#education department jobs 2021

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #14

April 12-19 2024

The Department of Commerce announced a deal with Samsung to help bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing and research and development to Texas. The deal will bring 45 billion dollars of investment to Texas to help build a research center in Taylor Texas and expand Samsung's Austin, Texas, semiconductor facility. The Biden Administration estimates this will create 21,000 new jobs. Since 1990 America has fallen from making nearly 40% of the world's semiconductor to just over 10% in 2020.

The Department of Energy announced it granted New York State $158 million to help support people making their homes more energy efficient. This is the first payment out of a $8.8 billion dollar program with 11 other states having already applied. The program will rebate Americans for improvements on their homes to lower energy usage. Americans could get as much as $8,000 off for installing a heat pump, as well as for improvements in insulation, wiring, and electrical panel. The program is expected to help save Americans $1 billion in electoral costs, and help create 50,000 new jobs.

The Department of Education began the formal process to make President Biden's new Student Loan Debt relief plan a reality. The Department published the first set of draft rules for the program. The rules will face 30 days of public comment before a second draft can be released. The Administration hopes the process can be finished by the Fall to bring debt relief to 30 million Americans, and totally eliminate the debt of 4 million former students. The Administration has already wiped out the debt of 4.3 million borrowers so far.

The Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion dollar collaboration with USAID to buy American grown foods combat global hunger. Most of the money will go to traditional shelf stable goods distributed by USAID, like wheat, rice, sorghum, lentils, chickpeas, dry peas, vegetable oil, cornmeal, navy beans, pinto beans and kidney beans, while $50 million will go to a pilot program to see if USAID can expand what it normally gives to new products. The food aid will help feed people in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Department of the Interior announced it's expanding four national wildlife refuges to protect 1.13 million wildlife habitat. The refuges are in New Mexico, North Carolina, and two in Texas. The Department also signed an order protecting parts of the Placitas area. The land is considered sacred by the Pueblos peoples of the area who have long lobbied for his protection. Security Deb Haaland the first Native American to serve as Interior Secretary and a Pueblo herself signed the order in her native New Mexico.

The Department of Labor announced new work place safety regulations about the safe amount of silica dust mine workers can be exposed to. The dust is known to cause scaring in the lungs often called black lung. It's estimated that the new regulations will save over 1,000 lives a year. The United Mine Workers have long fought for these changes and applauded the Biden Administration's actions.

The Biden Administration announced its progress in closing the racial wealth gap in America. Under President Biden the level of Black Unemployment is the lowest its ever been since it started being tracked in the 1970s, and the gap between white and black unemployment is the smallest its ever been as well. Black wealth is up 60% over where it was in 2019. The share of black owned businesses doubled between 2019 and 2022. New black businesses are being created at the fastest rate in 30 years. The Administration in 2021 Interagency Task Force to combat unfair house appraisals. Black homeowners regularly have their homes undervalued compared to whites who own comparable property. Since the Taskforce started the likelihood of such a gap has dropped by 40% and even disappeared in some states. 2023 represented a record breaking $76.2 billion in federal contracts going to small business owned by members of minority communities. This was 12% of federal contracts and the President aims to make it 15% for 2025.

The EPA announced (just now as I write this) that it plans to add PFAS, known as forever chemicals, to the Superfund law. This would require manufacturers to pay to clean up two PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. This move to force manufacturers to cover the costs of PFAS clean up comes after last week's new rule on drinking water which will remove PFAS from the nation's drinking water.

Bonus:

President Biden met a Senior named Bob in Pennsylvania who is personally benefiting from The President's capping the price of insulin for Seniors at $35, and Biden let Bob know about a cap on prosecution drug payments for seniors that will cut Bob's drug bills by more than half.

[kpopscatterbrain]

Kdramas/Movies with strong female characters

Dramas

Eve (2022): Lee La-El (Seo Yea-Ji) When Lee La-El was little, her father died unexpectedly. Powerful people were responsible for his death. After her family was destroyed, Lee La-El prepared for the next 13 years to take revenge. Starting by targeting Kang Yoon-gyeom, one of the main culprits who orchestrated the death of her father. Along the way she becomes torn between her desire for revenge and her feelings for Yoon-gyeom.

It's Okay To Not Be Okay (2020): Ko Moon-Young (Seo Yea-Ji) Ko Moon-Young is a popular children's book author with antisocial personality disorder. She had a troubled childhood and a turbulent relationship with her parents. She develops romantic feelings for a psychiatric caregiver after a coincidental encounter and often goes to extreme lengths to get his attention.

Hotel Del Luna (2019): Jang Man-Wol (IU) Jang Man-Wol is the moody owner of Hotel del Luna. The hotel catering to the dead has been bound to her soul in order to atone for the sins she committed 1,300 years ago. Through the new manager Gu Chan-sung, the mysteries and the secrets behind the hotel and its owner are revealed

My Name (2021): Yoon Ji-Woo (Han So-Hee) Yoon Ji-Woo’s father gets murdered suddenly. She wants to desperately take revenge on whoever is responsible for her father's death. She starts working for a drug crime ring that her father was a part of. Ji-Woo joins the police department as a mole for the drug ring.

Vagabond (2019): Go Hae-Ri (Bae Suzy) Go Hae-Ri is an NIS agent and is currently working undercover at the Korean embassy in Morocco. She is tasked to help the bereaved families of a fatal flight. She helps Cha Dal-Geon whose nephew was on the flight uncover a darker and more sinister conspiracy than they expected.

Sisyphus: The Myth (2021): Gang Seo-Hae (Park Shin-Hye) Gang Seo-Hae is an elite warrior. She can take down the biggest men with just her bare hands. She is a sharpshooter and a bombmaker. She learned these skills to survive in a world that is dominated by gangsters and military cliques. One day she time travels to save a genius engineer.

Mr. Sunshine (2018): Go Ae-Shin (Kim Tae-Ri) Go Ae-Shin is an orphaned noblewoman and a member of the Righteous Army. Her parents were independence fighters who died in Japan due to their colleague's betrayal. She trains as a sniper. An american soldier Eugene meets and falls in love with Go Ae-shin. 

The Glory (2022): Moon Dong-Eun (Song Hye-Kyo) Moon Dong-Eun was a victim of high school violence. She waited for the bully ring leader get married and have a child. Now she is the homeroom teacher of her tormentor's child. Her cruel revenge plot begins.

Tomorrow (2022): Koo Ryeon (Kim Hee-Seon) Grim reaper Koo Ryeon is the leader of a crisis management team. The teams objective is to save suicidal people. Choi Jun-Woong (Ro Woon) is a young job seeker who is unable to secure a job. One night, he accidentally becomes a new member of the crisis management team.

Remarriage & Desires (2022): Seo Hye-Seung (Kim Hee-Seon) Seo Hye-seung who lost everything in an instant after her husbands affair and su*cide. She signs up to a matchmaking company Rex for the upper class, and participates in the race of her desires for her revenge.

Under The Queen's Umbrella (2022): Queen Hwaryeong (Kim Hye-Soo) Queen Hwaryeong is supposed to act with grace and dignity, but she has troublemaker sons. The queen decides to abandon strict protocols to transform her sons into deserving princes through education and personal growth, all while navigating the complexities of motherhood and royal life.

Juvenile Justice (2022): Sim Eun-Seok (Kim Hye-Soo) Sim Eun-Seok is an elite judge with a personality that seems unfriendly to others. She hates juvenile criminals and gets assigned to a local juvenile court. There, she breaks custom and administers her own ways of punishing the offenders.

K-Movies

Kill Boksoon (2023): Gil Bok-Soon (Jeon Do-Yeon) Gil Bok-Soon is a single mother and a contract killer working for M. K. Ent. Highly regarded by her peers, she has a 100% success rate and is one of a few killers rated "A" by her company. Right before Gil Bok-Soon is set to renew her contract, she gets involved in a kill or be killed confrontation.

Ballerina (2023): Jang Ok-Ju (Jun Jong-Seo) Ok-Ju used to work as a bodyguard. Ok-Ju is friends with Min-Hee, who is a ballerina. Min-Hee asks Ok-Ju for a favor. She wants Ok-Ju to take revenge.

The Witch: Subversion (2018): Ja-Yoon (Kim Da-Mi) A young girl escapes from a mysterious laboratory where she was trained to become a murder weapon. 10 years later, the girl, named Ja-yoon, is living a normal life, apparently without any memory of her past, she becomes involved in a crime.

Special Delivery (2022): Eun-Ha (Park So-Dam) Eun-Ha is a special driver for deliveries. She delivers anything or anyone for the right price. Her success rate is 100%, but she gets involved in an unexpected delivery accident.

Brave Citizen (2023): So Shi-Min (Shin Hae-Sun) So Shi-Min used to be a boxer in her student days. She now works as a contract teacher at a high school. She confronts a school bully, who frequently torments other students.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for ditching a long-term friend?

I (35F) had a friend (S, 33F) for years. We bonded the first night we met. We had ups an downs, and went everywhere together. I helped her kick her bf out after he tried to hit her and helped her through two miscarriages. She helped me through a family member death and a career change. We would speak almost every day, for hours.

She was always slightly more conservative than me. When 2016 rolled around, she supported Trump. I didn't like that, but it wasn't my place to bitch about it to her, it was her decision.

By 2020, she'd changed. Idk how it happened but she went from slightly conservative Christian who loved school and being a nurse and had friends who were LGBT+ (myself included), to deadnaming trans patients, refusing to do a blood draw on a patient after she said it was a prerequisite for an abortion, forcing patients to pray with her, even when they and their families spoke out against it, and bugging her coworkers to pray with her. She got fired from the hospital and was completely unable to hold down a job after that, and went through about 6 jobs that year, getting fired from them all. She got with a guy (B, 32M) and he is a... Well, he is a damn nut. Flat earther, antivaxxer, anti- Department of Education, anti-cell phone, thought bluetooth was turning kids trans, and that covid is 100% a hoax. Absolutely bonkers. But she was smitten, so I supported her, barely.

It's important to note that I backed away from her a bit after she was fired from the hospital. We were only speaking once every few weeks at that point.

Shortly after she got with B, my nephew was born. My nephew is half Mexican, half white. She called him "cute for a half n*g" because she thought my SIL is black. This blew me away because she's half Mexican. I told her off and distanced myself even further.

In 2021, she was a huge supporter of Jan 6th. She LAUGHED when that one cop killed himself. I stopped talking to her completely after that. Deleted her contact info and forgot she existed for almost 2 years.

Cut to October of this year, and she calls me. I didn't recognize her #. She and B are getting married! And she wants me to be a bridesmaid!!! Yayy! (sarcasm). She told me a long-winded variation of "I know we haven't talked for a bit but I promise I'm not as bonkers as I was, I think I let Facebook suck me in, and I'm sorry."

So, I let her back in. Not emotionally, mind you. She's not the woman I once knew anymore. I don't tell her where our house is (my partner and I moved while S and I weren't speaking), and I didn't tell her what car I drove. I didn't tell her anything about our lives, and kept the conversation solely on her, to try and read her out a bit.

Sure enough, two conversations in she starts ranting about how black people are black because they received the mark of Cain (it's a Christian thing? I guess? Idk I'm not religious) and thus should be avoided because they are inherently "up to no good," and that systemic racism doesn't exist because the US has had a black president.

I roll my eyes, hang up the phone, block her number, and end it, permanently, right there. I received a few odd texts from a number I didn't recognize, probably B's phone, so I just blocked that number and deleted them without reading most of them.

Cue our mutual friends. 🙄

She misses you! People can have differing opinions and still be friends! Why are you being so closed minded? She told us you yelled at her! 😭😭😭

Lol. I didn't say a word, but whatever.

I'd rather adjust my life to her absence than adjust my morality to her ignorance.

My partner is on my side, they saw her change, too. But our mutual friends are still upset. I shared some the racist and sexist text convos between me and S, and it's like they hadn't even considered my side of the situation. One is on my side now, the other two are still questioning how I can throw away a 6 year friendship over "differing politics."

So, Tumblr, AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[mariacallous]

Linda McMahon, a business and wrestling executive and major Republican donor, is likely to lead the Education Department, CNN reported Tuesday evening, citing four people familiar with the matter.

McMahon, a co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team who has virtually no experience in education, served as director of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term. She left the administration in 2019 and went on to help create the American First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank that’s been closely involved in planning for the second term. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about the selection.

McMahon is perhaps most known for her time as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, which she co-founded with her husband, Vince McMahon. Together, they built the company from a small regional corporation to a multinational public enterprise. She stepped down from the executive role in 2009. In 2010 and 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

Although her experience in education is sparse, McMahon does have some ties. A New Bern, N.C., native, she graduated from East Carolina University in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in French and certification to teach. She also served a one-year term on the Connecticut State Board of Education after being appointed by Republican governor Jodi Rell in 2009.

She’s a longtime supporter of and board member at Sacred Heart University, a private Roman Catholic institution in Fairfield, Conn. In 2012, Sacred Heart’s student commons was named after McMahon, who gave $5 million to support capital projects at the university, according to The Register Citizen.

Picking McMahon, a wealthy executive with little experience in education, is a move reminiscent of Trump’s first term, when he appointed Betsy DeVos as education secretary. DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist known for her support of school choice, voucher programs and charter schools, was a controversial candidate whose confirmation required then–vice president Mike Pence to cast a tie-breaking vote in her favor.

McMahon will be the second consecutive education secretary with ties to Connecticut—current secretary Miguel Cardona grew up in the state and served as commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education from 2019 to 2021.

McMahon’s name was not one of those thrown out as a potential candidate to lead the department, though The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that she was in the running for education secretary or U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, citing people familiar with the matter. McMahon was up for the position of commerce secretary, CNN reported, though that job went to Howard Lutnick, also a co-chair of the transition.

Candidates whom some lobbyists and experts considered likely to be on the short list included Ryan Walters and Cade Brumley, the state superintendents of Oklahoma and Louisiana, respectively; Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty; and Christopher Rufo, a board member at New College of Florida and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, McMahon will take over a department that Trump has repeatedly said he wants to get rid of. But doing so will require an act of Congress. Some policy analysts have said Trump and his allies are more likely to leverage the department’s power to reshape the higher education system. Trump himself has pledged to fire accreditors in order to reclaim colleges from the “radical left” and proposed creating a free online university funded by taxes on wealthy private colleges.

McMahon penned an op-ed for The Hill in September supporting the Workforce Pell Act introduced by congressional Republicans in 2023, offering a rare glimpse into her potential education policy agenda.

The bill, which would expand eligibility for federal Pell Grants to students enrolled in short-term credential programs, was blocked by Democrats but faces a much easier path to becoming law in the new Congress. Critics worry that in lieu of increases in overall Pell funding, expanding the program would deplete funds for students pursuing four-year degrees.

In the Hill piece, McMahon argued that Pell funding for credentials like coding boot camps would “create high-paying jobs for more Americans.” A report published Monday on a federal short-term Pell pilot program found that it did not lead to higher employment or earnings for participating students.

“Half a century ago … colleges were focused on preparing students for professional roles at the highest levels of government, science, business and the arts,” she wrote. “Today, however, many degree programs have lost sight of their mission … Our educational system must offer clear and viable pathways to the American Dream aside from four-year degrees.”

Career Education Colleges and Universities, a national trade association representing for-profit technical institutions, endorsed Trump’s reported pick in a statement Tuesday evening.

“Linda McMahon has extensive experience that positions her well to address many of the key areas that will be education priorities in the new administration,” CECU said in the statement. “We look forward to working with the new secretary and the team assembled around her. Under her leadership, we are confident that the new Department of Education will take a more reasoned and thoughtful approach in addressing many of the overreaching and punitive regulations put forth by the Biden administration, especially those targeting private career schools.”

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

DES MOINES, Iowa — Wearing bright yellow Crocs, carrying a backpack and holding a clipboard stacked with papers, Ahmed Musa listens intently to a student. You would be forgiven for thinking Mr. Musa was a student himself; it is ​“staff dress like a student” day during spirit week at Theodore Roosevelt High School, and Mr. Musa looks the part.

Then again, Mr. Musa, 24, was a Roosevelt student not too long ago. He graduated in 2017.

He is talking with senior Jackie in a second floor hallway. She is animated, her purple and white braids falling across her baby blue N95 mask as she explains a problem. She is the president of the K-Club and there was an incident among members. The K-Club, she says, is about all things K-pop, from Korean music to food to movies to fashion. Mr. Musa laughs — he thought it was the ​“Kulture Club.”

Jackie goes on to give a broad overview of the situation: Racist and homophobic memes were posted in the group’s online chat of several dozen members. Tempers flared and arguments spilled over from social media into the classroom. Then a shouting match erupted during a club meeting. Fortunately, it didn’t come to blows. Members contacted the club’s teacher-advisor who contacted the school’s ​“restorative practices” team.

As a restoration facilitator, Mr. Musa’s job is to listen to problems and help students find solutions. Talking with Jackie that morning was the first step (a ​“prerestorative conference”) toward a formal ​“restorative circle.” Restorative circles are a group activity meant to help repair harm and restore relationships.

Jackie was one of several students I spoke with during two week-long visits to Roosevelt this year — once in the spring and once in the fall — to witness the school’s implementation of its new restorative practices program. Vanessa, a freshman struggling with the transition from remote learning during Covid, and Yonathan, a sophomore caught with drugs and weapons at school, were also among them. (Students involved in the RP program are referred to by first name to protect their privacy.)

Before the pandemic, armed officers known as ​“school resource officers,” or SROs, from the Des Moines Police Department would patrol the school hallways. But during the summer of racial justice marches and protests after the police murder of George Floyd, students, parents and community members spoke out against SROs at Des Moines School Board meetings. In the end, the police contract with the schools was terminated. After scrambling to make remote schooling work during the long, mournful slog of the pandemic, Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) were left to find a way to reimagine school safety — and fast.

The district moved quickly to implement restorative practices, an increasingly popular educational model for school safety, violence prevention and mediation.

The 2021 – 2022 school year was a huge opportunity with the highest of stakes: DMPS could become one of the only districts in the nation to succeed in concurrently removing SROs and implementing restorative practices, or the district and its students could be thrown into crisis.

Restorative practices (RP) derive from ​“restorative justice,” which is used to bring together, in mutual agreement for mediation, the victim and the perpetrator of an offense. The goal is typically restitution for harm caused while helping the perpetrator restore community ties.

In education, ​“practices” is often swapped in for ​“justice” because it involves children who aren’t in criminal proceedings. Formal conflict resolution, after a dispute or rule-breaking, does play a role, but RP is also proactive, explains Anne Gregory, a Rutgers professor and one of the nation’s leading RP experts.

One core proactive practice is ​“check and connect.” This might be as simple as having teachers and staff say hi to each student as they enter the school, or asking a student between classes how their day is going. When there’s an issue, students can then sit down with a trusted adult to build ​“their own insight into themselves and what’s driving their behavior,” Gregory says.

Gregory emphasizes that relationship building is a two-way street. These micro-interactions of ​“check and connect” also change how teachers see students. They undermine ​“overgeneralization [and] negative stereotyping” and create space for understanding, Gregory says. When a student has ​“attendance problems,” for example, the right mindset involves ​“thinking about and understanding what’s going on for the family of that student that morning in getting out the door” — which is a ​“very different approach,” Gregory adds, from ​“sending a police officer to your house the fourth time you’re truant.”

(Continue Reading)

[beardedmrbean]

Children have been pushed out of schools, and hospitals have been left overcrowded after a surge of migrants into a remote city in Indiana, residents claim.

The population of Logansport has increased by 30 per cent since 2021 following a wave of migrants, Chris Martin, the city’s mayor,  told the Pharos-Tribune.

That would put the number of migrants arriving at more than 5,000, in a county that had a population of just 18,000 people in 2020, according to census data.

At the same time, the number of Haitian immigrant students in the Logansport schools has increased 15-fold, from 14 in 2021 to 207 this year, according to the New York Post.

It is understood that migrants have been drawn to the central Indiana city for jobs at a local meat-packing plant.

However, their rapid arrival has put the city’s health and education system under strain, with parents claiming they have been forced to pull their children from school to stop them from falling behind.

Nancy Baker, 44, a mother of two, said that her 16-year-old daughter, Cheyanne, dropped out of high school because teachers did not have enough time for the English-speaking pupils.

“There were way too many kids and it seemed to her that since they didn’t speak the language, or didn’t understand what was going on, they were getting more attention,” she told the New York Post.

“And so she and the other kids who grew up here who were having issues or struggling in certain things weren’t able to get the attention that they needed — the help they needed from the school.”

Barrie McClian, a retired teacher, said public schools and healthcare centres had been “impacted terribly” by the surge in arrivals.

“They have to figure out how to educate all these folks, without having anybody who knows how to translate for a lot of the languages. So those are big problems,” he told Mail Online.

Safety concerns

The influx of outsiders to the town has also raised concerns over safety, with Ms Baker claiming her daughter is scared to leave the house after being chased by a group of migrants.

“She was walking by herself and she was walking that way and two of them were going this way, she just kinda smiled at them as they walked by. They started yelling for her after they got past her. She turned around and she looked at them and they were like, ‘Come here! Come here!’” Ms Baker told the Post.

She added that her daughter had to run down the street to a coffee shop and was now “scared to go outside”.

Meanwhile, local health officials have raised concerns that the rapid influx of migrants is placing emergency rooms under strain.

“This surge has created a drastic climb in medical visits,” Serenity Alter, Cass County health department administrator, told The Post.

“It has been necessary for the hospital, health department and express clinics to boost translation services in order to ensure that medical needs are understood.”

The city is the latest flashpoint in the debate around immigration that is proving to be one of the most divisive issues in the lead up to the election.

It comes after Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance drew attention to Springfield, Ohio, where the former president claimed without evidence that illegal Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs.

The Republican candidate has also highlighted problems with immigration in Aurora, Colorado, where he alleged armed members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua have overrun the town.

Logansport residents voiced their concerns about the city’s response to the impact of legal immigration during a meeting of the city council last Monday, with some calling on the Republican mayor to resign.

Attendees also claimed the city’s services were being impacted, with one stating that “rents are high” and that schools and the police department are overwhelmed, Fox 59 reported.

The mayor admitted there had been “some assimilation issues” from the arrival of people with “different culture beliefs” but called on politicians to “stop playing politics” with the town.

“We would rather you do your job and actually do something instead of talking about this,” Mr Martin told The Post.

[septembriseur]

“After two years as a refugee, my former student M. has received his U.S. resettlement paperwork and is ready to start his new life in America!

I taught M. when I worked at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in Kabul. The eldest son of a large, loving, but poor family, he spent his earliest years in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Like many Afghan boys, he grew up working to help support his family. But thanks to his obvious intelligence and his family's commitment to education, he was able to attend school and pursue his bachelor's degree.

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, M.'s family faced danger and persecution as a result of his father's work with the American military. They were eligible for U.S. Special Immigrant Visas, but the process was slow and almost nonfunctional. AUAF was able to evacuate M. to a third country where he could continue his education and wait for his refugee resettlement to the USA to be processed. While finishing his BA as a refugee, he was also supporting his family in Kabul and searching for ways to help them: pursuing their SIV application through the vast maze of American bureaucracy and working with my sister Heather, who filed to sponsor them for Humanitarian Parole.

Over the past two years, M. has become like a member of my family. He's helped my nephew with a school presentation; my niece baked him a cake to celebrate his university graduation. I've talked to his baby niece on the phone. He's helped me learn to read and write Dari Persian, putting up with my endless mistakes and questions. We text each other animal pictures and political frustrations.

Though M.'s family have now received their Humanitarian Parole and SIV petition approvals, they are still waiting for State Department evacuation from Kabul for their visa interview. But for M., good news has finally come: he has received his resettlement paperwork and is arriving in America the day before Thanksgiving!

He could use some help: when he was evacuated from Afghanistan, he was only allowed to take one bag of stuff with him. In America, he'll need more: weather-appropriate clothes, a phone, bus fare, and enough money to continue supporting his family in Kabul while he looks for a job.

This is an opportunity to help give a solid start to a gifted young man who has overcome incredible odds to make it this far— and to help repay an Afghan family who risked it all for America and American values.

Whatever you can give will help M. get started on his American journey!”

[covid-safer-hotties]

Tess Finch-Lees: It hasn’t gone away you know, Paris Olympics proved ignoring Covid is not a winner - Published Aug 20, 2024

‘Olympic dreams shattered”, “Covid causing havoc”, “Everyone’s dropping like flies”: just some of the headlines from the Paris “post-Covid Olympics”. But when it comes to fighting Covid, there’s nothing.

At the outset, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned of a SARS-Cov-2 surge globally, with a 20pc positivity rate in Europe (not seasonal, not normal) and at least 40 outbreaks in the Olympic village.

Many athletes were unable to compete due to post-acute Covid illnesses. Volunteers wrote to organisers saying “Covid pandemic threat denial” won’t protect against infection, demanding the implementation of scientifically proven mitigations. Organisers replied they were monitoring the situation and since there’s no testing, there’s no data and technically, no Covid. However, sanitiser is available.

The WHO also warned in recent weeks that the SARS2 pandemic is far from over and such high levels of uncontrolled transmission could lead to more severe variants emerging. A travel warning was issued for countries where transmission doubled in a week. Ireland was among them. Unsurprising, given our SARS2 wastewater levels last month were the highest since 2021. I guess Covid didn’t get Luke O’Neill’s “the pandemic’s over” memo.

It’s our Government’s job to communicate WHO health information to the public. No announcement ensued. Radio silence also from our Government-appointed interim chief medical officer, Professor Mary Horgan.

Public health officials and the media have a duty to expose the huge body of buried evidence of harms associated with repeated, forced SARS2 infections. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation reported 9,755 patients waiting for beds last month – the worst month for overcrowding since records began in 2006.

Yet, responding to Limerick Hospital’s suspension of services due to emergency department overcrowding, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly claimed the number of people waiting on trolleys overall was falling.

Last month, I documented the rising SARS2 surge resulting in hospital outbreaks, harming patients and staff with a predicted knock-on effect on all services. Had Mr Donnelly reinstated universal masking then, this deterioration might have been mitigated. A study in the Journal of Hospital Infection last month found that preventative measures in healthcare, including staff N95/FFP2/3 masking and patient admission screening saved lives and money through reduced in-patient days and staff sickness.

SARS2 deaths data has not been published since May. My repeated requests for this data have thus far yielded nothing. But, we know that deaths increase globally after every wave, as do those suffering with long-Covid.

A review of long-Covid published in Nature Medicine last week, estimated that up to the end of last year, 400 million people of all ages, regardless of health status, have long-Covid, leading to an annual global economic toll of $1trn, or 1pc of the global GDP. Author Dr Ziyad Al-Aly warns that long-Covid affects nearly every organ system, including cardiovascular, endocrine, immune, reproductive, gastrointestinal and nervous system, describing it as, “the defining health crisis of our time”.

The review authors concluded that, effective policies should focus on prevention, support for patients, access to quality care, a co-ordinated global response, professional education and public health communication.

Five years into this pandemic, the evidence of harm is now irrefutable. Yet most people are unaware, for example, of the Lancet study published in June indicating brain abnormalities in survivors of Covid two years later and that “people recovering continue to experience cognitive, psychiatric, neurological symptoms and brain functional alterations”. Numerous studies have found that even “mild” SARS2 infections can cause or accelerate neurological degeneration. This has wide-ranging implications.

In May, pathologist Dr Margot Bolster reported that Covid-induced brain fog was likely a significant factor in a multi-car crash in Cork killing two in 2022. The driver, who veered onto the wrong side of the road, tested positive for Covid in the morgue. “There were all sorts of brain symptoms with it… it affected all organs of the body,” Dr Bolster said.

Last week, the WHO issued yet another warning: “Your health is precious. Protect yourself and loved ones from Covid: stay at home if sick. Test, get boosted, ventilate, mask around others.”

Again, this information was not shared. Instead, our governments are pathologising those of us using proven tools to protect ourselves and our loved ones. As though being scientifically literate is an act of disobedience, punishable by state-sponsored stigma and ostracisation.

The Paris Olympics proved that pretending the pandemic is over only serves to prolong it, that everyone, including elite athletes, are vulnerable and that we can’t hand-wash our way out of an airborne pandemic.

We urgently need clean indoor air and sterilising vaccines. Until then, FFP3 masks are the most effective tool we’ve got to protect our precious health.

[mandsleanan]

Jade S. Sasser is an associate professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Her research explores the relationships between reproductive justice, women’s health and climate change, and she’s the host of the podcast “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question.” The following excerpt is from her newest book, “Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future,” which was published earlier this year.

Full text under cut.

The kid question. It comes up over and over again in the form of family questions and expectations. It arises in conversations with peers, partners and new dates. It appears in the quiet times, sitting in the spaces where our wildest hopes and deepest fears collide.

American society feels more socially and politically polarized than ever. Is it right to bring another person into that?

In 2021 and 2022, I conducted a series of interviews on this topic with millennials and members of Generation Z, all of them people of color. Some grew up in low-income families and neighborhoods while others were from the middle- or upper-middle class. Some of them identify as queer, or their close family members and friends do, which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

These interviewees have more climate change knowledge than most people do. All of them are college-educated; most of them either grew up or have lived for some time in Southern California; and most have taken environmental studies classes, either as undergrads or in graduate school.

Their experiences as members of marginalized groups have shaped their experiences with climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma — as well as hope and optimism. Paying closer attention to those emotions and mental health in communities of color, including how they shape reproductive plans, will become an increasingly important component of climate justice in the United States.

Bobby

Bobby, 22, considers himself an environmentalist. He recently graduated from college in Southern California with a degree in sustainability studies. His family is Guatemalan American.

Bobby is both confident that he will become a parent one day and also certain that he won’t bring his own biological kids into the world. His thoughts about the environment, the future, and parenting come into sharp relief through his current job at a restaurant, where he is unhappily employed. “There’s so much being wasted that could be returned to the earth.”

He connects these waste issues to carbon emissions and how he feels about having children. For Bobby, this is an ethical issue, a reason why he should not have biological children:

Students discard food into a bin as part of a lunch waste composting program at an elementary school. (Associated Press)

“This is why I’m leaning more toward a foster kid, and maybe eventually adopting them. Because it wasn’t my choice to have that kid, but I can help guide them to have a better life. … The environment is really the deciding factor for me.”

Although he always wanted to have children, his thoughts about fostering arose from taking environmental studies classes. “Going into college was the first time I was exposed to this information firsthand, and I realized for the first time, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I had never learned before … about things like food waste and carbon emissions. And that’s when the gears started turning in my head about the future and what I wanted to do.”

Victoria

Victoria is the same age as Bobby; she graduated from the same university and is also from an immigrant family, though hers is from Ghana. In Victoria’s house there were four siblings and half a dozen cousins who were always around. As a result, Victoria really cherished the closeness and security of a large family.

“I guess in the future, I would love to have children,” she says. “I’d really like to have a big family. I grew up in a big family, so it’s nice.”

Victoria is interested in perhaps adopting or fostering, and she also connects the desire for this to her undergraduate education in environmental topics.

Protesters hold a “silent march” against racial inequality and police brutality that was organized by Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County in June 2020. (Associated Press)

Victoria’s concerns about biological children are multifaceted: She worries about the future of healthcare access, wealth inequality, and whether her children would receive a low-quality education or be racially tracked in public schools. Ultimately it comes back to how racial inequality interacts with other social challenges to heighten her own sense of vulnerability and that of her potential future children.

“If I have children, they will be Black children,” she says. “It isn’t self-hatred. I love being Black, but the things I’ve gone through I wouldn’t wish on other children.”

This is a frequent topic of conversation among Victoria and her friends. They talk about whether they want to have children in the future. Most of them do not.

That feeling of being traumatized by an awareness of ongoing racial inequality shaped the perspectives of a group of Black women I spoke to. They were different ages, from their 20s to their late 30s, and they ranged from just starting out to having established careers. However, each perceived herself, and the prospect of becoming a mother, through the lens of vulnerability.

Rosalind

Rosalind, 38, is a Black woman of Caribbean origin living in Southern California. She has a graduate degree, a job as a scientific researcher, and is settled in a community she likes. Nevertheless, thoughts of the future are a heavy, ever-present burden. When I ask if there is one issue that feels like the primary reason for not having kids, she answers decisively: racism.

“With all of the anti-Black violence, and the police violence against us, it just seems so unsafe. And I see so many of my friends who do have children that are constantly stressed because of this, especially the ones who have teenage boys who are taller than average. They send their kids out there and then just spend their time worrying about whether their child is going to be targeted or harassed in some way, or potentially killed. I just don’t think I have the disposition to put up with that kind of stress.”

Melanie

Melanie, a 26-year-old Native American woman, was raised on the Navajo reservation and in Southern California. She idealizes having a big, happy family, but there are aspects of the world that give her pause, so she struggles with whether it’s morally OK to have children.

Drought last year took a toll on Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Melanie’s feelings about climate change include a general sense of powerlessness and lack of control over other people’s actions, which directly translates into her fears about parenthood: “With climate change, we’re the driving force of things breaking down, but then also, the planet’s going to do what the planet’s going to do. … So … it almost feels, like, kind of shameful to want to have children.”

Juliana

Juliana, a 23-year-old Mexican American woman, is strongly aware of negative peer pressure from friends. She recently graduated from art school, and her friend circle is mainly composed of queer and transgender, anti-establishment artists. Most of them have no intention of having children of their own, which seeps into conversations with Juliana.

Her friends cite environmental and mental health concerns. Their anxiety tells them that they can’t properly take care of themselves, much less a child. They also struggle, as trans and nonbinary people, with the issues of access to fertility centers and the need to use reproductive technologies that feel out of reach.

The Borel fire devastated Havilah, a historic mining town in Kern County, in late July. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

As a dark-skinned Mexican woman, she regularly experienced racism growing up in Southern California— and given that her husband is white, any child she might birth would be biracial, which raises questions about whether and how they would navigate the world differently than she has. But Juliana is an optimist, and she does plan to have one child.

Elena

I spoke to several young women who are addressing the kid question with their dates, potential partners, and long-term boyfriends. Elena, 22, is one of the most certain people I’ve met: She is not having children.

She’s from a Salvadoran immigrant family in which she is one of four children, while her mother was one of 12. Her certainty that stems from both life experiences and climate fears:

“Me being interested in environmental policy cemented my decision to not have kids, but I do have some personal things that I’ve gone through in life that I wouldn’t want my kids going through, like not having a dad. So I feel like it’s best if I just focus on myself and take care of my mom. ... I can also spend my time and energy focusing on someone that’s already here.”

Elena brings this conversation up on every first date with any new guy she sees. Given that most of them expect to have families in the future, Elena feels strongly that she does not want a relationship. This has been discouraging for her, but her mind is made up.

Like some of the other people I interviewed, Elena’s feelings about climate change were sparked by environmental studies classes. She says, “[I] started feeling like having kids is definitely not a sustainable thing to do. … I don’t want them to grow up and have to leave their home because of sea level rise. Or be worried because of really weird weather patterns.

A pump station sits idle near homes in Arvin, Calif., where toxic fumes from a nearby well made residents sick and forced evacuations in November 2019. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Veronica

Elena’s close friend Veronica, a 22-year-old from Los Angeles, manages the cultural expectations of a large, immigrant family from Guatemala. “Because of my Hispanic background people are always like, when are you gonna have children, of course you’re having children. It is what it is, right? But now that I’m an adult, I think about it differently. Would my child have a good quality of life? Will they be able to survive?”

She wants to have a child, “but I also want to be mindful of that child. Because it’s not just about having it, it’s about raising it. And being able to sustain it as well.”

For Veronica the everyday environmental concerns link directly to the larger issues shaping climate change: power, who has it, and who doesn’t. Though seemingly distant, intergenerational power imbalances — and older generations’ legacies of generating the emissions that have caused climate change — make her feel that it is unfair for people her age to have to ask the kid question.

She says: “I just think that people in power, whether they believe in climate change or not, it’s not beneficial for them to really do something about it. Because they’re older, it’s not going to affect them the way it affects us. … They have so much money and power it doesn’t affect them the same way. They can buy protection from what the rest of us are going to have to deal with.”

Although these interviews focused primarily on the challenges young people face as they approach reproductive questions, many of them still wanted families of their own. For those who were certain about having children, the reasons were emotional: love, joy, happiness, and hope.

Bobby was clear that he doesn’t plan on having biological children, but he was happy about the thought of fostering in the future and was particularly excited at the thought of his sister having kids.

“I would love to be an uncle,” he said. “Just seeing the next generation, the reason why I’ve been more optimistic about having a foster child of my own, is about being able to see them grow.”

This 2019 aerial photo provided by ConocoPhillips shows an exploratory drilling camp at the proposed site of the Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope. (Associated Press)

“I want to create a space where kids have loving, supportive parents. My parents aren’t perfect, but I know that I grew up in a loving home where they would do anything for my success and protection, and I want to create that for someone else.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Melanie, whose experience living in a racially and gender-diverse family inspires her to want to recreate the same.

She said: “When I look within my own family, we’re very diverse. We’re Black, we’re white, we’re Native American. We’re straight, we’re queer, we’re nonbinary. And we still have compassion for each other and that kind of spills over into compassion for other people that we don’t know. And I think, like, I don’t want to quit. I don’t want to let the bad things dictate how I make my decisions

“The idea of bringing someone into this world and growing them with compassion and love, and making sure they grow up knowing to stand up for other people and stand up for what’s right, that’s a little glimmer of hope.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid:

"Florida could start looking a lot like Hungary," noted New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in Feb 2023., writing about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's quest to restructure higher education in line with his far-right views. Although many GOP politicians have made pilgrimages to Budapest to proclaim their alignment with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's repressive policies, DeSantis has been arguably the most aggressive adopter of Hungarian-style restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and attacks on higher education. The sad sight of all those books discarded by far-right New College employees in a dumpster for being politically “unacceptable” will stay with me a long time, not least because it is similar to what happened to books from public and private libraries during the right-wing Chilean military dictatorship, the Chinese Communist “Cultural Revolution,” and many other regimes.

As the Tampa Bay Times reported, 13,000 books were thrown into a dumpster as though they were trash or toxic waste. After images of the dumpster circulated, causing a public outcry, New College went into damage control mode. They made a preliminary decision to fire the dean of the college library for not following proper procedures, including justifications for each book selected for elimination. But the New College was just fine with having hundreds of other books discarded as part of a purge of the Gender and Diversity Center! As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it's worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don't only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

Authoritarian Visions of Education: Italy and Chile

The regime of Benito Mussolini (1925-1943) provided the template for right-wing authoritarian actions. Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile. Since most universities were public, professors and researchers were civil servants and could be pressured through bureaucratic means. First came a 1931 loyalty oath to the King and Fascism, then a 1932 requirement to join the Fascist Party to apply for jobs or promotions. Student informers monitored their peers and their teachers, recording any critical remarks or anti-regime jokes, and new university student organizations inculcated Fascist values through extra-curricular activities. In the Cold War era, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who seized power through a 1973 U.S.-backed coup, claimed that universities were hotbeds of Marxism and targeted them for "cleansing." By 1975 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed (and thousands sent to prison), and philosophy and social science departments had been disbanded. [...]

Hungary, Model for the GOP and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

Today’s right-wing autocrats mostly come to power through elections and extinguish freedom slowly. Yet universities continue to be the targets of leaders who seek to eradicate free thinking and turn campuses into sites of informing, mistrust, and fear. Orbán had already started to drive the liberal Central European University out of Hungary when his 2018 re-election accelerated his crackdown on education. Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of "public trusts" run by Orbán cronies. Like his fellow far-right strongmen, Orbán aims to discredit and dismantle all liberal and democratic models of education to produce a new authoritarian-friendly population. As someone who grew up under Communism, Orbán knows the power of political socialization. He also knows that universities have always been sites of resistance to authoritarianism (a theme of the resistance chapter of Strongmen).

[...] If some of this sounds familiar to readers in America, that's not surprising. DeSantis's maneuvers to remake New College as a model of far-right pedagogy take a page from Orbán's crusades. Increasingly, it's not just "make America Florida," as the DeSantis camp advocates, but "make America Hungary" —a goal fellow Orbán fan and former Fox host Tucker Carlson also supported. [...]

Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly attacked as agents of the destruction of family, faith, and decency as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán. On that note, “anti-Judeo-Christian values” is now a category of offense for the authoritarian targeting site Professor Watchlist. Checking my page there to see what new outrage I have committed is one of my back-to-school rituals. Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat takes a look at how authoritarians target universities in the war on dissent and free expression.

[ausetkmt]

North Carolina’s Republican-controlled House passed a previously vetoed proposal Wednesday to restrict how teachers can discuss certain racial topics that some lawmakers have equated to “critical race theory.”

The House voted 68-49 along party lines for legislation to ban public school teachers from compelling students to believe they should feel guilty or responsible for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex.

United in their opposition, House Democrats challenged Republican claims that the bill would reduce discrimination and argued that a comprehensive history education should make students uncomfortable.

Republican seat gains in the midterm elections give them greater leverage this year to override any veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who blocked a similar proposal in 2021 and urged legislators this month in his State of the State address, “Don’t make teachers re-write history.” But Republicans, who are one seat short in the House of a veto-proof supermajority, will likely need some Democratic support for the measure to become law.

North Carolina is among 10 states considering such proposals, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen others have already limited how teachers can discuss racism and sexism in the classroom.

Gaston County Republican Rep. John Torbett said the proposal, which now heads to the Senate, would prohibit schools from endorsing controversial concepts, including that one race or sex is inherently superior.

“This great education state must have an educational system that unites and teaches our children, not divides and indoctrinates them,” said Torbett, the bill’s sponsor.

Several Democrats, including Reps. Rosa Gill of Wake County and Laura Budd of Mecklenburg County, raised concerns that the language is vague and does not outline clear boundaries for teachers. Budd said this “massive failure” places unnecessary pressure on teachers who may feel like they need to stifle productive classroom discussions to keep their jobs.

“The bill, on its face, is the obvious attempt to micromanage from the General Assembly into the classrooms,” she said during floor debate. “It’s overreach and will have a chilling effect on teachers and educators in curtailing what they think they’re allowed to teach.”

Republican lawmakers in committee had applauded the measure for “banning” critical race theory, a complex academic and legal framework that centers on the idea that racism is embedded in the nation’s systems and institutions that perpetuate inequality.

The bill does not explicitly mention the framework, but it would prohibit teaching that the government is “inherently racist” or was created to oppress people of another race or sex. Its language mirrors a model proposal from Citizens for Renewing America, a conservative social welfare group founded by a former Trump administration official to rid the nation’s schools of critical race theory.

Republicans nationwide have spun the phrase into a catchall for racial topics related to systemic inequality, inherent bias and white privilege. While many K-12 public schools teach about slavery and its aftermath, education officials have found little to no evidence that critical race theory, by definition, is being taught.

North Carolina schools would also be required under the bill to notify the state’s Department of Public Instruction and publish information online at least a month before they plan to host a diversity trainer or a guest speaker who has previously advocated for the beliefs restricted by the legislation.

Cary mother and activist Michelle O’Keefe was among several parents who testified against the bill in a Tuesday committee meeting. O’Keefe said she doesn’t want her young child sheltered from learning about racism and other atrocities in history, as long as those lessons are age-appropriate.

“The best way to keep history from repeating itself,” she said, “is to know the history.”

Another mother worried she could be banned from speaking at her child’s school career day because she has a documented history of speaking out against social injustices. Democratic Rep. Julie von Haefen of Wake County expressed a similar concern that she might no longer be able to substitute teach because of her record on racial justice issues and gender equality.

[homonationalist]

The most prominent demand emerging from the summer 2020 protests was to defund the police and reallocate the money to provide health care, education, jobs with living wages, and affordable housing, as part of the broader struggle to abolish the prison industrial complex. As I witnessed the protests, I became increasingly concerned that family policing was absent from most calls to defund the police. Some activists even recommended transferring money, resources and authority from police departments to health and human services agencies that handle child protection. These proposals ignored how the family policing system surveils and represses Black and other marginalized communities in ways similar to, and coordinated with, the law enforcement systems condemned by the protesters.

Diverting money and power to child protection agencies would result in even more brutal state intrusion in Black communities. Linking 911 to the Child Abuse Hotline would increase disruptive child maltreatment allegations and investigations. Even well-meaning recommendations to deploy social workers to conduct “wellness checks” in homes would likely result in increased reporting to CPS, expanding the state’s monitoring and separation of families. Residents of Black neighborhoods live in fear of CPS agents entering their homes, interrogating them, and taking their children as much as they fear police stopping them in the streets, harassing them, and taking them to jail.

Dorothy Roberts from “Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being” (2021)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tabia Lee

Published: Mar 26, 2023

DR TABIA LEE: Accused of 'whitesplaining'. Told students are either 'victims' or 'oppressors'. And then fired as diversity chief... my grim story of how woke extremists are taking over America's colleges

-

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs on college campuses are being turned on their heads.

Instead of promoting creative new ideas, fairness and welcoming spaces, DEI departments have been hijacked by ideological extremists to enforce ideological compliance.

Believe me, I should know.

In August 2021, I was hired to lead an institution wide transformation as a faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California. As a life-long teacher, dedicated to pursuing diversity, inclusion, anti-racism, and equity and equality in education this was a dream come true.

Unfortunately, my dream job quickly became a nightmare. And ultimately, I was fired.

I have now come to recognize that adherents of 'critical social justice theory' at De Anza College, who view all social dynamics through a lens of power and privilege, also use it as a cudgel to beat down and silence anyone with whom they may disagree.

Even I, someone who some may assume would be on the side of so-called 'social justice warriors,' was too heterodox in my thinking. And I was bullied out.

To be clear, I am not a liberal or a conservative, nor a Republican or a Democrat. I don't identify as a radical, progressive, or feminist. I have spent my life avoiding labels. I am an educator, scholar, humanist and critical thinker. And it is people like me who are – sadly – being chased out of education.

During the hiring process at De Anza, I was told that the previous leadership running the Office of Equity was 'too woke' and alienating people. Their approach was apparently very aggressive. They would 'call people out,' and accuse them of racism.

It was a sentiment echoed by multiple individuals in over 60 hours of conversations that I conducted to assess the needs of the campus. Many expressed discomfort with the college's intellectually oppressive culture and rigid ideologies.

So, I assured the hiring committee that my approach would be different. As I have all my career, I pledged to create spaces of inquiry where diverse and even divergent viewpoints could be heard would be welcomed and accepted. It is my belief that through this process, people can find areas of commonality and work together in the best interest of students.

Little did I know that this approach would be considered a threat by De Anza College ideologues. And conflict erupted almost immediately after I was hired.

I discovered that fellow faculty and administrators were using definitions for White Supremacy that I was not familiar with. To me, White Supremacy is associated with White Nationalism, the KKK, and Neo-Nazi organizations.

Instead, at De Anza College, White Supremacy was often associated with qualities, such as being on time, objective thinking, using written communications, setting an agenda, and demonstrating a sense of urgency.

These beliefs were aligned with the work of a scholar named Tema Okun and these re-definitions of White Supremacy were not only perpetuated at De Anza College but throughout the California Community College system.

I set out to engage with the De Anza community to develop a better understanding of various words and practices.

I questioned why De Anza's official communications capitalized some student racial categories and not others. For example, the word 'black' was capitalized, while the word 'white' was not. I questioned the use of terms like 'Latinx' and 'Filipinx' to refer to people of Latino and Filipino descent. In my years of experience working with Spanish-speaking and working-class communities, not once did the community ever use those terms to describe themselves.

I believe that terms like 'Latinx' are manipulations of language that originated in the Ivory Tower of academia.

But when I raised these topics for exploration, there was never constructive engagement. Instead, I was put under the spotlight and accused of being aligned with right-wing extremists.

For attempting to set an agenda for meetings, I was accused of Whitespeaking and Whitesplaining and supporting White Supremacy.

As a faculty director, not an administrator, I assumed that I would be permitted all of the academic freedoms of speech and expression that a tenure track position is usually afforded. I was wrong.

In fact, my tenure review process was subverted by ideological extremists, who used it to harass, bully and eventually fire me.

I now have a better understanding of the dominating ideology at work at De Anza College and throughout many of our California Community Colleges.

Unfortunately, a few bad actors working under a banner of 'Critical Social Justice' are subverting the tenure review processes and creating an ideological litmus test for career advancement.

A tenure review process, or any teacher evaluation process should be an objective, evidence-based process. In my case, it was used as an authoritarian enforcement mechanism.

It is my great fear that if folks pushing Critical Social Justice ideology have their way, faculty in California Community Colleges will be required to profess allegiance to certain rigid ideas.

Faculty will be forced to commit to embedding these ideas into their course curriculum. They will be compelled to state their pronouns and demand that all members of their classroom do the same. They will have to view every student as a victim or an oppressor.

There is a reason why these faux-academics insist on chasing free-thinkers out of their midst – it is because they cannot defend their own ideas.

I hope that by sharing my story, I can shine a light on this issue. And since coming forward, I have been contacted by many people, who say they've experienced the same treatment.

Too many faculty members in California Community Colleges are afraid to question this emerging Critical Social Justice ideology. Too many are afraid to question or resist lest they be labeled a racist or worse. 

History has shown us that authoritarianism advances through a reliance on intimidation and the compliance of a majority that cowers in fear.

To the educators out there, I encourage you to keep asking questions and promoting critical thinking. There are resources out there to protect your civil liberties. And I want you to know that you are not alone.

[another-corpo-rat]

Shot by the dear @halsin💕

Victoria Crane Netrunner | Affiliation: Arasaka

“You know something I don’t? I doubt that but go on; I’m curious how you’ll waste my time.”

A snake in the rat’s nest, between her natural ease in lying and quiet brutality there was little doubt that Victoria Crane would flourish in the corporate life. Climbing high off of her mother’s shoulders and then higher still off the backs of beaten down peers, making sure to dig her heel into their spines, Victoria has managed to create her own niche within Arasaka. One she defends with tooth and claw.

She has had a hand in several company projects and missions throughout the years, garnering her own reputation as an individual best avoided in cyberspace. Her name gained extra polish due to her ongoing association with Adam Smasher.

Once deftly subtle in her approach, working with the cyborg for so long has taught her the effectiveness of tossing a grenade now and then.

Relationships

Partners: Adam Smasher (Current, Mainline) Unnamed wife†

Relatives: Marion Victoria-Diane Crane (mother) Joseph Benjamin Morris-Crane (father)† Angelo Victor Morris (half-brother)†

Biography

1990s-2020

Born in England in the mid-90s, Victoria was primarily raised by her mother while her father worked in the NUSA. Throughout her youth she would be repeatedly called her mother’s ‘mini’ due to their similarities in both appearance and temperament.

This temperament would be sharpened against the whetstone of her peers during her school years, aimed pointedly at those she felt didn’t belong anywhere near her social circles. She was notably unmoved following an announcement that a classmate had committed suicide, and hardly bothered when a friend of that classmate laid the blame for their death at her feet. This individual would later have to drop out due to their parents losing their jobs and standing within Arasaka.

Upon completing her education, Victoria immediately moved into a corporate job – working for Arasaka’s London Counter-Intel department. Her quick ascension through the pay brackets was accelerated by an unquestionable skill in netrunning and nepotism.

2021-2023

In 2021 Victoria was transferred to the Night City offices. Reunited with her father, she simultaneously learned of his affair and second family. Their relationship promptly crumbled.

She was kept busy during the Fourth Corporate War, assigned as the company netrunner for a hired merc, she worked with them until their attempted defection to Militech. Sloppy in covering their tracks, Victoria became quickly aware of what they were planning and alerted her superiors – she had the pleasure of zeroing them herself and did so with a brutality unique to netrunners.

Following this, Victoria was assigned to work with Adam Smasher. Throughout 2022 they would work several missions together, but Victoria would not meet the cyborg in person due to deeming it unnecessary. It was late in 2022 and through sheer luck that she happened to step into the same elevator as him on her way to a mission briefing. Their first words exchanged in person were allegedly insults.

Still, the duo would develop something of a camaraderie. One of their recorded mission communications included Smasher encouraging a less bloodless approach in how Crane should deal with her familial issues. While she agreed, Crane also claimed she didn’t want their suffering to end ‘too quickly.’

Present in Night City on the night of the nuking, Victoria was not operating within the tower as Smasher felt it stupid to have his netrunner present where the action was going to take place. This decision kept Victoria alive. She would jack out of her chair following comm disruption and repeated failure to re-establish contact with Smasher, only to look out in horror as she witnessed the sky turn red.

2023-2050s

Victoria would return to the London offices after the bomb, certain that Smasher had been lost in the attack. She would claim the contrary but it was clear to any who knew her that she was not herself for some time afterwards. Her fury at learning her father and his second family had survived was uncharacteristic as she had destroyed personal property and outright threatened the life of his mistress.

It wasn’t until 2026 that Victoria learned of Smasher’s survival. A notable relief gave way to her usual coldness in a matter of minutes. 

She would operate primarily from the Arasaka tower in London, assigned once again to be the netrunner for an Arasaka-hired merc. Enthralled with the familiar brand of violence, Victoria and the merc would marry in the late ‘30s. Neither of them were particularly loyal or loving.

Following her marriage and due to his ailing health, Joseph would reach out and try to repair their shattered relationship. While his attempts would amount to naught and achieve little else than further agitating Victoria, she made copies of his neurological research knowing they would prove useful for her own project idea that had taken root.

Joseph died in 2039 and perhaps in a last-ditch effort to make amends, had left a majority of his wealth and belongings to his daughter. Victoria would dispose of most of it and sell anything of value, but she kept a painting he had purchased specifically for her (the original of Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes.)

In 2042 Victoria returned to Night City when her wife was on an operation. While she waited for her to return in the AV Hangar, she was instead reunited with Smasher who was also involved in the op. He greeted her with the news she was a widow, her wife having “gotten herself killed.”

The two would leave the hangar together to ‘catch up.’ Within a matter of days, she was reassigned as Smasher’s personal netrunner.

2053-2076

In 2053 following Smasher’s assignment as Yorinobu Arasaka’s bodyguard, the Arasaka heir attempted to replace Victoria, removing her from the position and assigning another that he personally selected. Smasher would burn through a number of these replacements in a matter of months, with the longest surviving only forty-six days.

In this interim, Victoria had dedicated her time to a personal project called OIZYS.

She returned to the role of Smasher’s netrunner within the year and would continue to work on OIZYS during lulls between work Arasaka assigned to Smasher and any personal gigs he took on.

In 2056, the project would see a successful test that confirmed its viability. Victoria pitched the project to Arasaka, successfully gaining funding and permissions for further tests on company-provided subjects.

In the same week as this successful run, her father’s former mistress would vanish following a public spectacle at a celebratory dinner for her half-brother. Angelo, placing the blame on Victoria for her treatment of his mother through the years and demanding that their father chose while simultaneously rejecting his attempts to amends, hired a fixer to plant a bomb under Victoria’s car.

The attempted murder failed, instead killing her building’s valet. In the days that followed and with the gossip mills churning, a number of Angelo’s illicit activities from the 2020s onward became public. This included videos of him in the midst of orgies, drunken slander of the Arasaka family and NUSA government officials, recordings of his calls concerning the attempted car-bombing, and his involvement in recording the torture and murder of a NCPD’s officer’s son.

He would commit suicide by the end of the week. With no family to arrange a funeral and his friends in hiding, his body was dumped in the municipal landfill.

In 2061, OIZYS had changed as Victoria was ‘highly encouraged’ to incorporate an experimental nanite technology into its operations. While the nanites solved a trigger-delay issue, they were also more aggressive than anticipated and would not stop in their assault after the amygdala had been overwhelmed.

The project was deemed a success and Arasaka has used it successfully against a handful of international targets, however Victoria and a small team are still working to iron out the kinks. These efforts have been slow-going both because of the experimental status of the nanites themselves and the uptick in work Smasher performed for the company at the direct behest of Yorinobu.

2077

Following the sudden death of Saburo Arasaka and the aggressive actions of Yorinobu in the wake of becoming CEO, Victoria became suspicious of the man’s intentions. Like many, she saw through the inconsistencies with his poisoning story but would bite her tongue to see what direction he would steer the company.

Unhappy with said direction, she acts as if her hands are tied due to the influx of work that has landed in her lap with Smasher’s promotion to Head of Security. However, some have noted her free time spent in the company of Michiko Arasaka.

Cyberware

NetWatch Netdriver Mk.5 Self-ICE | Ex-Disk | Visual Cortex Support Favoured Quickhacks: Ping | Short Circuit | Contagion | Cyberware Malfunction | Reboot Optics | Suicide

Cyberoptics, EMP Threading, Chromed cyberarms with claw mods, Chromed collar, Optical Camo, Syn-Lungs, Titanium Bones, Lynx Paws, and a Midnight Lady

Weapons

“Charon” A personalised M2038 Tactician that deals electrical damage. Rarely used but always on-hand.

“Lancehead” A gold and black balisong tipped with neurotoxin. Victoria’s preferred method for dispatching anyone who gets too close. This weapon was a gift from Smasher, she claims that holds no bearing on her favouring it.

Notes

Victoria has modified her Contagion hack to attack aggressively, causing death more often than naught in its onslaught. Even those who survive the initial upload may die days later from the prolonged assault on their organs.

Smasher is the cause for her cyberarms – having deliberately crushed her right arm in early 2023 following a flare-up of carpal tunnel. She opted to get both replaced.

Her titanium bones and syn-lungs were not wanted modifications but were necessary after Smasher’s AV was shot down by juiced-up Animals. Her lungs were punctured by her ribs when he was tossed on top of her by gravity.  

Divider by Saradika

[notafraidofredyellowandblue]

Martin Schneider - a life for music 🕯

Martin Schneider, was a Opera director, professor and father of Constanze (costume designer) and Christoph (Rammstein drummer)

Martin passed away in 2021, and Tagesspiegel posted an obituary for him, which i thought you might like to read 🌺

Obituary for Martin Schneider: Felsenstein says yes

He always returned from trips to the west. Not because of the country. Because of the family and the opera.

Sometimes  it all begins with an urgent wish, the origin of which remains a mystery, but which sets the course for a whole life: Martin Schneider, whose life has been about classical music, opera and, to a large extent, everything subtle, wanted a violin at the age of seven. His parents, his mother a housewife and his father an accountant, fulfilled his wish in Merseburg, Saxony-Anhalt. His cot and his mother's zither were exchanged for it, and with a briquette in one hand and the violin in the other, the boy went to the violin teacher, the piece of coal being part of the fee.

He later became a member of the "Schäfer Choir" and many years later played Bach's Double Concerto in the Cathedral of Merseburg with Gerhard Schäfer, his choirmaster for 13 years. So the direction was set, and the young Schneider continued to follow it consistently: He studied music education, German and musicology at the Martin Luther University in Halle, graduated with a diploma, and when, in the summer of 1961, after all his studying, he went on vacation to the Feldberg Lakes in the Uckermark, he learned about the construction of the Wall in Berlin and also about his first job in the music department of the Berlin Radio. Berlin, the big city that was still unknown to him, in which he had only once seen “The Good Man by Sezuan” with the young Käthe Reichel at the Berliner Ensemble, would from now on be his new home, but would also from now on be divided.

The leaders and steerers get involved

He started the journey with great excitement. And then noticed that he was expected to be an editor on children's radio. He had thought more of editing for serious music, but that didn't help, he accepted the challenge. But he soon looked elsewhere: he was far too annoyed that the socialist leaders and steerers themselves interfered in the selection of children's songs. He had experienced that often; he remembered this time best: he appeared in the editorial office and all his colleagues looked at him in horror. Nobody said "How could you!", but it was clearly evident in their eyes. What happened? He had put the song "Now we're driving across the lake, across the lake" into the program on the very day a republic refugee paddled across the Baltic Sea in the direction of freedom. An unintentional coincidence, but he was accused of bad intention. This is how it could go in the socialist cultural apparatus.

Such experiences made him keep an eye out, he wanted to work creatively, maybe even use his own voice, but unfortunately it wasn't suitable, as the voice coach at the Komische Oper confirmed. She advised him to apply there as a dramaturge or assistant director, for him, as he will later say, "a sign from heaven". The rest is quickly told. Director Walter Felsenstein says yes, Martin Schneider starts with a trainee salary in September 1962: 450 marks gross. The salary increases in the coming years, as does the reputation of the new employee. He stays with the company for twelve years, succeeds and becomes a producer. Collaborates on Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Eugen Onegin. And Felsenstein makes many things possible, even the young father's move from a backyard dwelling with an outside toilet to a two-room apartment with hot running water. Daughter and son are born, Constanze becomes costume creator and designer, Christoph drummer for the rock band Rammstein. Their music is not really the father's taste, but he is happy that the son decided to go into music.

29 years "Bluebeard"

Martin Schneider always returns to the GDR from guest performances in western countries. Staying away is not an option, the connection to the family and to the opera is too important. In 1974 he moved to the Halle Opera House, became first director and took over the post of director in 1978. Felsenstein persuades him the promise to continue to supervise the "Blaubart" at the Berlin Komische Oper as evening director with a guest contract. He does this until 1992. In 29 years, the play has had 369 performances.

Another departure in 1980: Martin Schneider decides to become a freelancer. He works as a director and university teacher with teaching assignments at the Leipzig Music Academy. He becomes a professor at the Hanns Eisler Music Academy in Berlin.

A life for music, but also for many other things. For friends, good conversations, the Baltic Sea again and again and also for a new love. His first wife Brigitte does not return from a visit to the West in 1987, the marriage ends. On the beach at Ückeritz he meets Antje, who is eight years younger, comes from Cottbus and was a music dealer there. She now lives in Berlin. Even in Cottbus, friends had raved about him, she absolutely should get to know this Schneider, he was directing at the Cottbus Theater, a great guy. But there is no meeting, only many years later their time on Usedom.

Two aesthetes come together here, enjoying each other's clever minds. They even make a program out of it, with which they will go on a tour through the whole country from 2000, a literary-musical reading tour, 1400 times in 20 years! They absorb literature that was not accessible to them in the GDR and pass it on to a grateful audience.

And they also travel a lot privately, to Rome, to Prague and again and again to the Baltic Sea. At home they invite you to song recitals, Schubert's "Winterreise" is on Martin Schneider's mind until the end. On March 1, 2020 he sings it one last time.

With a good friend, he oracles over a beer as to who will be on cloud seven or eight first. It almost becomes a bet. Martin Schneider would have lost now. He dies on January 22, losing to the cancer that has bothered him for eight years. He wanted his son to play a drum solo for his funeral service. And "The Song of the Moldau" by Brecht and Eisler. He had wanted to record it himself, but he didn't manage anymore.

🌺🕯

[berniesrevolution]

CATALYST JOURNAL

While the uptick in strike activity in 2021 is heartening, its influence should not be exaggerated. The number and extent of job actions was noticeable but still very small by historical standards, and union density continued to decline. A significant labor upsurge might be in the works, but it is not in evidence yet.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis spoke movingly of the workers keeping the world turning in dark times:

People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone.1

These workers have done everything we’ve asked of them and more. They have been through hell, particularly those who have risked their health and well-being to care for the sick, educate the young, feed the hungry, and deliver the things the rest of us need to get through this period of grinding uncertainty. Employers, politicians, and talking heads have lauded them as essential workers, but the stark gap between the praise and the grim realities of working life in the United States — which was already miserable for millions before the pandemic — have pushed many to the breaking point. Indeed, record numbers of American workers have quit their jobs in what the media has dubbed the Great Resignation. According to the US Labor Department, 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021. The number of monthly quits has exceeded three million since August 2020, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.2 Job switchers span the employment ladder, but turnover has been largely concentrated in the low-wage service sector, where workers are taking advantage of the very tight labor market to get a better deal for themselves. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, workers with high school diplomas are currently enjoying a faster rate of wage growth than workers with bachelor’s degrees, a remarkable situation that has not occurred in decades.3

Worker discontent is not only finding expression in the form of quitting and job switching. In 2021, we witnessed a modest increase in the frequency and visibility of collective action in the workplace. Tens of thousands of workers, union and nonunion alike, challenged employers through protests and strikes across sectors and in many different geographical regions. Workers in health care and social assistance, education, and transportation and warehousing led the way, but they were joined by workers in hotels and food services, manufacturing, and other industries. Protests and strikes tended to be concentrated in states where labor is relatively stronger, namely California, New York, and Illinois, but some states with low union density, like North Carolina, saw an uptick in labor action, too. Pay increases were easily the most common demand, but health and safety, staffing, and COVID-19 protocols were high on the agenda as well.

The year 2021 was less a strike wave than a strike ripple, and it has not yet resulted in any appreciable increase in unionization. A few trends stand out. The first is that labor protest and strike action were heavily concentrated among unionized groups of workers. Unionized groups of workers accounted for nearly 95% of all estimated participants in labor protests and more than 98% of all estimated participants in strikes. The second is that protests and strikes were concentrated by industry — namely health care and education, which together accounted for roughly 60% of all labor actions. Finally, protests and strikes were heavily concentrated geographically. Just three states with relatively high levels of union density — California, New York, and Illinois — accounted for more than half the total estimated participants in protests and strikes. In short, collective workplace action is by and large taking place where organized labor still retains residual sources of strength. In this context, spreading protest and strike action beyond its current industrial and regional confines depends on unionization in new places.

Conditions conducive to labor action — rising inflation, pandemic-related pressures, and a tight labor market — are likely to persist into 2022, and the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been meaningfully supportive of worker organizing. US labor is probably not on the verge of a historic breakthrough, but in this context, workers may have an opportunity to make modest material and organizational gains.

Making new organizational gains is critical to the fortunes of the labor movement and the reviving US left. The vast majority of the workers involved in strikes and labor protests last year were already members of unions, not unorganized workers looking to unionize. This is why it is so concerning that last year’s uptick in labor action occurred amid a further decline in union density in 2021. The overall rate of union membership stands at 10.3% of the total labor force, while the total number of union members, just over fourteen million in 2021, continues its long decline.4 While some have argued that treating union density as the key measure of labor’s strength is a mistake, it seems clear that, at least in the US context, where union density and union coverage almost entirely overlap, it does provide an effective measurement of working-class power.5

Boosting the level of union density should therefore be among the leading priorities of progressives and socialists in the United States. As the power resources school of welfare state scholars has long argued, the relative strength of the labor movement and its affiliated political parties has been the single most important factor shaping welfare state development over time and across countries. Here in the United States, where we have never had a nationwide social democratic party aligned with a strong labor movement, the weakness of working-class organization is clearly reflected in the fragmentation and stinginess of our welfare state. The state-level wave of attacks on organized labor that began in 2010 have made it that much harder for unions to defend working-class interests and reduce inequality. But the fact that they were able to meaningfully mitigate the growth of inequality, even during the period of neoliberal retrenchment, shows that rebuilding the labor movement needs to be a chief priority of any progressive political agenda.6 The Biden administration’s pro-union stance suggests it understands this. But if it’s unable to act decisively to boost union membership, all the pro-union rhetoric it can muster will ultimately amount to little.

TRACKING LABOR ACTION

Researchers at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) began documenting strikes and labor protests in late 2020. Their ILR Labor Action Tracker provides a database of workplace conflict across the United States, based on information collected from government sources, news reports, organizational press releases, and social media. It counts both strikes and labor protests as “events” but distinguishes between the two. The major distinction between strikes and labor protests, according to this methodology, is whether the workers involved in the event stopped work. If they did, the event is defined as a strike; if they did not, it is defined as a labor protest. The Labor Action Tracker also collects data on a number of additional variables, including employer, labor organization (if applicable), local labor organization (if applicable), industry, approximate number of participants, worker demands, and more.7

ACTION TYPES

In 2021, there were 786 events with 257,086 estimated participants.8 Over 60% of the events were labor protests, while less than 40% were strikes (there was one recorded lockout). Roughly one-third of the estimated number of workers participated in labor protests, while roughly two-thirds participated in strikes. Further, the average number of estimated workers per labor protest (188) was significantly smaller than the average number of estimated workers per strike (553, see Table 1 for details).

DURATION

Neither labor protests nor strikes tended to last very long, which tracks with the generally sharp decline in strike duration in recent decades.9 Labor protests in particular were very short affairs. Of the labor protests with a start and end date, 96% lasted for just one day or less. Strikes also tended to have a short duration, but they typically did not end as quickly as protests. Of the strikes with a start and end date, one-third lasted for one day or less. Roughly two-thirds of strikes (68%) ended within a week, and over 90% ended within thirty days. One strike stands out for its unusually long duration: a 701-day strike by United Auto Workers (UAW) members against a metallurgical company in Pennsylvania, which began in September 2019 and ended in August 2021.

INDUSTRIES

An informed observer will not be surprised by which industries saw the largest number of labor action events (Table 2). The leading two industries by far were health care and social assistance and education, which are both highly unionized and have been subjected to enormous pressures during the pandemic. Together, they accounted for nearly 40% of the total labor protests and strikes. These industries also comprised over 60% of the overall number of estimated labor action participants — health care with 41.5% of the estimated participants, education with 18.8%. The overrepresentation of health care and education workers becomes even starker when we compare this to their employment shares in the overall labor force. In 2020, these two industries accounted for 16.3% of total nonfarm employment — health care with a 13.8% share and education with 2.3%.10 Put another way, the share of health care workers in 2021 labor actions was roughly three times larger than their share in the nonfarm labor force, while the share of education workers was more than eight times as large.

These two pace-setting industries were followed by a second tier of industries including transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing. It is not surprising to see these listed among the most turbulent industries, as they contain a mix of highly unionized employers and nonunion employers that have become a major focus of labor organizing activity, namely Amazon — the most frequently targeted employer, with twelve total labor actions — which was the target of twice as many labor actions as McDonald’s, the second-most targeted employer.

The industrial distribution of labor protests generally follows the overall distribution of labor action, with the notable exception of manufacturing, which saw far more strikes than protests. While the health care industry did not experience the largest number of strikes, it accounts for more than half of estimated strike participants (53%). Workers in education (12.4%) and manufacturing (16%) also accounted for outsize shares of the estimated number of participants.

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