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cringecatgirl · 4 months ago

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10+ Year Transition Timeline

Posting the thing that cracked my egg for my 10 year tranniversary

5th Jan passed by about a month ago, but better late than never. This is a very long post, with 30+ photos over about 14 years

Pre-transition 2011-2014 The question of how I knew I was trans? I had The Feeling from about age 11 (2008), reading a gender-bender manwa called PhD: Phantasy Degree in the school library. Wherein the Protag, Lady Sang, has a ring that swaps her gender once removed. Childhood was a difficult time, and I often would go to bed dreaming of comforting scenarios where I would be able to use this kind of power on myself (yes i like forcefem, how could you tell?)

The biggest barrier for my transition for the next 6 years was simply that I wasnt aware that transitioning was a possibility, or more accurately, viable. As a kid, I was aware of The Transexuals that appeared as a butt of a joke on TV, but it felt like an impossibility if you weren't rich and had connections, requiring many surgeries and god knows what else; how they were also depicted as unattractive, undesireable and fetishistic.

2015 The first year In early January, I came across a trans timeline post on imgur.com by sheer luck. What really struck out to me is how happy, and how beautiful everyone seemed post-transition. I'll never forget the feeling of discovering that those funny little dreams I have might not be just me who does. I looked into the comments and discovered what transitioning meant, as well as that most of the people only used HRT, which was relatively inexpensive compared to what I had been expecting. The next day I awoke after having a dream wherein I was looking into a mirror atop a hill, and seeing a girl looking back. Once I awoke, I decided then to transition; simply based of the massive euphoric feeling of seeing myself as a woman.

Sadly however, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing, or what I wanted. I was terrible at asking for help or researching. I was pretty broke too, so experimenting was quite difficult. My sister moved to London and my city didnt really have a great LGBTQ scene (still doesnt 10 yrs later), so I was basically by myself. In these photos above, I think I started telling my close friends and family but I really struggled to make any meanful change to my appearance. My one goal was to start the NHS HRT track, which was supposed to be a 18 month wait list. Due to my inexperience (and being a bit socially inept) with navigating the NHS and my GP, I wouldnt start HRT until 2019, almost 4 years later. If theres one thing I could go back in time to change, it would be to DIY HRT.

2016-2018 I'd left college and begun work. I didn't feel like I passed at all, and absolutely hated voice training. I don't really remember much about this time of my life, it felt like waiting for HRT so I could start living. In hindsight, I was very depressed. I ghosted a lot of my IRL friends and working in fast food was sucking the life out me. I was very unhappy with how I looked, and didn't know how to fix it. My wardrobe consisted of pretty basic & safe outfits, like jeans & hoodies; I didn't have an experimental phase like so many other trans women did. I was decent at makeup but made so many mistakes that people often laughed at me for. I spent most of my time in this period escaping into MMO's with my discord friends and working ~50 hours a week. Sadly, I think I lost a significant amount of hair due to stress during this period of my life. Some has since grown back, but not all.

2019 (CW: SA) This is the only year I don't have any photos of, which is somewhat odd since I started HRT in May. But it was also one of my lowest points. I was at the breaking point with stress from work and didn't have many IRL friendships, in addition to working with my Dad to sell his house.

This was also the year when I was sexually assaulted on the way home from work. I would then repress this for over 5 years, as of writing, I have my first appointment in 6 days.

By the end of 2019, I had left my crappy fast food job and was living in a house share, unbeknownst that the world was about to drastically change. My mental health was starting to improve with starting HRT, I'd also learned that I had a natural testosterone defeciency, which explained why I had almost no body hair and little facial hair growth (though i still needed to epilate). However, the NHS used this to determine that I didn't require anti-androgens, and I deeply regret not challenging them on this, as I learned it was a huge mistake on their part.

2020-2022 Immediately you can tell how much HRT affected my face and body in just a year. I'd also put on a decent amount of weight as a result of a fast food addiciton. I'd begun to feel better in myself, but still didnt like my appearance. 2020 felt like a turning point in my mental health, I started a cross-Atlantic long distance relationship with another trans woman that lasted about 3.5 years. Though this gave me emotional fufillment, I craved physical affection and initmacy. During this period, it felt like something between coasting and stagnation. I wasn't satisfied with how my life was but didn't have the drive to change things. I thought I was less depressed here but I think just barely.

In late 2023, I entered the lowest part of my life. I was unhappy with the state of my living conditions, my relationship, my appearance, and so many other small things. I was working a 9-5 whilst trying to maintain a relationship where my girlfriend would get off work at 10pm. Sleeping after work was impossible whilst living at my Mothers, and moving wasn't an option due to noise complaints. I wanted to loose weight, start prog, change my wardrobe, start wearing makeup again, start voice training, dye my hair, and start taking care of myself. I was so tired of feeling like a genderless blob. And I hit my breaking point. I quit my quite-decent-paying-but-otherwise-insufferable call center job and went back into fast food, simply so I could be with girlfriend more often. I hit the gym, started prog and all the other small things. I attempted voice training again, but this time decided not to listen to my own voice. I would judge how good my voice was based on how people responded. I found they would small talk and be way more chatty to me than before, in addition to less misgendering even after 2 weeks of training.

2024 was one of the best years I've ever had. But it started with a breakup. I was distraught at the time, but in hindsight I truly think it was for the best. The first month was incredibly difficult, but I kept up my routines of self improvement. I lost about 8kg (starting from 98kg) and finally found the style I like, goth. But it still felt like something was missing Soon after the breakup, I lost my job, but this was a blessing in disguise. I got referred in to where my Mother works, and soon found this missing piece that I needed.

Holy shit does a hair cut make a difference I felt like a completely new person, and people treated me so so so much better. I'd get compliments almost every day. I actually loved my appearance, and taking photos. I reconnected with my school friends I'd alienated. I felt confident about dating. I hit my weight goal of 85kg, and starting taking prog the right way. My mental health had never been better. By the end of the year, I'd moved out of my Mother's house, who had been manipulative and abusive up until this point.

2025

So here I am, 10 years later. I've still got things to finish off, mainly fixing my testosterone levels. But it truly feels like the end of the road.

Don't ever give up, no matter how far in you are. Happiness will often not find you, you have to pry it from the Earth yourself.

#transfem #trans timeline #trans #trans woman #before and after

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patrickxcromwell · 2 years ago

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INTRODUCING — patrick cromwell.

The Basics.

Full Name: Patrick Cromwell né Goodwin Nickname(s): Pat Face Claim: Andrew Scott Pronouns and Gender: cisman (he/him) Birthday: October 21st, 1976 Zodiac: libra ☉ libra ☽ gemini ➶ Hometown: Aurora, WV How long have they been in town?: 2 years Sexuality: Homosexual Housing: Suburbs Occupation: currently unemployed, non-practicing veterinarian Family: Arthur Goodwin (father — deceased), Harriet Goodwin (mother)

The Personality.

Patrick is a man who’s used to keeping his head down, mostly because he’s done so all his life. He grew up in an environment that led him to keep to himself and pretend to be someone he's not for as long as he can remember. His overall demeanor is a little awkward and reserved, maybe even strange to some, but behind the fidgeting and pulled up shoulders hides a gentle soul that has been through a lot. He tries to always be friendly and forthcoming, even if he’s not someone who talks a lot, he’ll go out of his way to hold a door or pick something up for someone before they can even lean down. Trust doesn’t come easily to Patrick though and he tends to keep people at an arm’s length in order to protect himself and others. He doesn’t like sharing a lot about his life or identity either but that’s mostly because he’s not used to being able to. Bearing secrets has become a habit he finds hard to shake but even the thickest and highest wall has to start chipping at some point.

The Biography.

Trigger Warnings: parental death, death of a spouse, depression, alcoholism

Patrick grew up on a small, run-down farm in Aurora, West Virginia and was born into a family that had barely enough money to put food on the table

His upbringing was anything but gentle and while his mother tried her best to offer him protection and shelter for as long as she was able to, he had to at least try (or pretend) to adapt to a life full of hard work and barely any ways to develop a personality of his own

His father was hard on him and yet wanted the best for him which translates to: he mostly wanted to raise him to be the “men” he and his own father were

Patrick was anything but that though, always a little too tender and unable to do what was expected of him, either because he cared too much about the animals living with them on the farm or simply wasn’t strong enough to work the way his father needed him to

He was always a bit of a dreamer instead, someone who liked to lay out in the sun to daydream of a life that was entirely different from the one he was leading

His love for animals was ultimately what would get him out of the small town

When his father passed when he was only eighteen, he had to promise his mother to do what he wanted to do for once and in turn, she sold the farm and moved into a small house in Aurora, while Patrick moved to Pennsylvania to start college with no money and more debt than he could’ve ever imagined BUT he pulled through

He got into veterinary medicine, working hard to get good grades, all while trying to make some money as a waiter at a local restaurant to keep a roof over his head

It was then when he met the man that'd be his first love and eventually became his husband, Matthew Cromwell.

They were polar opposites and yet, somehow completed each other. They moved in together and started to build a life together, getting married as soon as they were able to on a beautiful day in June, 2014 with Patrick taking on Matthew's name - an almost liberating moment for him.

But it'd only be a few years from then until tragedy struck.

Matthew loved the outdoors, while Patrick liked to stay in more, so it wasn't out of the ordinary for Matthew to take solo hiking trips without his husband in tow to unwind.

Patrick had a weird feeling about it from the start but ultimately let him go, a moment he regrets to this day.

Matthew died in what Patrick can only assume was a terrible accident that'd be the start of a series of traumatic events for the widower.

Since they couldn't retrieve Matthew's body and false accusations were quick to be made by both neighbors and Matthew's estranged family, Patrick was accused of having something to do with his husband's disappearance.

After a months long trial that'd drain Patrick emotionally and financially and left him with little to no time to properly work through his grief, he was suddenly all by himself and without an alibi.

Apparently, Matthew had a hefty life insurance that not even Patrick had known about until then, making him a suspect, considering it'd be paid out to him.

Ultimately, charges were dropped due to lack of evidence but Patrick was left shaken and a sum of money he wasn't exactly comfortable with.

The two of them had built a good life together after all, with Patrick working as a veterinarian and Matthew being a neurosurgeon but that didn't matter much to him now, not when he was stuck in that life without his best friend and partner to share it with.

Patrick's mother begged him to move back home and start working again after not being able to do so for over a year but Patrick insisted that he'd just need some more time to heal.

After trying his best to stay put and failing, he used the extra money along with their savings to get some space and moved into a house in a small town called Fairford, trying to settle into a new life but with no drive and no routine due to his mental state and grief still weighing him down, Patrick doesn't really see the point in even trying. Instead, he's currently stuck in a loop of sleeping most of the day and drinking too much with no real motivation to break the circle, all while trying to seem put together enough.

His mother and few remaining friends tell him to finally start living again but even after close to five years without his husband, Patrick has been unable to do so.

He also still wears his wedding ring, which tends to lead to people asking questions about his spouse but he's learned to dodge them most of the time.

You can find his full bio here.

The Connections.

friends

drinking buddies

someone he might actually talk to about his ongoing inner turmoil (good luck tho lmao)

anything really!

#fairfordintro #( intro. )#( about. )#death tw #grief tw #depression tw #alcoholism tw

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joachimnapoleon · 5 years ago

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Meet the Bonapartes: Louis (1/4)

I’ve been horrible about keeping up with my projects this year, but I’ve had a flurry of motivation lately so I’m trying to take advantage of it. So here is Part 1 of my write-up on Louis Bonaparte!

[Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 on Pauline]

***

Louis Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on 2 September 1778, the fifth surviving child of what would be eight surviving children born to Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino. His childhood name was Luigi, later changed to Louis after the Buonaparte family settled in France and "Frenchified" their names.

At the age of 12, Louis went with his older brother, Napoleon--at the time a lieutenant of artillery--to Auxonne, where Napoleon was stationed. Lieutenant Bonaparte's accommodations were spartan; Louis found himself "sleeping on the floor in a closet next to Napoleon's bed, with a single table and two chairs as their only furniture." Napoleon developed a paternal feeling for Louis, who was nine years his junior, and gave him additional tutoring in math, geography, and history while also paying for his schooling in Auxonne. "I can easily see that he will turn out a better fellow than any of the four of us," he wrote glowingly to Joseph that year. "But then none of us had so fine an education." The homesick Louis, meanwhile, wrote to Joseph, hinting that he'd be glad to return home, if Joseph would merely ask.

You have only to say the word, and I shall remain here. You have only to say the contrary, and I shall come home. You must know well that after Napolione it is you I love and cherish the most.

But Joseph didn't ask, and so Louis continued his education with Napoleon, who secured him a place in the artillery school of Chalons. Napoleon continued to praise his younger brother's progress to Joseph, writing on 6 September 1795 that

I am pleased with Louis; he answers my expectations; he is good, and of my own making: ardour, talent, health, ability, punctuality, and kindness--he has everything.... there is no man more active, clever, and insinuating. He could do in Paris whatever he liked.

After Louis left Châlons, Napoleon added him to his ever-growing number of aides-de-camp. He distinguished himself during the Italian campaign, fighting in the vanguard alongside Lannes at Piacenza and taking part in the storming of Pizzhighettone. "This brave young man," wrote Napoleon to Carnot, " deserves all the consideration that you may be so good as to show him." Sent briefly to Paris at the end of July 1796, Louis was promoted by the Minister of War to captain, and given a gift of a set of pistols. Returning to Italy, he continued to serve bravely, delivering a message on horseback at Arcola under a hail of bullets as men fell all around him, and later helping Marmont to drag Napoleon back to safety after the general fell into a ditch.

From all indications, Louis seemed to have a bright future ahead of him. But unbeknownst at the time to either Louis or Napoleon, the Italian campaign would spell the beginning of what would end up being a permanent decline in the health of Louis. The reasons for this are uncertain, though most historians agree that Louis contracted some sort of venereal disease in Italy that ultimately shattered his health. Historian Frederic Masson writes:

Until the end of the first campaign of Year V, Louis showed a strong constitution: an amiable comrade and bon vivant, cheerful enough to be cited at game and table, he claimed his share of the entertainments of the staff; but, either in Milan he had sought pleasures dearly paid for by a terrible illness, which he treated 'with all possible levity' and in such a fashion that his health would have been ruined by it; or that he carried within him a principle of rheumatic gout which transformed, in a short time, his physical temperament and moral character, he fell ill at Forli on 16 Pluviôse (4 February 1797)... and was obliged to seek care in Bologna, then in Milan, without being able to follow his brother to the Styrian campaign. He emerged from this malady withered, morose, melancholic, constantly occupied with his health, and persuaded that it was damaged.

Seeing Louis at Mombello after the campaign, Joseph was struck by the changes in his brother, now riddled with anxiety and depression. At Mombello, Louis kept largely to himself, going for long walks alone, reading, and writing.

At some point during this period, he fell in love with a niece of Josephine. Napoleon promptly nipped any potential marriage aspirations on his brother's part in the bud by having the girl removed from Madame Campan's school and married off his adjutant, Lavalette. This only caused Louis to plunge further into depression. Napoleon insisted that Louis accompany him to Egypt, in spite of his brother's protestations that his health would not be up to such a campaign. Aside from his recent illness, he was also still recovering from an accident, having been thrown from an overturned coach and injured his knee.

Louis found his brief time in Egypt miserable. "I suffered a great deal on our passage," he wrote Joseph on 6 July 1798, "this climate kills me." He was less than impressed with the desert tribesmen:

They are horrible savages, and yet they have some notion of gold and silver! a small quantity of it serves to excite their admiration. Yes, my dear brother, they love gold; and they pass their lives in extorting it from such Europeans as fall into their hands; and for what purpose!--for continuing the course of life which I have described, and for teaching it to their children. O, Jean Jacques! could he but see these men, whom he calls "men of nature," he would shudder with shame and surprise at having been able to admire them!... How many misanthropes would be converted if chance should conduct them into the midsts of the deserts of Arabia.

Napoleon sent Louis back to France in October of 1798. He was to deliver dispatches to the Directory, as well as some captured standards. Louis dragged the journey out for five months, ending spending three weeks visiting his mother in Ajaccio; he finally arrived in Paris on 11 March 1799. Among his first endeavours was to request a promotion which Napoleon had not mentioned to the Directory; the War Minister granted it anyway, and Louis was made a major on 30 July. He did not participate in the Brumaire coup, but Napoleon granted him another promotion in its aftermath anyway; he was now a chef de brigade of the 5th Dragoons. He sat out the ensuing campaign against Austria, taking the waters and writing poetry as Napoleon triumphed at Marengo.

Napoleon still remained largely oblivious to Louis's character defects for the time being, and, in 1801, devised the idea for a marriage that would--he thought--bring the Bonaparte and Beauharnais families closer together: Louis would marry Hortense, the daughter of Josephine.

It would not be a happy marriage.

***

Sources:

Atteridge, A. Hillard. Napoleon’s Brothers, 1909.

Broers, Michael. Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny. 2014.

The Confidential Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte with his Brother Joseph, Vol I, 1856.

Copies of Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypt, Intercepted by the Fleet Under the Command of Admiral Lord Nelson, 1798

Masson, Frédéric. Napoleon et sa Famille, Vol I (1796-1802), 1907.

Roberts, Andrews. Napoleon: A Life. 2014.

#Meet the Bonapartes #Napoleon #Napoleon Bonaparte #Louis Bonaparte #Joseph Bonaparte #history #Napoleonic

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bloodthirstymoonstone · 6 years ago

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Square One (ooc ramble)

So I thought I’d make a quick post talking about my continued journey into getting my Spicy Mental Health™ treated and how all that’s going. TLDR, I may have isolated the problem as to my noticeable decline with attention span over the past year or year and a half, but the good thing is that there’s probably a very easy way to fix it! Which is definitely good to know!

It gets pretty long winded and vent-y, too, though, so be warned. This is just a Real Ass Scoot Moment With Scoot Being Real, so keep that in mind.

So here’s a realization I made quite recently about my medication. For the longest time (I’m talking nearly 10 years or so) I assumed I didn’t have ADD, I just had anxiety and depression which was mimicking those symptoms. I believed this strongly, and for years despite getting legitimately diagnosed back in middle school (I think I was 13), before my anxiety diagnosis when I was 16. I think this is due in part to a REALLY BAD reaction to the drug Ritalin, which is notorious for making you feel like you’ve drank 10 coffees all at once. I honestly think that experience traumatized me so badly I truly thought I just didn’t have ADD at all.

I also probably believed this, in part, due to the anxiety medication I was on later, which did a great deal more to helping my condition. I won’t say which ones I was on because that would be TMI, but when I moved to Boston in 2016, I was on three different medications to treat my anxiety and depression. One was ancient and I’d been on it since I was first diagnosed back in 2009. One that was prescribed later when my Rock Bottom™ years started (I’m guessing 2011-2012). And then one I got at the tail end of my Rock Bottom™ years, in March of 2014. That last one might have been the one that Defeated The Evil and go the monkey of rampant, unchecked depression off my back for good, as well as a few key lifestyle changes.

Sometime when I moved here, I got a psychiatrist that, in retrospect, was fucking terrible for me. She barely listened to me at all, would shut me down when I came up with solutions she didn’t like, and ultimately discouraged me so much that I stopped doing anything more than going to her to get refills, and totally stopped going to therapy all together. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about my problems anymore, including her, because it was just so discouraging going to her about anything that she tainted the whole process for me. She shamed me for my weight, for not being social and making friends in a city and a part of the country I was totally unfamiliar with, and just never ever seemed to listen to me.

The most egregious case of this is when she fucked with my medication. Remember that list I just gave on the three types of meds I was on when I moved up here? Yeah, now I’m just on the last one. She took me off of the first two in 2016 (I think? Maybe it was 2017 -- my memory is shit), completely against my wishes, and she went totally cold turkey with it, too. I went to her, telling her that I ran out of those two maybe 10 days or so ago and though I wasn’t experiencing any withdrawal symptoms yet, but I’d really like to get back on the combination that had already taken me so far, and she literally refused. Saying “Oh, well, you’ve been off them both for so long already, so let’s see how it goes. I really don’t think you need to be on that much.”

It struck me as weird and panic inducing, even then, but she was adamant about it, saying that she didn’t want to risk me getting Serotonin Syndrome from taking so much medication for depression at once. Which, alright, fair enough, but she didn’t even try to ween me off of them. She just cut me off. But I trusted her judgement as a professional and certainly didn’t want to get sick or even die from taking too much medication, so I listened to her. And I never had a huge, unprompted depressive episode, so hey, maybe things were alright!

There’s a catch though. The second drug I was introduced to, approximately in 2011? Remember that? Yeah, guess what. I did my own research recently and came to find out that it’s also been known to aid significantly in patients that have ADD but don’t want to be put on stimulants like Ritalin. Because if you have anxiety as well as ADD, it makes you painfully aware of that racing heart sensation. For the past 2+ years, I’ve felt my attention span slipping in ways I couldn’t understand or control, all because someone who didn’t really know me (remember, I’d only moved to this region a few short months before I even saw her) decided to play God with my life and not listen to my totally justifiable fears.

I feel like all that time, all those abandoned threads and plot ideas, all the shit that I blamed myself for because I just couldn’t understand why it was so hard to pay attention suddenly!!! Is all her fault. I listened to everything she told me to do and then got so conditioned to never questioning her or talking to her about my problems anymore, that I didn’t even raise the difficulties I was having that were adversely affecting my life for what seemed at the time to be no reason at all. I feel cheated and angry. I might have cried a little bit when I realized it.

The good news in this is that, 1) I don’t have her as a psychiatrist anymore THANK GOD. Last I heard, I think she was leaving the practice (probably because she was treating other patients as terribly as she was treating me), but she’s definitely no longer with the business I frequent. I’ve only met with my new psychiatrist once, and he already seems so much more kind than her, and I’m grateful for him. And 2) getting back on the medication that I was yanked off of should be an easy enough process. I really just have to talk to my new guy and tell him what I want. I’m not interested in going back on the first, because afaik, it wasn’t doing much for me anyways, and maybe serotonin syndrome actually is a problem I should be worried about taking all three at once. But at least I’ll have the two that helped get me through Job Corps and the most stressful move of my life helping me out again.

More than that, I’ve started going to therapy again, and that’s a huge relief as well. I miss my old therapist, but she seems to have moved to another office of the same company that’s slightly further away, but I love the new woman I go to see. She’s so friendly and easy to talk to, and she’s also from out of town, so we get to crack jokes about New England Drivers™, which is always fun, lol. More than that, she’s helped me see that there are good qualities to me instead of All The Things I Want To Fix, like my creativity, sense of humor, and passion for caring about and defending my friends and those I care deeply about.

If we’re being honest, when I look back at these past years, it still kind of hurts. I can see quite clearly the break where my dwindling attention span started impacting my life and my presence in the RP community (technically it happened before I went indie, which means you guys have been dealing with 2 Braincell Scoot this whole time... My deepest apologies), and how it just kept getting worse and how frustrated I was with myself and things I couldn’t change about it.

But that’s also the good thing about all this. I can and will get better, hopefully sooner rather than later, and I hope you guys will be around to reap the benefits. I love you guys, and hopefully I’ll be able to get to some replies soon! Either on this blog or any of the three others.

#long post #ooc #ramblings #tw: medication #lmk if it needs any other tags idk #tw: vent

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donalddahmer · 4 years ago

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132

I’m in love with everyone I meet. I start to fall out of love with them almost immediately, thats why I hate fast talkers.

I can’t buy my own drugs so I buy time

Discipline makes me feel in control

Trunk thinking

Lets just say I’m having urges again. They include: walls beyond the spot wet and dry wall railing & rods

I have a spot on my lip but I didn’t get to kiss a stranger instead its now a painful reminder of what shoulda coulda woulda

I want to see them drunk but with their friends. Then I can voyeur and exit accordingly versus escorting myself and company outta my peoples.

I hate drunk personas. What does that mean other than you hate yourself and voted Tory because fundamentally you think cultural appropriation isn’t that bad and Macklemore deserved Best Rap Album, 2014.

I think I’m in love or I know like pretending I am

I don’t care if you love me need you to be in love with me or it’s for the birds

Don’t let sex take away from your masturbation. You need both to honestly unlock that 100% sexy feeling.

It’s all been done before echoes my cancelled lecturer. It’s about a don’t think just do attitude at some point. That’s where the free jazz starts. The good good. The ‘freedom begins here’.

I keep scrolling celebrities lives to see if they living but they’re just as done with lockdown as we are. I’ve never been bored on my own. No I’m bored: I’m bored due to everyone else’s boredom affecting me.

I take two 11:11 wishes today because I’m feeling extra empty

I miss the physical indication of knowing somoene’s excited to see me, and the sensitive shyness when you realise we’ve gone from soft to hard. Coy cocks its head, how do you want it? How you gonna give it.

I agree, out of 5 is better than out of 10 because 10 point stars are ugly and confusing. 5 gets to the point quicker and cleaner.

I like hard and fast but I can give you slow and smooth

Checking for and checking on are two different things; one has surpassed the other and that’s what’s wrong with the world.

I miss going to New York and all I got was this lousy carpet burn from wood floor on my left little toe, and no finish. It was Spike Lee hot that day. The kind of heat where you couldn’t have sex without ice cubes. Don’t touch me I have a flight to catch in the morning and I can’t combust until after I graduate.

I’d like to have an obsessive personality but I feel I’m already there by proxy

It’s none of my business what you think of me until I care to ask you so. Then and only then having run your mind or mouth please answer me directly, respectfully.

Why does everyone want to be my bestie but not my friend?

Repeat after me: a bill is 100, a bag is a grand and, this just in, a score is 20. Therefore with inflation from 1999 Bills Bills Bills by Destiny’s Child would now be Bags Bags Bags. Destiny full grown.

We stopped seeing each other and they got a terrible white dyke hair cut so I want to thank them for making it easier but we are no longer talking, naturally. They aren’t a white dyke so it makes it even worse/better.

I think I don’t feel accomplishment until I’ve learn something, like a new word definition. That’s my wont.

The floor is cloaked in my hair and my cat’s hair so everything feels alright

It used to turn me on that if we weren’t in a pandemic I could have him how I please and he wouldn’t have that Mango Hell anymore. Now too much of a life lie has been lived that we may as well believe too.

How To Keep Up With Yourself or Keeping Up With Kyourself. I’ve never watched a full episode of that show but I know all the drama. Now THAT’S scandalous.

I turned down the Forbes list in 2020 and I’m glad I know how to listen to myself

My mum is constantly seeking more polite ways to tell me off and I can love her for that alone

How do you figure out your style without trying on a few coats first - perhaps even along the way?

I love when someone uses their favourite word but it hasn’t quite settled into their vocabulary yet like when A said to me “I like that you knoll”.

She was at the kind of age that confuses men. Legally barely legal. Her harnessed ambiguity scared me and she knew it. I remember the power I used to have too and how it could so swiftly be dangerous both the knowing and not fully caring. Youth only holds that kind of power for so long: cherish it all, bet it all, run it all!

Do you ever fear getting to know your inner self because beneath the hubbub its just vacuous hollow, no white noise, just stroked hum.

I finished a book today, I instantly feel better. You have to get through things to succeed in this lifetime.

Sometimes I let me pen run as much as my mouth/mind does. This was just one of those days.

Do you still want to collaborate? I don’t want to do anything. I’m in heaven and depressed

COMPRESSION

I don’t know how to have a meltdown with a to do list. I need something to hitch meat to so I can rest awhile. Rest is all we’ve been able to un done so perhaps hide is a better word. Shapeshifter at large. Ghost in residence. They’ve been cutting their eye after me for days. Sometimes thrice past my rims. I tell them take a seat, stay awhile, but they scurry struck by my comforting whimsy. Where I’m from you lend every lost soul a pillow. Here, take my arm as a nook, let my hands hold your cheek awhile. You look like you’ve been puffing. Let me hold your breath awhile. I know things have been tight. Shush awhile;. Sleep, take good flight.

WHEN DAEMONS DANCE MY HEART GROWS WINGS

#residency #V.O Curations

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hirstories · 8 years ago

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Hola!

Hello there! Just wanted to drop a few words here. I’m alive and mostly well—the heat is terrible here in Florida. I drove 3,200 miles (scratching that one off the bucket list). We’re currently finding a place to live. If everything goes well I should be back sometime in September.

Thank you everyone who has PM’d me via FF.net, AO3 or in Tumblr. I should be writing back to everyone soon.

A few things:

FMA BB 2017. I’m going to be focusing in editing the story I have written for the FMA Big Bang 2017 (#fmabb17) which I wrote before May 2017. After Coveted, I needed to write something that wasn’t angsty or depressing. I do swing like a pendulum in my taste for stories so my big bang story is packed with lots of silly humor. I had the idea for this particular story since 2014. The original concept was angsty (big surprise there) anyway I was watching Sailor Moon Crystal and that’s when a new idea struck. The story details will be provided soon—definitely by July 13, 2017 which is when the FMA BB 2017 drafts are due. I don’t get to write silly/humorous stuff a lot but when I do…XD

Convergence. Now that Coveted has been finished, I’ll be rewriting and finishing Convergence. I do apologize to everyone who has been waiting on this story. The chapter upload will be slow since I will be editing my FMA Big Bang entry, but I will be uploading chapters for sure. After November, the chapter uploads should increase. Please keep in mind that each chapter for Convergence is massive and with the editing they will be even bigger (40-60 pages, single spaced).

Insidious. I’m actually quite shocked that people have been asking/requesting this story. I will be picking it up in 2018, most likely after I am at least 75% done with Convergence. I had to take a long break from Insidious because that story was affecting me more than I expected (yeah I chewed more than I could handle). I will finish the story and it’ll be more shocking than the first run. Ask and you shall receive…

I will keep you updated every chance I get. For those who celebrate the Fourth of July, I hope you have a great day.

#writer update #personal #saying hi

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love-god-forever · 6 years ago

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Salvation Testimony: God Accompanied Me Through Those Dark Days

By Zhao Zhihan

On the evening of August 13, 2014, I went out running some errands, but a sudden rain caused me some delay, so it was about 12 a.m. when I returned. On my arrival at the gate of my community, I met my elder sister and two brothers-in-law. “Why are they here at this late hour?” I felt confused. But before I could understand the situation, my sister sobbed and said, “How come you came back so late? We’re so worried about you. Your husband just met with a serious car accident and is badly injured.

Now, he is being transferred to the city hospital. Our brother called and asked you to go there …” “What? A car accident?” I simply couldn’t believe my ears. “How is this possible? I just saw him calling our son at dinner. How come he …” Seeing my bemused look, my two brothers-in-law explained the whole accident to me in detail, and told me, “The doctors of the county hospital said his chances of survival are poor, and that even if he could survive, it is very possible that he would be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life.” After I heard their words, my heart began to thump violently and I burst into tears, feeling as if heaven had come crashing down. At that moment, I really didn’t know how to deal with such a terrible situation.

Because it was too late, we couldn’t get a cab to the city hospital. I got extremely anxious and feared that I would not be able to see my husband in his last moment. Just when I was in helplessness, Job’s testimony struck me. When he encountered trials, he didn’t sin through his words or complain to God. Instead, he praised Jehovah God’s name and finally bore resounding testimony to God. I also remembered Abraham’s story. When he was a hundred years old, God bestowed upon him a son, but later asked him to make his son a burnt offering to Him. Although Abraham bore great pain in his heart, he was still able to obey God’s words. When God saw Abraham’s genuine heart, He not only didn’t ask his son of him, but even blessed him, and made his progeny as numerous as the stars of the heaven, and as plentiful as the sand on the sea shore. At the thought of this, I immediately prayed to God, “Oh God, my husband’s accident upset the balance of my mind. I’m so worried about his condition now. But thinking of Job’s and Abraham’s reverence and obedience to You, I know I should emulate them. Oh God, please protect my heart so that I won’t complain to You. I’m willing to submit to Your sovereignty and entrust my husband’s life to You.” After prayer, my anxiety slowly subsided.

Afterward, my brothers-in-law found a cab; when we arrived at the city hospital, it was about 5 a.m. Learning that my husband had been wheeled into the ICU, I anxiously went to ask the doctor about his condition. He said with a sigh, “His injury is too serious. Even if he could survive, he is very likely to become a vegetable. So, you’d better prepare yourself for the worst. Besides, you need to prepare at least 200 thousand yuan for the treatment.” Hearing his words, I nearly died of shock, thinking: “200 thousand yuan? If the treatment fails, I may lose both him and money. In that case, how are my son and I going to live without the backbone of the family? Even if he could survive, he would become a vegetable, and how should I support my family by myself?” These thoughts pressed down on me so hard that I couldn’t even breathe. I had no idea what I should do, and leaned against the wall weakly, feeling as if everything had gone black before my eyes.

In helplessness, I went before God and poured out my sufferings to Him: “Oh God, my stature is too small, so facing this situation, I feel particularly weak and don’t know what to do. Oh God, please enlighten me and guide me …” While praying, I thought of God’s words, “Like all things, man quietly and unknowingly receives the nourishment of the sweetness and rain and dew from God. Like all things, man unknowingly lives under the orchestration of God’s hand. The heart and spirit of man are held in the hand of God, and all the life of man is beheld in the eyes of God. Regardless of whether or not you believe this, any and all things, living or dead, will shift, change, renew, and disappear according to God’s thoughts. This is how God rules over all things.” Right, God is the source of man’s life and our life is bestowed by Him. Be they men or all things, their life and death are all in God’s hands. This is a reflection of God’s authority. Therefore, as a created being, I ought to obey God’s orchestration. When Moses guided the Israelites out of Egypt, there was no food for them to eat in the wilderness. At that moment, Jehovah God supplied them with quail and manna. As long as they listened to God’s words and obeyed Him, there would be abundant supply of food from God. However, some people lacked genuine faith in God. They feared that there would be no food the next day, so they preserved some manna, which, however, all became rotten the next day. From this story, I understood that, God is the Creator, who supplies and nourishes us mankind, and that as long as we sincerely obey Him and trust Him, we’ll obtain His continuous supply. At the thought of this, my depression and tension eased a lot.

Then I went to the ICU, only to see my husband’s body covered in bruises; his ears were bleeding because of a fracture of his skull. Apart from that, he had several other injuries: lung damage, three broken ribs, fractures to his right femur and five toes of his left foot. “When he went to work this morning, he was so happy and vigorous; and when he made a call to our son at dinner, he was still safe and sound. But now he is lying on the sickbed with life hanging in the balance.” At this thought, I felt so painful as if a needle had stabbed into my heart.

On the third day, my husband’s situation suddenly turned worse. His breathing became faint, and his complexion was extremely sallow like that of a dead man. Our relatives were all crying, saying that he wouldn’t make it. Looking at my husband, I felt utterly helpless. The thought that I might forever lose him threw me into deep grief. At that time, I remembered a hymn of experience, “God’s Ways Cannot Be Fathomed”: “You span heaven and earth, who knows the compass of Your deeds? We see but one grain on a sandy beach, quietly wait at Your disposal.” I silently sang the hymn in my heart and thought: “God is the Creator, who dominates the change of all things as well as the laws of nature. His authority and ability are beyond the limitation of geography and space. When the Lord Jesus came to do His work, He quieted the wind and the sea just by saying a word. And with one word, He resurrected Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. These facts all display that the authority of God’s words is immeasurable. Only God possesses such authority; He seizes the key to Hades and determines man’s life and death; He is able to raise the dead and bring something from nothing.” Pondering this, I gained some faith in God, believing that whether my husband could survive or not was in the hand of God, and I was willing to entrust his life to God.

The next morning, my son and I went to the ICU asking the nurses about my husband’s condition. When they told us that he was a little better than before, I shed grateful tears, quietly offering thanks and praise to God in my heart.

However, one week later, my husband still hadn’t come around. His doctor told me, “If he still remains unconscious, you’ll have to transfer him to another hospital, and I advise you to prepare some money for his future surgeries.” Then, the doctor pointed at a patient and continued, “This patient’s injuries are less serious than your husband’s. But after more than ten days of treatment, his edema hasn’t subsided and he is still in a coma. So we have to transfer him to another hospital.” Hearing these words, I was desperately worried that my husband wouldn’t wake up. “I’ve taken out a huge overdraft to pay the hospital bill. How could I raise so much money for the following surgeries? What if I delay his treatment because I fail to raise enough money?” At this thought, I was overwhelmed by anxiety and fear.

On the tenth day, his doctor said to me, “I’ve contacted a hospital for you. If your husband can’t come around these two days, you’ll have to transfer him, because he must have an operation on his femur in 5 days; otherwise, he would be disabled for the rest of his life. You need to prepare about 400 thousand yuan for his surgery as soon as possible.” Meanwhile, my relatives and the traffic police were looking for the culprit, but there were no results. My friends and relatives knew I was short of money, but they just offered a few words of comfort without the intention to help me. In desperation, I went before God crying and prayed to Him, “Oh God, though my husband hasn’t awoken yet, I know You’re protecting him. Today the doctor again asked us to transfer him to another hospital and prepare a large amount of money for his surgery. Now I feel utterly desperate and have no way to go. Please open up a path for me.” After prayer I calmed down a lot, and thought: “These days, I’ve personally seen God’s wondrous deeds through praying to Him and getting close to Him. It is entirely thanks to God’s blessing that my husband narrowly escaped death. So I believe that, as long as I truly rely on God, He will help me.” Then I consulted with my family members to find a solution.

To my surprise, when I went home to raise money, my uncle told me that he was willing to help me, and I also learned that the culprit had been found. At that time, my son phoned me and said excitedly, “Mom, dad has woken up. The doctors told me that we don’t need to transfer him, and they are scheduling him for surgery. Please come here quickly …” The good news made me weep for joy, and I continuously thanked God and praised His wondrous deeds.

Before the operation, the doctor asked me to sign the guarantee and the notice of critical condition, saying: “Though your husband has woken up, he is quite weak because of his injuries. The surgery will take a long time and he will be put under a general anesthetic. So the risk is he may never wake up. We’ve met such cases before. You’d better have a careful consideration before making the decision.” The doctor’s words made me so agitated that I didn’t know what choice I should make. Yet after a while, I thought: “The patient who is less injured still remains unconscious despite all the treatment, and needs to be transferred to another hospital. My husband, however, under the protection of God, has woken up and is still alive. Isn’t this God’s wonderful deeds?” At the thought of this, I no longer hesitated, and signed the guarantee while quietly praying to God, “Oh God, I believe that my husband’s life and death are determined by You, not the doctors. I sincerely rely on and look to You.”

My husband’s operation went very smoothly, which was a weight off my mind. Seeing my husband out of danger, the doctors all said this was a miracle, while I clearly knew that all of this was due to God’s blessing. However, my husband lost his memory after the surgery. He even didn’t remember me and often threw a tantrum like a baby. This made me distressed and worried. The doctor said, “It’s hard to say whether he’s able to get his memory back. When he becomes better, you may take him to the rehabilitation center.” In those days, I was brooding over this thing, and couldn’t eat or sleep. As I was at my wits’ end, a passage of God’s words sprang to my mind: “Which is to say, where a person goes after they die and are reincarnated, whether they are male or female, what their mission is, what they will go through in life, their setbacks, what blessings they enjoy, who they will meet, what will happen to them—no one can predict this, avoid it, or hide from it. Which is to say, after your life has been set, in what happens to you, however you try and avoid it, by whatever means you try and avoid it, you have no way of violating the life course set out for you by God in the spiritual world.” From God’s words, I understood this: “None of us can predict what we will go through in our life. Whether it is affliction or blessing, they are both a good chance for us to mature in life. In those miserable days, I’ve learned how to rely on God and look to God, and how to hand over my difficulties to God and obey His arrangement. In desperation, through pondering God’s words, I obtained some true knowledge of His authority. More importantly, I’ve personally tasted God’s love. He was with me all the time; every time I needed assistance, He would guide me to overcome those difficulties in time. But for God’s guidance, I would have lived in misery. If I hadn’t experienced those environments, I would never have true knowledge about God, and my knowledge of His authority would forever be doctrines.” Having realized this, I thanked God from the bottom of my heart for His reinforcing my shortcomings and supplying my life with these environments. I resolved to rely on God to walk the way ahead, and I believed He would guide me by my side.

After staying in the city hospital for 21 days, my husband was transferred to another hospital. In his recovery, I prayed to God every day, taught him how to speak, and helped him recover his memory. To my surprise, he gradually learned how to control his temper and remembered some relatives. Seeing him getting better and better day by day, I was overwhelmed with joy. Even his doctor felt amazed, saying, “How incredible! I can’t believe that he’s made such a quick recovery. This is indeed a miracle! The patient in the next room also had a car accident like your husband, but he has been in a coma for half a year after the surgery. It’s hard to say whether or not he could make it. You are really so lucky.” Hearing these words, I continuously thanked God in my heart.

After being discharged from the hospital, my husband recovered more quickly than before. He was able to walk with crutches and basically recovered his memory. One day, I told him what happened when he was in hospital, how I relied on God, and how God guided me through those dark days. He was moved to tears, saying, “Once I make a full recovery, I’ll share my experiences with others so that they can know God’s wonderful deeds.” Hearing what he said, I continuously offered thanks to God.

Through this special experience, I truly saw God’s miraculous deeds and appreciated this: God is the Lord of all things; He indeed commands the life and death of everyone; His authority and power are beyond any created or non-created being. As God’s words say, “Man’s life originates from God, the existence of the heaven is because of God, and the existence of the earth stems from the power of God’s life. No object possessed of vitality can transcend the sovereignty of God, and no thing with vigor can break away from the ambit of God’s authority. In this way, regardless of who they are, everyone must submit under the dominion of God, everyone must live under God’s command, and no one can escape from His control.”

#testimony #God’s name #Lord Jesus

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diemkay · 5 years ago

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Coronavirus Diaries: March 21

A while ago someone on Twitter suggested keeping a diary. I haven’t written here in a while, busy with changing countries, careers, and learning and adapting a lot. But this feels like a good time to start again. It’s hard to think or do much else, and it seems like a learning opportunity in the process.

I vaguely remember talking to my grandmother in December, asking if she’d seen the news about it in China. Now here we are, past the “just a flu bro” stage and into the trough of depression and resignation.

Examine your own morality

I liked this point from Cassie Kozyrkov, a data scientist at Google, on how to apply sound principles from decision science to your own life:

If you’re not in the habit of investigating your own morality, now is as good a time as ever to face questions like, “Under what circumstances, if ever, am I willing to put a stranger’s life at risk? How much risk?” (If you’ve ever driven a car around others or gone outside when you have the sniffles, I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve already risked strangers’ lives.)

It’s terrifying for me to see people not respond to this, still unaware of the severity.

Young does not mean immune

A (presumably Italian) doctor writing under anonymity for Newsweek last week was diplomatic:

Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. “We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life. Not to mention having every chance of catching another bug in hospital, while you’re being treated or waiting to get checked with an immune system distracted even by the false alarm of an ordinary flu. No travel for leisure or business is worth this risk.

Now, odds are, you might catch coronavirus and might not even get symptoms. Great. Good for you. Very bad for everyone else, from your own grandparents to the random older person who got on the subway train a stop or two after you got off. You’re fine, you’re barely even sneezing or coughing, but you’re walking around and you kill a couple of old ladies without even knowing it. Is that fair? You tell me.

“Young and unafraid of Coronavirus? Good for you. Now stop killing people”

This US doctor also speaking anonymously was more blunt:

“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube.

The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.”

Image via SkyNews: Coronavirus: Italy's hardest-hit city wants you to see how COVID-19 is affecting its hospitals

Lack of global coordinated response

It’s confusing to figure out whether your government is doing the right thing, or over/under-reacting to the situation. And the lack of well-coordinated global response to this outside of scientific research is even more confusing.

Dennis Carroll, virologist (and the former head of a USAID program that sought to identify animal viruses that might infect humans and to head off new pandemics):

In 2005, during the avian influenza, George W. Bush was on the phone routinely with leaders around the world about how to coordinate a global response. Barack Obama did the same in 2009 for the second H1N1 pandemic and in 2014 for the Ebola epidemic. You saw presidential leadership step up and act as a catalyst for forging a global way forward for a global problem. It has been absolute silence in this White House.

Populism here and across Europe and elsewhere has fragmented the global networks, which had been so instrumental in being able to bring together a global approach to problems like this. I’ve not seen any reports coming out of the White House that showed that as China was struggling to bring the virus under control, our president reached out to President Xi to talk about how to coordinate action. I’m stunned by the absolute absence of global dialogue for what is a global event. In Europe right now, you would never believe that there was a European Union. From where I sit, it looks like every country is making this up as they go along. Italy isn’t coordinating with Brussels. Brussels isn’t coordinating with Germany. There’s no coherent regional approach to this problem in Europe, even though they have a platform for doing it.

The Man Who saw the Pandemic Coming

Yuval Noah Harari noted the same thing: it took the G7 over a week to get on a conference call, and not much came out of it.

People share worse fake news than organizations

Who needs deepfakes and AI-generated images and text when you have plain text? According to an article by the FT, attackers are returning to old-school, text message-based spam campaigns to spread coronavirus disinformation. And it's working. When everyone’s emotionally volatile, the means don’t have to be that sophisticated.

On other platforms, I can’t even image what the shit show looks like on Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg did a press conference to say this:

"We are seeing hoaxes that are basically encouraging people who are sick to not get treatment, or to not act in ways that are going to protect the people around them, or in some ways to do things that will be actively harmful," he said. "There is one hoax going around that, if you think you have this, drink bleach and that will cure it. That’s terrible. That’s obviously going to lead to imminent harm if you do that."

On the other hand, Morocco is arresting people for spreading fake news. Soon in a country near you:

The most recent arrest was of a 48-year-old woman who was taken into custody on Wednesday after denying the existence of the coronavirus on her YouTube channel and urging her compatriots to ignore precautionary measures.

#coronavirus diary

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douglasacogan · 7 years ago

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Attorney General Sessions laments state recidivism data and impact of Johnson ACCA ruling

Attorney General Jeff Sessions today delivered these remarks to the National Sheriffs' Association Annual Conference, and his comments covered lots of criminal justice ground that I do not recall him previously speaking about directly. The speech is worth reading in full because of all it reveals about how AG Sessions' looks at crime and criminals, and here are just some of the comments that caught my attention:

This is a difficult job, but when rules are fairly and consistently enforced, life is better for all — particularly for our poor and minority communities. Most people obey the law. They just want to live their lives. They’re not going to go out and commit violent crimes or felonies.

As my former boss, President Reagan used to say, “Most serious crimes are the work of a relatively small group of hardened criminals.” That is just as true today as it was back then. That’s why we’ve got to be smart and fair about how we identify criminals and who we put behind bars and for how long....

I want to call your attention to something important. A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new report on the recidivism rate of inmates released from state prisons in 30 states. This is the longest-term study that BJS has ever done on recidivism and perhaps the largest. It was designed by the previous administration. The results are clear and very important. The results are of historic importance. The reality is grim indeed.

The study found that 83 percent of 60,000 state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested again within nine years. That’s five out of every six. The study shows that two-thirds of those — a full 68 percent — were arrested within the first three years. Almost half were arrested within a year — one year — of being released.

The study estimates that the 400,000 state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested nearly 2 million times during the nine-year period — an average of five arrests each. Virtually none of these released prisoners were arrested merely for probation or parole violations: 99 percent of those arrested during the 9-year follow-up period were arrested for something other than a probation or parole violation.

In many cases, former inmates were arrested for an offense at least as serious — if not more so — as the crime that got them in jail in the first place. It will not surprise you that this is often true for drug offenders.

Many have thought that most drug offenders are young experimenters or persons who made a mistake. But the study shows a deeper concern. Seventy-seven percent of all released drug offenders were arrested for a non-drug crime within nine years. Presumably, many were arrested for drug crimes also. Importantly, nearly half of those arrests were for a violent crime. We can’t give up....

This tells us that recidivism is no little matter. It is a fact of life that must be understood. But overall, the good news is that the professionals in law enforcement know what works in crime. We’ve been studying this and working on this for 40 years.

From 1964 to 1980, the overall violent crime rate tripled. Robbery tripled. Rape tripled. Aggravated assault nearly tripled. Murder doubled. And then, from 1991 to 2014, violent crime dropped by half. Murder dropped by half. So did aggravated assault. Rape decreased by more than a third, and robbery plummeted by nearly two-thirds.

That wasn’t a coincidence. Between that big rise in crime and that big decline in crime, President Reagan and the great Attorney General Ed Meese went to work. There was the elimination of parole, the Speedy Trial Act, the elimination of bail on appeal, increased bail for dangerous criminals before trial, the issuing of sentencing guidelines, and in certain cases, mandatory minimum sentences.

We increased funding for the DEA, FBI, ATF, and federal prosecutors. And most states and cities followed Reagan’s lead. Professionalism and training dramatically increased in local law enforcement. These were the biggest changes in law enforcement since the founding of this country. These laws were critical to re-establishing public safety.

When a criminal knows with certainty that he is facing hard time, he is a lot more willing to confess and cooperate with prosecutors. On the other hand, when the sentence is uncertain and up to the whims of the judge, criminals are a lot more willing to take a chance....

The certainty of a significant and fixed sentence helps us get criminals to hand over their bosses, the kingpins and the cartel leaders — and helps remove entire gangs and criminals from the street. Left unaddressed these organizations only get richer, stronger, more arrogant and violent placing whole neighborhoods in fear.

Law enforcement officers understand that. Sheriff Eavenson and NSA have been critical allies in the fight to preserve mandatory minimums for a long time — and I want to thank you for your strong advocacy. Many doubt their value. Maybe this is obvious, but a recidivist can’t hurt the community if he is incarcerated. A lot of people who would have committed crimes in the 1990s and 2000s didn’t because they were locked up. Murders were cut in half after 1980....

Look, our goal is not to fill up the prisons. Our goal is to reduce crime and to keep every American safe. We should not as a policy keep persons in prison longer than necessary. But clear and certain punishment does in fact make America safer....

One of the most important laws that President Reagan signed into law was the Armed Career Criminal Act. That’s the law that requires a minimum 15- year sentence for felons caught with a firearm after their third robbery or burglary conviction.

These are not so-called “low-level, nonviolent drug offenders” who are being picked on. These are criminals who have committed multiple serious offenses. In 2015 — after 30 years on the books — one critical line of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court as being too vague.

But because of this impactful ruling, every federal prosecutor lost one of their most valuable tools and they ask me for help regularly. Just one example is Jeffrey Giddings of Oregon. He had more than 20 convictions since 1991. He was let out of jail after the Court ruling and only 18 days later shot a police officer and held two fast food employees hostage. He has now been sentenced to another 30 years in prison. And the last thing he did before being put back in jail was to lash out in a tirade of profanity at police....

More than 1,400 criminals — each convicted of three felonies — have been let out of jail in the three years since the Court ruling. And so far, more than 600 have been arrested again.

On average, these 600 criminals have been arrested three times since 2015. A majority of those who have been out of prison for two years have already been arrested again. Here in Louisiana, nearly half of the released ACCA offenders released because of this court ruling have already been rearrested or returned to federal custody....

In this noble calling, all of us in this room are leaders. The NSA is fulfilling its responsibility in this regard. We must communicate sound principles to our policy leaders and to the American people when it comes to reducing crime:

A small number of people commit most of the crimes;

Those who are jailed for crimes are very likely to commit more crimes—often escalating to violent crimes — after their release; and

Congress and our legislatures must consider legislation that protects the public by ensuring that we incapacitate those criminals and deter others

And so the point is this: we should always be looking for effective and proven ways to reduce recidivism, but we must also recognize that simply reducing sentences without reducing recidivism unfairly creates more victims.

This Department of Justice under President Trump is committed to working with you to deliver justice for crime victims and consequences to criminals. We want to be a force multiplier for you.

The President has ordered us to back the women and men in blue and to reduce crime in America. And that’s what we intend to do. We embrace that mission and enforce the law with you.

There is a bit of rich irony to the Attorney General extolling the importance and value of "clear and certain punishment" just before lamenting a SCOTUS ruling that struck down a punishment as too vague to be clear or certain in any way. That irony aside, I am not at all surprised to see him highlight the depressing new data, first blogged in this prior post, revealing terrible recidivism numbers among those released from state prisons in 2005. I am not sure from where the ACCA-post-Johnson-release recidivism data comes, but I am sure all these numbers fuel the AG's belief that we should always be inclined to (over-)incarcerate in efforts to improve public safety.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2018/06/attorney-general-sessions-laments-state-recidivism-data-and-impact-of-johnson-acca-ruling.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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benrleeusa · 7 years ago

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Attorney General Sessions laments state recidivism data and impact of Johnson ACCA ruling

More than 1,400 criminals — each convicted of three felonies — have been let out of jail in the three years since the Court ruling. And so far, more than 600 have been arrested again.

A small number of people commit most of the crimes;

Those who are jailed for crimes are very likely to commit more crimes—often escalating to violent crimes — after their release; and

Congress and our legislatures must consider legislation that protects the public by ensuring that we incapacitate those criminals and deter others

This Department of Justice under President Trump is committed to working with you to deliver justice for crime victims and consequences to criminals. We want to be a force multiplier for you.

The President has ordered us to back the women and men in blue and to reduce crime in America. And that’s what we intend to do. We embrace that mission and enforce the law with you.

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newsnigeria · 7 years ago

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/british-spy-skripal-hoax/

The British Spy Skripal hoax

by Scott Humor

In regards to the British government-staged hoax around the persona of retired British spy Sergey Skripal: If TV police dramas told us anything it’s the principle of Corpus delicti, or “no body, no crime.” It’s the principle that a crime must be proved to have occurred before a person can be convicted of committing that crime.

Since February, the British government has been staging a bizarre theater employing dozens of actors dressed in police and firefighters uniforms and colorful hazmat suits, all to make the appearance of a crime being investigated.

Just one fact is enough to understand that an entire “the Skripals poison crime” has never took place. This so called “nerve agent” has never been placed on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons because it has never existed.

It’s non-existence was confirmed by Dr Robin Black, until recently he was a head of the detection laboratory at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Porton Down). He wrote in his review: “… emphasizes that there is no independent confirmation of Mirzayanov’s claims about the chemical properties of these compounds: Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Just like “Novichok” has never existed, no one was poisoned, nothing has happened. It’s a staged provocation and a hoax.

It is a typical war game scenario, in which the game “viruses,” or bits of fake information, were planted years ago, and now being used as “evidence” in a staged “crime.” They tell us that nothing proves today crime as a thirty-year-old newspaper article.

Just accept that everything the British government says is a lie.

For those who want to understand methods and techniques involved in staging these sort of augmented reality war game operations, I refer to my war games illustrated manual, “Pokemon in Ukraine.” The aim of any war game is to engage non-players in it. First step is to con people into accepting that staged events as real, or as Zakharova names this process “a legitimization of previously fabricated information.”

It’s been a month since the hoax around the British spy Skripal started. We still have no hard evidence that an alleged attack ever took place. We don’t have the victims. No third party medical tests, no CC footage of the victims, no official meetings with the victims, no samples of alleged poison; the list goes on and on.

During the briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, Moscow, March 15, 2018, she said: “Britain has not provided any data to anyone,” The truth is obviously being concealed. No one is providing information about the incident to anyone.”

In her interview to the newspaper Argumenti (Arguments), Zakharova said that either the British disclose all the facts, or “it’s all lies, from the beginning to the end.”

This stance of the Minister of Foreign Affairs demonstrates a tectonic shift from a willingness of Russia’s government to play along and accept war games as real, as it was in case of a staged war in Ukraine in 2014.

On Sunday, I received an email from a famous military defense attorney, Christopher Black, which I am posting here with his permission.

Chris wrote to me a few questions from a defense lawyer.

“Questions to the British Prime Minster from a citizen:

You state Skripal and daughter were poisoned – then where are they? Where are photos of them? Where are the medical reports stating what is wrong with them and their present condition?

You state Russians did this – fine then, where are the persons that administered it, how did they do it, where did they do it and when did they do it?

You state Russians are involved – but you have not put out any profile of any suspects nor have you put out a dragnet for any likely suspects who, if you are right and they did do this, are still then roaming around the country doing who knows what.

You state this is a national emergency and have police and army in strange suits on some streets but you have not put police and army elements at the airports and ports to try to catch the culprits to prevent them leaving the country.

Having failed to do these obvious things the only conclusion to be drawn is that you are lying to the British people.

We reject Russia was involved for obvious reasons. Therefore we cannot accept the rest of their claims either without evidence. All we know is that two people are claimed to have been poisoned. that is all we know – a claim.” Chris

He also added: “Where is the evidence that an nerve agent was used at all aside from there say so? Now, they have people chasing their tails arguing whether it is this agent or that agent, the various affects of them etc. etc, when we have no evidence that a nerve agent was used.”

“We have no evidence anything ever took place. Litvinenko – photos of him in a hospital bed every week for months. As for these two – we don’t even know if they exist, or were eliminated, or who knows what.”

“Again, I think this line of inquiry is pointless unless and until we see evidence of a nerve agent was used at all.

We should not accept any element of their story. We have to question every element of their story – for once you accept one part of it you will be stuck with the rest.”

I only want to add that at the end of this SITREP you can find a list of articles and research papers conducted by extremely smart and knowledgeable people and directed to the government of the UK, all telling them what they did and said wrong. I have to say with my deepest regret that what all these wonderful people have done is to provide the British government with free research and resources to stage another chemical attack hoax, only on much larger scale.

It’s nothing new for the British government to make similar accusations against Russia. Actually the United Kingdom has a long history of using its chemical weapons against Russians, while there is NO evidence that Russians had even used chemical weapons against the British Crown subjects.

Boris Johnson walks in Churchill’s footsteps by accusing Russia in using and stockpiling chemical weapons.

The British Chemical Warfare against the Russians

One of the earliest used chemical weapon in human history was cacodyl oxide. It was proposed as a chemical weapon by the British Empire during the Crimean War against Russia, along with the significantly more potent blood agent, cacodyl cyanide.

During the invasion of Russia by the British Empire and its allies, France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire, in 1853-1856 known as the Crimean war, the British army used sulfur dioxide during the siege of Sevastopol in August 1855. In May 1854 the British and French fleets bombarded Odessa with some “stinky bombs” containing some kind of poisonous substances.

During the invasion of Russia in 1918-1922, the Allied troops of the British, American, Canadian and French armies under the British command used the chemical weapons in Archangelsk in February 1919, and in August 27, 1919, near the village of Yemtsa, 120 miles South of Arkhangelsk, British artillery opened fire on the positions of the Red Army fighting with the foreign invaders. After the explosions green cloud covered the position of the Russian troops, Russian soldiers trapped in a cloud vomited blood and then fell unconscious and died. The British forces used CW called adamsite (dihydrophenarsazine).

“The strongest case for Churchill as chemical warfare enthusiast involves Russia, and was made by Giles Milton in The Guardian on 1 September 2013. Milton wrote that in 1919, scientists at the governmental laboratories at Porton in Wiltshire developed a far more devastating weapon: the top secret “M Device,” an exploding shell containing a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine [DM]. The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it “the most effective chemical weapon ever devised.” Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price, was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. “If you got home only once with the gas you would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda.”

According to Giles Milton, the author of Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot (2013): “Trials at Porton suggested that the M Device was indeed a terrible new weapon. The active ingredient in the M Device was diphenylaminechloroarsine, a highly toxic chemical. A thermogenerator was used to convert this chemical into a dense smoke that would incapacitate any soldier unfortunate enough to inhale it… The symptoms were violent and deeply unpleasant. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and instant and crippling fatigue were the most common features…. Victims who were not killed outright were struck down by lassitude and left depressed for long periods.”

The use of chemical weapons against Russians was supported in this by Sir Keith Price, the head of the chemical warfare, at Porton Down.

A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919. Bolshevik soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood, then collapsed unconscious. The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages. But the weapons proved less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then stopped.“

“Because an enemy who has perpetrated every conceivable barbarity is at present unable, through his ignorance, to manufacture poisoned gas, is that any reason why our troops should be prevented from taking full advantage of their weapons? The use of these gas shell[s] having become universal during the great war, I consider that we are fully entitled to use them against anyone pending the general review of the laws of war which no doubt will follow the Peace Conference.”

This was how Churchill justified the use of the chemical weapons during the Atlanta invasion of Russia in 1919, claiming that it was Russians, who “perpetrated every conceivable barbarity,” despite the fact that it was Russia who was invaded by the Allied armies and Russian people who were killed in millions.

How is the invasion of 1919 similar to what the British government is doing today? How did the British government justify its use of the chemical weapons against Russian villages? What exactly Russians did to deserve this?

Churchill ordered General Ironside, in command of the Allied forces, to make “fullest use” of the chemical weapon because: “Bolsheviks have been using gas shells against Allied troops at Archangel.”

But where would Russians get those weapons?

John Simkin in Winston Churchill and Chemical Weapons writes:

“Someone leaked this information and Churchill was forced to answer questions on the subject in the House of Commons on 29th May 1919. Churchill insisted that it was the Red Army who was using chemical warfare: “I do not understand why, if they use poison gas, they should object to having it used against them. It is a very right and proper thing to employ poison gas against them.” His statement was untrue. There is no evidence of Bolshevik forces using gas against British troops and it was Churchill himself who had authorised its initial use some six weeks earlier.”

The British repeated their use of chemical weapons against Russians on 27th August, 1919. when British Airco DH.9 bombers dropped gas bombs on the Russian village of Emtsa. According to one source: “Bolsheviks soldiers fled as the green gas spread. Those who could not escape, vomited blood before losing consciousness.” Other villages targeted included Chunova, Vikhtova, Pocha, Chorga, Tavoigor and Zapolki. During this period 506 gas bombs were dropped on the Russians. [John Simkin ]

But that wasn’t the end of the war crimes of the British Crown against Russia. After withdrawal of the British troops in October 1919, the remaining chemical weapons were considered to be too dangerous to be sent back to Britain and therefore they were dumped into the White Sea. The last time someone in Russia came across the British chemical weapons was in 2017 a man from Archangelsk found several British shells with iprit, which remains potent after one hundred years.

So, the British government has a proven historical record of laying false accusations on Russia accusing Russia in using chemical weapons anagst the British subjects, while using it against Russians. .

How was the 1919 false flag operation organized?

Excerpt from a book Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia, 1918-1920 By Clifford Kinvig, page 128

“On January 27, major Gilmore, a forward commander there, reported that “the enemy used a certain percentage of gas shells with no effect.” Ironside realized that this was a significant development, if only small in scale, and immediately notified the War Office: “Reports that 3 gas shells fired by enemy; my 1 gas officer has gone up to investigate. This is first suggestion of enemy using gas in any form, but if it is verified I shall ask for some gas officers and means of repair for masks. There is a plentiful supply of latter here.”

Three gas shells were hardly a major event, and Ironside’s reaction, it will noted, was entirely defensive. Not so the response from Churchill. The same day, without waiting for confirmation, he made this “first use” clear to the nation at large in a formal press statement and at the same time notified Ironside that the ship would be sailing in the middle of the month, loaded with gas shells for his various artillery pieces. Ironside still demurred, asking for instructions, since he had not yet verified the report that the Bolsheviks had indeed used the weapon. Plainly, the general had residual inhibitions. The clearest of directives from the War Office, however, soon followed. On 7 February the COGs at Archangel, Murmansk and Constantinople received a message in cipher from the Director of Military Operations: “Fullest use is now to be made of gas shell with your forces, or supply by us to Russian forces, as Bolsheviks have been using gas shells against Allied troops in Archangel.” The Secretary of State had wasted no time.

“Some critics have claimed that Churchill, in his keenness to use gas, falsely charged the Bolsheviks with using it first.”

The false flag attack was very simple. There were two unconfirmed reports that poisonous gas shells were used against the British forces. The press carried the reports, prompted by the War Office. Same day, the Director of Military Operations issued the order to use the chemical weapons.

When it became known, and people started accusing Churchill and the Allied forces command in using chemical weapons against Russians under false pretence, Churchill issued a memorandum

Churchill’s 1919 War Office Memorandum May 12, 1919

“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.”

Before the WWII the Britain also used chemical weapons in Afghanistan, India, and Mesopotamia.

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LINKS TO RELATED SOURCES AND RESEARCH

An open letter to the British MP from my old friend and sometimes editor Gerold Rupprecht:

“Dear Prime Minister Theresa May,

I ask you to quickly reverse course and create a constructive relationship with the Russian government.

I watched your speech in parliament with dismay, regarding the Skripal nerve-gas attempted assassination case declaring a verdict decided before proper investigation.

Mr. Skripal was not ordered to death or life in prison, but 13 years in jail by a Russian military court, subsequently released in a swap with the USA and pardoned, making the hypothesis of Mr. Putin or anyone else in Russian government ordering his execution preposterous.

You seem to be unapologetically denying objective reality in the best tradition of George Orwell’s “doublethink” (in his book 1984) where only appearances, not reality, matter.

A simple drive by shooting, stabbing or accident is much easier to arrange and almost impossible to trace. It is not as if Mr. Skripal was hard to have access to (he was still a Russian citizen, had a passport and a pension to collect).

The CIA preferred to contract out the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain in Beirut to local “Christian” allies, never mind the more than 80 innocents killed in the process. Assuming Russians wanted Mr. Skripal dead, arranging a robbery and stabbing is probably a lot easier. It is self-evident there is no good reason Russians would want him dead.

Your criminal and intelligence experts all understand the above.

Do you honestly want us to believe there is a secret lab in Russia with crazy scientists that instead of doing tests on rats prefer high profile political activists , that they like to try out polonium, nerve gas, sarin, dioxin, mercury, toxic flowers and unknown poisons, just before important political events such as Russia’s presidential election March 18th, 2018?

The mentioned gas “Novichok”, was manufactured in Uzbekistan in a factory that was later cleaned up by a US company. Coincidence?

I refuse to think that you are not too bright or poorly read. One has to make a determined effort to not be capable of logical thought and not be informed about the basic facts of the case.

Operation Gladio and the strategy of tension showed the NATO terror organization, responsible for the Bologna train station bombing and other false flag massacres such as the Baader-Meinhof Red Army faction or Red Brigades in Italy (not the Soviet KGB). Never mind Operation Northwoods.

The same kind of people who committed the “Gladio” crimes would be my prime suspects (MI6, CIA, Ukraine’s SBU, any combination of the aforementioned). Each one of these events was followed by an enormous mult-national propaganda campaign. If you have forgotten, it is willful ignorance on your part.

It appears as if you want to maintain the long established track-record of bloody false-flag operations in pursuit of political objectives, to give a pretext to an illegal military aggression.

After the CIA, which tried to kill Fidel Castro more than 600 times they would never kill a Russian in the UK, out of respect for international law?

People who have no problems blowing up a large train station, bringing down three buildings in Manhattan, would they have any hesitation to kill an ex-spy to justify further hostile actions against another country to preserve their dominance?

You may want a quick reminder,

“Professional standards require intelligence professionals to lie, hide information, or use covert tactics to protect their “cover,” access, sources, and responsibilities. The Central Intelligence Agency expects, teaches, encourages, and controls these tactics so that the lies are consistent and supported (“backstopped”). The CIA expects intelligence officers to teach others to lie, deceive, steal, launder money, and perform a variety of other activities that would certainly be illegal if practiced in the United States. They call these tactics “tradecraft,” and intelligence officers practice them in all the world’s intelligence services” -Hulnick & Mattausch, “Ethics and Morality in U.S. Secret Intelligence”

It seems the web of lies is falling apart, the attempts to backstop previous lies are getting desperate.

Your government’s official narrative is the height of idiocy.

Changing course to improve relations with Russia can and will improve your political support. It is obvious you have much to gain as well as your countrymen.

Sincerely,

Gerold Rupprecht

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NEWS IN BRIEF AND USEFUL LINKS

On Not Being Refuted – Several million people have now read my articles on the lack of evidence of Russian government guilt for the Salisbury attack.

Findings of 2016 Iranian study on novichok derivatives sent to OPCW

First Recorded Successful Novichok Synthesis was in 2016 – By Iran, in Cooperation with the OPCW

The brief history of British spies, “virgin queen worshipers,” and their bizarre occult traditions in the “Anatomyzing Divinity,” Jay Dyer Interview with Author James Kelley. Starts at 50 minutes. Both are renowned authors in the Eastern Orthodox Theology

The curious case of the Salisbury poisonings

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Rossiya’24 TV channel on Saturday: “Neither in the territory of the Soviet Union, nor in the Soviet era, nor in the Russian Federation has ever been performed research named directly or codenamed as Novichok,” she said.

‘I Think Skripal Attempted Murder Staged by US, UK Intel’ – Political Scientist

“Russia Did It!” Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

Zerohedge reposted the article.

Some readers comments are very helpful, like Looney’s timetable of alleged events pointing to a complete absurdity of the UK government’ claims.

JohninMK provided excerpts from Craig Murray’s articles on the matter.

Russian to Judgment

Of A Type Developed By Liars

Former MI6 spy Steele to give evidence in ‘dossier’ libel case

US training Syria militants for false flag chemical attack as basis for airstrikes – Russian MoD

Moscow expels 23 UK diplomats & shuts British Council in response to ‘provocative moves’

‘Not proxy’: Lavrov says US, British, French special forces ‘directly involved’ in Syria war

TASS just posted a statement that this agent was never developed or manufactured in Russia.

‘It’s nonsense’ to think Russia tried to poison Skripals ahead of elections & World Cup – Putin

Section II. Militarily Significant Aspects of Chemical Agents

——————

Scott Humor

Director of Research and Development

author of The enemy of the State

POKÉMON IN UKRAINE: Tactical War Game Introduction MANUAL (War Game Manuals Book

In case you have forgotten what happened in Ukraine, this book should refresh your memory with the incredibly precise and humorous chronicles: ANTHOLOGY OF RUSSIAN HUMOR: FROM MAIDAN TO TRUMP

Follow me on twitter

#russia #u.k #U.S

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nancyedimick · 8 years ago

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Is the Supreme Court allergic to math?

The Supreme Court in 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Yes, says Oliver Roeder, in an interesting essay at fivethirtyeight.com. At least some of the justices, he suggests, have “a reluctance — even an allergy — to taking math and statistics seriously,” as evidenced most recently by their questions and comments at the Oct. 3 oral argument in the Supreme Court’s Gill v. Whitford “partisan gerrymandering” case.

As he himself acknowledges, he’s hardly the first to make the suggestion; there’s a rather substantial library of academic commentary on “innumeracy” at the court (and, more generally, throughout the judiciary). But I think he’s correct in pointing out the rather serious consequences this might have in the particular context of the court’s deliberations in Gill.

I have long been struck by the fact that it is unfortunately well within the norms of our legal culture — among lawyers, judges, law professors and law students — to treat mathematics and related disciplines as kinds of communicable diseases with which we want no part. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard a student or colleague or member of the bar say something like, “Oh, math! I don’t do math — that’s why I went to law school!” It is well known that the surest way to place three-quarters of your audience into shutdown mode in a law school class or legal conference is to introduce a formula, or a graph, or the results of some calculation.

Gill, as most of you are probably aware, involves a challenge to the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature’s 2011 redistricting map, a map that, according to the three-judge panel below, was both intended to, and did, systematically disadvantage Democratic voters and advantage Republican voters across the state. As evidence of the intent of the map’s drafter to “secure Republican control of the legislature for the decennial period,” the court noted that the redistricting committee had prepared a number of different maps, and that the one finally chosen was the one that, in the opinion of those who had constructed it, was, statistically speaking, the one most likely to produce a Republican-dominated legislature.

As evidence of the discriminatory effect, the court found that it was “clear that the drafters got what they intended to get” — a map that made it “more difficult for Democrats, compared to Republicans, to translate their votes into seats.” In the 2012 election, Republicans won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote, which gave them 61 percent of the seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly, and in the 2014 election, Republicans took 52 percent of the statewide vote and ended up with 64 percent of Wisconsin State Assembly seats. [Put differently, when the Democrats received 51.4 percent of the statewide vote in 2012, they ended up with 39 assembly seats; when the Republicans received around the same percentage (52 percent) in 2014, they ended up with 63 seats — a 24-seat disparity.]

Of course, one would hardly expect perfectly proportional results — 52 percent of the overall vote leading to 52 percent of the legislative seats — from any districting map; and “partisan gerrymandering” is, to some degree at least, an inherent feature of any system (like the one that pertains in most states) that puts the legislature in charge of constructing the maps. So the case, in essence, poses the question: How much is too much? And how do we know whether and when it’s too much?

Now, I’m not sure I agree with Roeder when he says that the case “hinges on math”; one could imagine the court declining to engage with the “how much is too much?” question on any number of grounds (such as the plaintiff’s standing to raise the claim, or the “justiciability” of political gerrymandering claims in general).

But it is certainly true that “how much is too much?” questions often (and sometimes only) can be profitably analyzed with the aid of mathematical tools. If you want to know if a building exceeds the local building-height limit, you pull out a ruler. It’s useful to have some way to measure the extent to which the Wisconsin map does, or does not, entrench Republican control by giving Republican votes greater “weight” than Democratic votes.

COMMENTERS PLEASE NOTE: You do not have to remind me that when they are in power, Democrats “do the same thing.” I recognize that; that is precisely what makes this case so important. Power will attempt to entrench itself by all possible means, and that is as objectionable when coming from either direction on the political spectrum. This is not a partisan issue; it is one that anyone who cares about democratic processes should care about; it it’s not your ox being gored today, it will be tomorrow, I promise you.

The court below used a number of such measures, all of which demonstrated the bias incorporated into the Wisconsin maps: the “mean-median” index, the “partisan bias” measure, and the much-discussed (and terribly-named) “efficiency gap” (EG). The EG measures the number of “wasted votes”; votes that would not have affected the outcome of the election had they not been cast. [For example, all votes for a candidate who received less than a majority are “wasted” in this sense, as are all votes for the winning candidate in excess of the 50 percent+1 needed to secure the election.] All elections will have large numbers of wasted votes; the question, though, is whether the map is skewed in a manner that systematically wastes more Democratic votes than Republican votes (as the court below found that it was).

There are any number of questions one might have about how this phenomenon can be measured, and how particularly egregious violations of nonpartisanship can be identified. But the transcript of the oral argument here makes for rather depressing and disheartening reading. To my eyes, the argument shed less light than usual on the hard questions in the case, and the attitude of several of the justices towards the measurement question ranged, as Roeder suggests, from bemused befuddlement to outright hostility. Justices A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch pressed the challengers on whether any metric could ever serve as a constitutional bright line, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was particularly dismissive of what he called — rather oddly — “sociological gobbledygook” in the challengers�� arguments:

[If] you’re the intelligent man on the street and the Court issues a decision, and let’s say the Democrats win, and that person will say: Well, why did the Democrats win And the answer is going to be because EG was greater than 7 percent, where EG is the sigma of party X wasted votes minus the sigma of party Y wasted votes over the sigma of party X votes plus party Y votes. And the intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney. … And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.

That strikes me as a bit disingenuous. There are any number of opinions that the court (and the courts) issue that would leave the “intelligent man on the street” scratching his head, because of the presence of what we might call “legal gobbledygook,” and if Roberts is suggesting that the court’s use of objective mathematical indices of partisan asymmetry would be especially troublesome to the man on the street, I’m not convinced.

I think that perhaps Alito put his finger on what really troubles these metric skeptics: the fear that they will look ridiculous at some point down the road for having chosen a flawed measuring stick:

… gerrymandering is distasteful. But if we are going to impose a standard on the courts, it has to be something that’s manageable and it has to be something that’s sufficiently concrete so that the public reaction to decisions is not going to be the one that the Chief Justice mentioned, that this three-judge court decided this, that — this way because two of the three were appointed by a Republican president or two of the three were appointed by a Democratic President.

[Over the past 30 years] judges, scholars, legal scholars, political scientists have been looking for a manageable standard. All right. In 2014, a young researcher (Eric McGhee) publishes a paper, in which he says that the leading measures previously, symmetry and responsiveness, are inadequate. But I have discovered the key. I have discovered the Rosetta stone and it’s — it is the efficiency gap. And then a year later you bring this suit and you say: There it is, that is the constitutional standard. It’s been finally — after 200 years, it’s been finally discovered in this paper by a young researcher …

Now, is this the time for us to jump into this? Has there been a great body of scholarship that has tested this efficiency gap? It’s full of questions. Mr. [Eric] McGhee’s own amicus brief outlines numerous unanswered questions with — with this theory.

It’s a legitimate concern, I suppose; as in many areas of the law where courts are presented with non-legal “expert” testimony, they should be wary of jumping too quickly into the fray, choosing one contested side over another given that they generally do not possess the tools with which to evaluate the pros and cons of the testimony presented.

But I do hope the court does not rest on this to abdicate its responsibility to craft some meaningful and manageable measures of partisan interference with the electoral process.

Many years ago, John Ely provided, notably in his book “Democracy and Distrust,”what I continue to regard as the most persuasive solution to the fundamental dilemma posed by the institution of (undemocratic) judicial review in a democracy, and the conflicts arising from allowing the most unrepresentative branch of the government the power to overturn actions taken by the more democratic branches. Ely argued, in essence, that the court’s appropriate role is that of referee in the electoral arena. Ordinary electoral processes can be relied on to self-correct, without the need for judicial intervention, most attempts by lawmakers to act outside of constitutional boundaries, except in those circumstances where either (a) those actions corrupt the electoral process itself and are, as a consequence, self-sustaining and uncorrectable, or (b) the majority is withholding from the minority the protections it affords to itself. Electoral politics can’t correct these problems, which are inherent in the nature of representative democracies, and courts must step in.

The Warren court’s “one man-one vote” decisions of the 1960s and 1970s were, in Ely’s view, paradigmatic examples within the first category. Judicial interference in the reapportionment cases was justified because systematic bias favoring rural voters in state legislatures would never self-correct, because the legislatures were composed of those who had directly benefited from the bias, and the court had to intervene.

And so, too, in the Gill case; Wisconsin’s Democratic voters cannot, through their votes, correct the bias in the Republicans’ favor, because the map was drawn precisely to dis-enable them from being able to do that. It will be a sad day indeed if the court turns away from its constitutional obligation to keep the electoral process a fair one because its collective eyes glaze over at the sight of a mathematical symbol or formula.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/10/19/is-the-supreme-court-allergic-to-math/

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wolfandpravato · 8 years ago

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Is the Supreme Court allergic to math?

The Supreme Court in 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

But I do hope the court does not rest on this to abdicate its responsibility to craft some meaningful and manageable measures of partisan interference with the electoral process.

Many years ago, John Ely provided, notably in his book “Democracy and Distrust,” what I continue to regard as the most persuasive solution to the fundamental dilemma posed by the institution of (undemocratic) judicial review in a democracy, and the conflicts arising from allowing the most unrepresentative branch of the government the power to overturn actions taken by the more democratic branches. Ely argued, in essence, that the court’s appropriate role is that of referee in the electoral arena. Ordinary electoral processes can be relied on to self-correct, without the need for judicial intervention, most attempts by lawmakers to act outside of constitutional boundaries, except in those circumstances where either (a) those actions corrupt the electoral process itself and are, as a consequence, self-sustaining and uncorrectable, or (b) the majority is withholding from the minority the protections it affords to itself. Electoral politics can’t correct these problems, which are inherent in the nature of representative democracies, and courts must step in.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/10/19/is-the-supreme-court-allergic-to-math/

#Law #Lawyer

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ambitrary3 · 8 years ago

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The Neurological Similarities Between Successful Writers And The Mentally Ill

By Cody Delistraty

Source: http://thoughtcatalog.com/cody-delistraty/2014/03/the-neurological-similarities-between-successful-writers-and-the-mentally-ill/

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[This with a pinch of salt]

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Knowing his wife was upset with him for spending more time with his typewriter than with her, F. Scott Fitzgerald hatched a plan. He wasn’t proud of many of his short stories (he only included 46 of his 181 short stories in his published collections), but he knew that in order to win back his wife he’d have to whip up something quickly. Working from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m., he churned out “The Camel’s Back” for The Saturday Evening Post for a fee of $500. That very morning, he bought Zelda a gift with the money he had made.

“I suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement,” he commented in the first edition of Tales of the Jazz Age. “As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wristwatch which cost six hundred dollars.”

This was in 1920, and Zelda’s frustrations could still be assuaged with a well-timed gift. (After all, it was only after Scott had the money and prestige from publishing This Side of Paradise that she agreed to marry him earlier that year.) It wasn’t long though until Zelda had grown so fed up with Scott’s drinking and self-isolation that she lashed out, cheating on him with a French naval aviator while Scott was working on The Great Gatsby in the South of France. From then on, their marriage devolved into arguments and a devastating cocktail of debt, drink, and manic depression.

“Zelda’s spending sprees, her ‘passionate love of life’ and intense social relationships, her melancholic response to disappointment and the relatively late onset of her illness (she was born in 1900) point toward a mood disorder, as does the alternation between frank psychosis and a sparkling, provocative personality,” noted an older article in The New York Times Magazine that asked “How Crazy Was Zelda?”

The Fitzgeralds are perhaps the best — or at least the most intriguing — example of writers whose talents, when mixed with depression and vices (like alcohol and spending sprees), burned brightly then collapsed calamitously.

But of course, it’s not just the Fitzgeralds who battled depression and led lives that eventually spun out of their control. Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, David Foster Wallace, even J.K. Rowling are just a few of the writers who have been struck by the illness that Hemingway once referred to as “The Artist’s Reward.”

The common theory for why writers are often depressed is rather basic: writers think a lot and people who think a lot tend to be unhappy. Add to that long periods of isolation and the high levels of narcissism that draws someone to a career like writing, and it seems obvious why they might not be the happiest bunch.

Dig a little deeper though, and some interesting findings reveal themselves — findings not just about the neuroscience of writerly depression, but about why Hemingway was so awful to Hadley, why Scott and Zelda drove each other mad, and why writers, by and large, are not only depressed people but also awful lovers.

A few months back, Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria found a relationship between the ability to come up with an idea and the inability to suppress the precuneus while thinking. The precuneus is the area of the brain that shows the highest levels of activation during times of rest and has been linked to self-consciousness and memory retrieval. It is an indicator of how much one ruminates or ponders oneself and one’s experiences.

For most people, this area of the brain only lights up at restful times when one is not focusing on work or even daily tasks. For writers and creatives, however, it seems to be constantly activated. Fink’s hypothesis is that the most creative people are continually making associations between the external world and their internal experiences and memories. They cannot focus on one thing quite like the average person. Essentially, their stream of ideas is always running — the tap does not shut off — and, as a result, creative people show schizophrenic, borderline manic-depressive tendencies. Really, that’s no hyperbole. Fink found that this inability to suppress the precuneus is seen most dominantly in two types of people: creatives and psychosis patients.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that this flood of thoughts and introspection is apparently vital to creative success. In Touched with Fire, a touchstone book on the relationship between “madness and creativity,” Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins, reported that successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular people” to suffer from a serious depressive illness.

If you think about it though, this “mad success” makes sense. Great writing requires original thinking and clever reorganization of varied experiences and thoughts. Whether it’s Adam Gopnik’s first piece for The New Yorker that related Italian Renaissance art with the Montréal Expos or Fitzgerald trailblazing the “Jazz Age” with his combination of Princeton poems and socioeconomic class sensibilities in This Side of Paradise, a writer’s job is to reshape a hodgepodge of old ideas into brand new ones. By letting in as much information as possible, the brains of writers and artists can trawl through their abundance of odd thoughts and turn them into original, cohesive products.

It’s not a surprise then that Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, and the most wildly creative writers of our generation have such bizarre ideas: they cannot stop thinking, and whether pleasant or macabre, their thoughts (that can turn into masterpieces like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Pulp Fiction) are constantly flowing through their minds.

Although this stream of introspection and association allows for creative ideas, the downside is that people with “ruminative tendencies” are significantly more likely to become depressed, according to the late Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. Constant reflection takes a toll. Writing, editing, and revising also requires are near obsession with self-criticism, the leading quality for depressed patients.

In fact, a study conducted by Nancy Andreasen at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop found that 80% of the residents displayed some form of depression.

“One of the most important qualities [of depression] is persistence,” said Andreasen. “Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.”

While Fitzgerald liked to boast of his raw talent that allowed him to come up with clever stories for the Post or The Smart Set in mere hours, biographers have noted that he spent months pouring over drafts — a perfectionist making revision after revision. For better or for worse, creativity and focus are inextricably linked. As Andreasen said, “This type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering. If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

This mishmash of unremitting rumination and self-criticism means that writers are always working. Even quotidian life is a writerly task. In an interview with The Paris Review, Joyce Carol Oates said, “[I] observe the qualities of people, overhearing snatches of conversations, noting people’s appearances, their clothes, and so forth. Walking and driving a car are part of my life as a writer, really.”

Now, for just a second, put aside the recent news that journalism/writing was ranked as the sixth most narcissistic job by Forbes. And don’t think about the fact that writing is not only a lonely job, but it is also one that can turn a pleasant walk or a drive into a form of work. Instead, focus on how writing is about being able to create and control a world.

For what is writing, but an amalgamation of our thoughts and experiences finished off with a wax and a shine?

This need for control often translates to real life too, and it comes at the expense of the feelings and wishes of nearly everyone around them. Writers are often such terrible lovers because they treat real people as characters, malleable and at their authorial will.

When Charles Dickens was 24 (and allegedly a virgin), he married Catherine Hogarth, then 21. Almost immediately after they married, he became infatuated with Mary, her younger sister (so much so that she would later become the basis for Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shoppe). Mary died shortly thereafter, which proved a devastating blow for Charles, and for the rest of their marriage Catherine futility tried to live up to her sister. After 22 years and 10 children with Catherine, Charles met Nelly Ternan, a young actress, and deciding that he was quite tired of his wife, tossed her aside in favor of this new mistress.

Like so many authors, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ezra Pound to V.S. Naipaul, Dickens wasn’t much of a good person. In fact, he was a rather terrible person and had history not bowed at the beauty of his fiction, he would have been remembered poorly.

Writers can be rather awful people, and their blend of depression, isolation, and desire to control not only their own characters but the “characters” of their real lives has been a relationship-killer for centuries.

(As for the other relationship-destroyer — writers’ infamous penchant for alcohol — Gopnik postulates, “Writing is work in which the balance necessary to a sane life of physical and symbolic work has been wrested right out of plumb, or proportion, and alcohol is (wrongly) believed to rebalance it.”)

Trying to balance vice, borderline mental illness, and a disregard for the real world in favor of fictitious ones is perhaps a noble but Sisyphusian act for many writers. Try as they might, the greatest creatives in history have too much neuroscience working against them, too many ideas fluttering around their minds.

It would be cliché to quote Jack Kerouac in saying, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved” — and yet it is a platitude for a reason. The most fascinating people in history, the ones who make a difference, who create, might be depressed, perhaps miserable romantics, yet they have contributed more to society than many of them ever knew.

In fact, Fitzgerald died thinking he was a failure. He was in Hollywood doing “hack work” while his wife was in a Swiss sanitarium, and he often felt as though he were holding the ashes of his life in his hands. Only 44 years old but looking weathered and much older, he sat in his armchair listening to Beethoven, scribbling in the Princeton Alumni Weekly and munching on a Hershey Bar. It was a wintery morning in 1940, and as if propelled by a ghost, he leapt from his chair, grasped at the mantle piece, and collapsed on the floor. He died from a heart attack.

Zelda was too ill to make it to her husband’s funeral, but only a few months before, she had written to Scott with surprising lucidity, “I love you anyway — even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life — I love you.”

She knew that they were mad, that their creativity and vice and entirely unique perspective on the world would be both their greatest high and their most agonizing low. To the letter, she added, “Nothing could have survived our life.”

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feministdragon · 8 years ago

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「Some historians have called the decade of my birth “the Roaring Twenties” but for most it was a long death rattle.

Wages were low, rents were high and there was little or no job protection as a result of a postwar recession that had gutted Britain’s industrial heartland. When the Great Depression struck Britain in the 1930s, it turned our cities and towns into a charnel house for the working class, because they had no economic reserves left to withstand prolonged joblessness and the ruling class believed that benefits led to fecklessness.

Even now, when I look back to those gaslight days of my boyhood and youth, all I can recollect is hunger, filth, fear and death. My mother called those terrible years for our family, our friends and our nation a time when “hard rain ate cold Yorkshire stone for its tea”.

I will never forget seeing as a teenager the faces of former soldiers who had been broken physically and mentally during the Great War and were living rough in the back alleys of Bradford. Their faces were haunted not by the brutality of the war but by the savagery of the peace. Nor will I forget as long as I shall live the screams that fell out of dosshouse windows from the dying and mentally ill, who were denied medicine and solace because they didn’t have the money to pay for medical services.

Like today, those tragedies were perpetuated by a coalition government preaching that the only cure for our economic troubles was a harsh austerity, which promised to right Britain’s finances through the sacrifice of its lowest-paid workers. When my dad got injured, the dole he received was ten shillings a week. My family, like millions of others, were reduced to beggary. In the 1930s, the government believed that private charities were more suitable for providing alms for those who had been ruined in the Great Depression.

Austerity in the 1930s was like a pogrom against Britain’s working class. It blighted so many lives through preventable ailments caused by malnutrition, as well as thwarting ordinary people’s aspirations for a decent life by denying them housing, full- time employment or a proper education.」

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/10/hunger-filth-fear-and-death-remembering-life-nhs

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imreviewblog · 8 years ago

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Ebola's forgotten victims - what we can learn from them and what we can do

A hospital nurse checks the temperature of all visitors in Conakry (Guinea) in 2014, at the height of the Ebola epidemic. Marie-Agnès Heine/OMS, CC BY Eric Delaporte, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

The 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa caused thousands of deaths - precisely 11,310, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). But what happened to those who were infected, but survived?

Over a four-year period the Ebola virus, which causes bleeding and vital organ failure, struck in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, and less severely in Mali, Nigeria and Senegal.

In addition to those who died, the disease also infected more than 17,000 people who survived and were declared cured, at least officially. In the history of this newly emerging disease, this number of survivors is unprecedented in its scale.

The virus after the 'cure'

The Ebola virus was first identified in 1976, but scientists still have a lot to learn about the disease.

What happens to someone who has recovered from infection? What are the subsequent health impacts? Are they temporary or permanent? Is the virus definitively eliminated from the body, as in the flu, or may it reactivate one day, as with herpes? We are only now beginning to understand the answers to these and other questions.

Our research team conducted an intervention study with a large number of Ebola survivors: 802 out of the 1,270 identified in Guinea. We found that seven survivors in ten are affected by what we call "post-Ebola syndrome", a higher proportion than initially assumed.

The condition is characterised by several symptoms that can come and go, including severe fatigue, muscle and joint pain, head or stomach aches, neurosensory disorders such as dizziness or a loss in hearing, and an eye inflammation called uveitis (it affects the part of the eye called the uvea). These symptoms tend to decrease over time, suggesting that the majority of damage caused by the Ebola virus could be reversible.

Through this cohort, doctors will know how long survivors of an Ebola epidemic need to be followed for, and the standards of care they require.

A package of rice, but no medical follow-up

The project began with my arrival at the height of the epidemic, in September 2014, as a doctor and head of a research unit. I intervened at the request of the French Ebola taskforce. In the treatment centres, survivors were declared cured on a purely biological basis, after they had provided two negative blood tests for the virus.

Patients were then released with a "compassionate" kit, which consisted of a small sum of money and a package of rice. No medical follow-up was proposed.

In May 2014, at Gueckedou (Guinea). A mobile laboratory for testing the presence of Ebola virus in the blood. OMS/Cristiana Salvi, CC BY-NC-ND

On my return to Montpellier, France, I set up a team of French and Guinean researchers, including Mamadou Saliou Sow, a specialist in infectious diseases; the pharmacist and biostatistician Abdoulaye Touré; and the physician and biologist Alpha Kabinet Keita.

All are continuing the research project, working on the ground in Guinea. Until June 2018 at least, they are working with Ebola survivors to help manage the complications related to the disease.

Many symptoms, some severe

The good news at this point is that few post-Ebola syndromes take a severe form. We found only two cases of renal failure, one of which resulted in death. Eight people went blind as a result of inflammatory cataracts.

Doctors remain hesitant to operate on patients' cataracts because it isn't known how to eliminate the virus from the eye. There are also concerns that cataracts could recur in the absence of an antiviral therapy. Deafness occurred in one patient, a child, who was able to return to the school after being equipped with a hearing aid.

But scars left behind by Ebola are not only physical: 17% of the survivors studied suffer from depression. Given that they came close to death, and that many lost relatives, it's almost certainly post-traumatic syndrome, which requires dedicated care. One person committed suicide after surviving the disease.

A decontamination session of the nursing staff at the Ebola treatment center in Conakry, Guinea, in February 2015. Eric Delaporte/IRD, CC BY-NC-ND

To survive Ebola is also to confront the unfounded fear that former patients could pose a risk to those around them. In our study, 26% of survivors complain of feeling stigmatised. Anthropologists Desclaux Alice and Bernard Taverne worked with the same cohort of patients and found that some had lost their jobs, and a number of women were rejected by their husbands after returning home.

When Ebola returns

One crucial question is the risk of survivors falling ill again. This has already happened in Scotland and the US, with cases detected thanks to the more advanced health-care systems of industrialised countries. It is likely that similar cases have occurred in West Africa but were missed.

In 2014 a Scottish nurse developed the disease on her return from in Sierra Leone. Initially declared cured, nine months later she became ill with a meningitis resulting from persistence of the Ebola virus in her brain. After treatment with an experimental antiviral drug, she was again declared "cured".

The same year, an American physician was repatriated from the same country. After being declared "cured" he again exhibited declared symptoms, in particular an eye infection - the color of his irises had even changed from the blue to green.

Can the Ebola virus hide in "reservoirs" in the human body? Certain parts of the body, including the eye, the brain and the central nervous system, joint cartiledge and the testicles are called "immunologically privileged". They behave like fortresses that protect themselves from infection with a strong immune response. Their ramparts are difficult to cross for a disease, but once a virus manages to penetrate their defences, it can be difficult to dislodge.

In particular, sperm remains contaminated for up to 18 months after the acute phase of the disease. After this period, the virus disappears definitively and with it, any risk of transmission to a sexual partner.

For other parts of the body, the question of whether a virus might be able to reactivate later remains unanswered.

Staying with survivors

The WHO announced in December 2016 that an effective vaccine against Ebola had been developed, and with that, the men, women and children who survived the 2013-2016 epidemic began to fade from memory.

In the affected countries, most NGOs and aid organisations have shut down. Those that remain are often far removed from the daily lives of those who were affected. Public health systems in the areas hit by the disease are not in a position to take over.

But following survivors is vital to understanding how this terrible diseases affects people's health and communities, and help deal with any future outbreaks.

Eric Delaporte, Professeur de maladies infectieuses, Inserm, université de Montpellier, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2kjjaQO

#Healthy Living - The Huffington Post

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