title: Conscience

text: Thomas A Kempis in the medieval contemplative classic "The Imitation of Christ" (ca 1418) stated that the glory of a good man is the witness of a good conscience. "Preserve a quiet conscience and you will always have joy. A quiet conscience can endure much, and remains joyful in all trouble, but an evil conscience is always fearful and uneasy." The anonymous medieval author of the Christian mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing similarly expressed the view that in profound and prolonged contemplation a soul dries up the "root and ground" of the sin that is always there, even after one's confession and however busy one is in holy things: "therefore, whoever would work at becoming a contemplative must first cleanse his [or her] conscience." The medieval Flemish mystic John of Ruysbroeck likewise held that true conscience has four aspects that are necessary to render a man just in the active and contemplative life: "a free spirit, attracting itself through love"; "an intellect enlightened by grace", "a delight yielding propension or inclination" and "an outflowing losing of oneself in the abyss of ... that eternal object which is the highest and chief blessedness ... those lofty amongst men, are absorbed in it, and immersed in a certain boundless thing."


title: Conscience

text: Benedict de Spinoza in his "Ethics", published after his death in 1677, argued that most people, even those that consider themselves to exercise free will, make moral decisions on the basis of imperfect sensory information, inadequate understanding of their mind and will, as well as emotions which are both outcomes of their contingent physical existence and forms of thought defective from being chiefly impelled by self-preservation. The solution, according to Spinoza, was to gradually increase the capacity of our reason to change the forms of thought produced by emotions and to fall in love with viewing problems requiring moral decision from the perspective of eternity. Thus, living a life of peaceful conscience means to Spinoza that reason is used to generate adequate ideas where the mind increasingly sees the world and its conflicts, our desires and passions "sub specie aeternitatis", that is without reference to time. Hegel's obscure and mystical Philosophy of Mind held that the absolute right of "freedom of conscience" facilitates human understanding of an all-embracing unity, an absolute which was rational, real and true. Nevertheless, Hegel thought that a functioning State would always be tempted not to recognize conscience in its form of subjective knowledge, just as similar non-objective opinions are generally rejected in science. A similar idealist notion was expressed in the writings of Joseph Butler who argued that conscience is God-given, should always be obeyed, is intuitive, and should be considered the "constitutional monarch" and the "universal moral faculty": "conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it." Butler advanced ethical speculation by referring to a duality of regulative principles in human nature: first, "self-love" (seeking individual happiness) and second, "benevolence" (compassion and seeking good for another) in "conscience" (also linked to the agape of situational ethics). Conscience tended to be more authoritative in questions of moral judgment, thought Butler, because it was more likely to be clear and certain (whereas calculations of self-interest tended to probable and changing conclusions). John Selden in his "Table Talk" expressed the view that an awake but excessively scrupulous or ill-trained "conscience" could hinder resolve and practical action; it being "like a horse that is not well wayed, he starts at every bird that flies out of the hedge".


title: Conscience

text: As the sacred texts of ancient Hindu and Buddhist philosophy became available in German translations in the 18th and 19th centuries, they influenced philosophers such as Schopenhauer to hold that in a healthy mind only deeds oppress our "conscience", not wishes and thoughts; "for it is only our deeds that hold us up to the mirror of our will"; the "good conscience", thought Schopenhauer, we experience after every disinterested deed arises from direct recognition of our own inner being in the phenomenon of another, it affords us the verification "that our true self exists not only in our own person, this particular manifestation, but in everything that lives. By this the heart feels itself enlarged, as by egotism it is contracted."


title: Conscience

text: Immanuel Kant, a central figure of the Age of Enlightenment, likewise claimed that two things filled his mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily they were reflected on: "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me ... the latter begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity but which I recognise myself as existing in a universal and necessary (and not only, as in the first case, contingent) connection." The 'universal connection' referred to here is Kant's categorical imperative: "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Kant considered "critical conscience" to be an internal court in which our thoughts accuse or excuse one another; he acknowledged that morally mature people do often describe contentment or peace in the soul after following conscience to perform a duty, but argued that for such acts to produce virtue their primary motivation should simply be duty, not expectation of any such bliss. Rousseau expressed a similar view that conscience somehow connected man to a greater metaphysical unity. John Plamenatz in his critical examination of Rousseau's work considered that "conscience" was there defined as the feeling that urges us, in spite of contrary passions, towards two harmonies: the one within our minds and between our passions, and the other within society and between its members; "the weakest can appeal to it in the strongest, and the appeal, though often unsuccessful, is always disturbing. However, corrupted by power or wealth we may be, either as possessors of them or as victims, there is something in us serving to remind us that this corruption is against nature."


title: Conscience

text: Other philosophers expressed a more sceptical and pragmatic view of the operation of "conscience" in society.


title: Conscience

text: John Locke in his "Essays on the Law of Nature" argued that the widespread fact of human conscience allowed a philosopher to infer the necessary existence of objective moral laws that occasionally might contradict those of the state. Locke highlighted the metaethics problem of whether accepting a statement like "follow your "conscience"" supports subjectivist or objectivist conceptions of conscience as a guide in concrete morality, or as a spontaneous revelation of eternal and immutable principles to the individual: "if conscience be a proof of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid." Thomas Hobbes likewise pragmatically noted that opinions formed on the basis of "conscience" with full and honest conviction, nevertheless should always be accepted with humility as potentially erroneous and not necessarily indicating absolute knowledge or truth. William Godwin expressed the view that "conscience" was a memorable consequence of the "perception by men of every creed when the descend into the scene of busy life" that they possess free will. Adam Smith considered that it was only by developing a "critical conscience" that we can ever see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions; or that we can ever make any proper comparison between our own interests and those of other people. John Stuart Mill believed that idealism about the role of "conscience" in government should be tempered with a practical realisation that few men in society are capable of directing their minds or purposes towards distant or unobvious interests, of disinterested regard for others, and especially for what comes after them, for the idea of posterity, of their country, or of humanity, whether grounded on sympathy or on a conscientious feeling. Mill held that certain amount of "conscience", and of disinterested public spirit, may fairly be calculated on in the citizens of any community ripe for representative government, but that "it would be ridiculous to expect such a degree of it, combined with such intellectual discernment, as would be proof against any plausible fallacy tending to make that which was for their class interest appear the dictate of justice and of the general good."


title: Conscience

text: Josiah Royce (1855–1916) built on the transcendental idealism view of conscience, viewing it as the ideal of life which constitutes our moral personality, our plan of being ourself, of making common sense ethical decisions. But, he thought, this was only true insofar as our "conscience" also required loyalty to "a mysterious higher or deeper self".


title: Conscience

text: In the modern Christian tradition this approach achieved expression with Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stated during his imprisonment by the Nazis in World War II that "conscience" for him was more than practical reason, indeed it came from a "depth which lies beyond a man's own will and his own reason and it makes itself heard as the call of human existence to unity with itself." For Bonhoeffer a "guilty conscience" arose as an indictment of the loss of this unity and as a warning against the loss of one's self; primarily, he thought, it is directed not towards a particular kind of doing but towards a particular mode of being. It protests against a doing which imperils the unity of this being with itself. "Conscience" for Bonhoeffer did not, like shame, embrace or pass judgment on the morality of the whole of its owner's life; it reacted only to certain definite actions: "it recalls what is long past and represents this disunion as something which is already accomplished and irreparable". The man with a "conscience", he believed, fights a lonely battle against the "overwhelming forces of inescapable situations" which demand moral decisions despite the likelihood of adverse consequences. Simon Soloveychik has similarly claimed that the "truth" distributed in the world, as the statement about human dignity, as the affirmation of the line between good and evil, lives in people as conscience.


title: Conscience

text: As Hannah Arendt pointed out, however, (following the utilitarian John Stuart Mill on this point): a bad conscience does not necessarily signify a bad character; in fact only those who affirm a commitment to applying moral standards will be troubled with remorse, guilt or shame by a bad "conscience" and their need to regain integrity and wholeness of the self. Representing our soul or true self by analogy as our house, Arendt wrote that "conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home." Arendt believed that people who are unfamiliar with the process of silent critical reflection about what they say and do will not mind contradicting themselves by an immoral act or crime, since they can "count on its being forgotten the next moment;" bad people are not full of regrets. Arendt also wrote eloquently on the problem of languages distinguishing the word consciousness from "conscience". One reason, she held, was that "conscience", as we understand it in moral or legal matters, is supposedly always present within us, just like "consciousness": "and this conscience is also supposed to tell us what to do and what to repent; before it became the "lumen naturale" or Kant's practical reason, it was the voice of God."


title: Conscience

text: Albert Einstein, as a self-professed adherent of humanism and rationalism, likewise viewed an enlightened religious person as one whose "conscience" reflects that he "has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value."


title: Conscience

text: Einstein often referred to the "inner voice" as a source of both moral and physical knowledge: "Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings one closer to the secrets of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice."


title: Conscience

text: Simone Weil who fought for the French resistance (the Maquis) argued in her final book "The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind" that for society to become more just and protective of liberty, obligations should take precedence over rights in moral and political philosophy and a spiritual awakening should occur in the "conscience" of most citizens, so that social obligations are viewed as fundamentally having a transcendent origin and a beneficent impact on human character when fulfilled. Simone Weil also in that work provided a psychological explanation for the mental peace associated with a "good conscience": "the liberty of men of goodwill, though limited in the sphere of action, is complete in that of conscience. For, having incorporated the rules into their own being, the prohibited possibilities no longer present themselves to the mind, and have not to be rejected."


title: Conscience

text: Alternatives to such metaphysical and idealist opinions about conscience arose from realist and materialist perspectives such as those of Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested that "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or as nearly as well developed, as in man." Émile Durkheim held that the soul and conscience were particular forms of an impersonal principle diffused in the relevant group and communicated by totemic ceremonies. AJ Ayer was a more recent realist who held that the existence of "conscience" was an empirical question to be answered by sociological research into the moral habits of a given person or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings. Such an inquiry, he believed, fell wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences. George Edward Moore bridged the idealistic and sociological views of 'critical' and 'traditional' conscience in stating that the idea of abstract 'rightness' and the various degrees of the specific emotion excited by it are what constitute, for many persons, the specifically 'moral sentiment' or "conscience". For others, however, an action seems to be properly termed 'internally right', merely because they have previously regarded it as right, the idea of 'rightness' being present in some way to his or her mind, but not necessarily among his or her deliberately constructed motives.


title: Conscience

text: The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in "A Very Easy Death" ("Une mort très douce", 1964) reflects within her own "conscience" about her mother's attempts to develop such a moral sympathy and understanding of others.


title: Conscience

text: Michael Walzer claimed that the growth of religious toleration in Western nations arose amongst other things, from the general recognition that private conscience signified some inner divine presence regardless of the religious faith professed and from the general respectability, piety, self-limitation, and sectarian discipline which marked most of the men who claimed the rights of conscience. Walzer also argued that attempts by courts to define conscience as a merely personal moral code or as sincere belief, risked encouraging an anarchy of moral egotisms, unless such a code and motive was necessarily tempered with shared moral knowledge: derived either from the connection of the individual to a universal spiritual order, or from the common principles and mutual engagements of unselfish people. Ronald Dworkin maintains that constitutional protection of freedom of conscience is central to democracy but creates personal duties to live up to it: "Freedom of conscience presupposes a personal responsibility of reflection, and it loses much of its meaning when that responsibility is ignored. A good life need not be an especially reflective one; most of the best lives are just lived rather than studied. But there are moments that cry out for self-assertion, when a passive bowing to fate or a mechanical decision out of deference or convenience is treachery, because it forfeits dignity for ease." Edward Conze stated it is important for individual and collective moral growth that we recognise the illusion of our conscience being wholly located in our body; indeed both our conscience and wisdom expand when we act in an unselfish way and conversely "repressed compassion results in an unconscious sense of guilt."


title: Conscience

text: The philosopher Peter Singer considers that usually when we describe an action as conscientious in the critical sense we do so in order to deny either that the relevant agent was motivated by selfish desires, like greed or ambition, or that he acted on whim or impulse.


title: Conscience

text: Moral anti-realists debate whether the moral facts necessary to activate conscience supervene on natural facts with "a posteriori" necessity; or arise "a priori" because moral facts have a primary intension and naturally identical worlds may be presumed morally identical. It has also been argued that there is a measure of moral luck in how circumstances create the obstacles which "conscience" must overcome to apply moral principles or human rights and that with the benefit of enforceable property rights and the rule of law, access to universal health care plus the absence of high adult and infant mortality from conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and famine, people in relatively prosperous developed countries have been spared pangs of "conscience" associated with the physical necessity to steal scraps of food, bribe tax inspectors or police officers, and commit murder in guerrilla wars against corrupt government forces or rebel armies. Roger Scruton has claimed that true understanding of "conscience" and its relationship with "morality" has been hampered by an "impetuous" belief that philosophical questions are solved through the analysis of language in an area where clarity threatens vested interests. Susan Sontag similarly argued that it was a symptom of psychological immaturity not to recognise that many morally immature people willingly experience a form of delight, in some an erotic breaking of taboo, when witnessing violence, suffering and pain being inflicted on others. Jonathan Glover wrote that most of us "do not spend our lives on endless landscape gardening of our self" and our "conscience" is likely shaped not so much by heroic struggles, as by choice of partner, friends and job, as well as where we choose to live. Garrett Hardin, in a famous article called "The Tragedy of the Commons", argues that any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself or herself for the general good—by means of his or her "conscience"—merely sets up a system which, by selectively diverting societal power and physical resources to those lacking in "conscience", while fostering guilt (including anxiety about his or her individual contribution to over-population) in people acting upon it, actually works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.


title: Conscience

text: John Ralston Saul expressed the view in "The Unconscious Civilization" that in contemporary developed nations many people have acquiesced in turning over their sense of right and wrong, their "critical conscience", to technical experts; willingly restricting their moral freedom of choice to limited consumer actions ruled by the ideology of the free market, while citizen participation in public affairs is limited to the isolated act of voting and private-interest lobbying turns even elected representatives against the public interest.


title: Conscience

text: Some argue on religious or philosophical grounds that it is blameworthy to act against "conscience", even if the judgement of "conscience" is likely to be erroneous (say because it is inadequately informed about the facts, or prevailing moral (humanist or religious), professional ethical, legal and human rights norms). Failure to acknowledge and accept that conscientious judgements can be seriously mistaken, may only promote situations where one's conscience is manipulated by others to provide unwarranted justifications for non-virtuous and selfish acts; indeed, insofar as it is appealed to as glorifying ideological content, and an associated extreme level of devotion, without adequate constraint of external, altruistic, normative justification, conscience may be considered morally blind and dangerous both to the individual concerned and humanity as a whole. Langston argues that philosophers of virtue ethics have unnecessarily neglected "conscience" for, once conscience is trained so that the principles and rules it applies are those one would want all others to live by, its practise cultivates and sustains the virtues; indeed, amongst people in what each society considers to be the highest state of moral development there is little disagreement about how to act. Emmanuel Levinas viewed conscience as a revelatory encountering of resistance to our selfish powers, developing morality by calling into question our naive sense of freedom of will to use such powers arbitrarily, or with violence, this process being more severe the more rigorously the goal of our self was to obtain control.


title: Conscience

text: In other words, the welcoming of the "Other", to Levinas, was the very essence of "conscience" properly conceived; it encouraged our ego to accept the fallibility of assuming things about other people, that selfish freedom of will "does not have the last word" and that realising this has a transcendent purpose: "I am not alone ... in conscience I have an experience that is not commensurate with any a priori [see a priori and a posteriori] framework-a conceptless experience."


title: Conscience

text: English humanist lawyers in the 16th and 17th centuries interpreted conscience as a collection of universal principles given to man by god at creation to be applied by reason; this gradually reforming the medieval Roman law-based system with forms of action, written pleadings, use of juries and patterns of litigation such as Demurrer and Assumpsit that displayed an increased concern for elements of right and wrong on the actual facts. A conscience vote in a parliament allows legislators to vote without restrictions from any political party to which they may belong. In his trial in Jerusalem Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann claimed he was simply following legal orders under paragraph 48 of the German Military Code which provided: "punishability of an action or omission is not excused on the ground that the person considered his behaviour required by his conscience or the prescripts of his religion". The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) which is part of international customary law specifically refers to "conscience" in Articles 1 and 18. Likewise, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) mentions "conscience" in Article 18.1. It has been argued that these articles provide international legal obligations protecting conscientious objectors from service in the military.


title: Conscience

text: John Rawls in his "A Theory of Justice" defines a conscientious objector as an individual prepared to undertake, in public (and often despite widespread condemnation), an action of civil disobedience to a legal rule justifying it (also in public) by reference to contrary foundational social virtues (such as justice as liberty or fairness) and the principles of morality and law derived from them. Rawls considered civil disobedience should be viewed as an appeal, warning or admonishment (showing general respect and fidelity to the rule of law by the non-violence and transparency of methods adopted) that a law breaches a community's fundamental virtue of justice. Objections to Rawls' theory include first, its inability to accommodate conscientious objections to the society's basic appreciation of justice or to emerging moral or ethical principles (such as respect for the rights of the natural environment) which are not yet part of it and second, the difficulty of predictably and consistently determining that a majority decision is just or unjust. "Conscientious objection" (also called conscientious refusal or evasion) to obeying a law, should not arise from unreasoning, naive "traditional conscience", for to do so merely encourages infantile abdication of responsibility to calibrate the law against moral or human rights norms and disrespect for democratic institutions. Instead it should be based on "critical conscience' – seriously thought out, conceptually mature, personal moral or religious beliefs held to be fundamentally incompatible (that is, not merely inconsistent on the basis of selfish desires, whim or impulse), for example, either with all laws requiring conscription for military service, or legal compulsion to fight for or financially support the State in a particular war. A famous example arose when Henry David Thoreau the author of Walden was willingly jailed for refusing to pay a tax because he profoundly disagreed with a government policy and was frustrated by the corruption and injustice of the democratic machinery of the state. A more recent case concerned Kimberly Rivera, a private in the US Army and mother of four children who, having served 3 months in Iraq War decided the conflict was immoral and sought refugee status in Canada in 2012 (see List of Iraq War resisters), but was deported and arrested in the US.


title: Conscience

text: In the Second World War, Great Britain granted conscientious-objection status not just to complete pacifists, but to those who objected to fighting in that particular war; this was done partly out of genuine respect, but also to avoid the disgraceful and futile persecutions of conscientious objectors that occurred during the First World War.


title: Conscience

text: Amnesty International organises campaigns to protect those arrested and or incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience because of their conscientious beliefs, particularly concerning intellectual, political and artistic freedom of expression and association. Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award. In legislation, a conscience clause is a provision in a statute that excuses a health professional from complying with the law (for example legalising surgical or pharmaceutical abortion) if it is incompatible with religious or conscientious beliefs.


title: Conscience

text: Expressed justifications for refusing to obey laws because of conscience vary. Many conscientious objectors are so for religious reasons—notably, members of the historic peace churches are pacifist by doctrine. Other objections can stem from a deep sense of responsibility toward humanity as a whole, or from the conviction that even acceptance of work under military orders acknowledges the principle of conscription that should be everywhere condemned before the world can ever become safe for real democracy. A conscientious objector, however, does not have a primary aim of changing the law. John Dewey considered that conscientious objectors were often the victims of "moral innocency" and inexpertness in moral training: "the moving force of events is always too much for conscience". The remedy was not to deplore the wickedness of those who manipulate world power, but to connect "conscience" with forces moving in another direction- to build institutions and social environments predicated on the rule of law, for example, "then will conscience itself have compulsive power instead of being forever the martyred and the coerced." As an example, Albert Einstein who had advocated "conscientious objection" during the First World War and had been a longterm supporter of War Resisters' International reasoned that "radical pacifism" could not be justified in the face of Nazi rearmament and advocated a world federalist organization with its own professional army.


title: Conscience

text: Samuel Johnson pointed out that an appeal to conscience should not allow the law to bring unjust suffering upon another. "Conscience", according to Johnson, was nothing more than a conviction felt by ourselves of something to be done or something to be avoided; in questions of simple unperplexed morality, "conscience" is very often a guide that may be trusted. But before "conscience" can conclusively determine what morally should be done, he thought that the state of the question should be thoroughly known. "No man's conscience", said Johnson "can tell him the right of another man ... it is a conscience very ill informed that violates the rights of one man, for the convenience of another."


title: Conscience

text: Civil disobedience as non-violent protest or civil resistance are also acts of conscience, but are designed by those who undertake them chiefly to change, by appealing to the majority and democratic processes, laws or government policies perceived to be incoherent with fundamental social virtues and principles (such as justice, equality or respect for intrinsic human dignity). Civil disobedience, in a properly functioning democracy, allows a minority who feel strongly that a law infringes their sense of justice (but have no capacity to obtain legislative amendments or a referendum on the issue) to make a potentially apathetic or uninformed majority take account of the intensity of opposing views. A notable example of civil resistance or satyagraha ("satya" in sanskrit means "truth and compassion", "agraha" means "firmness of will") involved Mahatma Gandhi making salt in India when that act was prohibited by a British statute, in order to create moral pressure for law reform. Rosa Parks similarly acted on conscience in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama refusing a legal order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger; her action (and the similar earlier act of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin) leading to the Montgomery bus boycott. Rachel Corrie was a US citizen allegedly killed by a bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while involved in direct action (based on the non-violent principles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi) to prevent demolition of the home of local Palestinian pharmacist Samir Nasrallah. Al Gore has argued "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration." In 2011, NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen, environmental leader Phil Radford and Professor Bill McKibben were arrested for opposing a tar sands oil pipeline and Canadian renewable energy professor Mark Jaccard was arrested for opposing mountain-top coal mining; in his book Storms of my Grandchildren Hansen calls for similar civil resistance on a global scale to help replace the 'business-as-usual' Kyoto Protocol cap and trade system, with a progressive carbon tax at emission source on the oil, gas and coal industries – revenue being paid as dividends to low carbon footprint families.


title: Conscience

text: Notable historical examples of "conscientious noncompliance" in a different professional context included the manipulation of the visa process in 1939 by Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas (the temporary capital of Lithuania between Germany and the Soviet Union) and by Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary in 1944 to allow Jews to escape almost certain death. Ho Feng-Shan the Chinese Consul-General in Vienna in 1939, defied orders from the Chinese ambassador in Berlin to issue Jews with visas for Shanghai. John Rabe a German member of the Nazi Party likewise saved thousands of Chinese from massacre by the Japanese military at Nanking. The White Rose German student movement against the Nazis declared in their 4th leaflet: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" "Conscientious noncompliance" may be the only practical option for citizens wishing to affirm the existence of an international moral order or 'core' historical rights (such as the right to life, right to a fair trial and freedom of opinion) in states where non-violent protest or civil disobedience are met with prolonged arbitrary detention, torture, forced disappearance, murder or persecution.


title: Conscience

text: The controversial Milgram experiment into obedience by Stanley Milgram showed that many people lack the psychological resources to openly resist authority, even when they are directed to act callously and inhumanely against an innocent victim.


title: Conscience

text: World conscience is the universalist idea that with ready global communication, all people on earth will no longer be morally estranged from one another, whether it be culturally, ethnically, or geographically; instead they will conceive ethics from the utopian point of view of the universe, eternity or infinity, rather than have their duties and obligations defined by forces arising solely within the restrictive boundaries of "blood and territory".


title: Conscience

text: Often this derives from a spiritual or natural law perspective, that for world peace to be achieved, "conscience", properly understood, should be generally considered as not necessarily linked (often destructively) to fundamentalist religious ideologies, but as an aspect of universal consciousness, access to which is the common heritage of humanity. Thinking predicated on the development of "world conscience" is common to members of the Global Ecovillage Network such as the Findhorn Foundation, international conservation organisations like Fauna and Flora International, as well as performers of world music such as Alan Stivell. Non-government organizations, particularly through their work in agenda-setting, policy-making and implementation of human rights-related policy, have been referred to as the conscience of the world


title: Conscience

text: Edward O Wilson has developed the idea of consilience to encourage coherence of global moral and scientific knowledge supporting the premise that "only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible". Thus, "world conscience" is a concept that overlaps with the Gaia hypothesis in advocating a balance of moral, legal, scientific and economic solutions to modern transnational problems such as global poverty and global warming, through strategies such as environmental ethics, climate ethics, natural conservation, ecology, cosmopolitanism, sustainability and sustainable development, biosequestration and legal protection of the biosphere and biodiversity. The NGO 350.org, for example, seeks to attract world conscience to the problems associated with elevation in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.


title: Conscience

text: The microcredit initiatives of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus have been described as inspiring a "war on poverty that blends social conscience and business savvy".


title: Conscience

text: The Green party politician Bob Brown (who was arrested by the Tasmanian state police for a conscientious act of civil disobedience during the Franklin Dam protest) expresses "world conscience" in these terms: "the universe, through us, is evolving towards experiencing, understanding and making choices about its future'; one example of policy outcomes from such thinking being a global tax (see Tobin tax) to alleviate global poverty and protect the biosphere, amounting to 1/10 of 1% placed on the worldwide speculative currency market. Such an approach sees "world conscience" best expressing itself through political reforms promoting democratically based globalisation or "planetary democracy" (for example internet voting for global governance organisations (see world government) based on the model of "one person, one vote, one value") which gradually will replace contemporary market-based globalisation.


title: Conscience

text: The American cardiologist Bernard Lown and the Russian cardiologist Yevgeniy Chazov were motivated in "conscience" through studying the catastrophic public health consequences of nuclear war in establishing International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and continues to work to "heal an ailing planet".Worldwide expressions of "conscience" contributed to the decision of the French government to halt atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa in the Pacific in 1974 after 41 such explosions (although below-ground nuclear tests continued there into the 1990s).


title: Conscience

text: A challenge to "world conscience" was provided by an influential 1968 article by Garrett Hardin that critically analyzed the dilemma in which multiple individuals, acting independently after rationally consulting self-interest (and, he claimed, the apparently low 'survival-of-the-fittest' value of "conscience"-led actions) ultimately destroy a shared limited resource, even though each acknowledges such an outcome is not in anyone's long-term interest. Hardin's conclusion that commons areas are practicably achievable only in conditions of low population density (and so their continuance requires state restriction on the freedom to breed), created controversy additionally through his direct deprecation of the role of "conscience" in achieving individual decisions, policies and laws that facilitate global justice and peace, as well as sustainability and sustainable development of world commons areas, for example including those officially designated such under United Nations treaties (see common heritage of humanity). Areas designated common heritage of humanity under international law include the Moon, Outer Space, deep sea bed, Antarctica, the world cultural and natural heritage (see World Heritage Convention) and the human genome. It will be a significant challenge for "world conscience" that as world oil, coal, mineral, timber, agricultural and water reserves are depleted, there will be increasing pressure to commercially exploit common heritage of mankind areas.


title: Conscience

text: The philosopher Peter Singer has argued that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals represent the emergence of an ethics based not on national boundaries but on the idea of one world. Ninian Smart has similarly predicted that the increase in global travel and communication will gradually draw the world's religions towards a pluralistic and transcendental humanism characterized by an "open spirit" of empathy and compassion.


title: Conscience

text: Noam Chomsky has argued that forces opposing the development of such a world conscience include free market ideologies that valorise corporate greed in nominal electoral democracies where advertising, shopping malls and indebtedness, shape citizens into apathetic consumers in relation to information and access necessary for democratic participation. John Passmore has argued that mystical considerations about the global expansion of all human consciousness, should take into account that if as a species we do become something much superior to what we are now, it will be as a consequence of "conscience" not only implanting a goal of moral perfectibility, but assisting us to remain periodically anxious, passionate and discontented, for these are necessary components of care and compassion. The "Committee on Conscience" of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has targeted genocides such as those in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, the Congo and Chechnya as challenges to the world's conscience. Oscar Arias Sanchez has criticised global arms industry spending as a failure of conscience by nation states: "When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness. We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. This is not a necessary or inevitable state of affairs. It is a deliberate choice" (see Campaign Against Arms Trade). US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama during the 2008 violent protests in Tibet and aftermath said: "The situation in Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world." Nelson Mandela, through his example and words, has been described as having shaped the conscience of the world. The Right Livelihood Award is awarded yearly in Sweden to those people, mostly strongly motivated by "conscience", who have made exemplary practical contributions to resolving the great challenges facing our planet and its people. In 2009, for example, along with Catherine Hamlin (obstetric fistula and see fistula foundation)), David Suzuki (promoting awareness of climate change) and Alyn Ware (nuclear disarmament), René Ngongo shared the Right Livelihood Award "for his courage in confronting the forces that are destroying the Congo Basin's rainforests and building political support for their conservation and sustainable use". Avaaz is one of the largest global on-line organizations launched in January 2007 to promote conscience-driven activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict, thus "closing the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want".


title: Conscience

text: In a notable contemporary act of conscience, Christian bushwalker Brenda Hean protested against the flooding of Lake Pedder despite threats and that ultimately lead to her death. Another was the campaign by Ken Saro-Wiwa against oil extraction by multinational corporations in Nigeria that led to his execution. So too was the act by the Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel photographed holding his shopping bag in the path of tanks during the protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square on 5 June 1989. The actions of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld to try and achieve peace in the Congo despite the (eventuating) threat to his life, were strongly motivated by conscience as is reflected in his diary, Vägmärken ("Markings"). Another example involved the actions of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr to try and prevent the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. Evan Pederick voluntarily confessed and was convicted of the Sydney Hilton bombing stating that his conscience could not tolerate the guilt and that "I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent." Vasili Arkhipov was a Russian naval officer on out-of-radio-contact Soviet submarine B-59 being depth-charged by US warships during the Cuban Missile Crisis whose dissent when two other officers decided to launch a nuclear torpedo (unanimous agreement to launch was required) may have averted a nuclear war. In 1963 Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc performed a famous act of self-immolation to protest against alleged persecution of his faith by the Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem regime.


title: Conscience

text: Conscience played a major role in the actions by anaesthetist Stephen Bolsin to whistleblow (see list of whistleblowers) on incompetent paediatric cardiac surgeons at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Jeffrey Wigand was motivated by conscience to expose the Big Tobacco scandal, revealing that executives of the companies knew that cigarettes were addictive and approved the addition of carcinogenic ingredients to the cigarettes. David Graham, a Food and Drug Administration employee, was motivated by conscience to whistleblow that the arthritis pain-reliever Vioxx increased the risk of cardiovascular deaths although the manufacturer suppressed this information. Rick Piltz from the U.S. global warming Science Program, blew the whistle on a White House official who ignored majority scientific opinion to edit a climate change report ("Our Changing Planet") to reflect the Bush administration's view that the problem was unlikely to exist." Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was imprisoned and allegedly tortured for his act of conscience in throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Mordechai Vanunu an Israeli former nuclear technician, acted on conscience to reveal details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986; was kidnapped by Israeli agents, transported to Israel, convicted of treason and spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement.


title: Conscience

text: At the awards ceremony for the 200 metres at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman ignored death threats and official warnings to take part in an anti-racism protest that destroyed their respective careers. W. Mark Felt an agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation who retired in 1973 as the Bureau's Associate Director, acted on conscience to provide reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that resulted in the Watergate scandal. Conscience was a major factor in US Public Health Service officer Peter Buxtun revealing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to the public. The 2008 attack by the Israeli military on civilian areas of Palestinian Gaza was described as a "stain on the world's conscience". Conscience was a major factor in the refusal of Aung San Suu Kyi to leave Burma despite house arrest and persecution by the military dictatorship in that country.


title: Conscience

text: "Conscience" was a factor in Peter Galbraith's criticism of fraud in the 2009 Afghanistan election despite it costing him his United Nations job. Conscience motivated Bunnatine Greenhouse to expose irregularities in the contracting of the Halliburton company for work in Iraq. Naji al-Ali a popular cartoon artist in the Arab world, loved for his defense of the ordinary people, and for his criticism of repression and despotism by both the Israeli military and Yasser Arafat's PLO, was murdered for refusing to compromise with his conscience. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya provided (prior to her murder) an example of conscience in her opposition to the Second Chechen War and then-Russian President Vladimir Putin. Conscience motivated the Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who was abducted and murdered in Grozny, Chechnya in 2009. The Death of Neda Agha-Soltan arose from conscience-driven protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election. Muslim lawyer Shirin Ebadi (winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize) has been described as the 'conscience of the Islamic Republic' for her work in protecting the human rights of women and children in Iran. The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, often referred to as the 'conscience of China' and who had previously been arrested and allegedly tortured after calling for respect for human rights and for constitutional reform, was abducted by Chinese security agents in February 2009. 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in his final statement before being sentenced by a closed Chinese court to over a decade in jail as a political prisoner of conscience stated: "For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit." Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Russia, was arrested, held without trial for almost a year and died in custody, as a result of exposing corruption. On 6 October 2001 Laura Whittle was a naval gunner on HMAS Adelaide (FFG 01) under orders to implement a new border protection policy when they encountered the SIEV-4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel-4) refugee boat in choppy seas. After being ordered to fire warning shots from her 50 calibre machinegun to make the boat turn back she saw it beginning to break up and sink with a father on board holding out his young daughter that she might be saved (see Children Overboard Affair). Whittle jumped without a life vest 12 metres into the sea to help save the refugees from drowning thinking "this isn't right; this isn't how things should be." In February 2012 journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and killed by the Syrian Army in Homs during the 2011–2012 Syrian uprising and Siege of Homs, after she decided to stay at the "epicentre of the storm" in order to "expose what is happening". In October 2012 the Taliban organised the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai a teenage girl who had been campaigning, despite their threats, for female education in Pakistan. In December 2012 the 2012 Delhi gang rape case was said to have stirred the collective conscience of India to civil disobedience and public protest at the lack of legal action against rapists in that country (see Rape in India) In June 2013 Edward Snowden revealed details of a US National Security Agency internet and electronic communication PRISM (surveillance program) because of a conscience-felt obligation to the freedom of humanity greater than obedience to the laws that bound his employment.


title: Conscience

text: The ancient epic of the Indian subcontinent, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, contains two pivotal moments of "conscience". The first occurs when the warrior Arjuna being overcome with compassion against killing his opposing relatives in war, receives counsel (see Bhagavad-Gita) from Krishna about his spiritual duty ("work as though you are performing a sacrifice for the general good"). The second, at the end of the saga, is when king Yudhishthira having alone survived the moral tests of life, is offered eternal bliss, only to refuse it because a faithful dog is prevented from coming with him by purported divine rules and laws. The French author Montaigne (1533–1592) in one of the most celebrated of his essays ("On experience") expressed the benefits of living with a clear conscience: "Our duty is to compose our character, not to compose books, to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly". In his famous Japanese travel journal "Oku no Hosomichi" ("Narrow Road to the Deep North") composed of mixed haiku poetry and prose, Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) in attempting to describe the eternal in this perishable world is often moved in "conscience"; for example by a thicket of summer grass being all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors. Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" in "The Canterbury Tales" recounts how a young suitor releases a wife from a rash promise because of the respect in his "conscience" for the freedom to be truthful, gentle and generous.


title: Conscience

text: Bradley develops a theory about Hamlet's moral agony relating to a conflict between "traditional" and "critical" conscience: "The conventional moral ideas of his time, which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge his father; but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him". The opening words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 ("They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none") have been admired as a description of "conscience". So has John Donne's commencement of his poem "": "Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is;"


title: Conscience

text: Anton Chekhov in his plays "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya" and "Three Sisters" describes the tortured emotional states of doctors who at some point in their careers have turned their back on conscience. In his short stories, Chekhov also explored how people misunderstood the voice of a tortured conscience. A promiscuous student, for example, in "The Fit" describes it as a "dull pain, indefinite, vague; it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair ... in his breast, under the heart" and the young doctor examining the misunderstood agony of compassion experienced by the factory owner's daughter in "From a Case Book" calls it an "unknown, mysterious power ... in fact close at hand and watching him." Characteristically, Chekhov's own conscience drove him on the long journey to Sakhalin to record and alleviate the harsh conditions of the prisoners at that remote outpost. As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work: "Abandoning everything, he travelled to the distant island of Sakhalin, the most feared place of exile and forced labour in Russia at that time. One cannot help but wonder why? Simply, because the lot of the people there was a bitter one, because nobody really knew about the lives and deaths of the exiles, because he felt that they stood in greater need of help that anyone else. A strange reason, maybe, but not for a writer who was the epitome of all the best traditions of a Russian man of letters. Russian literature has always focused on questions of conscience and was, therefore, a powerful force in the moulding of public opinion."


title: Conscience

text: E. H. Carr writes of Dostoevsky's character the young student Raskolnikov in the novel "Crime and Punishment" who decides to murder a 'vile and loathsome' old woman money lender on the principle of transcending conventional morals: "the sequel reveals to us not the pangs of a stricken "conscience" (which a less subtle writer would have given us) but the tragic and fruitless struggle of a powerful intellect to maintain a conviction which is incompatible with the essential nature of man." Hermann Hesse wrote his "Siddhartha" to describe how a young man in the time of the Buddha follows his "conscience" on a journey to discover a transcendent inner space where all things could be unified and simply understood, ending up discovering that personal truth through selfless service as a ferryman. J. R. R. Tolkien in his epic "The Lord of the Rings" describes how only the hobbit Frodo is pure enough in "conscience" to carry the ring of power through war-torn Middle-earth to destruction in the Cracks of Doom, Frodo determining at the end to journey without weapons, and being saved from failure by his earlier decision to spare the life of the creature Gollum. Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that Albert Camus was the writer most representative of the Western consciousness and conscience in its relation to the non-Western world. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird portrays Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the classic film from the book (see To Kill a Mockingbird)) as a lawyer true to his conscience who sets an example to his children and community.


title: Conscience

text: The Robert Bolt play "A Man For All Seasons" focuses on the conscience of Catholic lawyer Thomas More in his struggle with King Henry VIII ("the loyal subject is more bounden to be loyal to his conscience than to any other thing"). George Orwell wrote his novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on the isolated island of Jura, Scotland to describe how a man (Winston Smith) attempts to develop "critical conscience" in a totalitarian state which watches every action of the people and manipulates their thinking with a mixture of propaganda, endless war and thought control through language control ("double think" and "newspeak") to the point where prisoners look up to and even love their torturers. In the Ministry of Love, Winston's torturer (O'Brien) states: "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable".


title: Conscience

text: A tapestry copy of Picasso's "Guernica" depicting a massacre of innocent women and children during the Spanish civil war is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room, demonstrably as a spur to the conscience of representatives from the nation states. Albert Tucker painted "Man's Head" to capture the moral disintegration, and lack of conscience, of a man convicted of kicking a dog to death.


title: Conscience

text: The impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1878 that "one must never let the fire in one's soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed. And he who chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure and will hear the voice of his conscience address him every more clearly. He who hears that voice, which is God's greatest gift, in his innermost being and follows it, finds in it a friend at last, and he is never alone! ... That is what all great men have acknowledged in their works, all those who have thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who have plumbed the depths of the sea of life."


title: Conscience

text: The 1957 Ingmar Bergman film "The Seventh Seal" portrays the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning disillusioned from the crusades ("what is going to happen to those of us who want to believe, but aren't able to?") across a plague-ridden landscape, undertaking a game of chess with the personification of Death until he can perform one meaningful altruistic act of conscience (overturning the chess board to distract Death long enough for a family of jugglers to escape in their wagon). The 1942 "Casablanca" centers on the development of conscience in the cynical American Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in the face of oppression by the Nazis and the example of the resistance leader Victor Laszlo.The David Lean and Robert Bolt screenplay for "Doctor Zhivago" (an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel) focuses strongly on the conscience of a doctor-poet in the midst of the Russian Revolution (in the end "the walls of his heart were like paper").The 1982 Ridley Scott film "Blade Runner" focuses on the struggles of conscience between and within a bounty hunter (Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford)) and a renegade replicant android (Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer)) in a future society which refuses to accept that forms of artificial intelligence can have aspects of being such as conscience.


title: Conscience

text: Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his last great choral composition the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) to express the alternating emotions of loneliness, despair, joy and rapture that arise as "conscience" reflects on a departed human life. Here JS Bach's use of counterpoint and contrapuntal settings, his dynamic discourse of melodically and rhythmically distinct voices seeking forgiveness of sins (""Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis"") evokes a spiraling moral conversation of all humanity expressing his belief that "with devotional music, God is always present in his grace".


title: Conscience

text: Ludwig van Beethoven's meditations on illness, conscience and mortality in the Late String Quartets led to his dedicating the third movement of String Quartet in A Minor (1825) Op. 132 (see String Quartet No. 15) as a "Hymn of Thanksgiving to God of a convalescent". John Lennon's work "Imagine" owes much of its popular appeal to its evocation of conscience against the atrocities created by war, religious fundamentalism and politics. The Beatles George Harrison-written track "The Inner Light" sets to Indian raga music a verse from the "Tao Te Ching" that "without going out of your door you can know the ways of heaven'. In the 1986 movie "The Mission" the guilty conscience and penance of the slave trader Mendoza is made more poignant by the haunting oboe music of Ennio Morricone ("On Earth as it is in Heaven") The song Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest is based on a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands called "Rorogwela" in which a young orphan is comforted as an act of conscience by his older brother. The Dream Academy song 'Forest Fire' provided an early warning of the moral dangers of our 'black cloud' 'bringing down a different kind of weather ... letting the sunshine in, that's how the end begins."


title: Conscience

text: The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) presents the Conscience-in-Media Award to journalists whom the society deems worthy of recognition for demonstrating "singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice".


title: Conscience

text: The Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International's most prestigious human rights award, takes its inspiration from a poem written by Irish Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney called "The Republic of Conscience".


title: Conscience

text: Winners of the award have included: Malala Yousafzai, singer and social justice activist Harry Belafonte, musician Peter Gabriel (2008), Nelson Mandela (2006), the Irish rock band U2 (2005), Mary Robinson and Hilda Morales Trujillo (a Guatemalan women's rights activist) (2004) and the author and public intellectual Václav Havel (2003).


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Thick as a Brick is the fifth studio album by the British rock band Jethro Tull, released on 3 March 1972. The album contains a continuous piece of music, split over two sides of an LP record, and is intended as a parody of the concept album genre. The original packaging, designed as a 12-page newspaper, claims the album to be a musical adaptation of an epic poem by fictional eight-year-old genius Gerald Bostock, though the lyrics were actually written by the band's frontman, Ian Anderson.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The album was recorded in late 1971, featuring music composed by Anderson and arranged with the contribution of all band members. The album was the band's first to include drummer Barrie "Barriemore" Barlow, replacing the band's previous drummer Clive Bunker. The live show promoting the album included the playing of the full suite, with various comic interludes. "Thick as a Brick" is considered by critics to be the first Jethro Tull release to entirely consist of progressive rock music. It received mixed reviews upon its release, but was a commercial success and topped various charts in 1972. Today it is regarded as a classic of progressive rock, and has received several accolades. Anderson produced a follow-up to the album in 2012, focusing on the adult life of the fictional Gerald Bostock.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Jethro Tull's frontman and songwriter Ian Anderson was surprised when critics called the band's previous album, "Aqualung" (1971), a "concept album". He rejected this, thinking it was simply a collection of songs, so in response decided to "come up with something that really is the mother of all concept albums". Taking the surreal British humour of Monty Python as an influence, he began to write a piece that would combine complex music with a sense of humour, with the idea it would poke light-hearted fun at the band, the audience, and the music critics. He also intended to satirise the progressive rock genre that was popular at the time. His wife Jennie was also an inspiration, whom he credited to have devised the character and lyrics to "Aqualung". She had written a letter to Anderson while he was away touring the album, ten lines from which Anderson used as inspiration for the new material.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Anderson has also said that "the album was a spoof to the albums of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, much like what the movie "Airplane!" had been to "Airport"" and later remarked that it was a "bit of a satire about the whole concept of grand rock-based concept albums". Although Anderson wrote all the music and lyrics, he co-credited the writing to a fictional schoolboy named Gerald Bostock. The humour was subtle enough that some fans believed that Bostock was real. Reviewing the 40th anniversary reissue, Noel Murray suggested that many listeners of the original album "missed the joke".


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The group ran through two weeks of rehearsals using the Rolling Stones' basement studio in Bermondsey. They had not intended to record a single continuous piece; the band came up with individual song segments, then decided to write short pieces of music to link them together.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Recording started in December 1971 at Morgan Studios, London. Unlike previous albums, where Anderson had generally written songs in advance, only the initial section of the album had been worked out when the band went into the studio. The remainder of the suite was written during the recording sessions. To compensate for a lack of material, Anderson got up early each morning to prepare music for the rest of the band to learn during that day's session. The lyrics were written first, with the music constructed to fit around them. Anderson recalls the album took about two weeks to record and another two or three for overdubs and mixing. The final work spanned the entire length of an LP record, split over two sides.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The group remembered the recording being a happy process, with a strong feeling of camaraderie and fun, with numerous practical jokes. They were fans of Python, and this style of humour influenced the lyrics and overall concept. Guitarist Martin Barre recalls the whole band coming up with various ideas for the music. Some parts were recorded in a single take with every member having an input, including significant contributions from keyboardist John Evan.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: "Thick as a Brick" was viewed by some critics as Jethro Tull's first progressive rock album. The album has a variety of musical themes, time signature changes and tempo shifts – all of which were features of the progressive rock scene. Although the finished album runs as one continuous piece, it is made up of a medley of individual songs that run into each other, none of which individually lasts more than 3–5 minutes. Parts of the suite blend classical and folk music into the typical rock music framework.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The album prominently features flute, acoustic and electric guitars and Hammond organ, which had been used previously, but the instrumentation includes harpsichord, glockenspiel, timpani, violin, lute, trumpet, saxophone, and a string section—all uncommon in the band's earlier blues-inspired rock. Anderson later said that the lyrics were partly derived from his own childhood experiences, though the overall theme was Bostock's attempt to make sense of life from his point of view.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The original LP cover was designed as a spoof of a 12-page small-town English newspaper, entitled "The St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser", with articles, competitions and advertisements lampooning the typical parochial and amateurish journalism of the local English press. The band's record company, Chrysalis Records, complained that the sleeve would be too expensive to produce, but Anderson countered that if a real newspaper could be produced, a parody of one would also be practical.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The mock newspaper, dated 7 January 1972, also includes the entire lyrics to "Thick as a Brick" (printed on page 7), which is presented as a poem written by Bostock, whose disqualification from a poetry contest is the focus of the front-page story. This article claims that although Bostock initially won the contest, the judges' decision was repealed after protests and threats concerning the offensive nature of the poem, along with the boy's suspected psychological instability. The front cover includes a piece where Bostock is accused without foundation of being the father of his 14-year-old friend Julia's child. The inside of the paper features a mock review by "Julian Stone-Mason BA", a pseudonym of Anderson.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The contents of the newspaper were written mostly by Anderson, bassist Jeffrey Hammond and keyboardist John Evan. While some of the pieces were obviously silly, such as "Magistrate Fines himself", there was a lengthy story entitled "Do Not See Me Rabbit" about a pilot in the Battle of Britain being shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. The overall layout was designed by Chrysalis' Roy Eldridge, who had previously worked as a journalist. Most of the characters in the newspaper were members of the band, their management, road crew, or colleagues; for instance, recording engineer Robin Black played a local roller-skating champion. Anderson recalls that the cover took longer to produce than the music.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The satirical newspaper was heavily abridged for conventional CD booklets, but the 25th Anniversary Special Edition CD cover is closer to the original, and the 40th anniversary boxed version contains most of the content from the original newspaper.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Following the album's release, the band set out on tour, playing the entire piece with some extra musical additions that extended performances to over an hour. At the start of the show, men wearing capes appeared onstage and began sweeping the floor, counting the audience and studying the venue; after a few minutes, some of them revealed themselves to be members of the band and began to play. During some shows, the entire band stopped mid-performance when a telephone rang on stage, which Anderson would answer, before carrying on performing. News and weather reports were read halfway through the show, and a man in a scuba diver outfit came onstage. The tour's humour caused problems in Japan, where audiences responded to the changes with bewilderment. Barre recalls these first live performances being "a terrible experience" as there was a lot of complex music with a variety of time signature changes to remember.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Anderson performed the entire album live on tour in 2012, the first complete performances since the original tour. In August 2014, Anderson released the CD/DVD/Blu-ray "Thick as a Brick – Live in Iceland". The concert was recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 22 June 2012, and featured complete "Thick as a Brick" and "Thick as a Brick 2" performances by the Ian Anderson Touring Band. Some of the humour and stage antics were maintained—especially the telephone ringing in the middle of a song, which was replaced by a cell phone and a Skype call.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: "Thick as a Brick" was originally scheduled for release on 25 February 1972. Following production problems relating to the 1972 miners' strike, it was held back a week to 3 March. The album reached the top 5 in the UK charts, and number one in Australia, Canada and the United States, where it was certified Gold.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Contemporary reviews were mixed. Chris Welch of "Melody Maker" praised the musicianship of the band and Anderson's flute playing, writing also that "the joke at the expense of a local newspaper wears thin rather rapidly, but should not detract from the obvious amount of thought and work that has gone into the production of "Thick""; he described the music as a creative effort where "the ideas flow in super abundance" but that "needs time to absorb" and "heard out of context of their highly visual stage act ... does not have such immediate appeal". Tony Tyler in his review for "New Musical Express" generally appreciated the construction of the suites and the arrangements, but he had doubts about the album's possible success. He called "Thick as a Brick" "Jethro Tull's own stand-or-fall epic after the lines of "Tommy"" and "an assault on the mediocrity and harshness of lower-middle-class existence in '70s Britain". Ben Gerson in "Rolling Stone" magazine called "Thick as a Brick" "one of rock's most sophisticated and ground-breaking products". Going further, the reviewer stated: "Martin Barre's guitar and John Evan's keyboards especially shine, and Ian's singing is no longer abrasive. Whether or not "Thick As A Brick" is an isolated experiment, it is nice to know that someone in rock has ambitions beyond the four- or five-minute conventional track, and has the intelligence to carry out his intentions, in all their intricacy, with considerable grace." "Rolling Stone"'s Alan Niester gave it 2 out of 5 stars in "The Rolling Stone Record Guide", judging it had "relatively undifferentiated movements". "Village Voice" critic Robert Christgau disliked the album, calling it "the usual shit" from the band: "rock (getting heavier), folk (getting feyer), classical (getting schlockier), flute (getting better because it has no choice)".


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Retrospective reviews have been positive. AllMusic wrote that "Jethro Tull's first LP-length epic is a masterpiece in the annals of progressive rock, and one of the few works of its kind that still holds up decades later." Jordan Blum of PopMatters thinks that the album "paved the way for modern progressive rock" and "today, it represents not only a pinnacle achievement for Jethro Tull, but also a concrete example of just how adventurous and free artists used to be." "Record Collector"s reviewer writes that "today, free from the irrelevant context of misdiagnosis and derision that dogged it on its original release, the album sounds like nothing less than an Olympian feat of composition and musicianship." According to "Modern Drummer" reviewer Adam Budofsky, "that it remains so elevated in progressive rock fans' hearts and minds forty years later is a testament to its quality." Paul Stump's "History of Progressive Rock" commented of the album, "The 'concept', a somewhat self-conscious and mannered lionization of individual genius ... against caricatured bourgeois Philistinism, scarcely sees the light of day through the thickets of Anderson's imagery, but this doesn't detract from what, in hindsight, is quite a respectable, if periodically water-treading, stab at advanced extensional technique."


title: Thick as a Brick

text: In 2014, "Prog" magazine listed "Thick as a Brick" at number 5 in the list "The 100 Greatest Prog Albums of All Time", voted for by its readers. "Rolling Stone" listed the album at number 7 in their "Top 50 Prog Albums of All Time". "Thick as a Brick" is ranked number 5 in the user-managed website Prog Archives' top albums list, with a weighted average rating of 4.63 stars. Rush's Geddy Lee has said "Thick as a Brick" is one of his favourite albums, as has Iron Maiden's Steve Harris.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The album has been reissued on CD several times: the first CD release (1985), the MFSL-release (1989), the 25th Anniversary Edition (1997), and the 40th Anniversary Edition (2012).


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The 40th Anniversary Edition was released in November 2012, and includes a CD, a DVD, and a book. The CD contains a new mix of the album. The DVD contains a 5.1 surround sound mix (in DTS and Dolby Digital), the new stereo mix in high resolution, and the original stereo mix in high resolution. The first pressing of the DVD/CD box contained a faulty DVD with significant audio errors. A corrected replacement edition was issued later, with only a horizontal line beneath the "album duration" note on the disc label to identify it. The album was also re-released on vinyl at the same time. This edition lists part one at 22:45 and part two at 21:07.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The downloadable version of the 40th anniversary edition splits the overall suite into eight separate parts:


title: Thick as a Brick

text: In 2012, Ian Anderson announced plans for a follow-up album, "Thick as a Brick 2: Whatever Happened to Gerald Bostock?". According to the Jethro Tull website, the sequel is "a full length Progressive Rock 'concept' album worthy of its predecessor. Boy to man and beyond, it looks at what might have befallen the child poet Gerald Bostock in later life. Or, perhaps, any of us."


title: Thick as a Brick

text: The follow-up album was released on 2 April 2012. It describes five different scenarios of Gerald Bostock's life, where he potentially becomes a greedy investment banker, a homeless homosexual man, a soldier in the Afghan War, a sanctimonious evangelist preacher, and a most ordinary man who runs a corner store and is married and childless. "Thick as a Brick 2" lists 17 separate songs merged into 13 distinct tracks (some labelled as medleys), although also all flowing together much like a single song. To follow the style of the mock newspaper on the original "Thick as a Brick", a mock online newspaper was set up.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: While "TAAB 2" was a follow-up "about" Gerald Bostock, the 2014 Ian Anderson solo album "Homo Erraticus" was presented as a follow-up work by Gerald Bostock. In the backstory Anderson created for the album, the now middle-aged Bostock came across an unpublished manuscript by one Ernest T. Parritt (1873–1928), entitled "Homo Britanicus Erraticus". Parritt was convinced he lived past lives as historical characters, and wrote detailed accounts of these lives in his work; he also wrote of fantasy imaginings of lives yet to come. Bostock then created lyrics based on Parritt's writings, while Anderson set them to music. As with the original "Thick as a Brick", authorship of each song on this album is explicitly credited to both Anderson and Bostock.


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Car maker Hyundai used the song in one of their commercials in 2001. Ian Anderson recorded a new version specifically for the commercial to avoid having another artist do it. He does not drive a Hyundai – indeed he has never held a driving licence – calling himself a "professional passenger".


title: Thick as a Brick

text: Composer Richard Harvey has covered "Thick as a Brick" in the special compilation "The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays Prog Rock Classics".


title: The Mallorca Files

text: The Mallorca Files is a British police procedural television drama series set on the Spanish island of Mallorca, starring Elen Rhys and as a pair of detectives. The series, broadcast on BBC One, was created by Dan Sefton and is a co-production between Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BritBox US and Canada, ZDFneo and France 2.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: The series focuses on the Welsh Miranda Blake (Rhys), and German Max Winter (Looman) as they solve crimes on the Spanish island of Mallorca.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: The series was broadcast on BBC One on weekday afternoons. It was broadcast in France on the France 2 channel in June 2020.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: A second series was confirmed on 11 November 2019, before the first episode was broadcast. Series 2 aired on BBC One from 1 February 2021 and all episodes were available on BBC iPlayer from that date.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: Series three is currently in development. In December 2022, the Majorca Daily Bulletin published an article quoting producer Dominic Barlow's confirmation that series three had been greenlit and would be filmed on location in Mallorca from April 2023.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: Total opposites Miranda Blake, a Welsh Detective Constable with London's Metropolitan Police, and Max Winter, a German detective, are teamed up by Inés Villegas, the Chief of Palma Police, to solve crimes, generally ones committed against the international community, on the island of Mallorca. Usually Inés gives them cases with less importance as the detectives are not Spanish.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: Cosmopolitan Pictures founder Ben Donald said the series came from "[a] desire to create a feel-good action-driven cop show like the ones I grew up with and, secondly, a desire to rebrand and refresh the Anglo-German relationship on television." Filming for the first series started in November 2018.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: Filming on the second series was interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Only six of the planned ten episodes were produced. Despite announcements prior to the series premiere, Nacho Aldeguer and Tanya Moodie did not return to the series, even though Moodie had become a regular cast member. Episodes penned by Rachael New, Alex McBride, Jackie Okwera and Emily Fairweather were written for the series, with Rob Evans signed on to direct. The unfilmed episodes are expected to be carried over into the third series should it be commissioned. Producer Ben Donald stated that post-production on the six finished episodes was completed in August 2020. Phil Daniels and Josette Simon were later confirmed amongst the guest actors cast.


title: The Mallorca Files

text: A soundtrack consisting of music from series one of The Mallorca Files was digitally released in February 2020. Music on the album was composed by Charlie Mole, and included guest vocals from Anna Ross who performs on the show's title and closing tracks.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: New York Fashion Week (NYFW), held in February and September of each year, is a semi-annual series of events in Manhattan typically spanning 7–9 days when international fashion collections are shown to buyers, the press, and the general public. It is one of four major fashion weeks in the world, collectively known as the "Big 4", along with those in Paris, London, and Milan. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) created the modern notion of a centralized "New York Fashion Week" in 1993, although cities like London were already using their city's name in conjunction with the words "fashion week" in the 1980s. NYFW is based on a much older series of events called "Press Week", founded in 1943. On a global scale, most business and sales-oriented shows and some couture shows take place in New York City.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: A centralized calendar of citywide events (including those affiliated with WME/IMG) is kept by the CFDA, and was acquired from calendar founder Ruth Finley.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The annual economic impact of New York Fashion Week upon New York City was estimated at US$887 million in 2016.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The first New York Fashion Week was created in 1943 by Eleanor Lambert, press director of the American fashion industry's first promotional organization, the New York Dress Institute.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The event, the world's first organized fashion week, was called "Press Week", and was created to attract attention away from French fashion during World War II, when fashion industry insiders were unable to travel to Paris to see French fashion shows. It was also meant to showcase American designers for fashion journalists, who had neglected U.S. fashion innovations.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: Press Week was a success, and fashion magazines like "Vogue", which were normally filled with French designs, increasingly featured American fashion.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: By the mid-1950s, the event was known as "Press Week of New York". Spring 1951 (held February 1951) was the 16th Annual Press Week of New York.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In 1993, the CFDA, led by president Stan Herman and executive director Fern Mallis, consolidated the citywide events known as "New York Fashion Week" by staging them in a cluster of white tents in Bryant Park. The event was branded with the trademark "7th on Sixth".


title: New York Fashion Week

text: Internationally, most business and sales-oriented shows and some couture shows have taken place in New York City since 2010. The emphasis, however, has perennially been financial. The LGBT fashion design community contributes very significantly to promulgating fashion trends, and drag celebrities have developed a profound influence upon New York Fashion Week.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The primary location for New York Fashion Week is Spring Studios at 50 Varick Street in Lower Manhattan. Locations have included a waterfront carnival, converted railway terminals and a former post office.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In February 2014, Dr. Danielle Sheypuk became the first wheelchair-using model to appear in a show for New York Fashion Week; she modeled for designer Carrie Hammer.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In September 2014, Karen Crespo became the first quadruple-amputee to walk at New York Fashion Week, also for Carrie Hammer.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: On December 12, 2014, a New York state court approved a settlement in a lawsuit by community activists over whether allowing the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week tents in Damrosch Park was a violation of the public trust doctrine. In accordance with the settlement, the City of New York, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts agreed not to renew their contract with IMG. As a result, the February 2015 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week was the last one staged in Damrosch Park.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In 2014, New York State passed legislation designating models under the age of 18 as child performers, restricting the hours they can perform and requiring additional documentation.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: Actress Jamie Brewer became the first woman with Down syndrome to walk the red carpet at New York Fashion Week, which she did for designer Carrie Hammer.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In December 2015, the CFDA announced that it had hired the Boston Consulting Group to study revising the format of New York Fashion Week to adapt to changes brought about by social media. One option being explored is to bifurcate the event, with private showroom appointments of next season's designs for buyers and public fashion shows displaying in-season merchandise for consumers.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The first New York Fashion Week dedicated menswear shows, called "New York Fashion Week: Men's", were produced.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The season ended with a number of designers either experimenting with, or planning to adopt, a "see now, buy now model", with items available from the runway immediately after (or even during) the show, rather than six months later. The charge was led by brands such as Burberry, although experiments in the format can be traced back to earlier shows by designers such as Diane von Furstenberg.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: Admission to shows at New York Fashion Week is typically in the form of accreditation, with specific events by invitation only. Most of the time being other designers, celebrities, and social media influencers.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In spite of CFDA's claim to run the "official" New York Fashion Week calendar, and as further purported by publications such as "Women's Wear Daily", it has been pointed out in publications such as "The Fashion Law" that CFDA has "little, in any, legal rights in the NYFW name". Therefore, trademark rights remain unclear, at best.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: In 2013 Fashion Week Inc., founded by business executive Trisha Paravas, registered the trademarks "New York Fashion Week", "NYFW" and "NYFW The Runway Shows" to use in conjunction with the production of its consumer-based fashion shows after realizing the current slate of New York Fashion Shows were invitation-only and designed for industry professionals and media.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: Trisha Paravas launched bi-yearly shows in December 2013 and initially called them "New York Fashion Shows". After her first few shows drew increasing interest, she decided to rebrand it. At the time, Paravas claimed there was no trademark filed for "New York Fashion Week", and filed for "New York Fashion Week" trademark, along with the abbreviation "NYFW".


title: New York Fashion Week

text: The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) lacked registrations for the "New York Fashion Week" trademarks, and tried to cancel Fashion Week Inc's registrations. Nonetheless, the CFDA was unsuccessful in its effort to have Fashion Week, Inc.'s "New York Fashion Week" trademark cancelled.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: On June 28, 2016, Fashion Week Inc. and its CEO Trisha Paravas filed a lawsuit for $10 million against CFDA and WME-IMG for trademark counterfeiting, trademark infringement, false designation of origin, dilution, and unfair competition.


title: New York Fashion Week

text: On August 12, 2016, the court denied Paravas and Fashion Week Inc.'s motion for a preliminary injunction. Judge Koeltl held that although Fashion Week, Inc. does have rights in the New York Fashion Week trademark, those rights are "limited" to "online entertainment ticket agency sales". On the other hand, the court held that the CFDA and WME IMG enjoy rights in the mark for the "broad ambit of organizing and producing fashion shows". When Gigi Hadid was 20 she got her first debut with us (New York Fashion Week).


title: Rachel True

text: Rachel India True (born November 15, 1966) is an American actress. She is best known for her roles in such films as "The Craft" (1996), "Nowhere" (1997), and "Half Baked" (1998). True is also known for her role as Mona Thorne on the UPN sitcom "Half & Half", which ran from 2002 to 2006.


title: Rachel True

text: True was born in New York City, the middle of three children. Her father is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, whereas her mother is of African American heritage. Her younger sister, Noel, is also an actress. True attended New York University.


title: Rachel True

text: True made her television debut in 1991 on the episode "Theo's Final Final" of NBC sitcom "The Cosby Show". In 1993, she moved to Los Angeles and made her feature film debut playing Chris Rock's character's girlfriend in the comedy "CB4". On television, she appeared in episodes of "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper", "Beverly Hills, 90210", "Getting By", "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", "Family Matters", "Dream On" and well as made-for-television movies "Moment of Truth: Stalking Back" (1993) and "A Walton Wedding" (1995). In 1995, she had supporting role in the erotic horror film "Embrace of the Vampire" starring Alyssa Milano.


title: Rachel True

text: In 1996, True landed her breakthrough role as Rochelle Zimmerman in the supernatural horror film, "The Craft", where she played a member of a teenage coven. True stated that she had to "fight" to audition for the part and was actively going up against her future co-stars Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney. Her role was originally written for a white actress, but that didn't deter her from auditioning. In 1997, she starred in the comedy-drama film, "Nowhere" alongside James Duval, the film received mixed reviews from critics. The following year, True starred as Dave Chappelle's romantic interest in the comedy film, "Half Baked". Also from 1997 to 1998, she also had the recurring role of Janet Clemens on "The Drew Carey Show". From 1999 to 2000, she appeared in the ABC drama series, "Once and Again".


title: Rachel True

text: True appeared in a number of independent movies, include "With or Without You" (1999), "The Big Split" (1999), and "Groove" (2000). She starred alongside Monica and Essence Atkins in the 2000 romantic drama film "Love Song". From 2002 to 2006, True starred with Essence Atkins in the UPN comedy series, "Half & Half", as paternal half-sisters who barely knew each other until becoming adults. She returned to film, playing the supporting role in the 2007 comedy "The Perfect Holiday". The following years, she appeared in a number of smaller and made-for-television films, include The Asylum productions "Social Nightmare" (2013), "" (2014), "" (2014), and "Sharknado: Heart of Sharkness" (2015). In 2017, True worked as a tarot-card reader in Echo Park.


title: Rachel True

text: True released her book, "True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Guidebook And Deck" in 2020. She appeared in horror films "Agnes" and "Horror Noire" in 2021. The following year, she joined the cast of the season season of Amazon Prime Video comedy series, "Harlem". Also that year, True was cast in "Half Baked 2", the sequel to the 1998 cult comedy when she reprising her role as Mary Jane Potman.


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: Arunabh Kumar (born 26 November 1982) is an Indian entrepreneur, producer and the founder of The Viral Fever.


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: He was the CEO of The Viral Fever but later stepped down after being accused of sexual harassment by a former employee and several other women. He rejoined TVF after a hiatus of 3 years as a Mentor.


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: Arunabh Kumar was brought up in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. After completing his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, he joined Shah Rukh Khan's production house Red Chillies Entertainment as an assistant's position under Farah Khan. He was the assistant director for the movie "Om Shanti Om".


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: Arunabh Kumar found himself amidst a controversy in March 2017. Over 50 women stepped up to accuse him of sexual harassment after an anonymous Medium post titled The Indian Uber- That is TVF.


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: FIR filed against Kumar on 17 March 2017 on the basis of a 3rd party complaint made by a Mumbai-based lawyer. On March 29, 2017, he was booked for molestation after a woman filed a police complaint in Mumbai. Following this, a second FIR was filed against him while his whereabouts were unknown.


title: Arunabh Kumar

text: On 16 June 2017, Kumar, accused in multiple sexual harassment cases, stepped down as TVF CEO and gave the charge to Dhawal Gusain.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: The Official Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales and (from March 2015) audio streaming in the United Kingdom. It was published for the first time on 22 July 1956 and is compiled every week by the Official Charts Company (OCC) on Fridays (previously Sundays). It is broadcast on BBC Radio 1 (top 5) and found on the OCC website as a Top 100 or on UKChartsPlus as a Top 200, with positions continuing until all sales have been tracked in data only available to industry insiders. However, even though number 100 was classed as a hit album (as in the case of The Guinness Book of British Hit Albums) in the 1980s until January 1989, since the compilations were removed this definition was changed to Top 75 with follow-up books such as The Virgin Book of British Hit Albums book only including this data. As of 2021, the OCC still only tracks how many UK Top 75s album hits and how many weeks in Top 75 albums chart each artist has achieved.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: To qualify for the Official Albums Chart, the album must be the correct length and price. It must be more than three tracks or 20 minutes long and not be classed as a budget album. A budget album costs between £0.50 and £3.75. Full details of the rules can be found on the OCC website.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: According to the canon of the OCC, the official British albums chart was the "Record Mirror" chart from 22 July 1956 to 1 November 1958; the "Melody Maker" chart from 8 November 1958 to March 1960;


title: UK Albums Chart

text: the "Record Retailer" chart from 1960 to 1969; and the Official Albums Chart from 1969 on. For eight weeks in February and March 1971 no Official Albums Chart was compiled due to a postal strike – for this period, the OCC uses the chart compiled by "Melody Maker" instead.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: In the 1970s the new album chart was revealed at 12:45 pm on Thursdays on BBC Radio 1, and then moved to 6:05 pm (later 6:30 pm) on Wednesday evenings during the Peter Powell and Bruno Brookes shows. In October 1987 it moved to Monday lunchtimes, during the Gary Davies show, and from April to October 1993 it briefly had its show from 7:00–8:00 pm on Sunday evenings, introduced by Lynn Parsons. Since October 1993 it has been included in "The Official Chart" show from 4:00 – 5:45 pm on Fridays (previously from 4:00 – 7:00 pm on Sundays). A weekly 'Album Chart' show was licensed out to BBC Radio 2 and presented by Simon Mayo, until it ended on 2 April 2007.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: Though album sales tend to produce more revenue and, over time, act as a greater measure of an artist's success, this chart receives less media attention than the UK Singles Chart, because overall sales of an album are more important than its peak position. 2005 saw a record number of artist album sales with 126.2  million sold in the UK. In February 2015, it was announced that due to the falling sales of albums and rise in popularity of audio streaming, the Official Albums Chart would begin including streaming data from March 2015. Under the revised methodology, the Official Charts Company takes the 12 most streamed tracks from one album, with the top-two songs being down-weighted in line with the average of the rest. The total of these streams is divided by 1000 and added to the pure sales of the album. This calculation was designed to ensure that the chart rundown continues to reflect the popularity of the albums themselves, rather than just the performance of one or two smash hit singles. The final number one album on the UK Albums Chart to be based purely on sales alone was "Smoke + Mirrors" by Imagine Dragons. On 1 March 2015, "In the Lonely Hour" by Sam Smith became the first album to top the new streaming-incorporated Official Albums Chart.


title: UK Albums Chart

text: The weekly Top 75 UK Albums Chart (albums described as hits in the case of British Hit Singles & Albums or The Virgin Book of British Hit Albums) were published in "Music Week" magazine until 2021. In 2018 Future (publisher of 'Louder Sound' publications such as "Metal Hammer" and "Classic Rock") acquired "Music Week" publisher NewBay Media. Future decided that the publication would go monthly from March 2021, and so a bespoke monthly Official Albums Chart Top 75 (similar to album charts used by "Top of the Pops" in the early 1990s and Absolute 80s on Sundays) started to be published from this date alongside monthly singles charts and specialist/genre charts.