Hasta La Gadget!

While Samsung’s Gear VR requires a smartphone and full-fledged headsets like the Oculus Rift require a computer, Alcatel’s newly announced Vision doesn’t need either. Indeed, it’s a standalone VR headset, which is still something of a rarity in the V…

Protect Your Knees

Knees have surpassed hips as the number one joint that gets replaced—one study from the Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that 1 in 20 people over the age of 50 had undergone surgery.

It’s really not surprising. The complicated structure of joints and cartilage coupled with a lack of protection makes knees especially vulnerable to injury. Knee injuries in turn can lead to osteoarthritis (OA), a form of arthritis that affects your joints. In fact, half of all Boomers who suffer tears to knee ligaments and cartilage will develop OA in as few as five years, says Patience White, M.D., a rheumatologist and vice president of public health for the Arthritis Foundation. Other conditions that make knees more prone to pain: bursitis, tendinitis, rheumatoid arthritis, and the inevitable wear and tear due to age.

While you can’t reverse the effects of knee damage or arthritis, you can slow them down. You may even stave off surgery forever, and save yourself thousands of dollars. The best time to do it is now—before the pain gets so bad you no longer can play with your grandkids. Here’s how:

1. Head to the doctor

f your knee hurts, make an appointment right away with your primary care physician, recommends Dr. White. The sooner you discover the cause of the pain, the sooner you can treat it and get relief.

The best thing your doc can do is refer you to a physical therapist, who will give you specific strengthening exercises. “The earlier you can come in and build strength in your knees, the better chance you have of avoiding surgery,” says Robert Agosto, DPT, director of physical therapy at the Sports and Spine Rehab Clinic in Rockville, MD. In fact, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that physical therapy was as good at easing pain and improving range of motion as knee surgery for people suffering from OA or a torn cartilage. And while a third of the 351 patients (all over 45) did eventually get surgery, the study showed that physical therapy is a good first option. And a cheaper one too.

2. Shed pounds

Sure, it’s a no-brainer, but knees bear the brunt of your body weight—and every pound you gain is the equivalent of four pounds of pressure on your knees. “So if you gain ten pounds, it’s like forty pounds across the knee, which is why the knees are so susceptible to weight problems,” says Dr. White, who’s also a professor at George Washington University School of Medicine. You can cut knee pain in half—as well as your risk of osteoarthritis—by losing 10 or 15 pounds, she adds. But even shedding one pound can help—if you couple weight loss with staying active. Osteoarthritis doesn’t necessarily have to go hand-in-hand with getting older, she adds.

3. Target key muscles

The key to preventing wear and tear is building up the muscles in the front and back of your thighs—the quadriceps and hamstrings. Warm up first by walking around the house or on a treadmill and then try these exercises, recommends Agosto:

Short arc quad: This one’s easy, but great for people who need to ease into knee exercises. Lie on your back with your knee resting on a rolled towel. Tighten your thigh muscles while lifting and straightening your knee slightly. Hold for five seconds. Repeat with the other leg. To see how short arc quads are done, click here.

Wall slides: Using a wall can be a gentler, safer way to build up your quadriceps. For slides, press your spine against the wall and slide into a sitting position as far down as you can comfortably go. Hold for a few seconds, then slide back up. Work up to longer holds and more reps. To see how wall slides are done, click here.

Bridge: This exercise boosts hamstring strength (as well as strengthening your core and butt). Lie on your back with your feet flat on the ground, and knees over the heels. Lift your pelvis off the ground. The aim is to make a straight line between your knees and your shoulders. To see how the bridge is done, click here.

4. Be gentler when you exercise

Running on roads can jar your knees, while a jog through a wooded trail carries the risk of falls and twists to knees and ankles. A better way to run is on a treadmill or track, or alternate jogging with walking, Dr. White suggests. Biking doesn’t put as much strain on your knees, but it can cause pain if you ratchet up the resistance too high on a stationary bike or the saddle is pushed back too far or is too low.

If you bike a lot outdoors, you might want to spring for a professional bike fitting, which can help you with seat and handlebar height and pedal strokes. Whatever exercise you do, just remember to warm up.  You lose muscle strength as you get older—especially if you sit at a desk most days—and that just increases your chances of injury when you head out to exercise.

5. Spice things up

Inflammation can exacerbate knee pain—as well as increase the risk of chronic conditions like arthritis, says Beth Reardon, RD, director of integrative nutrition at Duke Integrative Medicine Center in Durham, NC.  While pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen can inhibit the COX enzyme, a key player in inflammation, certain foods and spices can too. Chief among them is quercetin, a flavanol found in apples, onions, and green tea. Tumeric, cumin, ginger, and capsicum, found in red pepper, are also high in anti-inflammatory properties, says Reardon.  To get the effects of these anti-inflammatories, drink at least three cups of green tea a day and add these spices into your cooking rotation. Also eat more fruits, vegetables and fish that are high in omega-threes, like salmon.

6. Ditch the heels—and the flats

“High heels aren’t good for your knees, they’re not good for your feet. The lower the heel, the better,” says Dr. White, who recommends footwear with heels no higher than two inches. Also bad for knees: Shoes with no arch support, like loafers and ballet flats. If you love the ease of either, get over-the-counter inserts that can provide a bit more support. And if you walk a lot, splurge on a good pair of kicks that can really cushion your steps. Then slip on those heels or loafers once you get to your destination, says White.

7. Try supplements

Two supplements that promised pain relief to people with osteoarthritis have gotten mixed reviews from observational studies—glucosamine, found naturally in shellfish and animal bones, and chondroitin, made from animal cartilage. Both seem to benefit some people with OA and not others. “I don’t have any trouble with people trying either, especially if they help. But if they don’t, save your money,” says Reardon.

Instead, check out Zyflamend, a blend of anti-inflammatory spices like rosemary, green tea, ginger, tumeric, and Chinese herbs. The OTC supplement has been found to relieve pain in people with OA. “We should be eating more of those foods, but if you don’t then that’s one supplement I would recommend anybody take,” Reardon adds. The reported side effects: A bad taste in your mouth, heartburn, and diarrhea.

8. Keep a food journal

In some people with OA, eating foods like eggplant, tomatoes, and citrus can cause painful flare-ups, while others get a reprieve from their symptoms, explains Reardon. That’s why it pays to keep a record of what you eat and how you feel each day, she suggests. Or you can experiment with various foods. Eliminate tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and peppers for three weeks, and record your symptoms. Do the same with citrus. Then add each food back gradually and see if the pain worsens.

Also From Grandparents.com:

9 Things That Lower Your Pain Tolerance

8 Easy Ways To Protect Your Back

Get Busy In The Bedroom Without Back Pain

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

“I am, have been, and will be only one thing–an American.”
— Charles Foster Kane

“WAKE UP AMERICA; WAKE UP!” Those words, spoken by John Lewis just before he ended his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, are as imperative today as they were 53 years ago.

During this Labor Day week, the traditional start date for fall presidential campaigns, the time is overdue for all Americans to wake up and fully recognize that this is no ordinary election, that one of the candidates represents an unprecedented threat to America, and just how extensive that threat is.

♦ ♦ ♦

The original title of Donald Trump’s favorite movie, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, was “The American.” Trump has, with justification, been characterized by many terms–among them a bully, a narcissist, a pathological liar, a megalomaniac, a sociopath, a misogynist, and a xenophobe. It has, though, become apparent in recent weeks that the 2016 Republican nominee is, above all else, the opposite of what Welles saw Kane as. Trump is something never before seen as a major party presidential nominee: The Anti-American.

The giant leap taken by Trump and his associates since the party conventions is to aim their attack squarely at American democracy itself. More about that in a moment.

Welles plainly intended his protagonist to represent America. As many observers have pointed out, the similarities between the semi-fictional Charles Foster Kane and the semi-real Donald John Trump are unmistakable: the bombastic, bullying, privileged narcissist who inherited wealth, and falsely poses as the champion of the (white) working man. Consider how perfectly the following statements about Kane fit Trump: “But he never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life.” “He had no use for anybody who disagreed with him on any point, no matter how small it was.” When Kane’s first wife warns him, “People will think …” Kane responds loudly, “What I tell them to think!” Kane was, Welles said, “interested in imposing his will” on the nation as an act of self-aggrandizement.

Surely it seems, as Benjamin Hufbauer wrote recently in Politico, that “in playing out his narcissism on the national stage, Trump is making Citizen Kane, an old, black-and-white movie seen mainly by movie buffs, almost into a prophesy.”

Yet focusing on all the parallels–indeed, virtual identities–between Kane and Trump hides the key point that when it comes to representing America they are diametric opposites. The portrait of “The American” that Citizen Kane presented was anything but a complimentary one, but it was of an American. The portrait that The Trump Campaign presents is of an Anti-American.

♦ ♦ ♦

Throughout the nation’s history, as historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out a half century ago at the time of the Barry Goldwater candidacy, there has been a “Paranoid Style in American Politics”–a “recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” There was, Hofstadter contended, an important difference between earlier incarnations of this phenomenon and the form it had taken since World War II. The earlier movements had perceived a need to fend “off threats to a still established way of life.” The conspiratorial menace they perceived came from outside the main institutions of America. In contrast, since the late 1940s, the angry Americans had come to believe that the nation had “been largely taken away from them and their kind.” Their mission now was to repossess America “and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”–to “Take America Back,” as the Trump supporters say.

The clearest early example of this new form of paranoia that was offensive rather than defensive is what came to be known as McCarthyism, though other such other politicians as Richard Nixon had been pushing similar arguments before Sen. Joseph McCarthy joined them. Sounding almost exactly like Donald Trump in 2016, McCarthy proclaimed in 1951: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Once the imagined conspirators had been classified as already on the inside, the nature of the fight changed. The mortal threat was now seen as coming from “major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.”

The Trump candidacy is the culmination of the long campaign begun by McCarthyism and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and aimed at discrediting virtually every institution in the United States. By the early 1960s, the epicenter of the extremist movement was Dallas. During the 1960 campaign, a “mink coat mob” of right-wing high-society Dallas women accosted native Texan Lady Bird Johnson. The high-heeled thugs encircled the wife of Democratic vice-presidential nominee, jeering and cursing. One of these ladies of the right pulled Mrs. Johnson’s white gloves out of her hands and threw them into a gutter. Another hit Mrs. Johnson over the head with a sign reading, “LET’S GROUND LADY BIRD,” and then spit toward her face. Primal rage was unmistakable on the faces of these Dallas matrons. It should be noted that this first violent, hate-filled political mob of the calendar 1960s was not composed of scruffy young left-wing anti-Establishment “reds”; it was made up of “mature,” neatly dressed “conservative” women of Texas.

In October 1963, United States ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson was loudly jeered and threatened physically by people associated with ultra-right wing groups during a visit to Dallas.

It was, then, with good reason that President John F. Kennedy said to his wife on the morning of November 22, 1963, “We’re heading into nut country today.” He showed her an ad, bordered in the black of a funeral announcement, placed by the Birch Society in the Dallas Morning News, saying that the Kennedys were pro-communist.

The hatred brewing in Texas in the years leading up to that fateful day in Dallas was similar to the right-wing witches’ caldron being stirred to a bubbling boil by talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party that has finally boiled over with the Trump campaign.

A presidential assassination less than a year before the next election gave extremism a bad name and assured that 1964 Republican nominee Barry M. Goldwater’s seeming embrace of such extremist organizations as the Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan would doom him to disastrous defeat. Yet Goldwater wasn’t nearly as extreme as Trump is.

By the late 1960s, the bitter anger against a government perceived as oppressive was again growing, as evidenced in George C. Wallace gaining 13.5 percent of the votes for president in 1968. Following that election, President Richard M. Nixon made the fateful decision to try to add the Wallace voters to those who had cast their ballots for him by pursing a “Southern Strategy.” Nixon’s young advisor Patrick J. Buchanan urged the President to split the country apart in a way that he could pick up “far the larger half.”

Vietnam and Watergate, combined with the innumerable lies told by Presidents Johnson and Nixon, further undermined the reputation of the government in the minds of many Americans. “For some citizens, the Government has almost become like a foreign country,” President Jimmy Carter noted in his 1978 State of the Union Address. Two and a half years later, Carter addressed the nation about what he termed a “crisis in confidence.” He warned of “a fundamental threat to American democracy,” a major component of which was “a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.”

After defeating Carter, Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Reagan continued to denounce and run against what he disdainfully pronounced as the “gub-mint” even after he had been its head for years.

The constant drumbeat from such right-wing talk radio hosts as Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy on how the government was the enemy of the American people grew as the 1980s gave way to the 90s, particularly after Bill Clinton became president in 1993. In 1996, Fox News added visuals to the fear-mongering sounds coming from radios.

When domestic terrorists blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, it was clear that they had been influenced by hate speech to see the United States government as a foreign country–an enemy against which the American people should make war.

In 1994, Sen. Jesse Helms (R, NC) said President Bill Clinton “better have a bodyguard” if he came to North Carolina. The following year, Liddy told his listeners that he used drawings of Bill and Hillary Clinton for target practice. “I thought it might improve my aim,” he said. “It didn’t. . . . Having said that, I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House.”

Although the horror of the Oklahoma City carnage caused some lessening in the decibel level of right-wing hate speech for a time, conspiracy stories about the Clintons continued to be repeated and consolidated into books. One of the favorites was that the Clintons had murdered Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, who committed suicide in 1993. As he has with just about every other long-disproven charge against the Clintons, Donald Trump latched onto this one, stating in May, “I don’t know enough to really discuss it, but I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.” The circumstances of Foster’s death were, the Republican candidate said, “very fishy.”

The level of right-wing paranoia declined a bit during the presidency of George W. Bush, particularly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 produced a temporary national unity, but the frenzy reached new heights–or, more accurately, depths–with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Obama is the sum of all the fears of the people who have been the core of the “movements of suspicious discontent.” It is bad enough–absolutely horrible in their minds–that Obama is black and has an international background. But it is far worse even than that. While racist white men hated black people, their greatest horror was what they called “miscegenation” and “mongrelization.” Those terms had never referred to white men having sex and producing offspring with black women, which occurred routinely under slavery. The “pervading dread” of the white man, as Malcolm X said in 1964, “was his image of the black man entering the body of the white woman.”

Lynching and segregation were about “protecting” those whom white men classified as “our women.” Prior to the 1954 Brown decision, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to influence new Chief Justice Earl Warren to allow segregation by telling him that southern whites were not bad people: “All they are concerned about is that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.” But on January 20, 2009, the product of a black man and a white woman become president of the United States! It was enough to drive a certain sort of person in insane–and it did. After Obama’s inauguration, the “Tea Party” was formed to consolidate opposition to him. “This corrupt country has a head Negro in charge,” Tea Party activist and later Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said in 2013, after having tweeted in 2012 that Obama was not a “pure breed.” (Ms. Pierson also likes to wear a necklace of bullets and thinks the United States did not go into Afghanistan until Barack Obama was president.)

In 2011, Trump himself became the most prominent figure in one of the wilder conspiracy theories of the Obama haters, the claim that the President had not been born in the United States and so was ineligible for the presidency. When Trump took up the cause, it had already been repeatedly debunked, but continued to be believed by many people who were angered by the election of a black president. For six weeks in 2011, Trump pressed the “issue” almost nonstop and by so doing he thrust himself into prominence in the constellation of angry right-wing extremists.

♦ ♦ ♦

After more than a half century of angry, fearful right-wingers fouling the well from which all Americans drink, it may have seemed that it could not get worse. Yet it has. Donald Trump has now completed the poisoning of the common water that sustains our nation by not only turning against almost every American institution and value, but by attacking our very political system.

All the worst in the alternate reality world of suspicious discontent is brought together in Trump. He has attacked the media, the military, minorities, women, immigrants, the judiciary, science, free speech, the FBI, the CIA and American Intelligence services, NATO, religious freedom, people with disabilities, the Geneva Convention, common decency, veterans, war heroes, fire marshals, major league baseball . . . the list goes on and includes just about every revered institution in America apart from motherhood–no, wait, he has attacked mothers, as well: Gold Star Mother Ghazala Khan. Someone should ask him for his views on apple pie.

Though it seems that he never heard of a foreign dictator he didn’t like, Donald Trump has never met an American value or institution that he does like.

Outrageous as all of that is, the Republican nominee has taken the danger he represents to America up at least one quantum in recent weeks.

It has long been clear that a victory in November by Trump could be catastrophic for the United States. Now, though, the Republican nominee and his backers have become so extreme in their pronouncements that a Trump defeat also poses a serious threat to American democracy.

During his campaign for the Republican nomination, Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to use violence against those who oppose him: “I’d like to punch him in the face,” “I love the old days . . . they’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks,” “knock the crap out of him,” and so on.

Building on his lies about Barack Obama not being an American, Trump has indicated that the President may be in league with foreign terrorists. In June, after the terrorist attack in Orlando, Trump suggested that Obama either “doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. . . . There’s something going on.” Perhaps concerned that his followers might not get a veiled accusation that the President of the United States is in cahoots with Islamic terrorists, Trump removed all subtlety in August when he repeatedly and forcefully stated that Obama “is the founder of ISIS.” He added that Hillary Clinton is the co-founder of the terrorist organization.

What is a patriotic American to do if he is persuaded that the President and a presidential candidate are traitors? In case such a person wasn’t sure, Trump told a rally in North Carolina on August 9 that “Second Amendment people” could do something about a President Hillary Clinton. Though Trump and his campaign claimed that he wasn’t suggesting assassination, it is difficult to hear or read his statement any other way–surely some of his lunatic fringe followers took it that way. And one of Trump’s advisers, Al Baldasaro, had already said repeatedly that “Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason”–a position that did not cause Trump to disassociate himself from Baldasaro.

By the time he suggested that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Mrs. Clinton, Trump was trailing her badly in the polls. He classifies himself as a “winner” and says “I don’t like losers.” In his mind, that means that he cannot lose. It follows from that axiomatic belief that if he loses it must be because the election was “rigged.” “I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, at the beginning of August. He said that he was hearing “more and more” that the election would be rigged. Where he was “hearing” this rubbish was principally from Roger J. Stone Jr., a “political operative known for mischief and mayhem” who has been a key adviser to Trump dating back to the 2011 Birtherism campaign, and the alternate reality rightwing website, Breitbart.com.

Donald Trump has continued to talk about a “rigged election.” In a speech in Altoona on August 12, he proclaimed: “The only way we can lose, in my opinion–I really mean this, Pennsylvania–is if cheating goes on.” He said this of a state that has gone Democratic in each of the last six presidential elections and at a time when the four most recent polls all showed him to be trailing in the state by 10 or 11 points. Unsurprisingly, when Donald Trump loses he acts like a child who loses at a game and yells that the other kid cheated. Here again, he is channeling Charles Foster Kane. When Kane was soundly defeated in his race for governor, rather than admit that he had lost, he ordered that his newspaper run the headline: “FRAUD AT POLLS!”

In warning that the election would be stolen from him, Trump added that his campaign would send people “down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times.” Plainly, saying “certain areas” was giving a wink to his followers that the cheating would be done by African Americans and urging his backers to go to polling places and intimidate minority voters.

Every indication is that Trump will lose Pennsylvania fair and square, but his followers are being primed to see it as their Leader being cheated and so to react with anger and perhaps violence.

Trump’s hiring of arch-right zealot and conspiracy theorist Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart, to run his campaign was, as William Kristol, the conservative editor of the Weekly Standard said, “the merger of the Trump campaign with the kooky right,” and indicated, as the title of an article in that publication put it, that “Trump Has Decided to Live in Breitbart’s Alternative Reality.” A major part of that alternative reality is the campaign’s continued pushing of the baseless and extremely dangerous assertion that the election will be rigged.

The effect that the Trump campaign is having on a significant number of Americans can be seen in the happenings among the Trump faithful observed by an incognito reporter during the candidate’s first rally under the new management of Stephen Bannon, in Charlotte on August 19. Among them were: someone yelling, “Obama’s a goddamn Muslim terrorist,” two males “talking about beating the [crap] out of reporters,” a guy saying that if Trump doesn’t win “we’ll either have a civil war or the country will die,” people rolling their eyes about a disabled woman, with one of them saying, “I wish she’d leave,” and many people saying that Trump will lose in November “because media has rigged the election.”

Trump’s first major television ad, which followed the Bannon campaign reboot and debuted on August 19, begins with an image of Hillary Clinton, which quickly cuts to a polling place and a sign “Vote Here” as a voiceover says, “In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stayed rigged against Americans.” The ad then goes on to a variety of lies about immigrants and Mrs. Clinton’s positions on them, but the opening is clearly a message intended to reinforce what Trump has been saying about the American political system being rigged.

Just how dangerous this assault on the American democratic system itself is unmistakable in the comments Roger Stone made a few days before Donald Trump began his charges that the election would be rigged.

“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate,” Stone proclaimed. “We will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.” “It will be a bloodbath,” Stone continued. “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it.”

Combined with Trump’s oft-expressed admiration for such “strong man” leaders as Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jung Un, his declaration in his Republican Convention speech “Only I can fix it,” his classifications of President Obama and Hillary Clinton as traitors, the hint from the candidate and the outright statement by his adviser that Mrs. Clinton should be shot, and his repeated assertions that the American presidential election will be “rigged,” the suggestion that there will be a “bloodbath” to prevent the swearing in of Hillary Clinton as president amounts to a complete repudiation of the American democratic system and a call for the violent overthrow of the election results.

We have never before seen a major party presidential candidate remotely as antithetical to American values, American institutions, and American democracy itself as Trump is. While he talks of “making America great again,” he trashes everything about America. What he seeks is to make Donald J. Trump great again, and he is completely willing to destroy America in the process.

Beyond all the other outrages by Trump, the attack on American democracy itself and the encouragement of violence if he loses is the final, ultimate anti-American act.

What Trump and his advisers are currently doing is far more “a fundamental threat to American democracy” than the “crisis in confidence” that Jimmy Carter identified as such a threat in 1979. The Trump campaign is a clear and present danger to our nation, its values, and its system of government based on accepting the results of elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

There can be only one accurate title for the horror film, now appearing on screens across the country, starring Donald Trump as a candidate for the presidency of the United States: The Anti-American.

{Robert S. McElvaine, the Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College, is the author of ten books. He is currently completing a book manuscript, “The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964–The Year ‘The Sixties’ Began.”}

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SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian teenager who planned a terror attack which involved beheading a policeman and attaching explosives to a kangaroo at commemorations of the World War One ANZAC landings at Gallipoli was sentenced on Monday to ten years in prison.

Sevdet Ramadan Besim, 19, had planned to attack police at the Melbourne ANZAC Day parade on April 25, 2015, but his scheme was uncovered when police in Britain discovered phone messages between Besim and a 15-year-old British boy.

Victoria Supreme Court Justice Michael Croucher said that Besim’s decision to plead guilty was a major factor in his decision to impose a ten-year, rather than 15-year, sentence.

Croucher said that he had sought in his ruling to balance the need to protect the community from Besim’s “evil” and “terrifying” plans against the young man’s age, contrition and prospects of rehabilitation.

“I accept that Mr Besim’s youth and immaturity are significant mitigating factors. He was just 18 at the time of the offending and is now only 19,” Croucher said, according to a transcript of the proceedings.

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown Islamist radicals since 2014 and authorities say they have thwarted a number of plots.

About 100 people have left Australia for Syria to fight alongside organisations such as Islamic State, Australia’s Immigration Minister said this year.

There have been several “lone wolf” assaults in Australia, including a 2014 cafe siege in Sydney that left two hostages and the gunman dead. Also in 2014, police shot dead a Melbourne teenager after he stabbed two counter-terrorism officers.

Besim’s sentence may have seemed harsh just a handful of years ago, but must now been understood in view of recent mass casualty attacks in Europe and the United States, said Greg Barton, a terrorism expert at Deakin University.

“It has to be seen in the context of realized and attempted low-fi, lone-wolf attacks in the last two years that are fairly unprecedented,” Barton told Reuters.

“Every month or two there’s some development which makes the unimaginable suddenly very concrete.”

(Editing by Nick Macfie)

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Could it have been any clearer when John Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, wrote the following to incoming freshmen?

Ellison wrote: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

To many in the class of 2020, these words may have felt like being dashed with a bucket of ice water on a cold Chicago morning. Assuming that one accepts the definition of political correctness as the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize or insult certain groups of people, I can easily see how some would applaud the university’s actions, while others would bemoan them in disgust.

On its face, reaction to Ellison’s words may depend greatly on whether one holistically adopts a conservative or liberal orthodoxy. But to do so misses the point of the university’s message.

Political correctness, however defined, if left unexamined, can quickly morph into a slippery slope of stale pabulum. While there are certain terms that are unaccepted universally in the public discourse, what should be the penalty for such infractions? And who should adjudicate what is unacceptable? Isn’t that too subjective?

I take a backseat to no one in my opposition in the run-up of the preemptive strike and occupation of the sovereign nation known as Iraq, but was disappointed by the churlish behavior of students at Rutgers University who protested former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice being the commencement speaker in 2014.

President Obama, shortly after the Rice kerfuffle, accurately summed up the larger issues involved: “I don’t think it’s a secret that I disagree with many of the policies of Dr. Rice and the previous administration. But the notion that this community or this country would be better served by not hearing a former secretary of state or not hearing what she had to say — I believe that’s misguided.”

How can any university boast of preparing the best and brightest minds to contribute to the fabric of America if those minds only have room for the thoughts that correspond with their own? My grandmother would often tell me as a child, “What I don’t know could start another world.” That is true for all.

Ironically, is it not contrarian thought that serves as our best ally when it comes to crystallizing what we believe? Hasn’t the opposite been proven true by right-wing (not to be confused with conservative) think tanks, talk show host, and bloggers that eschew all things liberal?

It is easy to assume how political correctness is viewed, especially on university and college campuses, would depend on where one fell on the baby boomer to millennial age continuum. But according to a recent Gallup poll, 78 percent of college students preferred to attend a college or university “where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints.” This would include a campus that allows offensive speech over a campus that institutes prohibitions.
It is to operate in the comforting but erroneous belief that difference equates to deficiency. This is where political correctness can take on the ethos of arrogance and certainty.

The “I’m right, therefore you’re wrong” thinking is counterintuitive. E pluribus unum (out of many, one) is not a clarion call for homogenized thinking. It is instead the recognition that we require myriad voices in order to comprise and sustain the American experiment.

While advocates of political correctness may believe such thinking is aligned with a genealogy that goes back to the Enlightenment, it can be detrimental to our public discourse. If allowed to run amok, political correctness in its present form can evolve into an idiosyncratic morass of anti-intellectualism.

When Ellison wrote: “We do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” is that not the essence of education?

Maybe, as some critics have espoused, the letter by the University of Chicago was to pacify donors, but are not students the ultimate beneficiaries?

There will always be speech that offends, that is an affront to someone’s sensibilities. Is arbitrary censorship the answer? Or should our institutions of higher learning follow the University of Chicago’s example and others by embracing a philosophy that speech in all its forms is better for the culture?

The Rev. Byron Williams is a writer and the host of the NPR-affiliated “The Public Morality”

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