It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Bangladesh arrests social media star over dance video at mosque Police say the man was arrested Sunday near Dhaka, but his female dance partner is on the run. The 20-year-old could face up to five years in prison on religious charges. Police say the dance, filmed at one of 50 newly built mosques in Bangladesh, "desecrated" the site
Police in Bangladesh on Monday announced the arrest of a 20-year-old for his role in filming, starring in, and distributing, a video of himself dancing with a woman on the steps of a mosque in Cumilla, just east of the capital Dhaka.
Authorities say they arrested social media personality Yasin at his home in nearby Devidwar on charges that he hurt Muslim religious sentiment as defined under Bangladesh's 2018 Digital Security Act.
He is currently in pre-trial detention and could face up to five years in prison if found guilty. The local police chief said the dancing had "desecrated the mosque," according to news agency AFP. Female dancer still on the run
Police in the majority Muslim country say they are currently searching for the woman who danced in the video.
The footage, shot at one of 50 new mosques the government recently built, was made a month ago and uploaded to the video-sharing platform Likee, where authorities say it attracted as many as 940,000 views before it could be taken down.
Jacques Derrida is a very fine writer, but incredibly hard to read. His sentences, though often beautiful, tend to be sinuous; and while his vocabulary can be exuberant, bountiful and exact, it is often clogged with the jargon of old-fashioned textbooks of philosophy – “transcendental”, “originary”, “philosopheme”, “ontology” and “aporia”, for instance, not to mention fragments of Latin and Greek. He also had a taste, which you may or may not share, for puns and typographical tricks in the manner of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. If you skimmed through one of his books without knowing anything about him, you might conclude that he’s a charlatan or a nerd, or both. You would put it back on the shelf and say, “Not for me, life’s too short.”
But you’ve probably heard a lot about Derrida, even if you never read a word. By the time of his death – in 2004, at the age of 74 – he was the most famous philosopher in the world, and his stock has barely declined since then. He is still adored by many, and touted as a prophet for troubled times, and he continues to supply ample grist to academic mills. But he has his detractors as well: back in 1992, some self-selected guardians of philosophical virtue wrote to The Times to proclaim that his work “does not meet accepted standards of quality and rigour”. A left-wing professor at Essex University called him “the Liberace of philosophy”, and a Cambridge conservative assured us that “Derrida himself doesn’t believe most of the nonsense he’s famous for.” These professorial paragons have since been joined by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer, who denounced Derrida for attempting to “remove traditional meaning and replace it with a new meaning . . . feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy, and so-called queer-theory.”
Peter Salmon cuts through the hullaballoo with his brief, well-written and rather moving intellectual biography, An Event, Perhaps. Derrida has often been seen as an exponent of effortless Parisian glamour, for which he is sometimes envied and sometimes mocked, but Salmon shows that he was never at ease as a cultural rock-star, and that privately he remained shy, patient, conscientious, attentive and generous. He was, after all, an outsider at several removes. He was born in Algiers in 1930, and his humble Jewish parents tried to Americanise him by calling him Jackie, after the actor Jackie Coogan who played a winsome waif in Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid. But he could not escape his origins, and when he came top of his class at the age of ten he was denounced as a “dirty Jew” and deprived of the customary honour of hoisting the school tricolour. He was excluded from his lycée in Algiers when its Jewish quota was cut in 1941, and though he was readmitted a year later, after the allied invasion of French North Africa, he did not settle down. He failed his leaving exam in 1948, but had better luck the following year, and at the age of 19 he won a scholarship to a top lycée in Paris. The birth of "deconstruction"
Paris in 1949 was not an easy place for a solitary overseas student. Derrida failed his exams again, but in 1952 he was admitted to the exclusive but spartan École Normale Supérieure, which he found to be a place of “theoretical intimidation” and “tormented silence”. But he also met the writer and psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier, who would be his wife and ally for the rest of his life, and in 1955 he got a scholarship to Harvard, where he taught himself English by studying the works of James Joyce. He fulfilled his military service obligation by teaching for two years at a school for army children in Algeria, and then returned to Paris, where he earned a living as a lowly university teacher, while devoting his spare time to writing. By now he was steeped in academic philosophy, French style: he had a thorough familiarity with the writings of the great dead philosophers, and expected the same of his readers. He worked amazingly hard over the next ten years, making forays from philosophy into poetry, drama, linguistics, ethnography and psychoanalysis, and ended up, as he would recall, in a state of “nervous exhaustion not far removed from despair”. In 1967, however, he brought out three large books – Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference – and began to be noticed not only in France, with its philosophically educated public, but also in Britain and America.
By the 1980s everyone seemed to be talking about Derrida and his supposedly revolutionary doctrine of “deconstruction”. I myself tried to read several of his books, without getting very far, but they were now garnering prizes and prestige and I thought I’d better try again. I was working as a philosophy teacher at the time, and my colleagues agreed that we ought to put Derrida on the syllabus. When it came to teaching, however, they were not so keen. “He’s like the tar-baby,” said one: “touch him and you’ll never get free.” “He’s not a proper philosopher,” said another: “he doesn’t have a position on any of the big issues.” So it was down to me. I persevered with my reading, and my resistance dissipated: I felt I was beginning to get the point, and I managed to fulfil my quota of lectures. Since then, I must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading Derrida, and getting to know certain passages by heart. Reader, I do not regret a minute.
My colleagues were not wrong. If you let Derrida into your head it will be hard to turf him out, and I can think of quite a few people who have been reduced to Derrida tribute acts as a result. And it’s true that you cannot pin him down to definite “positions”: he’s not exactly a Hegelian or a Marxist, for example, but he’s not anti-Hegelian or anti-Marxist either; nor can you tell if he’s a materialist or an immaterialist, a rationalist or an empiricist, a realist or an idealist. But that was precisely his point: he wanted to persuade us that such labels are impediments to philosophical inquiry. The great virtue of philosophy, as far as Derrida was concerned, is not that it provides us with proofs or refutations, but that it weans us off an irrational yearning for intellectual closure. Did Derrida respect the philosophical tradition?
For better or for worse, I came to Derrida with a mind already reeling from Heidegger’s Being and Time. I was particularly taken with a section of the introduction, where Heidegger argued that we have a built-in tendency to misunderstand the process by which traditions are passed from one generation to the next. We come into possession of our traditions, he said, by actively interpreting them in the light of our own preoccupations; but we prefer to see the process the other way round, as if we were the passive receivers of external influence. In the case of philosophy, this meant that we conspire with each other to treat the great figures of the past, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as monuments to be inspected and conserved, rather than incitements to fresh philosophical activity. The ringleaders of the conspiracy are, it would seem, the historians of philosophy, who have made it their business to squeeze the life out of philosophical texts by reducing them to simple summaries and assigning them to neat little cells in some pre-existing chart of philosophical opinions. They may imagine that they are treating philosophy’s past with reverence and respect, but in reality they are allowing their pithy paraphrases to become surrogates for the originals – agents not of remembrance but of neglect. Heidegger therefore called for a new approach to philosophy’s past: we must “break up a tradition that has become compacted”, as he put it, “and expose the cover-ups to which it has given rise.” Heidegger described his exercises in philosophical rescue-archaeology as Destruktion or “destruction . . . with a positive aim”.
When Derrida engaged in “deconstruction” he was, in effect, playing variations on Heidegger’s theme. (That at least is how it struck me.) He focused on one philosophical text after another, demonstrating case by case that they are far stranger and far more interesting than the historians of philosophy would have us believe: Plato turns out to be a poor Platonist, and Descartes is not much of a Cartesian, and Hegel is no good at Hegelianism. Derrida’s critics saw these encounters as attempts to denigrate philosophy or bring it into disrepute, and so too did some of his admirers: they thought that philosophy had always conducted itself like an arrogant aristocrat, and that Derrida was a person-of-the-people leading a popular insurrection in the name of less elevated forms of literature. (Salmon quotes Derrida’s American translator Barbara Johnson, who claimed, rather implausibly, that “philosophy is defined by its refusal to recognise itself as literature”, while “literature is defined as the rhetorical self-transgression of philosophy.”) But that gets Derrida completely wrong: his attitude towards philosophy was not hostile but infinitely affectionate, and that is why, like Heidegger before him, he sought to rescue it from false friends.
On occasion, Derrida appeared to go even further in his valorisation of the philosophical tradition. He seemed to follow Heidegger (and Hegel too for that matter) in seeing philosophy as a massive, unified enterprise which got underway in ancient Greece and has since functioned as the intellectual engine driving the progress of civilisation in Europe, and perhaps through the rest of the world. Back in 1963, for instance, he pronounced that “the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would be impossible to philosophise … without them”, and in 1966 he spoke of “the history of philosophy, of the west, that is, of the world”, while claiming that “we have no language … which is foreign to this history”. His tone was perhaps ironic – but only up to a point: the notion of philosophy as the heart and soul of human culture functioned as a Derridean Aunt Sally, which he kept putting back on its pedestal so that he could have another go at knocking it down. Beyond the jargon
After a while I lost patience with these disquisitions about what “philosophy” really means; and I was relieved to find that Derrida had got bored with them too. Salmon traces the change to the early 1970s, when Derrida embarked on a vast exploration of the ramifications of patriarchy (or “phallocentrism”), after which he started writing about an enormous miscellany of new themes, without having to keep returning to the canonical heartlands of philosophy: the relations between politics and friendship, between Marxism and the future, between forgiveness and the unforgivable, between justice and law, between teaching and learning, between memory and mourning and between humans and animals.
Salmon guides us through these discussions with clarity, wit and self-deprecating humour – at one point, for instance, he wonders whether he has done enough to “fudge bits I don’t understand so well” and to conceal his dependence on Wikipedia. He is well aware that his postage-stamp summaries of dozens of thinkers touched on by Derrida go against the spirit of deconstruction, but many readers will thank him for them anyway, and they will also be pleased that he keeps his distance from the sort of groupies who, as he puts it, try to “sound hyper-French” when speaking their native English, and end up talking a “sub-Derridean word salad”.
Derrida was capable of spinning his ideas out at extraordinary length, but he could also come up with memorable turns of phrase, and Salmon quotes some excellent examples. “Surviving – that is the other name for mourning”, for instance, and “to have a friend . . . is to know in an intense way . . . that one of the two of us will see the other die.” As a less-than-perfect humanist I cherish Derrida’s remark that he “rightly passes for an atheist”, because “the constancy of God in my life is called by other names.” If that is too cute for your taste, try this: “if things were simple, then word would have got around.”
“An Event, Perhaps” by Peter Salmon is published by Verso
Rural areas like Walden, Colorado, are losing residents, while urban centers have grown in population. - Kyle Spradley/TNS
As states turn to drawing new state legislative and congressional districts after census numbers come out Aug. 12, they’re likely to find that rural, generally conservative areas have shrunk in the past 10 years and stand to lose power in statehouses and Congress.
A Stateline analysis of recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates shows rural areas lost 226,000 people, a decline of about .5%, between 2010 and 2020, while cities and suburbs grew by about 21 million people, or 8%. Only Hawaii, where retirees and remote workers are moving to rural islands, and Montana, which is drawing remote workers from pricey Washington state, saw more rural than urban growth.
Republican state legislatures will try to draw districts that preserve the political power of mostly conservative rural voters, but that task will become increasingly difficult as the population balance shifts toward cities.
“You can’t escape the math. These growing areas are going to grow in their representation,” said David Drozd, research coordinator for the nonpartisan Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Nebraska’s three largest counties, around Omaha and Lincoln, will likely add to their majority of representatives in the unicameral state legislature, Drozd said. It’s possible to keep the status quo by drawing smaller rural districts and larger urban ones — state law allows up to a 10% difference in population between districts — but that’s not a likely outcome.
“I’m sure some rural senators would like to protect those areas, but if you can see they’re intentionally skewed like that, they will be challenged in court,” Drozd said. Republicans have a supermajority in the legislature, but the state’s two largest and fastest growing counties voted for President Joe Biden last year.
Some of the biggest gaps between rural and urban growth are in conservative states that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020: Cities grew by more than 15% in Florida, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas, while the rural population of those states either declined (by 3% in South Carolina) or grew slightly (3% in South Dakota). In Arizona, where Republicans control the state government but Biden eked out a victory, the urban population grew more than 16% while the rural population grew less than 3%.
In some states, rural interests have organized to lobby for as much representation as they can keep. Pro 15, a group that advocates for largely rural northeastern Colorado, asked the state redistricting commission not to dilute the power of rural counties by dividing those voters into districts dominated by urban voters.
Colorado’s rural counties grew 4%, a fraction of the state’s 17% urban growth, according to the census estimates.
“If they start pulling our counties out it will dilute our rural voice,” Cathy Shull, the director of Pro 15, told Stateline, adding that rural areas support the whole state with agriculture, tourism and energy from oil, wind and solar power.
Rural residents depend on elected representatives to keep Colorado River water flowing to their farms and to help them protect their livestock from predators.
“Progressives in the city might want to reintroduce the gray wolf and think it was a really cool thing, since it wasn’t going in their backyard. And what if there’s nobody to speak for the people with sheep and cattle getting killed?” Shull said.
In states such as Texas, conservative rural areas have been tacked on to small slices of growing liberal cities to help maintain Republican power.
“When I lived in Dallas, I was in a [congressional] district that went way out into rural East Texas. My vote was diluted but I don’t think East Texas was happy about it either,” said Michael Li, an attorney and redistricting expert now at the progressive Brennan Center for Justice in New York City.
When urban and rural areas are mixed, he said, representatives may displease one of the two constituencies. Often, urban businesses can sway them with big donations that rural interests can’t match, he said.
“The rural vote may win but that doesn’t mean the rural area isn’t impacted,” Li said.
The Stateline analysis was based on Census Bureau estimates of county population changes between the 2010 census and April 2020. Those estimates, released in July, were derived from administrative records of births, deaths and housing construction. The detailed head count data used for redistricting will be released Aug. 12.
That tally could have some better news for rural areas. Statewide, Nebraska’s 2010 full count exceeded population estimates by about 20,000, Drozd said.
The legislative lines that lawmakers and redistricting commissions draw based on the 2020 census will remain in place for a decade. But the pandemic already may have made them out-of-date. Increased opportunities for remote work and feverish real estate markets have spurred many city residents to seek more affordable rural alternatives.
After the census count concluded in April, there were reports of large-scale moves out of cities as the pandemic peaked, though more recently there have been signs that young workers are returning to urban jobs and looking for housing there.
But the 2020 numbers will stand until 2030, and they mean more power for large Sun Belt cities that lean Democratic, said William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
“Despite the suburban and pandemic-driven city exodus movement in the last half of the 2010s decade, population shifts in the census-to-census period should bolster large city and metropolitan representation in congressional districts at the expense of smaller areas,” Frey said.
But Li of the Brennan Center said the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause could be seen as “a green light” for states to gerrymander by political party. The high court ruled that partisan gerrymandering might be “incompatible with democratic principles” but that it was up to states, rather than the federal courts, to curb it.
Other analysts note that in some states, conservative suburbs are maintaining their Republican bent as they grow.
In North Carolina, for instance, “in addition to the state’s deep red rural component there are several large suburban counties that are 60% Republican and that hasn’t budged much over the last decade,” said J. Miles Coleman, co-author of a recent University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis. The study predicts that redistricting could give Republicans at least six additional U.S. House seats in the South.
Juno teams with two observatories to learn more about Jupiter
NASA has announced that it’s working with other agencies and observatories to learn more about Jupiter. NASA is using data from Juno and the Japanese Hisaki Satellite, and the W.M. Keck Observatory to solve the “energy crisis” on Jupiter. Jupiter is five times further from the sun than the Earth and wouldn’t be expected to be warm.
NASA says based on the amount of sunlight Jupiter receives, the upper atmosphere should be somewhere in the range of -100 degrees Fahrenheit. However, measurements of the temperature in the atmosphere have shown it to be around 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Exactly where the extra heat comes from is one of the biggest mysteries surrounding Jupiter.
For five decades, scientists have been searching for the cause of the extra heating in the planet’s atmosphere, which is described as an “energy crisis” for the planet. The international team is working to solve the mystery by combining observations from Juno, Hisaki, and the Keck Observatory to discover a likely source of the extra heat in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
JAXA researcher James O’Donoghue says the team found that Jupiter has the most powerful and intense aurora in the solar system. O’Donoghue says the intense aurora is responsible for heating the entire upper atmosphere of the planet. An aurora is created when charged particles are hit the planet’s magnetic field. Those charged particles spiral along lines in the magnetic field towards the poles of Jupiter, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere resulting in the release of light and energy.
Here on Earth, the phenomenon causes a beautiful light show in the sky known as the aurora Borealis and Australis. Jupiter has such a powerful aurora thanks to material erupting from the surface of I/O, its highly volcanic moon. The combination results in major heating in the upper atmosphere over the polar regions of the planet. A theory suggesting the aurora could be what causes the higher-than-expected temperatures on Jupiter has been floating around, but these are the first observations confirming that.
Ganymede in Infrared Taken During Juno’s Most Recent Flyby
On July 20th, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft conducted a flyby of Jupiter’s (and the Solar System’s) largest moon, Ganymede. This close pass was performed as part of the orbiter’s thirty-fourth orbit of the gas giant (Perijove 34), which saw the probe come within 50,109 km (31,136 mi) of the moon’s surface. The mission team took this opportunity to capture images of Ganymede’s using Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM).
These were combined with images acquired during two previous flybys to create a new infrared map of Ganymede’s surface, which was released in honor of the mission’s tenth anniversary (which launched from Earth on Aug. 5th, 2011). This map and the JIRAM instrument could provide new information on Ganymede’s icy shell and the composition of its interior ocean, which could shed led on whether or not it could support life.
The JIRAM instrument was designed to detect infrared light emerging from Jupiter’s interior and characterizing the atmospheric dynamics to a depth of 50 to 70 km (30 to 45 mi) beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops. However, the instrument can also be used to study Jupiter’s largest moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – collectively known as the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer (Galileo Galilee).
As Scott Bolton, Juno’s Principal Investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), explained in a NASA press release:
“Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury, but just about everything we explore on this mission to Jupiter is on a monumental scale. The infrared and other data collected by Juno during the flyby contain fundamental clues for understanding the evolution of Jupiter’s 79 moons from the time of their formation to today.”
The two previous flybys took place on June 7th, 2021, and Dec. 26th, 2019, when the orbiter came within 50,109 km (31,136 mi) and 1,046 km (650 mi), respectively. The observational geometries these provided allowed the JIRAM instrument to see Ganymede’s northern polar region for the first time, as well as compare the diversity in composition between the low and high latitudes.
In particular, the Juno probe was able to visualize the dramatic effect charged particles (plasma) from Jupiter’s magnetic field have on Ganymede’s surface. Ganymede is unique among the moons of the Solar System because it is the only satellite that has its own magnetic field. On Earth, the presence of a magnetic field causes charged particles from the Sun to enter Earth’s atmosphere around the poles.
These particles then interact with gas molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere, leading to auroral activity – Aurora Borealis in the northern hemisphere and Aurora Australis in the southern hemisphere. Since Ganymede has no atmosphere to impede the flow of charged particles, the surface around the poles is constantly being bombarded by plasma produced by Jupiter’s giant magnetosphere.
Annotated map of Ganymede. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM/USGS
“We found Ganymede’s high latitudes dominated by water ice, with fine grain size, which is the result of the intense bombardment of charged particles. Conversely, low latitudes are shielded by the moon’s magnetic field and contain more of its original chemical composition, most notably of non-water-ice constituents such as salts and organics. It is extremely important to characterize the unique properties of these icy regions to better understand the space-weathering processes that the surface undergoes.”
The polar views and close-ups Juno was privy to build on observations made by previous NASA missions that have explored the Jupiter system. These include theVoyager 1 and 2 missions, which passed through the system in 1979 on their way to the outer Solar System; the Cassini-Huygensand New Horizons missions, which flew by in 2000 and 2007 (respectively) on their way to Saturn and Pluto, respectively.
This latest information also builds on observations made by the Galileospacecraft, which was the first dedicated mission to study Jupiter and its moons (Juno is the second) and the first mission to orbit an outer planet. In the near future, the ESA and NASA will be sending the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) and the Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter’s moons more closely – focusing on Ganymede and Europa, respectively.
Artist impression of Juno at Jupiter. Credit: NASA
The Juno mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Aug. 5th, 2011, and traveled 2,800 million km (1,740 million mi) to reach Jupiter on July 4th, 2016. The mission was originally intended to operate for seven years (concluding in 2018) but has since been extended twice: first until July 2021, and more recently until September of 2025. Said Ed Hirst, the Project Manager of the Juno mission at NASA JPL:
“Since launch, Juno has executed over 2 million commands, orbited Jupiter 35 times, and collected about three terabits of science data. We are thrilled by our ongoing exploration of Jupiter, and there is much more to come. We have started our extended mission and look forward to 42 additional orbits to explore the Jovian system.”
The next phase of its extended mission will see Juno tighten its orbit of Jupiter, which will allow it to make several close passes to observe Jupiter’s north polar cyclones. It will also perform additional flybys of Ganymede and make close flybys of Europa and Io (and more of Ganymede). Perhaps most significantly, the orbiter will conduct the first exploration of the faint ring system that encircles the planet, which is where some of Jupiter’s smaller satellites orbit.
These observations will expand on the discoveries Juno has already made about Jupiter’s interior structure, internal magnetic field, atmosphere, and powerful magnetosphere. Encased in a gaseous envelope and governed by such powerful forces, Jupiter is a proverbial onion, its many layers concealing additional scientific discoveries. With its many upcoming orbits, Juno will continue to peel back layers to learn more about how Jupiter and other gas giants formed and evolved.
Massive world-record fish caught with a bow and arrow
“You know, I set that goal of breaking a record every time I go out to fish, but I never would have thought I’d be breaking a record with this fish," Matt Neuling said.
By Adam Barnes | Aug. 9, 2021
A fisherman in Missouri is setting state and world records after catching a giant carp weighing in at more than 100 pounds.
“I was out with my buddy early that morning when we both shot what we thought was a 30-pound grass carp,” Neuling said, according to MDC. “My buddy’s arrow pulled out, but mine shot straight through and stayed in there.”
“We just couldn’t believe it. We knew what type of fish it was, but we had never seen one that size. This thing is a straight up monster,” Neuling continued. “A five-gallon bucket could easily fit in its mouth. If my buddy wasn’t with me, there was no way I could have pulled it out of the water.”
The department estimated, based on the size of the fish, that it was at least a decade old, MDC Fisheries Program Specialist Andrew Branson
“Bighead carp are an invasive fish from Asia. This particular fish is an example of just how well an invasive species can thrive if given the opportunity,” Branson said. “We encourage people to harvest these fish to help remove them from our waters.”
Neuling’s monster catch was weighed on a certified scale and is the eighth state-record-setting fish caught in 2021. The catch broke the bowfishing world record by around 25 pounds.
“It’s just crazy,” Neuling said. “You know, I set that goal of breaking a record every time I go out to fish, but I never would have thought I’d be breaking a record with this fish.”
The Mob Birthed Las Vegas, It Did Not Succeed It
By Luke Thompson Published August 10, 2021 IN SUMMARY: The "Mobbed Up" podcast season two by Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Mob Museum offers more insights into Vegas' historic mob ties
Mafiosi were ruthless, dealing with people they didn't like in extreme ways, including murder
Regulators successfully moved in and evicted the crime families from the city, allowing corporations to step in Las Vegas’ connection to the mob is its ancestry. However, corporate casinos are its future. The “Mobbed Up” podcast explains how Vegas’ casino industry was born and what role mobsters played in it.
“Mobbed Up” Podcast Looks into Las Vegas’ Crime Families
The Mob once flocked to Las Vegas, fully cognizant of the desert city’s potential. Of course, at the time, Vegas wasn’t much of a city. Yet, even Mafiosi have been unable to withstand the change of times with the criminal families of the United States birthing Sin City, but surely not its rightful successors.
When the first Mafiosi arrived in Vegas in the 1920s, they immediately pushed for the parched piece of land’s transformation. They surely were successful, relying on a good word and a compelling business argument.
The eight-series podcast developed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Museum completed its second season, hosted by Jeff German, a famed journalist who has gone reporting and investing in The Mob for over 40 years and who has shed a lot of light on how The Mob got in Las Vegas and was subsequently evicted by regulation and law enforcement. The “Mobbed Up” had a lot of insight to offer.
Birthed by Mobsters, Succeeded by Corporations
Once a lawless arena of powerful and often clandestine business interests, regulators was quick to catch up to the Mafiosi and created The Black Book, a blacklist where all suspected mobsters were lumped together and prevented from running or even approaching casinos.
The government was happy to see the birth of Las Vegas, but stepped in swiftly when mobsters thought that they could flout the law as they pleased. In the 1960s, the Nevada Corporate Gaming Act was passed, demanding from anyone participating in the running of gambling businesses to be registered and declare the source of their income. That gave an edge to upstanding investors who were just as vicious in their dealings, although that only had to do with actual business affairs.
According to US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the legislation did a lot to end the reign of the crime families in Las Vegas and present them with the harsh truth – their operations would not continue. The podcast ran to address various issues resolved by the passing of a regulatory framework that ostracized mobsters and turned them into social pariahs.
For one, argued Nevada Gaming Commission member George Stewarts, today’s casinos do not support burying people in shallow graves because they misbehave. The mobsters, though, could be trying to get back. However, Reid doesn’t see that to be the case any time soon.
Mobsters and their families and connections are now known to the state and law enforcement, and new license applications undergo extensive background checks that would show previous relationships to a crime family. Even if generations have changed, there is still the social stigma of allowing someone in the mobsters’ kin to run things in Vegas.
Doubt around new dementia drug
What prospects does the future hold for treating Alzheimer’s disease, now that doubt has been cast on the approval of Aducanumab?
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia. But despite a huge amount of effort being put into drug discovery programmes, no new treatments have emerged from the drug development pipeline for over 20 years. That is, until earlier this summer, when the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved Aducanumab. Not surprisingly this news garnered a great deal of attention, not least because Aducanumab goes beyond what any other AD drug therapy offered; it promised to treat the cause of the disease, not just its symptoms.
Aducanumab is one of a class of drugs known as immunotherapies. As the name suggests, these elicit an immune response to a disease-causing agent. The approach has proved successful with some cancer treatments, where it is clear that the tumour cells are responsible for the disease. Things are not so clear with AD. We do know that during AD a particular protein in the brain misfolds and then aggregates, causing a build-up of hard insoluble plaques. One hypothesis is that these aggregates are toxic and so kill brain cells.
Aducanumab is designed to clear these amyloid plaques, flagging them to the immune system for “clear up”. Experiments from as far back as 2012 showed that this worked in mice, and from there clinical trials began. The FDA’s recent approval would appear to be testament to the validity of this immunotherapy approach.
Unfortunately, things are not so clear cut. The FDA’s decision has been marred by controversy, with one Harvard professor of medicine proclaiming it to be “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history”. Whilst plaques are certainly a feature of AD, it is not clear if they cause the disease or merely correlate with it. Moreover, the original clinical trial was deemed a failure in 2018. Then, only after data was reanalysed was a positive benefit for some AD patients found.
So, what now for Aducanumab? The FDA has conceded that it is only available as part of a nine-year post-approval confirmatory study, so we may have to wait a while to see if it actually works. This article was brought to you by New Humanist, a quarterly journal of ideas, science and culture.
OCCULT CYBERWAR
Chinese cyber spies targeted Israel posing as Iranian hackers
SHOULD HAVE GONE ONE MORE STEP AND HID BEHIND NORTH KOREAN HACKERS
A Chinese cyber-espionage group has targeted Israeli organizations in a campaign that began in January 2019, and during which the group often used false flags in attempts to disguise as an Iranian threat actor.
Detailed in a report published today by security firm Mandiant, the attacks targeted Israeli government institutions, IT companies, and telecommunication providers.
The attackers, which Mandiant said it was tracking under a codename of UNC215, typically breached organizations by targeting Microsoft SharePoint servers unpatched for the CVE-2019-0604 vulnerability.
Once UNC215 gained access to one of these servers, they deployed the WHEATSCAN tool to scan the victim’s internal network and then installed the FOCUSFJORD web shell and HYPERBRO backdoor on key servers as a way to ensure persistence on the hacked organizations’ networks.
IMAGE: MANDIANT
Mandiant said the group took great care and several steps to hide their intrusions and minimize forensic evidence on a victim’s network, such as removing malware artifacts once they were not needed and using legitimate software to perform malicious operations.
UNC2015 planted Iranian false flags
Furthermore, the group also used false flags inside their malware source code in an attempt to hide their real identities.
Mandiant said UNC215 often used file paths mentioning Iran (i.e., C:\Users\Iran) or error messages written in Farsi (i.e., ‘ضائع’ – which translates to: lost or missing)
In addition, on at least three occasions, UNC215 also used an Iranian hacking tool that was leaked on Telegram in 2019 (i.e., the SEASHARPEE web shell).
However, Mandiant researchers said that despite these indicators, the UNC215 group has been conducting cyber-espionage operations of interest to the Chinese state since at least 2014.
Moreover, the attacks against Israeli targets are part of a larger espionage campaign during which UNC215 targeted a broader set of victims across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America, with targets typically in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and health care sectors.
But while the Mandiant research team attributed these hacks to the UNC2015 group, the company said it’s currently investigating the possibility that UNC2015 might be associated with a larger Chinese cyber-espionage group known as APT27 or Emissary Panda, a group which security firm Cybereason also recently spotted attacking telcos across Southeast Asia.
Catalin Cimpanu is a cybersecurity reporter for The Record. He previously worked at ZDNet and Bleeping Computer, where he became a well-known name in the industry for his constant scoops on new vulnerabilities, cyberattacks, and law enforcement actions against hackers.
China hacks Israel, Iran, for info on tech, business advances
Tolerance for Chinese cyber attacks has decreased globally following its handling of the coronavirus crisis, Hong Kong, and accusations of war crimes (GENOCIDE AGAINST THE UHIGARS)
China has hacked dozens of Israeli public and private sector groups as well groups in Iran, Saudi Arabia and a variety of other countries, the international cybersecurity company FireEye announced Tuesday.
The massive cyber attack appears to be part of a long-term spying strategy in the area of technology and business competition and advancement, rather than a desire to harm any of the target countries or businesses.
According to FireEye, Beijing does not discriminate along any of the fault lines in the region, using its cyber tools to spy on a wide array of Middle Eastern countries, which are often at odds with each other, while all doing business with China.
The goal seems to have been to gain intelligence into achieving better negotiation outcomes in terms of pricing by viewing internal email discussions and assessments, and to appropriate certain key technological developments where possible.
In addition, the attack is tied to cyber exploitation of holes in Microsoft’s SharePoint, announced by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) in 2019. Its maximum impact is not currently being felt.
The INCD tends not to name specific countries involved and would not name China on Tuesday.
The revelation was a joint effort by FireEye and Mandiant.
Mandiant, a part of FireEye, says it “brings together the world’s leading intelligence threat and frontline expertise with continuous security validation to arm organizations with the tools needed to increase security effectiveness.”
Estimates are that some public and private sector Israeli entities started to repel the attack once the SharePoint vulnerability was announced in 2019, but that in other cases, Chinese spying in Israel continued deep into 2020.
The timing of the current announcement seemed to dovetail with the announcement by governments in Europe, Asia, the US and NATO in July of a similar massive cyber attack carried out by China.
The report said that Mandiant and FireEye “worked with Israeli defense agencies to review data from additional compromises of Israeli entities. This analysis showed multiple, concurrent operations against Israeli government institutions, IT providers and telecommunications entities.”
During this time, Chinese espionage group UNC215 “used new TTPs [Tactics, Techniques and Procedures] to hinder attribution and detection, maintain operational security, employ false flags, and leverage trusted relationships for lateral movement.”
Mandiant said it “believes this adversary is still active in the region,” even if the specific kind of attack may not be its current major cyber spying move.
According to the report, UNC215 operators “conduct credential harvesting and extensive internal network reconnaissance post-intrusion. After identifying key systems within the target network, such as domain controllers and Exchange servers, UNC215 moved laterally and deployed their signature malware FOCUSFJORD.”
“UNC215 often uses FOCUSFJORD for the initial stages of an intrusion, and then later deploys HYPERBRO, which has more information collection capabilities such as screen capture and keylogging” said the report.
Next, the report said that UNC215 made several attempts to foil network defenders, such as “Cleaning up evidence of their intrusion after gaining access to a system - This type of action can make it more difficult for incident responders to reconstruct what happened.”
Further, UNC215 exploited “trusted third parties in a 2019 operation targeting an Israeli government network - The operators were able to access their primary target via RDP [Remote Desktop Protocol] connections from a trusted third party using stolen credentials and used this access to deploy and remotely execute FOCUSFJORD on their primary target.”
Most creatively, the report said UN215 planted “false flags, such as using Farsi strings to mislead analysts and suggest an attribution to Iran.”
China generally denies attribution on the record, but off-the-record complains that the US and other countries have a double standard, saying that even if US businesses do not engage in espionage, the NSA does.
However, tolerance for Chinese cyber attacks has declined globally as the country’s popularity has plummeted following its handling of the coronavirus crisis, Hong Kong, issues in the South China Sea and accusations of war crimes in its treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs in China.
Israel has maintained high level business connections with Beijing. Chinese companies have invested billions of dollars in Israeli technology start-ups, partnering or acquiring companies in strategic industries like semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
China is also building the railway between Eilat and Ashdod, a private port at Ashdod, and is on the verge of opening a massive new port in Haifa.
But Jerusalem has started to re-balance some of its dealings with China, opting out of cooperation in the application of 5G and other arenas, while avoiding public confrontations.
Former INCD chief Buky Carmeli confirmed to The Jerusalem Post in August 2018 that China and other cyber powerhouses were involved in spying throughout the Israeli public and private sectors, but that they had not reached the state’s “crown jewels” in digital terms.
The Chinese Embassy responded to the report, saying: “The FireEye report’s baseless accusations against China on cybersecurity issues are defamation for political purposes. China is a staunch upholder of cybersecurity. It has always firmly opposed and combated cyber attacks launched within its borders or with its network infrastructure.
“In fact, China is a major victim of cyberattacks. According to statistics from China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, about 52,000 malicious program command and control servers located outside China took control of about 5.31 million computer hosts in China in 2020, which seriously undermined,” China, said the Embassy
It concluded: “We hope Israeli friends and media outlets can make a clear distinction between right and wrong and refrain from providing platforms for rumors.”
The Prime Minister’s Office declined to respond.
The INCD said, “The State of Israel experiences many daily attempts at cyber attacks on a range of targets. Without addressing the identity of the attacker regarding who the report tries to identify, the events described in the report occurred in the past, were handled at the time and probed.”
“The authority even issued a warning at the time regarding the vulnerability described in the report regarding SharePoint and took steps to reduce” the impact on the Israeli economy.
Burundi ravaged by flooding from rainfall, swollen Lake Tanganyika
TUESDAY AUGUST 10 2021 People walk through Buterere, northwest of Bujumbura, in March 2017, after torrential rains destroyed more than 100 houses, resulted in six deaths, flooding and triggered landslides.
PHOTO | AFP Summary
Parts of Burundi are ruing floods that have destroyed property and displaced people in the past two years.
Lives in the sub-region bordering Lake Tanganyika have been disrupted but Burundi bore the greatest brunt of the floods as it is among the world’s 20 most vulnerable countries in terms of both preparedness and emergency response to natural disasters
Parts of Burundi are ruing floods that have destroyed property and displaced people in the past two years.
The floods, due to rising water levels on Lake Tanganyika and heavy rainfall, engulfed farmland, roads, markets, school playgrounds and churches.
About 52,000 people have been affected by floods since March 2021 according to United Nation’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix.
The tracker has identified 127,775 internally displaced persons in 28,569 households, of which 85 per cent have been due to natural disasters and 15 per cent from other reasons across the 18 provinces of Burundi.
The IOM said devastation linked to effects of heavy rain on the world’s second-deepest lake has affected Tanzania, Zambia and the DR Congo which share about 600 km of the water body.
Lives in the sub-region bordering Lake Tanganyika have been disrupted but Burundi bore the greatest brunt of the floods as it is among the world’s 20 most vulnerable countries in terms of both preparedness and emergency response to natural disasters.
WATCH: Fox News anchor claims Karl Marx wrote 'Mein Kampf'
On Fox News Tuesday, anchor Bill Hemmer made a major mix-up of political history when he appeared to credit philosopher Karl Marx with writing "Mein Kampf."
"I remember 20 years old going to Trier, Germany and trying to find the home of Karl Marx cuz, y'know, 1848 — he wrote 'Mein Kampf'," said Hemmer during the segment. "I want to know what it's all about."
Marx and Friedrich Engels were the authors of "The Communist Manifesto," which was published in 1848. "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") was written by Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator who was instrumental to developing fascism, and published in 1925.
By KENNEDY SENELWA
