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imsafiyacharles · 4 years ago

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ALABAMA’S AGING BLACK FARMERS UNCERTAIN ABOUT FUTURE AS THEY STRUGGLE TO CREATE LINES OF SUCCESSION

Billy Gibbons intends to die on this land.

At 70, the bespectacled Black farmer may very well be the last heir to work the family plot; 80 acres of black soil in Browntown, Alabama, an unincorporated community less than 20 miles north of Prattville.

Gibbons’ parents pinched and scraped to purchase the acreage for $850 in 1940. They intended to pass it down to him and his brother; but he died in 1976 after contracting meningitis while away at military training in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

“I can remember all of this was woods,” Gibbons said, waving his arm over the crop land that extended before him. It was a brooding morning that had already spilled rain and left his feet besieged by shallow pools of muddy water.

The old farmer wore a faded army jacket and dark cap with worn blue jeans; occasionally pulling his face mask to the side to expel a portion of the chewing tobacco occupying his right cheek, before apologizing for the habit.

“As far as you can see to woods was woods,” he spat.

The forest was so dense, and the family’s resources so limited, they worked only five acres of farmland to start.

“My Daddy, he done all the cleaning with a mule, a ax and a shovel,” said Gibbons.

They farmed row crops — collards, turnips, mustard greens — and bought a couple head of cattle. Gibbons had trees pushed off with bulldozers through the years. He now owns about 50 head, which he spreads across the family land and some 170 acres he rents just a mile up the road.

With the help of his wife, he hauls most of his vegetables weekly at the Curb Market downtown where in 1999, he became its first African American vendor. He would serve as president for nine years.

“This is a tradition here, and it’s still standing,” he said.

But for how long?

Like so many of the nation’s Black farmers, mostly clustered in the South, the future remains uncertain.

In 1920, African Americans accounted for 14% of all U.S. farm operators. That number has since dwindled to a staggering 1.4% percent. Alabama, the third most populous state for Black producers, sits at 6%, according to 2017’s agriculture census.

At the turn of the 20th century, Black landowners held 15 million acres. Today, they own 3.4 million, about half a percent of American farmland.

Black farmers have faced discrimination at every level, struggling against social and financial barriers to achieve land ownership and the right to operate their farms independently within an agricultural economy that has long profited from the exploitation of their labor through slavery, sharecropping and legal loopholes.

Over decades, many southern Black families lost land due violent intimidation, deceit and financial hardship. Farmers who sought loans from government agencies to keep their properties running in lean times or make needed improvements were denied, shortchanged or failed to receive timely assistance. (The United States Department of Agriculture settled in 1999 the class action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman brought by Black farmers alleging more than two decades of lending discrimination.)

While the latest agriculture census reported a 5% increase in Black producers between 2012 and 2017 after revisions to its data collection, there was also a 3% decline in Black operated farms.

“What I hope we don't see is the eventual extinction of the Black farmer,” said Brennan Washington. He works with limited resource farmers across the South as a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) liaison at Fort Valley State, a historically Black land grant college in Georgia.

In the past, Washington said, a Black farmer with a large acreage may have applied for a USDA loan to purchase seed, among other necessities, and would find their application lagging.

“[USDA] would process the paperwork too late for them to get their seed on time. So, they get their seed in the ground too late, they don’t get a crop, meanwhile they’ve got a lien on that property that USDA will seize if they can’t get it paid,” he said.

Further complicating matters is the fact that farmers are aging, and many are finding it increasingly difficult to get young people to replace them. Nationally, the average age of a farm owner is 57½ years old; 43% of Black farmers are 65 and older.

'Farming has shrunk from a mile to 300 feet'

Browntown is a Black community founded on farming. According to local history, twin brothers with the surname Brown bought the land that encompasses about a 20-mile radius; it was parceled among their heirs when they died. Gibbons’ grandmother was a Brown.

But the promise of higher-wage work, and the perceived freedom from Jim Crow segregation and racism lured many young Black people north during the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970, away from rural farm towns like these.

“Most of the farmers had large families and they kids was brought up on the farm. But as years got by and all these kids grow up, they was rushing to get away from the farm, because the farm was a struggle — still is a struggle,” said Gibbons.

The figures are dramatic. Between 1940 and 1950, more than 42% of the nonwhite Southern population vanished. That number rose to 65% for nonwhite youth between the ages of 15 and 19, according to a 2007 SARE report.

With four biological children and four stepchildren, Gibbons has no shortage of heirs. But their desire to enter a business they've watched their father struggle to maintain over the years is lacking, which means the family is currently without a contingency plan.

Marshall, 58, and Lorenzo Davis, 66, co-own Davis Farms about a mile west of Gibbons’ property and face a similar consequence. The brothers farm row crops, rotating varieties of watermelon, field peas, snap beans and other seasonal crops they sell daily at the Finley Avenue Farmer’s Market in Birmingham.

As farm operators, the two have found themselves in a position they never intended. Fond memories of time spent working alongside their father on the farm throughout their youth persuaded them to keep the business alive after he passed in 2004.

The brothers farm about 300 acres, half which belongs to the family, and 40 acres the late Davis bought in 1960. That land is legally split between Lorenzo, Marshall and a third brother, Andrew, who farms independently.

Like many operators, the Davis’ maintained full-time jobs to keep their farm going. Lorenzo retired in 2014 after 33 years as a correctional officer, and Marshall is still currently employed at a facility in Elmore County. He wakes early most days to put in work at the farm before heading to the prison for the second shift from 2 to 10 p.m.

“Twenty years ago, when our father was in operation, we had cows and hogs. At one time, we were up to 200 acres of field corn,” said Lorenzo.

By the late-90s they had quit farming cattle. The cost of feed was expensive, and profits were slim. Bills on a farm add up quickly — seed, fertilizer, fuel, equipment maintenance. Lorenzo pointed out a 20-year-old tractor they owned that cost them $60,000 to buy brand new; an equivalent today, he said, would be well over a $100,000.

“We might eventually have to get back into growing grain because we’re aging now and you can gather all that with machinery,” Marshall said. “Help is harder to come by now than it was 20 years ago.”

Like Gibbons, the Davis brothers remain passionate about farming but are struggling to devise a transition plan. Marshall’s 36-year-old daughter sometimes assists him at the farmer’s market., and Lorenzo has a 35-year-old son that has indicated an interest in the operation, but he doesn’t have much experience and works a good-paying job that his farm income would likely never match.

Without a probated will, farms are vulnerable to becoming heirs’ property

Most farm operators are generational, acquiring land as it is handed down through family members.

While 65% of white Americans with a high school education report having a will, only 23% of Black Americans possess one, according to a study reviewed by Texas A&M law scholar Thomas Mitchell who studies heirs’ property; land owned by multiple people who typically share a common relative that’s died without leaving a probated will.

Kara Woods has studied heirs’ property in Macon County as a postdoctoral researcher at Tuskegee University (TU). The historically Black 1890 land grant school’s research and extension programs provide agricultural education and support to Black producers; often subject to the same imposed financial limitations the farmers they serve face (Congress mandated 1890s because southern land grants they created 28 years prior barred Black students).

“It really goes down to generations ago when everything was in the family bible,” Woods said. “You might have the lineage in the family bible, [unofficial] wills in the family bible. People who were able to get land after becoming free didn’t trust white lawyers because they didn’t have means to read and write. So, at that point it was safer to keep the land without a will because you knew the family could always stay on it,” said Woods.

One of the problems with heir’s property is that it isn’t divided by parcels or acres; it’s split by percentage. That means that if a family has 50 acres and five heirs, each would be entitled to 10% of the land, not 10 acres. So, the more heirs a property has, the less value each person holds.

Because heir’s property is an informal form of ownership that involves multiple people, most banks refuse to allow the land to be used as collateral in financial lending, and it’s generally appraised at a lower value than clear title land.

These properties also rarely qualify for state and federal grant programs that cover everything from community development, to disaster relief and housing. Without individual ownership, heir’s property isn’t an effective tool for building generational wealth.

Before Alabama approved the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, co-drafted by Mitchell, in 2014, a single heir could force the sale of an entire property through a legal partition action. Usually the sale would net far less than market value for the land. (The 2018 Farm Bill includes a provision sponsored by former Sen. Doug Jones that would authorize $10 million a year through 2023 to help farmers resolve ownership and address succession issues to avoid this and other snags.)

Lack of generational leads put Black farmers on the back foot

Though fourth-generation Black Belt farmer Demetrius Hooks, 47, knows the value of a will, he’s had a hard time convincing his father, Al Hooks, 72, of the urgency in getting an official document drawn up.

Like the Davis’, Demetrius never imagined he'd assume farming as an occupation. He 'd always helped around on weekends at the Shorter farm, but when he lost his graphic design job at this newspaper around 2010, he spent more time there.

The father and son talked it over and decided Demetrius should assume a more official role. A few years later, he ended up at TU working as a farm internship liaison.

Demetrius handles sales and marketing for Al Hooks Produce, and his father does most of the farm work, though the younger Hooks does get his hands dirty every now and again. He has two siblings who have families of their own, but none work the farm.

The Hooks grow fruits and vegetables that they sell each weekend at the Macon County Farmer’s Market and through direct sales via text message to customers who pick up their “veggie crates” weekly at Demetrius’ home. They hold farm stands at Auburn and Birmingham’s summer markets, too.

Through a cooperative partnership facilitated by TU, the Hooks previously sold some produce items to Walmart. That created a need for an onsite processing plant to wash, refrigerate and package the vegetables. They were able to secure a $75,000 grant to build the $125,000 site and increase their capability.

Beyond the need to expand capacity, large retail contracts like these often require special certifications like GAP (good agricultural practices) that can be time consuming and expensive. And it can take months to receive payment.

Demetrius said the business had previously maintained a contract with Whole Foods, supplying them squash, zucchini, peppers and collard greens for a few years. When Amazon acquired the company in 2017 subsequent changes were made to their vendor specifications, which coincided with a cancer diagnosis. They could barely keep up with the requirements.

For many small Black farms that lack capital to pay certification costs or labor to meet greater demand, these large contracts remain out of reach.

The Hooks no longer sell to either large chain and are currently working with smaller regional retailers like Filet and Vine in Old Cloverdale; though they will again attempt to meet Whole Foods’ certification requirements now that Demetrius’ cancer is one-year in remission.

There’s a “gap in business development. It would be nice if everybody started their business at the same time and you didn’t have years of being locked out of certain opportunities because you’re Black. Once those blockages and implements of discrimination have been removed it’s not as if the next day I can easily walk into Whole Foods and be ready to deliver to them,” said Demetrius.

“You still have those generational leads. Other businesses that didn’t have those problems have that benefit of being able to maneuver through those obstacles once they come up.”

Although nothing has yet been written in ink, Demetrius has expressed to his father his interest in taking over the farm when he retires. But the matter of a probated will still hangs in the balance.

“I don't really think I should have a say of how it's done; it's how he wants to do it. But I need him to come out and tell me,” he said.

Certifications allow access to wider markets, but can be costly and limiting

In recent years, a burgeoning cultural movement has emerged seeking a return to African American agricultural traditions. Urban farmers, many of them women, have cleared blighted plots and cleaned up city blocks in an effort to nourish and beautify Black communities that too often lack access to fresh produce and healthy food options. The trend of “reverse migration,” first observed in the 1970s, continues as more Black people return to ancestral land in rural communities across the South.

“There’s a new awakening that's happening where people who left during the Great Migration and went to work a job in Detroit or Ohio, they're coming back to Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi,” said Natilee McGruder, a community land, food and farming systems advocate, who's currently working to connect local Black farmers with a national seasonal food chain.

“There are young Black people who are in New York and California who are landless, who want to farm, who are ‘woofing.’ There are elders connecting with young folks. And there are the 1890s that have always been here to support Black culture, Black community and Black farmers. There's a complete renaissance that's happening,” said McGruder.

At 77, Josie Gbadamosi-El Amin, may well be a part of this Black agrarian rebirth. When she began farming 10 years ago, she had no experience.

With bright eyes and a wide smile, the retired substance abuse counselor described how she fell in love with Shady Grove Blueberry Patch after a friend clued her in on a “secret” spot where locals picked berries on a conveniently absent farmer’s Tuskegee property.

“I had to lock my eyes on the line of trees because it was so overgrown that I was afraid I might get disoriented, and I better find my way out,” she said. “But I was just enamored by the blueberry bushes. It was just so wonderful. I had never seen anything like it. There was something about the spirit of this place.”

She inquired after the land and found a few leads, purchasing the 46-acre farm in 2010. The move was so left field that her four daughters were concerned she may have hit her head and corrupted her judgement in a recent slip and fall accident, she recounted; then burst into peals of laughter.

For the Watts, California native, owning a farm has been an all-consuming experience. So much to learn and so much to do.

Gbadamosi-El Amin moved to Tuskegee in 1969 to study sociology at TU. That connection paid itself forward for the new farm operator. From the agricultural school, she learned that the acreage she purchased was the former site of a working farm project led by Booker T. Whatley, the “small farm guru” who popularized the pick-your-own harvest method and subscription buyer’s club model (commonly known today as CSA) before it was widely adopted.

What looked like a mess of trees, tangled weeds, and overgrown bushes was in fact a model for sustainable agriculture cultivated by one of the country’s foremost experts on regenerative farming.

In exchange for seedlings, Gbadamosi-El Amin got a farmer to bring his tractor and a couple workers in to help clean up, as well as some Tuskegee students who joined in. The operation still runs as a “u-pick” service, inviting visitors to gather their own blueberries from the shrubs in late May through mid-August. The retired counselor also sells jams, dried fruit and blueberry tizanes — a fragrant, nutrient rich tonic that’s made from the leaves and fruit.

Education has been at the forefront of her approach. She and her husband work on the farm full time. With the help of extension agents at Tuskegee, Gbadamosi-El Amin has attended agriculture workshops and is learning how to write grants to apply for farm subsidies and improvements.

She regularly invites people interested in learning about agriculture to Shady Grove and even has allowed some to experiment with growing plants and herbs like turmeric, moringa and hibiscus on site. Although she uses organic methods, she is hesitant to seek certification, not solely because of the associated costs and paperwork but because it would likely prevent her from facilitating the sort of collaborative environment the farm’s ethos is grounded in.

“Once you get certified then you have to put all kinds of limits on your property. You can’t have people just wandering in the field to you-pick. You have to really control things. It really begins to limit the kind of interaction people can have,” she said. “What I wanted for the farm was to be a place where people could relax and enjoy themselves. That was part of what motivated me.”

Gbadamosi-El Amin said her daughters have since warmed to the idea of owning a family farm and have pushed her to create a formal long-term business proposal before they agree to get on board with any succession plans.

New federal legislation can help, but advocates face an uphill battle

In November, Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act, an attempt to address systemic barriers to success that operators have long faced; and encourage a new generation of young Black farmers who have the will but lack the capital to get established.

Among its aims are to reform USDA policies that facilitate discrimination, protect remaining Black-owned land, financially empower HBCUs to assist socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and establish a land grant program to support young, landless Black farmers. The bill would also create an agency mandated to return land to Black farmers previously seized by the government and create a federal bank to allow easier access to credit for farmers of color.

On Feb. 15, Democratic senators took that action a step further when they introduced the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a bill that would provide $4B in direct payments to these farmers to cover losses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as systemic discrimination. The bill, which has been lauded as historic by the National Black Farmer’s Association, would also lay out an additional $1 billion to address discriminatory practices at the USDA.

It will be an uphill battle to get these measures passed, but either bill would throw a much needed lifeline to farmers. Without them, the future remains as clouded as ever.

Gibbons, the 70-year-old Browntown man, for his part, is like most farmers, steadfast in his love and commitment to the livelihood. He was also frank about the farm’s future: there isn't one. Why counsel his children to leave good-paying jobs for such a risky profession?

He was brought up on farm life, the children lack his passion, he said; and would likely be unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices demanded.

“They couldn’t survive, I don’t think," Gibbons said. "Aggravation. That’s what farming is all about. I don’t know whether I love it or I’m crazy. It’s in my heart and I have no intention to quit. I’m just going have to die at it."

Read the story as it ran on montgomeryadvertiser.com here.

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bradfordarchive · 5 years ago

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clicks my fingers to no humanly discernible rhythm as i strut bk onto the dash w chara number two!! (it’s me nai bk again bt this time wearing a stick on moustache). bradley’s pinterest is HERE n u kno the drill mre abt her under the cut n like this fr those Sweet Sweet plots!!

MARGARET QUALLEY / CIS-FEMALE — don’t look now, but is that bradley milligan i see? the 23 year old psychology student is in their junior year and she is a rochester alum. i hear they can be brave, resilient, destructive and ruthless, so maybe keep that in mind. i bet she will make a name for themselves living in off campus. ( nai. 23. gmt. she/her. )

aesthetics: singeing a hole in your fishnets with the cherry of a menthol, spitting a pistachio behind the bar just to hear it ping off the nozzle top bottles, lemon in a fresh cut, a war torn poppy standing alone in an empty field, poking bruises, stomping over flowerbeds when there’s a path right next to it, dangling over ledges just to feel your chest jolt, a snarling rottweiler that should be muzzled, limp feet poking out behind a door, ‘I PROMISE I DON’T BITE’ scrawled on a name tag, slapping a bald head in front of you at the cinema like it’s a bongo, not owning a single jacket that isn’t stolen, driving a stolen car in the wrong lane against the traffic, blowing coke in someone’s face after asking “hey, does this smell funny to you?”, hair more feral than a wolf cub and eyes smudgier than a coal mine.

BACKGROUND:

father runs a gang n strip club in queens called ‘no angels’ tht fronts an affluent drug trade, primarily coke. his name is tony milligan n his gang is p infamous around there fr being jst like…. completely cutthroat n awful. they were nicknamed ‘tony’s rottweilers’ by locals bc he bsically has all of these trained dogs on leash at his command n they’re still a growing organisation tday

he’s pretty much the worst human being alive n bradley hs like….. a lot of issues with herself as a result of years of toxicity n abuse

in terms of more family bkground info her mum’s name was alyssa n she vanished when bradley was 12. jst like…. into thin air. nothing. no note. zilch. gan! n when bradley asked her dad abt it his response was essentially “guess she didn’t love us enough to stay”. as bradley’s got older tho n become (without intention) more involved in the business side of things, it’s become pretty clear there was far more to the story.

they had a horrible marriage n tony ws quite violent at the best of times, which didn’t help the fact tht alyssa ws struggling a lot w severe depression n rly just… not in the mindset to b dealing w anything else on top of tht, even where motherhood ws concerned. bradley p much… would look after her a lot n they’d both b scared of her dad n it was just a whole mess.

anyway im rambling bt basically tony (bradley’s dad) gt wind of alyssa sleeping w men tht worked fr him n he just… got rid. bradley’s kind of worked out over the yrs tht her mum didn’t jst leave on her own accord n tht something must hav happened to her bt she’s too scared of her dad to ever directly accuse him

when her mum went all of her dad’s cruelty pretty mch got channelled straight onto her. it ws diluted between two before bt as u can probably imagine her upbringing was jst…. a steep downhill decline frm tht point onwards

she learnt ways 2 deal w the incurring trauma bt they weren’t healthy ones at all! bsically jst. will do or take anything fr the distraction. chases a thrill like it’s the only way to remind her she’s alive. has absolutely no regard fr her own wellbeing n sometimes gets other ppl in trouble too bc she’s so insatiably reckless

she hd….2 separate stints of psychiatric hospitalisation n she never tlks abt it. like ever. acknowledging she’s been vulnerable is her worst nightmare n bc of the way her dad raised her she always thinks any sign of struggling within herself is weakness. truly does…. not kno how to properly emotion

CUT TO!!!! huntington beach. she’s currently living in a spacious loft above a rly busy bar tht i picture like. p close to campus so a lot of students prob frequent it?? she loves it bc she can sit on the window sill smoking n argue w ppl tht walk past drunk. jst randomly callin out like. nice chest hair Loser. i feel like she hasn’t even paid fr wifi she jst uses the bar’s free one n like. goes in there expecting free drinks all the time?? is jst like erm? i live here? let me drink? this is my house? aka she’s. a lot.

her dad’s opening up a new strip club (also called no angels bc he’s trying to lowkey make it like a chain) n he’s only allowed her to make the move bc she’s overseeing it kind of???? as well as a few guys tht worked fr him back in queens. one in particular called billy hs made the move n he’s a menace so. three cheers fr anarchy!

PERSONALITY:

the kind of sour cherry only certain people have a taste for

once drank a bottle of whiskey, insisted she could still do a cartwheel and accidentally kicked an old man’s front tooth out in the process. proceeded 2 collapse into a flower bed and laugh so much abt it that she cried

barely takes anything seriously 50% of the time and is angry the other 50%

if she was a coffee she’d be black with five grains of sugar that you couldn’t taste until the last sip

high functioning alcoholic. if u ever see her w a coffee cup u jst kno tht one sniff will confirm high alcohol percentage. honestly idk hw she does it her liver must b yellin

loyal to a point of fault. if she cares abt u and u murder a man in cold blood she’ll brawl anyone that says ur guilty

honestly wld probably fight a person over anything. sometimes she’ll jst be having a bad day n she’ll burst n take it out on whoever says the wrong thing. a minefield!

has the worst luck in romance…. ever. the majority of her past bfs hav been absolute beasts n as a result she kind of has the ‘romance is dead n love is a lie’ mentality

speakin of which i feel like she’s bi bt wldnt have dated a girl or anythin. like guys r probably…. her preference just bc historically theyv treated her worse n she hs a very self destructive personality like that. sexy!

dresses like courtney love, 2014 sky ferreira and a character from this is england had a baby. mostly wears stolen clothes from strangers and jackets that swamp her. hair is p much always a wild mess n she usually hd kind of smudgy/smoky makeup bcos apparently she’s allergic to combs and generally looking presentable… relatable content

she’s v sarcastic. sometimes blunt. kind of has a habit of…. assessing a person n she’s quite perceptive bc she’s been trained to b by the way she always has to monitor her dad’s expression fr the slightest emotion change. she’s quite confident n can p much mke a conversation out of whatever. sort of independent too like she hs a bunch of friends bt she doesn’t care abt going out places alone if she’s in a certain mood n jst wants…… to get into chaos. she’s probably kind of known around campus bt itd b a 50/50 balance between bein known as intimidating n bein known as that one girl tht always gets into anarchy

likes: fishnets, stealing cars, throwing watermelons off rooftops and whiskey

dislikes: amy schumer, honesty, yellow tulips and going home

PLOTS:

someone tht got a job at the new strip club her dad opened up in town?? either as a dancer or bartender or whtever. just a forewarning it’s probably gna b a pretty..... seedy and Not That Pleasant environment bc it’s like. a crime hotspot inevitably bc it’s a gang hangout so. ur chara wld truly be in fr a rollercoaster ride to say the least

she deals coke fr her dad’s gang bt it’s more like. a hobby than a steady source of income tht she Needs bc she just likes the thrill of the fact tht encounters in tht line of work can turn sour tbh. a Thrill Seeker! mayb she deals to ur muse??

anyone….. she’s brawled in the past like. she’s literally a menace i cnt express this enough. wil jst randomly throw a drink in someone’s face fr no reason bc she’s bored. she’s probably pissed off 1000 diff ppl in 1000 diff ways. the possibilities r endless n i jst think tht’s a sexy prospect!

fwbs perhaps??? exes??? (probably ws a tumultuous relationship wtever…. ur muse is like like bradley is. a handful)

mayb someone tht she met at an aa meeting when she hd to go fr a court mandated thing one time after bein arrested fr public indecency. i feel like there’s probably a rly expensive statue somewhere thts fancily Sculpted n she like. did a flying kick n kicked the dick of it off n gt arrested fr it

ppl she……. Goes Wild Goes Crazy w. truly jst the most self destructive person alive so anyone w a similar mindset wld b a hellish bt fun combination

on the contrary a gd influence cld b nice perhaps? like someone tht genuinely cares abt her n she jst doesn’t kno hw to compute it

um. honestly the world’s our oyster. hmu n we cn brainstorm if none of tht catches ur eye!

#huntingtonintro #depression tw #abuse tw #drugs tw #alcohol tw #alcoholism tw #hospitalisation tw #disappearance tw #death tw #grief tw #murder tw #self harm tw #addiction tw #so sry there r so many tws bradleys life hs been. An Experience to say the least

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tomahawk-swing · 6 years ago

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How about a drabble where Tomahawkman first meets Dingo?

Send me something to drabble about

[[I actually wrote this twice before but neither version ever truly satisfied me, so I really want to change Tomahawkman’s whole origin story someday … But I don’t have the motivation story for it right now orz

The rough idea I have is that he was programmed by Dingo’s mom, but she never had time to finalize the project. Shanka’s mom (her coworker at the village’s school) gave it to Dingo after his mom passed, but he needed a PET to install the Navi files into it. Dingo left his village with no money, and had to work odd jobs for a while until he could get his PET, and download Tomahawkman into it. I also wanted to change his creation date, but it conflicts with the backstory I have up to now, so I’m stumped …

The latest drabble was previously somewhere on my blog, but I supposed that I deleted it like a year ago when I decided to change the backstory … It’s probably not much different from what the story would be like today, but I don’t have the energy to edit or rewrite it ;-;

So here it is again, under the cut, raw from … October 2014 x) ]]

Whenthe much awaited day finally arrived, Dingo woke up with the daylight, afteranother the night in the forest. He made his way back to the city, using histomahawk for directions as long as he was still in the outskirts, andeventually reached the NetNavi store’s street again. There was a large crowdpatiently waiting in line : apparently, the whole city had decided to attendthe shop’s reopening … The young boy put his hands in his pockets and joinedthe line, keeping a tight grip around the chip which contained his futureNavi’s data.

This was certainly the hardest part of the whole week of waiting, asDingo was forced to stand still and barely move in the line. It was past middaywhen he could finally enter the shop, and the boy praised himself for hisdetermination. He raised his gaze and stared at the numerous displays aroundhim, which flashed with captivating adverts and promoted the Christmas-specialprovided by the store. The boy looked for a map of the place, and found outthat PET supplies were on the first floor, while Navi customizing was on thethird.

Heclimbed up the first flight of stairs and walked up to one of the multipledisplays, which all stood under a sign saying “Buy a PET here !”.This was exactly what Dingo was looking for, and he immediately started tofollow the instructions on the screen : he chose the offer he had seen a weekago by the store’s glass wall, and was able to choose further options for his PET.Colors, Navi mark, whether he wanted a handle or not … There was so much todecide already ! The young boy followed his future Navi’s main color scheme andslotted the chip in, so that he could load the Navi mark’s file.

After he was done, Dingo received a piece of paper which indicated hisorder’s number, and the display told him to take a seat and wait for his numberto be called. He would be able to pay right after receiving the PET, and couldgo up to the customization floor when that was done. Since there were so manyclients that day, the waiting lasted a real while, or at least it seemed so toDingo : he decided to sit right next to the cashier, and spent the time lookingat all the other clients.

Most people were lone adults, probably getting their children a first ornew PET for Christmas ; some were elderly couples, and were the ones to oftenask for the employees’ help. The loudest people were families, as smaller kidswhined because they were too young to get their own PET, and older ones arguedwith each other about which options they were going to take, or what theirNavis were going to look like.

When Dingo’s number was finally called, he jumped to his feet and walkedup to the corresponding cashier. The woman looked surprised to see him comingon his own, but she didn’t ask any question and handed him his brand new PET,while the young boy paid for it. He thanked the cashier and immediately leftfor the third floor, typing excitedly on the device’s buttons as he did so : hehad imagined this moment so many times, and knew exactly what he was supposedto do next.

Dingo walked up to another machine, which stood under a “Customizeyour NetNavi !” sign, and quickly linked his PET to the display : hiscurrent normal Navi’s characteristics were immediately analysed and displayedon the wide screen, and Dingo was able to slot his chip in as well. He thenproceeded to load each of the files into the corresponding part of the Navi’sprogramming : basic information, armor, weapons, strength and weaknesses,personality …

When he was done, Dingo contemplated his work for a moment beforepressing the “validate” button. His Navi’s outlook had changeddrastically, and perfectly suited the boy’s expectations. Since he hadn’tbought any new feature, Dingo didn’t have to pay at all, and he slotted thechip and the PET out of the machine.

The crowd had gotten so dense around the shop that he had to wait untilhe was out again to look at the screen, which was asking him to start the initializingprocess. The boy obeyed, and a progress bar appeared right next to apercentage, with the remaining time until the programm was done being installed… Fifteen hours and fourty-two minutes ! Dingo audibly gasped at the sight, andfelt a sudden urge to slash the PET in half with his tomahawk. He took a deepbreath and tried his best to calm down : he could resist another day, afterwaiting for a whole week …

Since he had absolutely no money left, this time, there was no way hecould spend the night at the hotel again. The boy walked back to the beachinstead, where he sat down and ate a sandwich, before leaving again for anotherwalk. When the sky started to darken, he climbed up the hill he had discovereda few days ago, where he could sleep without fearing to get woken up byanything else than daylight. He checked the PET a last time before trying tofall asleep, which took him more time than usual, considering how excited hewas about finally getting his own NetNavi.

Inwhat he believed was another dream, Dingo could hear a voice calling out hisname … But it strangely was no familiar voice, even though he was certain tohave heard it before. The voice was getting more insisting, and it’s not untilit became a yell that the boy really woke up and realised who was calling : hegrabbed his PET and stared at its screen, grinning broadly at the small figurewhich wore the same cheerful expression.

“Finally awake ? I was starting tobelieve that I had gotten your name wrong ! Nice to meet you, I’m Tomahawkman !We’ll be a team from now on, so I hope that we’ll get along well !”

“You’re an efficient alarm clock, that’salready a good start ! Nice to meet you too !”

The boy stood up and stared at the sea in front of him : he had chosen thisplace specially for the sight, which was quite nice to wake up to. He turnedthe PET around so that its screen faced the landscape :

“Welcome to the world, Tomahawkman ! Anyfirst impressions ?”

“For starters, that’s a great viewyou’ve got here ! Is this where you live ?”

“Ah, sadly, no … And to tell you thetruth, I don’t intend to stay here for a long while, even if it’s quite nice.There’s tourists everywhere, and these people really get on my nerves.”The boy didn’t even realise that he’d started to complain - he would neveradmit it out loud, but he’d deeply missed talking with someone. And even thoughhe’d only met his Navi a few minutes ago, he already considered Tomahawkman assomeone he could confide himself in.

“Oh, I see … Then what are you doinghere ? Aren’t you a tourist, too ?”

“No ! Well … I’m a traveller. I’m nothere to lay on the beach all day and get a tan. I want to travel across theworld !”

“Travel ? Sounds good to me ! Where arewe going ?”

There was a pause, as Dingo didn’t have ananswer to that question. But he didn’t want his Navi to be worried already, sogave the first name that came to his mind : “Japan ! I’m going to Japan!”

“Japan ? This is Ameroupa, right ? Thenyou’ve got a long way to go, but don’t worry, I’ll be by your side all the time! I’ll fight alongside you, and help you out whenever I can ! As long as it’snot homework, I’m up for anything !”

Dingo laughed wholeheartedly : he had intended for his Navi to belively, but this exceeded all of his expectations :

“Hahaha, don’t worry about that, I don’teven have homework ! I’ll make sure that you get an occasion to test out yourweapons soon, that’s a promise !”

“I hope so, it would be a shame if thisbeautiful axe remained useless ! I don’t mean to crack its paint, but if that’sthe only price I have to pay to have some fun, then I’m more than ready !”

The boy chuckled again and turned the holographic screen off asproceeded to walk down the hill, still holding his PET so that he could see hisNavi on the device’s smaller screen :

“Now that I’ve spent all my money to getyou, I should try to find a way to gain some again … I’ll run out of sandwichesand dried meat soon …”

“Wait, aren’t you living with yourparents ? Don’t you have any siblings ?”

Dingo wasn’t expecting his Navi to bring suchsubjects up already, but Tomahawkman’s curiousness had no more limits than thenumber of words he could utter within a minute, apperently :

“Well, no, I don’t … But that’s a longstory, I shouldn’t burden you with this already …”

“We’ve got a whole life in front of us,Dingo, so go on ! I can afford to listen for as long as you need !”

The boy took a deep breath and sat on a bench nearby : this was indeedgoing to take some time … He explained that he used to live in a village, in aforest far beyond the desert, and that his parents died in the fire which burnthis home down more than a year ago. He also talked about his childhood bestfriend, Shanka, about how he had to live on his own even though he was still akid, and ended his story with the latest events, the Martial Art tournament andhis trip to the seaside.

“Long story indeed … I’m sorry for yourparents, Dingo. I’m just glad to see that you were clever enough to take careof yourself, and it’s impressive to know how much you’ve travelled ! I bet lotsof kids your age would have given up after a day, but you kept going …”

“That’s because I was determined toreach this place and get you, Tomahawkman !”

“Hey, don’t give me more credit than Ideserve ! So you programmed me all by yourself ?”

Dingo had to admit that this was only partly true, and took this chanceto explain a little more about how his life had been for past months.Tomahawkman kept listening quietly, nodding from time to time as an onlyreaction :

“You’re strong-willed, that’s the leastI can tell ! And you’re a fighter, we’re going to get along on that point ! Butyour story made me think, maybe you could use one of your multiple talents toearn some money.”

“What do you mean, use my talents ? I’mnot really talented in anything …”

“Come on, you explained yourself thatyou loved wood carving, for example !”

“Oh, that’s right … I’m still not thatgood, but maybe I could try to sell some statues ! There’s plenty of woodaround here, I could easily get supplies in the forest …”

“That’s the spirit ! Do you want me toguide you up to the forest ? I should be able to find a map of this place!”

The boy looked around him : there was no one to be seen, so he took histomahawk out and waved it in front of the PET’s screen :

“Don’t worry about that, I can trust myinstincts !”

“Your instincts ? What do you mean?”

But Dingo wasn’t listening anymore, and after whispering the usualincantations, he cast the tomahawk high in the air, waited for it to fall down,picked it up and followed the direction it pointed :

“See ? If I keep following my tomahawk’sdirections, I’ll be certain to reach my goal ! This tradition has passed downin my family for generations, so you can believe in me !”

Tomahawkman didn’t really know how to react without offending hisoperator, which was something he’d rather avoid doing only a couple minutesafter meeting him for the first time …

“Well, if you say so … Let’s see if thisthing leads us the right way !”

The young boy nodded and kept walking, repeating the same gesturesmultiple times. After a while, Tomahawkman noticed that they hadn’t gottencloser to the forest at all :

“Dingo, are you really sure this is thegood way ?”

“Trust in me ! You’ll have to learn tobelieve in my instincts if you want us to be a good team !”

“Sorry, I just thought that it ratherwas the NetNavi’s job to guide his operator … But if you can do it all byyourself, it’s fine !” He lowered his tone and added : “But itdoesn’t look like your tomahawk is really trustworthy …”

“Hey, I’ve heard that ! I tell you,we’ll get there eventually ! And you’re not the one who has to walk, as far asI know !”

“You’re doing that to yourself, so don’tcomplain ! Just let me get a map and guide you !”

“No way ! I’ll find my own road, thanks!”

“I hope that not all humans are asstubborn as you are, or your world must be a real mess …”

Dingo didn’t reply and stuffed the PET in his pocket instead : he wasstarting to realise that programming his Navi to be as stubborn as he was hadbeen a bad idea … They weren’t going to get far if they kept headbutting ! Butthis argument apart, the boy was still extremely happy to have Tomahawkmanalongside him, at last. He couldn’t wait to try out his Navi’s abilities in aNetBattle ! This day really had the potential to become his best birthday ever…

#Anonymous #drabble #[[this is so old that i don't even dare re-read it #lately i've felt like my writing isn't good and isn't improving at all so ... why not just post old stuff that i was happy with back then]]

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Last week, we introduced a method for evaluating Democratic presidential contenders, which focused on their ability to build a coalition among key constituencies within the party. In particular, our method claims there are five essential groups of Democratic voters, which we describe as:

Party Loyalists, who are mostly older, lifelong Democrats who care about experience and electability.

The Left.

Millennials and Friends, who are young, cosmopolitan and social-media-savvy.

Black voters.

And Hispanic voters, who for some purposes can be grouped together with Asian voters.

The goal is for candidates to form a coalition consisting of at least three of the five groups.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that this is the only way to evaluate the field; rather, it’s part of what we hope will be a fairly broad toolkit of approaches that we’ll be applying as we cover the Democratic candidates at FiveThirtyEight over the course of the next 18(!!) months.1 Furthermore, in reality, the various ideological and demographic constituencies within the Democratic Party are more fluid than this analysis implies. Nonetheless, it has influenced my thinking — the coalition-building model has made me more skeptical about the chances for Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, for instance, but more bullish about Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker. In this article, I’ll go through a set of 10 leading contenders and map out their potential winning coalitions; we’ll tackle some of the long-shot candidates later on this week.

Let’s start with the man who has led most polls of the Democratic field so far, former Vice President Joe Biden. One lesson from the 2016 Republican primary might be to approach the polls with more humility. If a candidate is ahead in the polls for a sustained period of time — as Trump was for much of late 2015 and early 2016 — maybe we journalists ought to give a certain amount of credit to that, rather than just chalking it up to high name recognition or becoming overly wedded to some theory about how voters are “supposed” to behave.

With that said, there are some trouble signs for Biden. He performs worse among those voters who are paying the most attention to the primary, suggesting that his high name recognition compared to most other candidates is a significant factor in his lead.

And I’m not sure it’s going to be very easy for Biden to expand his coalition beyond the 25 percent or so that he’s getting in polls now. Presumably many of those voters are Party Loyalists, a group for whom he’s a good fit. Biden also has strong ratings among black voters, perhaps in part as a result of his being Barack Obama’s vice president — although his handling of the Anita Hill hearings and hawkish stance on criminal justice issues could give him problems among black voters if his record is subjected to greater scrutiny.

But where does Biden go after that? Could he gain support from The Left? Maybe a bit, but his dalliances with economic populism are more rhetorical than substantive; Biden’s voting record, and it’s a long one, is fairly centrist on economic policy. Could he win over Hispanic voters? Perhaps, as Hispanics sometimes back establishment-friendly nominees (like John Kerry in 2004), but Biden’s home state, Delaware, doesn’t have very many Hispanic voters (it has quite a few African-Americans, by contrast) and I’m less willing to give credit to a politician who hasn’t historically had to develop a relationship with a minority constituency. Still, a (Hillary) Clintonian constituency of Party Loyalists, black and Hispanic voters is probably Biden’s best bet.

When I originally conceived this article, I’d planned on splitting the Democratic electorate into three rather than five groups, which I’d roughly thought of as “white Hillary Democrats,” “white Bernie Democrats” and “nonwhite Democrats.” You can probably see why I abandoned that framework. One of the problems with it is that it groups blacks, Hispanics and other racial minorities together when (as in 2008) they sometimes gravitate toward different candidates.

But another problem is that what I had thought of as “white Bernie voters” is also really two different groups: Voters who belong to The Left and those who belong with the Millennials and Friends group. In 2016, Sanders got slightly more than 40 percent of the Democratic vote nationally, which corresponds to winning clear majorities of those two groups, plus making some inroads with younger black and Hispanic voters later on in the campaign. This year, he’s polling at a little less than 20 percent. The most obvious interpretation is that, while Sanders has held on to much of his support on The Left, millennials were mostly just looking for an alternative to Clinton, and they are now considering abandoning Sanders for younger, flashier alternatives such as Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris.

So how does Sanders form a winning coalition? He probably does need the millennials to return to his camp, which might happen if the field narrows and his major competition is, say, Joe Biden — but it would be trickier against a Beto or a Harris or a Cory Booker. (Hence the Beto-Bernie wars.) And finding a third coalition partner is even trickier. Party Loyalists are liable to be bitter over his treatment of Clinton in 2016 and over the fact that Sanders is not actually a Democrat. Even groups such as unions — important bridges between The Left and the establishment — have been hesitant to support Sanders’s candidacy.

As for black and Hispanic voters, maybe Sanders can hope that his weak performance among those groups in 2016 was more a matter of Clinton’s strengths than his own liabilities. Sanders’s favorability ratings are reasonably good among black and Hispanic voters, in fact. But a recent survey of influential women of color found very little support for Sanders — and in contrast to four years ago, he’s now running in a field that will likely contain a number of black and Hispanic candidates. Overall, Sanders looks like a candidate with a high floor but a low ceiling, and one who would probably benefit from the field remaining divided for as long as possible.

Warren has somewhat similar problems to Sanders, including having to build a relationship with black and Hispanic voters after being elected from an extremely white state — and having already made a misstep on issues of racial identity when she took a DNA test to “prove” she had Native American ancestry.

But she potentially has a higher ceiling because she’s more likely to win support from Party Loyalists, given that she’s a Democrat rather than an independent, and that she doesn’t have baggage from 2016. She’s also ever-so-slightly to Sanders’s right in a way that places her closer to the median Democratic voter.

The most likely winning coalition for Warren, in fact, probably involves the three predominately white groups: The Left, Party Loyalists and Millennials and Friends. (One of the things that helps her with millennials is that Warren has a bigger and better social media presence than you might assume.) Her path is tricky; she probably needs Sanders to founder. And that’s before getting into the gender dynamics surrounding her campaign and whether misogyny might hurt her chances. But she has a head start, having been the first of the big names to take official steps toward running and having hired key staffers in Iowa and elsewhere, which could give her more time to figure out a winning approach.

O’Rourke has one of the more obvious three-pronged coalitions: He’d hope to win on the basis of support from Millenials and Friends, Party Loyalists and Hispanics. The groups might support him for somewhat different reasons, and O’Rourke won’t win any of them without a fight, but he has a clearer path than the other Democrats we’ve mentioned so far.

O’Rourke really did help to motivate a surge in young voter turnout in his Texas Senate race last year; voters aged 18-29 were 16 percent of the electorate in 2018 as compared to 13 percent in the previous midterm in 2014. And overall turnout was up 80 percent as compared with 2014. O’Rourke won young voters overwhelmingly, whereas in 2014, Democratic nominee David Alameel had actually lost that group to Republican incumbent John Cornyn. O’Rourke also has one of the better social media presences among the Democratic contenders.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party establishment has been encouraging O’Rourke to run, presumably because they see him as electable and potentially able to raise gargantuan sums of money for the party. Electability is a fuzzy concept, and one should be careful not to let “electable” become a synonym for “good-looking white guy” and vice versa. With that said, O’Rourke’s performance in Texas was quite strong relative to the partisanship of the state — even though he lost to Ted Cruz (by just under 3 percentage points), it was the best performance for a Democrat in a high-profile statewide Texas race in years. His policy views are a bit squishy, but that could also be an advantage of a sort — the same could be said of Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.

There’s liable to be a Big Discussion at some point about Beto’s authenticity among Hispanic voters. O’Rourke has a Hispanic nickname, Beto, but his given first name is Robert and he doesn’t actually have any Hispanic ancestry. With that said, he represented a district in El Paso that is almost 80 percent Hispanic, and he beat an incumbent Hispanic Democrat to first win the seat in 2012. He also won 64 percent of the Hispanic vote against Cruz (who is Cuban-American2), which is pretty good in a state where the Hispanic vote can be more conservative than in other parts of the country. (Alameel won just 47 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2014, by contrast.)

The candidate who looks best according to the coalition-building model is probably not O’Rourke, however. Instead, it’s California Sen. Kamala Harris, who potentially has strength with all five groups.

Harris, who is of mixed Jamaican (black) and Indian descent, was easily the top choice in the survey of influential women of color that I mentioned earlier. So while I don’t automatically want to assume that nonwhite candidates will necessarily win over voters who share their racial background — it took Obama some time to persuade African-Americans to vote for him in 2008 — Harris seems to be off to a pretty good head start. And her coalition not only includes black voters, but also potentially Asian and Hispanic voters. Harris did narrowly lose Hispanic voters to Sanchez, a Hispanic Democrat, in 2016 (while winning handily among Asian voters). But her approval ratings among Hispanic voters are high in California, a state where the group makes up around a third of the electorate.

If black voters and the Hispanic/Asian group constitute Harris’s first two building blocks, she’d then be able to decide which of the three remaining (predominately white) Democratic groups to target to complete her trifecta. And you could make the case for any of the three. Harris polls better among well-informed voters, which could suggest strength among Party Loyalists. She’s young-ish (54 years old) and has over 1 million Instagram followers, which implies potential strength among millennials. (And remember, Democratic millennials highly value racial diversity.) Harris’s worst group — despite a highly liberal, anti-Trump voting record — might actually be The Left, the whitest and most male group, from which she’s drawn occasional criticism for her decisions as a prosecutor and a district attorney.

Overall, however, this is a strong position for Harris. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie points out, it may actually be a strategic advantage to be a black candidate in this Democratic primary in 2020.

If Harris rates strongly by this system, then it might follow that New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who is also black, would look strong as well. Indeed, Booker may be somewhat overlooked by the pundit class. He’s been pretty explicit about the fact that he’s eventually going to run for the nomination. And he scored strong favorability ratings in a recent survey of Iowa voters, although he isn’t yet many voters’ first choice.

With that said, there are a couple of areas in which Booker could fall a bit short of Harris. New Jersey doesn’t have as many Hispanic or Asian voters as California does (and Booker isn’t part Asian, as Harris is). And if The Left has some problems with Harris, it’s liable to have a lot of problems with Booker, who many leftists see as being too close to Wall Street and to big business. Winning on the basis of a coalition of black voters, Party Loyalists and Millennials and Friends is certainly plausible for Booker, but he doesn’t have quite as many options as Harris does.

As I said earlier, I don’t think this five-corners metric is the only way to judge the candidates. And there are other heuristics by which Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator, might better positioned. For instance, if Democrats are looking for a candidate who forms the best contrast to Trump, she has a pretty good case, as a woman from the Midwest who comes across as temperamentally moderate and without a lot of Trumpian bombast.

But I’m not quite sure how she builds a winning coalition. Klobuchar is potentially a near-perfect choice for Party Loyalists, who are liable to see her Midwestern moderation as being highly electable, especially after she won her Senate race by 24 percentage points last year in a state where Trump nearly defeated Clinton. Beyond that, though? Minnesota is a pretty white state, so Klobuchar doesn’t have a lot of practice at appealing to black, Hispanic or Asian voters. Her voting record is fairly moderate — she’s voted with Trump about twice as often as Booker has, for example — so she’s not an obvious fit for The Left. Millennials, perhaps? Her social media metrics so far are paltry — she has just 140,000 Twitter followers, for example — although (not totally unlike Warren) she has a goofy relatability that could translate well to Instagram and so on.

Klobuchar’s chances probably depend more on “The Party Decides” view of the primary than the more voter-centric vision I’ve presented here. In that view, party elites and Party Loyalists are leading indicators for how the rest of the party will eventually vote. One can imagine Klobuchar gaining traction if she performs well in Iowa, for instance. That’s a lot of “ifs,” however, whereas other candidates would seem to have more straightforward paths.

Another Midwestern senator, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, in some ways has a more obvious route toward building a coalition. Like Klobuchar, he can make some good arguments about electability, having been elected three times in an increasingly red state, potentially making him an appealing choice to Party Loyalists. But he’s also a tried-and-true economic populist, who would be able to build alliances with The Left, and he’s reportedly a top choice among labor unions.

Where Brown might pick up the third group for his coalition is harder to say. Ohio has a reasonably large black vote, so he may be able to appeal to African-American voters. His limited social media presence and rumpled demeanor wouldn’t seem to make him a natural fit for millenials, although rumpledness didn’t stop Sanders from gaining traction with millennials four years ago. Domestic violence allegations against Brown, stemming from his divorce in 1986, have historically not moved the needle against him in his Ohio campaigns but could be a concern to younger voters, especially younger women, if they’re litigated on the national stage.

Gillibrand, who looks increasingly likely to run, sometimes gives the impression of having conducted an analysis like the one you’re reading in this article and taking a color-by-number approach to the Democratic primary. But it can come out a bit awkwardly. On the one hand, Gillibrand has the lowest Trump Score of any senator, meaning that she has opposed Trump more often than any other Democrat in the upper chamber. On the other hand, she once took relatively conservative stances on gun control, immigration and other issues when serving in Congress as a representative from upstate New York. On the one hand, she uses leftist and feminist terms such as “intersectional” to describe how she sees the future. On the other hand, she has ties to Wall Street (as many New York Democrats do).

Gillibrand’s most natural path might be to start with Party Loyalists and build out a coalition from there. But her calls for Sen. Al Franken to resign — issued after several women accused him of groping them — reportedly triggered a backlash among some donor-class Democrats, who [warning, editorial comment ahead] apparently don’t care how stupid they look for blaming a woman for a man’s #MeToo problems.

With all that said, Gillibrand potentially has a reasonably high ceiling. In New York state, she has high favorability ratings among nonwhite voters and an especially large gender gap in how voters view her. So if she isn’t getting a lot of buzz among white male Democratic pundits, you should be a little bit wary about concluding that the lack of buzz is representative of the broader Democratic coalition.

We’re getting toward the end of what you might consider the top couple of tiers of Democratic candidates. And I’m not quite sure whether to consider Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, as one of the frontrunners or as more of a long-shot candidate. In the recent Selzer/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa, almost two-thirds of likely Democratic caucusgoers didn’t have an opinion about Castro either way. And neither his tenure as mayor nor his job as HUD Secretary necessarily required him to weigh in on the major issues of the day. So for better or worse, he’s starting out with a relatively blank slate and a malleable policy platform.

Castro does have the advantage of being potentially the only Hispanic candidate in the race. He’s a good speaker, having given the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic convention. And he’s been relatively explicit about his desire to run — he may even officially declare his intentions in the next few days. A coalition of Hispanics, Party Loyalists (if he can persuade party elites about the importance of the Hispanic vote) and Millenials and Friends might be Castro’s best option. As it happens, that’s also O’Rourke’s coalition, so the two Texans could represent a problem for one another.

There’s about an 80 percent chance that the Democratic nominee will be one of the 10 candidates I just mentioned, according to betting markets. Still, that does leave some room for a long shot, and there are literally dozens of other Democrats who are contemplating a presidential bid. There are also some candidates, such as Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who don’t seem especially likely to run, but who could be formidable if they did. We’ll cover some of those other Democrats in “lightning round” fashion in a third and final installment of this series later this week.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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nvlynnae · 6 years ago

Text

I actually received my Ancestry.com results a couple of days ago, but I have been so busy with life in general as well as making new discoveries of new cousins. I may even be close to breaking down a wall in my mom’s maternal great-grandma’s branch! It’s exciting to say the least! There is a cousin who is certain that we meet up there through her 90 year old father with a surname I have never heard of in our history. She is supposed to be getting me some information soon.

I have to say, I am already starting to meet some amazing people from both sides of my family tree through Ancestry and 23andMe. Many of my cousins on there are very similar to the ones I have grown up knowing: super caring and seem to be really fun to know!

It’s honestly a bit easier to find out your joint family history and also about these individuals as a whole through Ancestry. I did, however, already meet a handful of great individuals through 23andMe. I am totally pleased with my decision to do both tests.

Which Test Do I Recommend

If you are looking to do your own DNA testing and don’t know which to do, here are my basic recommendations:

If you know both sides of your family and you are more interested in genealogy, then go with the one at Ancestry.

If you know both sides of your family and are more interested in the health, the more science-y side of it, your haplogroup(s), and actually seeing in cool graphics where your identical DNA strands match with other people, then definitely go with the 23andMe. By the way, my maternal haplogroup is V7. It showed me that Benjamin Franklin is also part of the V group and therefore somehow related through our female ancestors. In my experience so far, connections on 23andMe are less likely to respond (or respond knowing much about their extended family history) than those on Ancestry. This is likely because many do the 23andMe for the health results and the big events they do in some cities trying to get a lot more people tested. They did this awhile back in the Reno area and it was HUGE! Many who I personally know that did it then actually have no interest in genealogy. Some of the connections I have found through 23andMe have been really helpful, though!

If you don’t know one or both of your sides and can afford it (I bought both of mine during amazing sales, which they often have around big family-related holidays, especially)… then I recommend both. A big reason for this is because you will have a much larger pool of connections since most people only do one or the other. I wouldn’t have found a potential first cousin if I hadn’t done the 23andMe. I also wouldn’t have found the amazing (likely about 3rd or 4th) cousins that I have found and who are trying to help me crack the code if I hadn’t done Ancestry.

One of my super helpful new-found cousins also told me about GedMatch where you can connect with people who have only done one of the three main DNA tests. There is also one called something like Family Finder.

GedMatch takes raw data from each of these and blends them together. You have to submit one, but it’s relatively easy to do. They recommend if you have done more that one test to choose the test to upload raw data from in this order (you only upload one no matter what… also remember to NOT unzip the file before uploading. I did that incorrectly the first time I tried): The older 23andMe test (I believe they said by or before 2014 testing), then Ancestry, then the newer 23andMe, and finally the Family Finder one. This is mostly due to something the test companies do or don’t do that can cap off the information available even in the raw form. I uploaded from my Ancestry test.

Gedmatch is also great, because at least one of the tests I did caps it off at a certain amount of connections it will show you. What if one that they don’t share is actually important to your search? Well, if he or she also did GedMatch, you can now find out about them! Too cool!

My raw data is still being crunched on GedMatch, but I am looking forward to checking out all that they have to offer, too. Apparently they have some cool tools that the other two don’t. Yes, I have now been researching that, too. You know me. 😉

How Do My 23andMe and Ancestry DNA Results Differ

This chart from Ancestry.com differs a bit from my DNA test from 23andMe, but that is because they sampled and grouped their findings differently.

Here is a side-to-side comparison:

The Ancestry one lumps more into the Great Britain category than 23’s British and Irish. The Scandinavian on Ancestry is more defined than 23’s Broadly Northwestern Europe (which would include that and more).

They both show 100% European, so yes… I’m still disappointed. LOL Believing all my life of a generous amount of Native American blood and loving that part of my history… I was truly hoping that 23andMe somehow doesn’t have it all defined or something…. I know, wishful thinking. BUT, I just discovered something the other day on there. You can change the “confidence level” from 50% to 90% which is much more conservative and not as speculative.

When I do that, my European goes down to 98.8%. Interesting….

British and Irish from 60.6% to 13.7%… huge difference. So they are assuming quite a lot when they are guesstimating that it’s all from Britain and Ireland in the usual confidence level they use. It does by the way (in the regular confidence view) show both of these nationalities, but British is about twice as much as the Irish in their estimation on there.

Scandinavian from 4.4% to 0.6% (but we are quite sure of this being in our family on my mom’s side).

French and German from 20.8% to 0.3%.

Broadly Northwestern European from 13.9% to 70.6%. I have to say, if I had seen this percentage meaning that they pretty much don’t know what I am… I would have been even more disappointed. This is likely what ate up my Iberian, too.

Broadly European 13.7% – new category for me. This is basically even more “who knows what you are”. This is probably where much of my Scandinavian and French/German went.

Unassigned 1.2% – new category for me. Hmm… I wonder what this could be.

As far as the Iberian on 23 (which I have definitely determined to be on my bio father’s side due to about one third of my connections over there having at least a trace)… the Europe West category on Ancestry includes the far eastern part of Spain with it.

I was actually REALLY getting into maybe being a bit Portuguese, especially when I started checking out recipes for my new-found nationality “group”. A lot of their recipes are very similar to how I love to cook, so I thought I was onto something. I might still be, but it’s muddied up a bit now. Either way, I am going to be trying some new recipes soon!

My Desire to be Part Basque

BUT�� I’m thinking that this area that Ancestry shows might be where the Basque people are from. I already absolutely LOVE Basque culture, food, etc.

Living for the last 21 years in northern Nevada has taught me all about the Basque. Hubby, “Buddy”, and I LOVE going out to a couple of Basque restaurants (when we can afford it….lol). It’s SO worth the money when you go to the right ones.

Our favorites are The Star in Elko, Nevada (a few hours away) and then J.T. Basque in Minden, Nevada (a little over an hour away). There is also a fave of ours that is a bit closer and in Carson City. Villa Basque Cafe is only open for breakfast and lunch, so they don’t do the whole family dining experience. They do have some amazing Basque breakfast dishes, though. So amazing that I have yet to try any of their lunches. You can also buy Basque chorizo, tamales, Portuguese Olive Oils, deli meats and cheeses, dry cod (never tried), a variety of pepper jellies, a whole slew of goodies imported from Spain, and some of their homemade sauces to take home. We do this often and Hubby even gets orders from a couple of people to pick some up for them when he goes. There is nothing like handmade Basque chorizo! The best in my opinion. Carson City is about an hour away from us, but we do go there quite often.

Does the Reno area have any good Basque? (We live in a valley outside of Reno.) Depends on who you ask and (as far as I can tell) how familiar they are with REAL Basque dining. 😉 The ones who have experienced places like The Star and JT’s are definitely not so impressed with the Reno area’s offerings. We totally did not like the most popular one in Reno. It wasn’t that good for any type of cuisine (not just comparing to Basque) and the service was horrible. Condescending and minimal to say the least. Trust me! It’s worth the drive to JT’s. 😉

Anyway…..lol Suffice it to say that I would LOVE to find out that I have Basque ancestry!

The Breakdown of Categories on Ancestry DNA

Great Britain 80% – Includes England, Scotland, and Wales.

Scandinavia 9% – Includes Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Finland is elsewhere; see below).

Europe West 6% – Includes Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein.

Finland/Northwest Russia 3% – Includes Finland and Russia (northwest).

Europe East 1% – Includes Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, Croatia.

Ireland/Scotland/Wales <1% – Just includes Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. These nationalities are partly included in Great Britain above.

What’s Next

So, what’s next for me?

I’m waiting to see what I can discover on GedMatch when my results are all analyzed etc. By the way, GedMatch is totally free, but they also take donations because it is totally volunteer. It’s not as flashy as the other two when they give you the results and matches and all, but they have SO much that they do differently. They totally add to the experience by connecting all of the testing sites’ results together. Pretty cool what they are doing!

I am totally looking forward to getting to know my new-found cousins! One even mentioned an upcoming reunion. I know that I cannot afford to attend it, but would love to in the future sometime. One said that we have the same cheeks and smile, but I haven’t seen a picture of her, yet. It’s great to imagine looking like someone else (in addition to my children). My grandma always told me that I looked JUST like her grandma. Problem is… the only picture she had was with her face looking down since she was blind. I do, however, think that I somewhat have my grandma’s smile. It mostly looks like hers during her teen years. Regardless, I honestly do love my smile. Some have told me that it’s too big…Not! 😉 But, I especially love it because both of my children also share it! ❤

After discovering that I am somehow related to a family line with a particular surname, I saw a picture of who is likely some degree of great-uncle (very slight chance direct line, but probably not). He appears to also have my cheekbones and nose.

My nose is a bit on the small side… My sister used to tell me things like God forgot to give me a nose when he was handing them out and asked how I breath through it…. honestly, not too well….lol Besides being smaller, it’s been broken… 😉 But this guy (at least from the front) appears to have a small nose, too.

I’m truly hoping to get more information about my potential first cousin. I now believe that I am the bio daughter of her father’s brother. I came to this conclusion partially since her maiden name is the same as a whole lot of my connections.

The search continues…

My Ancestry DNA Results Are In I actually received my Ancestry.com results a couple of days ago, but I have been so busy with life in general as well as making new discoveries of new cousins.

#DNA Testing #Genealogy

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thephoenixiaproject · 4 years ago

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Entry 02 (07/01/2020): Research, Inspirations and Ideas

Hi there!!

Welcome to entry number two! This project is still VERY much in the preparation stage, so I wanted to use this one as an opportunity to link all the sources that I’ve been using as a basis up until this point, as well as specific pieces of work that have inspired this project, plus some brainstormed ideas that might be experimented with in the future.

The next couple of entries after this will most likely be focusing on making some first demos, visual ideas, mood-boards, notebook scribbles, and maybe some character/story ideas too! I won’t lie, the scope of all the different areas does slightly scare me, especially since I have next to no experience in a lot of them - I feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants!!

But I’m definitely going to make a lot of mistakes as I try some new skills and play with new concepts for the first time, so please bear with me as I stumble around in the dark for a while :D Expect most of my nonsense to eventually end up getting heavily changed, retconned, or cut entirely!

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A List of Sources (at the time of writing!):

AWARE - AWAreness during REsuscitation - A Prospective Study (resuscitationjournal.com, October 6th 2014) - The first piece I found! The start of this idea came when I was thinking about how my dreams worked (more on that later!), and for some reason I suddenly remembered one religious studies lesson I had in school when I was 14 I think? Part of the lesson was talking about out-of-body and near-death experiences, and out of curiosity I looked it up to see if anything had changed. That’s when I came across this!

“What Really Happens After Cardiac Arrest?” - The New York Academy of Sciences (nyas.org, December 6th 2019) - A talk on the subject led by the Lead Author of the 2014 study, held in late 2019! There’s loads of interesting information and anecdotes in here.

Life — after life: Does consciousness continue after our brain dies? (nationalpost.com, April 18th 2019 [Updated October 2019]) - This article goes very in-depth as well as referencing a LOT of different studies, some even offering opposing viewpoints to each other! There’s loads of quotes and studies here that I really want to look more into.

Greyson NDE Scale (iands.org, 25th April 2015) - The NDE scale referenced in the National Post article - would be cool to use this somewhere somehow??

Understanding the cognitive experience of death and the near-death experience (academic.oup.com, 14th July 2016) - A summary of the 2014 AWARE experiment, but that references past studies into the field (see below!)

Life Changes in Patients After Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (link.springer.com, 8th December 2011) - One of the referenced studies, this one includes a ‘life changes’ questionnaire at the bottom which might be another source of ideas.

A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors (sciencedirect.com, February 2001) - An older study, but with very similar results to recent ones!

A Prospective Analysis of Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Patients (link.springer.com, June 2002) - Another older study, includes characterisations of the experiences, some of which correlate with AWARE’s most commonly reported themes.

Possible source - What Happens When We Die? by Sam Parnia, M.D.(penguinrandomhouse.com, 1st January 2007) - I’m debating whether to look into this - it’s written by the same project leader as the AWARE study, but this book was written 7 years prior to it. I’m also fully aware that despite trying to look everywhere, the majority of my current sources stem from Dr. Parnia. (This might not be a bad thing! It’s just surprising to me that most of the recent studies into this field I can find out about stem from him.)

-------- Inspirations/Ideas:

Just a quick place to put current inspirations down! I’m sure that once I’ve finished this entry I’ll realise I’ve missed some out, so I’ll edit this as I go!

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD:

Bojack Horseman - S6 E15 ‘The View From Halfway Down (& S6 E16 ‘Nice While It Lasted’) - Netflix - The View From Halfway Down takes place within Bojack’s mind, after he commits suicide by downing himself in the pool of his former home. This episode has a LOT of themes which link to the studies:

Just like how some CA survivors reported on seeing their life ‘in review’, the characters are asked what the best and worst parts of each of their lives were, leading to conflict of ideals between them as well as trying to tackle large philosophical questions.

Black tar, representing impending death, begins the episode as a drip in the ceiling, before consuming all the all the characters one-by-one, followed by both Bojack and the dream world the episode takes place in. With newer theories on loss of consciousness and brain cell/tissue functionality arguing that it may be a gradual process of decay, rather than an instant loss, the black tar effectively mirrors this. Combined with the fact that Bojack becomes more frantic as the episode ends and the tar begins to chase him, as well as more supernatural events which begin happening, this may mirror the post-death ‘elevated state of consciousness’ idea.

For the first half of the episode, Bojack believes that he is in a recurring dream he has had many times before in his life, even stating how the dream will end event-by-event. However, once these happen but dream doesn’t end, things take a darker shift, and it takes him time to realise he might not be waking up. While being unaware of their own death might be a concept to try in the future (although a scary one), it does bring up the idea that final moments of consciousness may be very similar to the dreams a person normally has (or take place in a similar format with similar people).

While Bojack’s father, Butterscotch, does feature in the episode, he takes on the appearance of Secretariat, Bojack’s personal idol. A percentage of CA survivors reported that post-experience, they came out of hospital and care with a renewed sense of who their true friends and family were - here it’s represented as a father taking the shape of an idol (but keeping his father’s voice).

The 20-25 minute time length: Supervising director Mike Hollingsworth revealed in an interview that the episode took place over around 30 seconds - one of the many theories on the length of consciousness persisting after death is 20-30 seconds, but in an elevated state, perhaps leading to a longer perception of time (e.g. 20-30 seconds becomes 20-30 minutes of video/audio).

The world this episode takes place in is a connection of significant locations in Bojack’s life (e.g. the kitchen from Horsin’ Around, the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge which Secretariat jumped off), albeit with slight changes. Purely coincidentally, this is how a lot of my dreams function!!

While it’s still theorised as to whether Bojack is actually alive in Nice While It Lasted, or whether it’s a continuation of his NDE, this episode focuses on optimistic reflection and reconciliation with the other major characters in the show, a similarity to the reflection on friends, family and morals reported by CA survivors.

Rachel Joyce - ‘A Snow Garden and Other Stories’ (Published by Penguin Books, 3rd November 2016)

This is an incredible collection of seven short stories, each one told at different time periods by different characters, the events of each story being individually unique, and yet all of them are linked in some way!! My current plan is to make multiple stories based off the different experiences CA survivors have had, and I’d love to somehow be able to link them all like these short stories are, to be able to tell another story in and of itself!

I really need to find more short stories like these, since the end result(s) of this project will probably be in short-story format (maybe 20 minutes of video/audio per character?). This book’s given me a lot of ideas in terms of character building in a short format, as well as what the ‘link’ could be between each.

Some of the characters in the stories were scrapped characters from Joyce’s previous works - I’ve been trying to think a lot on how to best approach character design for this project (since I’ve never done it before!) and this seems to show to me that compelling stories could be founded off a character’s traits, and that this could be a good way to start?? I don’t know, I could be completely wrong!

All the stories focus on one specific life-changing moment for each main character, but either through narration of past events or it coming up in conversation. we get a fairly clear picture of each character’s lives, their mentality, and where it stems from.

Pixar Animation Studio’s ‘Sparkshorts’ Films: - What happens when you give Pixar artists 6 months and a set budget? So far, 8 incredible short films, all in different styles, each exploring different and very real themes!! (Seriously, please check these out, they’re all incredible and hard-hitting and so worth your time!)

Seeing how such strong themes are addressed in such short time is insanely cool, and is exactly the kind of thing I want to try and make! It’s also super inspiring to see what awesome films can be made under such constraints.

If I end up making films/audio/albums on multiple people, these films show that you can play around with animation style, aesthetic, and storytelling techniques to create just as much heart and soul as each other. Varying styles is something I’d love to try when representing different characters.

‘Gravity Falls’ - Hidden Codes/Messages and Stan’s Mind:

The hidden codes scattered throughout both seasons seems like a cool way to enhance an existing narrative, fill in gaps in backstory, or work to link multiple together!

The ‘memory rooms’ approach may be one way of experiencing the ‘life review’?

Conclusion:

And there we go! I’ll probably come back and add more later, but for now here’s a lil idea dump. At some point in the future I’ll talk about musical influences and ideas too!

This will probably be the last text-filled entry - I’m hoping to use future entires more like a logbook, where I put up demos of what I’ve been working on. There’ll definitely be explanations to stuff (that I’ll probably needlessly overexplain!!) but nowhere near this and the previous entry’s level of paragraphs!

University deadlines are getting closer, so progress will probably be a bit sporadic for the next month or so. But I’ll keep chipping away at this when I can!

#phoenixia #the phoenixia project #dev blog

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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With Millennials less likely to believe in God, churches work hard to buck trends

John Boyle, Asheville Citizen-Times, March 31, 2018

The statistics are daunting, particularly when it comes to the “nones.”

Fewer younger people, particularly Millennials, attend church or believe in God, and they’re less likely to go to church. Just 50 percent of younger Millennials say they believe in God with certainty, compared to 64 percent for Gen X and 69 percent for Baby Boomers, according to the Pew Research Center.

“I think the first thing to point out, stepping back a moment, is there are big and important changes in the American religious landscape overall,” said Greg Smith, associate director for research at Pew, the Washington, D.C.-based organization that periodically publishes the Religious Landscape Study. “The share of Americans that have no particular religious affiliation--the atheists, the agnostics, the ‘nothing in particular’--that group is growing very rapidly. They are called the ‘nones,’ and the nones are growing very rapidly.”

The number of people who remain religious is still quite large, Smith said, but the trend away from organized church and faith remains troubling to pastors, priests and others who work in the field. Locally, they’re not just sitting on their hands and watching their membership decline.

Cathedral of All Souls in Biltmore Village has a growing younger membership, including a lot of young families, said Milly Morrow, associate dean at the church. That comes from reaching out to families and creating a comfortable environment for them.

“The other day a new young family came in, and the mother said she’s been searching other churches to find out where the other young families are,” Morrow said. “She came here and said, ‘Oh, they’re all at All Souls.’ That speaks a little to the story of why they’re going to church.”

More important, Morrow said, is the emphasis on teaching Christian beliefs and really instilling a sense of community among church members. They have found that Millennials, those in the 21-37 age range, are really interested in being part of a community, but also serving that community.

“I do know that my generation is looking for a place where service comes first,” said Morrow, 44. “The churches that are thriving right now are the churches that are really involved in community service and in social justice. That’s what’s going to keep a 20- or 30-year-old coming to church--an invitation to serve others.”

Pew’s 2014 research found that the percentage of younger Millennials who attend church at least once a week was 28 percent, and 27 percent for older Millennials. By comparison, 34 percent of Gen X attends weekly, 38 percent of the Boomers, and 51 percent each of the Silent and Greatest generations.

Millennials are a huge generation. The Pew Research Center noted earlier this month that “Millennials are on the cusp of surpassing Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living adult generation, according to population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau.”

Based on data from July 2016, Millennials (those ages 20-35 in 2016) “numbered 71 million, and Boomers (ages 52-70) numbered 74 million.”

At All Souls, which has been an anchor in Biltmore Village for more than a century, younger membership has waxed and waned over the years, but increased dramatically in the last 10 to 15, Morrow said.

The same holds true at one of the region’s largest churches, Biltmore Church in southern Buncombe County. The church comprises five campuses and has about 11,000 members, with an average weekly attendance of over 7,500, according to Matt Kendrick, the church’s Next Generation pastor.

Of those attending weekly, 25-30 percent are young adults, with more than 60 percent being under 40 years of age.

“The average age of new members has gone from the mid-40s to the low-30s over the last four-five years,” Kendrick said. “We’ve been intentional in trying to reach young adults, but I’ll also give credit where it’s due--a lot of people in their 60s or 70s, they’ve really rolled with the changes. Everybody is on board to reach more people.”

Biltmore is known for its dynamic services, featuring large television screens, upbeat music and energetic preaching, but Kendrick says the emphasis remains on the mission of teaching the Bible and the word of Jesus.

“We are authentic,” he said. “We are who we are, and we don’t try to be anything else. With Millennials, it’s all about transparency, all about being real.”

Biltmore Church also has a lot of service outreach programs, including international ministries, and the church has also developed a strong outreach on Facebook and Instagram.

Michelle Myers, 33, has been attending Biltmore Church for about six years with her husband, James, 35, and their three children: Noah, 7; Cole, 4; and Shea, a 19-month-old girl. They moved from Austin, Texas, and the No. 1 one factor in attracting them to Biltmore was “the authentic worship,” Michelle Myers said.

She also loves the community feeling there, though.

Asked what the church does to make the services and other amenities comfortable to families with young children, Myers said, “I’m trying to think of what they don’t do that makes it comfortable for kids.

“My kids love their leaders, and they’re not just being babysat--they’re learning and engaging,” Myers said. “Most Sundays, they’re studying the same passage as we are, so when we come home from church we’re able to have really great spiritual discussions.”

Reaching out to younger people and interesting them in church services is probably tougher today than it’s ever been, said John Grant, pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Asheville for 29 years. The historically African-American church has about 200 families who are members but only 10-15 percent of those members are younger adults.

Grant sees several factors at work in the drift away from organized religion in America.

“My observation would be first, there’s been a general secularization of our culture,” Grant said. “People don’t go to church like they did when I was coming up.”

“My summary is it’s difficult to compete with our culture,” Grant said. “Young people are being bombarded 24/7, so the challenge is to compete with the culture with limited resources.”

Young adults who go off the college also often drift away from their religious upbringing, sometimes because they’re exploring, sometimes because they had become bored, Grant said.

Numerous factors drive people away from religion, the Pew Center’s Smith said, including “generational replacement.” The older generations, including Baby Boomers, who tend to be mostly Christian and fairly devout, are aging and beginning to die off. They’re being replaced by new generations of younger people “that are simply far less religious than their parents and grandparents before them,” Smith said.

“Upwards of one-third of Millennials say they have no religion,” Smith said. “Only about four in 10 millennials say religion is ‘very important’ to them, and just four in 10 say they pray every day. Only about one quarter say they attend services at least weekly. That’s far below the older generations.”

More troubling for churches is that these trends are “very broad-based--we see them happening all across the country, through a variety of racial and ethnic groups, with men and women and through those with a variety of educational backgrounds. It’s very broad-based.”

The South, the bedrock of the Bible Belt, not surprisingly is still more religious than other parts of the country, but the trend of moving away from religion has grown here, too.

Immigration, while controversial, has actually bolstered the number of Christians in the country, Smith said, as “among immigrants to the U.S. in 2014, two-thirds were Christian.”

Brown and Annie Hobson watch on with their daughterBuy Photo

What’s driving people away from religion?

Some of what’s driving the shift is that as less religious adults have children and those children grow up, they also tend to be less religious.

Smith said their data is less specific on this, but Pew also has found that is has become more socially acceptable to not be religious, or a “none.” In 2007 and 2014, Pew asked respondents whether they would be less likely to support a presidential candidate who did not believe in God

In 2007, 61 percent said they would be less likely to support that non-believing fictional candidate. In 2014, the number fell to 53 percent.

“Being irreligious has less social stigma associated with it than it did in the past,” Smith said.

Politics also drives some of the decline. One idea among researchers is that over the past few decades religious belief “has come to be associated with--at least in the popular imagination--conservative politics, especially with moral issues like homosexuality and same-sex marriage.”

Different denominations have different approaches, but many people who do not share those conservative beliefs move away from religion.

“One part of the data that is consistent is we know religious ‘nones’ are a very politically liberal and Democratic group,” Smith said. “They vote strongly for Democrats and liberals in elections, and they’re very liberal on same-sex marriage and abortion.”

Grant, the Mount Zion pastor, said he’s often heard teens or youth complain that church can be “boring,” and he acknowledges that may be one factor in driving younger people away, especially in the media age when people have access to computers and social media all day long.

Smith maintains the drift away from religion is often just that--a slow movement away. He noted a 2008 study Pew did, asking Catholics and Protestants why they had switched religions or left a childhood faith. Answers ran the gamut and included their spiritual needs not being met, or they stopped believing in their religion’s teachings.

About a quarter said they were dissatisfied with the atmosphere at worship or with their clergy, which could indicate boredom with their church.

“But the number one answer they gave was they said they just gradually drifted away from their childhood religion,” Smith said. “It’s a gradual thing. A lot of things factor in--it could be boring, or it could be creeping doubts about the religion’s claims.”

The declining interest in religion is troubling for the religious world, but Smith points out that “even though we’re becoming less religious on a variety of ways, (America) is still a very religious place.” In fact, it’s not that there are fewer highly religious people in the U.S., rather “what’s changing is the population is growing, and that growth concentrated among people who are not particularly religious.”

And trends can be reversed.

“It’s worth remembering that just because a trend has been occurring in the recent past doesn’t mean that trend will continue indefinitely into the future,” Smith said. “Lots of things can impact trends.”

#Millennials and religion #church and millennials

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berniesrevolution · 7 years ago

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Young Americans have been moving left and leaving the G.O.P. in recent years, but a successful Democratic coalition built on the backs of liberal youth is far from a sure thing, especially in the short term.

The party’s problem is straightforward: getting them to actually go to the polls. Politicians know which part of the electorate still butters their bread — and there’s no avocado on it. Those aged 18 to 29 vote at far lower rates than older groups, decreasing their electoral power. But there are at least some signs that their participation levels will improve. And if an increasingly left-leaning voting bloc does become more politically active, there are huge potential gains for the Democratic Party.

The obvious positive news for Democrats is reflected in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (C.C.E.S.), a survey of 64,000 adults. Fifty-four percent of American adults younger than 30 identified as Democrat or leaning-Democrat in 2016 — that’s six percentage points higher than among the rest of the public. Young people also call themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” more often than Americans older than 30, by five and seven percentage points.

Roughly 60 percent of this group reported voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the C.C.E.S. (This is higher than the 55 percent reported in exit polls after the election.)

This may warm Democrats’ hearts, but it’s still a far cry from the hyper-left youth vote some like to think exists. President Trump won the white youth vote last year, after all. A significant part of the Democratic lean among the young can be simply explained by their increased diversity — but not all of it. The youngest voters have been leaning Democratic since 2004.

That doesn’t mean they have the same party loyalty of older left-of-center generations. They’re more likely to register as independent.

The young were nearly three times as likely as voters over 30 to vote for a third-party candidate last November. About one in 10 voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, or the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, or another candidate or write-in option. This could be a reflection of the fact that many young Americans had their first glimpse of national politics during the hotly contested ideological battle between Bernie Sanders and Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary election.

Young millennials — and I’m one of them — have experienced Democratic Party infighting practically since their political life began.

The infighting has continued in recent months: Should Democrats allowanti-abortion candidates? Is single-payer insurance the one “true” path forward for health care? Should the party make its main priority courting working-class whites?

As important as it would be for Democrats to unite and to keep left-of-center voters from straying, it would be even more helpful to win Republican converts. A recent report from Pew Research Center found that 23 percent of young Americans who identified as Republican or independent-leaning-Republican switched to identifying as Democrat or independent-leaning-Democrat from 2015 to 2017.

The same report estimated that just 9 percent of young Democrats or those who lean Democratic switched to the G.O.P. My analysis of survey data from the 2010-2014 C.C.E.S. panel survey finds that these recent levels of Republican-to-Democrat switching are around 11 percentage points higher than past levels.

...Across the Atlantic, too, there are clues that young people are more politically active, after being stunned by the Brexit vote. Sixty-four percent of voters 18 to 24 turned out in the 2017 British elections, an increase of 16 percentage points since the most recent contest in 2015. What’s more, that age group supported the leader of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist, by 20 points more than it did in 2015.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #democrats #democratic party #Millennials #Millennial Voters #progressive #progressive movement #bernie sanders #jeremy corbyn #democratic socialism

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vickisventures · 5 years ago

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U.S. Border Patrol

Time to open your eyes: This week we went on a tour of the Brownsville Border Patrol Station. It was a free tour arranged by the tour office at our park. It has been a very popular tour and I wasn’t sure if we’d get to go but the lady in charge was nice enough to put us on the list even though we were over the 30 they were given permission to bring. (Turns out we only ended up with 29 on the tour anyway!)

This blog will be about our experience there. I feel it is my duty to shed some light on these stations on the southernmost border. Honestly that is why they allow these tours…they want people to see the truth for themselves and then spread the news. So, I’m going to do my part.

What they (Border Patrol) are dealing with: We had 3 “tour guides” all of which had at least 14 years at the BP (Border Patrol). They have all worked in different areas of the BP over the years. They began the tour by showing us a video of statistics over the past 20 years or so. There was a huge spike in border activity around 2014. They blame a lot of that on lack of technology and under staffing. Once they worked on those issues, they were able to knock the numbers down on an average of 90%. Then there’s been another spike in the last few years due to being told that if they show up as a family unit, they can be allowed to come into the states. That has led to “fake” families. People claiming a child is theirs when it’s not. These large numbers trying to cross over have left the U.S. in another crisis. The border patrol stations are not designed to hold people for more than 24 hours. They are designed to be a place to process the illegals and they either deport them or turn them over to the ICE station in Bayview. The Brownsville station has 8 rooms where they can separate people for safety reasons. They like to keep men separated from women, sick people from healthy, young children from older ones, etc. They can only hold around 230 at a time yet when we had the huge crowd enter in 2019, they were dealing with 500 or more on any given day. All facilities were full in the Rio Grande Valley as well as the ICE facility. There was nowhere to send people once they were processed. This is where the media went crazy!

Fact or Fiction:

Media- People were being treated inhumanely.

Fact- It was overcrowded. They did have to divide spaces with fencing for protection of the people. They did have to build a makeshift facility to hold more people. But they were well taken care of…one of our tour guides said he had to make daily runs to town to get food. He said they even fed them burgers from McDonald’s. Most of them came in wet (from the river) and they gave them dry clean clothes. That sounds pretty great to me…fed, clothed and given shelter from the elements.

Media- Families were being separated

Fact- The “families” that were separated were those posing as families and really weren’t related (you can imagine how the media twisted that!)

Media- People were drinking water from toilets.

Fact- The toilet story was either lost in translation or another media spin. Apparently, the toilets have 2 parts to them…there’s a water fountain portion at the top of it and then the toilet portion below. No one was literally drinking out of the toilet.

So, as you can see, the media did a lot of unnecessary damage. There was no way to completely process and put before a judge all of those who were seeking asylum and so many got let into the states. They were given a paper with a court date and told to return for the hearing but as you can imagine, most did not return. (And the U.S. didn’t know where they’d gone.) Thanks to President Trump, he finally put a stop to this problem. He didn’t let anyone cross into the U.S. They were stopped in Mexico and told their court date. Judges were put in tents on the border and that’s where they held the hearings. Many of those trying to cross over simply went back home when they realized they weren’t going to just cross the border and disappear. Some tried to cross illegally. But at least this helped the BP facilities to do their jobs and not to be flooded with people.

From the inside: We got to see inside the processing room. There were rooms of different sizes. I saw 2 rooms holding men (most looked to be in their teens or early 20’s), 1 room holding a woman and 2 kids, and another with a single woman. I wondered if she might be sick since she was laying on a mattress sleeping. The rooms were being cleaned when we got there, so the men were sitting on benches waiting for them to finish. There were coolers marked sandwiches, hot pockets, and burritos. I also saw a lot of Gatorade containers. Everything seemed orderly and well run. Many times, they process people and release them within an hour. By release, I mean, they drive them to be bridge, walk them halfway across and say “adios.” We also got to see the video room where they monitor the many cameras placed along the border. I can’t even imagine doing that job! I asked if they had shorter shifts or more breaks due to eye strain, but they just laughed (respectfully) at my question. Since they are short handed at the moment, they have some national guardsmen helping out. Just that morning, they had caught a group of 8 trying to cross the wall. We were able to watch the video. 2 crossed the wall- of those 2, 1 was caught. The others ran back into Mexico. The wall, in most places, is only 18 foot but they said only young men are able to cross it. There’s no wire going across the top to deter people from trying to go over it either. Although we don’t know why that is for sure, they alluded to the fact that someone thought it would be inhumane if an illegal were to get caught up in the wire and get stuck. (Things that make you go “hmm”.) There are areas in the wall that are open to help out landowners, wildlife and farmers. They have extra cameras and patrol presence there to help, but there’s just so many miles of border that it’s impossible to patrol the whole border. There’s a section not far from here that they call the “Wild West” because it’s more difficult to patrol and more dangerous.

What can YOU do to help: Vote Trump! Trump has tried to help in many ways and hopefully will continue to try. The taller wall (30 ft) that he wants, would be very beneficial. The saddest statistic I heard was that even with all of their efforts, they only catch about 10-12% of the illegals trying to cross. That’s a frightening low percentage. (By the way, if you know of anyone who might be interested in working there, they are understaffed and actively seeking employees. I personally think it would be a “fun” place to work. I only wish I were about 30 years younger! HA!) They said they are constantly finding new ways the cartels are funneling people and drugs into the states. They said it’s an endless cat and mouse game. Another number that I was surprised at was how much it costs to hire someone to take you across the border. It’s anywhere from $10,000-12,000. Someone asked in the Q&A session how they could get that much money together and we were told that some cross over owing the cartel money and they have to secure a job once here and start paying them back. (And the cartel doesn’t lose their address like the U.S. does!)

We really enjoyed the tour and information. The BP agents were very forthright with their answers to our questions and you could tell that they wanted to clear up misconceptions about their agency. We are planning on touring the Weslaco border patrol station in a couple of weeks. We’ll see if they tell us anything new/different. We were told the last tour group there got to see the weapons room!

#border patrol #Brownsville border patrol station #full time rving

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psychologyforeveryone-blog · 7 years ago

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The Decline in Adult Activities Among U.S. Adolescents, 1976–2016

Hey, friends! Sorry to miss last week—I was so overwhelmed with work, and I decided to put that first. In the future, I’ll try to give you all a warning in advance if I’m going to disappear again!

Before I get into today’s study, I believe in declaring biases—I identify as a part of the asexual community, and I’ve done a significant amount of work within my college for asexual and other LGBTQ+ people. This means that today’s study, which is predicated on evolutionary theory assuming that human behavior is aimed at reproduction, naturally set me off. I’m going to do my best to be unbiased while describing the results, and I’ll give cleaner reasons for why I disagree with this sort of theory at the end of the report, but please do think about my arguments with my biases in mind. With that in mind, on to the research!

TL;DR Version: [i]

· The authors wished to test the hypothesis that instability in youth influences a person’s desire to begin engaging in reproductive activities, or “adult” activities (drinking alcohol, having sex, dating, driving, working for pay, and going out without parents) sooner.

· They found that over time, adolescents have been engaging in significantly fewer adult behaviors.

· They also found a significant correlation between instability during youth and earlier adult behaviors.

Media Analysis:

I don’t have too much to say here, because most of the articles are more political than based off the study. The results they’re interested in—the decrease in “adult behaviors” – is fairly straightforward. I’m not interested in getting into debates over whether it’s good that teens are having less sex or if it’s bad that they’re working less—I’ll leave that interpretation up to all of you.

Full Summary:

Hypothesis: The authors are examining at what age “adult behaviors” (here defined as drinking alcohol, having sex, dating, driving, working for pay, and going out without parents) occur in different generations and through different economic systems. They argued that people who grew up with economic and social instability would likely take a “fast path to adulthood”: having children and engaging in adult behaviors sooner. On the other hand, they argued that people with more stability were more likely to delay gratification, taking a “slow path” to adulthood where they engage in these behaviors later, with more focus on extended education.

Methods: For the purpose of this research, the authors examined three surveys examining children and young adults back as far as 1966. The surveys used were Monitoring the Future (MtF); the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), distributed by the Center for Disease Control; and the American Freshman (AF) survey. All together, these surveys examined over eight million children and young adults.

MtF examines people in 8th, 10th, and 12th grade, as well as young adults. It has data on 12th graders through 1971 and on the other groups through 1991. MtF randomly selects middle and high school populations to sample and asks questions surrounding drug and alcohol use, as well as questions surrounding paid employment, going out with friends, dating behavior, driving, and extracurricular activities. In addition, it records information on race, gender, and parental education level—the authors chose to divide children based on their father’s education level, with children whose father had a high school degree or less defined as low SES [a], and those with fathers possessing a higher degree defined as high SES. The research also breaks students down into urban, suburban, and rural regions.

YRBSS is a government-funded survey, sampling 9th-12th graders every other year to ask questions about risky and sexual behaviors. This research has been ongoing since 1991. For the purposes of the study at hand, the authors exclusively looked at the questions surrounding sexual behavior. This data did not report on SES, exclusively reporting race and gender.

The AF survey reports on incoming college freshman, with data going back since 1996. This survey examines freshman work experience, alcohol use, and extracurricular activities. It exclusively breaks students down by gender.

In addition to these surveys, the authors examined basic cultural information: number of children born per woman, median household income, unemployment rate, life expectancy, teen birth rate, mean age of first birth, college enrollment, prevalence of disease, and crime rates.

Results: As anyone who has read the multitudes of headlines can infer, younger people engaged in fewer “adult activities” than people in past generations. They were significantly less likely to go out, with 12th graders in the 2010s going out less than 8th graders in the 1990s. They were less likely to go on dates or have sex, with 54% of high schoolers having sex in 1991 to only 41% in 2015. In addition, the number of adolescents who drank alcohol declined massively, with a 59% decrease in the number of 8th graders who tried alcohol and a 26% decrease in 12th graders. There was also a substantial decrease in the number of children who had worked for pay, from around 75% in 1976 to around 55% in 2014.

While these declines hit certain groups harder (e.g. sexual activity for black high school students declining from 82% to 49%), it was fairly stable among SES, race, and location. Interestingly, the authors did not find that these decreases coincided with an increase in hours spent studying, and saw only a slight increase in hours of community service among 10th and 12th graders.

Finally, the authors looked at how cultural changes correlated with these decreases. They found that adolescents engaged in fewer adult behaviors when, during their childhood, the average family size was smaller, there was a lower life expectancy, there were more diseases, and the household income was lower. They found this correlation to be higher versus the correlation between these rates when the adolescent was engaging in the behaviors, supporting the authors’ argument that childhood experiences influence a person’s desire to reproduce earlier because of instability and insecurity.

Concerns and Important Issues: Like I stated above, I don’t like this study. The minute you reduce all human behaviors to reproduction, you’re walking a very dangerous line—what about the increase in same-sex sexual relationships? Is a teetotalling asexual who lives in New York City (and therefore has no reason to learn to drive) never an adult? The one thing this study seems to ignore is the growing decrease in emphasis on reproduction, especially among younger people. As women grew more liberated and the focus shifted from a nuclear, heterosexual family to a fulfilling life with or without children, these sort of evolutionary arguments seem to be trying to force old theories into a culture that doesn’t have the same values or pressures.

Indeed, this focus on older values and ideas is made even more obvious when you consider that the authors defined a family’s SES exclusively by the father’s education level. Women are working more and more outside the home, and their education level was presumably listed as well—the authors just chose not to look at it. I’ve worked with data analysis to know it wouldn’t be that hard to combine the two, so refusing to do so was certainly a choice.

This paper was also an excellent example of something that tends to get to me a fair bit: misleading figures. As an example, look at this:

On first glance, it looks like there’s been a massive decline in, say, work for pay: almost half the figure! But if you pay attention to scale, it’s actually only a change of 20 percentage points. The authors chose to cut the scale between 95% and 50%, making numbers look much lower and like there was a much larger gap between them. Always check scales-- it’s important.

In the end, the arguments in this paper seem better explained by a changing culture, not by theories assuming all human behavior can be traced back to evolution. Of course, none of this is what the media cared about—they were more interested in the statement that millennials are engaging in fewer adult behaviors.

Jargon Definitions:

a. SES= Socioeconomic status, aka “class”

Reference:

[i] Twenge, J. M. and Park, H. (2017), The Decline in Adult Activities Among U.S. Adolescents, 1976–2016. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12930

#psychology #science #culture #social issues #asexuality #queer #lgbt #millennials #p4e

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sandradea · 7 years ago

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Poverty: Simulations, Realism and Research

When I enter the woods, I completely expect and understand one thing to be true - what my mind wanders to and what it lands upon could be absolutely anything. Yes, I can have deep focus, but in the woods, I do not plan my thoughts or my focus. I let it find its own and I go along for the adventure.

On this particular day, I found myself constantly thinking about a major social issue running rampant throughout the world. It haunts us in our own country. There is no town or city you can step foot into without the issues of poverty existing - even the richest of our cities. Poverty has, unfortunately, found a home everywhere and the number of persons affected steadily increases.

I believe one of the biggest brick walls we have regarding poverty is the misunderstanding of what it is and what is causing it. Another issue is the fact that there are entirely too many misconceptions regarding the people who live below “the line.” Although, it would seem easy to conduct research and find the truths. Many people are just too busy planning their weekends or cooking pizza to take the time.

I have lived at the line. I wasn’t born and raised there, but I found myself there. It wasn’t fun and I found my way out. Not everyone is that lucky. The issues of poverty started occupying some space in my mind some time back. I put together a few ideas for some research projects to see what I could do to create more awareness. One night, one week ago to be exact, I attended an event. A poverty simulation. This opened my eyes to the the point of making awareness a priority.

Defining Poverty

How is poverty defined? These pieces of information are provided by the Center for Poverty Research at University of California, Davis:

The official poverty measure

The official poverty measure has been used to estimate the national poverty rate from 1959 onward. The measure is used to create income thresholds that determine how many people are in poverty. Income thresholds by the official poverty measure are established by tripling the inflation-adjusted cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and adjusting for family size, composition and the age of the householder.

The Census Bureau also provides data using ratios that compare the income levels of people or families with their poverty threshold:

A household income above 100% of their poverty threshold is considered “above the poverty level.”

Income above 100% but below 125% of poverty is considered “near poverty.”

Households with incomes at or below 100% are considered “in poverty.”

Household incomes below 50% of their poverty threshold are considered to be in “severe” or “deep poverty.”

The official poverty measure provides guidance for government poverty policy and programs. The official measure thresholds are the basis for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines which determine government program eligibility.

The supplemental poverty measure

The supplemental poverty measure provides a more complex statistical understanding of poverty by including money income from all sources, including government programs, and an estimate of real household expenditures. This information is valuable, but this measure’s thresholds are not the basis for government program income eligibility.

The measure was developed by a 2010 government technical working group. In 2011, its first year of use, it showed that 16 percent of Americans lived in poverty during 2010, compared to 15.1 percent from the official poverty measure.

This measure also shows the effect that a number of safety net programs have on poverty rates. In 2015, for example, Social Security reduced poverty overall by 8.3 percent. Refundable tax credits reduced poverty by about 2.9 percent, with the largest reduction among children under 18 years of age.

Importantly, the supplemental poverty measure showed a wider variation of poverty from state to state. For example, it found that over a three-year average from 2013-15 California had a poverty rate of 15 percent by the official measure. By the supplemental measure California poverty was 20.6 percent, which was highest in the nation.

According to a report by the World Hunger Education Service we are given these facts that were updated in 2016:

Poverty in the United States

The official poverty measure is published by the United States Census Bureau and shows that:

In 2015 there were 43.1 million people in poverty, 3.5 million less than in 2014. (Proctor 2016, p. 12-14)

The official poverty rate in 2015 was 13.5 percent, down 1.2 percentage points from 14.8 percent in 2014. However, the 2015 poverty rate was 1.0 percentage point higher than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession . The poverty rate was at 22.4 percent in 1959, the first year for poverty estimates. (Proctor 2016, p. 12-14)

The 2015 poverty rate for Blacks was 24.1 (down from 26.2 percent in 2014), for Hispanics 21.4 (down from 23.6 percent in 2014), and for Asians 11.4 percent (not statistically different from 2014). For non-Hispanic whites the poverty rate was 9.1 percent (Proctor 2016, p. 12-4).

The poverty rate for children under 18 was 19.7 percent in 2015, down from 21.1 percent in 2014 and the number of children in poverty was 14.5 million, down from 15.5 million in 2014. Children represented 23.1 percent of the total population and 33.6 percent of people in poverty (Proctor 2016, p. 14).

19.4 million Americans live in extreme poverty. This means their family’s cash income is less than half of the poverty line, or about $10,000 a year for a family of four. They represented 6.1 percent of all people and 45.1 percent of those in poverty (Proctor 2016, p. 17-19).

School meal programs remain an effective means of ensuring children receive the nourishment they need to be healthy. Photo: Bread for the World (May 13, 2015)

The supplemental poverty measure (SPM) was first published in 2011 by the Census Bureau and addresses concerns that have been raised about the official poverty measure. However, the official poverty measure does not reflect the effects of key government policies that alter the disposable income of families and thus their poverty status, such as the SNAP/food stamp program, the school lunch program, and taxes. Taking these adjustments into account, the SPM for 2015 showed 1.8 million more people in poverty in 2012, compared to the official poverty statistics (Renwick SPM, p. 3) .

The SPM also enables measurement of the impact of certain poverty programs on poverty.

People 65 and older had a supplemental poverty rate of 13.7 percent, equating to 6.5 million people in poverty. Excluding Social Security from income would more than triple the poverty rate for this group, resulting in a poverty rate of 49.7 percent.

Not including refundable tax credits (the Earned Income Tax Credit and the refundable portion of the child tax credit) in resources would have resulted in an additional 9.2 million individuals falling into poverty, a 2.9 percentage point increase.

Taking account of other noncash benefits also lowered poverty rates. For example, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits lowered the overall poverty rate by 1.4 percentage points or 4.6 million people. (Renwick SPM, pp. 12-14)

Hunger and the Struggle of Feeding Children and Families

One of the biggest issues existing in relation to poverty in our country revolves around hunger and food issues. I learned a new phrase today - Food Insecurity. A noun. It is the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The fact is this: "more than 800 million people live every day with hunger or food insecurity as their constant companion." (Dictionary.com)

As we eat our steak in a nice restaurant or our bag of fast food, we take it for granted because we put in a day of hard work, accomplishment and spent energy on completing daily life chores, there are those struggling to find work and equally, or more so, struggling to feed themselves and their families.

Are we oblivious to these facts? I would say not. I think the problem revolves around an assumption that food stamps and food pantries are taking care of the problems. Realizing these two things do not take care of all problems should rank a bit higher in our priorities.

Many of these people included in this number receive help by programs. But is it enough? Unfortunately, no. Given the number of adults losing jobs, the increase in the population of those who are dependent upon programs and restrictions to program access being enhanced, leaves a gap to fill. Where does the responsibility lie to fix these issues? It is true that programs exist that assist to battle hunger but we need to remember that these programs require funding, volunteers and the needed product. Oftentimes, this tends to be a thought far from most minds.

As with any social issue in our world, the steps to resolving the issue or minimizing the issue begins with awareness. The more we take the time to understand the many facets of an issue, the better equipped we are to tackle the issue while helping others to reach a better place in life.

Works Cited

www.dictionary.com

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/how-poverty-measured-united-states

http://www.worldhunger.org/hunger-in-america-2016-united-states-hunger-poverty-facts/

#awareness #poverty #food insecurity #understanding

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theliberaltony · 3 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): We’re back this week with the other 2022 primaries that are already on our radar — specifically, the big gubernatorial primaries and House primaries/macro trends to watch, as many House races are still in their nascent stage.

What follows is a preview of the candidates we know to be running (or at least seriously thinking about it) along with the intraparty fights Republicans and Democrats are having and what, if anything, this says about the general election.

OK, first up gubernatorial primaries. Which ones have already caught your eye?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): One primary I’m watching is on the Democratic side in Florida. It looks like it will be a heavyweight contest between Rep. Charlie Crist, who was previously elected governor as a Republican, and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, Florida’s only current Democratic statewide officeholder. And to add even more intrigue, state Sen. Annette Taddeo — who was Crist’s running mate the last time he ran for governor, in 2014 — has expressed interest in running, too.

Early polls give Crist a lead, which makes sense since he has lingering name recognition from his previous gubernatorial runs. But Fried could be more in line with the current zeitgeist of the party. Crist is an older white guy and, as a veteran of state politics, represents the party’s past. Fried, by contrast, is a younger woman who has already demonstrated a knack for online media (e.g., her multiple videos trolling Gov. Ron DeSantis).

Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, it’s been good to be a woman in a Democratic primary, and I feel like it will also help Fried that she’s the one throwing red meat (blue meat?) to the Democratic base — if it remains a one-on-one race.

sarah: That’s a good point about Crist, Nathaniel. Alex had a piece earlier this year showing that Crist’s bid could face long odds, as he’s already lost two back-to-back races. Per her story, since 1998, only 33 candidates of 121 who’ve run for U.S. Senate, governor or president have managed to win after having lost their previous bid.

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Yeah, Sarah, in that piece we also cited a February Mason-Dixon poll of registered Florida voters, and just 27 percent said they viewed Crist favorably. Forty-one percent viewed him unfavorably.

Of course, things might have changed since then. But those numbers aren’t a great start …

sarah: How competitive, though, do we think the Florida governor’s race is going to be with DeSantis up for reelection?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Florida has continued to move to the right in recent presidential elections, so it may not be the quintessential swing state it once was. While most of the swing states in the 2020 presidential election shifted to the left at least a little bit compared with 2016, Florida did the opposite. Trump actually won it by a larger margin than he did in 2016.

nrakich: Florida does have a knack for being close no matter which way the political winds are blowing, though. It was close in 2010, 2014 and 2018. So I think it will be competitive, but I wouldn’t bet against DeSantis.

alex: I wonder, though, if Democrats will use DeSantis’s very possible 2024 presidential run against him.

geoffrey.skelley: Democrats could certainly try to use DeSantis’s national ambitions in attack ads — “he doesn’t care about Florida; he cares about his political career” — but the effectiveness of such an attack might vary based on who the Democratic nominee is.

If it’s Crist, who has been governor, but then ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2010 as an independent (after it became clear he would lose the GOP primary to Marco Rubio), and now wants to be governor again, such an attack might ring hollow because he’s seen as something of a political opportunist. Fried, on the other hand, is a fresh face and maybe could make that stick more. Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s going to move the numbers much.

sarah: OK, Geoffrey, you’re up next.

geoffrey.skelley: Moving to another state that’s definitely no longer a swing state, I’m keeping a close eye on Ohio’s gubernatorial contest and its GOP primary. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine won in 2018 and now is looking for a second term, but he’s gotten quite a bit of intraparty backlash for his aggressive policies against COVID-19 — the Republican-controlled state legislature even voted to limit DeWine’s power to issue public health orders earlier this year. He also has attracted Trump’s wrath for not being a more vocal supporter. As such, former GOP Rep. Jim Renacci has decided to challenge DeWine in the GOP primary, and while it’s unusual for an incumbent governor to lose renomination, there’s at least some chance that could happen in Ohio.

It should be mentioned, however, that Renacci’s last campaign wasn’t especially impressive, as he lost the 2018 Senate race to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown by about 7 percentage points, having jumped over to that race after initially running in the gubernatorial contest that DeWine went on to win.

sarah: We were talking last week about how much the Ohio Senate primary, in particular, seemed to revolve around the question of who could be the Trumpiest candidate. Considering DeWine has received a fair amount of criticism from those in his own party, is he taking this primary bid seriously?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, Renacci is certainly trying to win over Trump supporters who are upset with DeWine. He tweeted last month that “Ohio First means America First!” and has gone after DeWine for his decision to close Ohio businesses and facilities to protect the public from the coronavirus.

alex: Brad Parscale, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, is also advising Renacci, according to NBC News.

sarah: But no Trump endorsement yet, right?

nrakich: Right, Sarah. That’s the big question for me in this race — will Trump endorse? Renacci was previously a close Trump ally and won his endorsement in 2018, but Trump reportedly soured on Renacci after his poor showing against Brown.

alex: NBC News also reported that a source told them the former president “has no plans to endorse him.”

geoffrey.skelley: Although Trump did openly encourage someone to run against DeWine.

sarah: I realize our primary challenge success-o-meter isn’t exactly apples-to-apples given this isn’t a presidential primary, but how would we weigh Renacci’s bid against DeWine currently?

geoffrey.skelley: Unfortunately, we haven’t seen a good independent poll of Ohio in a while. But back in the fall in 2020, DeWine polled quite well — for instance, an Ipsos/Spectrum News survey found last October that about two-thirds of Ohioans approved of his job performance, including 73 percent of Republicans. That was perhaps a little low for a Republican but still not the sort of terrible position that would indicate serious vulnerability in a primary. However, DeWine didn’t support Trump’s post-election attempts to overturn the election, so perhaps opposition has grown. Renacci’s internal polling — which should be treated with serious caution — did find him ahead of DeWine in the spring.

sarah: I’ll go next with the Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary.

Last week we talked about the Pennsylvania Senate primary, but there’s more than one marquee race in the state this year. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is term-limited, meaning the governor’s mansion is also up for grabs. Who’s actually running in this race is still very TBD, though.

For instance, no Democrat has officially declared they’re running at this point. But that may be because everyone is waiting to see what state Attorney General Josh Shapiro does. Earlier this year, he told Philadelphia Magazine that “I expect to be a candidate.” And if Shapiro does run, he’s likely a front-runner on the Democratic side given the profile he has built as the state’s attorney general. In 2017, he tackled the Catholic Church’s decades of sexual abuse in Pennsylvania dioceses. He also joined other attorneys general in fighting Trump’s travel ban and an injunction that stopped Trump’s rollback of birth control. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is reportedly considering a run, too, but he’d have to resign as mayor if he did run.

Among Republicans, though, far more names have been floated at this point, and even a few have entered the fray, including former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta. Barletta ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2018, but he’s built a reputation as a bit of a conservative folk hero for trying to take on illegal immigration while he was mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The law was ultimately struck down, but Barletta tried to penalize businesses and landlords who hired or rented to immigrants who had illegally entered the country. So far this Trumpy profile hasn’t helped Barletta win statewide office in Pennsylvania, though, and it looks as if he might face stiff competition from other Trumpy Republicans in 2022.

For instance, state Sen. Doug Mastriano hasn’t said he’s running yet — although he claimed Trump had asked him to run and promised to help him campaign (an aide told the AP that wasn’t true) — but he’s already showing his Trump bona fides, having hosted a hearing devoted to unfounded claims of 2020 election fraud and marching to the U.S. Capitol before the Jan. 6 insurrection. He’s also pushing an Arizona-style “audit” of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

But Mastriano isn’t the only possible contender with connections to Trump. Rep. Mike Kelly is also reportedly considering a bid and has a relationship with Trump. Notably, too, Trump-appointed former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain has already written to Trump seeking his endorsement even though he hasn’t yet said whether he’ll run. If McSwain does enter the race, though, it means potentially two prosecutors could go head-to-head in the general election.

A number of other Republicans are considering runs at this point, too, including U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser and state Sen. Dan Laughlin. Not to mention a number of candidates who have already thrown their hats in the ring with Barletta, including Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale and conservative activist Charlie Gerow.

The Republican gubernatorial primary in Pennsylvania is looking really harried at this point, and similar to many of the other primaries we’ve discussed, it seems as if it is going to be a competition around who can out-Trump the other.

geoffrey.skelley: Republicans are definitely hoping Pennsylvania will continue its pattern of flipping back and forth between the parties. It’s been more than 50 years since either party elected a successor to a sitting member from their party, and it’s never happened since the state got rid of its single-term limit in 1968.

alex: How likely is it that the Senate seat flips without the governor’s seat flipping, too?

nrakich: Good question, Alex. States don’t always vote the same way for Senate and governor, since one office is federal and the other is state-level, but the two offices have been tracking more closely in recent years. As Geoffrey wrote a few years ago, there was less split-ticket voting in 2018 than in any midterm since at least 1990.

geoffrey.skelley: And Pennsylvania voted very similarly for Senate and governor in 2018, when both races had incumbents, and I suspect they’ll vote similarly this time, too. After all, neither race will have an incumbent this time, so that will mean no candidate will get the ever-smaller incumbent bonus.

sarah: OK, Alex, you’re up!

alex: Well, Georgia is becoming a competitive battleground state, as evidenced by President Biden’s win there in November and Sens. Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s respective victories earlier this year. So the gubernatorial primary is going to be fun to watch.

On the Republican side, you have incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp fighting for a second term in what maybe should have been an easy feat for him. But after he didn’t embrace Trump’s unfounded claims about widespread election fraud in last year’s election, Kemp lost the support of some Republicans — particularly those on his right flank. So he has a couple of primary challengers now, including Vernon Jones, a former Democratic state lawmaker turned Republican and one of Trump’s most vocal allies in Georgia, and also Kandiss Taylor, a public school teacher and counselor.

What’s working in Kemp’s favor, other than his incumbency, is the fact that he did sign a far-ranging election measure in March that includes new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run. That hasn’t placated Trump, though, who called the law “weak” and said Republicans in the state should have taken far more drastic steps to curtail the ability to vote; Republican voters, however, have rallied around the state’s new voting law, and according to a Morning Consult tracking poll, Kemp had a 62 percent approval rating among Georgia Republican voters when he signed the elections bill on March 25. By April 6, it was up to 74 percent.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, I think everyone is just waiting patiently to see whether Stacey Abrams runs again. A lot of folks see the former speaker of the Georgia House running again in 2022 as a likely next step. A January poll from The Atlanta-Journal Constitution found that about 51 percent of Georgians viewed her in a positive light, including 10 percent of Republicans (although 41 percent of Georgians viewed her unfavorably).

geoffrey.skelley: Unlike in most states, a worry for Kemp is that he has to win a majority of primary voters because Georgia is one of seven states with a majority requirement for primary elections. So a crowded race doesn’t help him by splitting opposition — it would just get him a runoff where he’d have to win a majority.

sarah: The call for primary challengers in both Georgia’s and Ohio’s gubernatorial races from Trump … and then radio silence on who he’d back is certainly a strategy, though. It doesn’t seem as if either race, at this point at least, is posing a credible threat to the GOP incumbent.

nrakich: Yeah, Kemp is vulnerable in theory, but I just don’t see any credible candidate standing up to challenge him. It could get interesting if Trump endorses someone like Jones, but ultimately I don’t think he has what it takes. It will be incredibly easy for Kemp to smear him as a former Democrat, and Jones has a pretty sordid past — while serving as DeKalb County CEO, he was accused of rape, and a grand jury recommended that he be criminally investigated for corruption.

sarah: As we were talking about in Pennsylvania, though, the fact that Georgia has two elections up here in 2022 will be interesting, as the incumbents aren’t from the same political party.

So considering split-ticket voting is on the decline, it’ll be interesting to see whether Warnock and Abrams, assuming she runs again, win. Or whether it’s Kemp and as we discussed last week, Herschel Walker. Walker, though, as we said, still hasn’t entered the race, and given that he is a longtime Texas resident, he could face serious issues mounting a successful bid against Warnock.

It’s early yet, but these two races seem to be a little mismatched in terms of competition, as Abrams would be a heavyweight were she to enter, and Walker just isn’t that.

geoffrey.skelley: That potential scenario — if Walker is the GOP Senate nominee — could be interesting because the little swing vote that exists could be critical in places like affluent northern Fulton County and suburban Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where at least a few Kemp 2018-Warnock 2020 voters live. Will those voters line up behind one party or stick with Warnock and then go for Kemp again?

nrakich: One effect that the primary could have, even if Kemp wins it, is to push him further to the right — which could turn off voters like that. That’s basically what happened to former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Warnock’s 2020 opponent.

geoffrey.skelley: Exactly. The handful of voters who went for Warnock but in some cases stuck with former Sen. David Perdue — who lost to Ossoff in the other Senate race — are the voters I’m thinking about here.

sarah: OK, now this is a harder office to track at this point given the number of races, but what do we know about House primaries at this point? Or macro trends about the House that you’re already plugged into?

alex: There was an interesting PBS piece on how a gerrymandered Texas, specifically, could help Republicans with their goal of taking back the House in 2022. Here are some of the takeaways: Since the state gained two seats in the reapportionment process and the GOP-controlled legislature is in charge of making the new maps, these seats will likely be prime pickup opportunities for Republicans. What’s working against Republicans here is that Texas suburbs are becoming more blue, and they’ve already been accused of gerrymandering. But I think it’s fair to assume lawmakers will try to redraw these districts to benefit their party. And considering Republicans need only five seats to flip the House in 2022, Texas’s two new seats are a good opportunity for that.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, the big thing is redistricting. That’s going to influence where candidates run and who retires, and as Alex notes, who might win. If you’re the GOP drawing lines in big states like Texas or Florida, maybe you try to add Republican voters to a handful of Democratic-held seats.

That said, you still have a lot of candidates already declaring bids even though they don’t necessarily know exactly where the seat is going to be, simply because candidates need to start raising money and may have some inkling as to what the district in their area will look like.

sarah: And as Geoffrey and Alex are getting at, Republicans will disproportionately control the redistricting process. As Geoffrey and Nathaniel reported earlier this year, Republicans will redraw nearly 2.5 times as many districts as Democrats, 187 congressional districts versus 75. (To be sure, there are also 173 districts where neither party will enjoy exclusive control over redistricting — either because of independent commissions or split partisan control or because it’s an at-large district.)

nrakich: Thanks to redistricting, a big theme in House primaries next year is also going to be incumbent-versus-incumbent battles. Take a state like West Virginia, which is going from three congressional seats to two. Two of its current representatives are inevitably going to be drawn into the same district. Unless one retires, that will be a pretty spirited race.

And other incumbents could be thrown into races against each other in states where the opposite party controls redistricting — for example, Illinois Democrats may draw two of the state’s downstate Republicans together.

geoffrey.skelley: Aside from redistricting, I’d say the other main place where primary challenges are developing is with the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in January. I dug into their races earlier this year, and all but one of them already has at least one primary challenger. The lone one without a challenger is New York Rep. John Katko, but Trump recently told local Republicans he’d be happy to boost a challenger if they can find one. Then again, it’s also possible that Katko’s district will change substantially in redistricting because Democrats are in a position to control the process there.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least a handful of them retire or, because of redistricting, find themselves without a similar district to run in. Along with Katko, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s seat could be ripped up by state Democrats, who control things. And in Ohio, Republican Rep. Anthony Gonzalez’s impeachment vote probably won’t make him a priority for the state GOP to protect as they draw maps there.

sarah: It is a midterm election, though, and traditionally the party in the White House has fared poorly as a result. We’ve talked about why that might not be the case here in 2022, but one question I have is about the overall map. Do Democrats just have more vulnerabilities — that is, more Republican-leaning seats to defend — than Republicans?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, it’s interesting. Democrats actually are much less exposed headed into 2022 than in 2010, the last midterm for a first-term Democratic president. Using FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric, 74 Democrats represented seats that were more Republican than the country as a whole heading into the 2010 election. By comparison, only 24 Democrats are in the same position right now. So almost 3 in 10 Democrats in 2010 versus 1 in 10 Democrats today.

However, those pre-2022 numbers won’t be the final story because redistricting will change the state of play quite a bit in some states. And because Republicans control redistricting in more places, I suspect those numbers are more likely to worsen than improve for Democrats.

And given the Democrats’ narrow 222-213 seat edge, small changes could be enough to give the GOP a majority, too.

sarah: Interesting. There’s simply less easy ground for Republicans to make up, at least at this point, especially given some of their gains in 2020. But as you’ve all pointed out, what happens in the redistricting process could make a big difference moving into 2022.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Climate change is turning Florida's sea turtles female. How long can these species survive?

https://sciencespies.com/biology/climate-change-is-turning-floridas-sea-turtles-female-how-long-can-these-species-survive/

Climate change is turning Florida's sea turtles female. How long can these species survive?

Leatherback sea turtle. Credit: Public Domain

Two dozen tiny leatherback turtles swam around in small tanks, attached by fishing lines to a system that kept them from hitting walls and hurting themselves. As an open-water species, leatherbacks don’t recognize barriers, so they are kept on leashes at Florida Atlantic University’s lab at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton.

It was lunchtime and professor Jeannette Wyneken was feeding them a concoction she perfected over the years: organic gelatin, fish oil, protein and vitamins, shaped into little squares. Leatherbacks are picky eaters, feeding mostly on jellyfish.

Wyneken planned to fatten the baby turtles for a few weeks, until they are about the size of her palm and can undergo a laparoscopy to check their otherwise imperceptible gender—a process that requires inserting a tiny camera to view internal organs. Dozens of hatchlings will go through Wyneken’s lab this nesting season as part of her long-running turtle sex-ratio research in South Florida.

Yet even before any testing is done and the hatchlings are released back into the ocean, the scientist already knows there is a strong chance most of the turtles will be one gender: female.

As is the case with some reptiles, the sex of sea turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand where the eggs incubate. With climate change turning up the heat in South Florida, producing longer and hotter summers, sea turtle gender balance is being thrown way out of whack.

“It’s scary,” Wyneken said. “I’m seeing more and more all-female nests, and even when we have males, it’s a very small percentage.”

Wyneken’s research over the past 20 years shows that the number of males is decreasing across the three species she monitors, even as they lay eggs at different times during the March-October nesting season. Using the past decade as a reference, she said that seven out of the 10 years produced 100% female hatchlings. The three years in which nests produced males, the ratios ranged from just 10 to 20%.

In addition to the leatherbacks, the world’s largest sea turtle species, Wyneken tests the genders of loggerheads and green turtles in Boca Raton, Juno Beach and Sanibel Island, where nesting activity is closely monitored and temperatures in nests are tracked year-round.

What happens on Florida beaches is important for sea turtle populations: it’s the only state in the continental U.S. where leatherback turtles regularly nest; it hosts some of the world’s largest nesting aggregations of loggerheads; and it’s home to the second-largest number of green turtle nests in the Western Atlantic Hemisphere, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

In theory, sex ratios among leatherback turtles, which lay eggs early in the season before the height of the summer in South Florida, should be more balanced than that of loggerheads, which usually start nesting in June and whose eggs incubate in the hottest months of the year. And green turtles tend to lay eggs later, when beaches are beginning to cool in late August and September, so more males should hatch from their nests compared with the other two species.

But Wyneken said that for the past few years, especially since scorching summers of 2015 and 2016, she hasn’t seen a significant difference in the sex ratios of the species in South Florida: it’s girls, girls and more girls, in every nest.

And things are getting worse. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the world, coming in slightly higher than the previous record, which was July 2016, according to data from the World Meteorological Organization and the Copernicus Climate Change Service. There were wildfires in the Arctic, a huge ice melt event in Greenland and 90-degree weather in Alaska. European cities baked, with the temperature in Paris reaching 108.7 degrees. And this year’s record temperatures did not get a boost from a strong “El Nino,” which heats up surface sea water and contributes to warmer temperatures, as what happened in 2016.

“I never thought that what started as research on sea turtle gender ratios on a couple of Florida beaches would become a measuring stick for climate change, but that’s what I’m seeing,” Wyneken said. Before warming temperatures began to dramatically skew the sex of sea turtles toward female, the same nest would produce girls and boys, with eggs buried deeper in the sand leading to males and eggs on the warmer surface generating females.

What scientists have observed in South Florida is happening in other sea turtle nesting areas around the world.

On Australia’s Raine Island, the biggest green turtle nesting ground in the Pacific, the ratio was 116 females to one male in a 2018 study led by Michael Jensen and Camryn Allen, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The study found that older turtles that had hatched 30 or 40 years earlier were mostly female, but only by a 6 to 1 ratio. Younger turtles, however, born during the last 20 years, were more than 99% female.

Jensen and Allen “combined genetic and endocrine techniques to show that an important green turtle population has produced primarily females for two decades, suggesting that complete feminization is possible in the near future,” said the research.

Another study done recently with green turtles in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, by the University of Exeter and Portugal’s Marine and Environmental Sciences Center showed similar results.

But how soon could turtle populations run out of males?

Sea turtles have been around in some form for more than 200 million years, weathering all kinds of extreme weather events and even survived the extinction of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.

“These sex ratio findings are very concerning and we want to raise awareness about the issue, but there is also some hope,” said David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, a Florida research and conservation nonprofit. “Sea turtles are amazing at adapting to changes in their habitat and in the environment.”

There have been plenty of success stories of recovery of sea turtle populations. The Conservancy’s green turtle conservation program at Tortuguero, a major nesting spot in Costa Rica, started in 1959 and since then the population has increased sixfold, making the colony the largest in the Western Hemisphere.

Also, one male turtle goes a long way. Sea turtles are polygamous animals and one male will mate with many females. They have a long lifespan of around 50 years, but some species can live longer. Most sea turtles take decades to mature—between 20 and 30 years—and females are actively reproductive for about 10 years. Depending on the species, females will nest between two and eight times each season, laying about 100 eggs in each nest.

In Florida, sea turtle nesting activity has seen some ups and downs over the past few years, with a slightly negative trend since 2014. Overall, nest counts recovered significantly from the lows of the 80s and 90s, a result of conservation efforts in more densely populated areas. Nesting varies widely depending on the species and location. This year, researchers on the Gulf Coast and in Palm Beach country also are betting on record nest counts considering the numbers recorded so far.

The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission counted 91,451 loggerhead nests in the state in 2018, compared with 86,870 in 2014. But leatherback nests were down at 949 last year, compared with 1,604 in 2014. Green turtle nest reached 4,545 last year, down from 5,895 four years earlier.

Sea turtles hatchlings have never had it easy. Not all eggs in a nest are viable, and only a small share of hatchlings will survive and grow to become adults. The eggs may be dug up by raccoons, foxes or other predators. Those same predators can gobble up the babies as they race to the surf after emerging from their nests. Once in the ocean, they aren’t safe: crabs and other marine animals feed on baby sea turtles.

Mature turtles have few natural predators but humans have done a great job in cutting their survival odds significantly. Poaching of the eggs and the killing of nesting turtles for their meat or to make frames for eye glasses or jewelry have depleted populations all over the world. But the greatest threat to sea turtles is fishing gear, as hundreds of thousands of turtles are accidentally caught by trawl nets and on longline hooks.

And now there is climate change. Can they adapt by nesting in cooler beaches? Will female start looking for shadier locations to lay their eggs?

“All organisms tend to adapt to their changing environment by evolving through natural selection, but the question is, will turtles adapt as fast as the climate is changing around them?” said Fredric Janzen, an evolutionary biologist at Iowa State University who was one of the first scientists to connect climate change to temperature-dependent sex determination in turtles. In a 1994 study titled “Climate Change and Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination in Reptiles,” Janzen found that even a small increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) was enough to drastically skew the sex ratio of the painted turtles in his research.

In his opinion, changes are occurring faster than they did prior to human influence, and this can potentially—and fatally—outpace the ability of some species to adapt.

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Sea turtles start nesting season with ‘unheard-of’ numbers on one NC island, town says

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popwasabi · 6 years ago

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“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” Review: Kaiju WWE Match Barely Rises Above Script

Directed by Michael Dougherty

Starring: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Ken Watanabe, and Milly Bobby Brown

The term “dumb fun” gets thrown around a lot when describing a film like “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” It’s often a blanket defense to shield a movie of this kind from any legit criticisms as unnecessary because “you’re supposed to turn your brain off.”

While I’m certainly not against indulging in cheap escapism I feel this defense often misreads the quality of a “dumb” movie as there are tons of films with bonkers plot-lines and themes that still hold up to strong criticism. A movie can be dumb and still make sense and an action movie can still be bombastic without bludgeoning a viewer with poorly contrived plot devices.

(A large percentage of super hero films and the MCU as a whole fall under this category.)

While “King of the Monsters” certainly isn’t short on spectacle and dazzling visual effects, its plot is more than just a little half-baked; it’s raw as hell with little coherence that will do more to takeaway from the movie’s best moments than enhance them.

The dazzling, kaiju-sized action will be enough for a large percentage of fans I imagine, and certainly kept me mostly entertained throughout the two-hour, fifteen-minute run-time but it’s not enough to lift the final product beyond being just ok.

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” takes place five years after the events of the first film as we are introduced to Dr. Mark Russell a former Monarch scientist who specializes in animal behavior and communication. Russell has fallen out with his wife and daughter after Godzilla’s attack on San Francisco tragically took the life of his young son but after an eco-terrorist group bent on reviving the other titans of the Earth kidnaps them both Russell is brought back into the fold to help save the world.

The one big takeaway I’m sure most fans can agree on after leaving the theaters is quite clearly the giant monster scenes are some of the best in the genre’s history.

(I mean, nothing against traditional dude’s in rubber suits, of course.)

The special effects team which combined some motion-capture suit acting along with stellar CGI creates hyper realistic giant monster movement while also hearkening back to some good ol’ fashion WWE style kaiju on kaiju brawling. Yes, again, the plot leaves a lot to be desired here but the kaiju action more often than not starts before your brain hemorrhages too hard from trying to make sense of character motivations and thematic messaging.

Though I would’ve preferred less of these battles in the dark and/or rain the cinematography does create some truly awe-inspiring moments that will wow even the most uptight of viewers. It’s truly impossible not to find some joy in these scenes and for most die-hards fans this will be more than enough to satisfy.

(Me often times during the battles in my theater seat.)

Unfortunately for this die-hard the screenplay is lacking to say the least.

First, before I continue, I want to make something very clear; I have no problem with a film being “dumb.” More specifically I don’t have a problem with it being “unsophisticated.” A film like “John Wick” for instance is not a very sophisticated movie. Hitman loses wife, then dog gets killed so he goes on a murderous rampage to avenge both. The difference is despite “John Wick” having no art house message to tell at least you are never confused and/or irritated by the messaging and motivations of the characters in that plot and it never distracts from the meat of the film which is of course the action.

Many of Godzilla’s Showa era films (which this movie mostly pays homage too) are like this and they work fine because again the plot moves the story along in a simple but effective way without detracting from its best parts, namely the Kaiju-sized wrestling matches.

“King of Monsters” unfortunately mostly fails on this level.

(I can honestly say the same thing about “John Wick Chapter 3″ as well but I’m not going to get into that today *sigh* but hey pew, pew!)

About a third of the way through the film the plot’s wheels spin wildly out of control and the mostly cognizant story up to that point goes up in atomic flames. You’ll spend more times asking questions than just sitting and enjoying yourself and it’s a real detriment to an otherwise spectacular giant monster throwdown.

The film largely wastes the talents of a hugely talented cast because of this between Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Milly Bobby Brown and Ken Watanabe. All of them do well with what they have to work with but the script really needed far less characters to work efficiently and unfortunately the acting talent here alone is not enough to lift a script that has very little clear direction. Character motivations and pathos seem to be dropped at a whim and the film’s final moments contradict a lot of the plot movement from earlier in the film.

(The ending of this film in a nutshell...)

Again a plot doesn’t need to be sophisticated to be good but it should AT LEAST make sense and work with the action, not against it.

There’s some interesting world building here and there but large sections of it are inexplicably and quite literally blown to smithereens on occasions and it will make you wonder if there was more fascinating story layered underneath it all.

Despite my gripes I would say it’s still mostly forgivable how bad the story is because of the aforementioned kaiju brawling but there is one unforgivable moment in this film and it symbolizes a much larger issue I have with the American interpretation of Godzilla.

(SPOILERS ahead)

Godzilla is often viewed in a pretty straight-forward manner by most fans; he’s a giant, fire-breathing reptile here to wreck cities for two hours and not much more than that. For the longest time I mostly saw the big G-man in that way as well and for what it’s worth I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Godzilla films on purely a superficial level. After all, a large percentage of Godzilla’s filmography is largely schlock.

(Fun schlock, of course.)

But eventually as I got older and grew more into my half Japanese-American identity my view on Godzilla became a lot more nuanced especially after seeing the 1954 original without the American re-dubbing and editing.

If you haven’t seen the original Japanese “Gojira” do yourself a favor and give it a watch right now. The 1954 classic is a masterpiece of post-atomic bomb era story-telling in Japan and at the time a long overdue allegorical discussion of what happened during WWII in that country. However you may feel about the use of the atomic bomb to end the war you cannot say that the results weren’t horrifying and tragic and its radioactive aftermath is still felt in Japan today.

In the US radioactive waste creates super heroes like the Hulk, Spider-man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In Japan it creates Godzilla, a monster that is less a force of nature as these newer films describe him as but more the embodiment of dread, a vengeful God looking to bring about Armageddon to the sinful world. It played on very real fears about the hydrogen bomb and the escalation of weapons of mass destruction at the time and its message is still relevant.

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(The 1954 film is not meant to be “dumb” and/or “fun.”)

Now, I don’t have a problem too much with changing Godzilla into a super hero for this series. Afterall, the Showa era films it largely takes inspiration from depict Godzilla mostly in this light anyways but if you’re going to do that you can’t go slapping the face of the darker, more vindictive “Gojira” and its theme in the process and it does that in just one scene.

About half way through the movie, Godzilla is duking it out with King Ghidorah off the coast of Mexico when the US military gets involved by unleashing their brand new weapon: the Oxygen Destroyer. Those who have watched the 1954 original know this as the weapon that eventually kills Godzilla.

Those that understand the original will probably see why I find this scene unforgivable.

The use of the Oxygen Destroyer in the original 1954 film is not supposed to be a triumphant moment even when it kills Godzilla; it’s supposed to be a dark moment that gets to the core messaging of the film’s story. The Oxygen Destroyer represents the next level in mass destruction in the movie; a weapon more powerful and more terrifying than the atomic bomb that created Godzilla. Its creator Dr. Serizawa (who is NOTHING like the Serizawa in this series) is reluctant to use it because he understands what terrible power it carries and what it might do in the wrong hands. In the end he sacrifices himself and his research by purposely detonating the weapon along with himself to kill Godzilla.

The way this weapon is brought up and tossed out immediately in this story feels like a cheap fan servicey moment that winks at the audience going “hey remember the Oxygen Destroyer?” It is both shocking and frankly a tone deaf and fundamental misreading of what that weapon is supposed to represent in the larger Godzilla canon.

(What I felt like doing to the writers after this scene in the film...)

It might seem small to other fans but it really speaks to how America has misappropriated Godzilla each time they have gotten their creative hands on him to fit a comfortable narrative regarding weapons of mass destruction. Just watch the dubbed version of the 1954 film and you’ll understand what I’m getting at.

It’s extremely problematic, even it represents a tiny moment in the larger and again confusing plot of the movie and would’ve been better off left on the editing room table.

(Thank you for baring with my mini rant here if you read this far...)

It should be said that I don’t hate this movie, however, warts and all. The kaiju-sized action set pieces make the price of IMAX largely worth the money and I certainly enjoyed it more than the 2014 film at least. I feel “Kong: Skull Island” is a superior modern monster flick in almost every way but as far as cheap escapism goes you could do far worst “King of the Monsters” at least.

But the plot’s often baffling, confusing and problematic choices unfortunately keep the film’s best parts from being enough to rise above simply mediocre and that’s a real disappointment.

I’m still waiting for a truly satisfying high production value take on Godzilla but given the fundamental misreading of the big guy’s much more nuanced background by Hollywood perhaps I should stop looking to the West to figure it out.

Welp. At least there’s always “Shin Gojira”…

VERDICT:

3 out of 5

Hopefully Kong adds some much needed charisma to this franchise once he gets his big ape hands on Godzilla...

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