#the only person actively in the program who has studied abroad. except for my former roomie who’s in france rn but like . im the ONLY | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

route22ny · 3 years

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With Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations spiking around the country, dreams of a summer like those many us had in mind just a short time ago have faded.

The fully vaccinated have been told to resume wearing masks indoors. Companies and institutions are leveling vaccine mandates. And some municipalities are requiring people to show proof of vaccination to get into restaurants, bars, and gyms.

Confusion abounds about what is safe to do. (For the unvaccinated, there’s no confusion about what’s most important to do: Get immunized.)

To try to cut through the fog, STAT contacted three dozen epidemiologists, immunologists, and other infectious disease experts around the country to see how they are navigating the risk of Covid in these uncertain times. Twenty-eight responded.

STAT didn’t ask these experts to explain how they would advise others. Rather, we asked them to answer 10 questions — saying yes, no or only if masked — about their own willingness to engage in various activities, assuming they were vaccinated.

Their answers suggest that, with the highly transmissible Delta variant spreading, caution prevails. Those who know viruses best aren’t buying many movie tickets, and most aren’t eating indoors in restaurants.

But in other ways, responses diverged. And at least one expert suggested that geography really does matter when it comes to his own comfort level. Naor Bar-Zeev, a statistical epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, declined to respond to all but one of the questions, saying answers are highly dependent on the circumstances of a place.

“In a place where most people are unvaccinated, or otherwise at high risk, and where there is active transmission, I should act more conservatively and with greater caution, even though I am protected from disease,” he said. “In a place where most people are vaccinated, and there is low transmission, one can be more permissive.”

Let’s unpack their answers.

Of the questions, only one earned a unanimous response: “Would you send your unvaccinated child to school without a mask?”

“Lord, no,” Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, replied. “NO!!! As a parent and a pediatrician, that is a terrible idea,” wrote Andrew Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah.

None of 27 people who answered this question expressed a willingness to send an unvaccinated child to school without a mask. Carlos del Rio, a professor of epidemiology and global health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, said he’d withdraw an unvaccinated child from a school if it didn’t have a mask mandate.

Children under the age of 12 cannot yet be vaccinated as none of the vaccines has been authorized for use in this age group.

The other school-related question — “Would you send your vaccinated teen to school without a mask?” — drew almost as fervent a response, with 24 of 26 saying no.

Ellen Foxman, an immunologist at Yale University, was one of the exceptions. “Yes, if the high school had a high vaccination rate/low Covid transmission rate and my family had no high-risk personal contacts,” she wrote. “If the school required all students and staff to be vaccinated, I would have no problem whatsoever with no masks.”

Pavia gave a nuanced answer for his support for masks for vaccinated teens. “If the vaccinated kids don’t mask, the unvaccinated are unlikely to mask and there is a risk of bullying. Masks for all is much more likely to work,” he wrote.

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said he not only wouldn’t allow a vaccinated teen to go to school without a mask, he’d demand the teen wear an N-95 respirator. Cloth face coverings aren’t enough to combat Delta, he insisted.

Shane Crotty, an immunologist at La Jolla Institute of Immunology, said he’d send teenagers to school with masks, but would be okay with them taking them off around friends outside of school or during an outdoor lunch break.

When the experts were asked whether they would eat indoors at a restaurant, responses were slightly more mixed. More than half of respondents said no, but six said they would, or would in off-peak hours, and three more said they would do it but would wear a mask when they weren’t eating.

Saad Omer, director of Yale’s Institute for Global Health, said he would eat indoors in a restaurant that required customers to show proof of vaccination. “I generally feel safe indoors in a restaurant as long as underlying community transmission is low and I’m eating with other vaccinated people,” wrote John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. “However, I always prioritize eating outside where possible.”

That approach no longer seems viable to Syra Madad, senior director for the special pathogens program in the NYC Health + Hospitals network. “More than 95% of Americans live in areas of high or substantial community transmission so it’s no longer a matter of ‘Yes, I’ll eat indoors if I’m in an area of low community transmission,’” she wrote.

It seems like we’re over DIY hair — or so the answers to the question of whether the experts would go to a hairdresser or a barber shop would suggest.

All but four respondents said they would go to a hair salon or barber at this point even if they didn’t know the vaccination status of other clients. And even one of the four more cautious respondents allowed that she might consider it. “No, but if we are all far apart and there are few people I might with a mask,” said Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Most people who said yes did so with the caveat that they’d wear a mask. Jesse Goodman, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University, said he would go only if he and everyone else in the place was masked. Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale University immunologist, said she would try to reduce the frequency of visits. But Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was in favor of professional hair care in general.

“I know how careful my hairdresser has been,” Marrazzo wrote. “She also needs financial support; my hair also needs it.”

Would the experts go to the theater to see a film? Seventeen said no.

“Non-essential,” said Shweta Bansal, whose Georgetown University laboratory studies how social behavior affects infectious disease transmission.

Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in Manhattan, believes most people who are fully vaccinated are well protected at this point. He would go to see a movie wearing a mask.

Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has a different view on Covid risks than some of the other people STAT polled. He (and others) believe Covid is going to become endemic — we’re going to have to learn to live with it. For fully vaccinated people, Adalja said, the risks even from contracting Covid are pretty low.

“That fact makes me comfortable as a fully vaccinated individual without underlying health problems to resume my pre-pandemic life because I am risk-tolerant and I know that if I am to get a breakthrough infection it is likely to be mild,” he said. Adalja said yes to all but two of STAT’s questions; he would not send an unvaccinated child to school without a mask and would not currently give a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

William Hanage, an epidemiologist in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he’d happily skip going to the movies, but his wife enjoys going. So he would go, wearing a mask.

There was almost an even split among the experts to the question of whether they would attend a large outdoor concert or sporting event, with a slight edge going to the “yes” side. Most of the 15 people said they’d do it if masked.

Robert Wachter, the chair of the University of California, San Francisco’s department of medicine, said he’d don a mask “if shouting people [were] at very close range.” Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, said he “would not attend a large outdoor concert right now,” stressing the amount of Covid transmission in his state at the moment.

Move a mass gathering indoors and the answers shift. In response to the question of whether they would go to an indoor wedding or other religious service — one where they did not know the vaccination status of the other attendees — more of the experts said no.

Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor in George Mason University’s biodefense program, for instance, would go to an outdoor concert or sporting event, masked. Even with a mask, she would not attend an indoor wedding or religious ceremony.

Emergency physician Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of the consulting firm Advancing Health Equity, said she’d forgo indoor and outdoor large gatherings at this point.

We asked two questions about travel: “Would you travel to a part of the United States experiencing a surge in Covid cases?” and “Would you go on a non-essential international trip?” Surprisingly, there was slightly more willingness in the group to travel internationally than to domestic Covid hot spots.

In response to the former, Peter Hotez was succinct. “I’m living it,” said the Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, based in Houston-swamped Covid-19.

Del Rio, who lives in Atlanta, goes frequently to Miami to visit his son and his son’s family. “I am very careful when I travel,” he said. Since the pandemic began he has twice visited his mother in Mexico, “but at this point I am not going. May go later in the year,” he wrote.

Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, said he wouldn’t travel abroad now. Not because of Covid directly, but because he might get stuck somewhere if travel restrictions were instituted. Hanage and his family vacationed on Cape Cod this year instead of taking a planned trip to Iceland, for the same reason.

Nahid Bhadelia, director of Boston University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy & Research, said she would not travel to an American Covid hot zone if she could avoid it, but would travel internationally, if her destination had a high vaccination rate and a low transmission rate.

Angela Rasmussen, a coronavirus virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, said she would travel to a location in the U.S. having an upswing in Covid transmission, but would do it using precautions. As for international travel, “depends where, but masked,” she said.

Our final question was for the physicians in the group was this: “Would you recommend that patients who received the one-dose J&J vaccine get another dose of vaccine?”

Crotty, the immunologist at La Jolla Institute of Immunology, said yes; he tweeted recently about his support for giving J&J recipients an extra dose of vaccine to cope with the Delta variant. “I have had physicians emailing me thanks about my [Twitter] threads on this,” he said.

Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Lifespan Health System in Providence, R.I., said she’s waiting for guidance from the Food and Drug Administration. “But in the meantime, I certainly wouldn’t judge anyone who does get another dose.”

And Helen Keipp Talbot, a vaccine researcher at Vanderbilt University, pleaded the Fifth. Talbot is a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccination policy. “No comment,” was her reply.

***

About the Author: Helen Branswell

Senior Writer, Infectious Disease

Helen covers issues broadly related to infectious diseases, including outbreaks, preparedness, research, and vaccine development.

@HelenBranswell

***

source: https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/17/whats-safe-to-do-during-summers-covid-surge-stat-asked-public-health-experts-about-their-own-plans/

#life during covid #infectious diseases #vax up #coronavirus pandemic #covid-19

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locuras-blog1 · 4 years

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20100724-TP World Assembly Proclamation

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“The World Assembly to Proclaim the Substantial Word of God and the Era of the Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind.”

July 24, 2010 – New York City Manhattan Center

Program:

Dr. Thomas G. Walsh – Master of Ceremony Rev. Jesse Edwards – Invocation Dr. Thomas G. Walsh introducing Rev. In Jin Moon Rev. In Jin Moon – Welcoming Remarks 2 Songs by the Love and Life Band Dr. Thomas G. Walsh introducing Dr. Neil A. Salonen Dr. Neil A. Salonen Dr. Thomas G. Walsh introducing Alexander P.Haig Dr. Thomas G. Walsh introducing Archbishop George Augustus Stallings, Jr. Archbishop George Augustus Stallings, Jr. Short Video reflecting on True Parents Golden Wedding Anniversary Dr. Thomas G. Walsh introducing Rev. Dr. Hyung Jin Nim Rev. Dr. Hyung Jin Moon introducing Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and the True Parents Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon Presentation of flowers, True Father and True Mother signing the Proclamation and presentation of gift. 3 cheers of Mansei

Full Speech as given at the Cheon Jeong Gung Palace on July 8th:

Respected leaders from around the world, distinguished guests from home and abroad, ladies and gentlemen:

Representing True Parents’ True Family, the Republic of Korea, and blessed members worldwide, I would like to welcome and express our deep appreciation to our many esteemed guests. You have come, despite your busy schedules, to participate in this providential Convention to Proclaim the Word that Firmly Establishes the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind. In this year alone, thousands of representatives and top leaders from 120 nations of the world honored us with their presence at our Golden Anniversary, Coronation, and the Memorial Festival held at the new UN building—making it a wonderful occasion. Once again I would like to express my appreciation on behalf of all the people of the Republic of Korea and all of humankind.

Ladies and gentlemen, a few months ago I celebrated my ninetieth birthday and took my first steps toward the hundredth year of my life. This is a very eventful time in God’s providence. I have been blessed with a long life, beyond the average human lifespan. On the occasion of our fiftieth wedding anniversary, we are holding this occasion with people from all over the world. From a providential point of view, this year is not simply the year of our Golden Anniversary; it is a jubilee year.

We have fourteen children; five have graduated from Harvard University. Among our forty plus grandchildren, several of them are already studying there. Moreover, a great number of good men and women from 194 nations have come to recognize and follow us as the king of kings and the True Parents.

Throughout our lives, we have established many international organizations and institutions to promote world peace. We have invested unreservedly in many fields including interreligious cooperation, projects to benefit society, intercultural activities, sports, education and the media, and we have successfully led these initiatives with the aim of promoting peace and bringing salvation to humanity.

After working to succeed in all these things, people would probably commend us, saying that we deserve to look back at our lives and pleasantly celebrate our birthdays with the good wishes of all people. They would probably encourage me to forget about everything and sit back and enjoy the successes achieved during the past ninety years! However, my wife and I cannot look at the lives we have led in such a worldly way. We have had to complete the mission of the actual True Parents, given to us by God, who is Himself the vertical true parent of all humankind. Now, with three years remaining in this mission to make God’s kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, a reality, we are leading each day of our lives with more seriousness than ever before.

Throughout my life, I have offered myself for the liberation of God, the one and only true parent of heaven and earth, to restore to Him His rightful position as parent, to save all human beings who suffer in the realm of death, and to return them to God’s bosom. For this purpose I have persevered and triumphed, alone, over countless tribulations while leading the people of the world, who are like lost and unaware orphans searching for their parents, toward the goal of global salvation. Due to the Fall, brought about by our first ancestors, people are born into the false lineage. Every one without exception wanders in darkness even now, unable to break free of Satan’s bondage. Under such circumstances, how could my wife and I be anything less than completely serious in our lives as we show the 6.5 billion people of the world the way along the path toward the building of God’s kingdom on earth?

Three Stages of Re-creation Ladies and gentlemen, God created human beings as his children. As the original absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal being, God created people by breathing His love into them to endow them with a soul. If not for the Fall, we would have been able to perfect ourselves as God is perfect, fulfill the way of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and attain eternal life.

But unfortunately, human beings are living as descendants of the Fall. In order to live a perfect life, all people without exception must receive life through the blessing from True Parents in the three stages of rebirth, resurrection and eternal life. Rebirth, in this context, refers to an individual attaining new life. Resurrection is when a family and nation attains new life, and eternal life refers to all of humankind attaining perfection and living forever in God’s homeland after establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth and in the spirit world by attending True Parents, who have attained the position of the king of kings.

Your ancestors who are in the spirit world shall now return to this earth according to the time of the True Parents who directly govern all life and all things as the substantial entity of God who exists without form. They will go through the three-stage blessings of rebirth, resurrection and eternal life and complete the Original Divine Principle education—the education on absolute sexual ethics—organized by True Parents. Only then can they enter the original realm of Seunghwa and attain the qualifications to become a citizen of Cheon Il Guk.

We can easily see that each person’s life goes through three stages. Everyone is conceived through the grace of God and the love of his or her parents. The first stage of life is the long (yet short) nine months spent in the mother’s womb. No one is exempt from this! Whether we are conscious of it or not at the time, all of us without exception spend nine months in our mother’s womb. Even though a woman’s womb is smaller than some rice cookers, from the perspective of a fetus, it is larger than the entire universe.

What about our birth into the second stage of our lives, which occurs on earth? How could we find words adequate to describe the struggle of a newborn baby as it is faced with a completely unfamiliar, new world? The first lonely cry of a newborn as it experiences the large and wide world that it finds upon coming out of the womb is a blessing and celebration of a new time and space that promises a one-hundred-year future.

Today we are all blessed to be living in the second stage of our lives. Although a hundred years is much longer than the nine months we spend in the womb, please do not forget that there is still a course we must follow to a higher end. Although we have all forgotten the standard of consciousness that we possessed in our mother’s womb, and we are now enjoying our lives fully in this big, wide world, this is merely preparation for the final stage of our lives, which is eternal life.

That third stage occurs in the world of eternal life, which we can enter by reaching perfection—this is the spirit world. It is a world that cannot be imagined by people descended from the Fall. It is a world in which we transcend time and space. Just as the baby in a mother’s womb cannot imagine life on earth, we, as people living and breathing air in this earthly world, cannot easily understand the spirit world, where we will be reborn in our spiritual bodies, living and breathing true love.

Ladies and gentlemen, as people face death, they may tremble in fear and terror if they do not understand the true meaning of passing on. Although human history has continued for more than six thousand years, no one, unfortunately, has clearly taught the truth regarding death. Now, in the Last Days of history, I have been able to reveal this truth, this heavenly secret, as the True Parent of humankind.

Ladies and gentlemen, the word ”death” is sacred. It is not a synonym for “sadness and suffering.” Therefore, the True Parents have created the term seunghwa [ascension] to explain the true significance of “death.” The moment we enter the spirit world is the time that we enter a world of joy and victory with the fruits born of our lives on earth. It is a time for those of us remaining on earth to send off the departed with joy. It should be a time for great celebration. We should be shedding tears of joy instead of tears of sadness. That is the significance of the sacred and noble Seunghwa Ceremony. It is the first step toward enjoying eternal life in God’s embrace. The moment of death should be a time of greater excitement than that of a newlywed bride going to her groom’s home for the first time.

In order to open the door for all people to experience this kind of precious eternal life, I held a Seunghwa Ceremony at the United Nations headquarters in New York on March 18 in honor of world leaders who had recently passed into the next world.

The following are the names of those commemorated on that occasion:

General Alexander Haig, a former United States secretary of state, who saved my life by leading the bombing of the North Korean Hungnam Special Labor Camp where I was imprisoned during the Korean War ; Mr. Kim Dae-jung, a former South Korean president, who won the Nobel Peace Prize; Mr. Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat and head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, who died in the 2010 Haitian earthquake; the one hundred UN workers who died alongside Mr. Annabi; Mr. Rodrigo Carazo Odio, a former president of Costa Rica, who is known worldwide as “the Peace President”; Mr. Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president of Indonesia, who gave his entire life for the sake of his great nation, which has a population of more than two hundred million; Mr. Steingrimur Hermannsson, a former prime minister of Iceland, who helped bring about the meeting of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and United States President Ronald Reagan, which accelerated the end of the cold war; Shaykh Hassan Cissé of Senegal, who is respected as an exemplary person and a great scholar of Islam; and Mr. Laxmi Mall Singhvi of India, who is praised as the “Ambassador of Reconciliation and Peace” by India’s 1.1 billion people.

There are also other people whom we would especially like to remember through this ceremony and send to the spirit world with the Seunghwa Blessing. I’m sure you have already heard about the recent sinking of the ship Cheonan in Korea where 46 sailors suddenly lost their lives in the course of duty. During my four-city speaking tour in Korea in April, my wife and I bestowed the grace of the Seunghwa Blessing on these unfortunate seamen who died.

Later, during another event in Las Vegas, USA, I bestowed the Seunghwa Blessing on one Dr. Reiko Kawasaki, a 17th-generation descendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the last shogun in Japanese history, who united the Japanese archipelago in the 17th century. She was a medical doctor from Las Vegas, and recently passed away after living a life of continuous service to others. Through her benign influence from the spirit world, she will play a major role in Korea, Japan and the US, and also in resolving problems in spheres such as politics and economics for the sake of the realization of world peace. Thus, we have included her in the list of those who will receive this sacred Seunghwa Blessing.

Distinguished leaders, although the lives of the people whose names I mentioned were altruistic and philanthropic, none of them can be guaranteed entry into the world of eternal life without receiving the marriage blessing and the Seunghwa Blessing of the True Parent [Rev. Moon] in this world today, in which the parent-child relationship between God and humankind was severed due to the Fall of the first ancestors. Please take this point seriously.

Ladies and gentlemen, this era, when God has introduced the heavenly calendar, is a serious one. It is now the time in which all 6.5 billion of the world’s people must understand my teachings, which I bequeath as the True Parent who is responsible to give eternal life to all of humankind. Now is a time that you can share the good news of the coming of the True Parents throughout the entire world. The time has come to honor and inherit the tradition and spirit of the Korean people, from which the True Parents emerged, establish the heavenly tradition, and bring about world peace by uniting all 6.5 billion people of the world with the United Nations. With the start of the heavenly calendar, please do not forget that the Seunghwa Blessing Ceremony is a sacred rite in which anyone can inherit the worldview of a holy citizen of the kingdom of heaven and celebrate God’s liberation and all humankind’s liberation.

In this way, the ideal of a family based on true love can be completed, and God and all people, the heavenly spirit world and the earthly physical world, can be completely united to usher in a reign of peace over the world. Please take this time to express your gratitude to God and True Parents for giving the keys of the Blessing Ceremony and Seunghwa Ceremony to all the worlds’ nations, allowing for the establishment of the traditions of God’s kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, through True Parents.

Please join me in giving a round of applause to our Heavenly Father for His benevolence, through which we can receive the grace of precious life without Him asking for anything in return.

One Family under God Ladies and gentlemen, what is the path that humankind should take today? Even now tens of millions of innocent lives are being lost each year to war, disease, starvation and natural disasters that arise in all parts of the world. In every field you observe, from the individual to the collective level—whether religion, politics, education, culture or ideology—people are deeply mired in the swamp of self-centered egoism, raising walls around themselves. We now live in a world brought to ruin, where genuine communication has broken down.

Ultimately, the problems afflicting humanity can only be resolved through the worldview of One Family under God, in other words, the ideology based on true love, which my wife and I, the True Parents, have learned from Heaven and have championed and taught throughout our lives. This is the only way for humankind to find the path toward peace and happiness.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a historic time of great cosmic transition. It is a time for a great cosmic revolution to change history, to unite the spiritual and physical worlds and to create the ideal kingdom of heaven that God has longed for since the beginning of time.

We can no longer postpone or prolong the fulfillment of His wish. I have already proclaimed that January 13, 2013 will be ”Foundation Day.” That day will be the actual beginning of Cheon Il Guk. That day will be the origin. Yet, less than three years remain until then. Therefore, it is time for all people to be humbly obedient to Heaven’s decree. An unavoidable time is upon us today when we must invest ourselves completely with a life or death commitment for the remaining three years under the guidance of the True Parents who carry out the providence on earth as the substantial representatives of God, the king of kings. All the good spirits in the spirit world are mobilized and are already moving forward, a step ahead of you. Ladies and gentlemen, do you have any idea how much pain God suffered the moment our first ancestors, into whom God had invested His complete and unreserved devotion since time immemorial, fell and disappeared into darkness, becoming part of Satan’s lineage? Are you even remotely aware that our Heavenly Father—who endured tens of thousands of years of excruciating heartache so great that His bones shed tears and His flesh quivered—had to go through the long, dark tunnel of indemnifying the human Fall in order to save His lost children? How many have spent days and nights in tears, yearning to comfort our Father in Heaven?

The Mission of the Korean People Ladies and gentlemen, God raised and prepared the Korean people over a period of thousands of years. All people of the Christian faith recognize that God sent His true son Jesus Christ to earth two thousand years ago to save humankind. However, Jesus suffered a miserable fate.

The leaders of Judaism and the people of Israel were supposed to receive Jesus as the Messiah and follow him with absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. They should never have allowed Jesus’ crucifixion to take place. He suddenly left this world, leaving behind the words, “It is finished.” Yet these words apply to salvation in the spiritual reality only. After two thousand years of preparation, his Second Coming, on the Korean Peninsula, has finally borne the fruits of his labor.

From the past, the Korean people have worshiped God as the highest and primal ancestor of their forefathers. They called that single being and progenitor of all people the “One”—in other words, God. They served Him as the lord (who created night and day). Thus, all numbers begin from one and two. With the sense that He is their original ancestor, the Korean people have served God and thus the spirit of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values is alive in the soul and tradition of the race. They have maintained themselves over five thousand years of history, yet not once have they invaded or plundered another nation or people. The spirit of benefiting all mankind still flows in the veins of the Korean people.

The spirit of filial piety, fidelity, and loyalty, which are the fundamental virtues of human life, are still alive and breathing in Korean history. These values can be found in the men and women of Korea and reflect the pride and spirit of the Korean people.

I have inherited such traditional values as the true filial piety exemplified in the folk tale Shimcheong, about a devoted daughter who offered her life so that her blind father could see; the profound love and fidelity displayed by Choonhyang, who overcame the fear of death in order to keep the promise she had made to her husband; and the unbreakable loyalty exhibited by Admiral Yi Soon-shin, who gave his life to save his nation and people despite being abandoned by his king and other leaders. These lofty Korean values and traditions are not just matters of historical chance. Based on these values, Heaven has prepared this people; this was all part of the providence of creating a foundation to send the Messiah. On the foundation of such preparation, and riding on the energy of this peninsula, I finally came, having received Heaven’s seal as the True Parent of humankind and the king of kings.

The Path Humankind Should Take Distinguished Guests, your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:

The path that humanity must now take is clear. What would give you cause to hesitate in the face of the D-day that Heaven has revealed through us, the True Parents? There are now only 919 days remaining. Heaven’s blessings will be with you on your ambitious and busy course.

If you view the flow of history through eyes that focus on God’s providence, you can see that the changes of the times can be broadly classified into three stages. First is the “era of worldly matters,” in other words, a time when materialism took precedence. Next came the “era of human affairs,” a humanistic era when peoples’ knowledge and emotions took precedence in and dominated the world.

However, these eras were transitional. They were courses of preparation necessary in order to enter the era in which people could rid themselves of their fallen nature, return to their original selves and live as one united family where they attend God as their father.

The “era of heavenly affairs” is the final stage, in which human beings should follow the path of living for the sake of others. They should do this through establishing an absolute standard on the foundation of purifying themselves, both inside and out, through the holy Blessing Ceremony. This is the time of opening up the era of God’s kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, a time in which we can return to the heart of the one true God. Please continually engrave this point on your hearts.

Once the actual era of Cheon Il Guk begins, the spiritual and earthly worlds will be connected and brought into oneness, and all things will be governed under the Union of the Spiritual and Physical Worlds, which will be established on earth for the first time. Moreover, the providence will be carried out according to the heavenly law and the heavenly way. Elections conducted in a purely secular fashion will disappear from the face of the earth. All people will become one family through cross-cultural marriage and the World Peace Marriage Blessing, and we will enjoy tranquility and happiness in the sacred reign of peace. Let me say that this day is drawing near.

As part of preparing for that time, a few days ago, on February 14, I proclaimed to all of heaven and earth the start of the new heavenly calendar. The Gregorian calendar and lunar calendar shall now stand in the positions of Cain and Abel and serve the role of supporting the heavenly calendar, by which we will record and indicate the progress of God’s providence.

You must all now engrave True Parents’ teachings onto your bones and practice them in your life. We have no choice. If we do not prepare now, we will surely be left behind. We should learn from the courage and fortitude of the white-necked cranes that fly across the Himalayas—which are more than seven thousand meters high—in preparation for winter.

My Final Words for Humankind True Parents have already prepared the last words I will give to humankind. These have been prepared based on my triumphs over six or seven life-or-death situations, including six periods of unjust imprisonment. I am leaving behind eight textbooks and teaching materials for humankind to use for all eternity. These are published in almost a thousand volumes.

They are The Sermons of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Exposition of the Divine Principle, Cheon Seong Gyeong, The Family Pledge, Pyeong Hwa Shin Gyeong [Messages of Peace], True Families—Gateway to Heaven, Owner of Peace and Owner of Lineage and World Scripture. These are textbooks you will have to read and study even after you go to the spirit world. They are not just teachings that come from the mind of one person; they are textbooks and teaching materials that teach the heavenly way that God has granted to His suffering children for their salvation.

You should now set up the tradition of hoondokhae in your families using the books I have mentioned—that is, the tradition where three generations of a family start each day by reading Heaven’s word, and lead a life of practicing what they read, with a new heart. Let’s create a world where people in the spirit world and the earthly world can both attend True Parents at the same time, and read the word on the heavenly path together.

Once this happens, no matter how hard Satan may try to worm his way in to infest your lineage, once he encounters the hoondokhae tradition he will find no room to move. If a family is aligned with God as at high noon, where no shadow is cast, and still does not receive God’s blessings, who then could be deserving of them? When such heavenly families fill the earth, the world will automatically become the heavenly kingdom on earth and in the eternal spirit world, fulfilling the vision of one family under God.

Ladies and gentlemen, last year, my memoirs, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, an honest, candid account of my life, were published. Through this book I have clearly shown where you can find God’s will for humankind and the path that we, as God’s children, should follow. My life has been a typical model of the saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” I have as much faith in this book as in the hoondok textbooks and teaching materials I have mentioned. For this reason, I recommend it to you, believing that it will show you how to lead your lives according to true principles. It does not subtract or add anything to the ninety years of my life, which I have led under Heaven’s decree. I pray you will carefully read this articulation of true love and find great inspiration.

I have already mentioned that a life of vertical “noon-time” alignment casts no shadow. If we can all shine as we live such glowing lives, there will be no chance for the shadow of sin to be cast. Those who receive the light will be indebted to the light. I pray that we can now wipe away the tears of people in misery and poverty, and lead an illuminated life of eternal true love that dissipates all darkness.

Proclamation of the Era of the Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind Ladies and gentlemen, in Las Vegas a special proclamation was given centered on God by the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind on two separate days—one part at 2:20 AM on the 8th day of the 5th month of the Heavenly Calendar (June 19, 2010) and the other at 3:25 AM, on the 15th day of the 5th month of the Heavenly Calendar (June 26, 2010).

The number 3 from 3:25 AM represents the three eras from the saying “Success comes at the third attempt.” It also symbolizes the Old, New and Completed Testament ages. Twenty-five minutes, or the number 25, is a quarter of one hundred. The True Parents have achieved ultimate unity and offered and proclaimed the era of [God’s] full transcendence, full immanence, full authority and omnipotence upon the standard of perfection, completion and conclusion.

Furthermore, with the Seunghwa Ceremony for former United States secretary of state General Alexander Haig, I proclaimed that the ceremony for the victory of the first, second, and third Israels, which completed the ceremony for rebirth, resurrection and seunghwa during my lifetime, was transferred to Korea.

As a result, God’s homeland and hometown is now Korea. By proclaiming that Korea is God’s homeland, the Convention to Proclaim the Word that Firmly Establishes the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind can be completed in Korea. This has been declared on July 8.

Through this proclamation ceremony, all the borderlines in the entire cosmos have been abolished. Consequently, centering on the autonomous God, heaven and earth shall exist eternally, night and day, under God’s reign and with the support of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind.

Distinguished guests, at this serious and important time, a revolutionary and cosmic change must now take place in your lives. Let us summarize the message Heaven has given to us today in light of this.

First, all blessed families should first attend God at the center of their families and every day carry out hoondok education, which can completely unite parents and children. In other words, you should thoroughly teach the Divine Principle, the textbook and teaching material True Parents have bequeathed, True Father’s autobiography, and absolute sexual ethics taught through the Original Divine Principle.

Second, Heaven has permitted the grace of the realm of seunghwa for rebirth and resurrection to be bestowed on the family unit. Here, a requisite condition is the complete unity between parents and children. In other words, you must establish the standard for absolute parents and absolute children, and establish an absolute family.

Third, humankind has moved out of the realm of the era of restoration through indemnity, thanks to the grace of True Parents who have suffered hardships through which they sweat blood. Therefore, do not forget the fact that during True Parents’ lifetimes we all have the responsibility to liberate families, tribes, peoples, nations and the world from the realm of hell. Now that the era of restoration through indemnity has ended, what kind of era is dawning? The reign of tranquility and prosperity in the victorious realm centered on God and True Parents shall be eternal.

Fourth, we are now entering the era of God’s direct dominion. Ladies and gentlemen, I have said that less than three years remain until the D-day proclaimed by Heaven. I beg that you inscribe in your hearts the fact that we have entered the era of the realm of the cosmic Sabbath in which your family members in the spirit world shall return to the earth to receive Original Divine Principle education, and where eight generations will live together and share this together in a single family. Aju!

Once again, I offer you my heartfelt thanks for your gracing this occasion with your presence and celebrating this providential event. I pray that you will live in good health and in the abundance of God’s love. It is my hope that we can offer greater glory and honor to God the next time we meet.

I pray that the blessings of God, the king of kings, will be upon you, your family and your nation.

Thank you very much. Likes: 10 Viewed:

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Paris beckoned African-American intellectuals hoping to escape the racism and conformity of American life. Chief among them: Richard Wright, the acclaimed author of Native Son and Black Boy, who arrived in 1947. He was soon joined by Chester Himes, an ex-convict who mastered hard-boiled detective fiction; James Baldwin, the precocious essayist; and Richard Gibson, an editor at the Agence France-Presse. These men became friends, colleagues and, soon, bitter rivals. Their relationship appeared to unravel over France's war to keep its colony in Algeria. Gibson pressured Wright to publicly criticize the French government, angering the acclaimed author. Wright dramatized their falling-out in a roman à clef he called Island of Hallucination, which was never published, even after his death in 1960. In 2005, Gibson published a memoir in a scholarly journal recounting the political machinations his former friend had dramatized, telling The Guardian he had obtained a copy of the manuscript and had no objections to its publication. "I turn up as Bill Hart, the 'superspy,'" Gibson said of the story. Wright's book now seems prescient. In a strange twist, on April 26, when the National Archives released thousands of documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they included three fat CIA files on Gibson. According to these documents, he had served U.S. intelligence from 1965 until at least 1977. This was well after Wright wrote his book, and it's not clear if Gibson had engaged in espionage before that period. But his files revealed his CIA code name, QRPHONE-1; his salary (as much as $900 a month); and his various missions, as well as his attitude ("energetic") and performance ("a self-starter"). The most curious part of the story: Gibson is still alive. He's 87 and living abroad. (Gibson "will not be able to your questions," said a family friend who answered the phone at his residence.) The CIA is usually vigilant about defending the confidentiality of its sources and methods. In announcing the release of the JFK files last year, President Donald Trump declared the records would be opened in their entirety, "except for the names and addresses of living persons." Save for Gibson's, apparently. (The CIA declined to comment for this story.) SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Update your preferences » Born in 1931, Gibson grew up in Philadelphia and attended Kenyon College in Ohio. A stint in the Army gave him a taste for European life, and he moved to Rome and then to Paris. He wrote a novel, a detective story called A Mirror for Magistrates, and fell in and out with Wright and other expatriate intellectuals. In 1957, Gibson left Paris and went to work for CBS Radio News, according to his newspaper reports. With a colleague, he covered the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. In 1960, Gibson, who then sympathized with leftist movements, co-founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), which defended Castro's government from negative coverage in the North American press. When he left CBS, Gibson took over running the FPCC, and it grew rapidly on college campuses. He resisted subpoenas from Senate investigators seeking to discredit the group and urged civil rights leaders to support the Cuban cause. Yet in July 1962, Gibson quit the FPCC and wrote an anonymous letter on the group's stationery to the CIA. If the agency would arrange a secure meeting spot, he wrote, he could be of assistance. The CIA figured out who wrote the letter and made contact with the young intellectual. He had moved on to Switzerland to become the English-language editor of a new magazine called La Révolution Africaine. In a January 1963 memo, CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms informed the FBI that Gibson had told an agency source about the ideological direction of the magazine—further left—and how it planned to relocate 15 staff members from Paris to Algiers. RELATED STORIES New Study Debunks JFK Conspiracy Theory Trump's Twitter Fingers on the Grassy Knoll The CIA's Secrets About JFK, Che, and Castro Revealed When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the CIA asked Gibson about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who had corresponded with the FPCC. Gibson told them what little he knew and indicated he wanted to "maintain contact" with the U.S. government. In the summer of 1964, Gibson had another falling-out, this time with the publisher of La Révolution Africaine, who accused him of being an agent of the FBI and CIA. Whenever the charge was repeated years later, Gibson shrugged it off. "If I'm CIA, where's my pension?" he told The Guardian in 2006. By then, Gibson was no longer working for the agency. But his file shows that a Langley officer contacted him in January 1965 and arranged for a debriefing and "test assignment" that summer: "After recruitment and agreement to...[polygraph] examination, [s]ubject was introduced to his…case officer." He soon began working for the intelligence service as a spy. Four years later, according to his file, the agency increased Gibson's tax-free salary of $600 a month to $900 a month (the equivalent of more than $6,000 in 2018 dollars). His mission: to report on "his extensive contacts among leftist, radical, and communist movements in Europe and Africa." Gibson, his wife and their two kids settled in Belgium, where he lived the life of a cosmopolitan intellectual. He traveled widely and wrote a book about African liberation movements fighting white-minority rule. He also monitored the revolutionary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who trusted him as an ideological comrade. In his letters to the CIA's spy, Baraka signed off with the valediction "In struggle." (Baraka's son, Ras, is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey.) While the newly released CIA files don't include operational details, Gibson seems to have been a prolific spy. One CIA memo asserts that in 1977 his file contained more than 400 documents. His quip to The Guardian notwithstanding, Gibson even had a CIA pension of sorts. In September 1969, his case officer noted that "QRPHONE/1 has begun to invest a portion of his monthly salary in a reputable mutual fund of his choice. This modest investment program will enhance financial security in the event of termination and/or a rainy day." Gibson was still an "active agent" in 1977 when Congress reopened the JFK investigation and started asking questions about the agency's penetration of the FPCC in 1963. The House Select Committee on Assassinations asked to see Gibson's CIA file. The agency showed investigators only a small portion of it, but the entirety of the still-classified material became part of the CIA's archive of JFK records. That designation would eventually change. In October 1992, Congress passed a law mandating the release of all JFK files within 25 years. Gibson's secret was safe for the time being. In 1985, he successfully sued a South African author who asserted he was a CIA agent. The book was withdrawn, and the publisher issued a statement declaring that "Mr. Gibson has never worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency," a claim that no longer seems tenable. In 2013, Gibson sold his collected papers to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. To celebrate the acquisition, the university held a daylong symposium, "Richard Gibson: Literary Contrarian & Cold Warrior," dedicated to "furthering our understanding of the intellectual and literary history of the Cold War." With the release of Gibson's CIA files, scholars can now discern the hidden hand of the American clandestine service in writing that history. When it came to the character who inspired Bill Hart, "the superspy," Richard Wright's fiction was perhaps ahead of its time. This story has been updated with additional context to reflect the version that appears in the June 1 print edition of Newsweek.

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sunshineweb · 6 years

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A Hidden Cost Called Rented Suit Liability

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Lloyd’s of London, a 300-year-old insurance body, collects more than 33 billion pounds in gross premium every year. Its history goes back to the 17th century.

In 1906, when a major earthquake destroyed more than 80 percent of the Californian city of San Francisco, Lloyd paid out all the policyholder claims, irrespective of the terms of their policies. That cemented Lloyd’s reputation in the American market.

However, in the 1990s, this insurance behemoth was brought to its knees by a risk that had gone unnoticed for decades. After California earthquake episode, Lloyd started underwriting wide-ranging general liability cover to US businesses, including asbestos manufacturers.

Thousands of employees who had worked in asbestos plants were diagnosed with asbestosis, a deadly lung disease, twenty years later. These workers claimed the compensation from their former employer in 1990s. The employer, in turn, claimed it to the insurance companies like Lloyd who wrote the policy in the 1960s. Lloyd had failed to understand the nature of future risk and thus faced near bankruptcy.

Asbestosis is a classic example of a “long-tail” risk – one that can result in insurance payouts years after an original policy was first underwritten. Many of Lloyd’s policies were open peril policies, i.e., they covered any claim not excluded. That was a huge blunder.

In the field of software security, a network firewall is a way to thwart hackers and malicious programs from entering your system. One way a network firewall works is to rely on a whitelist instead of a blacklist.

In other words, access by default is blocked for everybody except those who are present in the whitelist. If you take the blacklist approach, you’re blocking people on the blacklist but those who are not in that list have access – similar to Lloyd’s open peril policies.

So that was Lloyd’s first mistake, i.e., to assume cover for a risk which they didn’t understand. And the second mistake was to not account for an unknown risk.

In insurance jargon, the cost arising out of such long-tail risks are called IBNR – incurred but not reported.

The triumph of Warren Buffett’s annual letters is in delivering a remarkably useful explanation of how the world of business and investing works. With his inexhaustible font of wit and wisdom, this is how Warren Buffett explained the idea of long-tail hidden costs in his 1985 annual letter –

A man was traveling abroad when he received a call from his sister informing him that their father had died unexpectedly. It was physically impossible for the brother to get back home for the funeral, but he told his sister to take care of the funeral arrangements and to send the bill to him. After returning home he received a bill for several thousand dollars, which he promptly paid. The following month another bill came along for $ 15, and he paid that too. Another month followed, with a similar bill. When, in the next month, a third bill for $15 was presented, he called his sister to ask what was going on. “Oh”, she said. “I forgot to tell you. We buried Dad in a rented suit.

Reading Buffett’s letter is an experience akin to having the top of one’s head removed for repairs. Buffett wrote the above anecdote in the context of the insurance industry. And although I have no economic studies I can cite to back this but I sense that the idea of “Rented Suit Liabilities” can be extended to other businesses and even our lives.

Martin Fowler is a British programmer and a world known authority on software architecture. Reflecting over Fowler’s acute observations about how software should be built has completely rearranged the interior decoration of my mind. Many times. He says –

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.

One of the most important principles of software engineering is to write code which is easily maintainable and extendable. But that requires deep thinking and a lot of mental effort. Since most software is built in the face of aggressive deadlines, software developers find it convenient to gloss over the design principles and slap together a hacky code which somehow works.

Imagine building a car with lego and instead of connecting two blocks with an appropriate connector, you glue them together with fevicol. It will work, but tomorrow if someone wants to replace a block, it becomes hard. In software, this is called ‘creating a technical debt.’ Sounds similar to rented suit liabilities, doesn’t it?

The first no-brainer which creates long-tail hidden risks is lack of integrity. And it applies to both – personal as well as corporate conduct. Every time a company’s management tries to get away with minor corporate governance issues, they might think they’re sweeping things under the carpet but they are actually laying the foundation of a graveyard which will soon be housing corpses buried in rented body bags.

In fact, any activity which focuses on short-term results at the expense of long-term benefits sows the seeds of rented suit liabilities. The hidden nature of rented suit liability comes from our unwillingness to think deeply about our decisions beforehand.

Another source of these hidden risks is when the incentives of decision makers are at odds with those who have to live with the long-term consequences of those decisions. For example, a CEO can slash the R&D and marketing expenses and boost the earnings of a company for a few quarters. That earns him a fat bonus and by the time the long-term effects of those expense-cuts start rearing their head, the CEO usually makes an unceremonious exit with a big severance package, and the shareholders are left washing their hands in the air.

Not just in business and investing, rented suit liabilities plague most of us in our non-investing endeavors too. Cut corners on exercising or eating healthy today, and it’s an invitation to rented suit liabilities.

Spending all the income today and postponing the savings? Well, isn’t it akin to accumulating the rented suit liabilities?

Nick Maggiulli, in his fantastic post on Hidden Costs, explores a very interesting question – If you’re offered $100 million on the condition that you have to accept this money publicly during a widely televised event, would you take the offer?

Had you posed this question to me a few years back, I would have said yes with gleeful confidence. However, now I am not so sure. In fact, I explored this subject sometime back in my post Inverting the Money Problem.

Here’s what Nick writes –

Time and time again I have seen how our society idealizes things that are littered with hidden costs. We want the great body, but without the reps. We want the returns, but without the risks. We want the lake house, but without the frozen pipes bursting because we forgot to put in antifreeze. We can idolize wealth, status, fame, and beauty all we want, but we don’t think about what happens if we ever actually get them…

We can never avoid all the hidden costs for the only way to do that is not to take any decisions. And if we tried to do that, it would leave us paralyzed.

So, what’s my point? Instead of throwing caution to the wind and jumping on decisions, we should think hard about what rented suit liabilities may emerge from our actions. And one of the mental tricks that helps is an idea called premortem.

Anne Duke, in her wonderful book Thinking in Bets, writes –

A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens. We all like to bask in an optimistic view of the future. A premortem is where we check our positive attitude at the door and imagine not achieving our goals. Imagining a headline that reads “We Failed to Reach Our Goal” challenges us to think about ways in which things could go wrong that we otherwise wouldn’t if left to our own devices.

Objectively, rented suit liabilities and hidden costs are simply the consequences of our decisions. Nothing more nothing less. With the benefit of hindsight, we call them liabilities because they turn out to be undesirable.

What if those decisions resulted into something which creates value? Rented suit asset, if your will. Or maybe hidden assets. After all, the rented suit was an asset for the guy who gave it on rent. That’s an interesting line of thought, isn’t it?

Have you seen any businesses which have long-tail hidden liabilities? How about any specific decisions in life which can create rented suit liabilities?

Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

The post A Hidden Cost Called Rented Suit Liability appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

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leslilinn039584-blog · 7 years

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konvolutes · 7 years

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So much good stuff by CEU colleague Mariya Ivancheva, but this bit on CEU is a wonderful self-critical history of the institution.

Mariya: Interestingly, between the time you asked me the questions and the time I answer them, things have changed dramatically for CEU – the Hungarian government of Victor Orbán targeted CEU with a bill that challenged the very operation of the university within the Hungarian polity. Despite an outpouring of international and national solidarity, including from very conservative Hungarian institutions and actors, and a 10.000 strong bilingual rally in Budapest on April 2, 2017, the bill passed the National Assembly on April 4th without much discussion, through a fast track procedure, and with over 75% vote of Fidesz MPs. Now, let us be clear, Orbán and his political allies have long shown they have no mercy for vulnerable populations — they have criminalized the homeless, caged and barb-wired refugees, and imposed disciplining workfare measures for the unemployed, while also not opening up new jobs, homes or futures. Universities and individual academics in Hungary have also long been under threat and exposed to growing repression and precarization, without much support from us in the international scholarly community.

What is really crucial in this instance is that Fidesz is not aiming for the “low-hanging fruit”, for the most vulnerable and precarious. It is targeting one of the strongholds of liberal thought (in both senses of “liberal,” but particularly in the European sense in terms of the institution’s senior management and branding). And this time, it seems no petitions, statements from political figures, op-ed-s in leading world media, and who-knows-what diplomatic bargaining behind the scenes can stop the reaction. How this battle will be decided seems to be less and less about CEU itself. On the one hand, the stakes are higher now that the Hungarian academics and students – in much more precarious situation income-wise and also in terms of their vulnerability to the Hungarian state power than most people at CEU – have stepped in firm support of the university. So the CEU community is not alone in this but the responsibility is also higher. On the other hand, the bigger question is whether the liberal establishment still holds any institutional leverage, or whether the future before us is rather that of existent and upcoming Orbáns, Putins, Trumps, and Erdoğans of this world…

But knowing how this same liberal establishment has acted when it was their time to save the homeless, the unemployed and the refugees, I wonder if it is their support that CEU should be eliciting … What steps will we take, as students and academics, to make sure that next time they come for another vulnerable group, we are there to support it with our own bodies, not half-heartedly and tongue-in-cheek-ly as it has too often been thus far? And yes, I ask this as self-criticism as well… Dark days…

But back to your question. The similarities between CEU and EUI that you mention are true, indeed, but there are differences worth exploring – perhaps a PhD thesis that someone else can write one day. The design of the two institutions was quite different. Unlike EUI’s endowment through EU funds and the understanding it would produce knowledge and expertise for the European Union, CEU was a privately endowed university. It was not initially designed to be limited to just one campus…The story goes that millionaire philanthropist George Soros conceived the idea of CEU after visiting the Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik, which held summer schools including neo-Marxist social theorists from both East and West. Initially, those who developed the idea pictured the first campus in Dubrovnik, with more to open across the region. Yet the war in former Yugoslavia started, the building of the Interuniversity Centre was destroyed, its summer school practices were interrupted, and the Western Balkans became a non-viable context for a new university. So the first campuses opened in Central Europe, which was more politically stable and more acquiescent to demands by international organizations for a transition to liberal democracy and the free market.

Budapest and Prague were the two first campuses. Later the Prague campus closed, and some of its programs opened in Warsaw, but by the early 2000s the Budapest campus remained the only one in function. CEU had two key characteristics in that era. First, its faculty included many former dissident intellectuals from East-Central Europe – liberal intellectuals who entered politics in the 1990s but then withdrew either into academic or into expert careers. Second, for the first fifteen years, CEU’s mission statement said that CEU was to train the new generation of political decision-makers in the post-socialist world. So there was this understanding that through short-term post-graduate degrees, students from the region would absorb Western liberal ideas about democracy, law and order and free market society, and then they would go back home to implement these ideas in their own countries.

I entered CEU in 2006 at a very specific time, when all these three components – the multiple campuses, the dissident core of faculty, and the idea of CEU as training ground of post-socialist political elites – had been taken off the ‘menu’. Under the late Rector, Yehuda Elkana, the university adopted a new identity: that of a research-intensive university that competes for global ranking and produces globally relevant scholarship, moving outside the narrow focus on regional political and social processes. The focus on 1 year MA programs gradually declined, while doctoral programs and research-intensive 2 year MA degrees were expanded, sometimes in consortia with other European universities. This helped satisfy the requirements of the Bologna Process, and of national and international accreditation processes.

So then, with few exceptions – faculty members recruited at the university were increasingly those who could live up to the ever more demanding and geographically uprooting standards of an international academic career. Thus, former dissidents were marginalized within the university. The student profile and career trajectories were changing as well. By the time I entered the university, the majority of the students were also not aiming at a political career, but were decided to stay in academia or work for the public sector. These were, more often than not, children of professional classes from the region: people ‘downclassed’ income-wise either during state socialism or at some or another point after 1989. Many of us had stayed completing a first degree in our home country, and could not afford an MA or PhD abroad unless fully funded. At that point in time, both Western and Eastern European public universities were increasingly introducing fees – so CEU became one of the only universities which offered a scholarship to most MA students and fully-funded PhD programs.

When I arrived, the Department of Sociology had just been moved from Warsaw and all its faculty had been dismissed. It had reopened as a Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest, attracting scholars with geographical and topical expertise far beyond the region and with degrees from top American and European universities. Instead of emphasizing regional expertise and policy-oriented knowledge, students got introduced to debates on neoliberal capitalism, globalization, international urban and rural development, memory and religious studies, and this ranged across sites as distant as the US, Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia.

Entering this department at this time has been extremely formative for me in many ways. In the first class I audited, one of my professors, Don Kalb, described himself as ‘crypto-Marxist’ and spoke against capitalism. That was a shock for someone like myself, coming from a liberal personal and intellectual upbringing in post-socialist Bulgaria. Other faculty were no less radical in their statements and political lines, excavating concepts of class, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, bourgeois state, political resistance, revolution, and further notions that the post-socialist universities in the region have swept under the rug of the ‘transition to liberal democracy’. During my Masters’ degree, I was one of the students who initially rebelled against what I thought was an uncritical acceptance of Marxist theory and the dismissal of the department’s regional focus. I initially saw it as diminishing the local relevance of CEU for the region and the region’s relevance for CEU students after graduation.

Yet, in a steep learning curve, I was soon to realize how the new approach — coupled with sensitivity to issues of gender, race, and a more refined contemporary world-systemic reading of concepts such as class and capital — gave us critical tools to explain our Eastern European reality. This was a reality that we as students and intellectuals of the periphery, in what Alexander Kiossev has called auto-colonising gestures, simply discarded and looked down upon as ‘shameful’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘backward’. Staying at CEU for my PhD, I was one of the first students of the department to leave East-Central Europe as a field-site and focus on Latin America. In my PhD thesis I used Marxist theory, comparative historical sociology, and political anthropology to critically examine Venezuela, a new socialist regime in the making. Although I’ve shifted fieldsites subsequently to Ireland and now to South Africa, East-Central Europe has remained always my key intellectual and political context, which I speak back to through my scholarship and activism, e.g. through the political platform LeftEast, where I am a member of the editorial collective. But I have also realized the importance of breaking through geographical divides in knowledge production, in search of comparable or contrasting historical processes.

The new cohorts who have entered CEU’s PhD program in Sociology and Anthropology after the economic crisis in 2008 often come with already shaped Marxist political thinking. Perhaps this is a combination of their getting degrees abroad with the opening up of Eastern European academia to this Marxist theoretical legacy, which was condemned or left in oblivion for two decades. Many of us – regardless of the geography of our field-site – have been using our scholarship for applied interventions in political and social struggles in the region. And it is, interestingly, precisely CEU – a privately endowed, elitist institution – which, through its generous funding and open intellectual atmosphere, has allowed a lot of quite radical debates to take place. Even though portraits of liberal thinkers as Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner still hang in the halls, to remind us of its past and the strife of its senior management.

But for me – as I recent said to an academic in the region decrying CEU as an outpost of neoliberalism – CEU is as any other university, a site of struggle. I prefer to have Popper and Gellner listening to student defences – where neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers are not even the most radical authors cited – and rolling in their graves. As an unintended outcome – perhaps of what Nicolas Guilhot has called Soros’s dialectical thinking – CEU has allowed the majority of people who call themselves Left in the region to emerge from its halls as faculty or students, without political repression. So when defending it today, it is not the institution as an uncriticizable bloc that need to defend. Rather, we need to defend our right to carry on challenging it from within, against the whim of an autocrat to just close it overnight.

On autonomy in the university

Eli: I loved your problematization of academic “autonomy” (particularly in “The Discreet Charm of University Autonomy” and in your joint paper on academic freedom with Kathleen Lynch). This has been a major issue in French higher education as well, where “autonomy” has been construed in very deeply opposed and ideologically laden fashions — new autonomy for institutional management has come very much at the expense of the collective autonomy of the traditional scholarly disciplines. What’s been the reaction to your efforts to produce a more politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy, or to show how it can in fact end up becoming a conservative tool (as in the anti-revolutionary “autonomous” universities in Venezuela)? Do you think that recent anti-precarity efforts, like #precanthro, can help revitalize the notion of autonomy in spite of the uncertain economic underpinnings of the current academy?

Mariya: So, in both papers, the main thesis – seen through my fieldwork in Venezuela, and through processes happening in traditional academic institutions in Western countries such as Ireland – was that current debates on academic autonomy speak only of autonomy from the state, but not of autonomy from the market. So, while academic autonomy and freedom are especially treasured in struggles against authoritarian regimes, often movements which demand them are much less alert about market processes that enter higher education. Thus even in liberal regimes, academics demand autonomy from the state, but often to avoid regulation and public responsibility, not to get a respite against market forces. In liberal market regimes, academic autonomy often becomes a way to perpetuate privilege and refuse public responsibility. This is especially visible in Venezuela, where it was used by anti-Chavista academics to entrench themselves in the traditional higher education system, and to refuse reform and massification.

And then, not to flog a dead horse, but to bring my own cherished alma mater, it was sad to see that when the CEU senior management came to struggle against Viktor Orbán, they did not underline their extended service to the community and the relevance of their programs, but rather their international ranking and their standing on the prestige market. And this while the university community – CEU but not only – has been put under increasing pressure to (self-) monitor its ‘research excellence’ through meaningless or narrow quantifiable criteria. There’s pressure on permanent academics to fundraise and publish-or-perish. There’s pressure on temporary research and teaching staff to follow these incentives and work almost for free. And there’s pressure on students to be happy they are given an education despite the often outdated and colonial curricula, and the demands to pay fees that put especially ‘nontraditional’ students at risk of ever growing debt. So academic autonomy is already under massive threat from the market, but the only threats we notice are the ones from the state even in instances when it tries to regulate against the market… Of course, if we discarding the relevance of academic autonomy, we deny the struggles of academics working in repressive regimes. But hyperbolizing and extending it beyond proportion contributes to keeping the university in its own elite confines. So then, what autonomy do we want? How can we achieve another as you put it, politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy — or I would add, a decolonized one? It’s a challenge, but a worthy one.

#academe #bookshelf #CEU #higher education #Central Europe #Hungary

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