Warne and Jayawardene Tutorial on Bowling Spin and Batting against Spin

Warne and Jayawardene on Bowling and Battling Spin

7 ways to tell if you’re heading for divorce

Krystal Woodbridge in The Guardian


‘When one person is stonewalling, the person being stonewalled may try to trigger a row in order to get a reaction’ (photograph posed by models). Photograph: JackF/Getty Images/iStockphoto




Problems such as stresses brought on by circumstances (new job, moving, living somewhere too small, a new addition to the family, etc) are often fairly easy to address and work on. They are usually a blip unless they are ignored and turn into some of the bigger things below. None of the things listed mean your relationship is heading for divorce unless one, or both of you, are not prepared to work on it, either because one of you no longer wants the relationship to work, or can’t admit anything is wrong. While you are both still committed to making it work, there is always hope.

My wife keeps saying 'No sex tonight': the spreadsheet that lays it all bare



Not having enough sex. This does not mean you need to head to the divorce courts. It’s the mismatch that matters. If you want more, or less, sex than your partner, that can cause problems. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what anyone else does or doesn’t do, it’s what works for you as a couple. Unless there’s an underlying psychosexual or medical reason, a lack of sex is usually a symptom of a deeper relationship problem rather than the issue itself.

Spending time together. Date nights are not necessary unless you want them to be. But not having them does not mean your relationship is doomed. However, if we replace “date nights” with “spending time together”, that is important. It can be going for a walk, watching a film or cooking together. What it does is say “I’m making you a priority”. Otherwise there is a risk of disconnection. If you don’t make time for each other, you can’t know what’s going on with your partner and without that there will eventually be a loss of intimacy. What make you a romantic, rather than a purely functional couple, is being emotionally intimate.

Appreciation and gratitude. These are really important and if they go (or were never there in the first place) this can start to lead to one of the four bigger warning signs below. It’s not about the grand gesture, but small, everyday signs of appreciation. Saying, “I really appreciate how hard you are working for the family,” or even just doing things like making someone a cup of tea. However, in couples therapy there are the Gottman Institute’s “four horsemen of the apocalypse” signs, which are good to know about and look for. These are warning signs that we would look for in therapy that may signal a relationship where the problems go a little deeper and is in trouble, unless the couple are prepared to recognise and work on these areas.

Criticism. If you or your partner criticise each other habitually, you are attacking their personality. Over time, this will breed resentment. If one person is constantly criticising the other partner this can become a huge problem.

Contempt. This is the hardest to work with but not impossible as long as it’s named, recognised and both of you are prepared to work on it. But if one consistently looks down on their partner, is dismissive, constantly rolling their eyes at what the other says, mocks them, is sarcastic (and not in jest) or sneers at their partner, then they are seeing them as “less than”. Contempt can closely follow behind loss of respect.

Defensiveness. If you can’t talk to one another because one or both of you are defensive, this can be a problem because you won’t be listening to one another’s point of view and, over time, you will switch off. Communication is key to working on any relationship problem – without that you can’t get anywhere. Defensiveness can lead to “blame tennis” where each person is just lashing out in defence: “You did this.” “Yes, but you did this.” You’re indignant and everything is a battle. You’re so busy defending yourself that nothing gets resolved. If you can stop, get some perspective and give each other space and time to talk and listen, you have a hope of sorting this out.

Stonewalling. This is when one person retreats, won’t talk, and will block the other person. It usually happens if the person stonewalling doesn’t want to hear what’s being said, either because they are afraid of it or can’t deal with it, or both. This can result in the person being stonewalled desperately trying to talk to the other; they may even try to trigger a row to get the stonewaller to react and talk. It results in an awful atmosphere and can eventually make the person being stonewalled too afraid to have any sort of discussion because they are afraid of the silent treatment. This then shuts down any hope of communication and reconciliation.

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Buddha in a Traffic Jam

Don’t fall for the new hopelessness. We still have the power to bring change

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian

 

After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: ‘You don’t start worrying about apocalypse.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock


A friend posts a picture of a baby. A beautiful baby. A child is brought into the world, this world, and I like it on Facebook because I like it in real life. If anything can be an unreservedly good thing it is a baby. But no ... someone else says to me, while airily discussing how terrible everything is: “I don’t know why anyone would have a child now.” As though any child was ever born of reason. I wonder at their mental state, but soon read that a war between the superpowers is likely. The doom and gloom begins to get to me. There is no sealant against the dread, the constant drip of the talk of end times.
I stay up into the small hours watching the footage of triumphant white nationalists sieg-heiling with excited hesitancy. My dreams are contaminated – at the edge of them, Trump roams the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. But then I wake up and think: “Enough.” Enough of this competitive hopelessness.

Loss is loss. Our side has taken some heavy hits, the bad guys are in charge. Some take solace in the fact that the bad guys don’t know what they are doing: Farage, Trump, Johnson, Ukip donor Arron Banks, wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. One of the “liberal” values that has been overturned is apparently basic respect for knowledge. Wilful ignorance and inadequacy is now lauded as authenticity.

However, the biggest casualty for my generation is the idea that progress is linear. Things really would get better and better, we said; the world would somehow by itself become more open, equal, tolerant, as though everything would evolve in our own self-image. Long before Brexit or the US election, it was clear that this was not the case. I have often written about the way younger generations have had more and more stripped away from them: access to education, jobs and housing. Things have not been getting better and they know that inequality has solidified. Materially, they are suffering, but culturally and demographically the resistance to authoritarian populism, or whatever we want to call this movement of men old before their time, will come from the young. It will come also from the many for whom racism or sexism in society is nothing new.

Resistance can’t come personally or politically from the abject pessimism that prevails now. Of course, anger, despair, denial are all stages of grief, and the joys of nihilism are infinite. I am relieved that we are all going to die in a solar flare, anyway, but until then pessimism replayed as easy cynicism and inertia is not going to get us anywhere. The relentless wallowing in every detail of Trump or Farage’s infinite idiocy is drowning, not waving. The oft-repeated idea that history is a loop and that this is a replay of the1930s induces nothing but terror. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. That is why we learn history.

I am not asking for false optimism here, but a way to exist in the world that does not lead to feelings of absolute powerlessness. A mass retreat into the internal, small sphere of the domestic, the redecoration of one’s own safe space, is understandable, but so much of what has happened has been just this abandonment of any shared or civic space. It is absolutely to the advantage of these far-right scaremongers that we stay in our little boxes, fearing “the streets”, fearing difference, seeing danger everywhere.

Thinking for ourselves is, to use a bad word, empowering. It also demands that we give up some of the ridiculous binaries of the left. The choice between class politics and identity politics is a false one. All politics is identity politics. It is clear that economic and cultural marginalisation intertwine and that they often produce a rejection of basic modernity. Economic anxiety manifests in a longing for a time when everything was in its place and certain. But the energy of youth disrupts this immediately, as many young people are born into a modernity that does not accept that everything is fixed, whether that is sexuality or a job for life. Telling them: “We are all doomed” says something about the passivity of my generation, not theirs.

The historian and activist Howard Zinn said in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: it reproduces by crippling our willingness to act.”

Indeed. Campaigning for reproductive rights isn’t something that suddenly has to be done because of Trump. It always has to be done. LGBT people did not “win”. The great fault line of race has been exposed, but it was never just theoretical. The idea that any of these struggles were over could be maintained only if you were not involved in them.

After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: “You don’t get into a foetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say: ‘OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.’”

Where can you push to keep it moving forward? Locally? Globally? Get out of that foetal position. Look at some cats online if it helps. We render those in power even more powerful if we act as though everything is a done deal. Take back control.

Whatever you think of him, Donald Trump is right on TPP and TTIP

Youssef El-Gingihy in The Independent

In a YouTube video of policy proposals released this week, President-elect Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This trade agreement encompasses the major economies of the Pacific Rim with the notable exclusion of China. Other policies included a hodge-podge of climate change denial through promoting fracking and coal, deregulation, infrastructure spending and measures against corporate lobbying.

There are mounting concerns about xenophobia following Trump's victory. The appointments of Breitbart's Stephen Bannon as chief strategist, the anti-immigration Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Mike Pompeo as CIA director (in favour of bulk data collection) and General Michael Flynn as national security advisor would appear to reinforce Trump's targeting of Hispanics, Muslims and other minorities.

Yet amid all this soul-searching, the key question liberals should be asking is why authoritarian nationalism is spreading across the West. The answer is relatively simple. Neoliberal globalisation has left millions behind both in the advanced economies and the global south over several decades. Wealth has been siphoned to the top. The economic fallout post-2008 has seen inequality widening, with many falling into poverty. The effects of austerity on southern Europe are a social catastrophe.

The liberal and social democratic parties previously representing working-class constituents have abandoned them and are captured by corporate power. The Democratic party under the Clintons and Obama as well as New Labour under Blair and Brown were emblematic of this process. The result has seen millions of voters turn to candidates positioning themselves as anti-establishment. Hence the success of the SNP, Ukip, Brexit and now Trump.

Free trade agreements are at the heart of the matter. Negotiations have taken place behind closed doors with corporate lobbyists. Transparency has been minimal. It is exactly this kind of undemocratic, technocratic managerialism which is prompting a backlash against elites. It is the same technocratic managerialism that saw the troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF impose unrelenting misery on southern Europe, rendering Greece as expendable. The troika even issued memoranda to be rubber-stamped by national parliaments.

Both the EU-US trade agreement, or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are sold as reducing barriers to trade through harmonisation of regulations thus increasing growth. But harmonisation effectively means a race to the bottom with the lowest common denominator regulations being adopted. In fact, there are not many barriers left and the question is more of how growth is distributed. It is now clear that trickle-down economics is a myth.

Trump has stated that he is against TTIP and TPP, and may even reverse the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Many people do not understand what these trade agreements mean so let me spell it out. They promote trade liberalisation. This essentially means opening up public services to corporate takeover. They would likely make public or state ownership difficult. They would restrict the financial tools available to countries to regulate banks. They would also limit their ability to impose capital controls.

They would lock in privatisation through Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses. This means that multinational corporations could sue governments if they took steps that harm their profits or even the future expectation of profits. This would take place through private, secretive courts rather than the normal law courts. In fact, precedents have already seen tens of countries sued by corporations for measures taken in the public interest.

The NHS is a good example. It is currently being privatised, paving the way for a private health insurance system. TTIP would mean that if a future UK government took steps to reverse this then they might well be sued. In effect, this acts as a deterrent against government actions harming corporate interests. This would apply not just to healthcare but to all public services, from education and broadcasters such as the BBC to public transport and utilities.

These trade agreements would also enforce enclosure of the commons through intellectual property rights. So drug patents would be extended to combat cheaper generic medicines. Patenting of the human genome would be enforced. Farmers might have to buy seeds from corporations. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a dystopian world to me.

Neoliberal globalisation is not some irresistible force of nature. Economic protectionism may not exactly be progressive but the current status quo of wage stagnation and falling living standards is unsustainable. If steps are not taken to remedy the damaging effects of neoliberalism then the backlash will only intensify, likely leading to rising nationalism, fascism and global conflict.

White fragility, white fear: the crisis of racial identity

Marcus Woolombi Waters in The Guardian

With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.

Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.

Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.

Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.

White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.

Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.

In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.

Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.

Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.

Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.

Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.

As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.

It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.

As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.

Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.

The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”

In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.

'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians



And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.

As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”

They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.

As a judge, I can see the racism embedded in the system

Peter Herbert in The Guardian

Britain often claims to possess the finest justice system in the world, with a “colour blind” approach to the law. Unfortunately, this isn’t true: justice is neither colour blind, nor is it equal.

Historically, the justice system has been used to legitimise slavery, and then colonialism, from Elizabethan England onwards. In Kenya, between 1951 and 1954, during the Mau Mau uprising, more than 1,090 Kenyans were executed by the British colonial judiciary, backed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This appalling figure represents the most liberal use of the death penalty in British legal history and is double the number of those executed by the French during the war of liberation in Algeria 10 years later.

In more recent times, judges have enforced the unjust “sus” laws (the informal name used for stop-and-search laws which still disproportionately affect BME people). It can be argued that racism is embedded in the DNA of the British judiciary and that it has proved uniquely resilient to education or training.

But to what extent is racism present in the system today? A study headed by David Lammy MP, published last week, makes for very disturbing reading.

In 1991, statistics regarding how differently BME and white suspects were dealt with in the criminal justice system helped to trigger race training for all full-time judges over a five-year period. Those statistics have not improved. If you are an African-Caribbean man you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white; you are also likely to obtain a custodial sentence of 24 months compared to your white counterpart’s 17 months. This is not because African-Caribbean men commit more serious offences than their white counterparts – these are punishments handed down for the same or similar offences. African-Caribbean men are also subject to receiving immediate custodial sentences with fewer previous convictions than their white counterparts. Our perceptions have become the reality that means 41% of all young people in detention are now from BME communities.


If you are African-Caribbean you are 16% more likely to be remanded in custody than if you are white

What is critical is that the report highlights, yet again, the fundamental racist disparities in the dispensation, administration and dissemination of justice. There is a crisis of both trust and confidence in the British judicial system among black communities. Their concerns are that it remains arbitrary, inconsistent and discriminatory. This interim report proves them right – despite its diplomatic language.

Of course, poverty, homelessness and drug addiction all play their part, as does the disproportionate influence of an institutionally racist police culture, which means black defendants are stopped and searched seven times more often than their white counterparts. This is despite falling stop-and-search figures, and falling crime generally.

A significant responsibility for this disparity of treatment still lies with an overwhelmingly white, middle class and male magistracy and judiciary, resistant to ethnic monitoring, which hides behind the fallacy that justice is “colour blind and impartial”.

We cannot expect to have a diverse judiciary and magistracy, and to recruit police officers, probation officers, prison officers and lawyers who look like us and are knowledgeable of our communities, if we are forced to operate in a system that is itself unwilling or unable to deliver justice equally to all. As Martin Luther King said, “It is not possible to be in favour of justice for some people and not to be in favour of justice for all people.”

At present, out of 161 members of the high court judiciary, there is not a single African-Caribbean judge, while only two are of Asian origin. Less than 2.5% of Oxford and Cambridge graduates (from whom 86% of high court judges are drawn) are of African-Caribbean origin. The legal pipeline and the outcome are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race training introduced in 1991, was only introduced on the basis that high court judges were exempt, as they simply did not require it. That rather arrogant intellectual exception must now be addressed.

Lord Neuberger’s comments last night suggest that he knows judicial diversity needs tackling. I am currently suing the Ministry of Justice for race discrimination and victimisation arising out of short speech on judicial racism and human rights I gave. It was at a meeting to protest at the decision of an electoral deputy high court judge to ban the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, from holding public office for five years. The allegation was that I indirectly criticised a fellow judge, the first time any judge has ever faced disciplinary action for this charge.

Several months later, in November 2015, there was an attempt to suspend me, approved by several high court judges, and the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, who threatened me with a formal suspension. This was at the same time that a fellow immigration judge of African origin had her complaint of sex and race discrimination ignored while the three white judges accused were never faced with suspension. A fellow Asian district judge still faces disciplinary sanctions for a minor complaint that at most was a competence issue, and three other BME judges are currently suing the Ministry of Justice. The treatment of BME judges by our white colleagues demonstrates a culture in which we are not accepted as equals with a fundamental right to challenge discrimination. Little wonder then that BME defendants and litigants face race discrimination in all jurisdictions.




Ethnic minorities more likely to be jailed for some crimes, report finds


Even if one achieves a “critical mass” of BME judges and magistrates, the injustice is unlikely to be eradicated if the culture of who is perceived to be the likely recidivist or the most “dangerous” offender persists. The only solution is the one resisted by the Ministry of Justice, and by most senior judges – that is monitoring each crown court and magistrates centre so that there can be proper scrutiny of individual courts to identify where the problem lies.

Allied to this must be a full acknowledgement by the Sentencing Council that sentencing and bail guidance must set out clearly the levels of disparity for each offence. Simply pretending the problem does not exist is a recipe for unconscious but appalling levels of racial bias to continue unchecked.

The training on race from 1991 to 1995 worked, as it forced judges to engage with BME mentors who challenged subconscious bias and racism as equals in a secure setting. The race awareness training practised in the 20 years since has been discredited as wholly ineffective. It is too polite, conducted infrequently and by fellow judges who themselves are part of the problem.

The judiciary is a pillar of our democracy with a historical responsibility for the racism that affects our fundamental freedoms and rights. If that is to change, it must work hard to eradicate disproportionate sentences and bail that remove the freedom and rights of people of colour. Justice cannot be the prerogative of a narrow, white middle-class elite, who believe that racism is a problem for other lesser mortals to confront.