#and our people are a bit sparse in the Midwest

[idleseas-ops]

The late summer air is comfortably balmy and still today as we meander down the North end of Green Road. Our footsteps are muffled by the sandy two-track that splits the forest in two, as if into separate biomes. To our right, and the West, is a second-growth forest of beech and oak, it’s canopy a brilliant stained glass cathedral of autumnal colors in beams of golden sunlight cascading down to the ferns below, with with wood thrushes and bluejays and northern peewees for a chorus.

To our left, on the east of the road, stands hundreds of identical rows of stock-straight, scraggly, sickly-looking pine trees, each and every one more sparse and pathetic looking than the last. Together, they look like a clone-brushed swath of a badly manipulated photo, like an AI generated post on r/nosleep, "What if the backrooms was in the woods?" Little else grows on this side of the forest, and even the trees themselves have few branches to identify them by, all of them clustered loosely at the top of their matchstick trunks, stripped bare and flaking the rest of the way down to their roots.

Still, taken together, the forest as a whole is beautiful, even in it’s more liminal spaces. This is our favorite place in the world, and the two of us are happy to be taking such a lovely walk today, enjoying the weather, and one another’s company, taking turns photographing any weird fungi we find with my camera. This is only one of many noteworthy things we’ve seen here; a bobcat sauntering down the road in broad daylight, clouds of golden pollen wafting from pine trees, a hummingbird alighting on hammock ties, the night sky aflame with northern lights.

This very stretch of road— though further south a bit— was where Bellamy and I originally met, group camping with mutual friends at a site affectionately (and appropriately) dubbed ‘Fairyland.' In the two years since, we’d spent every possible moment camping together in the back of my car- a peeling but sturdy Nissan that has served my family for almost two decades- though camping is not what we're doing out here today.

This time of year is idyllic. It’s September, so the tourists have gone home, the snowbirds have begun to flee south, and most of the townies are back to their typical routines with kids now back in school, thankfully including the ATV enthusiasts who often speed through here late at night. Tourists still come for the Fall Color Tour, but being as it’s hard to predict when it will begin or end, it’s a much smaller rush than the steady stream of summer vacationers that has now ceased.

We have had several miles of this road to ourselves for days, so we are a little surprised, though not unpleasantly, when we see another hiker coming towards us up the road. He looks from one side of the road to the other with a fond familiarity, like someone might appraise an old neighborhood they once called home.

He veers towards us and we exchange a pleasant greeting. The weather has put us all in a kindly mood. He gestures around broadly as he asks, are we from around here?

Bellamy and I exchange a quick glance, the question hanging unspoken between us. The small, rural towns in this area rely heavily on that good old “Midwest hospitality” which is, of course, not a type of hospitality at all; when you’re a vulnerable minority in these places, being honest can be dangerous.

But forest people are different. Someone who waits for the off season to visit the deep woods, and who comes alone, came out here specifically to find peace and connection with other living things.

Put another way: there are plenty of locals who wouldn’t have approached two visibly queer people if we were the last ones on Earth, let alone the only other two people in the forest.

I look back at our new friend and, after a moment of deliberation, decide he passes the initial vibe check. He has a kind face.

“We live here,” I tell him, gesturing broadly towards our campsite. “We’ve been living our car for about two months now, but we are locals originally, yeah.”

His jaw drops with a polite amount of awe. "Oh, no way! W-?” He peers through the trees to spot our vehicle, wine red still visible through the trees to a vigilant eye.

We give him the abridged version; Bel’s family evicted us, and we had no other prospects. We are too disabled to work. We had nowhere else to go. We were lucky to have national forest so close by, and one we were already familiar with.

Of course, choosing to disclose that you’re queer and trans is a risk above and beyond disclosing homelessness. I have already chosen to lay bare one of those things. The rest doesn’t need to be said. I figure he can read between the lines.

Our new friend listens to our saga with a due amount of reverence, gasping in shock and offering sentiments of disgust and disbelief that our communities would fail us this way, and comments what a tragedy it is that it's happening to so many people since Covid began, especially with the cost of living, and with the class stratification only growing steeper each year…

My vibe check was sound after all; this guy is with it and cool as hell. We immediately like him.

We ask him of himself. What brings him to this neck of the woods, quite literally? He tells us he is a horticulturist back in Ann Arbor, a famously accepting and diverse, but deeply expensive place to live, so he is sympathetic in more than one way (and I was right about reading between the lines; he himself mentions the lack of queer acceptance in rural communities and families like ours).

Though he was doing what he thought was once his dream job, he found himself increasingly disenchanted with it, working more and more with hoity-toity, wealthy landowners and their landscaping projects, rather than to protect natural areas like this one.

He had been traveling up to Nordhouse for decades to camp and hike, and the reason he had flagged us down today was to ask about the changes to Green Road. How familiar were we with this area over the past few years, and did we know what had changed lately? He had been coming here for decades, and it was virtually unrecognizable to him now.

He's in luck; our time spent camping, and now living, together out here means we are just the guys he wanted to meet, and have detailed answers to most of his questions. We are eager to lament the blocking off of trails for private property and cottage rentals; parcels of national forest land being sold and clear-cut, as well as clear-cutting around and widening roads; and an increase in signage, new two-tracks, and DNR presence along with increased overall traffic, owing to the discovery of Green Road of van life and camping apps. This very road has been cut off just ahead. Where once it used to connect to another trail further on, our campsite now marks the end of the road, along with a six-foot mound of dirt and some very clear signage.

He shakes his head sadly, and we all lament the mismanagement of the forest. To my absolute and utter delight, he motions to the soldier-like pines on the other side of the road as an example. We talk about how, when the CCC was mobilized, one of the things they did was plant millions of trees… the same type of tree, over and over and over, in identical little rows, in a very poor attempt to 'reforest' the devastation of the Midwest fire, logging and mining industries.

As many of these seemingly well-intentioned efforts do, they did not use a particularly well-suited species for this, nor did they pay any heed to biodiversity or what lived here before. They simply planted billions of the same type of tree in a massive monocrop that was, contrary to it's image of reforestation, often sold back to the lumber companies in due time.

The lack of biodiversity means an ecological dead zone in the forest, something one can sense even if one knows nothing about biology. hiking through that part of the forest is eerie. In the scraggly, too-orderly rows of pines, the birds don't sing. What sounds you do hear echo unnaturally above you, yet your footsteps are weirdly muffled by the endless bed of dry pine needles. The sunlight that filters through the patchy canopy feels weak and smoky. You feel far too exposed, as if something is watching you from just beyond the bend in the rows of trees, just past where you can see. It makes the hairs rise on the back of your neck and arms.

As soon as you pass back into the normal part of the forest you release so much tension you didn't notice you were holding, and realize you can hear birds and bugs and wind passing through the trees again. Like stepping between a sepia photo and full color video.

Having my disproportionate hatred for that chunk of woods validated by a horticulturist has made me giddy, and we commiserate about the state of the forest for some time.

Probably only 15 minutes have passed when he decides it’s time to be on his way, and us on ours; but he thanks us for stopping to talk to him. Our conversation has been intriguing for all of us, and we all seem to take heart from one another's company.

We are glad for it, too; we have had a dearth of normal and friendly interactions with people in general since becoming homeless. I will never forget the bit of “advice” we got from someone manning a booth for a therapy practice at a suicide prevention event, who suggested we merely buy or rent land to escape homelessness.

Even a conversation as simple and brief as this feels nourishing by comparison, like a hearty, homecooked meal for the soul. It’s nice to be treated like a person. It’s nice to be asked about our observations and to have our opinions respected even after disclosing that we are homeless.

As we move to part ways, the stranger pauses for a moment, palms together at his lips, brow furrowed. He is thinking very deeply, and choosing his last words with great care.

"I hope you guys thrive. I really do."

I realize only after we part ways that we never even exchanged our names.

[lucky-hammer]

Hi, I'm Luka, and this is my story.

If you're confused, it's because I was Oli when this happened and have changed my name.

Since my story came up, I wanted to post my perspective. Please please message me if you have questions or comments. I am willing to have calm conversations about nearly anything.

Never once did I think this had anything to do with me being queer.

This was simply a difference in beliefs that got well out of hand.

One of the reasons I fell in love with Judaism is the openness to discussion. The draw of the concept of the Talmud was groundbreaking in my little universe where my own family exorcised me and kicked me out of Sunday School for asking too many questions.

I admit I did wrong in this as well. I looked up to her and really wanted to be able to learn from her. I understand it is not her job to educate me, and I would have respected her saying she didn't want to discuss. And I would have respected her not engaging in my discussions.

I am not proud of my reaction, but I stand by standing up for myself. I am the proud owner of family heirlooms and I do not view my display of them as religious. Bringing greenery and lights into the home during a cold, dark winter is a non-religious (ad it predates modern religion) tradition of my German heritage to bring joy and warmth into the home.

My great grandmother hand made a miniature pine tree and all of the tiny ornaments she made herself. It was the first thing my grandmother gave to me when I moved out.

The other is a memorial ornament of my grandfather who died in 2020.

The discussion began with me asking for others to offer opinions on leveling with my history and my new religion during my first winter of study. I was open to hearing others thoughts. I wanted a discussion.

I did not expect someone to take my comment(s) in such bad faith or to tell me that (not word for word, but it seemed to be the vibe) even considering keeping these things means I'm not Jewish enough.

My Judaism is between me, my rabbi, and Hashem.

And we spent a lot of time talking about this after temple, and we came to our own conclusion. But understanding other forms and beliefs of and in Judaism is extremely important to the culture and study of the life I am actively choosing. Other people deserve and are entitled to their own system of beliefs.

I had questions. I asked this group specifically to hear their more conservative takes on the matter. I'm converting into reform and often feel it's not observant enough. My partner is reform, my temple is reform, so I wanted to get other views. Again, it is not anyone's job to teach me just because they're Jewish. Which is likely why there was very little response to most of my inquiries and is very understandable.

In summary:

- i miss you guys

- I'm am very sorry, though I have been told my many that I shouldn't be apologizing. I do think this particular situation was (at minimum) partially my fault

- She was supposed to be on hiatus. She had other things happening in her life and the misinterpretation of my statement must have been a straw to break the camels back and for that I am sorry.

- I'm extremely sad that I am not the only person who has had an experience like this with her.

- I've wanted to work this out for a long time.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

More women are running for president than ever. But there’s no one way to do it. This is the first in a series exploring the way that the women candidates in the 2020 race are navigating questions of identity, sexism and public critique.

“I fully intend to win this election” is the kind of line that seems a bit redundant coming from a person running for president.

But when Sen. Kamala Harris said it only a minute or so into her stump speech in Keene, New Hampshire, in late April, it felt like a polite retort to the question of whether she would be “electable” in a head-to-head contest against President Trump. America hasn’t seen too many women run for president, let alone a mixed-race woman, and Harris finds herself dealing with a powerful political irritant: answering the incessant question of whether the nation is ready for a president “like” her.

For months, polls have found that Democratic primary voters value a candidate’s ability to beat Trump regardless of whether they share that candidate’s ideology. And polls have found that former Vice President Joe Biden is perceived as having the best chance to beat Trump, even among those who don’t support Biden’s candidacy. Harris has remained in the top tier of candidates, with strong fundraising and decent small donor contributions, and her standing in the polls has remained steady. Since Trump was elected, though, narratives in the popular media have focused on the idea that Democrats must win back the Obama-Trump voter, giving outsize attention to white, male candidates. In such an environment, Harris’s race and gender are eyed as both a prize — another candidate could try to leverage her identity by naming Harris as his running mate, trying to capture the large number of black and brown women who tend to vote for Democrats — and a liability.

The 2020 race is not the first time that Harris has had to confront the “electability” question. And she’s responding to it now as she ever has: by emphasizing her policy and career bona fides above all else.

Identity is a well-worn line of questioning for Harris, and she sometimes seems to have little patience for overly personal tangents about her personal travails as a mixed-race woman in America.

In a 2017 interview with Harris, David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, interjected as the newly elected senator talked about her decision to become a prosecutor: “I want to get to that and your career in the law, but I just want to hear a little more about your folks and about the sort of cross-cultural upbringing and how that helped shape you,” he said, referring to Harris’s mother, who was Indian, and her father, who is Jamaican. Harris replied:

Well, you know, it’s funny, David. … But in my career, when I was district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California and even now as a United States senator, in each position, I was ‘the first.’ And in particular when I was DA and AG, reporters would come up to me and ask me this really original question, put a microphone in front of my face: ‘So what’s it like to be the first woman — fill in the blank, DA, AG. And I’d look at them not knowing how to answer that question, and I would tell them, ‘I really don’t know how to answer that question because, you see, I’ve always been a woman, but I’m sure a man could do the job just as well.’

You can almost see the trademark narrowing of Harris’s eyes in her answer. Her take on the personal as political often manifests itself as a recitation of past accomplishments and future plans rather than a fixation on her autobiography. Harris wants you to know she’s a doer, not a dweller. Her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” dispenses with the retelling of her childhood, adolescence and college years in a matter of 24 pages. The book is more the story of a career, albeit a remarkable one. It is very much a vehicle for introducing Harris’s policy thinking and her pristine résumé. Even the affecting words she writes about her mother’s death and legacy are relatively sparse — she pivots rather quickly to the problems of the American health care system, the opioid crisis and racial disparities in patient care.

When Harris ran for attorney general in California, she confronted some of the same electability questions she’s being forced to respond to in her 2020 presidential campaign.

Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Longtime friend Debbie Mesloh, who worked with Harris during her time as district attorney and on her Senate campaign, said Harris’s identity as a woman and a woman of color manifests itself most clearly in how she has approached policymaking on the job. “I’ve been with her in rooms where she’s the only person of color advocating policies that look completely different from what everyone else in that room has known,” Mesloh told me. She recalled that one of the first things Harris did when she became San Francisco’s first female district attorney was instruct her team to stop the use of the term “teenage prostitute,” as a way to talk more empathetically about girls who were often victims of human trafficking. (Harris pursued reforms to human trafficking prosecutions during her time as California attorney general.) In May, Harris’s campaign announced a policy proposal for pay parity that would ask companies, rather than individual complainants, to report pay disparities between the genders

“She grew up in this environment where, yes, you’re a woman of color, you’ve had this unique experience — then therefore, what?” Mesloh said. “What is that going to mean for what you say you want to do?”

That Harris doesn’t put her personal experiences front and center runs somewhat counter to the American public’s desire to know as much as possible about the lives of women, famous and otherwise. The how-she-gets-it-done genre is crowded, and some women politicians like U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have used social media to give constituents — and everyone else — glimpses into their everyday lives. Even Hillary Clinton’s campaign started a podcast, presumably as a way to everywoman its extremely famous candidate.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Kamala,” Jim Stearns, the campaign manager for her two district attorney races, told me, adding that she was a warm presence and “down to earth.” But, he said, “I never knew anything about her private life.” In her first campaign to be district attorney, Harris was running as the first woman of color for the position. “She usually frames things within issues, so it’s not necessarily about herself,” Stearns said. The campaign manager for her attorney general races, Brian Brokaw, said much the same thing. “Her identity is her identity, but that’s not how she runs,” he said. “She wants to be judged for what she believes in and what she’s done.”

The “electability” question that Harris now faces — a dubiously framed debate in the eyes of some — is also one that dogged her in her early California races. Brokaw said that during Harris’s 2010 attorney general campaign, skepticism around her candidacy came even from friendly corners. “I remember having a conversation with someone I won’t name, but at the time, he was a prominent state legislator, and he said, ‘I like Harris, I think she’s a great DA, and she’s got a bright future, but I don’t think she can win because I agree with her too much.’ And the point he was making was as a progressive himself, there was no way that someone who was a black woman from San Francisco with a progressive record could win a job in California that had been held entirely by white men for the history of the state of California.” Harris would go on to beat Republican Steve Cooley in a close race, but only after Cooley declared victory on election night. He conceded weeks later.

In Harris’s current race, her foil is the front-runner, Biden. He hadn’t yet gotten into the race when I saw Harris in New Hampshire, but his smiling face was on the cover of Time magazine when I popped into a drugstore. Harris has chafed against Biden’s pitch that he can win back so-called Obama-Trump voters. “There has been a conversation by pundits about ‘electability’ and ‘who can speak to the Midwest,��” she told a crowd at an NAACP event in Detroit recently. “But when they say that, they usually put the Midwest in a simplistic box and a narrow narrative. And too often, their definition of the Midwest leaves people out. It leaves out people in this room who helped build cities like Detroit. It leaves out working women who are on their feet all day, many of them working without equal pay.”

Harris’s path to the White House hinges on her ability to increase turnout of core Democratic constituencies in places lost by Democrats in 2016. Black turnout fell across the board in the last presidential election, including in key areas of “blue wall” states like Michigan with high black populations. That Harris is a mixed-race woman could, allies argue, be her greatest electoral strength, not a weakness. “This moment in time when we really see, especially within the Democratic Party, people looking at and seeing the power of black women,” Mesloh said, “has probably been the first time that there’s really been that recognition.”

In Keene, people seemed cautiously optimistic about Harris. Donna Doherty told me that she agreed with everything Harris had to say. “My only fear is that I think some people in our country aren’t ready to vote for a woman,” she said. Doherty’s friend, Sandy Thibodeau, was similarly complimentary: “She speaks very well, she’s very calm. A woman, unfortunately, needs to be.”

While Harris spoke, I found myself at pains to notice how voters reacted to her. People tended to call her “Kamala” rather than “senator” when they addressed her, but I couldn’t detect much else that was radically different from any other event in a far-too-long presidential campaign. At one point, in the middle of her stumping, I caught sight of Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, who had slipped into the back of the crowd. He shook his head in disbelief as she called out some gun control policies as too lax in one part of the speech and then looked around to see how others had reacted. For a moment, I was struck by how strange it must be to see a room full of people size up your spouse. And watching us — voters, journalists — watch her seemed as apt a metaphor as any for modern “electability” politics, 2020 included. The chief concern seems not to be personal belief, but concern for the personal beliefs of others: “some people in our country aren’t ready to vote for a woman”; “I don’t think she can win because I agree with her too much.”

Harris, for one, seemed confident when she stopped to say hello to a little old lady on the way out of the event: “It’s not going to be easy, but we’re going to win.”

[jwindish]

A Snowy February Weekend in the Upper Peninsula

How do you spend a snowy February weekend in the Upper Peninsula? You get outside and try to make the most of it.

This blog post started off as winter travel tips in the Marquette/Munising, Michigan area in February. However, our weekend plans changed quickly when the area was hit by one of the worst snow storms of the season.

Our plans for the weekend of February 22 – 25, 2019 originally included visiting the Lake Superior shoreline to stargaze, and visit Marquette, Michigan to photograph the abandoned ore dock, which we did do but not as planned.

One thing we did plan that turned out quite well was snowmobile riding on the extensive trails in and around Munising, Michigan. More on that in a few moments.

Accommodations

For this trip, we selected a nice little cabin just outside of Munising, which worked out quite nicely, as it was very close to our snowmobile rentals.

Pictured Rocks Cabins – A very nice, modern, yet outdoorsy cabin that will have you feeling right at home the moment you arrive.

Situated just off the Pictured Rocks National Shoreline and smack in the middle of the Hiawatha Forest, this cabin is just what we were looking for.

The cabin is two rentals in one cabin so you might not be alone, but the hosts (Brad and Kathy) are very good at keeping track of who is coming and going – but, not in an intrusive way. The second room was rented but we did not know our neighbors were even there.

Pictured Rocks Cabins has several options for booking. We booked through Airbnb, but Brad and Kathy have a nice website for booking. We just chose Airbnb because we use the site often and was familiar.

Photos below are all taken right at the cabin.

One final comment regarding our stay at Pictured Rocks Cabin – Brad and Kathy were great hosts. They both came to meet us when we arrived at the cabin to make sure everything was as expected. Since it snowed quite a bit that weekend, Brad made sure the drive was cleared of snow and accessible.

On Sunday, the 24th, when the blizzard hit, the entire area lost power for a period of time. Brad messaged us to make sure we were ok and that they had contacted the power company to get someone working on it for us. It was most appreciated.

Other lodging options – Pictured Rocks National Shoreline is a busy warm weather destination and there are more options for lodging during warmer months. Several of the hotels that are located near the shoreline close for the winter, however, there are still several options we heard about while visiting.

Holiday Inn Express, Munising – A spectacular location right on Lake Superior. Looked very busy when we visited, so book early.

Econolodge Inn & Suites – Wetmore, Michigan. This is located near Munising and only a short 10 minutes from Munising and the Pictured Rocks Shoreline. The Econolodge is also where our snowmobile rental was located. So, if you are renting snowmobiles, give this a look – again, very busy so check early.

Cherrywood Lodge – Wetmore, Michigan. This lodge is also part of the Econolodge property where snowmobile rentals are located.

Snowmobiling

When I was younger, we owned snowmobiles and they are incredibly fun. My wife was skeptical, to say the least. She had never been on one and was quite reluctant when I first suggested we give this a try.

The Upper Peninsula is really where it’s at if you want a great snowmobiling experience. Miles and miles of trails, lots of snow, groomed trails, and scenery that will absolutely amaze you.

We do not own snowmobiles, so renting for the day was in order. We heard of several places renting but we only checked on the location where we did rent from and they were very good to work with and were quite friendly people.

Munising Snowmobile Rentals – Wetmore, Michigan.

Definitely, give these Munising Snowmobile rentals a try if you are planning to take a snowmobile trip to the area.

Prices were average for a day rental. What made this experience renting our sleds so enjoyable was the great care taken by the staff to ensure we had a great experience. The staff made us feel welcome, helped us with our paperwork, made sure we were properly outfitted and gave us all the information we needed to operate our sleds safely.

Safety was definitely the selling point for Munising Snowmobile Rentals. From making sure we could operate our sleds safely, to providing us good options for the best trails to hit, and then having a staff member lead us safely to the trailhead to ensure we were headed the right direction. They also provided us a phone number and asked us to at least text message them during the day to let them know we were doing ok.

Photos below show our snowmobile and a small sample of the trails we rode.

Munising Snowmobile Rentals have a variety of sleds for every type of operator. We selected a two-seater since my wife had never operated a sled before. It was a nice sled.

My wife would say that the back seat of a snowmobile is not the place to be – it sits up higher and does not have the benefit of the windshield to block the wind. The back seat did have hand warmers though – that kept us out there a while longer for sure.

Our pictures were all taken with phones since it was just too difficult to take a larger camera. However, we did capture some amazing sights during our day on the snowmobiles.

Views from the trails and snapshots from a brief hike along the way to visit Miner’s Falls. We had snowfall the entire day of snowmobiling on Saturday.

Make sure you have proper identification and registration while on the trails. We saw Conservation stop a few snowmobilers checking for proper paperwork and safety. Keep up the great work #michiganconservation.

Scenes from the trails

Read more about Miners Castle Overlook HERE.

Miners Falls – located a short ride from Miners Castle Overlook. Was a little hike back to the falls but the scenery was well worth it.

Ice formation from Miners Falls

    Tips

Check the weather – we did not expect a blizzard even though the forecast called for snow. Travel was very dangerous

If you are renting sleds or have never been snowmobiling, call ahead and check with vendors, they will be more than happy to provide details. The trails were quite busy the last weekend of February. If you can go during the week, even better.

Travel in a truck or SUV with 4 wheel drive, if possible. We would have been stranded had we not been in my pickup with 4 wheel drive.

Food is sparse – don’t expect to see any chain restaurants in Munising. We got decent food but nothing spectacular.

Lodging was pretty much all booked up during our stay. We booked about three months in advance and things were pretty full then.

The locals were all fabulous – ask questions if you want details about local travel, food, destination, or any other specific information. They’ll be happy to help you.

So, there you have it, readers, our review of Munising, Michigan and our snowy weekend in February.

#munising #michigan #snowmobiling #microcation

      A Snowy February Weekend in the Upper Peninsula. A review and summary of a great midwest destination. A Snowy February Weekend in the Upper Peninsula How do you spend a snowy February weekend in the Upper Peninsula?

[eoleolhan-a]

ok i'll bite. is their mission any different from the east/west bos? how has it changed over the years? and do their battle tactics reflect their potential end goal?

hell yeah B) yes, their mission is different. they were separated from the west and east coast brotherhood chapters when their ship crashed in the midwest. that’s a bit of lore mentioned i believe in fallout tactics, but keep in mind this is all divergent from any canon beyond the small pieces ive taken. 

their mission started as “rebuild our ship, set up camp”. it quickly changed to one of more permanent standing as they realized there were very few powerful groups in the sparsely populated areas of the midwest, with the city of chicago being somewhat walled off by rubble. essentially, they saw themselves as the strongest and most capable in the area. they wanted to set up a new govt similar to the old world, something that would let people be free and protected. at first it was almost like lyons’ east coast BoS with a focus on keeping people safe and rebuilding. changes in leadership have made it more of a power grab, and as theyve grown theyve become less attached to ideology and more attached to utility and pragmatism. the growth and stability they have experienced in the midwest makes it easier to eschew ideas and focus on forming something of a government. they accept recruits of various types including ghouls, synths (if they knew of them), and sentient super mutants but only for low level positions. they are still internally human supremacists and often nepotistic in how they appoint both elders, and squadron leaders.

their fighting tactics are pretty brutal and do reflect, in a lot of ways, their end goal. they aren’t averse to mowing down resistance with gatling laser guns, miniguns, or soldiers in power armour. people can be killed or taken as prisoners, but property and infastructure should be left alone if possible to make it easier to rebuild. generally, they’ll try to avoid combat with small local settlements in order to try and get them to willingly join BoS ranks. if a settlement proves feisty, they’ll often use threats in their negotiations, or simply take over the area regardless and deal with rebels as they crop up. usually, however, small settlements that are at the whims of raiders, mutants, or ghouls will accept the protection and military resources in exchange for their caps and crops. their numbers increase pretty well when they take over areas, since settlers will join and become their own settlement’s BoS protectors, needing only one or two BoS paladins or so to help train and equip the locals. they patrol across and around their territory, with various checkpoints and lookout towers. they ask questions first, shoot later when it’s not an active combat situation. their main issue with the city of chicago is managing and navigating both the rubble, and two major settlements with their own goals and broad knowledge of the city’s subways, sewers, and passages through the heavy destruction of the city

[arvandus]

How does your voting system works? I was looking at a recent post you made and it says that Biden was winning, but Trump has more states, I didn't quite understand that... And apparently you dont get the results in the same say, right? Sorry if I'm bothering you.

Short answer: A big thing to keep in mind is that when looking at the map it seems weird because there are a lot of big states in the middle of the U.S. that are actually sparsely populated.   Most of the U.S. population lives along the coastlines (including the Great Lakes in the Midwest).

Long answer (a peak into the U.S. election system):

The U.S. election system is a bit odd.  Votes for presidential elections are shown in two ways: the popular vote and the electoral college. The popular vote is exactly how it sounds - whoever has the most citizen votes (in the entire U.S.) has the most popular votes.  Normally you’d think, “whoever wins the most votes wins, right?” NOPE. Not always the case in America! Why?  Because what REALLY matters, are the votes obtained through the electoral college. Basically, each state is given a certain number of electors based off of the number of congressional and senate representatives.  (Electors are designated individuals who represent their state and cast their presidential vote based off of the candidate winner within that state.). All states have equal senate representatives (2), but states congressional representatives are dependent upon population.  Therefore, states that have more people (and therefore more representation), have more electoral votes to cast towards a presidential candidate.

So for example, California has a higher population than, say, North Dakota.  Therefore, California gets more electors (55 total) whereas a less populated state will have far less (e.g., North Dakota has 3 electors).  Each state calculates their respective presidential votes within that state and whoever wins is given all of the electoral votes from that state. 

This is intended to mitigate the power of the population majority in favor of the political minority.  It’s meant to keep the majority from trampling over the interests of the political minority (i.e., the founders were scared of a full, direct democracy) so no one is neglected or taken advantage of within the political system. 

Unfortunately though, this method of assigning electoral votes based off of population per state has some serious issues. 

Mainly, it reduces the power of the vote in some states and increases it in others. The ratio of state populations and number of electoral votes within those states aren’t balanced/equal across all states (you can read more on this here).

This is how you get such things as “swing states” - states that are relatively even in their democratic vs. republican voters and have a significant number of electoral votes that the presidential candidates want.  So for example, the state of Pennsylvania gives 20 electoral votes.  Whoever can sway the most voters to vote for them in that state will get all of those 20 electoral votes to put them towards their end goal of 270 electoral votes to win.  So candidates are going to focus a lot of their attention in that state compared to a non-swing state whose majority always makes it lean one way or another.

You also get the issue of the political minority winning the presidential election even though the other candidate won the popular vote (e.g., this happened in our 2016 election between Clinton and Trump).

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, lol.  But I wanted to make sure that I explained it as best I could. P.S.: we didn’t know the results of the election the same day because a lot of citizens cast their votes via mail-in ballots this year due to covid concerns (safer than voting in person). Some states have it written into their laws that they aren’t allowed to actually open and count these ballots until election day.  So, if they’ve gotten millions of ballots (for example, Pennsylvania) then there is no feasible way for them to open and count all of the votes by the end of the election night.  Also, some states will accept ballots that arrive AFTER election day, so long as they were mailed out ON election day (i.e., post-marked with the election-day date), which are still counted towards the votes for that state.

[negativefate]

rambling stream of consciousness essay i wrote to myself dec 29, 2014

listening to harsh noise music while driving down the highway i had just taken off at 630 from my house and before that woken up at 5 to get ready and finish cleaning the last set of things and before that leaving a party at kevins house and not telling anyone that i wasn't going to be there for new years and causing disappointment and before that seeing a show at dead leaf with a great 8bit band at the end and before that walking back and forth to the liquor store to get some beer and before that awkwardly getting dinner after my cousin came to visit when we probably should have gotten dinner with them and then before that i am cleaning up the basement again, organizing stupid cables, making a couple old devices work which is fun, but is it worth the time spent even? if not, then is my time on this planet even fucking worth it or am i just making trash like i believe these actual physical well designed objects that come to my home are so jump to me landing in kansas city and here i put on a tape just to get in the mood again i get there only an hour after landing i clumsily look up directions to get to jacks house on my phone i find there’s a bus that gets me there for fuckin a dollar fifty and i give them 2 and they give me a ticket for 50 cents back i ride the bus and i'm pretty tired for lack of sleep, and we drive through some weird semi industrial areas that are sparsely developed yet there are people getting on and off the bus fairly consistently i almost don't even notice who is getting on and off and at one point i look back to the back of the bus and see that i don't remember hardly any of the people getting on one person is looking back at me with a mousey face i typify some of these midwest people's looks certain women especially have a certain look that just reminds me of various nondescript porn actresses or something i start reading a economics book and it talks about oil prices and how scarcity reflects prices and is a major signal to the economy it is an interesting point of view but i look for holes in the logic because it seems obviously presenting a plain vewpoint it is clear that the US for example doesn't give a fuck about scarcity or perhaps the signalling system is so degraded that there is a runaway development the roads are overbuilt the cars are overrunning the roads if i take the face value economic view that this is a supply and demand problem i see it as a very perverse value system that rewards wasting they clearly even mention that soviet economies have gross inefficiencies and if we reflect on our own inefficiency it's clear to see that we are not perfect i feel that the author should have made this more clear i notice that i passed a street that i saw on my map (wyanadote) and while i didn't think it was "already" time to get off, several people are standing for several city blocks instead of sitting waiting to get off therefore I realize perhaps we're at a central location and certainly we are I stumble a couple blocks from the "main transit center" to another crossing on wyanodote, and i pass several office buildings with retail space that is broken down on the first floors first an eye doctor shop, filled with eye product ads but being torn to pieces otherwise then a sandwich shop, with dark cloudy windows and closed signs and a vibe of a previous generations comfort food when i reach the bustop at the streets that i had spotted on my map i was pleased and the troost bus came almost instantly i didn't understand how to scan my transfer so the lady did it for me, and i was acting bashful she was wondering if i knew it was the troost bus and i said yes i was wondering if that question was loaded i rode the bus in the front and looked at all the people that got on and off as we went towards jacks house we passed a row of two story townhouses that were red and white and repetitive that just looked like a dead end life situation for successful people i remembered my talk with my dad about retirement plans and investing money and about how i was literally thinking of blowing my brains out rather than do that and how i was yet again thinking about suicide in the bus i didn't even take it seriously but the vividness of me blowing my fucking head off was really awful i finally started recognizing some troost landmarks and scrambled off the bus i gave my ticket to a guy that wanted a transfer and he lamented being late for the bus that i just got off i don't know how to respond to this very well but wished him luck i walked up to jacks house and there are birds and squirrels and life just running wild there it is bright and sunny though a bit chilly (maybe 40 deg) and all these animals just were simply flourishing i walk inside through a couple closed doors and find my keys in the decorative chicken ornament i was surprised to also find several condoms inside the chicken, which was really amusing (e.g. the rooster...cock...haha) then i sat for a minute and petted the cat i wondered why the cat wasn't outside killing all the abundant wildlife whatever i was wearing three jackets because i was convinced that frontier would charge me for stuffing my jacket in my backpack and making it oversized in reality they didn't appear to care but they charge 50 dollars for a goddamn carry on that wasn't declared so i didn't risk it so i take off several layers and start my car i find where i left several of the christmas presents that I had meant to bring back home in the trunk and sort of kick myself for it i consider taking my car to a dealership to get it fixed up but have no idea where i also consider getting some food somewhere but decide to just hit the road i'm fairly tired still so i decide the stop off at fast food a couple miles out of town during the ride i am listening to some shitty talk radio about some guys that are talking about their "online trading academy" for stock trading i pull over and get some mountain dew, burrito and gasoline. slurping reality blub sucker is all i am at that moment. i do a couple stretches but it doesn't really feel very good. i am still listening to the radio in the parking lot and i notice that they replay recorded segments of themselves suggesting it is not at all a live show. at that point i decide it's time to blast the "white eye of winter" cassette and just start driving. i decide intentionally to start making stream of consciousness analogies to the noises instead of just letting it wash over me in some nonverbal stupidity i realize music journalists are probably better than me at this but i take some interest in just naming the feelings that i get so I'll repeat that hear a full spectrum white wash starts and then quickly gets crushed into a rumbling full force debase attack that's totally intentional about getting a skull crushing sound "large numbers of priests that were administrating the gulags were arrested and presumed killed" "others were sent to the labor camps...and suffered more slowly...assumed to be part of stalins fringe" a demented drum sound with a short delay time and extremely high feedback pounds and is absorbed by a sea-worthy hiss that fuzzes out and pounds once again to a deep drum a wind swept saturation takes hold and kills everything around it dead leaves litter the ground like there was never life anyways a thin veneer on the surface of our planet oscillations that never even really meant anything the dark fades away...like a comet that is completely grey....without color next a dirty fucking liquid sounds like it's being squeezed through a rubber feeding tube and a vaguely operatic chorus sings in the background, lulliby for a screaming nightmare some full bodied drone hovers over the chorus and takes the 17th century in it's arms and lays it gently to rest, taking each of the sharp moments, the sick deaths, the negative atrocity culture, and bringing it up onto a safer place, one where the only thing that matters is th industrialization of our times the industrialization has replaced any notion that feelings matter, any notion that a fair working environment is something that people deserve we could give retards something to do but it's already done and if you go up the ladder you see more and more things have been automated away you don't think about the roads being built do you? you don't think about the farms that cover 80+ percent of arable land do you? even when you're flying from new york to LA you don't hardly notice that humans have claimed this land for themselves scintillation frequency evokes this convulsive thought control that rises into a nasty chemical haze that demands more resources it's silenced into yet another flailing drippy sound fade out

a electric whip takes the stand fucking whining about the deprivation of resources and stuggles to make some connection fiercely spitting out brief moments of feedback between any number of frequencies that it can communicate on with an aether with non-existant endpoint it takes on more and more endpoint arcing back on itself and driving the frequencies into logical conundrums that antirepel itself and howl into additional painful derivative maneuvers it makes no difference to the machine what the effects of it's energy is being expended on, but only that some noise is being made taken astray leading reclamation of a formerly _done wrong_ system that is now instantaneously trashed and thrown under to make way for something more unplanned more unrelenting in it's consumption of power and antisocial connectivity whining and crying you see tear droplets form in the wave spectrogram taking a full 90 seconds to develop from a mixture of waveforms into a coherent pattern at your notification level notification level that is aloof from what you are supposed to be paying attention to but is instead wired into the inverse avoidance pattern the end the beginning once more gain blasting the appearance of nothing into a oscillation that has wavelengths spanning over years in time \ the bright lightning shatters a dark blank sentimental moment between us vaccum heavy rain sucks the white light from the heavens turning your back onto the keloid frostbite fallow bulbous pulsing face  trancerotten yellow drainage trapnell decade trip fucker stumble block meaningless powernazi storm chaser populace chain reveals a mathematical rule. a pseudoconsistent logic to resolve fndamental curry's paradox from thin air what you thought was a clumsy blind behemoth is now an industrialized system that seemingly stands on it's own regardless of what yo even thought your very presence is nothing more than that like a dinosaur a placement that just gives you a central prominence as i start the other side the lull the powerful lull of harmonics drilled deep into the subcortex drilled deep into the somnambulist deity that rocks the beddy-bye to sleep that keeps the sharp reality away for at least some time for that reality of simple nature, the spikes of inedible plant matter, the vast nothingness that humans have somehow decided is rightfully theirs. homesteaded one small plot at a time until the federal government stepped in and purchased the large swaths of land a musical pattern that resembles a shaman opening and closing it's arms above it's head and taken drumming starts thathits something that's the vbrational equivalent of a untuned drum mode across an entire flood basin drumming starts that calls into question or owner ship of that land and the melodic butterfly that was once a welcome sight is now almost  gone a tick tock dog growl gargling on some infected bacteria sinus cavity occupies the entire space you can hardly remember what things that you thought reckless distasteful nonsense squanders what was left of your vague fact driven storyline a sigh of relief ahlzagailzeguh stomps something fierce onto the mixing floor and drives metallic shards of broken dreams into the woodwork you don't think about who built your house did you/ why do you think you are worth anything to the other people around you when i say you am i actually referring to myself? i'm just desperately trying to offload my stupidity onto someone else? what is vulnerable to critique? i sit almost braindead when i face some of the most important situations yet when something is inconsequential i can leap into action and hurl retarded insults atpeople who don't deserve it like this girl that played prince at a party for like 4 hours i walked up to her and nearly choked her lights out and when she closed the computer i said no! play something else! i proceed to chose a random song that i thought was good off of youtube and then i proceed to just stand there and drunkenly creep on some peoples conversation wishing i could have just chosen a song that was better it's not my fault right? no, it is... there's a huge societal expectation that can't handle you being this way there's a roaring electric god that isn't going to cradle you in your arms while your social environment sees you as if you were a crying baby on an airplane take just a couple things at a time put them "in their right place" maybe then you won't have a crushing retardation lingering over everything you touch repeat this ad nauseum don't think for a minute that you can "escape" this reality you're "personal experiences" (your vacation, your hanging out with friends) is so far deviated from your systematically disassociated life happenstance that your better off to just give the middle finger to everyone and everything until it's over until it's over and you drop a sharp process into the ground and levitate transgressional power you can physically and mentally fail during this tremble weirdly under the occipital signal tension  drab naked torbid flippant crater wield two basic components and when suddenly connected create a huge imbalance that sends flux reeling superintensely into the weak painless skinless meat proper happenstance flayed skinless animal carcass rotting spongiform encephalitis eschera coli sacchromyces schizophrenia pombe river blindness parasite trapped nderneat the helencaste psycholayer obligate individual disease question i never know what to say

[fimflamfilosophy]

Hey Greg, I decided not to continue college next semester (cost and lack of interest in any particular field being the largest factors,) and am staying with my parents over the summer while I find an affordable place to live and start a career path in the KC area. I don't know anybody else who would know that kind of thing. Sorry if this is a difficult question but I lack a lot of real world experience so any advice would be appreciated. P.S. I used to volunteer at the cat store in Dirt Mall

This is kind of a tough question. Education is expensive and I feel your pain, but if you work at all you’ll wind up in a field that would likely benefit from education. The staggering price tag of college can make it difficult to determine what’s a good idea to invest in. High demand degrees are also very competitive and require a lot of math and technical knowledge - they’re most likely to pay off, but I know engineers who have struggled to find work in their field because some of those jobs are regional or subject to the ebb and flow of material costs. Petroleum engineering is a good example, where it was previously a solid idea, but low oil prices have caused a bit of a slump - that slump has also affected chemical engineers to a lesser extent. Unfortunately, essentially zero young people can get their finger on the pulse of an industry from their schooling so the odds of you knowing what’ll be good in four years from now is likely nil..That’s the real problem we have compared to our foreign counterparts. Most educations are good - except certain soft fields that sanctify confirmation biases just to stay relevant - but not every education is $40k tuition plus $900 in textbooks per semester good. In fact a lot of educations, including the  Education field, ironically, aren’t that good. I know that in the Midwest they’ve been developing some alternate methods to obtain teaching credentials because of the financial liability of the traditional pathway. That’s how you know we’re a mess - the system can’t technically sustain itself into another generation without special stopgaps..Regardless, after working in retail a few years you’re almost guaranteed to find yourself wishing you had a degree. Retail work under a corporation is one of the most soul-leeching work environments available today because they’re designed around temporary efficiency. Almost no retail company expects you to stay on with them for more than a few years, so they build their models around exploiting you for the time they have you. If you’re the laid back type, you can survive in this environment by being friendly with your co-workers and not taking corporate seriously; you’ll never meet your metrics, but your immediate boss will forgive you because your personality makes the place less of a living hell..Your boss will change frequently, is the problem. Retail promises incentives for meeting corporate’s standards, but it’s a trick, because the standards are unrealistic and you’ll rarely obtain them. If you do meet them, corporate will raise the bar to prevent you from meeting them again. It’s a carrot on a stick. When the manager doesn’t meet the standards, they’ll have to go to meetings and discuss what they did wrong as though it’s their fault. The manager is probably being underpaid and exploited as badly as you are, and some bosses are foolish enough to try to drive their employees to attempt to meet the metrics. I’ve watched bosses like that drive themselves to the bone and then fall into a state of complete despair when they finally hit their breaking point - sometimes they’re hard-asses but other times they can be well-meaning people who legitimately believe doing a good job will get them noticed. That’s not to say nobody gets promoted, but I only saw the coveted promotion happen once in over five years, and I don’t know what caused it..Blue collar work is better emotionally, but less common and can be more competitive to get into. It also has drawbacks in terms of being more physically demanding, and sometimes your work hours are affected by the seasons. Construction work is a good field in plenty of ways, as is land survey. Working for a contractor is interesting in that your employer usually bills their client for the hours you spend on the project, which means they won’t discourage you from dawdling if jobs are sparse. Don’t get me wrong - they take it seriously and the client will be happy with a cheap and swift job, but unless your firm has a lot to do you’ll probably find yourself taking it easy some days - in Kansas you might be taking it slow on numerous days because the state budget has been in free-fall and there aren’t many projects active..Getting into a trade is a good idea if jobs are available in your area. Many trades are also affected by seasons and the regional economy. For the KC area, it might be a good idea to look into openings at your nearest airport - there’s more than just MCI around here and air is one of the bigger portions of the regional economy. Planes need plenty of maintenance and looking after, and they’re active year round. In my experience, the guys at the downtown KC airport seemed nice and in reasonable spirits - although the economy has gotten a bit shaky on air so that may have changed by now. MCI is much busier and therefore a lot more strict. If you’d like to try to become an air controller, that’s a possibility that actually expects some job experience before you go to school for it, but it’s a very slowly growing field so there’s not an abundance of openings..There are also plenty of medical specialties that require technicians. Specialists are probably grossly overpaid in the US, so that environment may change in a decade if our government doesn’t implode, but nobody makes a truly reliable ten year plan. Still, at the current moment you might be able to snag a technician’s education and a decent living looking at x-rays of the things other people put in their butts. Somebody has to! I’m told a lot of people go to the ER for that. Like, new person every day if you can believe it..It’s a tight job market in KC! I think as a general plan, I’d say you may as well settle for retail if you absolutely can’t find anything else, but recognize that it’s a soul-crushing dead-end for most people. Use the retail wages - which will not be much and will probably require two employers to be livable - to cover expenses, and constantly be on the look out for work virtually anywhere else. A lot of people leave the KC area to look for work in greener pastures, so best of luck!

[geekade]

Welcome to the F.C.U. (The Fargo Cinematic Universe)

In 1996, Joel & Ethan Coen created what many feel is their masterwork film, the murder mystery, crime drama, sociological regional study we lovingly know as Fargo. Near the end of the film, the only remaining living suspect, Gaear Grimsrud, is found stuffing the foot of his former partner in crime into a wood chipper near a cabin on a pristine frozen lake in the dead of winter. When the true hero of the film, pregnant law enforcement officer Marge Gunderson, stumbles across the crime scene, she shoots the eerily vacant-eyed psychopath in the leg as he tries to escape across the lake. As she transports him back across that frozen white tundra, she tries to make sense of the inconceivable tragedy which has unfolded.

“So, that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there,” says Gunderson. “And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper.  And those three people in Brainerd.  And for what? For a little bit of money? There's more to life than a little money, you know.  Don'tcha know that?  And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day.  Well.  I just don't understand it.”

It was an amazingly well-crafted moment and perfectly captured our feeling of revulsion and bewilderment.  Why would anyone commit those horrific acts on another human being?  What could happen in anyone’s life that would allow him or her to think that this was any way to behave?  Fargo would go on to win two Academy Awards – one for Frances McDormand for Best Actress and one for the Coen brothers for Best Screenplay.  

I’ll be the first to admit that when FX announced it was doing a television version of Fargo, I was very skeptical.  I mean, how could FX top the movie?  Without the Coen brothers? 

Well, the third season of showrunner-extraordinaire Noah Hawley’s expansion of that world is now underway on the FX network.  What began as a sparse, tightly written 98 minute film has now spawned two (going on three) seasons of gripping crime drama with a healthy dose of absurdist humor and a sprinkle of supernatural goings-on.   So what’s the secret?  How was Hawley and his team of writers able to so brilliantly capture the magic?  Not since M*A*S*H has there been such a critically renowned film that’s been turned into an unforgettable television program. 

So here, then, are the ingredients for what I think you need to create what I think is the most imaginative program on television.

Strong female lead characters

It is a tired old trope, but with very few exceptions, crime dramas generally tend to have far more testosterone.  Fargo, I can happily report, is the exception to the rule.  Following in the film’s footsteps, the lead female characters are strong-willed, capable women who can take care of themselves, thank you very much.  Molly Solverson (played by Allison Tolman) in season one and Carrie Coon’s character Gloria Burgle in season three are both dedicated, heroic police officers who innately can sense when something is amiss.  And Cristin Miliotti’s portrayal of Molly Solverson’s cancer inflicted mother Betsy in the time jump in season two is a testament to her acting ability and the level of writing on the show.

Even better, the women on the other side of the law are all well-drawn, motivated characters.  Jean Smart’s portrayal of the Gerhardt family matriarch was Emmy-worthy in season 2, as was Kirsten Dunst’s performance as hairdresser turned criminal Peggy Blumquist.  And my favorite femme fatale so far is season three’s stupendously-named Nikki Swango, wonderfully played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  Every time Nikki Swango is on screen you can almost hear Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” playing in your mind.  You know she’s in charge, and her manipulation of Ray Stussy so far has been wondrous to behold.  The women in Fargo are every bit as heroic, villainous, dedicated and savage as the men, if not more so.

Quirky Secondary Characters

Maybe it’s the accents.  Maybe it’s the names.  Whatever it is, the secondary characters in Fargo are so cleverly created.  Every character has a significant purpose in the plot and every character seems to have personality quirks which draw us in.   Bokeem Woodbine’s Mike Milligan, the philosophizing hit man.  Brad Garrett’s Joe Bulo, an almost bureaucratic mob boss.  Nick Offerman’s hilarious portrayal of Karl Weathers, an alcoholic libertarian lawyer.  Ted Danson’s gentle Sheriff Hank Larsson who is trying to create a new language to foster greater understanding between people.  And my favorite, the always reliable Oliver Platt and his portrayal of supermarket king Stavros Milos, whose discovery of a certain briefcase full of cash on a lone, desolate highway connects the television Fargo with the movie.     

Star Power

The ever expanding list of top flight actors who appear in Fargo is truly mindboggling.  The shorter shooting seasons which have now become the norm in television dramas has allowed an influx of a-team talent to lend the very capable writers a never ending parade of remarkable performances.  When your program can list the names above as well as Billy Bob Thornton, Bob Odenkirk, Keith Carradine, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Stephen Root, Adam Goldberg, Patrick Wilson, Jesse Plemons, Adam Arkin and David Thewlis, you’re doing something right.

Family Rivalries

Each season seems to focus, at least partially, on a rivalry between family members.  Whether it’s desperate bad guy wannabe Lester Nygaard (played by Martin Freeman ditching his British accent) sneaking out of the hospital in the middle of the night to plant evidence to frame his brother Chazz for murder, or the season long war between the crime family Gerhardt brothers in season two, Fargo excels at capturing the out and out animosity that can (and frequently does) exist between siblings.  Season three’s stunt casting of Ewan MacGregor playing both Ray and Emmit Stussy, brothers in conflict over a rare stamp and a decrepit Corvette Stingray, continues the almost biblical family battles we have seen to date.

Unfathomable Pinhead-ery and the Inevitability of Fate

When Nikki describes the official cause of death of drug addict Maurice LeFay, a parolee who was crushed by a two-hundred pound air conditioner pushed out of a window by Swango and her lover Ray Stussy after accidentally killing the wrong victim at the wrong address, as “unfathomable pinhead-ery,” you know you’ve struck gold.  Many of the plot complications on Fargo are not the result of a master criminal carrying out a complicated, Ocean’s Eleven-type scheme.  Inevitably, the crimes committed in Fargo are of the purely accidental variety and are the worst possible idea anyone could ever have in their short, strange lives.  The ideas never work, but the randomness of the crimes lead to a far greater ripple effect of violence and bloodshed.  Those ripples always begin as diminutive pebbles thrown into the frozen waters in this series.  But those ripples always grow exponentially into destructive waves. 

The fact that we know almost certainly that certain characters will meet their end is something we always see coming from the beginning.  But what is remarkable is how the characters meet their ends.  After Lester spends the better part of ten episodes wiggling out of one jam after another following the mutually agreed upon murder of his wife by supernova of evil Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Lester finally dies by falling into a hole in the ice trying to evade the police, echoing the previous accidental death of a man mistaken for Lorne Malvo.  Whether the death is by a plummeting air conditioner, the sudden random savagery of murdering twenty-two people in an office building, being hit by a car after murdering everyone in a diner or a car accident caused by a mysterious rainstorm of fish, the inevitable fate met by Fargo’s characters is probably one of the most satisfying and inventive aspects of Fargo.

Beautiful and Inventive Cinematography

I could spend pages just writing about the camera work done on this series.  So many moments of stark beauty, creative storytelling and flat out kick ass cinematography.  Case in point.  The P.O.V. camera on the air conditioner falling in free flight.  Or how about the final shot of the season opening pre-title sequence in East Berlin that slow zooms into a picture on the wall of what will become the Stussy backyard looking at rows of frosted trees in what is now the traditional Fargo title sequence.  Gorgeous and forlorn horizontal lines of tundra and snow.  The camera work on Fargo challenges the standard bearer Breaking Bad on creative placement and use of cameras.

Unspeakably evil characters with little to no compunction of any sense of morality

And…

Morally ambivalent characters who find themselves tempted to commit crimes either by accident or the temptation of a better life

In Fargo, these two categories go hand in hand.  The absolute evil of Lorne Malvo and his ingenious yet devious means of eliminating his targets is an example of the first category from season one.  As is the hilarious savagery of David Thewlis as the mobster/money launderer V. M. Varga in season three.  The truly evil characters in Fargo don’t care a whit about life or the morality of protecting it.   Inevitably, there is a huge chemical reaction when the truly evil meet the morally ambivalent.  (spoiler alert – evil always wins due to a failure to recognize that evil doesn’t care about a “no rough stuff type of deal.”)  The moments where the morally ambivalent see the true depths of depravity that humans are capable of recalls what Marge Gunderson was commenting on in that police cruiser.

What’s most remarkable about both the film and the television show is that writing never stoops to condescension; the plots and characters in Fargo are not being written in a fashion seeking to humiliate the people who live in the northern Midwest “flyover states.”  Instead, the world Fargo inhabits is simply the setting of a grand drama, like Elsinore, Verona or Athens.  The characters may have funny accents we’re not used to hearing, but they are fully developed three dimensional characters who only enliven and enrich what is arguably the best program on television. 

[lucretiars]

Cherry by Nico Walker

“The taste comes on first; then the rush starts. And it’s all about right, the warmth bleeding down through me. Till the taste comes on stronger than usual, so strong it’s sickening. And I figure it out: how I was always dead, my ears ringing.” I’m standing in the confines of a gorgeously-lit, delicately-balanced bookstore in the second story of the historic Fine Arts Building in the heart of downtown Chicago, light pouring in from the early-autumn golden hour, the crisp and clean pages of this novel jutting smooth and warm in my hands. At the lazy hour of 3:00 pm I’ve got the place to myself; the setting surrounding me a complete juxtaposition of the content my eyes are scrolling through—and this is the line that hooks me. Sober, save for the lingering coffee buzz that gently gripped hold just a few hours ago, I am suddenly hurtled into the body of a war veteran, addicted to heroin, riding a high and planning his next bank robbery. This is the world of Cherry, Nico Walker’s debut semi-autobiographical novel written over the course of several years from the Federal Correctional Institute in Ashland, Kentucky.

Cherry exposes the wrath of Walker’s unnamed narrator, leading readers down a walk through hell, a tender spectacle, an absurd dream, an intimate terror, a candid gut-reaction. There is a bleak disillusionment in the narrator’s trajectory, which allows readers to directly experience the grueling effects of PTSD and addiction. In our narrator, we meet the rough and tattered exterior of a deeply introspective and sensitive person. Mimicking Nico Walker’s literal state behind bars, his created main character wears the façade of the contrast between a metal jail cell trapping a living, breathing human inside.

The foreword of the novel drops you directly in the drug-addled, reality-grappling lives of our narrator and his partner Emily. Coalesced between discussing the plan of that day’s impending bank robbery and ruminating on how they imagined their recently adopted dog would help them get their lives together but now they’re merely “dope fiends with a dog”, the narrator takes a particularly large hit of their vice of choice and wakes up to Emily stuffing ice cubes into his underwear to shudder him awake. The narrator, though a bit disheveled, makes a crude joke about his hygiene and brushes the experience off like nothing, insisting to Emily to hurry up and get her hit in before she’s late for class. While there are glimpses of true affection and observations so saccharine and resonating, Emily and the narrator are distorted in an enabling and detrimental relationship; the kind of relationship that makes you understand the sheer power of denial.

Continuing in the foreword, still written through a backwards-told “ending at the beginning” tactic, our narrator is trudging swiftly yet lightly through the alleyway veins of an unidentified Midwest city after completing a robbery for the umpteenth time. Police sirens gradually piercing louder and louder to symbolize their looming arrival, the narrator unexpectedly finds a moment of contentment in the chaotic purgatory that is the life he knows now and the fate he is yet to endure. He finds a calm pocket of time to marinade on the simplistic hidden beauty of the dreadfully mundane reality around him, remarking, “The sirens are coming up Mayfield now, and the grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—the stoops are fucking wondrous! That’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go! This is the beauty of things fucking with my heart. I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for a while, but of course this is impossible, the gun in my hat could be a little obvious, the money sticking out of all my pockets too.” Through these scattered musings, I found myself reflecting on those past moments that suddenly, when we fear something actually really fucking bad may be about to happen, or we fear the possibility of reality becoming so twisted and wrong, we suddenly find gratitude in the minuscule speckles of beauty around us. And through Walker’s brutal, tender, and grippingly honest narrative, these bare slices of time—the impossible-to-name fleeting moments of life that keep us from completely losing it all when everything is falling apart—are unraveled through Cherry.

To be frank, the largest appeal of the book when I first picked it up was the process in which it was created. Nico Walker, still currently serving an 11-year sentence for robbery, crafted Cherry over four years behind bars. In his acknowledgements, Walker outlines the severely manual process of communicating with his publisher, Matthew Johnson. Each edit and recommendation given to Walker was expressed through weekly allotted phone calls. Unable to bring even a pen or paper along for documentation, their discussions were to be memorized and then divulged back in his cell. Walker writes, “The manuscript wasn’t so much a manuscript as it was a plastic bin full of paper. Every page has been rewritten one hundred times over. There was no Word file. It had all been done on a typewriter.” Somehow, this seemingly insufferable feat emerged with such power. Walker’s dialogue is crafted with such rhythm and realism that it mimics an old friend spouting the tales of their life to you at a party, drunk with grace and ease. But buried in the nature of what Walker is actually spouting to us is deep unease.

At the start of the novel, Walker introduces two widely juxtaposing quotes. The first, by Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe from his 1600’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament reads:

“Such use these times have got, that none must beg, but those that have young limbs to lavish fast.”

And, by popular country singer Toby Keith from his Americana southern anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”:

“And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you.”

Though worlds apart, these contrasting lines set the stage for Walker’s approaching journey. Initially used by the army in attempts to indict inspiration and patriotism in its soldiers, the fake plastic spectacle of the red-white-and-blue vomit becomes a comment on the brainwashed nature of American pride. Walker’s inclusion of Mr. Keith’s phony lyric at the start of his novel exposes a harsh reality to this otherwise overplayed tune. Often referring to it merely as “that Toby Keith song”, the narrator is resistant to the patriotism of his fellow soldiers. In an already hollow and alienating battleground, this further detaches him from his surroundings.

Intermixed with code-heavy language in the Iraq scenes, the authenticity of Walker’s war scenes will surprise you. Mingled in the muddles of mechanistic day-to-day routine, our narrator faces harrowing sights and experiences that force him to dig into the reality of who he is at the core. A la Full Metal Jacket, the army scenes are at times darkly comedic and other times so shrewdly acerbic, exposing each comrade our narrator interacts with as a true individual so nuanced that there’s no way they weren’t real. Amongst them are Specialist Grace who looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and had an 18-year old wife waiting for him at home, Sergeant Bautista, to which our narrator gets stuck in the almost dull routine of draining the abscess on his ass every night while he plays Madden, and a man who was only referred to as “Arnold”, who had dreams of being a computer genius and “bringing down Bill Gates”. It’s disclosed that all three of these men will not be alive when the narrator goes home, and Walker writes with such viscous detail as if to honor their memory.

Sprawled across six parts: “When Life Was Just Beginning, I Saw You”, “Adventure”, “Cherry”, “Hummingbird”, “The Great Dope Fiend Romance”, and “A Comedown”, readers are rapt along the narrator’s tour through love, violence, crime, and everything in between. The novel’s trajectory mimics a drug’s high—the initial excitement, the hidden fear, the gentle roller-coaster crescendo, the exhilaration, the subdued serenity, the banality, the regret, the car-crash decrescendo, the reality.

Walker writes with such an unexpected tenderness that even though his experiences were nothing short of foreign to me, I was catapulted into the perspective of the narrator’s psyche. Chapter Fifty-Two, the entirety spanning one long paragraph (Walker’s chapters range from quietly sparse to compressed and bursting) begins and ends with the sentence, “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.” In-between the graphic and miserable terrors the drug wracked on the narrator and Emily, Walker’s prose delicately weaves in the joy, bliss, and wildness they both experienced, reminding me of Mark Renton and his crew in Trainspotting. I believed Walker’s narrator felt paradise and passion in the transitory moments of his addiction. That harsh truth illuminated through these pages transform “The Great Dope Fiend Romance” from merely a staggered semi-autobiographical account of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to a stark observation of the reality that is the opioid epidemic. And as a part of the whole that is Cherry, this honesty becomes even more heartbreaking sandwiched between the terrors of going to a war way too young and naïve and resorting to crime as a means of coping. Walker writes about the emergence of the narrator’s newfound vice: “I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation. Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit. With robbery it’s a matter of abasement. Are you abased? Careful then. You might rob something.”

In a brief wholesome moment after treating his dog to a Wendy’s cheeseburger, Walker remarks through his narrator, “She reminded me of myself, insatiable.” In this fleeting reflection towards the close of the novel, I began to understand the gravity of the narrator’s losses and residual search for meaning. After experiences in combat stripped so much of himself away, the blissful yet impossibly impermanent highs he continued to chase with drugs, love, and crime were simply insatiable. Everyone can relate to experiencing the act of yearning, and I think that Cherry illustrates the simple notion of yearning for middle ground. Between the mundane and the chaos there is harmony, and without explicitly expressing it, the narrator pines for something solid to hold on to. The voraciously unquenchable lust for purpose.

Cherry feels like a process of dehumanization, but dispersed through even the bleakest moments, there are searing glimpses of human fragility and vulnerability. Through Walker’s narrative, I followed his character down a slowly sinking spiral, floating between some warped sense of hope only to find it disguised in obscurity. I was left wishing, grasping for a light at the end of the tunnel; but sometimes, there is no light. For Nico Walker, maybe there will be. But to write with purpose is to write the truth, and in his echoing honesty there is beauty.

“I was feeling melancholy, but it was a calming melancholy. Life was fucked but I was good. This was what I knew. And fate was fate. My heart was full and life was precious.”

[bordersmash8-blog]

Andrew Zimmern’s Lucky Cricket Is More Than a Controversy. It’s Also a Bad Restaurant.

It’s awkward to enter a restaurant like Lucky Cricket during a moment of controversy: The staff must carry on and do their jobs, knowing that some of their guests might just be rubberneckers hoping to get a glimpse of the place that its co-owner, travel television star Andrew Zimmern, claimed would save the Midwest from bad Chinese food. The ceilings of the dining rooms are decorated like the woven bamboo sides of a Chinese cricket cage, and that night, it felt like an apt touch: We were trapped here, restaurant staff, suburbanites, and media vultures all, trying to dig both meaning and livelihood from a place suddenly overloaded with the wrong kind of fame. On the night I went, the restaurant was three weeks old and chugging along, with Zimmern reportedly popping in once in a while to expedite in the kitchen.

I came to see Zimmern’s vision for the future with my own eyes — to view his secret weapon in the crusade against faux Chinese-American cuisine. To be absolutely clear, the firestorm around his remarks to Fast Company, wherein he said, “I think I’m saving the souls of all the people from having to dine at these horseshit restaurants masquerading as Chinese food that are in the Midwest,” was never a conversation about whether a white man could cook Chinese. (Of course people can cook whatever they want — relax.) It was about the strange idea that the food-court Chinese joints of the nation were a problem that needed fixing in the first place. That we the people have been duped by orange chicken and crab rangoon, and he, the world traveler and gourmand, would release us from our ignorance. In the fallout from Zimmern’s remarks, an essay I wrote in 2013 on cultural appropriation was quoted by Eater’s early coverage; writers of subsequent stories asked me for meatier quotes, and I obliged. For my trouble, I got an anonymous call on my cellphone from an earnest Zimmern stan, which made me want to go to Lucky Cricket even more.

Lucky Cricket is ostensibly our escape vessel from the tyranny of shopping-mall cashew chicken — so what does it look like? It looks dark and full of logos, a jumble of confusing signifiers. Adorned with a palm-thatched roof and giant Tiki faces with slushie machines in their mouths, the bar screams, “Rainforest Cafe but also Margaritaville.” Its tables’ surfaces feature iconic exotica album covers, celebrating an American musical genre famous for mixing the sounds of kotos, bongos, and gongs into a pan-Pacific pastiche of sound. That room was the first red flag.

If Lucky Cricket is meant to show us “real” Chinese cuisine, why is there a heavy Tiki element here? The Tiki aesthetic itself is mired in illusion, an invention of post-World War II Hollywood. You get the sense, being there, that you’re in a Disneyfied vision of the East. You see a Thai tuk-tuk (which of course you can sit in), photos of Asian marketplaces so generic it’s hard to place them, and posters that say “HAWAII,” while tucking into a plate of hand-torn noodles inspired by the cuisine of China’s central plateau. If this restaurant were a piece of writing, an editor would call it a “centaur”: two distinct organisms slapped together in an uncanny mess.

By the host station, there was already a wall of merch: T-shirts saying “Get lucky” awkwardly machine-translated into Chinese characters (a point of pride for Zimmern in the Fast Company interview) and a collection of kitschy Tiki mugs. Regardless of any complaints one might have about the rest of the restaurant’s authenticity, at least we know the mugs were manufactured in China. A private party space in the back, with sparse but blood-red decor, was labeled “Kung Food Room.”

In his remarks to Fast Company, Zimmern revealed that the goal of Lucky Cricket, aside from its own propagation as a nationwide chain, is to educate the Midwestern consumer and share the Chinese flavors and refinement that he experienced on his own culinary journey. The menu, he said, would feature his “favorites from around China.” Considering all of the bombast surrounding this opening, I at least expected the food to be decent, to be forced to admit that, yes, it was at least better than PF Chang’s, or even better than the Leeann Chin — Minnesota’s own Chinese-American chain — across the street. Yet the short menu felt incredibly watered down, and there was something fundamentally off about the execution of the majority of the items my group tried.

Top left: Stony’s Flyhead lettuce wraps. Top right: Soy sauce noodles. Bottom: Soy sauce noodles; Hong Kong waffles and Shanghai fried chicken; sheng jian bao; roast duck at Lucky Cricket.

The dan dan noodles were perhaps the most disappointing item we ordered. The flat egg noodles were a strange improvisation from the thin and cylindrical ones that a diner would normally see in this dish — are Midwesterners not used to spaghetti? To make matters more dire, the noodles were overdone to an Easy Mac consistency. The ground pork topping, meant to carry tang from pickled greens and numbing spice from ground Sichuan peppers, tasted like microwaved, airline economy-class breakfast sausage and was bereft of moisture. If we evaluate Zimmern in his self-appointed role as an educator, he has failed to introduce the dish properly.

Another basic item, the fried rice, was minimally and unevenly seasoned, absent of any crisp or wok-induced char. Even the bits of char siu, which one would normally expect to contribute some flavor, were tasteless. The dish required more than a little dousing with soy sauce and chile oil, provided to the table in Lucky Cricket-branded bottles. (The typeface may look familiar to fans of the late food magazine Lucky Peach.) More compelling were the Stony’s Flyhead lettuce wraps with ground pork, tofu, and loads of chopped garlic chives and an eggplant duo, one portion deep-fried and the other glazed with soy sauce and chiles. Both dishes were openly borrowed from other Chinese restaurants: Happy Stony Noodle in Queens, New York, and Peter Chang Cafe in Glen Allen, Virginia.

That the kitchen’s interpretation of the basics of Chinese meals — noodles and rice — were remarkably deficient is telling: So much went into the over-the-top aesthetic of the place, yet the details, those nuances that would supposedly shame every Panda Express cook in the nation, were actually worse for the wear. If Zimmern hadn’t set expectations so high on the realness scale, perhaps one would have forgiven the kitchen for its mishandling of building-block Chinese dishes. But if you can’t do noodles and rice, maybe try barking up someone else’s tree.

According to his Instagram, Zimmern occasionally checks in on the restaurant, though surely he’s not the one sending out those plates (nor would anyone reasonably expect him to). But if he were, perhaps that would be even more troubling, considering his claims of expertise. What Zimmern said during his video interview with Fast Company clarified for many what his intentions for the restaurant, for which he is a business partner, would be. And it’s not appreciation for the countless Chinese-American restaurateurs and cooks who adapted their cuisines to meet American palates where they were. Those pioneers did this for the sakes of their livelihoods and families, working day and night hawking General Tso’s chicken and sweet-and-sour pork so their kids could go to college. It’s hard to watch a well-resourced and connected outsider like Zimmern denigrate their contributions to American food culture while intending to profit off of the same.

Call me optimistic or naive, but I don’t think that the diners of Middle America, an increasingly diverse and worldly bunch, would be satisfied with an experience that is actually worse than food-court Chinese — as if a few aesthetic distractions like giant Tiki faces and Google-translated Chinese would make the experience feel more “real,” whatever that means. It’s hard to leave the restaurant with a strong impression of what it wants from you: It carries kitschy, mildly racist irony in one hand, and an argument for its own expertise in the other. That said, the vision of authenticity that Zimmern and his partners are peddling here exists in tension with a clear desire to filter it out of fear that Middle America can’t handle the good shit. And say what you will about Panda Express, but at least the fried rice is seasoned there.

Soleil Ho is a Minneapolis-based writer and podcaster, who is moving to California next year to be the dining critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Katie Cannon is a Minneapolis-based photographer. Editor: Hillary Dixler Canavan

Eater.com

The freshest news from the food world every day

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/12/7/18130579/andrew-zimmern-lucky-cricket-controversy-visit

[tendance-news]

Exploring the natural world through the lens of a camera

Wildlife and wild places in the United States deserve our protection. From the herds of bison roaming the Midwest’s Northern Great Plains to singular polar bears hunting from ice floes off the coast of Alaska, our nation is home to a vast array of unique animals that need our help. But what about those outside our borders?

The US government has long been a leader in international conservation and encouraged other countries to cooperate on efforts to conserve wildlife, habitats, and natural resources, particularly in the developing world. It's important to regularly share with our elected officials our concerns, hopes, and aspirations for the future of people, wildlife, and habitats.

WWF’s Lobby Day event helps activists do just that. Supporters from all over the country will come to Washington, DC, to meet with representatives in person on Capitol Hill to let them know that the environment needs to be a priority in the coming years.

Though it’s true that many of us participating in Lobby Day may never witness firsthand some of these animals roaming in their natural homes, we still have a window in—photography. Through the lenses of their cameras, photographers bring the majesty of the wilderness into focus for those near and far.

WWF asked three photographers who have captured slices of life in far off places to share a few words about their experiences in the field to inspire us as we, in turn, prepare to inspire our representatives. Take a look.

Snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan Most of us, it’s fair to say, won’t ever see a snow leopard in our lifetimes. Sparse and elusive, they're confined to one of the most remote and forbidding regions on Earth. Yet we’re comforted by the thought that somewhere out there, such a glorious creature has a secure place in this world. In this Anthropocene—the current time during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment—we know, their loss would be our failure.

It’s estimated that across their entire range, only between 4,000 and 7,000 snow leopards remain. Their best chance at survival, in part, rests with the humans living alongside them in Asia’s high mountains, where WWF helps train local communities to monitor and survey snow leopards and perform anti-poaching initiatives. While on assignment for WWF, I got to spend time in one such place: Ak-Shyrak, Kyrgyzstan, a remote village nestled at 10,500 feet beneath the mountainous Chinese border. In the community hall one afternoon, I watched local teenage girls, dressed in leopard-patterned fur suits, stage a theatrical skit and choreographed dance number that promoted the virtues of environmental stewardship. The enraptured audience, members of surrounding communities, included some former poachers who’d recently committed to wildlife protection.

This wasn’t fancy scientific monitoring or governmental-level activism, I remember thinking. This was super-grassroots education in the kind of place where changing the culture can really make a difference. Farida Balbakova, WWF's project coordinator in Kyrgyzstan who’d organized this local Snow Leopard Festival, looked on, satisfied. "I feel like I awoke something that was sleeping inside of them," she told me.

—Andy Isaacson

  Climate change in Mexico

Farming in the desert using rainwater might rank high on the list of quixotic pursuits. But on assignment in the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico, I found myself among ejido farmers, a long-standing tradition of farming well versed in squeezing every bit of sustenance from a single drop of water. They grow crops and raise livestock in a landscape that at first appears inhospitable. In the face of changing climate, they have adapted to increasingly challenging environmental conditions, developing practices that could help farmers on both sides of the border weather the pressures of climate change more sustainably. Their techniques at first seem so easy. A young boy splashes pebbles into a miniature canal system where his mother has just watered their garden. The clanking of rocks fills the air as farmers drop stones onto a weir that will trap water when the next rain comes. Climate change knows no boundaries. It is not a simple problem. But solutions can come from a simple act. We listen. And in this way at least, we do not look at the world as one defined by borders, but instead a kinship of land and water and river and life.

—Morgan Heim

  Forests of Argentina

I am on the road, on assignment, photographing the dynamics at the intersection of social and environmental issues about 200 days a year. My last project with WWF was the cover story on Argentina’s Gran Chaco region and the efforts to address deforestation in this heavily farmed and ranched region. It’s a subtle, working landscape with tangled, messy forests, and not the iconic nature we are more often inspired to protect. But to me that makes it more important. This is where people live close to—and rely most intimately on—their natural resources. It’s where the choices everyday people make, make a difference in the landscapes that are the vital connective tissues that connect those more charismatic hot spots—and connect us to it all. We need that flagship nature and wildlife; it sustains us emotionally and inspires us. But more importantly we need to connect to those places that sustain us literally. The open space in your community, the roadside wilderness we pass between daily destinations, and the scrappy, dry ‘el impenetrable’ forests of northern Argentina. 

—Jason Houston

Published February 14, 2019 at 08:00PM View on Worldwildlife.org

[magicwebsitesnet]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

11

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/jacky-rosen-dean-heller-kavanaugh.html |

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

11

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/jacky-rosen-dean-heller-kavanaugh.html |

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[computacionalblog]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

11

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/jacky-rosen-dean-heller-kavanaugh.html |

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[ouraidengray4]

Which Alternative Cold and Flu Remedies Actually Work?

Sneeze in a room full of family, friends, or coworkers, and you're bound to receive buckets of unsolicited cold and flu remedies people swear by—assuming they haven't put on their gas masks and run away.

Given the ineffectiveness of this year's flu vaccine (although it’s still worth getting—here’s why) and that forever-elusive "cure for the common cold," many of us have found ourselves turning to some combination of Grandma's home remedies, health food stores, and integrative health specialists for help. But even as we're meticulously dosing ourselves with vitamins and herbs, we'll be reading the latest headlines about scientific studies indicating it's all snake oil.

EDITOR'S PICK

Who should we believe? Is there a Big Pharma conspiracy out there, or are alternative medicines just another product in a for-profit system? If I think my favorite homeopathic cold medicine makes me feel better... can't I just trust my anecdotal experience?

"I don't think mainstream medicine is looking to be proactive," says Deepa Verma, M.D., AIHM, an integrative health physician, says of the mainstream approach to cold and flu viruses. "They're reactive—they just wait for things to happen and then treat it. That's what I was taught in med school."

Natasha Bhuyan, M.D., the district medical director of One Medical in Phoenix, Arizona, explains that unfortunately, money often plays a role in whether traditional doctors recommend alternative medicine.

"Doctors can't often endorse these treatments as there is a lack of trials and research on them," she says. "This is simply because funding a research trial is super expensive. It would be amazing if there were a lot more funding support for alternative treatments."

In many instances, alternative treatments may be as effective—perhaps more effective—than mainstream approaches. However, these treatments generally don’t receive the same kind of funding for high-quality clinical trials, so we can’t know for sure about their efficacy.

Where Science and Integrative Health Agree

Verma bases her practice on her own analysis of published research—and most of what she prescribes for her patients revolves around boosting their immune systems.

One of the supplements she recommends for immune system health is vitamin D (yeah, you may have thought we were going to say C—we'll get to that surprisingly controversial vitamin later).

"I live in Florida, and the number of people who are vitamin D deficient here is staggering—so you can imagine what it's like in people in the Northeast or Midwest," she says. "Studies have shown that vitamin D is very powerful in boosting immunity and preventing cancer, and also helping with a host of other things like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes."

Because the FDA doesn't regulate what goes into supplements, Verma said the best bet for patients is to get pharmaceutical-grade supplies straight from an integrative health specialist, naturopathic doctor, or other medical professional. She often administers her supplements via IV, so the active ingredients bypass the digestive system and enter the bloodstream in purer forms.

Want more? Why Are People Scared of Flu Shots? Reactions and Side Effects How to Treat the Flu: Remedies and Prevention Tips Does Vitamin C Really Help Prevent a Cold?

Verma also relies on established knowledge about how our immune systems sometimes fail us. The thymus gland, for instance, is where the body produces disease-fighting T-cells, but it naturally atrophies with age. An age-old remedy for treating the gland involves consuming the thymus glands of calves, and some current studies support this practice in the form of a supplement, which is derived from the same source but thankfully doesn’t involve actually snacking on a literal thymus gland.

The liver produces the antioxidant glutathione (GHS), which helps us fight infections but depletes naturally as we age. Reduced levels of GHS are associated with upper respiratory tract issues. In hospitals, when patients have overdosed on Tylenol, they’re given N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC), a glutathione precursor, to replenish their GHS. Studies have shown that NAC has also helped HIV patients and postmenopausal women improve their immune function, and some studies have shown it to be effective in fighting influenza. That’s why Verma often administers glutathione infusions after an IV.

Elderberry, aka sambucus nigra, also appears promising. This plant (when processed to eliminate naturally occurring cyanide) has antiviral properties and has been shown in multiple trials to be moderately effective in preventing people from catching the flu and colds, and failing that, in shortening their length.

Bhuyan is optimistic about Pelargonium sidoides, an ingredient in Umcka, a common natural cold medication. "There have been two fairly good randomized studies that show this can reduce the severity of symptoms of the common cold and acute bronchitis," she says.

"This is an herb that has been widely used in South Africa and Europe. Early lab studies show it has antibacterial and antiviral properties, in addition to giving your immune system a boost. However, in medicine, we are always seeking more evidence (i.e., multiple, super-strong trials with thousands of patients). But I still recommend this, as it's safe to use and has good early data."

Remedies Science Isn't So Sure About

Headlines about the efficacy of vitamin C fluctuate about as much as those for red wine, eggs, and coffee. The latest verdict from the National Institutes of Health on vitamin C is that it's an important antioxidant, and adults should consume about 75-90 mg a day, preferably from food. But they say it's not the miracle cure for colds and flu.

"There are fascinating studies on vitamin C," Bhuyan says. "A large analysis of 29 trials showed a small reduction in the duration of cold symptoms, but only in adults taking regular vitamin C (200 mg a day). It didn't really show a benefit for people who start taking it when they feel a cold coming on."

The results have been similarly disappointing for echinacea and colds. But when you go to the research on the immune system, both vitamin C and echinacea seem to do some good work. That's the research Verma pays attention to when she formulates her IV fluids in a combination called Myers' Cocktail, after a doctor who developed the method in the 1960s. When someone comes into her office feeling cold or flu symptoms, she typically uses about 25 grams of vitamin C, plus trace minerals, B vitamins, and glutathione.

"I take all those articles and I just compare them," she tells Greatist of what she does if the latest studies cast some inconclusive doubt on certain supplements. "I look at how the research was done. If they're inconclusive, I just do more research. If I can pull more articles that are saying it's more beneficial than not, then to me, that works. When I'm doing these treatments with my patients, I do check in on them a few days later, or they send me a text or email and tell me they're better or didn't come down with the flu."

After administering her Myers’ IV, Verma sends her patients home with echinacea, thymus extract, and two more ingredients with ambiguous science behind them: medicinal mushrooms and astragalus root.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) says the research on Chinese herbal remedy astragalus is sparse and poorly conducted—which doesn’t mean that astralagus isn’t a good supplement, it just means we don't know yet. Studies on various medicinal mushrooms seem quite positive so far—particularly in terms of its antiviral properties in the face of influenza—but very few have been conducted. As Bhuyan notes, it seems there just hasn't been enough money used to look into these naturally available ingredients.

What No One Is Recommending: Homeopathic Medicines

Coldcalm and Oscillococcinum are two brand-name homeopathic medicines widely available in stores. I load up on them every time I feel like I'm getting sick, and I feel like they keep me healthy or shorten my illnesses. But there's a huge chance that's all in my head.

A review of six studies of Oscillococcinum, which is derived from duck heart and liver but diluted down to one percent, found that the only evidence that this treatment shortens the flu came from a possibly biased study. The idea behind homeopathy—that an almost undetectable amount of a thing that's similar to what is making you sick will activate your body to get well—has been met with a lot of criticism, and manufacturer Boiron has been sued for its claims. At the same time, Bhuyan doesn't tell people not to use it.

"It's up to the patient if they want to use this product and spend the money," she says. The benefit of this medicine might be (read: probably is) a placebo effect, which is another way of saying that our minds can make us feel better too—at least a little bit.

"There is definitely validity to the placebo effect," Verma says. "When you think of something, it can manifest. That's why we encourage people to do meditation and think positive thoughts. When you have positive thoughts, you're releasing chemicals into your body that boost your immunity. That mental aspect goes hand-in-hand with the physical aspect. But your thoughts only go so far."

How Can We Make These Decisions?

Read up! Most of this research is available online, after all.

"Patients should feel empowered to read medical studies themselves and discuss them with their doctors," Bhuyan says. "When reading a medical study, here a few questions to ask yourself: Who funded this study and could there be some bias? Is the study well-designed, with enough patients and a control group? Were the end results actually meaningful to my life?"

Sure, these make for dry reading on a sick day—but you can always balance it out with a few hours of streaming Riverdale.

Sabrina Rojas Weiss lives in Brooklyn, surrounded by her fellow freelance writers and competitive stroller-pushers. Follow her on Twitter @shalapitcher.

from Greatist RSS http://ift.tt/2EYH7tG Which Alternative Cold and Flu Remedies Actually Work? Greatist RSS from HEALTH BUZZ http://ift.tt/2CDFkVY