a pure Jewish state, in faith or custom.

We know some of this history because of the stories of the Samaritan woman at the well and the Good Samaritan.  Samaria is, after all, directly north of Judea, the Southern kingdom.  What we sometimes forget is that Galilee is the region NORTH of Samaria.  It was ALSO a part of the old Northern Kingdom. The difference is that in the time of the Maccabees, about 150 years before the birth of Jesus, faithful Jews from Judea moved up to Galilee to try to resettle faithful Judaism up north.  The Galilee of Jesus day was multicultural and multilingual,  rural, and full of faithful Jews as well as lots of people who weren't Jewish at all.  It was also a colony of the Roman Empire.

Now, as Dom says, “The Jewish peasantry was prone … to refuse quiet compliance with heavy taxation, subsistence farming, debt impoverishment, and land expropriation.  Their traditional ideology of land was enshrined in the ancient scriptural laws.”1 Galilee itself was a fruitful place, and the land was useful to the empire.  Dom explains, “Lower Galilee's 470 square miles are divided by four alternating hills and valleys running in a generally west-east direction.  It is rich in cereals on the valley floors and olives on the hillside slopes.”2 It was also pretty rich in radicalism, perhaps BECAUSE of the percentage of very faithful Jewish people who believed land to be a gift from God for the people of God.

Now, John the Baptist did NOT do his ministry in Galilee.  (I JUST figured this out.)  His ministry across the river in Perea, in the DESERT.  I hadn't realized that Galilee didn't have deserts until Dom pointed it out.  The other side of the Jordan is the side people had waited on, it is the side they entered the Promised Land from.  Galilee, like Samaria and Judea, had been part of the Promised Land.   According to Dom, John the Baptist “is drawing people into the desert east of the Jordan, but instead of gathering a large crowd there and bringing them into the Promised Land in one great march, he sends them through the Jordan individually, baptizing away their sins in its purifying waters and telling them to await in holiness the advent of the avenging God.”3 He was re-enacting the entrance into the Promised Land, that gift of LAND for the people.  Thus he was challenging the religious, political, social, and economic bases of Roman control.4  This got him killed.  

Being a colony isn't a great thing for people.  That's obvious, right?  Colonies exist to bring wealth to the country that controls them, and that means that the people in the colony are means of wealth production.  Dom explains a bit more:

“When a people is exploited by colonial occupation, one obvious response is armed revolt or military rebellion.  But sometimes that situation of oppression is experienced as so fundamentally evil and so humanly hopeless that only transcendental intervention is deemed of any use. God, and God alone, must act to restore a ruined world to justice and holiness. This demands a vision and a program that is radical, countercultural, utopian, world-negating, or, as scholars say eschatological. That terms comes form the Greek word for 'the last things' and means that God's solution will be so profound as to constitute an ending of things, a radical new world-negation.”

The best known example of this in the Bible is when God acted to free the people from slavery in Egypt.  The people were oppressed, they cried out, God heard them, and sent Moses and set the people free.

That particular story is celebrated and remembered at the Passover.  The Passover is holy celebration of God's action to set the people free when they had no power to free themselves.    The Palm Sunday parade was a formalized entrance to the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem, at the time when Jerusalem was ALSO under Roman Imperial control.  It was, thus, a very dynamic situation.   The potential for Jewish upraising at Passover is the reason that the Roman Governor showed up then, with a lot of military might and show..  In fact, the Roman Governor came into the West Gate with a LARGE military parade, at about the same time that the Gospels say that the Jesus movement came in the East gate with a populist God parade.  

Can you feel the tension rising?

Dom goes further into explaining how religious ideas of eschatology, of last things, work.  He says that there are two models, and John the Baptist used one while Jesus used the other.  The John the Baptist way was passive for humans and active for God.  It was the idea that God is going to come save “us,” where us indicates a single group defined by those who know that God is about to act.  This sort of eschatology is based on a future promise that God will act to save us.  Dom says, “This future but imminent apocalyptic radicalism is dependent on the overpowering action of God moving to restore justice and peace to an earth ravished by injustice and oppression.”5 That might sound pretty good, until you hear the one Jesus used.  

As a reminder, Jesus was baptized by John.  That means he was a DISCIPLE of John (a student of John's), but one way or another he branched off of John's teachings and went his own way.   The second way that Jesus ended up going is called sapiential eschatology.  Dom says, “The word saptientia is Latin for 'wisdom' and sapiential eschatology announces that God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers.  It involves a way of life for now rather than a hope for life for the future.  … In apocalyptical eschatology, we are waiting for God to act.  In sapiential eschatology, God is waiting for us to act.”6

As far as I can understand it, this is the crux of it all.  We follow Jesus, who taught us about God who is already present to us, who works with us to change things for the better.  We aren't waiting on God.  We're working with God.  Jesus's ministry was one of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Dom explains this well too, “the sayings and parables of the historical Jesus often describe a world of radical egalitarianism in which discrimination and hierarchy, exploitation and oppression should no longer exist.”7  The Jesus kingdom movement, “is not a matter of Jesus' power but of their empowerment.  He himself has no monopoly on the kingdom; it is there for anyone with the courage to embrace it.”8 All of this may explain why they could kill Jesus, but not his movement.  

It also explains why the crowds were so excited on Palm Sunday and throughout Jesus' ministry.  Jesus was speaking to their problems, oppression, debt, loss of land, loss of subsistence, loss of dignity AND he was offering them the reality that God was already with them and they could change it themselves! No wonder they were having a Yay-Jesus parade.

I think the big questions this leaves US with today are about how we best live the Kingdom.  If it is already here, if God is already with us, if we can partake in the radical egalitarianism, if  God has given all human beings the wisdom to discern how, here and now in this world, one can so live that God's power, rule, and domination are evidently present to all observers... then what is it that we need make space for so that we can LIVE it!???  How do we access that wisdom we already have, how do we live that life that God has made  possible?

Or, to put it another way, how do we step out of the world’s obsessions with consumption, acquisition, fear, existential anxiety, competition, hierarchy, and distractions SO THAT we can live the GOOD life God already made possible?  Since the goal is to live in love and allow lovingness to expand in us, and I wonder if it is a matter of balance.  There is a need for rest, to savor the goodness; AND there is a need for activity, to respond to the goodness.  There is a need for more learning to know how to best respond, AND there is a need to teach others what we know.  There is a need to attend to the goodness of life AND there is a need to attend to the brokenness and see it clearly.  There is definitely a need to play – to live into joy, laughter and delight AND a need to be courageous and loving in seeking justice for all.  Because part of the call of Jesus is to live a good life, and the other part is to make it possible to for others to live a good life – but not JUST a good life!  The call is to a life that is a transformed, courageous, God-soaked with love.

In the end of our story we hear, “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, 'Teacher, order your disciples to stop.'  He answered, 'I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.'” This is the part I had entirely wrong.  It isn't that the stones are bursting with joy.  It is that the people cannot be silenced because they've been empowered. God's empowering love is with them, and they've learned that they already have what they need to change their lives and change the world.  And once people know that, they can't be silenced.  Thanks be to God!  Amen

1John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Stories of The Death of Jesus (USA: HarperSanFrancisco: 1995) 40.

2Crossan, 42.

3Crossan, 44.

4Crossan, 44.

5Crossan, 47.

6Crossan, 47.

7Crossan 48.

8Crossan, 48.

Rev. Sara E. Baron First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 Pronouns: she/her/hers http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

April 14, 2019

Critical Audit Matters: The Games Are On

As a guest here recently I took a look at the accumulating experience with extended auditors’ reports—the additional paragraphs that under international standards describe key audit matters (aka critical audit matters under the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s standards in the United States).

There I noted a major gap—nobody has yet asked whether investors actually pay any attention or give any value to the extra verbiage, while the evidence builds that they do not, notably the lack of indicative share price moves at Steinhoff Group in South Africa and the U.K.’s Thomas Cook.

If investors show no real concern for KAMs and CAMs, who does—and is auditor behavior affected?

With those questions open, studies are emerging on the first wave of U.S. CAMs. Examples include Deloitte this summer, on 52 large companies with fiscal years ending on June 30, 2019; a second in September by Audit Analytics that looked at 65 large-company filings, followed up and expanded in November; and a third reported in November by Accountancy Europe, summarizing the recent experiences with KAMs in Europe.

The Deloitte study and its commentary focused on the substance of the CAMs—the most common are goodwill and intangibles (35%), revenue (19%), and income taxes (15%)—headline subjects also observed by Audit Analytics.

As a topic for a day to come, it may be safely predicted that another year of experience will confirm these early indications of herding toward a converged set of common CAMs, and a booming bull market in boilerplate language. Meanwhile, there are implications simply in the number of reported CAMs and the potential for gaming involved—something worthy of attention by students of the dynamics between large-company auditors and the PCAOB.

The Deloitte study reported an average of 1.8 CAMs for each reporting company, with a distribution ranging from none at all or only one to an outlying maximum of seven or eight—figures consistent with the Audit Analytics finding of 1.9 each and the average of just over two each for the 20 largest U.S. companies reported.

For the auditors themselves, the simple question of optimal CAM frequency has salience at each of two stages—both when a company blows up in scandal, and also as the auditors go through the antagonistic process of PCAOB inspection. The first is because when challenged in a courtroom, the entire CAM process will have generated hostages to the auditors’ fortune and a litigation nightmare, with hostile lawyers pressing the perpetual question, “Where were the auditors?”

That disputing will likely trace to one of the typically common CAM topics—goodwill and intangibles (see Steinhoff), or the legitimacy of revenue (see Under Armour), or the vexed question whether and when an audit report should have been qualified (see Thomas Cook). Closing jury arguments will be built on one of two themes:

If a CAM had been issued: “They saw it, they addressed it, and they still botched it.”

Or if not, on the other hand, a back-footed auditor defending a report with few CAMs or none would be called to answer for a client’s fraudulent concealment: “There were billions in falsified transactions—how could they have missed them all?”

In the second case, although the level of PCAOB compliance might be thought of quotidian nuisance, there is the unfortunate frequency of inspected firms to manipulate their working paper files ahead of the inspectors—all the way to the prison-bound criminality involved in the theft of PCAOB inspection lists by personnel of KPMG.

As played straight most of the time, however, the auditors’ CAM counts will be relevant in handling inspections, where commentators since Sarbanes Oxley’s enactment in 2002 are recognizing that box-ticking and checklist fulfillment now rule (see here and here).

In that context, “zero findings” would plainly be the wrong answer. A PCAOB inspector would be understandably incredulous over a public-company audit where nothing rose to CAM-level significance. Likewise, the presentation of only a single CAM would open the auditor to a nitpicker’s prodding: “Out of all the issues you looked at, why only this one?”

Too many CAMs, of course, would provoke a different inspection issue—triggering the familiar maxim, “if everything is important, then nothing is important.”

A Goldilocks strategy emerges—firms will identify two CAMs at least, maybe three at most. Those numbers avoid the tail risks—too many or too few—while the inspectors can be entangled in extended discussions over competing priorities and resources, the interest level and reading tolerance of investors, and the length and complexity of audit reports. The gaming of that process and the accompanying negotiations can be prolonged until all players are cross-eyed with boredom and fatigue.

The result? Three or four years from now, a bright young PhD candidate will have an assured research topic and a glide-path along the tenure track, by compiling experiences under the rubric, “Who ever thought CAMs were a good idea?”

Jim Peterson is a 19-year veteran of Arthur Andersen’s internal legal group. He has been writing about the accounting firms and the Big Audit model since 2002, on his blog, Re:Balance, and in his two books, “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms” (2d ed. 2017) and, just released this May, “DOA: Can Big Audit Survive the UK Regulators?”

Related article:

Critical Audit Matters: Does Anybody Care?

The post Critical Audit Matters: The Games Are On appeared first on Going Concern.

republished from Going Concern

Government To Spend N1.149 Trillion On Petrol Subsidy In 2019

Government To Spend N1.149 Trillion On Petrol Subsidy In 2019

              A princely sum of N1. 149, 385 trillion is estimated to go into the payment of subsidy on petrol imported into the country this year.With the provision of a mere $1 billion, which is about N305 billion in the 2019 budget year, the country may run into a massive budget deficit if nothing is done about the development. The breakdown shows that at the prevailing $2.54 per gallon of fuel in the United States, which translates to N774.7 at the official exchange rate of N305 to $1, a litre of petrol in the country costs N193.68 on the average.Going by the last pricing template released in 2018 by the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), additional cost elements of N14.3 per litre is required to cover the retailers margin, bridging fund, dealers cost and transporters pay. Thus the landing cost of petrol in the country currently is N207.98. This implies that government currently pays N62.98 subsidy per litre of petrol.The Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), which has since deployed subsidy as part of its operational costs, as the last resort of supply line as enshrined in the NNPC Act 1977, defrays an estimated N3.149b per day under what is tagged under-recovery. The sum of N3.149b per day therefore implies that the country is projected to spend N1.149, 385 trillion in 2019 on petrol subsidy. The Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, last year said that the countrys daily consumption of petrol was 50 million litres.This daily national consumption figure was also, yesterday, confirmed by the acting General Manager, Corporate Services of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Kimchi Apollo. With the NNPC playing the role of the sole importer of petrol into the country and adopting the under recovery approach, the PPPRA no longer processes payments of subsidy, but its officials are still present at the ports to ascertain how many litres the NNPC is bringing in.The takeover of the processing of subsidy payment led many to conclude that the NNPC has usurped the function of the PPPRA, but Apollo insisted that the NNPC has not taken over PPPRAs responsibilities, stressing that both organisations are working together to ensure a smooth distribution of petroleum products. Apollo, who had, in an earlier statement explained that the Petroleum Support Fund ended in December 2015, added that the scheme has been managed by the PPPRA since May 2016.Under the this scheme, the statement explained, the agency regulates petroleum products supply and distribution through the issuance of Quantity Notification (QN) and LAYCAN to NNPC and Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs).It also monitors discharges at various facilities nationwide. Before now, the PPPRA generated data that is used by the Ministry of Finance to back up payment claims by marketers, before they were paid by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).The Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division of the NNPC, Ndu Nghamadu, promised to provide more details on the subject, but failed to do so as at the time of filing this report. However, while there is no evidence of abuse of the process, there is total absence of any back-end channel that is empowered to verify NNPC claims. Meanwhile, there is disquiet in the PPPRA as both the executive secretary of the agency, Abdulkadir Umar Saidu, and board chairman, Muhammadu Buba, are seen as NNPC boys that were sent to preside over the demise of the PPPRA, and possibly put the career of the workers at risk. The PPPRA staff members are indeed apprehensive that the current situation may jeopardise their jobs. Buba is a former managing director of Pipeline and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of the NNPC. The Guardian learnt that the reversal of the sale of the nations refineries by the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo, by the Musa YarAdua-led administration paved the way for the collapse to the liberalisation of the downstream sector. A source explained: The cancellation of the sale of the refineries by YarAduas administration led Nigeria to the present situation. The administration adopted a populism system of government in a capitalist economy. That was wrong. I think what would have been adopted by that government was welfarism as adopted by the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo. The sale of the refineries would have put Nigerias economy on a sustainable path. This is the same mistake the current administration is making. Principal Consultant to the National Assembly on Oil and Gas Industry Reform, Dr. Francis Adigwe, warned that the current subsidy regime is not sustainable, saying government must exit a regulated downstream sector.His words: Government needs to liberalise the downstream sector. Nigeria has an oil and gas industry that will not grow as long as government continues to subsidise products. The importation ensures the value-added that will provide employment and rejuvenate the economy is completely lost. Dr. Adigwe also dismissed as false, the belief that the Dangote Refinery, which is still under construction will sell petroleum products at subsidised rate saying, nobody should look at the Dangote Refinery as a company that will sell products to Nigeria at a discounted rate. Yes, government will not have to pay for product transportation, which will likely lead to some reduction, which could be very marginal.Stakeholders in the oil and gas sector, yesterday, insisted that the continued payment of subsidy on petroleum products and the secrecy surrounding the situation could cripple the nations economy. The experts, who said that Nigerians deserve an explanation for the alleged hijack of PPPRAs functions by the NNPC, noted that the prevailing situation wasan inefficient way of supporting the poor as the greatest beneficiaries.The PPPRA was established by an Act of the National Assembly in 2003 as an autonomous agency to primarily determine the pricing policy of petroleum products and regulate their supply and distribution. It was designed to report to the presidency, but the agencys travails started under the Goodluck Jonathan-led administration when then Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke was in office. While the Act that established the agency has not been repealed, most of its executive secretaries have reportedly been quiet order to avoid losing their jobs since those who wanted to run the organisation independently fell by the way side.A source familiar with the matter, who pleaded anonymity, told The Guardian that in 2014, one of such executive secretaries, Reginald Stanley was removed and replaced immediately with Farouk Ahmed. His removal was linked to claims of no subsidy on kerosene at a point when Alison-Madueke had a deal with some operators. Currently, the principal actors in the agency reportedly have direct working relationship with the NNPC.The Director, Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law (CPEEL), University of Ibadan, Prof. Adeola Adenikinju, insisted that the continued payment of subsidy is adding to the plight of the masses instead of addressing their poverty. According to him, the situation is unsustainable, provides more benefits to the rich and remains a barrier to economic development.Coupled with the secrecy that surrounds subsidy payment, Adenikinju stated that the situation has contributed immensely to the countrys poor local refining capacity. Lets remove subsidy and come up with policies that affect the poor positively. Theres no compliance even if budgets are made for subsidy. It is not good for the economy, he said. On the purported hijack of the function of PPPRA, Adenikinju stated that unless the PIB is passed to clearly define roles of agencies, overlapping functions and manipulation of regulatory provisions could continue.There are no set out laws, there is overlap and discretion. The PIB will put those things in order and set out the power of the boards. There is need for certainty, he added.He added that there was the need for the country to ascertain its level of daily consumption of petrol, noting that the current figure being paddled by the government lacks veracity. For the Chairman/CEO of International Energy Services (IES) Ltd, Diran Fawibe, the country must take the bold step of stopping the payment of subsidy on petrol. Fawibe, who noted that subsidies on consumption remained unsustainable in the long run because of it economic and multiplier implications, added that the countrys refineries must be in working condition to address the importation of refined petroleum products. NNPC should be made to explain why the jobs of PPPRA were taken over; I believe that the NNPC would not want to do anything that undermines the rule of law, so it needs to speak out on the issue, Fawibe noted. On the level of consumption, he says there is the need for an independent analysis, adding that the current situation lacks objectivity.Partner, Odujinrin and Adefulu, Adeoye Adefulu noted that with NNPC being the only importer of fuel, PPPRAs function of verifying subsidy claims is effectively redundant. Without the over/under recovery mechanism, it is doubtful that even the NNPC would be willing to import fuel. Nonetheless, without the check, questions would arise as to the veracity of the claims being made regarding the size of daily consumption of fuel. Ultimately, we would need to confront the subsidy question as a nation. We cannot keep dodging the issue, he noted. The continued payment of subsidy by the government is unsustainable and anti-development because the opportunity cost of the money expended on subsidy is money that the government is unable to spend on health, education and infrastructure. Beyond these issues, there is also the question of the transparency of the process. The NNPC has effectively been forced to be the sole importer because the private sector does not have faith in governments ability to pay subsidy as at when due. The over and under recovery method being utilised allows the NNPC to recover from crude proceeds its shortages from fuel importation, he added. In his contribution, Managing Partner, The Chancery Associates, Emeka Okwuosa says the current administration lacks credibility, especially in the light of current revelations on subsidy. According to him, the level of fraud that was perpetrated during the Jonathan administration in subsidy payment has re-echoed under the current administration despite the anti-corruption and due process campaign by the government. Okwuosa said: The Buhari administration needs to immediately institute an investigation to confirm the authenticity of the report and stop subsidy forthwith.He urged the presidency to take immediate action on the role of PPPRA that has been allegedly taken over.   Read the full article

Revealed: how ANZ executives can earn 300% bonuses – live

Chief executive offers mea culpa after appearance by AMP’s acting chief. Follow all the developments and updates

• AMP boss admits customers face waiting 17 years for remediation • The biggest banking scandal is that everyone knew – but still did nothing

6.17am GMT

What have we learned?

The royal commission spent a considerable amount of time asking Shayne Elliott, the chief executive of ANZ, about ANZ’s remuneration regime.

5.41am GMT

The day has finished off with Orr asking questions about ANZ’s response to the Sedgwick review.

Elliot will be back tomorrow at 10am, so we’ll hear more from him then.

5.36am GMT

Interesting.

Orr wants to know if ANZ has a clawback mechanism to reclaim remuneration after it has been paid to its Australia and New Zealand executives.

5.33am GMT

Orr rounds out this line of questioning by asking Elliott about his own remuneration.

Orr: “We know why your variable remuneration has been reduced, Mr Elliott.

5.29am GMT

Elliott says another reason individual executive compensation should not be published regularly is because it can lead to pay inflation across the industry.

Elliott: “I think it’s a reasonably well accepted – it may not be – but reasonably well accepted view that actually the regime of disclosing senior executive compensation has actually led to inflation in executive compensation.”

5.15am GMT

Elliott doesn’t want to be explicit about why ANZ executives have had their bonuses cut because he doesn’t want to create a “culture of fear”.

Orr: “Can I suggest to you that it’s not so much about a public shaming; it’s just a part of holding them accountable?

We run an organisation that is large. I have 40,000 people who come to work every day at ANZ in 33 countries. They have all sorts of backgrounds. They are all sorts of circumstances, beliefs, religions, ethnicity, etcetera. For me to be able to confidently assess that I can nail that communication and it not to be understood that it not to create a culture of fear, I think would be extraordinarily difficult. And I believe that we can do that in more general communication, rather than, to your suggestion, of essentially publishing performance assessments of the most senior executives of this company.”

5.10am GMT

The royal commission is spending so much time looking at the remuneration regimes in Australia’s banks.

Do you think it’s a safe bet that Hayne’s final report will contain recommendations on remuneration that won’t be welcomed by bank executives?

5.01am GMT

Orr wonders why ANZ doesn’t send internal communications to its staff to tell them why specific executives had their bonuses cut.

Elliott says it would be demotivating for ANZ’s executives.

4.57am GMT

Elliott tries to explain himself.

I think in the remuneration report from the directors, they do refer – I would have to refresh my memory – but they do talk about the generic decisions they’ve made about how they come to determine the appropriate [bonus] pool and ranking for people.

“I think they even talked about – and they will talk about it later – had applied downward adjustment to equity that had previously been awarded to previous executives.

4.51am GMT

ANZ shareholders kept in dark

There’s a long discussion about the reasons why, for the 2018 financial year, there were four instances of a current or former ANZ senior executive suffering a cut in their variable remuneration for reasons relating to risk, conduct or compliance.

4.31am GMT

Not bad for a year’s work

The royal commission hears about ANZ’s system of executive remuneration.

4.26am GMT

Elliott expresses frustration with the “two strikes rule.”

He concedes individual shareholders have very little say in how a large publicly-listed company is run, despite theoretically being part owners of the company.

4.12am GMT

Orr wants to know significant the expectations of shareholders are in setting remuneration structures for executives.

Elliott says they have a “very significant” voice, given their ability to vote on particular issues around remuneration means.

4.07am GMT

Orr talks about the remuneration regime for ANZ’s senior executives.

She wants to know if there has been an “incorrect calibration” - to use Elliott’s euphemism - of senior executive pay.

3.57am GMT

Orr: “In your submissions in response to the interim report you’ve said that, or ANZ said that, as a generalisation over a number of years, and due to various events, the financial services industry has developed a culture that has become overly focused on revenue and sales?

Elliott: “Yes.

3.55am GMT

Orr moves on to remuneration, and how it can encourage misconduct.

3.54am GMT

Orr: “Could each of those steps have been taken much earlier than following the Commission’s inquiry into these matters in the fourth round of hearings?

Elliott: “Of course.

3.51am GMT

Orr: “Now, since that round of hearings, ANZ has taken several steps directed to assisting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander customers living in regional and remote locations?

Elliott: “Yes.

3.44am GMT

Elliott had told colleagues of his, before the fourth round of hearings, to tell him how many ANZ outlets service communities of people that predominantly rely on Centrelink payments.

About 40 outlets meet that definition.

3.40am GMT

Elliott takes Orr through the steps again about the economics of ANZ’s branch network.

Orr then asks Elliott why ANZ was so concerned about being prepared for the fourth round of hearings, which were held in late June and early July.

3.11am GMT

We’re back after lunch.

Senior counsel assisting the royal commission Rowena Orr QC is asking ANZ’s chief executive Shayne Elliott about his bank’s decision to close scores of bank branches around Australia.

2.16am GMT

AMP’s acting chief executive, Mike Wilkins, wrapped up his evidence to the royal commission this morning.

It didn’t fill AMP’s shareholders with confidence. AMP’s share price has lost 3.7% today (as of 1pm AEST).

2.03am GMT

But with that we have broken for lunch.

The hearing will resume at 2pm.

2.02am GMT

Elliott insists that ANZ thinks seriously about its branch closures, taking things on a case-by-case basis.

He agrees there have been some cases where ANZ’s decision to close a branch has led to the final branch in a regional community shutting down.

1.58am GMT

Orr wants to know if people still go into branches to discuss significant things like home loans.

Elliott says they do, but for ANZ’s home loan book less than a third of home loans are originated through a branch – 55% come through brokers, another roughly 15% come through ANZ’s mobile banking network.

1.52am GMT

Orr changes the topic to ANZ’s branch network.

This year ANZ has closed 35 branches.

1.42am GMT

Interesting.

As part of ANZ’s attempt to ensure Neave remains independent they’ve put him on a fixed three-year term which won’t be renewed.

1.37am GMT

There has been a long discussion about ANZ’s “customer fairness adviser”.

In December 2016, ANZ appointed Colin Neave as ANZ’s customer fairness adviser with particular focus on remediation. Neave is a former commonwealth ombudsman.

1.34am GMT

And again on AMP, the sharp fall in the shares follows a release to the stock market confirming the figures revealed by Wilkins yesterday that the cost of fixing the company’s rep will be a hefty $778m.

Here is that statement to the ASX.

1.28am GMT

And just to follow up on the AMP shares post, this is a chart showing how the stock has performed in the past 12 months.

1.19am GMT

Shares in AMP have tanked this morning after the acting boss Mike Wilkins endured a fairly torrid time on the witness stand yesterday and today.

They are selling for $2.335, a fall of 3.91%.

1.09am GMT

Elliott’s performance so far has been reasonable.

It stands in severe contrast to Ken Henry’s, the chairman of NAB, who spent yesterday slouched in his chair, deigning to answer Orr’s questions when he thought they were worth responding to.

12.56am GMT

Orr: “So where does customer remediation sit now on your list of priorities for the application of your resources?”

Elliott: “I don’t have a list of priorities that numbers them one through 10 or something. I have a group that are all important. Remediation is there. If we were to speak to our team who run the Australia business, of which this refers to, they would tell you - and they have - and it’s documented - that remediation is their number one priority as a team. If I look at our board - and I believe it’s documented in the minutes - have encouraged or ... demanded that remediation deserves to be a top priority of the organisation.”

12.54am GMT

She wants to know why ANZ has previously described customer remediation as a “distraction”.

Asic uncovered an internal ANZ document in which a staff member said the bank put less focus on customer remediation – it was seen as a distraction, at the expense of earning revenue, and therefore not always given the highest priority.

12.45am GMT

Orr takes Elliott to the final finding in the ASIC report.

Asic found it took the major financial groups an average of 251 days to make the first payment to customers affected by a significant breach after the end of the investigation.

12.34am GMT

Orr takes Elliott to a second finding in ASIC’s report that it took the major financial groups an average of 150 days after commencing an investigation to lodge a breach report.

There is a legal obligation under section 912D of the Corporations Act to report significant breaches within 10 days of becoming aware of the breach.

12.31am GMT

Orr: “Would you still today be unable to look beyond seven years to see how many customers had been affected?”

Elliott: “Not in all cases.”

12.29am GMT

Elliott tries to offer an explanation, saying ANZ’s business was extremely complicated with different lines of reporting and oversight.

He says changes have been made, but he can’t say how long it will now take to identify a breach and report it to Asic. He would hope it could be significantly lower than 1,500 days.

12.18am GMT

It takes ANZ over four years to identify an incident that’s later determined to be a significant breach

Orr takes Elliott to an ASIC report on the breach reporting practices of Australia’s major banks.

12.14am GMT

Shayne Elliott offers a mea culpa:

Obviously the issues that we were talking about were over a period of time, in particular the [last] 10-year period, but I think, in fairness, drift back further than that in terms of the causes.

There was a recognition that at times we had – we always have to get the balance right between the needs of various stakeholders – that we had become far too focused on revenue, in particular, we don’t use the word sales but certainly revenue, as a definition of good behaviour, or good outcomes of excellence, if you will.

People who drove good revenue outcomes were seen to be doing a good job, and we paid less attention to how they achieved those outcomes.

12.10am GMT

ANZ has already acknowledged to the royal commission that it has engaged in a range of misconduct and conduct that fell below community standards and expectations.

In submissions to the commission the bank has blamed a culture that has become overly focused on revenue and sales.

12.08am GMT

Elliott has been CEO and executive director of ANZ since 1 January 2016.

Since last year he has also been the chairman of the Australian Banking Association.

12.04am GMT

Shayne Elliott, the ANZ chief executive, is now in the witness box.

Senior counsel assisting the royal commission Rowena Orr QC is leading the questions.

11.58pm GMT

Wilkins is very defensive about AMP’s vertically-integrated model.

The commissioner, Kenneth Hayne, isn’t buying it.

11.51pm GMT

In recent years, the banks repeatedly claimed that their financial advisers were acting in their customers’ best interests by selling them products that just happened to originate from the very banks for which the advisers worked.

And why wouldn’t an AMP-aligned financial adviser advise a customer to buy AMP’s products? AMP’s products are superior to its competitor’s products!

11.41pm GMT

Hodge lays out AMP’s vertically integrated model.

He says AMP customers are channelled through various distribution networks, with the main distribution channel being “advice” – via either direct or aligned financial advisers.

11.24pm GMT

Howard-McDonald warned in her memorandum:

As a business, we talk often about the value of a vertically integrated business but in practice my feeling is that we have little organisational understanding of what this means in terms of customer and other stakeholder expectations.

Further, on a day-to-day basis we operate as broadly four separate business lines who happen to share the same name and spend a lot of time doing business with each other, sometimes to the detriment of customer outcomes.

11.19pm GMT

The senior counsel assisting the royal commission Michael Hodge QC asks Mike Wilkins about a document Wilkins was handed by AMP’s customer advocate, Melanie Howard-McDonald.

Howard-McDonald’s role was to deal with customer complaints on a day-to-day basis.

11.05pm GMT

Good morning, everyone.

Thanks for joining Guardian Australia’s blog of the banking royal commission.

Continue reading... Revealed: how ANZ executives can earn 300% bonuses – live published first on https://yuanex.tumblr.com

Rebecca Solnit: They Think They Can Bully the Truth

Cousin to the noun dictator is the verb dictate. There are among us people who assume their authority is so great they can dictate what happened, that their assertions will override witnesses, videotapes, evidence, the historical record, that theirs is the only voice that matters, and it matters so much it can stand tall atop the conquered facts. Lies are aggressions. They are attempts to dictate, to trample down the facts and those who hold them, and they lay the groundwork for the dictatorships, the little ones in families, the big ones in nations.

Black Lives Matter has shown us policemen who continued to insist on their version of events when there is videotaped evidence to the contrary, or when physical evidence and eyewitnesses contradicts their account of events. You realize that they had assumed they could dictate reality, because for decades they actually had, and they were having a hard time adjusting to reality dictating back. As one of the Marx Brothers quipped long ago, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” The police assumed it was neither our eyes nor the evidence.

In February of 2015, two San Francisco policemen shot a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, to death. All the bullets entered him from behind—four went into his torso through his back—but they claim they shot in self-defense because he was rushing them. They did not face consequences, for lying, or for taking the life of a young man trying to get by in a strange land. Two months later, in North Charleston, South Carolina, Walter Scott was shot by a policeman while he too fled. He too died of bullets to the back, but his killer claimed self-defense in an account that differed dramatically from the videotape (which appears to show him planting a weapon on the victim after he had fallen) and eyewitness accounts. Scott’s killer got a 20-year sentence.

That victims will remain voiceless was the presumption behind much of the sexual abuse that’s been uncovered in the #MeToo era. Getting away with it is the same thing as assuming that no one will know, because your victim will be intimidated or shamed into silence, or that if he or she speaks up they can be discredited or menaced back into silence, or that even if they don’t shut up no one will believe them because your credibility crushes theirs. That yours is the only version that counts, even if you have to use savage means to make it so. Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow reported of former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s four victims, “All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal.” But it was he who faced reprisal in the end, because the rules changed, because a critical mass of women broke the silence and the system that perpetuated that silence, because the media that largely ignored or trivialized these stories began to take them seriously.

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Most of us think of truth as something that arises from facts that exist independently of our wills and whims; we have no choice in the matter, but we also believe in some sort of objective reality—either a thing did or did not happen, a sentence was or was not said, a substance is or is not poison. (And yes, I read lots of postmodern theory once upon a time and know all the counterarguments, but you know what I’m talking about.) What’s clear now is that most is not all, that a minority of us think that they can enforce a version that is divorced from factuality, and they always have. It corrupts everything round them and the corruption begins within them. Somewhere inside they know that they are liars and that they are imposing compliance to lies.

There are lies subordinates tell to avoid culpability, but they tend to be about specific things—I did not eat the cake, I did not show up late—while these fact-bullies can take charge of whole categories, as when a menacing father insists that his whole family pretend that everything is fine and they adore him. Gaslighting is a collective cultural phenomenon too, and it makes cultures feel crazy the way it does individual victims. That we are supposed to pretend that mass shootings and the epidemic gun death rate have nothing to do with the availability of guns is insane. That there is nothing to the Trump team’s dozens of covert contacts with Russian regime figures during the campaign and the Mueller investigation is a baseless witch hunt is a counterfactual agenda being pushed by sheer aggression from the Republicans and right-wing media and some supposedly left-wing darlings.

“The country is now in a sort of civil war, and part of what is at stake is truth and facts in the form of history, scientific fact, political accountability, and adherence to the law.”

This summer we are once again witnessing the indignation that arises in powerful men when it turns out other people have things to say and that they might be listened to and believed. Congressman Jim Jordan is outraged that nine former wrestlers report that when he was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, he knew but did nothing about their sexual abuse by the team doctor. It’s not a wrestling match he’s likely to win, but he seems to be unable to conceive that he’s not the boss of this story. (He tweeted on July 11 that CNN is contacting former staff and interns and “getting desperate,” as though this thing called reporting was both outlandishly unfamiliar and transgressive—“How can you ever trust such #fakenews?” he concluded.) Defenders of Darla Shine, racist conspiracy-theory-pushing wife of former Fox honcho Bill Shine (now the new White House communications director), claim that she is being smeared by having her own words recirculated. How dare you repeat things that I said! How dare you not let me rewrite what did and did not transpire!

It’s kind of like the Bill Cosby case—in which a surprising number of people seemed to be willing to believe that ten or twenty or thirty or eventually more than fifty women, most of whom were strangers to each other, were lying rather than that their idol was. It seemed to be less about the facts in the case than their conviction that he should be able to outweigh them, the way the person with the mic can shout down the crowd. Feminism, like many other human-rights movements, has been a process of amplifying voices until they can hold their own and of solidarity so that small voices can be cumulatively loud enough to counter the dictators. Thus have so many recent cases—from Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein—been built by many other women coming forward to support the testimony of the woman or women who broke the ice.

In 2014, singer Kesha sued to be released from her recording contract on the grounds that her producer, Dr. Luke, aka Luke Gottwald, had raped and otherwise abused her and that she had almost no creative control over her own music (a year earlier, her fans started a Free Kesha petition). Gottwald and the corporation refused to release her from the contracts she signed in her mid-teens, so there was a trial that brought more attention to the situation—when she lost, she remained stuck with him, hostage to a man she seems to dread and loathe. Now, four years later, he’s suing because “Gottwald’s music career will never recover from the damage she has caused.” By speaking up when his assumption seems to be that a superstar singer with a series of #1 hits would remain voiceless. But also, if you assume that Kesha is telling the truth (and I find her credible), Dr. Luke and his backers are blaming her for what he did, or rather for not keeping it secret. They assume he had a right to impunity, which is a right to do what you like and dictate the reality around it, a right to confront no competing versions, even from the other parties involved.

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Meanwhile, the radio host who groped Taylor Swift at a meet-and-greet and then sued her for saying so and getting him fired (he lost) complains he’s afraid to talk to women (perhaps because talking to a woman and grabbing a woman’s ass are apparently so hard for him to tell apart, a kind of confusion we’re hearing about from many men who are now “afraid to talk to” women). He says says he wants to tell her, “How can you live with yourself? You ruined my life.” That seems to be his way of saying that he was shocked to find that one of the most powerful figures in pop music had a voice and people believed her when she used it. During the trial that may be her greatest performance to date, Swift noted that contrary to accusations and long-established conventions, she had no responsibility to protect her assailant: “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” She was going after the assumption that no matter what he did, she has to keep life pleasant for him, by keeping her mouth shut.

“The [media] are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community.” –Donald Trump

Politifact published a timeline of White House positions on Trump’s alleged one-off sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, a rollercoaster of denials and admissions of things that were denied, and other contradictions. What’s noteworthy was that she signed, just before the election, a standard nondisclosure agreement: a contract to pay a woman to be silent so that a man’s version of reality might prevail. These things often happen when unequal status or menace alone don’t enforce the desired silence; Daniels also reports being threatened by a man who approached her and her child in a parking lot: “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’”

Lies require enforcement. Harvey Weinstein used nondisclosure agreements and armies of lawyers, spies from Mossad, threats to people’s careers and reputations, and the aid of a lot of others at the Weinstein Company and beyond to keep his high-profile victims silent, but he also had help from a society that traditionally silenced and discredited women. Long ago I wrote in my essay “Men Explain Things to Me” that credibility is a basic survival skill; the police have assumed that they have more than the people they target; men have assumed they have more than women. Despite everything going on in electoral politics, we are in era of leveling out who has this precious asset—or perhaps what’s going on in Washington is the backlash. Credibility is not inherent; it’s present in our own priorities and assumptions about who to believe. And those who are silenced beforehand don’t even get a chance at credibility.

More and more I come to see the compulsive, frenetic pace of lies by the president as a manic version of that prerogative of dictating reality. It’s a way of saying, I determine what’s real and you suck it up even if you know it’s bullshit. He has abandoned credibility for dictatorial power. When you’re a star, they let you do it, and the size of your stardom can be measured in how much you can force people to accept—or pretend to accept—contrary to their own intelligence and orientation and ethics. This is, after all, the liar who at CIA headquarters on January 21, 2017, told hundreds of CIA employees—skeptics whose profession is the collection and verification of facts—easily disproved lies about the size of his inauguration and the state of the weather the day before.

He told them, “And the reason you’re my first stop is that as you know I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community.” Which he did, since he’d compared them to Nazi Germany a few weeks before, but he tends to praise to their faces those he attacks behind their backs, as he’s just done with British Prime Minister Theresa May (and then denied the earlier statements; the Washington Post’s headline read “Trump denies he said something that he said on a tape that everyone has heard.”). One imagines that he has since childhood never been held accountable; it seems more than possible that after a lifetime of this he’s convinced that he actually dictates reality, or rather that it doesn’t exist, or only exists at his whim, that he is as freefloating in a void of unaccountability as the blimp in his image was in the air over London. That is, that he’s a nihilist.

His lying is sometimes regarded as a distraction or an annoyance, but it is a dangerous thing in itself, and he is himself a product of a system of producing and enforcing lies. This week we saw him lying, again, about the Russian role in making him president and corrupting our election; he surrendered to Putin in public with the latter as the victor in a cyberwar both men insist we pretend did not happen, a war they had perhaps just discussed in secret. Trump also insists that we take Putin’s word over that of US intelligence, the world’s news agencies, the Mueller investigation, and a lot of senators and congresspeople. The thing to remember here about an assault on truth is that it’s an assault.

His followers have had their minds weaponized by decades of Fox News and right-wing pundits promoting conspiracies and denying crucial phenomena, including the valuable role immigrants play in our economy and the urgent reality of human-caused climate change. The country is now in a sort of civil war, and part of what is at stake is truth and facts in the form of history, scientific fact, political accountability, and adherence to the law. In “The Prevention of Literature” George Orwell wrote that, “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened… Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

The internet has produced its own form of informational relativism. Facebook is now taking heat for its refusal, amid what is supposed to be an informational clean-up, to ban InfoWars—which, among the other conspiracy theories it’s pushed, claimed the Sandy Hook massacre of children was a hoax and the teenage Parkland mass shooting survivors were “crisis actors.” Asked about the continued presence of InfoWars, Facebook News Feed head John Hegeman said, “I think part of the fundamental thing here is that we created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of view.” That some of them are libelous and destructively false doesn’t seem to faze him (Sandy Hook parents, six of whom are suing InfoWars, have received threats from people who InfoWars directed to believe that the massacre was “a hoax to take away your guns”). This is a consequence of internet companies pretending they’re neutral platforms rather than information organizations with the responsibilities that have always come with that role. This is the result of their desire to serve any product to any customer, as long as it’s profitable.

Meanwhile Safiya Umoja Noble’s new book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism proposes that one driving force behind Charleston church mass murderer Dylann Roof’s racism was Google. Pacific Standard’s James McWilliams reports in a piece on Noble’s book that Roof did a search on “black on white crime” and was directed to a website by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist website promulgating lies. Google owns YouTube, which the Wall Street Journal reported last winter offers recommendations to viewers that “often present divisive, misleading or false content.” Tech critic Zeynep Tufekci noted, their “algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and it gives them what they want or think they want, whether or not it’s good for them or us or the record. The most powerful corporations on earth have, in other words, concluded that lies are profitable and pursued that profit.

As Hannah Arendt famously said, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Making those distinctions, doing the work to be clear, is resistance. It consists in part of supporting and reading good news outlets (including the newspapers whose financial basis has been undermined by the internet), and being informed both about the news they report and the historical background to the current crises to be found in books (and in universities, which makes it worth noting that the value of a humanities education is also under attack; one of its values is making people thoughtful sifters of data who are well-grounded in history). It consists of maintaining your capacity to fact-check and sift and evaluate information and your independence of mind. Solidity and steadfastness are key to resistance, and clarity, about who you are and what you believe. Principles are contagious, and though we need direct and dramatic action, the catalytic power of myriad people standing on principle and living by facts matters too. It means holding yourself and those around you to high standards not only of truth but of accuracy.

Good read found on the Lithub

Authority

We use the word “authority” to mean lots of things — police and state actors are “the authorities”, an expert may be “an authority on the matter, etc. But I want to suggest that it is very useful to think of authority as a characteristic of information in a social context. In particular, information is “authoritative” when some community of people to coordinate upon it and behave as if it were true, regardless of whether or not the information is in fact true, or even of whether the individuals doing the behaving personally believe it to be true. If information is authoritative, members of the community behave as if the information is true even despite strong, often opposing interests in the question. When we claim that someone “is an authority”, we are claiming that the information they produce will (or should) alter behavior within some human community. Authority subsists in the relationship between information and behavior in a social context.

Let’s take an example. A judge, in the context of a trial, is an authority. Suppose a judge pronounces a defendant guilty, despite her protestations of innocence. Both parties have produced information. But it is the information produced by the judge that guides the behavior of the vast preponderance of the community. Suppose the bailiff, who was present for the trial, privately came to a different conclusion than the judge, and believes that the defendant is in fact innocent. The bailiff will nevertheless behave as if she were guilty, taking her back into custody rather than setting her free.

More often than not, there is not so much cognitive dissonance. Most of us, most of the time, take a huge variety of conjectural “social facts” as given, condition our behavior as if they were true, and to the degree that we even give them a second thought, we believe them to be true. I log into my bank’s website, and check the balance of my account. Most of the time, I take the number presented as an authoritative representation of how much money I have “there”. I would prefer, quite strongly, that the number be millions larger, and my deposit balance at a bank is nothing more or less than what the bank acknowledges that it owes to me, so it is in a small way extraordinary that the bank and I are so willing to agree, despite diametrically opposed economic interests on the matter. But the miracle of authority is that it quells many disputes so thoroughly that parties don’t even imagine that there is any ambiguity or question to argue about. Authoritative information presents itself as factual, even when it (like a bank balance) has no external, empirical referent and is purely a social construction.

As surely as we depend upon the laws of physics to suspend us in our fifth floor apartments, we depend upon authority to give structure to our social and economic lives. Our very identities — our names, our credentials, the entity to whom our properties belong — exist as “social fact” by virtue of authority. The production of authority is the production of the social reality upon which we all coordinate. We talk sometimes about “defying authority”, by which we mean resisting some particularly crude and visible attempts to render information authoritative. But for the most part, to fail to coordinate on the “same facts” our community has settled upon comes off not as courageous but as insane. As Ijeoma Oluo writes:

A lot of things in our society are social constructs — money, for example — but the impact they have on our lives, and the rules by which they operate, are very real. I cannot undo the evils of capitalism simply by pretending to be a millionaire.

It’s hard to defy the authority of your bank account, even though the value that ends up there is the result of myriad social and institutional contingencies and is in a certain sense quite arbitrary. Of course we can, and under some circumstances we do, claim our bank balances are wrong. But whatever we believe the “true” figure should be is irrelevant as a practical matter unless and until an authoritative source (in this case, the bank itself) produces it. As individuals, we can dissent, but what makes information authoritative is how a larger community treats it, which often renders our own private judgements immaterial.

If authority is defined by information that a human community behaves “as if” is true, one might conjecture some relationship between processes that produce authoritative information and practices that might be colorably argued to be truth-generating. In most societies, a judge pronounces guilt, rightly or wrongly, after some kind of trial in which evidence is gathered and presented and the facts of the case are argued. In some societies, we might imagine the truth-generating power of legal procedure to be pretty good. In other societies not-so-much and we might mumble dismissively about “show trials”. As an anthropological matter, it’s clear that having some sort of narrative that connects the information we coordinate upon as “true” to processes that might mean they actually are true is helpful to the production of authority. Let’s call this “soft power”. On the other hand, if there are people with economic resources they can withhold to starve you, or with the physical capacity to harm and imprison you, they can, um, persuade the collective you to behave as if the information they produce is true. Let’s call this “hard power”. In nearly all societies, authority is generated by a combination of hard and soft power. We have a dispute. Is this house your house or my house? I can show you the deed to the property, evidence of a transfer of funds for its purchase, all of those things. But perhaps you can do the same. Our economic interests are opposed, and our standards of evidence are unlikely to be neutral. If we bring our dispute to the attention of the broader community, is it hard power or soft power that wins the day? Who knows? In most societies hard power is usually deployed under a fig leaf of soft power (the police evict me or they evict you following a trial with evidence and all of that). But sometimes this fig-leaf is so thin as to be meaningless. Even under procedures we consider decent, the ultimate “truth of the matter” will very often remain uncertain and contestable after all of the formalities have been deployed. A verdict will nevertheless be pronounced, and we will collectively behave as if the unknowable truth is known. Sure, that’s true in part because we believe hard power might eventually be deployed against those who defy the decision. But then, if the procedures were truly decent, you can argue that it is those who manage the institutions of soft power that determine the direction of the gun. And in practice, it’s rare for any overt hint of the exercise of hard power to be required to persuade most of use to behave as if some set of social facts is true.

It is a mistake — an easy, common, and foolish mistake — to imagine that hard power tells the whole story, that “how many divisions does he have?” is the beginning and end of the question of authority. The exercise of hard power is expensive. Even from the perspective of a “rational bandit” (ht Elaine Ou) whose ultimate source of legitimacy is the barrel of the gun, producing information about the world that causes people to behave in the ways you would like them to behave is cheaper and more efficient than frog-marching everybody everywhere all of the time. You’ll have more firepower available to defend your domain and plunder new lands if you can point your guns outward and your subjects still do what you want, then if you have to be pointing your guns inward at everyone. The law of the jungle selects for “voluntary compliance”. Further, relying upon the exercise of hard power butts up against the same informational limits that give rise to the economic calculation problem. No leader or ruling junta can even figure out what even they want the millions of people they rule to be doing all the time, let alone stand behind them with a gun and make them do it. [1] It’s much better if you can shape social reality so that people behave in roughly the way you’d like them to behave without your even having to tell them specifically what to do all the time, let alone point your scarce guns at them.

Communities want authoritative information on which they can coordinate. All sorts of valuable forms of collaboration are practical only when we are not bickering over every contingent and contestable social fact. Even flawed authority is better than no authority, and authority has network effects (the more people act as if some set of information is true, the more costly it is for others not to also act as if it were true). Nevertheless people dislike the cognitive dissonance associated with acting “as if” certain facts are true when they privately believe them to be false. We denote authority “Orwellian” when it is clumsy, when under threat of hard power or overwhelming convention it becomes in our interest to behave as if things we think false are true. Much more powerful (and so potentially dangerous) is authority that is not Orwellian at all, whose “soft power” is sufficiently persuasive that we privately believe nearly all of the social facts that we collectively coordinate upon. [2]

Authority, like most coordination problems, is relatively easy at small scale. We can choose a wise woman to judge and declare. However, the benefits of coordination grow nonlinearly with scale (“agglomeration effects”). Economic and military power accrue to polities that are able to produce authoritative information that coordinates behavior over large geographies and populations with minimal exercise of costly hard power. Modern, developed countries devote a significant fraction of their energies to the production of authority. Much of the work of the legal and accounting professions in the private sector, and of courts and the regulatory state in the public sector, is devoted to the production of authority. Finance, which concerns itself with contentious questions of who owns what and how scarce resources should be invested, is necessarily intertwined with the machinery of authority. The court system, the training and professional standards that apply to law and accountancy, the bureaucratic procedures that surround the operation of the regulatory state, all embody complicated sets of compromises between interests (which try to shape the social facts we coordinate upon for their own benefit) and the broader necessity of maintaining “credibility” and “legitimacy” so that recourse to hard power in shaping social behavior is rare. The production of “soft power” authority is the sine qua non of the modern state, and a source of competitive advantage for those who do it well.

The production of authority is a socio-technological problem, albeit a far-from-neutral technological problem (but technologies are never neutral). Although “soft power” authority is cheaper than resorting frequently to hard power to manage behavior, the systems by which we currently manage the production of authoritative information remain extraordinarily expensive — lawyers and judges and regulators and bankers don’t come cheap! Contemporary practices are also discriminatory. Most of the work of producing authority is done by a particular professional class, which is often socially and geographically segregated from the rest of the polity. Enfranchisement in the production of authority is skewed towards those within that class or capable of accessing (and paying) members of that class. This is problematic on technical grounds (those whose interests and perspectives are not included in the production of authority are more likely to privately dissent, diminishing the effectiveness of authority at coordinating behavior and increasing the degree to which hard power may be required), and on ethical grounds (the facts upon which we coordinate social behavior largely determine social outcomes, the determination of those facts is never neutral and always to a very large degree arbitrary).

The entropy of an individual human body is extraordinary large. It is a miracle, the degree to which even people we lock up as batshit crazy control and manage that entropy to yield elaborately functional behavior. The entropy of a human community or society is many of orders of magnitude larger, the space of potential social behavior is incomprehensibly vast and multidimensional. The behavior of so many bodies must be improbably constrained and synchronized to yield functional societies, which requires elaborate social coordination. Authority is an invisible drummer that helps to organize this dance. We construct authority. How we construct it is among the most important social, ethical, and technological problems we face.

[1] As with questions surrounding socialism and economic calculation, there is an case to be made that emerging information technology will render practical more pervasive and direct forms of state compulsion. So, um, exciting.

[2] When we are in it we are in it, but while we are thinking about authority from a distance, let’s remind ourselves that the absence of cognitive dissonance does not imply the presence of truth from some larger perspective. History is full of communities that produced authority effectively (in the sense that the “facts” that conditioned social behavior were widely privately believed), but which we now look back upon as having been egregiously in error, scientifically or morally. We might be “wrong” too. But authority is not about truth or falsehood in the eyes of God. It is about coordinating human behavior.

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20 Famous Speeches That Will Make You A Better Man

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20 Famous Speeches That Will Make You A Better Man

From Winston Churchill to Malala Yousafzai, history is awash with inspirational speeches spoken by great men and women. Naturally, though, not all speeches are created equal. You need only look at the orations of certain current political figures to notice that sometimes, when people speak, they really aren’t saying anything at all.

Luckily, everyone on this list not only has a point worth making, they deliver it with rare elegance, grace, and often humour. Whether you’re searching for best man speech inspiration, or simply looking to become a more rounded individual, there’s plenty here to serve as inspiration. And if your favourite speech is Mel Gibson’s pre-battle “Freeeedom!” call to arms in Braveheart, this is the list for you.

1. Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat

Winston Churchill

Britain’s most popular Prime Minister (sorry Theresa) is perhaps most famous for his rousing soliloquies on defiance in the face of adversity. Naturally, the most memorable of his speeches were given during his first run in the top job, from 10 May 1940 to 26 July 1945. Inheriting a tough job just as World War II was heating up (we’ve all seen Darkest Hour, right?) Churchill delivered his “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech to a parliament less than convinced that he was actually the right person to lead Britain to victory.

In it, he sets out his stall and explains the make-up of his new government. The most famous bit, though, comes towards the end: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs —Victory in spite of all terror — Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.” Not bad for his first speech in the job.

The lesson: Stick to your guns, even when those around you doubt your capabilities

2. Royal Wedding Sermon

Bishop Michael Curry

A passionate African-American preacher giving the sermon at a British royal wedding? It’s sad that in 2018 this seemed so radical. But judging by the much-memed expressions of certain guests, Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon was exactly the shake-up the establishment needed. And what a sermon it was. Focusing on “the power of love” (no, we’re not talking Frankie Goes To Hollywood), Curry’s speech reminded everyone that there’s nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to the warm fuzzies and that we’d all benefit from letting a little compassion into our lives. Well, it was a wedding, after all.

The lesson: “There’s power in love” obviously

3. I Have A Dream

Martin Luther King Jr.

This 1963 speech is perhaps the most famous speech in history. As King explains, it should be “self-evident that all men are created equal.” But, over half a century later, can we really say that King’s dream has come true? With #BlackLivesMatter today equally as vital as King’s campaigns, and less inclusive reforms taking place across the West, you might argue that we’re someway off. It’s worth, then, reacquainting yourself with King’s words, and seeing what you can do to help bring about equality between men, women and non-binary people of all creeds and colours. Because, occasionally, dreams do come true.

The lesson: Love thy neighbour, and keep fighting the good fight

4. That Rock N Roll

Alex Turner

The Arctic Monkey’s third Brit Awards win for both best British Band and Best British album made them unique among their peers. It’s understandable, then, for thinking Alex Turner – a real rock star, no less – might be a trifle tired of accepting awards from the pop-promoting awards body. His 2014 speech, in which he references rock n roll emerging from the slime may have had people making jokes about “rockstars in the toilet, practising their lines”, but to mock Turner is to miss the point. And the grins his bandmates are trying to hide. Let’s have a bit more mic-dropping, and a bit less Ed Sheeran. That rock n roll, eh?

The lesson: Don’t take yourself too seriously

5. Ich Bin Ein Berliner

JFK

The US President’s 1963 address to West Berlin crowds, against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, is often considered the Cold War’s most important speech. In it, Kennedy rallies the hearts and minds of the West against the tyranny of communism. The US will stand strong with the residents of West Berlin – a people surrounded on all sides by the Russian-held half of Germany.

So strong is JFK’s dedication that he wants to declare himself an actual Berliner. Their pain is his. And their strength is his. What he actually does is declare himself a “jelly donut” in the local parlance. Which only serves to make him seem even more likeable. Bloody Google Translate…

The lesson: Make sure you’ve got the local lingo down

6. Abolition Speech

William Wilberforce

When Yorkshire man William Wilberforce stood before the British House of Commons in 1789, slavery was still very much alive and well in the UK and her overseas colonies. It took some guts, then, to denounce the trade in human lives and freedoms as wretched and shameful. He asked for “cool and impartial reason”, and claimed that every single person in the House was guilty of compliance. Twenty years later, the Slave Trade Act of 1807 was passed, but the trade was not abolished until 1833. Wilberforce, by then retired from Parliament, died aged 76, just three days after hearing the the abolition act had been passed.

The lesson: If something’s worth fighting for, it’s worth being in it for the long haul

7. Quit India

Gandhi

India was the jewel of the British Empire, but enforced colonial rule could not last. When Britain refused to let India form its own government, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – leader of the Indian Independence Movement – sought to rally the people with this famous 1942 speech. In it, he urged the people of India to come together, and resist, without violence.

“Ours is not a drive for power, but purely a non-violent fight for India’s independence.”

A long five years later, Gandhi achieved his aims when India claimed its independence in 1947.

The lesson: Words will always be more powerful than a fist

8. The Decision To Go To The Moon

JFK

Delivered to a crowd at Rice Stadium, Houston on 12th September 1962, JFK’s address was designed to persuade the average American to support the effort to land a man on the moon. It was a resounding success, and simply historic in the scope and scale of the ambition it outlines. The payoff came on 20th July 1969, when Apollo 11 became the first manned mission to the moon, changing the game for good. A must-see for any manager or general trying to rouse the troops.

The lesson: The sky is no longer the limit

9. Barack Out

Barack Obama

A president with style, charisma and comic timing is a rare thing. Even more so these days. But, in his final speech at his last White House Correspondent’s dinner, Barry O is fantastic throughout, referencing Game of Thrones, shouting out Michelle and poking fun at his future. You’ll watch between your fingers though, as he hints that Hilary is a sure thing for the next presidency. Oh, and bill him for the mic. A masterclass in how to bow out with grace, even when everything seems like it’s going down the pan.

The lesson: Always leave in style

10. The Power Of Sport

Nelson Mandela

You might think that after 28 years in prison, Nelson Mandela would have bigger fish to fry than encouraging the youth of South Africa to take up sport. But, as anyone who’s seen Invictus knows, Mandela saw sport as a way of unifying his country, and instilling national pride in people of all creeds and colours. In this sports awards speech, he says simply that sport has “the power to inspire… the power to unite people in a way that little else does… sport can create hope where once there was only despair… it is more powerful than governments.”

The lesson: Don’t write off something that gives you happiness

11. The Fringe Benefits Of Failure…

J. K. Rowling

And The Importance Of Imagination. Good title. And J.K’s speech at Harvard University is just as inspiring as it sounds. After a round of jokes to get the audience warmed up (with only a handful of Harry Potter references, just in case you forgot) J.K. gets down to brass tacks: the importance of failure, and compromise. She talks of how her parents pushed her into a vocational degree, believing English Literature would never pay the bills. But while that turned out to be far from the case, her point is that life is difficult to control, and whatever path you set off down, you never know where you’ll end up. Magic.

The lesson: Go with the flow

12. Worldwide Access To Education

Malala Yousafzai

After being shot in the head by the Taliban, standing up and addressing the UN must be a doddle, right? Yeah, right. But, if she was as terrified as we would be, 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai did not show it for a second as she recounted her story, and asked for better education for children throughout the world so that we might welcome a more enlightened future.

The key, though, is to forgive and search for new ways to solve problems. In Malala’s words: “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him… This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”

A masterclass in bravery, and fighting for what’s right.

The lesson: Education and compassion are the key to greatness

13. Questioning The Universe

Stephen Hawking

A TED talk from Stephen Hawking? Yes, you are so lucky. In this 2008 speech, Hawking raises the biggest questions in the universe and tries to help us find answers. Are we alone in the universe? Where did life come from? And what is the future of the human race? Was there anything before the Big Bang? You’ll have to watch to find out.

The lesson: Always stay curious

14. How To Live Before You Die

Steve Jobs

In his 2005 speech at Stanford University, a very different type of genius tells three simple stories. The first is the story of his adoption, the second about getting fired from Apple – the company he started – and the third about death. Each morning, Jobs said, he woke up and asked himself if he’d be happy doing what he had to do that day if he only had a few days left. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” Just six years later, Jobs would indeed be dead, and it’s hard to say he didn’t live by his words each and every day.

The lesson: You have nothing to lose

15. Fall Forward

Denzel Washington

In 2011 Denzel addressed the University of Pennsylvania. His message: “Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.” According to Denz, it’s a fact that you will fail, lose and embarrass yourself – that’s inevitable. What matters is what you do after you’ve failed. In other words, keep on showing up.

The lesson: There’s no such thing as a mistake, just an opportunity to learn

16. Freedom or Death

Emmeline Pankhurst

Speaking in Hartford, Connecticut on 13th November 1913, the suffragette leader took no prisoners in her call for women to be treated as equal members of society, whatever it takes:

“We were called militant, and we were quite willing to accept the name. We were determined to press this question of the enfranchisement of women to the point where we were no longer to be ignored by the politicians… We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.”

Right on.

The lesson: Equality above all else

17. This Is Water Speech

David Foster Wallace

The late, great writer begins his speech with “If anyone feels like perspiring, I’d invite you to go ahead, because I’m certainly going to.” And it only gets better from there. His subject is, well, banal platitudes, and how they do, sometimes, have meaning – all told through the dissection of the traditional commencement speech. This might take a few watches but it’ll stay with you afterwards.

The lesson: We’re all part of something bigger

18. MUM Commencement Address

Jim Carrey

Continuing the trend of actors speaking to students, the comedian gave the commencement speech to the Maharishi University of Management’s class of 2014. Sure, there are some wild tangents, but the core of the speech sees Carrey at his most tender, touting the benefits of soft-serve ice cream, and the degree to which fear will have a role in your life. Most of us, he says, choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.

But there’s no point in doing so. He talks about his father choosing to be an accountant instead of pursuing a career as a comedian, only to later be made redundant. The lesson he imparted to Carrey junior is that you may as well take a chance, because you can always fail doing what you don’t love.

The lesson: Take a chance, because you can still fail even if you play it safe

19. Commencement Address Agnes Scott College

Kurt Vonnegut

One of history’s most unique writers brings his peculiar take on life to the 1999 Agnes Scott College commencement address. What’s most touching is how thankful he is for education, and the possibilities awaiting new students: “Thanks to you, the forces of ignorance and brutality have lost again.” He also quotes from Robert Browning, “A [wo]man’s reach always exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Beautiful words from two beautiful writers. Including the best advice of all time from Vonnegut: “Wear sunscreen”.

The lesson: The possibilities of the future are endless, if you have the courage to embrace them

20. Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

Queen Elizabeth I

Before Liz The Second, Britain had OG Liz, and some say she was the country’s finest queen. Case in point: on the eve of a decisive battle against Spanish forces in 1588, Elizabeth spoke to her troops on the front line:

“I am come amongst you… not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust… I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.”

Her willingness to fight and toil alongside her soldiers was rare enough at the time (least of all for a woman) but even more so now. A truly inspirational leader.

The lesson: Lead by example, and leave it all on the line

Sean Miller of Arizona, Christian Dawkins discussed payment to ensure DeAndre Ayton signing, according to FBI investigation

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Sean Miller of Arizona, Christian Dawkins discussed payment to ensure DeAndre Ayton signing, according to FBI investigation

FBI wiretaps intercepted telephone conversations between Arizona coach Sean Miller and Christian Dawkins, a key figure in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption, in which Miller discussed paying $100,000 to ensure star freshman Deandre Ayton signed with the Wildcats, sources familiar with the government’s evidence told ESPN.

According to people with knowledge of the FBI investigation, Miller and Dawkins, a runner working for ASM Sports agent Andy Miller, had multiple conversations about Ayton. When Dawkins asked Miller if he should work with assistant coach Emanuel “Book” Richardson to finalize their agreement, Miller told Dawkins he should deal directly with him when it came to money, the sources said.

The telephone calls between Miller and Dawkins were among 3,000 hours of conversations intercepted from Dawkins’ phone by the FBI.

Ayton, a 7-foot-1 center who was born in the Bahamas, is considered one of the top freshmen in the country and a leading candidate for national player of the year honors. He is averaging 19.6 points and 10.9 rebounds in what is expected to be his only college season, helping the No. 14 Wildcats take a 1½-game lead in the Pac-12 standings with three regular-season games to play.

Players at basketball powers such as Duke, UNC, Kentucky, Michigan State and Kansas may have committed NCAA violations that were uncovered by an FBI investigation, according to Yahoo! Sports.

A comprehensive breakdown of the teams, players, coaches and others implicated in the scandal engulfing college basketball.

Texas guard Eric Davis Jr. and San Diego State forward Malik Pope will not play while their schools investigate allegations they each took money from ASM Sports.

2 Related

ESPN analyst Jonathan Givony, in his latest mock selections, projects Ayton as the No. 2 prospect available for this year’s NBA draft.

Richardson, who worked for Miller the previous 10 seasons at Xavier and Arizona, was one of four assistant coaches arrested by FBI agents on Sept. 27, following a two-year investigation into bribes and other corruption in the sport.

Richardson is accused of accepting $20,000 in bribes and paying a recruit to sign with the Wildcats. In exchange for the money, the government alleges, Richardson agreed to influence Arizona players to sign with Dawkins and financial adviser Munish Sood, who also was arrested by FBI agents. Arizona formally fired Richardson on Jan. 11.

Richardson is charged with six felonies: conspiracy to commit bribery, solicitation of bribes by an agent of a federally funded organization, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, mail fraud conspiracy and travel act conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 60 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Oklahoma State‘s Lamont Evans, Auburn‘s Chuck Person and USC‘s Tony Bland were the other assistant coaches charged in the cases, along with Adidas executives James Gatto and Merl Code and former NBA referee Rashan Michel.

Dawkins, a former AAU director from Saginaw, Michigan, was charged with wire fraud in September after the government accused him of funneling money from Adidas to the families of high-profile recruits. Last week, a federal judge in New York declined to dismiss criminal indictments against Dawkins, Gatto and Code.

On Friday, Yahoo! Sports reported that players from more than 20 Division I men’s basketball programs have been identified as possibly breaking NCAA rules through violations that were uncovered by the FBI’s investigation into corruption in the sport.

Schools identified by Yahoo! as having players who possibly violated NCAA rules include Duke, North Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Michigan State, USC and Kansas. At least 25 players are linked to impermissible benefits, including Michigan State’s Miles Bridges, Alabama’s Collin Sexton and Duke’s Wendell Carter.

The documents detailed the work of Andy Miller and his agency. Yahoo! reported that the documents — which include paperwork from 2015 through 2017 — show cash advances as well as entertainment and travel expenses paid for college prospects and their families. They did not mention Sean Miller or Ayton.

Ayton moved from the Bahamas to San Diego, where he played two seasons of high school basketball. As a junior in 2015, he transferred to Hillcrest Prep Academy in Phoenix, where he played with current Duke freshman Marvin Bagley III. Ayton was ranked the No. 3 player in the 2017 ESPN 100, behind Bagley and current Missouri freshman Michael Porter Jr.

Ayton committed to Arizona on Sept. 3, 2016, after also considering scholarship offers from Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland and San Diego State. When Ayton signed with the Wildcats, Miller described him as “one of these once-in-a-generation types of players” because of his size and shooting ability.

After Richardson was arrested in late September, Arizona president Robert C. Robbins announced that the university had hired two law firms to conduct independent investigations into the matter.

Asked for a comment, Arizona reiterated statements issued by school athletic director Dave Heeke and Miller in October when the investigations were announced.

At the time the investigations were announced, Robbins said in a statement, “Head coach Sean Miller has not been charged with — nor accused of — any misconduct and he has been fully cooperative and supportive of our efforts to determine the facts in pursuit of the truth. … Based on the facts that we know at this time, we support Coach Miller and intend to provide him with all of the tools necessary to meet our goals and expectations.”

Milwaukee Bucks guard Jason Terry, who played at Arizona under coach Lute Olson from 1995 to ’99, tweeted that it’s time to for the Wildcats to “clean house.”

@APlayersProgram BearDown it’s time to clean house and bring home our own bloodlines to carry on Lutes Legacy. We have too much pride, too much tradition to allow outsiders to tear down what we built.

— Jason Terry (@jasonterry31) February 24, 2018

Miller, 49, is a three-time Pac-12 Conference Coach of the Year and has a 242-72 record in his ninth season with the Wildcats. The Arizona Board of Regents approved a contact extension for him in February 2017, which increased his annual salary to at least $2.9 million through 2022. He has denied knowledge of Richardson’s alleged scheme to bribe players to sign with Arizona.

“As the head basketball coach at the University of Arizona, I recognize my responsibility is not only to establish a culture of success on the basketball court and in the classroom, but as important, to promote and reinforce a culture of compliance,” Miller said in a statement released in September. “To the best of my ability, I have worked to demonstrate this over the past eight years and will continue to do so as we move forward.”

If Miller is fired for cause, his contract is written in such a way that he would still receive more than 85 percent of the money he is owed through May 31, 2022.

Miller’s contract provides that even if he is fired with cause, the university would have to pay his base salary. The contract defines his base salary as his salary plus his peripheral salary. That adds up to roughly $10.3 million through May 2022. The only part that Miller wouldn’t be entitled to is $1.7 million from Nike and IMG that is due to him if he completes his contract.

Keeping such a percentage on a firing for cause would be unprecedented. Most coaches who are fired for cause receive no additional money past their employment date. But the contract has no provision that waives the university’s obligation to pay Miller what is owed based on an NCAA violation. The contract makes no mention of the university’s recourse if criminality is involved.

The contract also provides that if Miller commits an NCAA violation, he would have to pay up to $300,000 in damages to the university’s coffers for the price of defending itself. If an NCAA violation occurs, Arizona has the right to claw back bonuses given to Miller during the time of the violation.

ESPN’s Darren Rovell contributed to this report.

MGMT 591 Full Course-Latest 2017 November

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 Contact us At: [email protected]  

        Question

MGMT591 Week 1 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 1: HIGH PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS - HPOS

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This week, our text discusses the definition of organizational behavior, and in particular, its applied focus. Our lesson focuses on high-performance organizations (HPOs). However, in order to become an HPO, an organization needs to navigate the complexities of the workforce as well as mitigate the challenges that exist. What are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities that exist for managers in using organizational behavior concepts? Give specific examples. How can the study of organizational behavior help organizations work through these challenges successfully?

dq 2

WEEK 1: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

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Post in this discussion the leader your team chose and why. No two teams may choose the same leader so be sure no one else has picked one before you post it. Put the name of the leader in the subject line. Also share any insights or issues as your team forms and you create the team contract.

MGMT591 Week 2 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 2: SATISFIED WORKERS ARE PRODUCTIVE WORKERS

3737 unread replies.123123 replies.

Our discussion question this week comes primarily from Chapter 3 in the textbook. Assume you are new to your job and on the first day, you have a conversation with your boss, who says, “Satisfied workers are productive workers.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not? Please support your opinion with evidence from our readings.

dq 2

WEEK 2: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

5151 unread replies.136136 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 Week 3 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 3: MOTIVATION

8585 unread replies.119119 replies.

Dr. Peter Drucker has stated: "You cannot motivate employees; employees must motivate themselves." What does Dr. Drucker mean by this statement in regard to motivational theory? At the heart of this statement is all about can managers motivate their employees. Some would argue that since motivation is “an inner drive that causes action, that managers cannot motivate their subordinates.” Others argue that managers can motivate their subordinates that is part of a manager’s job. What side of this argument do you find yourself and why?

dq 2

WEEK 3: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

4444 unread replies.128128 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 Week 4 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 4: MOTIVATION

8484 unread replies.113113 replies.

“Help! I have just been assigned to head a new product design team at my company. The division manager has high expectations for the team and for myself, but I have been a technical design engineer for four years since graduating from college. I have never managed anyone, let alone led a team. The manager keeps talking about her confidence that I will be very good at creating lots of teamwork. Does anyone out there have any tips to help me master this challenge? Help!” You immediately start to formulate your recommendations. What are the three key things you will advise her to do, and why those three first?

dq 2

WEEK 4: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

5050 unread replies.131131 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 Week 5 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 5: COMMUNICATIONS

8181 unread replies.112112 replies.

While communicating in teams and organizations, there are often gender and cultural issues that add a level of complexity to the process of transmitting a message. What are some of the non-verbal differences involved in communicating your message to members of a diverse organization? How do gender differences play a role in communications? What are some of the ways that organizations seek to account for these differences?

dq 2

WEEK 5: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

7575 unread replies.114114 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 Week 6 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 6: ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE

8282 unread replies.107107 replies.

Our text provides a thorough review of various organizational design structures; let's investigate our own organizational design preferences. Describe your current or most recent employer's organizational design (mechanistic, organic, hybrid). Is the structure consistent with the company goals? If you had the opportunity to redesign your current organization where you are employed, would you maintain its current structure, or change it to another model? What would that model be and why?

dq 2

WEEK 6: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

7676 unread replies.125125 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 Week 7 Discussion 1 & 2 Latest 2017 November

dq 1

WEEK 7: GET YOUR TEAM TO DO WHAT IT SAYS IT’S GOING TO DO

6969 unread replies.106106 replies.

Over the last three weeks, we have focused very much on leadership, power, organizational culture, and teams.More and more organizations are moving to team-based management. The article is Get Your Team to Do What It Says It's Going to Do. The article is located on the Assignments page under Reading. A few opening topics for this week's discussion:

Assess     the If-Then Plans model in the article for teams in setting goals. What     do you like about the model? From your perspective are there things that     are missing in the model?

How     receptive might teams be in adopting this model to help them in setting     goals?

Share     with the class what you found most interesting about the article and why.

dq 2

WEEK 7: TEAM PROJECT COLLABORATION

3838 unread replies.126126 replies.

In this discussion, you will view the voice threads submitted by the other teams and comment on at least 3 of them.

MGMT591 All Course Projects Latest 2017 November

Leadership and Organizational Behavior in Action

Objective

Research shows that people learn effectively when working on real problems grounded in their work experience.To this end, our Course Project is designed to incorporate students' work experience into the learning process in this course.

The project is an opportunity to explore, in-depth, a topic related to the course objectives (COs) that is of significance to you or your organization (current or former).

Summary

Members of the class are required to prepare an applied research paper, with a minimum of 10 pages but not to exceed 15 pages in length (excluding cover page, table of contents and appendices), on a specific issue related to leadership or organizational behavior.

Guidelines

Topic Selection

1. Select a specific organization of interest to you and identify a problem at the firm related to organizational behavior (OB).

2. Think of yourself as an organizational consultant and assume that a key manager has requested a thorough analysis and recommended course of action to resolve an actual organizational problem that will make a difference to the future performance of the organization.

3. Identify which course Course Objectives (COs) are related to the problem you identify.

Research Sources

1. All papers must have a minimum of six scholarly sources cited within the text of the paper and identified in the references section.

2. Additional research sources can be attached in a bibliography.

3. Review the following document for instructions on how to access and use EBSCOhost for your research: EBSCOhost (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Paper Format

1. All papers should be double-spaced, using an 11- or 12-point font.

2. The length of the paper is to be between 10 and 15 pages, not counting the cover page, table of contents, nor appendices.

3. The first page should include the title of the work, student name, course number and title, date, and professor name.

4. The second page should be a table of contents. It should, at a minimum, reflect the seven items listed in the Grading Rubric.

5. Follow APA style for general format and citations (see the APA Guidelines Tutorial in the Syllabus).

6. The paper sections must adhere to the guidelines below, and each section must be labeled in the text.

7. The language should be clear, concise, and precise.

8. The tone should be professional, consistent, and not filled with jargon.

9. Grammar and syntax (sentence structure) must be correct.

10. The report must be free of misspellings and typos.

Tables and Figures

1. All figures and tables must be referred to in your text before they appear on the page.

1. Figures and tables should appear on the same page as, or the page after, the text that refers to them.

2. All figures and tables need captions. Captions go below figures and above tables.

Quotations and Citations

1. Quotations and citations are crucial components of a research paper and must be present.

2. Failure to properly cite research sources and borrowed ideas is plagiarism.

3. Refer to the APA style guide for assistance with properly citing quoted or borrowed materials and ideas.

4. Turnitin is used on all reports and projects. A report can be obtained for your review prior to submitting your final work. Make sure that you are in compliance with the University's 20/80 rule.

Milestones

Week

Action   Required

1

Familiarize  yourself with course content and select an organization and problem area to  research.

3

Submit  a written Brief Proposal of Research containing the following:

1. A brief  overview of the chosen organization and your role in it

2. A  preliminary problem statement in the form of a researchable question

3. A brief  narrative description of the organizational problem that you would like to  research and resolve

4. Which  Terminal Course Objective(s) your problem is related to

3

Conduct  library research on your topic.

1. Identify a minimum of six scholarly  resources for your project.

2. All  resources for the paper must come from DeVry Library and must be of scholarly  quality.

3. Use the  librarians for assistance in accessing materials.

4. Review the  Using EBSCO tutorial.

Please  Note:  Articles found online (many on consulting company websites, Internet  magazines, or other blogs)will  not be considered an acceptable scholarly resource. Conduct your  research through a library where you can be assured that the sources are of  scholarly quality.

5

Submit  a written Expanded Research Proposal containing the following:

1. Title page  and Table of Contents

2. Documentation  of at least three initial scholarly sources from the library

3. Expanded  introduction to the organization

4. Expanded  description of your chosen problem

5. Preliminary  solution options (can be bullet points)

6. Preliminary  analysis of leadership and organizational behavior concepts addressed in the  paper

6

Continue  to work on the class project; seek professor help as required.

7

Submit  the completed project.

MGTM591 Week 2 Team Project Updates Latest 2017 November

 Do      an assessment of the employee satisfaction in one of the organizations      led by the Leader.(Chapter      3)

 Assess      the "mood" of this Leader and also assess the level of      Emotional Intelligence of the Leader especially applying the analysis on      pages 1-9 - 113 of the textbook. (Chapter      4)

 Apply      the Big Five Personality Model to the Leader. Assess      how much if any of the Dark Triad applies to this Leader.

 Read      and apply from the DeVry library the following article- Narcissistic      Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons. Authors:      Maccoby, Michael (Chapter 5)

 Apply      the criteria on Creative Behavior to the Leader. How      does the "Choosing to Lie" box on page 178 apply?

MGTM591 Week 2 Life Styles Inventory (LSI) Assignment Latest 2017 November

Life Styles Inventory (LSI) Assignment Guidelines

Developing a willingness and ability to engage in self-reflection is a critical leadership skill that is not easily learned, yet which reaps many rewards. The Life Styles Inventory enables you to examine your unique way of thinking and how it influences your behavior.

Your Assignment

Complete (on your own) Life Styles Inventory (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., so that you end up with your Life Styles Circumplex profile: 12 personal thinking style scores, with one score for each section of the circumplex. See the embedded link for additional information.

Write a three to five page paper examining and explaining your LSI results. Make sure to comply with the Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. provided. The required page count does not include the title page or table of contents. Hint: The table of contents should include the four topics in the grading rubric.

LSI Style Interpretations

Go to the LSI1 Results page, find your circumplex profile, and click on the circumplex slice of one of the styles.The site will bring you to a customized interpretation of the style you clicked on. Click on each of the 12 slices to see all of the customized style description pages.

MGMT591 Week 3 Team Project Updates Assignment Latest 2017 November

 Assess      the Leader using Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs, McGregor's Theory X-Y      model, Hertzberg's Two-Factor Theory and McClelland's Theory of Needs. Choose      and apply two of the Contemporary Theories of Motivation (pages 189-207      from Chapter 7).

 Examine      the motivational concepts from Chapter 8 and show how the Leader either      applied or missed applying these concepts..

MGMT591 Week 4 Team Project Updates Assignment Latest 2017 November

 Review      the organization this Leader was at the top of and assess what the group      behavior was like under this Leader (Chapter 9).

 How      did teams get implemented in the Leader's organization? Were they successful?      What could have been done better? (Chapter 10).

MGMT591 Week 6 Team Project Updates Assignment Latest 2017 November

· Apply concepts from the assigned Chapters.

· Be sure to include extensive research outside the textbook and also to cite the textbook correctly including page numbers.

· This week's paper should be at least 5 pages and less than 7 pages in length (not counting title page, references and any images or charts).

· Answer these questions and use each question as a separate header in the team's report.

o Using your research, apply applicable concepts from Chapter 15 and report on the organizational structure of the Leader's organization.

o Based on your research, use the tools in Chapter 16 to characterize the culture of the Leader's organization.How is your team's guess on what kind of Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) result this Leader's organization would see?

MGMT591 Week 6 Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) Assignment Latest 2017 November

Go to the OCI (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and follow the instructions on the site. There are two steps to this assignment.

(1) Submit your OCI results for this week (pdf or copy/paste into Word).

(2) Add three to five paragraphs about your learning experience impacted by the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI).

Discussing Behaviour, Inclusion and Exclusion: 12 considerations.

In this post I want to explore some issues that emerge from debates about behaviour systems.  This is based on my experience in numerous settings, including some challenging schools alongside others that are/were much more straight-forward.  It’s not a definitive list  – please feel free to add ideas via the comments.

1. Context:

Context is King and is not given enough weight in the debate.  Every time someone says that anything short of ‘No Excuses’ means ‘Excuses’ – ie schools being apologists for low standards of behaviour – or someone is outraged by central detentions or rules about phones and uniform I want to shout: CONTEXT!  If you’ve never taught a class where you felt students needed to be a whole lot more disciplined (dare I say obedient?) or, conversely, where students behave impeccably within a light-touch behaviour regime, it means you just haven’t seen how life is elsewhere. Don’t judge from afar or project from one context to another. That’s my advice.

2. Enforcement:

Should a principle of optimum minimal enforcement apply?: No more and no less enforcement than is necessary to create a safe, positive learning environment.  As  I explore in my Bus Lanes assembly blog, rules without enforcement are not really rules.  We all accept responsibility as community members for complying with the rules from which we all benefit; we also expect consequences when we break them.  I don’t understand why some commentators baulk at the idea of enforcement of school rules.  Do you want a smart uniform or not? Do you want students to arrive on time or not?   That just doesn’t happen by itself in a lot of contexts.

At the same time, I have seen schools where I felt some rules were surplus to requirements; where giving more freedoms to students would have made lessons and corridors feel more natural, relaxed and normal without a negative impact on learning or safety. What do mature children behave like when they are relaxed, happy and kind and focused on learning? They chat, they laugh, they move from place to place easily – they don’t need to line up and walk in silence, for example.  Context is King, of course.

3. Compliance:

There’s a big space between the act of compliance and the state of being compliant. I’ve written a (largely ignored) post about this here.  We are not in the business of creating boot camps where students are supressed, repressed and inhibited, afraid to breathe. We don’t want compliant children in that sense.  However, we do want children who recognise the authority required to run a safe, effective social institution full of potentially vulnerable young people.  Compliance isn’t a dirty word; we all drive on the left;  we comply because we see that it works for everyone.  So does doing what your adult teachers ask you to in the pursuit of learning.   Of course – this doesn’t mean that there’s no need for good relationships and mechanisms to deal with injustice.

4. Exclusions:

Exclusions should be a system issue, not a school issue –but every school should be in that system. I’ve written about this before.  Every school, surely, should play a role in providing safety-net provision so that we have the optimum match of provision to needs in any given community.  Not every school can meet the needs of every child; some children are very difficult to provide for adequately because of the detrimental impact they have on others and this becomes unsustainable.  Exclusion should not mean kicking kids out without  taking responsibility for the next stage; it should be a process of initiating a transfer to more appropriate provision at that stage in their lives.  It shouldn’t have to a one-way ticket.  In that context, exclusion should not be a sign of failure on a school’s part – it is a system issue. At the same time schools should all be accountable to the community of schools for the nature and extent of their participation.  It should be give and take; some schools are all take.

5. Circumstances:

Bullying and disruptive behaviour are complex but when students cause unacceptable harm to others’ learning or wellbeing it has to be addressed regardless of circumstances. Circumstances might explain antisocial or dangerous behaviours but they don’t excuse them.  I’m a firm believer that children are more likely to be let down by us having lower expectations of them when they live in disadvantaged circumstances – than by holding the same high expectations of them.  There are often mitigating factors that need to be understood as far as possible.  However, the very hard bit is that, sometimes, however tragic someone’s situation might be, it can become impossible to meet their needs as well as to protect the learning and safety of others.

6. Bottom Lines:

Without firm bottom lines, schools are not safe. I’ve been surprised to read of recent debates about exclusions for carrying weapons, for example.  In my experience, it’s vital to hold some zero tolerance positions:  Weapons; drugs; premeditated violent assault.   Even here there can be grey areas depending on the evidence base.  However, over the years I have been involved in permanent exclusions for each of these incidents and I’m 100% sure this was the correct course of action.  Partly you want the students involved to learn a very firm life lesson but mainly you need to hold a firm line that acts as a clear deterrent to everyone else, even if the students concerned are simply being naïve rather than malicious. The stakes are too high.

7 Intervention Timescales:

Mental health and Ed Psych interventions are usually too slow to address short-term provision pressures.  It’s always been a massive frustration to me that, in the formal proceedings that surround exclusions, there is a widely held position that interventions such as EP and CAMHS referrals must have been initiated with actions that follow before it can be said that the school has ‘tried everything’.  But, sadly, my experience is that even the best of these processes is very slow, is heavily dominated by diagnosis over treatment and, often, the practical suggestions for schools are things that are already happening.

Meanwhile, as the multi-agency work operates over months and years, students can continue disrupting learning and creating difficulty for their peers and teachers on the scale of days and weeks.  There’s a lot of lip service paid to these interventions in relation to the reality of their impact.  That’s the rather jaded voice of bitter experience in several schools. It may be all peachy elsewhere.

8. Provision:

Resource constraints or priorities often override principles in relation to in-house or external alternative provision.  Ideally within a school community you’d have multi-dimensional provision for supporting students with learning needs, separate provision delivering proactive programmes specifically for meeting SEMH needs and separate provision for short term internal exclusion and again for emergency responses to in-class disruption. That’s largely unaffordable so schools seek external solutions – they’re pushed towards exclusion and awkward internal provision.

9. Behaviourism

Behaviourism works – but only up to a point. You can get major gains through simple behaviourist choices and consequences approaches that train students into the habits of good behaviour. But where students become desensitised to repeated sanctions, the effect can wear off and some students – the pinball kids – don’t even respond in the first place, hitting the boundaries continually without the level of self regulation required. So, whilst these approaches are important, in some contexts, they are not enough and ever more strict regimes are not the answer.

10. Behaviour Systems need effective people.

Great systems require building both teachers’ behaviour management skills and running whole-school systems; not either or.  I agree that teachers at every stage should be able to teach in a disciplined environment and that it’s the role of leaders to create that. However I’ve rarely seen this work in practice – even  under ultra tight rigid regimes – unless the teachers are also developing their confidence and skill with assertive behaviour management.  It’s just so much harder for leaders to remote control behaviour relative to the impact of a team of assertive teachers who build positive relationships.  Similarly it’s rare to find impeccable behaviour in the absence of strong whole school systems that support teachers.

11. Conflicting ideals:

Stakeholders including parents, governors and even teachers can hold conflicting and competing ideals: a desire for optimal levels of discipline with no disruption or bullying and a desire for students to have freedoms and operate in a high trust culture.  They ideals can be incompatible in practice: you can’t have it all.  In particular you can’t have some rules for other kids that don’t also apply to your own. It’s a mistake to push for a strong system that involves sanctions as a lever and then lose your nerve when the numbers are high.

12.  Mainstream SEND

This is a massively sensitive issue and rightly so.  It’s simplistic to apply general ideas about mainstream SEND inclusion to students who fit in the Social, Emotional and Mental Health category –  because of the impact they can have on others.  Nobody will be happy to Perm-Ex a student with special needs – it’s always painful –  but I’m never surprised by the figures showing the high proportion of exclusions that involve SEND students – because, by definition, a student whose behaviour puts them at risk of exclusion despite interventions, has SEMH needs and is placed in that SEND group.  A lot of that correlation is circular; I find the outrage around this unhelpful because the cases I’ve known have all been complicated with exclusions justified.

Taking account of all the issues explored above, it’s often simply a case of not having the resources to meet a particular set of behaviour needs in a mainstream setting in a space where other children can also learn and be safe.  Where schools work hard to be inclusive but end up making difficult decisions on exclusions, it’s frustrating for them to be lumped in with schools that abdicate responsibilities for supporting inclusion across a wider community of schools.

Where disruptive behaviours originate in specific learning difficulties or have social origins, we face the intervention timescale challenge.  In my experience, schools have often held onto students longer than was healthy; for me, persistent disruption is a good reason for seeking new provision – too many other children can be affected if that doesn’t happen.  I’m thinking of specific students.  Too often this debate becomes a battle of virtues or it becomes taboo to suggest that some students need special provision – for schools to raise a flag and make the professional judgement that they cannot adequately balance the needs of all students with the needs of an individual.  It’s a sad conclusion to reach; but it can be a legitimate one.

There has to be another way – and this requires a greater investment in high quality specialist alternative provision – internally or externally – that allows children to succeed and/or to return to the mainstream at a later point.

              Discussing Behaviour, Inclusion and Exclusion: 12 considerations. published first on http://ift.tt/2uVElOo

Campus due process comments and responses

The quality of the commenters is one of the most enjoyable aspects of posting here. So, a few responses ® to comments © below:

C: “Another facet of campus sexual assault that is rarely discussed is the strong evidence that young women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted if they are not students than if they are (look at the National Crime Victimization Survey). Even if campus tribunals were fair and accurate, any ‘solution’ that focuses on college campuses alone will neglect the vast majority of sexual assault victims; in fact, by removing rapists from colleges and placing them among non-student populations, this system endangers those who already suffer more. This argument should resonate among those who focus on equity, since policies targeting campus sexual assault benefit disproportionately wealthy and white populations at the expense of poor and non-white populations. This is another reason to use police and the courts for investigation, adjudication, and punishment, and to use universities for prevention, education, and counselling. Policies improving the way the justice system handles sexual assault will benefit society as a whole, not just students.”

R: This is a very important point, in multiple respects. First, as the survey mentioned above notes, and despite the suggestion of activists on this issue such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), non-college women are at greater risk of sexual assault than are college women. The fate of these women seemed of little interest to both the Obama administration and the key congressional players on this issue.

The equity issue works in another way. Though the actual percentage is unclear, most female undergraduates (a portion of whom are part-time students) don’t live on campus. Of that constituency, those who are sexual assault victims, therefore, are far more likely than a student at a four-year, residential college to have as a perpetrator a non-student, with an attack outside of campus jurisdiction. These students are part of the “1 in 5” figure the Obama administration used, yet their fates seemed of little interest to the campus movement.

Finally, from an equity standpoint, the campus rape frenzy is, in its most basic form, a movement of the elite, for the elite. As Stuart and I discuss in the book, Clery Act figures show that allegations of campus sexual assault are far higher (by a factor of six, in some cases) at Ivy League universities or elite liberal arts colleges than at nearby institutions. By focusing almost exclusively on allegations of sexual assault handled through campus tribunals, the Obama administration and its allies wound up, whether intending to do so or not, focusing disproportionately on the nation’s elite institutions.

C: “ ‘The Campus Rape Frenzy’ as a title implies that the claims are rape are bogus. That is an unwarranted inference … [T]o then imply that the people who claimed rape are liars because the accused were not found guilty is pretty vile.”

R: The book makes no such claim. In fact, Stuart and I go to great lengths not to speculate about the motivations or mind-set of most accusers. The only accuser in the book whom we describe as lying is “Jackie,” from the Rolling Stone case, who claimed to have been raped by a person who, it turns out, doesn’t exist. We do use the word in a quote from the Amherst accuser, who searched for a cover story about having sex with her roommate’s boyfriend. She texted that the male student she’d eventually accuse of sexual assault was “too drunk to make a good lie out of shit.” We also use the word in quoting from a decision in the Ohio State case, where Judge James Graham ruled that an accused student’s lawsuit could go forward, since it was possible that OSU “Administrators knew that [the accuser] lied about the timing of her accommodation at the hearing and permitted her testimony to stand unrebutted.”

C: “You understand legal-ese, right? That’s where the conversation, below, is focused on. Stating that something is a requirement, etc., obfuscates the issues. It is entirely correct to say that the letter is coercive — that’s a great argument. Saying that the letter makes any requirements (APA, etc.) is incorrect … That is why precision matters in these issues. Well, it used to on this blog. Now we just let journalists in to hawk their latest red meat book”

R: This comment would be better directed at former OCR head Catherine Lhamon, who informed the Senate HELP Committee in 2014 that she expected colleges and universities to comply with OCR’s Title IX guidance, even though OCR had elected not to issue it as a regulation in compliance with APA. (Sen. Lamar Alexander, holding up the “Dear Colleague” letter: “You require [emphasis added] 6,000 institutions to comply with this, correct?” OCR head Lhamon: “We do.”)

To the extent you’re arguing that OCR improperly issued a de facto regulation as guidance, I agree, and hope that the lawsuits challenging OCR on these grounds (Doe v. Lhamon, Neal v. CSU-Pueblo, et al.) succeed. For now, however, the few universities that in any way challenged the OCR approach quickly received Title IX complaints, followed by investigations and resolution agreements.

C: “The author’s implication that the universities have no role in internal disciplinary proceedings involving ‘behavior that’s a felony in all 50 states’ is poorly considered. The police are handicapped in these matters because campus police handle everything on campus: moreover, the nature of a college campus is that it creates a lot of situations where young men and women are in situations where the behavior pretty clearly crossed into that felony category, but the standard of proof for a felony conviction, with its ramifications that far exceed anything the universities can impose, are impossible to meet.”

A: According to Education Department figures, there are more than 11 million female undergraduates. Data about where they live is not precise, but, as noted above, it seems that the vast majority of them do not live on a campus. So the claim that “the police are handicapped in these matters because campus police handle everything on campus” is false. Moreover, nearly all of the cases that we write about in the book are not handled by campus police (who are, in any case, often regular law enforcement officials). Instead, the investigations are conducted solely through the university’s Title IX office, with no involvement from law enforcement at all.

C: “Traditional law enforcement is totally better at assessing whether a felony has occurred. And campus tribunals are better at assessing whether a student’s conduct transgresses the rules governing the behavior of students admitted to that institution.”

A: This statement evades the central issue in these cases. Of course, campus tribunals are better suited than the courts to determine whether plagiarism or cheating on an exam has occurred. But on this issue, whether the conduct in question is framed as a potential felony, tort or disciplinary code transgression, the fundamental issue remains the same: Did the accused student sexually assault the accuser? Whatever their faults, courts (whether criminal or civil) are far better suited to gathering and testing the evidence to reach an answer to that question than are campus tribunals, which (as even their defenders have started to concede) are incapable of gathering enough evidence to confidently determine the truth.

Finally, several comments criticized one or more of the posts for their “partisan” criticisms of Barack Obama or Joe Biden. To me, claiming a “partisan” attack implies more than a simple criticism of a policymaker — it suggests a political motivation, or a willingness to hold officeholders of one party or ideological belief to a standard different from the standard to which the author holds politicians with which he or she sympathizes.

In my case: I’m a Democrat. I donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 primary campaign, 2008 general election campaign and 2012 general election campaign. I voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Whatever else has motivated me in my criticism of his administration’s policies on campus due process, it’s not partisanship.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/02/03/campus-due-process-comments-and-responses/

Campus due process comments and responses

The quality of the commenters is one of the most enjoyable aspects of posting here. So, a few responses (R) to comments (C) below:

C: “Another facet of campus sexual assault that is rarely discussed is the strong evidence that young women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted if they are not students than if they are (look at the National Crime Victimization Survey). Even if campus tribunals were fair and accurate, any ‘solution’ that focuses on college campuses alone will neglect the vast majority of sexual assault victims; in fact, by removing rapists from colleges and placing them among non-student populations, this system endangers those who already suffer more. This argument should resonate among those who focus on equity, since policies targeting campus sexual assault benefit disproportionately wealthy and white populations at the expense of poor and non-white populations. This is another reason to use police and the courts for investigation, adjudication, and punishment, and to use universities for prevention, education, and counselling. Policies improving the way the justice system handles sexual assault will benefit society as a whole, not just students.”

R: This is a very important point, in multiple respects. First, as the survey mentioned above notes, and despite the suggestion of activists on this issue such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), non-college women are at greater risk of sexual assault than are college women. The fate of these women seemed of little interest to both the Obama administration and the key congressional players on this issue.

The equity issue works in another way. Though the actual percentage is unclear, most female undergraduates (a portion of whom are part-time students) don’t live on campus. Of that constituency, those who are sexual assault victims, therefore, are far more likely than a student at a four-year, residential college to have as a perpetrator a non-student, with an attack outside of campus jurisdiction. These students are part of the “1 in 5” figure the Obama administration used, yet their fates seemed of little interest to the campus movement.

Finally, from an equity standpoint, the campus rape frenzy is, in its most basic form, a movement of the elite, for the elite. As Stuart and I discuss in the book, Clery Act figures show that allegations of campus sexual assault are far higher (by a factor of six, in some cases) at Ivy League universities or elite liberal arts colleges than at nearby institutions. By focusing almost exclusively on allegations of sexual assault handled through campus tribunals, the Obama administration and its allies wound up, whether intending to do so or not, focusing disproportionately on the nation’s elite institutions.

C: “ ‘The Campus Rape Frenzy’ as a title implies that the claims are rape are bogus. That is an unwarranted inference . . . [T]o then imply that the people who claimed rape are liars because the accused were not found guilty is pretty vile.”

R: The book makes no such claim. In fact, Stuart and I go to great lengths not to speculate about the motivations or mind-set of most accusers. The only accuser in the book whom we describe as lying is “Jackie,” from the Rolling Stone case, who claimed to have been raped by a person who, it turns out, doesn’t exist. We do use the word in a quote from the Amherst accuser, who searched for a cover story about having sex with her roommate’s boyfriend. She texted that the male student she’d eventually accuse of sexual assault was “too drunk to make a good lie out of shit.” We also use the word in quoting from a decision in the Ohio State case, where Judge James Graham ruled that an accused student’s lawsuit could go forward, since it was possible that OSU “Administrators knew that [the accuser] lied about the timing of her accommodation at the hearing and permitted her testimony to stand unrebutted.”

C: “You understand legal-ese, right? That’s where the conversation, below, is focused on. Stating that something is a requirement, etc., obfuscates the issues. It is entirely correct to say that the letter is coercive — that’s a great argument. Saying that the letter makes any requirements (APA, etc.) is incorrect . . . That is why precision matters in these issues. Well, it used to on this blog. Now we just let journalists in to hawk their latest red meat book”

R: This comment would be better directed at former OCR head Catherine Lhamon, who informed the Senate HELP Committee in 2014 that she expected colleges and universities to comply with OCR’s Title IX guidance, even though OCR had elected not to issue it as a regulation in compliance with APA. (Sen. Lamar Alexander, holding up the “Dear Colleague” letter: “You require [emphasis added] 6,000 institutions to comply with this, correct?” OCR head Lhamon: “We do.”)

To the extent you’re arguing that OCR improperly issued a de facto regulation as guidance, I agree, and hope that the lawsuits challenging OCR on these grounds (Doe v. Lhamon, Neal v. CSU-Pueblo, et al.) succeed. For now, however, the few universities that in any way challenged the OCR approach quickly received Title IX complaints, followed by investigations and resolution agreements.

C: “The author’s implication that the universities have no role in internal disciplinary proceedings involving ‘behavior that’s a felony in all 50 states’ is poorly considered. The police are handicapped in these matters because campus police handle everything on campus: moreover, the nature of a college campus is that it creates a lot of situations where young men and women are in situations where the behavior pretty clearly crossed into that felony category, but the standard of proof for a felony conviction, with its ramifications that far exceed anything the universities can impose, are impossible to meet.”

A: According to Education Department figures, there are more than 11 million female undergraduates. Data about where they live is not precise, but, as noted above, it seems that the vast majority of them do not live on a campus. So the claim that “the police are handicapped in these matters because campus police handle everything on campus” is false. Moreover, nearly all of the cases that we write about in the book are not handled by campus police (who are, in any case, often regular law enforcement officials). Instead, the investigations are conducted solely through the university’s Title IX office, with no involvement from law enforcement at all.

C: “Traditional law enforcement is totally better at assessing whether a felony has occurred. And campus tribunals are better at assessing whether a student’s conduct transgresses the rules governing the behavior of students admitted to that institution.”

A: This statement evades the central issue in these cases. Of course, campus tribunals are better suited than the courts to determine whether plagiarism or cheating on an exam has occurred. But on this issue, whether the conduct in question is framed as a potential felony, tort or disciplinary code transgression, the fundamental issue remains the same: Did the accused student sexually assault the accuser? Whatever their faults, courts (whether criminal or civil) are far better suited to gathering and testing the evidence to reach an answer to that question than are campus tribunals, which (as even their defenders have started to concede) are incapable of gathering enough evidence to confidently determine the truth.

Finally, several comments criticized one or more of the posts for their “partisan” criticisms of Barack Obama or Joe Biden. To me, claiming a “partisan” attack implies more than a simple criticism of a policymaker — it suggests a political motivation, or a willingness to hold officeholders of one party or ideological belief to a standard different from the standard to which the author holds politicians with which he or she sympathizes.

In my case: I’m a Democrat. I donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 primary campaign, 2008 general election campaign and 2012 general election campaign. I voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Whatever else has motivated me in my criticism of his administration’s policies on campus due process, it’s not partisanship.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/02/03/campus-due-process-comments-and-responses/