Books on the topic 'Sharp bounds'

This chapter considers the sharp Weyl formula using the tools provided in the previous chapter. It attempts to prove the sharp Weyl formula which says that there is a constant c, depending on (M,g) in a natural way, so that N(λ‎) = cλ‎ⁿ + O(λ‎superscript n minus 1). The chapter then details the sup-norm estimates for eigenfunctions and spectral clusters. Next, this chapter proves the sharp Weyl formula and in doing so, outlines a number of theorems, the first of which the chapter focuses on in establishing its sharpness and in obtaining improved bounds for its Weyl formula's error term. Finally, the chapter shows that improved bounds are also available for the remainder term in the Weyl formula when (M,g) has nonpositive sectional curvature.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book exposes Andrew Jackson’s failure to honor and enforce federal laws and treaties protecting Indian rights, describing how the Indian policies of “Old Hickory” were those of a racist imperialist, in stark contrast to how his followers characterized him, believing him to be a champion of democracy. Early in his career as an Indian fighter, American Indians gave Andrew Jackson a name—Sharp Knife—that evoked their sense of his ruthlessness and cruelty. Contrary to popular belief—and to many textbook accounts—in 1830, Congress did not authorize the forcible seizure of Indian land and the deportation of the legal owners of that land. In actuality, U.S. President Andrew Jackson violated the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, choosing to believe that he was not bound to protect Native Indian individuals’ rights. Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians draws heavily on Jackson’s own writings to document his life and give readers sharp insight into the nature of racism in ante-bellum America. Noted historian Alfred Cave’s latest book takes readers into the life of Andrew Jackson, paying particular attention to his interactions with Native American peoples as a militia general, treaty negotiator, and finally as president of the United States. Cave clearly depicts the many ways in which Jackson’s various dishonorable actions and often illegal means undermined the political and economic rights that were supposed to be guaranteed under numerous treaties. Jackson’s own economic interests as a land speculator and slave holder are carefully documented, exposing the hollowness of claims that “Old Hickory” was the champion of “the common man.”

This commentary analyses Article 11.1.1 of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) concerning definitions related to the plurality of obligors in a contractual setting. Art 11.1.1 defines two forms of plurality of obligors, joint and several obligations and separate obligations, but does not say under which circumstances they arise. According to this article, when several obligors are bound by the same obligation towards an obligee, the obligations are joint and several when each obligor is bound for the whole obligation; the obligations are separate when each obligor is bound only for its share. The PICC therefore appear to assume that, in principle, a plurality of contractual obligors produces either joint and several, or separate obligations. This commentary discusses the requirements for the plurality of obligors, joint and several obligations, separate obligations, and types of plurality not mentioned in Article 11.1.1, namely indivisible obligations, communal obligations, and accessory obligations.

This chapter uses an example to demonstrate the steps of specifying, calibrating, solving, and simulating a macroeconomic model in order to evaluate alternative policies for reducing domestic public debt. It extends the simple closed-economy New Keynesian model by incorporating the zero lower bound and asymmetric wage adjustment (in which wages are much more rigid in the downward direction). We examine the dynamics of adjustment, given a sharp increase in government debt due to a once-only big increase in spending. We find that selective tax-rate rules, incorporating a degree of tax relief in a period of fiscal consolidation, are effective instruments for rapidly reducing the overhang of a large stock of public debt.

The “Corner for Everybody” is a section of letters from readers, which appeared in Ameryka-Echo between 1922 and 1969. This chapter focuses on the “Corner” as a section which bound the readers into a community. The “Corner” offered them a sense of belonging and provided them with a safe space to share ideas and engage in the public conversation about all they found significant in their lives. In the process, the boundaries between public and private became blurred and the readers often established among themselves relationships that were personal, emotional, and long-lasting, and sometimes even extended beyond the pages of the newspaper.

Designing for Democracy addresses the question of how to “fix” digital technologies for democracy by examining how the design of the built environment (whether streets, sidewalks, or social media platforms) informs how, and whether, citizens can engage in democratic practices. “Democratic spaces”—built environments that support democratic politics—must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Each corresponds to a necessary democratic practice. Clearly bounded spaces make it easier to recognize what we share and with whom we share; they help us form communities. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to the communities they house and the other members within them; they help us sustain communities. And flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habits required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. These three practices—recognition, attachment, and experimentalism—are the affordances a built environment must provide in order to be a “democratic space”; they are the criteria to which designers and users should be attentive when building and inhabiting the spaces of the built environment, both physical and digital. Using this theoretical framework, Designing for Democracy provides new insights into the democratic potential of digital technologies. Through extended discussions of examples like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, it suggests architectural responses to problems often associated with digital technologies—loose networks, the “personalization of politics,” and “echo chambers.” In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing Democracy provides blueprints for democracy in a digital age.

Calligraphy and painting have a long and rich history of association with literary composition, especially poetry. These three “arts of the brush” share not just materials and tools of production but also a critical vocabulary and certain aesthetic ideals. The pronounced attention in the early history of each art to the world of nature as a source of verbal imagery, subject matter, and even graphic design bound these arts together in the formative stage of theoretical writings about each. As the practice of these arts matured in medieval times, it became common for them to appear together in a single, composite work: a painting inscribed with a poem, written as a calligraphic display. This composite form became a hallmark of Chinese visual and literary culture. Thus even when they were used separately, the aesthetic values of the others often remained in the minds of the poet-artist and reader or viewer.

This chapter discusses the communicative and coordinative role and importance to moral practices of the moral sentiments. A clear understanding of this role enables one to explain why people share responsibility for their moral practices and why changing these practices is a collective enterprise. The chapter thereby affirms the importance of tokens of appraisal regardless of how one answers the question whether, in one sense or another, one deserves them. The chapter elaborates upon two aspects of the practices of moral responsibility: (1) people are enabled to develop certain agential capacities, and (2) they are able to codetermine, consolidate, and fine-tune their normative expectations of one another. Several compatibilist philosophers have observed the first aspect. The second, however, has not received enough attention. This second aspect explains why and in what respect changing and improving one’s everyday practices is bound to be a difficult, painstaking, and above all collective enterprise.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the European project. Almost half a century ago, European nations began exploring the idea of a single currency: the Euro—the single currency shared by nineteen European nations. However, in giving up their national currencies, Eurozone members lost important policy levers. This basic flaw creates acute difficulties as countries that share the currency diverge from each other. Moreover, it is on the nature of the single currency that once member economies begin to diverge from each other, the common interest rate will cause the divergence to increase. Thus, although they described the project in grand terms, Europeans set about creating an “incomplete monetary union,” one that had a common monetary policy but lacked the fiscal safeguards to dampen booms and recessions. Within this incomplete structure, conflicts on the conduct of monetary and fiscal policy were bound to rise.

This article introduces three arguments that share a single conclusion: that a comprehensive science of language cannot (and should not try to) describe relations of semantic reference, i.e. word–world relations. Spelling this out, if there is to be a genuine science of linguistic meaning (yielding theoretical insight into underlying realities, aiming for integration with other natural sciences), then a theory of meaning cannot involve assigning external, real-world, objects to names, nor sets of external objects to predicates, nor truth values (or world-bound thoughts) to sentences. Most of the article tries to explain and defend this broad conclusion. The article also presents, in a very limited way, a positive alternative to external-referent semantics for expressions. This alternative has two parts: first, that the meanings of words and sentences are mental instructions, not external things; second, that it is people who refer (and who express thoughts) by using words and sentences, and word/sentence meanings play but a partial role in allowing speakers to talk about the world.

The task of Chapter 9 is to outline the vista beyond the Vattelian imaginary of sovereign equality. Instead of embracing one of its already existing alternatives, this chapter confronts the wagers, the assumptions, and the commitments that separate the most influential, but thus far mutually indifferent, five; but also a set of more basic images that they continue to share with the Vattelian imaginary even as they insist they have left it behind. One of the important tasks of these images, as this chapter hopes to show, is reconciliation—between infinite responsiveness and bounded power, between asymptotic orientation and situational equilibrium, between spatial scale and temporal pace, between the stability of structures and the dignity of transformations. To move beyond in this context is to ask: Can those pairs be reconciled differently? And more importantly: what for?

Autism is a deeply contested condition. To some, it is a devastating invader, robbing families of their children and sufferers of their personhood. To others, it is a form of neurodiversity, a fundamental and often valued aspect of identity that is more similar to race or gender than to disease states. How do young people coming of age with an autism spectrum diagnosis make sense of this conflict in the context of their own developing identity? The book addresses this question through sustained ethnographic engagement, informed by both clinical psychology and anthropology, within communities where people on the autism spectrum come together to live, learn, work, love, and play. Using an approach known as clinical ethnography, the book tracks neuroscientific discourses as they are adopted, circulated, and transformed among those affected by Asperger’s syndrome and related autism spectrum conditions. Dominant ways of talking about autism, whether as invasive disease or as hardwired neurogenetic identity, share a fundamental presupposition: that the healthy self is sharply bounded and destroyed if it is altered. However, the subjective experiences of youth on the spectrum exceed the limitations of these medical models. Reaching beyond medicine for their narratives of difference and disorder, these youth draw instead on shared mythologies from popular culture and speculative fiction to conceptualize their experiences of discontinuous and permeable personhood. In doing so, they also pioneer more inclusive understandings of what makes us who we are.

Management as we know it has been the driver of business growth in U.S. economies for a couple of centuries. Yet the practice of management is no longer focused on creating real value. Instead, it is now all about using sophisticated financial techniques-and practices like outsourcing and downsizing, among others—to improve profitability. Such addition through subtraction results in higher profits in the short term but puts the corporation and its employees at risk in the long term—not to mention the entire U.S. economy. Innovation and productivity improvement, corporate manager Jack Buffington argues, are lost arts in American business. So is getting back to basics the answer? Buffington's provocative thesis: Management as we know it probably can't be repaired. It must be replaced. Asian economies, meanwhile, are growing by leaps and bounds thanks in part to short-term, ill-advised decisions made by U.S. managers. Local companies and divisions of multinational organizations in emerging countries are on track to eventually overtake those of the West, putting our job base and prosperity at peril. If we want to bring manufacturing jobs back here to the U.S., corporate managers must seek productivity and innovation improvements in U.S. operations. Jack Buffington knows all too well how quickly things can go downhill for U.S. businesses. Turned into a relentless cost-cutter by the forces of globalization and Wall Street's expectations for short-term gains, he—like thousands of other U.S. executives—has watched some of the companies he's worked for disappear for want of real value. Whereas America once prized managers who displayed skill in optimizing the interplay of capital, labor, and technology to grow a company, today's professional manager is rewarded more often for being a cost cutter than an innovator. Fortunately, this book not only outlines the problem, it outlines the solution as well by establishing a 21st-century definition of management that will succeed in today's global economy. Rather than angling to produce a penny more of earnings per share to please the financiers, corporate managers will see once again how to use their ingenuity to produce products, services, and business processes that not only provide generous profits but sustain a business—and its jobs—for years to come. By heeding Buffington's call, the U.S. can rekindle its zeal for innovation, leading to an era in which consumers, workers, investors, and managers all prosper.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.