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maria-crossover · 1 month ago

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† The Believer †

General information | Prime Asset backstory | Trials | Dialogues

「 Prime Asset backstory」

Although she has a complete history of somewhat questionable crimes committed at an early age, it is not denied that a part of the subject's biography is missing. Especially the Walrider.

Originally born in Jujuy, Argentina, her family moved to California, USA, along with the girl's uncles with the decision of a better life and continuing with field work. Maria has been a fanatic of God since she can remember, a believer in religion. Her family and she have always been believers, praying for good progress and better crops in the field or better cattle.

It is said that she has ended up with a disability due to an accident while riding a horse, leaving fissures and poor physical development that affects the mobility of her left leg in the femur. Despite treatment with antibiotics, an alternative for the family in terms of economics, she has experienced moments of emotional decline due to her situation and living day to day in this condition. Despite being humble and with a clearly poor economy, she made the greatest effort to study. Because of her disability, she was not fit to work in the fields and was forced to study with her uncles at home, thanks to their professions as teachers and professors.

At eight years old, the girl's life took an unexpected turn after an incident that harmed her and her family. During a short walk with her uncles, running a couple of errands, they lost sight of Maria and could not find her anywhere in the village, the only thing they found was the cane that she used to help her move.

According to the latest reports of the Carmichael case, being a kidnapping, she has suffered years of psychological and emotional torture. The girl returned after six years, without the help of the cane and walking normally. Something that scared the family is that she still looked just as young, but the only difference was her height, her facial features didn't change completely and walking like a normal human was a miracle. According to the medical reports, she showed that the bones in her leg and femur were still the same, but somehow she walked well. However, her development has been affected by poor nutrition, clearly malnutrition and dehydration. Although it will take María some time to adjust to her old lifestyle after living day after day, it can be seen that she is not at all affected by the trauma she experienced during her childhood, which is quite scary and worrying.

She had confessed what her life was like being with her kidnappers, listening to screams of pain from other victims being tortured physically, psychologically and sexually. She has never been hurt or raped, luckily, according to what she remembers it is because she was too small to be used as a weapon. Weapon, that is what worried the officers who interviewed her after her reappearance.

The girl gave the address where she was kept in the shadows, out of her freedom and the other people who could not escape. The authorities immediately went to raid the place, what they found was an abandoned textile factory. In the basement of the place, they found bodies of men and women. In addition to artifacts, machines were used to experiment on people to try to make a weapon. The kidnappers identified themselves as foreigners, Russians and Germans. At least five doctors, fifteen armed men and seven men in charge of kidnapping many test subjects. After forensic studies, the victims are not correctly determined how they were massacred. They found fractures and parts of lower limbs separated from their bodies, which leaves many theories about the massacre. One person couldn't have killed thirty-five people, but what hasn't been determined is the gunpowder and ashes, which puts the theory on an attempt to erase evidence by burning the place.

The case had been put to one side, María being the only survivor of the kidnapping and the inhuman torture she had been through. However, Carmichael's case was taken up again after a year, after a serious accident at home left the village traumatised.

María's parents and uncles died in a fire, the house burned down and they lost most of their home and left the girl and her one-year-old sister, Annabelle, orphans. The origin of the fire has not been determined, but what is suspected was the girl's attitude. Since the accident she had been playing with the baby, ignoring the screams and cries of her family dying in the flames. But she wasn't identified as a suspect, as her way of acting was possibly fear and trying to block it so that it would not remember the trauma of her kidnapping, distracting Annabelle from the accident. It was a miracle that she and the baby survived that fire with ease, but after an interview with the girl, it left many questions for investigators. About the angel who called himself “Manny,” who saw him from the first months of his kidnapping. However, they brushed the questions aside, being nothing more than beliefs or possibly the girl’s imagination.

The girls were sent to an orphanage, unable to contact other relatives. But after a few months, Annabelle was adopted by a family, separating Maria from her. She was discouraged since then but never lost faith. But everything changes when the caregivers, nuns and priests end up slowly committing suicide, leaving the children. Some of those victims had confessed to having committed sins that do not deserve to be forgiven, such as physically and sexually abusing minors. But the most suspicious thing was the confession of one of the deceased nuns, who had seen the devil handling a puppet of flesh and bones, with that innocent smile and those eyes that look into the window of the darkest soul, feeding on our sins, fears and weaknesses.

María had been sent from orphanage to orphanage. With the same results, people who have taken their own lives or died under the flames of a fire. But the case comes to a conclusion, leaving the girl as the main suspect of all these events, since the incident with the Carmichael family. She was caught, trying to effortlessly hang a priest, with her feet on the roof of the church, however, she ends up killing the man by just breaking his neck. And as a response to trying to be stopped, she ended up killing the officers. However, it hasn't been determined how she killed them, but the forensic experts determined that they had found gunpowder and ashes, the same material that was found in the massacre of Maria's kidnappers.

Many neighbors said that they had seen the devil, disguised as the girl from the day she returned to the village. From time to time, detaching itself from Maria's body, being a kind of humanoid without facial features and composed only of dark shadows. Being one of the strangest and most sinister cases of the town, something supernatural. Although Maria had slipped away from the authorities, she didn't stop moving forward until she was nineteen years old, rebuilding her life in another country. In Cuba she had inherited fields from her grandparents, having the opportunity to do agriculture, but at the same time working in a fish market and keeping both businesses in balance for her own economy.

Clyde Perry went to investigate more about María Carmichael, being one of the people who has attracted a lot of attention. At first it was very difficult to communicate with her, since she was very distant and lonely. Finally, after buying fish and asking some casual questions, she invited him to talk in a more private place like her ranch, which Perry accepted with some trepidation but willing to take advantage of the opportunity.

From the moment they met, casually drinking tea and mate, María confesses that she knows that he has been following her and investigating her, being an interesting and peculiar person. But not only that, but she also flatters the investigator a lot about his appearance, especially his eyes, which makes him a little nervous. But after her questions and mockery, María shows the darkest side that a human being could have seen. Confessing how she hurt adults when she was a child, doctors, her kidnappers, nuns and priests, enjoying every scream of pain and asking for mercy as if God were judging each of them for their actions, the sins they committed. Feeling pleasure and satisfaction in doing justice with her own hands alongside her angel.

She had taken off her glasses and revealed one of her eyes completely dark as the devil, hungry for blood and afraid of its next victim. Then, the man could see how a kind of humanoid detached itself from its body and showed itself before him. Its dark form, without facial features and with swarms of ashes scattered on its body and the woman's, seeing the fear and before the eyes of the investigator. And the moment the humanoid tries to do something to Perry, Maria stops it with just one order and calling it "Manny."

The Walrider follows her order, returning to the woman's body and making her move normally again. She apologizes to the man, leaving him with a warning not to bother her again and to let him go unharmed, but wishing he would visit her again for being the only man to have caught her attention. Terrified, Clyde Perry leaves the shack with one hand in his pocket hiding his gun, unsure if that thing was going to come for him.

As Perry writes, he confesses that he has been having nightmares and bizarre dreams. After going to treatment for a while, they discovered that he had some kind of nanomachines and ashes in his ears, which explains his bad dreams and possibly a way for Manny to manipulate the minds of the victims to ground them, and corner each of them with the thoughts of taking their own lives. Which leaves the man traumatized, having seen the devil with his own eyes. After the researcher's treatment, Maria was later captured and sent to the Sinyala facility. However, she allowed herself to be captured while controlling Manny inside so as not to harm another person. Since then, she meets Dr. Easterman at some point, placing an ounce of her trust and loyalty in him.

#my oc #my original character #prime asset oc #the walrider #outlast walrider #the outlast trials #lore #oc lore

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haggishlyhagging · 1 year ago

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As the fetus's rights increased, mother's just kept diminishing. Poor pregnant women were hauled into court by male prosecutors, physicians, and husbands. Their blood was tested for drug traces without their consent or even notification, their confidentiality rights were routinely violated in the state's zeal to compile a case against them, and they were forced into obstetrical surgery for the "good" of the fetus, even at risk of their own lives.

Here are just a few of the many cases from the decade's pregnancy police blotter and court docket:

• In Michigan, a juvenile court took custody of a newborn because the mother took a few Valium pills while pregnant, to ease pain caused by an auto accident injury. The mother of three had no history of drug abuse or parental neglect. It took more than a year for her to get her child back.

• In California, a young woman was brought up on fetal neglect charges under a law that, ironically, was meant to force negligent fathers to pay child support. Her offenses included failing to heed a doctor's advice (a doctor who had failed to follow up on her treatment), not getting to the hospital with due haste, and having sex with her husband. The husband, a batterer whose brutal outbursts had summoned the police to their apartment more than a dozen times in one year alone, was not charged —or even investigated.

• In lowa, the state took a woman's baby away at birth even though no real harm to the infant was evident—because she had, among other alleged offenses, "paid no attention to the nutritional value of the food she ate during her pregnancy," as an AP story later characterized the Juvenile Court testimony. "[S]he simply picked the foods that tasted good to her."

• In Wyoming, a woman was charged with felony child abuse for allegedly drinking while pregnant. A battered wife, she had been arrested on this charge after she sought police protection from her abusive husband.

• In Illinois, a woman was summoned to court after her husband accused her of damaging their daughter's intestine in an auto accident during her pregnancy. She wasn't even the driver.

• In Michigan, another husband hauled his wife into court to accuse her of taking tetracycline during her pregnancy; the drug, prescribed by her physician, allegedly discolored their son's teeth, he charged. The state's appellate court ruled that the husband did indeed have the right to sue for this "prenatal negligence."

• In Maryland, a woman lost custody of her fetus when she refused to transfer to a hospital in another city, a move she resisted because it would have meant stranding her nineteen-month-old son.

• In South Carolina, an eighteen-year-old pregnant woman was arrested before she had even given birth, on the suspicion that she may have passed cocaine to her fetus. The charge, based on a single urine test, didn't hold up; she delivered a healthy drug-free baby. Even so, and even though the Department of Social Services found no evidence of abuse or neglect, State prosecutors announced that they intended to pursue the case anyway.

• In Wisconsin, a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl was confined in a secure detention facility because of her alleged tendencies "to be on the run" and "to lack motivation" to seek prenatal care.

Certainly society has a compelling interest in bringing healthy children into the world, both a moral and practical obligation to help women take care of themselves while they're pregnant. But the punitive and vindictive treatment mothers were beginning to receive from legislators, police, prosecutors, and judges in the 80s suggests that more than simple concern for children's welfare was at work here. Police loaded their suspects into paddy wagons still bleeding from labor; prosecutors barged into maternity wards to conduct their interrogations. Judges threw pregnant women with drug problems into jail for months at a time, even though, as the federal General Accounting Office and other investigative agencies have found, the prenatal care offered pregnant women in American prisons is scandalously deficient or nonexistent (many prisons don't even have gynecologists)—and has caused numerous incarcerated women to give birth to critically ill and damaged babies. Police were eager to throw the book at erring pregnant women. In the case of Pamela Rae Stewart of San Diego the battered woman charged with having sex against her doctor's orders—the officer who headed up the investigation wanted her tried for manslaughter. "In my mind, I didn't see any difference between born and unborn," Lieutenant Ray Narramore explains later. "The only question I had was why they didn't go for a murder charge. I would have been satisfied with murder. That wouldn't have been off-base. I mean, we have a lady here who was not following doctor's orders."

Lawmakers' claims that they just wanted to improve conditions for future children rang especially false. At the same time that legislators were assailing low-income mothers for failing to take care of their fetuses, they were making devastating cuts in the very services that poor pregnant women needed to meet the lawmakers' demands. How was an impoverished woman supposed to deliver a healthy fetus when she was denied prenatal care, nutrition supplements, welfare payments, and housing assistance? In the District of Columbia, Marion Barry declared infant health a top priority of his mayoral campaign—then cut health-care funding, forcing prenatal clinics to scale back drastically and eliminate outright their evening hours needed by the many working women. Doctors increasingly berated low-income mothers, but they also increasingly refused to treat them. By the end of the decade, more than one-fourth of all counties nationwide lacked any clinic where poor women could get prenatal care, and a third of doctors wouldn't treat pregnant women who were Medicaid patients. In New York State, a health department study found that seven of the state's counties had no comprehensive prenatal care for poor women whatsoever; several of these counties, not so coincidentally, had infant mortality rates that were more than double the national average. In California in 1986, twelve counties didn't have a single doctor willing to accept the state's low-income MediCal patients; in fact, the National Health Law Program concluded that the situation in California was so bad that poor pregnant women are "essentially cut off from access to care."

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

#susan faludi #female oppression #prenatal care #low income women #pregnancy #amerika #failed state #court-ordered kidnapping #USA is a society that wants to die #misogyny

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dailyanarchistposts · 1 month ago

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Chapter Seven. The New Class

To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them. —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1[143]

The elevator at the Hilton Hotel in Anaheim, California, fills floor by floor, as it descends with delegates for the National Religious Broadcasters annual convention. There is a slightly forced camaraderie and an awkward cheerfulness as we head down to the lobby. People glance quickly at the plastic name tags on one another’s chests. They smile as new passengers step inside and say good morning. They sprinkle the words of the converted into their banter, talking about how “blessed” they are to be here, beginning brief dialogues with phrases such as “Where is your ministry?” and ending them with “Praise the Lord.” This call-and-response is a form of initiation, an easy way to draw the lines between themselves and nonbelievers, to establish the parameters of their exclusive community. All subcultures have their linguistic codes of identification. This new class is no exception.

The convention has brought together some 5,500 Christian broadcasters from radio and television, who reach, according to their figures, an estimated 141 million listeners and viewers across America. And they see themselves as both the persecuted and the powerful. These twin themes run through the event. They are both threatened by conspiratorial forces that seek to destroy them and empowered by the certainty of Christ’s return. These emotions bond them together as a crowd, as comrades in the battle against the godless.

Southern California, along with Colorado Springs, is one of the epicenters of the radical movement. Numerous television evangelists, including the disgraced Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker, got their start in these huge, soulless exurbs. These large developed tracts of housing are isolated, devoid of neighborhood gathering places, community rituals and routines, even of sidewalks. The isolation, coupled with the long, lonely commutes in a car; the cold, impersonal world of the corporate office; and the banal, incessant chatter of talk radio and television create numbness and disorientation. This destruction of community is one of the crucial factors that has led to the rise of the Christian Right. The megachurches, which have prospered in these environments, have become surrogate communities, places where people can find clubs to pursue common interests, friends, a sense of belonging, and moral direction. In these sprawling churches, which often look like shopping or convention centers, believers are reassured, told that affluence is blessed by God—a sign of their righteousness and the righteousness of their nation—and that in the embrace of the church they have a place, a home.

There is a Starbucks in the Hilton Hotel lobby. Dee Simmons from Dallas is waiting to order a coffee. Around her neck she is wearing a gold cross studded with diamonds, and on her face, smooth and unwrinkled, makeup is artfully applied. The line of men and women, in front and behind us, is conservatively dressed in skirts or coats and ties. They are about to head into the convention hall next door. Simmons and a friend, Samantha Landy, with red hair, are chatty and friendly.

In 1987, Simmons says, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a “modified radical mastectomy.” Five years later her mother died of cancer. These events led her, she says, to turn her focus away from the designer clothes boutiques she owned in Dallas and New York to nutrition.

“When God gave me my life back, I decided to make a difference in people’s lives,” she says.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out some pamphlets for Ultimate Living, her company. She tells me about her books, including The Natural Guide to Healthy Living, and mentions the numerous Christian talk shows she regularly appears on, including Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, as well as Hope Today, Praise, Something Good Tonight and the Armstrong Williams Show.

“I was saved and found Christ when I was 3,” she says. “I’m64. My daughter is 36.”

She appears to wait for the effect of her age, which she will repeat a few more times, to sink in.

“I also have skin care products which are all natural,” she says. “I am on Living the Life once or twice a month, the show with Terry Meeuwsen, who was Miss America. There is a huge crossover with my nutrition work. Everyone is interested in nutrition, even nonbelievers. I use organically grown papayas. I have eight laboratories where I make Green Miracle. Green Miracle combines greens and roots that are ground up. They have all the vital nutrients. I sell it at cancer hospitals. It is good for diabetes, heart disease, immune support, hormone problems, any issue, really.”

Landy tells me she runs “Christian celebrity luncheons” in Palm Springs as part of her work of “salvation outreach for snowbirds.” Her ministry, she says, focuses on country clubs and golf courses, places “where people do not often hear the word of God.

“A lot of people go to churches and assume the pastor has a personal relationship with Christ,” she says, “but they often do not. I bring in celebrity speakers like Gavin MacLeod, he was the Captain on Love Boat; and Rhonda Fleming, she was in over 40 films and starred with Bing Crosby—speakers who have really accomplished things in the world who are Christian. Rhonda Fleming did her own stunts.”

Her list of Christian celebrities available to speak includes Donna Douglas from the Beverly Hillbillies; Ann B. Davis, who was Alice on The Brady Bunch; and Lauren Chapin, who played Kathy on Father Knows Best.

“Tell him about the wedding,” Landy prompts.

Simmons’s daughter recently got married in Dallas. The wedding was filmed for broadcast on a show called Sheer Dallas. She urges me to watch it. The wedding theme, she says, was “Sultan’s Palace: Her Majesty the Queen.” There were 500 guests who gathered in a building known as the Hall of State and “flowers from all over the world.” She says she would rather not mention the cost. Her husband—who, she says, is “very, very wealthy,” adding “I don’t need to work”—refers, she says, to the wedding expense as “the national debt.”

“Her husband is quite a bit older,” Landy interjects.

“There was a huge fireworks display,” Simmons says, “but I am too embarrassed to tell you how much it cost. When the fireworks stopped, a quartet sang ‘God Bless America.’ There was a saxophone solo. Everyone had chills.”

“It was awesome,” Landy says.

The cake took three months to make. There were jewels and semiprecious stones both on the cake and in the bridal bouquet. Both had to be brought the day of the wedding to the Hall of State in an armored truck.

“The bridal gown took five and a half months to make,” she says. “It had mink this thick,” she adds, holding her thumb and index finger about four inches apart.

The women, minor celebrities in the world of Christian broadcasting, capture the strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity and America’s celebrity-driven culture. Not only are the wealthy blessed by the Lord and encouraged to engage in a frenzy of outlandish consumption, but also those who are famous, those who have achieved any celebrity or notoriety, no matter how minor, or those who have power, are seen as having important things to say about faith. Wealth, fame and power are manifestations of God’s work, proof that God has a plan and design for believers. This new class of celebrity, plutocrat Christians fuses with the consumer society, one where the lives and opinions of entertainers, the rich and the powerful are news. The women tell me they are in Anaheim because the yearly convention is the only time they can see all the major Christian broadcasters in one place. But it is clear they also come to be seen.

“These are the people who set up the shows,” Simmons says. “This is a good way to see everybody. It is like the gathering of one big family. We have flown in to network.”

This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.

The Convention Center, located next door, is a huge, curvy glass structure with gleaming towers. The exhibition hall on the first floor has plush, blue carpeting and 320 display booths. At the far end of the hall lie the twisted remains of an Israeli bus blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism has the largest display space in the hall. The Christian Law Center, organized to remove “activist judges” in the courts, has people handing out yardsticks of gum. At a booth featuring Valerie Saxion’s book The Gospel of Health, they are mixing raspberry shakes in blenders. A Virginia Web design company in another booth offers “church Web sites the way God intended.” A bearded man dressed as a biblical prophet promotes tours to the Holy Land. Numerous antiabortion booths are staffed by women, who, it often turns out, had multiple abortions before finding Christ. There are fringe groups such as Jews for Jesus and Accuracy in Media, which is passing out a report with the title American Troops Cheer Attacks on U.S. Media.

Rows of palm trees are visible through banks of windows, and on the upper floors are technical workshops, such as “Finding God in Hollywood,” as well as luncheons. One seminar is entitled “Taking Over Cities for Christ: The Thousand-Day Plan.” In the parking lot outside the center is a pickup truck with large hand-painted panels covered with antigay slogans. There is a round red circle with a line through the center superimposed on the faces of two men kissing. “Stop the Insanity” is painted across the top. I walk outside after surveying the hall and pick up one of the pamphlets in a metal box on the side of the truck. “PROTECT YOUR FAMILY & FRIENDS FROM THE DANGERS OF…HOMOSEXUALITY: THE TRUTH!” the pamphlet says. It lists “the facts about homosexuality they refuse to teach in Public Schools or report on the Evening News!” including “because of unsanitary sexual practices, homosexuals carry the bulk of all bowel disease in America” and “homosexuals average 500 sexual partners in their short lifetime.”

The opening session is held on the third floor, a large room with a round stage surrounded on three sides with rows of folding chairs. The hall is dimly lit. There are a few thousand people. Large television screens are suspended from the ceilings, and the platform in front of us has a podium and a grand piano. The host, Bob Lepine, cohost of the radio show Family Life Today, broadcast from Little Rock, Arkansas, is a round-faced man with an easy smile. He begins the session by showing himself in a video wandering the beaches near Anaheim asking surfers and stray Californians, some of whom clearly spent the night sleeping on the beach, what “NRB” means. No one knows, but the guesses evoke laughter from the hall.

“One of the fun things about coming here…I was thinking about the old days, you know, when we used to go to Washington to the Sheraton in February, and it’s cold, and now we come here and it’s warm, and you get to go to the beach and see weird people,” he quips. He explains that the evening is sponsored by the Family Research Council and introduces its president, Tony Perkins, who, he notes, “was responsible for the covenant marriage law that got passed in Louisiana,” a law that made it harder for couples to divorce.

Perkins is typical of the new class of insider-cum-outsiders. He organized the rallies, broadcast around the nation to church audiences, known as “Justice Sunday,” which featured an array of politicians such as Senate majority leader Bill Frist, all pounding home one central theme: the Democrats are at war with “people of faith.” The Democrats used the filibuster, viewers were told, to block judicial appointees who were people of faith. Perkins works for James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council, the lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family empire. Dobson has said the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade unleashed “the biggest Holocaust in world history” and has compared the “black-robed men” on the Supreme Court to “the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan.”[144]

Justice Sunday was part of a strategy devised more than two decades ago by Woody Jenkins, Perkins’s political mentor. Jenkins and some 50 conservative men gathered in May 1981 at the northern Virginia home of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie to plot the growth of their movement following Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory. They formed the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive, right-wing organization that brought together dominionists such as R. J. Rushdoony, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell with right-wing industrialists willing to fund them, such as Amway founder Richard DeVos Sr. and beer baron Joseph Coors. As DeVos quipped, the CNP “brings together the doers with the donors.”[145]

Jenkins, then a Louisiana state lawmaker, became the CNP’s first executive director. He told a Newsweek reporter: “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”[146]

In 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush addressed the group as he launched his bid for the presidency. The media were barred from the event. But those who wrote about the meeting afterward said that Bush, who refused to release a public transcript of his speech, promised to only appoint antiabortion judges if he was elected. The group, which meets three times a year in secret, brings together radical Christian activists, right-wing Republican politicians and wealthy patrons willing to fund the movement. During Bush’s presidency, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have attended CNP meetings.[147]

Perkins, like other leaders in the movement, has troubling associations with white supremacy groups. They work hard now to distance themselves from these relationships, often quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and drawing parallels between their movement and the civil-rights movement. But during the 1996 Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins, Perkins, who was Jenkins’s campaign manager, signed an $82,500 check to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, to acquire Duke’s phone bank list.[148] And as late as 2001, Perkins spoke at a fund-raiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group that has called blacks “a retrograde species of humanity” on its Web site.[149]

The ties by Christian Right leaders such as Perkins with racist groups highlight the long ties between right-wing fundamentalists and American racist organizations, including the Klan, which had a chaplain assigned to each chapter. During the Depression, when many on the right and in corporate America were openly flirting with fascism, fundamentalist preachers such as Gerald B. Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith fused national and Christian symbols to advocate the country’s first crude form of Christo-fascism. Smith, who openly admired the Nazis, founded a group called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, whose magazine was The Cross and the Flag. The movement proclaimed that “Christian character is the basis of all real Americanism.”[150]

By the late 1950s these radical Christians had drifted to the fiercely anticommunist John Birch Society. Many of the ideas championed by today’s dominionists—the bizarre conspiracy theories, the calls for unrestrained capitalism, the war against “liberal” organizations such as the mainstream media and groups such as the ACLU, along with the calls to dismantle federal agencies that deal with housing or education—are drawn from the ideology of this rabid anticommunist enclave. Timothy LaHaye used to run John Birch Society training seminars in California. And Nelson Bunker Hunt, a member of the John Birch Society’s national council, worked with LaHaye to help found the CNP.[151]

A baritone voice booms throughout the arena as we watch video images of the nation’s capital: “America’s culture was hijacked by a secular movement determined to redefine society, from religious freedom to the right to life. These radicals were doing their best to destroy two centuries of traditional values, and no one seemed to be able to stop them until now.”

“Will Congress undo 200 years of tradition?” the video asks ominously. “Not on our watch.”

“This is about calling Christians across this nation to action,” Perkins says in the video. “As one who spent nearly a decade in political office and even longer as a minister of the Gospel, I see [the Family Research Council] as a bridge between Christians and between government. Spanning a gulf that has been created by judicial decisions that have taken away the rich soil of this nation, that is this historical soil of Christianity, and by those whose misguided theology have caused Christians to abandon the public square, leaving a cavernous void in public policy. As this bridge, the Family Research Council sends its team to Congress and into the White House on a daily basis, to advocate for family and for our faith.”

There was a brief attempt at resistance to the rule of National Religious Broadcasters by these dominionists. Wayne Pederson in 2002 was appointed to replace the group’s longtime president, Brandt Gustavson. “We get associated with the far Christian right and marginalized,” Pederson told a reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. “To me the important thing is to keep the focus on what’s important to us spiritually.”[152] His effort to shift the organization’s focus away from politics saw the executive committee orchestrate his removal a few weeks later. He was replaced by Frank Wright, who had spent the previous eight years serving as the executive director of Kennedy’s Center for Christian Statesmanship, a Capitol Hill ministry that conducts training for politicians on how to “think biblically about their role in government.”

Wright, with white hair and a cold, hard demeanor, lacks the easy banter of Lepine or the comforting, bland good looks of Perkins. Wright lauds the transformation in Washington, saying that 130 members of the House of Representatives are “born again.” He tells a story, which elicits laughter and applause, of how during a late-night private tour of the capital, he and other pastors stopped and prayed over Hillary Clinton’s Senate floor desk.

Wright, like most speakers, begins by talking about his long marriage. It is a reminder that in Christ is stability, that the home and marriage are protected, that Christian men and women achieve bliss denied to others. The movement, he says, is the bulwark against chaos, against a return to lives spinning out of control.

“The Gospel changed not just my life, it changed my marriage to Ruth,” he says. “It changed my family. The Gospel changes families, and churches and communities and cities and nations. All of what we call Western civilization today, it has the shape that it has and the character that it has because the Gospel changes things.”

And then he warns his listeners about the enemies at the gate, saying that “calls for diversity and multiculturalism are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone who is willing or desirous or compelled to proclaim Christian truth. Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they’ll tolerate just about anything except Christian truth.”

The broadcasters’ association, he explains, is lobbying in Congress against hate-crime legislation, which, Wright explains to the audience, “is step one to defining what you do as against the law.” The broadcasters have worked to thwart the “fairness doctrine,” what he calls “the bane of Christian broadcasters.

“A bill was filed in the House of Representatives that would require any programming that was ‘controversial,’ quote unquote, in nature, to give equal time to opposing viewpoints,” he tells the crowd. “Now let me think about this…controversial things…the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the bodily Resurrection. Everything we teach is controversial to someone else. If we had to give equal time to every opposing viewpoint, there would be no time to proclaim the truth that we’ve been commanded to proclaim. So we will fight the ‘fairness doctrine’ tooth and nail. It could be the end of Christian broadcasting if we don’t.”

The preoccupation with legislation, the plethora of speakers who come from Christian lobbying groups based in the capital, attest to a movement that is increasingly as preoccupied with legislation as with saving souls. And those that do not deal with the nuts and bolts of legislation remind those present that there are forces out there that seek to destroy Christians. James MacDonald, an imposing man with a shaved head, runs a church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and is heard regularly on 600 Christian radio outlets. He fires up the crowd.

“How many of you out there think ministering the Word is unpopular?” he asks, as a sea of hands shoots into the air.

“His eyes are like a flame of fire,” MacDonald says, quoting Revelation 19. “Out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, and with it he can strike the nations. He treads the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of the almighty God, and on his robe and on his thigh a name is written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus commands all men everywhere to come to the knowledge of Him.”

He reminds us that “ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclamation” and “there is power in the unapologetic proclamation of truth. There is power in it. This is a kingdom of power.” When he says the word “power,” he draws it out for emphasis. He tells the crowd to eschew the “persuasive words of human wisdom.” Truth, he says, does “not rest in the wisdom of men but the power of God.” And, in a lisping imitation of liberals, he mocks, amid laughter and applause, those who want to “share” and be sensitive to the needs of others.

His antics delight most of the crowd, but not all. Luis Palau, a close protégé of Billy Graham, is one of the few present at the convention who is uncomfortable with the naked and repeated calls for power. Palau is an affable man, an Argentine with a refreshing worldliness about him. He also represents a traditional evangelicalism that has been shunted aside, often ruthlessly, by this new class. His focus is on personal salvation, he says, not the seizing of political power. He refused to become involved in the referendum banning gay marriage in Oregon, where his organization is based, although he, like Graham, is no supporter of gay rights. But he bristles at the coarseness, the naked calls for a Christian state, and the anti-intellectualism. He, like Graham, shuns the movement’s caustic, biting humor that belittles homosexuals, those deemed effete intellectuals and those condemned as “secular humanists.” The emphasis on abortion and gay marriage to the exclusion of other issues worries him.

“There are some Christians who have gone overboard,” Palau says, choosing his words carefully as we talk. “The message has become a little distorted in states where they talk about change yet focus on only one issue. We need a fuller transformation. The great thing Billy Graham did was to bring intellectualism back to fundamentalism.

“I don’t think it is wrong to want to see political change, especially in places like Latin America,” he says. “Something has to happen in politics. But it has to be based on convictions. We have to overcome the sense of despair. I worked in Latin America in the days when almost every country had a dictator. I dreamed, especially as a kid, of change, of freedom and justice. But I believe that change comes from personal conviction, from leading a more biblical lifestyle, not by Christianizing a nation. If we become called to Christ, we will build an effective nation through personal ethics. When you lead a life of purity, when you respect your wife and are good to your family, when you don’t waste money gambling and womanizing, you begin to work for better schools, for more protection and safety for your community. All change, historically, comes from the bottom up. And this means changing the masses from within.”

Palau sees his work as focused on the conversion of souls, who, once they become saved, will become a force for “structural, institutional change.” But this, he adds, “can take two or three generations.”

The emphasis on personal renewal and commitment to Christ—the staple message of evangelists such as Billy Graham and Luis Palau—is an anachronism to the new class. While speakers demand that followers give their lives to Christ, and while the born-again experience is considered the dividing line between believers and nonbelievers, the conversion experience is no longer the dominant theme pounded home from the pulpit or across the airwaves. It has been replaced by the rhetoric of war, the demands of a warrior God who promises blood and vengeance, and by the rhetoric of persecution, by the belief that there are sinister forces that seek the destruction of believers. It has also been replaced by a conspicuous and unapologetic infatuation with wealth, power and fame. As the movement has shifted away from the focus on personal salvation to a focus on power, it has incorporated into its theology the values, or lack of them, of a flagrant consumer society.

The strangest alliance, on the surface, is with Israeli Jews. After all, the movement generally teaches that Jews who do not convert are damned and will be destroyed in the fiery, apocalyptic ending of the world. It is early on Sunday morning in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel. The Israel Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters are serving plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. Nearly everyone is white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Temple will be rebuilt to herald the Second Coming. Some 700,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and with the steep decline in overall tourism, they have become a valued source of revenue in Israel.

Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return. The belief that Jews who do not convert will be killed is unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, the new Israeli minister of tourism; and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Medved is one of the most prominent Jewish defenders of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and of the radical Christian Right. He wears a yarmulke and is warmly greeted by the crowd.

“A more Christian America is good for the Jews,” he says. “This is obvious. Take a look at this support for Israel. A more Christian America is good for America, something Jewish people need to be more cognizant about and acknowledge. A more Jewish community is good for the Christians, not just because of the existence of allies, but because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism.”

A former left-wing radical, who in later life embraced Orthodox Judaism, he lambastes other Jews for their hostility to Christianity.

“When you see Jews who are part of the attack on Christmas,” he says, “you know they have rejected their own faith.”

He ticks off causes in which both Jewish and Christian people have been active, including the call for prayer in schools and the fight against abortion (although abortion is legal in Israel). He defends his Jewish integrity by saying he does not believe in the Rapture. But this is more than a religious alliance. It is a political alliance. It unites messianic Christians with right-wing messianic Jews, who believe God has anointed them to expand their dominion throughout the Middle East at the expense of the Arab majority.

This is soon made clear by the next speaker, Glenn Plummer, a black minister from Detroit who is active in the Republican Party. It is his role—I suspect because his status as an inner-city black minister makes expression of such sentiments “all right”—to unleash the audience’s vituperative hate against Muslims. He says he knows about Muslims because “I come from Detroit, where the biggest mosque in America is. It didn’t take 9/11 to show me there is a global battle going on for the souls of men…. When Islam comes into a place it is intent on taking over everything, not only government, but the business, the neighborhoods, everything.”

The Christian writer Kay Arthur, who can barely contain her tears when speaking of the Jews and Israel, assures those in the room that, although she loves America, if she had to choose between America and Israel, “I would stand with Israel, stand with Israel as a daughter of the King of Kings, stand according to the word of God.” She goes on to quote at length from the Book of Revelation, repeating many of the familiar passages that inspire the movement, and speaks of Jesus seated in a throne floating about Jerusalem as believers are raptured up toward him in the sky. The fate of unreconstructed Jews, including—one would assume—those hosting the breakfast, is omitted.

A popular radio host, Janet Parshall, who also leads tours to the Holy Land, speaks to the group of her dialogue with the Lord about taking tourists to a place where there are suicide bombings and attacks.

“‘God, the Holy Land has terrorists,’ I said. But God said, ‘Janet, you’re from Washington DC,’” a quote that elicited laughter.

Hirschsohn, Israel’s minister of tourism, says to the gathering: “You stood with us for the last four years when nobody else would. Thank you.”

“The Bible tells us the Lord spoke to Abraham in the land where today American troops are defending freedom,” he says. He announces that the Israeli tourism ministry will build a “pilgrim center” for Christian tourists in the Galilee.

The charred remains of Israeli Public Bus 19 are in the neighboring convention hall. The bus, owned by a Christian Zionist group called the Jerusalem Connection, was blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in January 2004. The president of the organization, retired U.S. Brigadier General James Hutchens, according to information from the group, “looks at the conflict in Israel within a biblical context.” Bus 19 has, since the group acquired it, been displayed around the world, including in The Hague and in numerous “Remember Israel” rallies in the United States. On a table next to the bus, a seated Jerusalem Connection official hands out pamphlets reading, “Bring Bus #19 To Your Community!”

One of the reasons to bring the bus, the pamphlet says, is that “for Christians, you will increase in stature, appreciation and acceptance by Jews.”

An Egyptian woman, a Christian who is manning a booth near the bus that advertises Christian broadcasts to the Arab world, is periodically reduced to tears by enraged conventioneers who, after visiting the bus, tell her Arabs are “terrorists.”

Onlookers climb onto a platform alongside the bus to peer within. Its sides are scorched black, center doors twisted, steel frame bent and shattered. Bus 19 has been adorned with banners bearing biblical quotations, including: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them” (Amos 9:15); “And I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3), and “Those who say come, let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more…. They form an alliance against God” (Psalm 83:4–5).

There are cards of condolences from American schoolchildren, flowers on the flooring of the bus, and at the base of the raised platform large photos and biographies of those killed in the attack. A poster reads: “When Palestinians love their children, more than they hate Israel, then there will be peace in Palestine.” The poster shows six photos of children holding weapons or strapped with explosives.

“Over 50 public transportation buses just like this one have been bombed in Israel,” reads another sign. “In three and a half years, suicide bombers have killed more than 975 people in Israel. They are represented here.”

But some of the Israelis in the hall are uncomfortable with the Bus 19 display. They are telling conventioneers, whom they are trying to get to visit Israel, that the bus represents an old phase in the conflict, and that Israel is now moving toward peace. One Israeli is Marina, who has long, blond hair, a brown shirt, and knee-high leather boots. She immigrated to Israel from Holland and lives on a cooperative mango farm near the Sea of Galilee. She says she is “embarrassed” to be at the convention. “These people are anti-Semitic,” she says, speaking softly as conventioneers move past the large Israeli display space. She is unhappy with the bigotry toward Muslims expressed by the speakers. When asked why the ministry is here, she answers curtly: “money.”

“No one else visits Israel,” she says.

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education—in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs. They will become the new class. Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible. It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration.

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brookstonalmanac · 5 months ago

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Holidays 8.1

Holidays

African Emancipation Day (Trinidad and Tobago)

Air Force Day

Armed Forces Day (China, Lebanon)

Azerbaijani Language and Alphabet Day

Basil Day (French Republic)

Battle of Athens Day

Bitcoin Independence Day

Caribbean Day

Chopsticks Day

Clergy Sexual Abuse Awareness and Prevention Day

Cross-Quarter Day

Cycle to Work Day (UK)

Day of Azerbaijani Language and Alphabet

Day of Pachamama (Peru)

Day of the Rear Services of the Armed Forces (Russia)

Day of the Telephone Operator (Mexico)

DOGust

Earth Overshoot Day 2024 (a.k.a. Ecological Debt Day) [ website ]

Ectopic Pregnancy Awareness Day

801 Day

Emancipation Day (UK; British Commonwealth)

Freedom Day (Belize)

Freedom to Marry Day (Minnesota)

Friendship Day

Gold Star Children’s Day

Girlfriends’ Day

Good Sportsmanship Day

Grain Marketing Freedom Day (Canada)

Guca Brass Bands Day (Serbia)

Harriet Quimby Day

HitchBOT Remembrance Day

Homowo (a.k.a. Hooting at Hunger; Ghana)

Indigenous Peoples Day (Taiwan)

International Adaptive Activity Day

International Can-It-Forward Day

International Childfree Day

International Mahjong Day

International Marine Protected Areas Day

International Sri Lankan Leopard Day

International Woo-Ah Day

Jerry Day

Laa Luanys (Isle of Man)

Laughter Day (Southern California)

Led Zeppelin Day

Liberation of Haile Selassie Day (Rastafari)

Memorial Day for the Victims of World War I (Russia)

Minden Day (UK)

Minority Donor Awareness Day

MTV Day

National Alpaca Day (Peru)

National American Family Day

National Andrew Day

National CBD Day

National Girlfriends Day

National Huddle Ledbetter Day

National Mahjong Day

National Minority Donor Awareness Day

National Mountain Climbing Day

National Non-Parent Day

National Poll Worker Recruitment Day

National Promise to Care Day

National Spritz Day

National Waifu Day

National Warsaw Uprising Remembrance Day (Poland)

National Wedding Day (UK)

National York Day

Odaiba Day

Oxygen Discovery Day

Parents’ Day (Democratic Republic of the Congo; Zaire)

Planner Day

Play Ball Day

Pod Body Day (Portland, Maine)

Respect For Parents Day

RNA Day

Rounds Resounding Day

San Francisco Cable Car Day

Scout Foundation Day

Scout Scarf Day

Social Resistance Day (North Cyprus)

Spider-Man Day

Sports Day

SSN 801 Day

Startup Day Across America

Swiss National Day

Technical Support Worker Day (Russia)

Treida de Santo Domingo de Guzmán (Nicaragua)

Thoroughbred Birthday (Southern Hemisphere)

Victory Day (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam)

White Rabbit Day

Wipe the Slate Clean Day

Woman Astronomers Day

Women’s Day (Thailand)

World Breastfeeding Day

World Day of Joy

World Fintech Day

World Lung Cancer Day

World Middle Finger Day

World Naked Sailing Day

World Scout Scarf Day

World Wide Web Day

Yaoi Day

Yorkshire Day (England)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Belgian Frites Day (a.k.a. International Day of Belgian Fries)

Homemade Pie Day

International Albariño Day

International Can-It Forward Day

Mars Bar Day

National Nutritional Yeast Day

National Raspberry Cream Pie Day

Old Vine Day

Independence & Related Days

Benin (originally Dahomey; from France, 1960)

Colorado Statehood Day (#38; 1876)

Guadalcanal Province Day (Solomon Islands)

Jennytopia (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Switzerland (a.k.a. Confederation Day; from Holy Roman Empire, 1291)

Toku (Declared; 2014) [unrecognized]

Vodopol (Declared; 2021) [unrecognized]

1st Thursday in August

August Thursday (Anguilla) [1st Thursday]

Emancipation Day (Bermuda; 1st Day of Cup Match) [Thursday before 1st Monday in August]

Kid Lit Art Postcard Day [1st Thursday]

National Dash Cam Day (UK) [1st Thursday]

National IPA Day (f.k.a. International IPA Day) [1st Thursday]

Weekly Holidays beginning August 1 (1st Week of August)

Brat Days (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) [1st Thursday thru Sunday]

Carnaval del Pueblo (London, UK) [1st Week]

International Assistance Dog Week (thru 8.7) [1st Week]

International Clown Week (thru 8.7)

International Mathematicians Week (thru 8.9)

National Albariño Week (thru 8.5)

National Cleanse Your Skin Week (thru 8.7)

National Fraud Awareness Week (thru 8.7) [1st Week]

National Minority Donor Awareness Week (thru 8.7)

National Scrabble Week (thru 8.7) [1st Week]

National Video Game Week (thru 8.7) [1st Week]

Satchmo Days [begin Thursday nearest 8.4 thru Sunday]

Simplify Your Life Week (thru 8.7)

World Breastfeeding Week (thru 8.7) [1st Week]

Festivals Beginning August 1, 2024

American Cured Meat Championships (Omaha, Nebraska) [thru 8.3]

August is Maine Lobster Month (Statewide, Maine) [thru 8.31]

Bear Lake Raspberry Days Festival (Garden City, Utah) [thru 8.3]

Castlefest (Lisse, Netherlands) [thru 8.4]

Clam Festival (Highlands, New Jersey) [thru 8.3]

Denver Burger Battle (Denver, Colorado)

Eden Corn Festival (Eden, New York) [thru 8.4]

Empire Farm Days (Pompey, New York) [thru 8.3]

Estherville Sweet Corn Days (Estherville, Iowa) [thru 8.4]

Gen Con (Indianapolis, Indiana) [thru 8.4]

Green Gathering (Chepstow, United Kingdom) [thru 8.4]

Houston Restaurant Weeks (Houston, Texas) [thru 9.2]

Katahdin Sheep Show (Mexico, Missouri) [thru 8.3]

Klamath County Fair (Klamath Falls, Oregon) [thru 8.4]

Lollapalooza (Chicago, Illinois) [thru 8.4]

Mammoth Festival of Beers & Bluesapalooza (Mammoth Lakes, California) [thru 8.4]

Mile of Music (Appleton, Wisconsin) [thru 8.4]

Minnesota Fringe Festival (Minneapolis, Minnesota) [thru 8.11]

Mobile Motion Film Festival (Zurich, Swizterland) [thru 8.31]

Official Star Trek Convention (Las Vegas, Nevada) [thru 8.4]

Outer Banks Watermelon Festival (Nag's Head, North Carolina)

Owensville Watermelon Festival (Owensville, Indiana) [thru 8.3]

Phelps Sauerkraut Weekend (Phelps, New York) [thru 8.4

Pol’and’Rock Festival (Woodstock Festival Poland; Czaplinek, Poland) [thru 8.3]

Saint Dominic Days (Managua) [thru 8.10]

Saskatoon Fringe Festival (Saskatoon, Canada) [thru 8.10]

Spicemas (Grenada Carnival; St. George’s, Grenada) [thru 8.13]

Sumner County Fair (Caldwell, Kansas) [thru 8.4]

Toronto Caribbean Carnival (Toronto, Canada) [thru 8.5]

Twin Cities Vegan Chef Challenge (Minneapolis, Minnesota) [thru 8.31]

Washington Wine Month (Washington State) [thru 8.31]

Wisconsin State Fair (West Allis, Wisconsin) [thru 8.11]

World Lumberjack Championships [thru 8.3]

XIT Rodeo & Reunion (Dalhart, Texas) [thru 8.3]

Zanzibar International Film Festival (Zanzibar City, Tanzania) [thru 8.4]

Feast Days

Abgar V of Edessa (Syrian Church)

Alan Moore (Australian War Artist; Artology)

Aled (a.k.a. Eiluned or Almedha; Christian; Martyr & Virgin)

Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori (Christian; Saint)

Æthelwold of Winchester (Christian; Saint)

Bernard Võ Văn Duệ (Christian; One of Vietnamese Martyrs)

Betty Lou’s Dad (Muppetism)

Cartoon Day (Pastafarian)

Chantal Montellier (Artology)

David Gemmell (Writerism)

Day of the Dryads (Macedonia)

Dormition Fast (Orthodox Church) [thru 8.14]

Drug Side-Effects Day (Church of the SubGenius)

Ethelwold of Winchester (Christian; Saint)

Eusebius of Vercelli (Christian; Saint)

Exuperius of Bayeux (Christian; Saint)

Faith, Hope, and Charity (Christian; Virgin Martyrs)

Feast of Faith, Hope, Charity, and their Mother, Wisdom (Christian; Martyrs)

Feast of Kamál (Perfection; Baha'i)

Feast of Ninlil (Sumerian Goddess of the Grain)

Felix of Girona (Christian; Saint)

Festival of Lugh (Celtic here god)

Festival of Xiuhtechuhtli (Aztec God of the Calendar)

Gerhard Hirschfelder (Christian; Blessed)

Herman Melville (Writerism)

The Holy Maccabees (Christian; Saint)

Imps Charity Scramble (Shamanism)

Isobel Lilian Gloag (Artology)

Jackie Ormes (Artology)

James Henry Govier (Artology)

Jan van Scorel (Artology)

Kalends of August (Ancient Rome)

Lammas (a.k.a. ...

Feast of Bread (Neopagan)

Feast of First Fruits (England, Scotland)

Feast of the Wheat Harvest

Festival of Albina (Irish White Barley Goddess; aka Alphito)

Festival of the First Fruits

Gule of August (England, Scotland)

Imbolc (So. Hemisphere; Neopagan)

Lady Day Eve (Neopagan)

Lammas, Day 2 (Celtic, Pagan) [5 of 8 Festivals of the Natural Year]

Lammas Eve (a.k.a. Lughnassad Eve)

Lammas Sabbat

Luanistyn (Manx Gaelic)

Lithasblot (Norse Harvest Festival)

Loaf Mass

Loki and Sigyn’s Day (Norse)

Lugh (Celtic Book of Days)

Lughnasa

Lughnasadh (Grain Harvest) [Ends on Samhain]

Lúnasa (Modern Irish)

Lùnastal (Scottish Gaelic)

Sexon Hlafmaesse

Lobster Boy Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Mati-Syra-Zemlya Day (Slavic Goddess of the Earth)

Pachamama Rayni (Festival Celebrating Mother Earth) [Ecuador; Peru]

Pellegrini (a.k.a. Peregrinus), Hermit (Christian; Saint)

Peter Apostle in Chains (Christian; Saint)

Procession of the Cross and the beginning of Dormition Fast (Eastern Orthodox)

Quarter Day (Scotland)

Richard Wilson (Artology)

Rose Macaulay (Writerism)

Sebastiano Ricci (Artology)

The Spanish Romancers (Positivist; Saints)

Vhrsti (Artology)

Warsan Shire (Writerism)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Dismal Day (Unlucky or Evil Day; Medieval Europe; 15 of 24)

Egyptian Day (Unlucky Day; Middle Ages Europe) [15 of 24]

Fatal Day (Pagan) [15 of 24]

Tomobiki (友引 Japan) [Good luck all day, except at noon.]

Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [35 of 60]

Unlucky Monday (when Eve gave birth to Cain; Philippines) [1st Monday] (3 of 4)

Premieres

Alfred, by Thomas Arne (Opera; 1740)

Alice the Peacemaker (Disney Cartoon; 1924)

American Graffiti (Film; 1973)

Bargain Daze (Heckle & Jeckle Cartoon; 1953)

Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger (Book; 1927)

Big Chief No Treaty (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1962)

The Big Money, by John Dos Passos (Novel; 1936)

Burning Love, by Elvis Presley (Song; 1972)

Cape Kidnaveral (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1961)

Charley’s Aunt (Film; 1941)

Cook and Stagger (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1956)

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, by Judi and Ron Barrett (Children’s Book; 1978)

Concert for Bangladesh, hosted by George Harrison (Charity Concert; 1971)

Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, by Squeeze (Album; 1985)

Cowardly Watchdog (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1966)

Crazy with the Heat (Disney Cartoon; 1947)

Crusader Rabbit (Jay Ward Cartoon TV Series; 1950)

The Dog Show (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1950)

Driven to Extraction (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1963)

Dune, by Frank Herbert (Novel; 1965)

The Dusters, featuring the Mighty Heroes (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1971)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (Novel; 1968)

Eric, by Terry Pratchet (Novel; 1990) [Discworld #9]

Everybody’s Rockin’, by Neil Young (Album; 1983)

The Fabulous Firework Family (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1959)

The Final Countdown (Film; 1980)

Flebus (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1957)

Flight of the Navigator (Film; 1986)

The Four Musicians of Bremen (b Iwerks Cartoon; 1922)

A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin (Novel; 2000) [A Song of Fire and Ice #1]

Gangsta’s Paradise, by Coolio (Song; 1995)

Generals and Majors, by XTC (Song; 1980)

The Genie with the Light Touch (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1972)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Novel; 2008) [Millennium Trilogy #1]

Give Me Liberty (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1967)

Golden Egg Goose (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1951)

Guardians of the Galaxy (Film; 2014)

Heaven Can Wait (Film; 1943)

The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes (Poem; 1906)

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle (Novel; 1901)

House Busters (Heckle & Jeckle Cartoon; 1952)

Howard the Duck (Film; 1986)

How to Catch a Cold (Disney Cartoon; 1951)

Jeremy, by Pearl Jam (Music Video; 1992)

Judo Kudos (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1968)

King Tut’s Tomb (Heckle & Jeckle Cartoon; 1950)

The Littlest Bully (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1960)

The Lyin’ Lion (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1949)

Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey (Children’s Book; 1941)

Meat, Drink and Be Merry (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1961)

Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by C.G. Jung (Philosophical Book; 1933)

Money (That’s What I Want), by Barrett Strong (Song; 1959)

The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey (Novel; 1975)

Mrs. Jones’ Rest Farm (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1949)

MTV (Cable Network; 1981)

MySpace (Social Media App; 2003)

96 Tears, by ? and the Mysterians (Song; 1966)

North Dallas Forty (Film; 1979)

Nothing in Common (Film; 1986)

Oil Through the Day (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1964)

Open House (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1953)

Paul Bunyan (Disney Cartoon; 1958)

Porky the Rain-Maker (WB LT Cartoon; 1936)

Pride of the Yard (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1954)

Rain Dogs, by Tom Waits (Album; 1985)

Rear Window (Film; 1954)

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (novel; 1938)

The Road Not Taken (Poem; 1925)

Robots in Toyland (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1965)

Rule Britannia, by Thomas Arne (Song; 1740)

Señorella and the Glass Huarache (WB LT Cartoon; 1964)

Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather (Novel; 1931)

Shootin’ Stars (Modern Madcaps Cartoon; 1960)

Shotgun Shambles (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1962)

Sick, Sick Sidney (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1958)

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemingway (Short Story; 1936)

Steel Wheels, by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1989)

Superiority, by Arthur C. Clarke (Short Story; 1951)

A Swiss Miss (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1950)

The 39 Steps (Film; 1935)

Tot Watchers (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1958)

Trouble in Baghdad (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1963)

Truant Officer Donald (Disney Cartoon; 1941)

The Trumpet of the Swan, by E.B. White (Children’s Book; 1970)

Turning the Fables (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1960)

The Twist, by Chubby Checker (Song; 1960)

Video Killed the Radio Star, by The Buggles (Music Video; 1981)

A Wedding Knight (Modern Madcaps Cartoon; 1966)

The Wiggles, by The Wiggles (Album; 1991)

Wild and Woolly Hare (WB LT Cartoon; 1959)

Witchy Woman, by The Eagles (Song; 1972)

Today’s Name Days

Alfons, Kenneth, Peter (Austria)

Alfonz, Jonatan (Croatia)

Oskar (Czech Republic)

Maira, Maire, Mairi, Maris (Estonia)

Maire (Finland)

Alphonse (France)

Alfons, Kenneth, Peter, Uwe (Germany)

Efkleos, Elesa, Markelos, Solomoni (Greece)

Boglárka (Hungary)

Alfonso, Giacomo (Italy)

Albīna, Albīns, Dags, Jarmuts, Spekonis (Latvia)

Almeda, Bartautas, Bartautė (Lithuania)

Peder, Petra (Norway)

Brodzisław, Justyn, Konrad, Konrada, Nadia, Piotr (Poland)

Božidara (Slovakia)

Alfonso, Caridad, Esperanza, Fe, Pedro (Spain)

Per (Sweden)

Charissa, Charity, Chasity, Cheri, Cherie, Cherry, Cheryl, Esperanza, Faith, Faye, Hope, Nadia, Nadine (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 214 of 2024; 152 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 4 of Week 31 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Tinne (Holly) [Day 27 of 28]

Chinese: Month 6 (Xin-Wei), Day 27 (Ding-You)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 26 Tammuz 5784

Islamic: 25 Muharram 1446

J Cal: 4 Purple; Foursday [4 of 30]

Julian: 19 July 2024

Moon: 8%: Waning Crescent

Positivist: 17 Dante (8th Month) [The Spanish Romancers]

Runic Half Month: Thorn (Defense) [Day 9 of 15]

Season: Summer (Day 43 of 94)

Week: 1st Week of August

Zodiac: Leo (Day 11 of 31)

Calendar Changes

August (Gregorian Calendar) [Month 8 of 12]

#Holidays

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catsofcalifornia · 1 year ago

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Liam from Women United For Animal Welfare in Los Angeles, California

Click here for more information about adoption and other ways to help (as well as a video of sweet Liam)!

Click here for a link to Women United For Animal Welfare's main website.

Hi! Meet Liam! Liam is the sweetest most affectionate Flame Point Siamese kitty! He is approx 6-7 years old, neutered, vaccinated, vaccinated. Unfortunately Liam tested positive for FIV but negative for Felv. Fiv can be managed with a healthy and safe environment along with proper nutrition. It is not a death sentence. It is only transmittable through deep bite wounds through fighting however Liam is not a fighter so he could go to a home with an FIV negative cat. We rescued Liam from the shelter where he was medical listed due to his eyes needing surgery. We provided the entropian surgery he needed and he is doing much better now that he can see better! Liam must have lived on the street for a long time as he also had a badly broken jaw at one point that has already healed. Our vets recommended that we do not surgically fix it as he can eat just fine and it doesn’t seem to cause him any pain. He does however have a crooked smile! Liam is such a sweet boy who deserves the world! He loves to be in the mix and greets everyone at the door when they come in. Liam gets along fine with cats but doesn’t like dogs so it’s best he goes to a home with no dogs. Liam also became good friends with a tiny 8 week old female kitten named Sherman who he would love to go to a home with but it’s not absolutely necessary.

#cats #california #los angeles #adoption #adoptnotshop

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xtruss · 7 months ago

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This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories A Century Ago, And We’re Still Dealing With The Consequences

When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a New Method For Weighing Their Dinner Options, She Launched a Century of Diet Fads That Left Us Hungry For a Better Way to Keep Our Bodies Strong and Healthy

— By Michelle Stacey

Illustration By Zoë van Dijk

In 1909, more than a decade before the 19th Amendment would grant her the right to vote, Lulu Hunt Peters had already achieved a rare status for a woman of her time. She earned a doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, when fewer than 5 percent of American medical students were female, and she was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital; she led its pathology lab for a time and later served as chair of the public health committee for the California Federation of Women’s Clubs in Los Angeles. The role, wrote the Santa Cruz Evening News, came with “more power than the entire city health office.” She lectured frequently about public health and child nutrition.

Over the next decade, though, what Peters came to regard as her greatest triumph was more personal than professional. As she entered her 40s, Peters used stringent and unrelenting discipline to slim what she described as her “too, too solid” body by dropping 70 pounds. That was what she really wanted to tell people about, with a fervency that approached the messianic. She began tailoring her lectures toward the holy grail she had discovered, a tool that she saw as the key to her weight loss: something called the calorie.

Familiar territory even to schoolchildren today, the calorie was, more than a century ago, a niche concept just beginning to emerge from the laboratory and into public view. Peters was about to supercharge that evolution, in the process turning the meaning and use of the calorie on its head and spurring its transformation into one of the most enduring and significant health concepts of the modern day. The calorie gave the public its first penetrating view inside the foods they ate, providing an elementary understanding of nutrition. But it would also go on to torment millions, enrich corporations, inspire generations of advertising campaigns, provoke widespread guilt and pride, and even, some argue today, lead Americans, fat gram by carb gram, calorie by calorie, into epidemic levels of obesity, by instructing the masses to focus on calories rather than on nutrients and steering them toward highly processed carbohydrates.

Left: The cover of Lulu Hunt Peters' book Diet and Health. Right: Having lost 70 pounds, Peters wanted to help others reduce.“I will save you; yea, even as I have saved myself and many, many others,” she wrote. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters ended up distilling her passion for calorie counting into a slim handbook, which was published in 1918 and went on to become the first diet best seller in history. Titled Diet and Health With Key to the Calories, Peters’ book did not stint on humor and playfulness. She engaged her 10-year-old nephew (“the little rascal”) to contribute whimsical stick-figure illustrations, and she made up satirical names like Mrs. Ima Gobbler and Mrs. Tiny Weyaton for hapless members of what she in later works would call the “Friendly Fat Fraternity” (epithets and terminology that would not go over benignly today). But throughout, she paid constant obeisance to the invisible, ineffable calorie. “You should know and also use the word calorie as frequently, or more frequently, than you use the words foot, yard, quart, gallon and so forth,” she wrote. “Hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie.”

The idea had a novelty and simplicity that sparked a movement. By 1922, Diet and Health reached the best-seller list and remained there for four years, nestled among works by Mark Twain and Emily Post. And just like that, a century of calorie-counting began—for better or, as it’s become increasingly clear, for worse.

When Peters Started Proselytizing For The Calorie In The Mid-1910s, the concept was so new to the general public that she had to tell her readers how to pronounce the word. (Kal’-o-ri, she explained, adding coyly that yes, calories are kosher.) But researchers had been studying the calorie for decades, for reasons that could not have been more different from Peters’. The calorie, based on the Latin root “calor,” meaning heat, was first identified and used by the French chemist and physicist Nicolas Clément, who described it in the 1820s as a measure of heat that could be converted into energy. Specifically, it was defined as the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Centigrade. Clément was not concerned with food or body weight, but with how to measure the steam energy needed to operate engines. In the decades that followed, though, other European scientists extended the idea to the human body, using the logic that the body is also a machine that burns fuel (food in place of coal) to create energy. By the late 1800s, German physiologists were measuring the energy values of foods using Clément’s methods, and using a “respiration calorimeter”—an enclosed chamber that measures an animal’s oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as heat given off—to track how that energy was actually processed in the body.

Beginning in 1869, and again in the 1880s, a New England chemist named Wilbur O. Atwater went to Germany to study the emerging science of nutrition. He returned with an idea that would revolutionize how Americans view food. The calorie, he believed, could help improve dietary health at a time when malnutrition, not obesity, was the greater problem. And as a fitting addition to the ongoing Industrial Revolution, which was showing how science could transform daily life, the calorie could also make American workers ever more productive—and at a low cost.

Chemist Wilbur O. Atwater built the first American respiration calorimeter, a copper-lined box that estimated a person’s calorie expenditure by measuring the heat they produced while living inside the device for as many as 12 days at a time. Right: GL Archive/Alamy; Left: Volgi Archive/Alamy

The “father of American nutrition science,” as Atwater became known, wrote fervently in the 1890s about improving “the intellectual and moral condition and progress of men and women” by establishing a standardized formula for deriving calories from various foods, calling them “physiological fuel values.” This would allow Americans to choose their foods by the numbers—rather than by guesswork or emotion—and thereby get the biggest nutritional bang for their food buck. “In our actual practice of eating we are apt to be influenced too much by taste,” he wrote. The solution was to “regulate appetite by reason,” aided by his lists of calories. His work has proved so durable that nutritional labels on every grocery-store item today hark back to it. Calories are still based on the heat they generate, though scientists no longer subject food to a calorimeter, because their nutritional contents can be calculated by the “Atwater system,” which assigns a calorie value to each gram of protein, fat and carbohydrate found in foods.

In 1894, Atwater’s nutritional guide became the first published by the United States Department of Agriculture. Hammering the economic point, it was filled with price calculations for various foods factored with the calories they provided. A section titled “Cheap vs. Dear Food” compared the “calories of energy” available from, say, 25 cents’ worth of oysters with 25 cents’ worth of wheat flour (news flash: the flour was less “dear”). This little-known economic aspect of the calorie likely reached its apex in 1920, when former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn proposed that international trade should use the calorie rather than precious metals as a universal currency: The value of an item, he proposed, would be based on the calories required to produce it. For example, the cost of a wool coat would depend on the calories needed to raise the sheep, shear the wool, sew the garment, transport it to market and so on. Unwieldy to say the least.

The Progressive ideals of the age, which fixated on science, rationality and quantification, were pervasive, and the nascent food-marketing industry saw a possible bonanza. As early as 1915, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company seized upon the calorie. “Pure Beer Is Next to Milk as Energy Builder,” Schlitz proclaimed in a newspaper ad. “A glass of milk yields 184 calories; a similar glass of pure beer, 137 … And Doesn’t Make You Bilious.” An ad for Presto Quick-Flour compared a pound of prime beef with a pound of its flour—1,000 calories versus 1,600 calories—and their respective prices, 25 cents versus 6 cents. “Presto is thus proven four times as good value as beef—just ponder on that!”

The excitement was also filtering into academia. When Peters was earning her medical degree, she likely would have studied Atwater’s writings and his calorie guides as a tool in determining children’s nutritional needs, one of her areas of expertise. (Atwater died in 1907, while she was still in medical school.) But her novel insight was to look at the calorie the other way around, by hypothesizing that it might be used not only to guide healthy weight gain but weight loss as well. “Peters was part of a movement of food reformers in this time period who were turning toward making food more rational,” says Helen Zoe Veit, a food historian at Michigan State University and the author of Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early 20th Century. “The idea was to eat, not because of tradition or god forbid for pleasure, but according to science and numbers, and to the new knowledge about nutrition.”

Having struggled with what she felt was her own excess weight, Peters made her body her first research subject, and she interpreted her 70-pound loss as a resounding mandate.

Peters Was A Savvy Promoter, but she was also lucky. The decade in which she launched her calorie crusade was uniquely suited to her skills as a communicator—and to her message. A tsunami of social transformations had been building from the turn of the century, including a shifting cultural preference from the curvy Gibson Girl of the 1890s to a whittled-down, boyish silhouette that would become the 1920s flapper. Through the second half of the 19th century a certain plumpness, especially in women, had been seen as charming, healthy and feminine. It also served as a signal of wealth and abundance. As the 20th century began, however, excess weight came to be associated with the lower classes and the poor, while slenderness became counterintuitively a sign of affluence and status.

To explain the shift, many historians point to the ideas of the American economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen, presented in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The new upper-middle class that arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, he posited, displayed not only “conspicuous consumption” but also “conspicuous waste.” And what said “waste” better than being food-secure enough to turn away food? A starving person would never diet, but a debutante could if it meant slipping into a form-fitting ball gown.

In addition to her Diet and Health book, Peters penned a daily newspaper column with the same title, often responding to readers’ letters by sharing her own weight-loss struggles. Newspapers.com

That shift is illustrated in a study of dieting among women at Smith College, published in the Journal of Women’s History in 1995, which documented how body weight was seen between the 1890s and 1920s. In the earlier years, students wrote home about the wonderful feasts they enjoyed at school, and even about their goals to gain weight. A student weighing 135 pounds wrote to her mother in February 1892: “It is my ambition to weigh 150 pounds.” Educators and social pontificators had fretted that academic life would take a toll on young women’s health and, importantly, their feminine appeal and future reproductive capacity. Packing on a few pounds, rather than wasting away, was seen as proof of robustness.

By the early 1920s the script had flipped. Dieting culture became so pervasive that a letter to the editor published in the Smith College Weekly in 1924 was titled “To Diet or Not to Die Yet?” Written by three Smith students, the letter warned against the obsession with weight loss: “If preventive measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon, Smith College will become notorious, not for the sylph-like forms but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her students.”

Fashion followed a similar trajectory. Nineteenth-century designs had exaggerated female-specific roundness, first with hoop skirts and later with bustles, although the generous bottom halves were balanced out by a nipped-in waist, courtesy of corsets. But by the late Victorian era, doctors were railing against the garment, and what was coined the corset controversy arose. Almost a century before the so-called bra-burning movement in the late 1960s, early feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote, in 1873, “Burn up the corsets! … Make a bonfire of the cruel steel that has lorded it over the contents of the abdomen and thorax so many thoughtless years, and heave a sigh of relief; for your ‘emancipation,’ I assure you, has from this moment begun.”

Fashion finally began to loosen its hold on the corset in the first decade of the 20th century, only to usher in the hobble skirt—a straight, narrow silhouette that replaced the nipped-in waist with a hem so tapered that the wearer’s legs could barely move. Fashion designer Paul Poiret, the hobble skirt’s inventor, wrote of this era in his 1931 autobiography, “It was in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset,” while adding that though he “freed” the bust, “I shackled the legs.”

After World War I ended, Peters (front row, center with glasses) traveled to Serbia with fellow women doctors and dentists on a Red Cross humanitarian mission to deliver food and treat disease. Tango Images/Alamy

The irony was that while women were giving up the torments of corsets and hobbles, they substituted a form of internal torture to control their bodies: what became known as “reducing.” To that end, they were aided by another innovation: the bathroom scale, which appeared on the American market in 1913. Until then, people had their weight measured only at doctors’ offices, or at public “penny-slot” scales found in movie theaters and department-store restrooms. When medical advances like sanitation systems, vaccination and pasteurization presented the promise of better hygiene and longer life spans, people began to feel that their health was in their own hands. A personal scale, like the calorie, offered would-be reducers a magic number, a way to quantify their success, or failure, and a sense of control over the process of reducing—or, as Peters came to call it, “Petersizing.”

Into This Newly Weight-Conscious Landscape Stepped Peters. She began her book by being daringly honest about her frustrations with her weight, even as many other details of her life remained in shadow. We know that Peters was born to Thomas and Alice Hunt in 1873 and reared in the small town of Milford, Maine. She attended Eastern Maine State Normal School and then moved to California, where she married Louis H. Peters in 1899. Several years later, she began her medical training.

Louis Peters plays nary a role in the history books, and he rarely appears in Lulu’s writings. What did he make of her growing fame—and of her hard-won smaller silhouette? Was part of her impetus to lose weight a desire to please her husband? On the contrary: In her book, Peters wrote that once you start reducing, you will have to combat “your husband, who tells you that he does not like thin women. I almost hate my husband when I think how long he kept me under that delusion. Now, of course, I know all about his jealous disposition.” She also mentions that she was near her heaviest when the two married, so presumably her plumpness was not a deal-breaker.

Veit, the food historian, cautions against drawing conclusions about Peters’ marriage. “She does make sure to establish that she is married, because that would be a sign of status,” Veit says. “For a single, middle-aged woman—what was then called an ‘old maid’—to write a book like this would have been a mark against her. So she makes clear at the outset, ‘I have been successful on the marriage market.’” Other writers of weight-loss narratives in the 1920s, who were enjoying their first boom thanks to both Peters and the new flapper ideal, were also explicit about slenderness being “part of maintaining the chemistry in your marriage,” Veit adds. “At that time, attractiveness was being more and more linked to a certain kind of figure.”

In the early 1900s, fashion trends evolved from tight-fitting and often uncomfortable corsets that exaggerated women’s curves to looser flapper dresses that created narrow, almost boyish silhouettes. Left: Smithsonian Libraries, American History Trade Literature Collection; Right: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

In a presage of a confessional media environment still far in the future, Peters’ struggles with weight were part of her public persona—and, as with Oprah Winfrey and Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch, key to her business pitch. Of her pudgy childhood and relentless weight gain, she wrote, “I never will tell you how much I have weighed, I am so thoroughly ashamed of it,” only to add “but my normal weight is 150 pounds, and at one time there was 70 pounds more of me than there is now.” The use of the word “ashamed” to describe her 220 pounds was no accident. Peters believed that shame was a strong motivator, a notion that comes up repeatedly in her works. (She later wrote a newspaper column titled “A Disgrace to Be Fat.”)

Today we would call this language fat-shaming and recoil at the words, says Chin Jou, an interdisciplinary food historian at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food With Government Help. And yet, while we may not use such blunt language, Jou says, Peters’ “underlying fatphobia is still very much a part of dominant American ideas about what constitutes a healthy and aesthetically pleasing body.” As for the word “fat,” she continues, today’s self-described “fat acceptance” activists and advocates are trying to reclaim it by untangling it from ideas about morality and self-control.

For Peters and others in her time, though, the supposed immorality of plumpness was intimately bound to her message. She compared keeping up dieting to keeping up “other things in life that make it worth living—being neat, being kind, being tender; reading, studying, loving.” Veit says, “Being fit was seen as the visible expression of moral issues—having to do with self-control, being smart, ambitious, efficient. All of these virtues from the era were tied up with not eating too much.” Moreover, Veit goes on, “She felt that she was speaking with authority: ‘I’ve done it so you can, too.’ And that gave her license to be really outwardly, explicitly bigoted against fat people. Today, it’s become socially unacceptable to say that fatness results from personal failings, but there remains a tremendous amount of moralization of thinness and fatness that’s part of mainstream culture.”

Peters, ever the intuitive marketer, also linked what she saw as the inherent morality of slenderness to another high-profile virtue: patriotism. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal government promoted cutting back on consumption with the catchphrase “Food Will Win the War.” Colorful cookbooks and posters extolled flourless “victory meals” and “sowing the seeds of victory” by growing your own vegetables (“Every Garden a Munition Plant!”). One leaflet explained the value of self-sacrifice more explicitly. “Sugar Means Ships: The sugar used in sweet drinks must be brought to America in ships. … These ships must now be used to carry soldiers to the front. Drink less sweetened beverages. We are at war. Every Spoonful—Every Sip—Means less for a Fighter.”

The U.S. Food Administration urged Americans to cut back on sugar, wheat, fats and meat during World War I. © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved. Gift of John T. Spaulding/Bridgeman Images

Peters put her own spin on the calories-patriotism equation. Barely four paragraphs into Diet and Health, she wrote, “In wartime it is a crime to hoard food. … Now fat individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer. Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion and even aversion! How dare you hoard fat when our nation needs it? You don’t dare to any longer.”

Peters advised rounding up one’s overweight friends and forming a Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser Class. The class should invest in a good accurate scale, she explained, and meet once a week to weigh themselves—an idea (minus the kaiser element) that found new life in the early 1960s when Nidetch launched the neighborhood weight-loss clubs that would become Weight Watchers. To her credit, Peters put her own boots on the ground in Europe after the armistice. In 1919, she joined a Red Cross medical delegation to the Balkans and stayed there for almost two years, earning decorations from the Serbian and Albanian governments for her child welfare and public health work amid the devastated postwar civilian population. Peters later wrote about “medical calls on foot in the scorching sun over unkind cobblestones, long-distance calls on unkinder mules, long hours in nerve-racking clinics [and] ferocious man-eating mosquitoes.”

She returned home in 1921 to find her book going into multiple editions, and on April 25, 1922, she debuted a daily “Diet and Health” column in the Los Angeles Times, which propelled the book to the best-seller lists. The column would ultimately be syndicated to newspapers nationwide and continue until her untimely death, from pneumonia, in 1930.

From the start, Peters’ column put her talents as a sprightly and engaging writer on display. She addressed the reader as a friend whose struggles she understood. She was also shrewd, in a surprisingly modern way, about the power of the come-on—and the cliffhanger. Titled “What’s Your Weight?,” that first column walked readers through the various ills, such as diabetes, that could be attributed to excess weight, before ending with: “Do you want to reduce? Foolish question number 13,579. Why, you want to reduce more than you want anything on the face of the globe or the feet of the gods! We’re going to show you how. Tomorrow’s the day. And it’s oh, so simple!”

The simplicity was the draw, in the same way that modern-day diets promise “easy” weight loss. What also likely kept readers coming, though, was Peters’ frankness, her willingness to get into the trenches with other “fat friends.” One week into her column’s run, she wrote an entry titled “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” In it, she described an incident when she was about 50 pounds overweight, and she stepped into an elevator. “No one got out, and I got in,” she wrote. “The operator shut the door and pushed the lever of the car. No response. Back and forth he pushed. … Car did not quiver.” A “gracious gentleman” got out; the car didn’t budge. Another gentleman followed, to no avail. “Blushing, but game, I said with a wan smile that I would get out. The car shot up”—but not fast enough for her to miss the “imbecilic laughter” of those inside. It was “embarrassing,” she admitted, but also “invaluable. … I reduced.”

The resulting “victory meals” left more supplies available to feed both members of the military and starving civilians in Europe. Tango Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters urged her readers to “send in your most embarrassing moment!” in the style of a modern-day master of social media soliciting likes and comments. And it worked: Eventually she was receiving thousands of letters, which she often used as material in her columns. To “Mary,” who wrote to Peters saying how much she was encouraged by her personal story of weight loss, she replied at confessional length. “It’s a continuous fight, Mary! … I find that if I get started on candy nuts, I’m just like a drunkard with his dram. … It was only last week that I had my last gorge. I had had a good dinner, but I had a longing for those pernicious candied nuts. I bought a pound, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t eat the most of them myself. … When I averaged my calories for that day, they mounted to nearly 4,000, almost enough to keep me going for three days!”

Peters Was A Product Of Her Times, with flapper-style bobbed hair, fringed headbands and plucked eyebrows, but she was also a harbinger of the future. Many modern marketing ploys echo Peters’ methods—for instance, the fixation on 100-calorie portions. Peters organized her “key to the calories” by units of 100 calories: For that number, you could have one and two-thirds ounces of chicken, three ounces of lean fish or one average-size apple. Today, a vast array of snack items, from pretzels to mini-protein bars, are offered in 100-calorie packages. And Peters’ instructions are familiar to any contemporary dieter: “You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change,” she wrote. Elsewhere, a warning: “Don’t ‘taste’! You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first.”

Generations of Americans have adopted Peters’ idea to count calories, encouraged by a public health infrastructure that instructs us to “eat less and move more.” Unfortunately, the fruits of this advice have been dismal. The vast majority of calorie-restricting diets have been shown to fail in the long run and in fact often result in a weight regain beyond the starting weight. Numerous studies over recent decades have shown that taking in calories and burning them (that is, eating and exercising) are not separate processes but are instead intimately related in a complex dance: Cutting calories triggers a cascade of hormonal reactions that increase hunger and fatigue while slowing metabolism, making it more difficult to lose weight. One research analysis in the journal Public Health Nutrition describes attempts to achieve and maintain a calorie deficit as “practically and biologically implausible.” New weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic appear to interrupt that cascade, by manipulating hormones in the gut and the brain to decrease appetite.

Peters’ focus on units of 100 calories still influences today’s food industry. Snacks of all stripes strive to project a healthful aura by touting their calorie counts and designing serving sizes that hit that magic number. Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty

Meanwhile, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 42 percent of American adults are obese, compared with 30 percent just 20 years ago. (In 1962, it was 13.4 percent.) As these numbers rise, along with rates of Type 2 diabetes, the edifice that Peters—and Atwater, in his own way—constructed around the calorie has begun to crumble. Increasing amounts of research suggest that the mathematical equations they promoted are drastic over-simplifications. Consider Peters’ calculations, outlined in her book: “Cutting out 1,000 calories per day would equal a reduction of approximately 8 pounds per month, or 96 pounds per year.” Under this logic, one could continue to shrink away to nothing by simply continuing to cut out 1,000 calories per day, but it doesn’t work that way. Peters herself discovered the limits of her body’s ability to shed pounds. She longed to break through her own plateau and dip down closer to 150 pounds, but despite a draconian regimen limiting her to about 1,200 calories per day plus regular exercise, she never succeeded.

The error in the “calories in-calories out” equation may boil down to this: Human bodies are not coal-burning machines, and food is not coal. Rather, the body and food are both vastly more complex, and they interact in complicated ways that have evolved in humans over eons. Researchers are finding that body weight and virtually everything that influences it—hunger, satiety, metabolism, fat storage—are affected by a broad range of factors that were a mystery 100 years ago. These include hormones, such as insulin, which increases appetite and promotes fat storage; ghrelin, the “hunger hormone”; and leptin and peptide YY, which are called “satiety hormones.” We are also still learning about the microbiome—the unique population of bacteria in an individual’s digestive tract—and how specific bacteria can powerfully affect weight loss or gain, as well as mechanisms like the parasympathetic nervous system, which can affect energy expenditure (the “calories out” part of the equation).

Numerous factors inherent in foods affect how many calories are actually retained in the body, and whether those calories are stored as fat or, for instance, burned for energy or used to build tissue and muscle. Highly processed carbohydrates break down almost instantly in the body, prompting insulin release and fat storage; protein breaks down slowly and requires more energy to do so, essentially “using up” some of its calories just in digestion. Some foods, including certain types of nuts, have considerably fewer calories when measured in the body than they have in lab tests. And food when raw yields fewer calories in digestion than the same food cooked. These anomalies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Ozempic and similar drugs, first prescribed to regulate diabetes, have reshaped the debate around losing weight through will-power alone. George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images

No surprise, then, that a 2013 book titled Why Calories Count faces off against another from 2021 titled Why Calories Don’t Count, and that nutritional conferences have become hotbeds of argument and contention. Some experts on the anti-calorie-counting side believe that, beyond being a disappointment for generations of dieters, calorie-reduction regimens and their promoters bear some responsibility for the obesity epidemic. Jason Fung, a nephrologist and expert in obesity and Type 2 diabetes, writes in his book The Obesity Code that calorie reduction is a “cruel hoax.” By prioritizing calories over other considerations, such as macronutrient makeup (proportions of carbs, fats and protein) and the effects of industrial processing, the “just cut calories” theory fostered the idea, he writes, that “100 calories of cola is just as likely as 100 calories of broccoli to make you fat.” Making calories the kingpin also helped lead to the low-fat-diet movement, which Fung and other experts blame for ushering in our current age of obesity. The medical establishment decades ago prescribed reducing fat intake in favor of moderate protein and plentiful complex carbs. In practice, that advice seemed to give many people license to load up on simple, processed carbs in place of satiating fats. That in turn leads to more insulin release, in order to move sugar out of the bloodstream and into storage—which leads to more hunger, more snacking and bigger fat stores on the body.

There are signs that the “calories aren’t everything” message may be seeping into the public consciousness, but many of Peters’ talking points about obesity and weight loss still linger: for one, the obsession with quantification. While fewer people may be counting calories, Veit says, “Whether it’s our weight, our BMI, clothes size, life expectancy, cholesterol levels, there are all these other numbers we associate with our bodies.” Not to mention replacing counting calories with counting carb grams, as some are now doing. And while the overt fat-shaming of Peters’ era is now more frowned upon, striving for slenderness seems to retain a moral dimension. In some ways, says Jou, “Feminine diet culture today can be even more taxing on women. Not only do participants of diet culture manage their food intake, but they also tend to undertake considerable exercise regimes to achieve a ‘toned’ look. The women following Peters’ diet program were just trying to be thin.”

Today’s strivers may talk about eating “clean” and improving their health, but the ideal baseline is still to be lean, and those who are heavy frequently continue to be quietly judged and found lacking in simple willpower. Will new drugs like Ozempic, which demonstrate the biological underpinnings of obesity, begin to lift that blame? Possibly. But for many people, there appears to be an inherent logic to the idea of simply buckling down and cutting back.

Decades later, Peters’ belief in willpower over want still resonates. “Your stomach must be disciplined,” she wrote in 1918.

What could be simpler?

#Body #Doctors #Food 🍲 🍱 🥘#Health #Newspapers 🗞️ 📰#Women in Science #Smithsonian Magazine

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worldwidenews29 · 5 months ago

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Kamala Harris: From Prosecutor to Vice President of the United States

Kamala Harris's journey to become Vice President of the United States is a tale of ambition, perseverance, and groundbreaking achievements. From her early days as a student at Howard University to her role as a prominent figure in criminal justice reform, Harris has left an indelible mark on American politics. Her ascent to the second-highest office in the land has sparked enthusiasm and hope for many, particularly among women and people of color.

Harris's path to the vice presidency has been marked by several notable milestones. Her time as California's Attorney General and her tenure in the U.S. Senate paved the way for her historic nomination as the first woman of color on a major party's presidential ticket. As Vice President, she has taken on crucial responsibilities, including leading efforts on immigration policy and championing the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris's commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and her role as President of the Senate have further cemented her position as a key player in shaping the nation's future.

Kamala Harris's Formative Years

Family Background and Influences

Kamala Harris's mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian biologist and civil rights activist from Chennai, India. [1] Born on April 7, 1938, to P. V. Gopalan and Rajam, Shyamala belonged to the Brahmin caste and was a gifted singer of South Indian classical music. [1] After winning a national competition as a teenager, she pursued Home Science at Lady Irwin College in New Delhi before unexpectedly applying for a master's program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958. [1] Shyamala eventually earned a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology from UC Berkeley in 1964, the same year Kamala was born. [1]

Kamala's father, Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. [1] Born on August 23, 1938, in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica, to Beryl Christie Harris and Oscar Joseph Harris, he has Afro-Jamaican and Irish-Jamaican heritage. [1] Donald received his Bachelor of Arts from the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and later earned a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1966, where he met Shyamala through the civil rights movement. [1]

Education and Early Career

Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to Shyamala and Donald. [2] [3] She and her younger sister, Maya, were raised primarily by their mother, who instilled in them a commitment to civil rights and social justice. [2] Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black college, where she was active in the civil rights movement and the Black Student Union. [2] After graduating from Howard, she earned a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. [2] [3]

Shaping of Political Values

Harris's parents were active in the civil rights movement and brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller, teaching her about heroes like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights leader Constance Baker Motley. [4] This exposure to the fight for equality and justice at a young age shaped her political values and commitment to building strong coalitions that fight for the rights and freedoms of all people. [4]

Prosecutorial Career Highlights

Alameda County District Attorney's Office

After graduating from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Kamala Harris took a position in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. [13] As a Deputy District Attorney, she also prosecuted cases involving homicide and robbery, working at that office from 1990 to 1998. [13]

San Francisco District Attorney

In 1998, Harris was named managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit of the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, where she prosecuted three strikes cases and serial felony offenders. [13] She served as the first woman District Attorney in San Francisco's history from 2004 to 2010, becoming the first African American woman and South Asian American woman in California to hold the office. [13] [14]

As San Francisco's District Attorney, Harris was an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, officiating the first same-sex wedding after California's Proposition 8 was overturned. [14] She also started programs focused on re-entry services and crime prevention, and was known for her tough stance on violent crime. [15]

California Attorney General

Kamala Harris served as California's Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 after winning her first race in November 2010 by a slim margin over Republican Steve Cooley. [14] As Attorney General, she secured a $20 billion settlement for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed on and a $1.1 billion settlement for students and veterans who were taken advantage of by a for-profit education company. [14]

Harris launched initiatives to curb recidivism, with subdivisions focused on program development, evaluations, and grants. [16] In 2015, the California Department of Justice became the first statewide agency to adopt a body camera program for all special agents, and Harris launched law enforcement training on implicit bias and procedural justice. [16] She also initiated a criminal justice open data initiative to increase transparency and a dashboard for public criminal justice data. [16]

Harris had a strong stance against truancy, releasing the annual "In School and On Track" report from 2013 through 2016, which detailed truancy and absenteeism rates in the state. [16] She called for harsher consequences for parents of truant children, a policy she had implemented as a prosecutor. [16] [17]

National Political Ascendancy

U.S. Senate Tenure

Harris served as the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021; she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African-American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the U.S. Senate. [20] As a senator, Harris advocated for gun control laws, the DREAM Act, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, federal legalization of cannabis, as well as healthcare and taxation reform. [20] She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. [20]

#donald trump #kamala harris #election 2024 #joe biden #trump ear

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years ago

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Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 1, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

Drugmaker Eli Lilly announced today that it will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, bringing costs for people with private insurance and those without insurance who sign up for Lilly’s copay assistance program into line with the $35 cap for Medicare recipients Congress imposed with the Inflation Reduction Act last August. Republicans all voted against the Inflation Reduction Act and explicitly stripped from it a measure that would have capped the cost of insulin at $35 for those not on Medicare. They continue to oppose the measure. On February 2, 2023, newly elected House Republican Andy Ogles (TN) introduced his first bill: a call to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, claiming it “took a gigantic step toward socialized medicine.” The bill had 20 far-right cosponsors. At the time he introduced the bill, Ogles presented himself as an economist with a degree in international relations from Middle Tennessee State University. Since then, an investigation by NewsChannel 5 in Nashville revealed that he took one course in economics and got a “C” in it, and that his resume was similarly exaggerated across the board. Ogles won a seat in Congress after the Republican state legislature redistricted Nashville to make it easier for a Republican to win there. Lilly’s announcement in the face of Republican support for big pharmaceutical companies is a bellwether for the country’s politics. Biden has pressured companies to bring down the price of insulin—most notably by calling for such legislation last month during his State of the Union address—and is claiming credit for Lilly’s decision. But there is more to it. The astronomically high price tags on U.S. insulin compared to the rest of the world have become a symbol of a society where profits trump lives, and there is growing opposition to the control pharmaceutical companies have over life-saving drugs. A number of other entities, including a nonprofit company in Utah called Civica Rx, the state of California, and a company run by billionaire Mark Cuban, have all promised to produce generic insulin at a fraction of what pharmaceutical companies are currently charging. Lilly's announcement is likely a reaction to the changing moment that has brought both political pressure and economic competition. The company’s leaders see the writing on the wall. The administration continues to work to create positive change in other measures important to ordinary Americans. This month ends temporary increases in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, previously referred to as “food stamps.” At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress boosted SNAP payments, keeping as many as 4.2 million people out of poverty. Congress ended those extra benefits late last year through the Consolidated Appropriations Act that funded the government. About 42 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, and the end of that boost will cut those benefits by $90 a month on average. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack wrote an op-ed at CNN today, promising that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, will do its best to protect families losing the expanded benefits. It will work to adjust benefits to rising prices, expand school lunch programs, and promote access to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. “Our country was founded to support the prosperity and potential of Americans in every corner of the nation,” Vilsack wrote. “Under President Joe Biden’s administration, we’re making good on this promise.” Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, but they imposed on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified it within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification. In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But now there are legal challenges to that ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit. The Senate hearing was designed to examine whether the deadline could be separated from the amendment to allow the amendment to be added to the Constitution, but it was far more revealing than that. Faced with the possibility that the ERA might become part of the Constitution, right-wing leaders insisted that the ERA has “just one purpose left,” as the Heritage Foundation put it: “Abortion.” They claim that since, in their view, women are now effectively equal to men across the board in employment and so on, women’s current demand for equality before the law is simply a way for them to capture abortion rights. Catholic bishops of the United States have written to senators to express “alarm” at the ERA, warning it would have “far-reaching consequences” with “negative impacts to the common good and to religious freedom.” They claim it would require federal funding for abortions and would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” “We strongly urge you to oppose it,” they wrote, “and any resolution attempting to declare it ratified.” This fight highlights that the attempt to stop government protection of individuals is really about imposing the will of a minority. A piece by Megan O’Matz in ProPublica today explored how an anti-abortion law firm has been sowing doubts about the 2020 presidential election as part of a long-term strategy to end abortion rights. Led by former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, whose law license was suspended a decade ago for ethics violations, lawyers at the Thomas More Society worked to restrict access to the vote and to stall President Joe Biden’s inauguration in order to keep Trump in office. Their efforts thrived on disinformation, of course, and the echoes from the testimony released recently in the defamation case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Corporation continue to reverberate in the fight against public lies. In that testimony, both Fox News Channel hosts and top executives admitted that they knew Trump’s claims of victory in the 2020 presidential election were lies but spread them anyway to keep their viewers from abandoning them for another channel. Now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given exclusive access to 44,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to one of those hosts, Tucker Carlson. Today, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) did an end run around McCarthy to address the problem of disinformation directly at the source. They sent a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chair of the Fox Corporation, and other top Fox executives, reminding them of their damning testimony and reminding them that “your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day.” They wrote: “We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior.” It is an important marker, and if the Fox Corporation can read the writing on the wall as well as Eli Lilly can, it might shift the focus of the Fox News Channel, which already seems to be trying to pull its support for Trump and give it to Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But that protest is unlikely to change the behavior of right-wing members of Congress. Yesterday, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Mark Green (R-TN) blamed the Biden administration for the deaths of Caleb and Kyler Kiessling from fentanyl poisoning after their mother, an attorney and conservative activist, testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security. But the young men, along with 17-year-old Sophia Harris, died in July 2020, when Trump was president. When senior CNN reporter Daniel Dale asked Greene’s office why she had blamed Biden for the deaths, her congressional spokesperson, Nick Dyer, “responded by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘do you think they give a f*ck about your bullsh*t fact checking?’” Dale also asked him to comment on Greene’s lies about the 2020 presidential election yesterday. Dyer answered: “F*ck off.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political cartoon #woke #Mike Luckovich #Atlanta Journal Constitution #Equal Rights Amendment #equality #lies and the lying liars.#liar in congress #faked resume #FAUX News #Rupert Murdoch #democracy

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severeprincesheep · 1 year ago

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Monday 21 February 2005

A row erupted yesterday after an expert said youngsters brought up as strict vegetarians suffered mental and physical problems that could affect them for the rest of their lives.

Nutritionists in Britain dismissed the findings of the US study as " rubbish", and the report prompted Sir Paul McCartney, whose first wife, Linda, put her name to a range of meat-free food, to telephone the BBC to dismiss the claim.

Lindsay Allen, from the University of California at Davis, found just two spoonfuls of meat a day given to children on a vegetarian diet could produce a dramatic and permanent improvement in their physical and mental development. The study took place in Kenya, where children are fed almost exclusively on staple crops. Their diet lacked many of the micro-nutrients essential for the growth of brain and muscle tissue, Professor Allen said. "It's applicable to the West as well. There have been studies on vegetarian women [in Europe and the US] and their children are very developmentally delayed," she added.

Although some vegetarian parents gave their children food supplements, many vegans, who ate no animal products, reared their children on the same food they ate themselves, she said. She told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington: "There is absolutely no question that it's unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans. Even when they were adolescents these children who were fed as vegans when they were young still had delayed development or permanently impaired development,"

Professor Tom Sanders, research director of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London, criticised her for extrapolating from a group in a developing country that had a relatively deprived diet. "Taking people who have limited food choices and adding animal products will provide elements missing from their restricted diets. But where you have a good choice in developed countries, you can select a balanced vegan diet even for children," he said.

Professor Sanders made a study of vegan nutrition which followed children from conception to the age of 26, to show that the development of vegans was normal. "Their diet in developed countries contains plenty of wheat, soy, pulse and salads, and provided they avoid Vitamin B12 deficiency by eating fortified foods or supplements, they are not at any disadvantage," he said. He admitted that a vegan diet for children under the age of five might pose a risk of malnutrition if there was too much reliance on vegetables.

Sir Paul, a strict vegetarian for 20 years, said he had raised his children as non-meat eaters with no ill-effects.

"It has been a good thing for me and my children, who are no shorter than other children," he said. Britain's 500,000 vegans and vegetarians had half the mortality rate of the general population, he added.

Stephen Walsh, of the International Vegetarian Union, said that "to conclude from this particular plant diet that all plant diets are poor, and that the only way to correct the problem is through animal products, is frankly ludicrous".

The study in Kenya involved 544 children with a typical age of seven. Some were fed an extra two ounces of meat a day, while others were given a cup of milk. After two years children fed meat had muscles up to 80 per cent bigger than those with an unsupplemented diet and also showed the biggest improvement in intelligence, activity and leadership skills, Dr Allen reported.

#vegetarianism #health #child abuse #parenting #diet

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drcare4u · 6 days ago

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Study Shows This Improves Women's Sleep & Mental Health

Registered Dietitian Nutritionist Molly Knudsen, M.S., RDN is a Registered Dietician Nutritionist with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from Texas Christian University and a master’s in nutrition interventions, communication, and behavior change from Tufts University. She lives in Newport Beach, California, and enjoys connecting people to the food they eat and how it influences health and…

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bhanotmedspa · 1 month ago

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Skin Aging Why Your Skin Changes Over Time

CO2 Fractional Laser Treatment in San Jose helps to Maintaining healthy, youthful-looking skin requires an understanding of skin aging. We at Bhanot Medspa in San Jose, California, understand that aging skin is a complicated process that is impacted by a number of internal and external causes. You can protect your skin and improve its beauty by being aware of these contributing factors.

The Aging Process: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic FactorsIntrinsic Aging

The natural aging process brought on by hereditary causes is called intrinsic aging, sometimes referred to as chronological aging. This kind of aging, which is unavoidable, comprises:

Reduced Production of Collagen: Collagen is a protein that gives skin its suppleness and structure. Collagen production declines with age, resulting in wrinkles and drooping.

Decreased Elastin: The skin keeps its shape thanks to elastin fibers. The skin loses its firmness and flexibility as we age because our bodies produce less elastin.

Skin Thinning: As people age, their skin's surface layer, or epidermis, becomes thinner, leaving them more vulnerable to injury and bruising.

Reduced Oil Production: As we age, our sebaceous glands generate less oil, which makes our skin drier and sometimes more irritable.

Extrinsic Aging

Extrinsic aging results from environmental factors and lifestyle choices that accelerate the natural aging process. Key contributors include:

Sun Exposure: Also known as photoaging, UV radiation from the sun is the main cause of premature skin aging. Wrinkles, pigmentation changes (like age spots), and an uneven skin tone are caused by sun exposure damaging collagen and elastin fibers. It's crucial to use broad-spectrum sunscreen to protect your skin.

Pollution: Free radicals produced by environmental contaminants lead to oxidative stress in the skin. In addition to causing inflammation, this stress can hasten the decomposition of collagen and elastin.

Smoking: The toxic compounds in tobacco smoke break down collagen and elastin, causing early lines and a lifeless complexion. Smoking also deprives the skin of vital nutrients by decreasing blood flow to it.

Diet: Skin health can be adversely affected by inadequate nutrition. Glycation, a condition in which sugar molecules attach to proteins like collagen and cause stiffness and damage, can be brought on by diets heavy in processed foods and sugar.

Stress: Prolonged stress can alter hormones, which can have an impact on skin health. Inflammation brought on by elevated cortisol levels can worsen skin disorders like eczema or acne.

Sleep Deprivation: Lack of sleep impairs the body's capacity to heal itself overnight, which results in dreariness, dark circles under the eyes, and an increase in aging symptoms.

Hydration: Skin that is dehydrated looks lifeless and is more prone to fine wrinkles. Keeping well hydrated promotes the general health of the skin.

The Role of Hormones

Skin aging is also significantly influenced by hormonal changes, especially in women going through menopause when their estrogen levels drop. This decline may result in a loss of suppleness, increased dryness, and decreased collagen production.

Genetic Factors

Our skin's aging process is also influenced by our genes. It's possible that some people are genetically more likely than others to experience wrinkles or changes in their pigmentation sooner. Knowing your family's history can help you adjust your skincare regimen.

Managing Skin Aging

While you cannot stop the aging process entirely, there are several strategies you can adopt to manage its effects:

Sun Protection: Even on overcast days, apply a broad-spectrum sunscreen with at least SPF 30 every day.

Healthy Diet: Limit processed foods and sweets while increasing your intake of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and healthy fats.

Frequent Exercise: By supplying oxygen and nutrients, physical activity improves circulation and supports healthy skin.

Hydration: To keep your skin moisturized, sip on lots of water throughout the day.

Skincare Routine:Use skincare products that contain retinoids (to encourage cell turnover), hyaluronic acid (to hydrate), peptides (to enhance collagen formation), and antioxidants (such vitamin C).

Professional Procedures: For specific anti-aging advantages, take into account procedures like chemical peels, microneedling, or laser therapy provided by Bhanot Medspa.

Conclusion

You can take proactive measures to keep youthful skin by being aware of the many aspects of skin aging. We provide individualized consultations at Bhanot Medspa in San Jose to assist you in creating a skincare routine that works for you and your particular requirements. You can attain healthier, more vibrant skin at any age by taking care of the external and intrinsic causes of aging. Come see us today for professional guidance or treatments created just for you.

#CO2 Fractional Laser Treatment in San Jose

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dailyanarchistposts · 4 days ago

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Author: Sandy Young Topics: California, Community, health care, immigrants, Oaxaca, The Utopian

Imagine that you are fifteen years old and pregnant. You find yourself in a country where you share no common language. You have never seen a health care provider in your life. You know that you want your baby born healthy, and born a citizen of this new country. So you make your way to a clinic, where strangers ask you all kinds of questions you don’t understand about a “medical history” you do not have, make you take off all your clothes and touch you in very intimate ways. Now imagine being that health care provider.

Las Islas Family Medical Group in Oxnard, California, 40miles northwest of Los Angeles, is a county-based community clinic which sees some 1,200 patients per month. Our ten physicians and three Family Nurse Practitioners provide medical care to an agriculture-based community with a large monolingual Spanish-speaking population.

We have long prided ourselves on our ability to provide respectful quality medical care to our patients who are often lacking in educational skills and financial resources. Recently, however, the rapidly growing Mixteco population in our county has challenged our complacency.

The Mixteco are an indigenous people of southern Mexico, mostly the state of Oaxaca. Their existence as an organized community in that area predates Europeans by over 2,000 years. Since the conquest by Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Mixteco and other indigenous groups have been marginalized into the least fertile, hilly areas of Oaxaca. Subsistence farming was subdivided into smaller and smaller plots as the indigenous population grew. Massive deforestation of the area by the Mexican lumber industry in the first half of the 20th century turned huge areas of Oaxaca into non-farmable wasteland. At the same time, large agricultural interests in both Baja California and the United States began to court indigenous groups as a new and easily exploitable cheap labor source. It is estimated that some 300,000 inhabitants of Oaxaca, mostly indigenous peoples, have migrated over the last thirty years to other parts of Mexico and the U.S. The Mixteco make up a large part of these emigrants.

I had visited Oaxaca several times to enjoy the richness of the agricultural ruins, artisan handcrafts, and to attend the spectacular “Guelegetza,” an annual outdoor dance festival which features the music and dancing of all the region’s indigenous groups. From these travels, I had a rudimentary understanding of the area and its history. So I was pleased but surprised when I first began to identify Mixteco patients at the clinic. After all, it’s a 3,000-milejourney. Over the last year, the number of Mixteco-speaking patients has risen dramatically.

It is estimated that Ventura County now has at least 5,000and perhaps 20,000 people for whom Mixteco is their primary language. Many of these people are monolingual—they do not speak Spanish, let along English; most have never had medical care before in their lives. We see them primarily for prenatal care. (In California, all pregnant women may apply for Medicaid, whether they are legal residents or not.) It often takes them months before they are able to navigate the system, so we see them late in their pregnancies. Often, they do not know their month of conception. If there have been previous births, they are likely to have been at home, without a known birth weight.

The Mixteco as a rule are very small people, so our standard measurements are not really appropriate in accessing fundal height, expected weight gain, etc. Most are fieldworkers who continue to work into very late pregnancy to be able to afford their rent. Most have inadequate nutrition and housing. The majority cannot read or write in any language. And there are several dialects within the Mixteco language, so that not all of these people can even communicate with each other.

As the details of this picture started to emerge, it became clear that we needed to develop a whole new system to bring these patients into the health care network. After getting the green light from my clinic’s medical director, I started to publicize a community meeting, where we could begin to explain to people how to access community resources and the importance of regular and early prenatal care. Our clinic’s prenatal educator and my medical assistant helped to get the word out. I solicited donations (like ten cans of menudo), so at least we could give people a good hot meal.

Our first real breakthrough came when a registered nurse who works in a maternal-child health program called to say that not only would she like to be part of the organizing effort, but that she knew a community organizer who spoke fluent Mixteco and Spanish. Antonio works with a group of lawyers who are helping migrant workers attain legal rights, and who received a grant from the U.S. Census Bureau to help get Mixtecos counted for the 2000 census. He agreed to join forces with us and translate from Spanish to Mixteco for the meetings.

Our publicity for the meeting was mainly word of mouth within our own clinic. I was thrilled when twenty-five people jammed into our little billing office and Mixteco Community Organizing Project was born.

Two months later, the successes are great and the challenges greater. We’ve involved some sixty families in our meetings. By and large, our patients show up for their pre-natal care visits and are having healthy babies in the hospital. Most continue on with the clinic for well-child visits and family planning services. We’ve already had to change the name of our meetings from “Reunión Mixteca” to “Reunión Indigena” as families from other southern Mexican indigenous groups have joined us.

We now have a part-time employee at Las Islas who speaks fluent Spanish and Mixteco. She is proving to be a tremendous asset in communicating with our patients and demonstrating our commitment to serving their needs.

The barriers are still incredible. Transportation is a huge issue. Getting to the clinic usually involves walking or taking the bus.(“Lucky” patients who can get a ride maybe dropped off at 7 a.m. and picked up at4.) We are using a County-sponsored taxi voucher program to get patients in labor to the hospital, but this involves a lot of time spent in teaching patients how to use the vouchers.

It is difficult to stay in contact with our patients. Many don’t have phones, change addresses often, and leave the area for months out of the year when local employment is scarce.

We need to build our “necessities of life” program. The small amount of food and clothing we are able to provide is far from adequate. Fortunately, as each day goes by, some-one new comes to donate time or resources. Our hard-working clinic staff keeps finding new and better ways to communicate and teach.

Our short-term goals include enlisting some of our families in a Public Health program, which will train people to go into their own communities as public health promoters.

Those who are recipients of help now will be the leaders in providing help to the newly arrived in the future. We need to learn more about the Mixteco culture, language and beliefs to be able to provide respectful quality medical care. We need to form links with other immigrant communities in California, Oregon and Washington to ensure continuity of care to the immigrant population.

The work is enormous. But the potential benefits to the entire community—English-, Spanish- and Mixteco-speaking—are enormous also. Quality health care, living wages, decent work and living conditions, mutual respect and celebration of diversity are the bases of a strong and stable community. It’s my hope that we are taking the first baby-steps towards those ends.

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pyrolitheus · 2 years ago

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A story from the other side: Before I went on T (testosterone) and started inadvertently presenting male, I just let everyone around me believe their own assumptions that I was a woman because it was easier than constantly coming out of the closet. It was hard for me to find work in my field but I finally landed a job at this analysis lab (in WA, USA) where we did the testing that goes into nutritional food labels and checking products for heavy metal contamination and so on. I liked my job because my work was keeping people safe. But, there was a problem - at higher levels beyond my entry level position, there was a huge turnover with all the women. The men stayed put. The pay disparity within the lab was so significant that the women could almost always find a higher paying job in a lab in short order. The men felt stuck and unable to leave because they would all have to take pay cuts if they went somewhere else. I thought I was lucky being at a lower level. I thought the disparity didn’t apply to me. Then I found out that the high school boys they hired to wash the lab glasswares that I used for my work were paid more than I was. So then I did some digging and found out what the standard wage was for my job. I put together some information about that, presented it to the boss, and asked for a raise to bring my wages up to industry standard. He gave me 83% of what I asked for and told me I should be grateful despite still underpaying me compared to industry standards. Fast forward to after T changed my face shape and slapped a beard on my chin, and all of a sudden every job interview went smoothly. Everyone wanted to hire me. With the added edge of people actually wanting to hire me, I started being able to take risks I couldn’t before, like asking for higher wages when offered jobs, and it never stopped anyone from hiring me even if they told me no to the wage request. Then one time when I asked for a higher starting wage, I was told, “We just hired someone else to do the same job at that wage, and we want your pay to be equitable with hers, so no, we can’t do that.” I countered with “Another way to make the pay equitable is to give her a raise to bring her wages up to what I’m asking,” and they said yes. That never would have happened pre-T. Oh, also? I changed my name long before I went on T. Just having a masculine-looking name on my resume meant I landed far more interviews than I did before I changed my name. Pre-T and after name change, I would see people’s faces look shocked or crestfallen when I walked in. One interviewer even told me outright that he had thought I was a man when he decided to interview me, and didn’t think women could do the job...and that was in California when Obama was President, before the influence of Trump’s presidency made it even harder for women to get hired. I knew I was being discriminated against but seeing the other side first hand and sometimes being just handed things I didn’t have to work for because people think I’m a man when they see my face (I’m not, I’m nonbinary)...I really don’t think that the vast majority of cisgender men, especially white cisgender men, really understand just now much the world is stacked in their favor at the expense of others.

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1090402436995473408

#gender politics #usa context

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brookston · 2 months ago

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Holidays 10.15

Holidays

Amaryllis Day (French Republic)

Blind Americans Equality Day

Breast Health Day (EU)

Cayenne Festival (French Guiana)

Coup d'État Anniversary Day (Burkina Faso)

Day of Merriment (Republic of Molossia)

Evacuation Day (Tunisia)

Fete Nationale de l'Evacuation (Evacuation Day; Tunisia)

Ghatasthapana (Nepal)

Global Handwashing Day

Idic15 Awareness Day (Canada)

”I Love Lucy” Day

International Archeology Day

International Day of Older People (Australia)

International Day of Rural Women (UN)

International Power of One Day

King Father’s Commemoration Day (Cambodia)

Lucille Ball Day

Mahakiki (Hawaiian New Year Season begins)

Maths Day

Mertz of All Possible Mertzes

Me Too Day

Mother’s Day (Malawi)

My Mom Is a Student Day

National Aesthetician Day

National Cherish Black Women Day

National Grouch Day (Sesame Street)

National HSA Awareness Day

National Latinix AIDS Awareness Day

National Officials Day

National Pharmacy Technician Day

National Philately Day (India)

National Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Day

National Pug Day

National Riley Day

National Shut-In Visitation Day

National Stations Day (UK)

National Tree Planting Day (Sri Lanka)

No Child Left Inside Day

Pacific Leatherback Conservation Day (California)

Pharmaceutical and Microbiological Industry Employees Day (Belarus)

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day (Canada, Italy, UK, US)

Pynkalycious Day

Rainbow Pickling Day

Rectification Day (Burkina Faso)

Sewing Lovers’ Day

Shwamae Su’mae Day (Wales)

Shine a Light Night

Southern Belle Day

Teachers’ Day (Brazil)

Twist and Shout Day

White Cane Safety Day

World Anatomy Day

World Day of Amblyopia

World Home Artificial Nutrition Day

World Rural Women’s Day (Malawi)

World Students’ Day (India, UN)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Champagne Day

Dine With TV Dinners On the Floor Night

National Cheese Curd Day

National Chicken Cacciatore Day

National Dashi Day

National Lemon Bar Day

National Mushroom Day

National Red Wine Day

National Roast Pheasant Day

National Shawarma Day (Canada)

Independence & Related Days

Parvia (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

3rd Tuesday in October

Information Overload Day [3rd Tuesday]

National Flex Day [3rd Tuesday]

National Pharmacy Technician Day [3rd Tuesday]

Pay Back a Friend Day [3rd Tuesday]

Taco Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

Tapas Tuesday [3rd Tuesday of Each Month]

Target Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

Tater Tot Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

Textiles Tuesday (Canada) [3rd Tuesday]

Trivia Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

Trusting Tuesday [3rd Tuesday of Each Month]

Two For Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

Weekly Holidays beginning October 15 (2nd Full Week of October)

National Snow Blower Maintenance Week (thru 10.21)

Festivals Beginning October 15, 2024

Haifa International Film Festival (Haifa, Israel) [thru 10.26]

Sunbelt Ag Expo (Moultrie, Georgia) [thru 10.17]

Union County Agricultural Fair (Union, South Carolina) [thru 10.19]

Feast Days

Brice Marden (Artology)

Bruno of Querfurt (Christian; Saint)

Cúan of Ahascragh (Christian; Saint)

Dragonbunny (Muppetism)

Ed McBain (Writerism)

Emma Chichester Clark (Artology)

Equirria (October Equus, sacrifice of a horse to Mars; Old Roman Empire)

Feast of the Three Noble Ladies (Ancient Egypt)

Friedrich Nietzsche (Writerism)

Hilo Chen (Artology)

Hobbes (Positivist; Saint)

Hospicius (a.k.a. Hospis; Christian; Saint)

Ides of October (Ancient Rome)

Italo Calvino (Writerism)

James Tissot (Artology)

John Vanderlyn (Artology)

Ludi Capitolini (Jupiter games; Ancient Rome)

Mario Puzo (Writerism)

P.G. Wodehouse (Writerism)

Poetry Day (Ancient Rome)

Rainbow Pickling Day (Shamanism)

Ralph Albert Blakelock (Artology)

Richard Speck Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky (Anglican; Saint)

Teresa of Ávila (founded Reformation of the Barefoot Carmelites; Christian; Saint)

Thecla of Kitzingen (a.k.a. Tecla; Christian; Saint)

Will Insley (Artology)

Winter Nights: Day of the Freya and the Disir (Pagan)

Yet Another Noodle Day Day (Pastafarian)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Economy Book; 1958)

Alice Plays Cupid (Ub Iwerks Disney Cartoon; 1925)

The Barbary Pirates, by C.S. Forester (History Book; 1953)

Boom at the Top or Angry Young Moose (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S5, Ep. 221; 1963)

Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone (Novel; 1937)

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White (Children’s Book; 1952)

The Cincinnati Kid (Film; 1965)

Clock Cleaners (Disney Cartoon; 1937)

Cold Turkey (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Cartoon; 1929)

Curb Your Enthusiasm (TV Series; 2000)

The Dancing Bear, featuring Farmer Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1937)

The Dragon Reborn, by Robert Jordan (Novel; 1991) [Wheel of Time #3]

Dr. Seuss on the Loose (DePatie-Freleng Animated TV Special; 1973)

Elvis’ Christmas Album, by Elvis Presley (Album; 1957)

Figaro and Cleo (Disney Cartoon; 1943)

Fight Club (Film; 1999)

The Fires of Heaven, by Robert Jordan (Novel; 1993) [Wheel of Time #5]

Fiery Fireman (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Cartoon; 1928)

Football (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1935)

Football Toucher Downer (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1937)

For Once in My Life, by Stevie Wonder (Song; 1968)

Fur, Fur Away or Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S5, Ep. 222; 1963)

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, by Elton John (Song; 1973)

Good Golly Miss Molly, recorded by Little Richard (Song; 1956)

Grand Ole Opry (TV Variety Show; 1955)

The Great Dictator (Film; 1940)

The Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits (Album; 1974)

Heidi (Film; 1937)

Honduras Hurricane (MGM Cartoon; 1938)

I Love Lucy (TV Series; 1951)

I Wish I Had Wings (WB MM Cartoon; 1932)

The Jazz Fool (Disney Cartoon; 1929)

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (Film; 2019)

Just in Case, Parts 1 & 2 (Underdog Cartoon, S3, Eps. 7 & 8; 1966)

King Neptune (Silly Symphony Disney Cartoon; 1932)

La Mer, by Claude Debussy (Symphonic Suite; 1905)

The Last Duel (Film; 2021)

The Lion King (Broadway Musical; 1997)

Little Woody Riding Hod (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1962)

Lord of Chaos, by Robert Jordan (Novel; 1994) [Wheel of Time #6]

The Mid Makes Right (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1948)

Mr. Wonderful (Film; 1993)

The Nightmare Before Christmas (Animated Film; 1993)

The Night the City Sang, by Peter Desbarats (Poetry; 1977)

Nowhere Boy (Film; 2010)

Once Upon a Studio (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Disney Cartoon; 2023)

Paint Your Wagon (Film; 1969)

Porky’s Naughty Nephew (WB LT Cartoon; 1936)

The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale (Self-Help Book; 1952)

Power Windows, by Rush (Album; 1985)

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis (Novel; 1951) [The Chronicles of Narnia #2]

RED (Film; 2010)

Rock Me Amadeus, by Falco (Song; 1985)

Rudy (Film; 1993)

Sabrina (Film; 1954)

The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder (Play; 1942)

Slip Sliding’ Away, by Paul Simon (Song; 1977)

Social Lion (Disney Cartoon; 1954)

Soup’s On (Disney Cartoon; 1948)

The Straight Story (Film; 1999)

Surfing with the Alien, by Joe Satriani (Album; 1987)

Team America: World Police (Animated Film; 2004)

To Have and Have Not, by Ernest Hemingway (Novel; 1937)

Tupelo Honey, by Van Morrison (Album; 1971)

Two Scent’s Worth (WB MM Cartoon; 1955)

Why Not Me, by The Judds (Album; 1984)

Today’s Name Days

Aurelia, Theresia (Austria)

Rezika, Tekla, Tereza, Terezija, Valter (Croatia)

Tereza (Czech Republic)

Hedevig (Denmark)

Eda, Ede, Hädi, Häidi, Heda, Hedi, Hedvig, Heidi, Heivi (Estonia)

Helvi, Heta (Finland)

Thérèse (France)

Aurelia, Franziska, Therese, Theresia (Germany)

Loukianos (Greece)

Teréz (Hungary)

Teresa (Italy)

Eda, Ede, Hedviga, Jadviga (Latvia)

Domantė, Gailiminas, Leonardas, Teresė (Lithuania)

Hedda, Hedvig (Norway)

Brunon, Gościsława, Jadwiga, Sewer, Tekla, Teresa (Poland)

Luchian (Romania)

Terézia (Slovakia)

Teresa (Spain)

Hedvig, Hillevi (Sweden)

Lucian (Ukraine)

Essence, Terence, Teresa,Terrance, Terrence, Terri, Terry, Tess,Tessa, Theresa, Trace, Tracey, Traci, Tracy (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 289 of 2024; 77 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 2 of Week 42 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Gort (Ivy) [Day 17 of 28]

Chinese: Month 9 (Jia-Xu), Day 13 (Ren-Zi)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 13 Tishri 5785

Islamic: 11 Rabi II 1446

J Cal: 19 Orange; Fryday [19 of 30]

Julian: 2 October 2024

Moon: 95%: Waxing Gibbous

Positivist: 9 Descartes (11th Month) [Giordano Bruno / Pascal]

Runic Half Month: Gyfu (Gift) [Day 9 of 15]

Season: Autumn or Fall (Day 24 of 90)

Week: 2nd Full Week of October

Zodiac: Libra (Day 23 of 30)

#calendar #Holidays

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