#also this leaves out the huge amount of self advocacy that you have to do in the medical system especially as female presenting and a poc

[osmiabee]

Hi. I'm a biologist of colour with PCOS. There is significant amount of error and misinformation here.

Hirsutism is NOT a diagnostic criterion for PCOS - let alone the most important one - it's one of many indicative symptoms which can include adult acne, infertility, "male pattern" excess hair growth and "male pattern" balding - There are not considered diagnostic criteria as these are secondary symptoms that occur due to excess testosterone.

The diagnostic criteria are all direct symptoms: you need 2/3 for official diagnosis: Irregular periods (self-reported), Visible cysts on ovaries (via ultrasound), and Excess "above range" Testosterone (via blood test),

When you test for what is considered a "healthy range" you have to exclude people who are unhealthy and exhibiting symptoms, as they will skew the data. Worst case scenario this can lead to people NOT getting the diagnosis and treatment they need because they are considered "normal" even while exhibiting secondary symptoms.

The 97.5th percentile is a common statistical tool that excludes the extremes of the data to set a realistic average range. When someone comes in with symptoms of a disease (in the example above, men with osteoporosis) and you test them and find their hormones are different to 95-97.5% of a healthy, asymptomatic population, you can then point at that hormone as a potential cause of disease and correct it.

I cannot describe to you how important it is to exclude people with the "makes too much testosterone" disorder, while testing a baseline population to get an idea of the "normal/healthy" levels of testosterone.

Because PCOS is so common (2-10% of the population depending on your statistical model) that bar/threshold for testosterone in women is set high. Likely because even while trying to exclude people exhibiting PCOS symptoms (including excess hair) so many people with underlying PCOS (and high androgens) are largely asymptomatic (half of cases accourding to the NHS), and either live their whole lives unaware or do not get tested until they have significant fertility or secondary health problems later down the line.

In my own case when I got my results back I was the third woman that *day* that my doctor had to call to say "sorry, your androgen results were quite high but technically within the normal range," likely because that 97.5 percentile bar they're using as a baseline is skewed by the fact that a huge proportion of women have PCOS, and even while exc they can't exclude us all from the baseline based on diagnosis, family history, and secondary symptoms obvious to doctors (like hirsutism) alone!

These are all tools made to inform individualised medicine: despite my "normal range" androgens I am currently taking Spironolactone (a testosterone reducing drug - commonly used in HRT) to combat the effects of PCOS because my "in range" hormones were still clearly too much for my individual body, and caused symptoms that made me unhealthy (anaemic and in severe pain due to periods + painful acne) and put me at risk of things like diabetes and heart disease later down the line.

This isn't about just arbitrarily excluding women with "too much" hair. But about setting a useful baseline for XX-female high-androgen disorders.

BECAUSE BEING ABLE TO ACCURATELY DIAGNOSE PCOS IS A GOOD THING.

The linked study above that was immediately dismissed as weird and racist, looked at the symptoms of a diverse group of american women with PCOS, and found preliminary data that the areas of skin that respond to high androgen levels (due to PCOS) differ depending on race. (for example - African Americans commonly developed facial hirsutism under their chins, while hispanic individuals were more likely to develop it on their arms and legs).

STUDIES LIKE THIS ARE GOOD, ACTUALLY, BECAUSE IF WE ONLY HAVE DATA FOR WHITE PEOPLE, POC WILL BE UNDERDIAGNOSED.

These kinds of studies are important, because it tells dermatologists where to look for secondary symptoms of PCOS in their patients, which is important because 92% of people with PCOS have symptoms affecting their skin, and 1 in 4 undiagnosed people are referred for PCOS diagnosis by a dermatologist.

IN CONCLUSION: This isn't about defining "woman" or "normal female" or setting "arbitrary" "spider eating" statistical rules for what is an acceptable testosterone range. It's about creating an accurate model for disease, which despite potentially affecting 1/10 people with uteruses, is massively underresearched and underdiagnosed. Because of medical misogyny. And racism to boot.

It's true that huge swathes of medical practice are rooted in misogyny and racism, and uphold a gender and sex binary that is, in reality, far more flexible and complicated than historic tests would allow for, but this post is inaccurate and relies on borderline deliberate misinterpretation of the medical data to make that point.

I forget why, but I was on the Wikipedia page for polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I started researching hirsutism in women, and I learned the following things in this order:

there's a diagnostic criteria used to evaluate how hairy a woman is

This is important because being too hairy is a diagnostic criteria of most disorders that cause hyperandrogenism

Disorders that cause hyperandrogenism can be diagnosed by...measuring how hairy you are (this is the main and most important diagnostic criterion for PCOS)

Disorders that cause hyperandrogenism are important because they are correlated with obesity, infertility, and...being too hairy?

I think to myself, wait, what is a normal range for testosterone in women? I find this article...which set reference ranges for "normal" testosterone levels in women...EXCLUDING WOMEN WITH PCOS?

Quote: "Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is another notable condition in genetic (XX) females, which is characterized by excessive ovarian production of androgens. This condition is included for comparison with DSD, as the affected females with PCOS are genetic and phenotypic females. The elevated levels of testosterone in these females can lead to hyperandrogenism, a clinical disorder characterized variably by hirsutism, acne, male-pattern balding, metabolic disturbances, impaired ovulation and infertility. PCOS is a common condition, affecting 7%-10% of premenopausal women."

So: the study claims to demonstrate a clear distinction between the normal range of hormone levels in "Healthy" men and "healthy" women...with "healthy" being defined in the study as...having hormones within the "normal" range.......................

So I researched what the clinically established "normal" range for testosterone in women is

THERE ISN'T ONE????

Quote from the above article: "Several different approaches have been used to define endocrine disorders. The statistical approach establishes the lower and the upper limits of hormone concentrations solely on the basis of the statistical distribution of hormone levels in a healthy reference population. As an illustration, hypo- and hypercalcemia have been defined on the basis of the statistical distribution of serum calcium concentrations. Using this approach, androgen deficiency could be defined as the occurrence of serum testosterone levels that are below the 97.5th percentile of testosterone levels in healthy population of young men. A second approach is to use a threshold hormone concentration below or above which there is high risk of developing adverse health outcomes. This approach has been used to define osteoporosis and hypercholesterolemia. However, we do not know with certainty the thresholds of testosterone levels which are associated with adverse health outcomes."

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

It's batshit crazy to make a diagnostic criteria for medical disorders by placing arbitrary cutoffs within 2-5% of either end of a statistical distribution. What the actual fuck?

"The results came back, you have Statistical Outlier Disease." "What treatments are available?" "Well, first, we recommend dietary change. You should probably stop eating so many spiders."

Another article which attempted to do this

Quote: "Subjects with signs of hirsutism or with a personal history of diabetes or hypertension, or a family history of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) were excluded."

"We're going to figure out the typical range of testosterone levels that occur in women! First, we're going to exclude all the women that are too hairy from the study. I am very good at science."

Anyway I got off topic but there are apparently race-specific diagnostic tools for "hirsutism." That's kinda weird on its own but when I looked more into this in relation to race I found this article that straight-up uses the term "mongoloid"

[female-malice]

Ready for another example of the UN being a political organization and not a scientific one? Here's a rundown from Environmental Studies professor Matthew Hayek:

Part 2 of the blitz on “healthy meat”. Did you hear the UN now says meat is “crucial” and offers better nutrition than plant foods? Again, they come from a report with industry meddling, self-citing, deceptive and contradictory press releases and takeaways

The report is in four parts the first of which is a review of evidence of nutritional value of animal foods, based on more than 500 peer-reviewed sources. Sounds pretty fair. But this was a “narrative review”. Not a systemic one. Which means that they’re not reviewing all of the evidence, and aren’t using any external guidelines. The cards can fall in any direction because they’re not wedded to a particular protocol. 

From the jump, they key messages starts with a baseless talking point that meat’s protein is “high quality”. This isn’t true.

It’s derived from DIAAS, which is a metric that assumes meat proteins are higher than plant proteins. We know plant proteins like beans need to be cooked (to break down anti-nutrients) and combined (e.g. rice & beans). But DIAAS ranks raw, uncombined ingredients. The “high quality protein” myth talking point flies in the face of peer-reviewed research & reviews like @GardnerPhD that show plant proteins are absorbable, complete, and sustainable.

This is the danger of using a “narrative review”. It’s the lowest, most subjective form you can do, because it’s not reproducible, transparent, or complete. It can reproduce any biases that the authors harbor. They even say it!

Despite the subjective methods, and the pro-animal slant of the reviewers and funders, many of the findings and key messages are quite tame and even at odds with the headlines. Oh look, their own *subjective* review of others’ *rigorous systemic* reviews found mixed results of animal food benefits to kids. Hardly the same as the headlines! They imply that everyone needs to eat animals, especially pregnant women and kids, or risk deficiencies and disorders.

A bulk of the *new* analysis here, which we could consider systemic, just looked at gaps in countries diet guidelines. They found that they’re not particularly specific, and they leave out sustainability recommendations. 

And yet the final conclusion was that all countries should provide guidance on animal foods. Why? We’ve already established that their benefits are context-specific, some confer risks, and many have huge environmental impacts that guidelines don’t account for.

Gee, I wonder why the authors could be motivated to pressure countries to include animal foods in their guidelines…

These groups have major meat and dairy, feed, and animal pharma conglomerates as their contributors. They are not advocacy NGOs, they are mouthpiece trade groups for the most powerful donors in the global animal agriculture trade.

Even more worrying, the document implies that representatives of industry groups served as funders and *reviewers*. That level of industry meddling is a huge and unprecedented conflict. And would be reprehensible for other industries with high-emitting products. There should also be little wonder why the press and key messages don’t distinguish between low-income countries, whose diets are lacking in *many* food groups, with high income, where most people (from most groups and life stages) consume more than enough protein. Industry would benefit from meat consumption being higher, regardless of the risks and contexts. Those biases made their way all through the key messages and headlines of this report.

The @UNFAO needs to deeply reconsider its criteria for commissioning reports and media. This level of financial conflicts, the authoritative and deeply misleading headlines, subjective methods, and the lack of skeptical and independent review are all serious concerns.

[ofreligion]

hi everyone !! my name is reed, chaotic energy queen, owner of a single braincell (only 33% of the time), and 1/2 of the admin team at covingtonhqs. i live in the est timezone, use they & she pronouns (pls alternate these as much as u can, thank u mwah), am 19 years old, and a hot mess disaster. however, you’re not here to hear about me, you’re here to read all about my daughter, michal. so, without further delay, click the read more to learn all about the one, the only, michal glickman.

name: michal glickman gender & pronouns: cis female, she & hers age: 21 major & year: environmental studies major with a dual concentration in toxic plants and environmental advocacy, fourth year faceclaim: diana silvers occupation: floral apprentice at foxglove florists

everyone has a moment where they first find the place that they belong, michal’s just happened to be in the middle of bum fuck nowhere

bresheit––in the beginning

born michal אביבה glickman (pronounced michal aviva glickman) at 6:00am on april 22nd, 1998 to two loving parents; rabbi adam עקבא (akiva) glickman and deborah ברכה (bracha) glickman nee goldstein esq

name meanings time !

michal: biblical michal was king saul's daughter and first wife of david. in the biblical narrative, michal chooses the welfare of david over the wishes of her father. when saul's messengers search for david in order to kill him,  michal sends them away while pretending she is ill and laid up in bed. she lets david down through a window and hides teraphim in his bed as a ruse. although she risked her life in helping him, after he leaves the court, he makes no attempt to contact her. after michal was returned to david, she criticized him for dancing in an undignified manner, as he brought the ark of the covenant to the newly captured jerusalem in a religious procession. for this she is punished, according to samuel, with not having children until the day she dies.

אביבה (aviva): a modern hebrew name meaning "springtime". it is related to the name of the israeli city tel aviv, as well as to the jewish holiday passover which occurs in the month of nisan, previously called aviv.

glickman: the name glickman is a proud symbol of ancient jewish culture. it is taken from the yiddish word glik, which means luck.

more about her parents !

michal’s dad works as hemlock’s one and only resident conservative rabbi at temple shir shalom, located about a fifteen minute walk from the glickman family home. (i define conservative judaism as a happy medium between reform ~laid back judaism~ and orthodox StRiCt judaism, a conservative jew would probably punch me for saying that). 

michal’s mom works as a corporate lawyer at some ugly mean bank that hates the environment and we don’t stan at all

they didn’t meet on j date but they met via j date’s predecessor, their grandmothers being best friends

the past !

the glickmans have been a member of high society in hemlock since their matriarch, michal’s great grandmother hadassah, came over during the holocaust. she immigrated easily, fitting right in with the crowd. an avid follower of practical kabbalah, a jewish mystic tradition concerning the use of magic, her uniqueness made her quite the popular person, and people began to pay large sums of money for her to interpret their dreams and read their palms.

hadassah was the last follower of kabbalah in her line, and her son cut off ties to the mystic tradition as soon as he was able to choose his own religious practices. 

still the past but less far in the past !

michal’s upbringing was pretty standard for a white rich kid in a white rich town. she was brought to parties and events she didn’t want to go to, forced to wear cute dresses and shoes and things that she felt weird wearing. she wanted to run around outside, she didn’t want to eat gross appetizers at boring events and pretend like she wanted to be there. 

as the years she spent on this earth grew, so did the amount of donor events and fundraising efforts and pairs of fancy shoes she owned. despite her expressing to her parents multiple times that this was not who she was, that these were not things she wanted to go to, they refused to listen to her and continued to drag her to the events against her will.

while they took care of her financially, they didn’t take care of her spiritually. she has a weird complicated relationship with her childhood, as it could have been so much worse, and in the grand scheme of things she was so lucky, but there were so many things she wished she could have done like go hiking and play basketball and be allowed to be herself, and missing out on that has really stopped her from letting her true self shine through, even now.

the label !

now, you may be asking yourself, “reed, how on earth does michal fit this label?” well, let me tell you!

when i hear high heels, i think of an old pair of dress shoes that you probably should’ve gotten rid of a while ago. they’re scuffed, a bit too small for you, and have lost the majority of their shine. michal is trapped in this idea of what her parents want her to be, and while she still squeezes into those high heels for important holidays and events that she is still forced to go to, it’s something that she does begrudgingly, and because she doesn’t want to start conflict.

vayikra––and he called

on a retreat to charles mound, the highest point in illinois, during her sophomore year of high school, michal experienced what it was like to feel the presence of god. she took her shoes off, laid down in the grass, and closed her eyes. it was the first moment she was certain of anything

ever since then, michal’s point of view on spirituality and religion has changed drastically, and she has become much more in touch with the world around her. she practices her judaism through gardening, leading environmental protests (sometimes against her mother’s company, she’s got no clue how she’s managed to avoid getting caught for that), and going on lots of hikes and adventures

it was a moment of clarity for her, her first opportunity to really be who she wanted to and needed to be

bamidbar––in the wilderness

so now, she’s stuck. she knows exactly what she wants to do and who she wants to be, yet is afraid of coming clean to her parents, who currently think she is studying economics on a pre-law track. 

she has this kind of double life that she leads, she’s one person at school and another person at home, and as much as she hates it, she fears being cut off from her parents if she refuses to do what they ask of her

headcannons

taurus sun, pisces moon, taurus rising

she was born on earth day in case that was lost on u adjshjkfdhgfd

wants to be a park ranger when she grows up

very socially awkward and bad @ most human interactions, but is also super witty once u get to know her

hasn’t been single/not actively pursuing a or being pursued for a romantic relationship since she was six 

falls in love extremely easily, leads to her getting her heart broken a lot

bisexual (prefers women & nb individuals, probably like a 4.5 on the kinsey scale)

while she has had a lot of romantic relationships, real friendships are harder for her to make, and finding one that sticks and makes her feel comfortable is something that is so sacred and special for her that she cherishes it

really looks up to melanie, the connections she makes with people, and how confident she is in the person that she is

smokes a lot of weed

extremely anti-shoe, if she could never wear shoes, that is what she would do, but bc she has to wear shoes sometimes she wears tevas and birkenstocks most of the time

has a huge passion for learning and gaining knowledge, would probably have seventeen minors if she could

she wants to visit every national park by the time she turns 30

michal has a catfish named dog!! it’s a hebrew joke bc in hebrew, dog means fish.

wanted connections

exes ! all of the exes ! ending on good terms, ending on bad terms, first love, losing their virginity to each other, right person wrong time, something that was never quite a relationship

friends ! pals ! amigos ! comrades !

other things i FORGOT TO FINISH AND RAN OUT TIME FOR THIS PLS PLOT W/ ME THANK U

[missmentelle]

Let’s Talk About “Dependent Personality Disorder”

From time to time, we all have to depend on other people. We might seek out the help of others when we’re sad, sick, lonely, or uncertain of what to do, and that’s perfectly normal; refusing to ask for help, ever, is actually a huge problem in its own right. But when depending on others goes from a “sometimes” thing to “a permanent way of life”, that’s when we see something called Dependent Personality Disorder. When people use the pop-psychology term “codependent”, what they are often referring to are relationships that involve a person with dependent tendencies, or full-fledged dependent personality disorder.  So what is that, exactly? - Simply put, Dependent Personality Disorder is a psychological condition that causes people to become extremely emotionally dependent on other people, to the point that they aren’t able to function on their own. This is not a temporary thing - DPD usually starts in your late teens or early twenties, and continues for the rest of your life.

- People with DPD cannot comfortably make decisions on their own. Most people will ask for advice when they’re trying to decide on something really big, like moving to a foreign country or starting a family, but people with DPD need excessive input from other people on small, everyday decisions like spending money or choosing what to eat. They require constant input and reassurance from others, or they become too paralyzed with anxiety to make decisions. They often encourage others to simply make life choices for them. 

- People with DPD have a warped sense of self-esteem. They constantly see themselves as helpless and incompetent, destined to fuck everything up, while they see everyone else around them as powerful and very competent - even when neither of those things is true. This is why they need assurances from other people to make decisions; they believe that they aren’t capable of making any good decisions unless they are firmly guided by people they see as more capable than them. 

- People with DPD constantly seek out ‘caregiver’ relationships. DPD is an “anxiety-class” personality disorder, which makes many people assume that people with DPD are too anxious to form relationships. The opposite is true. DPD causes people to desperately seek out and cling to people they view as possible caretakers. It’s extremely difficult for them to form healthy, balanced, egalitarian relationships, because they don’t feel they are worthy of them; instead, they are largely seeking to form dependent relationships with people who function more like substitute parents than friends.  - It is extremely difficult for people with DPD to function on their own. This is not a personality quirk; this is a disorder that can rob you of your independence. People with DPD are so fearful that they cannot take care of themselves that this can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Adult life involves making a lot of decisions. The constant need for reassurance and direction from others can make it extremely difficult - if not impossible - for people with DPD to complete college, hold down a job, embark on a creative career, learn to drive, or live by themselves. They may find it too overwhelming to take responsibility for things like managing their own finances, and feel much more comfortable when someone else - someone they view as more competent - takes care of these things for them. 

- In relationships, people with DPD often become doormats. They have an intense fear of abandonment, which is particularly devastating for them because they depend on others in order to make any decisions or take any action in life. So to avoid abandonment, they quickly become submissive and pliable - they generally do not disagree with others, voice their own opinions, or call out abusive behaviour. They bend over backwards to ensure that other people will abandon them, even if this means doing deeply unpleasant things for the other person, or tolerating treatment that most people find completely unacceptable.  - They tend to end up stuck in an unhealthy pattern of hopping from relationship to relationship. People with DPD tend to be clingy, and often require an enormous amount of energy from their loved ones, as they are constantly checking in for guidance and reassurance about the same things, over and over again. Many people are not able to deal with this, and end their relationships with the dependent person. People with DPD do not handle the end of relationships well, and tend to jump blindly into new relationships to avoid being alone - only to face the exact same problems. 

- People with DPD are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They have astonishingly low self-confidence, wish for others to make their decisions, and fear abandonment above all else - most people find this an off-putting combination, but for some abusive partners, this is basically a description of the perfect mate. It is easy to take control of their finances and social life, and they rarely attempt to leave abusive situations.

- DPD is not a form of depression. Low self-esteem is certainly a symptom of depression, and living with untreated DPD can cause depression, but they are not one and the same. Even if you treat the depression, the dependency and need for assurance will still remain. 

- Your upbringing affects your chances of having DPD. While a large part of DPD is genetic, there is evidence that growing up in certain types of homes can raise your chances of being diagnosed. Children who survive neglectful and abusive homes are at-risk, particularly if they were stuck in that situation for a long time. Children who come from excessively strict and authoritarian homes are also at increased risk.  - It’s not really clear where to draw the line between “disordered” and “not disordered”, especially when you factor in gender roles. Women have higher rates of DPD than men, which many psychologists attribute to the fact that women are often raised to depend on men to provide for them. That doesn’t mean that every stay-at-home housewife has DPD. Learning where to draw the line between a person who tends to be submissive and a person who has full-fledged DPD is tricky, and it’s not always clear where the boundary should lie.  Dependent Personality Disorder is one of the least-talked-about disorders, even though most of us can probably think of at least one person who fits this description. It tends to get left out of online conversations about mental health and advocacy. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter - this is a very real disorder that profoundly affects the lives of people who have it, and it’s important to recognize the struggles of people with DPD rather than blaming them for their lack of independence.  It’s also important to note that there is treatment out there for DPD. If you have it, or if you suspect you may have it, you should know that trained therapists can help you to gain self-confidence, form healthy relationships and take the reigns of your own life. Confronting any mental health issue is scary, but this is a condition that can be managed, and you deserve to feel better. 

[mykidsgay]

My Daughter Came Out TWO DAYS Before Leaving for College!

“My daughter came out to me TWO DAYS before leaving for her first year of college, so not only am I worried about my baby girl leaving home, I have no idea what to do or say with this information. I don't care if she's gay, but she's growing up so much so quickly. I hope she's thinking it all through and not just trying to fit in at college. What should I do?”

Question Submitted Anonymously Answered by Polly Kim

—

Polly Says:

From talking to parents at PFLAG meetings, I can tell you this is not uncommon: kids often come out to their parents right before they go to college, or during a vacation right before they go back. Even though it was sudden to you, think about it from your daughter’s perspective: she’d probably been working up the courage to tell you for weeks. She may have set going off to college as the end limit, the day she felt she should absolutely tell you by. She may have wanted to start this new stage of her more adult life as her authentic self, and wanted to make sure you knew this truth about her before she left you.

Back to you though; I can understand how shocked you were and how you felt, adding this surprise and worry to the whole empty nest (or at least less full nest) issues we all go through when our children go off to college, and the uncertainty about changes in family relationships that occur when our babies grow up and become more independent. My daughter came out to my husband and me the night before the fall activities fair at her high school. She wanted to join the GSA (Gay Straight Alliance), and she didn’t want to tell people she was gay when she signed up without having already told us. She had been looking for the right opportunity all summer, and the deadline kept looming and there was never the right moment to tell us, so she wrote us a note the night before the fair. I was definitely surprised and wondered, “If she’s gay, why didn’t I already know?” Even though I too didn’t care if she was gay, I doubted myself as a parent for not having seen this coming.

Saying, “Are you sure?” is one of the most common responses parents have when their child comes out to them. The other is, “I already knew.” Both stem from our feeling that we know our child even better than they know themselves. It’s tough to find out we didn’t know something about this person we raised. Be happy that your daughter trusts you enough to share this part of herself with you. In return, trust that she is telling you the truth. She’s probably been going through this journey of self-discovery for months or years, and she probably wouldn’t have told you she’s gay if she was unsure. It’s really hard for a child to come out to a parent—they’re risking rejection from the person they care most about—so it’s unlikely a child would go through the huge step of telling a parent if they were just trying out being gay to “fit in”. Your daughter could have acted gay in front of her new friends without involving you if that’s what was going on.

As far as what to say or do, all you have to say is that you love her. It’s OK to ask questions about her feelings, and to ask her how you can help nurture your mother-daughter relationship. What you can also do is join PFLAG for support meetings and help finding resources and ways to join in advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s comforting to talk to veteran parents who’ve been through this, and to share this experience with other parents who are just starting the journey like yourself. Go to PFLAG.org to find your nearest chapter. It’s also great that you are already finding your own resources, like this website!

For the college student’s perspective, I asked my 21(?!)-year-old daughter Shelby for her advice to you. Her words were so great I wanted to just share them all instead of stealing her ideas:

(First off she asked, “Is this person going to Smith?” which is her college, because that’s about the only school where being gay could help you fit in more than not.)

I hear that you’re feeling rushed and worried that your daughter is leaving home and growing up and changing so quickly, and that you’re feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. For many people who want to come out to their family, it never feels like the "right" moment, and so often it will happen at a transition time or last day of a holiday visit, which can feel last minute or overwhelming.

College is a great time to get to know who you are and what kind of people you want to be around and be in relationships with. It feels like you have a fresh start, leaving behind the old you and coming in with no assumptions. It seems like your daughter wants you to be a part of that fresh start, and it was important for her to come out to you before going off and being out at college.

It hurts when people assume you are identifying a certain way to fit a trend or for attention. Never assume that someone is inauthentic when they make themselves vulnerable to come out to you. Coming out, even if it seems rushed, takes an incredible amount of effort and likely years of "thinking it all through".

With perhaps the exception of a few schools, college campuses are still heteronormative* spaces, and the majority of people are cisgender** and straight. LGBTQ+ students across the country still face pressure and discrimination. Being openly gay is not commonly a way to "fit in".

So, what to do?

Keep giving encouragement for all aspects of her life and showing that you love her.

Do your own research on LGBTQIA rights, history, and achievements. Read LGBTQIA fiction, too!

Thank her for telling you and acknowledge that it might have been difficult for her to do so.

Try to think of how she has been this way all along. This is not a way she's changing,  she’s just telling you how she has always been. Don't feel like you have to "do" or say anything with this information!  

Good luck to you and your daughter during this time of transition!

*Heteronormative – a worldview that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation. **Cisgender – one’s assigned sex at birth matches one’s gender identity.

***

Click here to read about our brilliant contributors!

[butterflyinthewell]

Let’s clear up this hooey with “orlandomakeup” right here, right now.

* * * TW: Mentions of violence, attempted murder, rape culture, abuse, a suicide attempt, alcohol (spiked drink) and severe bullying. * * *

This post was typed with a calm mind. It’s not an angry retaliation. I want to set the facts straight on this issue. I have no desire for anyone to send hate to orlandomakeup or boycott them-- I only encourage a boycott of anything that supports Autism Speaks.

This person is not keen on keeping facts straight. They’re projecting their own behavior onto me. I’m merely laying out the facts and letting the rest of the chips fall where they may.

(Note: I made some minor edits and corrections because I was interrupted several times while trying to type this and it posted to my blog instead of drafts for some reason. It should all be correct now as of 1:35pm PST on August 5, 2017.)

First off, it sounds like orlandomakeup is a caregiver and not autistic themselves. The artist is not the problem, it’s the person promoting their art. I think the artist is unaware that Autism Speaks is harmful, but orlandomakeup seems to conveniently leave off any means of contacting the artist who painted the artwork.

Anyway, here’s the facts of what happened.

My reblog of the post in question. Orlandomakeup deleted the original, so you won’t find it on their page unless they reposted it from scratch.  http://butterflyinthewell.tumblr.com/post/163797108223/orlandomakeup-buy-a-painting-and-support-autism

They responded via the post comment system. It’s on the post, but I’ll put the text of it here, too: (images of the art left off to prevent the screenshot from getting huge, you can see them if you click the link I shared above.)

Their text on the post: 

“Buy a painting and support autism. 10% of sale will be donated to Autism Speaks. Painting created through the eyes of autism.

White snowflake on cobalt blue background. Acrylic paint. Small amount of blue glitter for added sparkle. Feeling of calm, winter, peace, tranquility, contentment. 16"x20" canvas.

#autism #autistic #abstractart #artforautism #aspergerssyndrome #autismspectrumdisorders #highfunctiningautism #autismspeaks #autisticartist #autismawareness #autismsupport #photooftheday #potd #abstractart #aspergers #lifewithautism #artforaspergers

(Ebay link left off to avoid it getting clicks.)”

My reblog text:  

“Don’t buy this art. The money goes to a charity that harms autistic people. I wish the OP would support ASAN instead at autisticadvocacy.org because that charity really helps autistic people without trying to silence or erase us.”

And their comment

“The artist is autistic, and Autism Speaks has never harmed her. You speak of bullying yet you bully. The artist has been bullied everyday of her life due to autism. She has even been held by gun and knife, shot and stabbed at, and beaten until left nearly for dead. Your hate exemplifies why people are bullies towards those of us with autism.”

They’re calling me a bully because I reblogged the linked post above and told people not to buy “this art” because it’s supporting Autism Speaks and said I wished the artist would support ASAN instead. ASAN (Autistic Self-Advocacy Network) is a charity run by autistic people that actually helps autistic people and not parents / caregivers / anybody except the actually autistic people. 

They equated my behavior to being bullied-- to being shot, stabbed, beaten, etc. Just...what? I was bullied in nearly the same way for being autistic, same as the artist. I was never shot at (thank God), but for all 4 years of high school I was threatened with rape and murder, survived a murder attempt, narrowly escaped a rape situation by refusing a drink spiked with vodka that would’ve intoxicated me to a blackout, I endured public humiliation on an almost daily basis and attempted suicide once because none of the authority figures who were supposed to protect me did shit to stop the bullying...

...and orlandomakeup is equating my saying “don’t buy this art because it supports Autism Speaks” to THAT?

Wow, talk about trivializing bullying. Just wow.

At no point do I say “ewww, don’t by this artist’s art ever!” or “eew, this art is ugly!” or “the artist sucks!”

All I did was point out that buying that art will support Autism Speaks, a charity that harms autistic people. 

Orlandomakeup is defending Autism Speaks on the grounds that “it never hurt them (the autistic artist)”.

Again, I need to remind people that defending a person or organization as “good” because “it / they didn’t hurt me / this person!” is like saying someone who abuses their spouse is a good person because they distribute food at a homeless shelter. That person may help the poor, but they still go home and beat the shit out of their spouse and they are NOT a good person.

Likewise, Autism Speaks is not a good organization. Just because (general) you saw it do good doesn’t mean it is good. It still stigmatizes and demonizes autism and their claim of “acceptance” is “accept that your child has an autism diagnosis, but don’t accept their autism.” Autism Speaks changed “cure” to “solution”. All they did was change a word, not their rhetoric. Autism Speaks is harmful to autistic people the same way PETA is harmful to animals. They care about profit, not lives.

So, I still ask-- where is the bullying behavior this orlandomakeup person claims I’m engaging in? Nowhere. Orlandomakeup, reblogged stuff about bullying and made one long callout post that doesn’t directly name me even though it’s very obviously about me. Keep in mind they did this after they blocked me, and I only found out because someone who follows me saw their post. I figured it would look at it out of curiosity. I plan to let this whole thing go after this point, but I want to clear the facts up before they get all muddled and twisted their through distorted view. 

Here is a link to their callout post. http://chicglamgeek.com/post/163823401339/fifty-shades-of-bullies  (DO NOT SEND HATE!!!)

ETA: Forgot a link due to constant interruptions while writing this post. Here’s their “bully” tag where they again attack me without naming me.  http://chicglamgeek.com/search/bullying  I didn’t bother screencapping. If they delete stuff, it just proves they’re trying to hide that they’re projecting their behavior onto me.

I also have a screenshot of their big post. Linked due to size. http://imgur.com/a/Dr4zG

The text of the post is in the description area below the image so that those who are blind or have trouble processing screenshots can read the post, too. I’ll add the text under the cut of this post just in case imgur farts.

They claim I’m showing “disdain” of the art when that’s not even close to what I was doing, but orlandomakeup won’t see any other POV except their own. I fully endorse buying the autistic artist’s art (because it’s beautiful art!), just don’t buy the art that supports Autism Speaks. 

If someone knows how to contact the autistic artist to tell them about A$, please do.

There. Those are the facts of the situation. I’m now washing my hands of it. Orlandomakeup can continue calling me a bully if they want. I wanted my side of the issue out there in case they continue trying to convince people that I bullied them. 

I did not bully orlandomakeup or the autistic artist. I am not saying orlandomakeup is a bad person.

Unfortunately, orlandomakeup is misrepresenting everything I said and is projecting their own behavior onto me. They could have blocked me and carried on, but they chose to write that long and obvious post and may be talking trash about me in private. (I have no way to know, nor do I care. I know who I am and what I represent.) 

Again, I say this is not posted in anger. I posted my side to ensure the facts are straight. From here on out orlandomakeup can say whatever they want about me, but I know I’m telling the truth to the best of my ability.

Please do not harass them or send hate. That solves nothing. 

If you feel an urge to send them something mean, do yourself a favor and close the tab instead, okay?

Text below. Bolding is their references to me.  Btw, I’m amused that they think I’m a Millennial. I’m not a Millennial. I was born in 1980. I just turned 37 (as of July 29, 2017).

There are two basic types of bullies.

1. Those who have full understanding of their actions and seek power and control.

2. Those who lack the intellectual capacity to understand their behavior.

The latter is the most dangerous, because there is no reasoning with them. They disparage and harass with the belief that they are doing no wrong. All bullies are shallow, insecure, and need numbers. They have no strength of their own. They are weak.

Millennials are exceedingly becoming the bullies about which they speak. They bully as a platform for drama and attention. They lack the intelligence to acknowledge their faults and how to conduct themselves. They lack professionalism and decency. Millennials suffer from narcissism. They think their lives and stories are more compelling, because they want attention. However, there are bullies well into their late ages that also have these characteristics.

These bullies can be found at any age and are not confined to school. They are coworkers, neighbors, strangers, and, more dangerously, online. Bullies intend to harass even if the are not intelligent to know they are bullying. At any age, they have the ability to know they should not perpetuate negativity, but some still claim they do not understand how their actions are harmful. While this may seem contrary, consider that when you address their behavior with them, they insist they are “not bad” people, ask their friends to insist they are nice, even say they are Christian. Your addressing their behavior puts them on notice that they are harmful. At this point, they become aware that they are engaging in this behavior but are defensive to avoid admitting they are wrong. Introverts and intelligent people admit when they are wrong, because they are more concerned with data and facts than feelings. They have no incentive to lie. They do not rely upon external validation. Extroverts do. This is not to say that all extroverts lack intellectual capacity, only that they are more motivated to be bullies.

Here are some examples of bullying that were unprovoked and occurred in situations where the person being harassed did not know the bully and/or was not interacting with the bully:

1. I like how you match your lipstick to your sweater. On second thought, I don’t. It’s ugly. You’re a bitch.

2. You need to pray to be normal.

3. Jesus can make you not be Asian.

4. We don’t want, you know, the black people in our neighborhood.

5. You’re not celibate. Look at you. You look like a model.

6. Don’t buy this art.

7. You need to smile.

Why are these words harmful? One of the “rules” of Christianity is to do unto others as you would have done unto you. If you cannot say something nice, do not say it at all. These examples ignore cultural and biological differences. They are punitive.

1. Introverts do not need compliments. In fact, they sometimes find compliments offensive. This “compliment” was a way to seek attention. The person did not receive attention, so he had intent to harm to assuage his feelings of insecurity.

2, 3, & 7. While there is a normal distribution, statistically speaking, people are not normal. There are cultural and physiological differences, which may seem “odd,” but those differences do not warrant being forced beliefs of the insecure. If you do not smile, shake hands, laugh at jokes, or make eye contact, you are not abnormal. You handle / process emotion differently.

3 & 4. Racist and ethnocentrist.

5. There is no look of celibacy. If one prefers to preserve his/her temple, then others should not assume their inability to keep their legs shut afflicts everyone.

6. Demanding that others boycott art defames the artist, nothing else. That statement alone shows disdain for the artist and/or the art. If one feels financial contribution to the artist is repulsive, or one feels the contribution would benefit one to the detriment of others (i.e. Boycotting people who shop at Hobby Lobby* as opposed to boycotting Hobby Lobby itself), then one should make the distinction. There is a difference between harassment and social awareness. Using the Hobby Lobby example, a person who shops at Hobby Lobby may not be aware of the practices of the establishment. Demanding people avoid the individual is harmful, seeks to exclude, and seeks to harass the individual rather than the establishment. Demanding the person avoid Hobby Lobby is completely different. A mature minded, intelligent person knows the difference. A bully who lacks intellectual capacity does not make the distinction.

The best way to handle someone who disparages you and claims they did nothing wrong is to ignore him/her. S/he will have friends to join in the disparage fest, because s/he is insecure and has to belittle everyone and everything that is secure. S/he needs power and control to compensate for the lack of power and control s/he feels with his/her life. S/he is unreasonable, immature, unprofessional, and lacks mental capabilities to examine his/her actions. This type of person always has to be right and will never understand his/her shortcomings. Additionally, these people are not intelligent enough to understand that constant communications from them and/or others on their behalves are harassment. It is no different than painting the n- word or the word “slut” on someone’s locker or home. It is no different than walking by someone bound, throwing rocks at them.

The best last word is the one left unsaid. This does not make one weak. It makes one mature and intelligent enough to understand the other person is deficient. In other words, thou shall not give pearl to the swine. Do not waste your energy on people who are unwilling to accept and admit their faults, those who are incapable of higher thought processing.

* This in no way suggests anyone boycott Hobby Lobby. People have their own reasons for shopping or not shopping there.

[roxxdafoxx]

30 “red flags” part 2

16. When they gas light you.

“Any form of gas lighting no matter how small.

Also pre-blaming you for things they know will happen because of them. He’d tell me on vacation ‘that drink is too strong you’re just going to pass out later and we won’t be able to go out and do anything,’ but in reality it was him passing out from drinking at 9pm forcing us to stay in. Or saying ‘yeah I want to see the sunrise but you’re never going to get out of bed that early,’ yet I went and saw it and he slept until 2 hours later when I finally got him up.

When I realized it, I saw he was basically trying to make me give up on doing things so he could blame me for us not doing it, even though if I held up my end he wouldn’t hold up his. Between that and making me think my emotions were invalid when he’d upset me just made for a super manipulative relationship.”

—madguins

17. When they hide their finances from you.

“For me, the very first red flag was not communicating finances [we were married]. He would ‘give me’ a certain amount to spend, but never wanted me on his bank account. I had my own, but we had agreed on joining accounts—which is why I transferred my money to his since it had better interest rates/bank/etc. I had no access to my own money. It took him 6 months and a threaten of divorce to be put on the account. And then I saw it—he had lost ALL of our money by spending it on him damn self. I couldn’t do anything—I could even put food on the table or put gas in our cars.

The second red flag was when we adopted a puppy [this was after I began a finance boot camp with him]. The puppy would cry at night. Ex had a temper. I heard him storm into the living room, open the kennel, and shake the dog yelling ‘I will fucking SHOOT you if you don’t shut the FUCK up!’ I shot out of bed, grabbed the dog, told him he would do no such thing, and left to stay with a friend.

Another one was when we were play wrestling and he pinned me down so hard my arms started going numb. I told him to get off of me and then kneed him in the back. He punched my face. I was stunned and told him ‘didn’t your mother ever teach you not to hit a woman?’ “Nope, they’re fair game and you look like you can handle your own anyways.”

The immense guilt trip I received any time I did something for myself—driving over to a friend’s place for coffee, going on a weekend trip to the beach, going to my family’s…it was ridiculous.

There were other red flags as well, but these were the top three I could think of. It wasn’t until I told my Chain of Command some of these things that they sent me to victim advocacy. I had to be told that I was a victim of abuse. We, obviously, have since divorced and I am now happily re-married to someone who believes we are partners in life. Together, we balance each other out.”

—badgerfu

18. When they have an opinion about every single thing you do and every single person you talk to.

“The first red flag is the person having an opinion about every single thing you do and every single person you talk to, like they need to be hands on in all your dealings and activities like they are your parent or some shit. Normal people don’t want to coach your life, only fucked up people do.”

—shewshoe

19. When you tell someone else about what’s happening and they react with horror.

“When I told a coworker about things she reacted with horror. That’s the thing about abusive relationships, at least in my experience. They start off great and then slowly warp into something terrible and the abused person might not know.

I didn’t even notice what was happening to me until two years in. Looking back it blows my mind that I accepted the treatment but at the time it just seemed fine.

I was working at a coffee shop and while closing one day started chatting with a new co-worker—by this point I had been isolated from all my friends and I thought it was because I was a terrible person so was cautiously trying to make a new friend. We were drinking wine while we worked and started dishing about our men and her reaction to my ‘what happened on date night this past week’ story was horror.

It got me thinking and once I knew to look, all of the other red flags showed up.

This was also the same way I found out my parents were abusive. A friend in high school saw the bruises and cuts and when I told her I got in shit for losing a toy something she was like ‘ummmm…that is not a normal reaction to that.’”

—full-of-grace

20. When they keep casually dropping passive-aggressive comments during normal conversation.

“The casual passive-aggressive comments he would drop in normal conversation. Then the comments would become more direct, then mean, and finally just cruel. And once he saw that I would accept those, well, the floodgates of abuse just burst open.”

—scaredofmyownshadow

21. When they make you feel like shit about yourself.

“The need to question everything I did and every one I liked.

The constant need to make ME question them.

None of my pre-existing friends were ‘good to me’ in her eyes.

The need for my constant undivided attention every single waking hour.

Not being able to ‘trust me’ yet doing all of the things that made me ‘untrustworthy’ i.e., taking my phone to the toilet.

Making me feel SHIT about myself. Constantly. But also making me believe she was the only one who didn’t make me feel shit.”

—i_am_gud

22. When they always expect you to take their side, no matter how unreasonable they’re being.

“Like 3 weeks in, when he randomly started arguing with someone over some stupid shit, I sided with the other person who I thought was being reasonable. The PoS got furious at me, saying ‘I expect you to be on my side.’ Aghast and pissed, I walked away ignoring him. He suddenly started playing nice and sweet again. I should have never looked back at that point because he soon turned out to be a massively manipulative, immature, emotionally abusive piece of fucking scum. Ugh.”

—KissyKillerKitty

23. When they keep breaking up with you.

“I don’t know about the first, because it was all so gradual over the course of a few years. Things were fantastic in the beginning but the shifts caught me off guard. Also I was a young adult and have moved out of home for the first time. It was my first ‘real’ relationship and I was stupid and blind.

Some highlights:

• so clingy. Had to literally spend every minute together or else it would be a fight because ‘we are drifting apart’ (because I spent an afternoon reading a book) • telling me I wasn’t raised correctly, nit picking every little behavior, telling me that I was something he needed to ‘fix’ because I was so messed up. Using my anxiety and depression against me. • pressuring me to do drugs. • constant cheating accusations • not allowed to have friends. Could only be friends his friends. • picking fights with me over tiny things, escalating them to the point of making me cry and then ‘look how crazy you’re acting you bitch’ Fights would only end if I apologize and promise to do better. Even if I was not in the wrong. He just liked to exert that control. • he suddenly hated my family for no reason, me visiting them resulted in such huge fights and violence that I just avoided it. Despite the fact that my family lived five minutes away. • he was unemployed and a drug addict, but he’d get so angry with me for ‘choosing my job over him’ because I refused to skip work. • breaking up with me constantly, instantly retracting as soon as I’d agree. Lots of sobbing and begging to change on his end. this became an every other day occurrence toward the end. • refused condoms, no birth control because it ‘fucks with your body’ (like seriously, your cocaine addiction doesn’t though?) So yeah, obviously I got pregnant. Had no say in anything, including my child’s name. He also pressured me to do drugs while I was pregnant, but I never gave into that. • his addiction was my fault because I couldn’t stop him. Same with the drinking. He would get blackout drunk, pick fights with me and trash the house. Things escalated to physical abuse on almost a daily basis. • threatening to kill himself if I ever left. Eventually that graduated to threats of killing me and my son too.

There’s so much more but it’s stressful to write about even though it’s been over 8 years. I’m grateful to my son because even though he didn’t come through the best of circumstances, he gave me the strength to finally leave when he was born.”

—magnumthepi

24. When they start smothering you, even a little.

“So I once worked as a prison warden in a prison for men who had abused their s.o. During lunch breaks I used to read their court trials, the legal reasoning interest me. During one lunch break I said to a more experienced colleague –Well, from working here and reading about all these trials I’ve learnt the importance of telling my *daughter (she was in her early teens back then) to walk out after the first strike.* –No, said my colleague, you tell her to walk out when he starts to always pick her up from work. You tell her to walk out when she wants to go out with her friends and he insists on her staying at home by saying ” but honey, I had planned to make you dinner and then we can cuddle in the sofa and watch a movie. That’s where it begins. When the first strike hits she has been controlled for a long, long time.”

—Norman3

25. When they never have anything to say about any person of the opposite sex, but especially their exes.

“Two things made me uneasy and really stand out in retrospect.

He had nothing positive to say about any woman he had ever dated, or even met. All ex-girlfriends were ‘mentally ill’ and hateful. All his friend’s girlfriends/wives were mean and overbearing. He liked his mom, but no other women.

He isolated me from my friends. He kept saying how nice it was to stay in alone and kept asking me to break established plans with friends.”

—victorontonian

26. When they constantly harass you about all your friends of the opposite sex.

“Would absolutely fall apart when the idea of me drinking around women came up.

Would call me when I went out to check if I was OK.

Constantly asking what I thought about my friends who were girls.

Obviously she ended up cheating on me.”

—DAHGS

27. When they argue about every little thing.

“Expecting me to reply within a half hour and then subsequently giving me the silent treatment to ‘punish’ me for not replying. Then complain that I didn’t care enough to check in on her when she was ignoring me.

Also arguing at every little thing and then giving the silent treatment when I didn’t agree with her on something.

Expecting me to ‘accept her for who she is,’ the smoking, drinking mess of a person who was too lazy to work for her future and expected me to give her money for everything, then blaming everything that went wrong on her abusive father.

The best(?) of all, threatening suicide when I decided I had enough and was going to cut off the relationship. That was pretty traumatic too.

P.S. sorry if this isn’t completely relevant to the question.”

—GOverlord

28. When they ‘neg’ you.

“Negging. First sign of this, run away.”

—SlanginPie

29. When there’s a voice in your head telling you something is wrong.

“Not really answering the question, but after a while there was always a ‘voice’ in the back of my head telling me that what was going on was wrong. I’d just ignore it, or convince myself that it was normal almost automatically. People would tell me that she was being abusive and everything would ring vaguely true somehow but I’d just ignore it for a million reasons. Low self-esteem being one of them, feeling somehow responsible for what they did, being the another. It wasn’t until I one day realized that I was subconsciously making excuses for them in my head that I decided to get the fuck out of there, and even though I knew at that point that the relationship was not good for me, it was still the hardest decision ever.”

—picassos_left_nut

30. When their actions make you feel anything less than equal and loved.

“There are so many red flags and scenarios that could point to an abusive relationship, but it comes down to this: If your partner’s actions make you feel guilty, worthless, defensive or making excuses, or ANYTHING less than EQUAL and LOVED—you need to get out….especially if you find yourself making excuses again for why you can’t get out.”

—Matilda__Wormwood

[kaescarribean-blog]

week two

sunday, august 18

I’m writing this a bit far advance so I’m losing details of what has happened already, but I’m going to do my best! On Sunday, my two friends and I were just going to head down to Brewer’s beach to hangout and see what was going on with this Chili cookoff we had heard about. We assumed it would be a food truck or two, but when we got there, we couldn’t even recognize the beach we’d known for the last week! There was probably around 15 food trucks, a huge stage where a band was playing, and multiple boats pulled up to the beach. We recognized some people who we had hitch-hiked from earlier (...for a very short distance and with three friends, we made a judgment call and figured it was safe, thank god it was) on a boat, so we said hi and they invited us to come hang out! The rest of our NSE group saw us on the boat and came over to hangout too, the people were really gracious hosts and were excited to have so many people hanging out. We stayed down at the beach for a long time, and after we showered, ate, and met up at me and Blanca’s suite to hangout with some of the basketball team. We ended the night here, but it was a packed and extremely fun day, all without leaving campus!

monday, august 19

First day of classes! I only had one, which was swimming and snorkeling. It takes place at Brewers beach, but technically at the marine science building which is right down on the beach as well! I thought it was very lucky for the marine science department to have such a set up -- but it was incredibly difficult to find this building from campus because you had to take some sort of side road that is not marked and there are no signs on any of the buildings anywhere. We didn’t do anything in class besides talk about the semester, but afterwords since we were already down there some of my friends who were in the class and I decided to just stay down by the beach. It was pretty lowkey and I didn’t really go in far, but it was nice to get my time in the water due to class. I can’t remember much else happening today. 

tuesday, august 20

The official first week of me landing in Charlotte Amalie! Time had already passed so much, and it feels like it could have been months since my arrival. This is my big day of classes, where I have Self Management: Wellness and Risk, Basic Design, World Lit, and Disparities in Health Care. Four classes a day definitely takes a lot out of you, and made it decently harder for me to keep up my streak of going to the water everyday. Two things that struck me today: one of my classes is a conference class, and another is a hybrid, which they did not tell me when registering. Conference classes are pretty common here since the St. Croix campus is so small (smaller than St. Thomas for me is hard to believe). It utilizes video chat, and we have cameras and microphones in each classrooms, and there is only a teacher in one of them. This is actually okay since the teacher is in the St. Thomas classroom, but it was so foreign to me and seemed so simple and everyday to everyone else. Hybrid classes exist for essentially the same purpose: lack of teachers. My World lit class AND history of the Virgin Islands class ended up being converted into hybrids, so you only meet once a week and then have the rest of your work online. This I really don’t like since I don’t do well with a lot of online classes, but I figured it would be good because I could have more time to do what I want and do work later. Anyways, I ate dinner and called it an early night due to the amount of schoolwork and stress I had to deal with during the day, and I was reminded that I will actually need to be doing some sort of studying while I’m here. Tragic. I’m also becoming more and more familiar with the idea that NO ONE in the Virgin Islands has any organizational skills or sense of urgency no matter the occasion, and to reallyyyyyyy stop expecting much when it comes to these things. Ex: paying tuition or registering for classes. Who cares, right? I guess not them!

wednesday, august 21

On Wednesday, I slept in very late and appreciated the lack of classes I have. The History class is the only thing I had to report for, so I organized my laundry and my room, and relaxed for a bit. At night, we went downtown into Red Hook, which is a very decent hop over to the other side of the island, and hung out at a view local dives with almost the entirety of the NSE group. Incredibly fun. One thing worth mentioning is the night time transportation. There’s not much to do for nightlife near the University, so to do something at night, we’re going to need to get into a car. The problem is that none of us have cars, clearly, and that the $1 safaris stop running at 6pm. So, we are forced into using the overpriced and tourist-targeted taxi system. They charge you for distance as well as per head, and they are always trying to rip you off and tell you prices far above what is reasonable, because they know they can take advantage of tourists. However, once you give a little pushback and show any general knowledge of the island, the usually loosen up and get you an okay price. This night, to get there and back per person was $12, but there were 14 of us in the van, so he made $168 dollars off of a 20 minute drive. And he wanted to charge even more! The point is, people always think we are tourists, and we’re constantly having to practice self-advocacy in order to not get taken advantage of. 

thursday, august 22

I only went to one class today due to a combination of myself not making it to two and another getting cancelled (but me sitting in the class alone for 30 minutes). Then, I have no idea how I spent my day and there’s nothing in my camera roll to help remind me. I wish I did these daily instead of whenever I have time, I really want to do a better job about taking everything in! Some days are just mundane and I’m too tired by the end to recount all the happenings. Today must have been one of these days. 

friday, august 23

No class - so, I think I may have gone into town, and come back and watch the sunset? One interesting thing that I’m not sure if I’ve noted is that the sun sets extremely early here, which I am a little bummed about. At home, because it was summer we were squeezing out daylight until around 9pm, but here, the sunsets at a very premature 6:45. I hope it doesn’t get earlier. That’s all I’ve got!!

saturday, august 24

Finally a day I remember! We got up early (8 am...but felt much much earlier) and one of my friends roommate has been going to school here for all of her 3 years, so she offered to lead us on this hike we always have wanted to go on! When you sit at the beach, you can see these rock/cave structures in the mountain, and we always talked about going. Today, we did! Though it took only about 30 minutes total, it was one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever been on. To call it a hike even seems disrespectful, it was literally an uphill mountain climb -- as in, you couldn’t be holding your phone or water bottle in your hand because you usually needed all four limbs to get your body up and over enormous rock structures. At one point, it literally seemed like the trail was at a 90 degree angle, and there was a rope on the side of a tree we had to hold onto to hoist ourselves upwards. Insanely challenging, but so breathtakingly beautiful once we got to the top! I don’t think I’ve ever sweat so much in my life. After this, we went home and took a breather for about an hour, showered, and then headed down for the beach. The school was throwing a cook out type thing, which meant lunch was served at the beach, which was fun. They also had many obstacle courses and games set up, but we were all far too worn out from the hike to participate in any of that. They had some kayaks for use which we did take advantage of, except the guard didn’t tell us we had to stay within the buoys, so we headed out way too far and they had to come get us in the rescue kayak and tell us to turn around, which all of our friends are still laughing about. One cultural thing that I don’t think I’ll get used to is how loud simply everything is. The music, the volume of people’s voices, their tvs, everything. So, the entire time the school was throwing this event they had music blasting louder than I’ve ever heard, and even at the most distant point we reached on the kayaks it was still too loud for all of us. When I’m at the beach I personally much prefer listening to the ocean or some sofftttt music in the background, but the locals do not seem to share this preference. For dinner, they clearly were serving the leftovers from lunch at the beach, and everything tasted stale and old. I don’t mean to leave this day on a bad note, those are just some observations I have that fit in here. This day was still amazing!

[toomanysinks]

Transportation Weekly: Amazon’s secret acquisition and all the AV feels

Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or air taxis, too.

Yup, another transportation newsletter. But I promise this one will be different. Here’s how.

Newsletters can be great mediums for curated news — a place that rounds up all the important articles a reader might have missed in any given week. We want to do a bit more.

We’re doubling down on the analysis and adding a heaping scoop of original reporting and well, scoops. You can expect Q&As with the most interesting people in transportation, insider tips, and data from that white paper you didn’t have time to read. This isn’t a lone effort either. TechCrunch senior reporter Megan Rose Dickey, who has been writing about micro mobility since before the scooter boom times of 2017, will be weighing in each week in our “Tiny But Mighty Mobility” section below. Follow her @meganrosedickey.

Consider this a soft launch. There might be content you like or something you hate. Feel free to reach out to me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share those thoughts, opinions, or tips.

Eventually, we’ll have a way for readers to sign up and have Transportation Weekly delivered each week via email. For now, follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

ONM …

There are OEMs in the automotive world. And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers.

This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation will live.

We promised scoops in Transportation Weekly and here is one. If you don’t know journalist Mark Harris, you should. He’s an intrepid gumshoeing reporter who TechCrunch has been lucky enough to hire as a freelancer. Follow him @meharris.

Amazon quietly acquired robotics company Dispatch to build Scout

Remember way back in January when Amazon introduced Scout, their autonomous delivery bot? There was speculation at the time that Amazon had bought the Estonian-based company Starship Technologies. Harris did some investigating and discovered some of the intellectual property and technology behind Scout likely came from a small San Francisco startup called Dispatch that Amazon stealthily acquired in 2017.

It’s time to stop thinking about Amazon as just an e-commerce company. It’s a gigantic logistics company, probably the biggest on the planet, with a keen interest — and the cash to pursue those interests — in automation. Think beyond Scout. In fact, wander on down this post to the deal of the week.

Dig In

Each week, transportation weekly will spend a little extra time on an approach, policy, tech or the people behind it in our ‘Dig In” section. We’ll run the occasional column here, too.

This week features a conversation with Dmitri Dolgov, the CTO and VP of engineering at Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet.

Ten years ago, right around now, about a dozen engineers started working on Project Chauffeur, which would turn into the Google self-driving project and eventually become an official company called Waymo. Along the way, the project would give rise to a number of high-profile engineers who would go on to create their own companies. It’s a list that includes Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson, Argo AI co-founder Bryan Salesky and Anthony Levandowski, who helped launch Otto and more recently Pronto.ai.

What might be less known is that many of those in the original dozen are still at Waymo, including Dolgov, Andrew Chatham, Dirk Haehnel, Nathaniel Fairfield and Mike Montemerlo.

Dolgov and I talked about the early days, challenges and what’s next. A couple of things that stood out during our chat.

There is a huge difference between having a prototype that can do something once or twice or four times versus building a product that people can start using in their daily lives. And it is, especially in this field, very easy to make progress on these kinds of one-off challenges.

Dolgov’s take on how engineers viewed the potential of the project 10 years ago …

I also use our cars every day to get around, this is how I got to work today. This is how I run errands around here in Mountain View and Palo Alto.

A little bird …

We hear a lot. But we’re not selfish. Let’s share. An early investor, or investors, in Bird appear to be selling some of their shares in the scooter company, per a tip backed up by data over at secondary trading platform EquityZen. That’s not crazy considering the company is valued at $2 billion-ish. Seed investors should take some money off the table once a company reaches that valuation.

We’ve heard that David Sacks at Craft Ventures hasn’t sold a single Bird share. We hear Tusk Ventures hasn’t sold, either. That leaves a few others, including Goldcrest Capital, which was the lone seed investor, and then Series A participants Lead Edge Capital, M13, and Valor Equity Partners.

Got a tip or overheard something in the world of transportation? Email me or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

While you’re over at Twitter, check out this cheeky account @SDElevator. We can’t guarantee how much of the content is actually “overheard” and how much is manufactured for the laughs, but it’s a fun account to peruse from time to time.

“Is this really the state of VC today?” https://t.co/GmPhv3FN6q

— SelfDrivingElevator (@SDElevator) February 7, 2019

Another new entrant to the mobility parody genre is @HeardinMobilty.

Deal of the week

There’s so much to choose from this week, but Aurora’s more than $530 million Series B funding round announced Thursday morning is the winner.

The upshot? It’s not just that Aurora is now valued at more than $2.5 billion. The primary investors in the round — Sequoia as lead and “significant” investments from Amazon and T. Rowe Price — suggests Aurora’s full self-driving stack is headed for other uses beyond shuttling people around in autonomous vehicles. Perhaps delivery is next.

And believe it or not, the type of investor in this round tells me that we can expect another capital raise. Yes, Aurora has lots of runway now as well as three publicly named customers. But investors like Sequoia, which led the round and whose partner Carl Eschenbach is joining Aurora’s board, T. Rowe Price and Amazon along with repeaters like Index Ventures (general partner Mike Volpi is also on the board) have patience, access to cash and long-term strategic thinking. Expect more from them.

Other deals that got our attention this week:

Lime raises $310 million

Self-driving truck startup Ike raises $52 million

Tesla’s acquisition of Maxwell Technologies for $218 million

Online car retail platform BrumBrum raises $23 million led by Accel

Car subscription service Cluno raises $28 million led by Valar Ventures, the firm founded by Peter Thiel

Snapshot

Speaking of deals and Tesla … the automaker’s $218 million acquisition this month of Maxwell Technologies got me thinking about companies it has targeted in the past.

So, we went ahead and built a handy chart to provide a snapshot view of some of Tesla’s noteworthy acquisitions. 

One note: Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in 2018 that the company had acquired trucking carrier companies to help improve its delivery logistics. We’ve dug in and have yet to land on the company, or companies, Tesla acquired.

The deals that got away are just as interesting. That list includes a reported $325 million offer to buy Simbol Materials, the startup that was extracting small amounts of lithium near the Salton Sea east of San Diego.

Tiny but mighty mobility

Between Lime’s $310 million Series D round and the seemingly never-ending battle to operate electric scooters in San Francisco, it’s clear that micro mobility is not so micro.

Lime, a shared electric scooter and bikeshare startup, has now raised north of $800 million in total funding, surpassing key competitor Bird’s total funding of $415 million. Thanks to this week’s round of funding, Lime’s micromobility business is now worth $2.4 billion.

Lime currently operates its bikes and scooters in more than 100 cities worldwide. Over in San Francisco, however, Lime has yet to deploy any of its modes of transportation. Since last March, there’s been an ongoing battle among scooter operators to deploy their services in the city. The city ultimately selected Skip and Scoot for the pilot programs, leaving the likes of Lime, Uber’s JUMP and Spin to appeal the decision.

A neutral hearing officer has since determined SF’s process for determining scooter operators was fair, but the silver lining for the likes of JUMP, Spin and most likely, Lime, is that the city may open up its pilot program to allow additional operators beginning in April.

Notable reads

Two recent studies got my attention.

The first is from Bike Pittsburgh, an advocacy group and partner of Uber, that published the findings from its latest AV survey based on responses from local residents. The last time they conducted a similar survey was in 2017.

The takeaway: people there, who are among the most exposed to autonomous vehicles due to all the AV testing on public roads, are getting used to it. A bit more than 48 percent of respondents said they approve of public AV testing in Pittsburgh, down slightly from 49 percent approval rating in 2017. 

21.21% somewhat approve

11.62% neutral

10.73% somewhat disapprove

8.73% disapprove

One standout result was surrounding responses about the fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona involving a self-driving Uber that struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March 2018. Survey participants were asked “As a pedestrian or a bicyclist how did this change event and it’s outcome change your opinion about sharing the road with AVs?”

Some 60 percent of respondents claimed no change in their opinion, with another 37 percent claiming that it negatively changed their opinion. Nearly 3 percent claimed their opinion changed positively toward the technology.

Bike Pittsburgh noted that the survey elicited passionate open-ended responses. 

“The incident did not turn too many people off of AV technology in general,” according to Bike Pittsburgh. “Rather it did lead to a growing distrust of the companies themselves, specifically with Uber and how they handled the fatality.”

The other study, Securing the Modern Vehicle: A Study of Automotive Industry Cybersecurity Practices, was released by Synopsys, Inc.and SAE International.

The results, based on a survey of global automotive manufacturers and suppliers conducted by Ponemon Institute, doesn’t assuage my concerns. If anything, it puts me on alert.

84% of automotive professionals have concerns that their organizations’ cybersecurity practices are not keeping pace with evolving technologies

30% of organizations don’t have an established cybersecurity program or team

63% test less than half of the automotive technology they develop for security vulnerabilities.

Testing and deployments

Pilots, pilots everywhere. A couple of interesting mobility pilots and deployments stand out.

Optimus Ride, the Boston-based MIT spinoff, has made a deal with Brookfield Properties to provide rides in its small self-driving vehicles at Halley Rise – a new $1.4 billion mixed-use development in Virginia. 

This is an example of where we see self-driving vehicles headed — for now. Small deployments that are narrowly focused in geography with a predictable customer base are the emerging trend of 2019. Expect more of them.

And there’s a reason why, these are the kinds of pilots that will deliver the data needed to improve their technology, as well as test out business models —gotta figure out how to money with AVs eventually — hone in fleet operational efficiency, placate existing investors while attracting new ones, and recruit talent.

Another deployment in the more conventional ride-hailing side of mobility is with Beat, the startup that has focused its efforts on Latin America.

Beat was founded by Nikos Drandakis in 2011 initially as Taxibeat. The startup acquired by Daimler’s mytaxi in February 2017 and Drandakis still runs the show. The company was focused on Europe but shifted to Latin America, and it’s made all the difference. (Beat is still available in Athens, Greece.) Beat has launched in Lima, Peru, Santiago, Chile and Bogota, Colombia and now boasts 200,000 registered drivers. 

Now it’s moving into Mexico, where more competitors exist. The company just started registering and screening drivers in Mexico City as it prepares to offer rides for passengers this month. 

TechCrunch spoke at length with Drandakis. Look out for a deeper dive soon.

Until next week, nos vemos.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/08/transportation-weekly-amazons-secret-acquisition-and-all-the-av-feels/

[fmservers]

Transportation Weekly: Amazon’s secret acquisition and all the AV feels

Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or air taxis, too.

Yup, another transportation newsletter. But I promise this one will be different. Here’s how.

Newsletters can be great mediums for curated news — a place that rounds up all the important articles a reader might have missed in any given week. We want to do a bit more.

We’re doubling down on the analysis and adding a heaping scoop of original reporting and well, scoops. You can expect Q&As with the most interesting people in transportation, insider tips, and data from that white paper you didn’t have time to read. This isn’t a lone effort either. TechCrunch senior reporter Megan Rose Dickey, who has been writing about micro mobility since before the scooter boom times of 2017, will be weighing in each week in our “Tiny But Mighty Mobility” section below. Follow her @meganrosedickey.

Consider this a soft launch. There might be content you like or something you hate. Feel free to reach out to me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share those thoughts, opinions, or tips.

Eventually, we’ll have a way for readers to sign up and have Transportation Weekly delivered each week via email. For now, follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

ONM …

There are OEMs in the automotive world. And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers.

This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation will live.

We promised scoops in Transportation Weekly and here is one. If you don’t know journalist Mark Harris, you should. He’s an intrepid gumshoeing reporter who TechCrunch has been lucky enough to hire as a freelancer. Follow him @meharris.

Amazon quietly acquired robotics company Dispatch to build Scout

Remember way back in January when Amazon introduced Scout, their autonomous delivery bot? There was speculation at the time that Amazon had bought the Estonian-based company Starship Technologies. Harris did some investigating and discovered some of the intellectual property and technology behind Scout likely came from a small San Francisco startup called Dispatch that Amazon stealthily acquired in 2017.

It’s time to stop thinking about Amazon as just an e-commerce company. It’s a gigantic logistics company, probably the biggest on the planet, with a keen interest — and the cash to pursue those interests — in automation. Think beyond Scout. In fact, wander on down this post to the deal of the week.

Dig In

Each week, transportation weekly will spend a little extra time on an approach, policy, tech or the people behind it in our ‘Dig In” section. We’ll run the occasional column here, too.

This week features a conversation with Dmitri Dolgov, the CTO and VP of engineering at Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet.

Ten years ago, right around now, about a dozen engineers started working on Project Chauffeur, which would turn into the Google self-driving project and eventually become an official company called Waymo. Along the way, the project would give rise to a number of high-profile engineers who would go on to create their own companies. It’s a list that includes Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson, Argo AI co-founder Bryan Salesky and Anthony Levandowski, who helped launch Otto and more recently Pronto.ai.

What might be less known is that many of those in the original dozen are still at Waymo, including Dolgov, Andrew Chatham, Dirk Haehnel, Nathaniel Fairfield and Mike Montemerlo.

Dolgov and I talked about the early days, challenges and what’s next. A couple of things that stood out during our chat.

There is a huge difference between having a prototype that can do something once or twice or four times versus building a product that people can start using in their daily lives. And it is, especially in this field, very easy to make progress on these kinds of one-off challenges.

Dolgov’s take on how engineers viewed the potential of the project 10 years ago …

I also use our cars every day to get around, this is how I got to work today. This is how I run errands around here in Mountain View and Palo Alto.

A little bird …

We hear a lot. But we’re not selfish. Let’s share. An early investor, or investors, in Bird appear to be selling some of their shares in the scooter company, per a tip backed up by data over at secondary trading platform EquityZen. That’s not crazy considering the company is valued at $2 billion-ish. Seed investors should take some money off the table once a company reaches that valuation.

We’ve heard that David Sacks at Craft Ventures hasn’t sold a single Bird share. We hear Tusk Ventures hasn’t sold, either. That leaves a few others, including Goldcrest Capital, which was the lone seed investor, and then Series A participants Lead Edge Capital, M13, and Valor Equity Partners.

Got a tip or overheard something in the world of transportation? Email me or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

While you’re over at Twitter, check out this cheeky account @SDElevator. We can’t guarantee how much of the content is actually “overheard” and how much is manufactured for the laughs, but it’s a fun account to peruse from time to time.

“Is this really the state of VC today?” https://t.co/GmPhv3FN6q

— SelfDrivingElevator (@SDElevator) February 7, 2019

Another new entrant to the mobility parody genre is @HeardinMobilty.

Deal of the week

There’s so much to choose from this week, but Aurora’s more than $530 million Series B funding round announced Thursday morning is the winner.

The upshot? It’s not just that Aurora is now valued at more than $2.5 billion. The primary investors in the round — Sequoia as lead and “significant” investments from Amazon and T. Rowe Price — suggests Aurora’s full self-driving stack is headed for other uses beyond shuttling people around in autonomous vehicles. Perhaps delivery is next.

And believe it or not, the type of investor in this round tells me that we can expect another capital raise. Yes, Aurora has lots of runway now as well as three publicly named customers. But investors like Sequoia, which led the round and whose partner Carl Eschenbach is joining Aurora’s board, T. Rowe Price and Amazon along with repeaters like Index Ventures (general partner Mike Volpi is also on the board) have patience, access to cash and long-term strategic thinking. Expect more from them.

Other deals that got our attention this week:

Lime raises $310 million

Self-driving truck startup Ike raises $52 million

Tesla’s acquisition of Maxwell Technologies for $218 million

Online car retail platform BrumBrum raises $23 million led by Accel

Car subscription service Cluno raises $28 million led by Valar Ventures, the firm founded by Peter Thiel

Snapshot

Speaking of deals and Tesla … the automaker’s $218 million acquisition this month of Maxwell Technologies got me thinking about companies it has targeted in the past.

So, we went ahead and built a handy chart to provide a snapshot view of some of Tesla’s noteworthy acquisitions. 

One note: Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in 2018 that the company had acquired trucking carrier companies to help improve its delivery logistics. We’ve dug in and have yet to land on the company, or companies, Tesla acquired.

The deals that got away are just as interesting. That list includes a reported $325 million offer to buy Simbol Materials, the startup that was extracting small amounts of lithium near the Salton Sea east of San Diego.

Tiny but mighty mobility

Between Lime’s $310 million Series D round and the seemingly never-ending battle to operate electric scooters in San Francisco, it’s clear that micro mobility is not so micro.

Lime, a shared electric scooter and bikeshare startup, has now raised north of $800 million in total funding, surpassing key competitor Bird’s total funding of $415 million. Thanks to this week’s round of funding, Lime’s micromobility business is now worth $2.4 billion.

Lime currently operates its bikes and scooters in more than 100 cities worldwide. Over in San Francisco, however, Lime has yet to deploy any of its modes of transportation. Since last March, there’s been an ongoing battle among scooter operators to deploy their services in the city. The city ultimately selected Skip and Scoot for the pilot programs, leaving the likes of Lime, Uber’s JUMP and Spin to appeal the decision.

A neutral hearing officer has since determined SF’s process for determining scooter operators was fair, but the silver lining for the likes of JUMP, Spin and most likely, Lime, is that the city may open up its pilot program to allow additional operators beginning in April.

Notable reads

Two recent studies got my attention.

The first is from Bike Pittsburgh, an advocacy group and partner of Uber, that published the findings from its latest AV survey based on responses from local residents. The last time they conducted a similar survey was in 2017.

The takeaway: people there, who are among the most exposed to autonomous vehicles due to all the AV testing on public roads, are getting used to it. A bit more than 48 percent of respondents said they approve of public AV testing in Pittsburgh, down slightly from 49 percent approval rating in 2017. 

21.21% somewhat approve

11.62% neutral

10.73% somewhat disapprove

8.73% disapprove

One standout result was surrounding responses about the fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona involving a self-driving Uber that struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March 2018. Survey participants were asked “As a pedestrian or a bicyclist how did this change event and it’s outcome change your opinion about sharing the road with AVs?”

Some 60 percent of respondents claimed no change in their opinion, with another 37 percent claiming that it negatively changed their opinion. Nearly 3 percent claimed their opinion changed positively toward the technology.

Bike Pittsburgh noted that the survey elicited passionate open-ended responses. 

“The incident did not turn too many people off of AV technology in general,” according to Bike Pittsburgh. “Rather it did lead to a growing distrust of the companies themselves, specifically with Uber and how they handled the fatality.”

The other study, Securing the Modern Vehicle: A Study of Automotive Industry Cybersecurity Practices, was released by Synopsys, Inc.and SAE International.

The results, based on a survey of global automotive manufacturers and suppliers conducted by Ponemon Institute, doesn’t assuage my concerns. If anything, it puts me on alert.

84% of automotive professionals have concerns that their organizations’ cybersecurity practices are not keeping pace with evolving technologies

30% of organizations don’t have an established cybersecurity program or team

63% test less than half of the automotive technology they develop for security vulnerabilities.

Testing and deployments

Pilots, pilots everywhere. A couple of interesting mobility pilots and deployments stand out.

Optimus Ride, the Boston-based MIT spinoff, has made a deal with Brookfield Properties to provide rides in its small self-driving vehicles at Halley Rise – a new $1.4 billion mixed-use development in Virginia. 

This is an example of where we see self-driving vehicles headed — for now. Small deployments that are narrowly focused in geography with a predictable customer base are the emerging trend of 2019. Expect more of them.

And there’s a reason why, these are the kinds of pilots that will deliver the data needed to improve their technology, as well as test out business models —gotta figure out how to money with AVs eventually — hone in fleet operational efficiency, placate existing investors while attracting new ones, and recruit talent.

Another deployment in the more conventional ride-hailing side of mobility is with Beat, the startup that has focused its efforts on Latin America.

Beat was founded by Nikos Drandakis in 2011 initially as Taxibeat. The startup acquired by Daimler’s mytaxi in February 2017 and Drandakis still runs the show. The company was focused on Europe but shifted to Latin America, and it’s made all the difference. (Beat is still available in Athens, Greece.) Beat has launched in Lima, Peru, Santiago, Chile and Bogota, Colombia and now boasts 200,000 registered drivers. 

Now it’s moving into Mexico, where more competitors exist. The company just started registering and screening drivers in Mexico City as it prepares to offer rides for passengers this month. 

TechCrunch spoke at length with Drandakis. Look out for a deeper dive soon.

Until next week, nos vemos.

Via Kirsten Korosec https://techcrunch.com

[phawareglobal]

Angela Michelle - phaware® interview 207

Angela Michelle is a professional photographer and yoga instructor living in San Antonio, Texas. She was diagnosed with CTEPH in January 2018 after years of experiencing symptoms. Angela underwent PTE surgery in August of 2018 at UCSD.

My name is Angela Michelle. I am from San Antonio, Texas, and I was diagnosed with CTEPH, which is a form of pulmonary hypertension.

How I was diagnosed is actually quite a story. I began getting short of breath probably about 2013, and I kept bringing it up to my doctors. I was told it was allergies, it was asthma, respiratory infections, it was just that I was overweight. I would take whatever meds they gave me. I'd use inhalers. Nothing worked. I would try to work out. I was developing an intolerance to exercise, and so this continued on for quite a few years.

Then in 2016, I actually had a stroke. At that time, they realized I had multiple pulmonary embolisms, as well as my carotids were blocked. They decided to try to figure out what would make a then 38-year-old woman just throw all these clots, so it was determined I have antiphospholipid syndrome, and that was the first I'd ever heard of this particular disease. That was 2016, and I was short of breath at the time, and they told me, oh, it'll get better. They'll dissolve on their own, and so I left the hospital, continued on with my life. I was really lucky in that my stroke didn't leave me with a whole lot of physical limitations. It did leave me completely blind in one eye, but I found I was able to adapt to that.

So as I continued on, I just kept getting more and more short of breath. I am a yoga instructor, and so I would notice that even during yoga class, I was way out of breath more so than usual. I again brought it up to my doctors and they decided to send me to a pulmonologist, but it was going to be a long wait, and in the meantime, I ended up developing a cyst that needed to be removed, and it was totally unrelated to anything, but because of me being on blood thinners, it did require a hospitalization.

While I was there, and I was going to get put under to remove the cyst, they realized that my O2s were really low, and it was so low that they decided not to put me completely under, so I had to have the operation awake. Then at that time, they decided to send me home on oxygen, and when I kept trying to figure out like, well, why is this happening and what it is, they didn't seem to know, and they're like, "you'll just have to wait to see the pulmonologist." This happened a little over a year after my stroke, so this was July of 2017.

While I was in the hospital, I was very active on social media, Facebook and Instagram, and I shared a lot of my story, especially my health condition because I actually had two hospitals misdiagnose my stroke, and it was a third hospital that caught it. so I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions about that as well. So I am very active in telling my story. At that time, I was writing on Facebook and I was sharing that I was in the hospital and my low O2s, and it turns out an old friend of mine who I actually knew from middle school and high school had become a heart surgeon, and he was actually working out in L.A. He privately messaged me and suggested that they look into pulmonary hypertension, particularly CTEPH. He explained that it was really rare, but that I kind of fit the bill for it considering my antiphospholipid blood clotting disorder, that I was out of breath with no known cause, and so I was the one to originally bring it up to my doctors here in San Antonio.

At this time, I was already on oxygen 24/7, and the disease had progressed to a point that I couldn't even walk across the room without getting really short of breath, feeling like I was going to pass out and my heart rate skyrocketing. When I brought it up to my doctors locally, they were hesitant because they were like, "well, it's really rare", and they're like, "well, maybe, but let's run tests." I went through the whole battery of tests, and it wasn't until I had my right heart catheterization in January of 2018, and at the time the cardiologist that performed it, she said I didn't have pulmonary hypertension. So I was kind of like, well, that's good, but now we're back at square one.

Well, then my follow-up appointment of the pulmonologist, he was like, "no, you do have it, and I'm sending you to a PH specialist." So I ended up at a PH specialist here in San Antonio, and as soon as I met with him, he asked me what I knew about the disease, and at this point because my friend had told me about it, I had months of looking it up online and learning about it, so I told him what I knew, and he said I was pretty well informed and that he was sending me as a recommendation to have PTE surgery in San Diego.

I did have PTE surgery on August 7, 2018, so I'm about 10, 11 weeks out of surgery. I'm doing much better. I do still use oxygen on exertion. I'm currently in pulmonary rehabilitation, and I wear it when I work out, but I'm not needing it on my day-to-day activities and I have seen a huge difference.

After my stroke was misdiagnosed, I realized I had to take my health into my own hands. Prior to that, I relied on what the doctors said, I felt like they knew best, I didn't have a medical degree, and after two hospitals had misdiagnosed me, I knew something was wrong, but I didn't listen to my gut. I listened to the doctors. After that happened, I realized that it was really important that I be my own health advocate.

When my friend suggested that this was a disease I could have, I decided to go full force and use my energy to understand this disease, to figure out if it's what I had, and to really push my doctors. I really do feel like in a lot of ways I had to advocate for the tests that I needed to have done. I was lucky to have a friend who knew about this disease. He knew what tests I needed to have done to get the diagnosis. He was a text away from answering any of my questions, and he told me what tests to ask for, what questions to ask for, and I was able to send him copies of my test results and he could help me decipher them. I was really lucky to have that, and not everyone has that access to someone who can help guide them.

I just think that there's a lot of misinformation and misconceptions, and I don't think a lot of doctors understand this disease yet. Just like my cardiologist, I don't even know if she knows what it is, because according to her, I didn't have it, and I obviously did and do, so I just think there's a lot of information that is still not being put out and getting to the doctors so that they diagnose people properly.

Life has definitely opened up to me. It's amazing how I feel, I'm not short of breath all the time. I can do things like walk my dog or go to the grocery store and not be tied to an oxygen machine. For the past year and a half I was on oxygen 24/7, so I don't think you realize until you've gone through this, the amount of freedom that you had taken from you and then that you get back after, so I feel very free and very lucky to be on this side. I was really scared of the surgery because I do have a blood clotting disorder and I knew the risks going into that, so just to be on the other side, the anxiety and the I guess frustration of it all has really dissipated.

Advocacy is really important to me right now because it did take so long to get diagnosed, even though it was about I guess two years/a year and a half from thrombosis, at least known thrombosis to the CTEPH. I had been experiencing symptoms five years before that. Because of my missed stroke, I am really big on advocacy and educating the community, knowing the signs of different diseases, understanding our body, listening to our body, and learning how to be our own health advocate.

I would love to help patients learn how to navigate their health and the system, and so I am working on material to actually teach people how to do that, how to take the right notes and where to research and how to research, and how to reach out and how to talk to your doctors. I feel like that's really important, and we need to be responsible for our own health and not just hand it all over to someone who sees us for five/ten minutes every once in a while.

Also understand that for those of us living with these diseases, we live a very different life. A little bit of empathy, compassion can go a long way to help us in our world and navigating what we go through. A little bit of self-love and compassion for ourselves too that this is hard hands that we have been dealt, but that ultimately the choice is ours in how we choose to live our life and how we choose to deal with what we've been dealt. I always say it is what we make it in life, and so I feel like me going through this was part of me experiencing what I had to to lead me to where I'm at, and where I'm at is really wanting to help others now.

My name is Angela Michelle, and I am aware that I am rare.

Learn more about pulmonary hypertension trials at www.phaware.global/clinicaltrials. Never miss an episode with the phaware® podcast app. Follow us @phaware on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & Linkedin Engage for a cure: www.phaware.global/donate #phaware #phawareMD #CTEPH #CTEPHday #ClinicalTrials @CTEPHAdvisor  @BayerPharma @BayerUS  @antidote_me

*Photo Credit: II Sapphires

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Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Bales of recyclables at an Ecomaine recycling facility in Portland, Maine. Ecomaine is one of many U.S. recyclers that have been affected by China’s waste import restrictions.

Americans recycle millions of tons of trash every year. We trust that the items we toss in the blue bin won’t end up in a landfill. We hope this stuff is repurposed and turned into reusable goods ― but a lot of it isn’t getting recycled at all. 

Two-thirds of U.S. states are facing a recycling crisis of our own making. For months, mountains of plastic, paper and other materials have been piling up at recycling facilities across the nation. Recyclables are ending up in landfills en masse. Some municipalities — from Sacramento, California, to Hooksett, New Hampshire — have canceled or significantly curtailed their recycling programs, leaving residents with no choice but to throw their recyclables in the trash. 

To put it in the words of a waste manager in Bakersfield, California, the situation is “not just a little bad, it is terrible.”

“I’ve been in garbage all my life. This is unprecedented,” Kevin Barnes, the city’s solid waste director, told The Bakersfield Californian earlier this month. “I think there’s been nothing in history this severe for the markets. So we’re in uncharted waters here.”

The first signs of trouble came in January when China, which had long served as the world’s de facto wastebasket, banned the importation of several categories of recyclable waste. For decades, China had bought massive shipments of recyclable plastics, paper, cardboard and other materials from countries around the world.

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It had been a win-win situation. On the one hand, China needed a steady supply of recyclable waste to feed its flourishing manufacturing sector. And on the other, countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Japan lacked the recycling facilities and manpower that China had ― and they desperately needed a destination for their growing quantity of garbage.

About a year ago, however, China abruptly announced its intention to close its borders to this trash influx. The country notified the World Trade Organization that it would be banning the import of 24 categories of solid waste, including several kinds of scrap plastic and mixed paper. It also demanded that other waste materials, like cardboard and scrap metal, have only 0.5 percent contamination from food and other sources ― a standard that American recyclers have said is “impossible” to meet.

The immediate global impact of the new Chinese restrictions, enforced on Jan. 1, was staggering. “It was a huge shock — a tsunami for the industry,” said Arnaud Brunet, head of the Bureau of International Recycling, speaking from Brussels on Wednesday. “When the biggest market for recyclables progressively shuts the door to imports, you can expect the global industry will be under stress.”

Prior to its new policy, China had been processing at least half of the world’s exports of waste plastic, paper and metals. Between 1992 and 2016, China accepted more than 110 million tons of plastic scrap from countries around the globe, or about 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste. A recent study predicts that about 120 million tons of plastic waste will be displaced worldwide by 2030 because of China’s policy change. 

Aaron Ontiveroz/Getty Images

Alpine Waste & Recycling in Denver has been investing in cleaning up its paper recycling stream in an effort to meet China’s new import standards.

The United States has long been one of the biggest exporters of trash to China. Of the estimated 66 million tons of material that Americans recycle each year, about one-third used to be exported — a majority of which had been bound for Chinese shores.

Since January, however, local and state governments, together with domestic recycling companies, have had to figure out new destinations for all this garbage.

At least 38 states have experienced “noticeable” impacts since the policy took effect, according to Waste Dive, a D.C.-based publisher of waste industry news that’s been documenting the ban’s effects with this online tracker.

At least 10 states — including California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon — have been “heavily” affected. A waste coordinator in Alaska, another of the hardest-hit states, described the shake-up as “Armageddon for recycling.”

“At this point, there is no state in the country that has not felt at least something because of the ban,” Waste Dive reporter Cole Rosengren told HuffPost. 

Is your #recycling facility being impacted by China’s waste import restrictions? Check out our resources page and infographics for more information on policy and next steps! https://t.co/SHZ6KubZjH pic.twitter.com/ND8b7UvHJ9

— SWANA (@SWANA) July 15, 2018

Recyclables Get Dumped 

In the U.S., local governments often contract private recycling companies to collect and sort through recyclables. Once sorted, the marketable materials are sold to domestic or overseas processors. In the past, China had, in many cases, been that final destination.

Nowadays, however, there are few willing buyers ― and none of them come close to filling China’s shoes.

“Overall, the value of a ton of recycling has declined by about 40 percent over the past year,” David Biderman, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, told HuffPost in an email.

In some of the worst-hit places — like parts of the Pacific Northwest, which has traditionally sent a greater proportion of its recycling to China, and New England, where waste processing costs had been hefty even before the ban — there’s now “no market” at all for certain materials like mixed paper (cereal boxes, junk mail, magazines and the like) and some types of plastic, Biderman said. 

Across the country, thousands of bales of paper and plastic are being stockpiled and stored at recycling facilities in the hopes that new markets will eventually be found for them.

E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company in Massachusetts, told The New York Times in May that half of its 80,000-square-foot facility was stacked high with about 6,000 tons of stockpiled material. In New Hanover County, North Carolina, “piles of recycled cardboard” have reportedly sat unused for months.

Mid America Recycling in Des Moines, Iowa, told The Wall Street Journal that it had stockpiled about 1,000 tons of mixed paper, which it had hoped to sell when prices improved.

All of it, however, was eventually dumped in a landfill.

“We had to purge,” Michael Barry, the company’s president, told the paper in May. “There’s no demand for it.”

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Recology, a curbside recycler in San Francisco, admits it’s been diverting some materials to landfills. “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill,” a company rep told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month.

Dumping recyclables in a landfill is a recycler’s nightmare. “We hate the landfill. We do everything we can to avoid it,” Brunet said. “It’s a waste of resources — for the industry, for the planet.”

But many U.S. recyclers have had to resort to landfills in recent months. 

States like Oregon and Massachusetts have laws prohibiting companies from dumping recyclables ― but have recently been granting waivers so firms can dispose of the materials they can’t seem to sell.

Garten Services, an Oregon recycler, told The New York Times that the company recently sought a waiver to dump about 900 tons of recyclables in a landfill.

Republic Services, one of the country’s largest waste managers, said it’s disposed of more than 2,000 tons of paper in landfills since January.

Some municipalities have raised recycling rates or even resorted to canceling or cutting back on recycling services. The Alaskan cities of Sitka, Ketchikan and Petersburg, for instance, have stopped accepting mixed plastics and paper to their recycling programs. In Arizona, one of the states believed to be less severely affected by the new recycling landscape, the city of Flagstaff nevertheless announced in June that it was limiting its curbside recycling collection to only #1 and #2 plastics.

Sacramento said it was similarly dropping several kinds of plastics from its curbside program, and Hooksett, a New Hampshire town of some 14,000 people, said it was canceling curbside collection entirely. The town has said the move is only temporary. The Hooksett Department of Public Works did not respond to questions about when the program would be reinstated.

Saul Loeb/Getty Images

The Waste Management Material Recovery Facility in Elkridge, Maryland, says it’s had to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic that it would have normally sold to China.

‘A Real Wake-up Call’

China has been widely vilified as the cause of the current recycling fiasco. But industry watchers say the blame should not be placed on China, which has cited environmental and public health concerns, as well as a desire for self-sufficiency, as reasons for its policy change.

“China’s not the bad guy,” Mark Murray, executive director of the advocacy group Californians Against Waste, told the Los Angeles Times in June. “To the Chinese credit, they’ve decided they don’t want to have Third World [trash] sorting in their country.”

So, who then should be held accountable for this mess? It turns out we’re all to blame.

“People were upset and had been pointing the finger at China, but really, here in the U.S., it’s a shared responsibility,” Rosengren said.

China’s waste import restrictions have revealed just how flawed ― and dirty ― the American recycling industry is, and how bad American consumers are at recycling.

“One of the principal reasons China imposed these restrictions is that the scrap and recyclables that the U.S. was sending to China included too much ‘contamination’ ― material that is not recyclables,” Biderman said. “This is because many Americans are ‘wishful recyclers’ and put items in the recycling container hoping that the recycling company or local sanitation department will recycle them.”

Dirty takeout containers, most plastic bags, batteries, Christmas lights, garden hoses and those takeout coffee cups from Starbucks are all not recyclable ― yet many Americans toss their trash willy-nilly into the recycling bin without a second thought.

Rosengren also blames waste management companies for allowing higher levels of contamination over time. Before the ban, some companies were shipping recyclables to China with contamination levels of up to 30 percent, he told HuffPost.

“Things had been good, they were making money, so a lot of these companies got complacent,” he said.

Federal, state and local governments also failed to support and invest in domestic recycling infrastructure, Rosengren noted. “Everyone got complacent, they figured China would just be there… It’s been a real wake-up call for people.”

David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Trash is separated on a conveyor belt at E.L. Harvey & Sons in Westborough, Massachusetts, on May 31. The company says it’s been forced to stockpile thousands of tons of recyclables since January.

New Markets, New Opportunities

Industry experts say China isn’t likely to soften its stance on foreign scrap ― in fact, the country recently suggested that it would seek to ban all solid waste imports by 2020. Global recyclers will thus need to evolve and adapt.

There are expectations that the downturn in the recycling industry will continue for many months, if not years. But there is also optimism that the recycling industry as a whole will eventually emerge better and brighter than ever. 

“On the short term, it’s painful for the industry, but long term it’s probably a good thing for society at large,” said Brunet, who predicts more market diversity and better, cleaner recycling processes as a result of China’s policy change.

Already, new recycling markets have emerged to fill the void that China once occupied. In recent months, recyclables have flooded into other nations, mostly in Asia, including India, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.

These countries have only a fraction of China’s processing capacity, however, and signs of strain are already starting to show.  

“Vietnamese ports are clogging up due to the upsurge of plastic waste imports into the country,” Von Hernandez, global coordinator for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, said in an email. “In Thailand, the spike in imports is, unfortunately, fuelling demands to establish more incinerators in the country, which would be tantamount to exporting and externalizing one country’s toxic air emissions to another, if those plastic materials end up being burned in those facilities.” 

It remains to be seen whether these other nations will be able to adequately ― and sustainably ― handle the new influx of waste. 

Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Ecomaine says it’s been implementing new policies to eliminate contaminated recycling from its waste stream in an effort to reduce losses in the global recycled-commodity market.

Stateside, many opportunities have emerged for the American recycling industry ― from investments in contamination reduction to the building of more recycling infrastructure. 

“I hope that the federal government recognizes the value of strong municipal recycling programs in the United States,” Biderman said. “Recycling is a job creator ― recycling creates up to seven times more jobs per ton than landfilling, preserves landfill space for what truly needs to be disposed of, and is good for the environment.” 

Consumers, too, have a critical role to play in turning the recycling tide. 

“People seem to think that once recyclables hit the curb, they just go away. They don’t think about the process,” Rosengren said. 

Check your local guidelines to find out what can and cannot be recycled in your municipality ― the rules tend to vary from city to city and county to county. “Make sure you’re giving the right stuff, and make sure they’re all clean and dry,” Rosengren said. “Get the peanut butter out of the jar, rinse your beer bottle out and remember to never, ever put plastic bags in your recycling. That’s death to a recycling facility.”

“Try to reduce your consumption,” he added. “Just because you’re recycling doesn’t mean you’re absolved of your environmental footprint on the Earth.” 

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Congress's New Bill Can't Eliminate Russian Influence Online

http://ryanguillory.com/congresss-new-bill-cant-eliminate-russian-influence-online/

Congress's New Bill Can't Eliminate Russian Influence Online

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would require online political advertisers to provide additional disclosures about who’s paying for their ads, but the measure may prove a half-step toward preventing foreign adversaries from influencing US elections online.

During a press conference Thursday, Democratic senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the much-anticipated Honest Ads Act, cosponsored by Republican senator John McCain.

“Our entire democracy was founded on the simple idea that the people in our country should be self governing,” Klobuchar said. “Now 240 years later, our democracy is at risk. Russia attacked our elections, and they and other foreign powers and interests will continue to divide our country if we don’t act now.”

The bill arrives amid continuing revelations about how Russian operatives used tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to advertise political messages to American voters around the 2016 election. The bill is the first move by Congress to require political advertisers online to comply with the same disclosure standards already required of broadcast, radio, and print advertisers. But the design of digital platforms, which unlike radio and television allow virtually anyone to create content, means rules aimed only at advertisements will have limited effect.

“It’s a good piece of legislation to address the modern realities of campaign financing and the need for disclosure,” says Adam Sharp, former head of news, government, and elections at Twitter. “But I’m skeptical of how it will tamp down on behavior by bad actors like we saw in the 2016 election.” Warner himself described the bill as “common sense light-touch regulation.”

The bill amends the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which governs political ad spending. It would require tech platforms with at least 50 million monthly users in the United States to “maintain and make available for online public inspection” a record of advertisers who spend at least $500 on the platform advertising on campaign issues, or issues of “national legislative importance.” Those ads would be required to include disclosures citing who paid for the ads. The bill leaves it up to the platforms to decide how to implement those disclosures, requiring only that the recipients of ads can access the information with “minimal effort.”

The publicly available record would include an ad’s content, a description of the target audience, the number of views, and the date it was first and last displayed. It would also include the average rate charged for the ad, the name of the candidate mentioned, if any, and contact information for the purchaser of the ad. Platforms would have to compile these records “as soon as possible” and retain them for four years. Finally, it would require platforms to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure foreign entities aren’t behind those ads.

The legislation aims to address a major regulatory blind spot that has left online political ads virtually unregulated, largely as a result of government inaction. Facebook in 2011 asked the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules that would have required it to include disclosures on every political ad, detailing who paid for the ad. Facebook argued the rule was impractical and that Facebook ads ought to be regulated as “small items,” like campaign buttons and pens, which require no such disclaimers. The FEC was split and never reached a decision. Ever since, Facebook and other platforms have not required disclaimers from political advertisers.

Now, that lack of oversight is drawing harsh scrutiny after the company revealed that a Russian propaganda group known as the Internet Research Agency created 470 fake Facebook accounts, with which it purchased $100,000 worth of politically divisive ads, aimed at Americans. Twitter has similarly pinpointed roughly 200 accounts linked to the same propaganda group, in addition to hundreds of bot accounts that researchers say have direct connections to Russian operatives. Meanwhile, Google has reportedly discovered at least $4,700 worth of ads linked to Russian influence groups.

The new bill would modernize the regulatory environment so that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other tech platforms require the same disclosures of political advertisers as other media. “This is a substantive legislative proposal that addresses the online disclosure gap that we and other good-government advocates and campaign-finance experts have talked about for years,” says Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency advocacy group.

Substantive as this legislation may be in addressing advertising, though, it’s far from comprehensive. The most effective way to influence people online often is not through ads, but with viral content.

Facebook says that the ads purchased by those Russia-linked pages reached some 10 million people. But researchers say the unpaid, organic posts created by those same pages reached many times that number. According to Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, just six of the 470 fake account pages that Facebook identified reached roughly 340 million people through regular Facebook posts, eliciting some 19.1 million interactions in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

Albright says it’s unclear whether the Russians paid to “boost” any of those posts, a form of advertising that guarantees the post will be shown to more people. Even if they did, once the posts were published, they took on a life of their own. On the pro-veteran page Being Patriotic, which Facebook identified as being connected to Internet Research Agency, one post read, “At least 50,000 homeless veterans are starving, dying in the streets, but liberals want to invite 620,000 refugees and settle them among us.” It received more than 724,000 shares, likes, and comments.

“When you say ‘ads’ people think of a display ad. When really this is more insidious,” says Albright. “It’s content. It’s news.”

At a time when anyone can start a media company overnight and use Facebook to expand its audience, there’s little reason for someone to register a Super PAC and comply with whatever oversight comes with it, says Andrew Bleeker, CEO of Bully Pulpit Interactive, who ran Hillary Clinton’s digital-advertising operation. “I’m not worried about the Trump campaign,” he says. “I’m worried about the billionaire who, rather than starting a Super PAC, starts a media company that’s not regulated, because there are huge free speech issues.”

On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that members of President Trump’s inner circle, including campaign digital director Brad Parscale, adviser Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted posts from an account called @Ten_GOP before the election. That account has since been reported by the news outlet to be Russian propaganda and was suspended by Twitter. Whether the retweets were innocent mistakes or intentional is something investigators will, no doubt, examine.

The point is: organic posts can do just as much damage as ads, and the Honest Ads Act does very little address that fact. Not that it could. These open platforms now pervade our lives, and there’s likely no amount of legislation that could stop a malicious actor from exploiting them. “Like a lot of regulation, the good actors who follow the rules wind up being boxed in and the bad actors don’t care and will find other ways around it,” Sharp says.

One problem, Sharp says, is that the sponsors are rhetorically framing what is essentially a campaign-finance reform bill as national-security legislation. That’s largely to do with the fact that the Democratic senators who first drafted the bill wanted Republican support—in this case, from McCain—in order to introduce it. “On the Republican side there’s resistance to additional campaign finance regulation, but some receptiveness to the idea that this is necessary from a national-security standpoint,” says Sharp.

Klobuchar acknowledged as much during the press conference. “If you ask John McCain why he would get involved in a bill like that,” she said, “his main answer would be: national security.”

While this bill may not stop every foreign adversary who might like to infiltrate American elections, Albright says there are ways in which it could be improved. He suggests that in addition to making “reasonable efforts” to identify foreign entities attempting to advertise on their platforms, tech companies should be required to tell individual users if they have been exposed to ads purchased by a foreign entity. It would be similar to the way, say, businesses are required to alert customers of a data breach.

In some cases, Albright says, the Russians may have been able to amass equally, or more, sensitive information from users from their phony pages. One post on the page, LGBT United, asked members, “Straight girls, would you ever experiment with a lesbian?”

“People commented back,” Albright says. “Facebook needs to reach out to every single person who provided anything on those pages.” Right now, there’s a petition circulating on Change.org demanding Facebook do that.

Facebook, for its part, has announced changes to its election integrity policies. Going forward, it will require political ads to disclose on an ad who paid for it, and it will create a public repository of different variations of ads, which will be housed on the advertiser’s Page. But questions remain about how, exactly, these new policies will be implemented and what will constitute a political ad. On Nov. 1, representatives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will appear at two congressional hearings to answer questions about how Russia was able to use their services to influence the election.

Whether the Honest Ads Act makes it through a highly divided Congress already saddled with addressing marquee issues like the budget, the healthcare system, and immigration, is unclear. But if it does advance, the bill ought to be the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.

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Congress's New Bill Can't Eliminate Russian Influence Online

http://ryanguillory.com/congresss-new-bill-cant-eliminate-russian-influence-online/

Congress's New Bill Can't Eliminate Russian Influence Online

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would require online political advertisers to provide additional disclosures about who’s paying for their ads, but the measure may prove a half-step toward preventing foreign adversaries from influencing US elections online.

During a press conference Thursday, Democratic senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the much-anticipated Honest Ads Act, cosponsored by Republican senator John McCain.

“Our entire democracy was founded on the simple idea that the people in our country should be self governing,” Klobuchar said. “Now 240 years later, our democracy is at risk. Russia attacked our elections, and they and other foreign powers and interests will continue to divide our country if we don’t act now.”

The bill arrives amid continuing revelations about how Russian operatives used tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to advertise political messages to American voters around the 2016 election. The bill is the first move by Congress to require political advertisers online to comply with the same disclosure standards already required of broadcast, radio, and print advertisers. But the design of digital platforms, which unlike radio and television allow virtually anyone to create content, means rules aimed only at advertisements will have limited effect.

“It’s a good piece of legislation to address the modern realities of campaign financing and the need for disclosure,” says Adam Sharp, former head of news, government, and elections at Twitter. “But I’m skeptical of how it will tamp down on behavior by bad actors like we saw in the 2016 election.” Warner himself described the bill as “common sense light-touch regulation.”

The bill amends the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which governs political ad spending. It would require tech platforms with at least 50 million monthly users in the United States to “maintain and make available for online public inspection” a record of advertisers who spend at least $500 on the platform advertising on campaign issues, or issues of “national legislative importance.” Those ads would be required to include disclosures citing who paid for the ads. The bill leaves it up to the platforms to decide how to implement those disclosures, requiring only that the recipients of ads can access the information with “minimal effort.”

The publicly available record would include an ad’s content, a description of the target audience, the number of views, and the date it was first and last displayed. It would also include the average rate charged for the ad, the name of the candidate mentioned, if any, and contact information for the purchaser of the ad. Platforms would have to compile these records “as soon as possible” and retain them for four years. Finally, it would require platforms to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure foreign entities aren’t behind those ads.

The legislation aims to address a major regulatory blind spot that has left online political ads virtually unregulated, largely as a result of government inaction. Facebook in 2011 asked the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules that would have required it to include disclosures on every political ad, detailing who paid for the ad. Facebook argued the rule was impractical and that Facebook ads ought to be regulated as “small items,” like campaign buttons and pens, which require no such disclaimers. The FEC was split and never reached a decision. Ever since, Facebook and other platforms have not required disclaimers from political advertisers.

Now, that lack of oversight is drawing harsh scrutiny after the company revealed that a Russian propaganda group known as the Internet Research Agency created 470 fake Facebook accounts, with which it purchased $100,000 worth of politically divisive ads, aimed at Americans. Twitter has similarly pinpointed roughly 200 accounts linked to the same propaganda group, in addition to hundreds of bot accounts that researchers say have direct connections to Russian operatives. Meanwhile, Google has reportedly discovered at least $4,700 worth of ads linked to Russian influence groups.

The new bill would modernize the regulatory environment so that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other tech platforms require the same disclosures of political advertisers as other media. “This is a substantive legislative proposal that addresses the online disclosure gap that we and other good-government advocates and campaign-finance experts have talked about for years,” says Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency advocacy group.

Substantive as this legislation may be in addressing advertising, though, it’s far from comprehensive. The most effective way to influence people online often is not through ads, but with viral content.

Facebook says that the ads purchased by those Russia-linked pages reached some 10 million people. But researchers say the unpaid, organic posts created by those same pages reached many times that number. According to Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, just six of the 470 fake account pages that Facebook identified reached roughly 340 million people through regular Facebook posts, eliciting some 19.1 million interactions in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

Albright says it’s unclear whether the Russians paid to “boost” any of those posts, a form of advertising that guarantees the post will be shown to more people. Even if they did, once the posts were published, they took on a life of their own. On the pro-veteran page Being Patriotic, which Facebook identified as being connected to Internet Research Agency, one post read, “At least 50,000 homeless veterans are starving, dying in the streets, but liberals want to invite 620,000 refugees and settle them among us.” It received more than 724,000 shares, likes, and comments.

“When you say ‘ads’ people think of a display ad. When really this is more insidious,” says Albright. “It’s content. It’s news.”

At a time when anyone can start a media company overnight and use Facebook to expand its audience, there’s little reason for someone to register a Super PAC and comply with whatever oversight comes with it, says Andrew Bleeker, CEO of Bully Pulpit Interactive, who ran Hillary Clinton’s digital-advertising operation. “I’m not worried about the Trump campaign,” he says. “I’m worried about the billionaire who, rather than starting a Super PAC, starts a media company that’s not regulated, because there are huge free speech issues.”

On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that members of President Trump’s inner circle, including campaign digital director Brad Parscale, adviser Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted posts from an account called @Ten_GOP before the election. That account has since been reported by the news outlet to be Russian propaganda and was suspended by Twitter. Whether the retweets were innocent mistakes or intentional is something investigators will, no doubt, examine.

The point is: organic posts can do just as much damage as ads, and the Honest Ads Act does very little address that fact. Not that it could. These open platforms now pervade our lives, and there’s likely no amount of legislation that could stop a malicious actor from exploiting them. “Like a lot of regulation, the good actors who follow the rules wind up being boxed in and the bad actors don’t care and will find other ways around it,” Sharp says.

One problem, Sharp says, is that the sponsors are rhetorically framing what is essentially a campaign-finance reform bill as national-security legislation. That’s largely to do with the fact that the Democratic senators who first drafted the bill wanted Republican support—in this case, from McCain—in order to introduce it. “On the Republican side there’s resistance to additional campaign finance regulation, but some receptiveness to the idea that this is necessary from a national-security standpoint,” says Sharp.

Klobuchar acknowledged as much during the press conference. “If you ask John McCain why he would get involved in a bill like that,” she said, “his main answer would be: national security.”

While this bill may not stop every foreign adversary who might like to infiltrate American elections, Albright says there are ways in which it could be improved. He suggests that in addition to making “reasonable efforts” to identify foreign entities attempting to advertise on their platforms, tech companies should be required to tell individual users if they have been exposed to ads purchased by a foreign entity. It would be similar to the way, say, businesses are required to alert customers of a data breach.

In some cases, Albright says, the Russians may have been able to amass equally, or more, sensitive information from users from their phony pages. One post on the page, LGBT United, asked members, “Straight girls, would you ever experiment with a lesbian?”

“People commented back,” Albright says. “Facebook needs to reach out to every single person who provided anything on those pages.” Right now, there’s a petition circulating on Change.org demanding Facebook do that.

Facebook, for its part, has announced changes to its election integrity policies. Going forward, it will require political ads to disclose on an ad who paid for it, and it will create a public repository of different variations of ads, which will be housed on the advertiser’s Page. But questions remain about how, exactly, these new policies will be implemented and what will constitute a political ad. On Nov. 1, representatives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will appear at two congressional hearings to answer questions about how Russia was able to use their services to influence the election.

Whether the Honest Ads Act makes it through a highly divided Congress already saddled with addressing marquee issues like the budget, the healthcare system, and immigration, is unclear. But if it does advance, the bill ought to be the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.

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Jade Bryant

Visual artist Jade Bryant, 25 from Devon in the UK is part of the ASLI team as our Arts and Mental Health Campaigner & Feature Writer, every campaign we ask our team members and ambassadors if they would like to contribute to our publication. Jade chose to contribute a visual art piece on the social stigmatisation of mental health and here is what she had to say about it:

What motivated you to deal with your chosen submission subject?

I use art as a means of self help – mental health therapy and as a coping mechanism for my own mental health issues: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Dissociative identity disorder (DID) and as a way of raising awareness about mental health as a whole. Having personally suffered a lot of judgement inside and outside of the mental health system for my disorders, my chosen subject is with the aim to express my personal feelings of how I have been made to feel since ‘coming out’ as mentally unwell and being open about my journey to recovery and how it has been responded to by with a range of reactions from a variety of people: strangers, mental health professionals, old friends, family, ex-partners, the list goes on… (and not always in a good way). My motivation stems from my disappointment in how society and the media have painted the mentally unwell and how that affects our treatment, services available to us and all in all, our rights as equal human beings.

How Do You See Me? – By Jade Bryant

  What are your present and future goals for your art?

My present goals stand as they always stand, to continue to raise awareness of mental health issues and to highlight how art can be not only a brilliant self therapy method, but how it can also create change and build an understanding of important issues that need to be heard and seen. It has the ability to bring people together and I would love to eventually set up ASLI based workshops in my home area of Devon, as a member of the team, I think running arts and crafts workshops with the idea of mental health awareness at the centre of it, can help a range of people (especially with lengthy waiting times for therapy and entering the system and the amount of cuts we are seeing to services in the area) I also want to start the idea of regular mental health ‘drops’ – anonymous, free, little self help guides, art prints, and crisis team details and other information in a little package that can be dropped around different locations that may be useful to people.

Have you experienced any form of discrimination; and if so what was it based on and how did you deal with this?

Being young, and being female, I can’t say I haven’t experienced any form of discrimination – as that would be untrue. Ever since I was young I have felt the pressure of having to live up to an unrealistic stereotype of what a ‘girl/ ‘woman’ should be. I have been on the receiving end of shocking conversations with some males that believe they are entitled to my body, just because. From what I can remember most about feeling discriminated against in terms of my sex, most of my mind wanders back to when I have been in working roles. At the age of 12/13 I was a waitress, where I was regularly greeted by derogatory comments from customers, my own boss often told me I was only good as a ‘pretty face’. When working as a street charity fundraiser, I was part of a team that would be situated in different locations each day. My team was 5 females (including myself) and one team leader who was male. All of my team, briefed me on the ‘tricks of the trade’ – one of which being – because I was young and female, I should dress somewhat ‘attractively’ and in their own words – from the women mostly, they told me ‘short skirts and shorts, low cut tops, your best bet for sign ups is to target young, single looking, single parent possible, males’ – I didn’t stick to this advice, to me, I was working for a charity, why would I need to pander to the discriminatory stigma of my gender in order to make them money? Surely, the charity would speak for itself; this is again where I faced more discrimination, doing the role required constantly trying to stop people going about their day – which often lead to a lot of rude comments, abuse and rejection. I found a lot of people would rather judge my quality of life via the role I was doing, rather than the cause I was doing it for. Eventually, I was told to leave the job for not meeting my targets, which I found odd considering I had met them consistently, each day. I eventually found that my team was over it’s limit, and they had hired someone who already had a previous relationship with one of the team members who had been working with said team for over a year. I felt that it was for the best that I didn’t pursue the job, the pressure was unreal and the cause always seemed shielded by a capitalistic ideology.

What are your opinions on what causes discrimination?

I think a multitude of factors contribute to what causes discrimination, lack of education, misinformation, media propaganda, etc. School education could be a huge area for improvement, I don’t remember us being properly taught about anything to do with discrimination in a modern context. It almost felt as though we were still taught under the guise of ‘if a boy pulls your hair and hurts you, its a sign that he likes you!’ – let alone talking broadly on the subject of race at all, it always felt as though we were being taught in a way that already made us segregated from the people and situations we were learning about. I remember education in regard to this matter being abrupt, short and very absolute, in a black and white manner of thinking – as if there were no grey areas. But of course, there are always grey areas.

The media does no real effort to help lessen discrimination, if anything it would be more aptly suited to say that it effectively contributes to more discrimination than it does hinder any. I say this because daily we see news stories clearly showing the discrimination towards genders, ethnicity, races, cultures and many more. We see young, white males, clearly guilty of sexual abuse crimes walk free after a reduced sentence – yet some black people are losing their lives for driving home from work…

What do you do to actively stand against discrimination and have you ever had to intervene as a witness to it?

I do my best to always stand up for whomever may need it, may that be a stranger on the street, or someone I have known for years. Aside from using my art and writing as means of actively standing against discrimination; I have been witness to quite a few examples of discrimination in my life, there have been times where I have intervened, there have been times where I have not. But all have had reason. I have stood up for my female friends in situations where males have called them out in a derogatory tone, or tried to be to hands on when they have made clear indication of not wanting their personal space invaded. As a team member to the ASLI team, mostly dealing in the area of mental health awareness and advocacy, I would say that part of my stand against discrimination is by use of participating in issues like this one, as well as using my own artwork to try to further understanding of social issues.

What are your opinions on labels and stereotypes?

I have always felt that stereotypes are damaging to our overall humanity. They very rarely regulate positive connotations, and mostly always create a dramatised, fictitious idea of who people are. I live in quite a rural area of Devon, where impressions of any ethnicities other than our own are quite negative. Despite the fact cultural diversity isn’t particularly booming here. The media has always played a role, I believe, in segregating people via how they look, act or what they believe in. When we label people, or stereotype anyone – we are setting ourselves apart from our fellow human beings. It creates a scapegoat for the media to mislead and misinform us – shifting blame onto innocent people. Anything that further drives a wedge between us and our fellow human beings, usually at the cost of lives and people’s well being, is not something I believe to be useful or good for humanity. Having been regularly ‘stereotyped’ in school and growing up, I have felt only a small manner of what that sort of segregation feels like; and it’s usually painful, disappointing, and tiring and isolating. Always with the common jokes, and typical insults that would ensue from a base ‘stereotype’ of a certain type of person, usually always an outside opinion formed solely on what a person looks like.

What are your opinions on national identity and in your opinion does nationalism create or deter discrimination?

In and ideal world, I would ideally love to be able to just say ‘I am a citizen of the world’. I don’t believe we need to have ‘borders’ – people should be allowed free movement, I don’t believe that the very few who made those rules that stopped that motion, should be able to speak for the millions who also share this planet. I do believe that nationalism adds to discrimination and often fuels it, but I wouldn’t say that it is the root cause/creator. There is nothing wrong with having pride in ones country, or where one is from, I just choose to celebrate that as a human being that lives on planet earth, not Jade Bryant, English citizen of the United Kingdom. It becomes an issue, when that pride eventually rolls down the generations and misleads them into a huge sense of entitlement, that entitlement – with a little help from the media adding to racial stereotyping and scape goating of whole religions, creates a pool of people who have been misinformed about their own history, and their place in it. Quite simply, Stanhope said it best:

““Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”

― Doug Stanhope”

What social privileges do you have? For example: are you white, able bodied/minded, a man, rich, heterosexual, thin… etc.

In many ways according to the question, I am very privileged, I’m young, thin, and white. I can’t say I’m able bodied/minded because I do have a range of health and mental health issues. I do not come from wealth at all, and am nowhere near what could be considered rich. I see myself as privileged in mostly small ways, I have close friends who are incapable of doing things I may sometimes find no problem, so I often remind myself of this – and with that it makes me appreciate the things I can manage, because even though they may seem as small to some, like just going out to the shops or speaking to someone in the street, those things are things that some people would give anything to be able to do without a second thought. I’ll admit, for myself, because of my DID – it can often be a mixed bag of whether I can even achieve those seemingly small every day tasks. Some days I’ll even surprise myself with what I have accomplished (sometimes because someone has had to remind me I actually did do them!) And other days, it will be very obvious that I just can’t seem to get my body to move, or find the motivation to even speak out loud.

How does social privilege affect our world in your opinion?

In multiple ways; there are so many types of privilege that affect our world that it is difficult to narrow it into one answer. Privilege; in any meaning of the word – continues to affect our world through the continued segregation and misunderstanding towards certain people. It hinders our progress as a collective humanity by creating insignificant differences amongst us. I feel it all comes down to the same root issue really, keeping people in a state of opposal to a certain ideology, group of people, politics, etc, etc. Privileged groups usually hold power, that power usually enables them to form laws, rules and other regulations, but it also creates a hierarchy, the group in power privilege from the under classes work, i.e. capitalism. Thus said, the people at the top of the ladder hone the most benefits, but usually at the cost of some sort of morality. Privilege is a phenomena that cannot work under the guise of equality, it needs inequality in order to perpetuate itself and continue to succeed.

Have you ever denied your own privilege due to feelings of guilt or misunderstanding?

I have denied my own privilege, countless times, but not from feelings of guilt or misunderstanding – but because in each moment I have done this, I have chosen to. I have chosen to deny my own privilege, for the sake of someone who may not have that same one, simply because I feel it human of me to do so. In the simplest of terms, to me, even being able to eat a meal is a privilege – there have been times in my youth, where I was close with a person who didn’t have that much of a benefit, so often times when she and I were hanging out together listening to music in my room, and mum called my name for tea (she would often deny her own privilege too in the same way) – I’d often ask my friend if she would like it instead, not because I felt guilty for her – but because I could relate to her in some ways – I’d seen brief instances of her home life, I could empathise. I knew I had my mum in my secret corner most of the time – my friend didn’t have that safety net in her house, and while I knew I couldn’t go in and give her parents a lesson in parenting, I decided the least I could do was help her in the small ways I could. I never took pity on her, she was my equal, and my friend. I’ll admit on the other hand there may have been times where I have denied my own privilege out of assumed guilt, but having two personality disorders often plays a role in the reason for that guilt. Often times, I haven’t felt ‘worthy’ of anything, so you deny yourself even your own privilege out of spite of not feeling as though you deserve it. This isn’t a self deprecatory act more so than it is an act of numbness.

Do you feel social privilege should be taught at school and if so why and how young?

That is an interesting question, but given some thought, yes, I do think it should be taught in schools, along with more information about mental health. These things make up our society, and inevitably affect it. I was the butt of many socially privileged ‘jokes’ back in school, even in primary. So I believe, it should at least be taught as early as primary school (possibly pre school) in some cases, but in an informative manner. What I really believe, is that parents should be functional in teaching their children these essential life skills too, as caregivers, children often lead by the example their parents are setting, watch how they interact and copy it, and so on – teaching parents how to teach their children, should also be a priority. It is quite sad that we even have to ask should this be taught, it is sad that privilege does what it does. It speaks for a changing world when someone has more, and they instead of sharing or bettering the world around them, decide to barter more of it away at the risk of their human counterparts. 10. Have you ever experienced social stigmatisation and if so what was it based on and how did you deal with this?

Many times. Mostly while I have been under my local mental health team. I have had to attend countless meetings with the head of my local team and other officials because of my assumed ‘behaviours’ when communicating with some of the staff. I was recently sent to a final warning meeting about my behaviour based on one interaction with a receptionist. Who I was told, took my behaviour ‘personally’ when I was in a moment of clear crisis, and it also came to light that the team had proceeded with this meeting without any evidence of what I was supposed to have done that violent or threatening. Suggesting they can take the word of a non medically trained member of staff, working in a first point of contact for people suffering with issues in their mental health role, over the word of the person navigating the system. All this says to me is that there is a clear imbalance of equality. This latest meeting threatened to cut off all of my mental health care, therapy, medication, and more – somehow I don’t feel that power imbalance to be particularly just. Especially when I have tried to raise my hand and complain about their treatment since day one, yet I seem to be the one still getting threatening letters with police action. I must reiterate, I have never once threatened a member of staff or been violent towards anyone in the profession. I lose my patience sometimes, like most people do, and most people would, trying to navigate these systems and their rules. Because not only that, but I am going through consistent what could be a ‘classic example’ of social stigma, still within the realms of the mental health system. I stand at a mere 5”4 (ish) and weigh a humble 7 stone. I’m aware my BMI states ‘underweight’. The reason I lost so much weight was for multiple reasons – but – I am not unwell. So – when I had to send off my assessment to the DWP and had to have supporting evidence, I asked my mental health team for any copies of documents they had of mine. I was sent quite a few I’d seen before, and interestingly, one I hadn’t been sent – but should have been. When I read the assessment write up letter that had been wrote, in the space that had the header ‘Diagnosis:’ he had written, “Anorexia nervosa” Something never touched upon in any former assessment or GP appointment, or in the specific assessment that he was writing of– because I am not anorexic. Ever since this, every person dealing with my mental health care has been pushing this idea. I’m constantly asked about my weight, what I eat, If I don’t eat to punish myself, and every single time I say the same thing: ‘I’m not anorexic, I have been this weight for over a year and continue to eat as much as I feel I want to – believe me, if there’s food around that I like, it won’t be there for long” and not once have the mental health team weighed me, so to make that huge assumption is just amazing really. Instead of engaging on what I actually went into the system for, they would rather push diagnosis’ on me that I have never had, or don’t have. Given that I have never spoken to them about any real issues with my weight, they have never weighed me, or spoken to me about this ‘hunch’ they have had prior to any of this, not one thing to suggest it should be something they would look into – the only conclusion I’m led back to is that when some people look at me, all they see is my size, and this, this is a form of social stigma. Landing people into categories of severe mental and physical illness based on something as simple as looking at me, yet never even asking me a thing. Furthering that this is their own perception of ‘beauty/healthy/whatever’ gone askew, they have taken their personal opinion on how I look, and tried turning it into something ‘diagnosable’. I am still dealing with this type of stigmatisation from my mental health team, who just won’t seem to drop the subject no matter how much I press it.

What are your opinions on political powers and world leaders using stigmatisation against certain groups to further their own agendas, such as with Muslims, Black people, LGBTQ individuals, mentally ill and disabled people?

I don’t believe it to be completely misjudged to believe that our government uses clear propaganda to influence our opinions on certain groups of people, in order to keep their agendas satisfied and the public on their side. They often portray the mentally ill to be ‘dangerous and violent’ and there are countless news articles that are worded to just that affect, often with very little mention as to who the person actually is. They also misuse words in order to create a strong picture in the public’s mind of disharmony and inequality, such as: the rhetoric currently being debated that Donald Trump is unfit to rule as President because he has ‘mental health issues’ – no, they know every word they write has the power to be influential, and the people in power of running these articles, and writing them, are ruled by that very same agenda, they drop in a couple of words and a huge chunk of society reads no further, because they take what they see as truth (call it an ignorance in convenience) – thereby; creating a clear discord between society, and people who may be mentally unwell – which is what my current painting for this submission aims to reflect. That the mentally unwell are often and always portrayed in society as ‘monsters’ ‘something to fear’ ‘beware of’ etc. The symbolism of the spider, I took brief audience interaction from – I basically wrote up a poll asking what people feared the most out of three or four of the most commonly feared and dangerous animals on the planet. Quite obviously, arachnids won. With that information – I decided to use it for symbolism. The spider, wearing a skull as a body, represents the stretched truth of how we, the mentally unwell, are made out to look, the skull adding to the dramatised sensationalism that is also made from us. An example of this is often found in TV and Film, using mental illnesses as characteristic horror-thriller traits, often highly misunderstood and lacking in grounded reality, one of the most current examples of this type of thing would be M. Night Shyamalan’s recent horror-thriller’Split’ – a film about a person with DID who kidnaps some young women, but also has an alter who apparently can alter his body chemistry to such a point where he can climb walls like Spiderman. But, Overall, my opinion on political powers using any group of people to further their own means and ends, is just plain evil. It isn’t done to help raise a healthy and truthful awareness of any of these groups, if anything it is almost always aimed at creating more divides, that you can usually trace back to a political agenda.

Do you support or take part in any anti-stigma organisations or charities and if so which ones and why?

I support a range of charities that aid in anti-stigma movements. Art Saves Lives being the main one! But I also support the charities: Mind, PDAN, Rethink, Project Semicolon. I also regularly participate in the Time To Talk events as best as I can. I have been a supporter of the UAF movement for some time now. I also support the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. As well as these things I support the use of service dogs for people with mental illnesses – and feel this is something that we should better help research and fund. I support these causes and many others for simply the reason that I believe people should be treated equally, we all deserve the same rights as one another. Most of these organisations are set up or founded under suffering loss, or some kind of imbalance within society, or a lack of something that people who need it – cannot access. So all of these organisations are set up to strive to bring equality and understanding to everyone, and to be able to give people who are in need, the help they deserve, or to just simply educate people, give people a voice, so that they can be heard. These things are important for us as a society within the workings of the media, and our own government, we are flooded with biased information that misleads people’s opinions of their fellow man, under false pretences, and creates more of a divide between people, so these types of organisation serve to give the truth a platform, and with that, it brings people like myself and so many others – hope.

In your own words please tell us how you feel the arts and creativity can further help to empower, communicate and educate people with regards to discrimination, privilege and stigmatisation?

Art is a language that anyone can communicate in, it is always open to interpretation and I believe that those are imperative qualities that make the arts and creativity such brilliant methods of education and communication about such important issues that need more awareness and education. Art of any kind, be it music, painting, drawing, animation, photography, etc, they all allow us to see what the artist intends, as well as what we interpret, with that comes the ability to create in ways that do in fact, educate people. People can tell or hide as much as they want through creativity – but still allow themselves the freedom to have a voice about such subjects that they may be feeling, be that stigmatisation, discrimination or privilege.

Check out Jades other interviews for previous campaigns:

Artist Jade Bryant is fiercely tackling her mental illness with art and in the process is changing the world’s awareness of Borderline Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Welcome Jade Bryant as ASLI’s Newest Team Member

Artist Jade Bryant Tackles Money and Elitism with her Visual Art

If you would like to find out more about Jade please follow these links:

Facebook Page

Website

Jade Bryant Art Shop

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  ASLI Team Member Jade Creates a Piece of Art to Highlight the Stigmatisation of Mental Illness Visual artist Jade Bryant, 25 from Devon in the UK is part of the ASLI team as our Arts and Mental Health Campaigner & Feature Writer, every campaign we ask our team members and ambassadors if they would like to contribute to our publication.