One of my favorite galleries is Lacoste, in Concord, MA–which features nationally and internationally known ceramicists–as well as emerging artists. Founded by Lucy Lacoste,  a ceramicist herself, the gallery shown the work of 80 or more artists.  Over the years, I’ve much admired Lacoste’s striking displays–which have provided insight and inspiration for my own writing and art.

The current exhibit, which runs November 19-December 4, 2016, is NORDIC LIGHT, features the work  of Anne Fløche and Hans Vangsø,  partners in life who work independently interpreting contemporary ceramics in Aarhus, Denmark. As Lucy Lacoste explains:

Anne Floche with patron

Anne Fløche is a Danish clay sculptor experimenting with various forms and colors in clay by using utensils or implements to make markings on clay surfaces. The color principles of terra sigillata, a clay slip used like a glaze, informs her application of colors which are subtle yet rich in scale. For Anne, clay is a broad canvas whereas glazes, engobes and slips are paints for her artistic expressions. In this exhibition, she is inspired by architectures of different geographical locations. Her sculptures are composed to form landscapes or cityscapes of an imagined world.

Anne Floche, Green Box

Anne Floche, Blue with White

Anne Floche, Tablet with White Time is Curved

Hans Vangso

Hans Vangsø is a Danish studio potter mentored by the great Gutte Eriksen, following the rich Scandinavian and Japanese ceramic traditions. His works are simple in form and line yet the surfaces are highly textured. Multiple firing processes and unconventional treatments of surfaces are his hallmark. Vessels are bisque fired then applied with thick glazes, wrapped in seaweed or metal then tightly bound in newspaper before firing to a high temperature.  Bubbles and blisters on the vessel surfaces as a result of these processes are unique in each vessel. Colors are subtle but there are unmistakable markings that appear to have gone through some form of geological stress.  

Hans Vangso, Tall Jar

Hans Vangso, Cut Jar

Lacoste Gallery was introduced to the work of Hans Vangsø and Anne Fløche by William Hull, the pre-eminent curator of Danish ceramics in the US. They are partners and share a home on the east coast of Jutland, Denmark.

Lucy Lacoste

“We have shown Hans Vangsø many times over the years; this is the first full show with him and his partner Anne Fløche. Both are rooted in Scandinavian traditions yet are applying exciting and new treatments to ceramic art. They have come to symbolize the new in Danish ceramics”  Lacoste said.

The current show runs through December 4, 2016. Next up is “New Pots, Utility 2, featuring the work of Linda Christianon and Jan McKeachie Johnston, from December 10, 2016-January 7, 2017. An opening reception with Christiabso and Johnston will be held on Saturday, December 10, 2016, from 3-5 pm; the artists will speak on Sunday, December 11, at 2 pm.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant base in Cambridge, MA.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning pr and digital marketing firm in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

With all of the sturm, drang, disruption and depression in Cambridge last week after Donald Trump was elected President, I thought I’d retreat to upstate New York to commune with nature and art.

The nature went well,  but as it turned out, there was a shooting, probably gang-related, at Crossgates Mall, not far from my family home. There was news of hate crimes in New York  and elsewhere. And  I arrived at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College a few minutes too late for a community discussion of the election and its aftermath.

The discussion had been held beneath an installation called “Flag Exchange,”  comprised mainly of torn American flags. The flags collected as part of a multi-year project in which artist Mel Ziegler traveled across the US— offering new replacement flags for tattered ones flying at homes, post offices, businesses, and other public locations. The exhibit also included picnic tables painted red, white, and blue–all aimed at provocation and one would hope thoughtful dialogue on the current state of democracy.

After  accepting the gift of  a safety pin (the post-Trump election symbol of solidarity with those who have experienced racism, homophobia, xenophobia and such),  I did manage to escape somewhat into art in a wonderfully expansive  exhibit called “Six-fold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science,” curated by Skidmore faculty from a variety of disciplines.*

Among my favorite pieces were:

Drawing Memory, 2016, a wall-sized installation in which Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk (b. 1964) uses white chalk on black-painted background to evoke and build on his understanding of Nsibidi, an African art form used by the secret Ekpe, or (Leopard Society). Art history Professor Emeritus Lisa Aronson writes that while he remains an outsider to the society, Ekpuk’s work resembles the dense and crowded aesthetic of Nsibidi (which is  often played out on cloth) giving his viewers a complex display of imagery to decode. Ekpuk’s wall drawings mirror Nsibidi’s impermanent and performative nature, both in his preferred use of an erasable chalk medium and his practice of removing the murals from the wall at the end of exhibition.

First Family–Hexagon, 2010

Iranian born Monir Farmanfarmaian (b.1924) synthesizes Persian history and artistic traditions and western geometrical abstraction in her mirrored sculpture “Hexagon.” According to  Computer Science Professor Michael Eckman, the calculation and geometry of 14th century mosaics are closely tied to Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, and its sacred numerology. As Farmanfarmaian explains, “The six sides of the hexagon are the directions, forward, backward, right, left, up, down. The hexagon also reflects the six virtues: generosity, self-discipline, patience, determination, insight and compassion. All the mosques in Iran, with all the flowers and the leaves and the curves and so on are based on hexagons. For me, everything connects with the hexagon.”

 Arachna’s Arcade, 2008, by Providence, RI, sculptor Dean Snyder (b. 1955) is a “drawing in space,” of a spider web. Its  “silk” is composed of highly-polished steel–which makes the web appear almost photographic in that it transposes the outside garden into the Tang gallery, curator Rachel Seligman, associate professor of mathematics, points out.

Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture (Return to Formlessness), 2015  With use of color pencil, graphite and architectural stencils on antique ledger book pages, the intricate drawings of American artist Louise Despond (b. 1983) emerge  “organically”,  beginning with a few marks on paper but with no formal plan.  “Each drawing is a process of discovery, with a larger, universal force guiding the emerging patterns. This intuitive process generates imagery that is symmetrical, highly geometric and possessed of an expressive energy that she feels is connected both the spiritual realm and to nature,” Seligman writes.

Hours 1-8, 2016. In this series of oil paintings on linen, Grace DeGennera (b. 1956 ) “explores the ways we experience the passage of time.”  As  Roe-Dale points out, DeGennera uses “iteration”  to depict this movement, not unlike  the way in which mathematicians iterate a model (as Gravner and Griffeath did to generate their “snowfake”, described below). “Time that progresses discretely is visualized in her beads of pigment, suggesting a clock ticking …hour by hour,” Roe-Dale writes. “From afar, however, the series evokes the continuous unbroken flow of time from past to future, through the loosely brushed washes of color in the backgrounds, which reflect the shifting light as day turns into night.”

Bentley “photo” of real snowflake

Wilson Bentley’s “Snowflakes” are captured through novel
photomicrosopy techniques he developed  starting in 1885. Bentley (1865-1931) a farmer and amateur meteorologist, was the first to photograph a single snow crystal. According to Roe-Dale, Bentley’s work responds to the 1611 inquiry of  German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler’s  into the genesis of forms and to his theories about he origin of the intricate hexagonal pattern of the delicate snowflake structure.

Snowfake

Snowfakes
In 2016, Janka Gravner (b. Slovenia, 1960)  and David Griffeath (b. US, 1948)  used a mathematical model to computationally generate what they call “snowfakes.”. A goal was to investigate the formation of snow crystals and perhaps to advocate for the human ability to replicate natural, ordered beauty with deliberate, algorithmic design. According to Roe-Dale, Gravner and Griffeath used the methods of cellular automation to account for physical variables such as temperature, pressure and water vapor density in modelling the diffusive, freezing, attachment and melting actions of individual water molecules in a matrix of three dimensional space. They came up with more than 80 types of snowflake crystals generated by nature, thus providing insight into the form and design of ice and other crystalline solids.

*
Thomas Bansted’s “Last of the Dreadnaughts,” 2011-2012, (below) is  based on “Dazzle,” a pattern of disruption conceived by British artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917.  During World War I, Wilkinson commanded a unit in the Royal Academy, in which artists and students created bold patterns used on ships to make it difficult for submarines to predict boats’ paths or aim weapons.

In “Dreadnaughts,” Bangsted, (b. Denmark, 1976) created a series of large-scale digitally-assembled photographs of World War I ships.  Associate Art Professor Sarah  Sweeney writes that in his manipulations, Bangsted applies a Dazzle pattern that “highlights the incongruity of the ship with its background”–breaking up the form of the ship and concealing its identity.

As explained on the Tang Website, Patterns, systems, and networks are all around us, and in this digital age we are increasingly aware of their influence on our lived experience. This exhibition explores some of the ways in which human beings create and manipulate patterns, and why we are intrinsically driven to do so. Patterns allow us to understand and predict complex natural and cultural phenomena, and to create artworks and other structures of surprising complexity and unity.

Yet the exhibit also shows that in nature–as in snowflakes and spider webs–while amazing and beautiful patterns exist, no two creations  are exactly alike, and patterns are enhanced and enlivened by variation.

Given the current political situation, it strikes me that that much as we may crave the comfort and safety of ongoing patterns, we can also be bored by them. And that as inhabitants of the natural world we must expect–and find beauty despite– disruption in our lives.

I highly recommend the exhibit, which will be at the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York, until March 12, 2017.

*The exhibition was co-curated by Rachel Roe-Dale, Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs, Tang Museum, in collaboration with: Lisa Aronson, Professor Emeritus of Art History; Grace Burton, Associate Professor of Spanish; Michael Eckmann, Associate Professor of Computer Science; Rebecca Johnson, Associate Professor of Psychology; Elizabeth Macy, Visiting Professor of Music; Josh Ness, Associate Professor of Biology; Gregory Spinner, Teaching Professor in Religious Studies; and Sarah Sweeney, Associate Professor of Art. The exhibition is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Friends of the Tang.

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is an author, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. 

New Cambridge Observer is publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and digital marketing firm located in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

In early 1933, delegations of rank-and-file workers from all over Germany descended on the headquarters of the German Communist Party in Berlin. They were demanding that their leaders call a general strike to topple the newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. That tactic had worked in Russia, when the Bolsheviks organized a successful general strike to prevent the proto-Fascist general Kornilov from marching on the capital and overthrowing the liberal Kerensky government.

The Bolsheviks did not like Kerensky, but they knew that for them, Kornilov would be so much worse. German workers were familiar with Nazis and their brutality from their neighborhoods and workplaces, so they knew that Hitler in power would also be really bad news. To their amazement and dismay, the delegations met with only derisive dismissal. Hitler was nothing to worry about, their leaders told them. He would last no longer than any of his recent predecessors had. He would fall within weeks.

Hitler did not fall. During his first few months in office, he suspended the constitution, disbanded the parliament, imprisoned his political opponents, and forced all military officers to retake their oaths of office, this time to him personally, rather than to the constitution. The last of these became the primary impediment that prevented generals like Rommel from taking the action that they soon realized would be necessary until it was much too late.

Disgruntled Democrats and love-struck Republicans who still hold out hope that they can make a silk president out of a sow’s Trump are committing the same naïve blunder as those German Communists. They are thinking inside the proverbial box. The Fuhrer did not live inside that box, and neither does The Donald.

Hitler promised to “restore Germany to its proper place of glory among the nations.” He rose to power with the support of the SA, a private army of thugs and hooligans who reveled in the legitimacy they had suddenly acquired by being associated with a major political figure. Then, he bolstered his power with the support of the SS, a private army of disenfranchised young aristocrats who yearned to get back at least a semblance of the former titles and privileges they had lost as a result of Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Trump promises to “make America great again.” He is supported by dozens of armed militias and biker gangs waiting in the wings for their leader to call them to action. The Rolling Stones learned what havoc biker gangs can wreak, when they naively hired the Hell’s Angels to provide “security” for their music festival in 1969.  What they had intended to be the West Coast equivalent of Woodstock was turned instead into a fatal orgy of beating and stabbing. All it would take to deputize these thugs as an official SA/SS-type Presidential Guard, accountable only to Trump, would be an executive order.

Given Trump’s complaints that the election is being rigged against him, his declaration that he can lose only if the election is rigged, and his call to his followers to monitor polling venues in problematic neighborhoods on election day, we can expect to see action from these people even if he loses.

Hitler never received more than 40% of the vote the several times he ran for president, usually much less, but the man who defeated him eventually appointed him chancellor, because there was no one else left, and his storm troopers were causing so much trouble. Benito Mussolini, for whom Trump has expressed some admiration, became prime minister of Italy in a similar way. Even without Trump’s winning the presidency, try to imagine some future president having to appoint Trump secretary of state, defense, or treasury just to shut him up. (By the way, how will Trump’s “observers” know whether someone is “voting five times,” since for them, all of “those people” look alike?)

When reporters asked Al Gore what he intended to do after the Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush, he replied that he would do nothing, because the only recourse in our system to such a decision would be violent revolution, and that sort of thing did not interest him. Trump is not Gore. As he keeps reminding us about himself, “I do not lose.” His suggestion that potential Clinton judicial appointments might be neutralized by “the second amendment people” was not an assassination threat, nor was it sarcastic or a joke. It was a heads-up to his troops.

President Obama’s characterization of Trump as “unfit to do this job” was, characteristically, graciously understated. Trump’s recent behavior, most notably his attack on the Khan family and his claim that Obama was the founder of ISIS, has begun to resemble that of the Roman emperor, Caligula, even more than that of Hitler.

Roman Senate, Wikipedia, Public Domain

Roman emperors were nominally required to seek Senatorial approval for their decisions, but the Senate had long since become a rubber stamp. The U. S. Congress has a similar history of powerlessness in the face of certain kinds of presidential faits accomplis.

Harris S Truman http://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=2267 Credit: Frank Gatteri, United States Army Signal Corps

Harry Truman embarked on a major war entirely on his own, without receiving or even seeking the constitutionally mandated congressional declaration of war. Ronald Reagan violated the constitutional prohibition of granting special status to one religion over others by becoming the first U.S. president to appoint an ambassador to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

Would any president appoint an ambassador to the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston or the main Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City? In neither Truman’s nor Reagan’s case did anyone in Congress raise even a peep of objection out of fear of alienating important electoral constituencies. Constitutional requirements simply vanished without a whimper, let alone a constitutional amendment. With Trump in the White House, Congressional impotence will be complete, not so much because of electoral constituencies, even assuming that elections will still matter, but because of Trump’s militias.

Trump’s declaration that Hilary Clinton “is the devil” is similarly Caligulesque. Roman emperors typically looked forward to achieving godhood through an apotheosis that they expected to take place at their deaths. Caligula believed that he was already a god during his lifetime. In Trump’s case, if Clinton is the devil, and Trump is her nemesis, then Trump must be –– well, you figure it out.

Outside of the context of a presidential election, it might actually be amusing, in this connection, to take note of the fact that the Jewish Gematria  value for The Donald is 282, the same as the value for Satan (http://www.gematrix.org/), and that the value for Donald J. Trump is 1,189, the same as the value for both The Fool Is The Devil and The Destruction Of The Planet. (Wikipedia defines Gematria as “an  Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric code/cipher later adopted into Jewish culture that assigns numerical value to a word/name/phrase in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other or …to the number itself as it may apply to Nature, a person’s age, the calendar year, or the like.”)

To be fair, it must also be noted that the Gematria value for Hilary Rodham Clinton is 953, the same as the value for both Multitude Of Sins and Fraudulent Concealment, but it is definitely not the value of The Devil, which is 851. Bernie Sanders, by the way, scores 451, the value of As Dead as a Doornail. This is metaphorically accurate right now, but is likely to become literally true, if Trump gets presidential power.

Believers in reincarnation might find it significant that Trump was born just over a year (June 14, 1946) after Hitler committed the sin of suicide (April 30, 1945). Believers in the Book of Revelation might find this helpful in explaining why Trump has been making himself look increasingly like the most qualified candidate for Antichrist that the world has seen in seventy years.

Trump is correct, contra Clinton, that this country “is going to Hell.”

Who would be better to make that determination than Gematria 282? On the other hand, this is not the fault of immigrants, legal or illegal, but is more a result of the persistent efforts of people like Trump to avoid paying appropriate taxes. The seven billion dollars that Trump’s family alone would save from Trump’s proposed elimination of the estate tax would make a good down payment on his wall, or, lest we forget, toward rebuilding schools, hospitals, highways and bridges. These are, after all the aspects of the country that are indeed “going to Hell.”

Despite scoffers, Trump will certainly be able to build his wall, and he will be able to make Mexico pay for it. At least, he will start. All it will take is an executive order seizing all Mexican assets in the United States for what the president will have decided is an essential governmental purpose.

Trump has a history of getting away with invoking eminent domain for personal gain, and he has made it clear that he will run his political empire exactly as he has run his financial one.

Like Trump University, the wall will likely never be finished, because the money will run out, as a result of budget overruns and kickbacks for Trump-connected construction companies and Trump-appointed inspectors. Mexico will be no more able to prevent this seizure than Austria (or more recently Crimea) was to prevent the Anschluss. Any Supreme Court that would declare Trump’s action unconstitutional will likely have ceased to exist by the time it gets to hear the case. The United Nations might wring its hands and express its outrage, but it will be as helpless to do anything meaningful as the League of Nations was when Mussolini took Ethiopia.

By Goldwater for President 1964 – https://campaignrhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/goldwater.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50332089

Trump has been compared to Barry Goldwater, and there is some truth to that. Goldwater embraced the far-right John Birch Society, while Trump has accepted support from the Ku Klux Klan and recently appointed a modern-day equivalent of Joseph Goebbels as the CEO for his campaign. Hearing the head of The Trump Organization call the Clinton State Department “a criminal organization of pay to play,” just because she might have been overly gracious in thanking people for donating to a charity, would have brought an admiring smile of approval to the lips of the Nazi propaganda minister. It’s like Al Capone calling Eliot Ness a gangster, just because he might have inadvertently conducted a couple of wiretaps without a warrant.

On the other hand, Goldwater had a coherent political ideology that he remained more or less loyal to throughout his political career. Hitler also had a consistent lifelong ideology, but without the deep commitment to constitutionality that Goldwater professed, replacing it with “the will of the leader” as the source of legal legitimacy. Trump has shown no ideological consistency whatsoever, as shown by his recent apparent about-face-(but-not-really) on immigration just because his poll numbers were down, and he has expressed his contempt for any kind of “tradition” in favor of his own narcissistic notion of what he calls “common sense” as his sole guiding principle. In other words, Trump is loyal to nothing but Trump. As the proverbial twentieth-century General Motors executive might say now, “What’s good for Trump is good for Trump. Forget the USA.”

Putin on a bike

Consider Trump’s alleged on-again off-again “relationship” with Vladimir Putin. Trump was confidently asserting that Clinton’s emails had been hacked well before it was officially revealed that they had indeed been hacked by the Russians. How could he have known? Bush said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. John McCain said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen three letters, K-G-B. When Trump looks into Putin’s eyes, or anyone else’s, he sees only dollar signs.  It would not be beyond the limits of a Trump-type deal to trade U. S. membership in NATO for a string of Trump golf courses across Russia. Business is business. Trump’s daughter recently vacationed in Croatia with Putin’s girlfriend. Perhaps, it was just a social visit.

Nobody took Hitler seriously when he wrote in Mein Kampf that he would like to gas thousands of Jews. How could this have been anything but rhetoric? Trump shrugs and smiles when his supporters yell out at rallies or tell interviewers that Clinton and other current government officials should be imprisoned or killed. He says he wants to keep Muslims and Mexicans out of the country, and that those who are already here are criminals and terrorists. What does one do when one has large populations of criminals and terrorists, too many to deport,  a mostly built wall that can help to keep them from leaving voluntarily, and a “deportation force” of armed hooligans eager to kick butt?

Trump says he will reinstate water boarding and worse, because “torture works.” His recently former top campaign aide lobbied for foreign torturers for decades, most notably the pro-Putin former president of Ukraine. And then there is the admiration that Trump has expressed toward the mafia. Like torturers, “They get things done.” Based on his professed values and his actual business practices, in fact, Trump has shown himself to be not a businessman, but a gangster, Whitey Bulger in a suit. Bulger would have sent his thugs after the Khans. Trump is polished just enough to have realized that at least for now, he had to settle for insults and insinuations. Trump is what Bulger would have become, if he had inherited $40 million.

Clinton, of course, is everything the pre-endorsement Sanders said she is. A Clinton presidency would indeed be business as usual, with emphasis on both business and, in contrast to Trump, as usual. However, she is no more hypocritical than, say, McCain, who owns six mansions, but despite his war-hero status, refuses, like Trump, to pay his fair share of taxes to fund a war that he vehemently promotes. It is to Clinton’s credit, and it is not insignificant in this election, that she has never encouraged anyone to call her The Hilary.

Forget about Clinton’s emails, which would have been just as insecure on a government server as on her own, since anything on the network can be hacked, and just for the moment, put Benghazi aside as well. Of course, she lied.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas

So did Republican president and war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he assured the American people on national television in 1959 that the United States did not send spy planes over the Soviet Union. That was exposed as a lie the very next day, when the Soviets showed captured American spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers on their national television, thereby setting the stage for the anti-“establishment” cynicism of the 1960s. The idea that a president would lie to the public was still shocking to many people in those pre-Ellsberg, pre-Nixon days, but surely not today.

Rare indeed is the politician (or businessman, or parent, or spouse) who can get through life without ever telling a lie. However, most politicians are not pathological liars and compulsive career conmen who cannot distinguish true from false or right from wrong, the legal definition of insanity. In regard to credibility and trustworthiness, does a presidential candidate who refuses to release his tax forms, even though the IRS has said it would be okay, have the right to cast a stone?

The general strike that didn’t happen was the last chance the world had to prevent World War II, the Holocaust, and the need to invent nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The last chance the world will have to stop Trump and his consequences, if he wins the election, will be the moment after Mike Pence is sworn in as vice-president.

What a wonder it would be to behold, the entire United States Supreme Court going on strike, because they cannot in good conscience administer the oath of office to a lunatic. The justices are sworn, after all, to protect the constitution against its enemies, foreign and domestic, in whatever form they might appear. No one else is empowered to administer the presidential oath. Technically, Obama might still be president, but temperamentally, like Gore, he would be unlikely to press that claim in such a circumstance, nor is anyone who matters likely to take him seriously, if he did. Conservatives would actually get one of their own as president, and everyone else could breathe a sigh of relief that for at least another four years, there would be no mushroom cloud. The ongoing need to deal with Trump’s storm troopers would perhaps be one thing the two parties can agree on, and that would at least be a start.

Of course, all of the pieces would have to fall into place for this scenario to work out. A simpler and less risky path for Republicans, as some seem to have begun to realize,  would be simply to let or even help Clinton win and then work to control her from Congress, as they have been doing more or less successfully with Obama. Taking everything into account, they will never be able to do that with Trump.

Given his enormous wealth, the demonstrated competence of his friend Putin’s hackers, and the apparent persistent willingness of top Republican leaders to put up with anything from Trump as long as he promises them tax cuts, Trump can actually win this election, regardless of what the polls might tell us. If he does win, and if he actually gets to hold office, hold on to your hat. The rollercoaster will be out of control and, “Believe me,” as in 1933, things will begin happening “fast.”

Trump recently told a largely white audience, aiming his question at the few black people there, that “58% of your youth are unemployed. And asked, “What do you have to lose?” The obvious answer, of course, is “the other 42%.”

Sure, you can’t trust Clinton to tell you the truth about everything she does. Of course, not.  However, in contrast to Trump, you definitely can trust her not to fly off the handle  and launch nuclear missiles in a fit of pique, just because some two-bit mini-Trump in some other country has made some offhand remark that she’s decided to consider insulting.

If you are one of those people who are still considering joining the ranks of those German Communists in repeating a world-historical blunder that you might not live long enough to know you should regret, then ask yourself three questions. Would you entrust Bernie Madoff with the password to your bank account? Would you entrust Bill Clinton with the keys to your teen-age daughter’s bedroom? Do you really want to entrust the likes of Donald Trump with the keys to the nation’s nuclear codes? Then, in Trump’s words, let “common sense” prevail, and as Ted Cruz said at the Republican convention, vote your conscience.

Steven Cushing

Guest author Steven Cushing is an internationally respected writer, consultant and educator on language, logic, and communication. His many publications include Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes, “Critique of Puerile Reason: A Pragmatic Look at J. P. Moreland’s The Creation Hypothesis,” and How You and Your Computer Think Alike–and Don’t: An Exploration into the Nature of Mind. Like Bernie Sanders, he is a veteran of many of the progressive struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s, and he has also contributed to numerous government-sponsored projects involving most notably civil defense, aviation safety, computer security, and cryptography. He currently teaches in Cambridge, MA and can be reached most readily at stevencushing@alum.mit.edu. 

His views do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.

MIT, Convergence Idea Challenge

For the  last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work on an amazing national report about the Convergence of technologies in the life sciences. The goal of the report–which will be launched this coming Friday at the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, DC– is to encourage  increased  funding for engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and information technologists for work in health and life science fields.  More on the report and Convergence later this week.

For now, I want to let you know that Nobel Prize winning scientist Phil Sharp of the MIT Koch Institute  has offered a $3000 award for the best Convergence idea submitted by students across the US–and that the public is invited to help choose  a second, $1000 “community” winner—-by “liking”  ideas submitted via on Facebook.  The goal is to challenge  emerging researchers to combine the life/physical sciences, information technology, social sciences, and engineering to improve human health.The voting deadline is 6 pm on Thursday, June 23, 2016.

Here’s a list of the submissions–which come from researchers across the US.  More info on each idea–and “like” options– are available at https://www.facebook.com/ConvergenceIdeas/

• Hex House; a rapidly deployable, dignified home
• A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Tackling Childhood Poverty
• Biomarkers and Neural Circuits Underlying Resilience to Stress
• Neuroprosthetics in Nerve Reanimation: Implantation of Intraneural Building
• Beyond Biology Breast milk – mine of potential therapies
• Getting VacSeen-ated Mobile Screening and Diagnostics
• Engineering Pro-Regenerative Immunotherapies
• Empowering HIV-positive Youth in Swaziland, Africa: A Novel Digital Mentorship Experience
• Development of minimally invasive assessment of placenta across gestation
• An Epidemiological Cellular Automata Model of Gun Violence
• Transforming Clinical Data Into Field-Deployable Medical Apps
• Engineering a Flexible Organic Photovoltaic Cell as an Artificial Retina to Restore Sight: A Promising Vision in Bio-nanoelectronics
• Accelerating translation from bio-discovery to engineered applications by single cell niche sequencing
• Using Nature’s Fundamental Choice Against it
• Drinking Water Health – Intermittent Water Supply in Developing Countries
• “Brain train” – optogenetic cognitive-conditioning for neuropsychiatric disorders
• Sparsh- Sleeping Bag
• Quantified ethology decreases time to diagnosis of infection
• Interlocking culture system for resolvable three-dimensional cell arrangements
• A New Treatment for Depression through Modification of Semantic Networks in the Brain Using a Computer Game

–Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a marketing and communications firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

An Open Secret

The documentary movie “An Open Secret” does a wonderful job of exposing the sexual abuse of children in Hollywood. But you’ll probably never see it– not because of the difficult subject matter, but because almost no commercial theaters are willing to screen the film.

Written by  Amy Berg, Lorien Hayes and Billy McMillin and directed by Berg, the 2014 film shows that abuse of child actors is pervasive in Hollywood and that most people in the industry know about it. Either they’ve been personally touched by it (pun intended) or know someone who has been. Many powerful people in Hollywood who could ruin the careers of anyone who pushes for justice on this issue are involved.

I applaud the subjects who were willing to share their painful stories and especially the teenager who actually went to court against his agent/abuser. The abuser got only six months in jail and is still in the industry despite solid proof of the exploitation.

Questions:
It’s a big story, so why isn’t anyone willing to distribute the film? Why has it been pulled from film festivals?  Why after seeing the film have network executives refused to have the film on their networks? Why did the Screen Actor’s Guild unsuccessfully sue the filmmakers after seeing the film in which the head of their Young Performers Committee was implicated in the scandal?

Answer:

The topic is too hot to handle and hits too close to home.

Who can speak out for the innocent victims? In “Spotlight”, Hollywood is happy to pay homage to the reporters who uncovered sex abuse in the Catholic Church a number of years ago, but unwilling to acknowledge it in their midst.

In the past, I’ve attributed problems of child actors to their inability to handle fame and fortune and an acquired sense of entitlement. Now I wonder whether their spiraling out of control has far more nefarious roots.

I thank the Boston Globe for sponsoring the screening of this movie in its documentary series along with a Q&A session with the producer. I wish that others had the courage to take on this difficult topic and not bow to the powerful perpetrators, but who’s to take up the mantle? Newspapers are too financially strapped to take on such financially powerful interests so others such as documentary filmmakers or even comedians (like those who exposed Bill Cosby) need to raise our awareness and lead us to take action.

See the movie if you can and be outraged by the subject matter (child sexual abuse) and by the story behind the story (the unwillingness to deal with the “open secret”).

–-Sheila Green