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This is a condensed version of a chapter originally published in the open textbook Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology. It is printed here under the same license as the original.
Many depictions of design process, and a majority of early design learning experiences, depict design as rather linear—a "waterfall" view of design (Figure 1). This depiction was put forward as a flawed model (Royce, 1970), yet it is relatively common. It also contrasts with what researchers have documented as expert design practice.
Figure 1
Google Image Search Results of Design as a Waterfall Model
Fortunately, as instructional designers, we have many models and methods of design practice to guide us. While ADDIE is ubiquitous, it is not a singular, prescriptive approach, though it is sometimes depicted—and even practiced—as such. When we look at what experienced designers do, we find they tend to use iterative methods that sometimes appear a bit messy or magical, leveraging their past experiences as precedent. Perhaps the most inspiring approaches that reflect this are human-centered design and design thinking. However, most of us harbor more than a few doubts and questions about these approaches, such as the following:
To answer these questions, I explore how research on design thinking sheds light on different design methods, considering how these methods originated and focusing on lessons for instructional designers. I then share a case to illustrate how different design methods might incorporate design thinking. I close by raising concerns and suggesting ways forward.
There is no single, agreed-upon definition of design thinking, nor even of what being adept at it might result in, beyond good design (Rodgers, 2013), which is, itself, subjective. If we look at definitions over time and across fields (Table 1), we see most researchers reference design thinking as methods, practices or processes, and a few others reference cognition or mindset. This reflects the desire to understand both what it is that designers do and how and when they know to do it (Adams, Daly, Mann, & Dall'Alba, 2011). Some definitions emphasize identity (Adams et al., 2011), as well as values (e.g., practicality, empathy) (Cross, 1982). In later definitions, design thinking is more clearly connected to creativity and innovation (Wylant, 2008); we note that while mentioned in early design research publications (e.g., Buchanan, 1992), innovation was treated as relatively implicit.
Table 1
Characterizations of Design Thinking (DT) Across Fields, Authors, and Over Time
Design research field characterizes DT (1992) | IDEO president introduces DT to the business world, 2008 | Stanford d.school (2012) & IDEO (2011) introduce DT resources for educators | Education researchers characterize DT for education research & practice, 2012 | Design researchers continue to develop nuanced characterizations of DT in practice, 2013 |
"how designers formulate problems, how they generate solutions, and the cognitive strategies they employ." These include framing the problem, oscillating between possible solutions and reframing the problem, imposing constraints to generate ideas, and reasoning abductively.
(Cross, Dorst, & Roozenburg, 1992, p. 4) |
"uses the designer's sensibility and methods [empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, collaboration] to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity."
(Brown, 2008, p. 2) |
"a mindset." It is human-centered, collaborative, optimistic, and experimental.
The "structured" process of design includes discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and evolution (d.school, 2012; IDEO, 2011) |
"analytic and creative process that engages a person in opportunities to experiment, create and prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign"
(Razzouk & Shute, 2012, p. 330) |
"a methodology to generate innovative ideas."
These include switching between design tasks and working iteratively. (Rodgers, 2013, p. 434) |
For another great summary of various approaches to design thinking, see this article by the Interaction Design Foundation. This foundation has many other interesting articles on design that would be good reading for an instructional design student.
Design thinking emerged from the design research field[1]—an interdisciplinary field that studies how designers do their work. Initially, design thinking was proposed out of a desire to differentiate the work of designers from that of scientists. As Nigel Cross explained, "We do not have to turn design into an imitation of science, nor do we have to treat design as a mysterious, ineffable art" (Cross, 1999, p. 7). By documenting what accomplished designers do and how they explain their process, design researchers argued that while scientific thinking can be characterized as reasoning inductively and deductively, designers reason constructively or abductively (Kolko, 2010). When designers think abductively, they fill in gaps in knowledge about the problem space and the solution space, drawing inferences based on their past design work and on what they understand the problem to be
Research on design thinking should inspire us to critically consider how we use precedent to fill in gaps as we design. Precedent includes our experiences as learners, which may be saturated with uninspired and ineffective instructional design.
A critical difference between scientific thinking and design thinking is the treatment of the problem. Whereas in scientific thinking the problem is treated as solvable through empirical reasoning, in design thinking problems are tentative, sometimes irrational conjectures to be dealt with (Diethelm, 2016). This type of thinking has an argumentative grammar, meaning the designer considers suppositional if-then and what-if scenarios to iteratively frame the problem and design something that is valuable for others (Dorst, 2011). As designers do this kind of work, they are jointly framing the problem and posing possible solutions, checking to see if their solutions satisfy the identified requirements (Cross et al., 1992; Kimbell, 2012). From this point of view, we don't really know what the design problem is until it is solved! And when doing design iteratively, this means we are changing the design problem multiple times.
Other design methods that engage stakeholders early in the design process, such as participatory design (Muller & Kuhn, 1993; Schuler & Namioka, 1993) and human-centered design (Rouse, 1991) have also influenced research on design thinking. While these approaches differed in original intent, these differences have been blurred as they have come into practice. Instead of defining each, let's consider design characteristics made salient by comparing them with more traditional, linear methods. These methods tend to be iterative, and tend to bring stakeholders into the process more deeply to better understand their experiences, extending the approach taken in ADDIE, or even to invite stakeholders to generate possible design ideas and help frame the design problem.
When designing with end-users, we get their perspective and give them more ownership over the design, but it can be difficult to help them be visionary. As an example, consider early smartphone design. Early versions had keyboards and very small screens and each new version was incrementally different from the prior version. If we had asked users what they wanted, most would have suggested minor changes in line with the kinds of changes they were seeing with each slightly different version. Likewise, traditional approaches to instruction should help inspire stakeholder expectations of what is possible in a learning design.
Inviting stakeholders into instructional design process early can lead to more successful designs, but we should be ready to support them to be visionary, while considering how research on how people learn might inform the design.
Designers who engage with end-users must also attend to power dynamics (Kim, Tan, & Kim, 2012). As instructional designers, when we choose to include learners in the design process, they may be uncertain about how honest they can be with us. This is especially true when working with children or adults from marginalized communities or cultures unfamiliar to us. For instance, an instructional designer who develops a basic computer literacy training for women fleeing abuse may well want to understand more about learner needs, but should consider carefully the situations in which learners will feel empowered to share.
With a focus on understanding human need, design thinking should also draw our attention to inclusivity, diversity, and participant safety.
We next turn to an example, considering what design thinking might look like across different instructional design practices.
To understand how design thinking might play out in different instructional design methods, let's consider a case, with the following three different instructional design practices:
A client—a state agency—issued a call for proposals that addressed a design brief for instructional materials paired with new approaches to assessment that would be "worth teaching to." They provided information on the context, learners, constraints, requirements, and what they saw as the failings of current practice. They provided evaluation reports conducted by an external contractor and a list of 10 sources of inspiration from other states.
They reviewed short proposals from 10 instructional design firms. In reviewing these proposals, they noted that even though all designers had access to the same information and the same design brief, the solutions were different, yet all were satisficing, meaning they met the requirements without violating any constraints. They also realized that not only were there 10 different solutions, there were also 10 different problems being solved! Even though the client had issued a design brief, each team defined the problem differently.
The client invited three teams to submit long proposals, which needed to include a clear depiction of the designed solution, budget implications for the agency, and evidence that the solution would be viable. Members of these teams were given a small budget to be spent as they chose.
Team Waterfall, feeling confident in having completed earlier design steps during the short proposal stage, used the funds to begin designing their solution, hoping to create a strong sense of what they would deliver if chosen. They focused on details noted in the mostly positive feedback on their short proposal. They felt confident they were creating a solution that the client would be satisfied with because their design met all identified requirements, because they used their time efficiently, and because as experienced designers, they knew they were doing quality, professional design. Team Waterfall treated the problem as adequately framed and solved it without iteration. Designers often do this when there is little time or budget[2], or simply because the problem appears to be an another-of problem—"this is just another of something I have designed before." While this can be an efficient way to design, it seldom gets at the problem behind the problem, and does not account for changes in who might need to use the designed solution or what their needs are. Just because Team Waterfall used a more linear process does not mean that they did not engage in design thinking. They used design thinking to frame the problem in their initial short proposal, and then again as they used design precedent—their past experience solving similar problems—to deliver a professional, timely, and complete solution.
Team ADDIE used the funds to conduct a traditional needs assessment, interviewing five stakeholders to better understand the context, and then collecting data with a survey they created based on their analysis. They identified specific needs, some of which aligned to those in the design brief and some that demonstrated the complexity of the problem. They reframed the problem and created a low fidelity prototype. They did not have time to test it with stakeholders, but could explain how it met the identified needs. They felt confident the investment in understanding needs would pay off later, because it gave them insight into the problem. Team ADDIE used design thinking to fill gaps in their understanding of context, allowing them to extend their design conjectures to propose a solution based on a reframing of the design problem.
Team Human-centered used the budget to hold an intensive five-day co-design session with a major stakeholder group. Stakeholders shared their experiences and ideas for improving on their experience. Team Human crafted three personas based on this information and created a prototype, which the stakeholder group reviewed favorably. They submitted this review with their prototype. Team Human-centered valued stakeholder point of view above all else, but failed to consider that an intensive five-day workshop would limit who could attend. They used design thinking to understand differences in stakeholder point of view and reframed the problem based on this; however, they treated this as covering the territory of stakeholder perspectives. They learned a great deal about the experiences these stakeholders had, but failed to help the stakeholders think beyond their own experiences, resulting in a design that was only incrementally better than existing solutions and catered to the desires of one group over others.
The case above depicts ways of proceeding in design process and different ways of using design thinking. These characterizations are not intended to privilege one design approach over others, but rather to provoke the reader to consider them in terms of how designers fill in gaps in understanding, how they involve stakeholders, and how iteratively they work. Each approach, however, also carries potential risks and challenges (Figure 2). For instance, designers may not have easy access to stakeholders, and large projects may make more human-centered approaches unwieldy to carry out (Turk, France, & Rumpe, 2002).
Figure 2
Risks and Pitfalls Associated with Different Levels of End-User Participation and Iteration
While originally a construct introduced by design researchers to investigate how designers think and do their work, design thinking became popularized, first in the business world (Brown, 2008) and later in education. Given this popularity, design thinking was bound to draw critique in the public sphere. To understand these critiques, it is worth returning to the definitions cited earlier (Table 1). Definitions outside of the design research field tend to be based in specific techniques and strategies aimed at innovation; such accounts fail to capture the diversity of actual design practices (Kimbell, 2011). They also tend to privilege the designer as a savior, an idea at odds with the keen focus on designing with stakeholders that is visible in the design research field (Kimbell, 2011). As a result, some have raised concerns that design thinking can be a rather privileged process—e.g., upper middle class white people drinking wine in a museum while solving poverty with sticky note ideas—that fails to lead to sufficiently multidimensional understandings of complex processes (Collier, 2017). Still others argue that much of design thinking is nothing new (Merholz, 2009), to which researchers in the design research field have responded: design thinking, as represented externally might not be new, but the rich body of research from the field could inform new practices (Dorst, 2011).
These critiques should make us cautious about how we, as instructional designers, take up design thinking and new design practices. Below, I raise a few concerns for new instructional designers, for instructional designers interested in incorporating new methods, for those who teach instructional design, and for those planning research studies about new design methods.
My first concern builds directly on critiques from the popular press and my experience as a reviewer of manuscripts. Design thinking is indeed trendy, and of course people want to engage with it. But as we have seen, it is also complex and subtle. Whenever we engage with a new topic, we necessarily build on our past understandings and beliefs as we make connections. It should not be surprising, then, that when our understanding of a new concept is nascent, it might not be very differentiated from previous ideas. Compare, for example, Polya's "How to Solve it" from 1945 to Stanford's d.school representation of design thinking (Table 2). While Polya did not detail a design process, but rather a process for solving mathematics problems, the two processes are superficially very similar. These general models of complex, detailed processes are zoomed out to such a degree that we lose the detail. These details matter, whether you are a designer learning a new practice or a researcher studying how designers do their work. For those learning a new practice, I advise you to attend to the differences, not the similarities. For those planning studies of design thinking, keep in mind that "design thinking" is too broad to study effectively as a whole. Narrow your scope and zoom in to a focal length that lets you investigate the details. As you do so, however, do not lose sight of how the details function in a complex process. For instance, consider the various approaches being investigated to measure design thinking; some treat these as discrete, separable skills, and others consider them in tandem (Carmel-Gilfilen & Portillo, 2010; Dolata, Uebernickel, & Schwabe, 2017; Lande, Sonalkar, Jung, Han, & Banerjee, 2012; Razzouk & Shute, 2012).
Table 2
Similarities Between "How to Solve it" and a Representation of Design Thinking
Polya, 1945 How to solve it | Stanford's d.school design thinking representation |
Understand the problem | Empathize, Define |
Devise a plan | Ideate |
Carry out the plan | Prototype |
Look back | Test |
My second concern is that we tend, as a field, to remain naïve about the extant and extensive research on design thinking and other design methods, in part because many of these studies were conducted in other design fields (e.g., architecture, engineering) and published in journals such as Design Studies (which has seldom referenced instructional design). Not attending to past and current research, and instead receiving information about alternative design methods filtered through other sources is akin to the game of telephone. By the time the message reaches us, it can be distorted. While we need to adapt alternative methods to our own ID practices and contexts, we should do more to learn from other design fields, and also contribute our findings to the design research field. As designers, we would do well to learn from fields that concern themselves with human experience and focus somewhat less on efficiency.
My third concern is about teaching alternative design methods to novice designers. The experience of learning ID is often just a single pass, with no or few opportunities to iterate. As a result, flexible methods inspired by design thinking may seem the perfect way to begin learning to design, because there is no conflicting traditional foundation to overcome. However, novice designers tend to jump to solutions too quickly, a condition no doubt brought about in part by an emphasis in schooling on getting to the right answer using the most efficient method. Design thinking methods encourage designers to come to a tentative solution right away, then get feedback by testing low fidelity prototypes. This approach could exacerbate a new designer's tendency to leap to solutions. And once a solution is found, it can be hard to give alternatives serious thought. Yet, I argue that the solution is not to ignore human-centered methods in early instruction. By focusing only on ADDIE, we may create a different problem by signaling to new designers that the ID process is linear and tidy, when this is typically not the case.
Instead, if we consider ADDIE as a scaffold for designers, we can see that its clarity makes it a useful set of supports for those new to design. Alternative methods seldom offer such clarity, and have far fewer resources available, making it challenging to find the needed supports. To resolve this, we need more and better scaffolds that support novice designers to engage in human-centered work. For instance, I developed a Wrong Theory Design Protocol (https://edtechbooks.org/-ub) that helps inexperienced designers get unstuck, consider the problem from different points of view, and consider new solutions. Such scaffolds could lead to a new generation of instructional designers who are better prepared to tackle complex learning designs, who value the process of framing problems with stakeholders, and who consider issues of power, inclusivity, and diversity in their designing.
I encourage novice instructional designers, as they ponder the various ID models, approaches, practices and methods available to them, to be suspicious of any that render design work tidy and linear. If, in the midst of designing, you feel muddy and uncertain, unsure how to proceed, you are likely exactly where you ought to be.
In such situations, we use design thinking to fill in gaps in our understanding of the problem and to consider how our solution ideas might satisfy design requirements. While experienced designers have an expansive set of precedents to work with in filling these gaps, novice designers need to look more assiduously for such inspiration. Our past educational experiences may covertly convince us that just because something is common, it is best. While a traditional instructional approach may be effective for some learners, I encourage novice designers to consider the following questions to scaffold their evaluation of instructional designs:
To be clear, the goal is not to make all learning experiences fun or easy, but to make them worthwhile. And I can think of no better way to ensure this than using iterative, human-centered methods that help designers understand and value multiple stakeholder perspectives. And if, in the midst of seeking, analyzing, and integrating such points of view, you find yourself thinking, "This is difficult," that is because it is difficult. Providing a low fidelity prototype for stakeholders to react to can make this process clearer and easier to manage, because it narrows the focus.
However, success of this approach depends on several factors. First, it helps to have forthright stakeholders who are at least a little hard to please. Second, if the design is visionary compared to the current state, stakeholders may need to be coaxed to envision new learning situations to react effectively. Third, designers need to resist the temptation to settle on an early design idea.
Figure 3
Designers Need to Resist the Temptation to Settle on an Early Design Idea
Finally, I encourage instructional designers—novice and expert alike—to let themselves be inspired by the design research field and human-centered approaches, and then to give back by sharing their design work as design cases (such as in the International Journal of Designs for Learning ) and by publishing in design research journals .
Adams, R. S., Daly, S. R., Mann, L. M., & Dall'Alba, G. (2011). Being a professional: Three lenses into design thinking, acting, and being. Design Studies, 32(6), 588-607. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.004
Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 84.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21. doi:10.2307/1511637
Carmel-Gilfilen, C., & Portillo, M. (2010). Developmental trajectories in design thinking: An examination of criteria. Design Studies, 31(1), 74-91. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2009.06.004
Collier, A. (2017). Surprising insights, outliers, and privilege in design thinking. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/-ie
Cross, N. (1982). Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies, 3(4), 221-227. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-jg
Cross, N. (1999). Design research: A disciplined conversation. Design Issues, 15(2), 5-10. doi:10.2307/1511837
Cross, N., Dorst, K., & Roozenburg, N. F. M. (Eds.). (1992). Research in design thinking: Delft University Press.
d.school. (2012). An introduction to design thinking: Facilitator's guide. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/-Sg
Diethelm, J. (2016). De-colonizing design thinking. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 2(2), 166-172. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-zY
Dolata, M., Uebernickel, F., & Schwabe, G. (2017). The power of words: Towards a methodology for progress monitoring in design thinking projects. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik. St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Dorst, K. (2011). The core of 'design thinking' and its application. Design Studies, 32(6), 521-532. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006
Floyd, C. (1988). A paradigm change in software engineering. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 13(2), 25-38.
IDEO. (2011). Design thinking for educators: Toolkit. https://edtechbooks.org/-HV.
Kim, B., Tan, L., & Kim, M. S. (2012). Learners as informants of educational game design. In J. van Aalst, K. Thompson, M. J. Jacobson, & P. Reimann (Eds.), The future of learning: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 401-405). Sydney, Australia: ISLS.
Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3(3), 285-306. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-cC
Kimbell, L. (2012). Rethinking design thinking: Part II. Design and Culture, 4(2), 129-148. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-ef
Kolko, J. (2010). Abductive thinking and sensemaking: The drivers of design synthesis. Design Issues, 26(1), 15-28. doi:10.1162/desi.2010.26.1.15
Lande, M., Sonalkar, N., Jung, M., Han, C., & Banerjee, S. (2012). Monitoring design thinking through in-situ interventions. Design thinking research (pp. 211-226). Berlin: Springer.
Merholz, P. (2009). Why design thinking won't save you. Harvard Business Review, 09-09. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/-tR
Muller, M. J., & Kuhn, S. (1993). Participatory design. Communications of the ACM, 36(6), 24-28. doi:10.1145/153571.255960
Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (1986). User centered system design. Hillsdale, NJ: CRC Press.
Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important? Review of Educational Research, 82(3), 330-348. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-yk
Rodgers, P. A. (2013). Articulating design thinking. Design Studies, 34(4), 433-437. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-TT
Rouse, W. B. (1991). Design for success: A human-centered approach to designing successful products and systems: Wiley-Interscience.
Royce, W. W. (1970). Managing the development of large software systems Proceedings of IEEE WESCON(pp. 1-9): The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Schuler, D., & Namioka, A. (1993). Participatory design: Principles and practices. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tripp, S. D., & Bichelmeyer, B. (1990). Rapid prototyping: An alternative instructional design strategy. Educational Technology Research and Development, 38(1), 31-44. doi:https://edtechbooks.org/-nb
Turk, D., France, R., & Rumpe, B. (2002). Limitations of agile software processes. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Extreme Programming and Flexible Processes in Software Engineering (pp. 43-46).
Wylant, B. (2008). Design thinking and the experience of innovation. Design Issues, 24(2), 3-14. doi:10.1162/desi.2008.24.2.3
The Design Society publishes several relevant journals:
CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts
International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation
The Design Research Society has conferences and discussion forums.
Other journals worth investigating:
Sign up for monthly emails from Design Research News to find out about conferences, calls for special issues, and job announcements.
This content is provided to you freely by EdTech Books.
Access it online or download it at https://edtechbooks.org/eme_6606/design_thinking.


text:
Let The Memories Begin
No one has to tell a parent how quickly kids grow up. In the blink of an eye, they seem to go from hopscotch to high school. But memories are the secret to keeping them forever young. And Disney memories? They're magical things filled with color, wonder and laughter. The kind of memories that live happily ever after in our hearts.
So whether you're dreaming of creating magical memories for the first time, or hoping to create even more, now is the time to bring your family to Disney Parks. Don't wait a moment longer. There's a Disney memory waiting for you right now.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
A rambling kinda talk about life and all that comes with it, past, present & future, joined together with an eclectic selection of great music... (click the title to listen to the podcast, or subscribe in iTunes)
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Dicks & Janes Podcast #2 - still getting started
The Music:
Danko/Manual - Drive-By Truckers (Uncut, April 2005)
Jolie Louise - Daniel Lanois (O Canada)
Jealous Guy - Claudine Longet (Mojo - Beatlemania, Vol 2)
Bobbi Got A Job - Catwoman (The Edge 1995 New Music Search)
Goofing at the Table - Jack Kerouac (Poetry for the Beat Generation)
Little Rootie Tootie - Thelonious Monk
Doodlin' - Horace Silver & the Jazz Messengers (Best of Ken Burns Jazz)
6 comments:
Hey Dude, and other John Lennon fans, the above is the url of a podcast Rolling Stone magazine put together consisting of a very long interview with John & Yoko they have chopped into bite-sized pieces - May 17, 2006 9:52 PM
hmm... that didn't work very well, the url got cutoff. I put the url in my ID for this post. If you right click on my nale, you'll get the whole url :) - May 17, 2006 9:56 PM
aw phooey!
to heck with it!
it's all in the previous post, just piece it together.... - May 17, 2006 9:59 PM
- Scarborough Dude said...
Thanks Krash- I downloaded them a while back, and enjoyed hearing the 'real' John Lennon. I have always been a big fan, and still sorry for the loss...
- May 17, 2006 11:01 PM
I've been listening to a "retrospective" of Dicks & Janes on the GO from Appleby Stn., mainly 'cause my local LCBO no longer stocks Sapporo beer and last winter wasn't a good time to be sitting out back listening to D&J anyway. Now I'm backlogged.
So, it's great that you're re-posting the early days. That gives me the chance to complete my personal Dicks & Janes Archives.
BTW... as an exile from the Montreal of the '60's I'm transported back when I hear references to Doug Pringle at CHOM and SGW and all that. And D&J+Sapporo rekindles memories of time in Tokyo so those references flare up too, eh.
Thanks for the memories, Dude. Have a great summer break. - May 18, 2006 8:08 AM
- Scarborough Dude said...
Well pmh, you've sure got me scratching my head! I'm trying to fit all the clues together and I just can't come up with a name to fit the initials. Guess maybe we've never met, which is okay - just kinda neat there are pieces of the past we share. Doug Pringle! The original Adam Curry!!
Thanks for listening, and writing in- come again eh! - May 18, 2006 7:10 PM


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Tuesday's elections are anything but dull. From the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Northwest, there's a colorful and compelling roster of political contests. Although there isn't anything close to the drama of an Election Day in a presidential year, many of the races have national implications.
In Boston and New York, it's the end of a political era as those cities prepare to replace longtime mayors. In New Jersey and Virginia, there are high-profile gubernatorial races that could shape the future of the Republican Party — and possibly the 2016 presidential race. Among the lesser-known contests, an Alabama special congressional runoff lays out the battle lines in the GOP's civil war in stark detail.
Here are nine races to watch Tuesday:
New Jersey Governor
Almost everyone expects Republican Gov. Chris Christie to win re-election. The only question is by how much.
The margin matters a great deal because a blowout Christie win will serve as his springboard into the 2016 presidential race. He doesn't even try to deny it anymore. A runaway victory Tuesday will provide Christie with a compelling case for a 2016 candidacy — especially if he shows coattails in state legislative races, or any kind of traction with African-American or Hispanic voters.
He'll be positioned to argue that he's a conservative who can win in one of the most Democratic states in the nation, and his winning record in a state that President Obama carried by 17 percentage points will be hard for Republicans to ignore after two consecutive GOP presidential losses.
Virginia Governor
Republican Ken Cuccinelli has trailed in the polls for months. He's struggled to connect with independents and female voters. Even among Republicans, his numbers aren't stellar.
The outlook seems grim for the conservative Cuccinelli, the state's polarizing attorney general, but there's one saving grace: Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, has been criticized for being a little too slick and superficial, and he's failed to put the race away.
If McAuliffe wins, his victory will put a close Clinton family ally in the governorship of a key swing state. And it will mark the first time since 1973 that Virginia voters elect a governor from the political party of the sitting president.
Alabama Special Congressional Runoff
There's a reason you've heard next to nothing about this special election: It's an overwhelmingly Republican seat, one that's all but certain to send a new GOP congressman to Washington. But the kind of Republican who wins Tuesday is why this southern Alabama race matters.
The 1st District contest is a classic match-up between an establishment-backed conservative, Bradley Byrne, and a Tea Party-oriented foe, Dean Young. Byrne is a former state senator and candidate for governor who's gotten a late infusion of cash and support from House GOP leaders and the Chamber of Commerce. Young, who's powered by conservative grassroots energy, has a penchant for making controversial remarks and says he wouldn't vote for John Boehner for speaker.
Young described his style this way during a recent radio interview: "[Voters should get] a big ole thing of popcorn and a Big Super Gulp and lean back and turn on C-SPAN. Because I promise you, I will stand on the floor of the House and stand for the principles that we believe in that made this nation great."
Byrne said of his opponent: "I think if he were elected he would be an embarrassment to the Republican Party and an embarrassment to our district."
Virginia Attorney General
This down-ballot race wouldn't be so important if not for the prospect of a Democratic sweep of Virginia's top offices. With Republicans bracing for defeat in the governor's race and an even bigger loss in the lieutenant governor's race, that leaves this neck-and-neck contest for attorney general as the party's last, best hope.
Republicans have poured cash into state Sen. Mark Obenshain's campaign in an attempt to overcome the efforts of another state senator, Democrat Mark Herring, to portray Obenshain as a right-wing ideologue — the same criticism lodged against the GOP's other statewide nominees.
Washington State Senate
With its avalanche of out-of-state and independent group spending — at least $2.5 million has poured in — the special election in Washington's 26th Legislative District now ranks as the most expensive legislative race in state history. Among the big spenders: liberal California hedge fund billionaire Thomas Steyer.
Why the interest in this relatively obscure Puget Sound-area seat? Republican state Rep. Jan Angel has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-corporate, conservative group that's under attack from progressives, and both parties view the election between Angel and Democratic state Sen. Nathan Schlicher as pivotal to control the closely divided state Senate in 2014.
New York Mayor
It's hard to believe: America's largest city hasn't elected a Democratic mayor since 1989. But New York is poised to break that streak this year by electing Democrat Bill de Blasio, the city's public advocate.
De Blasio, who has a formidable lead in the polls over Republican Joe Lhota, has promised a dramatic break from the policies of outgoing three-term Mayor Michael Bloomberg — in fact, he has described his vision as an "unapologetic progressive alternative to the Bloomberg era."
Boston Mayor
In the close race to succeed Tom Menino, Boston's longest-serving mayor, there are notable stylistic differences between the two progressive candidates vying to succeed him: Backers of state Rep. Marty Walsh, the son of Irish immigrants, have framed City Councilor John Connolly as a "son of privilege."
But there aren't many major policy differences between Connolly and Walsh. Education policy has emerged as a key issue, with Connolly embracing the role of reformer. Another key flashpoint: Walsh's close relationship with labor unions and its effect on his ability to govern.
Boston mayoral races are officially nonpartisan, but the city hasn't elected a Republican to City Hall since 1926.
Seattle Mayor
In another battle between two progressives, Mayor Mike McGinn is at risk of being ousted after a single term. Polls have shown his opponent, state Sen. Ed Murray, with a comfortable lead, and Murray's liberal record — he helped shepherd passage of the state's gay marriage legislation — has insulated him from some of McGinn's attacks in the heavily Democratic city.
McGinn's predicament is somewhat unusual: Seattle's economy continues to hum and the mayor isn't enmeshed in scandal. But his confrontational style has proved abrasive enough to alienate many, and Murray has gotten traction with the promise of a more inclusive and less provocative governing style.
Nassau County, N.Y., County Executive
In the decades following World War II, Nassau County was home to the nation's pre-eminent suburban Republican machine. But the GOP's hold on the giant Long Island suburb began to loosen in the 1990s. By 2002 the unthinkable happened: A Democrat, Tom Suozzi, won the powerful post of county executive.
In a harbinger of the national Republican sweep to come — and its focus on taxes, debt and spending — the GOP knocked off Suozzi in a 2009 upset. But now he's back, looking to unseat GOP County Executive Edward Mangano in a rematch. Demographics — the county continues to become more Democratic and more diverse — and the national GOP brand are working against Mangano. But the issues in play — property taxes, debt, spending, the county's longstanding troubled finances — could work to his advantage.
Either way, the outcome is likely to provide valuable insights into the mood of the suburban electorate.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Guy Maddin's distinctive, stylized riffs on antiquated film processes are an acquired taste that I was unable to fully acquire in my earlier samplings of his work. I found the Canadian director's films to be more interesting ideologically than they were as viewing. His style of stressing his film and shooting through edge-warping irises felt to me like pretentious shortcuts rather than legitimate tools of his craft, the flashy pictures put out in front of empty stories to keep us from noticing the man behind the curtain had no clothes. (Such mixed metaphors would not be out of place in Maddin's Cuisinart world, either.) This has all changed now that I've seen Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), newly released by Criterion.
Whether Brand Upon the Brain! is merely the entry point I have been waiting for to grant me access to the Guy Maddin aesthetic or whether it's the long-awaited blossoming of a filmmaker struggling to establish his own style is something I cannot address until I eventually backtrack and pick up the pieces I missed. Regardless, it definitely appears to be a career high, an artistic effort where the artist has found the vehicle he has always longed for and the perfect means by which to execute it. Shot like a silent film, Brand Upon the Brain! is an exercise in pseudo-autobiography, its fractured editing style meant to reflect the fractured memory that is emerging from Maddin's subconscious. Broken into twelve chapters (plus one interlude) and featuring intertitles that appear in choppy fragments, Brand Upon the Brain! plays like it's being beamed in from a distant communications tower, the signal stretched thin, only being picked up in pieces. It's both disjointed and totally linear, like a dream. Or a tale recounted by a sporadic amnesiac.
The story begins with Guy Maddin (played by Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to the island of his childhood, sent on an errand by his long-estranged Mother to fix the place up in anticipation of her return. The Maddin family lived in a lighthouse that also served as an orphanage where young Guy (Sullivan Brown) and his Sis (Maya Lawson) grew up with the children in their Mother's care while their Father (Todd Jefferson Moore) conducted strange experiments in his lab. Once there, Guy begins to paint the lighthouse white, as if whitewashing his own troubled past, and with each brushstroke, he falls deeper into memory until the audience becomes privy to everything that happened there.
Maddin is clearly an unreliable narrator of his own life, sprucing up his remembrances by refracting them through a prism of old movies and a bygone pop culture of child detectives and Hal Roach comedies. As artistic reference points, one can spot Peter Pan's lost boys, classic Hollywood horror movies, and European erotica. The Maddin island is eventually invaded by the Lighthouse Kids, a world famous investigative brother and sister team that suspects foul play in the unexplained deaths of several orphans from the island. Each child was found with a mysterious mark on the back of his or her head, like someone was burrowing into their brain. Except, even the Lighthouse Kids are not what they seem, as only one of them (played by Katherine E. Scharhon) has come to the island. First she appears in her true guise as Wendy, whom Guy becomes smitten with, but then Wendy dresses up as her brother Chance and begins to have an affair with Sis. Guy is still attracted to Chance/Wendy, but he doesn't know why.
There is much that Guy doesn't understand about the island beyond his budding sexuality. Much of the thematic thrust of Brand Upon the Brain! is uncovering how the child became aware of awful truths. Throughout the film, Guy often faints, unable to process everything he is witnessing, like a victim of abuse blocking out that which is too painful to remember. Metaphorically, we are seeing a mad scientist father who ignores all else in pursuit of his work, a rebellious sister, and a mother who envies the youth she sees in her daughter and yearns to take it from her. Mother is played by four actresses, all representing different ages--Gretchen Krich as the properly aged woman, Clara Grace Svenson and Cathleen O'Malley as de-aged incarnations, and Susan Corzatte as the "present" day older woman. In the horror/sci-fi tropes, Mother and Father are quite literally feeding on these children, and there are also signs of incest, of Mother molesting the young Guy and maybe even Sis. Likewise, Mother does not approve of her children embracing sexuality beyond her, and part of the grown-up Guy's growth in the modern day framing sequence is dealing with what that sexuality may be. The "brand" upon the brain is not just referring to the leaching holes, but the psychological damage left by one's upbringing.
Amidst this swirling narrative--told through voiceover and music, as well as the silent-film intertitles--Maddin creates a deliriously creative world. Father cooks up many amazing gadgets in his lab, including bizarre, almost steampunk-style communicators that carry distorted messages between the family members, including haunting instructions from times past. The top of the lighthouse is like the bridge of the spaceship in a 1950s B-grade sci-fi picture, and Mother watches from on-high like a Disney villainess, her guidance leading her children astray rather than bringing them safely home. Maddin and director of photography Benjamin Kasulke use black-and-white for all of its nostalgic purposes, to invoke the happy and the sad, the good ol' days and the not-so-good today.
Brand Upon the Brain! is demented and demanding, but as an expression of one man trying to uncover the imprint of past experience on his psyche, it's positively exhilarating.
Viewers of Brand Upon the Brain! have a choice of seven different stereo soundtracks to choose from. Three of these are studio recordings, and four of them are live recordings captured during the national tour Guy Maddin took the film on, performing the audio live with an orchestra, Foley artists, a castrato, and using different narrators in different cities. The choice you make will mainly change the narrator, though there are some noticeable differences in the soundtrack with the live performances, most obviously in a different quality to the Foley sound effects and the replacement of the prerecorded boys choir with the solo castrato (the songs are in chapters 11 and 13 on the DVD and worth toggling over to hear the live singing). The possible narrators are Louis Negin (a regular Maddin collaborator and the actor who played Truman Capote in 54) and Guy Maddin himself in the studio; professional weirdo Crispin Glover, poet John Ashbery, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and legendary actor Eli Wallach live; and showing up twice, the traditional and preferred narrator, Isabella Rossellini, doing double duty in the studio and in the live arena.
If I had to choose, I'd choose one of the female narrators over the males, as the gender switch not only fits some of the thematic concerns of Brand Upon the Brain!, but it also creates an interesting disconnect, particularly in the first-person passages. I changed the narrator with each chapter break when I watched the movie, and it made for a rather fascinating experience. Of all the tracks, the only one I didn't really care for was John Ashbery's, whose speaking style was too stilted and distracting, not fitting with the flow of the film itself.
In addition to the sound options, there are multiple bonus features on the DVD itself, including a theatrical trailer and one deleted scene. The deleted scene runs approximately six minutes and it details a climactic showdown between Sis and the character Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), her very masculine teenage counterpart.
97 Percent True is a new 50-minute documentary examining the unique production. It charts the evolution of Maddin's art and what has influenced him before transitioning into the unique nature of how this film came about, including a rushed development and shooting process, the post-production period, and decoding some of the autobiographical aspects of the movie. Of interest are the color photographs and behind-the-scenes footage of the Brand sets, as well as other narrators from the tour, like Udo Kier and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Interviewed for the movie are Maddin, Kasulke, co-writer George Toles, editor John Gurdebeke, and composer Jason Staczek, among others.
The last of the extras are two new short films made by Guy Maddin exclusively for this DVD and which spotlight certain members of the production team in Maddin's inimitable way. It's My Mother's Birthday Today is a surreal, five-minute portrait of Dov Houle, a.k.a. the Manitoba Meadowlark, the castrato who performed the songs on the live tour. The nine-minute Footsteps shows the Foley team at work, with some humorous embellishments.
Even if you've been suspicious of Guy Maddin's bizarre point of view before, toss out any worry when it comes to Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection. It's a delicious malformation of an autobiography, playing with movie iconography and childhood nostalgia in order to examine the seminal experiences that indelibly changed the auteur's psyche. Shot like a silent movie, with multiple versions of the score and narrators to choose from, this crazy hybrid of melodrama, sci-fi, and horror excites more than it confounds, but even the confounding is exciting in Maddin's delirious world. Complete with new short films and a decoder-ring documentary, mark another in the win category for Criterion.
For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.
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Goodbye Dollar, It Was Nice Knowing You!
Jul 4 2019 / 12:45 pmOver the past two years, the White House has initiated trade disputes, insulted allies and enemies alike, and withdrawn from or refused to ratify multinational treaties and agreements. It has also expanded the reach of its unilaterally imposed rules, forcing other nations to abide by its demands or face economic sanctions. While the stated Trump Administration intention has been to enter into new arrangements more favorable to the United States, the end result has been quite different, creating a broad consensus within the international community that Washington is unstable, not a reliable partner and cannot be trusted. This sentiment has, in turn, resulted in conversations among foreign governments regarding how to circumvent the American banking system, which is the primary offensive weapon apart from dropping bombs that Washington has to force compliance with its dictates.
Consequently, there has been considerable blowback from the Make America Great Again campaign, particularly as the flip side of the coin appears to be that the "greatness" will be obtained by making everyone else less great. The only country in the world that currently regards the United States favorably is Israel, which certainly has good reason to do so given the largesse that has come from the Trump Administration. Everyone else is keen to get out from under the American heel.
Well the worm has finally turned, maybe. Even the feckless Angela Merkel's Germany now understands that national interests must prevail when the United States is demanding that it do the unspeakable. At the recently concluded G20 meeting in Tokyo Britain, France and Germany announced that the special trade mechanism that they have been working on this year is now up and running. It is called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) and it will permit companies in Europe to do business with countries like Iran, avoiding American sanctions by trading outside the SWIFT system, which is dollar denominated and de facto controlled by the US Treasury.
The significance of the European move cannot be understated. It is the first major step in moving away from the dominance of the dollar as the world's trading and reserve currency. As is often the case, the damage to US perceived interests is self-inflicted. There has been talk for years regarding setting up trade mechanisms that would not be dollar based, but they did not gain any momentum until the Trump Administration abruptly withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran over a year ago.
There were other signatories to the JCPOA, all of whom were angered by the White House move, because they believed correctly that it was a good agreement, preventing Iranian development of a nuclear weapon while also easing tensions in the Middle East. Major European powers Germany, France and Great Britain, as well as Russia and China, were all signatories and the agreement was endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. The US withdrawal in an attempt to destroy the "plan of action" was therefore viewed extremely negatively by all the other signatories and their anger increased when Washington declared that it would reinstate sanctions on Iran and also use secondary sanctions to punish any third party that did not comply with the restrictions on trade.
Instex is an upgrade of a previous "Special Purpose Vehicle" set up by the Europeans a year ago to permit trading with Iran without any actual money transfers, something like a barter system based on balancing payments by value. The announcement regarding Instex came as a result of last week's meeting in Vienna in which the JCPOA signatories minus the US got together with Iranian ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi, who called the gathering "the last chance for the remaining parties…to gather and see how they can meet their commitments towards Iran."
Iran is quietly pleased by the development, even though there are critics of the arrangement and the government is officially declaring that Instex is not enough and it will proceed with plans to increase its uranium production. This produced an immediate response from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week speaking in New Delhi "If there is conflict, if there is war, if there is a kinetic activity, it will be because the Iranians made that choice." Nevertheless, Instex could possibly be a model for mechanisms that will allow Iran to sell its oil without hindrance from Washington. But a sharp reaction from the White House is expected. While Instex was in the development phase, US observers noted that the Iranian Special Trade and Finance Instrument, that will do the actual trading, includes government agencies that are already under US sanctions. That likely means that Washington will resort to secondary sanctions on the Europeans, a move that will definitely make the bilateral relationship even more poisonous than it already is. A global trade war is a distinct possibility and, as observed above, the abandonment of the dollar as the international reserve currency is a possible consequence.
Trump has already been "threatening penalties against the financial body created by Germany, the U.K. and France to shield trade with the Islamic Republic from US sanctions." The Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Israeli Sigal Mandelker, warned in a May 7th letter that "I urge you to carefully consider the potential sanctions exposure of Instex. Engaging in activities that run afoul of US sanctions can result in severe consequences, including a loss of access to the US financial system."
Indeed, the White House appears to be willing to engage in economic warfare with Europe over the issue of punishing Iran. The Treasury Department issued a statement regarding the Mandelker letter, saying "entities that transact in trade with the Iranian regime through any means may expose themselves to considerable sanctions risk, and Treasury intends to aggressively enforce our authorities." Mike Pompeo also was explicit during a visit to London on May 8th when he stated that "…it doesn't matter what vehicle's out there, if the transaction is sanctionable, we will evaluate it, review it, and if appropriate, levy sanctions against those that were involved in that transaction. It's very straightforward."
It is perhaps not unreasonable to wish the Europeans success, as they are supporting free trade while also registering their opposition to the White House's bullying tactics using the world financial system. And if the dollar ceases to be the world's trade and reserve currency, what of it? It would mean that the Treasury might have to cease printing surplus dollars and the US ability to establish global hegemony on a credit card might well be impeded. Those would be good results and one might also hope that some day soon the United States might once again become a normal country that Americans would be proud to call home.


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The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities.
Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.
Fatimah Asghar is the creator of the Emmy-Nominated web series Brown Girls, now in development for HBO. She is the author of If They Come For Us and a recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman fellow. In 2017, she was listed on Forbes's 30 Under 30 list.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC and a Cave Canem fellow, she holds an MFA from the New School. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Other books of interest
The BreakBeat Poets
Edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, et al. -
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
by aja monet -
The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2
Edited by Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, et al. -
Black Queer Hoe
Build Yourself a Boat


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(CNN) — Researchers in Hawaii have found a mammoth World War II-era Japanese submarine scuttled by the U.S. Navy in 1946 to keep its advanced technology out of the hands of the Soviet Union.
The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii discovered the I-400 in 2,300 feet of water off the southwest coast of Oahu, according the school.
"Finding it where we did was totally unexpected," lab operations director and chief submarine pilot Terry Kerby said in a university statement. "All our research pointed to it being further out to sea."
At nearly 400 feet long, the I-400 and its two sister ships were the largest submarines ever built before the nuclear age.
Initially conceived as a weapon to target the U.S. mainland and capable of reaching any point on the globe without refueling, the subs were effectively underwater aircraft carriers outfitted with three folding-wing seaplanes capable of carrying an 1,800-pound bomb.
The ships were never used to attack the mainland United States and saw only limited service before Japan surrendered in 1945.
But their novel design represented a tactical shift in thinking about the use of submarines, which until then had been strictly seen as anti-ship weapons, James Delgado, director of the Maritime Heritage Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in the university statement.
"Following World War II, submarine experimentation and design changes would continue in this direction, eventually leading to ballistic missile launching capabilities for U.S. submarines at the advent of the nuclear era," Delgado told the university.
The submarine was found in August, but the laboratory didn't notify the public until after informing the U.S. State Department and the Japanese government, the university said.
The I-400 was one of five Japanese submarines captured by the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II and sent to Hawaii for examination, the school said.
With tensions rising between the Soviet Union and the United States after the war, the Navy scuttled the ships to avoid their advanced technology falling into the hands of the Soviet navy in what would become one of the first intrigues of the Cold War.
The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory has so far found four of the ships.


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If you're reading this, you've already taken the first step towards making your relationship healthier. The next step is to see me for Couples Counselling.
During counselling, you'll learn tools that will enable you to see the bigger picture, let go of resentment and build a relationship which makes you both happier.
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National Honor Society
Donor Brick Information
When building the new high school and elementary buildings, a brick donor wall at both buildings was constructed. We can and are continually adding bricks to both buildings. In the high school, we have completed the panels in the auditeria by the trophy cases and we now have in the entrance way by the high school office an area with the next group of bricks.
In the elementary, the bricks are also in the entrance way by the office. There is more room at that location to insert new bricks as they become engraved.
Please, if you haven't had the chance to see the brick donor walls at both buildings, stop in any time and check them out!
If you are interested in purchasing a brick (perhaps as an excellent Christmas present), please read the order form below. Thanks for your continuing support of Kalida Local Schools!
For More Information Click Here.
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William Allen, Michigan State University
Civil rights may be comprehensively defined as the rights to common or equal participation in civil society. Natural law governs the terms of participation in civil society, comprehensively extending from conception to full maturity. Accordingly, an accounting of civil rights calls for an accounting of natural law. Here we will define natural law, as it pertains to human action, as did C. S. Lewis: a standard of right conduct—not of humans' own making—for beings whose self-directed motions are not determined by regularities of material bearing. That such a rule lies at the bottom of what are termed "civil rights" may not at first seem evident, particularly in the United States, where civil rights have had to be fought for and won through perseverance. That judgment would be mistaken, however, and we may readily discern the extent of that mistake by reviewing the development of our understanding of civil rights.
We define civil rights in the context of the founding of the United States Constitution, and in many respects they are best understood in that light. The first place in which to find that context is the Declaration of Independence, which declares the meaning of civil rights.[1] Secondly, we have the best indigenous articulation of civil rights from that founding father who also best explained the relation between civil rights and natural law: James Wilson. Thirdly, reviewing illustrative Supreme Court defenses of civil rights can quickly reveal how far the decisions of the justices were regulated so as to tie advances in civil rights to an advance in understanding natural law (even for persons who would disavow reliance upon natural law). Finally, the seminal statement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," clearly expresses the fundamental ground of equality identified by James Wilson (and the Declaration of Independence) as essential to civil rights; it also invokes the entire sweep of Western reflection on the meaning of justice in such a way as to show the pursuit of civil rights as nothing less than perfecting civil relations in light of natural law.
Someone may object that the Declaration of Independence establishes a defense of political rights and therefore not, as such, civil rights (often treated either as independent of, or as dependent upon or derivative from, political rights). Let us clarify, then: when the Declaration asserts that "to secure" the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness,
it most of all distinguishes the natural rights antecedent to every government and the resultant "civil rights" that restrain governments to observing and protecting those natural rights.
Such a reading is readily deducible from the elegant formulation of James Wilson, a member of the Constitutional Convention of the United States in 1787 and also a Justice on the first Supreme Court under the Constitution. Wilson provided that citizens, regardless of identity or culture, are entitled to "natural" and "acquired" rights, the latter consisting of two rights: the right to "the honest administration of the government in general," and, "in particular, to the impartial administration of justice."[2] Wilson was not alone in this assertion: he elaborated and confirmed strong suggestions contained in the Constitutional Convention and most notably in The Federalist Papers. The latter argues specifically that "justice is the end of government," that, "security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. . . ,"[3] and that civil rights concern the protections of all parties of the whole, minority or otherwise.[4]
Justice Wilson's definition of civil rights went to the heart of the concept. He is most helpful, however, in articulating the foundations of that concept, which he accomplished in his law lectures on the topics of "natural rights," "the general principles of law," and "the law of nature."
The discussion of natural rights begins from the universally accepted concept of a transition from a "state of nature" into a "state of civil society," mediated by individuals surrendering some natural rights in order to attain civil security. However, Wilson insists, contradicting Edmund Burke and William Blackstone, that what is surrendered is minimal indeed because civil rights are founded on "the stable foundation of nature," and not "the precarious and fluctuating basis of human institution."[5]
The "Lectures on Law" discussed the general principles of law as progressing naturally and consistently from the law of God to man-made law. In that process, Wilson reasoned, man could place confidence in the project of protecting civil rights without surrendering a claim to justice. God's law for man (apart from that communicated only in Revelation) "is communicated to us by reason and conscience." Such law known purely by "reason and the moral sense" "has been called natural." Furthermore, "[h]uman law," which has "deficiencies," "must rest its authority, ultimately, upon the authority of that law, which is divine." Among the kinds of human law Wilson defines "[t]hat [law] which a political society makes for itself" as "municipal law."[6]
Wilson's "municipal" law is the primary focus of concerns for civil rights because of a second important argument of his: namely, civil rights originate in concerns for domestic economy or household management, (or in other words, marriage, parentage, and character formation), because it is precisely in that environment that citizens are brought to full maturity, fit for the common or equal enjoyment of and responsibility for the order of civil society.
Wilson reiterates: since government itself results from the natural law, every government that fails to secure and enlarge the exercise of natural rights "is not a government of the legitimate kind." Natural law in that sense points to the obligations of humans as they stand "unrelated" to others, "related" to particular others, and "related" to others in general. Insofar as humans stand unrelated ("state of nature") there is no role for government; insofar as they stand in either particular or general relations, government plays the role of securing their rights and responsibilities in those relationships. In general ("in his unrelated state") man has natural rights to property, his character, liberty, and safety. In his "peculiar relations," depending on whether he is a spouse, parent, or progeny, he has "peculiar rights" and "peculiar duties." In his "general relations" man has the rights "to be free from injury, and to receive the fulfillment of the engagements, which are made to him" and the duties "to do no injury, and to fulfill the engagements, which he has made."[7]
The paramount universal duty of government is the duty to "preserve human life." Reviewing the history of the exercise of unnatural powers over the "newly born," Wilson recognizes the "consistency, beautiful and undeviating," with which the "common law" "protects human life, from its commencement to its close." This common law is the same discovered by Sir Edward Coke in Euripides ("the common law of Athens") and thus appropriated by Wilson as a standard imperfectly attained until the most recent times.
In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from every degree of actual violence, and, in some cases, from every degree of danger.[8]
In other words, the rights attaching to man in "his unrelated state" (merely by virtue of his humanity), subsequently obligate government and, indeed, provide initial legitimacy to government. Next Wilson took up in sequence marriage ("the true origin of society"), parentage ("the relation of parent and child"), and "the duty of parents to maintain their children decently; . . . to protect them, . . . and to educate them. . . ." He also ruled out slavery as "unauthorized by the common law. Indeed, it is repugnant to the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist in any social system."[9]
What this account means is that the best understanding of civil rights in practice is derivable from close attention to how citizens in any given country—indeed persons altogether—are treated in the course of the conduct of their lives in their ordinary relations. As Wilson put it, "publick law and publick government were not made for themselves," but for "society" . . . "particularly domestick society."[10]
It is therefore notable that many of the landmark decisions concerning civil rights in the United States touch upon precisely the monuments of domestic economy cited by James Wilson.
The United States Supreme Court has upheld individual rights of marriage not merely as a positive result of the prescriptions of the Constitution or statutes but as something "long recognized" as one of "the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." Moreover, "marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival."[11] Similarly, the freedom of contract and the right to maintain a home for a family were affirmed on the grounds that the "rights to acquire, enjoy, own and dispose of property . . . [were] . . . an essential pre-condition to the realization of other basic civil rights and liberties. . . ."[12] Finally, the rights of parents to educate their children not only have been held not to derive from positive law but have been deemed strong enough to resist even the demands of positive law. To quote the Court,
The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.[13]
These judicial affirmations of natural law dramatically confirm the analyses of C. S. Lewis and Justice Wilson. That is to say, arguments from "fundamental theory" are far more the reasons for those decisions than any compulsive operation of the laws. To that extent, they reflect the force of natural law thinking in lighting the path to civil rights. It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that the most fundamental, initiating right to life itself, in light of which the rights of domestic economy gain traction, has received from the Supreme Court only the blessing of positive prescription and been qualified by subjection to the countervailing will of others.
If anything were to reveal the necessity to found civil rights on altogether "fundamental" and "unqualified" arguments, it would surely be the ultimate defense of civil rights penned by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He stated at the outset that "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," which means that he took a transcendent standard and not a transient promise as the basis of the claims he defended. He argued for the "interrelatedness of all communities and states," which in turn led him to the famous formulation, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." In short, King believed that the defense of civil rights for black people in particular required the articulation of the rights of people anywhere and everywhere.
King manifested this perspective in his defense of civil disobedience:
Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."[14]
It was on the foundation of St. Augustine's natural law theory, then, that King discovered the grounds of civil disobedience: "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law." Nor did he stop there. He invoked Aquinas, Martin Buber, Socrates, Tillich, and Niebuhr (among other authorities) to establish that the claim he defended was not a parochial claim merely derived from majority rule.
To defend civil rights for black people meant to prove that "segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful." The moral error begins with the denial of common or equal position in the civil society, and it ends with refusing to some "the honest administration of the government and the impartial administration of justice." Thus, the examples King used covered the same two categories established by Justice Wilson.
First, he cited the "code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself." This, he held, is "difference made legal," where the term difference means precisely unjust. The rule of justice is "sameness made legal." To attain that standard of governmental performance, however, requires common and equal participation in the civil society and in the government predicated upon that society. Thus, people should not be subject to laws which they "had no part in enacting or devising."
The second category, the impartial administration of justice, provided the most dramatic defense of the theory King defended, for in mounting the argument against the "racial injustice [that] engulfs this community," King had to bring his case home to the level of domestic economy that revealed precisely how far civil rights had been impaired. The reductio ad absurdum of lunch counter sit-ins to defend the right to enjoy public custom was not meant to show how trivial civil rights claims were but rather how far injustice had penetrated. What was amiss was the ability of American blacks to conduct themselves under the guidance of natural law because of the unnatural (preternatural?) obstruction of their opportunities to do so. That meant no families, properly speaking; no education, properly speaking; no self-government, literally speaking. Where there is no domestic economy there is no political community.[15]
If it is warrantable to insist that all human beings should live in accord with the law of nature, then it is an absolute requirement that all be secured the civil opportunity to do so. For that reason, civil rights can be meaningfully defined only as the common or equal participation in civil society.
Works Cited:
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay. The Federalist Papers, ed. By Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
Collected Works of James Wilson, ed. by Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall. Vols I. & II. Liberty Fund, Inc. 2007. Lectures: "Of the General Principles of Law,' "Of the Law of Nature," "Of the Natural Rights of Individuals."
Martin Luther King, Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," url: www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf .
Loving v. Virginia. 388 U.S. 1; 87 S. Ct. 1817; 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1082. June 12, 1967.
Pierce v. Society of Sisters. 268 U.S. 510; 45 S. Ct. 571; 69 L. Ed. 1070; 1925 U.S. LEXIS 589; 39 A.L.R. 468. June 1, 1925.
Shelley v Kraemer. 334 U.S. 1; 68 S. Ct. 836; 92 L. Ed. 1161; 1948 U.S. LEXIS 2764; 3 A.L.R.2d 441. May 3, 1948.
W. B. Allen. "The Truth About Citizenship." Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law. 4:2 (Summer 1996). 355-372.
[1] For one of the more famous instances of the connection of the Declaration of Independence to civil rights, see the famous speech of Martin Luther King, delivered August 28, 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
[2] James Wilson, Collected Works of James Wilson, ed. by Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc. 2007), Vol. II., Part 3, "Lectures on Law," Chapter VII, "Of Crimes Against the Rights of Individuals Acquired Under Civil Government," p. 1160.
[3] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. By Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), Essay # 51, p. 351.
[4] For the details of these arguments, see The Federalist Papers, #8, p. 45; #10, p. 57-62; #28, p. 178; #43, p. 298; #84, p. 578.
[5] Op. cit., Wilson, Vol. II, Chapter XII, "Of the Natural Rights of Individuals," p. 1056.
[6] Ibid., Vol. I, Chapter II, "Of the General Principles of Law," p. 498.
[7] Ibid., Vol. II, Chapter XII, "Of the Natural Rights of Individual" p. 1062.
[8] Ibid., p. 1068.
[9] Ibid., 1066-1078).
[10] Ibid., p. 1081.
[11] Loving v. Virginia. 388 U.S. 1; 87 S. Ct. 1817; 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1082. June 12, 1967, at 190.
[12] Shelley v Kraemer. 334 U.S. 1; 68 S. Ct. 836; 92 L. Ed. 1161; 1948 U.S. LEXIS 2764; 3 A.L.R.2d 441. May 3, 1948, at 841.
[13] Pierce v. Society of Sisters. 268 U.S. 510; 45 S. Ct. 571; 69 L. Ed. 1070; 1925 U.S. LEXIS 589; 39 A.L.R. 468. June 1, 1925, at 535.
[14] Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf .
[15] Ibid.
Published 2011 by the Witherspoon Institute


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U.S. stocks continued their record run Monday as hopes that lawmakers would pass a budget added to the recent enthusiasm.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.3%, closing at a record high for the fifth consecutive trading day. The S&P 500 gained 0.3% and is less than 10 points away from its all-time closing high. The Nasdaq added 0.2%.
Both the Dow and S&P 500 have risen for seven consecutive trading days.
Stocks have been supported by better-than-expected economic data and signs the Federal Reserve will keep its stimulus policies in place for some time.
Investors have shrugged off federal spending cuts that went into effect this month, and seem optimistic that Congress will pass a budget before a March 27 legislative deadline.
"It looks like we might actually get a budget this year," said Charlie Smith, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group.
Smith said his firm is in the process of shifting from "playing defense to offense." But he was cautious about the outlook for corporate earnings.
All three major indexes are already up between 9% and 10% this year.
Related: Bank stocks still 50% below all-time highs
Stocks could continue to move higher as investors regain their appetite for risk, but the bull market is vulnerable to a pullback, noted John Stoltzfus, chief market strategist at Oppenheimer.
"At some point, likely sooner than later, a piece of negative news or some data point will trip the bull up," Stoltzfus wrote in his weekly note to clients.
Historically, stocks have been flat to modestly lower two months after hitting a record high, according to BTIG chief global strategist Dan Greenhaus. That might not be too bad, considering stocks have gained roughly 15% from the lows hit last November, he added.
There were no major economic reports released Monday, but retail sales data, due Wednesday, could move the market.
Investors are keen to see whether the increased payroll tax, delayed tax refunds and higher gas prices have caused consumers to pull back on spending. February sales are expected to have risen 0.5%, according to economists polled by Briefing.com.
Wal-Mart (WMT) warned last month that its February sales had been softer than expected.
On the corporate front Monday, shares of Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) fell more than 10% after the retailer reported earnings and sales that fell short of forecasts. The company also said it expected a sharp slowdown in same-store sales for the first quarter.
Shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) rallied nearly 14% as enthusiasm over the upcoming debut of its latest smartphone, the Z10, grew. AT&T (T) said it would begin pre-orders on Tuesday.
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn signed a confidentiality agreement with Dell (DELL)to review the PC maker's financial information, a move that could head off a showdown over Michael Dell's buyout.
Shares of Genworth Financial (GNW) rose 6% after an article in Barron's called the stock undervalued.
General Electric (GE) named former SEC chairman Mary Schapiro to its board of directors.
Related: Fear & Greed index moves deeper into extreme greed
Overseas, markets in Europe and Asia ended mixed.
The Nikkei rose modestly, extending this year's big rally. Japanese stocks have outperformed this year as investors welcome Tokyo's efforts to stimulate economic growth. But shares in China ended lower, dragged down by concerns over Chinese manufacturing.
The dollar rose against the British pound and the Japanese yen, but fell against the euro.
Oil prices dropped, while gold prices moved slightly higher.
The price on the 10-year Treasury edged lower, pushing the yield up to 2.06%.


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Universidad Europea de Madrid is a dynamic and innovative institution, aimed at adding value to the society and to actively contribute to its progress. Currently over 16,000 students from vocational training, degrees, masters and doctorates and different disciplines such as Engineering, Architecture, Art, Medicine, Laws, Economics, Sports, Marketing, etc. His career began in July 1995. Since 1999 member of the Laureate International Universities network, a leader in higher education offering undergraduate education, graduate and other higher to more than 750,000 students worldwide research institution. Currently this network is composed of more than 65 institutions and has physical presence in 29 countries on five continents, which offers students numerous opportunities for academic exchanges, cultural immersion and comprehensive training.
Universidad Europea offers in-person, blended, hybrid and online programs, and has defined its own pedagogical model for eLearning and hybrid courses that has been tested up today in more than 530 authors generating materials of different areas of knowledge, over 700 teachers involved in the training process, 6533 students were enrolled in online format and over 11,000 resources available in 30 degrees, with content also adapted to mobile devices.
Read more: http://universidadeuropea.es/


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Abortion and Eugenics Before the European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) currently has before it an unprecedented number of cases relating to abortion. Because the principles established by the Court in its case law are binding on the 47 member states, the next few months will be decisive for the respect of human life and dignity. The European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ), which intervenes as a third party in many of these cases[1], wishes to draw attention to these very important cases.
Among the cases that the European Court must now judge on, there is the case of a Polish mother who complained of difficulties in obtaining permission for her minor daughter to have an abortion[2]. There is also the case of a woman who died during pregnancy, (allegedly) due to conscientious objection exercised by doctors[3]. In another case, a woman who became sterile following an abortion complained of not having been properly informed of the risks[4]. In two other cases before the Court, the women who gave birth to children with disabilities complain of not being able to have abortions[5]. Finally, on a related topic, the Court also has before it a case involving a ban by the Italian legislature of pre-implantation diagnosis[6].
The ECLJ submitted its written observations on 2 April in the case of Anita KR?ZMANE against Latvia in which a mother complains of not having been able to abort her Down's syndrome daughter. She alleges in particular that her doctor had breached an obligation to prescribe a screening test for Down's syndrome. Pretending the existence of a direct causal link between the absence of testing and the birth of her daughter with Down's syndrome, the applicant claims to have suffered a violation of her right to respect for private life, a private life which includes – according to the applicant – the right to decide to have an abortion. In summary, it is a question of whether or not eugenics has become a human right.
This claim — which attempts to make eugenics a human right — may seem crazy. However it did not immediately shock the Court, otherwise the application would have been rejected for not complying with the eligibility criteria, or for abuse of rights because, under the Convention, "no one may use the rights guaranteed by the Convention in order to seek the abolition or restriction of those rights" (art. 17). There is no doubt that the KR?ZMANE case and other cases now pending before the court are used strategically to try to advance the "rights" to abortion and eugenics. Eugenics, like abortion, is in danger of becoming a social normality; those who still see the inhumanity of these practices are becoming increasingly rare. In fact, postmodernism creates the inhumanity of post-humanity, and eugenics is one of the instruments of this post-humanity which aims at surpassing the human nature.
To assist the Court — which is faced with the danger and complexity of these cases — the ECLJ attempted to emphasize in its written observations the situation and stigmatization of people with disabilities. It also endeavors to highlight the true foundations and requirements of human rights and bioethics, with regard to respect for human life, the purpose of medicine and the prohibition of eugenics.
In the coming months, the European Court will have responsibility for defining, for the 47 member states, much of the legal framework of abortion and family issues such as eugenics and conscientious objection. This legal framework will bear the moral prestige of the Court. This responsibility is significant because the Court is conducted at developing these jurisprudential rules largely outside the framework of the Convention, as abortion and eugenics are contrary to the Convention, as it was conceived, written and intended by its authors. Indeed, there is no doubt that in 1950, just after the Second World War, the drafters of the Convention condemned those practices as inhumane, and it was inconceivable to them that some would one day claim that they are human rights.
Faced with a society that largely tends to deny the value and humanity of preborn life in favor of ending or exploiting it, the Court interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights in a manner that tolerates the practice of abortion while expressly denying the existence of an alleged right to abortion[7]. While some "bioethical" authorities lobby for the legalization of "postnatal abortion"[8], the Court would fail in its mission by leaving the unborn child completely unprotected.
For the ECLJ, it is clear that the Court (which received from the Member States its duty of guaranteeing the fundamental rights of "all people"), should set limits to those practices, particularly with regard to late abortion (after the viability threshold) and selective abortion based on the characteristics of the child, including genetic characteristics (the sex and health status of the child). In its observations, the ECLJ has shown that the international law and the European Convention protecting prenatal human life do not create a right to abortion, but, instead the State has the positive obligation to protect life, including prenatal life. Even when a state permits abortion, it remains subject, in respect of the Convention, to the positive obligation to protect life and preserve the rights and competing interests. The State must thus, for example, prevent such stigmatization of people with disabilities and their families, protect the freedom of parents to not abort, make effective the prohibition of eugenics and genetic discrimination, respect the therapeutic purpose of prenatal diagnosis, respect the right to conscientious objection by medical personnel, etc.
These coming months will be decisive for the respect of human life and dignity. The Court will also have to rule on cases concerning euthanasia[9] and "surrogate mothers"[10]. The European Court of Human Rights has its roots in modern and humanist culture. Such applications invite the Court to sever these ties and to embrace the illusion of post-modernity, and with it, inhumanity. The danger is serious, because a "Court of Human Rights" that would recognize and protect abortion, eugenics, euthanasia and the practice of surrogacy would simply become inhumane.
[1] The ECLJ intervenes in the cases of P. and S. v. Poland, No. 57375/08, Kruzmane v. Latvia, No. 33011/08, and Costa and Pavan v. Italy, No. 54270/10 and previously intervened before the Grand Chamber in the cases of A, B. and C. v. Ireland, and S. H. v. Austria
[2] P. and S. v. Poland, No. 57375/08
[3] Z v. Poland, No. 46132/08
[4] Csoma v. Romania, No. 8759/05
[5] Kruzmane v. Latvia, No. 33011/08 ; Ozçakmak v. Turkey, No. 24573/08
[6] Costa and Pavan v. Italy, No. 54270/10
[7] In the Grand Chamber case of A. B. and C. v. Ireland
[8] Alberto GIUBILINI et Francesca MINERVA, "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?", inJournal of Medical Ethics, doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100411.
[9] Cases of Koch v. Germany, No. 497and Gross v. Switzerland, No. 67810/10
[10] Cases of Mennesson and Others v. France, No. 65192/11 and Labassee and Others v. France, No. 65941/11