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hitoshiikigai · 4 years ago

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Foreign Feelings

anon request: Hiya there Sen!! I love your blog and i would love to read more of your writings. Can i request an imagine for being like a first year european shy student and becoming Nekoma’s manager, she slowly develops a crush for kenma but doesn’t know how to express her feelings because of language and because she thinks kenma won’t return her feelings

‪(o_ _)ﾉ彡☆ a/n 「i made it gender neutral, i hope that's ok and if it's not, i can change it to your liking! also, this is my first romance fic in my whole life, i hope it's satisfactory(ᗒᗣᗕ)՞ i feel like i just forgot the slowly part-」

‪pronouns used: they/them

‪word count: 2.8k

You continuously repeat your introduction in your head as you wait for your turn. It's ok, you can do this, you've learnt this in basic Japanese lessons, it's just a few lines. Nothing too complicated!

The voice of the person behind you breaks the chant in your mind, "I'm Haiba Lev and..." Your thoughts block out the rest of his introduction. Is he a foreigner too? That name definitely does not sound Japanese but you note of his perfect pronunciation- a screech of a chair moving startles you and you're suddenly aware of the eyes of your new classmates staring right at you.

Sucking in a deep breath, you stand up, doing a bow, the Japanese words tumbling clumsily out of your mouth, "I'm (Y/N) (L/N)- no wait- (L/N) (Y/N), please just call me (y/n). Nice to meet all of you." You keep your eyes on your desk as you bow once again before sitting back down. You pretend not to notice the murmurs and sounds of interest about the two foreign students in their class, busying yourself by preparing your things for the lesson.

Mechanical pencil on the right. Pencil case right above your notebook. The ruler-

"Psst... Hey, you're not from Japan, right?" You turn around to meet glowing green eyes that somehow made you feel like you were looking into a cat's eyes instead. You nod and he grins in what you could guess as excitement. However, before he could say any more, he was cut off by the teacher signalling the start of class.

Maybe he's a potential friend?

After a few lessons of trying to keep up with the lessons taught in Japanese, your brain's finally granted with a break from trying to translate and you can't help the sigh that escapes you as you rest your cheek on your table, closing your eyes.

"Hey Y/N! Wanna have lunch with me?" You open your eyes to see your tall classmate looming over you- right, his name's Lev. Or should you call him Haiba?

You quickly weigh the pros and cons of eating with him. He seems like a nice person to be friends with and having a non-Japanese friend in this less-than-familiar country could definitely do you some good, maybe your Japanese can improve faster as well. But... you were planning to just find some nice quiet spot to listen to music in hopes of preventing the growing headache, a result of an overwhelming first day.

Well, there's no harm, you suppose... "Sure, I don't mind," you agree and you search for your wallet in your bag as Lev waits patiently.

Once he sees you're ready, he smiles widely and starts walking to the cafeteria most likely and you follow him, having to walk slightly faster to keep up.

"Where are you from? I'm half-Russian but I can't speak Russian. Oh! I know a few people here already! I visited the school before the school year started and made friends with people from the volleyball team. I'm actually gonna join the team once they start taking in applicants and-" Lev rambles on and you could only hum or nod, insert a few words of your own when he asks a question until you reach the cafeteria.

"Lev! Here! You're late!" You see a student with black messy hair that spikes up everywhere except for the fringe that covers his right eyes waving his arm. Lev bounds up to the table with you in tow and you can already see a few curious eyes examining you. Your gaze sweeps across the table, an uninterested guy playing with a switch catching your eyes a tiny fraction longer than the others before you look down at the floor, shuffling just a bit behind Lev, your current shield.

"This is Y/N, my new friend! They're not from Japan and I thought I could show them around," Lev claps his hands on your shoulders and moves you forward, putting you right in the spotlight.

Oh no. Ok, deep breaths. A simple introduction, no big deal. It's definitely a smaller group, better than a whole class.

"H-hi..." You clear your throat, cursing yourself mentally for the stutter, and repeat yourself with what you hope was a stronger voice. There's a chorus of greetings and before you even realise, you find yourself squished between Lev and a friendly-looking guy with a buzzcut, who you soon come to know as Kai, after a round of introductions.

How did you end up here? In a gym full of flying balls that could accidentally hit your face anytime? With your arms full of water bottles that you just filled up? You definitely did not sign up for this... Ok, well technically you did, you just didn't know what was in store. Try being a manager just for one practice, they said. Somehow, it feels like you were tricked somewhere along the line.

You hand the water bottles to the boys, jolting slightly when your hand unintentionally brushes against Kenma's. He thanks you quietly and you only nod in acknowledgment, avoiding any form of eye-contact with him and quickly moving on to hand the rest of the water bottles out before going back to the sidelines to watch.

It's really amazing watching them play. Everyone seems so coordinated with each other and the teamwork is seamless. Despite that, there are a few individuals that pique your interest: Yaku who seems to be able to teleport anywhere in the court, Lev with his tall and powerful stature, and more importantly, Kenma with his smart plays. It's like he calls the game, dictating where and how the ball goes and it's a whole experience observing him. Of course, the other members are amazing in their own ways, watching the team play is like watching a well-oiled machine working.

"How are you, Y/N?" Kai asks from beside you, wiping his sweat and giving you a warm smile.

You peel your eyes away from the quiet setter to answer Kai, and also to make sure you aren't caught staring at the certain player, "It's..." You try to find the correct words in your brain as Kai waits patiently for your answer. "It's nice... to watch. Everyone's good." You blush in embarrassment at the simple words you used, not having the full vocabulary to communicate what you really want to say. Kai, being the angel he is, makes a noise of approval and gives another warm smile which at least make you relax.

"If you need help with anything, you can ask any of us," he tells you before going back to the courts. You bow to him which he only waves off, laughing amiably.

After attending a few more practice sessions and having lunch with the team almost every break, you've grown a bit more comfortable with them, especially with Kai and Yaku, along with Lev. The team always tried their best to use simpler words whenever they spoke to you and you're definitely grateful for their efforts. However, there's just one person you've barely interacted with:

Kozume Kenma.

The third years obviously noticed the lack of interaction, especially Kuroo and he made it his own personal mision to try to get the two of you to talk to each other more, albeit with many difficulties.

"Come on, Kenma. You don't think I don't notice you paying attention anytime Y/N talks? You're not exactly very slick, you always pause your games just for Y/N," Kuroo nudges Kenmas side with his elbow which Kenma slaps away in irritation.

"Shut up Kuroo."

Kuroo leans in closer to Kenma, "You can't tell me you don't notice Y/N staring at you during practice? Blushing whenever you're 5 metres away from each other? Or when-"

"Kuroo, please just shut up," Kenma groans and glares at his switch, clicking away at the buttons and suppressing the urge to scream in anger as the words 'GAME OVER' flash on the screen. Instead, he closes his eyes, inhaling deeply before letting out a long sigh.

Kuroo smiles knowingly before his eyes shift over to something behind Kenma.

"Kuroo-senpai? Kenma-senpai? Has Kai-san arrived yet? I need to ask him something..." Kenma stiffens as your soft voice reaches his ears. He bristles at the 'senpai' title attached to his name, wanting you to just rid of the honorific altogether. He was supposed to tell you, in fact, he had been wanting to tell you to just refer to him casually just like everyone does but he never got the chance. How could he when your conversations only last 30 seconds long each time?

Jump. Jump. Duck. Ju- GAME OVER.

He pressed down his buttons more aggressively, a frown slowly forming on his face. Why couldn't he be more talkative? Why is talking so hard? Why is talking to YOU so hard? Lev does it so easily, Kai too, and Yaku and... and just everyone in the team but him.

You stare in concern as you watch Kenma play angrily with his game and you look to Kuroo for answers only to be met with a shrug.

"Yaku will be running late, some class meeting or something," Kuroo stands up and stretches, walking out of the gym, "Meanwhile, I'll go get my things."

The sounds from Kenma's game filled up the awkward silence and you take a moment to steel yourself, walking towards Kenma. "A-are you okay, Kenma-senpai? You look... angry?" At your question, Kenma's fingers still and the sounds suddenly stopped.

Kenma looks up at you and places his switch on his lap before looking away. "I'm okay... I'm not angry." He mumbles and you smile in relief at his words. "Do you want to play?" He suddenly offers his switch to you and you blink in shock, never really having known or seen him to ever share his switch with someone, simply rejecting anyone- save for that tangerine boy from another school- who tried to even get their hands on his beloved switch.

Noticing your hesitance, he places the gadget on the bench, between the two of you, letting you take your time. You look back to search for anything that will clue you in if he doesn’t actually want to do this, but finding none, you gingerly take it, careful not to drop it or at least try to not leave any embarrassingly sweaty fingerprints. You feel Kenma shifting closer to you to get a closer look at the screen and you don’t know if you feel lightheaded from him being the closest he has ever been that you can actually feel body heat radiating from him or from forgetting to breathe. Trying to focus on the little digital character instead and your fingers clumsily hitting the buttons, a contrast to the way his nimble fingers moved with muscle memory.

And if you felt butterflies in your stomach as he occasionally positioned your fingers on the correct button, the butterflies immediately flew away the moment Lev walks in the gym and you were left with just tingling fingers.

You cradle the box of apple pie you bought in a rush from the bakery, trying to tidy up the ribbon you tied around it to make it more presentable. You had asked Kai about what Kenma liked because you knew there was no way you could write or even say anything close to romantic in Japanese, so you figured out you could give him little gifts, you know, actions soeak louder than words, that kinda thing? As you think of the many ways you could say something wrong by declaring your feelings to him in a foreign tongue like unknowingly saying something ridiculous, or stupid, or even worse, something dirty! Lev’s incessant teasing and mock-kissing noises only stopped when you reached the gym.

“Oh? Y/N-chan, who’s that apple pie for, I wonder,”Kuroo gives you a knowing look and blatantly stares at Kenma, who just seems unbothered. You try to reason yourself that he was only concentrating on his game. Ignoring Kuroo, you take a tentative step towards Kenma, making sure you’re in his line of sight before thrusting the box to him, “For you Kenma… Uh, enjoy it!” You blurted out before brisk walking to the equipment room to take refuge, not even waiting for his reaction.

You hear the muffled shouts of the boys and you can imagine them crowding Kenma. You wince in sympathy.

During the whole practice, you had to deflect the many looks and questions the boys gave you. Thankfully, Kai managed to stop them before it got too much. A godsend. Before any of them could corner you after practice, you zoomed past the gym doors the moment you were done with your manager duties, forgetting that you had barely paid any attention to Kenma the whole time.

“Lev, do you know who’s this from?” You ask Lev, holding up the canned drink that was left on your table.

“Oh, that’s from Kenma. He came here earlier to place it there. He honestly could’ve just asked me to pass it to you but he said I would lose it or something. How mean,” Lev huffs but you can only focus on the fact that Kenma went through efforts to make sure you received it.

“Thank you for the apple pie yesterday. It was really nice,” Kenma took a seat beside you, on the same bench you first played his switch together.

“T-thank you for the drink! It’s my favourite,” you smile shyly. The corner of his lips curl up, just ever so slightly, which you think was the trick of the light.

Kenma gives his switch to you, now a weekly routine for the both of you on days he finishes class earlier. The distance between you and him grew smaller and smaller until your elbows brush against his at any slight movement.

This is it. This is the moment. You made a mental deal with yourself a week ago. If you win this level today, the one where you always lose, you’ll confess to him and if you don’t, you’ll simply leave your feelings hidden and buried deep in the safe in your heart.

Your eyebrows furrow in concentration, refusing any help from Kenma (Kenma just ignored the tiny sting in his heart when you did).

In the meantime, Kenma takes the chance to watch you, sharp, feline eyes studying your features. The stray baby hairs peeking out after a long school day, the slight sheen on your skin from the hot and humid gym, the determination in your eyes. Determination? To beat the level? He restrains himself from chuckling at your cuteness. This felt very different when he watches Shouyo play his video games. Kenma just really feels different any time he’s around you.

You abruptly stand up and cheer, “I did it! Kenma, look!” You show him the screen with the words ‘MISSION COMPLETE’ flashing repeatedly on the screen. You grinned widely at him and he smiles back in fondness.

Suddenly, you go all quiet, which concerned Kenma. “I have something to tell you.” At that, he tilts his head, urging for you to go on.

“I… IlikeyouKenma!” Your words end up being stringed together but from the widening of his eyes, he mostly likely understood.

“You do?”

You nod with pink dusting your cheeks, your fingers fiddling with the ends of your blouse. You’re prepared to get rejected, maybe even move back to Europe and never show your face to him again. And if not, at least you could quit the manager position to avoid any future confrontations with him.

“I like you too, Y/N,” he replies softly, but it was definitely audible in the quiet gym.

And if all else fails- wait what? This time, it’s your turn to look at him wide-eyed, processing what he just said.

“Y/N! Did you leave me for your boyfriend?!” The doors burst open with Lev boisterously shouting, Yaku walking calmly behind him with a twitching eyebrow.

You backpedal away from Kenma, dropping the switch in surprise and you scramble to pick it up, saying a stream of apologies to him, wiping away the dust and checking for any cracks.

Yaku, being more aware of the mood, kicks the back of Lev’s knees, adding a smack to the back of the head for good measure, hissing, “Shut up, you idiot!”

You make eye contact with Kenma before bursting into giggles, him just letting out a snort. You’re just glad you managed to confess before Lev could confess for you.

[1 New Message]

Kenma: wanna beat the next level after practice? you can come over to my house for dinner

You: yes! i’d love to!

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lizacstuff · 4 years ago

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Sen Çal Kapımı / Edser Asks

After the fragman, I got a few anons this afternoon, my answer are under the cut.

(Also my initial reactions are in this post.)

Anonymous said: In the spirit of optimism- when Eda broke up with Serkan in 25, everyone freaked out but by the end of the next episode, she proposed LOL. Maybe just maybe they won’t do the “everyone pretends Selin and Serkan are a thing for medical reasons for multiple episodes” route and someone gets her kicked to the curb in 29. I wonder how much of the 2.5 hrs will be before he comes back and how much is after.

LOL, I certainly would like Selin to be back for only one episode. I hope my speculation is right (this post,)and her narrative purpose is to make Serkan distrust Eda from the start and once she’s done that she can exit stage right.

As for the theory you mention, which I have seen on twitter, I don’t see people pretending they’re together for medical reasons. That makes zero sense to me (not that medical diagnosis on a silly romantic dramedy dizi would be accurate, lol) why would that be necessary? Why would anyone go along with that? Especially when all he would need to do is google himself to find out about his relationship with Eda. They were all over the tabloids and on the cover of a magazine. Plus it seems like he knows about Eda, Selin tells him "she turned you into someone you’re not and dragged you into a different world.” He has to know they were in a relationship.

There is a lot of knee-jerk hysteria over there right now which is leading to completely neurosis-induced, nonsensical, worst-case scenario speculation. I recommend avoiding for awhile if anyone is easily upset by that type of thing.

As for the timeline of the ep, great question. I am hoping that the walk into ArtLife is not the end of the episode. We’re going to need to see Serkan and Eda meeting face to face before this episode is up in order to survive! We know almost the full cast (including Hande and Kerem) were shooting at a cafe yesterday, and the cast looked dressed up. Most thought it was for 1x28, so that seems like there are scenes with Serkan and the full cast in this ep.

Though, the show has a lot of questions to answer. How in God’s name did he end up in that cabin? Did he get on the plane or not? Was he held captive and got dropped in the woods with only Selin’s phone number? Has he been in a coma? Was there foul play involved? Was there a brain injury or did Babaanne arrange his kidnapping and give him some experimental drug to wipe out his memories of Eda?

Not sure if this Deniz is a law enforcement official or some sort of private detective, but there would have been some sort of official inquiry and search when he went missing. So he can’t just be lazing around for 2 months, easily findable. And Selin can’t have been with him for anything length of time without the others knowing he’s alive, because that would pretty much be kidnapping. So what HAPPENED?

Anonymous said: I hope we get good Eda and Aydan moments. She didn’t get married but she is still Aydan’s daughter now. He’s going to come back and find that this woman has his mother, his company, his dog, his car, his friends.....there’s no way that he doesn’t just know that Selin has been a snake.

Yes, please! I’m sure we will get Eda and Aydan moments, it looks from the first trailer that they will lean on each other while he’s missing. Which they should, they’ll be the two that will hold out hope and give one another comfort.

I am LOVING that Eda is driving his car and taking care of his dog. As she should, they were hours away from being married! And yes, you’re correct, he’s going to find Eda so deeply embedded in everything he remembers (except Selin) that it’s going to drive him crazy. Who is this woman and how did she ensorcell him so thoroughly? Can’t wait for him to find out.

You know what I’m most looking forward to in regards to Aydan? Serkan’s shock that his mother has conquered her agoraphobia. Can’t wait for him to find out that Eda was instrumental in helping her do that.

She is going to hit him like an emotional freight train. A second time.

Anonymous said: i know most of the fandom has already accepted it as fact bc they can't wait for the actual ep to make conclusions, but i'm less inclined to believe he's been in that cabin w/ selin for 2 months.. idk HOW he gets there, or how selin ends up there.. but for some reason i think they find him first, and he takes off by himself for a bit as he's overwhelmed with the whole situation.. and then selin enters. idk, we'll have to see it, but i think, like all trailers, it's confusing on purpose.

This theory is definitely possible. That he’s found and freaks out and goes to the cabin. Perhaps the last he remembers he was still with Selin so he reaches out to her for answer about what’s going on. That would make sense why he accepts her comfort, and she gives it, but can’t help herself from trying to do everything in her power to make him distrust Eda. Even if she doesn’t have hope of reconciliation, just to cause chaos because she doesn’t want them to find happiness together. She’s said it more than once, she didn’t want him happy, while she was not.

Anonymous said: I am not emotionally prepared to watch the look on Eda’s face when Serkan walks in holding hands with Selin after being missing for the last two months....😭😭😭. Also even if Serkan & Selin are purely platonic watching their scenes together are going to be brutal. I am prepared to cry ( both tears of joy & sadness) & be very mad at various points in this episode. It will be an rollercoaster of emotions for sure.

Yep, pretty much all of this! I don’t think I’m going to enjoy watching this episode at all. However, my hope is that I will really enjoy watching the storyline that it sets up where we get to watch Serkan fall in love with Eda all over again. Think of all the delicious, UST-y, sexy, funny, fiery, passionate scenes that are in store for us!

Off the top of my head, things I want:

Serkan opening Madonna in a Fur Coat and finding their photo

Serkan’s deep-seated memory kicking in and mindlessly tearing the crusts off bread for her without realizing it or knowing why

Finding out his computer password and what it means

Seeing photos of them from their matchmaking party. Looking so in love and surrounded by friends and family and everyone looks so happy

One of the friends, Engin or Piril snapping and telling him the big change Eda brought about in him was just that he was happy

Serkan seeing media clippings of them and their relationship

Eda handcuffing him so they have to spend time together while trying to jog his memory

After being suspicious and trying to keep her at arms length, Serkan finally breaking down and asking her questions about their relationship

Serkan being mistrustful of her, but still unable to say no to her

Anonymous said: So I get that SCK is going through a reset and now we will get to watch Eda & Serkan fall in love again but seriously they brought Selin back like that...WTF? Now she is even worse than Balca. Plus the entire world thinks Serkan is dead but somehow Selin found him and never bothered to tell anyone else...that should send up some red flags for sure. Regardless of the explanation, this situation is going to crush Eda. And it seems like a lot to go through to have him immediately get his memories back so we could be stuck with this storyline for a while.

Yes, poor Eda is going to be crushed no matter what. However, I know that people have been theorizing that the memory loss would be short, but I never thought it would be. What’s the point of this reset unless they’re going to follow through with it and milk it for as many episode as possible. They’re trying to find ways to keep this show going and this is their big swing.

The entire point is to recreate the magic of Eda and Serkan falling in love, and, honestly, I'm not sure why anyone would want that to be over in 2 episodes. I don’t see it as being stuck with the amnesia story, I’m excited for all the parallels, watching Serkan get struck by lightning a second time when he first sees her. Watching him be suspicious of her, of her motives of her abilities, but then finding out all the same things that he found out the first time, that she’s fierce, kind-hearted, loyal and talented. And just a bright shining light for him.

My heart melts just thinking about it. We just have to get rid of that opportunistic, malevolent, bitter hag.

Anonymous said: one complaint that i've seen in regards to sck is that characters aren't sent off properly.. but outside of maybe fifi (which we don't know how they'll explain her leaving) am i the only one that doesn't... really care? everyone that's left has been unsubstantial or in a villain role, and personally whatever way they leave i'm fine with lol.. i know when selin left ppl were mad bc they wanted a redemption story arc for her.. but not every character NEEDS that by default, if that makes sense.

For context, this ask was sent before the fragman. I agree with you, no side character needs redemption by default. I’ve said it many times, but on this specific show, really only two characters matter: Eda and Serkan. This is their story. Their love story. Everyone else is supporting in the truest sense of the word. They all exist to prop up the A story. So for most of them their journey doesn’t matter unless it directly affects Eda or Serkan. (Aydan’s growth and redemption has directly impacted Eda and Serkan and that’s why time has been spent on it). Selin is a tool. She’s behaved erratically at time because she only exists for the writers to use her to antagonize the protagonists. Her story in and of itself does not matter.

I laughed hysterically when some on twitter were thinking Serkan might really be dead and Kerem was leaving the show.

Seriously? You think they would try to keep this show going without Edser? That anyone would pay money for it, without them? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! If one of them were to leave, the show would be over. Dead. Cancelled. There is NO reason for this show to keep going other than for more Edser. Everything else is an after thought, filler, or characters that prop up Eda and Serkan either literally or symbolically or thematically. Nothing else stands on it’s own.

They devised this storyline in order to go back to the magic of these two people falling in love. Full stop. That’s why we’re seeing this reset. Because no other characters or their storylines are compelling enough to carry the show. I applaud the writers for creating a situation where we could watch Serkan fall in love with Eda one more time. (just get rid of Selin, please, so I can enjoy it... and do it quickly.)

#Sen Çal Kapımı #Sen Cal Kapimi #edser #sck speculation #sck spoilers #sckask #sck 1x29 #asklizac #anonymous

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thesummerstorms · 5 years ago

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Rev Recaps Hard Contact (Chapter 13)

CW: mentions of past attempted sexual assault & dealing with the attacker, mind influence/control

TL:DR Recap: Darman and Etain are finally reunited with the rest of Omega. Unfortunately, Guta-Nay is also there. Etain and the squad develop a plan, but it involves sending Guta-Nay to his death.

Beginning Kal Count: 24 Ending Kal Count: 25

We open with what’s honestly one of my favorite exchanges between Niner and Fi, and I can’t resist screenshotting it right off the bat:

“Hey, Sarge, I’m being positive.”

“Are you on drugs?”

Fi noticing that Niner is on edge and offering to swap and Niner being too stubborn to do it,even though he specifically hates doing that exact job.

They’re still dragging Guta-Nay around with the, which unfortunately means this chapter is whenI have to start dealing with him. But even as Niner tries to press him for more info, Guta-Nay is too stupid to give it. Even when Niner plays charades to get his point across.

Atin sens up a remote to scout ahead of them, and they accidentally end up spying on Darman, who aims a gun at the remote but luckily refrains from shooting it.

I legitimately can’t tell you why I love that scene. I just do. Anyway, within five minutes they finally, finally rendezvous with Darman and Etain. Etain is having a hard time adjusting to actually seeing Niner, Fi, and Atin, even though intellectually she already knew that Darman was clone. Fi makes a joke about Guta-Nay smelling bad. Etain asks for Omega’s names. Someone was about to introduce themselves as a CC (clone commander) rather than an RC (Republic Commando) again, but she cuts them off.

Darman was the first one to break the rule with Jusik, but he’s been embarrassed every time it comes up, and it clearly now embarrasses him to break the taboo around his squad, even if Etain’s been calling him by his name for a while. Social conditioning is intense. However, this time Fi and Niner introduce themselves as well, where as I think last time it was just Atin.

... unfortunately, I now have to deal with Guta-Nay.

Again, Etain’s meant to be Jedi, yes, but 1000% percent not blaming her for the reaction. I just /love/ how seeing Guta-Nay, who she explicitly calls a rapist and who attempted to attack her, gets to be the trigger for her to be ashamed of her emotions, restrained by one of the male characters (even if it is Dar and he doesn’t know the context) and Niner’s comment about Guta-Nay being useful sends her immediately into a self worth spiral as she ... is she supposed to be comparing herself to Guta-Nay here? Or is this just a reaction because the two emotional triggers are intertwined from this whole experience, or..?

Anyway, isn’t it great? /sarcasm

(Hat tip to Dar for being bold enough to grab a Jedi’s arm while they have their lightsaber ignited, I guess, though.)

Can I... can I just mention that on one hand, I can make a Watsonian interpretation for why Etain’s reaction to being told the person who tried to rape her might have useful information might be for her brain to jump to waiting for Darman to tell her how much he despises her... but on the other hand, I don’t care and I hate Traviss intensely for setting this scene up this way?

But, in what’s going to be pretty typical Etain fashion from this point in the series on, that sense of worthlessness drives her pretty much immediately to action. She asks Niner what information they need, and then sits Guta Nay down across from her, and waits until they’ve both calmed down. And then she immediately sets to using Force-persuasion to convince Guta-Nay to talk. This time, unlike when he was chasing her, she doesn’t struggle with it at all.

side note, there is a kind of sweet moment with Atin and Darman that I like, but it’s weirdly placed- breaks up the rest of the moment from Etain’s pov:

Then we switch to Niner’s pov, probably because Etain is busy with the Weequay and no one actually wants to hear him talk, least of all me as a reader, and also KT needs an opportunity for Omega to be doubtful of Etain.

Niner hates scruffy rig. Darman actually does clean his deecee when nervous; it isn’t just a weird innuendo that someone had to point out to me. Darman pulls out the holomaps that Etain... stole? I just realized I have no idea where she got them. But she’s been guarding them this whole time. He proceeds to praise her, unprompted, but Niner has already been told by Jinart that Etain is useless, so he’s skeptical.

Kal Count of 25. Dar just kind of regrets opening his mouth, I think, and wishes his brother would back off. But he does want to try to defend Etain, even if he’s had his own doubts before this point. So first he tries the standard defense, then when Niner isn’t content with that, he does his best. But Niner is freaked out by Jedi Mind Influence, not reassured like Darman was in the escape scene. I’m not really sure what to even make about “human females” and the fact that KT really needs to drive home that, after being behind enemy lines for three months, Etain has no sex appeal.

There’s also that word “emaciated” again.

Finally, Etain finishes her interrogation. She briefly mistakes Niner for Dar, but immediately corrects herself by saying “Of course, you’re Niner.” She reports on what little she can and offers to try to summon Jinart with the Force.

This is actually a scene that will be recounted again- apparently Darman will tell Kal about it at some point between leaving Qiilura and seeing Etain again in Triple Zero. Skipping a bit ahead, but:

Listen, the thought up Darman telling Kal all about the Jedi he absolutely Doesn’t Have a Crush On, maybe enthusiastically, maybe shyly, should make me smile, except given how Kal will treat their relationship in that book and the things he’ll accuse Etain of, it just makes me sad.

Anyway, I’m digressing. This is clearly a big moment for Niner, and he’s surprised that Etain can tell that Atin has been hurt in particular. I don’t entirely get why Traviss goes back and forth on what motivations/emotions Etain can sense to what strength (say like... her not being able to feel Darman’s grief for Theta squad versus immediately feeling Atin’s grief for his TWO former squads plus the Vau abuse we technically don’t know about till next book.) But I’m always going to rule in favor of her being stronger at Force sense because it’s really her signature Force ability, and Traviss has a bad habit of lowering her ability levels out of nowhere so she can be yelled at.

Niner explains what happened to Atin, and Etain expresses sympathy, and promises to see if there’s a way she can help. She specifically mentions Force encouragement, which makes me a little uncomfortable and which she decides by the next novel never to use again without permission. But Niner, despite his worry a few paragraphs ago, is favorably impressed.

We timeskip and go back to Etain’s point of view then. The commandos notice someone approaching, but it’s only Jinart.

Niner is the member of Omega who gets picked on for being straightlaced, but ngl, I relate to him a lot in this book.

Jinart lets them know that while Hokan is trying to bluff them into thinking Uthan is in the villa, she’s actually back in the facility, which makes me wonder what the point of all those Hokan POV scenes were. They start trying to brainstorm how to get into the facility, which has no extra exits or conspicuous vents because it’s meant to secure a bioweapon, and realize that they’ll still have to deal with the droids in the villa anyway, as close as they are.

So they decide to try and smuggle in a bomb to take out the villa droids pre-preemptively because Hokan has already (for reason I still don’t understand) filled the basement there with explosives, In order to make it worth while, they want Hokan to think they’ve really fallen for his trick and are headed for the villa only, and thus to put most of the droids there.

A) Shut up,Jinart, you don’t get to be bitter.

B) Etain is already falling into that pragmatism thing. And I don’t think she’s wrong here. But she’s going to have more trouble actually doing it than she thinks.

And then it’s finally time to find out the origin of the gurlanin. Jinart reveals that Qiilura is her homeworld and that the settlers have destroyed her habitat without knowing the gurlanin were there, so she wants all of them, but especially the Trade Federation. Etain says she’ll make sure the Republic follows through, and Jinart threatens- “make sure you do” because the gurlanin are good at being everywhere. It’s foreshadowing for the next three books, of course, which all involve plot points with the gurlanin, as much as I wish I could be rid of them.

So they set about convincing Guta-Nay that there’s another squad and they intend to all attack the villa, except he’s so stupid they barely need to act. We get this really, really, really terrible line from Etain’s point of view:

Listen, this is where I’m drawing a line with this whole thing, Traviss. Because making the rapist who attempted to harm your main character from a race “so stupid that they can barely communicate functionally with humans and are all prone to drinking and criminality” wasn’t bad enough, we now get “the rapist is a monstrous child who isn’t able to control himself or understand that other people have feelings” which is the most bullshit thing in a series FULL of bullshit. No. Fuck that.

On the other hand, we do get one of my top five favorite scenes in the whole book, one of the few moments where Atin and Etain get to have a friendship, and something I really, really, really wish had been built on in later books.

Atin: Making my explosives neatly is WORTH the possibility of getting shot in the ass.

Atin walks her through all the squad’s tech, first letting her hold his deecee and look through the scope, then when she asks letting her try on his helmet and talking her through the HUD. He’s skeptical the whole time, but also, it takes some trust and patience to talk the commander who you are dubious knows her stuff through all of your personal kit. But Atin is the tech guy, and this is his wheelhouse and he shows her that patience. He also talks to her about the (perceived, not necessarily accurate) differences between ARCs, commandos, and troopers as he understands it.

I’m still not comfortable with the Force aspect of this, but it’s walked back in the next book. Atin fumbing the wire and pretending to focus hard because he’s embarrassed. And Etain is very touchy feely- I lose track of how many times in this series she grabs or pats or reaches for someone’s arm or hugs them or kisses them on the cheek.

Then we get to the part that’s actually my favorite:

It’s just... really nice? Seeing Etain get a little bit of respect and a little bit of friendship and feeling it in return? I will never be over the fact that it’s thrown away after this book. In fact, I can’t remember if she and Atin ever speak to each other again.

Eventually they finish up and Etain alternates between trying to sleep and trying to see if Guta-Nay has left yet. A couple of watches change. Fi attempts to feed her and is turned down. And Etain realizes she’s going to have to make Guta-Nay run, directly use Force persuasion to make him want to go back to Hokan, when he’s trusting the Republic to keep its word and not kill him.

It’s a good thing the chapter ends here, because honestly there’s gonna be so much bullshit to unpack in the next chapter, and I’m too tired for that.

#Republic Commando #Rev Recaps RepComm #Etain Tur-Mukan #Niner Skirata #Atin Skirata #Darman Skirata #Fi Skirata #Hard Contact #RepComm

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exyjunkies · 6 years ago

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“Well, damn, I think we’re playing this Seven Minutes in Heaven game a little wrong, are we not?”

Between the both of them, Ronan had spoken first. The silence for the past half-minute had been deafening, with the noise of those outside the closet an almost distant thrum. With the gap of two years since their last encounter, the whole situation was uncomfortable. And terribly awkward.

Adam wasn’t sure whether he wanted to kill him, or...

“Why did you go here tonight?” Adam hoped that Ronan flinched. “You knew I was going to be here.”

“Ah,” Ronan sounded mildly offended. “Because I’m the kind of ex that just knows where you’ll be every day of the week. Of course.”

“Not like that, dumbass. If you don’t already know--”

“I do know. You’re dating Chris, the best friend of the host of this party, and part of the rowing team. Yeah. I got it.”

It sounded like the drone of class recitation. A significant part of Adam really wanted to punch him.

“Then why are you here?”

“Gansey dragged me along. Said it was about time I stopped being single.”

An ache made its way into Adam’s chest, and Adam thanked his stars that the closet was relatively dark on his end. He didn’t know whether or not he should correct what Ronan just said about Chris, who had broken things off just this afternoon. The only reason he was here was because the bars near campus were all full, and he seriously needed a drink.

Very unlike him to seek alcohol, especially when his classes this semester were particularly demanding, but exams weren’t for another two weeks anyway.

Adam, you know I absolutely love that you’re so school-oriented. It’s just...

Just what?

Chris had fiddled with his phone, not wanting to look him in the eye. It’s just... I don’t think we fall on the same spectrum. Y’know. In terms of priorities.

Adam had braced himself for a fight. Hmm. Fine. And you think I should be the one to adjust. Cool.

No, you wouldn’t have to do that. I think... for both our sake, we should break up.

Adam had said nothing, merely gave a huge enough sigh that Chris had thought he was absolutely devastated.

Adam wouldn’t go so far as to say that he expected it. It was just that...by now, he had thought that Chris already understood that he wouldn’t be able to move up from his spot on the priority list, which went academics and then everything else.

But I mean, we can still be friends, yeah? Chris had pulled Adam into a hug, and Adam had barely registered how he felt about the whole thing as he nodded dumbly on Chris’ shoulder. In that moment, all he could think about was getting back to the paper he had been writing.

Chris wasn’t at the party later that night, which gave Adam the hint that he was genuinely sad about the whole thing. And Adam was too. Only a little bit, but he really was. Chris was a great guy, and they’ve been dating for almost three months. Chris was opinionated and good-humored, and was able to keep an intellectually stimulating conversation with Adam around half the time.

Also, he was gorgeous.

A few hours after the breakup, after Adam had done his paper and then a bit of processing, he found that he couldn’t tell when he had stopped.

Stopped putting as much effort as he was expected to, to make things work. Stopped looking forward to seeing Chris. Stopped caring about when Chris told him how his day was, stopped being excited to tell Chris about his.

At the end of everything, Adam had realized that he was just... tired.

And that things with Chris, as much as he had tried (and oh, did he try), could never be the same as--

“And yet you’ve landed yourself in here. With me.” Adam knocked his head back, closing his eyes. The bottle just had to point itself at Adam, not at the guy next to him. Some guy named Dan. Maybe if it were him, Ronan’s time in here would’ve been more worthwhile. Stupid beer bottle.

“Well, we can just... sit here and do nothing, if that’s what you want. We’ve got around five minutes more.”

The closet was big enough that they didn’t need to stay close to each other. It smelled of dust and fabric softener. Adam found a wall to lean back against, and slid down to the floor, bringing his knees up and hugging them.

There was a few seconds of fumbling on Ronan’s end, until Adam’s eyes burned against the light bulb above. He blinked up against the brightness and frowned.

“Found the stupid switch,” Adam heard Ronan mumble, then he heard a thump, not too far from him. Ronan had decided to sit next to him.

And for the next half minute or so, they sat in silence. Adam looked down at his shoes, swallowing the lump in his throat. Even with the space of years between them, Adam wondered if this was how he wanted things to go. If he wanted the both of them to sit there and do nothing. His body was so, so heavy with fatigue, and he wanted nothing more than to go home.

To go home and feel like it was home.

“Um--”

“Ro--”

Ronan’s surprised laugh was muffled by his hand. He tilted his head up and against the wall. “You first.”

“I...” And Adam could’ve said many things.

There were so many things he needed to get out.

Instead, he went for, “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

Ronan’s head rolled sideways to look at him. And that patience, that understanding, the part of Ronan that had made the biggest hole in Adam’s heart when Ronan had left, was clear as day.

“It’s our senior year, and I still hold that sentiment, Parrish.”

“It’s not like me, you know? I’ve always... always been... been me. And nothing, not any class, not any bully, not even any bad relationship, had gotten in the way of that. And that worked out fine for me.”

“You still hold top spot in all your classes. Probably.”

Top two in his physics class, but Adam wasn’t about to admit that. “But then I’ve never felt this... this helpless. I’m just so...? Done with it all. Nothing in my life feels worth it anymore. It’s hard.”

And maybe Adam felt something tug in his chest when Ronan inched closer, sliding against the wall, until they touched shoulders. He didn’t even know if they were past seven minutes already.

“Listen, Adam,” Ronan said, voice a little rough. “I know I may not be the best person for this type of crap, but I know you have it in you to get back up and make things better for yourself. It’s what I’ve always admired you for, you know? Being able to do that. You have other people around you who believe in you. Gansey and Noah and Sargent. Maybe Cheng, if you get to see him around. Your teachers, because I’m sure as hell you’re buddy-buddy with a lot of them. Those guys on the decathlon team.” He cleared his throat a bit. “And of course, there’s that one person who keeps you together every step of the way.” Ronan shook his head, a small smile on his face. “You can’t forget that.”

He probably meant Chris. Adam sighed, closing his eyes again. His next words were so soft, and yet it seemed like they filled the closet.

“Chris and I are done, Ronan.”

A beat of silence followed, which felt a lot longer than it actually was.

Then, Ronan’s voice was low and dark. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

A tear had left Adam’s eye before he could help it, and it felt onto his jacket sleeve. He sniffled and shook his head. Ronan shot him a concerned look.

“It was--ah, God--many things, I guess. He broke it off. Said he didn’t have the same priorities as I did. Which was... fine. I’m not sad about it.” Adam stared straight ahead. “It was probably a long time coming.”

Ronan was silent after that, and Adam understood. It was because in this moment, he didn’t know his place with Adam yet.

“I don’t think I loved him,” Adam continued, answering one of the questions Ronan was probably itching to ask. He felt Ronan tense beside him. “We never said the words to each other either. He was great, but... I don’t think there was ever that pull. We were together for quite a bit, but it never got to that point.”

“How long?”

“Almost three months.”

“Shit.”

“I know. I don’t know how I even made it past one.”

And Ronan laughed then, loud and true, and hearing it made Adam’s heart jump. Just a little.

But enough that Adam had laughed a bit too.

“You are many things tonight, Adam Parrish, and one of them is a complete asshole.”

“I deserve a prize or some shit for my level of tolerance.”

Ronan shook his head in amusement, and looked up at the ceiling again. The tension between them had eased considerably, a huge weight falling off of Adam’s shoulders. Adam wondered if this was what it felt like to be removed from everything he had to do, everything he had to be.

“You deserve so much better, yeah?” Ronan said, knocking his head once against Adam, and Adam felt that tug again, a little stronger this time. “You’ll be okay.”

Relief flooded Adam’s system, and Ronan was near him, was so close to him that the cogs in Adam’s brain were starting to malfunction. He was just broken up with a few hours ago, for fuck’s sake. He shouldn’t be feeling like this.

It shouldn’t feel this right.

“Guys?” Two knocks on the door came, and Adam mentally cursed. Fucking seven minutes. “Time’s up. I know you guys must be enjoying, though, but hurry up.”

Laughter came from the rest of the people outside, amidst shouts of Get a room! and Aren’t you guys broken up already, anyway? Ronan exhaled steadily.

“I guess we’re done here,” he said, and Adam felt all the peace drain from him as Ronan moved away and stood up. Ronan offered a hand, then withdrew it when Adam shook his head.

“Suit yourself,” Ronan said, turning around, and Adam just couldn’t take it anymore.

“Wait. Ronan. Stop. I--” Adam did his best to scramble to his feet, his legs not taking kindly to being suddenly held upright. He held onto the wall for leverage.

“Something wrong?”

Adam was frustrated now, as more knocks came from outside. “Okay. It can’t just be me.”

“What--”

“Do you not feel it too? Ronan. Ronan. I get it now. Or... at least I think I do. It’s been too fucking long. And you’re finally here.”

Ronan crossed his arms. Something moved along his features, as if he was trying to make sense of the matter. “But you broke up with me. Why should there be anything--”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know why I’m feeling something. But it feels right, Ronan, it feels like we fit. And we might’ve ended on one of the worst possible notes back then, but believe me when I say that ours was the last time I ever tried to fight for a relationship.”

Adam had taken too much out of himself with that monologue, and he slumped back against the wall, barely holding himself up. He was breathing a little heavily, but he wasn’t done.

“The others that followed, they all went as easily as they came, because I never tried to make them stay. There was nothing compelling me to do so. But you, Ronan. We fought so much, and each time, I was so, so scared I was going to lose you. It did get to a point where we had to go our separate ways. It really was too much to handle back then. But now. Now I see why the others didn’t mean as much. As much as I tried to forget about all of it, I don’t think I ever stopped feeling the way I felt about you.”

Ronan’s hands were clenched into fists as Adam finished, chest heaving a little.

Then, Ronan surged forward, cupping Adam’s face with his hands as he kissed him.

It was a mix of grief and relief and anger and happiness and pain and regret, and Adam wrapped his arms around Ronan, holding him as close as possible. Ronan’s tongue licked into Adam’s mouth, and it was everything Adam had been missing since all those years ago. Adam’s face was streaked with more tears now, because he didn’t realize he was holding onto so damn much. Now, he was more than ready to let everything go.

They pulled apart after a few minutes, Adam resting his forehead against Ronan’s and Ronan wiping Adam’s tears away. The knocks became louder, more insistent.

“Go the fuck away, asshole!” Ronan turned to shout at the door.

“Heh. Classy.”

“You’re one to fucking talk.” Ronan’s arm slipped around Adam’s body.

And as much as Adam wanted to continue the kissing (because the drought had lasted so long and he was here, he was here), they still needed to finish talking.

“Ro’, if we do this again, I... I wouldn’t know what to do if we fucked up again.”

Ronan looked Adam in the eyes, a determined look on his face. Adam’s heart was beating hard against his chest, and he took a deep breath to calm himself down.

“I can’t promise that we won’t, Adam.” And Ronan’s other hand went up to cup Adam’s jaw. “But I swear that I will be with you to fix things if we do.”

It was honesty, brutal and real, and Adam held onto it like a lifeline. He nodded, closing the space between them and kissing Ronan again, a little slower this time around.

Because if Ronan could admit to their shared humanity, their similar capability to make mistakes, then maybe this time around, everything will be alright.

#pynch #ronan lynch #adam parrish #the raven cycle #trc #myfic #trc fic #WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO #LOOK AT THIS!!!!!!!! IT'S 1 AM AND I AM EMOTIONAL #also this isn't proofread oops sorry

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go-redgirl · 6 years ago

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Donald Trump Jr: ‘Left Unchecked, Big Tech Could Construct Social Credit System’

Donald Trump Jr. warned in an article for the Hill, Sunday, that Big Tech companies could soon construct a communist-style social credit system if “left unchecked.”

In the article, titled “Conservatives face a tough fight as Big Tech’s censorship expands,” Trump Jr. claimed that the “right to freely engage in public discourse through speech is under sustained attack, necessitating a vigorous defense against the major social media and internet platforms.”

Listing Facebook and Twitter’s use of shadowbans, YouTube’s demonetization, and Instagram’s censorship, Trump Jr. declared, “If it can happen to me, the son of the president, with millions of followers on social media, just think about how bad it must be for conservatives with smaller followings and those who don’t have the soapbox or media reach to push back when they’re being targeted?”

“Silicon Valley lobbyists have splashed millions of dollars all over the Washington swamp to play on conservatives’ innate faith in the free-market system and respect for private property,” he continued. “Even as Big Tech companies work to exclude us from the town square of the 21st century, they’ve been able to rely on misguided conservatives to carry water for them with irrelevant pedantry about whether the First Amendment applies in cases of social media censorship.”

Trump Jr. then proclaimed, “It’s high time other conservative politicians started heeding [Sen. Josh] Hawley’s warnings, because the logical endpoint of Big Tech’s free rein is far more troubling than conservative meme warriors losing their Twitter accounts. As we’re already starting to see, what starts with social media censorship can quickly lead to banishment from such fundamental services as transportation, online payments and banking.”

“Left unchecked, Big Tech and liberal activists could construct a private ‘social credit’ system — not unlike what the communists have nightmarishly implemented in China — that excludes outspoken conservatives from wide swaths of American life simply because their political views differ from those of tech executives,” he warned, adding, “There is no conservative principle that even remotely suggests we are obligated to adopt a laissez-faire attitude while the richest companies on earth abuse the power we give them to put a thumb on the scale for our political enemies.”

In February, Instagram deleted a post from Trump Jr. about actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax, and Instagram users have also reported being unable to like posts from Trump Jr. and his father, President Trump.

In December, Trump Jr. described Big Tech bias as “pretty disgusting,” and declared, “I think it shows, and says what everyone already knows, that these are incredibly biased platforms, and they’re using their incredible power to influence people from a very young age. You know, they’re doing that, they’re pretending it’s not happening. It’s happening. Anyone with a brain sees it’s happening. And so, it’s pretty disgusting to see it, and frankly, there should be consequences.”

Trump Jr. also warned last month that if Americans don’t fight back against Big Tech censorship now, they’ll never get a chance again.

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter

Trump Jr. also warned last month that if Americans don’t fight back against Big Tech censorship now, they’ll never get a chance again.

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter

READ MORE STORIES ABOUT:

National Security Politics Tech Big Tech Censorship China Donald Trump Jr.Internet Censorship Masters of the Universe Online Censorship Social Credit System social media censorship

________________________________________________

OPINION: Trump Jr is 100% correct the Big Tech Companies have been ‘Left Unchecked’. And we believe that they have done way more damage than meets the ‘eye’.

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prettislim · 6 years ago

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Revealed! The New Fitness Secret of Bollywood Celebs: Prettislim!

The glamorous, Bong-Beauty, Riya Sen, known for her "Hot Bikini Body" and for her roles in blockbuster movies like Style, Jhankaar Beats, Apna Sapna Money Money, Shaadi No 1, Ragini MMS Returns & many more, believes in staying fit & healthy from inside to the out. Her social media presence continues to attract a large fan following. She is passionate about yoga & fitness and being a part of the glamour industry means that celebrities like her must maintain their fitness all-around the year. Riya Sen's upcoming movie includes Rokda, planned to release in 2019.

Recently, Riya visited the 'Prettislim Clinic' in Andheri West, Mumbai, to further improve her Fitness.

In a personal interview, Riya Sen shares her experience with Prettislim:

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Riya Sen found out about the U lipo Body Shaping Treatment & Slimming Treatment, offered by the clinic through one of her friends from the industry.

Prettislim is a 14-year-old slimming clinic, run by a team of qualified doctors & dietitians. It offers Weight Loss, Body Toning, Figure Correction, Inch loss, Tummy Tuck, Spot Reduction & many other services. It has 3 centers in Mumbai at Bandra, Andheri & Kandivali. Prettislim launched 4-In-1 U-Lipo, for the first time in India, 5 years ago & since then has helped hundreds of clients including many celebrities. Prettislim has been ranked as the No.1 Bariatric and Slimming Clinic in Mumbai in 2016, by All India Lifestyle Hospital & Clinic Survey, conducted By Times of India. Prettislim Clinic has also been selected as "The Economic Times Best Healthcare Brands" in 2016 & is also "The Official Fitness Expert of Fbb Colours Femina Miss India 2017".

Prettislim is the brain child of Dr. Puneet Nayak and he believes that human body is the only place where you live in, so you can't neglect the same.

Dr. Nayak says, "In our hectic lives one should not neglect our health and fitness. Celebrities need to maintain a toned & healthy body to look slim & fit on screen. Also most of celebs have erratic & busy work schedules, which makes the job difficult. Hence, at Prettislim, we have developed the non-surgical and most advanced 4-In-1 U-Lipo Treatment, which is safe, painless and clients lose up to 8 cm in each treatment from the targeted area. Also it only needs 1 hour a week, so it perfectly fits in the schedule of busy clients, including celebs. Prettislim also has a team of experienced dietitians & physicians to cover all aspects of fitness, including diet, lifestyle, medical problems, fitness, etc. Our programs help in spot reduction, body toning, figure correction, apart from slimming & weight loss."

He further adds that, "Riya has been a very sweet & cooperative client. She was regular for the sessions & followed all the instructions given to her during the course of her program. She was always truthful & upfront about all the aspects of the slimming program. She is a well-known yoga & fitness enthusiast & we are happy to help her in her fitness journey"

He also shares about his experience with Fbb Colours Femina Miss India finalists, who were consulted & trained at Prettislim clinic, since Prettislim was the Official Fitness Expert for the event. "All the finalists were quite aware of the diet & fitness regimen. They were quite excited & participated enthusiastically in all fitness activities. We gave them tips about body composition, diet & nutrition, healthy foods & charted individual fitness plans for them. They had many questions & concerns about body weight, slimming, figure correction, body shaping, etc. which we cleared one by one. Many of them showed keen interest in U-Lipo. In fact, Miss World, Manushi Chillar, who was also a finalist at that time & later went on to become Miss India & then Miss World, herself being an aspiring doctor, was quite aware of fitness concepts. She liked the concept of U-Lipo & recommended the same. She was impressed about the aspect of no side effects of U-Lipo, as it is completely non-surgical & also it only needs 1 hour a week, which is affordable by all"

Watch Miss World Manushi Chillar Speaking about Prettislim & U-Lipo, in the below Video

https://youtu.be/lmbvIozQaTE

Dr. Nayak concludes that "Fitness is not only needed for celebs & models, but for every individual. With the help of modern technology, it has now become easy to maintain fitness for all, even for busy bees."

If you Need More information, You Can Call Prettislim Helpline 8080808818

Visit Nearest Prettislim Clinic @ Bandra(w), Andheri (w), Kandiwali (w) Website- www.prettislim.com Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/PrettislimClinicIndia Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/prettislimclinic/ Twitter- https://twitter.com/PrettislimIndia YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/user/Prettislimclinic Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/company/prettislim/

#prettislim weight loss clinic

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eds-zebra-warrior · 3 years ago

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2021 Ehlers Danlos Society Awareness Month (Day 10 Prompt: Mental Health)

I deal with Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Complex PTSD. They all effect me in some way and depression is something I never dealt with much when I was younger. It seemed to really hit hard around the age of 25 when my health took its most drastic decline. Complex PTSD and Depression run hand and hand and result very much from being sick and not being able to get appropriate help for this. Complex PTSD goes much deeper and this condition is the one what I will explain more in depth.

At age 5 was when my mom first brought up my chronic pain to my pediatrician. He brushed it off saying “she probably just heard it from a grandparent or one of you who said their back hurt and they got attention for it so is copying them for the same attention. At age 8 I was seen for a UTI and was told, she's too young for UTIs but it may just be puberty coming on. Later that year I was taken to children's for passing out and like the UTI they told my parents not to worry about it. I’m probably just going into puberty and about to start my period which didn't happen until I was almost 15. When I was 10 I saw a doctor for my spinal curvature that I have had all my life but no one did anything about until this time. He took an x-ray and talked to my mom. She asked about a back brace to correct it and he said "absolutely not. braces only cause more problems and will make her muscles too weak. Now I'm being asked "why didn't they ever give you a scoliosis brace? If you wear a brace as a kid your spine will adjust to it and it will straighten as you grow, correcting itself. As an adult all they can do is fuse your spine. Your doctor ruined you. If he braced you as a kid you wouldn't have the pain and degeneration of the disks you have now." to make things worse they put me in chiropractic's which messed my back up even worse and the forceful cracking wore down my disks further. It took until I was 16 for anyone to realize the harm being caused and the chiropractors agreed that I should not receive further treatment but the damage was already done.

My mom complained about my GI issues since I had surgery at 4 days old. Being told I just have IBS and need to eat more Fiber where I only got worse to the point I had to be put into colonics for regular treatment also starting at around 10 years old. Having essentially a hose shoved up your butt and then having everything vacuumed out isn't fun, especially for a 10 year old. At age 12 the woman who did my colonics finally brought attention to my doctor by telling her how difficult it was to remove my chronic intestinal blockages where I was then told that I would have 80/90 percent of my colon removed. My insurance made me get a second opinion and due to my age this doctor said absolutely not and it never happened.

When I was 13 I had just gone to a camp for kids ages 12-14 where we got to camp overnight at Magic Mountain where we pulled an all-nighter there. It's one of those family fun centers for kids with arcade games, indoor laser tag, go karts, and of course the tunnels you can crawl around and play in. Everyone thought it was really special as it's usually only open to kids under 48 inches tall but also having juvenile dwarfism and just starting HGH, me and one other kid were the only ones still short enough to play in the tunnels on normal business days but we were all crawling through those hard plastic tunnels all night, the next morning my mom picked me up and I had probably over 50 bruises on my arms, legs, near the bony structures of my spine etc. so she took me to the doctor suspecting anemia and since it wasn't anemia my doctor jumped to the conclusion of child abuse. At age 14 I was finally diagnosed with Celiac Disease. The GI issues continued while others improved. I did a little better until I was 15 when I started having to go to the hospital at least once a month for symptoms such as heart palpitations, chest pain, trouble breathing etc. and this is when the real medical abuse and neglect started.

This same year, I was banned from Mount Carmel East Hospital for being a frequent flyer and diagnosed with Hypochondriasis and as an attention seeker. They asked my mom not to bring me back but by law they have to treat someone if they show up to the hospital so one day my mom took me to the ER again at age 16 for chest pain and palpitations. I was lying in the hospital bed with my mom sitting in the extra chair when I flatlined. No one came into the room so my mom ran down the hall and grabbed my nurse pleading for help. My nurse told her they heard the alarms and they are just ignoring me and suggested that my mom do the same thing. I probably just pulled one of my leads off because I’m known for being an attention seeker and they feed on attention from things like this.” My mom ran into my room and started CPR herself which she took when I was 6 before becoming a girl scout leader. Back then the ER did not have walls between rooms, instead just having a curtain on three sides. The nurse went into the room beside mine while my mom did CPR. When my mom revived me I took a big gasp for air and the nurse heard this, ran into my room, checked my leads and realized they were all connected and my heart had in fact stopped. She called the doctor who listened to me and left the room. He came back an hour later and said he was releasing me saying “You seem fine now. You’ve been here an hour and nothing else has happened so this is probably just one of those flukes. You know a one time thing that will never happen again so as far as I’m concerned there's no need to keep you” and he sent me home.

Of course it wasn't just a one time thing; this happened a second time in which the same thing happened then a third time in which I had a seizure at school and they sent me to the hospital. The hospital hooked me up to the monitors and I again later flat lined. They came in with the crash cart and pulled my gown down and started charging the paddles, preparing to shock me when I went into a grand mal seizure and my heart started. It had stopped for 57 seconds and the hospital admitted me for the seizures. When I started having seizures they ran four, yes four drug tests, one urine and three blood tests believing I was on drugs and every tune tine the came back they believed they were somehow wrong and would re-test me then brought in a case manager to interrogate me and demand I tell her what I took that may not be showing up on the test. Eventually they did an EEG and diagnosed me with epilepsy but did nothing about my heart the whole time I was there eventually sending me home and referring me to a neurologist. None of the meds they put me on helped and she moved away with no answers so my doctor referred me to another neurologist who again was stumped but noticed I had an arrhythmia so referred me to a cardiologist.

The cardiologist ordered a tilt table test and I had a 4:30 pm appointment. I went in for the test and was lied back. I had told him about the history of coding and seizures but since it went in my medical records I didn't know if he believed me. He put me on the table and eventually tilted it up telling me that I may pass out but I’m in the right place and to let them know if I felt funny. After being stood up, the nurse asked how I felt. I said fine. A minute later she checked in again and I said I felt fine. About 5 seconds after I said fine all I could get out of my mouth was “Uh-ohh” and next thing I knew the table was flat and I was waking up to about 12 people in the room. The doctor told me not only did I pass out but my heart stopped but he had good news. He told me he was able to save me some paddle burns from being shocked thanks to what I told him about the seizure seemingly restoring my heart rate. He decided to inject me with adrenalin to see if he could simulate the same response the seizure caused and it worked. He then told me I had two choices, get an emergency pacemaker put in there or they can life flight me to Cleveland Clinic to see if they have any other options for me. I chose the pacemaker and they took me to x-ray so he could see the structure of my heart before he did it. The x-ray came back abnormal because I had a smaller than normal heart that was tubular shaped instead of round. He placed the pacemaker and later pulled my past records to find in every imaging study I had done since the age of 4 days old I had this same congenital heart defect but no one ever diagnosed it. It took 23 years for a diagnosis and had probably been having shorter cardiac arrests all my life.

When I was 19 I lost the ability to walk the first time and went to Grant where they did a spinal tap and a brain CT for M.S. I was told I have Psychosomatic Personality disorder because both were negative for M.S. I was kept 8 days where they worked on my waking and the nurse and both PT's told the doctor they didn't think this was Psychosomatic in nature and more testing should be done. He said that would be up to my doctor and this time wasn't nearly as bad as the third time. I could stand with a walker and after about 6 days the PT's no longer had to hold part of my weight with the gait belt. I used the walker. After two days of this I was able to make it the 10 feet or so to the bathroom on the walker with just the PT's holding my gait belt just in case for precaution and not holding my weight so they sent me home with outpatient PT where I learned to walk without assistance again in about two months and walk normally again in about 4 or 5 months.

At PT they put me into in aquatic therapy and my stomach swelled up like I was 9 months pregnant within about 12 hours time. I also started going to the bathroom like a normal person for once in my life, between twice a day and once every other day. My mom took me to children's urgent care. I was still 19 and my mom just always wanted to go with me so I let her. They did a pregnancy test and I wasn't pregnant so they sent me to grant. I went to Grant where the ER doctor asked if I was sexually active and at 19 I was still a virgin. I told them no and said there was no chance of pregnancy. He pulled my mom out I'd the room and told her that kids my age tend to lie about pregnancy and how urgent care did a urine pregnancy test and he wanted to do a blood pregnancy test which is more accurate. My mom told him I was 19 and first of all you can't go from a totally flat stomach to looking 9 months pregnant in 12 hours and secondly that he legally needs to be talking to me and not her where he went in and loudly accused me of having unprotected sex, being irresponsible and need to go to an OBGYN, not a hospital when I screw up and get pregnant. I kept telling him I wasn't pregnant and he said "yeah… right… well see about that, I think I know what pregnancy looks like" did the blood test and came back an hour later and said "GREAT NEWS! You're not pregnant! You can get dressed and go home now" Then release me with paperwork on pregnancy prevention methods.

A few weeks later I was still swollen up so bad I looked like I was 9 months pregnant and now having bloody bowel movements and my mom took me to Mount Carmel where I later found out I got from the pool at riverside during aquatic therapy because a ton of patients ended up getting C-Diff. Their pool was shut down and they got in trouble for insufficient chemical levels and had to also start making patients sign a consent form that they didn't have diarrhea or abdominal pain the day of therapy since someone obviously did have C-Diff and used the pool as a public toilet. I wasn't pregnant and had C-Diff the whole time, going to all of my college classes when I had something contagious the whole time.

At 27 when I went fully paralyzed the hospital tried to diagnose me with conversion disorder same goes for the two years prior when I developed a limp that got worse and worse until I lost all ability to walk (all three mean the same thing, it's all in your head) At the ER they set me up with a team of four neurologists and four Psychiatrists where one Neurologist came in on the sixth day and said "Okay the gig is up. Quit wasting our time and resources, I know you can walk '' Picked me up out of the bed and just let go dropping me onto the hard tile floor. He was shocked that I went crashing into the tile floor and left me there for a good two minutes while he paced saying "oh my god, I've never seen anything like this. this isn't conversion disorder, it can't be right? I've never seen anything like it. her automatic reflex to catch herself didn't kick in. In conversion disorder she still would have tried to break her fall. I've just never seen anything like this. I've never seen anything like this." before putting me back in bed and leaving the room

Later that day he returned with neurologist two, telling him to pick me up and drop me, not telling him what would happen. This in turn made neurologist 2 believe I would catch myself and this is why neurologist one had asked him to pick me up and drop me. When I didn't do this, hitting the floor again like a ton of bricks, he was equally shocked and so was the first neurologist since it happened twice in a row, he called in neurologist three and had him drop me, with the same thing happening and then later neurologist four. Neurologist four refused to pick me up and drop me saying the other two neurologists had already told him what happened. Neurologist one was very persistent, Insisting that he must see this with his own eyes. Neurologist one, then picked me up and dropped me for the fourth time leaving neurologist one both looking shocked and mad.

That evening, my dinner was brought to me and I started to take the lid off when here comes Neurologist one into my room with one of the psychiatrists. Again, he picked me up and dropped me in front of him. The Psychiatrist said "This isn't psychological." They left the room and right before shift change all four Neurologists and all four Psychiatrists came into the room. The Physiatrists took a seat on the couch and the neurologists stood when neurologist one looked at the other three psychiatrists and said "You haven't seen this yet. I have to show you. One said "No... we heard, leave her in her bed, another said "Yeah we heard all about it, we don't need to see it." I don't know if it is even important or not but I forgot to mention that Neurologist 1 was Indian and had a thick accent. Anyhow, Neurologist one, again insisted that they see what happened and for the sixth time, picked me up out of bed, stood me up and just let go leaving me to hit the tile floor like a ton of bricks. Neurologist 4 tried jump forward and catch me and this time since I was dropped closer to the bed I also tried to grab the bottom bed rail on the way down but just smacked my arm into it. Neurologist 6 didn't get to me on time either so I hit the floor again and when I hit, I went fully bladder inconsonant peeing all over myself. They put me in the bed and I couldn't control my bladder so after changing the Chux pad 4 times they put me in diapers.

The doctors left me there for another day , now covered in bruises doing nothing as far as tests but sent a case manager in to say I could no longer live alone and when my parents mentioned me moving in with them with home health care. The case manager said she believes I need more intensive care than what can be provided at home and I needed to go into a long term care facility for young adults. I got so depressed at this point I was suicidal because I had been pulled out of work only about 6 months prior from my PCP, lost the ability to walk, a lot of other symptoms were new so I as primarily bedridden and had no custom wheelchair and stuck using a really uncomfortable, broken and wobbly folding wheelchair that used to be my grandmas and was too small for me as she was only 4’7” in her 90s and I’m 5’1” Possibly 5’2” or 5’3” if it weren't for my spinal curvature and had no leg rests so we had to tie an exercise band around the bottom of the chair for me to put my feet on to keep my feet off the ground and the bottom of my legs under my knees were higher than the seat so I had to put a pillow under my legs or just deal with my legs leaned to one side. Lastly in the last 12 hours I went from using a toilet to peeing all over myself and in diapers. Ultimately they were unable to find a long term care facility of any kind that could take me either because of my dietary restrictions or my age and I was sent home with my parents on home health care and with no reason I was paralyzed.

It took two years to finally get an MRI done due to the perseverance of my cardiologist of all people but of course when I went to Cleveland Clinic to get them done, the first thing the tech says to me is "we've never done one of these before but I Google it this morning. We don't have the right parts for this kind of MRI but I think we can Jimmy rig it. That's when I knew they were going to be a big problem. I was right. We got a good enough MRI to know I was paralyzed but the flexion/extension portion was totally unusable so to this day I'm still fighting the government and insurance to cover an upright MRI out of state since they can't do the flexion/extension in Ohio.

My mom requested my tonsils be removed when I was 6 and was persistent in asking at almost every appointment she attended if mine because I got strep 2-5 times a year and was told over and over again my tonsils were huge but I would grow into them. At 21 I was sent to an ENT at Ohio ENT for sinus infections where my ENT got on my mom for not being persistent when I was young about getting my tonsils removed and how its her fault and I need them removed and how much more pain I'm going to be in because she didn't push hard enough to get them removed when I was a kid then when he removed them he came out while I was still in on the table to show her my tonsils and showed her how infected they were and picking green stones out of them to show her and blaming it all on her. He also did a termination reduction and septoplasty. I was sent home to call them an hour and a half later because my nose was bleeding so bad. They told me it's normal. I called back an hour after that to tell them I used 3/4ths of the gauze and was told I need to calm down, the surgery went fine and bleeding is normal. I then called back a third time two hours later and told them I went through the whole stack of 2000 gauze pads, saturated two washcloths and was now using a towel that had a large spot now covered in blood and felt like I was going to pass out when the nurse pauses and said "he sent you home with a whole pack of gauze? Usually we only give out about 20, so your telling me you went through a whole 2000 pack of gauze?" I said they were in a paper package that was unopened and said 2000, 4"x4" medical grade gauze" and she told me to get back to the hospital immediately.

When I got there they found he didn't cauterize the incision in my nose where they did the septoplasty and pulled out a section of bone so had to numb me up and cauterize it to stop the bleeding than give me iron pills and an iv infusion to replace my blood volume. They sent me home and the tonsillectomy was a simple recovery but the termination reduction and septoplasty which I was told would be an easy recovery was by far the most painful and worst surgery I've ever had. After the bleeding stopped I noticed my nose ran all the time, especially when I tilted my head forward. I was in the nursing program at the time and mentioned a CSF leak to the surgeon at the follow up. He said everything went perfect… even though it wasn't because I had to go back for the bleeding and sent me home. A month later he saw me again and I told him again I really thought I had a CSF leak from the turbinate reduction and he said "I know what I'm doing. I don't make mistakes and you don't have a CSF leak" I have gone through a large box of tissues around once a week since then told by doctors in the spring and summer, it's just allergies and in the winter, "everyone's nose runs in the winter" to find out this year when I finally found a doctor versed in EDS that I in fact have a CSF leak but now he can't find a doctor who knows how to repair it in EDS patients.

Drug tests, pregnancy tests and STD testing are the first things the hospital always does. Even now at almost 33 years old, the one good symptom of EDS is that you look much younger than you really are and even that can be a double edged sword. You look like you're younger than I am. In my 30s people still guess me to be between the ages of 14 and 19. When you go to the hospital, even with your age being on the paperwork, people discriminate and look at you, treating you as if you're the age you look rather than your true age, jumping to the conclusion of drugs.

When I was 29 I went to Mount Carmel for my chronic pain and was left in a special waiting room they have for drug addicts for 9 hours. I begged them to drug test me, even offering to let them come into the bathroom to watch. I was in so much pain, this was right after I was paralyzed and not yet in pain management so not on anything. They refused to do a drug test and when I went into shock my mom begged them to take me back and help me. they kept telling her I was an addict and my mom kept telling them "how would you even know. She's been asking you to drug test her since she got here and you put her in this room. It's quite obvious what this room is for and you've refused to do any kind of testing, urine, blood, anything so how can you call her an addict when you won't even do a blood test." The staff kept yelling at me for lying on a blanket on the waiting room floor and telling me to get into a chair which made the pain worse. It got so bad my mom later told me that the other patients were yelling and cussing out the staff telling them they need to take me back, one even openly admitted she was an addict and has been around addicts most of her adult life and that I'm not an addict because she would know. My mom said even a teenager was yelling at a nurse to take me back and one threatened to call the cops for patient abuse. About an hour after there was a borderline riot in the waiting room over me they finally took me back.

When I was 30, I was admitted into OSU Medical center presenting with extreme abdominal pain, the inability to hold down any kind of food and struggling to hold down water and bowel movements that were almost straight blood. Red blood with black clots. The first few days the doctors took me seriously. No one assessed my bowel movements except my nurse and she and I couldn't get anyone to but the doctor told me he was going to put on a feeding tube the following morning because my blood work kept getting worse and worse. I weighed 110 lbs. normally but had dropped to 91 lbs. The next morning Dr S walked in and said he was releasing me to go home. I told him the doctor said he was doing the feeding tube today while they ran more tests and he said "well he's not here today and now I'm your doctor and there's nothing wrong with you so you're going home."

My mom then stepped in and said "you're joking right. Half of her blood work is coming. Back abnormal, no one but this nurse had bothered to even look at her bowel movements and she's lost 9 lbs. in a week and mornings wrong!" The nurse then spoke up and said "with all due respect I really think you should look at this patient's bowel movements." he got very defensive yelling and saying he diagnosed me with Anorexia and General psychosis and sent a referral to OSU Psychiatry. I need cognitive behavioral therapy. I then called my GI doctor while my mom argued with him saying she refused to take me home like this because she's afraid I'd go home and die. My blood sugar had been dangerously low and I couldn't eat so she's not taking me home to die. Dr Shadchehr started yelling that he was calling securely to escort us out if we don't leave because I'm not medically I'll. I'm mentally ill and anorexic so refusing to eat

I spoke to my GI doctor on speaker phone and he told my mom to take me Straight to Riverside. Dr S laughed a sarcastic laugh saying they won't see you.

We went to Riverside and They took me straight back. The doctor walked in and said. "I've heard all about you. Your doctor at OSU told me you were coming. You were treated by him and right here it says general Psychosis and Anorexia. You have a diagnosis, he said you're perfectly healthy so there is no need for me to see you today. He sent a referral to a psychiatrist so I recommend you follow up with her. I had to wait a little over a week to get get into the psychiatrist and continued bleeding and losing weight in that time but finally the day came.

I went to the psychiatrist the next week and I'm a Paraplegic so I wheeled back to her office. After she talked to me and my mom for a few minutes. As soon as I got back she said "so what is it I'm supposed to be seeing you for?" I said, ``Apparently I'm Anorexic and crazy" she said "no really, why are you here?" I told her basically because I have to be and explained what happened in the hospital. She said she looked at my medical tests and things before I got there and did some psych evaluations and then said sure you're a little depressed but who wouldn't be, going through what you're going through but I have good news and bad news. Good news is you're not Anorexic or have any kind of psychosis or any kind of serious mental illnesses. The bad news is, I can't help you. The doctor recommended CBT but not all the CBT is going to fix a physical health problem and a very serious one at that. She then went on a tangent saying "I am so VERY sorry this is happening to you.

I can't tell you how many times this happens where these narcissistic, know or all doctors send me patients line you who are very sick with a physical health condition and try to pawn it off on a mental health problem, endangering your lives because they don't want to admit they actually don't know something. If I had to guess I would say that at least 90 percent or more doctors develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder at some point in their career and many by the time they get their PhD and they are the worst patients to have because of course they have NPD so believe they know it all but they are also Doctors so believe they know everything there is to know medically which means they are the least likely to seek help or treatment for this because they believe you're wrong. That right, they aren't mentally ill and you're wrong so never get help and continue to abuse and neglect patients like you for the rest of their career or until someone dies and they lose their license." she said "I'm going to read you the letter he sent me and show you. I can confidently diagnose him without even seeing him in person just because his letter is so grandiose." She read me his letter pointing out all the parts where he showed signs of narcissism in his writing which was almost every sentence and sometimes more than once in a sentence and said it's one of the worst cases she has seen and she was going to write to OSU and suggest he be removed as a traveling doctor there. She then gave me her card and said to contact her if anything ever comes up that she can help and apologized again for what he did to me wishing me luck in finding a medical doctor who will listen and can figure out what's wrong.

By the next week it had been three weeks since still bleeding and all I had been able to keep down in that tone was just under two cans of chicken broth, a small fruit smoothie, about six spoonful of mashed potatoes over several tries, the hospital gave me a peach fruit cup and I got down half of one slice of a peach, one and a half Popsicles and about 4-12 ounces if water or juice a day so was really dehydrated, really anemic from blood loss, really malnourished and had dropped from 110 lbs. to 72 lbs. I'm 5'1" by the way. I was to the point I couldn't even roll over without passing out and had to be pushed to the bathroom with my head between my knees because I kept passing out just sitting up. I couldn't go to the hospital because Dr. S had called them and convinced them I was totally insane. My mom didn't have any more PTO and went to work. I was so sick I literally thought I was going to die and wrote a note on my arm in sharpie saying who I was if I was found, what I originally went to the hospital for so they knew I was sick, my mom's contact info and a letter to my parents telling them how much I loved them and passed out twice just from holding my arms up. I was so sick and this doctor ruined my chance to get hospital care.

I then made one last stitch effort to save myself. I had told them at the ER that I had started three new meds. I managed to call the manufacturer on speaker phone with the phone lying on my chest without passing out and the first place I called was the manufacturer of Northera. They forwarded the call to one of their lab doctors. I explained my symptoms and the first thing he said was "Oh my God! A DOCTOR sent you home like this! He then said " Listen I need you to get to the ER NOW. You should probably call a squad. You are having a severe side effect from Northera and I can't believe the hospital would even consider sending you home without looking into these. I believe this doctor sent you home in life threatening condition with a condition called Gastric Ischemia. Northera is manufactured to raise your blood pressure. But in some cases it can raise your blood pressure on only certain parts of the body, usually the GI system. It can cause blood pressure to get so high that the blood vessels in your intestines and GI tract to spontaneously rupture. You are internally bleeding and can die very easily from this and I'm honestly shocked you're talking to now so you need to get to hospital asap. I told him I can't because Dr S called the other hospitals and told them I'm crazy and they just sent me home without doing anything. He said "If they won't take you, call back and have them transfer your call back to me. I will listen for your call and speak to them on your behalf. I then let him go and knowing that the ER wasn't an option.

I called my neurologists office who prescribed it. My doctor wasn't there but they called Northera and called me back saying they were getting me in with another one of their doctors and to get there as soon as I could. I had to call my mom and they let her leave work to take me. When I got there and the doctor saw me he instantly got furious that Dr S sent me home in life threatening condition. He assessed me, said I definitely have Gastric Ischemia, took me off Northera and sent me to get albumin, iron, a banana bag, fluids and a bunch of other meds to build up my blood volume because I was sent home internally bleeding for so long, they tried to replenish my electrolytes, vitamins and minerals since almost everything came back as low to very low on the blood test, pain meds, a ton of stomach meds like Zofran, Famotidine, something they said coats my stomach and intestinal lining and kept me there all day.

They didn't give me any kind of calories but told me only drink juice or things high on calories and to come back if I don't improve on 48 hours and said they want me to be eating within 48 hours, said it would be a liquid diet and I'll probably be on a liquid diet for a whole until my GI system has had time to heal and to take it slow. Work on a liquid diet and maybe try thicker foods like cottage cheese and work my way up to soft food and eventually solid food. Told me I can try things if I want to but it could take a few months to get back to a totally normal diet. About 36 hours later I got a half of a cherry icy down. By the next day I was able to eat two cans of chicken broth and 24 oz of juice and improved from there. I was on a liquid diet for about 3 weeks, a soft diet gradually going from really thin things line yogurt, pudding and apple sauce to mashed potatoes that weren't so watery they poured off the spoon to things with some spices line pot roast blended up on the blender with ensure and eventually macaroni and cheese. It took me about weeks to graduate from Mac and cheese to solid food like cereal or real meat but I did struggle eating only solid food for a while. My GI system was so damaged it had to basically learn to work again.

August 2019 my mom went in for a gallbladder removal and told the surgeon she had EDS like I do. I woke up that morning feeling a total sense of doom like something bad was going to g happen and that my mom shouldn't have the surgery done. We got ready and went to the surgical center. She signed in and my mom, dad and I took a seat. That's when I told my mom I think she should cancel it and that I have a horrible feeling about this but couldn’t explain why. She just kind of laughed it off and said it would be fine. I kept telling her it's not too late to back out and she can always get a second opinion until they call her back to prep her for surgery. Once they prepped her they called me and my dad back to sit with her.

The surgeon Dr K came in the room and that's when I knew things would be really bad. I have always said that if a doctor comes in wearing an expensive suit or really expensive looking pin skirt and suit jacket to run and if they come in wearing khaki pants or a more basic pair of slacks or jeans like anyone can find at a place like TJ Maxx and a polo, regular old button up shirt that is like plaid or not too fancy or a basic blouse than they are the good doctors. The fancier they are the worse their sense of ethics and medical capabilities. When you have a doctor walk in wearing what looks like a custom made suit, tailored perfectly to their body, dress shoes shined to the point you can see your own reflection in them, golden cufflinks, a massive ring on their hand or even worse, multiple rings, pocket liner with a big chunky fancy and custom engraved pen in their pocket with hair styled to perfection than you better run for your life… Well her surgeon walked in and his outfit probably cost more than the most expensive suit that Donald Trump or Bill Gates himself could even rationalize buying with an ego to match. That's when I started asking questions like how many surgeries he has done and his success rate. I also told him my mom has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and asked him how familiar he is with the condition and the surgical protocol surrounding it. He condescendingly replied that knew how to do surgery on EDS patients then explained what they were going to do as if we were total idiots. When he left the room I basically pleaded with my mom to cancel it and find another surgeon, telling her again I had a terrible feeling about this whole thing and meeting the surgeon just confirmed my bad feelings about all of this. The nurse and anesthesiologist came to get her and as she was being wheeled out the last thing I said as she was being wheeled down the hall was “It's not too late.”

She went through with the surgery and almost the whole time she was in surgery I was practically burning holes in the carpet with my wheels packing and shaking. My moms had a lot of surgeries and some more major than this and I have had quite the list of surgeries myself. My dad is the one who has only been put to sleep twice but I have never been like this during any of our surgeries. Usually I’m just like “bye mom, good luck!” and I'm pretty content about things. Of course there's always a bit of anxiety but it’s nothing major. Honestly, I'm usually way less anxious than most people are but this time I was a mess. My mom came out of surgery sooner than expected and soon after they let me and my dad come back to see her.

The first thing she said when we walked in her room was "sometimes wrong. I told them and they didn't believe me" the nurse came in and said the surgery was a success and said she would leave the surgical center in a half hour. I brought up the fact that my mom felt like something was wrong and the nurse asked what was wrong and my mom said she just doesn't feel good at all. The nurse blew it off on being groggy from the anesthesia and left the room. My mom went downhill from there. A half hour came and an hour later they came in and said “well some people need to stay a little longer than others. This is normal, it just depends how quick you clear the anesthesia. I told them, with EDS we usually need extra to stay asleep because me metabolizes it quicker than someone without EDS which again they blew off and the nurse walked out. She started having extreme pain which they blamed on the fact that they filled her abdomen with air to remove her gallbladder, Her blood pressure started dropping which they blamed on anxiety. She was, white as a ghost.

The doctor came in 3.5 hours later to check on her and kept asking if she was ready to go home trying to get her out and this is when we noticed he was acting strange, like he was nervous himself and was trying to get rid of her. Soon after she started having trouble breathing and they had to put oxygen on her. At this point I blatantly asked him if he nicked her liver and he offensively said he hadn’t. After about 6 hours my mom was literally yelling in agony any time she was moved because the pain was so intense. Her blood pressure was in the 70s/40s and at that point, having a lot of medical knowledge between nursing school and my experiences with EDS I started telling them they needed to send her to the hospital and flat out told the doctor he screwed up. He got really defensive and mad but he still left her there and every time he came in he was so nervous himself that he couldn't stand still and was basically dancing in place. I kept asking him what he did because I could tell he knew what he did and he just kept saying the surgery went perfectly and some people's bodies just over react so they need to stay a little longer. They kept saying it was normal and she would go home soon.

Nine hours later her blood pressure was bottoming out and of course they had to close and everyone wanted to go home so he couldn't keep her any more and just hope she magically got better, they finally decided to send her to the hospital. They called the squad and the doctor started filling out paperwork for transfer. The paramedics loaded my mom up with her screaming and crying out in agony the entire time. They were ready to go and the nurse asked Dr Keith if he was done with his paperwork that goes to the ER with my mom and he replied saying wait a second. I want to make sure I word this the right way. When I’m done look this over for me. I need to make sure I dot all of my I’s and cross my Ts to make sure I cover my butt.” She agreed to look at it, both thinking no one heard during all of the commotion which I happened to be recording, which is one benefit to being in a chair. You can put your phone on record and lay it on your lap, against your stomach and no one notices but I knew he screwed up and wanted all the documentation I could get. You can hear the paramedics and my mom yelling more than anything but I have no doubt if I downloaded this onto a computer and was able to adjust the sounds that you could hear the doctor say this.

She was taken to Mount Carmel where they ran blood work and realized quickly that she was internally bleeding. They gave her two units of blood and then admitted her. giving her more during the night when moving from the gurney to the ER bed and from the ER bed to the admission bed she screamed in agony and pain. The next morning we visited my mom at the hospital. She looked terrible but said she was feeling better... I think wishful thinking and asked me to bring my service dog for her to visit with later that afternoon. Little did we know, she was so sick and her blood levels were so low that she remembers little to nothing from about a half hour after being brought out of surgery at the surgical center. My dad and I went home for lunch and to get my service dog Maggie and when we were pulling into the parking garage we got a call from a surgeon at the hospital

He said my mom was crashing, they had called rapid response and they couldn't wait for more imaging and tests to find the site of the bleeding. They had to go to emergency exploratory surgery and to get to the hospital now. I told him we were in the parking garage and he told us to meet him upstairs in the ICU waiting room which was shared with the drop down unit she was originally placed in. When we got there The surgeon told us they moved her to the ICU wing. He said she seemed to be stable earlier this morning but suddenly her vitals went and she started crashing. The nurse called rapid response who was giving her blood to try to stabilize her enough for surgery right now because as things stand she would never make it through surgery so they were trying to bring her vitals up and stabilize her enough to operate. He told us he doesn't believe in giving people false hope and wanted to be honest with us, saying things didn't look good at all but if we want to go ahead with surgery he would try his best. He said it was our decision if we wanted to try exploratory surgery or let her go and he wouldn’t judge us for either decision we made again telling us how bad things were but also saying she seems to have a lot of willpower. I signed the paper to have them do the surgery as my mom put me as the person to make these decisions for her care. He then told us that at this point, when a patient is as critical as she is, whether they make it through surgery or not is no longer up to the surgeon but up to the patient and their willpower to fight. He asked if I had any questions for him and I said “There's no time for questions, just please, I’m begging you, do your best to save my mom. We still need her. He told us rapid response was in her room so there will be a lot of people so it's pretty crazy in there right now but told us he suggested that we go in, tell her goodbye and make our peace with her now just in case because we may or may not have another chance to.

We went to the ICU and I stopped right outside the hall where a nurse came walking up. At this point I started crying telling my dad to go in and told him I can't because we had Maggie with and Service dogs aren't allowed into the ICU but to tell my mom I love her. The nurse then said “Just go ahead into the room. You’re in the hospital a lot too aren't you? I said yeah. He said “I knew I had seen you two around here before. I’ve seen her and trust me, she’s way more behaved and better trained than most of the so-called service dogs other people bring in here. The only thing that worries me is that she will get stepped on because there's a lot going on in there”. I picked her up and put her on my lap and he said “Perfect” He took us to her room and told us to try to get up by the bed to see her but also try to stay out of the way of rapid response. Being an interpreter and also going to school for nursing I quickly spotted out the best place to be without then having to tell me. There were four people in her room working on her, one left from the right side of her bed to go grab some more blood and there was a couch beside her bed that was up against the right wall but about 2.5 feet from the back wall so I told my dad to go into the hole where the couch wasn't against the back wall and went in after him parking my chair right in front of him and with my knees under the edge of the back of my moms bed so we could both reach her.

The rapid response guy came back and I asked if I was in his way and he said no, not at all and that he will have to remember this because that's a good spot for people to stand and be out of the way. She had 4 double lumen lines going into her connected to four bags of blood, antibiotics, and a ton of other bags of medications. Somehow she was still awake and talking. We told her we loved her and needed her, to keep fighting and I told her Maggie was here too and needed her grandma and put my mom's hand on her head. My mom said hi to her and told us she wasn't going anywhere. Interestingly, this was one of the only things she remembers from the whole experience. She later said she remembered thanking me when they were taking her down to surgery that she made me a promise not to go anywhere so she better not break it lol. They wheeled her out of the room and as they were going out of the room I told one of the nurses that she had Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

They sent us down to surgical waiting. In surgical waiting they told us that it's hard to tell how long surgery will last because it depends how hard it is to figure out what's going on during exploratory surgery but at the very least we are looking at 2 hours. I asked if we had time to take my service dog home and drop her off since if she made it out she would be back in ICU and she said we should have plenty of time. We live about 12 minutes away from the hospital so ran home and dropped Maggie off. On the way I called her brother and mom and updated them. Of course when we got home my Autistic dad goes into the kitchen and starts pouring chicken broth into a pot and filling up another with water to make himself some mashed potatoes and noodles so I had to stop him and tell him there was no time for that and if he was really that hungry grab something quick like a sandwich because we had to get back to the hospital. He asked why, saying they said at least two hours. I told him because we need to be there in case something goes wrong. He grabbed a sandwich and a bag of chips and we went back to the hospital.

We got back 35 minutes after we had left and when we went into the waiting room my aunt and uncle were in there and said they called my mom this morning and said they were going to visit but when they went to her room, someone else was in there and they told them she was in surgery. She asked why we didn't call and tell them. We said we didn't know they were coming and it's an emergency surgery so we didn't know it was happening ourselves until about an hour ago. 45 minutes after they took her back, a nurse came out and told us they were done. I asked if she was okay since “were done” doesn't say much, not even if she survived or not. She just said that the doctor said he would meet us up stairs in the same waiting room he spoke with us in before surgery. We went upstairs and he never came. After 45 minutes of waiting for the doctor my aunt and uncle left. An hour went by and no one came. After an hour and 15 minutes I couldn't wait any longer so went back down stairs while my dad stayed upstairs and told the surgical waiting nurse we had been up there for over an hour and the doctor still hasn’t come. She seemed surprised and then said to go back up there and she will send him our way when she finds him. I went back towards the elevator and here comes the surgeon out of a door in the hall.

He apologized and said he was just about to come up there and it's been a crazy day because as soon as he got my mom out, they had another emergency surgery. He said my mom survived the surgery but things are still very critical and that she was in a coma. He said he still doesn't want to get our hopes up because he doesn't believe in that and that we need to be very aware that what happens from here is very much reliant on her and it's now up to her and how badly she wants to fight whether she goes one way or the other. He said the surgery was actually really quick because once they got her open it was quite obvious where the bleeding was coming from He said it looked like her liver had been sliced into during the surgery and after bleeding for so long her body couldn't tolerate it anymore and all of a sudden she went from internally bleeding to hemorrhaging. He said when they sliced her open her abdominal cavity was filled with blood, which I knew because before they wheeled her into surgery her stomach was so distended she looked like she was pregnant. He said it was a good call telling the nurse that she has EDS because that's not something he's familiar with but the nurse had a family member with this so was able to give him some pointers. He said he had a hard time with suturing her liver shut because her tissues kept ripping through the sutures so they ended up putting a dissolving sponge in there around her liver to help hold it together and did multiple layers of sutures to close it up. He said once he was able to close up her liver he pulled all of her abdominal organs out (he acted it out with his hands), saying the intestines, kidneys etc. examining them one by one, to make sure he didn't miss anything before putting them back in, cleaning her out really good and closing her up. He again said things are very critical and I asked about the game plan. He said he was hoping for her to come out of the coma in about two weeks and if that doesn't happen we will worry about that when the time comes. He then told us we can go see her if we want to.

I got my dad and we went to my moms room. She was covered in tubes and surrounded by machines. I asked the nurse if they knew if she had any cognitive functioning and they did not and wouldn’t be assessing that yet. I went up to her and put my fingers into her fist and asked her if she could hear me, to squeeze my fingers. She squeezed. I then noticed her feet were covered up and I know she hates having her feet covered so I asked her if she wants her feet uncovered to squeeze my hand. She squeezed. I then uncovered them and asked her if she wanted them covered back up to squeeze my hand and she didn't squeeze. That's when I started having some hope.

I told my dad to get on the other side of her and he did and I told her those fingers were his and to squeeze his fingers and she did. I then started asking her yes and no questions, telling her to squeeze my hand for yes and my dad's hand for no. I asked if she was in any pan and she squeezed his hand. I asked if she was comfortable and she squeezed my hand. I asked if she needed anything and she squeezed his hand. I asked if she was tired and she squeezed my hand. I asked if she wanted us to leave so she could rest and she didn't squeeze any of our hands so I clarified and said “It's okay, if your tired mom, You’ve been through a lot. If you want us to leave so you can get some rest we can come back tomorrow morning. It’s about 7:00 at night now and if you need to rest we totally understand. I will call the nurses station right before I go to bed to check on you and I have an alarm set for 8 in the morning to call again and check, right after shift change. If you want to go to sleep we will come back tomorrow around 9 or 10 in the morning but it's totally up to” right then she squeezed my hand and I said so you were worried because you didn't know when we would come back? She squeezed my hand. I said we will be back between 9 and 10. Did you want us to leave so you can rest? She squeezed my hand. I then pulled my hand out and told her good night and good bye. I saw her fist clinch like she was squeezing and I went back over and said I saw her squeeze and asked if she needed anything and she clinched her other fist so we went home for the night.

Of course I ended up calling the nursing station at 9 pm, at midnight, at 4 am and at 8 am that night but we came back the next morning. There wasn't a lot of progress that day but we visited twice that day. The third day I made my 8 am call and to my surprise they said she started co breathing with the respirator earlier that morning. We visited again and she was still in a coma but they said her co breathing was getting better and better and if she kept up the good work, they may take her off the respirator portion of life support the next day and put her on forced air. Well we left and when we came back at around 7:30 pm they told us she was starting to come out of the coma and was now in a semi conscious state now opening her eyes and looking around every once in a while and they had just pulled the respirator and put her on forced air.

The nurse followed us into her room and said they would like to try a nasal cannula and are pushing her hard because you can get addicted to oxygen fairly quickly saying they wanted to sit her up in a chair and put a nasal cannula on her at the highest setting and asked if we would mind sitting with her and letting them know if her oxygen hit 70%. We agreed and she was still very much comatose only opening her eyes once when the first started to lift her to put her into a recliner. They reclined it back enough that she wouldn't fall out and had us watch her. We talked to her even though she couldn't talk back other than squeezing but she did open her eyes twice within a half hour. After about 28 minutes her oxygen hit 78 percent so they came in, put her back on forced oxygen and back in her bed saying she was doing really well. We visited a little while longer and then left so she could get her rest. On day four she woke up and was out of the coma, able to talk to us but did fall asleep a lot. That day they went back and forth between the nasal cannula and forced air. Day 5 she went onto the nasal cannula and was pretty much full out of the coma. She got better and better and pretty much as soon as she could prove she could get back and forth to the bathroom without passing out they sent her home. Her oxygen would still drop really low when she went to the bathroom or walked at all so that was scary but she came home. She struggled with her oxygen levels for a long time but eventually that improved.

Months later she was still struggling with memory which she still does to this day, she still has pain and severely decreased energy levels. We found out over a year later that she had multiple brain aneurysms either during one or the surgeries or while on life support and was diagnosed with permanent cognitive impairment. She has very low energy levels now and will never be like she was before the botched surgery. She returned to work only to be laid off during the pandemic but while she was working I honestly felt like she had no business working and should be on disability as when she wasn't working all she did was lay on the couch and sleep. She had zero life outside of work because work took every ounce of energy she had, just doing a desk job so it does worry me that she has been trying to get another job because since being laid off she still spends most of her day on the couch asleep or just laying down watching tv, struggling to even get out of bed in the morning and get the energy needed to do things like shower, cook and clean.

I see a lot of me, right before my doctor pulled me out of work in her. Refusing to admit she's as sick as she is and pushing further than her body can actually tolerate, all because this doctor said he knew about EDS and the surgical protocols when he didn’t and maybe even his job as a whole, slicing her liver open and when was scared he would get caught so didn't tell the hospital what happened and spent 9 hours covering his butt while he let my mom sit there dying and left the hospital having to go in emergency exploratory surgery to try to figure out what happened when if he told them and sent her to the ER right away they may have been able to fix it without her having all the problems from bleeding out and the coma she had today. And to think, in Ohio you can't sue for medical abuse and neglect unless someone dies or is essentially permanently a vegetable so. These doctors just get to walk away with no ramifications for destroying people's lives.

PTSD is complex and severe especially when you are living in a world of people with very high respect for medical personnel but you know if you have a rare disease you don't get the caveat of good doctors and nurses. They are far and few and honestly the medical field is just like every other job where 95 percent of the personnel does 5 percent of the work, pawning it off on the 5 percent of the staff that actually takes their job seriously forcing them to do 95 percent of the work. As I mentioned before, I saw a psychiatrist after falsely being diagnosed with anorexia and general psychosis when I really had a life threatening condition called Gastric Ischemia and she said that she believes at least, the very least 90 percent or more doctors develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder at some point in their career and many by the time they get their PhD and they are the worst patients to have because of course they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, so believe they know it all but they are also Doctors so believe they know everything there is to know medically which means they are the least likely to seek help or treatment for this because they believe you're wrong and continue hurting people and even taking lives never believing they are to blame.

I believe this wholeheartedly and those with common conditions take for granted the medical care they receive. Doctors like easy cases, they like treating conditions they know about because they know exactly what to do and can get them in and out, putting in little work and making a lot of money but if you have a rare disease most doctors and even nurses are too narcissistic to admit they haven't heard of something or don't know everything there is to know about every medical condition. Most humans are also very lazy creatures preferring to take the easiest way out so if they don't know about your condition there's no way they are going to sit down at a computer for hours and really look into it and learn about it and too much pride to contact specialists in the field to get advice and learn to treat the patient properly. They look for the easy way out and unfortunately the easy way out for most doctors is one word, well actually one word that they keep replacing with a new word every few years. Hypochondriasis, Psychosomatic Personality Disorder, Psychosomaticism, Somatization Disorder, Munchausen Syndrome, Illness Anxiety Disorder, Factitious Disorder Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder, General Psychosis, Conversion Disorder. It doesn't matter what term they use as the term is updated every few years once patients catch on to the true meaning “Nothing is wrong and it's all in your head” Occasionally if you present with other symptoms like weight loss or vomiting they may even pin a body dysmorphic disorder on you such as Anorexia or Bulimia. Anything to get you out of their hair and make you someone else's problem so they can get their next easy fix patient. Most doctors doctors and a lot of the bad nurses develop narcissistic personality disorder and true convince themselves that they are doing the right thing, even if they get a call saying the patient died upon release, “they were fine when they were here so that's unrelated”

Even if a person has a medical condition that explains their symptoms but they don't take the time to listen to the patient or do research its “well the symptoms the patient presented with had nothing to do with their preexisting condition" so if they die they can go home at night feeling zero guilt and zero remorse because the medical field is very much based on desensitizing themselves to trauma that they take it to the point of denying accountability to the patient, their other doctors, their families and even themselves which is why the majority of EDS patients and patients who have severe or serious rare disease as a whole develop complex PTSD.

There is no treatment available to us because who do they send you to for PTSD? A Psychiatrist, a Psychologist or a Counselor and what are they? Health care workers. Practicing in the very same field that has encompassed us with a lifetime of medical abuse and neglect. Sending someone with Complex PTSD from medical abuse and neglect is like sending a US military soldier who developed PTSD after being a prisoner of war in Iraq back to Iraq to talk about their experiences with an Iraqi soldier. It just doesn't work. To make things worse, the abuse and neglect continues even after your diagnosis so it's like sending that US soldier back to Iraq to be a prisoner of war over and over and over again. If the medical field doesn't change the abuse continues and the PTSD gets worse and worse throughout our lives.

#MyEDSChallenge #MyHSDChallenge

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actutrends · 5 years ago

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The Iowa Town Where Marianne Williamson Is Already President

Photos by KC McGinnis for Politico Magazine

Adam Wren is a contributing editor at Politico Publication and Indianapolis Regular Monthly

FAIRFIELD, Iowa– Inside the Raj, a picturesque French country-style day spa and resort nestled among cornfields in southeastern Iowa, I requested the gemstone light therapy, which promised to deluge me with inner peace, broaden my consciousness and increase my energy.

But they informed me I wasn’t prepared.

I had actually traveled to Fairfield and nearby Maharishi Vedic City to try to comprehend the appeal of Marianne Williamson, a spiritual master running for president.

On Thursday, less than a month before the Iowa caucuses, Williamson laid off her whole staff but didn’t suspend her project. “The point of my candidacy has actually been to inform the heart’s truth and that does not cost money,” she composed. There are a couple of places in the nation where her heart’s fact resonates more than others. If you look at the greatest densities of Williamson donors around the U.S.– as illustrated in an August analysis by the New York City Times— most fall in the locations you might anticipate: Northern California, Hawaii and candidates’ capitals like Sedona, Arizona. However one is right in the heartland– in truth within a brief drive of the gabled white farmhouse made popular in American Gothic

In these surrounding southeast Iowa burgs of Vedic City and Fairfield– farming communities, dotted by a Household Video, a Pizza King and a Tractor Supply store– Williamson might as well already be president.

Head northwest of the Fairfield town square a couple of blocks, past Everybody’s Whole Foods store, equipped with the finest foods from America’s first all-organic city, and you’ll begin to find out why this location has actually seen a lot Williamson. This is the home of Maharishi International University, a school established in 1974 by the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a famous neo-Hindu professional and master to the Beach Boys and the Beatles. On the edge of campus, the Maharishi Tower of Invincibility towers above the horizon. I would later on learn it’s a sign of “best inner coherence and combination,” making the space around it “impenetrable to disorderly outdoors impacts,” according to MaharishiTower.org.

The tower guards two giant domes that hover above the flat Midwestern earth like golden, grounded flying saucers. Inside these 2 domes, two times a day, nearly 1,000 residents collect– women in one, men in the other– to participate in transcendental meditation, an essential part of Maharishi’s mentors, and yogic flying, a kind of cross-legged hopping that practitioners state can mimic flying. It’s a practice they believe makes the world a more serene location. Adherents say that if they can get the square root of 1 percent of the U.S. population– about 1,900 people– here practicing meditation all at once, their brain waves can materially enhance the world and elevate humankind’s collective consciousness, fending off wars, economic downturns and, according to a current argumentation released by a doctoral prospect at the university, car accidents.

” When people will practice meditation together in a big enough group, it has an impact of soothing the environment for an extended range,” Ed Malloy, Fairfield’s nine-term Democratic mayor, informed me on a current visit.

” It’s very real,” said Fred Travis, a professor and chairman of the Department of Maharishi Vedic Science.

Of the nearly dozen residents I consulted with on my trip– from Malloy to a regional café owner– all seemed to understand Williamson and support her candidacy (though Sen. Bernie Sanders and, provided her peacenik platform, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard drew some support, too). And, as remote as these fans of the late Maharishi may seem from in-the-know politics, they are also more pertinent than you might think: Individuals of Jefferson County are timeless Obama-Trump voters– Obama won the county by 16 points in 2012, but it turned for Trump by half a point in 2016.

In September, on the International Day of Peace, Williamson spoke to a crowd collected here at a regional events. “How ridiculous is it that we have one day that we commit to peace?” She asked the audience. “International Day of Peace. One day. Much we could say that 364 days of the year appear quite much dedicated to war.”

For the next hour or so, she described her vision for the nation, before leading the audience in a 10- minute directed meditation.

The crowd beinged in silence.

If you construct it, they will Om. That was more or less the sentiment that led Rogers and Candace Badgett in the early 1990 s to construct– in the middle of cornfields– a $7 million, 36,000- square-foot medspa referred to as the Raj, a health retreat devoted to Ayurvedic, an Indian school of alternative medicine advanced by the Maharishi. (” People don’t utilize om” in transcendental meditation,” Candace would later inform me, when I ventured the contrast between Field of Dreams and the Raj. “It’s a various type of meditation.”)

The Raj is in Maharishi Vedic City, a few miles north of Fairfield and the university.

As I pulled up to the hotel in the middle of relatively nowhere, I found a half-dozen luxury vehicles parked out front.

Inside, as I waited for Rogers and Candace, I perused a menu of health spa treatments. My eyes settled upon something called Maharishi Light Therapy with Gems. For $120, I could get the Routine Beamer ($250 for the Big Beamer), a treatment which promised “higher states of consciousness.” After a very long time on the project path, it sounded great, whatever it was. (I would later on find out the treatment basically sends light beams into your body through gems. Practitioners think the stone’s crystalline molecular structure gives the light a corrective effect. The Huge Beamer, by the way, “makes use of 12 times the number of gemstones for a more enhanced and restorative effect.”)

Rogers, born in Western Kentucky, made his cash in coal and oil financial investments and assisted his family obtain the Boston Red Sox in the 1980 s before moving here in the 1990 s to deepen his transcendental meditation practice and be close to the university. Everyone in Fairfield and Vedic City seems to come from someplace else, drawn by the towns’ tranquil values: There are individuals from all 50 states here, and some 80 different countries.

Rogers and Candace took me into the parlor, the very same room where they’ve entertained Williamson throughout her stays. After her 2014 stopped working California congressional campaign, Williamson accepted an invitation from Candace to decompress here.

Over the next hour, the Badgetts sang the praises of Williamson. “I think they misunderstand her luster and her functionality because she speaks about love, and love appears extremely kind of abstract,” Candace stated. “Marianne’s understanding of love is much more profound than what individuals take it to be, since she’s simply speaking about an underlying field of intelligence in reality, and you come back to physics … that there is an underlying field of intelligence that generates matter. … She understands the entire concept of collective consciousness, and that you need to raise collective awareness to resolve concerns.”

I kept the discussion more or less on politics and asked about Williamson’s lack of experience in many policy areas. “The greatest problem is that individuals probably think it’s a cult or probably New Agey,” Candace told me.

Later, in the all-organic, non-GMO vegetarian dining room downstairs, I consulted with Travis, the Maharishi University teacher and director of its Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition. He wanted me to understand that what I had simply spoken with the Badgetts wasn’t bunk. He pointed out that one doctoral candidate at the college just recently analyzed the number of vehicle accidents surrounding Fairfield and discovered that accidents increased the further you went from the city. “Individuals here are aware that we do not reside in a classical world,” Travis informed me over a meal of vegetarian lasagna, broccoli and turnips. “We reside in a quantum world.”

The claim to be able to promote peace and security through meditation is one of Williamson and Fairfield’s less controversial beliefs. Williamson has actually questioned compulsory vaccines. She has composed that “illness is an impression and does not exist” and that “ cancer and HELP and other physical diseases are physical symptoms of a psychic scream.” None of this is “evidence-based” or backed by science.

Those pseudoscientific beliefs seem to be shared, in part, by residents of Fairfield.

There is likewise no reliable scientific proof that sending light through gemstones can cure the body.

In my discussion with the Badgetts at the Raj, I asked what would occur to me if I acquired the gem treatment.

” Different individuals have various reactions,” Rogers informed me.

Should I provide it a try right now? I asked Candace.

” I do not think so,” she said. It required to be done with a bigger program, she told me. I wasn’t prepared. Instead, I got the tongue checkup.

I also went through an Ayurveda Pulse Assessment, which, according to the Raj site, is a diagnostic exam in which an “specialist can feel the level of imbalance in the body, even before specific signs of imbalance end up being manifest.”

” That’s your unique music,” Mark Toomey, an Australian with a doctorate in physiology from Maharishi University, told me after pressing on my radial artery and instructing me to close my eyes. I passed both diagnostics, however Toomey stated he might tell I needed to get more rest. “Your pulse feels a bit tired to me, a bit rundown. Are you tired?” The project trail didn’t seem to be using well on me, he said.

Back at Everybody’s, in Fairfield, Mayor Malloy told me he goes to the Raj for three to 5 days a year as a matter of preventative health.

” We’ve had conversations about [mass meditation] as a technology,” Malloy said.

Malloy didn’t strike me as a charm charm kind of person. This time around, he informed me, Williamson’s ideas weren’t getting the kind of fair media protection he thinks they should have.

” All of her political concepts are well-formulated,” Malloy stated.

We talked about the town’s economic surge. “When people are devoted to establishing their own growth and capacity, there’s a lot of creative dynamism that comes out of that,” Malloy told me.

I discussed the traffic accident research study Travis had actually informed me about. That was nothing compared to the other thing that happened, Malloy said.

” Did he tell you about what occurred in the Washington, D.C., study?”

In the summer of 1993, 4,000 practitioners of transcendental meditation descended on Washington with what seemed like a far-fetched aim: lower the district’s criminal offense rate. They set up their two-month experiment in places such as a conference room at the Washington Hilton and at Gallaudet University. They had actually tried this with a smaller group for a period of 10 years, but it didn’t work. Until 1991, the nationwide office of transcendental meditation had been in Washington, however the Maharishi had grown inflamed with the capital’s seeming intransigence to the powers of transcendental meditation; it had worked in war zones, why could not it work in the District of Columbia?

” I would not encourage anyone to stay in the pool of mud,” the Maharishi stated in defeat.

Go west, the Maharishi informed his disciples. And so the national TM head office decamped from Washington to Fairfield.

But in 1993, a group of adherents attempted to save the country’s capital once again. “It would almost be careless if we didn’t bring this knowledge to the leaders of Washington,” Kamal Sunev, a spokesperson for the People for a Crime-Free D.C., a TM nonprofit, told the Washington Post at the time.

Malloy was there, and so were the Badgetts. They practiced meditation for up to 4 hours a day. “We were going to lower criminal offense,” Rogers stated. “In the summer. In Washington, D.C.”

The city’ spolice chief at the time, Fred Thomas, said the only thing that would stem criminal offense in the summer was a blizzard.

Under the instructions of John Hagelin of Maharishi International University, they invested $4.2 million on the program. “This might be the most far-out job we have actually backed, but it might be the most crucial,” Haeglin informed the New York Times

4 weeks in, violent criminal offense dropped by 23.3 percent. One Washington detective raised an eyebrow at the findings, though: “There has been impressive work by the officers and leaders of the patrol districts,” Winston Robinson, a leader of the 7th District, told the Post

A 1999 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Social Indicators Research checked out the phenomenon, showing that the drop couldn’t be attributed to authorities staffing. TM adherents and specialists chalk it as much as something called “super glow,” in which the positive vibes from those meditating altered the neighboring field of awareness. As a perk, researchers of transcendental meditation say, then-President Bill Clinton’s approval rating increased, while medical facility injury cases and unintentional deaths decreased– all thanks to the meditating, they argue However one of the paper’s authors compared crimes that occurred to crimes that might have taken place based upon a time-series analysis, a suspect method.

” You raise the whole consciousness, the consciousness is going through the galaxy, every word coming through your mouth is traveling through the galaxy,” Mila Urana, a housewife from Fort Salonga, New York, who did a two-week TM shift, told the Times “Whatever is favorable.”

There was a moment, previously in the campaign, when America– or at least a few of America– seemed prepared to take a Williamson campaign seriously, visualizing her as a kind of spiritual Trump slayer who could marshal our better angels and point us towards a “politics of love.” Her project introduced crystal memes and made its share of buffooning coverage. America is an intricate place, not least since a town like Fairfield– with its attractive white gazebo, town square and nine-term Democratic mayors– can exist together with even the most outré beliefs and candidates.

The last person I satisfied in Fairfield was Betsy Howland, the owner of Revelations, the coffee bar and New-Agey book shop where Williamson’s books are prominently shown simply off the town square.

Whenever Williamson remains in Fairfield, she makes a stop at Discoveries. A couple of years ago, Williamson had a secret to share with Howland: “I believe I’m going to run for president,” she whispered across the register.

Howland’s three daughters have actually taken Williamson’s course in wonders offered online. A Methodist, Howland moved here in 1998, leaving her partner, who had the “old beliefs” and didn’t meditate. Before the move, she had run a department store in Sidney, New York City, an old Montgomery Ward that, thanks in part to her meditation she said, set sales records. One day, she asked herself: What’s the most essential thing I could do for the world? She chose it was to sell whatever and transfer to Fairfield to add to the group coherence and meditation program. Now, in between shifts at the shop, she meditates at 5 p.m. and 6 a.m.

” I see her vision,” she told me of Williamson. “I believe they ‘d make an excellent team” in 2020, she informed me.

” A lot of the anger and hate and partisanship originates from stresses in the system. And if nothing more, meditation, in my case TM, it assists relieve those tensions.”

After we talked for a while, I informed her I had simply another concern. Did she think Williamson was unfairly criticized in September when she recommended people could use the power of their minds to turn away Typhoon Dorian? “The Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas … might all be in our prayers now,” Williamson tweeted on September 4. “Countless us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a crazy concept; it is an innovative usage of the power of the mind. 2 minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm.”

Minutes later on the account erased the tweet. Her team later on said “it was a metaphor.”

In the pregnant time out in between my concern and her answer, Howland shot me a stern however quizzical look.

” You don’t believe you can?”

The post The Iowa Town Where Marianne Williamson Is Already President appeared first on Actu Trends.

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Jeremy Stoppelman’s Long Battle With Google Is Finally Paying Off

Amy Osborne for BuzzFeed News

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in an elevator at Yelp headquarters in San Francisco.

The line outside Shizen, San Francisco’s hottest Michelin-starred hipster vegan sushi restaurant, is extremely long, but the wait is surprisingly short. After the doors open and the first wave of diners are seated, the line mostly disappears, despite it being one of the more popular spots in the city. Just a few people linger on the sidewalk. Why aren’t more people waiting to get in?

The line, or lack of it, is a weirdly effective real-world product demo for Yelp, the 15-year-old review site and local business directory. Shizen has put its reservation system and waitlist on Yelp. Which means that when impatient diners want to wait for a table, they can do so at a bar around the corner, or even at home, and then arrive just in time to be seated. In other words, you don’t have to stand in line to be in line. And so, before you know it, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s vegan CEO, is tucking into a roll made from beets, kale, and, uh, seaweed pearls. (Trust us on this one: 5 stars.)

Yelp bought a waitlisting company in 2017, and it rolled out new predictive wait times and notification features this year. It’s one of a slew of changes the company made in 2019, including introducing some new ways for it to make money. This follows years of moving beyond mere reviews. You can look up a restaurant’s rating, sure, but you can also use it to get a quote from a chimney sweep or order delivery through one of its partners.

“One of the most powerful companies in the world didn’t want us to succeed.”

And while rolling out new features and revenue streams, or even pivoting into completely different business models, are relatively normal things for tech companies to do, for Stoppelman and Yelp, it feels a bit existential.

“In Yelp’s case, it’s been the thing that I probably have been most focused on for the last decade,” said Stoppelman, “finding a way to survive knowing that one of the most powerful companies in the world didn’t want us to succeed.”

That powerful company is Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet. For most of Yelp’s history, it has been engaged in a painful and public spat with the search and advertising giant, with Yelp executives endlessly beating the drum about what they describe — in interviews, tweets, regular newsletters, and even cutesy animated videos — as Google’s anticompetitive practices.

For years, this seemed like a quixotic fight at best. Stoppelman or some other Yelp executive would take a swipe at Google, which Google would then more or less ignore as it casually snacked on YouTube or Motorola or Nest or Waze or Fitbit. But this view of Google — and big tech writ large — as too big and too powerful has gained traction in recent years both in Europe and the United States, and it is now facing multiple antitrust actions, and has already racked up billions in fines. In recent weeks, attorneys general from 50 states and territories (minus California) announced an antitrust probe into Google’s advertising and search business. The winds have shifted and are coming from the left and the right. The Donald Trump administration has been openly antagonistic toward Big Tech, and the president has said on multiple occasions in response to questions about Google that it might be a monopoly. Meanwhile Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a literal plan to break it up.

In short, the world has lined up behind Stoppelman, who, despite the changes he’s making to the site’s platform or the newfound seriousness with which his antitrust arguments are being taken, is basically doing what he always has. In a series of two wide-ranging interviews with BuzzFeed News, one at Yelp’s office and another at the vegan sushi place, he talked about the changes his company has been through the past 15 years. But mostly he talked about trust. Gaining it, losing it, and, of course, busting it.

Stoppelman is 41. He’s thin and athletic-looking, with cordlike veins that snake down his biceps and that hyperfit, low-body fat upgrade that tech execs seem to have all downloaded at the same time. A Virginia native, he moved to the Bay Area after college, in 1999, and went to work as an engineer during the peak of the first dot-com boom for @Home Network, which was in the early stages of a merger with the internet portal Excite, which Stoppelman said was “clusterfucked.”

“I finished all the coding ideas that my boss had. I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m out of stuff. What do you want me to work on next?’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh, meet me at my desk at 4:45.’ I’d go by his desk and he’d be gone,” said Stoppelman. “But it was also late ’99, early 2000, so it was hopping in the Bay Area. I was getting recruiting calls already. My phone was ringing every day.”

One of those calls came from a recruiter at X.com, a banking and payments processing company founded by Elon Musk, who had already founded and sold a previous company. Stoppelman went in for an interview.

“At the end of it I met Elon, and I was blown away. I was like, I want to be like this guy! He’s only 28 years old but was much like he is today. He’s like, we’re going to take down Visa! He’s wildly ambitious and knows what he wants to do. Who knows if it will happen, but I’d never met anyone like that.”

They did in fact make it happen, succeeding beyond what was probably in any way realistic in those early days (although Musk himself was pushed out of the CEO role along the way to make room for Peter Thiel). X.com was renamed PayPal; in 2002, as the dot-com boom was going south, eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Those early PayPal employees were suddenly quite rich.

This was the origin of the “PayPal Mafia,” so named for the group of former PayPal employees who went on to found a slew of successful businesses and invest in many others. In many cases they started companies together, or invested in each other’s startups. The group includes Musk, Stoppelman, Thiel, Russell Simmons, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Joe Lonsdale, and Dave McClure, among others. Together they would start some of the best-known companies in Silicon Valley, among them LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and YouTube, while their capital investments helped give rise to Facebook, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Stripe, Airbnb, Square, and a host of others.

Stoppelman attributes much of their success to timing. The dot-com market correction began in early 2000, its deflation accelerating after the Department of Justice won a ruling against Microsoft in April that year, and continuing all the way through 9/11 and beyond. Once high-flying companies like Pets.com and Kozmo.com became nothing more than correction roadkill as the market sloughed off trillions of dollars in value. But the PayPal guys, on the other hand, did great.

“While the internet was collapsing around us, our company was successful. We didn’t go through the trauma of the dot-com bust,” said Stoppelman. “Everyone had some capital and confidence at a time when most people that had been anywhere near the blast radius of the internet were completely dismissive. The mainstream thinking was ‘Yeah, that internet. Maybe it’s a utility, but it’s not this exciting commercial thing we thought it was.’ That created a very fertile soil. You have people with capital, interest, confidence, motivation, all at the right time in their career — late twenties to late thirties — pretty good odds.”

In 2004, after he spent a year at Harvard Business School, Stoppelman along with Simmons, also of PayPal, cofounded Yelp with investment from yet another PayPal alum, Levchin. In its early days, it was going to have more of a social networking–style structure, where people could ask friends for recommendations. But as Stoppelman and Simmons absorbed a lot of what was happening elsewhere on the internet, particularly with blogging, Yelp settled on local business reviews as a sort of “directed blogging.” The focus was mostly restaurants and small businesses, but you could review just about anything you could think of there: plumbers, doctors, gas stations, cannabis clinics, hotels, parks, monuments, dog parks, you name it.

Problems began almost immediately.

Trust is hard to come by, especially on the internet, where everything anyone doesn’t like is fake. Facebook has spent years awash in fake news and misinformation. Amazon ratings and reviews are notoriously compromised by bad actors. Photos are shopped. Videos are doctored. That account is a bot. The chans have wormed their way into our brains. And even when we see the same stuff, we can’t always agree what happened.

For Yelp, the trust problem was fake reviews. Restaurants were paying people, or offering them discounts, to write nice things on the site. Or people would, for one reason or another, trash a restaurant they had never been to. Maybe it was a competitor, or maybe the owner was an outspoken Democrat. Yelp’s solution was to take an aggressive stance. Most of its users probably didn’t notice, but it created a lot of headaches for its relationship with the businesses it relies on for ad dollars.

But trust was also something Stoppelman and Simmons had thought about, extensively, at PayPal, a company whose entire business depended on getting strangers to send each other money via the then-new internet. In fact, they had seen PayPal’s business boom and were now rich precisely because it had cracked down on fraud and established consumer trust. They had a low tolerance for scammers.

“Within the first two weeks we could see some business owners generating obvious reviews for themselves. The fake content popped up pretty quick. We could tell that spam was going to be a problem,” said Stoppelman. “And we also looked at the competitor that we were up against in those days, Citysearch. They had a consumer review feature, but it was just totally spammed out.”

From those early days, Yelp focused on taking down reviews that it thought were spammy or bogus. Those takedowns became something of an arms race, and the company has sometimes gone to extremes to try to keep things in check. Yelp will publish consumer alerts on businesses pages when it detects inauthentic activity, for example, and even runs sting operations.

“We have a team that tries to buy reviews from people, and then also try to identify businesses that are buying reviews,” said Stoppelman. “If we catch someone red-handed, we’d take screenshots of correspondence and all that and put up a banner saying on their business page, saying, ‘Hey, this business is trying to game the system, and here’s the evidence.’”

It also takes action when people start reviewing businesses simply because they are in the news for other reasons, often political — because everything is political now. For example, in 2018, when the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, refused to serve then–White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, online mobs from all across the country turned to Yelp to pummel the restaurant with negative reviews — even though they had never set foot in the door.

This is a relatively common occurrence, and it doesn’t always take a national story. Local issues can also send people to a business’s page for punitive reasons, which means Yelp has to police these kinds of review-brigading all over the country, even when the company isn’t aware of whatever the issue is that triggered the action. So it has an algorithm to detect what the company calls an “unusual activity” alert that it adds to the business’s page until the activity subsides and it can mop up.

It also surfaces reviews algorithmically via recommendation software. It segregates reviews that the software flags for being solicited or biased, or because it doesn’t know enough about a user. Which means Yelp hides almost 30% of the reviews posted to its site, according to the company. This review filter is, to put it mildly, enormously unpopular among businesses. It has also led to a rash of false conspiracy theories (covered previously by BuzzFeed News) that the company takes down good reviews in order to get businesses to buy ads. It also means Yelp leaves money on the table — it could easily juice engagement and user numbers if it took a less aggressive approach to policing content. But here’s the thing: It works. The company is approaching 200 million reviews, and it may even have passed that milestone by the time it announces its quarterly results this week.

Moreover, when you see an average review number on Yelp, it’s a pretty good indicator. A 4.5-star restaurant is probably going to be pretty great. A 2-star restaurant? Not gonna eat there. You might also see an alert about a restaurant’s cleanliness on Yelp. In more than 30 states, it makes that information available right on a restaurant’s page. It’s another transparency measure that’s good for consumers but has probably cost the company money with the communities of small businesses that populate its site.

“If you optimize for maximum attention, you’re leaning into human nature of rubbernecking at train crashes, and all the worst stuff that humanity can provide.”

“I’m sure we could have been making a lot more money if we allowed ourselves to be compromised and just said: Anything goes on Yelp. You want 5 stars? Tell your friends to go write a bunch of reviews for you and they’ll be on Yelp and then you can advertise. And wouldn’t it be wonderful?” said Stoppelman.

Instead, Yelp went another route. It is vigilant about reviews, and has passed on some easy ways to make money from users’ data. It doesn’t let businesses target users who happen to be walking by with an ad, for example. Despite persistent rumors, it’s hard to imagine Yelp fitting in as an acquisition target for Big Tech — in just two interviews with BuzzFeed News, the outspoken Stoppelman took shots at Facebook, Amazon, and Google.

Which is all the more curious as Stoppelman is a member of perhaps the most successful circle of investors ever, in the PayPal Mafia, and yet his business runs counter to so much of the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, which argues for growth at any cost.

“When I look out at other companies,” Stoppelman said, “I see other priorities, namely growing revenue as much as possible. So why didn’t Facebook crack down on certain types of content, or why did they allow sensational stories or stories that are not true to blast across the network and get amplified so much? Had they had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, this is bad for the world’ or ‘This is bad for our long-term brand, we should shut it down,’ it probably wouldn’t have turned into an eventually traumatic political issue.

“But at the end of the day, collecting attention is the way that they make money, and they dial up the algorithm — the same as YouTube, same for Google. You know, it’s like Google and Facebook did the same thing: Use the algorithm to optimize for maximum attention. And if you optimize for maximum attention, you’re leaning into human nature of rubbernecking at train crashes, and all the worst stuff that humanity can provide. And that’s where you end up. And I’m sure it was like rocket fuel for their business, but now we’re paying the price.”

Amy Osborne for BuzzFeed News

Stoppelman talks with Ronald Clark, head of investor relations, and Brigitte Ehman, manager of business operations and strategy, as they walk through the front lobby at Yelp headquarters on Sept. 20 in San Francisco.

Yelp’s headquarters are in the old Pacific Bell Building, once the tallest building on the West Coast, and the first skyscraper in San Francisco’s SoMa district. When Yelp moved in, it was an early tech colonizer of this particular section of downtown San Francisco, today known as the East Cut. Now, the East Cut is swimming with internet giants, and the Pacific Bell Building is dwarfed by the Salesforce Tower, just a few blocks away.

Yelp’s windows look out on that building and the park next door that bears Salesforce’s name. You can see the offices for Slack, Trulia, and Facebook as well, all of which ring the new multibillion-dollar park and transit center. LinkedIn and Google have offices nearby. To the west, on a blighted section of Market Street, are Uber’s and Twitter’s headquarters. Pinterest is a few blocks south. So is Airbnb. Yelp is hemmed on nearly all sides by tech behemoths.

Yelp is small compared even to Twitter. It’s endured years of ups and downs, including a stock slide last year over the way it sells ads. (It eliminated fixed-term contracts.) The company has a market cap of only about $2.5 billion — nothing compared to Alphabet or Amazon, both of which have market caps of nearly $900 billion. Or, for that matter, Apple and Microsoft, which have both blown past trillion-dollar market cap territory.

Yet Yelp is a tidy, profitable business that pulled in $55 million in profit on $942 million in revenue last year. Seventy-three million people open it up on their phones every month. One hundred million look at it on the web. That’s not shabby. But in 2019, in the era of billion-plus user companies, a mere 100 million people puts you at a disadvantage.

“Google didn’t stick to the plan.”

“The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If Google is the starting place for all of the people that are tapping into the web, to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it’s really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”

To that end, much of what Yelp has been doing recently is aimed at connecting directly with its audience. In addition to things like reservations and waitlists, it also introduced new customization features, which let you set up dining preferences, dietary restrictions, and other personalized options. These are nascent but represent a big push for the company as it tries to provide individualized recommendations — which means that when you search for a place to get lunch in the near future, your results will be different than your coworkers’ at the next desk over. Yelp has rolled out new tools for businesses as well. A new “Connect” tool lets businesses communicate directly with people who have shown an interest in it — maybe they’ve checked in there or written a review. It also added features designed to help new businesses without many reviews reach audiences, and as a way to build new revenue streams outside of search ads.

But it is the roiling national debate about the role Big Tech plays in our lives — from the way it enables disinformation to how it relies on unfair business practices — that has thrust Stoppelman into the center of a national conversation. Yet he didn’t just end up there. Much of the newfound traction that the antitrust argument is getting is due to a long game from Yelp, which has leaned on regulators across the world for years now. The company began when Google’s business was under far less scrutiny.

“We really started Yelp to do something noble,” Stoppelman said. “We wanted to help people connect with the best local businesses. There was this platform called Google, and we essentially did everything that they said. We generated really fantastic content, we cultivated community, we did all these things that were expensive, that were hard to do, and required a lot of innovation. Google didn’t stick to the plan.”

Google tried to buy Yelp in 2009, but the deal fell apart. And so the larger company built out its own local business reviews, and today it promotes those above content from Yelp, TripAdvisor, or other competitors. Search for “Thai restaurants in Hollywood,” for example, and Google will spit back the top-rated ones from its own listings. Yelp’s listings will generally be there, but farther down the page.

“The only way that we could get them to do the right thing in the early days was by shaming them in the press. So that’s where this all began — they would do something egregious like steal our content and put it in every Android phone and the Google Places app. We would talk to TechCrunch or something, and someone would write it up, and they’d be shamed into doing something. And then eventually they got tired of that and … as we would shame them, they’d get less responsive. And so we would naturally progress to the next level, which was ‘Okay, the only source of power now that might be able to check them is government.’”

Google, via a spokesperson, denied these claims.

In 2011, Yelp’s senior vice president of public affairs, Vince Sollitto, gave a presentation to the Conference of Western Attorneys General, in which he charged that Google was engaging in anticompetitive practices that hurt its smaller competitors. Meanwhile, Luther Lowe, Yelp’s vice president of public policy, aggressively continued to make the antitrust argument to the press. (If you write about Google, Lowe is probably already lurking in your inbox.)

“What happened is that the government lost its will to prosecute.”

“I’ve always had a view that the government could and should play a role. I was born in the late ’70s, a child of the ’80s. My dad was an SEC lawyer who worked on insider trading cases. My worldview has always been government regulation isn’t the end-all, be-all, but the government can and should play an assertive role in shaping a market economy,” said Stoppelman. “But what happened is that the government lost its will to prosecute.”

Yelp’s effort has ramped up as Google began delivering more answers on the search results page itself — including local information that had been Yelp’s bread and butter — rather than linking out to third parties. As of this past summer, more than half of all Google searches now end without a click, according to a SparkToro analysis of Google’s clickstream data. That is, most of the time when someone searches for something on Google, they just get the answer they are looking for in the results themselves and don’t have to click through to another website (and see another website’s ads).

But who cares if I get my restaurant reviews from Google instead of Yelp or see hotel rankings right in a Google search rather than on TripAdvisor? The convenience of getting exactly what you are looking for without having to click out or wait for another page to load, especially in the era of mobile, is great. No question.

Yelp needed to show that Google delivering its own answers and own products above others hurt actual consumers, and not just Google’s would-be competitors. So Yelp launched a campaign to try to show how the search giant’s practices did just that. In short, Yelp’s argument is that when Google displays its own results it deprives consumers of choice and, worse, that Google’s local reviews are, well, not good.

“Google’s reviews… It is kind of comical that they call theirs reviews!” Stoppelman said. “Most, probably like 60% or 70%, of their reviews are actually ratings with no text. But they have to compete against us, so they’re generous with what they call a review.”

It’s been a slog. But there is also now real movement — and not just in Europe, which is more prone to regulation than the US — on the issue of antitrust. And on the issue of user trust, there have also been a litany of tech scandals that have roiled Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Uber. High-profile startups like Theranos and WeWork turned out to be little more than elaborate cons. Tech, and Big Tech in particular, has few political friends on the left or the right. What was once one of the more admired industries suddenly seems more like a politically convenient punching bag.

There was a time when all that seemed to matter in tech was scale. Everything was about getting to a billion, and then the next billion after that. Growth was good for its own sake. And anyone who deviated from these lines was unrealistic, or flat-out irrational. But today those ideas are very much in retreat. Facebook and YouTube and Amazon are so large now that they seem almost beyond policing. Companies are increasingly being asked to defend their scale and practices. It turns out, when you put a billion people together on the internet and let them say whatever they want, the marketplace of ideas bends toward propaganda and Nazis.

Stoppelman seems to be playing a long game, counting on some of the scale we’ve let these companies stack up to be leveled off by government actors. It is often said in and around Silicon Valley that we are in the early stages of the internet. And the question before us now is really about how much control we want to place in a handful of companies, be they in the US, or China, or wherever.

“The first seven years or eight years, there was a lot of eye-rolling in Silicon Valley about Yelp being a complainer, or I’m a whiner, or this is a stupid issue,” Stoppelman said. “I think the reality is now the world has caught up.” ●

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themomsandthecity · 6 years ago

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Meghan McCain Shares Touching Tribute to Late Father: 'All That I Am Is Thanks to Him'

Following Sen. John McCain’s death at age 81 on Saturday after a battle with stage-four brain cancer, the late political maverick and war hero’s daughter Meghan McCain shared a touching tribute on social media. In a message she captioned “I love you forever – my beloved father @SenJohnMcCain,” Meghan, 33, revealed that she was by her father’s side as he “departed this life today.” “In the thirty-three years we shared together, he raised me, taught me, corrected me, comforted me, encouraged me, and supported me in all things,” she wrote. “He taught me how to live. His love and his care, ever present, always unfailing, took me from a girl to a woman — and he showed me what it is to be a man.” I love you forever – my beloved father @SenJohnMcCain pic.twitter.com/Y50tVQvlVe — Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 26, 2018 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js When planning her wedding to Ben Domenech last fall, Meghan pushed the date forward in the wake of her father’s cancer diagnosis. Despite his tenuous health, the ailing senator was on hand for his daughter’s big day. RELATED VIDEO: Sen. John McCain, Maverick Politician and Decorated War Veteran, Dies at 81 “All that I am is thanks to him,” she continued in her tribute. “Now that he is gone, the task of my lifetime is to live up to his example, his expectations, and his love. My father’s passing comes with sorrow and grief for me, for my mother, for my brothers, and for my sisters. He was a great fire who burned bright, and we lived in his light and warmth for so very long. We know that his flame lives on, in each of us. The days and years to come will not be the same without my dad — but they will be good days, filled with life and love, because of the example he lived for us.” RELATED: John McCain Dead at 81: Obama, Biden, Trump and More Pay Their Respects to the War Hero Senator Cindy McCain, the Senator’s wife of 38 years, also mourned the loss on social media. “My heart is broken,” tweeted Cindy, 64, minutes after her family announced his death. “I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years,” she continued. “He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the place he loved best.” My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best. — Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) August 26, 2018 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Sen. McCain, the former POW and outspoken Republican politician nicknamed The Maverick for being unafraid to disagree with fellow members of his party, died at 4:28 p.m. on Saturday, his family announced in a statement, according to NBC News. McCain is survived by wife Cindy, and his children: Douglas, Andrew, and Sidney (all with first wife Carol McCain) and Meghan, Jack, James, and Bridget, with Cindy. On Friday, his family said that Sen. McCain, “with his usual strength of will,” decided to stop treatment for the stage-four brain cancer he had been battling since its diagnosis last summer. “In the year since,” the McCain family said, “John has surpassed expectations for his survival. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict.” http://bit.ly/2NmnahI

#Celebrity #Politics #Death #John McCain #Meghan McCain

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digitalmark18-blog · 6 years ago

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As internet 'spoofing' gets better, you may surf into a sea of sharks

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/as-internet-spoofing-gets-better-you-may-surf-into-a-sea-of-sharks/

As internet 'spoofing' gets better, you may surf into a sea of sharks

It’s easier than ever to get waylaid on the internet, diverted to dangerous territory where scam artists await with traps baited for the unsuspecting user.

It’s all about devious misdirection, fumble-fingered typing and how our brains can confuse what our eyes see. Big money can await the clever scamster, and costs are rising for corporations and politicians who do not take heed.

The problems lie in the inner workings of the internet, and touches on issues like the vast expansion of the combination of words, dots and symbols that comprise internet addresses.

It’s no longer just .com, .net., .org and a handful of others. Now, there are 1,900 new extensions, known as top-level domains, things like .beer, .camera, .city, .dating, .party and .shop.

“We see a ton of them being used maliciously,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish security company F-Secure, who called the new endings “a big headache.”

The problems revolve around what computer scientists refer to as “spoofing” of the Domain Name System, or DNS, which has been called the phone book of the internet. It’s been going on for a while, and touches on what users type into the address bar of a browser window or click on at a website. There are new ways to make phony addresses look real.

“Creating a spoofed domain name, or even hijacking a domain name, has become a lot easier today,” said Israel Barak, chief information security officer at Cybereason, a cyber security firm based in Boston.

Just a few years ago, spoofing an internet address, say, microsoft.com, was primitive.

“You would have to maybe change that ‘i’ to a 1. I’m going to be M1crosoft with a 1 today, or even change the ‘o’ to a zero, or change the ‘t’ to a seven. For senior citizens with fuzzy vision like I’m starting to get, you might squint at that and say, ‘Looks like Microsoft to me,’” said Paul Vixie, chief executive of Farsight Security, a San Mateo, Calif.,company.

An internet pioneer, Vixie has been involved in its governance for three decades. He is an architect of some of the protocols used in the DNS system and advises the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Los Angeles non-profit that serves as the guardrails for the borderless global internet.

But Vixie said the internet is still in its Wild West phase. He compared the online world today to the era of highways before seatbelts and airbags.

“It just takes us some time to catch up. First, you innovate, you kill a lot of people or steal a lot of money, whatever it is, and then somebody comes along and says we got to secure this somehow. We’re still in that first phase here,” Vixie said.

To bridge the gap between English-speaking and non-English-speaking worlds, internet organizers have incorporated domain names utilizing characters covering 139 modern and historic scripts. It’s not just major scripts like the Cyrillic alphabet and Chinese characters. It’s also Runic, Buhid, Rejang and dozens of other obscure language scripts.

Scamsters have had a field day with parts of those scripts. They’ve inserted look-alike characters into internet addresses, sending users to bogus malicious, websites.

Vixie said numerous distinct characters look like the Roman letter “i.”

“They are completely visually the same down to the last pixel on your screen to the real lower-case ‘i.’ So there is no way that you’re going to tell the difference,” he said.

Inserting such exotic characters into a link is one technique criminals employ to send users to look-alike sites that may appear to be a bank website, a Gmail troubleshooting page or some other page that asks for a username and password. Other techniques are also used.

In some cases, adversaries target employees of a corporation, nuclear plant, military unit or other high-value facility where they seek a digital foothold. The hackers send the targets tailored emails with the malicious links.

“It’s easy(and) it’s cheap,” said Tom Richards, co-founder and chief strategy officer for GroupSense, a Virginia cyber threat intelligence firm.

As a hacker, Richards said, “All I need to do is register a website that looks like my target and then send that to a handful of employees or people affiliated with the organization or potentially even customers. And then I can trap them. I can send them malware. I can get them to fill out a form.”

“It’s embarrassingly effective.”

Not so long ago, companies would buy common domain names that were almost like their normal websites, but off by a letter to ensure clumsy typists wouldn’t go astray. So, in the case of Walgreens.com, if you type in walgreen.com or walgrens.com it will still take you to the drugstore chain’s site. .

With the proliferation of new domain names, the task has grown more difficult.

“It is getting harder and harder for companies. There are just so many combinations,” said Steve Manzuik, director of security research at Duo Security, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, vendor of cloud-based security services.

Some cyber security experts suggest that average internet users need to get more savvy about phony websites, reading the components of what is in the address bar, like domain names and suffix paths. Others say that expects too much of average internet users.

Most users see “dots and slashes and question marks. They don’t know what this means,” said Rich Smith, director of Duo Labs, the advanced security research team at Duo.

FILE – This May 23, 2018 file photo shows Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaking in Washington. Harris has been the target of social media misinformation campaigns since she became a U.S. senator. Every month for the last 18 months, her office has discovered on average between three and five fake Facebook profiles pretending to be hers, according to a Harris aide. It’s unclear who creates the pages, which are often designed to mislead American voters about the ambitious Democratic senator’s policies and positions. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

J. Scott Applewhite AP

As election season approaches, some politicians are taking special care to ensure variants of their website addresses aren’t snatched up and registered by foes. Other politicians are less aggressive. At a recent talk at the DefCon hacker convention, a father-son election research team, Kevin and Joshua Franklin, cited two websites that troll incumbent politicians.

One targets Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who chairs the House intelligence committee and is a sharp critic of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Users who click on a website with an address similar to his re-election site arrive at a website partly in Russian with a photo of Nunes in a Stalinesque pose.

Pranksters also trolled Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, with the website of the Democratic Socialists of America.

At least one congressional candidate, Republican Pete Stauber of Minnesota, has prepared well, registering 37 domain names that are variants to ensure an opponent doesn’t troll him., Joshua Franklin said. Stauber’s campaign didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

Tim Johnson: 202-383-6028,@timjohnson4

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s name.

Source: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article216791995.html

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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With a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, Minnesota has a reputation as a blue state, but make no mistake: The Land of 10,000 Lakes has a purple hue. The state went for Hillary Clinton by 46.4 percent in 2016, but Donald Trump wasn’t too far behind at 44.9 percent.

These days, though, Trump isn’t faring so well here. His approval rating is hovering around 38 percent among registered voters, compared to the 51 percent of voters who say they disapprove of him, according to an NBC News/Marist poll released last month. The national political climate, and backlash against Trump, is going to be a challenge for Republicans if they hoe to make any gains in Minnesota in the 2018 midterm elections.

Still, the GOP is fielding credible candidates in a lot of races here, with a particular eye on taking back the governor’s mansion now that Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton is not seeking reelection.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe talk to reporters in 2012. Dayton is retiring this year. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With a handful of competitive congressional seats, the state could also be critical in the battle for control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Two longtime Democratic Congress members in more conservative districts are running for governor and lieutenant governor, giving Republicans a few of their only chances to win seats from Democrats. But Democrats also have openings to pick off a few House districts, in their quest for a majority.

Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN) walks through the Capitol on October 25, 2017. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Who are the Democrats? US Rep. Tim Walz, state Rep. Erin Murphy, and state Attorney General Lori Swanson.

Who are the Republicans? Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (you may remember him for his very short-lived race for president in 2012), and former state Rep. Jeff Johnson, who also ran for governor in 2014 and lost to Dayton.

What’s the story? The Democratic primary in Minnesota contains all of this year’s big political themes. Murphy — a former nurse — is running on a Medicare-for-all platform and picked up an endorsement from the state Democratic Party, though that doesn’t necessarily mean much in Minnesota.

Walz and Swanson actually look like the frontrunners: a July NBC News/Marist poll found 28 percent of Minnesota primary voters favored Swanson, 24 percent supported Walz, and 11 percent backed Murphy. Walz represents a more conservative part of the state in Congress, and is being forced to reckon with his past stance on guns — one that had earned him an A rating from the National Rifle Association.

There’s not a lot of new blood on the Republican side, which is shaping up to a race between a former governor and a former nominee for governor. Pawlenty certainly has a lot more name recognition and cash than Johnson, reflected in his 19-point lead in that NBC News/Marist poll.

But Pawlenty also has some vulnerabilities; notably, his moneyed establishment ties (he’s worked as a lobbyist after leaving the governor’s mansion in 2011) and his disavowal of President Trump, which could hurt him with Trump voters in the state.

As for the general election? The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates this a toss-up, but the NBC poll found Pawlenty trailing all three Democratic contenders.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) walks to a Democratic Caucus meeting at the US Capitol on January 19, 2018. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Who are the Democrats? Sen. Tina Smith, the former lieutenant governor whom Dayton appointed to Senate in wake of Al Franken’s resignation after a sexual misconduct scandal, is running again. She’s facing a primary challenge from former Bush administration official Richard Painter, who has been active calling out the Trump administration’s ethics violations — but it doesn’t look like a very competitive race.

Who are the Republicans? State Sen. Karin Housley faces dental technician and first-time candidate Bob Anderson — who really loves Donald Trump.

What’s the story? Smith and Housley will probably emerge victorious in their respective primaries on Tuesday. As for the general election, this race looks to be pretty comfortably Democratic. Cook rates it Likely Democratic. Smith has pretty much kept her head down and voted with the Democratic caucus as a freshman senator; she was already popular in the state before being appointed, so it’s unlikely she’ll be voted out. She has a double-digit lead in a hypothetical matchup with Housley.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) waits for President Trump to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress on February 28, 2017. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Who are the Democrats? US Rep. Keith Ellison (also the current vice chair of the Democratic National Convention), former Ramsey County Attorney Tom Foley, state Rep. Debra Hilstrom, attorney and former state Supreme Court clerk Matt Pelikan, and former state Commissioner of Commerce Mike Rothman.

Who are the Republicans? Former state Rep. Doug Wardlow and former state Sen. Robert Lessard.

What’s the story? Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress and a progressive firebrand, is easily the most recognizable name in the pack of Democrats running to replace Lori Swanson, who is now running for governor. Ellison has promised to stand up to the Trump administration through the courts.

On Sunday, the son of Ellison’s ex-girlfriend wrote a lengthy Facebook post alleging that Ellison had been abusive. The claims have not been independently verified, and Ellison has denied mistreating the woman. Hilstrom, the only woman running in the attorney general race, called on Ellison “to answer these allegations” just a few days before the primary.

This post was brought to my attention because I was tagged in this post. Domestic Violence is never ok. The incidents described are troubling. I call on Keith Ellison to answer these allegations.https://t.co/CQ1LSVfZqf

— Debra Hilstrom (@debrahilstrom) August 12, 2018

On the Republican side, Wardlow is promising to enforce the “rule of law” in Minnesota. There aren’t many available ratings for this race, but the state has only elected a single Republican attorney general since 1955 … so it seems safe to say the eventual Democratic candidate is favored to win.

Minnesota First District congressional candidate Dan Feehan works a parade in Waterville, Minnesota, on June 10, 2018. Jim Mone/AP

Who are the Democrats? Iraq War veteran and Obama administration official Dan Feehan. Tim Walz, the district’s current representative, is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.

Who are the Republicans? Former US Treasury Department official Jim Hagedorn and state Sen. Carla Nelson.

What’s the story? Walz is well-liked in this relatively conservative region of the state; he was reelected to six terms by running as a moderate Democrat. But now that he’s departing, it’s not a given that Democrats can replicate his success.

Feehan has the imprimatur of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He’s running as moderate — in favor of protecting the Affordable Care Act, the state’s farmers, and the military. Hagedorn and Nelson are both running on conservative platforms and embracing the politics of President Trump. Walz’s exit is one of the few good opportunities for Republicans anywere in the country — Cooks rates the district R+5 (which means, all else being equal, it leans five points more Republican than the rest of the nation) and a toss-up.

Rep. Jason Lewis (R-MN) leaves the House Republican Conference meeting in the Capitol on March 20, 2018. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Who is the Democrat? Former journalist and hospital executive Angie Craig. She ran for this seat in 2016 (and lost) and has the DCCC’s backing.

Who is the Republican? Rep. Jason Lewis, in office since 2017.

What’s the story? You may know Jason Lewis from the torrent of explosive comments he’s made on his former right-wing talk radio show. He once complained about how it was no longer politically correct to call women “sluts,” equated LGBTQ people to “rapists” and other criminals, and said that “young single women” who vote to protect their access to birth control didn’t have brains.

Craig, on the other hand, is an openly LGBTQ candidate and mother who is hoping to draw a contrast with Lewis on social issues and his controversial commentary. She competed against him in 2016 and lost, but Democrats are hoping this year will be a more favorable environment. The district is R+2, and Cook has put it into the Likely Republican category.

Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-MN) is reflected in a video monitor in the Longworth House Office building on November 8, 2017. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Who is the Democrat? Distillery CEO and philanthropist Dean Phillips, who also has the backing of the DCCC.

Who is the Republican? Rep. Erik Paulsen, in office since 2009 and a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

What’s the story? Paulsen was first elected 10 years ago and seems to be pretty popular in his district. He’s a moderate who didn’t support Trump in 2016; he wrote in Marco Rubio instead. But he sticks reliably with House Republicans, casting votes for both Obamacare repeal and GOP tax cuts.

Phillips is hoping he can draw a contrast, but he’s the kind of candidate the Democratic base is pushing back against. He comes from wealth and has made a fortune off his family’s liquor business and gelato company. He has been upfront about this, and vowed to run without self-funding his campaign or accepting PAC money, though he’s still getting plenty of money from various industries. The district should be competitive; Cook rates it R+1, but the Third District went for Hillary Clinton by 10 points in 2016.

From left, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) former Vice President Walter Mondale, and Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) attend a fish fry and fundraiser for Nolan at the Northland Arboretum in Baxter, MN on October 27, 2016. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Who is the Democrat? Rep. Collin Peterson, in office since 1991 and ranking member on the Agriculture Committee.

Who are the Republicans? Air Force veteran David Hughes and National Guard veteran and businessman Matt Prosch.

What’s the story? This district is the strange amalgamation of both being rated R+12 and yet still in the Likely Democratic category by Cook. That’s because Collin Peterson has been in the House for a really, really long time.

He was first elected in 1990 and is the longest-serving House member in the Minnesota delegation. There’s a reason Democrats want Peterson to stay — he’s been consistently reelected in a conservative district. Peterson has a record to reflect that; he’s a friend to farmers in a rural district dominated by agriculture and tends to vote more conservative. Hughes ran against Peterson in 2016 and lost by 5 percentage points.

Who are the Democrats? North Branch Mayor Kirsten Kennedy, state Rep. Jason Metsa, former state Rep. Joe Radinovich, former TV news anchor Michelle Lee, and progressive activist Soren Sorensen.

Who are the Republicans? St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber and Duluth school board member Harry Welty.

What’s the story? The Eighth Congressional District is another conservative-leaning one that Democrats have nevertheless managed to hang on to. Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan, first elected in 2012, is vacating his seat to join the ticket of gubernatorial candidate Lori Swanson. With Nolan out, Republicans see a prime opportunity to win back control of a district Cook rates R+4.

There’s a large field of Democrats running to be the nominee, and there isn’t a clear frontrunner so far. The state party hasn’t yet endorsed a candidate, although Metsa is leading the race in campaign cash. But Democrats are nervous about the prospect of challenging Stauber — a well-known local politician who has out-fundraised all his Democratic competitors so far.

Original Source -> The Minnesota primary elections, one of 2018’s fiercest battlegrounds, explained

via The Conservative Brief

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cashcounts · 6 years ago

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9 of the Worst Lies About Vaping in the Media

1. Vaping is just as bad as smoking

This is the worst lie of all. There are about 36 million American smokers, and more than a billion worldwide. They don’t deserve to be lied to about a product that could very well save their lives. Burning tobacco produces smoke that contains a lot of proven carcinogenic chemicals, along with combustion products like carbon monoxide that cause cardiovascular damage.

Even if we can’t quite say that vaping is safe, no legitimate scientist believes that e-cigarette vapor is even in the same ballpark as smoking for health risks

“To undermine the public’s appreciation of the severity of smoking’s hazards by comparing real cigarettes to fake ones is doing a huge disservice to the public and to smokers in particular,” writes Dr. Michael Siegel. “There is no legitimate scientific dispute over the fact that vaping is much safer than smoking.”

2. The vape companies are luring your children!

The FDA prohibits e-cigarette manufacturers from claiming their products are safer than smoking, a tool to quit smoking, smoke-free, or even that they don’t contain tobacco. Being prevented from advertising truthfully any of the real benefits of vaping, the few manufacturers that advertise at all to general audiences naturally fall back on tried and true ad techniques: celebrities and glamorous imagery.

And that has earned them accusations of “using the tobacco playbook” to trick teenagers into “a lifetime of nicotine addiction.” The real benefit of these ads is to the worn-out politicians who grab hold of anything they can blame on “Big Tobacco.”

So the know-nothing political hacks blame EVERYTHING on Big Tobacco! Who’s pushing “child-attracting” flavors like cotton candy and gummy bear? Big Tobacco. Who’s behind the epidemic of exploding vapes? Big Tobacco. And whenever an opportunistic pol finds a friendly microphone, the media are there to dutifully report that vapor companies are “using the same tactics and ads used by Big Tobacco that proved so effective.”

3. Vapor is full of formaldehyde and other scary chemicals

The formaldehyde scare came from a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine from the authors of a study at Portland State University in which some cheap top-coil clearomizers were overheated to the point where they burned off the liquid and delivered unvapeable dry hits. Their conclusions have been soundly debunked — including in this recent study by Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos.

We breathe and eat chemicals every day, but most of them don’t affect us. It’s true that there are a lot of scary-sounding chemicals in vapor, but they’re present in tiny concentrations. Everything we eat, drink, or breathe has chemicals that might be risky to consume in large quantities. But we don’t consume them in large quantities.

The Royal College of Physicians agrees. In its comprehensive review of e-cigarette science, the College concluded, “In normal conditions of use, toxin levels in inhaled e-cigarette vapour are probably well below prescribed threshold limit values for occupational exposure, in which case significant long-term harm is unlikely.”

4. Big Tobacco invented e-cigarettes and owns the vapor industry

E-cigarettes were developed and first sold by a Chinese pharmacist named Hon Lik. The products made it to U.S. shores in 2007. Five years later, in 2012, American cigalike manufacturer Blu was purchased by tobacco company Lorillard. That was the first involvement of the tobacco industry in the sales of vapor products.

Since then, all the Big Tobacco companies have introduced e-cigarettes of their own, and it is true that they have a strong sales presence in convenience stores and gas stations — the traditional source of cigarette sales. However, Wells Fargo tobacco industry analyst Bonnie Herzog estimates that the c-store market accounts for less than 40 percent of the whole vapor products market. The rest of the business is the independent vaping manufacturers that sell their wares online and in dedicated vape shops.

Here’s a secret: adults like sweet, fruity, and dessert flavors just as much as kids do.

And it’s looking like the tobacco industry is looking for other products to compete in the low-risk nicotine marketplace. That’s partly because many of the early vaping patents are owned by Fontem Ventures — a subsidiary of Imperial Brands (formerly known as Imperial Tobacco). Philip Morris International (PMI), British American Tobacco (BAT), and Japan Tobacco International are all pursuing so-called heat-not-burn (HNB) products as alternatives to cigarettes, although so far their introductions have been more hype than anything.

PMI claims its IQOS HNB device is converting Japanese smokers at a rapid rate — but nicotine-containing vapes are illegal in Japan, so it’s not exactly a fair fight. Both IQOS and BAT’s HNB device called Glo are seeking approval from the FDA as Modified Risk Tobacco Products (MRTP). The federal agency has never granted an MRTP approval before.

5. Vaping causes popcorn lung!

Some e-liquid contains diacetyl or acetyl propionyl, buttery flavorings that are thought to have caused a condition called popcorn lung (actual name: bronchiolitis obliterans) in some flavoring factory workers almost two decades ago.

But there has never been a diagnosed case of popcorn lung in a vaper. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any cases of popcorn lung in cigarette smokers either — even though cigarettes contain between 100 and 750 times the diacetyl of e-cigarettes. And as vaping gets more (usually negative) attention in the press, and anti-vaping public health activists watch closely, it seems less and less likely that any real connection between vaping and popcorn lung would be missed.

6. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin

Nicotine may cause dependence, but there is a lot of debate about whether “addictive” is even the correct term for a drug that causes no permanent damage to most users. It’s probably more accurate to say that cigarette smoking is addictive. When you inhale smoke, nicotine is delivered quickly to the bloodstream and the brain, producing a rapid reward that the brain craves again and again. Tobacco smoke also has other constituents like ammonia that increase the smoker’s desire for more. It’s not just the presence of nicotine that makes smoking addictive.

Other kinds of nicotine products deliver it with less of an addictive punch. The FDA says nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products like gum and patches “do not appear to have significant potential for abuse or dependence.” There’s no reason to assume that vaping is any more addictive than those products.

And, in fact, a 2014 study from two well-known nicotine researchers concluded that, “E-cigarettes may be as or less addictive than nicotine gums, which themselves are not very addictive.” So…not only not as addictive as heroin, but not as addictive as nicotine gum — which the FDA says isn’t addictive at all.

7. Exploding vapes…everyone panic!

Having failed to prove any serious health risks, “vape explosions” have become the fear industry’s story of choice lately. The news stories, as always, are regularly helped along by the inane jabbering of cooperative politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer.

The truth is that there have been very few fires or explosions from vapor products. And most of those have been caused by user error, including many from mishandling of batteries. Almost all of these accidents could have been avoided with a little education on battery safety.

By contrast, fires caused by cigarettes and other smoking cause tremendous damage and death. The National Fire Protection Association estimated that in 2011 alone 90,000 fires were caused by smoking, resulting in more than 500 deaths, 1,600 injuries, and $621 million in property damage. Of course, comparing that level of damage to vape accidents is never done. It just wouldn’t suit the anti-vaping narrative.

8. Vaping is a gateway to smoking

The claim that vaping will lead teenagers to smoke is widely repeated and completely unproven. The studies that claim to show a gateway often turn out to be poorly constructed, rely on tiny samples, or use Rube Goldberg methodology. Mostly though they ignore a concept — well known to social researchers — called common liability.

Common liability says that the teenagers that try vaping are likely to also be the ones that try smoking, or marijuana, or drinking — or any risky behavior.

Clive Bates, in his excellent guide to navigating gateway studies, concluded, “When you look at the full picture the data far more consistent with the vaping gateway being an ‘exit’ from smoking than an entrance.” He’s right. With fewer teens and adults smoking than anytime since we began counting them, even if vaping isn’t responsible for all the kids not smoking, it’s clearly not causing a massive uptake in cigarette use.

9. Flavors are a marketing trick to hook kids

It’s all about bubblegum and cotton candy. Those are the e-liquid flavors that drip from every politician’s lips when they denounce the vapor industry for trying to “addict a new generation.” But those sorts of flavors are only sold by companies that don’t advertise to the general public, and they really aren’t available anywhere children can (legally) get them. We also know from government-funded surveys that the majority of vaping teens are using nicotine-free e-liquid.

Now I ask you, what sort of genius businessperson would build a sales strategy around selling the non-addictive version of an unadvertised product illegally to underage purchasers?

Here’s a secret: adults like sweet, fruity, and dessert flavors just as much as kids do. Further, ex-smokers find that those flavors help distance them from the experience of combustible tobacco. I don’t know any vaper that doesn’t use “kid flavors.” I also don’t know any adult — vaper or not — who doesn’t like candy, fruit, or pastry. The floor of the U.S. Senate — the very place many of these claims originate from — has a desk full of candy, which the very, very adult senators share.

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garancefranke-ruta · 7 years ago

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Too close for comfort: How social media changed how we talk to (and about) each other in America

Illustration by Yahoo News; source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

WASHINGTON — “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore,” Donald J. Trump thundered at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

“Here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”

Though fact checkers disagreed with his assessment that it was a lie-free convention, Trump’s from-the-podium denunciations of political correctness during the campaign resonated loudly. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either,” Trump told Megyn Kelly at the Fox News debate in response to questions about his offensive comments about women. He would later dismiss his shockingly crude comments to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush as “locker room talk.” As former White House adviser Steve Bannon recently told Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes,” “People didn’t care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it. It had no lasting impact on the campaign.”

Offensive speech, true speech, politically correct speech – America has for the past two years been having a national debate about what the appropriate boundaries of public discourse ought to be. At the heart of this conflict is not just the question of who says what about whom, and how frankly, but a fundamental transformation in the technologies of speech over the past decade that has changed how the conversation itself is conducted. These changes have decreased perceived freedom of speech at the same time that they have magnified once marginal positions to create a novel public speech environment that can seem at once stiflingly conformist and shockingly extreme. And in the process of carving new public squares out of the once private realm of social ties, the new social technologies have made politicians of us all, subject to the same strictures on speech that formerly only truly public figures had to be concerned with.

“Our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well,” noted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his lengthy February letter to the public.

“Big tech’s incursion into public/civic life,” Slate tech columnist Will Oremus has called it and similar efforts from other major firms.

Social media has, by design, fundamentally reshaped how we have conversations with each other, moving casual speech from the auditory ether to the realm of the written. And it has vastly expanded the audience for conversations that used to happen in small communities of relatively similar people, replacing them with one-to-many interactions with people who potentially have a wide array of views, and weak or even no direct personal ties.

From secret Facebook groups to support Hillary Clinton to Twitter pile-ons to the Alt Right’s provocative “free speech” tours at college campuses, we now are living in a world transformed by a massive decline in undocumented and uncontested speech — for most of human history, the very cornerstone of how we existed in society.

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The transformation has been astonishingly swift. 79 percent of online American adults used Facebook in 2016, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center right after the election, and 24 percent used Twitter. Overall 86 percent of American adults use the internet, meaning that 68 percent of American adults were on Facebook in 2016 – and 76 percent of those checked in daily. Twitter users skewed younger and better educated than Facebook ones overall.

Just eight years ago, these social networks were so far from dominant that Pew didn’t even mention Facebook in its post-election analysis of how voters got their information, lumping everything digital into a single “internet” category. But we can get some sense of what’s changed from their early 2009 observation, “Usage of social networking sites has nearly quadrupled over the past four years—from fewer than one in ten online adults in early 2005 to more than one in three today.” And most of that would have been Facebook, as by 2010, only 6 percent of the adult population, or 8 percent of the adult online population, was using Twitter.

Illustration by Yahoo News: source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

While for early adopters it may feel like the social networks have been with us since the mid-2000s, in point of fact they were not very well-developed or widely used when Obama was elected president.

Overall, only “55 percent of all American adults went online during the 2008 election season to get news or information about the campaign, to communicate with others about politics, or to contribute to the online debate,” Pew found. By 2014, the average Facebook user had 338 friends and cited “sharing with many people at once” as the top reason for using the network and the numbers using Facebook was on track to surpass the one-time all digital category. Importantly, Pew found as early as 2008, “those who are most information hungry are the most likely to browse sites that match their views.”

That observation was at the heart of a slew of articles and books dating back to technology columnist Farhad Manjoo’s oft-overlooked but analytically important 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which located the new success of campaigns of what we would today call fake news — like the 2004 Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — in the ability of partisan actors to manipulate the newly fragmented and increasingly digital media ecosystem.

“In the last few years, pollsters and political researchers have begun to document a fundamental shift in the way Americans are thinking about the news,” Manjoo argued, in words as timely today as their were more than nine years ago. “No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we’re also holding different facts. Increasingly our arguments aren’t over what we should be doing…but instead over what is happening.” The new fights would be over “competing visions of reality,” he predicted, correctly.

MoveOn cofounder Eli Pariser continued the argument in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, blaming personalization as well as fragmentation for the failure of the digital utopian dream.

“For a time, it seemed that the Internet was going to entirely redemocratize society,” Pariser wrote. “Bloggers and citizen journalists would single-handedly rebuild the public media. Politicians would be able to run only with a broad base of support from small, everyday donors. Local governments would become more transparent and accountable to their citizens. And yet the era of civic connection I dreamed about hasn’t come. Democracy requires citizens to see things from another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.”

“Left to their own devices, personal information filters are a kind of autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown,” he warned.

At the same time our speech is more public and potentially contestable than ever before, we are increasingly cocooned in digital media worlds that reflect and reinforce our own views. And we increasingly live in physically atomized and homogenized communities that reflect our own values back to us, as Bill Bishop so well documented in 2004’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

These dynamics work in dark synergy to amp up political polarization. Also contributing to the divisions are two political cycles’ worth of gerrymandering that have led to a congressional map where seats often are more vigorously contested from the intra-party extremes in primary cycles than by opponents across the aisle.

We are surrounded by a world that reflects us online, except that our once private speech utterances now increasingly take place in micro-publics, where we are forced to patrol the boundaries of our filter bubbles, defriending and muting and blocking those who intrude upon or take exception to our worldviews.

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The effort and drama involved in defending what is said online — the ever-present tension between competing world views and different speech communities that are now endlessly visible to each other — at once drives people away from the new public squares and radicalizes those who witness the fights within it.

There have been many famous cases of individuals driven from the most public of the new digital public squares, Twitter. Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones left Twitter after becoming the target of a broad harassment campaign, though she later returned to using the service. “Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out,” wrote author Lindy West in January, explaining why she was leaving the site. In return for what she shares with the world, “I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.”

Her real reason for leaving, “wasn’t the trolls themselves … it was the global repercussions of Twitter’s refusal to stop them,” she wrote, in words that take on additional weight after Charlottesville:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now – how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? – and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad”, and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Meanwhile Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, has cited the public vilification of publicist Justine Sacco over an offensive tweet about AIDS and Africa as a turning point in his own political evolution. “It was an awkward joke; an attempt to be edgy in the hands of an amateur comedienne that fell flat. But it whipped up the social justice hate mob into a frenzy,” he wrote in 2016.

Complaints and asides about our new digital speech communities are a daily part of living in them. “Every time I get off Facebook I feel like I need to decontaminate. That site is toxic,” wrote Jordan Uhl, one of the organizers of June’s March for Truth on Trump’s Russia ties, on Friday. “I wanted to write about [Hillary Clinton] and engage rigorously with her ideas far more than I did. But I didn’t. In part, I did not have the energy to deal with the inevitable backlash, from corners right and left,” writer Roxanne Gay admitted in the New York Times. One of the largest Facebook groups of Clinton supporters was a secret (or open secret) group because women wanted a place to express their views without being pounced on for holding them. “As much as possible,” group founder Libby

Chamberlain told the Washington Post, “it removes the risk that they’re going to be attacked for their views.” “It’s become a thing now, where I see one of my peers tell their story, then get dogpiled by 22yr olds for furthering problematic narratives,” wrote David Wynne about his generation of queer men, who experienced a different world than do young gay and lesbians today. Lesbian author and filmmaker Sarah Schulman went so far as to write a book, Confict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, to take on the contemporary culture of “overreaction to difference.” “The mere fact of the other person’s difference is misrepresented as an assault that then justifies our cruelty,” she charges in it.

As Facebook and other tech companies come under increasing scrutiny for their lack of oversight of the public commons they have created, and the space they’ve allowed to trolls, bots, and foreign agents with disruptive intent, it’s worth also considering the role they’ve played in creating an environment seen as stifling the speech of both liberals and conservatives.

For good and for ill, we now live in an environment of highly contested speech, where more people than ever before in human history can see and publicly react to the different views around them.

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In many ways, the underlying dynamics cannot solely to be laid at the feet of the tech companies. Benjamin Barber argued in his seminal 1992 Atlantic magazine article Jihad vs. McWorld, later a book of the same name, that the rise of global culture fueled the rise of defensive tribalism and fundamentalism as traditionally isolated communities were forced to defend their old ways and cultural identities in the face of a homogenizing media onslaught.

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

Barber was writing in a world dominated by television, but the echoes of his argument hang over the debate about today’s digital world.

“Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community,” wrote Zuckerberg in his letter. “This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.”

Barber’s broad theory was the opposite of the technocratic utopianism of Zuckerberg and other digital leaders. Proximity and visibility can increase conflict, as old ways of living feel themselves to be under assault and people dig in to defend their views. Globalism gives birth to reaction, the vision of a world community leading to a hardening of the lines around those viewpoints that the broader global community cannot or will not absorb. In a diverse world, as in a diverse nation, there will be competing visions of the best life and deep disagreements about who should wield power.

“Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the ‘user’—but their worldview rolls over it,” argues Franklin Foer in his just-released book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a deep look at the changes wrought by the foursome Europeans call GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These big tech companies “are shredding the principles that protect individuality,” he argues. “Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship…they hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make through the day.”

They believe “we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence” but in fact they are an example of the twinning of “monopoly and conformism,” actors that marry corporate “concentration” and intellectual “homogenization” into a powerful new threat to the very idea of individuality.

Facebook itself is grappling, more than a decade after its founding, with some of these issues. As individuals feel themselves to be threatened by being thrust into direct, seemly intimate conversations with those they disagree with, the divides between them often only harden and they seek out communities of agreement.

“Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign,” Zuckerberg noted in his February letter.

“Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on.” Facebook would be rolling out tools and a new focus on “safe” and “meaningful” groups to built these alternative communities.

The big question is if it’s ever going to be possible for this kind of reconciliation and shared understanding to happen online, thanks to the inherent dynamics of the medium he helped create.

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It can be harder to see other people as real in a world that is all-too-often virtual, where people are performing for an audience, where there are grave questions about whether the communities we are partaking of are real, and where people routinely say things to each other with a vehemence and passion that’s as much a factor of the distance between them as their actual intentions.

But the past year has also seen some astonishing examples of the collapse of seemingly hardened online identities in the face of physical reality and real human society, governed by actual laws. And the law takes comments made online seriously, even when those who make them insist they are merely performing in character before their micro-publics.

In Charlottesville, a young white man ripped off his Vanguard America White shirt when confronted by a crowd. “I’m not really white power, man, I just did it for the fun,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

What happened? A reporter asked him. “Scared the shit out of me,” he replied.

He was there because “it’s kind of a fun idea,” he later explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

So-called “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell made the sort of threats in a crowd he had made online as the manager of what he told a judge was “a racist podcast,” and now sits in a Virginia jail, bail having been denied as he awaits trial on charges of pepper-spraying someone during the melee in Charlottesville. His lawyer sought to play down his aggressive and racist statements at the rally as the performances of a shock jock, although the crimes he is charged with seem consistent with those sentiments.

“Pizzagate” gunman Edgar Maddison Welch pled guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon and transporting a firearm over state lines after firing an AR-15 in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant that had become a magnet for bizarre online conspiracy theories. He was sentenced to four years in jail.

And most recently, former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli had his bail revoked by a judge for posting a comment to his 70,000 Facebook followers offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who could snatch a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour.

“The fact that he continues to remain unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions or words demonstrates to me that he may be creating ongoing risk to the community,” said U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, explaining the decision to hold Shkreli.

“This is a solicitation of assault. That is not protected by the First Amendment.”

And yet it – and the defense of those actions — is the sort of thing we see online all the time: the idea that what he was doing lay somewhere between joking and trolling. “He did not intended to cause harm,” Shkreli’s attorney Benjamin Brafman said. “Being inappropriate does not make you a danger to the community.”

The judge disagreed. But ultimately the legal system cannot be the forum for adjudicating speech in the public square; it has an interest only insofar as other criminal accusations have become part of the picture.

Will efforts by the digital companies themselves be the solution? In the wake of the Charlottesville march, many internet providers have sought to shut down radical forums and cease to give platforms to white supremacist groups for online organizing.

This may force those groups to use older tools to organize and spread their message.

But “no-platforming” steps by the big companies also reinforce the message that fuels grievance from extremists, and raises concerns that the big tech companies, having created new public squares, are now taking on a role stifling of speech in the name of politics.

And so the free speech fights roll on, gathering in-real-life opposition as they go. Digital provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter, and other Alt Right figures are headed back to Berkeley, California, next weekend, where they will surely be met by angry Antifa protestors and students who object to their presence. And where we will see again what these online fights look like when made flesh.

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