Independent: 30,000 Muslims just marched against Isis and extremism

Thousands of Muslims from around the world converged on the UK for a convention where they rejected extremism and violence of terror groups such as Isis.

More than 30,000 members of the Ahmadiyya Islamic movement met at Oakland Farm in Hampshire for a three-day convention, the 50th time the annual event has taken place. [...]

"The only thing the terrorists are achieving is to completely violate the teachings of the Holy Quran and of the Holy Prophet Muhammad," His Holiness Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad told attendees, according to the MailOnline.

"Let it be clear that they are not practising Islam, rather it seems as though they have invented their own hate-filled and poisonous religion."

The Ahmadiyya movement has 129 centres across the UK including the Baitul Futh Mosque in south London, the biggest in Western Europe.

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VICE: What I Learned as a Black Man Traveling Through the Terrifying Heart of America

Unfortunately, I was also disenchanted by the undercurrent of racial hate that I saw from coast to coast. As a sort of baptism by fire, one of our first stops was an interracial cuckold porn shoot, where I saw the age-old stereotypes of black men as savage, sex-crazed beasts turned into XXX entertainment. As I watched a white actress and two hulking brothers dripping in baby oil get it on, the white director told me the film's target audience was mainly white southerners, a demographic whom he said actually begged his studio for more degradation and sexual minstrelsy. There's a kind of terrible logic to that: You'd only find those sorts of scenes sexy if you were fearful of and repulsed by black men, if you saw them not as people but as some kind of fierce, untamed taboo.

What was fascinating to me was how that piece of pornography was so steeped in plantation-era raceplay. The stereotype of black men as a sexual aggressors against white women was often used as one of the main excuses to subjugate blacks—it also obscures the actual history of rape in America slavery, once a routine practice in this country. How did we get so far from truth in our ideas about each other?

I thought a lot about the real and imagined history of slavery on my trip across the country. Time and time again, I came across distorted takes on its practice and ramifications, which have lead me to feel that even though more than 150 years have elapsed since the Civil War, the rot at the core of the American experiment remains. What distraught me the most was this sort of hate-filled nostalgia people I met seemed to have. They fetishized bygone eras that were defined by the brutalization and subjugation of my ancestors. [...]

I'm reminded of a quote from Don DeLillo's classic novel White Noise: "Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence." I'm also reminded of Beenie Man, who said basically the same thing but shorter: "When yuh live in the past, yuh lost."

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Business Insider: A tiny bank in Italy could decide the future of Europe

The loans on the balance sheets of Italy’s local banks weren’t made to consumers spending beyond their means, or speculative house purchasers, but mostly to local businesses. Their customers were primarily the country’s large number of small- and medium-sized enterprises, often family-run, with business models not that different from the very dynamic enterprises of southern Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, which concentrate on making niche products — specialized textile machinery, for instance — for international markets.

This throwback banking model insulated Italian banks from the fast-developing financial shocks of 2007 and 2008. At the beginning of the global crisis, as other European governments spent large sums bailing out their banking systems, it looked as if Italy had the most solid banks in Europe. The European Central Bank’s calculation of the fiscal cost of bank bailouts for the 2008-2013 period shows a cost for Germany of 8.8 percent of GDP and for Spain of 4.9 percent, with much higher amounts for European countries that required a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (Ireland, 37.3 percent; Greece, 24.8 percent; and Portugal, 10.4 percent). Italy, by contrast, spent less than 0.2 percent of GDP.

But this encouraged a dangerous complacency in Italy, as a slow-moving economic crisis gradually rotted the country’s financial foundation. A long-standing failure to undertake structural reforms has condemned the country to exceptionally sluggish growth, even before the 2008 crisis. Italy’s clothing and textiles sector has been hit by the move of production to Asia or to lower-cost producers in southeastern Europe; even luxury manufacturers are beginning to outsource production. Eventually, the weaknesses of the Italian economy hit the country’s banks with a massive volume of nonperforming loans — the current estimate is 360 billion euros. (It didn’t help matters that the Italian government is often a hindrance; there are many stories of businesses that contract with the government only to find they are never paid.) [...]

In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, Tancredi Falconeri states: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If the government isn’t allowed to help banks directly, it has to commit itself to a new growth dynamic for the entire continent. It remains quite uncertain that it can — or will be allowed to — follow up on that promise.

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Politico: How We Killed the Tea Party

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds. [...]

Any postmortem should start with the fact that there were always two Tea Parties. First were people who believe in constitutional conservatism. These folks sense the country they will leave their children and grandchildren is a shell of what they inherited. And they have little confidence the Republican Party can muster the courage or will to fix it. Second were lawyers and consultants who read 2009’s political winds and saw a chance to get rich. [...] 

POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates. [...]

A provocative theory holds these groups intentionally back candidates that can’t win to assure fundraising flow. Some may genuinely believe they help (others obviously know they don’t). But it’s no secret that the day after Mitt Romney’s defeat was a huge fundraising day in the conservative world. And electoral success would undoubtedly affect business. Current affinity for Cruz and Trump is conditioned on them losing. Victory attenuates the need for the “action” these groups purport to catalyze. It also blunts the emotional appeals which kick-start contributions. That’s why one conciliatory note in the inauguration speech would start the emails flying about how the grass roots has been sold out and “we need your help to keep President Trump true to his word. 

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Business Insider: This woman was shocked by how differently she was treated when she wore a veil — so she opened a library

"More than that, what really horrified me was when I was in my casual clothes, people treated me normally, but when I was wearing the veil and I was out with my mom, or just walking, people would treat me differently," Nocum said.

"There was a very real sense of fear and distrust because you don't see a lot of hijabis here in Manilla. When I wear that, it automatically signals something that people actually associate Islam here with conflict and aggression," Nocum continued.

"I'm supposed to be the same person. I'm Arizza, but it's the way when I wear the clothing of one religion versus the other I'm treated completely differently." [...]

The idea was to create a buzzing community center in which Catholics and Muslims could interact together. Arizza became involved in 2011, helping set up five further libraries across the Philippines in just a year. [...]

Nocum: "Our beneficiaries were Muslims and Christians down in the south, in the areas of conflict, but we realized we needed a program to reach out to other Filippinos who weren't previously aware of the trouble that has been going on."

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BBC: Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered

Next the two teams were pitched against each other in a game designed to test their creativity. They had 16 minutes to think of as many ways as possible to improve education at the psychology department. As Baas expected, the angry team produced more ideas – at least to begin with. Their contributions were also more original, repeated by less than 1% of the study’s participants. [...]

In essence, creativity is down to how easily your mind is diverted from one thought path and onto another. In a situation requiring fight or flight, it’s easy to see how turning into a literal “mad genius” could be life-saving.

“Anger really prepares the body to mobilise resources – it tells you that the situation you’re in is bad and gives you an energetic boost to get you out of it,” says Baas. [...]

Then in 2010 a team of scientists decided to take a look. They surveyed a group of 644 patients with coronary artery disease to determine their levels of anger, suppressed anger and tendency to experience distress, and followed them for between five and ten years to see what happened next.

Over the course of the study, 20% experienced a major cardiac event and 9% percent died. Initially it looked like both anger and suppressed anger increased the likelihood of having a heart attack. But after controlling for other factors, the researchers realised anger had no impact – while suppressing it increased the chances of having a heart attack by nearly three-fold. [...]

In some situations, happiness carries far more serious risks. It’s associated with the cuddle hormone, oxytocin, which a handful of studies have shown reduces our ability to identify threats. In prehistoric times, happiness would have left our ancestors vulnerable to predators. In modern life, it prevents us paying due attention to dangers such as binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

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Jacobin Magazine: How the War on Terror Fuels Trump

The recent denunciations underscore a growing consensus among foreign policy elites in both parties: that Trump’s disrespect for constitutional norms and antipathy toward limits on executive power pose, as the Washington Post put it, “a unique threat to American democracy.”

Some voters, however, aren’t convinced.

Eighty-eight percent of Republicans and 40 percent of the general public support Trump. Judging by the last few months of polling, a significantly larger portion backs his national security agenda. Half the country supports a temporary ban on Muslim immigration; 44 percent favor a registry for Muslims already here; 53 percent want to intensify surveillance of US mosques; and 63 percent endorse the torture of terror suspects. In the latest Pew survey on the subject, voters say Trump would do a better job than Clinton defending the country from future terrorist attacks. [...]

If a constituency exists for Trump’s extreme anti-terror agenda it’s because Republicans and Democrats alike have spent the last fifteen years cultivating paranoia, secrecy, and deference to executive authority — while vastly overstating the threat of attacks on American soil. [...]

Obama’s DOJ largely continued these polices (with the exception of torture), abandoning a campaign commitment to bring transparency to the war on terror. Instead, he has ramped up investigations and prosecutions of national security leakers and resisted efforts to make public the worst crimes of the Bush administration.

On the battlefield too, there’s been much continuity between Bush and Obama. Bush administration lawyers reimagined the meaning of warfare, increasing the executive’s unilateral authority to wage it and creating a legal framework for a borderless, multifaceted war with no necessary end.

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