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STAR TREK BEYOND, Classic STAR TREK, and the Beastie Boys Are a Perfect Match

Nothing is better than a good mashup, right? While it’s super fun to watch a YouTube video of two unlikely properties being mashed together (like Bob Ross and Fallout 4, for instance), sometimes it can be fun to find the combinations that are so natural it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.

One such mashup is this video masterpiece from the YouTube channel Darth Blender, where they took video from classic Star Trek, dubbed it over with dialogue from Star Trek: Beyond, and set it against Beastie Boys music.  Regardless of your feelings about the most recent Star Trek film, you’ve got to admit that this is a pretty brilliant use of the film’s dialogue. And since the new Star Trek films take place in an alternate universe to Shanter’s Star Trek, it’s pretty fun to see the worlds collide in a new way, even if it’s just for the internet.It’s also a great reminder how awesome classic Star Trek is. Seriously. If you haven’t seen the series from the sixties, you’ve got to remedy that right away.

Classic Trek isn’t the only thing getting it’s time in the sun in this movie. The Beastie Boys also get a tip of the hat as the background music for the trailer. And this is the second fan-made trailer we’ve seen with Beastie Boys music this month! Earlier this month a fan-edited trailer of Rogue One was released with the Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” in the background. I’m definitely on board with their music showing up in more trailers, and maybe even some official trailers, too. Regardless of where Beastie Boys tunes pop up next, this mashup trailer is simply golden, and is fun for Trekkies and Beastie Boys fans alike.

What do you think of the mashup? What’s another Beastie Boys mashup you’d like to see? Tell us in the comments!

Feature Image: Paramount

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Nesbits - Fina Art and Antiques Auctions

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Some Auction News

The UK will introduce a ban on ivory sales, Environment Secretary Michael Gove confirmed today as he set out our plans to help protect elephants for future generations.

The Government is publishing the response to its consultation on a UK ivory sales ban, and confirming robust measures that will be brought into force through primary legislation.

The ban will cover ivory items of all ages – not only those produced after a certain date. The maximum available penalty for breaching the ban will be an unlimited fine or up to five years in jail.

There were more than 70,000 responses to the consultation, with over 88 percent of responses in favour of the ban.

The number of elephants has declined by almost a third in the last decade and around 20,000 a year are still being slaughtered due to the global demand for ivory.

Environment Secretary, Michael Gove said:

Ivory should never be seen as a commodity for financial gain or a status symbol, so we will introduce one of the world’s toughest bans on ivory sales to protect elephants for future generations.

The ban on ivory sales we will bring into law will reaffirm the UK’s global leadership on this critical issue, demonstrating our belief that the abhorrent ivory trade should become a thing of the past.

In line with the approach taken by other countries, including the United States and China, there will be certain narrowly-defined and carefully-targeted exemptions for items which do not contribute to the poaching of elephants.

The exemptions have been tightened since the Government published its proposals for consultation, but still provide balance to ensure people are not unfairly impacted:

  • Items with only a small amount of ivory in them. Such items must be comprised of less than 10% ivory by volume and have been made prior to 1947.
  • Musical instruments. These must have an ivory content of less than 20% and have been made prior to 1975 (when Asian elephants were added to CITES).
  • Rarest and most important items of their type. Such items must be at least 100 years old and their rarity and importance will be assessed by specialist institutions such as the UK’s most prestigious museums before exemption permits are issued. In addition, there will be a specific exemption for portrait miniatures painted on thin slivers of ivory and which are at least 100 years old.
  • Museums. Commercial activities to, and between, museums which are accredited by Arts Council England, the Welsh Government, Museums and Galleries Scotland or the Northern Ireland Museums Council in the UK, or the International Council of Museums for museums outside the UK.

By covering ivory items of all ages and adopting these narrow exemptions, the UK’s ban will be one of the toughest in the world. The US federal ban exempts all items older than 100 years as well as items with up to 50% ivory content. The Chinese ban exempts ivory “relics”, without setting a date before which these must have been produced.

The UK is already showing global leadership in the international fight against the illegal ivory trade, and at a recent European Environment Council called for EU member states to follow the Government’s lead and ban commercial trade in raw ivory – which is already banned in the UK – within the EU as soon as possible.


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Luck Continues to Reap Benefits of U.S. Amateur Win April 4, 2017 By Garrett Johnston

Curtis Luck's U.S. Amateur victory at Oakland Hills has changed the early trajectory of his golf career. (USGA/Chris Keane)

The whirlwind tour for Curtis Luck since winning the U.S. Amateur Championship last August at Oakland Hills Country Club continues this week at Augusta National Golf Club.

Luck, 20, of Perth, Australia, went on to help his country win the World Amateur Team Championship last September in Mexico, then added the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship title to his resume the following month. Five PGA European Tour starts and one at Bay Hill served as his preparation for Augusta National.

The Masters is expected to be Luck’s final act in the amateur ranks, as he plans to turn professional after the year’s first major. By doing so, Luck will forfeit the spots in the U.S. Open and The Open Championship that he also earned with his U.S. Amateur victory.

Luck made his PGA Tour debut at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in March, the day after he ascended to the top spot in the World Amateur Golf Ranking™, supplanting Maverick McNealy. Unfortunately, he opened with a 7-over-par 79 and was disqualified after signing an incorrect score card following the second round.

It was a tough ending to what had been a challenging week. A few days prior, Luck’s practice time was limited due to a bout with food poisoning.

“It’s unfortunately one of those things; it’s the first time that I’ve actually been DQ’d,” said Luck, who signed for a par on his final hole instead of the bogey he actually made. “I had a really rough two days and, unfortunately, it got the better of me.”

But with Augusta on the horizon, there was still plenty to be excited about.

Luck contacted fellow Aussie Adam Scott in December to set up a practice round for Masters week, and the 2013 champion told Luck what he should expect on Augusta’s undulating greens.

“Adam said it’s all about managing yourself around the greens more than anything there,” Luck said. “You can’t miss it there; there are only certain spots where you can and you need to get your strategy down and figure out exactly what you’re going to do.”

Per tradition, as the reigning U.S. Amateur champion Luck will play with Danny Willett, the reigning Masters champion, in the first two rounds of the tournament. They'll be joined by 1997 U.S. Amateur champion and seven-time PGA Tour winner Matt Kuchar on the first tee at 12:24 p.m. EDT on Thursday.

“To be playing with Danny, I’m really excited for it,” Luck said. “I’ve met him and he’s a really nice guy.”

Another Masters tradition Luck is hoping to experience is the famous Crow’s Nest, an area under the clubhouse cupola where amateur competitors at the Masters traditionally stay.

“I’ve got a house for the week and was hoping I’d be able to stay (in the Crow’s Nest) before the week, but it turns out I can’t, though I might get up there for a night,” Luck said. “I’d love to, but at the same time, I’m there for the golf and I think ultimately being in a house with my family is probably the best result for me.”

His parents, Stuart and Jody, will attend with his sister, Jasmine; his coach, Craig Bishop; and his grandmother. Stuart caddied for Curtis at Oakland Hills.

A number of friends from Luck’s home course, Cottesloe Golf Club in Swanbourne, Australia, also plan to attend. There’s even word of a group of close to 300 Australians who will come out to support him and the other Aussies in the field.

Beyond getting to play in the Masters, Luck appreciates all of the opportunities that his U.S. Amateur win has created.

“It just opened up so many doors for me to obviously play golf all over the world,” said Luck.

His best finish against professional competition is a tie for 11th in the Emirates Australian Open in November. He also tied for 23rd in the European Tour’s Omega Dubai Desert Classic in February.

Earning an invitation to the Masters via his U.S. Amateur title took some pressure off Luck in October, when he overcame a seven-stroke deficit in the final round to win the Asia-Pacific Amateur by one. The winner of that event also earns a spot in the field at Augusta.

“I was fortunate in that I didn’t have to put any pressure on myself to perform that week because I had already done what I needed to do to get into the Masters,” Luck said. “That was probably a massive contributor to my success there.”

After turning professional after the Masters, Luck hopes to start in as many as nine PGA Tour events, including the Dean & DeLuca Invitational, the Memorial and the Quicken Loans National.

If he hopes to play in the U.S. Open and The Open Championship, though, Luck will have to earn his way into the fields at Erin Hills and Royal Birkdale, respectively, via the qualifying route.

Garrett Johnston is a freelance sports writer and video producer.

Around the Association


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Stroke Play, Round 1: Live Updates September 10, 2016 | Erie, Pa.

Kim Benedict is trying to conquer The Kahkwa Club and advance to match play. (USGA/Fred Vuich)

U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur Home

8:52 p.m. EDT: Although holes 10 through 18 at The Kahkwa Club feature two par 5s, U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur competitors are quickly learning that the outward nine of the Donald Ross design offers more scoring opportunities. Three of the four easiest holes during Round 1 (Nos. 2, 3 and 9) are on the front and overall, the front (40.434) is playing about a stroke easier than the back (41.403), with six players yet to complete Round 1. A pair of players in particular, Liliana Ruiz and Judith Kyrinis, started their rounds on No. 10 and struggled at the outset, but jumped back into contention for match play with solid inward nines. Ruiz, of Colombia, went out in 43, then made a triple bogey on hole No. 5, her 14th of the day, before making three straight birdies to notch a 36 on Kahkwa’s front nine. Kyrinis, the runner-up in the 2014 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur, went out in 41 before playing holes 1 through 9 in 1-under 35.

7:05 p.m. EDT: U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur competitors LeeAnn Lewis, of Great River, N.Y., and Lisa McGill, of Philadelphia, have captured numerous state and regional golf championships, but their adventurous spirit ranges far outside golf course boundaries. The two scaled Mount Kilimanjaro in 2011, and last September, they trekked to the  base camp for Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Ron Driscoll chronicles their quarter-century of adventure travel.

6:36 p.m. EDT: Round 1 of stroke play has been suspended for the day as of 6:27 p.m. EDT due to inclement weather. Play will resume on Sunday morning at 8 a.m. EDT.

5:55 p.m. EDT: Julia Potter has posted the first under-par round of the championship, birdieing the par-4 18th hole to post a 1-under 71 at The Kahkwa Club. Potter, the 2013 U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur champion, carded four birdies against just three bogeys on Saturday to give her the clubhouse lead. Playing well in stroke play could foreshadow success once match play begins: Potter was the stroke-play medalist in 2013 before eventually capturing the title at Biltmore Forest Country Club in Asheville, N.C.

4:25 p.m. EDT: One player making waves at The Kahkwa Club Saturday afternoon is 2013 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion Julia Potter. Starting on No. 1, Potter, 28, shot 1-under 35 on her outward nine, and is even through 11 holes. With the field currently averaging just over 40 strokes on the outward nine, Potter, of Indianapolis, Ind., has put herself in excellent position early on in the championship.

Potter became the first left-handed female to win a USGA championship when she defeated Margaret Shirley-Starosto in 19 holes at Biltmore Forest Country Club in Asheville, N.C. The two squared off in the championship match again the following year, with Shirley-Starosto prevailing, 5 and 3, at Harbour Trees Golf Club in Noblesville, Ind.

3:03 p.m. EDT: The Kahkwa Club is a Donald Ross gem with an unusual configuration – only one par 3 and one par 5 on the outward nine. The inward nine has a more typical two par 3s and two par 5s to create its overall par of 72. That leaves 12 par-4 holes ranging from 311 to 384 yards, and those two-shotters were creating much of the difficulty on a blustery first day of stroke play.

“I didn’t realize that there was going to be so much wind today, so it was definitely take it one hole at a time,” said Shannon Johnson, who had the best score of the morning wave, an even-par 72. “When we made the turn to the back nine, it seemed like the wind changed and it was swirling a little bit, which it made it a little more difficult to get some club selections right and get dialed in.”

The toughest seven holes of the day thus far are par 4s, led by the uphill 10th, which measures 365 yards. Its stroke average for the first 99 players to pass through was 4.88, and fewer than a third of them (31) managed to par it, with a lone birdie against 50 bogeys and 17 double bogeys or higher. That hole was followed closely by No. 7, No. 5 and the double whammy of Nos. 17 and 18. All of those holes were playing at 4.72 or higher.

The overall scoring average through 2:45 p.m. EDT was 81.5, with the incoming nine (41.2) playing slightly higher than the outward nine (40.4).

For a full look at Course Statistics, click here.

2:36 p.m. EDT: With Saturday’s morning wave complete, Shannon Johnson holds the clubhouse lead at even-par 72. The Norton, Mass., resident earned low-individual honors at last year’s USGA Women’s State Team and continued her streak of successful USGA championship play.

“I think (Kahkwa) sets up really well for my game,” said Johnson, whose 4-under 212 at Dalhousie Golf Club in Cape Girardeau, Mo., set the Women’s State Team scoring record. “It’s a very target-oriented golf course, which I love. I seem to play better at those. When we played (USGA Women’s) State Team last year, it was kind of the same thing. Very get it off the tee, in the fairway. You had to be in the right quadrants of the green as well. I seemed to be, for the most part, in the right spots.”

Johnson put herself in prime position to reach match play, and likely has her fingers crossed that she doesn’t have to face 2010 Senior Women’s Amateur champion Mina Hardin. Hardin eliminated Johnson in the Round of 64 of the 2008 Women’s Mid-Amateur, and also emerged the victor in their Round-of-16 meeting in 2014.

Saturday has been a challenge at The Kahkwa Club, but Shannon Johnson was able to battle her way to an even-par performance. (USGA/Fred Vuich)

2:05 p.m. EDT: At Friday’s Players Dinner, Lauren Greenlief related to the crowd just how quickly she realized the magnitude of winning last year’s championship in Choudrant, La. After she sank the clinching putt on the 17th green at Squire Creek Country Club, she turned to her 71-year-old caddie, Danny Bannister, who had tears in his eyes.

Greenlief’s march to victory in her first Women’s Mid-Am came as a relative unknown. This week at The Kahkwa Club, the resident of Reston, Va., is seeing the other side of the coin.

“It’s definitely a different feeling than flying under the radar,” said Greenlief, who received an exemption into the LPGA Tour’s Kingsmill event in May. “The Rules officials all know me and say hi to me. It puts a little more pressure on you. I want to go out and play well for me and didn’t quite do that today.”

Greenlief opened her defense with an 8-over-par 80, which included six bogeys and a double bogey on the par-4 17th hole.

“It was a little bit frustrating – I thought I drove the ball well in the wind pretty much all the way around,” said Greenlief, a University of Virginia graduate. “I hit the irons a little shaky and came up short with some of my wedge shots. And I didn’t roll any putts in today.”

The management consultant knows what needs to improve in Sunday’s second round of stroke play.

“I’ve always been a good ball-striker,” she said. “Putting is something that’s come a little less naturally and something I’ve had to work toward. I felt like I rolled a lot of good mid-range putts, which is encouraging going into tomorrow. I’ve just got to get one or two of them to drop.”

Lauren Greenlief had a disappointing start to her U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur title defense on Saturday. (USGA/Fred Vuich)

1:28 p.m. EDT: 2014 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion Margaret Shirley-Starosto has advanced to the final match in this championship each of the last three years, so most people would expect her to be a factor deep into the week. In addition, this year’s venue, The Kahkwa Club, holds happy memories for her as the site of the 2004 U.S. Women’s Amateur, where Shirley-Starosto reached the Round of 16 at age 18.

“I remember just how much I like this golf course, so that’s always a good thing, and I knew how challenging it was,” said Shirley-Starosto, who was upbeat after her round of 5-over-par 77 on Saturday. “The best [Women’s] Amateur I ever played was here. I definitely have good vibes coming here. It was 12 years ago; I’m such a different player than I was.”

Shirley-Starosto, 30, is one of three players in this field who played in the Women’s Amateur in 2004, along with Meghan Stasi and Katrin Wolfe, and she knows that the golf course and the conditions will provide a formidable challenge.

“You can’t fake your way around this golf course. If you’re not hitting good shots, you’re going to have some difficulties,” she said. “Normally the wind doesn’t affect your putting, but there were some putts out there [today] that I was thinking about what the wind was doing. On [No. 9], I made a 30-footer, but I hit [the putt] a lot harder than I normally would have because of the wind.”

Margaret Shirley-Starosto competed in the 2004 U.S. Women's Amateur at The Kahkwa Club (left). She's back here this week for the Women's Mid-Amateur (right).

11:59 a.m. EDT: Playing together in the 9 a.m. grouping off of hole No. 1, Shannon Johnson, of Norton, Mass., and Tara Joy-Connelly, of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. (pictured), made the turn in the first round of stroke play at The Kahkwa Club at 1 under par. Johnson, 33, was the low individual in last year’s USGA Women’s State Team Championship while helping Massachusetts to a fourth-place finish. A recreational hockey player who grew up in South Dakota and won more than a dozen events in her home state, Johnson set the Women’s State Team 54-hole scoring record at 4-under-par 212. Joy-Connelly, 43, who won the 2015 Florida Women’s Mid-Amateur, is a Massachusetts native who was named the Bay State’s Player of the Decade for the 2000s and has teamed with fellow Women’s Mid-Am competitor Meghan Stasi to twice win the Women’s International Four-Ball title.

Tara Joy-Connelly has made her mark in the amateur game in both her native Massachusetts and adopted home state of Florida. (USGA/Fred Vuich)

11:18 a.m. EDT: In the top 5 in the early going at The Kahkwa Club is four-time U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur champion Meghan Stasi. The Oakland Park, Fla., resident, who most recently won in 2012, shot a 1-over 37 on her first nine this morning, starting her round on No. 10. Stasi, 38, is one of 10 USGA champions in the field at the U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur. Some more facts and figures about the field:

10:54 a.m. EDT: The facts and figures for Round 1 of stroke play here at The Kahkwa Club.

10:28 a.m. EDT: One player who is off to a flying start during Round 1 of stroke play is Ann Miles, of Dublin, Ohio. The former NCAA Division II All-American for Ashland (Ohio) University has a clean card through the opening nine at The Kahkwa Club in her USGA championship debut. The 27-year-old is a personal lines underwriter for Nationwide Insurance. For more about Women's Mid-Am competitors, see our storylines for this week

9:58 a.m. EDT: The Kahkwa Club has hosted two previous USGA championships, the 1971 U.S. Women’s Open and the 2004 U.S. Women’s Amateur. In 2004, Michelle Wie made a stir at age 14 with her prodigious drives during stroke play. She qualified for match play, where she was eliminated in the second round by another future major champion, Inbee Park. More on this from the USGA's Ron Driscoll.

Michelle Wie was just 14 years old when she teed it up in the 2004 U.S. Women's Amateur at The Kahkwa Club. (USGA/Steven Gibbons)

9:20 a.m. EDT: Women's Mid-Amateur competitors are playing Round 1 under the spector of inclement weather on Saturday. There was light precipitation overnight before the start of the championship, so the course is playing damp, something competitors had a chance to experience during Thursday's practice round.

“I feel confident that our group is going to get through [Saturday]. I’m concerned for the people that are teeing off later," said Meghan Christensen, of Houston, Texas, on Friday. "It’s playing a little heavy, the grass is heavy and the air is a little heavier, so the ball isn’t going as far. [6,125 yards] is going to be playing more like 6,300 yards.”

The Erie, Pa., area has seen approximately 1.15 inches of rain since Thursday.

8:22 a.m. EDT: The 30th U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur Championship is underway from The Kahkwa Club in Erie, Pa. Round 1 of stroke play began at 8 a.m. EDT, with 2014 champion Margaret Shirley-Starosto, of Woodstock, Ga., hitting the first ball off of the first tee. She was followed by playing partners Danielle Proctor, of Sewickley, Pa., and Julie Carmichael, of Avon, Ind. The championship begins with 132 players, who will play two rounds of stroke play. The field will then be cut to 64 players for match play.


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Jaguar is growing in crossover class and this vehicle is popular with each new model. Big expectations are on new 2017 Jaguar XQ which could be launched in few months. New platform are going to be mad...


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Orphan Black

The Neolution will continue to be televised—Orphan Black has just been renewed for season four. It’s hardly surprising, since the show is both critically acclaimed and a fan favorite. BBC America shared the news earlier today that Orphan Black will continue to replicate itself, as if by some kind of magic or science, along with some statistics on the show’s ever-increasing viewership.

Last month, AMC played reruns of season two on all of its networks (AMC, BBC America, IFC, Sundance TV, and WEtv) simultaneously, a strategy that netted the show’s highest audience numbers to date: 1.9 million viewers. So far this season has been packed to the gills with plot and characters, but maybe the recent revelation that the Dyad Institute has kept things all in the family will help re-focus the longer arcs. And if not, there’s always next year (and ten more episodes), #CloneClub.


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Would Jesus Use Bitcoin Against the Money Changers?

In the ancient times of Passover, it is said that Jesus of Nazareth had disrupted the money changers’ business by driving them out of the holy temple. About two millennia later, Satoshi Nakamoto unleashed Bitcoin to the world when the creator mined the genesis block. The currency came at a time when corruption in the banking industry was becoming apparent just as it had been during the time of Jesus.

Also read: Australian bitcoin exchange CoinTree introduce regular purchases feature

Jesus and Satoshi: Allies Against the Money Changers?

He that oppresses the poor to increase his riches, and he that gives to the rich, shall surely come to want.

– Proverbs 22:16

Money Changers
Money Changers cast out of the Temple

After the economic crisis and subsequent bailouts the ultimate fintech weapon was born. Much like the whips Jesus held and cast the Money Changers out of the temples of Jerusalem, Bitcoin has become a tool of that magnitude. There are multiple events within the Bible in the Old and New Testament describing the awry economic activity at the time. One event in 25 AD is the tale of Jesus Christ banishing the existing financial institutions from the temple – a story that has a significant economic reference to our current times.

But would Jesus support a digital currency like Bitcoin as a tool that helps eradicate today’s “money changers,” i.e. the central bankers from our global economy? Because the digital currency does pose a threat to centralized money forces, there’s a high chance he would advocate of a currency that’s peer-to-peer, decentralized and open source.

When Jesus removed the money changers from the temple, he and the crowd used specific items to help the citizens with the process. He triumphantly wielded whips made of rope smashing the Money Changers tables disrupting their activities just as the permissionless cryptocurrency does.Jesus

Similarly, Satoshi also gave us a figurative whip to battle the money changers of our time. The digital currency’s creator invented the code that removed the need for banks and other “money changing” intermediaries.“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” wrote Satoshi after releasing Bitcoin following the economic crash of 2008. The genesis block contained scripture referencing the banking industry bailouts where central banks had printed enough fiat currency to save the money changers of today at the taxpayers’ expense.

In the book of Matthew, it says that many of the church’s bankers were manipulating the economy and colluding together as a monopoly in what Christ called his house of prayer. Matthew 21:12-13 explains the occurrence:

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the Money Changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers. The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.

In 2008, the bank bailouts brought economic harm and failure stemming from corruption and insider manipulation of the monetary system. The mortgage fiasco showed a collusion of forces working together with poorly managed assets. Millions of people lost their homes and global economies never truly recovered. During the time of Jesus, these intermediary money changers also acted as banks with the high-priestly families using them to devalue currency against their citizens.

For example, a relative of the Sanhedrin family explained that the money changers engaged in price gouging when selling doves. At the time, these birds were extremely valuable and used for religious trade. The dove price was fixed at a rate the poor could hardly afford, and this angered Jesus. In the Gospel of John verses 2:13 – 16, the scripture explains his disgust:

In the temple courts, he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep, and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’

Just as it was in the ancient times of Rome, people are starting to see that banking monopolies have a death grip on economic activity. The Money Changers have now consolidated most of the world’s wealth to the top 1% of society creating a class system not unlike the societal structure that existed during the time of Jesus.

Consolidation of the Money Changers

Jesus Christ may agree with the nature of Bitcoin and what it offers to the people of the world. If anything, it’s our chance to disrupt the “money changing” practices of the current banking cartel and reduce their parasitic influence on our money system. At the time, Jesus temporarily stopped the money changers from devaluing the currencies between Roman and Jewish coin. Following his death, however, the Roman Empire continued to debase their sovereign coin, which resulted in a failing economy, and the empire’s ultimate collapse.

But while Jesus was captured, Satoshi understood the importance of anonymity and disappeared before the authorities could apprehend the creator. In result, Bitcoin remains a viable tool against the financial cronyism of today. Someday Bitcoin could reverse the destruction and havoc inflicted on our global economy from endless money printing and Keynesian economics.

Do you think Jesus would approve of Bitcoin? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Pixbay and Wiki Commons.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

Tags in this story
Bailouts, Central Banks, Jesus, King James Bible, Money Changers
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Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written thousands of articles for news.Bitcoin.com about the disruptive protocols emerging today.


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Connecting Music and Japanese-American History with Kishi Bashi The Kishi Bashi String Quartet and Master Class will shed light on a dark chapter of U.S. history.

Music, cultural awareness and history will converge in two days of events featuring singer-songwriter, composer and violinist Kishi Bashi on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 27 and 28, at Chapman University’s Musco Center for the Arts.

Backed by the harmonious energy of a string quartet, the loop-pedal-wielding artist will perform in concert Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Bashi reimagines the sonic worlds of artists and compositions ranging from Dvořák’s American String Quartet to his own songs reminiscent of contemporary indie pop to Japanese folk songs to Talking Heads covers. His Japanese-American heritage plays a central role in his music as he grapples with the realities of the immigrant experience and the complex histories.

His latest project featured a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $100,000 to tell the story of World War II Japanese internment sites. In “Omioyari: a Songfilm by Kishi Bashi,” he contends with his own identity as a Japanese-American. In so doing, he creates music that breaks down the barrier between composer and filmmaker, pioneering a new ambitious form of artistic expression.

Stephanie Takaragawa, Ph.D., will join Kishi Bashi for a Musco Center Master Class.

Music and identity will meld on Wednesday at 7 p.m. when Bashi and Stephanie Takaragawa, associate dean of Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, join up for a conversation as part of the Musco Master Class Program. The discussion will focus on Bashi’s filming of “Omoiyari” and his quest to create music in locations relevant to Japanese-American citizen incarceration during World War II. Admission is free and open to the public.

Takaragawa, Ph.D., teaches sociology and cultural anthropology and has published widely on the subject of Japanese-American identity. The combined events bring an exceptional and needed focus to the subject of incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII, she says.

“His work is so beautiful and unique on its own, but coupled with the intention of drawing more attention to the Japanese-American internment in ways that are visual, auditory and creative provides greater depth to the history. The presentation of this information in the context of his work is also unique in its integration in a place where people may not expect to be educated in this way,” Takaragawa says.

The programming is part of the University’s plan to eventually establish a center dedicated to the study of Japanese-Americans in World War II — those who served and the many forced into incarceration.

In partnership with that effort, a third related event is planned for Friday, March 1, at 7:30 p.m., when theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku delivers a Presidential Lecture titled “The Future of Humanity.” Kaku is one of the founders of string field theory. His ability to explain science to mainstream audiences has made him a popular author and speaker.

If You Go

Tickets for the Kishi Bashi String Quartet Live! concert on Feb. 28 are on sale now for $25-45 and may be purchased through the Musco Center online at or by calling the box office at 844-OC-MUSCO (844-626-8726). All print-at-home tickets include a no-cost parking pass.

Wednesday’s Master Class, supported with funds from the Yamagishi Endowment for Asian Studies, is free and open to the public.

Bashi is a frequent collaborator with noted indie artists, including Regina Spektor and Alexi Murdoch. He also founded the electronic rock group Jupiter One before setting off as a solo artist. In 2012, NPR Music named him “Best New Artist.”

His first full-length album, “151a,” was released in 2012 and was followed up by 2014’s “Lighght” and “Sonderlust” in 2016. It was 2015’s “String Quartet Live!” that launched Bashi into orchestral collaborative performance with the support of two violins, viola and cello. In June 2018, Ben Folds presented Bashi at Kennedy Center accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra as part of the Declassified series.

Born in Seattle and raised in Norfolk, Va., Bashi graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied composition for film. He is now based in Athens, Ga., and has found success with songs and scores used in television, movies and commercials for Microsoft and Sony.

“When I first saw Kishi Bashi at a showcase at Joe’s Pub in New York City, I saw the audience singing along to these beautiful melodies, some new and some old. I was instantly enamored with his passion, his knowledge and his story,” said Richard T. Bryant, executive director of Musco Center. “He draws from a deep well of inspiration: his training, his family, our shared histories.”

In the Wall Street Journal’s review of “String Quartet Live!,” critic Jim Fusilli wrote “that new environment confirmed the integrity of (Bash’s) compositions and validated the frequent comparisons to Andrew Bird and Owen Pallett, classically trained violinists who move readily between musical styles.”

Dawn Bonker

Dawn Bonker


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7th Annual College Goal Sunday Comes to CSM

College-Bound Students Receive Free Help to Complete FAFSA

Students looking for assistance on how to complete the FAFSA are invited to the College of Southern Marylands (CSM) seventh annual College Goal Sunday on Feb. 10.

College Goal Sunday is a nationally held one-day event that provides college-bound students and their parents with free assistance and guidance on how to complete the FAFSA, also known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. When completed accurately and filed by the state deadline of March 1, the FAFSA form ensures that students will be considered for all of the grants, scholarships and loans for which they are eligible The FAFSA is also the gateway for entrance into all major national, state and institutional financial aid programs.

Events like College Goal Sunday are a great opportunity for families who are looking for ways to finance their kids education to receive information directly from financial experts, said George Bachman, director of CSMs financial aid department.

College Goal volunteers will be on-hand to answer questions and provide line-by-line assistance on the FAFSA form beginning at 2 p.m., at the La Plata Campus, in The Center for Business and Industry, rooms 113 and 113E. Inclement weather date is Feb. 17.

Students, and parents, attending College Goal Sunday need to bring proof of their 2007 income and benefits information, such as completed IRS federal income tax returns and W-2 forms, end-of-year pay stubs, and/or proof of untaxed income. The form is available online at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov, or hard copies are available at the financial aid department offices at the La Plata, Leonardtown or Prince Frederick campuses. For information contact CSMs Financial Assistance Department, 301-934-7531.

Need Help Filling Out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid)? College Goal Sunday, Feb. 10, 2-5 p.m., College of Southern Maryland, La Plata Campus, Center for Business and Industry, Rooms BI-113 & 113E, 8730 Mitchell Road, La Plata. Regional financial aid experts will provide free assistance to students and parents in filling out the 2008 FAFSA form, which is required by most colleges and lending institutions for grants, scholarships and loans consideration. Free. Inclement weather date Feb. 17. 301-934-7531 or 301-870-2309, Ext. 7531 for Charles County; 240-725-5499, Ext. 7531 for St. Marys County or 443-550-6199, Ext. 7531 for Calvert County.

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Irish Withdraw Confidence From Banks

Irish Withdraw Confidence From Banks

Trust in financial institutions down across European Union

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ahead of Irish lawmakers' approval last week of billions in international loans to shore up the country's troubled banking system, Gallup surveys showed residents' trust in their financial institutions is also in need of rescue. Irish confidence began to freefall after Ireland started bailing out its biggest banks; the 16% who expressed confidence this June is the lowest level yet.

The European Union and International Monetary Fund's multibillion-dollar rescue package aims to help Ireland cope with costs from bank bailouts that became too expensive for it to afford alone, and a budget deficit that soared to 32% of the country's GDP this year. However, the aid package is also viewed as an emergency measure to keep the debt crisis contagion from spreading across Europe, where trust in financial institutions has also dropped since the global economic crisis, but nowhere near the 52-percentage-point decline in Ireland.

The 16% of Irish residents who expressed confidence in their banks in 2010 is one of the lowest ratings in the EU, along with ratings in fellow bailout recipient Greece (15%). Confidence is relatively low as well in other EU countries that financial analysts worry could be candidates for possible euro-zone bailouts, namely Portugal (36%) -- which has had no major problems with its banks -- and Spain (31%) -- which has had some problems with its banks, but not the large ones.

With the restructuring required under the terms of the rescue package, it's too early to know the fate of Ireland's banks. It's also too early to tell whether the EU and IMF's gamble will stem the debt crisis. One thing is certain; Irish taxpayers have bailed out their banks before, and now they will have to do it again because Ireland is partly funding its own bailout. Polling of Irish voters by the Irish Times last week showed a slim majority initially backing the plan. Unless the Irish see real, visible progress, however, their confidence in the nation's financial institutions may be slow to rebound.

For complete data sets or custom research from the more than 150 countries Gallup continually surveys, please contact or call 202.715.3030.

Survey Methods

Results are based on face-to-face and telephone interviews with approximately 1,000 adults in each EU member state between May and August 2010. For results based on each sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranged from a low of ±3.5 percentage points to a high of ±4.0 percentage points.

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Pope Francis admits to immorality in the Catholic family

On his return from the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis admitted that priests and bishops in the Catholic Church had sexually abused nuns.

He responded to a question a journalist asked, “There are some priests and also bishops who have done it,” the pontiff said.

The papal admission followed a rare outcry last week from the Vatican’s women’s magazine over the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and religious sisters feeling forced to have abortions or raise children not recognised by their fathers.

The issue hit the headlines last year after a nun accused an Indian bishop of repeatedly raping her in a case that triggered rare dissent within the country’s Catholic Church.

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Minoan Lines on its Way to Launch Piraeus-Chania Route

Chania, Crete.

Chania, Crete.

Greek coastal shipping company Minoan Lines expects to soon receive permission from the Greek Shipping Ministry to launch the ferry route connecting Piraeus with Chania, Crete, this summer.

The company’s submitted application request will be discussed at the Coastal Shipping Transport Council in a meeting scheduled for June 11.

Once approved, the route will be carried out with the Mykonos Palace vessel (former Europa Palace).

Minoan Lines has renamed its "Europa Palace" to "Mykonos Palace".

Minoan Lines has renamed its “Europa Palace” to “Mykonos Palace”. Photo source: / @patra 110505 a

In an announcement on Wednesday, Minoan Lines said that it intends to raise the Greek flag on the Mykonos Palace instead of the Italian flag and staff the vessel exclusively with a Greek crew, immediately after the Greek Shipping Ministry officially announces the approval of the route.

Moreover, the company said that it would transfer the ship from its Minoan Italia Spa subsidiary to the Minoan Lines parent company, following all necessary legal procedures.

“The management of Minoan Lines estimates that the launch of the Mykonos Palace vessel, one of the most modern and luxurious boats in its class, will contribute to the upgrading of sea transport on this line, enhance healthy competition and further improve the services to the traveling public and the business world,” the company said.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Shipping Minister Panagiotis Kouroublis said that the launch of the new route, would “break the monopoly on the Piraeus-Chania line”. The line is currently operated only by the Attica-ANEK consortium.

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MSc in Sustainable Tourism Development: Deadline for Applications is April 5

Applications for the MSc in sustainable tourism development, launched by Harokopio and Aegean Universities and the Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne, end on April 5.

Inova Receives ‘Best Tourism Marketing Agency’ Title at WTM London 2018

Inova Hospitality Management won the silver award as the Best Tourism Marketing Agency at the 2018 International Travel & Tourism Awards, held during WTM London 2018.

Thai Airways Appoints GTRS as its General Sales Agent in Greece

Aiming to further develop and expand its operations in the Greek market, Thai Airways has appointed GTRS as its exclusive General Sales Agent (GSA) in Greece.

Xenia 2018 to Show How Digital Technology is Shaping Hospitality

The ways digital technology is shaping the future of the hospitality industry will be the main focus of the Xenia Digi Hotel conference, to take place during November 24-26, in Athens.

Travelworks, Poseidonion Grand Hotel Up for Int’l Travel & Tourism Award 2018

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SWOT Provides its Sales Expertise to STAR Hotels Through New Partnership

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Ryanair Appoints Chiara Ravara as Head of Sales and Marketing

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WTM London: New Exhibiting Area for Marketing and PR Professionals

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Mindhaus Develops Marketing Strategy for ‘Euphoria Retreat’ in Greece

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Travel, Hospitality Megatrends Presented at Athens Conference

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Countdown to 2nd Panhellenic Place Marketing & Branding Meet in Larissa

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Corfu to Host Major Marketing Conference in April

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Young Face of the Week: Vassilis Polyzos, Head of Digital Marketing at Nelios, Athens

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Developing Greek Tourism in a Simple Way – Interview with SWOT Manager George Constantinidis

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International Hotel Awards: Brand Management Of “Poseidonian” On Spetses Honored

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Harvard was founded in 1636, and it took only three years for trouble to stir up over food. Nathaniel Eaton, the Puritan college’s first master, was dismissed in 1639, in part because of his misuse of dining funds. Call it a case of defeatin’ Eaton over eatin’.

From the 17th century on, food was often at the center of the plate when it came to student discontent, an interpretation of Harvard history captured in the 1936 book by A.M. Bevis, “Diets and Riots.” There were rebellions over comestibles in 1766 (butter), 1807 (cabbage), and 1895 (Irish stew). One famous food fight at University Hall in 1818 set off a chain of events that culminated in the entire sophomore class of 80 resigning en masse, at least briefly. (Among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

Through Dec. 20, visitors to Pusey Library can look at how food has for centuries turned up in student activism at Harvard — from butter that “stinketh” in 1766 to cage-free eggs in 2011. “Dining and Discontentment” was organized by Carla Cevasco, a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard, and by Stephanie B. Garlock, a history concentrator who graduated this year.

The exhibit includes a timeline of Harvard’s dining history, including a few facts that could settle bar bets. For one, forks were introduced to the mealtime experience only after 1710. The college brew house was built in Harvard Yard in 1762, two years before the first Harvard Hall burned to the ground. (There is no connection between the two events.) Waiters were replaced by cafeteria-style dining in 1943, during a world war that had many other leveling effects on American society. And Radcliffe students were allowed to dine in the Houses beginning in 1961, but only at language tables.

Main course

  • An 1875 photograph of waiters at Harvard’s Memorial Hall. Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

  • A letter of reply to then-undergraduate David Souter ’61, LL.B. ’66, who in 1958 complained about slow dining room service.

  • At the October opening of “Dining and Discontentment,” Professor Laurel Ulrich (center) talks with “Tangible Things” students Ozdemir Vayisoglu ’16 and Deborah Montes ’16.

  • A detail from College Commons records, 1765-1829, one of the Harvard artifacts on display in “Dining and Discontentment.”

Under glass in the exhibit are artifacts that offer material evidence of how things were and how things have changed in Harvard dining. A class ledger for 1689 is on display, with a smooth leather binding. “To know that people were writing on animals at that point in history is very interesting,” said Cevasco. Nearby are the College Commons records for 1765 to 1829, open to pages of rules. Tutors were always to dine in the commons, for instance, and dinner would always include at least two dishes.

Inside another glass case is an 1875 photo of Memorial Hall waiters lounging outside on a set of steps. All are well dressed, many in crisp white aprons, and all are black. Memorial Hall had started offering meals the year before. But next to the photograph is an 1885 Thanksgiving Day menu from Memorial Hall, including a caricature of a black waiter opening a bottle of champagne. The contrast of the caricature with “the incredible dignity of the waiters … is really powerful,” said Cevasco, “and will inspire a lot of important questions on Harvard past — and Harvard present.”

Then there are the plates, cups, and menus from times gone by, among them a vanished artifact called a “Harkness Tray.” This segmented dish — in use from the 1950s through the 1970s — was one example of how a building’s design could extend to the smallest details. The Harkness Commons, a graduate-student dining hall designed by Walter Gropius, opened in 1951. (The modern-making architect taught at Harvard from 1937 to 1952.) The trays, meant to be dishware, were also an example of how form does not always follow function, said Cevasco: the segments of the earliest trays were too shallow to keep foods apart, so people took to balancing dishes on top of the trays.

Of course there is correspondence. In the fall of 1958, Lowell House undergraduate David Souter — later a Supreme Court justice — argued that Sunday evening dining lines moved too slowly. The polite reply is on display too.

“Dining and Discontentment” is one in a series of temporary exhibits assembled for “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History,” a General Education course taught by American historian Laurel Ulrich, the 300th Anniversary University Professor. (Cevasco is one of the course’s teaching fellows.)

Ulrich’s course is co-taught with Chipstone Foundation curator Sarah Anne Carter, Ph.D. ’10, and they are working on a HarvardX version of it now. This summer, the course’s teaching fellows flew to Milwaukee for what Carter called a “material culture boot camp” at Chipstone “to train them to teach with objects,” she said.

Another exhibit for the course explored the economics of botany, the study of plant products exploited for profit. Another was at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where students looked at a 116-year-old tortilla, a tortoise from the Galapagos, and the science of bird taxidermy.

Ulrich often compares the collections at Harvard to a cabinet of wonders, a tradition of displaying intriguing bricolage that dates to the Renaissance. “We want them to also see [Harvard collections] as cabinets of knowledge, and cabinets of opportunity,” she said.

Part of that opportunity is to break out of patterns of learning that can seem completely dependent on the lecture and the book. “We’re still locked into the 19th century,” said Ulrich of classroom pedagogy. “We’re trying to get people to think across categories.”

Another of her teaching fellows, American Studies Ph.D. student John Frederick Bell, sees great value in breaking out of categories, and in looking at the historical resonance of objects. “We have to disorient them at first,” he said of the students — then insights pour in. Bell remembered a visit to Harvard’s mineralogy collection. “You just look at that, and you have to look at historical questions,” he said. The minerals prompted inquiries beyond science — into the history of mining, for example, and the conquest of the American West.

Getting out and around to collections is all about the insights that rise out of the real, and juxtapositions of the real — such as the blackface caricature of Memorial Hall waiters so near the actuality of the elegant waiters. “It’s got to start with wonder,” said Ulrich of learning. “And that’s the hardest thing to teach.”

 “Dining and Discontentment” is on display at the Pusey Library through Dec. 20. Several of the documents featured in the exhibit are held by the Harvard University Archives.


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Spying is a secret world that strives mightily to stay out of the public eye. But in an age of almost limitless electronic surveillance, that’s become much harder to do.

Just in the past year, three men identified as Russian military intelligence officers were accused of poisoning a former spy, his daughter, and two others, using a deadly nerve agent. A Russian woman acting as a graduate student admitted to U.S. prosecutors that she was an agent for Russia while cozying up to officials in the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party. And this week, former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said that he opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president might have been acting on behalf of Russia after Trump fired McCabe’s boss while the FBI probed that country’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Suddenly, the topic of spies and spying dominates newsfeeds. Yet much of what the public and even policymakers know about this complicated subject is shaped by old James Bond films or John le Carré novels — and that needs to end, according to Calder Walton, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

Walton studies intelligence history and international relations, and co-runs the Applied History Project at HKS. He was recently named general editor of “The Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence,” to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. The three-volume work will document for the first time the vast and largely opaque record of how undercover information-gathering has been used and misused in conflicts from the ancient world through the cyberwarfare of the present.

The Gazette asked Walton to help contextualize the FBI’s Russia investigation and the role other intelligence agencies may be playing in it, and to explain how intelligence and espionage have changed — and remained unchanged — since their earliest days.

Calder Walton

Gazette: First, what is the difference between espionage and intelligence?

Walton:  Espionage traditionally refers to human spies and spying. Intelligence is much broader. It can mean human intelligence, but it also can mean technical intelligence operations, like signals intelligence, or code-breaking, or imagery intelligence. Intelligence is not mysterious: It is secret information, which, by definition, requires secret means to obtain. Sometimes there’s not that much difference between publicly available information in The New York Times, for example, or in the Harvard Gazette, and in intelligence briefings — and when that happens, policymakers rightly ask what’s the point of intelligence briefings if they can read the same or similar information in the press? The purpose of intelligence is to provide policymakers, decision-makers, with something extra — something they can’t obtain, read, or see on the news or some other way. So, at its most basic, the purpose of intelligence is to help policymakers make their decisions. It’s to be able to know about enemies’ intentions and capabilities, and it is to be able to know about threats on the horizon. It doesn’t always work, as we’ve seen recently, but that’s the aim.

GAZETTE:  Is it always conducted by one government or state against another?

Walton: Not necessarily. Intelligence existed even before there were states, as we understand them today — it goes back to the ancient and nomadic worlds. Today, intelligence is also being conducted in another way outside of governments and states: With the privatization of intelligence, with big businesses like Facebook, hoovering up data, intelligence exists in the private sector as well as the government. In fact, big companies like Facebook now know arguably more about people than even the government, in some cases. So that’s a form of intelligence. It doesn’t have to be state-to-state. But traditionally, for the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, it was state-to-state, yes.

GAZETTE: What do you make of news that the FBI opened an investigation into whether the president of the United States has been working on behalf of Russia? In the history of Western espionage, has there been anything comparable to a major world power like the U.S. possibly being controlled by an enemy agent like Russia?

Walton: I think what we’re seeing unfolding on the news every day right now is, potentially, the greatest intelligence or espionage scandal in modern history, maybe in history, full stop. The Kremlin has managed to get a candidate who’s very favorable to itself in the White House. It is still slightly hypothetical, because we don’t know the results of the investigation, but the fact that [the FBI] started an investigation at all, and this question had to be asked at all, shows how weird and unprecedented this situation is. If the music stops right now and actually there’s nothing to it, still the fact that we had to ask this question, and it was investigated, is extraordinary.

My inclination is to say the FBI would have had to have a strong basis of evidence. Where did the information probably come from? We’ll hopefully know in 50 years’ time when the records are out, but it seems likely that they probably came from different sources, from signals intelligence, maybe from human sources, from foreign intelligence and from allies, as well. Unlike the U.S., and this is a crucial point, where there are restrictions on eavesdropping of phone calls and communications of U.S. citizens, those rules don’t apply to international allies. So it may well be that closer allies like Britain or Germany would have been collecting phone calls in a way the U.S. wasn’t. But it would not be inconceivable to say “this happened.”

I’m struggling to find another parallel where Russia or another known power might have helped to install someone with loyalty to another country in the White House or in particular behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The Kremlin used the KGB repeatedly throughout the Cold War to meddle in U.S. domestic politics. Every major branch of [President Franklin Roosevelt’s] wartime administration was penetrated by Soviet intelligence — in particular by now-infamous KGB agents such as Alger Hiss, who was working in the State Department. Also, FDR’s close adviser Harry Hopkins had set it up so that if, in 1944, FDR died — and unfortunately, it looked quite likely that he was going to die then — he would appoint Alger Hiss to be his secretary of state and Harry Dexter White to be his secretary of the treasury. And we now know from KGB records that both were Soviet agents.

In 1968, the Kremlin offered to secretly subsidize the election campaign of Hubert Humphrey, who was running against Richard Nixon. He politely turned down the Kremlin’s offer. The KGB’s greatest attempt to meddle in U.S. presidential elections in the Cold War was against Ronald Reagan, whom the Kremlin regarded as the greatest single threat to the Soviet Union, which he probably was. So, in his various election bids, they did everything that they could, first, to undermine him, and second, to gather compromising material on him. They tried to dig up anything they could that would blacken his name, but they couldn’t find anything. And when that happened, they tried to do anything they could to support his opponents. Moscow sent a telegram to the KGB officers stationed in the U.S. saying essentially, “It doesn’t matter which party you get an agent in, Democrats or Republicans, but whoever it is must defeat Ronald Reagan.” None of this worked. Reagan won in a landslide. But the Kremlin’s strategy was clear: promote favorable candidates and undermine those hostile to Moscow.

There have been extraordinarily high-level penetrations of the KGB, and then Russian intelligence, into the U.S. intelligence community itself as recently as the 1990s with Aldrich Ames, who was, at one point, the head of CIA Soviet counterintelligence, and Robert Hanssen, who was in the FBI.

Even if this is nothing, the fact that we’re all spending so much time on this serves the Kremlin only too well in its long-term strategic aims.

GAZETTE: What can you tell us about the forthcoming book project, “The Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence,” that you’re co-editing with Christopher Andrew, the renowned British intelligence historian?

Walton: I’m thrilled to be leading this project, which will be a landmark three-volume study. There are about 30 chapters in each volume. The first volume is the ancient world and the medieval world; the second volume is from the Renaissance to the First World War. The First World War marked a major change in terms of the way the government gathered intelligence. And the third volume is from the First World War to present-day cyberwarfare.

I’m general editor of the whole project, and also volume editor of the third volume on the 20th century. I’ll be contributing at least three chapters and also an introduction and a conclusion. Once we’ve got all 90 chapters together, then, as the two general editors, we will be bringing the whole thing together and trying to answer a fundamental question: Looking at this whole enormous tapestry of history, what difference can we say intelligence has made to statecraft and warfare? That’s really the aim of the whole project. What difference has it made? Does it make a difference, and if so, how? When and why hasn’t it made a difference? And what are the broad trends and themes that will help us understand intelligence — how it can be used and how it can be abused or misused? We’re calling the project, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Intelligence from Plato to NATO.”

Gazette: Will any of the research be done at Harvard?

Walton: Yes, absolutely. I’m here and we’ve got obviously a wonderful collection of historians here. We’re hoping to involve a number of historians at Harvard. The project fits well with the public policy research of HKS — in this case, informing policymaking by learning from history. I’m excited to bring it to the Applied History Project at HKS, which I help to run, and also the Intelligence Project at HKS, which I’m part of. My aim is to use “The Cambridge History of Intelligence” to make HKS into a world-leading center for the study of intelligence history. “The Cambridge History” has a clear applied-history spirit to it in that it’s trying to understand what’s going on today by looking to the past. That’s really what we’re trying to do.

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Gazette: Technology aside, how does intelligence and espionage today differ from 100 years ago, 500 years ago? Because at the end of the day, people are still people. We haven’t changed very much, I imagine.

Walton: That’s right. The joke is that it’s the world’s second-oldest profession. Humans are humans, as you just said. Having a well-placed spy in your enemy’s camp, that’s the same as it’s always been and will always continue to be even in the cyber era, with the role of the human agent who can give you codes and passwords into an enemy state or nonstate actor that is trying to launch a cyberattack. If you have an agent who can give you those passwords, that’s clearly crucial. It’s also no different than how agents have been recruited all throughout history.

Aside from technology, the old phrase “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” was unfortunately the dominant U.S. attitude before the Second World War — with catastrophic consequences at Pearl Harbor. There was a belief in the U.S. government before World War II that lowering yourself to intercepting communications, well, that’s not what gentlemen did. But America learned the hard way: In reality, that was what everyone else was doing, and America was being not only naïve, but putting itself at risk by not doing so.

How different are government interception activities today from the past? They’re different in scale and nature, obviously, with the digital revolution, the interconnectivity of everybody in the world, so there’s more data than ever before, and it’s growing exponentially. Government agencies and businesses are gathering more data more quickly than ever before. But the principle of intercepting communications that someone wants to keep secret, involving people aiming to do harm in one way or another, that goes right back to the ancient and classical world. So, the principle is the same, but the scale at the moment almost beggars belief compared to the past — a seismic change.

The digital revolution unfolding in front of us right now, with knock-on consequences for intelligence gathering, is analogous to the development of the printing press in the 1400s. Both are revolutions in the transmission of ideas. And we saw what the printing press unleashed within Europe and then the New World. I think it’s safe to say that if that past is a guide, then the cyber revolution today will also be unleashing all sorts of social revolutions and dislocations that we can’t predict at the moment, but it definitely has an intelligence component for private business, citizens, and government.

Gazette: If most of the espionage techniques, the active measures, Russia used in the 2016 election and is still using to shape U.S. politics and public opinion are straight from the old Soviet intelligence playbook, why are they still effective?

Walton: You’ve hit on something that’s really close to my heart. We do know about these techniques — information about the KGB’s playbook is in the public domain — the professionals know about them within the FBI and the CIA. The problem is there’s a massive, yawning gap in terms of the public understanding about Russian active measures, in particular, and intelligence more generally. From my perspective, much of this stems from the fact that intelligence is not addressed in serious books of history. I guarantee you that if you pick up most books on post-war international relations, U.S. foreign affairs, and some of the best and most recently published books on the Cold War, intelligence is addressed in a lopsided manner, at best — more often as footnotes of history. You will likely find references to what the CIA did, about how they meddled in foreign countries and launched coups. But I guarantee you that you will find hardly any mention of the KGB, or Soviet active measures. The result is you’re given this lopsided, one-sided view of history where the CIA was apparently active in these countries doing various things, instigating coups, but there’s no mention of what the KGB was doing in those same countries. We are supposed to believe that CIA was operating in a vacuum.

In reality, KGB active measures were often on a much larger scale than anything the CIA could marshal in the Cold War. So, part of the surprise and shock about recent revelations about Russian active measures, from poisonings in England to election meddling in the U.S., has arisen because of a lack of public understanding about their long history. I’m afraid it has a lot to do with historians and scholars of international relations not incorporating intelligence into their work. From my perspective, this is going to be my lifetime’s work, to try to get the use and abuse of intelligence incorporated into international relations scholarship in a way it is not at the moment.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.


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The Harvard Gazette

Leave those calluses alone

Blood-brain barrier chip performs human-like drug and antibody transport

Science & Technology

Leave those calluses alone

Nick Holowka, Postdoctoral Researcher, performs an ultra sound on callouses

Science & Technology

Leave those calluses alone

Postdoc fellow Nicholas Holowka (pictured) measures calluses with an ultrasound. Holowka and Professor Daniel Lieberman are studying the benefits attached to calluses.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

A groundbreaking researcher in running turns his attention to walking, with and without shoes

Daniel E. Lieberman doesn’t hate shoes. The Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Science and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology wants to clear that up right away.

“There has been debate about barefoot running being good or bad, or shoes being good or bad, and this is the wrong debate,” Lieberman said. “It should be about what the costs and benefits of shoes are and how we can better understand how shoes affect our feet, our health, the way we walk.”

He should know.

Since Lieberman published his groundbreaking study, “Endurance running and the evolution of Homo,” in Nature in 2004, researchers across the globe have studied the biomechanics of running, particularly as it involves bare or shod feet. But, oddly, few have considered walking, the primary mode of transportation humans have used to get from Point A to Point B over the past quarter of a million years.

Now comes Lieberman with his latest paper, which has just been published in Nature. This time he explores the value of the calluses we develop while walking barefoot, finding them to be a marvel of natural selection’s ability to engineer without trade-offs.

Most people are aware of how developing calluses protects skin. Common sense would suggest that there is a price to be paid in lost sensitivity. Not so, say Lieberman and his collaborators, who found no matter how thick, tough, and crusty the skin on the bottom of walkers’ feet became, they could still feel the ground as well as someone with virtually no calluses.

Professor Daniel Lieberman standing in his lab.

“We live in this weird world where calluses are bad ... But until recently it was abnormal not to have calluses," said Professor Daniel Lieberman.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

“We tested the sense of touch, the dynamic sense of what you feel on the ground. We found these stiff calluses don’t prevent any communication between the force of the feeling of what you are stepping on and what makes its way to the nerve cell to be transmitted to your brain,” said Nicholas B. Holowka, a postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and lecturer in Human Evolutionary Biology. Holowka shares first-author credit on the study with Bert Wynands of Germany’s Technical University of Chemnitz.

To study habitually barefoot walkers, Lieberman and members of his lab joined their German collaborators in Kenya, where they worked with Professor Robert Ojiambo of the University of Global Health Equity and orthopedic surgeon Paul Okutoyi of Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. In a rural town in the western part of the country, the team studied the feet of people who never wear shoes, then compared them with the feet of a similar demographic of people from a nearby city who are typically shod.

Technical University of Chemnitz Professor Thomas Milani, the lead scientist from Germany and an expert on how sensory perception affects gait and foot function, said his team meticulously calibrated and adapted their instruments for the study to guarantee the testing equipment’s validity and reliability. Their devices and observations not only confirmed that calluses didn’t interrupt the sense of touch, but that people with thick calluses didn’t walk any different than people with thin ones.

Two feet, one from a shoe-wearer, the other one is a callused from not wearing shoes.
Measuring foot biomechanics

Comparing the foot of a shoe wearer vs. the barefoot walker. In Kenya, researchers measured the biomechanics of the barefoot walker.

Photos by Thomas Milani and Daniel Lieberman

This wasn’t true, however, for shoe wearers. The study found that they had heavier foot strikes than their barefoot counterparts. The researchers don’t know what this extra force does to the body over a lifetime of wearing sandals or sneakers, but they wonder whether and how it relates to increasing rates of degenerative joint diseases such as osteoarthritis.

Lieberman and Holowka returned to Boston to conduct more research using a local cohort of barefoot enthusiasts. The results backed up their findings in Kenya: Calluses serve a unique function and aren’t nuisances to be scrubbed away during a pedicure.

“We live in this weird world where calluses are bad, like you have a problem with your shoe, and you go to a podiatrist, and they remove them,” Lieberman said. “But until recently it was abnormal not to have calluses. We’ve lost touch with our bodies in some respects and this is a good example of that. When we tell our results to barefoot people, they say, ‘Tell me something I don’t already know.’”

How fast can we run?

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Bad knees through the ages

Research from Lieberman Lab goes deep to clarify prevalence of osteoarthritis


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Becoming conservation leaders

Today, the Mro parabiologists do much more than document the biodiversity of their ancestral forests for Western science.

To reduce hunting of turtles in the region, the CCA team has entered into a conservation agreement with six villages, establishing hunting moratoriums on highly threatened turtles and tortoises and other rare animals. In return, CCA helped the villages build six primary schools, where there were none nearby, and a Crafts for Conservation program that’s created a market for jewelry and other products crafted by the Mro women.

The Mro parabiologists monitor hunting and consumption of wild animals within these villages. If a parabiologist finds a turtle in a village home, he recovers the animal, takes its measurements, gives it an ID, and releases it back into the forest.

Mro parabiologists monitor and rescue turtles from villages, and release them back to the forest. Image credit: Scott Trageser Photography/Creative Conservation Alliance.

Menrua Mro, a 21-year-old parabiologist, who lives in Dangli Para village in Bandarban district, is one such turtle and tortoise guardian. Menrua had seen Rahman since the researcher started visiting his village in 2011, he told Mongabay. But, like most other parabiologists in his team, he started working with CCA only after his neighbor, Passing Mro introduced him to Rahman in 2016.

At the time, Menrua had been unhappy working on a farm, and was “looking for something else to do,” he said. So training as a parabiologist seemed like a better option. Menrua now goes from one village to another trying to dissuade people from eating or harming rare animals and birds like tortoises and hornbills.

“What I like best about this work is that I get to make new friends all the time from different villages and even in Dhaka and from other parts of Bangladesh,” Menrua said. “With the money I got through the work I was also able to pay back the debt my father had.”

So far, the Mro men have rescued and released more than 100 highly threatened turtles and tortoises into the wild — 21 of them in 2018 alone. In fact, Rahman’s team estimates that the hunting of these reptiles has declined by at least 50 percent in the area they’ve covered. They have also established the first in-country, captive breeding colonies of Arakan forest turtle and Asian giant tortoise to help secure the reptiles’ future.

Shahriah Caesar Rahman with Arakan forest turtles in breeding center. Image credit: Scott Trageser Photography/Creative Conservation Alliance.

In general, though, wildlife populations seem to have declined in the area, Rahman said, and the local people likely don’t find enough wild animals to hunt. Moreover, turtles and tortoises provide very little meat, so the Mro people have come to rely more on crabs and fish for their protein.

Apart from keeping an eye on turtles, some parabiologists act as protectors of nests of threatened great hornbills (Buceros bicornis). Some of the more senior parabiologists serve as community leaders, acting as a bridge between the research team and the rest of the Mro people. Others help with the plant nursery that’s been established to cultivate both bamboo to reduce the communities’ dependence on the forest for wood and rare native plants to help future reforestation efforts.

The researchers now work with 10 male parabiologists who each receive a monthly salary of about $100. They have upgraded to smartphones now to help with their monitoring work.

“They take pictures and send me photos and all other evidences by Messenger — who is cutting trees, which hornbill is nesting where, and so on,” Rahman said.

The Mro parabiologists have become so critical to the researchers’ work that they are regularly listed as formal co-authors of scientific papers.

“As scientists, we often have this ego that we know everything, but I can have five Ph.D.s and still never have the knowledge that these people have,” Rahman said. “These people read the forest like pages in a book. You show them a picture of a bird, and they would tell you about when it breeds, when its mating season is, which tree it nests in, where it nests, what its call sounds like.

“A lot of information that we collect and publish wouldn’t happen without them,” he added. “While this authorship may not matter to them at all, I think this is the respect they deserve.”

Sometimes, the Mro men end up surprised by the status of their own forests. For example, Proroy Mro, who co-authored a 2017 study looking at pangolin distribution in the CHT region, told Mongabay last year that whereas he used to think Bangladesh harbored lots of pangolins, the surveys showed him how few there actually are, and that he felt lucky to have so many near his village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Both CCA researchers and Mro parabiologists co-author scientific papers. Image credit: Scott Trageser Photography/Creative Conservation Alliance.

The Mro-CCA partnership has earned Rahman several laurels, including, most recently, the 2018 Whitley Award, dubbed the “green Oscars.”

M. Monirul H. Khan, a professor of zoology at Jahangirnagar University in Dhaka, said the Mro people had access to the deepest parts of the CHT, where the remaining forests and valuable wildlife occur, and they were the key to conserving whatever is left there. By gaining their confidence and partnering with them, CCA had “made a major breakthrough,” especially since no other organization had been able to develop such a mutual partnership, Khan added. “The Mro people live with the forests and wildlife of the CHT and their role is critical for any successful conservation initiative,” he said.

Rahman’s group has had less success partnering with the local branch of the Forest Department, though.

“They work separately, don’t communicate or share information with us, and don’t maintain good relations with us,” said S.M. Golam Mowla, a forest officer with the Chittagong division of the department. “They take permission from the Dhaka office, not from us, despite their site falling within the jurisdiction of Chittagong. If we worked together, we could jointly visit the area, we could help them with our local staff.”

Rahman acknowledged there was a lack of coordination between his conservation group and the local forest department. The Sangu-Matamuhuri Reserve Forest within the CHT region, where Rahman’s CCA team works, officially falls under the jurisdiction of the forest department. But the department has little actual authority over the area, Rahman said, primarily because of the complex political landscape, including local armed conflict.

“It is not their fault. It is because the area is remote, it is not safe, and they don’t have adequate resources,” Rahman said of the department. “If the forest department could find mechanisms to increase their presence there, the gap in communication will decrease and it would help us tremendously, and we could help them in return.”

Khan of Jahangirnagar University agreed that working in remote parts of the CHT was “extremely difficult, and there was very little or no presence of government officials in some areas.”

‘It’s not been a fairy tale’

The local people, too, have not always supported CCA’s actions.

When Rahman first started exploring the CHT forests, some people feared his goal was to collect resources from their forest and evict them from their land.

This mistrust stems from the region’s long history of political conflict. The hill people have been at odds with the government of Bangladesh over a series of policies that the groups felt marginalized them and threatened their identity. This includes the government’s recognition of only the Bengali language and culture, as well as the settling of Bengalis in the CHT, which, over decades, has led to land-grabbing and evictions of the hill ethnic groups, triggering armed conflict. Despite a peace accord signed in 1997, the CHT region remains heavily militarized and volatile. Promises of rehabilitating those displaced haven’t been met, and with the local people lacking formal rights to their traditional land, land-grabbing and violence continue to mar the landscape.

“As a result, some people think we’re going to evict them from their land,” Rahman said. “So while we have had success, we must admit that it’s not been a fairy tale. People are very complex, and there’s no magic formula. What we do may work in some villages, but it won’t in others.”

Hills in the Chittagong Hill Tracts lay bare from unsustainable logging and agricultural practices. Image credit: Scott Trageser Photography/Creative Conservation Alliance.

The parabiologists and Rahman’s team also have limited powers when it comes to tackling commercial hunting or poaching in the region. While the parabiologists are able to monitor and report on opportunistic hunting from villages they have agreements with, confronting organized poaching or wildlife trafficking is harder and would require official enforcement agencies to step in.

“If they see instances of logging or poaching, the parabiologists cannot intervene, because if they did, there would be conflict, and people will harm them,” Rahman said.

Despite these challenges, Rahman remains optimistic about the future. The local communities are not just helping reveal their region’s rich biodiversity to the world but are also changing their behaviors. The latter is harder to measure, but in some cases quite visible: many of the parabiologists now serve to protect the animals they once hunted.

“One guy would go hunt elephants, skin them and eat them. Now he’s saving them,” Rahman said. “Another parabiologist used to hunt pangolins, and sell them. But now he’s working with us. One day he found a turtle, and when the turtle died, he couldn’t sleep at night because the death of the turtle had disturbed him.

“These stories give us hope, and I think we need that in conservation,” he added. “No matter how many species I discover or how many papers I publish, to see people who used to hunt avidly now protect those very species gives me hope.”

Mro parabiologists set up camera traps, collect GPS data, take measurements of animals, and conduct social surveys. Image credit: Scott Trageser Photography/Creative Conservation Alliance.

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Suzie LeBlanc replaces Emma Kirkby for Nov. 19 concert and masterclass

Soprano Suzie LeBlanc, one of Canada's foremost specialists in the music of the baroque and classical periods, will replace Dame Emma Kirkby in a Nov. 19 concert and masterclass in Kelowna.

"We learned over the weekend that Dame Kirkby will not be able to travel to Canada due to illness," says Manuela Ungureanu, organizer of UBC Okanagan's Minds and Music concert series. "In Ms. Kirkby's place, Suzie LeBlanc will complete the scheduled tour of Western Canada, including the concert and masterclass here in Kelowna."

On Nov. 19, LeBlanc will perform a baroque program accompanied by Sylvain Bergeron (lute) and Luc Beausejour (harpsichord) starting at 4 p.m. at First Lutheran Church, 4091 Lakeshore Road, in Kelowna.

LeBlanc – who in addition to touring the world also teaches baroque singing and performance practice at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Music – will lead a 1.5-hour master class in the early evening. Selected for the masterclass are voice students Jenavieve Moore and Chelsea Sauer from the South Okanagan, and Dorothy Neufeld Marshall and Elaina Moreau from the Central Okanagan.

Ungureanu said she is disappointed that music lovers will not hear Dame Kirkby in the Okanagan this year. "But we are thrilled to welcome another of the world's great sopranos, and a Canadian treasure in Suzie LeBlanc," she said. "We're sure our Okanagan audience will find this performance a marvelous experience – and that the four voice students selected for the masterclass will learn a great deal from Ms. LeBlanc."

In addition to her performance in Kelowna later this month, LeBlanc's 2007-2008 season is highlighted by performances as soprano soloist in Messiah with the Detroit and Toronto symphonies. She will be heard with the Victoria Symphony in a Bach programme conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, with the Grand Philharmonic Choir of Kitchener in Bach's Johannes Passion, also with Orchestre Metropolitan du Grand Montreal.

Audience tickets for the performance and master class are $23, and are available for purchase through Ticketmaster. Tickets already purchased for the Dame Kirkby concert may be returned to Ticketmaster for refund, or kept and used for the Leblanc performance and masterclass. Proceeds from the Nov. 19 event and any donations will go towards the purchase of a baby grand piano for the UBC Okanagan campus.

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