#UP Assistant Professor Economics Result Declared

[24cgnews]

Uttar Pradesh असिस्टेंट प्रोफेसर भर्ती परीक्षा का रिजल्ट घोषित, इतने कैंडिडेट्स का हुआ सेलेक्शन

Uttar Pradesh असिस्टेंट प्रोफेसर भर्ती परीक्षा का रिजल्ट घोषित, इतने कैंडिडेट्स का हुआ सेलेक्शन

Uttar Pradesh UPHESC Assistant Professor Posts Result 2022 Declared: उत्तर प्रदेश उच्चतर शिक्षा सेवा आयोग (UPHESC) ने असिस्टेंट प्रोफेसर पद��ं (UPHESC Recruitment 2022) के लिए हुई परीक्षा के नतीजे (UPHESC Assistant Professor Result 2022) जारी कर दिए हैं. इस भर्ती परीक्षा के माध्यम से कुल 103 सहायक प्रोफेसर पदों (Uttar Pradesh Government Job) पर कैंडिडेट्स का सेलेक्शन हुआ है. इन 103 पदों में से 100…

[brand-strategy-consulting-blog]

26 Greatest Advertising Brand Strategy Consulting Services

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We help purchasers enhance their shareholder value by setting objectives primarily based on perception and foresight concerning the fundamental sources and drivers of worth. We then establish and buildcapabilitiesat the enterprise level and throughout enterprise models that may drive sustainable development over the lengthy run.

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We assist develop a powerful model promise so that customers choose the corporate beyond the product.

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He left academia to begin up and run three high-growth firms, including an $80 million runaway success story.

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In people-based service businesses, the acquisition is more risky as a result of individuals and their skills are the most important purchase merchandise.

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The predominant mental image about “the way issues work” in business is a product-based picture. This picture results in a product-oriented language, and the language in flip constrains communication in such a means that one can not develop actually revolutionary approaches to managing the service enterprise. Consulting to help with the optimization and implementation of name growth methods.

• Like Go Compare, they will break things that must be broken. Saying so, they may continually re-think strategies and worth propositions to maintain your brand relevant. (Especially now since conventional approaches to "development and innovation" are turning incumbents into laggards). Ultimately, all seven of those branding ideas work collectively and reinforce one another for amassed effects – visibility and growth. Through strategic and deliberate branding, you'll be able to assist your agency stand apart and get ahead. Every single one of these advertising channels needs to befundamentallyaligned with your branding concepts.

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As the healthcare industry expands, they're shifting to implement contingent workforce programs that increase their reach and provide sustainable growth. We help these efforts through workforce management packages that provide the seamless integration of skilled independents into their ecosystem. We fuse an analytical strategy with creativity to grow stronger manufacturers and businesses. Lush's branding strategy is simple and genuine, precisely why the corporate has an enormous brand following.

Virtually all product-oriented corporations have some form of research and growth effort that's responsible for designing and testing new merchandise and/or modifications to present products. The R&D task in service-oriented firms is totally different as a outcome of it is complicated by the shortage of a physical product. A service, especially in people-based businesses, could be a little bit different every time it is rendered.

They are made attainable by the reality that the production, distribution, and sale of the product may be uncoupled, usually being achieved by different firms. The conventional picture of the service enterprise is that the service is “invariably and undeviatingly private, as something performed by people for other people.”2 This perspective is erroneous. Automatic automobile washes, automated banking services, and pc time-sharing are simply three of the many examples of service companies in which the service is supplied by automated gear.

To provide you with concepts that make you go whoopee, the strategist will research your brand, study what your idea is and what you would possibly be offering in terms of worth to your customers. As part of the job, strategists will also keep an eagle's eye on the competitors. They will observe competitors, examine brands just like yours, have a glance at their communication and maybe the strategic approaches to position your brand to become THE BRAND.

This often entails conducting surveys, together with competitor analysis to understand the voids in the market that your brand can fill. Get methods, ideas, and instruments for growing your firm’s model with Hinge’sBrand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms. Finally, you'll use your positioning statement as inspiration for headlines and persuasive language on your website and in advertising collateral. To learn more about uncovering your differentiators, try our free Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms. Also, I recommend you learn this weblog post on aggressive differentiation.

The complete process of creating such providers deals with ideas rather than bodily objects. The testing course of varies depending on whether or not the service is equipment-based or people-based, but in both case it's tough to do check marketing or different kinds of market analysis on the model new service. Customers should be enticed into experiencing the service, and this usually requires major marketing efforts. Thus the worth of introducing a successful new service may be fairly high as a result of it is difficult to predict what service concepts might be understandable and engaging to the shopper. Probably less is understood about the usage of price as a strategic weapon in service companies than about any of the opposite strategic variables.

The finest logos actually look compelling, they’re aesthetically pleasing, and they’re memorable. They shouldn’t be overly advanced and must be simple to decipher visually. But more than all of this, one of the best logos speak to the brand itself. One essential component to that is the artwork and science that both go into logo design. Your emblem is more than your name, it says one thing about who you're, and it represents you when folks come into contact with it.

Establishing your self as athought leaderis one of the effective marketing instruments for impartial contractors. Blogging via your individual web site or via a channel corresponding to LinkedIn is a creative outlet that permits you to share your experience and attain an viewers you may not join with through traditional advertising strategies. Speaking opportunities are one other method to promote your name and voice. Reach out to skilled organizations, conferences, and local media and provide to share your expertise. Looking to grow your business by way of new merchandise and services?

[lia-jones]

Growing Pains - Chapter Twenty Three - Nobel Material

I felt soft warm hands brushing the hair out of my face. Opening one eye, I took in my surroundings. The room was still dark, which meant that the sun wasn’t quite up yet. A soft familiar voice whispered in my ear.

“I’m going for a run, I’ll be back in an hour. Go back to sleep.”

I closed my eyes obediently, as Victor’s lips brushed softly against my hair, lulling me back to sleep.

I was greeted by the smell of pancakes when I walked into the kitchen, two hours later. Victor was humming by the stove, dripping batter in the skillet, looking fresh and pleased. He smiled as he watched me sit on the stool at the kitchen island, running my fingers through my wet curls.

“Good morning.” He greeted me as he handed me a mug with freshly brewed coffee.

I took a sip of the comforting drink. His coffee was strong and aromatic. I hummed as I felt it go down my throat.

“Hmmm. Thanks. And good morning.”

Victor already knew that I wasn’t very chatty before my morning coffee, so he would usually let me be until I had had at least one third of the mug. I watched him walk around the kitchen, his perfect buttocks moving as he walked and turned in front of the stove. After a short while, I had a beautiful plate of pancakes topped with raspberries, walnuts and maple syrup, my favorite.

“I have a late meeting today, I won’t be able to leave on time. I’ll have a driver take you here.” Victor spoke behind his newspaper, as he read the news.

“It’s fine. I have to go home today, anyway. Besides, I have that reunion with the Dean.”

“You’re going home today?” He peeked from behind the paper, eyebrow raised.

“Well, I have to at some point. I have been sleeping here for the last two nights already. I need to do laundry and stuff.”

“I have a washing machine and a cleaning lady. She could do that for you.”

“And let your cleaning lady get her hands on my undies? No way.” I joked.

“What’s so wrong with that?”

“Only you are allowed to touch my undies.” I used a playful dramatic voice.

Victor cleared his throat as he glanced at his wristwatch, and got up from his seat. I did the same.

“Keep it that way.” Victor came closer and softly slapped my butt. “We have to go.”

It had been two months since I completed my doctorate, and I was no longer an intern in LFG, as I took Ted’s position as an international business consultant. Although we never made an effort to hide our relationship from anyone at LFG, we didn’t talk openly about it either, except for Goldman and Diane. Victor was an extremely private person, and I didn’t want people treating me differently because I was dating the boss.

I arrived at my desk and found I already had another cup of coffee for me. I frowned at it, puzzled.

“Goldman brought it. He went to buy coffee for all of us.”

“Hmmm, nice going, Goldie. I can always use more coffee.” I said, opening up my laptop and checking my email.

“Ok, before you go all work no play mode, I want to share an idea with you.” I nodded and turned to Diane, giving her my attention. “So, Goldman wants to know if you want to go on a double date.”

“Wait, you and Goldman plus me and…” I trailed off, not wanting other people to hear me namedrop Victor’s name.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a good idea, but him on a double date? I don’t see that happening anytime soon.” I shook my head in disbelief. Victor? No way.

“Either way, Goldman will invite him himself. I was just asking because you are my friend, and you matter as much as he does.”

“And that’s very thoughtful of you.” I smiled. “Just don’t get your hopes up.”

My day went on between calls, clients and proposals. Miss Bates took my suggestion to heart and was preparing a fashion show, and even though she wasn’t my client, Victor asked me to help her out. So, every day I would get tons of emails with pictures or questions, that I obliged to answer.

Later in the afternoon, Goldman told me Victor wanted to see me.

“You called?” I said, opening the door that Goldman left ajar.

“Close the door behind you.” Victor said from behind his computer.

As I shut the door and turned to face him, Victor was already standing right behind me. I jumped a bit, startled.

“Seriously, a bell around that neck would be a wonderful idea.” I teased.

“You’re not having coffee.” He whispered, pulling me for a long kiss.

“Is that all you wanted?” I asked when he let my lips go.

“No.” He went for the desk and took out a set of keys. My car keys. “It’s parked at LFG’s parking lot, -2, letter C.”

I tried to grab the keys but he lifted his hand high, so I couldn’t reach them. I gave him a flat look.

“On one condition.” He continued. “You’ll meet me at my apartment after you’re done, and we’ll have dinner. Bring a bag of clean clothes.”

“Wow, you’re persistent.” I pretended to be upset. “You’ll call me when you’re done? My meeting will probably be over before yours.”

“That being the case…” He showed me my car keys. I noticed there was a card and another key on my keychain. “The keycard is for the gate and the garage. The key is for the front door. You can wait for me inside.”

“Mr. Lee… The keys to your kingdom?” I smiled.

“Quit being foolish and let me go to my meeting.” He pretended to be annoyed. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

The sun was turning orange when I arrived at Loveland University. Professor Carson, the dean, was already waiting for me at the gate. I was surprised by such a ceremonious reception.

“Good afternoon, Miss Jones. My name is Olive Carson, we spoke on the phone.” She shook my hand. Professor Carson was probably well into her fifties, but looked amazing for her age. Her olive skin was toned, and contrasted beautifully with her green eyes, and her beautiful dark brown hair was soft and silky. She took very good care of herself, it seemed.

“Nice to meet you.” I smiled. “I’m yet to understand exactly why I’m here…”

“Let’s have some tea in my office, and I’ll tell you.”

We walked into the imposing Faculty building. The wooden walls bared the pictures of the great minds the University harbored, and on a fancy plaque below, their name and feats. I was entranced looking at all these faces as I walked down the corridor, some I knew very well from my Economics books.

We sat in her elegantly decorated office, tea already waiting for us. She kindly poured me a cup, starting in a very soft, professional voice.

“So Miss Jones, it came to our attention that your doctorate thesis was published recently.”

“Yes…” I frowned, confused. “A few weeks ago.”

“One of our most esteemed professors is an acquaintance of Professor Williamson. He said the Professor was extremely impressed with your work. And we were pretty impressed too.” The Dean said, offering me a warm smile.

“Thank you.” I felt myself blush a bit. “Still I don’t understand what I’m doing here.”

“We want you to further your study. Under our wing, evidently. I’m here to offer you a position as Head Researcher at our University.” She spoke more assertively now, looking me in the eyes.

“It’s just my doctorate thesis. Yes, it got me a praise, but…”

“It’s promising, to say the least. Some would even say it’s Nobel material.” She declared. “The implications of your thesis will make many heads turn. And the fact that you already tested it and got good results only makes it more fascinating. We want to have you, and to be perfectly honest, other universities want you too. We wanted to be the ones to make the first offer, hoping the location is a factor in your decision, since you are currently living in Loveland.”

I stared at her, my mouth slightly open. Not the most professional attitude, I agree. But I became terrified when I heard those two startling words. Nobel material.

“I’m working at LFG.” I started refusing. “I have a new position, I have been promoted, I don’t see how…”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but as your work clearly shows, you will not be happy for long with a consulting position.” I was surprised. How did she know what my job was? “This is once in a lifetime opportunity, Miss Jones.”

She was absolutely right, of course. Most of my teachers had worked really hard to get noticed by universities and get a simple assisting teacher or research collaborator position, let alone what was being offered to me, Head Researcher. I would have my own team, call the shots, conduct the research as I saw fit. It was extremely pleasing to work with those companies and watch them grow, and although I still could all of that at LFG, this was MY project. MY baby.

“I have another thing to add, though. All our head researchers are required to… share their knowledge, so to speak. You will also be required to teach, even if only a few hours a week.”

I smiled. That wasn’t a disadvantage at all. I knew I would love the interaction.

“Miss Jones, I’m not expecting you to give me an answer right away. You’ll need to take many things into consideration before you give us your answer, and that is only wise. Besides, Mr. Lee is a big donor to our University, so we want you to depart in the best terms possible. Give me a call when you feel ready.” She said, handing me her card.

I drove to Victor’s home, my head reeling with the recent events. I was torn between excitement and guilt. Excitement because of the offer, something so new and enticing, a more dynamic job where I could wear jeans and sneakers to work and interact with live people, with a lot less stress, and still keep my mind fed with my investigation. I remembered how fun it was to read all those authors, to learn what was on their minds, and still have a saying on all that. It felt scary but also empowering, to have a thought of my own. Very different from the life I had left behind.

But I also felt guilty because of Victor. He helped me through it all, encouraged me and nurtured me, provided me comfort so I would be my best. I remembered right at the end, when I could barely sleep due to my constant focus to finish my thesis and get a good result, Victor would drop by with dinner, sometimes take me to bed when I fell asleep at the computer while he was there. Victor trusted my work, offered me Ted’s position, choosing me instead of more seasoned workers, and I was leaving him stranded. I felt like I was returning a handmade gift. I couldn’t do that.

I rang the bell when I got at the gate of his private condo. No need to use the keycard if he was at home. No answer. I opened it myself and got it.

I used the key to enter Victor’s apartment, placing the keys on top of Mr. Claw’s aquarium, poking the glass to greet him. I smiled, still not believing Victor had kept the lobster I rescued from the steaming pot as a pet.

“Hello, my crustacean friend. I see you were fed already.” I spoke to him, as I watched him walk a bit towards the sound of my finger on the glass.

Then I smelled something. Something delicious. And that brought my attention to the sound of something sizzling.

And yes, there was Victor, focused on the pan on the stove, already in his sweatpants and sweater, glasses on the bridge of his nose. I ran my hand down his back, and he reached his hand back to touch me.

“Why didn’t you open the gate, if you were home?” I said, coming to his side, to see what he was cooking. Veggie stir fry.

“What’s the point? You have the key.” He glanced at me. “Go get yourself comfortable, dinner will be ready in ten.”

“Ok. Don’t set the table, I’ll do it.” I said, taking my bag to his bedroom.

After changing into my leggings and a baggy sweater, I went to the kitchen to get what I needed to set the table. Victor was already serving the food in plates, a glass of wine already waiting for me.

“How was your day?” Victor asked as he sipped his wine. “What did the Dean want?”

“She offered me a job. I think I’m going to say no.” I decided at the spur of the moment, not wanting to disappoint him.

“What kind of job?” He looked at me over his glasses, not missing my nervous hand playing with the charms of my bracelet.

“As Head Researcher.” I answered like I didn’t care at all. “They read my thesis, want me to continue the study.”

“Tell me exactly what she said.” Victor asked, sitting straight on his chair. All business.

“Well, she started grooming me a bit, took me to her office, we had tea, told me my study was promising, Nobel material, the whole nine yards of adulation. You know the drill.”

“And you’re saying no.” He confirmed, looking at me confusedly.

“I don’t know. I’m happy where I am. I don’t want to leave LFG.” I said, poking a mushroom with my fork, maybe a bit harder than I should. “How was your meeting?”

“Boring, compared to yours.” He was still watching me closely. “But it ended sooner than I expected, I have reached an impasse with Cooper, we may have to drop the funding. He won’t agree with anything I suggest. Maybe I should tell him I have Nobel material working for me.” He teased.

I took the dirty plates from the table, giving him a faint smile. Victor followed me with the glasses, filling mine again while he waited for me to load the dishwasher.

“So… Nobel material.” He started, his voice soft, as he handed me my glass of wine.

“Oh, she meant nothing with that, she was trying to woo me, that’s all.”

“We both know that’s unlikely.” He looked me in the eye. “Why are you not taking that job?”

“I just started in my new position. Ted’s position, that you gave me instead of a lot of people that probably deserved it too. I can’t leave, not after all the support you gave me, and all the trust you put in me. It would be almost like cheating.” I finally confessed. Victor put his glass on the counter, pulling me into his arms.

“I remember you telling me how your ex kept you on the ground, not wanting to let you fly. He discouraged you from taking your doctorate, made you work at his family’s company just to keep you close. Do you think I’m like that?” I turned my gaze to Victor. He seemed apprehensive.

“It’s different, I’m choosing this.” I corrected him.

“Because of me. I don’t want that. Do you want to take the job?”

I said nothing.

“Silence usually means yes.” He concluded. “And if you want to know my honest opinion, you’d be an idiot if you didn’t.” I rested my head on his chest, not wanting to talk. “I’m not Daniel. Don’t turn me into him. Take the job, if that’s what you really want.”

He was absolutely right. I was putting myself in the people-pleaser position, disregarding what I felt. I had accepted every kind of crap Daniel threw at me, just to keep the relationship going, and was now putting myself in the very same position. But Victor wasn’t Daniel.

“You’re right.” I said, after a while. “I should take it. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

“Finally.” Victor gave me a soft smile. “Welcome back.”

“I’m sorry.” I said, burying my face even deeper in his chest. “You are not like him. You are nothing like him. I know that, Victor, please don’t think that I don’t.”

“On a scale from one to ten, how stupid do you feel right now?” I sighed, not wanting to answer. I felt like a ten, of course. “Contrary to your ex, I want to see you succeed. I take pride in all your achievements, and I support anything that brings a smile to that silly little face. Got it?”

I beamed at him. God, I loved that man so much.

“Got it.”

[theculturedmarxist]

The Trump administration’s cynical announcement of a set of fraudulent “guidelines” that will serve to legitimize a rapid reopening of businesses and a forced return to work, in unsafe conditions, brings to an end any public pretense of a systematic and coordinated effort within the United States to prioritize health and to protect human life in combatting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The premature return to work that the Trump administration is orchestrating will lead to countless thousands of deaths, which could be prevented if a rigorous program of social distancing, supported by a massive program of testing and contact tracing, were implemented and sustained during the coming critical months.

There is absolutely no significant factual evidence, let alone scientific analysis, that can be cited to justify Trump’s announcement. Leading epidemiologists have already publicly challenged the validity of the statistical model being used by the White House. Referring to projections by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center told the medical journal STAT: “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool. That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

The pandemic is exacting a horrifying toll in human life. During the 24 hours that preceded Trump’s announcement, the COVID-19 coronavirus claimed 4,591 lives in the US. This number was more than a 75 percent increase over the 2,569 deaths during the previous 24-hour period. Over the past three days, the nationwide death toll has risen from 26,000 to over 36,000.

It is widely recognized that the official figure substantially undercounts the total number of deaths. The discoveries of bodies of elderly patients in two different nursing homes are only the most frightful examples of the gap between the official and real death toll. At this point, there is no reliable tally of people dying outside of hospitals, either of an undiagnosed COVID-19 infection or of causes related to the pandemic.

This is a global pandemic. There are, as of this writing, 2,216,000 cases and 151,000 deaths. These statistics are no more reliable than those provided for the United States. The previously reported figures are already being revised upward.

Trump’s blatant ignorance and gangster-like persona imparted to the announcement of the guidelines the sociopathic and generally putrescent atmosphere that pervades all his public appearances. But his policies are not simply those of an individual. The criminal form in which the policies are presented is determined by the economic and social interests of the class Trump serves.

For the financial-corporate oligarchy, the pandemic has been viewed, above all else, as an economic crisis. Its principal concern, from the start, was not the potential loss of life but the destabilization of the financial markets, the disruption of the process of profit extraction, and, of course, a substantial decline in the personal wealth of the members of the oligarchy.

While in February and March, the Trump administration publicly downplayed the seriousness of the crisis, officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve worked in close consultation with the major banks to structure and implement a multi-trillion-dollar bailout that would dwarf that which followed the financial collapse of 2008.

During the first three weeks of March, the news was dominated by the mounting international and national impact of the pandemic on public health. Public attention was focused on the drama of the cruise ships, the deaths in Italy and the initial reports of infection in Washington state. The urgent need to implement quarantines and shut down non-essential businesses was, despite Trump, widely acknowledged.

On March 19, the “CARES Act” was introduced in the Senate. The rapid passage of the bailout of the entire financial industry was taken for granted. Indeed, corporate executives, kept well informed by their political servants in Congress, took advantage of the plunge on Wall Street to buy back billions in company shares in anticipation of the massive rally that would follow the final passage of the CARES Act.

As soon as the CARES Act was introduced, the focus of the media began to shift toward an aggressive campaign for a return to work. There could be no delay. The massive increase in fictitious capital—more than $2 trillion in digitally created debt—was to be added to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet within less than a month. Additional trillions of dollars of debt will be added in the coming months. This represents, in the final analysis, claims on real value that must be satisfied through the exploitation of the labor power of the working class. The greater the debt incurred by the state-sanctioned creation of fictitious capital, the more urgent the demand for a rapid end to restraints on the process of profit extraction.

Thus, on March 22, even as the CARES Act was making its way toward passage, Thomas Friedman, the leading columnist of the New York Times, initiated the campaign for a return to work: “What the hell are we doing to ourselves? To our economy? To our next generation?” he shouted. “Is this cure—even for a short while—worse than the disease?”

The latter sentence provided the slogan for a campaign that became increasingly insistent in the weeks that followed. Arguments against excessive concern for the protection of human life became more and more brazen. Evading an examination of the socio-economic interests that had prevented an effective response to the pandemic, the Times began extolling the benefits of human suffering. “As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering,” opined columnist Emily Esfahani Smith on April 7. “That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer as well.”

On April 11, the Times dished up further musings on the benefits of suffering and death. Ross Douthat, in a column titled “The Pandemic and the Will of God,” invited readers to consider “how suffering fits into a providential plan.” Another essay, by Simon Critchley of the New School in New York City, proclaimed that “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die.” Pretentiously invoking the authority of Descartes, Boethius, More, Gramsci, Heidegger, Pascal, T.S. Eliot, Montaigne, Cicero, Dafoe, Camus, Kierkegaard and even Boccaccio—all within the confines of one newspaper column—this academic blowhard summed up the wisdom of the ages by advising his readers, “Facing death can be a key to our liberation and survival.”

The brutal practical agenda underlying these rather ethereal ruminations on suffering and death found blunt expression in the text of a round-table video conference organized by the Times. Participants included Zeke Emanuel, who is notorious for arguing that physicians should not seek to prolong life beyond the age of 75, and Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, whose advocacy of euthanasia for debilitated infants led to protests upon his appointment to the university post 20 years ago. The Times is entirely familiar with Singer’s views, as it wrote extensively two decades ago on the controversy generated by his arrival at Princeton.

The text of the video conference discussion was posted in the on-line edition of the New York Times Magazine on April 10, under the title “Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It? Five thinkers weigh moral choices in a crisis.”

In its introduction to the text, the Times asserted that it will become necessary to accept that there is a “trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy.” While in the short term the two goals may be aligned, in “the longer run, though, it’s important to acknowledge that a trade-off will emerge—and become more urgent in the coming months, as the economy slides deeper into recession.”

In its analysis of the “trade off,” the Times proceeds from the unquestioned premise that economic interests can only be those of the capitalist class. The profit system, private ownership of the productive forces and vast personal wealth are unalterable and eternal. Therefore, the “trade off” requires, inevitably, the sacrifice of human life, specifically, the lives of working people.

Singer declared that it is impossible to provide an “assistance package for all those people” for a year or 18 months. “That’s where we’ll get into saying, Yes, people will die if we open up, but the consequences of not opening up are so severe that maybe we’ve got to do it anyway.”

It goes without saying that none of the Times’ panelists called attention to the fact that Congress had just injected several trillion dollars into the coffers of the banks and corporations to save executives and shareholders. Nor was it noted that there are approximately 250 billionaires in the United States, who have a collective net worth of close to $9 trillion dollars. If this wealth were expropriated and distributed evenly among the 100 million poorest households in the United States, it would provide each household with a monthly income of $5,000 for 18 months!

Of course, the expropriation of this gargantuan sum of privately held wealth—which is entirely legitimate and necessary in the context of a massive social crisis—is not an option which the Times and its panelists are even prepared to consider as a theoretical possibility. But they are willing to accept the deaths of countless thousands as a matter of practical, i.e., capitalist necessity.

The subordination of life to the profit system is not confined to the United States. It is being proclaimed as a universal principle by the ruling elites in Europe. The Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the main voice of the Swiss ruling class, posted an article yesterday, that asks:

Do you want to live forever? This was the question Frederick the Great asked his soldiers at the Battle of Kolin in 1757, when they gave way to the enemy. One is inclined to ask the same question again in view of the disputable relationship between the corona sick and deceased on the one hand and the population as a whole and those suffering from common diseases on the other.

Some things here seem to be—literally—crazy. But also the collateral damage of disease with its wanton acceptance of the destruction of the economy provokes the whole question. Anyone who wants to put it drastically could say: We choose economic suicide to prevent individual elderly people from passing away a few years earlier than would be expected under normal circumstances.

The advocacy of a policy that accepts, and even advocates the culling of the aged and weak finds its most explicitly fascistic expression in a lengthy essay published on April 13 in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Titled “We need to talk about dying,” it is written by Bernard Gill, a sociologist who has been associated with the Green Party.

In a sweeping assault on the development of science, Gill denounces the “heroic narrative” that celebrated the great nineteenth century scientists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch “as heroes who made microbes visible, manageable and therefore controllable.” Gill protests:

In this story of creation, the microbes are aliens, which threaten us and therefore hold us down with power are best exterminated. “Our” lives against “their” lives—scientific knowledge and well-organized defensive struggle until the final victory of hygiene, which promises eternal life in a germ-free environment.

But this is a violation of nature. “Our life,” Gill declares, “is not conceivable without death.” But those who seek “to contain the infection with all means, also fights dying with all means.”

Gill advocates an acceptance of the natural spread of the pandemic—based on the program of “herd immunity”—which views “dying as a natural process that is individually painful for those involved, but from a distance makes room for new life.” With this approach, Gill argues, “we come to terms with the microbes in the knowledge that our life without death is unthinkable. We console ourselves with the prospect of new life.”

These are arguments with which Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who committed suicide 75 years ago this month in his Berlin bunker, would have readily agreed.

Deeply reactionary and inhuman ideas are wafting about Germany. But there, no less than in the United States, they arise not from the sick psychology of individuals, but from the needs of the capitalist system.

The same publication, Der Spiegel, that provides a forum for Gill, warns that the German auto industry cannot endure a prolonged shutdown.

The longer the corona crisis lasts, the louder industry calls will grow for politicians to finally name a date for the easing of the shutdowns in order to provide companies with some planning security…

The automotive industry in particular is facing a trial of strength for which there is no historical precedent. In order to prevent a collapse, companies need to get their shuttered factories opened again this spring.

Involved as well are critical issues of global competitiveness. Der Spiegel continues:

There are also geostrategic interests. Executives at companies in Europe want to strengthen the European market in order to establish it as a counterweight to the United States and China as economic powers...

This is all the more true given that China, where the coronavirus originated, appears to be emerging from the crisis faster than the rest of the world.

The COVID-19 coronavirus confronts mankind with not only a scientific-medical problem, but also a political and social challenge. The response of the ruling classes to the coronavirus pandemic reveals that its interests are incompatible with human progress and the very survival of mankind.

In its failure to prepare for the pandemic, its chaotic and disorganized response to the coronavirus once the outbreak began, its subordination of every social need to its own economic interests, its nationally-grounded sabotage of all possibility of a unified global response to the disease, and its open justification of the reactionary and neo-fascistic program of social euthanasia, the ruling class is demonstrating the necessity of socialism.

For humanity to survive, the subordination of society to the money mad capitalist elites must be ended.

David North

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Erica Heftmann breaks free from the control of the FFWPU / UC

Dark Side of the Moonies by Erica Heftmann  (Penguin Books 1982)

Erica Heftmann was born in Washington, DC, in 1952. She believed she was born again in 1974 to Korean parents — the Lord of the Second Advent, Reverend Moon, and his wife, Hak Ja Han. She was deprogrammed from the Moon cult and became interested in the issue and power of mind control. In the 1980s, because of her research and expertise in that field, she was in demand as an adviser to mental health professionals, clergy, legislators, educators, legal and medical practitioners, law enforcement agencies, mind control victims and their families throughout the world.

Contents

Part I – Heavenly Deception

Part II – Free Will But No Choice

Part III – Return to Reality

Part IV – From the Outside Looking In

1 The Technology of Mind Control 2 Deprogramming Therapy 3 Judiciary, Legislature and the ‘Cryptocracy’ 4 Critical Judgement

Notes

Dark Side of the Moonies is the disturbing account of one person who gave up her own mind, her whole life to a man she thought was the messiah.

Since her liberation from the Moonies, she has come to understand the power that was used to control her. In revealing the hidden life of one cult, Erica Heftmann exposes the startling force cults are exerting in society – and the grip they have on many people.

I was a Moonie. When I regained my mind and could look back at the horror of it, I realized that my freedom was conditional. I was haunted by the need to understand how and why I had been transformed into what I hated most. Now I would be an ex-Moonie. My innocence would never return. … I had to live with the ignorance and prejudice of a public that believes I was somehow pre-disposed to becoming a cult member while they are immune. People think cults are something to laugh at, groups of religious half-wits who would never have made it in life anyway and are better off where they are. I was there … to further incredible schemes of political and economic power.

I am setting out my story and my explanations of it. I do this for the sake of others who have suffered agonies so profound as to make my cult experience seem like a holiday. I wish that I could bring voice to the countless others... I write this for people under mind control, especially those I love who are mentioned in these pages. Do not be afraid to use your own minds; you need no greater masters.

In this era we are learning about the plight of the handicapped, the minorities, those who have been denied the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We must learn about all unfortunates because we are responsible for depriving them by our failure to listen, to understand, to allow them the right to help themselves. Those who are able and refuse to help are the true unfortunates. They do not know how precious life is.

Erica Heftmann 1981

page 1

Part I – Heavenly Deception

On the last day of 1974 I nudged my way through the bustle of downtown Los Angeles with a lot on my mind. It wasn’t only taking inventory of the past year. It was the pattern I saw emerging. Breaking away, testing new ground, retreating. Every path led to the same edge and, feeling I couldn’t make it across, I would go back to find another path. I had come to know the edge pretty well.

I was surprised to hear the stories that circulated about me because I considered my life to be too ordinary. My measuring standards were not set by my peers but by the characters that peopled my books and travels.

Adulthood was edging me away from my mother and an older sister I adored. My father and brother had removed themselves from the family during my late childhood but what was left was stable. Mom was always patient, comforting, totally involved in her two girls.

I had a short romance with formal education. After two terms at university I declared myself graduated, having learned everything I felt the institution had to teach me: how to find a book in the library and how to sit down to coffee with an interesting professor.

With full sails and no rudder, I went to Europe taking every precaution not to be a hippie, annoyed that of all the times I could have been born on this planet I had to co-exist with a counter-culture that popularized doing one’s own thing. I picked my way carefully to avoid the throngs of stereotyped individuals who faced me at every turn. …

My mother was not easy to rebel against because I felt she was usually right. How could I break away and establish my own identity if there was no risk involved? She was always there to fall back on, to soften the blows. … Maybe you’ve been on your own for a few years but the world has just been your playground.

Wait a minute. Don’t be that hard on yourself. Someone puts you on a speck of cosmic dust whirling through space without asking your permission and then just as rudely and abruptly and inevitably takes you away. While you’re here you’re given a set of problems and a set of rules for solving them. Like someone leaving a kid to amuse himself with square pegs and round holes. ’Bye kid, see you in eighty or ninety years. No, Erica, I don’t blame you one bit for stepping back to take a look at it all. People are manipulating and killing each other and for what? Do they even enjoy the spoils of their exploits? Why waste your life trying to set things up for them to destroy when you have enough sense to realize that there’s something else in this existence to do?

Lonely, confused and worried about fulfilling my potential, I had escaped the forced gaiety of the office New Year’s party. Everyone making crass jokes about resolutions and getting drunk to forget them.

On the last working day of the year, all the desk calendars in the office buildings were collected and released into the wind from the roofs. They fluttered down like ticker tape. Now as I walked the last couple of blocks to the bus stop, I stared at them cluttering the pavement. Some pages had little notes jotted on them. OCTOBER 15/meet Dave for lunch. Or 2:00/REGIONAL MEETING. Giving in to a wave of melancholy, I couldn’t help but see the metaphor days lying in the gutter, accumulated so quickly and then forgotten.

A big commuter bus moved away from the kerb and blasted a clump of pages into an open drain with its exhaust. So it’s come to this, has it, I tried joking with myself.

I looked up about the same moment that I felt someone gazing at me. A pair of blue eyes much like my own. A young woman just a few paces away was watching me. She was wholesome looking, rather tall, and had a short, dark-haired young man with her.

In my memory, it is etched that I was the one to start the conversation but I know that this is not the way it happened. There was just something so familiar and so welcoming in her eyes that I felt myself reaching out to make the first move.

All I needed for an introduction was to know that they were foreigners. How well I remembered the feeling of being a newcomer to a city and how comforting it was when strangers had stopped and talked with me.

The girl’s name was Ingrid and she was from Switzerland. The one she towered over was Antonio, a Peruvian. I asked how such an unlikely combination had met They explained that they were touring with an organization called International One World Crusade. This was their last stop in America and within a week they would push on to Japan.

Ingrid had spent all of her time in Los Angeles cooped up in the kitchen cooking for the others. On her first opportunity to get out and see the sights, she was delighted to meet someone. They chatted on. Out of the corner of my eye I was searching for a coffee shop we could dive into. I made the suggestion. It was one of those magical meetings that happens when one travels and I could tell the feelings were shared all around. My bus didn’t stop running for a few hours.

‘We’d love to,’ Ingrid said, ‘But we are just on our way back for an evening meeting. Would you like to walk with us? You could see our headquarters office and meet some of the others.’

Something flickered in me, making me want to bolt, no matter how friendly they were. Something about not being on neutral turf. I noticed it at the same time I realized that I was already walking with them in their direction. …

page 187

Part III Return to Reality

Up late this morning. At 6.00 I should already be in the lodge with Paul to correct reflection books. Paul is the best assistant I’ve ever had and this is by far the most successful workshop since the old days with Alex. Yesterday Mr Kadachi gave the VOC lecture so that we could have some time to catch up on our reports but we scrambled up onto the roof of the lodge to talk instead.

I think it is important to develop a good subject-object Foundation for the Abel position we hold collectively. …

Paul is still having Chapter Two problems about his old girlfriend. I am glad he is confiding in me. I remember all the times Kathy and I kept him away from Lisa and occupied when the centres used to come up for weekend workshop. I thought Lisa’s transfer to MFT would solve a lot. They were both trying hard to overcome and by all external appearances they had but now I’m finding out that Paul is entertaining hopes of being blessed with her. It isn’t good to think about the Blessing, especially trying to second-guess Father. Paul keeps insisting that Spirit World prepared them for the Family because they had been sweethearts since high school. . He is suffering so much and so much wants to please Heavenly Father.

We must be a good combination because we’ve been having such fantastic results with our workshops. We work as a unit. Father was right that if you serve someone well enough, you make him dependent on you. He opens up to you and gradually the power shifts its balance point. If you are a good object, it is much more important than being a mediocre subject. …

I have finally learned how to handle sleep. Imagine how much time is wasted in the Fallen World. Midnight is just the beginning of the evening for me. Paul covered for me for fifteen minutes yesterday during discussion and made me sleep. On the way down the hill with the class, he whistled for me when they passed the dorm and I was out the back way and down to the lodge before them. I had only had forty-five minutes of sleep the night before and during the past weeks it has been usually two hours, sometimes three. That fifteen minutes was like a whole night I got up completely refreshed. I think I’ve finally broken through.

I must apologize to Mr Kadachi. I was so upset with him because he slept during the day and pulled staff meetings as late as 3.30 in the morning — never before 2.00. The meetings were late only because he was reading or playing with his lizards. When he had us as a captive audience he would put off staff matters and expound on some recent theory about the Restoration. I contradicted one of his theories and still feel horrible about it but it did bring the meeting to a quick close. No one else would dare stand up to Kadachi-san. …

The day sailed by with its own effortless momentum. In the afternoon I was called into the kitchen for a phone call. Mr Kadachi was pacing. I picked up the receiver.

‘Erica? I was afraid I wouldn’t get through to you. They gave me the usual runaround.’

‘Well, Mom, sometimes I’m busy and can’t get to the phone.’

‘Too busy to take a call from me?’

I rolled my eyes up. How would she like it if I interrupted her at work?

‘I’m here in San Bernardino and I hope you won’t give me some story about being too busy to see me today. We have a date, you know.’

Did we? It seemed that I was always trying to get out of some engagement and I kept postponing these visits with promises. Guess she finally caught up with me. Kadachi was at my side poking around in his lizardarium. I placed my hand over the receiver.

‘She says she’s in San Bernardino and wants to see me today.’

‘You have a workshop to look after. Tell her to make it another time.’

I uncovered the receiver. ‘I have a workshop to look after. Could we make it another time?’

‘Erica, I’ve driven all this way.’ She sounded a bit frantic. ‘Are you going to make me turn around and go back? I’m leaving for New York tomorrow, remember, and I want to see you before I go.’

‘She’s insisting. She says she’s driven all this way and wants to know if I’m going to make her turn around and go back. She’s leaving for New York tomorrow.’

Kadachi gave me a look that revealed nothing and turned back to his lizards. How could I be so weak as to have to bother him and get him to tell me what to do?

‘Look, Ma, I’m going to have to go now. My class is starting.’

Click

I was hardly out the door when the phone rang again. It took three calls before I was reluctantly given permission to go. I wasn’t pressuring either side, they just fought it out with me as the transmitter of information. The condition was that I be back for evening discussion. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world anyway.

By the time she and my step-father Chuck arrived, I was bathed and had styled my hair with a blow-dryer I found in the sisters’ cabin. I also found a ‘good’ set of clothes I’d never seen before. They fit and I looked very nice when I sized myself up in the mirror.

I ran down the steps of the lodge to meet them. The guard at the gate had already informed me of their arrival. After quick hellos I found myself in an argument. I wanted them to come inside and meet my friends. They replied flatly that they were not interested in coming in, only in seeing me.

‘You say you’re interested in what I’m doing. How are you ever going to find out if you don’t see for yourselves? You just keep reading those negative articles.’

They could hardly conceal their discomfort and my mother couldn’t pass the opportunity for some hostile remarks so I decided that it was better to leave right away. Then, at least, I could return earlier. Paul was thrilled about taking over for a while and I was looking forward to the meal so it wasn’t a bad arrangement after all. I told them to wait a moment on the landing. I searched for Kadachi to say goodbye. His wife told me he had locked himself in his room at his cabin. I would probably return before he emerged from his meditation.

I slid in the front seat between my parents and chattered the whole way down the mountain. I told them about Roy’s close scrape with his parents. They had tried to kidnap him but he escaped. He was sorry for hurting his father in the tussle on the ground but not sorry enough to speak with them. I usually handled Roy’s calls. They simply would not understand that he had been transferred. They thought we were hiding him. No one at camp even knew where he had been transferred to.

‘Imagine parents trying to do something like that to their own child!’ I gasped.

Chuck dropped us off at a small restaurant in town while he went to see about getting something fixed on the car. I ordered a large meal and wolfed it down. Mom didn’t touch what she had ordered. She said that she was coming down with flu and had lost her appetite. If my stomach had been able to stretch, I would’ve eaten her meal as well. We didn’t talk much. These days we had little in common. I couldn’t see the point in pretending to be interested in the Fallen World and she refused to take an interest in the Restoration. She kept glancing at her watch, obviously worried about Chuck taking so long.

When he arrived, he said he wasn’t hungry either and they wanted to beat the traffic back to town. They still had to pack for their trip. He hastily paid the bill and we went out to the car. The lot was dark and the car was at the rear of the building. I instinctively sized up the lot for fundraising. Hard habit to get over. Good thing I was going back to camp instead of out blitzing.

I was grabbed from behind and thrown forward. It happened so quickly that I was in the back seat between Chuck and a strange man before I caught my breath. My mind jammed. My mother was in the driver’s seat revving the engine and another person sat in the front seat on the passenger’s side. We took off as the doors were being pulled closed.

It was several moments before I could speak. My mind snapped into the witnessing mode. I politely extended my hand to the man on my right to introduce myself.

‘How do you do? My name is Erica.’

He reached under the seat and brought out a bouquet of flowers. Presenting them, he said, ‘Very well, thanks. My name is Dana. Here, these are for you.’

Dana! I couldn’t believe it. Dana Stevens? It must have been ten years since I’d seen him — he’d been living in Paris for that long. He was a dear friend of the family, someone I had been infatuated with as a child. Mom had told me that he had come back a few weeks before to get married.

I could not recognize him in the dark but there was no mistaking his style. I looked at the person in the front seat. A woman. She must be his new wife.

‘Mrs Stevens, do you mind if I embrace your husband?’ I threw my arms around Dana’s neck. It was totally unprincipled but my mind was jilted and I was too happy to see him to care about Principle for that moment.

My mother had the wheel gripped firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Erica. You didn’t show up at Dana’s wedding so we’re going to have another reception party now just for you.’ I believed her even though I still felt a panic. I had no time to be part of a practical joke. They would worry back at camp, especially Kadachi. I pleaded for her to stop and let me phone them at least. My mother could always out-insist me, especially when I became hysterical. I thought of leaping from the car, disregarding the danger, but I was flanked by two strong men. Roy had told everyone to carry matches with them so they could set fire to the place if anyone ever took them by force. A lot of good that would have done me. I was no longer in the mood for conversation and numbly rode the rest of the way in silence. My mind was blank as if I had been unplugged.

We pulled off the freeway somewhere in Long Beach and, after circling around some residential streets, pulled up at a modest house with several cars parked in the driveway. They surrounded me on the few steps into the house and then, with some other people, formed a corridor so that I had no choice but to go past them to the rear of the house. I didn’t know how many people were in the house or who they were. It didn’t look like a party.

I entered a small bedroom at the end of the hall. The room was tiny, carpeted and bare except for a blanket and a pillow. There was a piece of plywood covering the one small window. Through my mind flashed the story of The Collector. It was clear to me that I was going to be held prisoner for someone’s pleasure but I had no idea for what purpose.

The sight of the blanket and pillow made my heart stop. I knew this was the end of the line. When I looked up I saw half a dozen strangers standing around me. The door was shut. It was explained to me that I would have to speak with these people. Disbelief clogged my mind. They wanted to talk to me about the Movement. How could they talk to me about something they knew nothing about? I understood then that I would stay in that room until I converted them all or died — there would be no way to escape unless I could befriend one of them and gain sympathy to be set free. I wondered how that tiny room would look after the first year. I would know every crack on the ceiling, every sound from the outside. I looked for Dana. Surely he would help.

‘Can I see Dana please?’

‘I’ll see if I can find him for you. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’ It was a woman who spoke. She was thirty-ish, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She looked nervous, which gave me confidence. She left the room and two or three of the others trailed out with her.

Dana appeared at the door. His shirt was unbuttoned and he had a beer in his hand. He looked at me with mild surprise as if he couldn’t fathom why I might want to speak with him.

‘Dana, what do you think you’re going to prove with this? I’m going to be missed at camp by people who care about me. What sort of a kangaroo court do you intend to hold? You’re holding me prisoner. You can’t do that.’

Spectacularly unimpressed with my plea to his sense of justice, he suppressed a belch and scratched his chest. ‘I’m not the one who made the decision, you know. Your mother wants you here. It can’t hurt to listen.’

‘Listen? Under these conditions? Why didn’t you just arrange to have these people, whoever they are, come and meet me in a coffee shop somewhere? I would discuss anything with anyone at any time. That’s my job.’

‘Well, your anywhere and anytime and anyone seems to be here and now with these folks, doesn’t it?’

The years had changed him. I remembered the late-night talks, how, he had made my head spin with his unconventional ideas. He was the one who first infected me with the idea of breaking free. Now he had sold out like the rest of them, even getting a beer belly. There would be no point in talking to my mother. I knew how she was once she made up her mind about something. I asked to see Chuck. I knew he would not be able to conceal anything. His face always gave him away. He had always listened to my ideas with endless patience and took my troubles to heart. He supported and nurtured my individualism with pride, even the things that must have been hard to swallow. Surely he would understand me now. Yet when he came in and sat in the same place that Dana had been sitting, I wondered if I was going to come up against the same stone wall. Maybe they had some kind of routine worked out. We were no longer on the same team. God had divided us.

He didn’t give me the chance to wonder long. He took me in his arms. ‘We had to do this, honey.’ His voice broke and he cried, unable to speak for a while. ‘It’s a horrible thing to have to see you here like this. We want you to be free. I know that’s a hard thing to understand, that we’ve locked you up to free your mind. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t love you. All we want you to do is to listen to these people. They’re good people, honey, don’t be afraid. You know your mom would never let anyone hurt you. That’s why she wants you away from that group. We miss our girl — the one who’s so free, the one who was never afraid to stand up for what she believed.’

Now it was my turn to force back the tears so I could speak.

‘Will you stay with me?’ I was terrified of the thought of them leaving the next day for New York.

‘Of course we’ll stay with you.’ It was my mother. She must have been listening at the door. I didn’t hear her come in.

‘You aren’t going to New York?’

‘No, that was just a story to get you to come with us. We were so afraid that you would cancel again and now that we brought Sara out here —’

‘Sara? Is she that lady? The one in the shorts.’

My mother held a handkerchief for me to blow my nose as she had done when I was a child. ‘Now the other side, blow hard, you can do better than that.’ I laughed through the tears until Sara walked in with some others and my panic returned.

I decided to size up my captors. Mom and Chuck left the room. The others sat around me in a semi-circle. Danny had been in the Children of God. He said he’d been deprogrammed by Sara.

Doug had been in the Family. As soon as I learned this I tried to see the brother in him. Sometimes he revealed it but he had been in the Fallen World too long. The brother in him was only a flicker. Perhaps he would be the one I would befriend if I could convince him of Principle. He could help me escape back to Father. Would that make him my spiritual son? He did not want to talk about his spiritual parents or his missions. He said they were not important. What else could there be to talk about if we were going to talk about the Family?

Jill had been in the Family too, but not long enough to know very much.

I didn’t know quite what to make of Sara. She seemed to try to blend into the background and quite succeeded — all but those eyes of hers. Every time she caught my glance she pinned me to the spot.

Something was rattling around loose in my mind trying to find where it belonged. Maybe my whole mind was rattling around loose. I felt fatalistic — the controls were jammed on automatic pilot I felt almost... well, sportive, gay... having the burden of the destiny of mankind lifted from me temporarily. The ball was for once in somebody else’s court. A funny thought lifted the corners of my mouth. Old girl, you only get kidnapped once in life, that is, unless you’re terribly unlucky. You may as well have a good time. After all, you’ve got a captive audience.

I made myself comfortable. ‘It looks like we’ll be here for a while,’ I remarked breezily. ‘If you want to do your job properly, you’ll need some background information on me. I guess I’d better tell you about myself.’

Danny stretched out and groaned, then unclasped his hands from behind his neck and drew himself up on one elbow. ‘The only thing we need to know about you is already obvious. You’re brainwashed.’

‘You watch too many movies. Who do you think you are, Clint Eastwood? Where did you get this brainwashing stuff?’

‘Well, Queen-for-a-Day, what happened to your humility, love, understanding for mankind and all of that? If you were a real disciple of Christ, you’d be praying for me and setting a good example. I guess your dignity and integrity only work when you’re plugged into your little messiah.’

Doug shot him a look to keep quiet. Interesting. They were not united so I was bound to triumph. First rule of Principle. Unity forms the Foundation. I had the knowledge of Principle on my side, they had nothing, not even unity. Evidently Doug remembered something of it in trying to keep Danny in line.

Danny rolled onto his back and addressed the ceiling. ‘All right, go ahead and give us your testimony. I probably know it word-for-word already. I’ve heard enough of them and they’re all the same. Don’t tell me, let me guess — you went to India, came back and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, had an abortion, became a militant feminist —’

Doug cut in, ‘Don’t mind him. Sure, I want to hear your story. It’s hard to be a Moonie. You wouldn’t be where you are unless you were a good person but don’t tell me that you joined because you realized it was the truth. None of us joined because we understood what they were teaching us.’

I began my story. To my surprise, it didn’t come out like I had planned it. It wasn’t my usual testimony. I told them about my life before, about the things I had loved and believed, things I had forgotten until then. I must have talked for two hours. Sara was pacing outside. Jill left for a while and when she came back in she asked me if I wanted anything to eat.

‘No thanks,’ I answered. ‘I had dinner with my mother.’ My mind drifted back to the camp for a moment. It seemed universes away. I wondered where I was. Whose house was this?

‘Is this Sara’s house?’

‘No,’ Jill answered. ‘It belongs to a woman named Alice.’

‘Can I see her?’

A woman was brought to the door. She hesitated before coming in. She was a friendly looking, middle-aged lady, the kind I’d seen by the hundreds on the lots, motherly, middle-class. I thanked her for letting us use her house. It seemed to me that it must have been a great inconvenience to have so many people in her home for such a long time. I indicated the boarded window. I was sorry for my being the cause of her house being turned upside-down. Tears formed in her eyes.

‘Honey, your parents love you very much. Everyone here is very concerned for you. We all want the best for you. Everything will turn out all right.’ She hesitated and phrased her question shyly. Jill says that you don’t want anything to eat. Can I bring you something else? Something to drink? How about a glass of warm milk?’

Warm milk, yech. I always hated it and gagged on it but I didn’t want to refuse her hospitality. For her sake I gratefully accepted. I was glad I did when I saw the look on her face. She couldn’t have been more happy if I’d given her a million dollars.

While she was fetching the milk, the conversation turned away from me and the kids talked among themselves. I couldn’t hate them. I wished that I could have joined in the conversation but it was as if they were speaking another language, things I hadn’t any knowledge of. Danny was sprawled out comfortably. Jill was teasing him and heaved the pillow at him. He propped himself up with it and turned to me.

‘So, this Moon is the messiah, eh?’

The devil himself couldn’t have been more satanic. What a way to talk about Father! It slashed my heart to hear him referred to as ‘Moon’. I would have to educate this guy if we were going to be able to talk at all. He would have to learn to call him Reverend Moon.

‘History will show if he is the messiah or not Reverend Moon has —’

‘I know, he has the potential of becoming the messiah but now he is in the John the Baptist position. I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you just come out and say it. It will save us a good twenty-four hours. Don’t give me all the PR lines. I know you believe he’s the messiah.’

‘Well, I have to define what messiah means.’

‘Yeah, he has to be born in Korea between certain years — where’d you get all this information anyway? I could tell you that the messiah has to be 5’5”, have blue eyes and be born in Los Angeles in 1952. How’s that grab ya?’

‘God has revealed certain things to me.’

‘What’d He do, call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’

‘Don’t try to get off the subject by attacking me. Yes, I believe in God but my God doesn’t go around talking to me. Just answer a simple question: did God call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Does that mean no?’

‘No, God did not call me on the phone. There, are you satisfied?’

‘Did He send you a telegram?’

Doug broke in. ‘What he means is how does God communicate with you. You said that God revealed certain things to you. How did you receive them?’

How did I receive them? I just knew. ‘I just knew.’

‘Maybe you just knew wrong?’

‘Divine Principle clearly outlines the qualifications for the messiah.’

‘Great, who wrote the Divine Principle?’

‘It was revealed by God.’

Doug looked at Danny. ‘You getting dizzy yet? I told you the Moonies have everything tied up and you can go round and round for ages without getting anywhere.’

Danny sat up and looked at me. ‘It’s no different than my group. We believed our leader was the end-time prophet Why? Because his doctrine said so. I thought God revealed it to me too.’

‘Well, you were misled. Divine Principle talks about that. You were in a cult’

‘And you are in one.’

Alice came in with the milk and my mother trailed in after her.

‘Are you getting sleepy? I brought you some things to sleep in.’ She produced a nightgown and slippers. My eyes popped out of my head. A nightgown no one had worn before. It was so beautiful, so elegant, and slippers. I couldn’t wait to put them on.

‘Where can I change?’ Surely I wasn’t expected to change in front of the men. I had heard that men in deprogrammings humiliated and raped sisters.

Danny and Doug stood to leave.

‘Good-night, Brothers.’

Doug said good-night but Danny couldn’t resist getting in one last little dig. ‘In case you didn’t know, we are not biologically related. Brothers is also not a common slang term — it’s a Moonie word. The sooner you stop talking like a Moonie, the sooner you’ll stop thinking like one. Do me a favour, hey? Every time you use a Moonie word and I stop you, try substituting an English word.’

‘Okay, good-night, Clint Eastwood. How’s that?’

He tossed the pillow at me.

Sara and I were alone. She was cautious but wanted to know how I felt, what I needed, what my fears and anticipations were. There was nothing about her or any of the others that would cause me to distrust them. I could see that they were sweet and honest people, just misled and being used by satanic forces. Mostly, my mind was on sleep. The opportunity to sleep away from masses of people, in clean bedding, in a quiet house, in my own nightdress, close to my parents — it was too much of a luxury to put off.

Sara asked if I would mind if she and Jill slept in the room with me. I laughed. Would I mind having only two sisters in the room with me? I was under the covers in a flash and the light was turned out. They left the door ajar. They were going to sit in the kitchen for a while and come to sleep later. Mom came in to say good-night. I made her promise me one last time that she would not leave for New York that she would be there when I awoke in the morning. I don’t remember if she left before I fell asleep.

With the window boarded over and no sunlight, I had no idea what time it was. By habit, I was completely awake. From totally off to totally on in a millisecond. I tried to fall asleep again but it was useless. I’d have to get up sometime and face the music. This was Sunday. I had probably missed Pledge. I couldn’t muster my thoughts to say a proper Pledge but I started in on a short prayer. Security and anxiety were marbled in my heart As long as we talked about Principle, I would be safe. They were not united and they did not have God’s truth. There was no way they could harm me. It would just be a matter of time. Sara came in.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you. I just came in to find my brush.’

‘It’s okay, I just woke up before you came in. What time is it anyway?’

‘Ten o’clock. Bet you’ve never had such a good sleep in the cult.’

Cult! That word hurled frustration, fear and anger at me. I stood up quickly and began to fold my bedding.

‘You want to take a shower?’

‘Yes, thank you. If I may.’

Sara showed me across the hall. What a luxurious bathroom. I felt like a princess. A fresh set of towels were set out for me and everything was spotless. A new toothbrush and a new tube of toothpaste, a hairbrush, even some cosmetics. I turned the shower on full blast. Sara yelled through the door.

‘There’s plenty of hot water. Let’s forget about the cold shower conditions, okay?’

‘Okay!’ How did she know about conditions? She obviously didn’t know very much. I couldn’t set a condition without clearing it with a central figure anyway. I stepped into the shower. Ah, I would have a hard time stepping out again. I watched the steam escape through a small window. I remembered in The Collector that the woman had thrown a note out the window in hopes that someone would pass by and read it. Maybe I could do that. But what good would it do? I was in the Fallen World now. Even if I could squeeze out the window and run away, to the police maybe, they’d just bring me back here. In Satan’s world who would help a Family member? I would have to work it another way. I didn’t have enough mental power to consider the future anyway. It was all I could do to concentrate on the present I was being bombarded with new-old sensations, the things in the bathroom, the cleanliness, the newness, the freshness, the comfort and security. I was reluctant to turn off the shower. My mother came in and talked to me through the shower door. She wanted to know if I needed shampoo or anything else. If nothing else, it was overwhelming to be with her in circumstances that seemed so normal. It was like being on holiday. Maybe I could postpone the inevitable confrontation. I felt a surge of energy and wanted to crow with pleasure. Sleeping until ten o’clock!

Mom brought me some clothes to change into, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It felt deliciously wonderful and forbidden to wear them. I asked permission to keep the slippers on. She gave me a queer look

The bedding was put away and the room was bare again but for one blanket and a pillow. As I dried my hair with a towel, Danny asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I wasn’t in the mood for eating. We decided on coffee.

He brought it in and went out again for his Bible. Doug carried in a small case of papers. They wanted to talk about fundraising. Fair enough. Doug had been on MFT. I couldn’t understand why he asked me questions he already knew the answers to — questions about the Economic Restoration. It was as boring as giving lecture to answer him.

They couldn’t do anything to dislodge the truth. After all, they had nothing better to offer. Nothing better than beer, cigarettes, divorce — the Fallen World. I remembered how Larry had told me that even if God did not exist and if Father wasn’t the messiah, the gathering of dedicated people giving endlessly of themselves was bound to be the best thing yet.

‘Why do you lie on the streets when you beg money from people?’ Sara entered into our discussion.

‘I don’t lie. I never did. Lie about what?’

‘Lie about where the money was going.’

‘Everyone knew I was from the Unification Church. We even wore —’

‘— badges issued by President Salonen,’ Doug. ‘But most people didn’t understand that you were a Moonie. If they ask you outright if you are raising money for Reverend Moon, you deny it, don’t you?’

‘Never! I’m proud of Father. Why would I conceal the truth?’

‘You lied to Tom Evans.’ Now my mother. Okay, I made a sales pitch in the gallery of someone who worked with my mother and by the time I realized who he was I couldn’t retract what I had said.

‘Okay, so I lied once.’

‘Once!’ Everyone cried out in unison.

I was not hurt for myself. I was trying to shield Father from their attack. Nothing they could say or do to me would worry me, but they must not blaspheme.

Sara said, You don’t even know when you’re lying and when you’re not. You weren’t like that before. Somebody taught you a little trick called Heavenly Deception.’ Danny chimed in, Yeah, we did the same thing in the Children of God but we called it Spoiling Egypt.’

Sara continued ‘And in Scientology they call it Fair Game and in the Divine Light Mission they call it something else and I call it a con game. How could you tell people the truth about where the money was going when you don’t even know yourself? What about your little 40-day condition that was extended? Where did that money go?’

How did she know about that? I told her what I had found out. The money went to buy some land.

‘That land was already paid for, honey. The money you raised went straight into Moon’s pocket for some little private business deals. Wake up, Erica, you’ve been had.’

I turned to Doug. ‘You know the importance of fundraising. It is to pay indemnity. We have to restore tribal, national and other levels.’

Doug turned to his case of papers and fished out a page from Master Speaks. He read to me from it that Father said all of that indemnity was paid already. I demanded to see the page. Master Speaks. The first thing that hit me seeing it was the format of the page. The familiarity of it energized me. He snatched it back.

‘Don’t space out on me. I know you are visually programmed. The sight of the thing reinforces your programming. Just read these lines.’

I read them. How did I know the paper wasn’t a forgery. ‘Mother, how could you want me to believe people as low as these. Look at Sara. Look at the way she’s dressed, the way she speaks.’ Sara stiffened.

‘Please don’t smoke in front of me either,’ I demanded. How satanic to fill the room with smoke. She didn’t say a word, just stubbed out her cigarette and put the ashtray outside the door.

‘I won’t smoke in front of you if it bothers you but I’ll tell you this, you spoiled brat, it’s not the smoke that bothers you. It’s this holier-than-thou little goodie-two-shoes routine of yours. Why don’t you come back down to earth with the rest of us mortals. You can’t even answer simple questions. How thin your perfection is when you’re outside your self-centred cult. You think you’ve become more God-like? Is God so arrogant? You think you’re saving the world with Moon’s money? What do you know about responsibility? Do you tend the sick, the poor, do you ever pay income tax?’

‘I’m a missionary without income. I have nothing to pay tax on.’

‘Maybe, but you have to file every year with the government anyway. When was the last time you filed?’

‘Okay, so I didn’t file last year, big deal.’

The morning dragged on. They kept talking from man’s point-of-view. I kept talking from God’s point-of-view.

We broke for lunch and, while we ate at least, the crew eased up on me. As soon as I put my plate down, Danny looked over at me through narrowed eyes.

‘So, Moon’s still the messiah, huh?’

I had to fight to keep the food from coming back up. There was just no point going on like this. We could discuss until Satan’s restoration and they still wouldn’t make sense.

‘You can say what you want but you’ll never make me lose my love for Father.’

‘Erica, when we point things out, just assess them as they are, at face value. If the Bible says one thing and Doctrine X contradicts it, then that doctrine is wrong if it claims to be harmonious with the Bible. You click off when anything threatens Moon. You have no ego, no mind of your own. You’ve got two possibilities: a) Moon is the messiah, b) Moon is not the messiah. If it helps you, let’s not say Moon, we’ll say Mr X instead. Now, he’s either the messiah or he’s not. He can’t sort of be the messiah, agreed?’

It took us a long time to get on equal footing. Finally he got me to accept, for the sake of argument, the hypothetical.

‘If he is the messiah, we can all pack up and go home. If he’s not the messiah and has claimed to be, then what is he?’

I couldn’t fill in the blank.

‘If he’s not the messiah and he’s claimed to be, then he’s a fraud. Now, how can we determine if he is or not? Glad you asked that question, folks. Let’s make it really easy on him and not even use the acid test. We’ll just let him cut his own throat. He says that God is eternal, absolute and unchanging, further that he is the second Christ. It follows, seeing as God doesn’t change His mind, Moon must jive with what the first Christ said about Christ’s mission.’

This was not so difficult to accept as the initial point. Once he got rolling, I could follow him after a fashion. As soon as he pulled out the Bible to substantiate what he said, to prove that Jesus and Father did not agree, I was hopelessly lost again. Every time he made a point, I would do a quick scan through Purpose/Fall/Restoration.

I was aware of the binary functioning of my brain. Each question entered and was shuffled off down yes/no corridors until it met the proper answer or a dead end. Something like a pinball machine. I worked the flippers like mad but the balls just rolled down the chute. Danny would send the ball shooting out again and I made the same scan through Principle with the same result. Sometimes a phantom answer would appear but it would vanish either before or after the question passed through. I couldn’t hold both a question that didn’t compute and a phantom answer that didn’t compute. One of them faded as I concentrated on the other.

Danny was well versed in the Bible. If only Kadachi or Alex could have been with me. Surely they would know the answers. There had to be Divine Principle reasons why the Bible was wrong, I just didn’t know them. After a while my attention scattered. When we talked about the Family, I felt my mind become agile again but as soon as Danny started up with his Bible, my brain felt like cotton and my eyelids started to droop.

Some people came in the room quietly like they were entering a theatre after the show had started. I felt like I was on the operating table in an arena for medical students. Bright lights and someone saying, ‘Here we see the soul exposed, badly lacerated. The heart is bleeding and the mind is twisted. Some of this will be corrected through surgery but the patient will probably never be healthy again.’

One of the visitors, a middle-aged man with a kind face picked up Danny’s Bible and leafed through it. I braced myself for a raging born-again argument ‘You believe you’re doing God’s will, don’t you?’ Probably next he was going to ask me if I knew God’s will by telephone or telegram. I set my jaw. It’s too long a story to explain — if I told you that I know God when I see Father, you’d never understand.

‘You’d do whatever Moon asked you to, wouldn’t you?’ ‘He would never ask me to do anything that was not the will of God.’

‘What if he asked you to kill your mother?’

‘ — ’

‘Why don’t you answer me?’

‘ — ’

‘Forget about answering that question. Your silence tells me what I really wanted to know: you actually have to sit and think about whether or not you’d kill your mother if a man told you to. A man, Erica, not a god, and you are under his control.’

He snatched up the Bible. The sound of the turning pages was like trees falling in the forest.

‘“If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The Bible says to help the poor, to help other people. Jesus didn’t tell his followers to give Him their possessions. He told them to distribute them among the needy. Do you believe that is a good thing to do?’

I nodded.

‘Well, then, that makes you better than True Father, doesn’t it? You want to give to the poor and your messiah only wants to take everything for himself.’

I was too weary to begin to explain to him the meaning of the Economic Restoration. When Jesus was on earth, it was the mission of the messiah to serve mankind. For the Second Coming, it became the duty of mankind to serve the messiah.

He wouldn’t let go of that point. That makes you a better person than your Master of the Universe, doesn’t it?

‘You have more compassion than he does. You don’t see anything wrong with him keeping everything for himself?’

I thought back to Father’s visit that had left me so desolated. I remembered that the brothers and sisters from the centres drove through the night to get back to their centres and sleep only an hour or two before having to drive back for Father’s morning address. Meanwhile, Father was sleeping in silk sheets. He could have at least let them sleep in the garage. One driver fell asleep and his van had gotten into an accident.

I began to cry. The man holding the Bible was looking at me waiting for an answer. I couldn’t speak. He put the Bible down and cradled me. So long I had been giving, giving, giving everything I had. He rocked me gently and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re right here. Don’t be afraid. We’re all going to see you through this, doll.’ He didn’t try to hush me, he just let me cry. I tried picturing True Father in my mind but I could not see him comforting me like this. I couldn’t believe that even in the Spirit World he was beside me. All I knew was the here-and-now of things and their realness. Fear gripped me — so this is how Satan would win me — with confusion, with trying to soften the warrior in me.

I heard myself make the man promise he would come back the following day. When he went to the door, I got up and extended my hand, Moonie-style, to shake hands with him. He grabbed me in a bear hug and ruffled my hair, ‘You’re gonna be all right, kid.’

With the others, discussions went on without either side gaining. I retreated under the blanket. Only my head showed, propped on the pillow. Doug and Sara and Jill continued. They would go through a point and ask me to clarify my side of it. I had just not studied enough, not read enough Master Speaks. There were answers to these things but I did not know them. The things they asked me didn’t matter. I believed in Father.

Sara asked me, ‘What I want to know is why you need so much proof to get out of the group. Lord knows you didn’t need any proof to get into it If I ask you if two plus two is five, do you need to look it up? No! You just use the common sense you had as a child. So why, if I show you things that don’t add up by Moon’s system, can’t you see it?’

Danny came over and ripped the blanket off me. ‘It’s the dead of summer, you know. The rest of us are sweating. What are you, a foetus? Sit up and join the human race.’

I grabbed the corner of the blanket and we each tugged our end of it. ‘Well, I see you have enough strength to fight for your baby blanket, don’t you have enough strength to fight for your mind? We’ve been sitting here hour after hour force-feeding you. Where’s your interest? Some disciple you are. Let’s assume that Moon is the messiah and we’re satanic. Don’t you have a lot to learn from us? You should be picking our brains for all we’ve got, go back to your cult and show them the blueprint of the opposition. You’re a lousy Moonie, I’ll say, and you’re not much of a human being. Your brain doesn’t work. We ask a simple question and you either space out or tell us something Moon said. I think we might as well just cover you up with this blanket and stick you six feet under, babe.’

He smiled. ‘But it’d be a shame, ’cause I know you’re in there, somewhere. I know because I’ve been through it. I’m only tough on you because someone’s gotta do it, otherwise we’d sit here playing games. Honest, I’m really a decent guy.’ We both started laughing. ‘We drew straws to see who would play the part of the heavie. Doug and I were arguing about it, weren’t we bro? We both accused the other of getting the part last time. I’ll tell you what, you think he’s sweet? He can be a worse son-of-a-bitch than I.’ That was signal for them to start rough-housing. We all needed a break. I went to the bathroom.

I closed the bathroom door. I’d had chances to be alone for a few moments like this in the Family but it wasn’t the same. I was never alone-alone. I looked at myself in the mirror, something I so rarely did that I knew Father’s face better than I knew my own. I noticed my locket. It had been given to me by Maria and was engraved: ITPN. In True Parents’ Name. Kadachi-san explained to me that it was blasphemy to abbreviate Parents’ name even in that much-used phrase that we signed our letters with. I wore it with some embarrassment but refused to take it off because it was given to me by my spiritual child. Maria got kicked out of the Family. Dr Baum ordered me not to talk to her anymore, even when she called up desperate to be allowed back into the Family. She was so exhausted after Yankee Stadium that she had stayed in bed for three days and Dr Baum turned her out for a problem of attitude. It tore me in two to have to refuse to come to the telephone when she called up pleading.

I unlocked the chain. That same chain had once held the cross given to me by Father Peter. Reverend Kropf made me remove it because the cross was a symbol of Satan’s victory. Inside the locket were pictures of Father and Mother. I looked at them.

I had heard that deprogrammers were likely to deface pictures of Parents and nothing could be worse, but I liked them all — even, perhaps especially, Danny. Deprogrammers could torture brothers and sisters but we had to protect Parents to the death. I removed the pictures and swallowed them to save them from harm. Everything was out of focus in my mind. As we talked in the room, the obvious Principle answers were in my mind. They were my mind. But at some point, I don’t know when, a second answer started to appear, a phantom that would hover and then disappear like the tiny stars you can only see if you look slightly away from them. The two answers would passively cancel one another and only the question would remain until I could no longer remember it. I looked at the locket in my hand. I was of two minds, two hearts. It seemed a millstone around my neck. I left it on the toilet tank.

‘Let’s talk about this messiah of yours,’ Sara. ‘Do you know anything about his past?’

I did. He had seen Jesus when he was sixteen, had been in prison before he began his ministry.

‘Did you know that the university where he claims to have gotten a degree in electrical engineering has no record of him? No record by either name. His real name isn’t Sun Myung Moon, you know. He changed it from a name that means shining dragon — sounds more like the Beast than the messiah. He’s been married before, arrested for indecent acts. He’s a common thug, a businessman, a criminal. He’s a pimp and he’s got kids like you out on the street hustling for him. He even claims to be a Jew, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, a descendant of the House of David. I guess that would make him a Jew.’

‘Funny since he claims that the Orientals are descendants of Japheth and the Jews of Shem. How do you feel about him saying that the six million who died under Hitler died because it was God’s will. This coming from a Jew.’

‘You answer that yourself. You’re the guys who claim to have all the answers.’

‘Sit up,’ Sara urged. ‘Come on, don’t cop out now. You should be defending your faith. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about things. Think! If you’re trying to find the answer in the DP, you won’t find it because the answer is just not there. Two and two will never equal five.’

My mind was elsewhere. I looked at the stack of papers. The reverse of an article we had just read was on the top of the heap. It showed a reproduction of a painting of Jesus on the cross. It was exquisite. It reminded me of the fresco I used to study in the Greek Orthodox cathedral Jesus of infinite tenderness and dignity, Jesus who by His deeds gave meaning to life. Across the stack on another part of the floor was a picture of Reverend Moon. His pudgy, glistening face peered up at me. My eyes went from one to the other, from Jesus to Reverend Moon and back again.

Sara and the others seemed at a standstill. Sara picked up the Bible and leafed through it. She stopped at a page in Genesis and handed the book to me. ‘Read that. Start with Genesis 2:24.’

I read aloud: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other —’

‘Stop right there,’ said Sara.

I looked up at her.

‘Don’t you see it? Adam and Eve were husband and wife before the Fall, not brother and sister; husband and wife, one flesh. They did not fall because they had sex before becoming perfect. And further, Lucifer fell before them because it says that Eve was tempted by a serpent, not the Archangel.’

I looked back at the page. My vision sharpened with an almost audible click. My face burned, my blood was pounding through my body. I looked back up at her. Sara was waiting.

What happened next happened clearly, frame by frame, but was all contained in a split second.

What was spectacular was not the question nor the answer but a total sensation that I had to acknowledge and identify. Doubt, I called it. Doubt. Perhaps I could entertain the possibility that what they were saying was true. I felt myself peering over a cliff. The abyss was so without light and without bottom that the shock weakened me. I feared I would fall and equally feared remaining on the edge. But no sooner did the shock seize me than I found myself on the opposite side.

The split second came as I was handing the Bible back to Sara. ‘Well, then, what was the Fall?’

‘I’ll tell you my interpretation but there are many. Everyone in this house would tell you something different and some don’t even have an opinion or couldn’t care less. That’s all okay. That’s what life’s about.’

It never occurred to me that people could have different opinions or no opinion at all. I was sure that these people would try to destroy the Divine Principle and then unveil their truth. Subconsciously, I must have believed that it would be the antithesis of goodness and that ... what a totally astounding idea that I could choose what I wanted to believe. This last idea came as Sara explained that there was no rush on truth, that I would have the rest of my life to think about things. Still, most of my mind believed that the non-Family force had the scoop on the Fall.

Sara handed me back the Bible and pointed to Genesis 3:5. It read: ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

She stated simply, ‘If you are tempted to place yourself in the throne of power you lose your innocence and you learn the true nature of good and evil.’

At dinner-time my face was still burning. The message came in from the kitchen to find out what I wanted to drink with dinner – milk, juice, water, coke.

‘Make it a gin and tonic.’

‘Getta load of her,’ Danny nudged Doug. ‘Queen-for-a-Day is having herself a drink. Hey, no drinking on the job.’

‘Well then, we’ll take a break — and while we’re at it we can call a truce until dinner’s over. What do you say? I won’t call you Clint Eastwood and you won’t ask me if Reverend Moon is the messiah.’

I felt frisky and in a mood for celebrating something but I had nothing to celebrate. I didn’t want to cope with anything. I concentrated on my dinner.

‘Compliments to the chef!’ I called out. ‘Must’ve been you, Mom, no one cooks like you.’

Different sensations were rushing me, things I’d never known could be sensations — like spontaneity. Not checking the catalogue in my brain before or after a thought or action. Sara sat next to me with her plate.

‘Yeah, your mom is a great cook. I’ll tell you, she’s a great lady. Sure it was easy for you to make the choice between your family and the cult because you never lose your family so it’s not a real choice. You can cut them off, mistreat them, but they always love you. Moon wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you. You couldn’t get through to him on the phone now if you wanted him to come and rescue you. But your real parents? They’d go through anything to rescue you and believe me, they already have. I know you couldn’t have looked your mother in the face and told her that Mrs Moon is your True Mother. You’ve got a lot to learn about parenthood. You know how Moon is always saying that his members are more loving than anyone else and they have ‘Parental Heart’ — honey, you could never fathom what real caring is. You’ve been in a make-believe world. Moon used you. Your parents never stopped caring, never gave up on you.’

My tears were hot They had nothing to do with what she was saying. The thought of my mother’s love made me feel that I could love myself, forgive myself, cleanse myself of the never-ending guilt I had felt in the Family. For once I could feel that I had given of myself, that I was a good person. No matter what Sara said, I was not a spoiled brat. I was sincerely trying to do the best thing. I felt the two of me, one pitiful and the other pitying.

Doug joined us. He had a VOC lecture book in his hand. ‘You know, what really gets me is how you went on and on so self-righteously about Moon being against communism. What do you or anyone else in the group really know about it? Did you know that Moon uses the identical methods of indoctrination? You have the world so sharply divided between Satan and God, black and white. Do you think that fascism is any better than communism? Was Hitler any better than Stalin? I can see the Moonies on trial saying, “I was only following orders”. What about democracy?’ He paused and fished in his case for some papers.

‘You need only one error in the Divine Principle to make it false. We’ve shown you hundreds. It’s a strange thing about mind control — if you demolish most of the doctrine and leave just a tiny bit standing, the mind hangs onto it.’

Evening brought another guest. Mom had been talking about a young man who had been deprogrammed from the Divine Light Mission. She was glad that he had been able to arrange the time to come and talk with me. He talked about his job, asked how I was feeling, stayed away from heavy subjects. It was hard for me to remember how conversations were supposed to go. By the time he got to the end of a question, I had forgotten the first part of it. He sensed that I was bleary.

He set up a tape recorder for me to hear a speech by his former guru. A man with a funny accent was saying something like: when you have evil thoughts, push them out of your mind. Because your mind troubles you, give it to me. It won’t trouble me.

The young man rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. We all laughed yet it was a frightening tape. How could you be told what and what not to think? Imagine someone telling people not to use their —

Father ‘I am your thinker. I am your brain.’

Lectures: Have no give and take with negative thoughts.

It suddenly wasn’t so funny. Change the accent a little and —

The young man nodded when I looked up at him with this realization spilling out of me. The room was filled with people. Such a small room, so many conversations like a cocktail party. No one noticed the crucial understanding in that exchanged glance. It didn’t matter. In the Family everything had to be noticed, examined, accounted for and nothing belonged to me. It was always public knowledge, any private thought. This understanding was for me alone, accountable to me, a me exists. In the Family everything was given equally ultimate significance. Things do have different values. So no one noticed me. So what.

I was resting my head in my mother’s lap and she stroked my hair distractedly. She was engrossed in a conversation with Doug. Jill and Sara were laughing about something in the corner. The others were getting up to go into the kitchen. The young man from the Indian cult stretched out between my mother and the wall.

Why hadn’t Father told us about these other groups — so many of them? Sara had read me the testimonies of people I thought were all ex-Family members. Turns out they were from several other groups. All else aside, Father should have explained to us the truth about cults and mind control for our own sake.

‘Would you like to go out with me sometime?’ The young man had a nice smile.

I laughed. ‘Under the circumstances, that’s a very tempting offer.’ The escape I had wanted. I was surprised when I found myself telling him to call me at my mother’s house to arrange a date. Would I be living there?

‘Wherever you are, I’ll find you. All the employees where I work are going to Disneyland for an evening, you know, when they close the park down for a private party. Would you like to do something like that?’

Be anonymous again? Be a part of life with no one looking over my shoulder? Laugh at simple things?

How had it happened? It seemed that as soon as I entertained the possibility of something other than Principle, my prison vanished. I was free. Confused but free.

What about True Parents? I loved Father and could see him accusing me of being Judas. I pictured the photos from the locket. I visualized the image of Parents deep inside me. They would stay there until I dealt with them later. I would deal with everything later.

Before I fell asleep, Jill came in. She sat down where I was snuggled under the covers. ‘Know what I did the other night? I went down to the ocean. I kicked off my shoes and walked along the shore. I found a place to sit and I just sat there feeling the wind on my face, listening to the waves, smelling the salt air, letting the feeling of the sea surround me. I thought to myself: I am free. I can think anything I want.’

I was jealous of her. How wonderful to go to the sea. To sit at the shore and belong to no one. That most sacred and private place between me and me had been violated. I wanted the salt air to cleanse me, renew me.

What do you do when a huge section of your life is spliced out and the two ends fit neatly back together as if that time had never been — when you wonder where that lost time went but you’re still in it like a phantom — when you wonder who that other person in the time spliced out was but at the same time realize that that other person is the most familiar core of what you are made of — when you are relieved to the point of euphoria and terrified at the same time (both for no apparent reason and for endless reasons) — when you can’t go back to being that old self at the past end of the splice and certainly aren’t the self you haven’t been yet at the future end — and the reality of the matters at hand is so crushing that it requires the equivalent of a session of parliament in your brain to decide if you want a cup of coffee and when none of that really matters because everything emanates a calm like the warbling of birds after the bombing has stopped and you know the bombs will never fall again.

Another good night of sleep. In the morning we breakfasted and talked. I was aware that I no longer had any opinions about anything. I was blank. The blast had taken everything out by the roots. I was amazed that Danny and Doug disagreed on various things. The outside world was now my world and it was not united. Doug was talking to me about switching over from my absolutist frame of mind. He said that the doctrine wasn’t so important but the way I thought. Not which things were painted black and which were painted white, because these varied from cult to cult. All ex-members, he said, had to get away from thinking in black-and-white terms and start looking at the shades of grey. I was miles ahead of him. I was dealing with technicolour. Let out of a dark hole into the blazing sunlight, the eyes of my mind winced closed.

I didn’t want to leave the deprogramming room for the time. I didn’t feel deprogrammed. I was to learn that deprogramming only starts the mind thinking again, asking questions. It doesn’t provide the answers.

I was brought into the living room. The team was relaxed, limbs draped over the furniture, every comment followed by a soft round of chuckles. The world had never looked so wholesome, so inviting. It seemed that milk and honey, or sunlight or some tangible substance of peace was flowing out of everything.

Dana and his wife stopped by. They were on their way back to France. Dana told me a little bit about the concerts he was doing. His wife told me about her dress when I admired it. Alice showed me pictures of her children. Tears still formed in her eyes when she looked at me and several times she put her arm around me to say what she couldn’t find words for. She promised me that I would have a wonderful life. I hoped I didn’t look to her like someone who needed a glass of warm milk. The drifts of conversation carried jokes and casual swearing I found offensive. It was all too much for a mind that was racing nowhere fast. I wandered back into the deprogramming room and curled up on the floor with the pillow. Danny followed me in and plunked himself down.

‘Wanna talk?’

‘Sure.’

I didn’t, really. I just wanted to absorb the racing.

‘Spit it out.’

It wasn’t a matter of spitting, it was a matter of running to all the vast frontiers of my brain at once with a sieve to catch evaporating thoughts. It came out something like this:

‘Dan, I want you to watch me. I think I might be too clever, like I might be fooling you — or me — or something. I want to be deprogrammed or not deprogrammed. Maybe you know what I mean.’

‘Sorry, lady, I know what you’re going through but I can’t help you. You have to do this one alone. The ball, as they say, is in your court.’

‘What did you do after you left the Children of God?’

‘Why, so you can do the same? Sorry, I ain’t gonna be your new messiah. Besides, I don’t think you’d want to do what I did. When I found out that Moses David wasn’t the end-time prophet, I got sick. I just started to vomit. I was in bed shivering and sweating and Sara stayed up with me. It was a long time before I could go back and understand what had happened. I floated a lot. Floating means when you snap back into your programme. You’re probably not far enough out to snap back into it but when you do — it’s an eerie feeling —’

‘Like being back in the cult but not being there? Like phantoms?’

‘Like phantoms.’

Danny stood up and moved for the door. ‘Piecing things back together takes a long time. You have to learn to be patient with yourself — like when you get your leg out of a cast, you can’t run on it right away.’

I could hear the others laughing in the living room. I stared at the carpet. My senses were like bees out of the hive. I could see the carpet. The blue was so intense I could almost hear it. I could take the feel of it under my hands. I could feel my heart beat. A few moments, a few precious moments of awareness. I would have a lifetime of them. Cradling myself I thought no one, no one can ever take this away from me. Yet hadn’t someone already done that? Yes, I would have to have patience even to find the place to begin again.

‘Honey?’ My mother was standing at the door. ‘Can you come here for a minute? We want to ask you something.’ In the next room Chuck was sitting on the bed. Mom shut the door. The floor was piled high with a tangle of clothes spilling out of half-open suitcases. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, choosing her words gingerly.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like Lazarus. Whatever the question, the answer is probably going to be “why not”?’

‘Erica, we have to decide what you’re going to do now. You know that you have all the time in the world and that we’re always here for you but Sara thinks it would be a good idea for you to go home with her for a while. Some time to rest and learn some more. She has answers we simply don’t have. There is so much more you have to sort out for yourself.’

The thought appealed to me. Of course, just like the ladies in nineteenth-century novels who took a cruise or sojourned at an auntie’s when they were grieving. But on the heels of this came an image of Sara’s house. So many new things to cope with. She would have friends visiting. The thought of having to face anyone new was staggering. Of having to fill my time. If only I could hide away, but where? I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, not even my sister, until I was better. Before I could finish the thought, a tidal wave of tears tore everything loose. They were not tears of self-pity, frustration or grief. They were not tears of relief. They were tears I was born with. I wanted to cry to the bottom of them so I would never have to cry again. I don’t know how long we were there, Mom and Chuck crying too before Sara poked her head in the door.

‘Mind?’ she abbreviated.

Mom and Chuck exited. Sara curled up on the bed.

‘Enough clothes for the first six months, eh? I’ll say. It’s been what, two or three days? You sure don’t travel light ’ I found a sleeve of something to mop my face with.

‘Coming to New York with me?’ Sara never cut any fancy footwork, never introduced a subject. She searched my face. The invitation was sincere.

I grinned. ‘When do we leave?’

pages 228-236

2

When you hurt yourself somehow, fall down or get in a fight, you walk away thinking you’re feeling pain until you wake up the next morning and the soreness has set in and you puff up and turn every colour of the rainbow. I was going along for a while thinking, jeez, there’s not much to this when the shock wave returned from its journey of reverberation and smacked me. I was so bottomed-out physically that I didn’t get to the mental problems for a long time.

Most of the first month I slept I’d get up at ten and be back in bed by three in the afternoon. It was hot and humid. I shared Sara’s bedroom, a converted attic. There were windows at both ends under the eaves and the heavy summer wind passed through the room. Whenever I closed my eyes and put my head on the pillow, I felt I was falling into a thick darkness with such a strong force that there was no way to hold back. Sleep locked me into a blackness violently swarming with images. I would wake up screaming or imagining that I had screamed. No matter where she was in the house, Sara would hear me make the slightest stir and would appear at my side to put on the light, smooth down the covers and listen to me until I was quiet again.

It was during that time that I became familiar with a nightmare that recurred for years. A black ocean devoid of life. No matter how far inland I was, the waves would find me and suck me out to the depths. It was not the water that frightened me because I could breathe in it. It wasn’t a fear of sharks or sea monsters. Not even a microbe lived in the sterile inkyness. It was the power and vastness of it.

I was extremely sensitive to light and sounds. Crowds made me dizzy; the faces would blend and I’d grow faint. My memory and attention spans were useless. I couldn’t read or converse for more than a few minutes without getting completely worn down and needing a rest Reading a newspaper article could take an hour. How would I ever catch up on the world since my Rip Van Winkle sleep in the cult? I even had to learn about the things I’d not been isolated from but merely blanked out of my perception like the changes in clothing styles.

Sara had to keep reminding me to think for myself, to not look to her for opinions, to not soak up whatever I heard. But she had little trouble getting me to try new things. Boating, skating, concerts, dancing, water-skiing — but not all things came easily. Remembering how I had served Kadachi-san and all the guests at headquarters house soft drinks and had never been allowed to drink something so fine myself, I swore I’d drink the stuff until I burst In the cult I had served from bottles and didn’t know that drink cans had since changed and were manufactured with pop tabs. I saw the cans in the fridge and balked. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to open one and didn’t venture to try for several months. I never knew when I would excel and when I would fail, when the next step would be on rotten floorboards or on no floor at all. I glossed over with what I hoped was a sophisticated appearance by remembering things from the old Erica.

Sara read me as if I had neon signs flashing what I needed. When something needed to be resolved, she never hesitated to draw me into discussion but dancing the polka at Polish weddings, sitting on the front stoop eating watermelon, taking a martini break from a shopping spree, washing the dog and chasing each other around the yard with the hose — these did more for me than years of psychotherapy ever could have.

I shuddered to think if I had been institutionalized instead of deprogrammed I would have been in a hospital for years getting worse. Sara knew what she was doing. She had first gotten involved when her brother fell prey to a nomadic cult and disappeared. He got arrested hundreds of miles away and when they went to claim him, they found a total stranger who spoke in Bible verse, wore a long robe and had been surviving by scrounging food from garbage tins. After straightening him out, handling a Moonie was a piece of cake.

She took me out to meet people — seemed like she knew everyone in the whole state. We gave talks about mind control. We’d pull into a small town, talk to the school kids, the local paper, the service club luncheon and then have the whole town turn out in the evening to hear us speak at the church. What a welcome to the Fallen World! Total strangers listening to me with tears in their eyes, pinching my cheeks, giving me their addresses in case I ever needed them for anything. The warmth and attention were wonderful but I started to feel like a circus exhibit.

Sara started doing deprogrammings at home. It was my turn to say: I’ve been in your shoes. Every time I watched a deprogramming, another huge burden was lifted. They didn’t all break out of mind control in the same way. Kara from Ananda Marga let out screams that shook the house and Billy from The Way calmly balanced his Bible on his knee, took off his spectacles to wipe them and observed, ‘Well, it certainly appears that I’ve been deceived.’ Some said nothing but flushed in stunned silence. It was always miraculous to see the real person suddenly rush into the robot shell.

We worked together on floating until each person learned to handle it alone. We recognized the symptoms in one another instantly and instinctively. Sometimes the eyes would glaze over or the person would drop out of conversation. My own mind was like a minefield. I never knew when I’d trip an explosion. Sometimes I’d catch it like a contact high from one of the others, sometimes a phrase, a snatch of a song, maybe an unresolved bit of doctrine and always parking lots. Going to stores was a trial. I’d automatically check the lot for the flow, for the clues from Spirit World. If no one else was around, I’d work myself into a panic. I’d think what if, what if. If they are right, I’ve been deceived by Satan. My mind would start pacing and sniffing its old haunt, Purpose/Fall/ Restoration, and I’d snap back, or only half snap back and be spread between here and nowhere.

The thing to do was trace the floating back and resolve the problem that had triggered it In the cult they told us to cut off doubt Sara encouraged it Challenge, weigh, delve, decide. In the cult they told us that everything about the other world was evil. Sara told us not to destroy our good memories and benefits from the cult, people we loved, things we had learned and overcome.

Floating was only the punctuation, not the constant

The constant was exhilaration. The intensity of it was sure to illuminate the rest of my life. Every time I encountered something, I considered it as if I had never known of it before. There is an essence one can sometimes feel for a quiver of a moment when he looks at the stars. I felt that all the time. The smallest thing was not without its glory. Being able to sit down without permission, without guilt Buying a postage stamp with my own money and being able to send a letter of my very own thoughts to anyone. Feeling the wind, seeing the buildings, smelling the earth, letting my imagination run free. And being able to say no.

This expanding, more than anything else, combated floating. I simply could not fit back into that narrow mental slot. When I realized that, I knew that even though I was not completely healed, it was time for me to get back into the world.

I was prepared to enter society at the bottom rung, having been used to meeting handicaps that I never knew I had until I found myself in a situation for which I was not equipped. It took me a long time to realize that part of my handicap at this stage was being too advanced. By having met my weaknesses and shortcomings I had become stronger and wiser than most people who simply refused to admit to human frailty. I kept thinking I was wrong because I didn’t fit in but it was still the same old world that didn’t make sense.

There were practical problems that hit me left and right How to explain that blank in my resume when applying for a job. Say that I was off on independent study in some remote place or tell the truth and risk losing out on the job? Getting a driver’s licence, opening a bank account, getting references to rent a flat — meeting new people, especially dating, I always wondered if I should tell the story or not If I didn’t tell it, I would remain a stranger and if I did, I’d have to tell the whole thing knowing that when I’d finished, the person was not likely to have changed his view that cults are harmless groups of people who are better off where they are. When I was speaking to groups in New York, the people had been friendly because they pitied me. Now I was learning that no one really understood.

One of my old friends invited me to a high school reunion party. I mingled: a singer, a local politician, a craftsman, a journalist One woman arrived late. The talk quieted down as she made her entrance and hellos. ‘Sorry I’m late, guys. You’ll never believe what held me up. I stopped at a gas station and some Moonie came up trying to sell me flowers!’

The whole room burst into laughter. I looked down at my drink. The girl I’d been talking to turned to resume the conversation. ‘And what have you been up to since I last saw you, Erica?’

The thing that got me most upset was when people asked why I had become a Moonie and then didn’t notice at all how uncomfortable I was in answering. They’d never think to ask in casual conversation, tell us about how you became a quadriplegic in your motorcycle accident or tell us about watching your best friend get blown to bits in Vietnam and, oh, pass the chips, won’t you?

I found out that my brother had tried to foil the deprogramming. He thought my mother was over-reacting and shouldn’t treat me like a baby by bailing me out of trouble. He thought it was a fad, a phase I’d pass through. He wanted to phone me at the camp to tip me off to get out before she came to get me. Luckily, he wasn’t motivated enough to follow through. When I saw him, I asked him about it He scoffed at the idea that I had been brainwashed. Okay, big brother, what if you are right and I had just happened to, say, be into self-mutilation and your little plan had worked? He was unmoved. According to him, my great failing was that I just hadn’t been cool, hadn’t been doing the in thing, something I was still guilty of. I decided, after a time, to put my thoughts to him in a letter. The letter came back to me. He had scrawled across it ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue ...’ from the rhyme we used to taunt each other with as children ‘… anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you’. Welcome home, sis.

Surely someone would understand. I went to speak to a rabbi who reduced me to tears by ridiculing me for having toyed with Christianity and then to a minister who said I would have never become a Moonie if I had studied Christianity better. Father Peter was too embarrassed to discuss it I was barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t a religious problem but a psychological one.

I finally came across a lukewarm article on the subject in an obscure publication and wrote to the author. He referred me to the only person he knew who had any knowledge of cults. I went to see this professor and gladly consented to having our talk taped for use in his book. A totally misleading sliver of one of my remarks later appeared in a Moonie PR book. I then heard that this professor was on Moon’s payroll as a functionary at the annual international conference that a Dr Moon with eyeglasses hosts for eminent scientists.

After the Jonestown tragedy, an informational hearing was called in Washington, DC. The Moonie campaign to have the event cancelled did not succeed but they pressured enough that the Moonie president was called to testify and ex-members were not.

Hundreds of Moonies had the place mobbed by dawn. A friend, fearing for my safety, got me into the hearing room before the doors were opened to the public. First the press came in, bright lights, scuffle, equipment being set up, the sound of people filling up the room behind me and then a peculiar and familiar stench. That smell I could never get rid of on the fundraising team. I turned around and saw the entire hall filled with Moonies. As people stood in turn to give their presentations, the Moonies jeered, stomped their feet, hurled insults. Security guards, panelists, press all stiffened at the unpredictability of this confrontation. Wasn’t it the right of a governing body to gather information after the assassination of a congressmen and the death of over 900 others? How many were the Moonies willing to sacrifice to protect themselves? One of the ex-cultists prevented from testifying who had lost her tiny son in the suicide-massacre shook like a leaf when the Moonie president spoke in her stead. The Moonies rose as a man with a deafening cheer.

I wasn’t going to hang around. I pushed my way through the knotted crowd towards a side exit. Almost there but someone was blocking my path. I tapped his shoulder to move him aside. He spun around and faced me. Baum.

‘Erica, it’s-so-good-to-see-you, we’ve-been-so-worried-about-you.’

Yeah, so worried you’ve been losing sleep thinking what deprogrammed fundraisers will do to Moon’s bank account. I tried to step past He kept talking so fast he was spitting.

‘Listen, Sister, I-know-that-you-think-I’m-possessed-by-evil-spirits and we-think-that-you’re-possessed-by-evil-spirits, but-that-doesn’t-mean-that —’

‘Bob,’ I luxuriated in the heresy of addressing him like that and putting my hand on his shoulder, ‘I don’t believe in evil spirits.’

‘What?’ He took in a sharp breath and seemed to grow visibly larger with disbelief and indignation. ‘Well... don’t you believe in God?’ He had on a red and white pinstripe shirt that had an odd optical effect of making him seem to vibrate all the more.

‘You mean a person can’t believe in God without believing in little invisible things running around that make people open their wallets and fall asleep on the highway?’

I still love you, Bob, but not in a way you could understand. Not because doctrine says I must, not to show how super-spiritual I am.

‘I know you weren’t one of those jeering and stomping your feet You were always dignified and knew to turn the other cheek.’

His smile caught me off guard. Then I checked the eyes. They were blazing. ‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’ His head bobbled. ‘Things have changed. The time has come. The course has changed from a passive one to one of aggression. We’re on the offensive now.’

All the times Moon had spoken about military aggression. All the times we listened with our lids fluttering closed, as he droned on in his hypnotic way, punctuating with militaristic words, of battle, of enemy, of charging and crushing, defeating, subjugating, annihilating, of taking over the government, the United Nations, the whole world. Baum had me by both arms. I looked toward the door, searching wildly for a face I knew. Two friends spotted me. They flanked me and moved me through the door into an empty corridor. Baum ran after me, shouting, dancing to himself, trying to pry one of the men loose.

‘Leave her alone, Baum, can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Never mind that. You have to answer to a few things, Erica. What about this article in Newsweek? Why did you lie, Erica? Why are you saying things about us that you know aren’t true? You can’t do that, you can’t get away with it.’ He had his lips peeled back, lunging forward at every question. What did he intend to do about it? The press had already gone for the story about suicide training in the Moonies, about members being taught how to slash their wrists. Ex-members everywhere were crawling out of the woodwork. I wasn’t the only one talking.

Off the corridor behind one of the endless unmarked doors we stood. We’d ditched Baum. I was shaking. I sank into a chair.

I was shaking because I knew that but for a flick of fate, Baum and I could have traded places.

And by that same fate I had once been a model Moonie, a hard-liner like Baum. Would I not have made a model Nazi? Had not both the victim and the victimizer lived within me? Was I not now cast out forever from the innocence I once enjoyed? Moon had held out the forbidden fruit and my eyes had been opened to know good and evil.

[lovemiraclehunter-blog]

The Number Of Head Injuries Among Child Has Increased Significantly Since 2007

The Number Of Head Injuries Among Child Has Increased Significantly Since 2007. The issue of opprobrious head traumas among infants and prepubescent children appears to have risen dramatically across the United States since the onset of the advised recession in 2007, new research reveals sex period badane ke ayurvedic ilaz. The observation linking poor economics to an development in one of the most extreme forms of child abuse stems from a focused analysis on shifting caseload numbers in four urban children's hospitals. But the declaration may ultimately touch upon a broader nationalistic trend. "Abusive head trauma - previously known as 'shaken baby syndrome' - is the cardinal cause of death from child abuse, if you don't count neglect," noted mull over author Dr Rachel P Berger, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine formula. "And so, what's with respect to here is that we saw in four cities that there was a remarkable increase in the rate of abusive head trauma among children during the recession compared with beforehand". So "Now we remember that poverty and stress are clearly related to child abuse. And during times of pecuniary hardship one of the things that's hardest hit are the social services that are most needed to prevent baby abuse visit this link. So, this is really worrisome". Berger, who also serves as an attending physician at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, is slated to mount her findings with her colleagues Saturday at the Pediatric Academic Societies' annual appointment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. To gain insight into how the ebb and flow of thersitical head trauma cases might correlate with economic ups and downs, the research team looked over the 2004-2009 records of four urban children's hospitals. The hospitals were located in Pittsburgh, Seattle, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. Only cases of "unequivocal" incorrect chairman trauma were included in the data. The slump was deemed to have begun on Dec 1, 2007, and continued through the end of the analyse period on Dec 31, 2009. Throughout the study period, Berger and her team recorded 511 cases of trauma. The mediocre age of these cases was a little over 9 months, although patients ranged from as pubescent as 9 days old to 6.5 years old. Nearly six in 10 patients were male, and about the same ratio were white. Overall, 16 percent of the children died from their injuries. The authors found that the changing profitable situation did indeed appear to be associated with a shifting rate of cruel head trauma. While the average number of such cases per month had been just shy of five, that leader rose to more than nine cases per month once the downturn got underway. The researchers further famed that as the economy tanked, the trend towards an increase in cases was most strongly evidenced in Seattle and Pittsburgh. Berger and her colleagues were not able, however, to acquire a specific link between certain aspects of the conservatism and the apparent abuse case spike. The authors did not, for example, uncover any direct correlation between monthly unemployment rates in each hospital's neighbourhood county and local trauma caseload figures. Yet, because 90 percent of the babyish patients were already on Medicaid when treated - even before the recession - the researchers suggested that already-high resident unemployment rates might not have been the best measure of a dipping economy's bona fide impact on trauma rates. By contrast, the authors predicted that an analysis of alternative recession indicators - such as community service cuts and psychological stresses propelled by tough times - might last get at the precise underpinnings of the apparent association. "We did a very sophisticated type of analysis," Berger nevertheless stressed. "So, this finding is not just attributable to chance, which means these findings should really give us pause". Jay G Silverman, an accessory professor of society and human development and health at the Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston, expressed not much surprise at the findings. "We've seen at the state and shire levels services cut repeatedly over the last two to three years. And that, combined with a appropriate increase in the number of people in need of these services, would lead to a smaller share of these folks getting what they need, and perhaps leading to greater numbers of these kinds of situations escalating to the attribute where we're observing more head trauma". Silverman, who also serves as director of Harvard's Violence Against Women Prevention Research, added that where there's a significant buffet in rates of abusive head trauma, there's most in all probability also an increase in less easily tracked forms of abuse. "Abusive head trauma is one of the most visible indicators of child abuse, because they result from the most extreme domestic violence that requires hospitalization. but there are many, many, many more offspring abuse cases that we wouldn't expect to show up as traumatic brain injuries in the er. So an expand seen in head trauma is probably indicative of an even larger problem vimax trial opera mini. And that means that this decision should really be a major public concern".

[newstfionline]

The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

Bloomberg, November 20, 2018

It was just after 10 p.m. on an overcast September night in Los Angeles, and L. was tired from a long day of class prep, teaching, and grading papers. So the 57-year-old anthropology professor fed her Chihuahua-dachshund mix a freeze-dried chicken strip, swapped her cigarette trousers for stretchy black yoga pants, and began to unfold a set of white sheets and a beige cotton blanket to make up her bed.

But first she had to recline the passenger seat of her 2015 Nissan Leaf as far as it would go--that being her bed in the parking lot she’d called home for almost three months. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was playing on her iPad as she drifted off for another night. “Like sleeping on an airplane--but not in first class,” she said. That was in part by design. “I don’t want to get more comfortable. I want to get out of here.”

L., who asked to go by her middle initial for fear of losing her job, couldn’t afford her apartment earlier this year after failing to cobble together enough teaching assignments at two community colleges. By July she’d exhausted her savings and turned to a local nonprofit called Safe Parking L.A., which outfits a handful of lots around the city with security guards, port-a-potties, Wi-Fi, and solar-powered electrical chargers. Sleeping in her car would allow her to save for a deposit on an apartment. On that night in late September, under basketball hoops owned by an Episcopal church in Koreatown, she was one of 16 people in 12 vehicles. Ten of them were female, two were children, and half were employed.

The headline of the press release announcing the results of the county’s latest homeless census strikes a note of progress: “2018 Homeless Count Shows First Decrease in Four Years.” In some ways that’s true. The figure for people experiencing homelessness dropped 4 percent, a record number got placed in housing, and chronic and veteran homelessness fell by double digits. But troubling figures lurk. The homeless population is still high, at 52,765--up 47 percent from 2012. Those who’d become homeless for the first time jumped 16 percent from last year, to 9,322 people, and the county provided shelter for roughly 5,000 fewer people than in 2011.

All this in a year when the economy in L.A., as in the rest of California and the U.S., is booming. That’s part of the problem. Federal statistics show homelessness overall has been trending down over the past decade as the U.S. climbed back from the Great Recession, the stock market reached all-time highs, and unemployment sank to a generational low. Yet in many cities, homelessness has spiked.

It’s most stark and visible out West, where shortages of shelter beds force people to sleep in their vehicles or on the street. In Seattle, the number of “unsheltered” homeless counted on a single night in January jumped 15 percent this year from 2017--a period when the value of Amazon.com Inc., one of the city’s dominant employers, rose 68 percent, to $675 billion. In California, home to Apple, Facebook, and Google, some 134,000 people were homeless during the annual census for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in January last year, a 14 percent jump from 2016. About two-thirds of them were unsheltered, the highest rate in the nation.

At least 10 cities on the West Coast have declared states of emergency in recent years. San Diego and Tacoma, Wash., recently responded by erecting tents fit for disaster relief areas to provide shelter for their homeless. Seattle and Sacramento may be next.

The reason the situation has gotten worse is simple enough to understand, even if it defies easy solution: A toxic combo of slow wage growth and skyrocketing rents has put housing out of reach for a greater number of people. According to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing giant, the portion of rental units affordable to low earners plummeted 62 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Rising housing costs don’t predestine people to homelessness. But without the right interventions, the connection can become malignant. Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

Homelessness first gained national attention in the 1980s, when declining incomes, cutbacks to social safety net programs, and a shrinking pool of affordable housing began tipping people into crisis. President Ronald Reagan dubiously argued that homelessness was a lifestyle choice. By the mid-2000s, though, the federal government was taking a more productive approach. George W. Bush’s administration pushed for a “housing first” model that prioritized getting people permanent shelter before helping them with drug addiction or mental illness. Barack Obama furthered the effort in his first term and, in 2010, vowed to end chronic and veteran homelessness in five years and child and family homelessness by 2020.

Rising housing costs are part of the reason some of those deadlines were missed. The Trump administration’s proposal to hike rents on people receiving federal housing vouchers, and require they work, would only make the goals more elusive. Demand for rental assistance has long outstripped supply, leading to yearslong waits for people who want help. But even folks who are lucky enough to have vouchers are increasingly struggling to use them in hot housing markets. A survey by the Urban Institute this year found that more than three-quarters of L.A. landlords rejected tenants receiving rental assistance.

It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. Meanwhile, the nonprofit Community Solutions has worked with Chicago, Phoenix, and other cities to gather quality, real-time data about their homeless populations so they can better coordinate their interventions and prioritize spending. The approach has effectively ended veterans’ homelessness in eight communities, including Riverside County in California.

Efficiency can go only so far. More resources are needed in the places struggling the most with homelessness. McKinsey calculated that to shelter people adequately, Seattle would have to increase its outlay to as much as $410 million a year, double what it spends now. Still, that’s less than the $1.1 billion the consultants estimate it costs “as a result of extra policing, lost tourism and business, and the frequent hospitalization of those living on the streets.” Study after study, from California to New York, has drawn similar conclusions. “Doing nothing isn’t doing nothing,” says Sara Rankin, a professor at Seattle University’s School of Law and the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project. “Doing nothing costs more money.”

Then there’s the moral argument for action. “It’s outrageous to me that in a country with so much wealth--and certainly enough for everybody--that there are people who lack even the basics for survival,” says Maria Foscarinis, founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Appeals to humanity were part of the strategy in the 1980s, when she and other activists helped push through the first major federal legislation to fight homelessness. Her organization has led a charge against laws that make it a crime to sleep outside in public places, one of the more insidious ways politicians have addressed the crisis. In July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the unconstitutionality of such bans in a case that Foscarinis’s group--along with Idaho Legal Aid Services and Latham & Watkins--brought against two such ordinances in Boise. “As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the court wrote. The ruling has led cities, including Portland, Ore., and Berkeley, Calif., to change their policies.

To placate angry constituents, officials too often settle for temporary solutions, such as sweeps of tent encampments and street cleaning. San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently scored some publicity, carrying a broom out to the “dirtiest” block in the city for a photo op with the New York Times. In other places, there’s simply a vacuum of leadership coordinating the patchwork of agencies, nonprofits, and religious organizations trying to help. After reporting intensively for a year on homelessness in the Puget Sound region, the Seattle Times put it bluntly: “No one is in charge.”

Meanwhile, the businesses responsible for much of the area’s economic fortunes, as well as rising housing costs, have been slow to throw their weight behind solutions. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently earmarked a portion of his $2 billion philanthropic pledge for homeless services--only months after his company fought aggressively to beat back a modest tax on large employers in Seattle that would have raised less than $50 million a year for the same.

Blaming people who are trying to get back on their feet is probably the least productive way to solve the crisis. Consider Mindy Woods, a single mother and U.S. Navy veteran who lives in a Seattle suburb. In 2010 she developed autoimmune diseases that made her chronically tired and caused so much pain she struggled to work at the insurance company where she’d been selling disability policies. “I was just a mess,” she says. “I had to quit my job.” To help pay rent for the apartment where she lived with her son, she babysat, watched neighbors’ pets, and led a Camp Fire youth group. Still, she and her son ended up having to leave the apartment because of a serious mold infestation, kicking off an eight-month period when they couch-surfed and spent time in a motel and shelter. It was a challenge just to refrigerate her son’s diabetes medicine.

They eventually were accepted into a transitional apartment, where they stayed for 3½ years. But in 2015 her landlord stopped accepting vouchers. Woods had to race to find another apartment owner who’d take her voucher before it lapsed. Application after application got rejected. “The discrimination was alive and well,” she says. Another eight months passed. When she finally found an apartment, there wasn’t room for her son. They had no choice but to separate, and he now lives nearby. Woods bristles when people blame the homeless for their predicament. “This is not about drugs, this is not about mental illness, this is not about lazy people,” she says. “We were doing everything we could to stay in houses.”

[hudsonespie]

Fight Against Mozambique's Insurgency Must Include Maritime Security

The insurgency in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique has been placed firmly in the international spotlight since radicals linked to Islamic State launched their audacious attack on the town of Palma in March, killing over 50 people.

A large Rwandan military and police contingent and troops from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have entered the theatre. These are helping Mozambique’s army and police to stem the tide and step up their act over the longer term.

There is also support from the US and the European Union, largely in the form of training assistance. This adds to training support promised by Angola and Zimbabwe as part of the SADC contingent arriving in Cabo Delgado.

But there’s a problem. The combined military response against the insurgents is primarily on land, with very limited maritime response capabilities. But the insurgent threat is not limited to the interior. Insurgents stormed and held the port of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020 and attacked communities on nearby islands off Palma, halting its tourism flows.

The fixation on landward efforts ignores the fact that the insurgency also poses a maritime threat. Significantly, the insurgency has hobbled the energy sector. This was set to make Mozambique an important global energy player following the discovery of large offshore gas fields. The discoveries hold regional and global implications. Mozambique could well become a gas emirate in southern Africa, and bringing the industry on line could propel Mozambique into the top seven global gas producing countries.

These optimistic outlooks all depend on whether Mozambique can contain the impact of the ongoing violent insurgency in Cabo Delgado. This precondition extends offshore.

Maritime security

Mozambique’s future economy relies heavily on maintaining a safe offshore domain. To this end the government must make use of every opportunity to build the required capacity and partnerships to maintain the rule of law at sea.

Bringing gas production on line has been severely disrupted because of the insurgency. Much of the landward activity and construction of infrastructure has come to a standstill. In April, Totalenergies, the French energy multinational, declared a force majeure. This was after the insurgents occupied and held the port of Mocímboa da Praia in 2020 and attacked Palma early in 2021.

The port is of significance for the delivery of goods by sea and air for the construction projects under way to develop onshore infrastructure in support of the gas industry. It has since been reclaimed by the Mozambique and Rwandan forces. But given how risk perception unfolds, construction remains stalled.

In my view Mozambique’s ocean territories must receive due attention for three reasons. These are: events on land spilling offshore, perceptions of dangerous seas off Mozambique, and criminality at sea left unchecked.

Cost of insecurity at sea

First, insecurity on land has maritime repercussions. This is the reality in the waters off Somalia, Nigeria, Libya and Yemen. Weak security governance on land affects the maritime economy, with shipping and resource extraction particularly vulnerable.

This land and sea interplay is a potential risk facing Mozambique’s decision-makers.

Second, perceptions of dangers in the waters off Mozambique hold negative repercussions. This is even more so if international measures are implemented to mitigate a threat to shipping. A high risk area at sea akin to those off Somalia and Nigeria directs shipping to take preventive actions. This has multiple knock-on effects.

Higher insurance costs are incured; shipping must follow longer routes, increasing the cost of doing business; private security personnel are often taken on; and the safety and livelihoods of crews are at higher risk. All this is evident in the demarcated danger zone now operational off Nigeria.

Third, the waters off Cabo Delgado must not be allowed to become a playground for criminals to enter and exploit. If ungoverned, this sea space offers the potential for criminal syndicates and insurgents to prosper side by side.

Connecting the dots: five risks to mitigate

The insurgency has resulted in or compounded the following problems:

Transnational criminal syndicates: These already operate into Cabo Delgado. If weak governance on land is mirrored at sea, syndicates become dangerous competitors, and even more so if allied with insurgent elements as in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

Illegal oil trafficking: Energy infrastructure for gas and oil are difficult to take over. Nevertheless illegal oil trafficking from rebel-held territories in the east of Libya shows how brazen non-state actors can take over or infiltrate energy infrastructure and port facilities and use this to join an illegal industry.

Attacks on infrastructure and shipping at sea: Sri Lanka provides a good example. The Sea Tiger wing of the insurgent movement Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam attacked Sri Lanka’s navy with suicide vessels for several years.

Drone attacks: The recent drone attack on a commercial vessel passing through the Gulf of Oman, with Yemen and Iranian connections, must also serve as a warning. There have been allegations of the presence of drones in Cabo Delgado.

Drug smuggling: Insecurity at sea off Cabo Delgado carries the risk of compounding the problem posed by drug smuggling networks operating in the area. No effort should be spared to prevent the insurgents and the smugglers cooperating.

Overall, the tactics I’ve outlined call for a comprehensive response, one most probably beyond anything the Mozambique authorities can mobilize on their own.

Some small steps with a maritime focus have taken place. Two small, lightly armed South African naval patrol vessels arrived in Pemba harbour for patrols off Cabo Delgado.

A training team from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recently arrived to help train maritime personnel from Mozambique to increase maritime security governance. The Rwandan military contingent includes a limited small boat capability to extend their presence off the coast, albeit only near harbour patrols.

Fourth – in recapturing Mocímboa da Praia from the insurgents in early August 2021, the operation included a surprise attack by a small contingent of Mozambique soldiers from the sea.

Looking forward: what needs to happen

The maritime situation in Mozambique must not be allowed to emulate the maritime threats found off Nigeria, Somalia and the rebel-held territories in Libya. Allowing this would hold dire implications for international shipping and subsequently for Mozambique and the landlocked countries in the region.

It is precisely this threat that underscored the need for cooperation between South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania to prevent piracy from gaining a foothold in Mozambique. Ongoing maritime operations between South Africa and Mozambique also need to be maintained.

Cooperation with a wide array of partners to promote maritime security governance over the longer term must remain a priority. This is a long term objective to be addressed in the context of the current armed insurgency, and sustained beyond the present volatility.

Stability on land and at sea must be addressed simultaneously.

The South African Navy and UN Office on Drugs and Crime are the first naval and capacity building respondents to arrive. But the SADC should seriously consider using its Standing Maritime Committee to assist Mozambique. The aim would be to bring about a formal regional arrangement for cooperation to secure regional economic and security interests in the southwestern Indian Ocean over the longer term.

Mozambique is in no position to contribute significantly to the broader array of maritime security endeavours. That’s why international partners need to play a role. The SADC must now pass the acid test of stemming the insurgent threats from spilling over and threatening the region’s wider landward and maritime interests.

The intervention forces currently fighting the insurgents should extend their role offshore to prevent a collapse of security at sea off Mozambique or at the minimum, any such perception among the international maritime community.

Francois Vrey is an Emeritus Professor of Military Science, Stellenbosch University. He currently serves as the research coordinator of the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA) of Stellenbosch University. 

This article appears courtesy of The Conversation and may be found in its original form here.

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/fight-against-mozambique-s-insurgency-must-include-maritime-security via http://www.rssmix.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Veterans Push for Medical Marijuana in Conservative South

RALEIGH, N.C. — Each time Chayse Roth drives home to North Carolina, he notices the highway welcome signs that declare: “Nation’s Most Military Friendly State.”

“That’s a powerful thing to claim,” said Roth, a former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who served multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now he says he’s calling on the state to live up to those words. A Wilmington resident, Roth is advocating for lawmakers to pass a bill that would legalize medical marijuana and allow veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and other debilitating conditions to use it for treatment.

“I’ve lost more men to suicide since we went to Afghanistan in ’01 than I have in combat,” said Roth, who said he doesn’t use cannabis himself but wants others to have the option. “It’s just unacceptable for these guys to go overseas and win the battle and come home and lose the battle to themselves.”

He is among several veterans brought together by a recently formed advocacy group called NC Families for Medical Cannabis. These veterans have testified before the legislature and visited lawmakers individually.

In a state that’s home to eight military bases, one of the largest veteran populations in the country and a Republican-controlled legislature that prides itself on supporting the troops, they hope their voices will act as a crucial lever to push through a bill that has faced opposition in the past.

“If we really want to be the most veteran-friendly state in the union, this is just another thing we can do to solidify that statement,” Roth said.

From California to Massachusetts, veterans have been active in the push for medical marijuana legalization for decades. But now, as the movement focuses on the remaining 14 states that have not enacted comprehensive medical marijuana programs or full marijuana legalization, their voices may have outsize influence, experts say.

Many of these remaining states are in the traditionally conservative South and dominated by Republican legislatures. “The group carrying the message here makes a huge difference,” said Julius Hobson Jr., a former lobbyist for the American Medical Association who now teaches lobbying at George Washington University. “When you’ve got veterans coming in advocating for that, and they’re considered to be a more conservative bunch of folks, that has more impact.”

Veterans also have the power of numbers in many of these states, Hobson said. “That’s what gives them clout.”

Successes are already evident. In Texas and Louisiana, veterans played a key role in the recent expansion of medical marijuana programs. In Mississippi, they supported a successful ballot initiative for medical cannabis in 2020, though the result was later overturned by the state Supreme Court. And in Alabama, the case of an out-of-state veteran arrested and jailed for possession of medical marijuana incited national outrage and calls for legalization. The state legalized medical marijuana earlier this year.

To be sure, not every veteran supports these efforts, and the developments in red states have been influenced by other factors: advocacy from cancer patients and parents whose children have epilepsy, lawmakers who see this as a states’ rights issue, a search for alternative pain relief amid the opioid epidemic and a push from industries seeking economic gains.

But the attention to the addiction and suicide epidemics among veterans, and calls to give them more treatment options, are also powerful forces.

In states like North Carolina, where statewide ballot initiatives are banned, veterans can kick-start a conversation with lawmakers who hold the power to make change, said Garrett Perdue, the son of former North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue and a spokesperson for NC Families for Medical Cannabis and CEO of Root Bioscience, a company that makes hemp products.

“It fits right in with the general assembly’s historical support of those communities,” Perdue said. “For [lawmakers] to hear stories of those people that are trusted to protect us and enforce the right of law” and see them as advocates for this policy “is pretty compelling.”

Gary Hess, a Marine Corps veteran from Louisiana, said he first realized the power of his platform in 2019, when he testified in front of the state legislature about seeing friends decapitated by explosions, reliving the trauma day-to-day, taking a cocktail of prescription medications that did little to help his symptoms and finally finding relief with cannabis. His story resonated with lawmakers who had served in the military themselves, Hess said.

He recalled one former colonel serving in the Louisiana House telling him: “They’re not going to say no to a veteran because of the crisis you’re all in. As someone who is put together well and can tell the story of marijuana’s efficacy, you have a powerful platform.”

Hess has since started his own nonprofit to advocate for medical marijuana legalization and has traveled to other state and national events, including hearings before the North Carolina legislature.

“Once I saw the power my story had,” he said, “the goal became: How do I expedite this process for others?”

Experts trace the push for medical marijuana legalization back to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, particularly in California’s Bay Area.

As the movement tried to expand, medical marijuana activists realized other regions were not as sympathetic to the LGBTQ community, said Lee Hannah, an associate professor of political science at Wright State University who is writing a book about the rise of legal marijuana in the U.S. They had to find “more target populations that evoke sympathy, understanding and support,” Hannah said.

Over time, the medical marijuana conversation grew from providing symptom relief for patients with AIDS to include such conditions as cancer, pediatric epilepsy and PTSD, Hannah and his colleagues noted in a 2020 research paper. With each condition added, the movement gained wider appeal.

“It helped change the view of who a marijuana user is,” said Daniel Mallinson, a co-author on the 2020 paper and the upcoming book with Hannah, and an assistant professor at the Penn State-Harrisburg School of Public Affairs. “That makes it more palatable in these legislatures where it wouldn’t have been before.”

In 2009, New Mexico became the first state to make PTSD patients eligible for medical marijuana. The condition has since been included in most state medical marijuana programs.

The movement got another boost in 2016 when the American Legion, a veterans organization with 1.8 million members known for its conservative politics, urged Congress to remove marijuana from its list of prohibited drugs and allow research into its medical uses.

“I think knowing an organization like the American Legion supports it frankly gives [lawmakers] a little bit of political cover to do something that they may have all along supported but had concerns about voter reaction,” said Lawrence Montreuil, the group’s legislative director.

In Texas, when the Republican governor recently approved a law expanding the state’s limited medical marijuana program, he tweeted: “Veterans could qualify for medical marijuana under new law. I will sign it.”

It’s smart political messaging, Hannah said. Elected officials “are always looking to paint laws they support in the most positive light, and the approval rate of veterans is universally high.”

Nationally, veteran-related marijuana bills seem to be among the few cannabis-related reforms that have gained bipartisan support. Bills with Democratic and Republican co-sponsors in Congress this session deal with promoting research into medical marijuana treatment for veterans, allowing Veterans Affairs doctors to discuss cannabis with patients in states where it is legal and protecting veterans from federal penalization for using state-legalized cannabis.

Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), who has co-sponsored two bipartisan bills concerning veterans and medical marijuana this session, said the interest of veterans is “what drew me to cannabis in the first place.”

In North Carolina, veterans like Roth and Hess, along with various advocacy groups, continue to drum up support for the medical marijuana bill. They know it’s a long battle. The bill must clear several Senate committees, a full Senate vote and then repeat the process in the House. But Roth said he’s optimistic “the veteran aspect of it will be heavily considered by lawmakers.”

An early indication of that came at a Senate committee hearing earlier this summer. Standing at the podium, Roth scrolled through his phone to show lawmakers how many of his veteran contacts were now dead due to suicide. Other veterans testified about the times they had contemplated suicide and how the dozens of prescription medications they had tried before cannabis had done little to quiet those thoughts.

The hearing room was silent as each person spoke. At the end, the lawmakers stood and gave a round of applause “for those veterans who are with us today and those who are not.”

The bill later passed that committee with a nearly unanimous vote.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Veterans Push for Medical Marijuana in Conservative South published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Veterans Push for Medical Marijuana in Conservative South

RALEIGH, N.C. — Each time Chayse Roth drives home to North Carolina, he notices the highway welcome signs that declare: “Nation’s Most Military Friendly State.”

“That’s a powerful thing to claim,” said Roth, a former Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who served multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now he says he’s calling on the state to live up to those words. A Wilmington resident, Roth is advocating for lawmakers to pass a bill that would legalize medical marijuana and allow veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and other debilitating conditions to use it for treatment.

“I’ve lost more men to suicide since we went to Afghanistan in ’01 than I have in combat,” said Roth, who said he doesn’t use cannabis himself but wants others to have the option. “It’s just unacceptable for these guys to go overseas and win the battle and come home and lose the battle to themselves.”

He is among several veterans brought together by a recently formed advocacy group called NC Families for Medical Cannabis. These veterans have testified before the legislature and visited lawmakers individually.

In a state that’s home to eight military bases, one of the largest veteran populations in the country and a Republican-controlled legislature that prides itself on supporting the troops, they hope their voices will act as a crucial lever to push through a bill that has faced opposition in the past.

“If we really want to be the most veteran-friendly state in the union, this is just another thing we can do to solidify that statement,” Roth said.

From California to Massachusetts, veterans have been active in the push for medical marijuana legalization for decades. But now, as the movement focuses on the remaining 14 states that have not enacted comprehensive medical marijuana programs or full marijuana legalization, their voices may have outsize influence, experts say.

Many of these remaining states are in the traditionally conservative South and dominated by Republican legislatures. “The group carrying the message here makes a huge difference,” said Julius Hobson Jr., a former lobbyist for the American Medical Association who now teaches lobbying at George Washington University. “When you’ve got veterans coming in advocating for that, and they’re considered to be a more conservative bunch of folks, that has more impact.”

Veterans also have the power of numbers in many of these states, Hobson said. “That’s what gives them clout.”

Successes are already evident. In Texas and Louisiana, veterans played a key role in the recent expansion of medical marijuana programs. In Mississippi, they supported a successful ballot initiative for medical cannabis in 2020, though the result was later overturned by the state Supreme Court. And in Alabama, the case of an out-of-state veteran arrested and jailed for possession of medical marijuana incited national outrage and calls for legalization. The state legalized medical marijuana earlier this year.

To be sure, not every veteran supports these efforts, and the developments in red states have been influenced by other factors: advocacy from cancer patients and parents whose children have epilepsy, lawmakers who see this as a states’ rights issue, a search for alternative pain relief amid the opioid epidemic and a push from industries seeking economic gains.

But the attention to the addiction and suicide epidemics among veterans, and calls to give them more treatment options, are also powerful forces.

In states like North Carolina, where statewide ballot initiatives are banned, veterans can kick-start a conversation with lawmakers who hold the power to make change, said Garrett Perdue, the son of former North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue and a spokesperson for NC Families for Medical Cannabis and CEO of Root Bioscience, a company that makes hemp products.

“It fits right in with the general assembly’s historical support of those communities,” Perdue said. “For [lawmakers] to hear stories of those people that are trusted to protect us and enforce the right of law” and see them as advocates for this policy “is pretty compelling.”

Gary Hess, a Marine Corps veteran from Louisiana, said he first realized the power of his platform in 2019, when he testified in front of the state legislature about seeing friends decapitated by explosions, reliving the trauma day-to-day, taking a cocktail of prescription medications that did little to help his symptoms and finally finding relief with cannabis. His story resonated with lawmakers who had served in the military themselves, Hess said.

He recalled one former colonel serving in the Louisiana House telling him: “They’re not going to say no to a veteran because of the crisis you’re all in. As someone who is put together well and can tell the story of marijuana’s efficacy, you have a powerful platform.”

Hess has since started his own nonprofit to advocate for medical marijuana legalization and has traveled to other state and national events, including hearings before the North Carolina legislature.

“Once I saw the power my story had,” he said, “the goal became: How do I expedite this process for others?”

Experts trace the push for medical marijuana legalization back to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, particularly in California’s Bay Area.

As the movement tried to expand, medical marijuana activists realized other regions were not as sympathetic to the LGBTQ community, said Lee Hannah, an associate professor of political science at Wright State University who is writing a book about the rise of legal marijuana in the U.S. They had to find “more target populations that evoke sympathy, understanding and support,” Hannah said.

Over time, the medical marijuana conversation grew from providing symptom relief for patients with AIDS to include such conditions as cancer, pediatric epilepsy and PTSD, Hannah and his colleagues noted in a 2020 research paper. With each condition added, the movement gained wider appeal.

“It helped change the view of who a marijuana user is,” said Daniel Mallinson, a co-author on the 2020 paper and the upcoming book with Hannah, and an assistant professor at the Penn State-Harrisburg School of Public Affairs. “That makes it more palatable in these legislatures where it wouldn’t have been before.”

In 2009, New Mexico became the first state to make PTSD patients eligible for medical marijuana. The condition has since been included in most state medical marijuana programs.

The movement got another boost in 2016 when the American Legion, a veterans organization with 1.8 million members known for its conservative politics, urged Congress to remove marijuana from its list of prohibited drugs and allow research into its medical uses.

“I think knowing an organization like the American Legion supports it frankly gives [lawmakers] a little bit of political cover to do something that they may have all along supported but had concerns about voter reaction,” said Lawrence Montreuil, the group’s legislative director.

In Texas, when the Republican governor recently approved a law expanding the state’s limited medical marijuana program, he tweeted: “Veterans could qualify for medical marijuana under new law. I will sign it.”

It’s smart political messaging, Hannah said. Elected officials “are always looking to paint laws they support in the most positive light, and the approval rate of veterans is universally high.”

Nationally, veteran-related marijuana bills seem to be among the few cannabis-related reforms that have gained bipartisan support. Bills with Democratic and Republican co-sponsors in Congress this session deal with promoting research into medical marijuana treatment for veterans, allowing Veterans Affairs doctors to discuss cannabis with patients in states where it is legal and protecting veterans from federal penalization for using state-legalized cannabis.

Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), who has co-sponsored two bipartisan bills concerning veterans and medical marijuana this session, said the interest of veterans is “what drew me to cannabis in the first place.”

In North Carolina, veterans like Roth and Hess, along with various advocacy groups, continue to drum up support for the medical marijuana bill. They know it’s a long battle. The bill must clear several Senate committees, a full Senate vote and then repeat the process in the House. But Roth said he’s optimistic “the veteran aspect of it will be heavily considered by lawmakers.”

An early indication of that came at a Senate committee hearing earlier this summer. Standing at the podium, Roth scrolled through his phone to show lawmakers how many of his veteran contacts were now dead due to suicide. Other veterans testified about the times they had contemplated suicide and how the dozens of prescription medications they had tried before cannabis had done little to quiet those thoughts.

The hearing room was silent as each person spoke. At the end, the lawmakers stood and gave a round of applause “for those veterans who are with us today and those who are not.”

The bill later passed that committee with a nearly unanimous vote.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Today's Business and Markets News: Live Updates Daily Business Briefing May 27, 2021Updated  May 27, 2021, 9:03 a.m. ET There is growing concern among some large investors in Exxon that the oil giant could suffer in the future if the demand for oil falls rapidly.Credit…Yuri Gripas/Reuters Exxon Mobil was dealt a stunning loss at its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday from an unlikely opponent: a small new activist investor focused on climate change, Engine No. 1. The hedge fund won at least two seats on the oil giant’s 12-member board. It may yet claim a third nominee when the counting is over. For corporate America, the DealBook newsletter reports, the upset victory for Engine No. 1 and its allies is a clear sign that company boards and leaders need to pay attention to environmental, social and governance issues (known as E.S.G.) — or suffer rebukes. Exxon was the first activist campaign for Engine No. 1, which was founded last year by an energy and tech investor, Chris James. Its head of active engagement is Charlie Penner, a veteran hedge fund executive who helped lead campaigns against companies like Apple while at Jana Partners. Engine No. 1 began agitating against the oil giant in December, calling on the company to diversify away from fossil fuels and reduce its carbon emissions. But it began work on the campaign last March, courting large investors like public pension funds that held far larger stakes in Exxon, and thus had more sway. That’s how it parlayed a stake of just 0.02 percent into getting its preferred nominees on the company’s board. Exxon’s shares rose 1.2 percent Wednesday. The fund’s campaign was a bet on a confluence of events, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, including longstanding investor dissatisfaction with Exxon’s corporate governance and a growing appreciation on Wall Street for E.S.G. That position appeared to be supported after the Exxon meeting. In a note explaining why it backed some of Engine No. 1’s board candidates, BlackRock — which owns nearly 7 percent of Exxon — said the company’s directors “need to further assess the company’s strategy and board expertise against the possibility that demand for fossil fuels may decline rapidly in the coming decades.” Exxon had largely played down Engine No. 1’s concerns, and pressured the firm to drop its challenge after a much bigger hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, called off a campaign. But Engine No. 1 persisted, and also benefited from timing: It began its campaign while oil prices were still depressed by the pandemic. Had oil not rebounded in recent months, Engine No. 1 executives believed, all four of its proposed directors might have been elected, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Exxon’s loss was just one sign on Wednesday that Big Oil is facing a climate reckoning. A Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell must speed up its efforts to cut its carbon emissions. And Chevron shareholders backed a proposal to compel the company to help customers reduce their own emissions. Read more An Exxon Mobile oil refinery in Channahon, Ill. Shareholders say the oil giant should invest more heavily in renewables like wind and solar energy.Credit…Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock Big Oil was dealt a stunning defeat on Wednesday when shareholders of Exxon Mobil elected at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to steer the company toward cleaner energy and away from oil and gas. The success of the campaign, led by a tiny hedge fund against the nation’s largest oil company, could force the energy industry to confront climate change and embolden Wall Street investment firms that are prioritizing the issue, The New York Times’s Clifford Krauss and Peter Eavis report. The campaign Engine No. 1, the hedge fund leading the campaign, was seeking to defeat four of the company’s 12 director candidates. Its victory is a sharp rebuke to Darren W. Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, and is the culmination of years of efforts by activists to force the oil giant to change its environmental policies and approach. Engine No. 1 and its allies had argued that Exxon’s stance on climate change and the oil and gas business was not just bad for the planet but that it would hurt the company’s profits in the future as governments required businesses to reduce and eventually eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases. The winners Gregory Goff, former chief executive of Andeavor, a refiner, and Kaisa Hietala, an environmental scientist and former executive at Neste, a Finnish energy company that produces biofuels, were the two nominees declared winners. The company said the final results would not be publicly available Wednesday, and an independent inspector will determine the timing of an announcement. Reactions “This isn’t really about ideology, it’s about economics,” Chris James, founder of Engine No. 1, said. “And economics is what has driven the adoption of some of the alternative fuel sources versus fossil fuels. We want there to be an acceptance of change.” “We welcome the new directors,” said Mr. Woods, the Exxon head. “While there is still more to do, we are proud of the progress we have made to reduce emissions and clear plans for further reductions.” “This signals a new era for the role of corporations in climate change and a new era for corporate governance,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor. Why it matters The vote reveals the growing power of giant Wall Street firms that manage the 401(k)s and other investments of individuals and businesses to press chief executives to pursue environmental and social goals. Some of these firms are run by executives who say they see climate change as a major threat to the economy and the planet. The loss of at least two seats on its board will almost surely energize activists to pressure Exxon, other oil companies and businesses in various industries that they believe are not doing enough to address climate change. Read more The audience at an AMC theater in Manhattan in March. Shares in AMC have risen sharply this week.Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press U.S. stock futures fell slightly on Thursday before fresh data is released later in the day on state unemployment benefit claims and durable goods sales. The jobless claims are expected to fall for a fourth week to the lowest level since before the pandemic. Investors will be watching jobs data closely in the United States, as a measure of how the economic recovery is progressing and how much monetary stimulus the economy still needs. The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate to keep inflation stable and reach full unemployment, and recent data has shown a sharp rise in prices. Policymakers say the increase is likely to be temporary, but they have been “talking about talking” about when the central bank will be ready to slow down its bond-buying program. The monetary stimulus has helped keep stock prices high. That said, the strength of the labor market is being vigorously debated. In April, job gains slowed sharply and some employers have complained about struggling to fill vacancies even as millions of people remain unemployed. Randal K. Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision, said on Wednesday that he thought the central bank should start discussing how and when to slow its big bond purchases. Elsewhere in markets The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.1 percent, creeping up for a sixth day and touching another record high. Oil prices fell. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropped 0.8 percent to $65.70 a barrel. Shares in Eli Lilly fell 1 percent in premarket trading after the drugmaker said in a regulatory filling that it had received a subpoena from the Department of Justice for documents concerning its manufacturing plant in Branchburg, N.J. Reuters has reported about accusations of irregularities in quality control at the plant, where Lilly makes a Covid-19 treatment. Shares in AMC, the big movie theater chain, dropped 6 percent and was one of the most traded stocks in premarket trading, while shares in video game retailer GameStop fell 4 percent. AMC shares have jumped 62 percent this week and GameStop rose 37 percent as the popular “meme stocks” picked up steam again. Shares in Royal Dutch Shell fell 1.4 percent on Thursday after a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday that Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, must speed up its reduction of carbon dioxide emissions to tackle climate change. The court said Shell was “obliged” to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of its activities by 45 percent at the end of 2030 compared with 2019. Exxon Mobil shares slipped in premarket trading after shareholders of the largest oil company in the United States elected at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to move the company away from oil and gas to cleaner energy. Read more A job fair organized by High Road Restaurants in New York. New claims for state jobless benefits fell to their lowest weekly level since before the pandemic.Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock Initial claims for state jobless benefits fell last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The weekly figure was 420,000, a decline of 34,000 from the previous week and the lowest weekly total since before the pandemic. New claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for jobless freelancers, gig workers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits, totaled 93,500, a slight decline from the prior week. The figures are not seasonally adjusted. New state claims remain high by historical levels but are less than half the level recorded as recently as early January. The benefit filings, something of a proxy for layoffs, have receded as business return to fuller operations, particularly in hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality. More than 20 Republican-led states have said they will abandon federally funded emergency benefit programs in June or early July, saying the income is deterring recipients from seeking work as some employers complain of trouble filling jobs. Those programs include not only Pandemic Unemployment Assistance but also extended benefits for the long-term unemployed. In a separate report, the government on Friday issued its second reading for U.S. growth in the first three months of the year. It said that the economy expanded by 6.4 percent in the first quarter, the same rate as reported last month. California’ s CA Notify app is based on the Apple-Google software. About 65,000 people have used it to notify others of possible exposures to the virus.Credit…Paresh Dave/Reuters When Apple and Google collaborated last year on a smartphone-based system to track the spread of the coronavirus, the news was seen as a game changer. The software uses Bluetooth signals to detect app users who come into close contact. If a user later tests positive, the person can anonymously notify other app users whom the person may have crossed paths with in restaurants, on trains or elsewhere. Soon countries around the world and some two dozen American states introduced virus apps based on the Apple-Google software. To date, the apps have been downloaded more than 90 million times, according to an analysis by Sensor Tower, an app research firm. Public health officials say the apps have provided modest but important benefits. But Natasha Singer of The New York Times reports that some researchers say the two companies’ product and policy choices have limited the system’s usefulness, raising questions about the power of Big Tech to set global standards for public health tools. Computer scientists have reported accuracy problems with the Bluetooth technology. Some of the app users have complained of failed notifications, and there has been little rigorous research on whether the apps’ potential to accurately alert people of virus exposures outweighs potential drawbacks — like falsely warning unexposed people or failing to detect users exposed to the virus. “It is still an open question whether or not these apps are assisting in real contact tracing, are simply a distraction, or whether they might even cause problems,” Stephen Farrell and Doug Leith, computer science researchers at Trinity College in Dublin, wrote in a report in April on Ireland’s virus alert app. Read more Ms. Guzman and Vice President Kamala Harris with President Biden when he signed an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program in March.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times Isabella Casillas Guzman, President Biden’s choice to run the Small Business Administration, inherited a portfolio of nearly $1 trillion in emergency aid and an agency plagued by controversy when she took over in March. She has been sprinting from crisis to crisis ever since. Some new programs have been mired in delays and glitches, while the S.B.A.’s best-known pandemic relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, nearly ran out of money for its loans this month, confusing lenders and stranding millions of borrowers. Angry business owners have deluged the agency with criticism and complaints. Now, it’s Ms. Guzman’s job to turn the ship around. “It’s the largest S.B.A. portfolio we’ve ever had, and clearly there’s going to need to be some changes in how we do business,” she said in an interview with The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley. “The S.B.A. needs to be as entrepreneurial as the small businesses we serve,”she added. “What I really, truly mean by that is that a more customer-first approach.” The S.B.A. is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency, with an annual operating budget that is typically less than half of what the Defense Department spends in a day. It was long viewed within the government as a sleepy backwater. But when the pandemic sent unemployment claims soaring, Congress responded with a plan to give businesses money to keep their workers employed. Just seven days after President Donald J. Trump signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in late March 2020, the Small Business Administration began accepting applications for the Paycheck Protection Program. Despite lots of speed bumps — including confusing, often-revised loan terms and several technical meltdowns — the program enjoyed some success. Millions of business owners credit it with helping them survive the pandemic and keep more workers employed. Read more Warehouses are sprouting up in fields in the Lehigh Valley, part of a boom driven by the area’s proximity to New York.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times In recent decades, the area in and around Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley has evolved from its agricultural and manufacturing roots to also become a health care and higher education hub. Now there’s a new shift, The New York Times’s Michael Corkery reports. Huge warehouses are sprouting up like mushrooms along local highways, on country roads and in farm fields. The boom is being driven, in large part, by the astonishing growth of Amazon and other e-commerce retailers and the area’s proximity to New York, the nation’s largest concentration of online shoppers, roughly 80 miles away. But the warehouses are being built at such a dizzying pace that many residents worry the area’s landscape, quality of life and long-term economic well-being are at risk. E-commerce is fueling job growth, but the work is physically taxing, does not pay as well as manufacturing and could eventually be phased out by automation. Yet the warehouses are leaving a permanent mark. There are proposals to widen local roads to accommodate the thousands of additional trucks ferrying goods from the hulking structures. Developers are confident in the industry’s growth, however, particularly after the pandemic. Big warehouse companies like Prologis and Duke Realty are investing billions in local properties. Many of the warehouses are being built before tenants have signed up, making some wonder whether there is a bubble and if some of these giant buildings will ever be filled. “People are calling it warehouse fatigue,” said Dr. Christopher R. Amato, a member of the regional planning commission. “It feels like we are just being inundated.” But some, like David Jaindl, a third-generation farmer, said the concerns in the area about warehouses were unwarranted. “They are certainly good for our area,” said Mr. Jaindl, who is developing land for several new warehouses. “They add a nice tax base and good employment.” Manufacturing jobs in the Lehigh Valley pay, on average, $71,400 a year, compared with $46,700 working in a warehouse or driving a truck. The region is still home to large manufacturing plants that produce Crayola crayons and marshmallow Peeps candies. Read more Source link Orbem News #Business #Live #Markets #news #Todays #Updates

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Keys to an Equitable Recovery: Better Data and ‘Trusted Messengers’

“It is a structural problem that people don’t have access to high-quality health care.”

— Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University, and chair of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 Health Equity task force

In early December, a Black doctor, Dr. Susan Moore — then hospitalized with Covid-19 — posted a video online complaining of inadequate care by her white doctor. After her video was shared widely, the problem was corrected, but just weeks later, Dr. Moore died of complications from the disease.

The news lit up the group chats of Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, whose friends pointed out just how painfully familiar Dr. Moore’s experience was.

“There were so many text threads with my friends saying, ‘Yes, this happens,’” explained Dr. Nunez-Smith, a practicing internist, an associate professor at Yale University and the founding director of Yale’s Equity Research and Innovation Center. After the inauguration, she will also chair President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 Health Equity task force.

“So often, even I have to declare I’m a physician, almost out of this desperation to say, ‘Hey, pay attention to me, listen to me,’” she said in a recent phone interview.

“If it’s this hard for me, then what is it like for our patients who aren’t part of this system, who have a million other competing priorities, who don’t speak the language of health care?”

Dr. Nunez-Smith has noted that even when she’s functioning as a physician, some of her patients don’t take her seriously, handing her their meal trays or assuming that she has come to empty the trash.

This kind of inside-out, top-to-bottom racism in the health care system and the social and economic inequities that lead to poor health outcomes have been the focus of much of Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research. In her newest role, she has been tasked with drawing up a pandemic recovery plan that is both efficient and equitable.

In Her Words caught up with Dr. Nunez-Smith over the phone to discuss the vast racial health disparities of the pandemic and what the next few months will look like.

What frustrates you most about the conversations around gender and racial disparities in the health outcomes of Covid-19? Have there been moments where you’ve just buried your head in your hands?

Yes, I do have those moments! We have to counter the personal blame narrative. Things like, “These people haven’t taken care of themselves well enough, that’s why they have comorbidities” and other such notions that really are blind to the underlying reality.

It is a structural problem that people don’t have access to high-quality health care or to even think about early diagnosis and appropriate treatment for chronic conditions. What about the environments where people live? Is it really possible to get out there and do physical activity? Is it safe? Are there environmental toxins? Are we talking at all about who has the privilege of staying home? These things are not accidental. They are the results of policies that have been driven by a legacy of racism in our country and all the other -isms.

We know that certain groups, Black and Hispanic communities for example, have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. What are some of your policy priorities moving forward to address these inequities?

One of the things we have to commit to is the disruption of that predictability. We have to have conversations around access to high-quality health care pathways but also conversations about educational and economic opportunities.

In the short term, though, as we think about Covid-19 and recovery, we have to ask what it looks like to have equitable access to testing, tracing, supportive quarantining and isolation, treatments and access to vaccination.

What does it look like?

First, we need better data. This is a huge thing that I spend a lot of time on: We have incomplete data right now, across the country, and we need better data to inform and drive policy.

Covid-19 Vaccines ›

Answers to Your Vaccine Questions

If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine?

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help.

When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated?

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021.

If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask?

Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially get authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while they’re not experiencing any cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be intensely studying this question as the vaccines roll out. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders.

Will it hurt? What are the side effects?

The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection won’t be any different from ones you’ve gotten before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. But some of them have felt short-lived discomfort, including aches and flu-like symptoms that typically last a day. It’s possible that people may need to plan to take a day off work or school after the second shot. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that will provide long-lasting immunity.

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed.

Then it becomes an exercise in operations and logistics, but it’s also about understanding the lived experiences and realities of people.

So think about something like testing. So much of the testing in our country is drive-up testing, so obviously you need a car. And what are the hours of those facilities? Or, think about vaccinations that require special handling and cold chain storage. Where are we setting up those kinds of facilities and how far are they from the hardest hit? We also have to make sure there is no cost for the vaccine.

But really, the road map begins with data; it’s foundational.

Are there systems in place to make good data available? Is it just a matter of someone at the top — like you — asking for it?

I’m trying to get that understanding myself. I’m sure you’ve seen that our conversations and communications in terms of the transition are a bit … well, they are what they are … so we don’t have full visibility of everything that exists. But do I think it is possible for us to collect the data we need? Yes.

We need to collect data along the lines of sex, gender, race, ethnicity and geography. And kudos to all of the jurisdictions that are figuring out how to collect this data in a really robust way. But for the places where that might be hard, I think the federal government has a role to play in terms of technical assistance and guidance.

There are so many studies that show that men and women have different reactions to vaccines, but when I was looking through the data of the two vaccines that have been greenlit by the F.D.A., I found little information on the sex differences in adverse events (side effects) and immunogenicity (immune system reaction). Does that concern you?

You’re right, sex is a biological variable, and I think it’s really important for there to be transparency. But keep in mind where we are — we’re in emergency use authorization, we’re not in approval — and more of this information will come; I do expect to see more subgroup analyses.

The communities we’ve been talking about — racial minorities, women and LGBTQ folks, for example — have little trust in the health care system already because of how they’ve been treated in the past. What kind of messaging will help rebuild that trust when it comes to the vaccine?

It is completely rational for the groups that you listed to have a healthy degree of skepticism. We have to start the conversation there and acknowledge that there are groups in our country that have not really received the respect and the fair treatment that they deserve. It is very frustrating when people are like, “Oh these folks aren’t educated.” We need to understand why people have this apprehension.

We need to find out what questions people have and try to answer them. Let us be honest and transparent, and when we don’t know the answer, we won’t make it up. We’ll say, “We don’t know yet.”

Then we need to ask, well, who do you want to hear that answer from? That matters a lot. We know that information moves through different groups and populations differently. Maybe it’s their doctor or maybe it’s their neighbor who is a nurse. People text me all the time, not as a person involved with the advisory board, but simply as a doctor they know. So we have to make sure that the trusted messengers have answers and consistent messaging.

So far, the vaccine rollout has been slow, and we’ve been seeing stories of haphazard and even unfair rollouts in different states and institutions. What are your plans to ramp up the speed of the vaccine campaign in an equitable way?

We’re already seeing some places where there are concerns that there aren’t enough vaccinations for their health care workers. And in other places, they’ve moved on to other groups that haven’t been prioritized by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

I feel very confident there hasn’t been political interference in the work that the A.C.I.P. is doing, advising the C.D.C. and the F.D.A., and that these guidelines are considering equity. I’m very reassured when it comes to that.

But what the C.D.C. provides to states is guidance, and states do have discretion to adjust. So what has emerged is this patchwork of lots of different things bubbling up. There is a lot more that can be done in terms of federal coordination.

Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.

In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here to get future installments. Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com. Follow us on Instagram at @nytgender.

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The Best Advice You Could Ever Get About Easy To Make Dinners For Family

Like your medical professional, your CPA recognizes a lot concerning your individual scenario. Connection of service http://archerawbz061.unblog.fr/2021/01/05/the-top-reasons-people-succeed-in-the-dining-room-table-and-chairs-for-small-spaces-industry/ is likewise a vital element. That's why, for many individuals, choosing a Certified Public Accountant is the appropriate option.

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An "inner auditor" CPA can essentially be summed up by the job title. Inner auditors validate the accuracy of their company's internal documents. They check for mismanagement, waste, or fraud. This is a significantly crucial area of bookkeeping. Internal auditors take a look at and also examine their companies' monetary as well as details systems, management treatments, and also interior controls to guarantee that records are exact and also controls suffice.

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Even after you graduated from university and you are currently a Certified Public Accountant, you will certainly still require to learn about the various modifications and also trends in the business globe. This assists you to understand what to do and what not to do when owning an organization or helping those that do. In bookkeeping, you will certainly see that there will certainly be a lot of occupation possibilities that you can consider.

Certified Public Accountant can likewise function as teachers or as scientists in colleges. If you have a flair for training, then this occupation course is for you. This career path in book-keeping can also provide you with fantastic chances.

A Certified Public Accountant should go through proceeding education and learning as accounting and also tax regulations transform from year to year. Consequently, just a Certified Public Accountant can make certain that your income tax return is entirely exact, which is very important to the IRS. Because a Certified Public Accountant has intimate expertise of tax legislations and readily available exceptions, a Certified Public Accountant can ensure you obtain the largest reimbursement feasible.

In case you are chosen for audit by the Internal Revenue Service, your best option to come via the audit cleanly is to have a Certified Public Accountant at hand. A CPA is as knowledgeable about tax obligation law as the Internal Revenue Service representative executing the audit. As a result of this, the Certified Public Accountant can discuss a lower charge, help you avoid charges, and assist you assert the deductions you are worthy of.

If you are not exactly sure whether you might have a simple tax return that you can do on your own, contemplate this thought. You could be missing out on considerable tax obligation benefits. Or perhaps you are worried that you may be making mistakes in your work. You might need to make a decision whether you must employ a certified public accountant.

CPAs are college-educated and also qualified experts certified by the states in which they practice. They have passed a strenuous licensing test as well as are called for to abide by rigorous ethics requirements. They are to stay existing with evolving tax obligation regulations and laws. Just Certified public accountants, lawyers, or enrolled agents are licensed to represent you before the Internal Revenue Service.

A Certified Public Accountant can have a "public" work summary. This type of work can be summed up in what the majority of people envision as normal accounting professional's work. It includes carrying out a wide range of audit, bookkeeping, tax, and also getting in touch with tasks for their customers, which may be corporations, governments, nonprofit companies, and people. Certified Public Accountant specialties are usually chosen.

Still various other CPAs may select to focus on auditing financial statements to notify capitalists as well as authorities that declarations have actually been properly prepared and reported. Certified public accountants normally own their own companies or help public accountancy companies.

“Managerial" CPAs works in a business. These Certified public accountants are also called a price, administration, commercial, business, or exclusive accounting professionals. Certified Public Accountant managerial accountants record and analyze the monetary details of the companies for which they work. This job summary includes an in-depth listing of obligations - such as budgeting, efficiency analysis, cost monitoring, and also property administration.

An "inner auditor" Certified Public Accountant can primarily be summed up by the work title. Internal auditors validate the accuracy of their company's interior records. They look for mismanagement, waste, or fraud. This is a significantly vital location of audit. Internal auditors analyze and assess their firms' economic and info systems, monitoring procedures, and also internal controls to guarantee that documents are exact as well as controls suffice.

They protect versus fraud and waste. They likewise assess firm procedures by reviewing their performance, effectiveness, and compliance with business plans and treatments, legislations, as well as federal government guidelines. This inner auditor task description can vary with different firms. They may consist of work responsibilities such as electronic data processing or design. They may execute environmental, lawful, insurance, financial, and health care auditing.

Their task summary may consist of solid interpersonal and communication abilities due to the fact that many Certified public accountants work on groups. They need the ability to connect bookkeeping as well as economic info clearly and concisely.

Also after you graduated from university as well as you are already a CPA, you will certainly still require to learn more about the different changes and fads in the business globe. This assists you to understand what to do and also what not to do when possessing a company or helping those who do. In bookkeeping, you will certainly see that there will certainly be a lot of job chances that you can think about.

Certified Public Accountant can likewise function as professors or as scientists in universities. If you have a propensity for training, then this career course is for you. This profession course in book-keeping can additionally supply you with excellent chances.

CPAs can aid you in your person or service accountancy and also in your tax obligation prep work in numerous means. Hiring a CPA to do your accounting solutions requires is the best means to guarantee that your audit is mistake totally free in case of Internal Revenue Service or other audit.

Arthur C.F. Pratt - Bend CPA

1557 Northwest Mount Washington Drive,

Bend, OR 97703

(541) 389-4272

[bangkokjacknews]

Feature: What started the First World War?

What started the First World War?

But, a century later, debate still rages over the causes behind the conflict, which claimed the lives of 17 million people, traumatised a generation, overturned old empires and changed the world’s political order forever. The simplest answer is that the immediate cause was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of Austria-Hungary. His death at the hands of Gavrilo Princip – a Serbian nationalist with ties to the secretive military group known as the Black Hand – propelled the major European military powers towards war. The events that led up to the assassination are significantly more complicated, but most scholars agree that the gradual emergence of a group of alliances between major powers was partly to blame for the descent into war. By 1914, those alliances resulted in the six major powers of Europe coalescing into two broad groups: Britain, France and Russia formed the Triple Entente, while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy comprised the Triple Alliance. As these countries came to each other's aid after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, their declarations of war produced a domino effect. CNN lists these key developments: - June 28, 1914 - Gavrilo Princip assassinates Franz Ferdinand. - July 28, 1914 - Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. - August 2, 1914 - Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and Germany sign a secret treaty of alliance. - August 3, 1914 - Germany declares war on France. - August 4, 1914 - Germany invades Belgium, leading Britain to declare war on Germany. - August 10, 1914 - Austria-Hungary invades Russia. As the war progressed, further acts of aggression drew other countries, including the United States, into the conflict. Many others, including Australia, India and most African colonies, fought at the behest of their imperial rulers. Alliance Theory But even the alliance theory is now considered overly simplistic by many historians. War came to Europe not by accident, but by design, argues military historian Gary Sheffield. According to Sheffield, the First World War began for two fundamental reasons: "First, decision-makers in Berlin and Vienna chose to pursue a course that they hoped would bring about significant political advantages. Even if it brought about general war. Second, the governments in the entente states rose to the challenge." Sheffield adds: "At best, Germany and Austria-Hungary launched a reckless gamble that went badly wrong. At worst, 1914 saw a premeditated war of aggression and conquest, a conflict that proved to be far removed from the swift and decisive venture that some had envisaged". Was WWI caused by a family feud? Far from being remote rulers who knew nothing of their enemies, the heads of state of Britain, Germany and Russia – George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II – were first cousins who knew one another very well. A BBC documentary screened earlier this year, Royal Cousins at War, told the story of Wilhelm's difficult relationship with his parents and antipathy towards all things British and argues that this helped bring the world to the brink of war. The three monarchs were like "sleepwalkers stepping towards an open lift shaft", Richard Davenport-Hines says in his review of Miranda Carter's book on the subject, The Three Emperors. Insecurity The events leading up to the conflict are "a study in the envy, insincerity, festering rancour and muddle that only families can manage". Unlike many family feuds, however, disagreements between the royal cousins exacted a geopolitical price. "As relationships between the royal cousins waxed and waned, so did the relationships between their countries," the Daily Mail's Ruth Styles says. Queen Victoria attempted to broker peace between the cousins, but after her death good will "between the Russian, British and German branches of the family dissipated and Europe edged closer to war: George V and Tsar Nicholas on one side, and their estranged cousin, Wilhelm, on the other," Styles says. The engagement was disastrous for all three monarchs. By the end of 1918 the German kaiser was deposed and had fled into exile, the Russian tsar and his children had been executed by revolutionaries, and the British king presided over "a broken, debt-ridden empire," Davenport-Hines says. Which nation was the primary aggressor? The question of which country or countries caused the war is sometimes flipped on its head by scholars who have asked which countries – had they conducted themselves differently – could have prevented it. On the BBC website, military historian Sir Max Hastings says that while no one nation deserves the blame alone, Germany is more guilty than most, as "it alone had power to halt the descent to disaster at any time in July 1914 by withdrawing its 'blank cheque' which offered support to Austria for its invasion of Serbia." Sir Richard J Evans, Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge disagrees, arguing that Serbian nationalism and expansionism were the root cause of the conflict. "Serbia bore the greatest responsibility for the outbreak of WW1," Evans says, "and Serbian backing for the Black Hand terrorists was extraordinarily irresponsible," Other leading scholars believe the blame should be shared equally between all the main players: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Serbia, Russia, France, the Ottoman empire and Britain. The "fatal mixture of political misjudgement, fear of loss of prestige and stubborn commitments on all sides of a very complicated system of military and political alliances of European states" led to the descent into all-out war. Why did the US join the war? Until the US Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson "had strained every political sinew" to keep the country out of the conflict, author Patrick Gregory writes for the BBC. Despite widespread horror in the US over newspaper reports of German atrocities against civilians, the general feeling among in the early months of the conflict was that American men should not risk their lives in a European war. That all started to change in May 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the British passenger liner the Lusitania as it crossed the Atlantic, killing 1,198 of the 1,962 people on board. The attack provoked shock and fury across the world. Among the dead were 128 Americans, putting substantial pressure on the government to abandon its neutral stance on the conflict. Although ambivalence to the war remained strong enough that Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war", Gregory writes, the Lusitania atrocity swelled the ranks of the pro-war lobby, led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. In response to the outcry, Kaiser Wilhelm II halted U-boat operations in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the pro-war sentiment in the US continued to fester - and when Germany announced plans to resume its naval strikes on passenger ships in January 1917, it exploded. Public opinion was further inflamed, writes Gregory, over the emergence of a telegram, supposedly from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman to Mexico offering military assistance if the US entered the war. Observers soon came to believe that the change in public feeling made US entry into the war inevitable, and eight weeks later Congress approved a resolution declaring war on Germany. The Anglo-German arms race Towards the end of the 19th century, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany embarked on a massive project to build a fleet that would rival Great Britain's. The Royal Navy at the time was regarded as the most powerful in the world, although its primary purpose was not military, but the protection of trade. "Britain relied upon imports and its economic prosperity rested on seaborne trade, financed by the City of London," Paul Cornish, the senior curator at the Imperial War Museum, says. "Any threat to Britain's naval supremacy was a threat to the nation itself." A shipbuilding arms race with Germany began in 1898, but Britain had gained a technological edge over its rival by 1906, with the development of a new class of battleship – the dreadnought. "Designed around the firepower of heavy guns and powered by steam turbines, these huge vessels made all earlier warships obsolete," Cornish adds. "In both countries, the public, encouraged by the press, popular authors and naval pressure groups, demanded more battleships." Ultimately, Germany was unable to keep pace with the spending power of its rival and shifted attention away from its navy back to the development of its army. However, "the damage to Germany’s relationship with Britain proved irreversible". Is it wrong to try to point the finger? Attempting to identify which nation or nations should be held accountable for the war is an exercise doomed to failure, Margaret MacMillan argues in her 2013 First World War history, The War that Ended Peace. In her Spectator review of MacMillan's "important new study", Jane Ridley says that the book's main thrust is that the blame game itself is "conceptually flawed". "The alternative to searching for scapegoats is to examine the system," MacMillan argues "and the international system in 1914 was seriously dysfunctional". According to MacMillan, the alliances drawn up between nations before the war could actually have helped to preserve the fragile peace. However, pacifist ideals were brushed aside by the "frightening shifts" in the mindset of Europe’s leaders who ultimately came to think in terms of military solutions rather than diplomatic ones. "The most we can hope for," MacMillan says, "is to understand as best we can those individuals who had to make the choices between war and peace." Can any individual be blamed for the First World War? The Guardian identifies six people who, from a British perspective, had the largest roles in the events leading to the outbreak of war: Kaiser Wilhelm II, the "hot-tempered, military-minded ruler of German empire and kingdom of Prussia" who was "increasingly suspicious of motives" in Britain, France and Russia David Lloyd George, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, who "against his earlier inclinations" ultimately became a leading proponent of military action against Germany Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who found himself caught between Russia's loyalty to Serbia, and his desire to avoid war on the continent Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was "keen to strengthen Austrian army" but wanted not to antagonise Serbia Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister who led the nation into war, to be replaced by Lloyd George in December 1916 Edward Grey, the foreign secretary who "was ineffective in his attempts to warn Germany against threatening Belgium's neutrality in 1914". 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