#also there are indigneous people outside of north america!

[sharpth1ng]

Oh my god I feel crazy having to say this but I've just witnessed an interaction that made it feel necessary. If someone tells you they're native and you think they look too white or too black to be really native please fucking educate yourself?

My great aunts were literally sold to white americans as pre-teens. Why do you think their children look white?

And when enslaved people escaped their oppressors which communities do you think were safe for them to go to? At least in my area Native history and Black history is inextricably linked.

Native people can have light skin and eyes. Native people can have dark skin and curly hair. If someone is mixed, they're mixed. Don't erase their Indigenous identity.

Even non-mixed Natives have a variety of skin tones and hair textures. It's not up to people outside our communities to decide who is or isn't Native.

[96thdayofrage]

The Original Karens: From Emmett Till’s Accuser To The White Woman Who Sparked The Tulsa Massacre

Written by Clay Cane

In this current climate of protests and demands for justice, the entitled and indignant white women known as “Karens” appear to be falling apart.

From Amy Cooper, whose over dramatic 911 call on a birdwatching Black man blew up in her face, to Lisa Alexander, who was shocked to discover that no one needs her permission to write “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on their own property, Karens are in a rage. Not even a camera in their face will stop their toxic entitlement, which has led to a string of viral sensations.

When thinking of the country’s experiences with white supremacist violence, the discussions are typically centered around men. However, white women have historically been at the helm of this terror, using their tears and imaginary delicateness as ammunition for victim hood and ultimately destroying lives or at its worst, taking one.

Once upon a time, even the slightest hint that white womanhood may be in danger resulted in the lynching of Black children or a thriving town full of Black families being burned to the ground.

Here are some of the most horrific stories of Karens going wild before the term came into existence.

Sarah Page

There has been a lot of talk around Tulsa, Oklahoma due to this month's 99th anniversary of the tragic race massacre that took place there in 1921. Many people may not know the race massacre began with a 17-year-old named Sarah Page.

Page was an elevator operator in what was called the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. On May 30, 1921, reportedly, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, was getting on the elevator to use a segregated bathroom on a higher floor. He allegedly tripped when entering the elevator, accidentally grabbed Page's arm and she reacted by screaming. Rowland fled but the police were called. The next day, Rowland was arrested and word spread that a Black man assaulted a white woman.

According to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report via The Washington Post, Rowland was accused of assaulting Page “on a public elevator in broad daylight."

Within 18 hours, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street, was annihilated. In 1921, The New York Times described the massacre as “one of the most disastrous race wars ever visited upon an American city.”

No one knows what happened to Sarah Page or Dick Rowland after the massacre.

Fannie Taylor

On January 1, 1923, 22-year-old Fannie Taylor began screaming outside of her home. A neighbor rushed to the distressed white woman only to find her beaten and bruised, yelling for her baby. Miss Fannie claimed a Black man broke into her home and attacked her. The neighbor searched her house to find the baby safe and no signs of a break in.

Rumors quickly spread that Taylor was raped and robbed by a Black man. Taylor’s husband, James Taylor, gathered a group of men to find the imaginary criminal, even calling on the Klu Klux Klan for assistance.

A pack of 400 terrorists headed to the neighboring area, an affluent Black town in Rosewood, Florida, accusing any Black man they could of the crime. Fannie’s fraudulent tears was the excuse these envious hellions needed to purge out their rage.

Their first victim was Sam Carter, a local blacksmith, who was tortured and hung. They eventually began looking for a man named Jesse Hunter, who they claimed was an escaped convict.

The Black residents of Rosewood fought back but there were many casualties, including Sarah Carrier, a woman who did Fannie Taylor’s laundry. She was shot in the head, according to History.com. Her son Sylvester Carrier was also fatally shot.

The race massacre lasted for a week, burning Rosewood to the ground and killing countless Black people.

As for Fannie Taylor, she reportedly had an affair with a white man who beat her, which is why she had been found abused that night. She thought it was better to accuse a Black man of assault then to take accountability for her own actions.

The 1997 film Rosewood, directed by the late John Singleton, depicted the massacre.

See the clip below of actress Catherine Kellner as Fannie Taylor.

Eleanor Strubing

In December of 1940, Eleanor Strubing, a wealthy white woman in Connecticut accused her 31-year-old Black chauffeur, Joseph Spell, of raping her four times and throwing her into a river. Spell was arrested within hours and immediately sent to jail to wait for trial.

The New York Times famously ran a story with the headline, "Mrs. J.K. Strubing Is Kidnapped And Hurled Off Bridge by Butler; WOMAN KIDNAPPED; HURLED OFF BRIDGE." The article claimed he “confessed after 16 hours" of questioning.

Spell was facing 30 years in prison.

Thankfully, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and its head lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, represented Spell. Marshall and his co-counsel proved evidence that Strubing lied. She, in fact, had consensual sex with Spell and jumped in the river because she was terrified that she might become pregnant from their affair. In her mind, the only option was to accuse Spell of rape in order to justify a possible pregnancy.

An all-white jury found Joseph Spell not guilty, which was shocking for the time. Nonetheless, if this accusation would have been made in the South, Joseph Spell certainly would have died by public lynching.

Wil Haygood, the author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, wrote about the ruling, "It was a miracle. But Thurgood Marshall trafficked in miracles.”

Strubing, whose father was an investment banker and the former governor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, suffered no punishment for lying under oath. Her husband, John K. Strubing, died in 1961 and she remarried to John W. Barclay. Stribing died at 92 years old in 2000.

Joseph Spell moved to East Orange, New Jersey after the trial. It’s not clear when he passed away.

The 2017 movie Thurgood was based on the Joseph Spell trial. See the clip below of Kate Hudson as Eleanor Strubing.

Carolyn Bryant

In August of 1955, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of touching her and whistling at her in a store (he reportedly had a lisp and was unable to whistle.) Till, who was visiting from Chicago, was in Mississippi for the summer spending time with family. Within hours, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s home. The child was tortured, mutilated and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His naked body was weighed down with a fan blade.

Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law J.W. Milam, the terrorists who lynched Till, were found not guilty by an all-white jury.

In the 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant admitted to lying and claimed that she actually didn’t remember what happened that day in the store.

She is still alive today, living in Mississippi at 86 years old. Emmett Till would have been 79 years old on July 25 if it wasn’t for Carolyn Bryant.

The 65th anniversary of his death is August 28.

Victoria Price and Ruby Bates

Before The Central Park Five in 1989, which would become the Exonerated Five in 2002, there was the Scottsboro Boys in 1932.

On Mach 25, 1931, a group of Black and white teenagers were riding freight trains looking for work, which was common during the Great Depression. The white teens wanted the Black teens off the train and a fight broke out. The white teens attempted to forcibly throw the Black teens from the train. In defending themselves, the Black teenagers instead kicked the white teens off the locomotive.

The angry white teens went to a local sheriff who demanded the train be stopped.

Nine Black teens were removed, ages 13 to 19. However, two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, were also on the train and spent their time wrongfully accusing several of the Black boys of rape.

Similar to the Exonerated Five, that one accusation stole the innocence of nine Black children.

The teens were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama: Haywood Patterson, 18; Clarence Norris, 19: Charlie Weems, 19; brothers Andy Wright, 19 and Leroy Wright, 13; Olin Montgomery, who was nearly blind, 17; Ozie Powell, 16; Eugene Williams, 13, and Willie Roberson, 16, who could barely walk due to severe syphilis.

The all-white and all-male jury trial was over in a matter of days and all of them — except 13-year-old Leroy Wright — were found guilty of rape and given the death penalty. There was no evidence of course since Bates couldn’t identify the men she claimed raped her.

The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal wing of the American Communist Party, joined the case. By November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel. Shortly after, Ruby Bates admitted she lied.

Nonetheless, the back and forth with the courts continued for years.

By 1936, Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years. In 1948, he escaped from prison and made it to Michigan. The governor refused to extradite him to Alabama. By 1951, Patterson was convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl. In 1952, he died of cancer. He was 39 years old.

In July of 1937, Clarence Norris was eventually convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 1946 and moved north, where he married and had children. His autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys was released in 1979. He passed away in 1989 at 76 years old.

In July of 1937, Andrew Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. He was released in 1950 at 38 years old. Charlie Weems was also convicted of rape and paroled in 1943. He spent the rest of his life in Atlanta. It’s not clear when or if Wright and Weems have passed away.

Ozie Powell’s rape charges were dropped but he pled guilty to assaulting a deputy, which happened while in custody. He was released from prison in 1946. After spending four years on death row as adults, all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Leroy Wright were dropped.

It is not known how or when Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, or Ozie Powell died.

After being released, Leroy Wright, the youngest, went on a national lecture tour and then joined the Army. In 1959, according to PBS, Wright accused his wife of having an affair, fatally shot her and then committed suicide. He was 41 years old.

As for Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Price never recanted her testimony and died in 1982 at 77 years old. Bates had the privilege of going on a speaking tour, bizarrely, for the International Labor Defense (ILD), which defended the Scottboro Boys. She claimed to have lied because she was "excited and frightened by the ruling class of Scottsboro." Bates died in 1976.

[acrossthewavesoftime]

10,12,13 for the asks! :)

Thanks so much for the asks!!! :) I have several people from history I'm extremely interested in, but since I've repeatedly posted about Samuel Graves (1713-1787), I've picked him:

10. What is your favourite quote by / about them?

Not so much quotes as experiences reading his, alas few, accessible private letters that give a little more personality and context to the naval officer. Have a little something from a letter to his cousin William, dated 12 October 1775:

Very much have your friend Lord C. and other Lords of that party to answer for. Their necks are too small a forfeit to their country. As to their heads, the Americans have sucked out their brains: they made use of those ready tools to prevent, till they were prepared, the indignation and resentment of Britain from being poured out upon them; [...].

I think the quote speaks for itself and illustrates why people found him a bit crass and rude. That said, contrary to the picture of the senile dodderer several fathoms out of his depth some contemporaries attempted to paint of him, the letter I quoted from also reveals a very thoughtful, aware and militarily able commander constrained by factors outside his sphere of influence.

There is also an interesting letter he wrote to a midshipman in 1775, containing this young man's orders for his first independent command that I find quite touching because it differs in tone from the orders he gave other officers as it has a politely distanced, yet distinctly paternal tone. You can tell from his detailed explanations and cautions to the young man he actually cared about those under his command and strove to reassure a likely excited, yet also nervous young man asked to take on a great responsibility for the first time.

If I had to go with one specific quote however, perhaps something that could be taken out of context and twisted enough by adding the obligatory picturesque landscape background and a terribly original cursive font until it looks and sounds like the kind of post you might get likes on Instagram for, I'd pick this one:

Go off, embrace whatever you want to do and don't hesitate or waste your opportunities because you're overthinking and waiting for time, place or other related factors to be perfect; this one dead dude tells you to anyway.

12. Let us know the three best books about your favourite historical figure!

The sad answer is, there is none. A lot of my research has involved primary documents or records thereof, the Naval Documents of the American Revolution (NDAR), the biographies of his ward and godson Elizabeth Posthuma and John Graves Simcoe with whom he was extremely close and, particularly regarding his service, various articles and publications relating to the Royal Navy in the mid- to late 18th century. One I found quite helpful is a dissertation by the title The Royal Navy in North America, 1774-1781. A Study In Command (Tillney, John Andrew, 1980).

13. If you had the chance to meet them, what is the first thing you would ask them?

It depends! Given I would have to travel back in time to meet him, the question of when exactly our paths would cross would impact which questions I would be able to ask him.

Suppose now I successfully managed to travel to, say, 1782 and found myself a person who can formally introduce me to Admiral Graves as the convention of the times dictates, I would probably ask him something completely inconsequential first to get a conversation going before slowly moving on to more intimate or controversial questions.

So, knowing he and his wife had a pretty metal taste in decorations (dark paintings and black sofas) I would probably compliment the sofa, ask him where such a tasteful piece of upholstered furniture might be got, before plopping down 'pon the same and ensnaring him in a longer conversation.

...might I return the ask and propose 5, 8 & 20?

Image credit:

Elizabeth Simcoe, A Bend in the St. Lawrence, c. 1792, wash on paper. Archives of Ontario via Wikimedia Commons [accessed 18 July 2021].

...just had to pick something by her because Samuel, quite the proud parent, showed off her art to his friends and acquaintances when she was a child.

[mcjickson]

THE CONSTANT

I think about Edith Fuller a lot. Edith Fuller, if you don’t remember—and there’s absolutely no reason you should, all things considered—was a wunderkind kindergartener who qualified to represent Tulsa in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. You know, the one for eighth graders. At 6, Edith was the youngest contestant in the history of the Bee, and as such was the darling of the media covering the event. And with good reason—as she had no idea of the relative enormity of her achievement, she carried herself with the infectious humility of a genuine 6-year-old, not a media darling. She was basically the Bad News Bears of the Spelling Bee: a scrappy little towheaded upstart that you couldn’t help but root for. She made the final round of competition but caught some brutal words early in the day, and spent the rest of the event doing insanely adorable color commentary and interviews. And then the tournament was over, and Edith went home with her family and back to being a 6-year-old. I could not wait to see her come back as a first-grader. I was so very excited to see how far she could get with another year of study under her belt, so when the next year’s finalists were announced, I immediately searched the list to find her speller number. And she wasn’t there. She hadn’t qualified. There was no joy in Mudville; first-grade Edith had struck out. I felt a slight measure of relief for whichever 8th-grader from the greater Tulsa region had pulled off the upset. Turns out it wasn’t an eighth-grader, though. It was a dapper little 3rd grader in a bow tie. Young Sal Lakmissetti had done the impossible and knocked out America’s sweetheart. I was happy for him—until I read about how it happened. One of the reasons that watching the Bee is so emotionally involving is that the tension between the spellers and their occasionally overbearing parents can be so heart-wrenchingly intense. Edith had been a respite from that—her parents seemed to have been surprised that she had developed those skills. Sal’s dad on the other hand, had gotten indignant when Sal lost to Edith in Tulsa the year before. So he hired the previous year’s tournament champion to give Sal private lessons for a year. You know, the way you do when you want your 3rd grader to trounce a 1st grader in a contest for 13-year-olds. Not for nothing, but that is basically the plot of the movie Bad Words. Sal’s dad had turned him into Chitanya Chopra. I wonder if Sal’s dad knows how to spell “autofellatio.” I wonder if Edith had been heartbroken when she lost the Tulsa bee. Turns out, the next year she wasn’t interested in participating at all. And her dad didn’t push her, because it wasn’t about him. Edith Fuller’s dad got it right, and he just let her be a second-grader and pursue whatever her enormous second-grader heart wanted. I was ecstatic she didn’t return, that she was out there getting to be a kid. The funny thing is, I’m not really obsessed with spelling per se. What I am obsessed with, however, is the raw human drama of watching painfully awkward home-schooled kids on ESPN. There’s no denying the hilarity of some of their more awkward moments. But the real reason to watch is to marvel at their bravery. I’ve heard it alleged that the #1 most commonly held phobia in American adults is a fear of public speaking. And yet year after year, some of the most sheltered kids in America gather in a hotel in DC called The Gaylord (because these kids aren’t bullied enough, I guess), and walk up to a microphone before millions and risk entire-hometown-disappointing embarrassment. Wanting to more fully understand what these kids go through, I let my family talk me into entering an adult spelling bee sponsored by the local library. After my initial disappointment that “adult spelling bee” didn’t mean it was a four-letter-words contest, I got fully enthused at the prospect of competing, and even had our friend Scott design a t-shirt for me to compete in, emblazoned with a bee illustration and the mantra that governed my participation: “Edith Fuller is my constant.” By “constant”, I was referencing what was maybe the best-ever episode of Lost, a self-contained narrative about a man searching for the love of his life across shifting time periods. The usual complications of time travel narratives were overcome by the idea that in order for him to find his true path, he had to serve as a “constant” to remind other people what their true purpose was. My true purpose in entering the bee was to try to have the kind of come-what-may attitude that made Edith shine. And that’s largely the way it went down. I breezed through the first few rounds with ease, the words got hard in a hurry, but I acquitted myself nicely. After a solid initial hour that whittled a field of about forty people down to six, I was relieved when I got thrown a softball for an umbrella-drink-loving goober like me: daiquiri. Which I promptly misspelled. I’ll never forgive myself for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but I’m always happy to throw that t-shirt on these days. Of course, now, a couple years removed my own bee experience, it’s more evident than ever to me that when I throw that t-shirt on, Edith Fuller is a codename. A transparent alias, at that. I’m sure you have a person in your life that serves as your constant: not necessarily your partner or best friend (though it could be), but the person you go to when you need to be reminded of who you really are. What you’re really about. Who believes in you with no agenda. I’ve been lucky to be that for a few people—I was my brother Patrick’s constant, for instance. And while Declan’s always been my wartime consigliere—there’s no one more clutch in a crisis—Delaney has always been my constant. They say having kids is like living with your heart outside your body, and that has always hit me at a cellular level. I don’t talk about it often—or ever really—as it’s not something that happened to me, or that I went through, it’s Delaney's story. But for context I need you to know that when she had a debilitating mystery affliction a couple years ago, she was put through a series of tests for terminal illnesses. Those tests came back negative, but for a little while I had to confront the possibility of losing my baby girl and it nearly fucking broke me. Thank jeebus, the folks at the Mayo Clinic were able to diagnose her malady, and it’s something she had to learn to live with, and cope with, and thrive with. And she’s done all of that, admirably, but it required her to delay college for a frustrating year. Given the ways we’ve all been sidelined lately, it’s done me good to remember the ways Delaney got through her involuntary gap year with grace. Multiple creative projects. Tending to the care of small things. Finding ways to breathe through the worst of it. And leaning on the people who love her most. And I’ve treasured her as my constant like never before, and spending time with her got me through being 2x4’ed by my avowed best friend. (There’s been some good-natured conjecture by well-meaning friends as to whether the most recent playlist was indeed a break-up mix. First of all, I don’t want to knock whatever any of you have do to get over somebody, but listening to a bunch of songs that rub your nose in the loss just isn’t my thing. There’s no denying that when I sequenced the songs, I was struck by the lyrical subtext that emerged, but they weren’t selected for that purpose. In fact, most of those songs were in the playlist before I found out what had happened. But it merits a thoughtful inquest, in any case. You poor bastards.) And I guess that’s the thing. There’s something legitimately sad about when your best-laid plans and most fervent desires don’t work out the way you envisioned, especially when it was completely out of your control. (And dear readers, as you well know, most things are out of our control.) But maybe, just maybe, if you can somehow keep your eyes open for the joy you find on the detour, and have a sense of where—or more specifically who—your true north is, you might wind up writing a better story than the one you had planned. And maybe this new story was the point of you all along. I love the thought that right now, in all likelihood, Edith is doing something that's simultaneously challenging and entirely age-appropriate. Which, in a very real way, will be her trophy for not participating. I don't think Edith's done with the Bee, but I'm also not sure I would be heartbroken if she was. And I absolutely believe that, much like Delaney, Edith has more in store for us than we could ever imagine. Even in the middle of missing my people—and especially my North Dakota hussy constant—I have to say that being reminded of who I really can be has me feeling like one of the Bad News Bears myself these days, with all the swagger of Ahmad stepping up to the plate in the Astrodome: “Back up, suckers. I feel good.”

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So I’ve read the book A Game Of Thrones...

...thus now I’ll inflict this post nobody asked on you because I am like that.

I’ll be honest, I had had the books in my possession for a few years, but, as you probably know, you don’t choose when you read a book, the book chooses the right time to be read. Especially in this case, it didn’t feel right to read the books while the show (which had I been following weekly since... season 5 maybe? I’m bad at keeping track of this stuff) was ongoing, ergo now the timing finally felt right. So I brought the first book with me on my vacation, and I’ve read it mostly on the beach.

(Yeah, the chapters about the north and winter are kind of weird to read while you’re happily roasting under the sun, sitting on a banana-shaped inflatable seat and floating on the water, but hey.)

It’s been a while since I watched the first seasons of the show so my memories of it are shaky, but from what I remember the first season followed the plot pretty closely, and the main differences are in tone (the show going kinda overboard with a pretty pointless crassness) and in a less “channeled” point of view for obvious medium reasons since GRRM tells the story strictly through the eyes of a pretty limited array of characters while a visual medium won’t do that. (I’m assuming the books progressively increase the number of point-of-view characters, considering just a few of them die, at least any soon?)

Before reading the book, I thought the younger age of the characters compared to the show would rub me the wrong way, but I’ve found it to be a non-issue, both because the “voice” of the younger characters is not overly unrealistic for kids their age (at least not too much to break my suspension of disbelief), because the story itself acknowledges that they’re young and makes a point of it (I’m thinking Robb having to be Lord Robb, for instance), but also because the tone of the book is not as exaggeratedly sexual as I remember the early seasons of the show to be.

I’ve only read the first book so I don’t know if the tone stays consistent, but I’m suspecting that most of the “grimdark” accusations that are moved to the series are from people who think they know what the series is like. It’s dark - no doubt about it - but it’s about people for whom life isn’t meaningless, for whom values and emotions and relationships aren’t meaningless. But okay.

The plot of the first book made me roll my eyes again at how the show handled its final portion - the story originally took form around the Stark-Lannister conflict, and of course a billion other players appeared on the board and that wasn’t the core of the plot forever, but still the show decided that Cersei who? also who cares about the idea of “noble families squabble pointlessly while these threats develop from north and south”, ta-da, let’s just put everything in a cauldron and cook a soup with no narrative structure. The show has its last conflict between Dany and a Cersei-shaped cardboard figure, and it has to climb glass in order to make it compelling at all (literally the two characters have no personal history, Missandei had to die because otherwise there was no reason for Dany to have a personal investment in defeating Cersei other than she was the random person sitting on the throne she claimed for herself... The conflict between them was hyper-rushed, nothing made sense but happened because the plot said so, meanwhile Arya Stark is just there and doesn’t even catch a glimpse of the one person she’s always meant to kill more than anyone else, Sansa Stark who is the character who had the closest connection to Cersei in the narrative outside of the other Lannisters is just in Winterfell sitting there and probably knitting a sweater or something while foreshadowing freezes outside, and everyone else just... is there. Okay.

On the other hand, I can very well believe that GRRM’s indications for Dany’s ending would be, you know, going “mad”, because I can see that that was his intention all along - obviously I don’t know how the story will end but the impression I’ve got from Dany’s arc in the first book is that the whole point is that it’s a tragedy, and, sure, it’s possible that she’ll break what is essentially a curse inside her, but I don’t think so. The feeling I’ve gotten especially from the last few Dany chapters is that the point of her story is that her transformation into a “dragon” (waking the dragon, if you prefer) is an actualization of a curse that ran in her blood and now takes a hold on her. Her rising from the fire is actually the beginning of her fall, or better, there is no rise or fall, there is just the dragon curse she could never escape because it was her destiny all along, and she never really had choices anyway. The birth of her son and his simultaneous death, the birth of the three dragons instead, and everything else, awoke the dragon in her, and dragons are no nice, benevolent creatures. Her personality might be loving and benevolent, and I know she’ll act on those traits in the future, but the Targaryen curse flows in her. Obviously the dragon madness is inextricably interlaced with grief, and indeed it’s all about death - Dany’s own, after all, because the girl dies and the dragon is born from the fire, and while she’s still herself and undoubtedly still carries qualities she had before, the curse that lied (almost) dormant in her has finally taken ahold of her. I wonder if she’ll break free of the curse eventually - but it seems unlikely given how the story starts, the very act that makes her acquire power is something that just grabs her more tightly inside what I can’t see but a curse from how the author describes it.

The first book was pretty much introductory for many characters (not Ned’s, bye Ned), Arya’s and Sansa’s journeys have just been set in motion, Bran’s is sort of on hold waiting for being truly set in motion, while Tyrion and Dany have sort of similar arcs, a journey of acquiring agency, although in very different ways, for Tyrion he literally becomes a prisoner and struggles to get back home (not literally but to his family and his “place”), for Dany she starts literally as an object sold from man to man and eventually finds her “place” with the dragons and her own khalasar, and both of their stories will basically re-start from there. I don’t really remember the narrative structure of Catelyn’s chapters, maybe that’s the point, she’s always in motion, almost like she’s spinning. Asfghjkl I forgot Jon. His arc is also an introductory one, at the end of which he embraces the Night’s Watch as his family and his place.

The most disturbing part in the book, for me, would be Tyrion’s farce trial in the Eyrie. I suppose that Lysa Arryn and Littlefinger murdered Jon Arryn in the books too (the foreshadowing is there) and that knowledge made the scene extra creepy. I suppose I feel strongly in general about narratives about a lack of a lawful judicial process, of characters being falsely accused of things and being denied actual trials, which is something for instance JK Rowling plays with a lot to create the most disturbing situations in the Harry Potter books (it works) and incidentally a reason why Captain America: Civil War could have been a powerful movie if they hadn’t fucked it up thoroughly. Had I been tasked with writing the Captain America 3 movie, my plot would have involved a farce trial for Bucky (and possibly other characters) masqueraded as perfectly fine, and the characters finding out that the authorities behind the whole thing are the wider Hydra network that didn’t come up in the internet leak. People in power abusing their authority makes for powerful narratives, but nooo, the real bad guys have nothing to do with the authorities or the government and also... Steve Rogers is a bad guy too, because fuck you. Long live capitalism and right-wing ideologies amiright.

I’ll take this detour away from the book as my clue to end the post, but please feel free to come chat with me or ask my thoughts about anything related to the book! 😊

[mitchbeck]

CANTLON: PRO HOCKEY HAS A RUSSIA PROBLEM

BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings HARTFORD, CT - Pro Hockey has a Russian problem. NHL teams playing in the Czech capital of Prague next month have been told their Russian players are not welcome. The Czech Foreign Ministry informed the NHL of its position resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the ministry declined to say whether the NHL's scheduled regular season games between the Nashville Predators and San Jose Sharks on October 7th and 8th at Prague's O2 Arena in the Czech capital will honor the request and exclude Russian athletes.  The travel rosters have not been finalized, but Nashville's roster includes Russian forward Yakov Trenin, while San Jose's includes forward Evgeny Svechnikov. Defenseman Nikolai Knyzhov won't be an issue as he is unavailable for the Sharks anyway, as he is out with a torn Achilles tendon. "We can confirm that the Czech Foreign Ministry has sent a letter to the NHL to point out that, at this moment, the Czech Republic or any other state in the (visa free) Schengen zone should not issue visas to the Russian players to enter our territory," Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Smolek said in a statement. The ministry added it informed the league "about ongoing negotiations about banning entry for those citizens of the Russian Federation who already had received valid visas before." It said a ban on Russian athletes in sports events in European Union countries was also recommended by EU sports ministers in Brussels, where the EU is located and part of its sanctions on Russia. The Czech Republic (Czechia) was one of the first EU countries to stop issuing visas to Russian nationals following the February invasion of Ukraine. Exceptions include humanitarian cases and people persecuted by Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime. The NHL is returning to Europe for its first games outside of North America since the start of the pandemic. Besides the two games in Prague, the Colorado Avalanche and Columbus Blue Jackets will play another two games in Tampere, Finland, on Nov. 4-5. The Finnish government's position on Russian players was not immediately clear. However, they have applied for NATO membership, so anything that might jeopardize that will be avoided. Czech native and former NHL great Dominik Hasek has led the opposition to Russian players coming to Prague since the games were announced in April. Hasek, virulently anti-Russian, approached the upper house of Parliament, the Senate, in the Czech government, and the Foreign Ministry about the issue. "It's very important for the support of our Ukrainian ally and safety of our citizens," Hasek said in an interview for a Russian broadcaster. After it was not aired in Russia, he had it published in the Czech media. "Yes, we don't want any promotion of the Russian aggression here," Hasek tweeted after the ministry's move. "We're guarding our lives and the lives of our allies in the first place." NHL President Gary Bettman and his AHL counterpart, Scott Howson, have a growing dilemma. On the surface, the NHL cut all ties with Russia at the onset of the invasion. They have remained silent since. However, a handful of Russian/Belarussian players were drafted in Montreal at the annual draft. Several present and past players have signed in Russia, Belarus, and China at the AHL level. It’s a major problem. The more the war drags on, and the more war crimes mount, the more difficult it becomes for Mr. Bettman and Mr. Howson to do nothing. Public indignation will force their hand. With a new season rapidly approaching and the war dragging on, mass graves have recently been found. It must be noted that not all Russian players are pro-Putin, for example, New York Ranger forward Artemi Panarin. However, the issue with professional record chasing there's long-time top-performers Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin, their positions become more problematic by the day. (An ESPN story was used in the formation of this piece) GARRETT BURNETT Last year, the Hartford Wolf Pack lost the second alumnist to pass away in Garrett Burnett. He alternated between Burnie, and Rocky, as his nicknames. The circumstances under which his career ended were very sad. For the first time, we can reveal, with his permission, what happened. Former LNAH teammate and member of the ex-Wolf Pack community now retired, Brandon "Sugar" Sugden, his close friend, is still emotional about it all these years later. Burnett was out with friends one night in the off-season in Delta, BC, just outside Vancouver. The group was hassled, and words were exchanged. The parties went outside to settle their differences. The Crown, the Canadian legal system in its investigation, said in the ensuing melee had always reported Burnett was hit over the head with a chair and suffered debilitating injuries that left him a shell of his behemoth 250-pound frame. Sugden said that wasn't entirely the case - Burnett had been shot in the head. The security footage of the fight went missing, and not to this day had it ever been produced by the establishment in question, or had anyone ever been charged in the attack. So the cover story about the chair was made up by authorities, hoping somebody would come forward to authenticate or provide convincing, authoritative evidence and testimony to the incident. But, sadly, no one did. Sugden, at the time, was informed of how severe Burnett's situation was. He arrived at his friend's bedside, completely unprepared for what he saw. "I saw all those tubes and wires coming out of him. I didn't even recognize him. "I had to walk out of the room, (compose) myself, and go back in and be with him. "The doctors said his being such a strong athlete likely saved him. It was a horrible, awful time." Burnett survived initially but was left with severe injuries that forced him into rehab to re-learn his motor skills. He passed away last year. Let's hope during the Wolf Pack celebration being planned for later this year, they include a nice tribute to Burnett. NHL HARTFORD WOLF PACK HOME Read the full article

[firehawk12]

Crazy Rich Asians (2018): The Flawed But Necessary Asian-American Cultural Milestone

(Apologies!  I keep forgetting to update my Tumblr... repost from my Medium account)

There is so much to unpack before you can even talk about Crazy Rich Asiansin any meaningful manner and understand why so much of the Asian-American community has gotten behind the film via the so-called #goldopenmovement.

I think the easiest way to begin is to imagine what life would be like if you had no sense of belonging within the culture you inhabit. Books, music, television, film, theater, fashion — none of it reflected who you are and how you were necessarily different from everyone else. For the last half-century, this is essentially how Asian-Americans (and by extension, Asians-Canadians) lived their lives.

I can only write on my behalf, but I knew at an early age that I would never really be considered a “Canadian”, because as much as we like to pretend we’re in some kind of post-race multicultural utopia, I still feel foreign despite having lived in Canada for essentially my entire life.

But obviously that’s not necessarily unique to my experience — certainly a lot of people feel alienated within their own homelands because they don’t look like, act like, or otherwise inhabit the space of normativity that defines “Canadian-ness” (or “American-ness”).

But I can’t really claim to be “Chinese” either. Certainly I am racially and ethnically Han Chinese, but culturally I am as far removed from being Chinese as one possibly can be as a “Canadian Born Chinese”. I can functionally communicate in Cantonese, read Hanzi at a grade school level, and I’ve never actually been to China or Hong Kong, and my Chinese cultural references are old John Woo and Stephen Chow movies. There is a cultural void that I’ve felt for most of my life, and it comes from — as Crazy Rich Asians explains — being a “banana”, where my race and my cultural context have created the extreme feeling of alienation that is familiar to most, if not all, minorities living in North America.

So this is where we land on the North American notion of the hybrid identity that has developed over the last century. I’m not Chinese, I’m not Canadian, but I exist in some undefined border — the liminal space between the two — as a “Chinese-Canadian”. But what does that even mean when there is no culture that defines Chinese-Canadian identity? I don’t want to deny the great cultural contributions of artists such as Mina Shum or Wayson Choy and many others (Double Happiness is still a foundational text for me in terms of being able to articulate the fact that I don’t have an identity whatsoever), and I mean no offence when I suggest that these artists aren’t household names (and I’d much rather re-read Choy than yet another Atwood novel…).

I came to Double Happiness when I was in my teens, already feeling the anxiety of not having an identity and being unable to articulate it because there was simply no outlet for me to express my inability to connect with the greater culture around me. I saw myself in Sandra Oh’s Jade, a woman who would never be Chinese enough for her parents or other Chinese people, but who isn’t Canadian enough to be accepted by Canadian society as an actress (I’m sure this was something that Sandra Oh had to fight against during the early parts of her career). I think it was at that moment that I understand that I would always feel like an outsider in my own homeland, not necessarily because I was marked with a visible difference, but because it took so long for me to see myself reflected in the culture that I consumed.

This isn’t necessarily a unique Chinese or even Asian-North American experience. As I wrote several years ago when I began to unpack the importance of yet another seminal Asian American cultural moment — the debut of Fresh Off The Boat — both the “real” and fictional Eddie Huang embraced hip hop because he was able to relate to a culture defined by alienation. Meanwhile, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese ends by having the main character admit that he can never be white and escape “Chin-Kee”, the specter of Chinese-ness that haunts his every waking moment, and accept that being Chinese is a part of what defines him even if he doesn’t necessarily explain how that acceptance manifests itself.

But the fact that I can make references to a hit ABC sitcom and an Eisner award-winning graphic novel in order to try to articulate some notion of Chinese-American identity is precisely why it is so crucial to have a culture that represents the unique situation of being neither Chinese and neither American (or Canadian).

I love James Hong and respect him for his long career and the work he has done in order to help insert a Chinese face into American culture, but my entire identity in the early 90s was essentially tied to this clip:

The fact that I can’t remember any other “role models” from my childhood except James Hong putting on that accent and annoying Jerry, Elaine, and George is perhaps a sad reflection of my limited worldview as a child of the 90s, but also a condemnation of what happens when there is no one for you to look up to.

We are so hungry for representation because we live in a cultural vacuum, where the only other cultural reference you can make is to The Joy Luck Club or how fucked up it was that people thought this was okay:

It’s interesting because Hari Kondabolu’s attempts to address the problematic nature of Apu from The Simpsons touches on this exact same anxiety, where being South Asian is defined entirely by a single cultural touch point that can influence your life forever (that’s even before addressing the indignity of being represented by a white man putting on an accent in a bout of modern brown-face). Thankfully between The Mindy Project, The Big Sick and Master of None, South Asian-American representation has certainly improved in the last few years.

That’s not to say that East Asian-American representation, both on screen and off screen, hasn’t improved either. In film alone, Justin Lin basically built up one of the most improbably popular blockbuster franchises in recent history out of nothing — made more miraculous when you think about how the Fast and Furious films were culturally diverse before Disney decided that maybe their superheroes didn’t all have to be white men.

But even so, it’s been contingent on the Asian community to just accept things the way they are and not raise too much of a commotion about cultural representation. So when Tina Fey decides to double down on her racism with an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about how Asian-Americans humourless internet trolls who don’t understand comedy, we’re just to accept the fact that she above criticism. When Ghost in the Shell ends by explaining a Japanese girl had her brain carved out and placed into Scarlet Johansson’s body, we should be grateful that they mentioned the character’s Japanese origins at all. When Scott Buck refuses to address Iron Fist’s Orientalism, we just have to accept that no one is allowed to change the origins of a character because comic books are sacrosanct.

All of that explains why Crazy Rich Asians is such an important film for the community. With all of this cultural baggage on their backs, I respect the sacrifice Kevin Kwan and Jon Chu made when they eschewed an easy Netflix deal in order to bring the film to theaters even more than I did when I had initially read the interview.

It’s not that there haven’t been countless great Asian-American films made between The Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians. Justin Lin’s own Better Luck Tomorrow, or Only the Brave, or Saving Face, or Eat With Me, or the recently released Gook to just name a handful are great films in their own right for telling stories about Asian Americans that simply aren’t reflected in the culture otherwise

(Edit: I’ve been told that I’ve been remiss in not including the Harold and Kumar trilogy in the above list. Apologies to John Cho and Kal Penn!)

But the only way to get the culture to pay attention — not just the people consuming it, but also the people producing it — is to make the biggest impact possible and even in 2018 with streaming services and video on demand, the path to cultural relevance is still through a major movie studio that can both promote your film and widely distribute it across the world. It’s unfortunate, but that’s why people still point to The Joy Luck Club and don’t mention any of the smaller independent films that have come out since then. The fact that the last film before The Joy Luck Club to feature an all Asian cast to be distributed by a major movie studio was Flower Drum Song in 1961 (which is a film/musical that probably has as much, if not more, cultural baggage associated with it than even The Joy Luck Club) points to the significance of Crazy Rich Asians and why it has become a moment for Asian-Americans.

Kevin Kwan made another important production decision that drives home how much is riding on this film’s success. During pitch meetings, Kwan recounts meetings where producers suggested that having a white actress in the Rachel Chu role would make for a more successful film — to pull a quote from the interview, apparently he was told that “it’s a pity you don’t have a white character” — makes his decision to option the rights to his book for a dollar in order to maintain creative control a moral stance against Hollywood producers who don’t see any value in Asian actors.

Certainly the film’s fish out of water story could have easily been adapted so that Rachel Chu became Rachael Churchill (starring Scarlett Johansson or Emma Stone, of course) and many of the beats would have been the same. But his film is so powerful precisely because Rachel (Constance Wu) is Chinese-American. She isn’t Chinese, as Nick’s mother Eleanor (performed with perfect stoicism by Michelle Yeoh) constantly points out throughout the film, and that’s actually not a problem for her. In fact, the film goes out of its way to show how her Chinese-American identity helps her navigate the precariousness of Singapore’s socialite lifestyle, allowing Rachel to be proud of being a “banana”.

Are there problems with the film? Undoubtedly. The fact that the one time South Asians are shown in the film involves using them as comedy propspoints to narrow focus of the film and how much it ignores of the realSingapore. Or how Oliver (Nico Santos) is queer, but is never actually shown with another man, perhaps because gay sex is technically still a criminal offence in Singapore. Of course, the title itself points out that the only poor people shown in the film are the servants who presumably slink back to their cramped government subsidized high-rises after they are done serving the crazy rich Asians who employ them.

Even if you ignore the social issues, the film itself isn’t perfect either. It has the feel of an adaptation where they didn’t want to cut any of the cast, but had to cut all of their supporting stories in order to get the film to hit the 120 minute running time. And I mean this with utmost respect to Jon Chu’s career, but I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Jem and the Holograms a few years ago and there are times when the film feels just as workmanlike and banal as that failed outing. You’d think the climatic moment where Nick chases down Rachel in order to propose to her (again) would be wonderfully cinematic, but it’s perhaps the least exciting visual moment of the film. Similarly, the much written about Mahjong battle at the end was a great moment in spite of the direction, not because of it.

There is a lot wrong with the film. That’s unavoidable. Do I wish a studio picked up George Takei’s Allegiance and I was writing about about a big budget film about a Japanese-American family torn apart by the forced internment policies of a racist United States? That would have been great.

But in a way, this is very much like Fresh Off The Boat (and not just because of Constance Wu). When the real Eddie Huang quit narrating the show because it deviated so far from the harsh reality of his childhood experiences as a Chinese-American growing up in Florida, I totally sympathized with his decision and understood his rationale. Fresh Off The Boat isn’t an unvarnished look at the Chinese-American experience, nor is it ever going to touch on issues of race in a meaningful way. For better or for worse, it’s just not that kind of show nor is it trying to be. But the producers of the show were able to include an episode where the entire B-story was in Mandarin, a first for a family sitcom in America.

Crazy Rich Asians is very much in the same position as Fresh Off The Boat. It’s telling the world that Asians and Asian-Americans are just people like everyone else, facing similar problems as we try to carve out an existence in the world and live our lives. We fight with our in-laws, we get cheated on by our husbands, we have rivals who try to sabotage us, we deal with friends that we only talk to because we grew up with them and not because we have anything in common with them, we even deal with racism from time to time (although most of us don’t have the money to humiliate a racist by buying their place of employment).

It’s not the Asian-American of Do The Right Thing, let alone BlacKkKlansman, but I have to hope that if this movie is a success, then those types of stories will come in time. Maybe they’ll make a spin-off featuring Nico Santos’ Oliver called Crazy Rich Gaysians and have his character confront Singapore’s endemic social and structural homophobia. Or maybe they’ll make a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead-like movie about the two guards where they discuss the existential crisis of life defined only by serving as a backdrop to the stories of the rich. I believe that we can get there eventually, we just need to use Crazy Rich Asians as the push to get us there.

Anecdotally, the movie feels like it is appealing to more than just Asian-Americans desperate to be represented on screen. When the credits started rolling at my screening, a couple of Jewish women (who went out of their way to build a connection with me by telling me that Jewish culture and Chinese culture are connected by Mahjong and Chinese food at Christmas) told me that they had a great time watching the film. And in the moment of hesitation I felt when they unknowingly asked me to represent my entire race and culture by asking me if I liked the film, I told them that I did.

Maybe I don’t like the film for all the same reasons that they did, but that’s the point. Crazy Rich Asians is a film that is miraculously both culturally specific and broadly appealing. Even if you don’t care about any of what I wrote and just want to watch a good romantic comedy, you would be hard pressed to find one as good as this one in recent years. But if you are that Asian-American who has been waiting for over two decades to feel like you belong to a culture that has largely ignored you and taken you for granted, you will be witnessing a moment of cinematic history. That alone is worth the price of admission.

I didn’t have any place to put this, and it’s such a minor point that really isn’t worth including, but as a former teaching assistant I felt compelled to at least mention it.

So the film is supposed to take place during Rachel’s spring break. We see early in the film that she has a TA (that she tortures), so it’s possible that she dumps all her papers on him and tells him to grade everything while she’s having an adventure in Singapore. That’s perfectly fine, but it seems clear that she ends up staying in Singapore for much longer than a week (there is at least 3 days of flying time depicted in the film).

This means that there is no way she gets back in time to teach her class, assuming she even goes back after getting engaged, which means the poor TA is stuck holding the bag with a bunch of undergrads who will probably blame him for their grades not being in or for class being delayed.

Won’t anyone think of the poor teaching assistants who don’t have billionaire partners to sweep them off their feet?

[alexsmitposts]

All Confusion and Contradictions n Trump’s Apocalyptic America Americans are angry. I suspected they would be, but it got confirmations of it in Miami, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. Basically, everywhere I went while “taking pulse and temperature” of this country where I used to live, cumulatively, for much more than a decade. “What is your job?” Shouted an African-American lady, right in the middle of the Union Station in the nation’s capital. Obviously, it was a rhetorical question, as she almost immediately answered her own query: “There are no jobs!” Mr. Floyd got murdered by perverse, sadistic police officers. The economy is collapsing, at least for the poor and the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic is like a rollercoaster, up and down, up and down, with no end in sight. People are confused, while the government is increasingly aggressive. Much of the so-called “progressive media” is suddenly not behaving progressively at all. Racism is sometimes fought against with brand new types of racism. Anti-racist movements get periodically infiltrated by the extreme right-wing groups, as I witnessed in Minneapolis. The US government is basically attacking countries like China, Venezuela, and Iran. Not just verbally, but militarily. And the reason why our world is not in the middle of WWIII, yet, is because of tremendous restrain and wisdom of the US adversaries. *** At home, no jobs, no coherent policy on how to fight against the COVID-19, and no national unity in the moment of disaster. What I have been witnessing so far were some jerky, inconsistent moves on the part of the governments (the federal and the state ones), as well as the ensuing confusion, half-hearted, and patchy solutions. Quite the opposite of what I experienced in Asia, be it in socialist China and Vietnam, but also in the far from the socialist nations such as Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines. Just a quick reality check, and it becomes clear that the US system already failed, squarely and patently: 30 million people out of jobs since the pandemic began. Three million infected, and probably, by now, much more. Over 130.000 US citizens lost their lives. Of course, it all depends on how the total number of victims is calculated. Still, no matter how it is done, even if the lowest numbers are correct, the United States is the most affected country on Earth, which is an absolute shame, considering that it is still one of the richest. The Trump Administration is, of course, aware of all this, and just a few months before the Presidential elections, it is desperately searching for someone else to blame for this enormous national disaster. The President and his men are frantically pointing fingers in all directions: from China (P.R.C.) to the World Health Organization (WHO). From the Communist Party of China, from President Maduro to the US state governors and those very few “disobedient” members of the mass media who still dare, at least occasionally, to challenge the official narrative. Conspiracy theories are abundant. Demonstrations and protests are taking place all over the nation. In New York City, the murder rate is up. Sirens are howling. People are uttering clichés: “Follow the money,” I hear everywhere. Who to blame? Inept regime? Monstrous outdated capitalism? Corporatism? Shitty education system? People don’t now. While ‘false prophets’ are thriving. Government, mass media, as well as a great majority of the so-called ‘progressive’ media (do not confuse it with left-wing media, which hardly exists in the United States), are blaming socialist China, and they are blaming Russia, Iran, and other independent-minded countries. *** This is clearly a political fight. The pandemic is there, of course, but for the White House, it is nothing else other than background noise. The US regime is fighting for its survival. Trump is clashing with various foreign countries, those which have a real, left-wing ideology. Much is at stake. The entire survival of the system is now in question. If this terrible scheme collapsed, the whole world would rejoice; it would benefit. But the majority of North Americans would lose. Even those who like to paint themselves as ‘progressives’ or ‘different ‘or “also victims.” And so, there are thousands of conspiracies aimed at discrediting the rage which followed the killing of Mr. Floyd. There are countless theories about the origins of the pandemic, as well as its management, or, more precisely, mismanagement. For both the Trump and his Democratic Party opponents, it is absolutely essential to discredit morally and socially much more successful countries like China, Russia, even Cuba. Monstrous propaganda tsunami has been unleashed in the United States, but also the UK It is unprecedented and overwhelming. Alternative voices are silenced. Censorship, even amongst the so-called ‘alternative’ Western publications, is becoming bulletproof. And it all happened literally overnight. While my essays used to be reprinted just 2-3 months ago by at least 20 major outlets in the United States and Canada, now it is at most five who dare. My internationalist, left-wing angle did not change at all. But their true colors got exposed. But my work has been gaining great support in non-Western countries. This says a lot about the situation! But back to Trump. He is attacking foreign countries, horrified that people could notice how optimistic and compassionate some other nations are. But he is also antagonizing those who are now bringing down statues, symbols, of Western bigots, genocidal cadres, slave owners, and conquerors. Not to mention the health officials, who dare to paint bleak (read: realistic) picture, and urging him to put people’s interests above those of the economy, particularly the private sector. On July 8, 2020, CNN reported: “Five months into a still-raging pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 Americans, the long-simmering tensions between President Donald Trump and the health experts who staff his government have escalated from private griping to shrugging disagreement to now open dispute. The result, people at those agencies say, is a new sense of demoralization as they continue their attempts to fight a once-in-a-generation health crisis while simultaneously navigating the whims of a President who has shown little interest or understanding of their work. That Trump does not trust nor follow the advice of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, is hardly new. The President has not attended a meeting of his coronavirus task force in months, and recently its sessions have been held outside the White House, including on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Department of Education. Fauci was told to participate in the meeting remotely by videoconference, preventing him from participating in a midday task force press briefing…” Precisely, nothing new. Except that even CNN, one of the mouthpieces of the regime, is finally noticing! It is all about spreading nihilism, on both domestic and foreign fronts. China is getting attacked in the most extreme, unreasonable, and even bizarre fashion by both President Trump and his team, but also by their adversaries. After winning the fight against the COVID-19, the P.R.C. has been blamed for virtually everything, from withholding data, negatively influencing the WHO, and even for the manufacturing of the virus in one of its laboratories based in Wuhan, and then spreading it everywhere, afterward. “Chinese Virus,” the White House has been calling it, while no one knows yet for certain, where it actually really originated. Naturally, Beijing and entire China have been indignant. None of the US government accusations have been proven. Allegations after allegations have been ridiculed by the US medical, scientific community, and often by the academia. But the administration already went too far, and it is clearly unable to stop its own attacks anymore. It ignores ridicule, hoping that its macho, vulgar and provincial rhetoric would appeal to certain group of uneducated, extremist part of the population, and win him the second term. Analyzing the uprising which followed the murder of Mr. George Floyd (who happened to be COVID-19 positive), I spoke to dozens of Americans of all races and social standings. The majority of them have been outraged by the government’s handling of the epidemy and the unrest. Not one person that I spoke to actually blamed China or any other foreign country, directly, for the dire situation in the United States. Anti-Chinese rhetoric is clearly a political football played by both Republicans and Democrats. The same goes for the anti-Russian sentiments, including belittlement of the Russian foreign aid sent to the United States, at the very beginning of the pandemic. The strategy of the US government is simple; some would say primitive: “Whatever terrible is happening inside the country, just counterattack and blame everything on the political opponents, and if you can’t, attack the foreign countries; China, Russia, even Iran or Venezuela. Or the United Nations agencies, like WHO. Send insults to all corners of the world, but also the battleships.” There is much that is going wrong in the US, very, very wrong. Tents with homeless people could now be spotted all around the downtown Washington D.C. The White House has been converted into a fortress. And while millions of American people are marching, protesting against the endemic racism and discrimination, the KKK and its affiliates like Proud Boys, are burning cities and infiltrating legitimate anti-racist demonstrations (something that I will soon be addressing in my essays). Images are apocalyptic. The situation is explosive. This is one of the most dangerous moments in world history. But, shockingly, not much is being written about the urgency and threat which our planet is facing!

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 2: Reluctant Deals

The first nightmares arrived with Babylon.

It was the first city in history to reach a population size large enough to thin the veil between the waking world and the Dream. There were only a few sparse records left of the nightmares that appeared during that time, and mentions of only one person who knew how to vanquish them. Every official Hypnos State text called her Iltani, and named her the first dreamhunter.

There was a statue of Iltani at the center of Fenhallow Academy’s campus—accompanied by Fabian Fenhallow, the school’s founder, whom most students forgot about until reminded—her arms raised, wreathed in flame. Emery was eight years old when she stood before the statue the first time, and as she looked into Iltani’s fierce bronzecast face, she began to understand the responsibility she’d been given.

Dreamhunters, forged by exposure to the Dream in the cities they protected, had worked alone and unorganized until the formation of small dreamhunting societies in China, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Middle East. Over time, more societies appeared across the globe, grew, and evolved to their current form: the Hypnos State. A neutral world government that worked outside politics to bring peace to nightmare-riddled cities across the globe, named for the Greek god of sleep.

That was what the textbooks said, anyway. Emery thought it was mostly garbage. The history all sounded good, but nothing as far-reaching as the Hypnos State would be “outside politics.”

Fenhallow had been created to give the Hypnos State a base of operations in the U.S. As the largest training center for future State employees in North America, it was the reason the Sleeping City had been built at all—and the Sleeping City was the only one of its kind. There was a billboard outside the city limits that had never changed and never would; a black background that disappeared against the night sky so the stark white letters, lit from below, hovered over the city:

FIND HOME HERE,

CHILDREN OF HYPNOS

Emery could see the back of the sign far in the distance where she sat on the sidewalk outside the Miller’s home. Her mission had taken her to the suburbs—and on a Saturday night, no less—so it took the cleanup crew forty-five minutes to reach her. By then, Cora was dead asleep in her father’s arms, exhausted by the night’s events, and Emery was ignoring the messages popping up on her wrist cuff and instead typing one out to her boyfriend, Joel, who was not a dreamhunter, and who would most certainly be asleep in his dorm room on Fenhallow’s campus.

Don’t listen to what anyone says tomorrow. 100% owned this mission by myself.

She sent it out and stared for a moment at the dark span of yard between the houses on the other side of the street, trying not to think of how much trouble she was going to be in when she got back to campus. As she stared, something shifted in the shadows, and she realized there was a man standing there, watching her. Only his face was visible, and only barely, and his eyes were covered by goggles.

Then a few members of the cleanup crew passed in front of Emery, and when she looked again, he’d slipped around the back of the house and disappeared. She’d heard from full-time hunters about people in the city who liked to creep on dreamhunters before or after jobs, like fanboys with celebrities, but she’d never seen it for herself.

The Millers had some weird neighbors.

The Hypnos cleanup crew consisted of two teams: one outfitted in gray jumpsuits, the other in jackets and ties. The jumpsuits took in the damage to the house, the broken window and bedroom door, and began calculating the repair costs. The jackets and ties spoke to Cora’s father about what had happened, then to the neighbors who had come from their houses to inspect the commotion.

Sarah Stainer, one of the jackets and ties, approached Emery where she sat on the curb. Stainer had still been in classes when Emery first arrived at Fenhallow; now she was in charge of her own crew out of the Hypnos State dispatch center on Main and Cherry. The crews worked nights, like the dreamhunters, so Stainer’s shirt already bore the scars of several cups of coffee. Still, compared to the sweat gathering under every part of Emery’s dreamform armor, Stainer looked the picture of spring. She loped over with an easy smile, a sheaf of her dark curly hair covering one eye, and her hands in her pockets.

“Really did it this time, huh, Em?” Stainer said.

Emery knew she wasn’t talking about the nightmares. “Hypnos’s eyeballs, Stainer, you could look a little less smug about it.”

“I’m the one who has to clean up your messes, Ashworth. I’ll look smug when I want to look smug.” She nodded her head back toward the car she’d driven to the scene. “Come on, let’s get you back. The dean has words for you.”

“Of course he does.”

The ride into the city felt like it took half the time it should’ve. Stainer remained mercifully silent the whole way to the school, which was Emery’s first clue that she was indeed in deep trouble. She would get the credit for completeing the termination request, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she’d completed the request alone.

Her dreamhunting class, only recently released to take on real requests, had received their partners earlier that week. They’d been chosen for each other by the North American Ward based on skill and personality tests and the recommendations of their professors, a process that had taken the last several years to complete. No dreamhunter was ever supposed to go without a partner, ever.

It wasn’t Emery’s fault her partner was the most useless stick-in-the-mud ever born.

Stainer scanned her ID at the security station outside the school. Fenhallow’s wide front gates swung open for the car. Towering oaks and wrought-iron lamp posts lined the main road into Fenhallow’s sprawling campus grounds. They first passed the dorms, a picture of Gothic Revival in pale stone, where lights burned bright with students up late into the night. Though they took classes together, the students were split into a day division and a night division. The night division—the dreamhunters-in-training—shared buildings but not rooms with the day division—the students who would become part of the cleanup crews, like Stainer, or security officers, or professors, or researchers for the Hypnos State. Some would go to work in Terminations and Request Fulfillments, that soul-sucking pit in the public Hypnos centers throughout the city.

Farther in, they passed the education buildings. All were dark except for the three main buildings around the quad: Hothram Hall, the athletic center, where dreamhunters trained to keep in peak physical fitness and learned how to use their weapons; the student center, lovingly referred to as the Crossing; and the administration building, three stories tall and stretching toward the sky, where the lights were always on. The three buildings surrounded the center of campus, where Iltani’s statue stood guard.

Stainer parked on the curb in the small roundabout at the foot of the admin building. Sweeping stone steps led the way the double oak doors. On each landing of the steps, a set of bronze plaques had been fixed in the stone, engraved with quotes from famous members of the Hypnos State. Emery had seen these for the first time when she was eight, too, shortly after she’d looked up into Iltani’s face, and she had dreamed of having her own words immortalized into Fenhallow’s very bones. Iltani had made dreamhunting the noblest profession in the world—there could be no greater achievement than inspiring future generations of dreamhunters.

Inside the admin building’s double front doors, the receptionist, David, looked up from the front desk and waved them through the lobby. He gave Emery a pained look and made some vaguely apologetic hand gestures. Emery could hear the laughter threatening to break through Stainer’s carefully pursed lips as they made their way up the staircase past David’s desk.

The whole building smelled of warm carpet and rich wood. Purple velvet covered the stairs. Portraits of past deans of the academy lined the wall, and all of them looked down on Emery with disapproval. At the top of the stairs they took a left down the hallway, and went to the very last room. Carved into the door was the closed eye of Hypnos, like an upside-down sunrise, in front of a blooming poppy. The doorknob was silver covered in a delicate gold filigree, the same as every dreamhunter weapon.

The plaque beside the door—also gold and silver—said Dean of Fenhallow Academy.

Stainer smiled. “Have fun in there.”

Emery sighed.

~

The Dean of Fenhallow was a dreamkiller: a dreamhunter who had defeated the worst the Dream could throw at him and won the ability to live out the rest of his life in service to the Hypnos State. He hadn’t pulled his weapon in years, and he still moved like a forty-year-old, despite toeing the line of sixty-five. He had a thick head of gray hair, warm hands, and lines around his eyes from a perpetual smile.

Well, near-perpetual.

Perpetual until now.

Emery stood before his desk with her eyes cast down to his teacup, because she couldn’t bear to look him in the face. Not while there were others in the room.

Stainer moved to the left of the desk with another dreamhunter student, still dressed in his t-shirt and sweatpants leisure wear, arms crossed over his barrel chest as he huffed out his indignation.

Wesley Jager.

Wes looked a little like an enraged bull when he got upset. His biceps strained against his sleeves, his nostrils flared, his black eyes narrowed into two glittering pits. He was a uniform brown from head to toe, except for those eyes. His bronze hair stuck up in the back.

“How did the hunting go, Emery?” said the dean. She’d heard him use many voices before. This was not actually his Dean of Fenhallow voice, though she doubted Wes or Stainer would know that.

Emery pressed her hands to her thighs. “I took care of both nightmares without any issues. I received the proper signatures and kept the subject safe. Everything was performed to procedure.” She wanted to scoff. She sounded so dull and formal, and she never talked to him this way.

Wes let out an angry huff.

“Was it?” The dean laced his fingers together. “I didn’t have you brought here for a simple debriefing. There is a reason dreamhunters have partners, and it isn’t so that you can leave them behind when you go on missions. Stainer tells me there was a class four nightmare involved tonight.”

“Class four is a little much. I mean, it was a flying whale, but—”

“When you dispatched that nightmare, what was the resulting dream cloud like?”

Emery coughed. “Big.”

“Mm. I suspect it was a bit difficult to breathe when it came for you. All that Dream essence hitting you at once, the body would go into shock.”

“A bit.”

“If you’d had a partner there,” the dean gestured to Wes, “he might have shared the burden. Not to mention having your back if that big nightmare got the better of you.”

Wes’s black gaze drilled into the side of her head. If he thought he was getting an admission of wrongdoing out of her, he was going to have a very bad night.

“I don’t think he would have.”

She didn’t have to look at Wes to feel him bristle. Stainer put a hand to her forehead. The dean sat up straighter.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s the lowest ranked in our class. I’m the highest. You can’t honestly expect him to keep up with me in the field. He can barely hold his weapon, much less fight something with it. If you wanted me to have a useful partner, I should have been paired with someone on my level.”

The dean’s expression settled into disappointment. Emery couldn’t look away from him, now that she’d met his eye; his gaze was a magnet, and to force herself to avert hers was to incite further disappointment. The dean turned to Stainer and Wes.

“Could I have a moment alone with Emery, please?” he said.

Stainer put a hand on Wes’s shoulder—he was half a head taller than her—and led him from the room. When the door clicked shut behind them, the dean stood from his desk and said, “Em.”

Guilt slammed into her in hot waves.

“Sorry, Grandpa.”

“If you’re sorry,” Grandpa Al said, “why did you do it?”

Emery growled. “Because he gets in the way! We have to climb on the roof to get to a nightmare? I have to make sure Wes isn’t falling off the side. I can shoot something and get rid of it right away? I have to make sure Wes isn’t in my line of sight, swinging that stupid hammer. If I have to have a partner, it should be someone who understands how things work.”

Grandpa Al’s disappointment softened. “Em, I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s why you’re still considered in training. Right now you’re supposed to learn how to work with your partner. I would have been shocked had you performed perfectly together immediately after being assigned. Did you give him any chance at all?”

“I’ve been in class with him for years. I know what he’s capable of.”

“I’m not going to request the Ward give you a new partner. Wesley deserves a chance.”

Emery took a deep breath and flexed her hands, trying to work out some of the tension. She finally looked away, because more disappointment was better than the soft, appeasing look he was giving her now. The look when he wanted something.

“How much of a chance?” she said.

“One month.” He said it so fast he had to have had it ready, maybe since she’d entered the room, maybe since he’d heard she’d left for the mission without Wes. “Give him one month of missions, and if you still can’t work together at the end of that, I’ll see about doing some rearranging.”

“Just one?”

“Just one.”

When she was thirteen, Grandpa Al had managed to reform her dorm-cleaning habits in an instant by mentioning that every dreamhunter engraved on the Fenhallow steps had been a notorious neat freak. She searched his face for any kind of duplicity now. He raised his hands and his eyebrows, innocent.

“Fine,” Emery said.

“That’s my girl.” He stood from the desk. “You know, Edgar was very worried about you. You should stop by his room so he knows you’re okay.”

Emery groaned. “Who told Edgar?”

“No one. He started checking the request logs religiously to see if you go on missions. He was actually the one who told me.”

Emery growled again and yanked the ponytail out of her hair as she turned for the door.

“Oh, and Em?”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob.

“Apologize to Wesley. You were speaking your truth, but it was a hurtful truth, and not one he needed to hear that way.”

Emery shouldered the door open.

Apparently, Wes wasn’t going to have as bad a night as she thought.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Apologies Are Hard)

[kristablogs]

Exploring the common misconceptions regarding trans and non-binary identities

Trans and non-binary identities have existed for centuries. But modern science has given new ammunition to detractors. (Kyle/Unsplash/)

Last month, a series of anti-trans tweets by author J.K. Rowling incited a maelstrom of anger, pain, and indignation. Specifically, Rowling opposed the phrase “people who menstruate” in an article, commenting on the social media platform, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people ... Wumben?”

In her tweets, Rowling has perpetuated several common misconceptions about trans people, many of which actively hurt and harm the trans community. Here’s a breakdown of some common misconceptions and why they’re harmful.

Gender and sex are not the same thing

Sex is usually determined by a doctor shortly after birth based on the external genitalia you have, and even then it’s not so clean cut. Estimates suggest that 1 to 2 percent of all people in the US are intersex, meaning their bodies don’t fall neatly inside the male/female binary: Their gonads, genitalia, and hormones don’t necessarily match in sex characteristics. 

Gender identity is less clinical and more focused on how an individual views themself. Human Rights Campaign defines gender identity as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither—how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.”

Gender presentation is how an individual chooses to look and show their identity through their appearance. How a person presents themself is separate to the gender they identify with—and trans individuals do not need to dress hyper-feminene of hyper-masculine to prove their gender identity.

“We still have that binary mindset of what a man and what a woman should look like. Then we have the additional layer of what a trans woman should look like and what a trans man should look like, and there’s often not a lot of space in between,” says Hansel Arroyo, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. He says being trans does not require adhering to stereotypical experiences: A trans woman dressed in typically ‘masculine’ clothing is still a woman.

Hormones are not sex specific

“Sex hormones” are a myth, says Katie Spencer, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who researches human sexuality and co-directs the National Center for Gender Spectrum Health in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cis men have estrogen and cis women have testosterone, not to mention the wide variability among intersex individuals—”we all have sort of a blend of them in our bodies.” 

Naturally variable hormone levels have been the center of controversy in competitive sports. For example, track-and-field star Caster Semenya has been scrutinized throughout her career because of her naturally high testosterone levels. Researcher Joanna Harper recently told Popular Science that we still don’t fully understand how all hormones affect athletic performance.

Spencer adds that there are plenty of trans people who don’t take hormones or have surgery just as there are plenty of cisgendered people who do need supplemental hormones, whether it’s for symptoms related to menopause, mediating sex-drive, or to prevent hair loss. So the perception that trans people taking hormones is evidence of something wrong or unnatural is completely moot, she says. What’s more, safe access to hormones is a public health issue: Hormone therapy can already increase your risk of heart attack, but taking hormones from unreliable black market sources means you’re never really sure how much of a hormone you’re taking, and that can result in serious medical issues, like kidney failure.

Cisgendered women are not the only people who can menstruate and get pregnant 

“Lots of bodies menstruate,” says Spencer. There are some trans men and non-binary people who menstruate and get pregnant. On the other hand, there are plenty of cisgendered women who don’t menstruate. Menopause and other conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome or uterine disorders can prevent regular cycles. To conflate menstruation with womanhood is wrong and offensive, says Spencer. Moreover, she says, it’s medically dangerous. 

Awareness of obstetric and gynecological care for men and non-binary folk is important, because their experiences are still poorly documented and understudied. That “time of the month” can come with a big psychological toll for some. One study of pregnant trans men found that trans men remain highly motivated to get pregnant at the prospect of fatherhood, despite the lack of information and support available to them. Another study shows that some trans men experience extreme isolation and body dysphoria during pregnancy. 

Access to the care they need to transition is crucial for trans folk and their mental health, says Arroyo. When they receive appropriate, thoughtful care, trans individuals have better mental health and are more likely to feel safe and satisfied with their care. Interfering with an individual’s ability to live their full life or to prevent them from having dysphoric feelings, he says, is awful.

Trans existence is not new

“Trans people have always existed,” says Jesse Pratt López, a photographer, activist, and proud trans woman who notably started a GoFundMe for homeless Black trans women. 

For example, before Europeans reached North America, many Native American tribes had third gender roles. Indigenous groups to this day have many different names for people across the non-binary spectrum. 

“Looking at past populations, from historical documents to archaeological artifacts, graves, funerary goods and skeletons, we know that the binary that we think of as gender being male or female didn’t exist in all populations—and we know it still doesn’t exist in all populations today,” says Sabrina Agarwal, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist at UC Berkeley. “We have evidence of gender and sexuality fluidity across human cultures from even prehistoric times—from ancient Egypt, Mesoamerican, the Inca, Southeast Asia, and even in the earliest Mesopotamaian writing tablets.” 

A lot of the archaeological record supports a long history of gender fluidity, Agarwal says. One way to see that is to look at grave sites. By analyzing a skeleton archaeologists can infer a person’s sex, but that sex does not necessarily match up with the gendered artifacts they find at the person’s grave site, she explains. This could be because the individual lived outside of the gender binary.

Suppressing “deviations” from what’s considered normal is an invention of white colonization, says Pratt López, and so framing transness as a new phenomenon is deceptive and wrong. When white colonizers moved in on communities around the world they forcibly brought with them tenets of sex and gender binaries.

Agarwal agrees. She says that “these ideas of a gender binary are a Western-centric perception—the white settler’s idea of how things are divided.” A noted example she has studied are the hijras, a term that includes transgender and intersex individuals, and eunuchs. South Asia has long recognized them, she says, but when British colonialists came in, they targeted and criminalized the hijra. They still face echoes of that stigma today, though India recently gave the hijra legal recognition as a third gender.

When you consider the record of gender fluidity in the world throughout history, Pratt López says, it becomes impossible to separate trans oppression from colonization.

Hijras have long been considered the third, fluid gender in India. (kaetana/Unsplash/)

Genitalia is not the only thing that matters in attraction and sexuality

Trans sexuality is a particularly frustrating misconception to talk about, says Pratt López. However, she says it’s difficult to pinpoint what is so hard for folks to understand. She puts forth this hypothetical situation: If a heterosexual man who is only attracted to women sleeps with a trans woman, the common public response to that kind of relationship is usually, “He must be gay” rather than, “She must be a woman.”   

Further, sex and gender are not the only reasons people become attracted to one another. “People are attracted to people on multiple levels,” says Katie Spencer. “Bodies are a part of that, and gender is a part of that, but they’re not the whole picture.” You’re not attracted to someone because of their genitals in any relationship, says Spencer, so reducing trans people and trans attraction to genitals makes no sense.

Transitions aren’t the same for everyone

“Transness, like anything, is a spectrum,” says Pratt López. She notes that how a person chooses to transition, and how they want to present themselves during this time, should occur on their terms: “Trans people don’t have to have any surgeries or take hormones in order to be the gender that they are.”

Rowling has also insinuated that queer youth are being “shunted towards hormones and surgery,” calling it “a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people.” Contrary to what the author claims, helping trans youth understand their identities, and meeting them where they are is pivotal to closing mental and physical health disparities between trans and cis youth. 

“There are people who would oppose somebody who is trans from getting appropriate medical services, whether hormone therapy or surgery, and I would encourage them to look at the health outcomes,” says Arroyo. The health disparity between cis and trans communities is frighteningly large, he says, but we see in our patients and in the research that providing support to both youth and adults can help close those gaps.

Conversion therapy, a category of discredited practices that aim to conform a person’s sexuality or gender identity to the societal norm or expectation, on the other hand, is dangerous and does not work. The UN has called it a “‘cure' for an illness that does not exist.” Comparing transitioning to conversion therapy is a baseless analogy that does not hold up. 

We often think of transitioning as going from one stereotypical side of the gender spectrum to the other, Arroyo says, but thinking about transitions as crossing a binary is inaccurate. A transition can mean different things to different individuals: Some trans folk may only want to transition by way of clothing and expression, while others might want to go as far as hormone therapy or surgery. There is no set end goal to a transition, no final destination. “It is not for me to say that one person’s way of expressing their gender is a transition or is not a transition,” says Arroyo. “And I think that’s a good reminder for us as medical providers—that it’s not for us to determine what transitioning is, but it’s for the individual to discover what transition is to them.”

How to be a better ally for trans people 

Trans individuals, and especially trans women of color, are disproportionately victims of violence. As of July 27, 22 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been violently killed in 2020 alone. 16 of them (76 percent) were people of color. 

 “Here we are, in 2020, still begging and pleading for people to see our humanity,” says Milan Nicole Sherry, a trans activist from New Orleans who organizes the city’s NOLA Trans March of Resilience and created the hashtag #blacktranslivesmatter. She says that instead of complacent allies, they need active accomplices who speak with their actions—those who will not only stand with trans people, but walk with them and protect them, too.

Ask yourself, “how can I show up?” and ask your trans friends, “how can I help you and trans people?”, says Sherry. If you phrase it in a direct way, then you are more likely to get a direct answer. 

Being an accomplice, as Sherry puts it, could mean joining them in protest, volunteering at a clinic or youth organization, or even just talking to those around you who are ignorant about trans people—all of it contributes to a movement towards acceptance.

Any and all action is impactful, especially during a time when celebrity authors and government agencies try to invalidate the trans community based on false interpretations of biology. 

[scootoaster]

Exploring the common misconceptions regarding trans and non-binary identities

Trans and non-binary identities have existed for centuries. But modern science has given new ammunition to detractors. (Kyle/Unsplash/)

Last month, a series of anti-trans tweets by author J.K. Rowling incited a maelstrom of anger, pain, and indignation. Specifically, Rowling opposed the phrase “people who menstruate” in an article, commenting on the social media platform, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people ... Wumben?”

In her tweets, Rowling has perpetuated several common misconceptions about trans people, many of which actively hurt and harm the trans community. Here’s a breakdown of some common misconceptions and why they’re harmful.

Gender and sex are not the same thing

Sex is usually determined by a doctor shortly after birth based on the external genitalia you have, and even then it’s not so clean cut. Estimates suggest that 1 to 2 percent of all people in the US are intersex, meaning their bodies don’t fall neatly inside the male/female binary: Their gonads, genitalia, and hormones don’t necessarily match in sex characteristics. 

Gender identity is less clinical and more focused on how an individual views themself. Human Rights Campaign defines gender identity as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither—how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.”

Gender presentation is how an individual chooses to look and show their identity through their appearance. How a person presents themself is separate to the gender they identify with—and trans individuals do not need to dress hyper-feminene of hyper-masculine to prove their gender identity.

“We still have that binary mindset of what a man and what a woman should look like. Then we have the additional layer of what a trans woman should look like and what a trans man should look like, and there’s often not a lot of space in between,” says Hansel Arroyo, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. He says being trans does not require adhering to stereotypical experiences: A trans woman dressed in typically ‘masculine’ clothing is still a woman.

Hormones are not sex specific

“Sex hormones” are a myth, says Katie Spencer, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who researches human sexuality and co-directs the National Center for Gender Spectrum Health in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cis men have estrogen and cis women have testosterone, not to mention the wide variability among intersex individuals—”we all have sort of a blend of them in our bodies.” 

Naturally variable hormone levels have been the center of controversy in competitive sports. For example, track-and-field star Caster Semenya has been scrutinized throughout her career because of her naturally high testosterone levels. Researcher Joanna Harper recently told Popular Science that we still don’t fully understand how all hormones affect athletic performance.

Spencer adds that there are plenty of trans people who don’t take hormones or have surgery just as there are plenty of cisgendered people who do need supplemental hormones, whether it’s for symptoms related to menopause, mediating sex-drive, or to prevent hair loss. So the perception that trans people taking hormones is evidence of something wrong or unnatural is completely moot, she says. What’s more, safe access to hormones is a public health issue: Hormone therapy can already increase your risk of heart attack, but taking hormones from unreliable black market sources means you’re never really sure how much of a hormone you’re taking, and that can result in serious medical issues, like kidney failure.

Cisgendered women are not the only people who can menstruate and get pregnant 

“Lots of bodies menstruate,” says Spencer. There are some trans men and non-binary people who menstruate and get pregnant. On the other hand, there are plenty of cisgendered women who don’t menstruate. Menopause and other conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome or uterine disorders can prevent regular cycles. To conflate menstruation with womanhood is wrong and offensive, says Spencer. Moreover, she says, it’s medically dangerous. 

Awareness of obstetric and gynecological care for men and non-binary folk is important, because their experiences are still poorly documented and understudied. That “time of the month” can come with a big psychological toll for some. One study of pregnant trans men found that trans men remain highly motivated to get pregnant at the prospect of fatherhood, despite the lack of information and support available to them. Another study shows that some trans men experience extreme isolation and body dysphoria during pregnancy. 

Access to the care they need to transition is crucial for trans folk and their mental health, says Arroyo. When they receive appropriate, thoughtful care, trans individuals have better mental health and are more likely to feel safe and satisfied with their care. Interfering with an individual’s ability to live their full life or to prevent them from having dysphoric feelings, he says, is awful.

Trans existence is not new

“Trans people have always existed,” says Jesse Pratt López, a photographer, activist, and proud trans woman who notably started a GoFundMe for homeless Black trans women. 

For example, before Europeans reached North America, many Native American tribes had third gender roles. Indigenous groups to this day have many different names for people across the non-binary spectrum. 

“Looking at past populations, from historical documents to archaeological artifacts, graves, funerary goods and skeletons, we know that the binary that we think of as gender being male or female didn’t exist in all populations—and we know it still doesn’t exist in all populations today,” says Sabrina Agarwal, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist at UC Berkeley. “We have evidence of gender and sexuality fluidity across human cultures from even prehistoric times—from ancient Egypt, Mesoamerican, the Inca, Southeast Asia, and even in the earliest Mesopotamaian writing tablets.” 

A lot of the archaeological record supports a long history of gender fluidity, Agarwal says. One way to see that is to look at grave sites. By analyzing a skeleton archaeologists can infer a person’s sex, but that sex does not necessarily match up with the gendered artifacts they find at the person’s grave site, she explains. This could be because the individual lived outside of the gender binary.

Suppressing “deviations” from what’s considered normal is an invention of white colonization, says Pratt López, and so framing transness as a new phenomenon is deceptive and wrong. When white colonizers moved in on communities around the world they forcibly brought with them tenets of sex and gender binaries.

Agarwal agrees. She says that “these ideas of a gender binary are a Western-centric perception—the white settler’s idea of how things are divided.” A noted example she has studied are the hijras, a term that includes transgender and intersex individuals, and eunuchs. South Asia has long recognized them, she says, but when British colonialists came in, they targeted and criminalized the hijra. They still face echoes of that stigma today, though India recently gave the hijra legal recognition as a third gender.

When you consider the record of gender fluidity in the world throughout history, Pratt López says, it becomes impossible to separate trans oppression from colonization.

Hijras have long been considered the third, fluid gender in India. (kaetana/Unsplash/)

Genitalia is not the only thing that matters in attraction and sexuality

Trans sexuality is a particularly frustrating misconception to talk about, says Pratt López. However, she says it’s difficult to pinpoint what is so hard for folks to understand. She puts forth this hypothetical situation: If a heterosexual man who is only attracted to women sleeps with a trans woman, the common public response to that kind of relationship is usually, “He must be gay” rather than, “She must be a woman.”   

Further, sex and gender are not the only reasons people become attracted to one another. “People are attracted to people on multiple levels,” says Katie Spencer. “Bodies are a part of that, and gender is a part of that, but they’re not the whole picture.” You’re not attracted to someone because of their genitals in any relationship, says Spencer, so reducing trans people and trans attraction to genitals makes no sense.

Transitions aren’t the same for everyone

“Transness, like anything, is a spectrum,” says Pratt López. She notes that how a person chooses to transition, and how they want to present themselves during this time, should occur on their terms: “Trans people don’t have to have any surgeries or take hormones in order to be the gender that they are.”

Rowling has also insinuated that queer youth are being “shunted towards hormones and surgery,” calling it “a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people.” Contrary to what the author claims, helping trans youth understand their identities, and meeting them where they are is pivotal to closing mental and physical health disparities between trans and cis youth. 

“There are people who would oppose somebody who is trans from getting appropriate medical services, whether hormone therapy or surgery, and I would encourage them to look at the health outcomes,” says Arroyo. The health disparity between cis and trans communities is frighteningly large, he says, but we see in our patients and in the research that providing support to both youth and adults can help close those gaps.

Conversion therapy, a category of discredited practices that aim to conform a person’s sexuality or gender identity to the societal norm or expectation, on the other hand, is dangerous and does not work. The UN has called it a “‘cure' for an illness that does not exist.” Comparing transitioning to conversion therapy is a baseless analogy that does not hold up. 

We often think of transitioning as going from one stereotypical side of the gender spectrum to the other, Arroyo says, but thinking about transitions as crossing a binary is inaccurate. A transition can mean different things to different individuals: Some trans folk may only want to transition by way of clothing and expression, while others might want to go as far as hormone therapy or surgery. There is no set end goal to a transition, no final destination. “It is not for me to say that one person’s way of expressing their gender is a transition or is not a transition,” says Arroyo. “And I think that’s a good reminder for us as medical providers—that it’s not for us to determine what transitioning is, but it’s for the individual to discover what transition is to them.”

How to be a better ally for trans people 

Trans individuals, and especially trans women of color, are disproportionately victims of violence. As of July 27, 22 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been violently killed in 2020 alone. 16 of them (76 percent) were people of color. 

 “Here we are, in 2020, still begging and pleading for people to see our humanity,” says Milan Nicole Sherry, a trans activist from New Orleans who organizes the city’s NOLA Trans March of Resilience and created the hashtag #blacktranslivesmatter. She says that instead of complacent allies, they need active accomplices who speak with their actions—those who will not only stand with trans people, but walk with them and protect them, too.

Ask yourself, “how can I show up?” and ask your trans friends, “how can I help you and trans people?”, says Sherry. If you phrase it in a direct way, then you are more likely to get a direct answer. 

Being an accomplice, as Sherry puts it, could mean joining them in protest, volunteering at a clinic or youth organization, or even just talking to those around you who are ignorant about trans people—all of it contributes to a movement towards acceptance.

Any and all action is impactful, especially during a time when celebrity authors and government agencies try to invalidate the trans community based on false interpretations of biology. 

[shirlleycoyle]

Trying to Maintain Social Distancing on New York City Sidewalks? Good Luck.

On Wednesday, New York City’s Department of City Planning (DCP) tweeted a guide for how to maintain proper social distancing on the city’s sidewalks. Using regular objects like tree pits, benches, and sidewalk joints, pedestrians can quickly judge how far they are from one another.

In a follow-up tweet, DCP said that “If you’re less than 6 feet, like the pairs in this photo, it should only be with someone who shares your living space.”

Six feet has become the magic number when going outside. Public health officials around the world are advising fresh air-seekers and grocery shoppers to maintain six feet of distance from everyone else in order to prevent others from breathing in droplets of the coronavirus. But six feet is easier said than done in New York City. Many neighborhood sidewalks are not like the ones in the photo and are in fact too narrow to maintain proper social distancing.

Although the DCP tweet was well-intentioned, it was met with indignation from many New Yorkers who have been demanding the city close off streets and parking spaces from cars in order to make up for the shortcomings of our sidewalks. In order to allow pedestrians to pass with the necessary distance, the argument goes, the city ought to be taking space away from vehicles at a time where traffic has plummeted, neighborhood parks are crowded, and playgrounds have been shuttered.

On top of that, the need for social distancing in New York right now is arguably greater than anywhere else in the country. As of this writing, 20,474 New Yorkers have been hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus cases and 4,260 people have died from the virus, according to the city’s Department of Health. The entire city is on edge with angst about the health of our family and friends. Most everyone is driving themselves crazy with what measures we can and must take to protect our neighbors.

To that end, DCP’s tweet rubbed some New Yorkers the wrong way for implying social distancing is solely a personal choice—and a failure to abide by it a personal failing—rather than a geometrical problem about how street space is allocated. In response to DCP’s tweet, Doug Gordon, a safe streets activist (no relation to this reporter), measured his own sidewalk. He found that, with tree pits every few feet, the functional walking space was only five feet wide, making it impossible to abide by the city’s social distancing requirements on his block. Meanwhile, parking lanes took up seven feet of space while a (mostly unused) travel lane took up 12 feet.

Inspired by Gordon’s experiment, Motherboard asked 17 New Yorkers in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens to measure the sidewalks directly outside their apartments. The results largely echo Gordon’s findings. Although 12 of the 17 sidewalks measured were at least 10 feet wide from curb to private property—in theory wide enough for passing pedestrians to maintain the necessary distance—the actual walking space was much smaller. In total, 12 of the 17 sidewalks (70 percent) had less than six feet of navigable walking space due to permanent obstructions like tree pits, construction scaffolding, or basement access gates. Plus, New York City’s garbage collection system mandates we put our trash on the sidewalk for extended periods, clogging walking space even more with semi-permanent garbage bags.

Want to help Motherboard's reporting on social distancing on American sidewalks? Measure your sidewalk and fill out this form.

Routine real-world situations narrow that space even further. A human being is about two feet wide, give or take. Dog-walkers, joggers, couples walking together, parents with kids either in or out of strollers, adults with carts full of groceries all make social distancing that much more challenging. It is simply not possible to social distance on most New York City sidewalks.

“We’re seeing what happens when public service announcements become a substitute for public policy,” Gordon told Motherboard. “Elected officials can do more than offer gentle suggestions or even stern finger wagging; they can create the conditions on the ground that make safe social distancing possible.”

Nevertheless, the city has thus far opted solely for finger-wagging, has done virtually nothing to provide more space for pedestrians, and, with the closing of playgrounds, has reduced the amount of safe space that can be used. A pilot program that pedestrianized a total of 1.5 miles of streets throughout the entire city, which has more than 6,000 miles of roads, was killed after just two weeks.

In part, this initiative was cancelled because the city no longer has enough healthy cops to enforce social distancing. The fact that the city required dozens of cops to be stationed at these open streets underscores the city’s stick-heavy approach to social distancing, which has included threats of fines, the closures of playgrounds, and regular patrolling by armed police officers. So far, Mayor de Blasio’s administration has rejected any effort to give people more space in which to distance.

Some New Yorkers are puzzled by this approach. “Most New Yorkers don’t own cars, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at how space is allocated on our streets,” said Danny Harris, executive director for the non-profit Transportation Alternatives. “New Yorkers and people in cities across the country are realizing that the scraps of space pedestrians have been given is dangerously inadequate.”

Indeed, many other cities are not only realizing how much space is given to cars relative to pedestrians, but doing something about it. New York City’s law-and-order approach to social distancing is in stark contrast to the measures other cities big and small around the world have adopted that give pedestrians and cyclists more space to be outside safely. Mike Lyndon, founder of the planning and research firm Street Plans, has been tracking Covid-related street closures in North America and found that four cities (Minneapolis, Denver, Louisville, Vancouver, and Portland) have closed off more than 10 miles of roads. Montreal closed off a parking lane on a 1.6-mile stretch of Mont-Royal Avenue. Cities from Brookline, Massachusetts to Berlin, Germany have taken similar measures.

It’s not just progressive urban centers that have repurposed street space for people. Dan Flannery, who lives in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn but is staying with his parents at a beach town in Central New Jersey, told Motherboard he’s flabbergasted by the city’s lackadaisical response, particularly when juxtaposed to the wealthy, Republican enclave he’s staying in now. Flannery said many towns along the Jersey shore have closed off boardwalks but instituted no-parking policies on nearby streets so cyclists and joggers have more space.

“It just baffles me that a deep red, rich town can accomplish this,” Flannery said, “and NYC—where a majority of households don't own a car—can not.”

Joe Marvilli, a spokesperson for the Department of City Planning, told Motherboard it is on pedestrians to maintain social distancing. “If a sidewalk is less than six feet wide, and is being used by someone else,” he advised, “wait at the corner for them to pass or use a crosswalk to safely get to the other side of the street."

Gordon didn’t think much of that advice. “What DCP is saying is that pedestrians have to go out of their way or inconvenience themselves all because the city won’t inconvenience drivers.” He also pointed out DCP’s advice might not be possible for everyone to abide by. “As for crossing the street, what if you’re in a wheelchair and there’s no curb ramp? What if you’re elderly and lugging groceries? What if you’re mid-block? This doesn’t seem to be a statement made by people who are actually walking anywhere right now.”

Want to help Motherboard's reporting on social distancing on American sidewalks? Measure your sidewalk and fill out this form.

Trying to Maintain Social Distancing on New York City Sidewalks? Good Luck. syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[dailybiblelessons]

Thursday: Preparation for the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Roman Catholic Proper 23 Revised Common Lectionary Proper 18

Complementary Hebrew Scripture from the Torah: Genesis 39:1-23

Now Joseph was taken down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man; he was in the house of his Egyptian master. His master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord caused all that he did to prosper in his hands. So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him; he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he made him overseer in his house and over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake; the blessing of the Lord was on all that he had, in house and field. So he left all that he had in Joseph's charge; and, with him there, he had no concern for anything but the food that he ate.

Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master's wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Lie with me.” But he refused and said to his master's wife, “Look, with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my hand. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” And although she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not consent to lie beside her or to be with her. One day, however, when he went into the house to do his work, and while no one else was in the house, she caught hold of his garment, saying, “Lie with me!” But he left his garment in her hand, and fled and ran outside. When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled outside, she called out to the members of her household and said to them, “See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to insult us! He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice; and when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his garment beside me, and fled outside.” Then she kept his garment by her until his master came home, and she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to insult me; but as soon as I raised my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me, and fled outside.”

When his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, saying, “This is the way your servant treated me,” he became enraged. And Joseph's master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king's prisoners were confined; he remained there in prison. But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer.¹ The chief jailer committed to Joseph's care all the prisoners who were in the prison, and whatever was done there, he was the one who did it. The chief jailer paid no heed to anything that was in Joseph's care, because the Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper.¹

¹In his defense before the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:1-53.), Stephen makes note that God was with Joseph.

Semi-continuous Hebrew Scripture from the Latter Prophets: Jeremiah 15:10-21

[Jeremiah's lament] Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me.

[God's response] The Lord said: Surely I have intervened in your life for good, surely I have imposed enemies on you in a time of trouble and in a time of distress. Can iron and bronze break iron from the north?

Your wealth and your treasures I will give as plunder, without price, for all your sins, throughout all your territory. I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.

[Jeremiah's lament] O Lord, you know;  remember me and visit me,  and bring down retribution for me on my persecutors. In your forbearance do not take me away;  know that on your account I suffer insult. Your words were found, and I ate them,  and your words became to me a joy,  and the delight of my heart;  for I am called by your name,,  O Lord, God of hosts. I did not sit in the company of merrymakers,,  nor did I rejoice; under the weight of your hand I sat alone,  for you had filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unceasing,  my wound incurable,  refusing to be healed? Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook,  like waters that fail.

[God's response] Therefore thus says the Lord: If you turn back, I will take you back,  and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless,  you shall serve as my mouth. It is they who will turn to you,  not you who will turn to them. And I will make you to this people,  a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you,  but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you,  to save you and deliver you, says the Lord.

I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,  and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.

Complementary Psalm 1

Happy are those  who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread,  or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord,  and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees  planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season,  and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,  but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,  nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,  but the way of the wicked will perish.

Semi-continuous Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up;  you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down,  and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue,  O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before,  and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;  it is so high that I cannot attain it.

For it was you who formed my inward parts;  you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.  My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,  intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days  that were formed for me,  when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!  How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand;  I come to the end—I am still with you.

New Testament Epistle Lesson: Philippians 2:25-30

Still, I think it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus—my brother and co-worker and fellow soldier, your messenger and minister to my need; for he has been longing for all of you, and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill. He was indeed so ill that he nearly died. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, so that I would not have one sorrow after another. I am the more eager to send him, therefore, in order that you may rejoice at seeing him again, and that I may be less anxious. Welcome him then in the Lord with all joy, and honor such people, because he came close to death for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for those services that you could not give me.

Year C Ordinary 23, Catholic Proper 23, RCL Proper 18: Thursday

Bible verses from The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All right reserved. Selections from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, copyright 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Footnotes in the Hebrew Scriptures that show where the passage is used in the Christian Scriptures are based on information from the The Complete Jewish Bible (CJB) by David H. Stern, Copyright © 1998 and 2006 by David H. Stern, used by permission of Messianic Jewish Publishers, www.messianicjewish.net. All rights reserved worldwide. When text is taken from the CJB, the passage ends with (CJB) and this copyright notice applies. Image credit: Word cloud created (on wordle.net) by Michael Gilbertson 24 August 2016. Image may be used under CC 2.5. Please credit The Lectionary Company.

[vilma34v4157762-blog]

10 Need To See Areas In The USA

A wander down any of Bangkok's for lots of sprawling and also labyrinthine alleys may carry unknown journeys for guests who are interested to discover the actual Thailand. The Health Department claimed the instances were actually discovered Monday in the far eastern urban area of Holguin and also had actually been actually affirmed as Zika by laboratory examinations The department claims not either person had actually journeyed outside the nation. From the amount of time Volkswagen's system was actually revealed, the car manufacturer has actually accepted to pay for billions to work out civil and criminal butt in the US. The majority of individuals behind the disaster, nevertheless, will likely get away with what they performed, such a long time as they remain in their indigenous nation. To the maximum level permitted by suitable regulation, adolf-onlineblog.info Business does certainly not warrant, recommend, ensure, or even presume accountability for any kind of services or product publicized or given through a third party with the Provider company or any hyperlinked site or solution, or even featured in any streamer or other advertising, as well as Business will certainly certainly not be an event to or whatsoever keep an eye on any kind of transaction in between you and also third-party companies of services or products. The forbearance may only have actually proceeded from a tempting sentiment of the incongruity of subjecting the future of twelve Conditions to the perverseness or nepotism of a thirteenth; coming from the example of stiff opposition provided through a MAJORITY of one sixtieth of people of United States to a solution accepted and also called for by the voice of twelve States, consisting of fifty-nine sixtieths of individuals an example still new in the mind as well as indignation of every consumer who has tasted of the injured tribute and also success of his nation. According to Sterling Lloyd, assistant director at the Education Week Proving ground and also coauthor of the Quality Counts record, the grading structure benefits mentions with a versatile technique to education." Extensively talking, in states at the top edge of the ranking, parents have the resources to sustain their children's discovering in well-funded colleges; students mention higher scholastic accomplishment in the class; as well as grads manage to go after occupations in an economic climate where possibilities are on call to them. The sum of what has actually been here provided as well as proved is actually, that the charge versus the convention of exceeding their powers, apart from in one occasion little bit of prompted by the objectors, has no structure to sustain it; that if they had surpassed their energies, they were certainly not merely called for, however demanded, as the discreet slaves of their country, by the circumstances in which they were put, to work out the freedom which they presume; which ultimately, if they had actually violated both their powers as well as their obligations, in suggesting a Constitution, this ought however to be taken advantage of, if it be actually computed to complete the perspectives and also joy of individuals of The United States. Penned in 1862 through Stephen Foster during the course of the American Civil Battle. Yet, he gained 13 even more times, including 6 majors. A United States Nation track coming from 1983 that applauds United States ladies as well as advises our experts ought to presume a lot more regarding getting United States made products to put Americans back to operate. The Great Ponds of North America includes linking freshwater pond surrounding Canada and the USA. The war of Iraq is actually most disparaging as well as opprobrious because every day because of horror project attack, uncounted folks are actually being killed regardless of higher or even reduced. Whenever they infuse themselves right into a process, the expenses naturally increase since an ever expanding, non-contributing administration establishes that adds NOTHING to either the premium of or even availability of medical care. France is actually certainly one of the most explored as well as adored nation in the world of tourism. That's since the much healthier individuals are actually, the less they have to pay in medical care. The format will certainly support you along with setting up the areas of a worldwide service program as well as guide you on just how to feature the demands of positioning your company in yet another country. She proposed that yearly in every nation certainly there must be an occasion on the same time - a Women's Day - to push for their demands. ARWU, the United States News Top International Colleges (BGU), Scimago (SCI), Webometrics (INTERNET), URAP, the National Taiwan College Rankings (NTU), and also RUR perform certainly not seem to be to become influenced in favour of their country's crown jewel colleges.

[magicwebsitesnet]

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights http://www.nature-business.com/business-trump-is-disposing-of-a-great-american-value-concern-for-human-rights/

Business

S.E. Cupp is a CNN political commentator and the host of “SE Cupp Unfiltered.” Rob Morrow is an actor, musician, director and producer. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)America is turning inward, and that’s making the whole world a more dangerous place.

This isn’t a neoconservative talking point, but, in our case writing as one conservative and one liberal, a shared concern from the left and the right. The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.

In a new

interview with CBS

, when pressed about the disappearance of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident with children living in this country, from the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Trump insisted there will be a “severe punishment” for the Saudis if they were responsible.

At least for now, that punishment does not include withdrawing our official presence at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative later this month. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin has stated he

still plans on attending

.

But Trump’s latest statement is a welcome – if vague – shift in tone from earlier in the week when Trump seemed to dismiss his possible murder as

not our problem

. “It’s in Turkey, and it’s not a citizen, as I understand it. But a thing like that shouldn’t happen.”

The “thing” that shouldn’t happen, of course, is that a journalist was possibly the victim of an extrajudicial killing on foreign soil, at the behest of one of our allied partners, Saudi Arabia,

according to

US officials. The President’s words imply that somehow Khashoggi’s fate should be less horrifying because he wasn’t an American.

It’s admittedly naive not to acknowledge Saudi Arabia’s important role in

fighting terrorism

in the Middle East and providing stopgap protection against

Iranian threats

. But that this President seems to believe Khashoggi’s citizenship somehow diminishes our responsibility to strongly rebuke the kingdom is deeply disturbing.

Worse, the President’s cold calculation of the cost of action — “I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,”

he said

of our arms trade with Saudi Arabia (which thus far has only earned $14.5 billion) — effectively puts a bounty on dissidents’ heads. For $110 billion in weapons, or far less, you can allegedly kill a dissident journalist without so much as a whiff of indignation from the US President. The quantifying of Khashoggi’s life is despicable.

It’s also signaling to the rest of the world that the United States will no longer lead when it comes to denouncing human rights violations, or holding the violators accountable, so long as the political or economic calculus favors silence or inaction. But being a shining beacon of democracy for the rest of the world should not only be the privilege but the obligation of our lifetimes.

From a genocide in

Syria

that’s claimed the lives of half a million people, to a staggering refugee crisis in

Myanmar

and protests and violence in

Venezuela

, there is a contagion of humanitarian crises sweeping the globe while the United States has receded into the background.

The ripple effect is that other countries feel emboldened to act out. Whether that’s in the case of Russia, which is widely believed to have extrajudicially

murdered

ex-spies; or in China, which

abducts

its own citizens — most recently

an actress and an Interpol chief

— before charging them with crimes after the fact; or in Egypt, where officials were accused of torturing, mutilating and murdering an

Italian postgraduate student

and dumping his body outside Cairo, to few if any repercussions.

How can we credibly profess our outrage at Russia, China, Egypt or anyone else when, just one year after the death of American college student

Otto Warmbier

after being imprisoned by the North Korean government, President Trump welcomed Kim Jong Un with open arms — and a

commemorative coin

— to a show summit in Singapore, where he heaped upon Kim the kind of lavish praise usually denied dictators who starve their own people?

Instead, brutal dictators, despots and war criminals are granted an open ear and open mind from President Trump. He

extolls

despots and

dismisses

our democratic allies as weak or unimportant.

This perverse

affinity for strongmen

limits America’s potential as well as democracy’s potential around the world. A strongman rules by fear — inherently viewing citizens as weak and governments as powerful. Democracy should be the opposite.

When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world’s worst bullies more ammunition and power.

There are no loopholes when it comes to basic human rights.

Every American, no matter his or her politics or point of view, knows our unique existential gift — we are our aspirations. So, with the world watching, the question is, to what do we aspire?

Read More | S.E. Cupp and Rob Morrow,

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights, in 2018-10-13 20:42:10

[blogcompetnetall]

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights http://www.nature-business.com/business-trump-is-disposing-of-a-great-american-value-concern-for-human-rights/

Business

S.E. Cupp is a CNN political commentator and the host of “SE Cupp Unfiltered.” Rob Morrow is an actor, musician, director and producer. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)America is turning inward, and that’s making the whole world a more dangerous place.

This isn’t a neoconservative talking point, but, in our case writing as one conservative and one liberal, a shared concern from the left and the right. The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.

In a new

interview with CBS

, when pressed about the disappearance of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident with children living in this country, from the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Trump insisted there will be a “severe punishment” for the Saudis if they were responsible.

At least for now, that punishment does not include withdrawing our official presence at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative later this month. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin has stated he

still plans on attending

.

But Trump’s latest statement is a welcome – if vague – shift in tone from earlier in the week when Trump seemed to dismiss his possible murder as

not our problem

. “It’s in Turkey, and it’s not a citizen, as I understand it. But a thing like that shouldn’t happen.”

The “thing” that shouldn’t happen, of course, is that a journalist was possibly the victim of an extrajudicial killing on foreign soil, at the behest of one of our allied partners, Saudi Arabia,

according to

US officials. The President’s words imply that somehow Khashoggi’s fate should be less horrifying because he wasn’t an American.

It’s admittedly naive not to acknowledge Saudi Arabia’s important role in

fighting terrorism

in the Middle East and providing stopgap protection against

Iranian threats

. But that this President seems to believe Khashoggi’s citizenship somehow diminishes our responsibility to strongly rebuke the kingdom is deeply disturbing.

Worse, the President’s cold calculation of the cost of action — “I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,”

he said

of our arms trade with Saudi Arabia (which thus far has only earned $14.5 billion) — effectively puts a bounty on dissidents’ heads. For $110 billion in weapons, or far less, you can allegedly kill a dissident journalist without so much as a whiff of indignation from the US President. The quantifying of Khashoggi’s life is despicable.

It’s also signaling to the rest of the world that the United States will no longer lead when it comes to denouncing human rights violations, or holding the violators accountable, so long as the political or economic calculus favors silence or inaction. But being a shining beacon of democracy for the rest of the world should not only be the privilege but the obligation of our lifetimes.

From a genocide in

Syria

that’s claimed the lives of half a million people, to a staggering refugee crisis in

Myanmar

and protests and violence in

Venezuela

, there is a contagion of humanitarian crises sweeping the globe while the United States has receded into the background.

The ripple effect is that other countries feel emboldened to act out. Whether that’s in the case of Russia, which is widely believed to have extrajudicially

murdered

ex-spies; or in China, which

abducts

its own citizens — most recently

an actress and an Interpol chief

— before charging them with crimes after the fact; or in Egypt, where officials were accused of torturing, mutilating and murdering an

Italian postgraduate student

and dumping his body outside Cairo, to few if any repercussions.

How can we credibly profess our outrage at Russia, China, Egypt or anyone else when, just one year after the death of American college student

Otto Warmbier

after being imprisoned by the North Korean government, President Trump welcomed Kim Jong Un with open arms — and a

commemorative coin

— to a show summit in Singapore, where he heaped upon Kim the kind of lavish praise usually denied dictators who starve their own people?

Instead, brutal dictators, despots and war criminals are granted an open ear and open mind from President Trump. He

extolls

despots and

dismisses

our democratic allies as weak or unimportant.

This perverse

affinity for strongmen

limits America’s potential as well as democracy’s potential around the world. A strongman rules by fear — inherently viewing citizens as weak and governments as powerful. Democracy should be the opposite.

When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world’s worst bullies more ammunition and power.

There are no loopholes when it comes to basic human rights.

Every American, no matter his or her politics or point of view, knows our unique existential gift — we are our aspirations. So, with the world watching, the question is, to what do we aspire?

Read More | S.E. Cupp and Rob Morrow,

Business Trump is disposing of a great American value: concern for human rights, in 2018-10-13 20:42:10