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betwixtofficial · 4 years ago

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UNDERWING CHALLENGE DAY 3

Day 1 [X]

Day 2 [X]

Who is your main cast? Describe as many of your OCs as you can cram into one post.

Character Introduction- this is by no means the entirety of our cast, not even close.

Leith and I each developed our own characters over many many years and I'm going to do my best to bring Leith’s characters to life as accurately as possible and I promise to love (torture) them like they're my own.

Andi’s characters-

Xavier Alexander Maxwell- When it comes down to it, this is Xave's story. A small pale faerie-human halfling, with a painfully tragic beginning, looking for love and family in all the wrong places. Xavier has neon, glitter, and more sexual energy coursing through his veins than he knows what to do with. A faerie half he doesn’t always have control over, and between the Fae, the Zaccardas, and his own personal demons- all fighting for a chance to control him, it’s going to be a long dark journey. It’s not ONLY pain and dark. It's just MOSTLY pain and dark. ...you know, aside from all the glitter and neon.

Alexander- I wasn't planning on adding Alex to this, I am not sure how I didn't realize he was one of the main characters till now, but he shows up as often or even more often than any of the other characters besides Xave. Alex is Xavier's fae half. They are the very first human/faerie hybrid and though they aren't completely separate, there are some strong distinctions, and they communicate with each other, so they are separate enough for Alex to have his own blurb.

But really it's very difficult to tell where one of them begins and the other ends. They are the same being, They are both magic and mundane, they are both human and fae. Xave tends to lean more human, Alex tends to lean more faerie, they are both real. They do have somewhat distinct personalities, ... Xave is 2010 Bill Kaulitz (especially the blushy giggly interviews) and Alex is Adam Lambert in For Your Entertainment. In either case there is a lot of mascara involved. It's complicated.

Rivet Dragonrail- A grown up lost girl with dark olive skin and brown eyes, she has always tried to put her clouded origins behind her, but they never seem to stay put. With freakish abilities she’d rather not have, a pervasive drinking problem she scoffs at, and an unfortunate talent for violence in the service of those for whom she is unwillingly compelled to play the role of savior, it seems like she’s always walking a path hellbent on destruction. She feels the sins she has committed are ceaselessly breathing down her neck, requiring atonement she does not know how to provide. She would like nothing more than to stand in the eye of the raging storm of the lives lived and lost around her, screaming at the sheer horror of it all, giving a big middle finger to both heaven and hell alike. But what good, really, would that do? So she plods on- her best friends are the knife on her hip, the beer in her fridge, the damn raven-shifter who has adopted her out of morbid curiosity, the damn chicken she’s adopted out of sheer respect for his will to live.... and Jaq, her ride or die that she can’t figure out her feelings for, but it doesn’t fucking matter because that just ain’t happening. Jaq is as gay as it gets.

Ember Skye Arceneaux- He’s too good to be true. No, really. His smile is like sunshine poured into your soul. Golden surfer boy good looks with sunkissed golden surfer hair tucked behind his ears, but his golden tan isn’t from the beach or the salon, it’s just his skin. Kind-hearted and generous. Plays guitar and sings like an angel with a perfect soulful raspy voice... And he loves Jaq absolutely and unconditionally, whether Jaq deserves it or not... and he’s Canadian. His only flaw seems to be that he’s maybe a little too laid back?

Luca Zaccarda- Since childhood his exceptionally ambitious mother has pushed him to leadership. She grafted her way on to the powerful Zaccarda family tree by marrying a younger son with no ambition past his next perfectly kneaded loaf of ciabatta, and then did everything in her power to see her eldest child reach the heights of power for which she believed he was destined. There’s only one problem- Luca doesn’t share her cut-throat nature. Ambition, power, and the trappings of wealth have never been the driving factors in his life and he’s set his mind to changing the status quo, mama and her scheming be damned. Oh, he’s just as capable a leader as she believes him to be. He’s no plump baker happily whistling away his hours in the kitchen like his father.. and he’s planning on taking down his own corrupt family, one... by one... by one. ...also... Mafia Werewolves anybody!?!

Teodoro Zaccarda- oh Teo, Teo, Teo. The black sheep. The playboy prince. Constantly in the tabloids, constantly in trouble, needing bailed out of this situation or that. Coming home drunk, or high, or naked. The family embarrassment. He just wishes his family wouldn’t expect so much from him. Like, the bare minimum. That’s all they expect Teo. The bare minimum.

There are about 50 other Zaccardas. I have a family tree of them. Some are more important than others, but the two listed here show up far more often than any of the others.

Leith’s characters-

Wynter Primose Dean - The physical embodiment of anxiety, standing at 6ft 9, built like a brick house, with a heart of gold and a difficult stutter. He fell in love with the right person at the wrong time, felt heartache like he had never before and after an extremely traumatic breakup he discovered his true nature, under a full moon, alone and afraid in the middle of nowhere - a werewolf. With a love for nature and all things wild, he spends a lot of his time isolated out at his cabin, crafting beautiful wooden furniture and spending more time with trees than with the people he calls family.

Jaq Knox - Dealing with childhood trauma and serious mental illness that messes up his perceptions of reality, he rarely trusts people. For the few he has let in it’s a constant battle with communication and understanding, for both parties involved. He struggles to understand the absolutes of right and wrong; he does have a moral code but often, especially in the past, he’s just been a thoughtless asshole as it was easier that way, easier to keep people at a distance. Throughout his struggles with his mind, encounters with the law and various substances, he’s been pushing boundaries in the art world and is slowly learning how to be a better person, realizing that people actually do care about him and that maybe having a found-family isn’t so bad after all.

Eden Knox - He seems perfect, standing at 6ft tall with soft, pale blonde hair and clear skin, dressing in white and pastel colors, carrying an expensive purse and smelling like a walking Bath and Bodyworks. But as with everyone he has his demons, his just happens to have a name - Jonah. He was swept off his feet at the tender age of nineteen and carried off into a life that was a very far cry from his upbringing in a group foster home. But his perfect life with his handsome husband is nothing like what it appears from the outside, and life gets very dark before it begins to get light again.

Aspen Merrill - The younger of the Merrill brothers, he started a family at a young age with a woman he didn’t truly love - after a very amicable divorce they now co-parent their two children. He was lost for a very long time, wandering between jobs he didn’t really enjoy, women he didn’t really love, friends he didn’t really like, until he met Luca and he found his calling. He is Alfred to Luca’s Batman, from straightening ties before important meetings to organizing decoy cars to get Luca out of dangerous situations, he is extremely calm and collected and a haven of stability.

Jonah Merrill - The king of his own castle, the only person that matters in his world is himself, oh and sometimes his husband, when its convenient to him of course. Never one to shy away from threats or violence to achieve a goal, he’s not only unstoppable in his personal life but in business, using his many connections to overpower and intimidate anyone who gets in his way. Once he discovers magic and the power it can bear he’s even more unstoppable than before, and uses his husbands complete loyalty for his own very dark plans.

The cast is a pride rainbow flag. We’re all queer here. Well, except for Aspen, he might be one of the only completely cishet character in sight.

#underwing challenge #writeblr #betwixt

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your-dietician · 2 years ago

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Insulin: 1.3 million Americans with diabetes rationed their supply in the past year, study finds

New Post has been published on https://medianwire.com/insulin-1-3-million-americans-with-diabetes-rationed-their-supply-in-the-past-year-study-finds/

Insulin: 1.3 million Americans with diabetes rationed their supply in the past year, study finds

CNN —

In December, Stephanie Arceneaux of Utah will have been living with type 1 diabetes for 30 years. She was diagnosed at age 6.

“I have seen a lot of changes within how diabetes is cared for,” she said. “I always thought that as I got older, that things would improve, and unfortunately, that has not been the case.”

Arceneaux’s husband and young son also both have type 1 diabetes. All three of them depend on insulin to survive.

“When I first heard stories about individuals with diabetes rationing their insulin, my initial thought was that is so horrible, because I know what it feels like not to have enough insulin in your body. At the same time, I also had this thought, ‘I’m so lucky that I’ve never had to do that,’ ” she said.

“But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had spent my entire adult life doing that. I’ve been lucky in that it didn’t cause any serious ramifications that I’m aware of, but I made choices in my life so that I would have the insulin that I needed to live.”

Arceneaux isn’t alone: According to research published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, over a million people with diabetes in the US rationed their insulin in the past year.

“The main takeaway is that 1.3 million people rationed insulin the United States, one of the richest countries in the world,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, the lead author of the study and a pulmonologist and critical care doctor at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, told CNN. “This is a lifesaving drug. Rationing insulin can have life-threatening consequences.”

Gaffney and his co-authors analyzed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2021 National Health Interview Survey, which included 982 people with diabetes who use insulin. They looked at how commonly these people rationed insulin because of how much it cost.

People were considered to be rationing if they responded positively to questions in the survey about skipping insulin doses, taking less than needed or putting off buying their insulin.

“What we found was that nationwide, about 1.3 million Americans with diabetes rationed insulin annually, and that’s about 16.5% of all those people who use insulin,” Gaffney said.

Some groups said they did so more frequently, such as those with type 1 diabetes; those without health insurance rationed most frequently of all.

Adults under the age of 65 rationed more frequently than those who were 65 and older, with Gaffney noting that almost all of those who were older and rationed less were covered by Medicare.

Two other groups who were more likely to ration insulin than their counterparts were middle-income people and Black Americans.

“We found high rates of rationing of a life-saving drug, and that should really be something of concern for everyone,” Gaffney said.

“We need urgently policy change to ensure that everyone has access to this critical medication without cost barriers,” he said. “And we need to do that today.”

Gaffney and his co-authors said in the study that there are several factors underlying their findings, including that insulin prices in the US are far higher than in other places, and that pharmaceutical companies have increased the price “year upon year, even for products that remain unchanged.”

“By limiting insulin copays to $35 per month under Medicare, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act may improve insulin access for seniors, who experienced substantial rationing in our study,” they wrote. “However, a similar cap for the privately insured was removed from the bill, and copay caps do not aid the uninsured. Further reform could improve access to insulin for all Americans.”

According to the CDC, more than 37 million adults in the US have diabetes, but 1 in 5 don’t know it. It is the seventh leading cause of death in the country and the No. 1 cause of kidney failure, lower-limb amputations and adult blindness.

The number of adults diagnosed with diabetes has more than doubled in the past year, the CDC said.

Type 1 diabetes is thought to be caused by an autoimmune reaction that stops the body from making insulin. According to the CDC, 5% to 10% of people with diabetes have this kind.

Type 2 diabetes means the body doesn’t use insulin well and can’t keep blood sugar at normal levels. It develops over many years and is usually diagnosed in adults.

Although there’s no known way to prevent type 1 diabetes, type 2 can be prevented or delayed with healthy lifestyle changes, including losing weight and being active.

The choices Arceneaux found herself making in order to ration included not eating – as insulin is needed to cover carbohydrates that a person eats – and rationing things like test strips needed to test her blood sugar, meaning she was unaware of how much insulin she needed to give herself.

She also rationed other care that she needed, she said, and spent a lot of time deciding which medical care was more important for her. She would go to her doctor to get insulin prescriptions, but she wouldn’t do other things that someone with diabetes is supposed to do, such as getting annual eye exams to check for complications like retinopathy.

The cost of insulin plays into her decisions “to a huge extent,” she said.

“If you don’t the have money to buy it, you don’t have the money to buy it,” she said. “So what I found myself doing was doing everything I possibly could, limiting everything I possibly could, so that I could purchase my insulin so that I would have it available.”

When she first moved out on her own, she said, she quickly ran into trouble: She could afford food or insulin but not both. A friend bought groceries to help her through.

“I remember telling her, ‘It’s difficult now. I’m young. I’ve just moved out on my own, but I know that it’s going to be better, you know, in five or 10 years, things are going to get better,’ ” she said. “And here I am. That was when I was 20 years old. I’m now 43, almost 44 years old, and it’s worse now. The costs have skyrocketed.”

She now has insurance through her husband’s employer, but “the cost of the premiums are so high that that leaves very little left over to afford everything that we need.” They often have to rely on donated insulin from other members of the local diabetes community, she said.

The findings of the new study are “so important,” said Dr. Kasia Lipska, an associate professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine who sees patients at the Yale Diabetes Center.

“The findings are really concerning in terms of access to insulin among Americans,” said Lipska, who was not involved in the research.

“We have a serious problem. There are many people with diabetes who are rationing insulin, and there are disparities in terms of access, in terms of age, race, income and insurance status,” she said. “I think that this study points to persistent access issues to insulin in our country.”

The findings did not surprise her, she said, but rather back up what she sees in clinical practice. Her own research into a single diabetes center found high rates of insulin rationing.

“We see people in the hospital setting who get admitted to the hospital because of high blood sugars, and then when we sort of ask what happened, turned out that they lack insurance or insurance is inadequate and they couldn’t take their insulin,” Lipska said. “In the outpatient setting, there is not a clinic that goes by where we don’t talk about cost of insulin and figuring out how to get the patient the insulin they need without breaking their budget. These are like daily conversations we have in the Yale Diabetes Center.”

Insulin is “like oxygen” for people with type 1 diabetes, she said, and those who go without can get very sick within hours or days and end up in the hospital with ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening complication. It can even be deadly.

Those with type 2 diabetes who don’t have adequate insulin can have high blood sugar levels, putting them at risk for complications such as heart disease, blindness and kidney failure.

“Diabetes is even more expensive now than it was in my 20s,” Arceneaux said. “I know that studies have been done that say that one in four individuals with diabetes ration their insulin, but my guess is that it’s much more than that. We just may not realize that we’re doing it.

“We’re doing what we need to stay alive, and that means getting the insulin that we need,” she said. “So we’re rationing not just our insulin but potentially other things in our life to do that.”

Arceneaux, who is the Utah chapter leader for the nonprofit T1 International, said she hears about rationing all the time.

T1 International is led by people with type 1 diabetes who support local communities, giving them the tools they need to access insulin and diabetes supplies.

“We deserve the same quality of life that everybody else deserves, and we shouldn’t have to sacrifice so much of our lives just to stay alive. That’s what so many of us that have diabetes are doing: We’re making sacrifices every day that others do not, that others don’t even realize,” Arceneaux said.

“I think that’s unacceptable, and it needs to change. And it needs to change now. We’re tired of waiting,” she said. “People with diabetes are tired of waiting. We need a true price cap on insulin, and we need that to happen today so that we can have everything we need to live.”

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sciencespies · 3 years ago

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SpaceX's First Civilian Astronauts 'Underestimated' How Intense The Training Would Be

https://sciencespies.com/space/spacexs-first-civilian-astronauts-underestimated-how-intense-the-training-would-be/

SpaceX's First Civilian Astronauts 'Underestimated' How Intense The Training Would Be

SpaceX is about to attempt a new first: launching a spaceship full of people who aren’t professional astronauts into orbit.

The four-person crew consists of a billionaire, a physician assistant, an engineer, and a scientist. On Wednesday, weather permitting, they’ll climb aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship atop a Falcon 9 rocket, then roar into space.

They’re set to orbit Earth for three days, enjoying the views and collecting data for scientific research, then plummet back through the atmosphere and parachute to a safe landing. They call their mission Inspiration4.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman chartered the flight from SpaceX and is both footing the bill and commanding the Crew Dragon spaceship. He gave the other three seats to Hayley Arceneaux, who survived bone cancer as a child and now works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran who works for Lockheed Martin; and Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist who serves as an analog astronaut in simulations of long-term Mars missions.

The crew isn’t just climbing into the spaceship like you or I might board a plane. They’ve spent the last four months training – studying manuals, pushing their bodies to new limits, and practicing for worst-case scenarios. They completed the training, which is largely based on NASA’s program, this week.

Even though Isaacman has spent thousands of hours flying jets and ex-military aircraft, he told Insider that the astronaut training was “more intense” than he expected.

“I definitely underestimated it to some extent,” he said.

When billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson each took their own rocket rides – flights which skimmed the edge of space but did not enter orbit – neither revealed the details of their training. But the Inspiration4 crew has been sharing its preparations publicly, offering a glimpse into what it takes to prepare amateurs for spaceflight.

Here’s what they’ve revealed.

Step one: Meet your rocket and watch it launch

Once the Inspiration4 crew was assembled, one of the first things they did together was watch SpaceX launch its third set of professional astronauts towards the International Space Station.

Arceneaux had never seen a rocket launch before.

“I thought I was gonna have anxiety before the launch, but it was actually really serene,” she told Axios reporter Miriam Kramer for the podcast “How It Happened.”

The soon-to-be spacefarers used a centrifuge to simulate the feeling of launch

Chris Sembroski sits in a SpaceX centrifuge chamber. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

A centrifuge spins really fast to create centrifugal force that pushes things outwards, much like a salad spinner or the spinning carnival ride that presses you against a wall. That force mimics the feeling of launch, when the pull of gravity on your body feels three times its normal strength. Many astronauts and pilots use centrifuges in their training.

Isaacman took his teammates up Mount Rainier

The Inspiration4 crew climbs Mount Rainier. (Inspiration4/Scott Poteet)

Washington’s Mount Rainier is a 14,410-foot active volcano covered in glaciers, with punishing weather and hazardous crevasses. Summiting requires ice axes and crampons. So Isaacman decided it would be the perfect place to break the ice with his new crewmates. They climbed the mountain together in early May.

“They built some mental toughness. They got comfortable being uncomfortable, which is pretty important,” Isaacman said. “Food sucks on the mountain. Temperatures can suck on the mountain. Well, that’s no different than Dragon. We don’t get to dial up and down the thermostat … And I can tell you the food isn’t great in space, from what we’ve tasted so far.”

After camping, it was time to hit the books

After Mount Rainier, the crew flew to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California to begin training in earnest.

“Every day was pretty much a 12-hour day, and then you were getting back to the hotel room, and you’re just studying. That was kind of the intense academic portion of the training,” Isaacman said.

They had to learn about the parts of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spaceship, how everything works, and what can go wrong.

“We have like 3,000 pages across 100 different manuals. It was a lot. I don’t think any of us really predicted that,” Isaacman said.

Then the crew practiced flying Crew Dragon in simulations

Sian Proctor on a visit to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

Inside a mock Crew Dragon model, the Inspiration4 passengers practiced the procedure for launches and landings. Once they got used to how things are supposed to work when all goes smoothly, trainers started adding issues and spacecraft malfunctions to the simulation.

Some of these exercises involved all four crew members, but some were just for Isaacman and Proctor – the commander and pilot of the mission. Eventually, they were doing full simulations with mission control and a launch director.

In early August, the crew did a grueling 30-hour simulation

Isaacman, Proctor, Arceneaux, and Sembroski put on their spacesuits, climbed in the simulation model of the Crew Dragon, and sealed themselves inside for the 30-hour ordeal. Nobody knew what was coming, not even the mission controllers. A simulation supervisor had pre-programmed everything.

They practiced a regular launch, with a weather delay included. They ate a meal and slept. But as their simulated mission began to reenter the atmosphere and fall back to Earth, all hell broke loose.

The Axios podcast recounts what happened. In the simulation, as the Crew Dragon pushed itself into Earth’s atmosphere, three computers failed. The crew lost touch with mission control. Then the capsule’s parachutes wouldn’t deploy.

“Now you’re blind, you can’t talk, and there’s no way for the chutes to come out. There’s also no way for Dragon to stabilize itself during essentially a hypersonic reentry,” Isaacman told Kramer.

When they got their bearings, the crew realized the simulation was sending their hypothetical capsule a continent away from its intended splashdown site.

“It felt very real. You’re living in it for 30 hours. The last 45 minutes, there was awareness from us in the capsule, and them on the ground, that there is a chance that this might not be actually a survivable situation,” Isaacman told Kramer.

In the end, they landed safely, but the podcast did not specify how the crew pulled it off.

The training also involved fun parabolic flights to simulate microgravity

In a parabolic flight, a plane flies in arcs up and down, creating up to 30 seconds of weightlessness at the peak of the arc. Some people call the planes “vomit comets.”

The team tested their bodies in a high-altitude chamber

It’s rare, but sometimes spaceship cabins become depressurized, just like an airplane cabin. Spaceships typically have oxygen masks on board in case this happens. But it’s still helpful to know how your body will react before you slip that mask on. Being familiar with the symptoms of oxygen deprivation can also alert crew members to a cabin leak if the spaceship’s systems don’t detect it first.

To experience those symptoms firsthand, under supervision, the crew took to an altitude chamber that exposed them to a low-oxygen environment.

“It provided great insight into each of our various symptoms,” Arceneaux said, according to a tweet from the mission’s account.

They’ve learned to draw blood and take skin samples

Since scientists want more information on how spaceflight affects the body, the Inspiration4 crew offered to gather biological data for NASA. In addition to taking each other’s blood and skin samples, the crew will monitor their sleep, take daily cognitive tests on an iPad, and scan their organs with an ultrasound device. Isaacman said they didn’t realize quite how extensive this research would be.

“We were like, maybe we should have talked about this before we did it,” he said.

He added that the crew members will have to take skin-cell swabs “three times a day on 10 different parts of our body.”

The crew squeezed in some jet piloting above SpaceX’s facilities in Texas

During their training period, the crew members made public appearances, did media interviews, and took trips to Space Camp and SpaceX’s rocket-development facilities in Boca Chica, Texas.

That latter site, which SpaceX founder Elon Musk calls “Starbase,” is where the company is building and testing prototypes of its Starship mega-rocket and Super Heavy booster. When they visited, the Inspiration4 crew members went for a plane ride high above the rockets.

Earlier in the summer, Isaacman and Proctor also did fighter-jet training in Montana to brush up on their piloting skills. NASA astronauts do the same to practice thinking and responding quickly under stress.

The Inspiration4 crew flies jets above SpaceX’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

With their training is complete, Isaacman, Proctor, Arceneaux, and Sembroski flew to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday to complete the final preparations for launch.

They are SpaceX’s first commercial passengers, but the company aims to fly more. It already has another such mission lined up in January: For that flight, called AX-1, the company Axiom Space chartered a Crew Dragon to take customers to the International Space Station for eight days.

The AX-1 crew includes real-estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy, and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe. Axiom Space’s vice president, former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, will command the mission. It’s not yet clear what their training regimen will be.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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swampflix · 11 months ago

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Lagniappe Podcast: Off Ramp & NOFF 2023

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival, culminating with the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp (winner of the Audience Award for Best Louisiana Narrative Feature). 00:00 Welcome 04:22 Burnt Roux06:45 Fck’n Nuts13:19 Chokehole: Drag…

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#bill arceneaux #brandon ledet #insane clown posse #juggalos #Lists & Articles #new orleans film fest #noff #off ramp #Podcast

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abcnewspr · 3 years ago

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HAYLEY ARCENEAUX, MICHAELA JAÉ (“MJ”) RODRIGUEZ, CATT SADLER, STACY LONDON, JULIA HAART, HOT TOPICS AND MORE ON ABC’S ‘THE VIEW,’ JULY 19 – 23

Exclusive with Bill O’Reilly Accuser Andrea Mackris, July 21

Honored with Daytime Emmy® Award for Outstanding Informative Talk Show, “The View” (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EDT) is a priority destination for our guests and must-see viewing for our loyal fans with up-to-the-minute Hot Topics, tackling the important conversations and sharing passionate opinions. “The View,” now in season 24, is the place to be heard with live broadcasts five days a week. “The View” is executive produced by Brian Teta and directed by Sarah de la O. For breaking news and updated videos, follow “The View” (@theview) and Whoopi Goldberg (@whoopigoldberg), Joy Behar (@joyvbehar), Sara Haines (@sarahaines), Sunny Hostin (@sunny), Meghan McCain (@meghanmccain) and Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) on Twitter.

Scheduled guests for the week of JULY 19 - 23 are as follows (subject to change):

Monday, July 19 – Hayley Arceneaux, who will fly on SpaceX’s “Inspiration4,” as part of the first private space flight in September; “View Your Deal” with hottest items at affordable prices

Tuesday, July 20 – Michaela Jaé (“Mj”) Rodriguez on her historic Emmy nomination as the first transgender person recognized in a lead acting category (“Pose”)

Wednesday, July 21 —Exclusive with Bill O’Reilly accuser Andrea Mackris; Stacy London (“State of Menopause”)

Thursday, July 22 — Entertainment reporter Catt Sadler on contracting COVID post vaccination

Friday, July 23 — Julia Haart (“My Unorthodox Life”)

Follow “The View” (#theview) on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

“The View” is now available on a podcast. Listen to the full show for free on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcast app every weekday afternoon.

“The View” can be streamed on ABC News Live weekdays at 5 p.m. EDT.

For more information, follow ABC News PR on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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dizzedcom · 4 years ago

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Last two crewmembers named for SpaceX’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission

We now know the names of all four individuals who will fly on the historic Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian spaceflight in history. In addition to previously revealed crew members Jared Isaacman (who’s footing the entire bill) and St. Jude Children’s Hospital employee Haley Arceneaux, Inspiration4 will include Dr. Sian Proctor and Christopher Sembroski as the final two civilian…

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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This 29-year-old cancer survivor is set to be the youngest American ever in space

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/this-29-year-old-cancer-survivor-is-set-to-be-the-youngest-american-ever-in-space/

This 29-year-old cancer survivor is set to be the youngest American ever in space

“I remember laughing,” Arceneaux told Appradab Business. “And then, I just said — ‘Yes! Yes, like, put my name down.'”

Arceneaux will be one of four crew members on Inspiration 4, the first spaceflight to take a group composed entirely of civilians — not professional astronauts — on a multi-day journey to orbit the Earth. It’s slated to take off in October 2021. Arceneaux will be joined by billionaire and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, who is funding the mission and plans to use the event to raise more than $200 million for St. Jude’s research.

Before last month, Arceneaux said she didn’t know who Isaacman was.

“I definitely did not expect this. I hadn’t even heard of the mission at that point because it was still a secret,” Arceneaux told Appradab Business.

By accepting, Arceneaux is now slated to become the youngest American, the first pediatric cancer survivor, and the first-ever person with a prosthesis to journey into space, a landmark that she said she hopes will inspire people with disabilities who previously thought such grand adventures were off limits.

“Until this mission astronauts have had to be physically perfect and, and now things are changing,” Arceneaux told Appradab Business. “It’s just incredible for the representation and getting to show cancer patients what’s possible.”

Researchers and advocates have long been trying to fight the stigma that people with disabilities are less suited to space travel. The weightless environment, which can make it easier for people with disabilities to move around, and the tenacity many people develop as a result of their disability can make them ideal candidates.

Arceneaux, whose femur was replaced with an internal prosthesis during her battle with cancer, said her orthopedic surgeon put all sorts of limits on her — no skiing, no sky diving, no jumping on a trampoline.

But, he told her, “You won’t have any limits in space.”

Surviving cancer

Arceneaux was 10 years old and on the verge of earning a black belt in Taekwondo when a knee ache led her to discover she had Osteosarcoma, a type of cancer that causes tumors to grow around developing bones. After being referred to St. Jude, she underwent a year of chemotherapy and surgery to save her leg, and, as is custom for St. Jude patients, was never given a bill for her treatment.

Despite the circumstances, Arceneaux described her time at St. Jude as one that “allowed me to be a kid.” She pulled pranks on her doctors with the other patients and put on dance performances, with an IV in tow.

“I can credit St. Jude for that because of the incredibly inspiring place that it was, and the staff that treated me like family,” Arceneaux said. That’s why, Arceneaux said, she became an ambassador for the hospital and, years after fully recovering from her cancer, she studied to become a physician assistant with the hope of joining the hospital’s staff. She now works with leukemia and lymphoma patients.

Though she said she fell in love with space during a trip to a NASA center on a family vacation pre-cancer, and she has two siblings that work in aerospace, she didn’t have any personal space-faring aspirations before the Inspiration 4 opportunity came along. She was more focused on Earthly travels, taking time away from work to visit places including Nicaragua, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mexico with the goal of one day visiting all seven continents.

Her spaceflight plans will put a hold on finishing that goal, but she said it was an opportunity she could not pass up.

“I was able to give St. Jude the definite yes just within about an hour,” she said. “They came back and they kept telling me I should sleep on it and I was like, ‘I’m not sleeping on it! Like, just put my name down. I’m going.'”

The mission

Isaacman, the Shift 4 CEO, said he wanted the Inspiration 4 mission to put a spotlight on charity -— and St. Jude specifically — because a lot has gone right for the billionaire in his life, he said during a press call earlier this month. He donated the first $100 million for the St. Jude fundraiser, and he pledged to give the three additional seats on the mission to a diverse crew of people who could inspire space lovers with dreams of extraterrestrial adventures.

Several wealthy thrill-seekers have flown to space after arranging to ride alongside astronauts during trips to the International Space Station in the early 2000s. But never before has an all-citizen crew flown to space, though several companies have announced plans to organize such a trip, including other promises from SpaceX that have yet to come to fruition. The company has pledged to take Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a group of artists on a trip around the moon by 2023, for example, aboard a vehicle called Starship, which is still in the early stages of development.

The Inspiration 4 mission, however, will make use of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the vehicle designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station that made its first crewed flights last year. Though the vehicle is designed primarily for NASA’s use, Crew Dragon is still privately owned by SpaceX, allowing the company to sell seats aboard to space tourists, private researchers and anyone willing to pay the roughly $50 million price of a seat. Isaacman, who is paying for all four seats on Inspiration 4, has not said how much he paid for the mission.

Isaacman and Arceneaux’s mission is the first civilian trip on SpaceX’s schedule.The pair will be joined by two other crewmates who have yet to be announced, both of whom will be selected from online contests: One will be an entrepreneur who uses Isaacman’s Shift4 payment platform, and the other will be a person who donates to the mission’s St. Jude fundraiser.

The Crew Dragon capsule, which measures about 13 feet in diameter, will be home to the four crew members during their multi-day flight to space where the relative strangers will live in close proximity as they fly through orbit at more than 17,000 miles per hour. They’ll wear the same spacesuits that SpaceX designed for NASA astronauts, and they’ll undergo much of the training professionals undergo in the months leading up to the mission.

Arceneaux said her training will begin shortly, kicking off with a trip in a centrifuge — a large device that spins rapidly to get astronauts acquainted with the intense G-forces involved with launching atop one of SpaceX’s rockets.

The journey will be arduous, and, as with any spaceflight, it will involve life-threatening risks. But Arceneaux said her family, including her brother and sister, who are both aerospace engineers, have been very supportive.

“I was talking about sleeping sitting up, and my brother was like, ‘There’s no up in space!'” Arceneaux laughed. “So they’ve had a lot of fun getting to teach me about their world.”

During the Inspiration 4 mission, the crew will be conducting some scientific experiments as they float through microgravity, Arceneaux said. But she’s most looking forward to a video call she has scheduled with St. Jude patients back on the ground.

“We’re going to be able to talk to them from space and to show them our views and… hopefully this will bring them a lot of joy and inspire them,” Arceneaux said.

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plusorminuscongress · 4 years ago

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New story in Politics from Time: How Eviction Moratoriums Are Hurting Small Landlords—and Why That’s Bad for the Future of Affordable Housing

In the mid-1960s, Greta Arceneaux was a young mother of two in the midst of a divorce with a low-paying secretarial job and an old house in Los Angeles. Dreaming of a better life for her family, she took out a loan, tore down the aging home and used the land to build a five-unit rental complex that, she hoped, would serve both as a home for her and her children and a ticket to the middle-class.

“I was a clerk with very little means, but a whole lot of guts,” recalls Arceneaux, now 81. Her plan worked. Over the years, income from that modest rental complex enabled Arceneaux to help put her children and grandchildren through college, purchase a separate home for herself, and save for her retirement.

Then the coronavirus pandemic upended it all. When COVID-19 reached U.S. soil, killing tens of thousands of Americans and squeezing the economy, the federal government, states and municipalities issued a raft of rent protections, including months-long eviction moratoriums. While such policies were issued in good faith—they were designed to protect renters who have lost their incomes from losing the roofs over their heads, too—they have leveled a crushing blow to small, independent landlords, like Arceneaux, who rely on a handful of rental units for their livelihoods.

Though the protections are dictated by local officials and vary by area, many are long-term: In the city of Los Angeles, where Arceneaux’s property is, tenants who have been impacted by the virus will have up to 12 months from the end of the city’s emergency declaration to repay their back-rent without late fees. In New York state, eviction protections last until the end of August, and in Pennsylvania, renters are shielded from evictions until mid-July.

For Arceneaux the city’s order has resulted in $15,000 in unpaid rent and $0 in government assistance to help her pay for maintenance expenses and other bills, including her personal mortgage. New California building codes also require her to pay at least $60,000, she says, for earthquake prevention reinforcement in one of her units by the end of the year. “My retirement is going down the tubes because of this,” she says.

The complexity of the broader economic crisis and its impact on renters is not lost on Arceneaux. “I feel sorry for him,” she says, describing one of her tenants who lost his job and stopped paying rent. “He’s caught in a situation just like I am. But why are they throwing me under the bus? Why am I responsible for him?”

Problems with eviction moratorium policies are twofold. First, not all landlords are alike. Large, wealthy real estate firms and development conglomerates don’t control the entire market: In fact, just over half of the U.S. rental supply, about 25.8 million units, are owned by business entities, according to the 2015 American Housing Survey. The other 22.7 million rental units are owned by individuals, who are more likely to own single units, homes and duplexes, and are often called “mom-and-pop” landlords.

The second issue is that while wealthy hedge fund investors and real estate firms, who are represented by powerful Washington lobbyists, will benefit from over $100 billion in tax breaks buried in the $2 trillion CARES Act, mom-and-pop landlords, for the most part get nothing. (The CARES Act tax provisions remove caps on individuals’ and businesses’ ability to write off significant net operating losses, so the benefits go almost entirely to millionaires and billionaires who tend to have the largest balance sheets.)

“I don’t understand how they can come up with all of this financial aid for the homeless, for renters, for agriculture, for big business, for airplanes,” says Arceneaux, who is a black member of the Coalition of Small Rental Property Owners, a California-based advocacy group that mostly represents black and Latinx landlords. “And they’re forgetting about the small mom-and-pop people that have two units or four units and serve such a great need in the community.”

Terri Lacy, a 55-year-old former interior designer with an autoimmune deficiency, says she also feels abandoned. Local and federal government programs seem to be offering bailouts to every other group, while imposing rules that increase the burden on people like her.

When Lacy’s children moved out of the inexpensive condos she purchased to help them start their adult lives in California and Nevada, she converted them into rental units. One tenant paid three-fifths of his rent in April, nothing in May, then moved out mid-month. Lacy says the tenant broke his lease four months early, and left her with unpaid utility bills and holes in the wall. Now she has to rehabilitate the apartment and re-list it while taking care not to contract the very virus that created her rental woes. “Who wants to rent a unit in the middle of the pandemic?” she asks, rhetorically. “Nobody.”

Lacy says another of her tenants has paid partial rent since she was laid off from her Las Vegas waitressing job, but not enough to cover Lacy’s property taxes or homeowners association dues. Without full rent checks coming in, Lacy’s personal savings account has taken a hit. Even if she wanted to evict and re-list, she wouldn’t be able to until after June 30, when Nevada’s eviction moratorium expires.

“Here I am expected to absorb everybody else’s heartaches,” she says, “and nobody’s there to resolve my heartache.”

The mom-and-pop landlords who are able to draw on their own savings to make it through the eviction moratoriums imposed by their local governments may struggle to recoup their losses when it’s all over. It’s unlikely that renters who have struggled to pay rent over the last few months will have lump-sums of cash available when their rent is due, and the job market may continue to be sluggish for months or years. Eviction courts may also be backed up in major metropolitan areas once they finally re-open. And even court rulings that come down in landlords’ favor aren’t absolute: Evicted tenants sometimes get away with not paying their debts by changing bank accounts, ignoring collections agencies, working cash-only jobs, filing for bankruptcy, or fleeing the state.

Those who aren’t able to make ends meet without collecting rent checks are likely to sell, says Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. And that’s bad news for low-income renters. Individual property owners are likely to sell to families who will convert their rentals to personal housing, or to large investment groups—which, in turn, are much more likely to renovate, rebuild, and increase the rent. “I think we are going to see some smaller landlords who have to sell their buildings because they just can’t cover the costs,” Schuetz says. “We know from the Great Recession that the people who can afford to buy real estate in a down market are large-scale investors [who] aren’t necessarily likely to keep rents low in existing buildings.”

The large-scale real estate firms that are left tend to build luxury mega-compounds with amenities such as floor-to-ceiling windows, marble countertops and state-of-the-art fitness studios that cater mostly to upper-middle class and wealthy people: Of the 371,000 new rental units expected to hit the market this year, as much as 80% the supply be part of luxury developments, according to real-estate analytics firm RealPage.

But those luxury offerings were out of reach for millions of Americans even before the virus hit. In 2016, nearly half of all renter households were spending at least 30% of their incomes on rent, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Now, with more than 20 million people still out of work, the proportion of people struggling to pay each month is almost certainly higher—especially among lower-income earners, who have disproportionately been affected by recent layoffs. While only 13% of people in households who made over $100,000 experienced employment disruption in March, 39% of working individuals in households with annual incomes less than $40,000 were laid off or furloughed, according to the Federal Reserve.

As tens of thousands of protesters flood the streets demanding an end to police brutality and systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in late May, it’s important to note that punting the rent burden to small landlords during this recession could also have a disproportionate effect on people of color if individual landlords abandon their real estate investments in droves. Due in part to discriminatory federal housing policies legal through the 1960s that blocked many people of color from home ownership—and therefore from amassing wealth that could be passed down to the next generation—black and Hispanic households are about twice as likely as white households to rent rather than own their homes, according to Pew Research Center.

A swift and systematic loss of affordable rental units available on the market would especially hurt those with low incomes. Eviction moratoriums aren’t “going to affect people in middle class housing, particularly. They’re paying the rent, their rental units will still be there,” explains Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “This is for people at the bottom end of the ladder who are going to find it harder to get affordable and habitable housing. They’re going to end up with expensive, lousy housing.”

Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies research associate Whitney Airgood-Obrycki argues the best solution to the nuanced problem would be the distribution of government-funded direct rental assistance payments that benefit impacted families. “That’s going to protect renter households, and that’s also going to protect small landlords from economic hardship,” she says.

The Democrat-led House of Representatives has already passed a version of this suggestion in its omnibus HEROES Act, which calls for $100 billion in rental assistance to families with incomes below average earnings in their areas. But the measure is moribund in the Republican-led Senate. A version sponsored by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has just 37 co-sponsors, none of whom are Republicans.

In the absence of a Congressional compromise, Arceneaux is weighing her options. She’d love to continue to offer affordable rental units to her community, but she has her own bills to pay. In the meantime, real estate firms have already attempted to take advantage of her predicament. Almost daily, she finds notices in her mailbox from prospective buyers expressing interest in the property she’s owned and maintained for over 50 years.

“It’s almost like the vultures are standing around waiting for something to happen,” she says, “so they can pounce.”

By Abby Vesoulis on June 11, 2020 at 10:08AM

#Time #politics #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus #TimeMag #TimeMagazine

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teafortwo29 · 7 years ago

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White Men Asking Barack Obama to Lead the Resistance Need to Do the Work Themselves

Michael Arceneaux 10/20/17

Yana Paskova/Getty Images

In the final press conference of his presidency, Barack Obama reiterated that he would largely keep mum once his successor took office. “It is appropriate for him to go forward with his vision and his values,” Obama explained. However, that statement did come with a bit of a caveat.

For Obama, there would be “certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values are at stake” that might “merit me speaking out,” he said. Those issues included “systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion,” “explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press” and “efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids and send them somewhere else.”

Of course, all of these things have happened—yielding statements from Obama on issues relating to immigration, climate change, and healthcare.

Still, this has not been enough for many who are understandably drowning in the misery of this administration—one spearheaded by a terribly erratic aspiring tyrant whose only real consistency since taking office is to dismantle the accomplishments of his predecessor, the man whose citizenship he questioned to gain political legitimacy.

In recent weeks, more men—notably white ones—have publicly called on former President Obama to play a larger role in the resistance of his successor. They want him to go further than he has—and forgo the tradition of former presidents taking a more apolitical stance after leaving public office—because citizens are suffering under the most atypical president in American history.

Among such men are Charles Pierce, whose work I greatly admire and who just this month wrote for Esquire that while Obama has more than earned his time of leisure ...

[T]he country is burning down at the moment, literally and figuratively. A concerted effort being made to obliterate all the achievements of his eight years in office is one or two timorous votes away from succeeding. We’re lurching toward war on the Korean peninsula, and there’s one natural disaster after another being dropped on a government that is half-staffed at best and being run by fools and lunatics in any case. Race and class and gender and all the other national wounds are being inflamed purposefully in the hopes that nobody will notice that the institutions of American democracy are unable to cope with the simple fact that the American people elected, yes, a fucking moron.

Those institutions are not capable of withstanding these assaults much longer without cracking.

... and Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect, who, in a piece for HuffPost titled, “Missing in Action: Barack Obama,” also published in October, claimed:

But the part that especially attracts Trump’s hatred is anything that Obama accomplished.

Some of these policy reversals are so unpopular even among Republicans that Trump has punted the issue of the Dreamers and the proposed Iran reversal to Congress. That way, Trump can signal his own hatred for anything Obama did but rely on Republican legislators to save sensible policy.

So, where, you might ask, is Barack Obama, as his legacy and his most important accomplishments are being systematically dismantled? Well, at last report he was in Brazil, offering a totally unremarkable set of platitudes to a corporate audience.

The common characteristic of those who heard it was that they could afford to pay upwards of a thousand bucks a ticket.

And then there was another piece published this month at HuffPost from former presidential candidate and election-2000 spoiler Ralph Nader, who, in an essay titled, “Obama: Too Cool for Trump’s Crises,” had this to say:

Obama could, for example, work to strengthen civic groups and help substantially to create new organizations to address urgent needs (such as averting wars); he could back opposition to Trump’s destructive policies that are running America into the ground while shielding Wall Street and the dictatorial corporate supremacists whose toadies Trump has put into high government positions.

Obama is a big draw and can raise hundreds of millions of dollars faster than most. Furthermore, he has the unique ability to fill the void the mass media is desperately looking to fill by serving as a counterweight to Trump. Hillary, hawking her latest book, doesn’t fit the bill here.

Instead, Obama, besides raising funds for his presidential library (about $1 billion), is getting press primarily for being paid $400,000 or more per speech before Wall Street and other big-business audiences.

The fact that Kuttner and Nader take issue with Obama’s doing what many modern presidents have done after leaving office is a curious critique, especially because they are essentially asking him to forgo amassing a fortune in order to clean up another mess made by white supremacy.

And yet, when Obama was treated to unprecedented amounts of hostility from the political right, neither Kuttner nor Nader came to his defense. I recall Nader claiming that Obama was worse than former President George W. Bush and dubbing him a “war criminal.” Years before that, Nader called Obama an “Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.” But suddenly, Nader now is repeatedly calling on Obama to be his hero.

Kuttner may not have employed hyperbole and slurs to criticize Obama, but he certainly did criticize him on health care and on trade, and he wrote an entire book dismissing his presidency based on a failure to live up to progressive standards that those who paid arguably closer attention to the campaign never saw candidate Obama promise to live up to.

Obama is not above criticism. I didn’t like his excessive use of drones, either. Nor did I care for his health care plan not including a public option. Obama had a lot of legislative accomplishments in the beginning of his term, but those who believe that he squandered other opportunities or sometimes caved into Republicans too easily—assuming that they would behave in kind—have a point.

Obama has a lot to do with the fact that the Democratic Party nationally was weak from an organizational front when it came time for the 2016 presidential election, which would have been the burden of any nominee. And he sure should have said a lot more about Russia’s role than he did.

There are other complaints, but most of all, I loathed the way he talked to black people: a paternalistic, admonishing and often condescending tone that he never duplicated with white folks.

That said, people like me spoke about the racism in which Obama’s administration was often entangled—while two of these exhausting, self-righteous, progressive white men feigning moral clarity did not.

Charles Pierce did, but his error mirrors those of others who want Obama not only to jump in with “the resistance” but also to lead it: Obama is not that guy.

Obama is not “too cool” for the resistance, but he is incapable of delivering the sort of messaging required of it. Look no further than his return to the campaign trail in New Jersey for Phil Murphy, the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey, and Sheila Oliver, who is running to be his lieutenant governor. Obama did not mention Sweet Potato Saddam by name, but he did speak about the tone on which his political ascension has been built. To the cheers of an adoring crowd in Newark, Obama claimed:

Some of the politics we see now we thought we’d put that to bed. That’s folks looking 50 years back. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century.

Fifty years? George W. Bush won in 2004 in part by fanning the flames of homophobia and then-majority anti-marriage-equality sentiments. Bush also won by an outside group pathetically distorting John Kerry’s service in Vietnam. Before that, he won in 2000 thanks to the Supreme Court and his brother—Jeb!—suppressing black votes in the state of Florida.

Before that, his father won his presidential election in part because of a racist campaign ad crafted by Lee Atwater, the racist behind the inherently racist Southern strategy. And before that, Papa Bush served with racist Ronald Reagan, the “welfare queen” stigma slinger, who originally promised to “Make America great again.”

Obama knows this, but as he illustrated in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, he chooses to see America differently even when it rubs its racism directly in his face.

That’s why it was frustrating to hear Obama also say in Newark:

You cannot complain if you didn’t vote; you did not exercise the power the Constitution gives us that people fought for. This is entirely under your control. If you don’t like how things are going, you gotta vote.

Many of us who are black are turned away from the polls. It is no coincidence that the first black president was succeeded by a demagogue who fanned long-stemming racial tensions in America in the first election to take place after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Speaking about Obama’s appearance in New Jersey, a senior adviser to Obama told Time magazine:

It’s in no one’s interest—including the former president’s, the Democratic Party’s, or the country’s—for President Obama to become the face of any resistance or the party. Instead, he is creating the space for leaders in the party to craft the best path forward that will make our country better.

Obama believes in America’s mythology too much to lead the resistance anyway. Obama, as Tressie McMillan Cottom brilliantly articulated in The Atlantic last December, has a misguided faith in white America.

Funny enough, while Obama delivered the political equivalent of the same old two-step, former President George W. Bush also criticized the 45th president without saying his name. Bush, however, did say something more direct:

Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. ... This means that people from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American. It means that bigotry and white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.

The son of a political dynasty that largely owes itself to white supremacy and bigotry condemning it now is a bit comically ironic, but ultimately, much of what is happening now is related to white supremacy and the desperate clinging to maintaining the status quo. White people are so desperate to protect whiteness and maintain the societal hierarchy, they voted for a ding-dong with the intellectual curiosity of roadkill.

I wish Barack Obama would say that with his platform, but he won’t. He believes in the institutions despite the fact that 45 has gone above and beyond to show on what they were founded and on what they continue to thrive.

Obama is performing within his capability. It’s time for people to measure their expectations accordingly, to set their projections aside and to see him for the man he’s always been.

He is not anyone’s mule. Obama remains the anomaly; it’s white men who have the monopoly on power.

If white men see the country burning, they need to look inward regarding how to fix it. After all, this is all a mess of their making anyway.

As it’s always been.

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sciencespies · 3 years ago

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Inspiration4 private crewed mission nears launch

https://sciencespies.com/space/inspiration4-private-crewed-mission-nears-launch/

Inspiration4 private crewed mission nears launch

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is gearing up for its first purely commercial human spaceflight, but many details about the mission remain unclear.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch a Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Inspiration4 mission next week. Four people will fly on the mission, announced in February, spending three days in orbit but not docking to the International Space Station.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is funding the mission, will fly as mission commander. The other three people — Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski — joined the mission either through competitions associated with the project or by being selected by Isaacman and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, for which the mission is intended to be a fundraiser.

The project announced Sept. 3 that SpaceX completed a flight readiness review for the mission. The launch is scheduled for a 24-hour window that opens at 8 p.m. Eastern Sept. 14 from the Kennedy Space Center, with the following 24 hours serving as a backup. With no docking to the ISS, the mission is not constrained to a short or instantaneous launch window.

Inspiration4 has not announced a more specific launch window, stating in the Sept. 3 announcement that it will narrow that window down to five hours about three days before launch based on weather forecasts for both launch and landing as well as for abort locations.

However, a Sept. 9 media advisory by Space Center Houston invited reporters to the center between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern Sept. 15 “to watch the SpaceX Inspiration4 launch and learn about the science aboard the mission.” The center is hosting several scientists who are flying life sciences experiments on the mission.

The mission is SpaceX’s fourth mission to carry people, after the Demo-1, Crew-1 and Crew-2 missions, but the first outside the auspices of NASA’s commercial crew program. Inspiration4 calls the flight the first “all-civilian orbital mission,” although the first orbital mission without any professional astronauts or cosmonauts on board is more accurate. Spaceflight analyst Jonathan McDowell noted Sept. 9 there have been 15 previous “all-civilian” orbital missions using the customary definition of civilian to include civil government employees as well as private individuals.

The private nature of this mission has resulted in a different flow of details about the mission than even NASA commercial crew missions. Inspiration4 has a partnership with Time magazine which led to a cover story in August. Time Studios has developed a documentary series about preparations for the mission, with the first installments appearing on the streaming service Netflix Sept. 6.

However, Inspiration4 has not done a briefing for other media since March. Brian Bianco, a spokesperson for the mission, said Sept. 7 that a final “prelaunch event” is planned one or two days before the launch, but didn’t have additional details about it.

When announced in February, Inspiration4 was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude’s. The mission has the goal of raising $100 million, plus an additional $100 million donated by Isaacman. Raffle ticket sales were expected to contribute a major share of that $100 million, but fell short of initial expectations.

The Inspiration4 website states that it has raised $29.2 million toward that $100 million goal as of early Sept. 10. The mission announced Sept. 9 that it will carry a diverse payload of items, ranging from memorabilia to non-fungible tokens, a type of digital collectible, it will later auction to raise additional funds.

“The impact of the Inspiration4 mission has been immeasurable, serving as an incredible platform to educate and engage millions in the movement to find cures and deliver care for childhood cancer and other catastrophic diseases through accelerated research and treatment,” said Richard C. Shadyac Jr., president and chief executive of American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, the fundraising organization that supports St. Jude’s, in the Sept. 9 announcement of the auction. “The auction is a critical component of the overall campaign as it enables us to reach new audiences and supporters as we work to fulfill our mission.”

#Space

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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“Here I am expected to absorb everybody else’s heartaches,” she says, “and nobody’s there to resolve my heartache.”

“It’s almost like the vultures are standing around waiting for something to happen,” she says, “so they can pounce.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Trump mounts last-minute push to thwart Democratic governor in Louisiana

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trump-mounts-last-minute-push-to-thwart-democratic-governor-in-louisiana/

Trump mounts last-minute push to thwart Democratic governor in Louisiana

“I will be in Louisiana tonight (Love it!) to get Republicans to vote for either of our two great Republican Candidates and force a [runoff] with John Bel Edwards, who has done a really poor job of tax cutting, car insurance cost (worst in USA), & is suspect on your 2nd Amendment!” Trump tweeted Friday morning ahead of his trip to Lake Charles.

The two GOP candidates,Rep. Ralph Abraham and self-fundingbusinessman Eddie Rispone, are competing for second place and a one-on-one shot at Edwards in a runoff if the incumbent comes up short of the 50 percent threshold. Republicans believe they will hold Edwards shy of a majority — and that they would have an advantage over Edwards in a runoff. But in the meanwhile, the two Republicans are attacking one another, jockeying for that second-place slot. In the final week, Rispone launched two new attack ads against Abraham hitting his congressional attendance record and painting him as insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2016 candidacy. Abraham, meanwhile, has been airing an ad telling voters, “Eddie Rispone has been lying to you.” Privately,Democrats are hoping that Edwards will win outright. Most public and private polling conducted by allies of the various campaigns has shown Edwards falling just short of the 50 percent he needs to clinch reelection outright. But the party is publicly cautious about the possibility of a runoff and expressing optimism that Edwards can win a head-to-head matchup with one of the Republicans. “It’s always hard to avoid a runoff in a multi-candidate race,” said Democratic strategist Scott Arceneaux, a former executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party. “Even with an incumbent. The math is difficult. In Louisiana, you have all these other candidates on the ballot that are going to get between 2 or 3 percent that essentially take up space. It’s hard, and I think John Bel has done an excellent job of keeping us in a position where he can certainly get there on Saturday. It’s one where he’s definitely in the game, and I think it’s where he could go 51 [percent] or 49.”

In their effort to keep Edwards under 50 percent, Republicanshave focused their attacks on Edwards’ handling of a sexual harassment complaint directed at his former deputy chief of staff, Johnny Anderson. Both the Republican Governors Association and a Republican-funded outside group, Truth in Politics, have aired ads criticizing Edwards for hiring Anderson, who had been accused of harassment in a previous job, and not moving swiftly enough to oust him.

In response, the Edwards campaign recently released its own ad featuring women, speaking directly into the camera, defending Edwards’ record on women.

Republicans say the late push — including visits from Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. — has momentum on the GOP’s side.

“We’re definitely looking at a runoff from our end,” said Andrew Bautsch, the executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party. “And that puts the governor in a bad spot from our end because if you look at it, an incumbent has never won going into a runoff in the state of Louisiana.”

In fact, Bautsch predicted that, despite polling showing Edwards nearing a majority, he will come up well short. “We think he’s going to be way under the 50 percent mark,” Bautsch said. “As of right now our goal is to rally our troops, which we’re doing with the president coming in, which we’ve done all week with the various rallies.”

Edwards, an anti-abortion Democrat who has avoided associating too closely with the national Democratic Party, has spent competitively in the race. His campaign has spent over $8 million on advertising, while Gumbo PAC, an allied super PAC, has spent nearly $6 million against the two Republicans.

Meanwhile, Rispone has contributed more than $11 million of his own money to his campaign. That has given him a massive advantage on the airwaves over Abraham, spendingabout $8 million on advertising, compared with Abraham’s nearly $2 million. RGA Right Direction PAC, the RGA-aligned affiliate in the state, has spent $4.5 million to keep Republicans on the offensive against Edwards.

Republicans are buoyed by encouraging numbers in early voting, with turnout up among GOP voters and down among black voters, a key bloc for Edwards. James Hartman, a Louisiana-based Republican consultant, predicted that if there is a runoff, the margin between Abraham and Rispone — who are running close in the polls — could be very small.

“I think it could be a very tight race for second place. I think it is theoretically possible that the governor wins reelection[Saturday],” Hartman said, pointing out that Edwards has taken pains not to alienate some conservative voters in the state through a strict anti-abortion bill.

Also complicating the turnout picture on an autumn weekend: football. Friday night’s Trump rally comes as high schools take the field across much of the state. Then, on Saturday, Louisiana State is hosting Florida in a prime-time matchup between top-10-ranked teams, and ESPN’s block party-style pregame show, “College GameDay,” is coming to Baton Rouge on Saturday morning.

Arceneaux, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, said he’ll be watching the turnout numbers Saturday night to see if Democrats got their voters out to beat back Republicans’ closing barrage.

“If African American turnout is high — if the base community is turning out — then he’s got a real shot at [winning outright],” Arceneaux said. “That’ll be the biggest indicator.”

#Foreign #governor #Louisiana #Politics

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dragons-in-bowties-blog · 6 years ago

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Rebel Wilson blocked me and other Black critics on Twitter, and here's what I hope happens next

Author Michael Arceneaux discusses how Rebel Wilson blocked him and several Black women for criticizing her erasure of plus-size and Black rom-com actresses, the egotistical ideology that got us here, and what he hopes Wilson's apology actually means. I often quote Kenny Rogers because so many vital life hacks are conveyed in his classic bop, “The Gambler.” Clearly Rebel Wilson is not familiar with the ways of Mr. Rogers because she recently displayed a lack of awareness as to when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, and when to walk away. As of Monday evening, though, she has seemingly figured out when to run-but it didn't have to be this way.

That is what makes the controversy surrounding Rebel Wilson's comments during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show last week all the more bewildering: She dug herself into a hole, and when folks tried to extend a hand and help her get out of it, she dismissively swatted them away. And then she blocked many of our majorly Black asses for being a bit more inclusive in our assessments, as noted in publications like Variety and Bustle.

I don't know how film promotion works in Australia, but this is not the best way to get the masses excited about your movie.

youtube

While promoting the movie in question, Isn't It Romantic, the 38-year-old comedian made the following declaration: “I'm proud to be the first-ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy.”

Thing is, Ricki Lake's starring role in the 1989 film Babycakes begged to differ. So did other films such as 2006's Phat Girlz and the 2010 release Just Wright starring Mo'Nique and Queen Latifah, respectively. Due to that oversight, Wilson's comment quickly spread far and wide across Al Gore's internet, and many quickly took to Twitter to inform Wilson of her error.

When confronted with the correction, Wilson doubled down. Claiming to know of the movies users mentioned to her, Wilson went on to note “that it was questionable as to whether: 1. Technically those actresses were plus size when filming those movies or 2. Technically those films are [categorized]/billed as a studio rom-com with a sole lead. So there's a slight grey area.”

This is hubris masquerading as nuance, but Halloween is over so let's all stop the pretending. Wilson is guilty of an error similar to one made by Sam Smith in 2016 when he accepted an Oscar for Best Original Song and said he was the first openly gay man to win such an award. That was not the case, and he proceeded to offer an explanation that quickly shifted to an apology and an acknowledgment of those who came before him.

Wilson was presented with the same opportunity, and she chose to go in another direction.

Hey my sweet sister. Let's please not allow this business to erase our talent with giving grey areas and technicalities. Take a moment and know the history. DON'T BE A PART OF ERASING IT. I wish you the best.

- Mo'Nique Worldwide (@moworldwide) November 3, 2018

Mo'Nique was right to correct Wilson. So were others. I count myself among them. Then Wilson blocked me and a bevy of other users all the same, despite the fact that we were not being aggressive or antagonistic in our tone.

I saw y'all tweeting about it so I got curious. I see Rebel Wilson takes criticism very well. Her kind is so typical. pic.twitter.com/w1dh4AlguV

- Michael Arceneaux (@youngsinick) November 4, 2018

Although I can understand the pressure celebrities face from a sometimes-vitriolic public-particularly on social media and especially towards women-most of the people offering Wilson insight into her false claim were Black women like Clarkisha Kent. She blocked them.

LMAO pic.twitter.com/VS2a4ZlZWQ

- Clarkisha “Technically Plus-Sized” Kent (@IWriteAllDay_) November 3, 2018

Anyway. Y'all enjoy. Because I'll be back to discuss how Rebel "gray-area" comments about Queen Latifah and Mo'Nique erased fat BW in the body posi movement and re-exposed the racist perceptions and misconceptions what fat WW project on the bodies of fat Black women. pic.twitter.com/oJUPqg5E2B

- Clarkisha “Technically Plus-Sized” Kent (@IWriteAllDay_) November 5, 2018

Sometimes you have to ask yourself what matters more: being correct or just wanting to be right. Likewise, does it really matter if you're the first to do something, notably if the real goal is to make sure others come after you? When it's the latter, you have no problem praising those that helped pave the way for you-a favor that returns to you in due time. I don't know if it was an epiphany or an invention staged by the movie studio publicist who just doesn't need this right now, but Wilson appeared to come to her senses.

On Monday evening, Wilson returned to Twitter to offer an explanation and a real apology.

In a couple of well-intentioned moments, hoping to lift my fellow plus sized women up, I neglected to show the proper respect to those who climbed this mountain before me like Mo'Nique, Queen Latifah, Melissa McCarthy, Ricki Lake and likely many others.

- Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) November 5, 2018

With the help of some very compassionate and well-thought out responses from others on social media, I now realize what I said was not only wrong but also incredibly hurtful. To be part of a problem I was hoping I was helping makes it that much more embarrassing & hard to-

- Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) November 5, 2018

acknowledge. I blocked people on Twitter because I was hurting from the criticism, but those are the people I actually need to hear from more, not less. Again, I am deeply sorry.

- Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) November 5, 2018

Wilson unblocked me, too. I suppose all's well that ends well, but this was so preventable. It became a bigger story because ego drove Wilson's intentions. All creatives should be more mindful of those who have paved a way for them, but no one expects an individual to know everything. It's okay to be wrong, and frankly, in this situation, a simple “my bad”-or whatever the Aussie colloquial equivalent is-with an acknowledgment to the women who came before her would have quickly ended this story.

I accept Wilson's apology, but I'm more curious about the actions she does or doesn't take as a result of what led her to it.

Michael Arceneaux is the New York Times bestselling author of the recently released book I Can't Date Jesus from Atria Books/Simon & Schuster. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Essence, The Guardian, Mic, and more. Follow him on Twitter.

The post Rebel Wilson blocked me and other Black critics on Twitter, and here's what I hope happens next appeared first on HelloGiggles.

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