How do professional accompanying musicians (seem to) figure out songs instantly?
Sometimes, when I'm watching any TV show which has a live hired band for accompanying and they have a musician guest, the host will ask for them to sing something on spot (that wasn't really planned), and they'll say to the band "please give me C Major [or whatever key]".
Then they'll start singing and the band will typically join him/her after a few notes. How do these guys figure out the entire chord progression for the song instantly?
(I'm obviously interested in situations like this that aren't staged.)
performing chord-progressions
Tamara Wijsman
Rafael AlmeidaRafael Almeida
In addition to legitimate answers to how musicians develop and access this skill, TV producers aren't against staging the show to seem like this is the first time the musicians are seeing it. Some shows will pretend, some will be legitimate. Top studio-quality musicians need to have this versatility though. – SRiss May 16 '11 at 6:07
I'm sure that sometimes it is really staged. I failed to state the premise that, for the sake of the question, I'm obviously interested in the situations that aren't staged =D – Rafael Almeida May 16 '11 at 13:22
I suspect the main trick is to be lazy, and follow the lead. After one repetition of the chord pattern, often just 4 bars, you got it and can join in properly. – Lennart Regebro May 16 '11 at 14:38
Should this be made a community wiki? – Rafael Almeida Aug 28 '11 at 12:40
There are formulas and sets of harmony formulas that musicians know of. ie. Chord Formation. I, IV, V7 sets of harmony; Chord Substitution; Fifth Motion, Dominant motion; Diatonic Cycles of Fifths, Chord Tone Substitutions, etc.
Each chords in each set have their own characteristics that you need to know what they represent. I can be indicative of what each chord's character are like but the fastest way to teach you that is through you experiencing it.
With that, once someone says: Gimme a C or whatever, immediately the musician knows the set of harmony ideas they must employ. And with their sense of feelings and hearing they will know what the next chord should be.
Of course they do make mistakes. That is where they correct themselves along the way in real time. In my place, we call it 'bluffology" - bluff our way through. Done properly, most people will not know our mistakes.
It does takes time to acquire such skill but the mindset must be tuned that way first.
Play By EarPlay By Ear
The musicians are "faking it" based on their knowledge of theory. This notion may be romantic but in my experience it is rather unlikely. There's simply too much that could go wrong. This isn't a jam session or a concert, it's a TV performance to showcase a singer. That said, in other situations they might be perfectly willing and able to "fake it" (that's where the term "fake book" comes from, after all), in which case Play By Ear's answer applies.
The musicians have played the song before (probably in a different key and are transposing it in real time). Rather likely. Professional musicians have a repertoire in the hundreds or thousands of songs and are fully capable of transposing.
They knew about the song before the show started, i.e it was staged. Very few things on TV are totally "on the spot" and unrehearsed. I find this to be the most likely explanation for this particular case.
Rein HenrichsRein Henrichs
For an example of what happens when performers are really put on the spot, VH1 had a series "Cover Wars", the first round of which was "The Human Jukebox", where the band had to play (or fake) each song given by the judges, on the spot. – KeithS Mar 2 '12 at 15:51
The short answer is - because they can hear how the song goes, and they know how to translate those pitches into a chord progression on their instrument that quickly. Because they went to music school or because they have many years of experience or both.
It's not faked or rigged or a trick.
While it does look like magic, it is a surprisingly common skill for professional musicians at the level you suggest - appearing on a national television broadcast for example. One would imagine that a certain level of recognition of proficiency is required to be invited there in the first place. In fact, it is expected that they would be able to do that. Just like you expect your dentist to recognize gum disease when he looks in your mouth.
Would one ask "How did my plumber know were to find the clogged drain I had, he had never been to my house before?" or "How did my doctor know that I was deficient in Vitamin D?". Because they have years of training and experience and know what to look for and how the system that they work with functions.
Believe it or not, being able to aurally recognize a chord progression is a learn-able, teachable skill. It takes practice, just like medicine or computer programming or chemistry, but there is a stepwise reproducible method to learn how to do it. So couple the knowledge of how music works with years of experience and you get someone who can hear a song for the first time and play along with it.
This skill is one of the many you are taught when you go to a music school and spend 4 years there. You take classes like "Ear Training" for semesters and semesters. And they even test you. They play songs at a piano and you sit in the class and have to write down how they go, just by listening to them.
http://www.berklee.edu/departments/ear_training.html
http://www.berklee.edu/core/eartraining.html
Here is an example test:
http://classes.berklee.edu/et/et1c1.htm
The instructor would play those phrases, and you would sit in class and have to write what he played. Then you turn it in and get graded. As you progress through your four years of music school, the examples get more and more complex until you have to listen to things like entire string quartets or symphonic pieces and notate them. All the parts. Of every instrument.
Despite music being an art, there is a great deal of the mechanics about it that humans have been thinking about and documenting for more than one thousand years, so most of "how do I do X" has long since been written down and is very well figured out and documented. It isn't magic, just 1000 years of ten million-million collective man hours of human beings thinking about this subject, writing things down and passing it on.
While from the outside it does sometime look like voodoo when someone does it, if you sat with a teacher who said "First you do this, then you do this, then you do this" every day for four years (or much much longer), it would not look so magical.
Basso RidiculosoBasso Ridiculoso
Your answer makes a lot of sense. However, a piece of music is not as spontaneous an event as a clogged pipe or mouth condition. Somebody created it. I just think your answer was too "ultimate" regarding the previsibility of music in general. Of course, the very question I asked implies that this previsibility exists in some degree, though. – Rafael Almeida Oct 3 '11 at 0:14
@RafaelAlmeida Music certainly can be that spontaneous. The simple answer to your question is, the musicians know what sound they want to make, and they know how to make that sound. – slim Mar 2 '12 at 11:04
You are very trusting! – Laurence Payne Dec 9 '16 at 13:00
Assuming they don't already know the specific song (it's quite likely they do), it's possible it's a contrafact: a song based on the chord progression of a jazz standard; e.g. 12-bar blues or rhythm changes. Or a pop song using a common progression with just 3 or 4 chords; e.g. I I IV V or I V IV V or I IV vi V or I iii IV V, etc
I've seen this mostly with pop songs. I imagined that they probably base their progression choice on a "standard" song. But this leaves the question, how do they decide which? Not less importantly, how do everyone agree in the choice, seemingly wordless? – Rafael Almeida May 16 '11 at 13:51
@Rafael: I can't resist spreading this as a demonstration that you can go a long way with 4 chords (even 3). – ogerard May 18 '11 at 7:07
@ogerard - Your link says it all :) – Hubert Czerski Jul 26 '11 at 9:22
TV-show bands research the music of guest artists beforehand, including the keys in which they work. They do this for a few reasons, not the least of which is the off chance that there is an improvized request for a tune. But on the whole everything is staged including what looks to be a spontaneous jam. The best perfomer in the world will sound bad with bad accompanyment or being forced to sing or play (especially sing) in an unfamiliar or just plain wrong key. They earn their keep by their reputation and media exposure, and nobody takes a chance on messing with their rep.
CalabiyauCalabiyau
Let alone without warming up for live TV. – yossarian Jul 27 '11 at 21:21
No they don't. Certainly not to the degree of polish we see in these 'spontaneous' performances. It's showbiz! – Laurence Payne Dec 9 '16 at 13:01
You can make a pleasing accompaniment to most melodies using three chords: I, IV, and V.
The reason this works is that between them, those chords have all of the notes in a standard scale.
For example, if the song is in the key of C major, then the I chord has the notes C, E, G, the IV chord has the notes F, A, C, and the V chord has the notes G, B, D. All seven distinct notes of the major scale are represented: C D E F G A B
So if the person singing or playing the melody plays a B, then you can play the V chord, and it will sound ok because B is in the chord. If they sing or play a G, you can choose between I and V because both chords contain the note G.
As you listen, you can get a feel for where the song is heading, and when the note G comes up, that prediction about where the song is going next helps you decide whether I or V seems like a better fit. For example, if it seems like the piece is nearing the end, you probably are going to encounter a V-I cadence or a IV-I cadence.
As you get more skilled, you can change it up a little bit, use different chords, make it more complex, but in a pinch, you can harmonize almost anything with I IV and V. There are exceptions, but for pop songs exceptions are rare.
Part of the neat thing about harmony is that there are many different ways to harmonize a melody that can be pleasing. So there are many possible ways to accompany a melody that will work. If there is more than one person accompanying the melody, they will have to coordinate a little bit. If they are in a band and have done this before, they will probably have a sense of which chord progressions the other band members like to use. It is possible for there to be mixups though, where some band members play one chord, and other band members play another. It is also possible to guess wrong about where a melody is heading and play a dissonant chord. However, dissonance is part of music, and if this happens, you can continue on to a more consonant chord with some filler notes and pretend you meant to do it all along.
So in summary, the accompanists probably don't know the chord progression for the whole song all at once. They probably can project a little bit into the future. They probably have a standard set of chords that they use in these situations, (For example, I, IV, and V, or another set of chords that covers all of the notes of the scale,) and they fit the chords to whatever notes the person sings or plays. The resulting harmony may not match the way that the person singing or playing the melody would usually harmonize the song, but it will sound pleasing nonetheless.
Strange AttractorStrange Attractor
I'm an accompanying musician and I do this all the time with the musical styles that I'm familiar with. Have you ever faked singing along with a song that you've never heard before? It's the same thing with musicians writ large.
The very brief gap in the first bar is where the musicians establish the key, the style and the general form of the song. All songs are composed of cliches, predictable chord progressions, rhythms and melody fragments that make up the style of the song. That's why reggae doesn't sound like Xmas carols.
Once the key and style are established, the musicians will very cautiously start adding suitable harmony, hanging back from the very front of the beat so that they have a few hundredths of a second to determine if they need to change their guess. In various musical styles there are also certain figures that are common for going to a particular chord. Once the song has been played through once, the form, style and harmonic progression have been established and the accompanying musicians can play with confidence.
As an audience member, this whole process can be difficult to pick up, unless a song takes an unexpected turn. As performing musicians my wife and I take great enjoyment in watching live performers fake their way out of the occasional "clam" to avoid a "train wreck."
propro
Reflecting upon the above answers, if a song is in a major key, using only the 3 major chords available i.e. I IV V when the part of the song you are playing feels like it is about to change chord (experience tells) there's a 50:50 chance of hitting the right chord next. Pretty good odds!! By using the other 3 chords as well -IIm IIIm VIm a fairly comprehensive choice of chords is available. If the player feels the tune needs to go from maj. to min., there's still a 33% chance of hitting it right. Experience is all....However, when you try to busk something which modulates wildly, expect trouble unless you know the map of 'new keys'.
I should make reference to the Nashville Number System, a system of pop music notation developed for country music performers, both background singers and instrumentalists, for use in places like the Grand Ole Opry stage show and widely used in the Nashville, Tennessee music industry by recording studio session musicians in accompanying singers. The premise is that once the chord progression for a song has been notated in the Nashville Numbers System, the performers can instantly transpose the song and perform it live in any key asked for by the singer. This presupposes some skill on the part of the performers, although country music is known for not being very complex.
The link above is to a commercial textbook devoted to explaining the Nashville Number System.
It is actually possible to practice sight-reading. What you do is you get as much new music as possible and try sight-reading it. It's good to start with music that is easy; I began with the Reader's Digest songbooks. And/or music you really like and are motivated to learn; for me that was Bach's Preludes and Fugues... But don't spend too long on each piece, move on to the next one. After a while you find that you're getting better and better. I did this when I was about 14-15 years old on piano, because I realised my music reading wasn't very good. After a while I found I could sight-read better. Eventually I became a piano accompanist - for many years this was my main musical job - and these days I can sight read very well. The answers above are correct, in that one tends to recognise patterns and automatically play them, also tend to use 'bluffology' when it goes wrong, as it sometimes does. But I thought I could add something to those articles, by saying how you can actually get to the point of being able to sight-read.
Andrew P PartingtonAndrew P Partington
I do this. Basically it comes down to developing your ears. I can offer twelve useful tips:
Learn to recognise all intervals instantly.
Learn all your scales and arpeggios without needing to look at sheet music.
Practice often with no written music. Challenge yourself to improvise in a certain style and key (or sequence of keys) convincingly for a few minutes at a time.
Learn songs. Then learn more songs. After that, learn a few more songs. Actually memorise them, and now and again go back and revisit the ones you forgot.
Don't worry about "perfect pitch", it doesn't really matter, but have GREAT relative pitch. So when you hear fragments of melody on the radio, in a shop, whatever - get the habit of mentally "playing them" on your instrument. (This is a follow on from 1.)
Listen actively to music - meaning, really observe what is happening, what different musicians are doing to support the overall performance, how the song is structured, when sections repeat and so on. Avoid "passive" listening as that creates a bad habit.
Study different styles and what great players on your instrument do in those styles. I play sax and clarinet - I used to play in a band doing funk, soul, reggae and so on, and a lot happened spontaneously. I developed a vocabulary of licks in those styles based on listening to classic records. (Sax players do certain very common things in a reggae band which are different from funk or blues.) Steal mercilessly from every possible source!
It helps to play some piano, guitar or bass - then you can look at their fingers which gives you more clues! Anyway you need to play a harmony instrument to learn harmony, And you must know harmony, and common chord sequences.
Put yourself in situations where you can develop this skill. You will screw up sometimes. Don't worry, just keep doing it. Learn to make your mistakes sound like you meant them!
Keep practicing.
Keep listening.
Bonus tip : put on a recording and see how quickly you can pick up what is going on and play something that fits with the other players on the tune.
danmcbdanmcb
Hmmmm ...
A TV show
Musician guest (obviously everyone would know who the musician guest is) Spontaneous singing
.. you can bet the band would be primed, for several popular tunes, otherwise they all look terrible on TV. Forgive my cynicism.
However if a musician does know a song (ie has heard it, perhaps can hum the tune) then there'sa a good chance of being able to "find" it spontaneously on an instrument, using experience.
It's a bit like singing : If you've heard a tuneyou can probably sing it spotaneously. It's one more level of experience to be able to play the basic chords etc on the instrument, especially if it's a simple song.
My speculation would also be that the singer would do well to pick a song which can fit a common chord progression, because they don't want to look stupid when the band go wrong because they chose to sing something which modulates in an unusual manner. But on live TV... they probably did improvise it in rehearsals, and now they're going to just do the same thing again. – Matthew Walton May 21 '14 at 10:10
Simple: a lot of education and a lot of experience. Over time, we are exposed to every sort of music variation and oddity. Eventually we get to the point where a piece, even though unknown, can be rather predictable. Notice when people are jamming they seem to manage some pretty tight endings simply because they've played a lot of endings.
Richard BestRichard Best
In my case it was a skill I developed by participating in countless jam sessions both with friends and strangers. I can follow others as they improvise and they can follow me as I take the lead. Chord leading comes into play quite often, as does having an extensive repertoire, and knowing how to transpose from one key to the next on the fly. Also having a strong sense of relative pitch and knowing chord structure and the resulting sound of it's harmonies helps a lot. Often one or two members of the orchestra can take the lead and others almost instinctively know how to go along. This can happen with varying degrees of success with almost any group of players, but it's only the proficient players that collect a check from the broadcasting companies.
skinny peacockskinny peacock
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Thursday, January 16th, 2020 (20:32)
The Document That Reveals The Remarkable Tactics Of Trans Lobbyists
by James Kirkup
A great deal of the transgender debate is unexplained. One of the most mystifying aspects is the speed and success of a small number of small organisations in achieving major influence over public bodies, politicians and officials. How has a certain idea taken hold in so many places so swiftly?
People and organisations that at the start of this decade had no clear policy on or even knowledge of trans issues are now enthusiastically embracing non-binary gender identities and transition, offering gender-neutral toilets and other changes required to accommodate trans people and their interests. These changes have, among other things, surprised many people. They wonder how this happened, and why no one seems to have asked them what they think about it, or considered how those changes might affect them.
Some of the bodies that have embraced these changes with the greatest zeal are surprising: the police are not famous social liberals but many forces are now at the vanguard here, even to the point of checking our pronouns and harassing elderly ladies who say the wrong thing on Twitter.
How did we get here? I think we can discount the idea that this is a simple question of organisations following a changing society. Bluntly, society still doesn't know very much about transgenderism. If you work in central London in certain sectors, live in a university town (or at a university) or have children attending a (probably middle-class) school, you might have some direct acquaintance. But my bet is that most people don't know any trans people and don't have developed views about how the law should evolve with regards to their status.
So the question again: how did organisations with small budgets and limited resources achieve such stunning success, not just in the UK but elsewhere?
Well, thanks to the legal website Roll On Friday, I have now seen a document that helps answer that question.
The document is the work of Dentons, which says it is the world's biggest law firm; the Thomson Reuters Foundation, an arm of the old media giant that appears dedicated to identity politics of various sorts; and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation (IGLYO). Both Dentons and the Thomson Reuters Foundation note that the document does not necessarily reflect their views.
The report is called 'Only adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth'. Its purpose is to help trans groups in several countries bring about changes in the law to allow children to legally change their gender, without adult approval and without needing the approval of any authorities. 'We hope this report will be a powerful tool for activists and NGOs working to advance the rights of trans youth across Europe and beyond,' says the foreword.
As you'd expect of a report co-written by the staff of a major law firm, it's a comprehensive and solid document, summarising law, policy and 'advocacy' across several countries. Based on the contributions of trans groups from around the world (including two in the UK, one of which is not named), it collects and shares 'best practice' in 'lobbying' to change the law so that parents no longer have a say on their child's legal gender.
In the words of the report:
'It is recognised that the requirement for parental consent or the consent of a legal guardian can be restrictive and problematic for minors.'
You might think that the very purpose of parenting is, in part, to 'restrict' the choices of children who cannot, by definition, make fully-informed adult choices on their own. But that is not the stance of the report.
Indeed, it suggests that 'states should take action against parents who are obstructing the free development of a young trans person's identity in refusing to give parental authorisation when required.'
In short, this is a handbook for lobbying groups that want to remove parental consent over significant aspects of children's lives. A handbook written by an international law firm and backed by one of the world's biggest charitable foundations.
And how do the authors suggest that legal change be accomplished?
I think the advice is worth quoting at length, because this is the first time I've actually seen this put down in writing in a public forum. And because I think anyone with any interest in how policy is made and how politics works should pay attention.
Here's a broad observation from the report about the best way to enact a pro-trans agenda:
'While cultural and political factors play a key role in the approach to be taken, there are certain techniques that emerge as being effective in progressing trans rights in the "good practice" countries.'
Among those techniques: 'Get ahead of the Government agenda.'
What does that mean? Here it is in more detail:
'In many of the NGO advocacy campaigns that we studied, there were clear benefits where NGOs managed to get ahead of the government and publish progressive legislative proposal before the government had time to develop their own. NGOs need to intervene early in the legislative process and ideally before it has even started. This will give them far greater ability to shape the government agenda and the ultimate proposal than if they intervene after the government has already started to develop its own proposals.'
That will sound familiar to anyone who knows how a Commons select committee report in 2016, which adopted several positions from trans groups, was followed in 2017 by a UK government plan to adopt self-identification of legal gender. To a lot of people, that proposal, which emerged from Whitehall looking quite well-developed, came out of the blue.
Anyway, here's another tip from the document: 'Tie your campaign to more popular reform.'
'In Ireland, Denmark and Norway, changes to the law on legal gender recognition were put through at the same time as other more popular reforms such as marriage equality legislation. This provided a veil of protection, particularly in Ireland, where marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for.'
I've added my bold there, because I think those are very telling phrases indeed. This is an issue that is 'difficult to win public support for' and best hidden behind the 'veil of protection' provided by a popular issue such as gay rights. Again, anyone who has even glanced at the UK transgender debate will recognise this description.
Another recommendation is even more revealing: 'Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure.'
According to the report, the countries that have moved most quickly to advance trans rights and remove parental consent have been those where the groups lobbying for those changes have succeeded in stopping the wider public learning about their proposals. Conversely, in places like Britain, the more 'exposure' this agenda has had, the less successful the lobbying has been:
'Another technique which has been used to great effect is the limitation of press coverage and exposure. In certain countries, like the UK, information on legal gender recognition reforms has been misinterpreted in the mainstream media, and opposition has arisen as a result. ….Against this background, many believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress, as much of the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise.
In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue.' (Emphasis added).
Although it offers extensive advice about the need to keep the trans-rights agenda out of the public's gaze, the report has rather less to say about the possibility that advocates might just try doing what everyone else in politics does and make a persuasive argument for their cause. Actually convincing people that this stuff is a good idea doesn't feature much in the report, which runs to 65 pages.
I'm not going to tell you what I think of the report, or the agenda it sets out. I'm not going to pass comment on it or its authors. I'm just going to try to summarise its nature and contents.
A major international law firm has helped write a lobbying manual for people who want to change the law to prevent parents having the final say about significant changes in the status of their own children. That manual advises those lobbying for that change to hide their plans behind a 'veil' and to make sure that neither the media nor the wider public know much about the changes affecting children that they are seeking to make. Because if the public find out about those changes, they might well object to them.
I started my first job as a researcher in the Commons in 1994. I've been studying and writing about politics and policy ever since. And in my experience of how changes in the law are brought about, the approach described in that report is simply not normal or usual. In a democracy, we are all free to argue for whatever policy or position we wish. But normally, anyone who wants to change the law accepts that to do so they need to win the support or, at least, the consent of the people whose authority ultimately gives the law its force. The approach outlined, in detail, in the Dentons report amounts to a very different way of lobbying to get the laws and policies you want. Even more notably, it suggests that in several countries people have been quite successful in lobbying behind a 'veil' and in a way that deliberately avoids the attention of the public. That, I think, should interest anyone who cares about how politics and policy are conducted, whether or not they care about the transgender issue.
I'm going to conclude with an observation I've made here before, but which I think bears repeating in the context of that report and the things it might tell people about other aspects of the trans issue: no policy made in the shadows can survive in sunlight.
via The Spectator
agenda biology female gay rights gender homosexuality LBGTQ lobbyists male non-binary reality sex sexuality tactics transgender transgenderism
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- PaulCraigRoberts.org - https://www.paulcraigroberts.org -
The American Collapse Accelerates
Posted By pcr3 On May 1, 2019 @ 5:51 pm In Guest Contributions,Other | Comments Disabled
Homeless Hordes take over elite California neighborhoods, camping in the gardens of multi-million dollar homes and making the prized beaches unusable.
LA, San Francisco, and Seattle becoming unlivable.
Murderous MS-13 El Salvadoran gangs taking over Long Island. Rich elites arming themselves and constructing safe rooms inside their homes.
Just wait until the millions of Americans displaced by robotics are thrown into the streets.
America is a dead man walking. It no longer works even for the elites.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-29/wealthy-elites-freak-out-homeless-hordes-take-over-west-coast-neighborhoods [1]
Wealthy Elites Freak Out As Homeless Hordes Take Over West Coast Neighborhoods
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, [2]
The elite are very "tolerant" of the homeless until they start showing up in their own neighborhoods. Even though the mainstream media keeps telling us that the U.S. economy is "booming", the number of Americans living on the streets continues to grow very rapidly, and this is particularly true in our major west coast cities [3]. More than half a million Americans will sleep on the streets of our cities tonight, and they need help, care and shelter. Sadly, as economic conditions deteriorate that number is likely to double or even triple. Of course many among the elite are all in favor of doing something for the homeless, as long as they don't have to be anywhere around them.
For example, let's talk about what is going on in Los Angeles. No city on the west coast has a bigger problem with homelessness than L.A. does, and many in the homeless population enjoy camping out on the beautiful beaches in the L.A. area at night.
But of course many of the elite that paid millions of dollars for beachfront property are not too thrilled about this. Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek's Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation [4]…
He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.
"A couple of weeks ago I had a problem," the former punk prince opined. "They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It's like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I'm a bloke that's worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door."
It is more than just a little bit ironic that a man that used drugs, sex and rock and roll to shoot to global fame now sounds like a tired old crank that just wants to get the hippies off of his front lawn.
And he also says that the beach in front of his home is almost unusable because of all the needles and human poop in the sand [4]…
Rotten added of the punks: "They're aggressive, and because there's an awful lot of them together they're gang-y. And the heroin spikes . . . You can't take anyone to the beach because there's jabs just waiting for young kids to put their feet in — and poo all over the sand."
Well, Johnny might as well become accustomed to his new neighbors, because the situation is only going to get worse as our national homelessness crisis intensifies.
In Los Angeles, the number of homeless people that have died has risen 76 percent [5] over the past five years, and this has happened during supposedly "good economic times".
So how bad will things get when the economy really starts going downhill?
Up the coast in San Fransisco, some wealthy residents are fighting tooth and nail to keep a proposed homeless shelter out of their wealthy neighborhood. The following comes from CBS News [6].
Some San Francisco residents are turning to crowdfunding to raise money to fight a proposed homeless shelter in their wealthy neighborhood. As of Monday morning, the effort [7] had raised over $80,000 of its $100,000 goal.
Calling itself "Safe Embarcadero for All," the organizer is appealing to residents of South Beach, Rincon Hill, Bayside Village, East Cut and Mission Bay, saying the money will be directed to a legal fund to pay for efforts to fight the homeless shelter. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has sponsored [8] legislation to fast-track the building of the Navigation Center, which would house 200 homeless people a stone's throw from Google's San Francisco offices and Gap's headquarters.
How wonderfully "tolerant" of them, eh?
Of course it is hard to blame them. The streets of San Francisco are littered with thousands upon thousands of used syringes [9], and the number of official complaints about human feces in the streets is going up with each passing year [10].
But instead of changing course, it looks like San Francisco officials will probably extend their free syringe program [11]…
San Francisco officials are debating if they should continue a needle exchange program that has left city streets littered with hazardous waste.
We have made an uncomfortable observation on social media: Thousands of needles are scattered on city streets, most likely came the Department of Public Health's needle exchange program.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors expects to approve a seven-year extension of the exchange program, could cost taxpayers a whopping $26 million.
Overall, the city handed out 5.8 million free syringes [9] in 2018, and a large number of those were simply thrown on to the streets when addicts were done using them.
Up in Seattle, neighborhood after neighborhood has been taken over by homeless encampments, and many residents are saying enough is enough [12]…
In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles's and four times higher than New York City's—Seattle voters may have reached the point of "compassion fatigue." According to the Seattle Times [13], 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a "zero-tolerance policy" on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city "wastes money by being inefficient" and "is not accountable for how the money is spent," and that "too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem." The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is "not spending enough to really solve the problem." For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.
With all of the money that they have, you would think that the major cities on the west coast would be showing the rest of the nation how to deal with homelessness, but instead things continue to get worse with each passing year.
And of course what we have seen so far is just the beginning [14]. During the next recession, the homelessness crisis will be far, far worse than it is today.
America should not have more than half a million people living in the streets, but we do, and those in power do not seem to have any solutions.
Article printed from PaulCraigRoberts.org: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org
URL to article: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/05/01/the-american-collapse-accelerates/
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-29/wealthy-elites-freak-out-homeless-hordes-take-over-west-coast-neighborhoods: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-29/wealthy-elites-freak-out-homeless-hordes-take-over-west-coast-neighborhoods
[2] Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/wealthy-elitists-freak-out-as-hordes-of-homeless-people-take-over-their-neighborhoods-all-over-the-west-coast
[3] in our major west coast cities: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/san-francisco-los-angeles-and-seattle-3-formerly-beautiful-west-coast-cities-have-literally-been-transformed-into-festering-hellholes
[4] is making headlines all over the nation: https://pagesix.com/2019/04/26/johnny-rotten-wants-cops-to-stop-homeless-punks-says-wife-cant-cope/?_ga=2.3198960.1123146593.1556366603-2054665944.1534505881
[5] has risen 76 percent: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-26/we-need-take-action-now-la-homeless-deaths-jump-76
[6] CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/san-francisco-homeless-shelter-fight-residents-raise-80000-to-stop-homeless-shelter-in-wealthy-area/
[7] effort: https://www.gofundme.com/f/safe-embarcadero-for-all
[8] sponsored: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/New-laws-could-expedite-opening-of-Navigation-13701577.php
[9] with thousands upon thousands of used syringes: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-04/2-million-syringes-still-missing-san-franciscos-drug-addicts-outnumber-high-school
[10] is going up with each passing year: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/nobody-does-it-better-the-amount-of-human-feces-on-san-francisco-streets-is-going-up-every-single-year
[11] extend their free syringe program: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-22/san-fransisco-needle-exchange-leaves-streets-littered-toxic-syringes
[12] are saying enough is enough: https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-residents-rebelling-homelessness
[13] According to the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/homeless-poll-results/
[14] is just the beginning: https://amzn.to/2L9Wm7C
Copyright © 2020 PaulCraigRoberts.org. All rights reserved.


Aesthetics of Everyday Absurdity: A Post-Soviet Fairy Tale
1950s Latvia. A peaceful if murky idyll framed by a grayscale sunset over the Baltic Sea is interrupted by the rumbling of a Soviet patrol vehicle. The next morning panic breaks out as three Russian soldiers discover a woman's shoe on the beach, and leap to the only apparently logical conclusion – "the border has been violated." So begins The Shoe, a subverted Cinderella tale that exchanges princes for ineffectual military underlings. Here, the prize for having the right sized foot is the gulag rather than the ball.
The narrative, insofar as there is one, follows the three hapless soldiers around the small town of Liepaja as they search for women to subject to the paradigmatic trial by shoe. (Liepaja is director Laila Pakalniņa's actual home town, which may in part account for the impressive physical use of the town layout). However, it is clear from very early on that the driving force behind the film is not the fulfillment of this quest, but rather the futility and ineptitude of their attempt. As a satire on Soviet inefficiency and misplaced paranoia, the film is unrelenting, from the depiction of the Russians as idiotic caricatures to their nonsensical approach to carrying out an illogical task, underpinned by the bizarre imagery of the nicknames assigned to them for radio communications ("Pine tree", "Bell-flower", etc.).
In contrast to the frenetic bustling of the soldiers, the daily life of the locals continues to meander along largely unaffected, creating a juxtaposition between the naturalistic setting and the farcical nature of the events taking place and also establishing a dominant sense of "us and them" (or arguably "them and them", since the audience is never fully aligned with the town dwellers). This alienating effect is heightened by the audio, which is strictly diegetic with no score, but emphasizes commonplace sounds, especially machines and animals, which acquire a distorted, uncanny quality. Similarly, the representation of the characters is fragmented, with intimate but anonymous glimpses. We observe the locals at home, work and leisure with an almost ethnographic eye that ultimately serves only to create further distance rather than personal knowledge. The most significant amount of exposition is devoted to the soldiers, but as they are generally shot either at a distance or extreme close-up they are largely indistinguishable from one another, as if forming three heads of a bickering Soviet Cerberus.
The most striking and accomplished element of these stylized aesthetics of the everyday is the mise-en-scène. Long, lingering shots unfurl with carefully composed frames that play on foreground-background contrasts. The alternatingly static and drifting camera seems passive, as if observing indiscriminately, then suddenly reacts to a person or an event, acquiring agency. Although ostensibly tailing the soldiers at work, the camera often precedes their marching or hangs back after they have passed, revealing what is hidden to them – evasive women, tantalizing untested feet scurrying in and out of shot. This places the camera in an interesting position that falls short of omniscience and sometimes coincides with the point of view of the soldiers, yet maintaining an air of complicity with the locals, which in turn it extends to the audience.
With its combination of naturalism and wry absurdism, The Shoe would not look out of place among the Czechoslovak films of the late 1960s, which raises the question of why the director felt compelled to paint a damning portrait of Stalin-era inadequacy in 1998, almost a decade after Latvia regained its independence. Of course, historical revisionism and reassessment was widespread through the newly independent states of the former Eastern Bloc, and seven years is not an excessively long time for this process, especially given the collapse of the formerly centralized film industry. It is not surprising then that some of the most successful Latvian films of the Post-Communist years have embraced the trope of the nation as a group of plucky underdogs who triumph against imperialistic superpowers, Defenders of Riga (Rīgas sargi) from 2007 being the most evident example of this.
In The Shoe, the disassociation of the Soviets and Latvians is very clear. Early on in the film the soldiers are seen as shadows hovering over the streets, and they go on to infiltrate every institution, from the school, to the slaughterhouse and the local factory. In one particularly memorable scene, the patrol searches an apartment building floor by floor, and as it opens each door all activities and sounds come to a sudden halt, and the residents stand awkwardly frozen. A linguistic clash also permeates the whole film, adding further layers of estrangement. However, while the occupier-occupied relationship is made patently apparent, the characters show no trace of heroism, at least not in the conventional sense. Their form of resistance rather lies in their dogged continuation of normal life, as exemplified by the true owner of the shoe, who is revealed in the final scene to be nothing more than a young, free-spirited pleasure seeker.
The subtle intersection of representational modes is thus neatly embodied by the titular shoe – an everyday, banal object that ultimately undermines the political meaning ascribed to it within a fantastical trope through its very banality. Whatever the message Pakalniņa intended to impart to the Post-Soviet world with this tale, it remains an impressive example of a story driven by aesthetics and atmosphere.
Uldis Brauns' 235 000 000 (1967)
Peter Bebjak's The Line (Čiara, 2017)
Kaljo Kiisk's Vagabond (Nipernaadi, 1983)


ARE WE LOSING OUR MORAL HIGH GROUNDS?
When you control massive resources even if it is not yours it gives one some aura of power and control. The Small, the Big and the Mighty will always try to be on your side.
The office of the Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic Nigeria is powerful because it has the awesome power to dispense funds to the various arms of governments, individuals and companies, that is why even fellow Ministers are cautious when they speak on matters that affects the Minister.
When the Finance Minister speaks, the big and mighty fall in to line for fear of being strangulated of flow of funds.
If its true that the National Assembly detected that the Minister of Finance submitted fake NYSC certificate and yet she was cleared to hold public office then something must be wrong in the way we are fighting corruption.
Amazingly also is how the Minister waggled her way through all the agencies responsible for vetting individuals that are being prepared to hold public office?
The actions of the NYSC headquarters in trying to sweep the matter under the carpet by not responding to the enquiries of the press to simply determine whether the certificate of exemption used by Minister Finance to secure her employment as minister is fake or not is to say the least disturbing.
In addition the in action by the executive and the failure of the relevant agencies of the state such as the ICPC to wane in to the controversy and do the right thing is regrettable.
The reason why I am saying this is because the law regarding somebody who violates the provisions that establishes the NYSC is so clear and it does not require further interpretation of the courts to apply.
To wit the law states that ;
"The year-long service, organised by the National Youths Service Corps (NYSC), is compulsory for all Nigerians who graduate from universities or equivalent institutions at less than 30 years of age.
In addition to being a requirement for government and private sector jobs in Nigeria, the enabling law prescribes punishment for anyone who absconds from the scheme or forges its certificates.
Eligible Nigerians who skipped the service are liable to be sentenced to 12 months imprisonment and/or N2,000 fine, according to Section 13 of the NYSC law.
Section 13 (3) of the law also prescribes three-year jail term or option of N5,000 fine for anyone who contravenes provision of the law.
ASubsection 4 of the same section also criminalises giving false information or illegally obtaining the agency's certificate. It provides for up to three-year jail term for such offenders.
The only category of Nigerians are qualified for exemption are	those;
1. who graduated after turning 30.
2.	holders of national honours;
3.	persons who served in the armed forces or the police for up to nine months.
4.	staff of intelligence agencies, or the armed forces.
In all these the Hon. Ministers Finance did qualify to be exempted from the one year mandatory period of the NYSC.
Available educational records of the Minister which has not been denied by her or spokes person shows that;
Mrs Adeosun graduated from the Polytechnic of East London in 1989, at the age of 22.
The curriculum vitae, of Mrs Adeosun shows that she was born in March 1967.
Having graduated at 22, it is obligatory for Mrs Adeosun to participate in the one-year national service, for her to qualify for any job in Nigeria.
By this it is indisputable that Minister knows the certificate of NYSC she is holding is fake.
Consequently, for the Minister to say that she was swindled by a third party, whom she requested to handle the exemption request with the NYSC is not only a lie but an abuse to our collective psyche.
Her explanations are therefore disrespectful, absurd, disgraceful and arrant non sense.
The only moral high ground that remains for the Minister is for her to voluntarily resign.
I am saying this because when the Minister was having her running battles with the embattled Director General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, She based her arguments on moral high ground.
She claimed that the DG was involved in activities that are un expected of a public officer. These are some the reasons she gave in suspending the DG;
" she alleged the DG is a Director in Medusa Investment Limited which is in violation of Public Service Rule 030424.
" she alleged DG was involved in awarding contracts to the same company and others to which he was related, thus resulting in a conflict of interest".
So we believe what is "good for goose is good the gander"
Mr. President you must know that the conspiracy theorist are going the round postulating that you refused to act because of the dark clouds hanging over your head on issues bordering certificates forgery.
The third columnist are urging you Mr. President to end this national embarrassment by releasing the signed copy of the Minister's resignation letter under your custody and end matter.
Mr. President, your body language on the matter is giving agencies of government responsible to handle this case some discomfort in holding the minister accountable for the criminality of her actions.
Mr. President if the Minister in spite of the clear position of the law on her actions still wish to cling to her position. In this regard you may wish to do the needful by sacking the Minister in order come out clean on the matter and remain on the moral high ground.
Any thing short of this will expose the in sincerity of your government in its fight against corruption.
BEFORE THE COUNTRY GOES ON FLAMES :


PREVIEW: Dundee @ Guildford
The Kitmart Dundee Stars are aiming to take both points in Surrey tonight after their comeback effort came-up short in a shootout on Saturday night in Nottingham.
Picture: John Uwins
Last night, the Stars lost 5-4 to Nottingham Panthers after penalty shots but made an outstanding comeback after falling heavily behind early on.
Omar Pacha's side were 3-0 down inside eight minutes but goals from Matt Marquardt and Colton Kroeker (Shorthanded) cut the deficit to one before the first break.
A late second period goal by Jagger Dirk tied the game at 3-3 but in third period the Panthers re-took the lead with five minutes to play.
However, a powerplay for Dundee with less than four minutes to go allowed Kevin Dufour to tie the game once more.
In overtime both goaltenders continued to make key saves before the Stars let a one-goal lead in the shootout slide and three straight conversions from Nottingham meant they took the win and extra point.
Now, Dundee are looking to continue their spirited performance against Guildford Flames as they aim to pack-up two more points and bring a total of three back to Tayside.
This will be the Stars third match of the season with Guildford and after a double header with Paul Dixons' men back in September both teams came away with a win each.
At home, Dundee doused the Flames but were burnt by the backdraft on the road.
Guildford currently sit fifth in the league standings, just 11 points ahead of the Stars but they have struggled for consistency in their recent performances, as they have picked up only a single victory in their last six games.
A 2-1 defeat at home to Manchester Storm on Thursday was followed up by a 6-2 loss at Sheffield Steelers on Saturday.
Ian Watters and Jamie Crooks scored the Flames two goals in last night's defeat but the squad was at full strength with spare goaltender, Wouter Peeters the only player sitting out.
Meanwhile, Dundee are still just one player short of a full roster as Kris Inglis continue his recovery form an upper body injury.
Looking ahead to tonight's clash with the Flames, Stars boss, Pacha added: "It is a funny one, the first time we went down to Nottingham, the game was 2-2 and the puck hits a referee and goes back into our zone for them to score.
"But in the other game I thought Nottingham played a really solid home game and we made some critical mistakes.
"So, we have to limit our mistakes all weekend against two very good teams."
Discussing the Flames, he added: "Our squad has changed since we last saw Guildford and they have had a few months now of playing together.
"It will be an interesting match-up because we have to play them four more times this season, so it is going to be a big test on Sunday but right now our attention is fully on Saturday in Nottingham."
Speaking after last night's shootout defeat, Stars forward, Craig Garrigan said: "Despite having a bad start to the game, the boys are happy to come out with a point.
"Coming back from 3-0 down just shows the great character we have and the fight we have throughout the team.
"Coming out with a point away to Nottingham will help motivate the team for tomorrow's game against Guildford.
"We can finish the weekend with three out of four points, so that's huge for our playoff push."
Talking about his side's chances tonight, Craig added: "Guildford are a highly offensive team with a lot of skill, we just need to limit our mistakes and play solid defensively then the offence will come.
"If we use our speed to our advantages and play within our systems, we will have a great chance to come out with the two points."
Face-off time for this Sunday's match in Guildford is at 6pm.


WILLIAM FERREL
Click here for audio of Episode 2421
Today, serendipity in the whirlwind. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
This world is sometimes more odd than we imagine. When people ask me how I get program ideas, I say that I follow threads of context. Well, a while ago I XeroXed some pages about a little-known 19th-century meteorologist -- William Ferrel.
That was before Hurricane Ike disrupted the Gulf Coast. After Ike, I finally took those pages off to lunch and read about Ferrel's work on tides and cyclonic action. Suddenly, he seemed very timely. Then the Internet revealed that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, had given his name to a small ship, The Ferrel. Perhaps he was not so obscure after all.
That evening we went to a play with a geophysicist whose company does subsea acoustic oil exploration in the Gulf. Before the curtain, I asked if he'd heard of Ferrel. He said, "Oh yes. I have a ship named after him -- I bought it after NOAA decommissioned it in 2002." "You what!" I said. (After all, you might find coincidences like that at the movies -- but not in real life.)
He went on to say, "I try to name all my ships after great scientists, but this one already had a fine name." So I guess you and I need to find out what this Ferrel actually did. He was born in remote south central Pennsylvania, in 1817. His family moved down into West Virginia where he attended a one-room schoolhouse. Ferrel was shy, very smart, and he hungered to learn about science. He learned enough to become a school teacher himself; then he taught until he'd earned enough to pay for college. He finally graduated from Bethany College in West Virginia.
After that, he went back to teaching while he studied the works of Newton and LaPlace. And he realized that LaPlace's theory of tidal action was oversimplified. LaPlace had ignored friction. Ferrel included friction and found that it not only affects tides, but also constantly slows Earth's rotation slightly. Ferrel created an early analogue computer that could predict tidal motions.
Then he saw that his methods for analyzing tides could also be applied to atmospheric movement. He showed that, hot air rising while Earth rotates will induce a secondary acceleration -- a so-called Coriolis acceleration. That's what creates the rotational motions of winds. He'd shown us how cyclonic storms work.
Prominence finally caught up with Ferrel. He took a high post with the Coast Survey. He was made a member, not only of the National Academy, but of several European academies as well. He truly was a giant in American science a century-and-a-half ago.
Now, thanks to Ferrel, when hurricanes come, we can predict them far enough ahead to seek cover. We have a basis for deciding to evacuate or to hunker down. And my friend's ship, the Ferrel, served as a refuge to its crew's families while Ike battered the Louisiana coast. It proved to be a sturdy safe haven against the very winds that its namesake had shown us how to anticipate.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
H. L. Burstyn, Ferrel, William. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, C. C. Gillispie, ed., Vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975): pp. 590-592.
I am most grateful to Alton L. (Jerry) Warren, CEO of Reservoir Geophysical Corporation, for his counsel -- and for having rescued the fine NOAA ship Ferrel from a scrap yard in Norfolk, VA, where its distinguished career as a research vessel would otherwise have ended. Warren has continued to use the vessel in the service of government and university oceanographic research. The image of William Ferrel is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Warren kindly provided the three ship photos.
For a detailed account of The Ferrel and its service as a NOAA vessel, see: http://www.moc.noaa.gov/fe/index.htm
Note added, September 22, 2017: A final crowning irony. The Warrens finally retired and sold the William Ferrel ship. Then, a British family of four took it to sea during the terrible Hurrican Maria. The storm capsized it on the shores of Puerto Rico, killing the husband. The wife and two boys were saved in a dramatic rescue by the combined forces of the US Coast Guard and the Royal British Navy. But the ship perished in a storm whose coming its namesake had helped to predict.
The Ferrel refurbished and reoutfitted
The Ferrel in dry dock, having just received a new coat of paint
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The new guy at Freddie Mac
Many wondered why Charles
First, Haldeman clarified what Freddie Mac's business is, and dispelled some common misconceptions. As a player in the secondary market, the company doesn't deal with families who are applying for mortgages; instead, it buys mortgages from banks and mortgage originators, packages them and issues mortgage-backed securities, which are then offered on the public market. "We do that so there's a flow of funds, so the originator has more funds that it can re-lend and put out into other mortgages," he said. "Liquidity, stability and affordability," are a real mantra for the company, he added. They underscore Freddie Mac's purpose.
In America's single-family and multi-family apartment mortgage space, Freddie Mac holds 23 percent of 55 million mortgages. However, Haldeman noted that public perception paints Freddie Mac and fellow mortgage giant Fannie Mae as the primary culprits in the mortgage crisis. "The data suggest the opposite," he argued. Although 10 percent of all mortgages are at least 90 days overdue and vulnerable to foreclosure, Freddie Mac's delinquency rate is only 4 percent. "That's an indication that we've done a reasonable job over the years of underwriting, and we've done a reasonable job of working with families to keep them in their homes," he said. Overcoming this negative image was just one of several uphill battles Haldeman had to fight when he arrived on the scene last August.
Besides being blamed for the housing crisis, Freddie Mac had a leadership vacuum. Its 6,000 employees had no CEO, CFO or COO. And there had been significant turnover among senior management. "When I took the job," Haldeman said, "I was the sixth CEO in six years, and the prior CEO had left the company after being in the job for six months." In addition, the company owed the government $50 billion it had borrowed at 10 percent interest. "Just to stay even, we had to earn $5 billion," observed Haldeman, who noted that the company's situation created a sense of hopelessness among employees.
Effecting significant change was slowed by the layers of approvals needed to carry out a strategy, since Freddie Mac is government-owned and regulated by the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA). At a traditional company, a CEO must win support from a board of directors to carry out major initiatives. At Freddie Mac, however, not only is board approval needed, but also the go-ahead from the FHFA. In addition, for "really significant decisions, the major owner has to be involved – the U.S. Treasury Department." For compensation decisions, the Obama administration's "pay czar," Kenneth Feinberg, must also sign off, and recent public criticism of pay packages in the financial industry makes compensation issues all the more nettlesome. "The louder the noise, the more difficult it will be to get fair compensation," Haldeman pointed out.
Added to those challenges is the fact that Freddie Mac's fate is uncertain. The company is still in "conservator-ship," or under the control of the FHFA – "not too different from being in receivership," Haldeman said – so climbing out of that $50 billion hole at 10 percent interest is difficult at best. After the federal government proposes a new business model for the company, that plan will be debated in Congress. As a result, Freddie Mac could become a federal agency; it could be broken up or it could be abolished outright. "Think about being an employee of the company and hearing statements like that on a regular basis," Haldeman noted.
Given all the strife, Haldeman is commonly asked why he agreed to take the reins at Freddie Mac. "First, I thought the mission of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was really important, and we ought to keep it together." The companies already had a strong infrastructure, and employees brought a vast institutional knowledge about the mortgage markets, he added. Haldeman also considered the company's goal of keeping people in their homes to be vital during a recession. Finally, he thought the job presented "an interesting management challenge: how to energize and motivate 6,000 people to stay the course and get the job done, given all the negatives."
Haldeman applies the same management principles to any company he joins. "The first day you come in," he said, "you literally don't know one person. You've got to have a template, some philosophy to bring" that can be applied to an organization and the culture that already exists. Haldeman said his ideal management model has eight necessary ingredients:
-Make integrity and high ethics prerequisites. A lot of business people think there's a trade-off between ethics and making money, Haldeman said, but "in my experience it's not that way. Integrity and ethics are a sort of precondition for business success." He encouraged leaders to establish "a personal brand" that is based on those qualities. When Haldeman was brought in to manage Putnam, the company had "an ethical problem" that ultimately killed the brand. "It cost us billions of dollars" in market value, Haldeman recalled. "If you are contemplating an action and your instinct is to go to the company's compliance manual, don't take that action."
-Create a workplace that's open, direct, candid and honest. Haldeman emailed all his employees when there was a House Financial Services Committee meeting, saying, "It's likely they're going to trash us, so be ready for it." He faced up to the uncertainty of the next two years, telling staff to focus on what they can do today. "We let employees feel that they know what we're thinking, what our strategy is."
-Make sure employees understand the company mission. A person's job is about more than making money, Haldeman stressed, and "to really motivate people, you need to have them believe that they're doing something worthwhile."
-Develop a business plan that all employees can understand and repeat. As an example, Haldeman cited a time at Putnam when morale was low, there was a run on the bank and clients were leaving. He directed employees to think about what the company actually did, that their job was "taking care of other people's money." Then he developed a clear, four-step business plan: Reestablish the public trust; bring great investment professionals on board; deliver great investment results and bring funds flowing in with better marketing and distribution.
-Communicate the mission and plan constantly. In one of his weekly dinners with company officers, Haldeman was asked, "So basically what you do is schmooze all day, right?" He accepts that characterization as critically important in his job – to transmit the values, the sense of mission and the business plan, not only to employees, but also to "directors, the regulator, Congress, customers and clients."
-Give other people autonomy. As a former asset manager, Haldeman said, he felt this was the only way to manage people. "If you want to attract and keep great people at any organization, you've got to give them a sense of autonomy, of ownership. The really good people won't tolerate being micromanaged."
-Enforce teamwork. Not enforcing it makes for dysfunctional management. Employees know "when a senior team is working together or when they are not aligned. If teamwork stays bad, you've got to get rid of some people."
-Senior managers must spend time walking around. "You can't stay in your office," he advised. "Too many CEO operations are cocooned and separated." Not only does circulating make employees feel more connected to management and the company, in many cases it's the best way to hear what's really going on.
Haldeman doesn't know what the future holds at Freddie Mac. As part of his business plan, he focuses on taking care of its two hugely important jobs right now: maintaining liquidity in the mortgage market to keep things flowing, and keeping people in their homes. Last year, more than 70 prtcent of all mortgages were handled by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, up 30 percent from just four years earlier. The companies filled the gap left by the fall-off among private market lenders. To help staunch the bleeding in foreclosures, Freddie Mac has shown forbearance and modified mortgages by lowering interest rates or extending the mortgage from 30 to 40 years, "to allow that monthly payment to be more suitable for the borrower." Haldeman explained that this is not principal forgiveness, but rate readjustment. Helping the company's efforts are the government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). Typically, a refinance would cover only up to 80 percent of a home's value, but following massive devaluations in the home sector, HARP now allows refinancing up to 125 percent of the assessed value. Haldeman stressed that this has broadly expanded the number of refinancings Freddie Mac can do.
Also in Freddie Mac's business plan is achieving compliance under the regulatory protections put in place by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which the company has been trying to do for four years, as well as meeting new federal accounting standards that require companies to "take all the off-balance-sheet assets and put them on the balance sheet," Haldeman said. That effort involved 900 employees in a $25 million technology project to put 12.5 million mortgages on Freddie Mac's balance sheet. Finally, Haldeman wants "to do a major restructuring of our infrastructure, our systems "and our business processes to make ourselves much more efficient."
Author: Consortium of professors at knowledge@wharton, affiliate of University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business
May June 2010
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Home » What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change?
What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change?
About a year ago, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, called to ask if I thought it might make sense to publish an anthology of the reporting on climate change that has appeared in the magazine's pages. Since he works at a breakneck pace, that volume appears in print this week, under the title "The Fragile Earth." It's a wonderful book, demonstrating not only the depth of The New Yorker's commitment to this planet but also the ever-growing sophistication with which writers have taken on this most important of topics. The dark splendor of Elizabeth Kolbert's pieces alone is worth the thirty dollars.
The book opens with a piece of mine called "The End of Nature," an excerpt from a book of the same title that appeared in 1989. It's been a while since I read the words I wrote as a twenty-eight-year-old, and it made me nostalgic to climb back inside that young and perhaps overly earnest mind. The essay is a combination of reflection on the sadness of living in a world where the human imprint could be measured in every cubic metre of the atmosphere, and of straightforward reporting about what we then knew about climatic disruption. In the late nineteen-eighties, I could fit every scientific report on global warming on my desk. The articles and monographs published since then would fill an airplane hangar, but what's amazing is how little has changed.


Sen. Kamala Harris defends Pelosi, saying she has been 'very respectful of women of color'
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaks to supporters Wednesday, July 10, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP)
By John Wagner
National reporter leading The Post's breaking political news team
Sen. Kamala D. Harris defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an interview that aired Friday, saying she has found her fellow California Democrat to be "very respectful of women of color," an assessment at odds with comments earlier this week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
During an appearance on the New York-based radio show "The Breakfast Club," Harris was asked about Ocasio-Cortez's assertion in a Washington Post interview that Pelosi had been "just outright disrespectful" with "the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color."
"That's not my experience with Nancy Pelosi," said Harris, a Democratic presidential primary hopeful. "And I've known her and worked with her for years. I've known her to be very respectful of women of color and very supportive of them."
The question about Ocasio-Cortez's comments followed a discussion of legislation that she and Harris have been working on together. The interview was recorded Thursday.
[Pelosi defends handling of 4 House women as Democrats fume about Ocasio-Cortez's top aide]
Tensions have flared in recent days between Pelosi and a group of four liberal female lawmakers known as "the Squad" — freshman Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ocasio-Cortez.
In an interview with the New York Times, Pelosi said that the four "didn't have any following," citing their lonely votes last month against a Democratic-crafted bill to address the southern border crisis. She has also made other remarks dismissing the group and their far-left proposals on the environment and health care.
And Pelosi stood up for moderates in the House Democratic caucus after Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, referred to members of moderate Democratic groups in a tweet last month as "New Southern Democrats" who are "hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s."
Pelosi's comments to the Times this week prompted Ocasio-Cortez's accusation in The Post that Pelosi was targeting "newly elected women of color."
Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican descent, Pressley is African American, Omar is a Somali immigrant and Tlaib is Palestinian American.
Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.
The "Squad" won backing Thursday from some liberal allies.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she and co-chairman Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) have requested a meeting with Pelosi "to talk about the general relationship of the progressives to the Democratic caucus."
But several other minority lawmakers said it wasn't Pelosi who was in the wrong. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called Pelosi a "proven leader with a lot of experience and maturity" and questioned the relevance of Ocasio-Cortez's remarks.
Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and Rachael Bade contributed to this report.
White identity politics drives Trump, and the Republican Party under him


Home › Feminism › Translation and Gender
Translation and Gender
By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 13, 2018
The interest of cultural studies in translation inevitably took translation studies away from purely linguistic analysis and brought it into contact with other disciplines. Yet this 'process of disciplinary hybridization' (Simon 1996: ix) has not always been straightforward. Sherry Simon, in her Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996), criticizes translation studies for often using the term culture 'as if it referred to an obvious and unproblematic reality' (p. ix). Lefevere (1985: 226), for example, had defined it as simply 'the environment of a literary system'.
Simon approaches translation from a gender-studies angle. She sees (p. 1) a language of sexism in translation studies, with its images of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and betrayal. Typical is the seventeenth-century image of les belles infidèles, translations into French that were artistically beautiful but unfaithful (Mounin 1955), or George Steiner's male-oriented image of translation as penetration in After Babel. The feminist theorists see a parallel between the status of translation, which is often considered to be derivative and inferior to original writing, and that of women, so often repressed in society and literature. This is the core of feminist translation theory, which seeks to 'identify and critique the tangle of concepts which relegates both women and translation to the bottom of the social and literary ladder' (p. 1). But Simon takes this further in the concept of the committed translation project:
For feminist translation, fidelity is to be directed toward neither the author nor the reader, but toward the writing project – a project in which both writer and translator participate. (Simon 1996: 2)
Simon gives examples of Canadian feminist translators from Quebec who seek to emphasize their identity and ideological stance in the translation project. One of these, Barbara Godard, theorist and translator, is openly assertive about the manipulation this involves:
The feminist translator, affirming her critical difference, her delight in interminable rereading and re-writing, flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text. (Godard 1990: 91)
Simon also quotes the introduction to a translation of Lise Gauvin's Lettres d'une autre by another committed feminist translator, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. The latter explains her translation strategy in political terms:
My translation practice is a political activity aimed at making language speak for women. So my signature on a translation means: this translation has used every translation strategy to make the feminine visible in language. (de Lotbinière-Harwood, quoted in Gauvin 1989: 9; also cited in Simon 1996: 15)
One such strategy discussed by Simon is the treatment of linguistic markers of gender. Examples quoted from de Lotbinière-Harwood's translations include using a bold 'e' in the word one to emphasize the feminine, capitalization of M in HuMan Rights to show the implicit sexism, the neologism auther (as opposed to author) to translate the French auteure, and the female personification of nouns such as aube (dawn) with the English pronoun she (Simon p. 21).
Other chapters in Simon's book revalue the contribution women translators have made to translation throughout history, discuss the distortion in the translation of French feminist theory and look at feminist translations of the Bible. Among the case studies are summaries of the key literary translation work carried out by women in the first half of the twentieth century. Simon (pp. 68–71) points out that the great classics of Russian literature were initially made available in English in translations produced mainly by one woman, Constance Garnett. Her sixty volumes of translation include almost the entire work of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov and Gogol. Similarly, key works of literature in German were translated by women translators: Jean Starr Untermeyer, Willa Muir (in conjunction with her husband Edwin) and Helen Lowe-Porter.
The important role played by women translators up to the present is emphasized by Simon's reference to the feminist Suzanne Jill Levine, the translator of Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres. In contrast to the self-effacing work of some of the earlier translators mentioned above, Levine collaborated closely with Infante in creating a 'new' work. From the feminist perspective, however, it is not only Levine's self-confidence but also her awareness of a certain 'betrayal' – translating a male discourse that speaks of the woman betrayed – that fascinates Simon. She hints (p. 82) at the possible ways Levine may have rewritten, manipulated and 'betrayed' Infante's work in her own feminist project.
The Translation of Gay Texts
More recent research in translation and gender has increasingly problematized the issue of language and identity. One example is Keith Harvey's study Translating Camp Talk (Harvey 1998/2004), which involved combining linguistic methods of analysis of literature with a cultural-theory angle, enabling study of the social and ideological environment that conditions the exchange. Harvey draws on the theory of contact in language practice and on politeness to examine the homosexual discourse of camp in English and French texts and in translations. Contact theory1 is used by Harvey to examine the way 'gay men and lesbians work within appropriate prevailing straight (and homophobic) discourses' (p. 404), often appropriating language patterns from a range of communities. Thus, he describes (pp. 405–7) the use of girl talk and Southern Belle accents (Oh, my!, adorable, etc.), French expressions (ma bébé, comme ça) and a mix of formal and informal register by gay characters in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Such characteristics are typical of camp talk in English. Harvey points out (p. 451) that French camp interestingly tends to use English words and phrases in a similar language 'game'. Importantly, Harvey links the linguistic characteristics of camp to cultural identity via queer theory (pp. 409–12). Camp is then seen not only as exposing the hostile values and thinking of 'straight' institutions, but also, by its performative aspect, as making the gay community visible and manifesting its identity.
Harvey brings together the various linguistic and cultural strands in his analysis of the translation of camp talk in extracts from two novels. The first (pp. 412–17) is the French translation of Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar. There are significant lexical and textual changes in the French translation:
The same pejorative word, tante/s ('aunt/s'), is used for both the pejorative pansies and the more positive queen.
The phrase to be gay is translated by the pejorative en être ('to be of it/them'), concealing the gay identity.
Hyperbolic gay camp collocations such as perfect weakness and screaming pansies are either not translated (faible, = 'weakness') or else rendered by a negative collocation (voyantes, = 'showy').
In general, therefore, markers of gay identity either disappear or are made pejorative in the TT. Harvey links these findings to issues of the target culture, discussing how, for instance, the suppression of the label gay in the translation 'reflects a more general reluctance in France to recognize the usefulness of identity categories as the springboard for political action' (p. 415) and a 'relative absence of radical gay (male) theorizing in contemporary France' (p. 416).
The second extract analysed by Harvey is from the translation into American English of a novel by the Frenchman Tony Duvert. Here, he shows (pp. 417–21) how the translator's additions and lexical choices have intensified and made more visible some of the camp and turned a playful scene into one of seduction. Harvey suggests that the reason for such a translation strategy may be due to commercial pressures from the US publishers, who were supporting gay writing, and the general (sub)cultural environment in the USA which assured the book a better reception than it had enjoyed in France.
See M. L. Pratt (1987), 'Linguistic utopias', in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant and C. McCabe (eds) The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harvey discusses how contact theory is used in Rusty Barrett (1997) 'The homo-genius speech community', in A. Livia and K. Hall (eds) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Categories: Feminism, Gender Studies, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Translation Studies
Tags: After Babel Aspects of Language and Translation, Angels in America, Barbara Godard, Constance Garnett, Encounters: Intercultural Movements : American Gay in French Translation, Gender, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, George Steiner, Gore Vidal, Guillermo Cabrera, Helen Lowe-Porter, Jean Starr Untermeyer, Keith Harvey, Lettres d'une autre, Lise Gauvin, Sherry Simon, The City and the Pillar, Tony Duvert, Tony Kushner, Translating Camp Talk, Translation Studies, Translation Theory, Willa Muir


North Carolina State Supreme Courtroom Makes a Daring Transfer
North Carolina State Supreme Courtroom Makes a Daring Transfer – #historical past #conspiracy
The North Carolina state supreme court docket likes to play with fireplace.
Just some months in the past some Republicans had been speaking about the potential of impeaching members of that court docket because it deliberated on whether or not to strike down legislative maps drawn after the 2020 census as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The court docket ultimately break up alongside partisan strains to strike down the Republican drawn maps, and the case is now earlier than the U.S. Supreme Courtroom.
Right this moment the state court docket once more break up alongside partisan strains in one other extraordinary case. The electoral map that the state legislature had drawn after the 2010 census had beforehand been declared unconstitutional attributable to racial gerrymanders, however legislators had been allowed to be elected and serve out their phrases till a brand new map could possibly be accredited. The court docket in the present day declared that these legislators had solely restricted authority given the flawed maps and a few legislative duties they weren't allowed to carry out. Particularly, the bulk decided that the legislature was barred from proposing some constitutional amendments. Though the case was remanded again to the trial court docket for additional proceedings, the clear implication is that the state constitutional modification that had been proposed by that legislature and ratified by the voters that had empowered the legislature to undertake a voter ID legislation is invalid.
The rules of common sovereignty and democratic self-rule as embodied in article I, sections 2 and three imply that people can solely train the sovereign energy that the individuals have transmitted to the legislature in the event that they validly maintain legislative workplace. The structure defines and constructions the processes by which people assume places of work that let them to train sovereign energy, and sovereign energy can solely be lawfully exercised by people who've come into workplace by the processes established by the structure for that very function. Burke v. Elliott (NC 1844). The legitimacy of any particular person officer's declare to train sovereign energy relies upon upon the legitimacy of the method by which that particular person got here to imagine the workplace to which sovereign energy has been delegated.
In step with the rules of common sovereignty and democratic self-rule, solely the individuals can change the way in which sovereign energy is allotted and exercised inside North Carolina's system of presidency. And, by their structure, the individuals assigned the Normal Meeting an important function within the modification course of. Particularly, the structure authorizes the Normal Meeting to provoke the method of enacting constitutional amendments by "undertake[ing] an act submitting the propos[ed] [constitutional amendments] to the certified voters of the State for his or her ratification or rejection," supplied that "three-fifths of all of the members of every home shall undertake [the] act." is undisputed that three-fifths of the members of every home adopted acts submitting the proposals so as to add the Voter ID and Tax Cap Amendments to the North Carolina Structure, and {that a} majority of voters ratified each amendments in 2018. The only query earlier than us is whether or not the legislators who handed the payments submitting these two amendments to the voters might validly train the authority conferred upon the legislature by the individuals in article XIII, part 4.
The court docket lays out a brand new check for figuring out whether or not a constitutional modification proposed by a legislature and ratified by the voters ought to nonetheless be struck down as constitutionally invalid.
Thus, when the votes of legislators elected due to an unconstitutional gerrymander might have been decisive in enacting a invoice proposing a constitutional modification, courts should assess whether or not there is a substantial threat that the challenged modification will (1) immunize legislators from democratic accountability; (2) perpetuate the continued exclusion of a class of voters from the political course of; or (3) deliberately discriminate towards a specific class of residents who had been additionally discriminated towards within the political course of resulting in the legislators' election. If any of those components are current, then the steadiness of equities requires the court docket to invalidate the challenged modification. If these components are usually not current—or if the legislators elected attributable to an unconstitutional gerrymander weren't so quite a few as to be probably decisive within the vote to place a proposed modification to the individuals—the challenged modification should be left in place.
The bulk concludes,
"We should always ever be conscious that the Structure to a fantastic extent is the rudder to maintain the ship of state from off the rocks and reefs." Hinton v. Lacy (NC 1927). Though the questions raised on this attraction are novel, the solutions can be discovered within the rules which are the muse of North Carolina's system of authorities as expressed in a number of provisions of the North Carolina Structure, the individuals's elementary legislation. The individuals have reserved to themselves the ability to amend or exchange these rules and provisions. Whereas they've assigned the legislature a function in the modification course of, the probably transformative penalties of amendments that would change fundamental tenets of our constitutional system of presidency warrant heightened scrutiny of amendments enacted by a course of that required the participation of legislators whose declare to symbolize the individuals's will has been disputed. In step with these constitutional rules and provisions, we conclude that acts proposing constitutional amendments handed by a legislature composed of a substantial quantity of legislators elected from unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered legislative districts, after the unlawfulness of these districts has been conclusively established, are not mechanically shielded by software of the de facto officer doctrine.
The three justices in dissent virtually begged the U.S. Supreme Courtroom to overturn this case as a possible violation of the republican assure clause of the U.S. Structure.
Breathtaking. Will probably be fascinating to see what comes subsequent.
The opinion might be discovered right here. I've already edited the case for the companion website to the Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington American Constitutionalism casebook. Completely happy to share it for anybody .
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Do You Believe the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hype?
By Bask Iyer Chief Information Officer, VMware; General Manager, Edge/IoT, Dell Technologies	June 25, 2018
Traveling between Silicon Valley, Austin and Boston, I am hearing about artificial intelligence and the future of work from so many angles and couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead. The strategies and applications are enticing and the next wave is promising. However, as we rush to embrace AI, I can't help wondering whether we are maximizing its full potential or just riding from technology wave to technology wave.
For instance, today our walls talk to us – almost everything in our lives talk to us. With a modest investment, smart technology sensors capture data we use to monitor, measure and manage our energy usage and efficiency (and more). I've done this in my own home. Unfortunately, I now have too much data and can only make minor choices around my consumption. The application I used sent me too many notifications, so I turned it off.
Have you experienced this as well?
We are in the early days of AI. However, I am looking forward to how artificial intelligence will automatically filter, analyze and provide insight needed to enhance both my personal and professional life. As Dell and VMware's CIO, I weigh these innovations to determine what is real, relevant and worth investing in as part of our digital transformation. We are doing this by identifying some tangible, short term use cases we can pursue that will deliver value today and determining the best way to transform our technology, processes and people for the future.
Let me share how we are doing that.
First, we must consider how the numerous innovative waves of technologies intersect and interact together. This is especially true with artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. To be successful, AI depends on consistent, high quality, real-time data. However, with multiple approaches and systems, it is challenging and time-consuming to find, access and make sense of the data available throughout a company.
Which brings me to my second point.
We must also collaborate across the company. IT isn't the only organization thinking about AI. Our partners in sales, engineering, marketing and other areas of the business are also exploring the potential of AI. If we're not collaborative, we will create more complexity and conflicting systems that delay our time to value. To get ahead of this, we are embracing what we call the Dell Digital Way, a cultural shift and approach that leverages Pivotal and agile methodologies, pair programming and the latest technologies like Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Rather than numerous disparate approaches, this enables us to work closely with our business partners to deliver better AI innovations and applications even faster.
I'm looking forward to how AI will automatically filer, analyze and provide insight needed to enhance both my personal and professional life.
And finally, as CIOs and IT professionals, we must foster an innovative, cross-functional AI-minded culture throughout the company, so we created the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence at Dell. Working together, this team of data scientists, data engineers, IT professionals and others from across Dell Technologies are determining the right platform and the governance structure for enhancing data quality. The Center also host events and contests for team members to collaborate and crowdsource innovative ways to solve a variety of challenges and goals related to our data and Internet of Things. This will this help us embrace AI faster and inspire our brightest minds and expand their career opportunities.
Machines may not take over the world yet, but they are rising. In the near term, AI will be essential for automating and eliminating painful and time-consuming processes like patches and enable us to focus on more innovative and interesting business opportunities. So while many people talk about how artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for human intervention, we don't have to worry just yet. There is plenty we need to do as humans, and IT professionals, to unleash the full potential of AI.
For now, AI is enhancing human potential rather than replacing it.
Watch me address 'cutting through the AI hype' at the 7 Artificial Intelligence Revelations from The Economist Innovation Summit or listen to Dell Technologies' Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman of Products & Operations Luminaries Podcast.
agile AI artificial intelligence internet of things IoT machine learning ML PCF Pivotal Cloud Foundry The Dell Digital Way
Artfully Managing Complexity – The Dell Digital Way
Modernizing Apps for the Cloud to Accelerate the Digital Journey
Listening Like Never Before: Tailoring IT Experiences to User Needs
Paving the Way to Digital Transformation with Senior Support and Sponsorship
About Bask Iyer
Chief Information Officer, VMware; General Manager, Edge/IoT, Dell Technologies
Bask Iyer is the CIO at VMware. He joined VMware in March 2015 and now leads its global information and technology organization, a group that manages critical technology systems supporting the company's worldwide business operations. In August 2018, Iyer added the responsibility of general manager, Edge/IoT for Dell Technologies. From December 2016 to August 2018, he also held the role of chief information officer for Dell.
A respected industry veteran, Iyer brings more than 25 years of experience in executing and driving change in traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies and Silicon Valley-based high technology firms. Prior to joining VMware, Iyer served as senior vice president and chief information officer at Juniper Networks, where he was responsible for the company's technology and business operations, which included critical services around business transformation, global business services, IT and real estate, and workplace services. Before joining Juniper Networks, he served as chief information officer at Honeywell, and chief information officer at GlaxoSmithKline Beecham for consumer healthcare research and development, where he was also the company's e-commerce leader. Iyer holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Annamalai University in India and a master's degree in computer science from Florida Institute of Technology.
Thought you might be interested in this article I found on Dell Technologies InFocus.
Three Years on Dell and EMC's IT Integration Journey: Tales from the Largest Merger in Tech
How Dell is Evolving Online Buyer Experience with PCF and Pivotal Labs Methodology
Strategy for a Brave New Multi-Cloud World: Navigating the Public, Private, Hybrid Cloud Frontier