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aboutcaseyaffleck · 4 years ago

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Casey Affleck Gets Philosophical About Life, Time & The Whole Damn Thing

“Time,” reflects Casey Affleck, “is something I have been thinking about lately. It is ironic how the older you get, the better you are at being patient. With less time left, people become better at waiting. But this year, I feel much older and a lot less patient. I guess you’ve got to accept that time is never wasted? That doing is no different than not doing? That you can’t kill time no matter what you do, and that no matter what you do you can’t prevent the opposite from happening either? I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early January, and Affleck and I are doing the Zoom thing, ostensibly to discuss his two new movies, the recently released indie Our Friend and the upcoming 19th-century period drama The World to Come. Yet our virtual tête-à-tête has become far more interesting, jumping wildly from his love of trains and travel to weightier topics like family, the future and the search for something more, something meaningful.

“I like the idea that time is an illusion. That past, present and future are all happening at once. I like it even though I can’t totally get my head around it. But either way, the me in the mirror gets older every day.”

Like most of us, he’s not only had plenty of time on his hands in recent months, housebound in L.A., but he’s tried to use his downtime wisely. “I tried to use this year of quarantine constructively,” the 45-year-old Oscar winner says. “I tried to see it as a winter season for shutting down and restoring something inside, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that evolved, I guess. I didn’t take up a new hobby or learn an instrument or get better at ‘self-care.’ If anything, I let my better habits and routines fall off. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and help buoy my friends and children when I could.”

As a guy with two teenagers at home — Indiana, 16, and Atticus, 13 — it hasn’t been easy, but he’s doing his best. He tried taking his sons on their annual camping road trip over the summer, but it was short-lived. Instead, he’s been focusing on making a happy home. “My kids don’t get to see their friends a lot, so I’m doing a lot more stuff with them, coming up with activities for the three of us, which they mostly hate, and I mostly let drop. And then I try again with the same outcome 90 percent of the time.”

While trying to create innovative plans to sustain his boys, he came up with one he thought might do some good, too. In June, he launched Stories from Tomorrow, a social-media initiative focused on creative writing by kids.

“At the beginning of all this last March, the first thing that occurred to me was that the quarantine would have a big impact on young people’s emotional well-being — the disruption they’re going to feel is really going to affect their mental health more than anyone else,” he says. “When I would sit down to write creatively, I felt better. But I couldn’t get my sons to journal or do creative writing much. I didn’t want to twist their arms about it. So I was like, ‘I’ll make a social media platform that inspires young people to write creatively, because it is such a good way of working out difficult feelings. And the way I will do that is have well-known people read the kids’ writing publicly.’ I knew that hearing your own writing read was exciting. I thought it would be really inspiring, that creative writing would be a great outlet for kids stuck at home.”

He enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler and Danny Glover, as well as two current costars, Vanessa Kirby and Jason Segel, and arranged for donations made through the program to go to children’s hunger nonprofit Feeding America and Room to Read, which supports female education. He reached out to schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, hoping to create a global community.

Affleck was excited to make progress, to have done some good, but the initiative didn’t take off as planned. “In the end, an Instagram account for creative writing by tweens just couldn’t possibly compete with the quintillion bytes of daily data generated online. I don’t know. But I tried! And anyway, since then lots of other organizations started doing basically the same thing, and they are more organized than I am, and they have done a better job. So be it.”

Yet, adults have been disrupted, too, including Affleck himself, who is aware that, relatively speaking, he has gotten through mostly unscathed. “Am I happy? I mean, I’m relatively okay. It’s been a hard time to find balance and to keep it. I would say it’s been a hard time in my life, but I know that it’s been harder for other folks. So far we haven’t lost anyone, and we haven’t lost our house. And I rediscovered that when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing better to do than to try to help other people. Being of service not only helps others but is a great way of getting outside of yourself. Also — and I really believe this — I think this time will be remembered as one when our country made leaps and bounds in the right direction; we are changing and growing and it’s uncomfortable, but we will be much, much better. I wish I could see the next couple hundred years. It’s going to be amazing.”

At the end of the day, it’s family that’s keeping him going. “Having my kids around and being able to spend so much time with them has been amazing. It is the brightest silver lining in all of this. They are what gives me the most joy. They are funny and smart and interesting and interested. They are just the best company ever,” he says. “Anytime I try to parent out some ‘teaching moment,’ I find they are two steps ahead. They help me make sense of stuff just as much I help them, if not more. I don’t have any answers, but batting the questions around, back and forth, is a good way of coping.”

CALEB CASEY MCGUIRE AFFLECK-BOLDT feels he is luckier than most. Although he and many of his peers have gone jobless for a full year, he spent 2019 working hard. He had not one but three films done and dusted prior to the start of the pandemic; the last one wrapped a week before mandatory quarantine. Two of these have back-to-back release dates: the tearjerker indie Our Friend came out in January, and sweeping period drama The World to Come will be released February 12. Thriller Every Breath You Take is slated for later this year. “I am so, so, so glad I spent 2019 working that much. It is what kept us afloat all through 2020,” he says.

The films themselves are radically different, but there are a few common threads. In both of his winter releases, Affleck plays a man who has lost a family member and whose marriage is in shambles. In both, he is a man in pain.

In the LGBTQ masterpiece The World to Come, which revolves around the love that blossoms between two married women on the mid-19th-century American frontier, his character, Dyer, says very little but manages to convey a wealth of emotion with his eyes alone. He may seem stoic, but he is suffering.

“The World to Come is a story about a couple who have lost a baby. They’re dealing with the grief in totally different ways and having a very hard time coming together again,” he explains. “My character wants to heal that by having another, but his wife [played by Katherine Waterson] is coping in a different way. She is severing all emotional attachment to him because it triggers more and more grief. She [only] seems to come alive when she is with their neighbor, a woman on the next farm [played by Vanessa Kirby]. He wants his wife happy, but he also would like her to love him. To me, this is the story of how couples can have their relationship shattered by a sudden loss. And it’s definitely a beautiful story about two women who feel that they have to hide their love and find the courage to love each other anyway.”

Affleck likes layers. He himself has many, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s drawn to roles written as fully formed characters, not caricatures. With Dyer, that’s abundantly clear. “Crisis is fun to play, [and Dyer] is in an interesting crisis,” he says. “I think he’s a really good person — a really decent, solid, loving person — which is what I loved so much about playing him and what I love so much about the writing. It’s more interesting when there’s no bad guy, just a conflict of circumstances and feelings that get so complicated that it drives two people apart.”

In Our Friend, a different set of circumstances drives the leads apart. Affleck and Dakota Johnson take on the true story of Matthew and Nicole Teague, whose imperfect marriage was strained by his long absences and her affair, neither of which seem at all important when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“To me, Our Friend is really a story about how petty grievances between people can divide them and then be forgotten when a gigantic tragedy is dropped in their laps. [Matthew] was wronged, it’s true — his wife cheated on him. On the other hand, he wronged her in a bunch of ways; [they] were just more passive and not quite so salacious. He wasn’t around. Matt got to be a dad and he got to travel the world as a journalist. He left her to take care of the kids. She wanted to have a life too, she had dreams of her own — she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to work — but she didn’t get to do that. She just got to be a mom. She was left holding the bag, and it wasn’t fair.”

He spent a fair amount of time immersing himself in the journalist’s life while filming in Fairhope, Ala., in 2019. (The film’s title is taken from Teague’s award-winning Esquire essay, “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.” The friend in question — played by Jason Segel — is a man who puts his life on hold to help the family during their darkest days.) But he did not become Matt Teague, which is an important distinction. “[Director] Gabriella Cowperthwaite asked that we not portray the personality traits of the real people. No accents, no mannerisms. [But] I did steal his style, because I had never seen someone nail the dad look any better than Matt. I say that with affection.”

As for the dreams Nicole gave up for her family, Affleck says, “If you were to ask Matt, I’m sure he would acknowledge that he was neglecting his role. He was neglecting her dreams, and that is a part of marriage, supporting what the other person wants. Like all relationships, it was complicated.”

Like life itself, really. This is why he can identify with both sides. He understands Nicole’s pain about the deference of her dreams as well as Matt’s desire to escape through travel — especially now, when Affleck himself has been completely grounded. Since the age of 17 he’s taken 20 cross-country road trips. His love of driving is secondary only to his enthusiasm for trains: Amtrak is his jam. He even fantasizes about owning his own train car one day.

Immersing himself in each location — whether it’s the sleepy Alabama town of Fairhope or the more exotic locale of Romania, which served as a stand-in for the East Coast of the U.S. in The World to Come — is actually one of the most desirable parts of the acting life, he says. “One of the things I love about working as an actor is that you go to some brand-new place and the community invites you in in a way that they don’t usually if you’re a tourist,” he confides. “You get to see what it’s like to really be there and imagine yourself living there.”

And he has — over the past ten years he’s spent so much time in cities including his hometown of Boston; Vancouver, British Columbia, the location of Light of My Life; Atlanta, where he shot the 2016 action flick Triple 9; Argentina, where he made Gerry; Dallas, for A Ghost Story; Calgary, Alberta, where much of the epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was filmed; Our Friend’s Fairhope set; Cincinnati, for The Old Man and the Gun; and Braddock, Pa., where he filmed the 2013 drama Out of the Furnace. “I have loved moving in and settling down and living a character’s life and then moving on. But I feel most at home in places that are struggling to get by. It reminds me of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel lighter in those places, more relaxed. I feel like myself. I fit in.”

For him, the where is almost as important as the who — immersing himself in the place is imperative to understanding his character. This is part of what makes him such an accomplished actor — he and most of the parts he plays merge. I draw a crappy analogy about how the characters are like a coat, which he very obligingly works with. “You have to build the coat from all of the scraps and pieces of yourself; all these characters are made up of little pieces of me,” he says, noting, “Obviously, sometimes they can’t be. Sometimes I have no connection whatsoever, and those are the jobs I look back on and I either feel nothing for, or worse. But sometimes you have to take the job that is available, like most people in the world. You know? I don’t think my dad wanted to be a janitor. But he did it.”

He’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and appeared in films that run the gamut from box-office juggernauts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise and Tower Heist to indie darlings like brother Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and Manchester by the Sea. He has even written and directed, most recently 2019’s Light of My Life, a bizarrely prescient movie about raising children in a pandemic. At this point in his career, he should have his pick of parts. “Not really,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who have done good work, who are driven, and who have something to share. I have never been someone studios embraced as a ‘movie star,’ never knighted. I have always had to fight for the parts I have gotten. And you know what? That’s fine. Let me fight. It’s how I cut my teeth, and it is how I will keep them sharp. You can’t ask for more than a chance to be in the ring. Also, movies and TV aren’t all I care about. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, jeez, I have to work, and there are two jobs available to me, and the one that isn’t as good is the one that is close to home and I can see the kids, so I guess I am doing that.’ I love movies and really try hard to make them good. I really bust my ass every day when I get the chance to make one. I care more about my family than any movie. It’s not [always] the job I love, but this is the reality of my life. But maybe life will be long enough for a few more chapters.

The forward momentum of his future is an interesting topic. At the moment, he isn’t so much planning for the future as he is exploring it, because Affleck is not someone who likes to live with regret.

“I guess [at the end of the day], regret should be reframed as a reminder to be different,” he observes. And so, with this in mind, he embarked on a personal journey several years ago and decided to go back to college (at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia). He had completed two years at Columbia University, but he never graduated — his film career kept getting in the way.

“I went back to school because I hadn’t finished, and I wanted to think about new things in a way that school can help you do,” he says. “I couldn’t go in person, so I found a strong online school and got started. You know, I’m 45, and I just thought, ’This is halftime. This is where you hit the locker room and think about how you want the rest of the game to go.’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘Okay, we went out, we played our best, we didn’t know what the other team was going to be like, we made some mistakes, we are in the game, so let’s adjust like this.’ Also, I’m not sure I want to be an actor forever. I had made a small pivot from acting into directing, and into producing more. And I like to direct movies. The most satisfying creative experience I’ve had in a long time was being a director. But ultimately it wasn’t quite enough. So I wanted to go study some of the things I was interested in. I wanted to do more with my life.”

Although he needed general credits to graduate, he found an unexpected passion for juvenile justice along the way, with a particular focus on alternative accountability programs. “I don’t know where this will lead me, or why I am so interested in it, but finding and implementing better systems for addressing harm and conflict among kids, adults too, but mostly young people, is something I care about. And the work that I have done so far has been fascinating and deeply rewarding.”

When I ask if this stems from his own experiences as a troubled kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass., with Christine, a single mom — his parents divorced when he was 9; his father, Timothy, an alcoholic tradesman, checked into a rehab facility in Indio, Calif., when Affleck was just 14 — he muses thoughtfully, “I love my parents and think they both did the very best they could and cared a lot. Period. Did I get into some trouble as a teenager? I got into some trouble when I was a kid, and I struggled a lot through high school with depression and substances, yes. Much of it I didn’t even know wasn’t normal. I don’t know if I was ‘troubled.’ Either way, as an adult, I’ve come to see that, regardless of how I compare to anyone else, I want less conflict in my life. That might be part of the reason why I’ve been so interested in learning about better ways of resolving conflicts, both with children and with grown-ups. It isn’t something they teach in school for some reason. Man, there is a lot they don’t teach you in school, huh? A lot you’ve got to learn on your own.”

And on this journey, mistakes will be made. That’s par for the course, and Affleck is no exception. “I have made so many mistakes, but life is the time for mistakes. I do believe people should hold themselves accountable and repair harm they have caused. That is important to me, and I try hard to do that whenever it is called for: apologize for mistakes and repair them,” he admits.

This is when our conversation, as such conversations are wont to do, comes full circle. Before we say goodbye, Affleck remarks, “You know, I heard Bono talking on Howard Stern’s show, and he said something about Frank Sinatra that was interesting. He said that he heard two versions of Frank singing ‘My Way.’ One version was recorded when Frank was young, and the other version was recorded when Frank was old. Each had the exact same words, same arrangement, same everything. But when Frank was young the line ‘I did it my way’ sounded proud, and when Frank was old it sounded humble. Whatever else time does to a person, I think it also does that.”

[source]

#casey affleck #interview #photoshoot #photo #quote

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gittetj · 5 years ago

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Build an OC: Starting from scratch

Let’s say you’ve decided to write a story but you don’t have any characters yet. In fact, maybe you don’t even know what the story is about. Maybe you’ve never even made an original character before! Well, don’t worry because you can make a decent character out of nearly anything if you know how to add some surprise and conflict to their personality. I mean, everything in the following example is something I just pulled out of thin air as I wrote it.

Usually, characters belong in a story or at least some kind of setting. Some people like to start by making a cast of characters and then let them lead to a story, others like to put together a plot and let that lead to the characters. Either way works, but since this post is about character development, we’ll go with the former approach.

For the sake of this post, let’s say all you know is what kind of story you want to make. Let’s go with something common like a young adult story about a teenage girl who discovers she has superpowers. There’re already tons of stories about teenagers with superpowers out there so now here’s a challenge to come up with a protagonist that doesn’t seem too generic.

We have to start somewhere, so just think of the most generic protagonist you can. A teenage girl before she gets the superpowers? I’m picturing she’s 16, lives with her parents, goes to school, probably has some friends and probably has a hobby she likes to do in her spare time.

Now, this girl might sound extremely boring to you, but that’s because right now you’re probably thinking of a character you’ve seen variations of a hundred times in other stories. There’re actually already plenty of variables to play around with here:

For example, where do the girl and her parents live? Maybe they’re in a country you don’t usually associate with superheroes, like South Africa or Syria or Greenland. A Greenlandic superhero? Haven’t seen that before, that might be interesting.

What kind of school does the girl go to? Maybe it’s not an average high school but rather a boarding school or a tiny school out in the countryside or maybe she’s homeschooled for one reason or another.

Her friends don’t have to be typical either. Maybe her best friend is an 80-year-old woman who used to be a stewardess or the neighbor’s 10-year-old son who really likes trains. It could be literally anyone because you don’t know what the story is about yet - you can make their personalities work together and come up with an explanation for how they became friends later.

She could have an unusual hobby like cave diving or building really advanced Lego models or it could be something that requires a lot of her time and devotion like maybe she’s working to become a professional athlete. Again it could be absolutely anything, just pick something that feels interesting to you.

This is already a lot of options and you could create even more by moving the story to a different time period or a different universe. A teenage superhero in the wild west? A teenage superhero on a Mars colony in the future? A teenage superhero in a fantasy universe where she isn’t actually very special because humans are the only creatures who don’t already have superpowers? You can do literally anything you want!

Having a million different options can be pretty overwhelming though so let’s reel it in a little, let’s sort through all these ideas to come up with something cohesive.

In this case, let's say you really don’t want to have to come up with a fantasy universe or do a lot of research on time periods or foreign countries you haven’t lived in. Most people reading this will probably either be American or be familiar with what it’s like to live in the US, so let’s say our girl and her parents are American.

Now, of all the random ideas I spewed out earlier the one that stuck with me was the 80-year-old stewardess best friend because I personally really appreciate when elderly people are included in young adult stories - and that’s what you should do at this stage, go with whatever feels right and interesting to you.

At this point, a good start would be to figure out why the 16-year-old girl and this 80-year-old stewardess are friends. The first thought that comes to me is that the girl is probably fascinated by the stewardess’s stories about all the countries she’s been to and the people she’s met through her job. If this is something that stands out to the girl she probably hasn’t traveled much herself - in fact, maybe she’s barely ever been outside her own state. Maybe she hasn’t traveled because her parents are very bound to the place they live, like maybe they’re farmers. If they’re farmers they must live in the countryside which could very well mean the girl goes to a small high school where everyone knows each other. If the girl really wants to break free of this place and everyone who only knows her as a plain farmer girl and not the adventurous traveler she really deep down wants to be, maybe that has made her a bit lonely, maybe that’s another reason she’s found an unexpected friend in the stewardess.

See how one detail can lead to something that’s starting to feel like a person worth telling a story about? There aren’t even any superpowers involved yet! Developing a character this way is a bit like doing detective work - you find a couple of pieces of evidence that seem promising and then you try to connect them and make assumptions that lead to more and more evidence until you have a clear picture of who the character is.

This story was supposed to be about the girl developing superpowers so let’s move on to that. If wanting to travel is a theme here and maybe even a conflict for the protagonist it would probably be fitting to give her a power that has something to do with that - something like flight or teleportation. Flight and a farm just make me think of Superman so let’s not do that and take teleportation instead.

What would a young girl with wanderlust and a newfound ability to teleport do? It’d be a good idea to take a closer look at her morals and personality before deciding that.

There’re a few character traits we can derive from what we already know:

The girl is curious about the world and people different from her

She picks her friends based on personality, not who it’s cool to be friends with

For that same reason, she’s probably pretty sure of her own values

She’s responsible or respectful enough of her parents to stay in her hometown despite wanting to travel

Or if you want to cook it down to just keywords:

Curious

Open-minded

Independent

Responsible

Self-restrained

Apart from the self-restraint these are all typically seen as positive traits, but rather than coming up with a similar list of negative traits to round the character off, let’s think about what the downsides can be to the traits we already decided on.

First, there’s definitely a conflict between her curiosity and her self-restraint. That’s really good; internal conflicts like that are what makes a character engaging because we can’t quite be sure which trait they’ll favor when they’re in a situation where they can only follow one of them.

Curiosity and open-mindedness in combination might make her a bit gullible. If someone told her things about the world that were false or skewed by the teller’s own agenda she might not question it.

Her independence could easily make her set in her ways, stubborn or unlikely to ask for help. She probably has strong beliefs about what’s right and wrong but since she’s so young she probably adopted those beliefs from her parents.

If she adopted her values from someone else, the kind of responsibility she expects of herself might not be right for her. This plays into the internal conflict between curiosity and restraint.

It looks like the big question this character will have to deal with is: Should she be as her parents want her to be or should she leave and find her own path?

It’s interesting to give someone like her the power to teleport because teleportation is basically ultimate freedom. She can go wherever she wants whenever she wants. Before getting her powers it’d be easy to come up with reasons why she couldn’t leave, but once she has them what’s the excuse when she can go to the other side of the world in a second? She’ll be forced to think about that conflict she’s struggling with.

I don’t know what kind of adventures our teleporting country girl will get herself into, but with a bit of brainstorming and some detective work, we already have a good foundation for both a protagonist and the beginning of a plot.

If you want to try to develop characters this way just keep building on top of what you already know. There’s plenty we don’t know about this girl yet - what does she do with her free time? What is she really good and really bad at? What does she tell people she wants to do with her life and is it the same as what she really wants? Don’t focus too much on the really flat questions (how tall is she, what’s her favorite food, what clothes does she wear) the answers to those often come up naturally as you get to know the character’s personality, and if they don’t you can figure them out as they become relevant.

If you get stuck it might be time to start thinking about the other characters in the story. In this example we already know the stewardess, the girl’s parents and some of the kids and teachers from the girl’s school will have some importance. Flesh them out and maybe it’ll reveal something new about the protagonist. You can go through the exact same steps as we just did with her, except now you already have a setting and a vague idea of where you’re going.

#number one in what will possibly be a series #because damn I just really like talking about character development #character development #writing

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avalon987 · 4 years ago

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The bracelet

part of the collection SUPER SEEDS

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THE BRACELET

Angola

1977

The cloud shapes mirrored the undulations of the waves formed by the grasslands.

By the plane window, Christian contemplated the landscape.

He could see the elephants carving a path through the savannah. The zebras galloped feverishly across the land because they were probably chased down by a pack of lions but it was hard to see the scenes well due to the altitude the plane was flying.

Christian was part of a delegation of South African diplomats who were trying to broker a peace agreement between the different parties involved in the civil war ravaging the country.

The occupants of the plane were quite nervous because they did not know what to expect once they landed.

Suddenly, the plane started to shake in a strange manner.

“What’s going on, it does not seem normal.” said Christian anxiously.

“It’s probably nothing” answered the man next to him.

But less than thirty seconds after, a thick smoke spread inside the cabin. There were ten people on board, including the pilot who made an announcement.

“Guys, the plane is experiencing an engine failure, we will have to make an emergency landing. Put you in the position I showed you before take off and brace yourself, it’s going to be rough!” said the pilot.

Christian could not believe it.

He thought about his wife and children.

Was it the end of his life?

The plane banked to the left rapidly. The pilot tried to maintain the balance but the ground was approaching at a fast pace. We could see the top of the trees.

A loud noise followed, the plane was upside down. The debris were flying everywhere inside the cabin.

For a couple of minutes, Christian passed out.

In his mind, a powerful light illuminated and surrounded his body.

A vision appeared.

A woman with clothes made of human bones was facing him, and she started to speak.

“I am the queen of the land of the dead. Are you ready to pass the test?” said the woman.

“What test? Asked Christian.

“It’s a test to know the weight of your soul.” said the woman.

“The weight of my soul? What do you mean?” asked Christian.

“I will put the bracelet of ages on your right wrist.

If you sink into the ground, it means that you are ready to be welcomed in the land of the dead, but if the bracelet disappears, you still have some work to do on earth. Your soul needs to complete its cycle to complete the purpose that the creator of all lives assigned to you when you were born.” said the woman.

Christian woke up from this vision.

He was fazed. He was upside down strapped into his chair, he could feel blood on his cheeks.

By miracle, nobody died when the plane crashed on the trees.

“It’s everybody OK?” shouted the pilot.

One by one, the passengers answered.

Some of them had broken legs but everybody managed to get out of the plane.

“Do you have an idea where we are?” asked Christian to the pilot.

“We were ten minutes away from a landing point.

I think if we go east following the sun we might be able to find a village” said the pilot.

He found the survival kit with the medical supplies to tend to the different wounds but some people needed more serious medical interventions.

The group decided to split in two.

Those who could walk would go to find help, and those who were more impaired would stay there.

They divided the food and water that was in the plane. They also had two revolvers. After all, they were in the middle of the wilderness.

The heat was excruciating. They could hear the roars of the Lions nearby.

Christian, the pilot and another man departed to find help. They walked in this arid land with difficulty breathing. Every two hours they tried to find a shaded area to rest. They walked the whole day.

They thought that they would never find a living soul.

Nearly before sunset, they found a village of shepherds. The pilot who was from the southern part of Angola spoke with them and explained to them the situation. By sheer luck, one of them had a motorcycle. Christian went with him to the closest town.

There was a very rudimentary dispensary.

Christian met Nadiara. She was the doctor.

She could speak perfectly in English. She had been trained in England.

Christian noticed that she had a beautiful Bracelet on her wrist. He explained to her what happened.

Nadiara told him she could help.

They picked up the pilot who stayed with the shepherds with the dispensary’s car, and they went to look for the crash site.

The pilot had an amazing photographic memory.

After roaming the area, they eventually found the wreckage.

Christian explained to Nadiara the purpose of his presence in this region, and that he was an envoy of the South African government who was trying to find a path to bring peace in Angola.

Nadiara could see that Christian was sincere even though he was a white South African.

She explained the atrocities which occurred in the town and the area recently. People were starving.

In some villages, hundred of bodies were left to rot in the sun.

This war was a terrible business.

Finally, the delegation of diplomats was evacuated to the capital Luanda.

After a quick recovery, Christian tried to restart the peace talks but the negotiations failed.

The war raged for years.

In South Africa, Christian continued to try to convince his bosses in Pretoria that it was in the country’s interest to find a solution to end this regional conflict.

Some nights, Christian had nightmares about the crash.

The queen of the land of the dead appeared to him.

“Put the bracelet on!.” said the queen.

He started to sink into the ground.

“Yes, you are ready, come to me my child!” said the queen laughing.

Christian woke up suddenly sweating profusely.

“You had a bad dream again. You are not the same since the accident. Maybe you should see someone.” said Christian’s wife.

“It’s OK, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.” said Christian

After four years, out of the blue, Christian received a letter in his office from Nadiara explaining that she needed his help because the war deteriorated in her region, and some warlords targeted the children in the villages to force the rebels to do something.

Many children had been displaced and put in camps because many of them became orphans.

They needed to be placed somewhere out the country to protect them.

Christian answered her that he would try to speak his superiors about it.

Unfortunately, despite all his efforts nothing moved for months.

Christian felt obligated to do all he could.

He harassed his bosses.

Finally, it was agreed that around two hundred children would be granted asylum if he could find families that would welcome them.

It took three months to do it, not only in South Africa but also in the United kingdom, United states of America.

But when he thought that the hardest was done, the operation was cancelled because it was deemed too dangerous due to the situation in Angola.

Christian was utterly depressed.

But after one week of ruminating to know what to do, Christian decided that he would do whatever it takes to achieve his mission.

He asked all his friends to donate money.

When his bosses heard that he wanted to go ahead regardless of the orders, they threatened to sack him. His wife supported him but she was worried about what could happen.

Christian went to Washington to give conferences about the situation in Angola, and he also helped to raise funds for the operation.

When they saw that Christian did not stop his efforts to rescue the children, he was fired from his job.

It did not deter him, with the money he had raised and the connections he had made during his career, Christian moved with his family to Washington.

He thought that would help him achieve his mission .

The atrocities escalated in Angola. The goal was to save at least one hundred children.

Meeting after meeting with high level officials and the CIA, Christian managed to convince them to do something.

An agreement was reached between the United States of America, the United Kingdom and south Africa to welcome two hundreds children refugees.

Christian set up a non profit organization to coordinate the efforts on the ground to achieve it.

When Christian tried to contact Nadiara to tell her the good news, he learned that she had been killed in her dispensary.

He was totally devastated, but in a way it gave him more motivation and urgency to help the children.

Christian went to Angola the following month.

For his safety, it had been decided to say that his organization was only there to distribute food to solve the famine crisis which plagued the region where he was supposed to find the orphans.

He had to go to the villages, refugee camps and orphanages.

But rapidly the word of mouth attracted more attention.

A squadron of mercenaries sent by a warlord tracked him down.

Four vehicles arrived, the men fired random shots to the building where Christian was.

He was always accompanied by three security guards who exchanged shots with the assailants. One of the guard was shot dead.

The two other guard fought valiantly, and the assailants retreated. It was more about intimidation.

Christian felt incredibly guilty because someone died as the result of his actions.

For a period, he wanted to abort the mission, but he decided that there was a reason if escaped death for a second time. He had to carry on.

He went with the two remaining guards to the orphanages and refugee camps to find the children.

Christian chartered a plane. But at the last minute, the plane was denied entry to go to South Africa due to recent developments.

Christian contacted his friends in the media world to explain the situation. The pressure mounted, and finally South Africa allowed the plane to take off.

It was only the beginning of the process because each adoption was a battle, it took two years to complete it.

Christian had to continually travel between South Africa, the United States of America and the United Kingdom on behalf of his organization.

His marriage suffered because he was rarely home. His wife accused him of loving more other children than his own.

Christian was constantly stressed, and to alleviate the burden, he started to drink more.

His health deteriorated.

He had moments of profound doubts.

He knew in his heart that it was the right thing to do but the cost was greater than he could have ever anticipated.

Finally, his wife decided to divorce him, between the arguments and his constant drunkenness, she had enough.

But despite these setbacks, he carried on with his non profit organization, and they saved more children.

During the divorce proceedings, one of his associates in the non profit organization embezzled money.

Christian was investigated by the police but was cleared of any wrongdoings.

This episode scared him, he had more difficulty trusting people.

From then on, Christian lived a solitary existence.

Thirty years went by after having rescued the children in Angola, when Christian received a phone call from movie producer who wanted to do a documentary about his life and the role he played to put the children in safety.

The producer told him that Nadiara’s daughter who miraculously survived the civil war wanted to see him.

The three of them met in Washington where Christian was still living. She thanked him for what he did for the children during the war.

She gave him a bracelet that her mother used to attract good luck.

When he looked at it, Christian started to cry.

The movie producer told him that he wanted to gather in amphitheatre many of the persons and their families he had contributed to save.

One month later, more than three hundred people waited for him to arrive.

When he entered in the amphitheatre, they started a standing ovation. He had not seen most them for thirty years.

Coming from a country which experienced apartheid, he was still moved when he saw that the children he contributed to save from the horrors of war married people from other races.

Some people flew from all over the world to thank him.

He touched the bracelet that Nadiara’s daughter gave him, and he shed tears of joy when looked at the faces around him.

“Now, Queen of the land of the dead, I am ready.” said Christian to himself smiling.

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alexsmitposts · 5 years ago

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US and coronavirus: three awkward questions Let's ask the question: what in reality can stand behind the words of the us under Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Philip Ricker, who directly declared our country to be conducting a campaign to "spread disinformation" about the fact that the United States is involved in the emergence and spread of the 2019-nCoV infection in China? There is no doubt that this demarche is, first of all, an "anti-Russian throw-in", as it was quite rightly assessed by the Russian foreign Ministry. But, at the same time, in accordance with the well-known Russian proverb, what is happening is extremely similar to the situation with the spontaneous combustion of a headdress on someone who has just sincerely felt through other people's pockets. There was a lot of excitement in Washington about this. Why would that be? I'm not going to press any charges. As well as saying anything to try to convince you that the outbreak of the coronavirus that threatens the planet today is directly related to the deliberate and deliberate actions of certain organizations, structures or individuals from the United States of America. I just suggest that you look for answers to just three blocks of questions set out below. What conclusions you come to in the end is your own business. However, we all clearly have something to think about. 1. Why so many "coincidences"? I will make a reservation at once – in any story that affects the interests of more than a couple of individuals and assumes financial consequences for an amount exceeding a hundred or two rubles (or dollars), I consider it categorically unacceptable to operate with categories like "coincidence" and "accident". This doesn't happen. And when" at stake " are the lives of millions and economic interests, numbering in the tens and hundreds of billions-even more so. In a situation with a coronavirus, too many details are not what they say, but just a shout that there is no "coincidence" to talk about here. First of all, it is about the simplest parameters: place and time. The epidemic" for some reason " breaks out on the eve of the Chinese new year, which more than 100% guarantees the maximum defeat of people with the virus and its maximum spread due to the seasonal migration flows inherent in China. Usually, during this period (according to official Chinese data), rail transport transports a little less than half a billion passengers around the country, and about 100 thousand of its residents travel by plane. If Beijing had shown a little less speed, determination and concentration in imposing quarantine and restricting freedom of movement, the whole of China would have been covered by a severe epidemic today. And this leads us to the question of the place where everything, in fact, began. If we assume that someone chose the ideal point of attack, then it should have been Wuhan. At least due to the fact that there is a us diplomatic mission there, which allows American citizens who have immunity and, let's say, a certain official affiliation to be in the city. But it's not just that. The largest transport hub in China, which has an equal distance from Shanghai and Hong Kong (about 800 km) - these are the cities whose defeat by the disease would be extremely unprofitable for the United States. In the first of them, there are too many representative offices of American corporations that employ US citizens – people who are not the lowest level in management. In the second, mass riots have been going on for a long time, and the Americans have already invested a lot of effort, money, and resources in fomenting them. But the production facilities of the Apple group, the company that Donald trump so wanted to "bring home", and which "rested" on this issue longer and more persistently than others, are almost half closer to the epicenter of the disease. And today, as you might guess, they are completely stopped. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, the world may soon be left without new iPhones at all... Whatever it was, the emergence of the 2019-nCoV epidemic occurred precisely at the moment of the tipping phase of the" trade war " between Washington and Beijing, almost coinciding with the signing of the first phase of the deal, which can become either a short-term truce, after which the fight will continue with a poorly predictable result, or... The beginning of the forced surrender of the Chinese comrades, who at all times preferred to sacrifice little in order not to lose everything. That's what it looks like. "War on two fronts" – and with American duties, and with the coronavirus, China may survive. The only question is-at what cost? The current situation clearly gives the United States a clear advantage in all further disputes and conflicts with the PRC. In any case, for the near future. 2. Why is 2019-nCoV so similar to an artificial ethnovirus? Conspiracy, you say? There are no diseases that can selectively affect representatives of only one nation, race, or ethnic group, there has never been, and cannot exist in principle?! Well, what about a lot of serious documentary evidence that work on this topic was started at least several decades ago and continues to this day? At the end of the 70s of the last century, South Africa had a top-secret project "Coast", the purpose of which was to create a bioweapon capable of hitting only people with black skin. And that's when (also a coincidence?) The USSR sent proposals to the UN to conclude a new international agreement prohibiting the development and creation of new types of WMD, including "ethnic weapons". Soviet military intelligence was working on its conscience... Theoretically, there are methods of genetic engineering, the same RNA interference, the creators of which received very real "Nobel prizes" for their development, allowing you to develop viruses that will infect and kill very clearly and differentiated. Yes, in the scientific world, this idea is considered extremely difficult to implement in practice, but if you take into account the huge amounts that are invested in military development by the Pentagon, we can not say that it is completely impossible. I really want to get an answer to the question: why do almost all the most deadly infectious diseases on the planet recently have their epicenter, the vast majority of them, in South-East Asia? "SARS", "swine" and "avian" flus, now 2019-nCoV... Let's write off everything out of habit as a "combination of circumstances" or think: is someone trying to find an "absolute weapon" against a particular ethnic group by trial and error? Today, scientists from all over the world are vying to claim a lot of "oddities" regarding the disease that struck China. An increasing number of them are beginning to assume its completely artificial nature. This conclusion was reached, for example, by scientists from the Delhi state University. Jawaharlal Nehru, who stated that 2019-nCoV is a tricky "build" of two different types of coronavirus that are characteristic of animals, with the addition of some "inserts" that are most similar in nature... AIDS! The fact that this virus is almost 80% similar to "SARS" or SARS, being its "augmented" and "improved" version, has already been fully proven. So: that SARS in any case could not occur naturally (for example, as a result of mutation), God knows when wrote such publications as the Lancet, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. It is not "yellow journalism", ladies and gentlemen! It is, accordingly, one of the most authoritative medical journals in the United States, as well as the official print bodies of the American Association for the advancement of science and the medical society of Massachusetts. To the credit of Russian scientists, it is worth adding that the clearly artificial origin of "atypical pneumonia" was stated in 2003 by a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, geneticist Sergey Kolesnikov. He, by the way, pointed out that it affects mainly Asians, representatives of the Mongoloid race. And, by the way, what about our statistics on deaths from 2019-nCoV? As of the time of writing this article – out of 2,400-plus deaths-only 20 outside of China (and not the fact that they also died not from there). As far as we know, the so-called "input cell" of the coronavirus, called ACE2 by geneticists, has already been isolated. According to their statement, this is usually only available for Asian men. Not an "ethnic virus"? 3. Why does the US behave as if it knew and prepared? We must pay tribute to the Americans-from the very beginning of the epidemic, they act extremely cynically, rejecting even the usual hypocrisy for themselves. The Consulate General in Wuhan was evacuated by them super-operatively. At the same time, a couple of days later, a statement by Chinese foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying was published on the website of the Xinhua news Agency, describing the actions of the United States as "more than untimely, ungenerous and extremely unfavorable". It was, it seems,about the ban on travel to China and the hysteria about the coronavirus, which is being fanned by the American media. But is it only about them? Exercises to conduct large-scale events in conditions of biological contamination are conducted by the Pentagon on a large scale and very regularly. The last time such maneuvers, which involved not only the military, but also representatives of many other state services and divisions, were held there just last year. One of the legends was "ensuring the transportation of biological material that is highly dangerous", and consisted of loading and unloading super-protected containers from aircraft... samples of the virus? Infected people? Such details were not shared with the media. By the way, what is interesting is that the us military and the South Korean army are working out the "joint response to biological threats of natural or artificial origin" with special punctuality. Asia Again... This has been happening every year since 2011. A lot has already been written about us biological laboratories, which have well-founded suspicions about their participation in the development of biological weapons. And yet... Hundreds of such highly classified objects exist almost all over the world. However, for some reason, a particularly large number of them are located along the borders of Russia and China. The development of "selective" bioweapons requires extreme accuracy and consideration of all local parameters without exception. These are not ordinary bombs. Now let's talk about another interesting American organization, which would be an unforgivable mistake not to recall in the context we are discussing. This is about the Johns Hopkins health safety Center. Employees of this Center regularly conduct extremely interesting simulations, which are, in fact, something like command and staff exercises, only in case of a global epidemic, not a war. The first such simulation, codenamed "Dark winter", took place in the summer of 2001. The last, "Event 201" (the fourth in a row) - in November 2019. In both cases, the "legend" was a massive pandemic. In the "Event 201" process, the coronavirus was clearly indicated as the cause. Both "staff games" directly preceded the time of outbreaks in China – in the first case, SARS, in the second – 2019-nCoV. What explanation do you have for this? Well, for the "snack" - a few more not so large-scale, but more than eloquent details. Wuhan became the first place in China where a real 5G network was launched. the US is absolutely ready to prevent the "penetration into the world" of this technology in the Chinese version at any cost. As it became known, Washington refused to evacuate its citizens from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where 330 Americans are located, despite the willingness of the Japanese authorities to let them go home. At the same time, 14 US citizens – passengers of the liner, whose presence of 2019-nCoV was confirmed, were removed from its Board and allegedly returned to their homeland with placement in the strictest isolation. More than a strange logic of action, don't you think? By the way, the Pentagon has been very active in all matters related to the coronavirus from the very beginning. Quiet work and business activity-as if he knows exactly what he is dealing with. In conclusion, I would like to remind you that the United States of America has already carried out at least once, almost completely, the genocide of an entire huge ethnic group, using, in fact, "selective bioweapons". Yes, Yes-we are talking about the indigenous population of the United States, North American Indians, which the ancestors of those who today hold senior positions in the White House, and the state Department, the CIA and the Pentagon, sitting in Congress, quite calmly poisoned with smallpox-infected blankets. In Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, this is called "precedent"...

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kvjff-blog · 5 years ago

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Joshua Ojonuba

Professor Robert Lunday

ENGL 1301

10 October 2019

The Beautiful Game

Two sprained wrists, at least four ankle sprains, couple of cuts and at least a dozen splinters: those are just some of my injuries over the last six or so years of playing competitive soccer. My injuries are on the minor side as many others suffer worse injuries that often require surgeries and months of physical therapy. Professional soccer is played by approximately two hundred and fifty million players in over two hundred countries and dependencies all around the world, making it the world's most popular sport. This does not include the millions more who play for fun, in semi pro clubs, and in amateur leagues all across the world. It would be almost impossible to imagine the amount of injuries they sustain as well as the extent of them. Seeing as the consequences and pain are so substantial, the question as to why so many people like myself play and get influenced by this sport on such a grand scale. The answer is: I don’t know, I don’t think anyone know to be fair. We all just play no matter the cost; the game is all. I remember reading an article about Ada Hegerberg, who is regarded as one of if not the best women’s soccer players alive. In the article she was asked why she even played since she had opted to sit out the women’s world cup for her country. She responded, "Playing football can be damn harsh, but every day is a fight.” reading this the first time I thought to myself, if it is as harsh as you say why not just quit playing? As I look back now I am able reflect on her statement, and I realize that we are similar. Never once while I played did I think about quitting, through the many injuries, through the long draining practices, through the failures and let downs, I fought through. Like Ada and many others I kept on going necessarily because I wanted to but more so because I had to; quitting never seemed like an option as least not one that crossed my mind.

Soccer has been a major factor in my life probably ever since I was a little baby especially after experiencing the major soccer atmosphere in Lagos, Nigeria, where I was born and raised. In fact my earliest memory of the sport was maybe in 2006 during the world cup. It was the qualification stages against Angola, and Nigeria desperately needed a win to qualify for the most famous and prestigious tournament in all of sporting history. When I was a kid in Nigeria, power outages were extremely common as Nigeria was and still is going through a power supply crisis. So it came as no surprise when suddenly in the middle of the game there was a power outage. Because this was an everyday occurrence we had a phase for it - “down nepa”, and when the lights would come back up we would yell “up nepa”. I had never witnessed a sense of community like I saw that day. As soon as the power went out, we immediately rushed out to the industrial generator out back like we always do. After about five minutes of tussling with the generator, struggling, trying to get it started, there was finally a spark visible through the window of the back room. By this time there had been a crowd formed behind us, seemingly the entire neighborhood was behind us cheering at the sight of light. Apparently we were the only household with enough gasoline to power their generator. “Ta lo fe wo ball”, my aunt said in her native Yoruba; she was asking who was ready to watch some ball or football. Which brings me to the question of why it’s called soccer in the U.S.A instead of football like it is everywhere else in the world, it’s like Americans always have to one up everyone else; anyway, I digress. Seeing as we were the only household with power and our TV was definitely not big enough for the magnitude of people that had now gathered expecting a game of soccer. Luckily one of the families in the neighborhood had a flat screen which in retrospect could not have been very big but it was definitely bigger than anything we or anyone within maybe the next three miles did. With our always reliable generator and the newly found TV, we were all ready to witness Nigeria do us proud and make it to the world cup for another year in a row. Even though the rest of the game was boring and disappointing with Nigeria losing one to zero to an admittedly much stronger and experienced squad in Angola, the moment of community and coming together is what makes it a memorable. Year after year, game after game, support poured in from all over the neighborhood. Nigeria vs. Ghana, Nigeria vs. Argentina, Nigeria vs. Brazil, Nigeria vs. Mexico, every lost seemly just as enjoyable as a win. These are the memories that I’ll keep forever, the memories of love, joy, peace and innocence during a time that would otherwise be considered bad or at the very least not ideal.

There is a famous quote that I along with numerous other soccer fans have heard that goes “you play soccer anywhere, you play soccer everywhere” the phase actually says “football” but for the purposes of this we’ll say soccer. The game is simple, right? Score and do not get scored on. The Truth is: yes, it is simple; but the difficult part is what’s left unsaid, the little things that make the game just so beautiful. The buildup, the passionate moments, the joy, the rivalries; these are all things that every fan and player all across the world can relate to. They have been numerous stories of soccer saving communities and bringing people together because as they say no matter how you’re raised or what culture you subscribe to, just like people are people soccer is soccer always. I remember reading a story about one of my favorite soccer players ever, Didier Drogba; unfortunately people from Africa are used to hearing stories of and even experiencing war or civil unrest. Even with him being from the Ivory Coast, where they had gone through extreme civil unrest, he was always representing his home country. "Come to Abidjan, Alex. You will not be disappointed.” he was quoted as saying to a reporter asking about his native country. Civil war had been happening for five years in the ivory coast when, right after leading his nation to the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany back in October 2005, he picked up a microphone given to him by a reporter in the dressing room and, surrounded by his team-mates, he fell to his knees live on national television. He begged both fighting sides to lay down their guns and, within a week, his wish had been granted. "It was just something I did instinctively," he said. "All the players hated what was happening to our country and reaching the World Cup was the perfect emotional wave on which to ride." Didier Drogba proved exactly what I have been saying about the power and passion soccer brings into the lives of its fans. In front of everyone in the world and his native people, he got on his knees and pleaded for peace. I can’t think of any other sports that could possibly do that, five years of deadly civil war, ended just like that. As a fellow African watching this unfold on TV, this further inspired me as well as other young African kids to play.

In 2011, when I moved to Houston, I went from merely watching soccer being played to actually playing it. Besides the occasional after school sessions of just the kicking of a peeled over leathery ball, I was never able to fully experience the true essence of the sport. Because not only was it hard to find a suitable environment to play but finding a ball was also almost always impossible as well. Going into middle school I knew that although we did not have a proper team I wanted to be a soccer player, if not professional (I knew at this point I surely could not be a professional player) then at least I could be competitive within the local club or school scene. After I somehow survived three long years in middle school without a sport to play it was finally high school and I would get a chance to play. Quotes like Tony Adams’ - “Play for the name on the front of the shirt, and they will remember the name on the back” played back over and over in my head. At the time it almost seemed like making my high school JV b team was at all comparable to the years of years he spent on top of the sport.

Who is Tony Adams, you may ask? Well my dear, dear reader, Tony Adams is without a doubt the best captain arsenal football club has ever seen in all its 133 years of being a top tier team. He was not only one of the reasons I became an arsenal fan but he influenced almost every part of my soccer career. I found myself studying almost everything he did in his prime, looking to emulate even the slightest bit of success from his greatness. I guess looking back now I think it’s clear to me that I desperately wanted to become someone better than I was. Someone more confident, more secure, maybe even just someone different than I was. I essentially tried copying every aspect of his playing style, even incorporating his celebrations as well. If I’m being honest I still sometimes have that feeling of wanting to be someone else other than myself, although not as much as I used to. Honestly I believe playing competitively really forced me to legitimately discover who I was and be comfortable as myself. That being one of many reasons why I would recommend everyone participating in some kind of sport or physical activity. Not to mention the atmosphere and relationships I created along the way.

I find that there is a certain unique sense of community with soccer that just isn’t present in any other activity on the planet, or at least not one I have participated in. Now I do not claim to be some sort of super athletic multi-sport champion but I have played my share of sports and been in quite a few communities. I have played basketball and football, been involved in concert band, art club and even science club. In my humble opinion, in terms of love and support expressed in each community they all pale in comparison to this beautiful beautiful game. In fact the only good comparison that I’ve found seems to be within the jujutsu and kickboxing community which oddly enough is less violence orientated as you would think by just taking a glance in. predictably I have been enjoying the martial arts mainly for the community to the point where it has begun to be almost a religion like soccer was and still is.

Soccer or football (as it’s more commonly called in other countries) is of course a way of life in almost every country all over the world, but more than that I would say it is a religion of sorts. The U.S. is one of the very few places soccer is not hallowed so it is perfectly understandable that some people do not understand the extent of the love people have for this sport. This is the part where I would try drawing a connection to another sport, American football or baseball maybe? Truth is I would hesitate to compare soccer worldwide to any sport as a matter of fact, not just popular American sports. In my experience American football and baseball defiantly have an extremely loyal fan base, but the fans are naturally fickle at times even sometimes changing and switching over between teams. However soccer fans, real soccer fans at least, are often born into their respective team and stay loyal all the way till death. Just like any other religion switching over to another religion (or club in this case) is highly frowned upon and potentially even dangerous. Like most all religions throughout the history mankind, intense rivalries are an ever present theme usually dependent on proximity to the rival club as well as any minor disagreements that may or may not have occur somewhere buried deep in the history of both clubs. As an arsenal fan, of course I despise our rival club, the Tottenham Hotspur, although I will admitted that there are a couple of Tottenham players I enjoy watching and sometimes even root for. I think the first time I ever thought of soccer as like a religion was when I randomly ran into a you tube video comparing Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, two players widely considered two of the best to ever play. The video creator spends the beginning portion of the video comparing both their stats for the past 12 years as well as their respected following. He then goes on for what seemed like eternity talking about sportsmanship and how well they have both individually represented the sport. Finally, at the end of the video, he comes up with the conclusion that although the two players are absolutely the best to ever lace up their boots and step onto the field, Messi is the greatest. In his words, “Messi in all his glory is the God of football, with Ronaldo sharing his glory as Jesus or Muhammad”. This seems to have stuck in my subconscious, only revealing itself now after a couple of years after going mainly unnoticed by me at the time.

Before I started writing this memoir I would have never thought that I had this much to say about soccer especially since it is not as much a part of my life as it’s been in the past. I guess in a lot of ways I have changed and evolve into what I would consider a better, more self-actualized version of myself. With that being said, I think it makes sense that soccer isn’t as important to me; it has served its purpose in my life and I’m sure it will continue to. I am forever grateful to this beautiful game and all the wonderful memoirs it brought into my life.

Afterword.

The honest truth is at the beginning of this memoir I was not really going to try as hard as I maybe could have. I was procrastinating, only waiting till the last minute to finish each installments that was due. I think I was thinking about it just as a class project I just had to get done instead of an interest project. After the turning in the first installment of this memoir and getting back the feedback, I began using my free time to write and combine the texts. It is amazing how much I've retained over my many years of playing and watching soccer. it was really interesting bringing back the memories and ideas I had lodged somewhere in my mind. I think by actually caring about this project and the subject, I was able to not only dive deeper but also articulate better.

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on-the-wings-of-hope-prose-en · 4 years ago

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Immunity

Hope dies last.

But how could have Gale hoped for anything right now, when the last hopes of the dying alive humanity were rapidly crumbling into thousands of tiny shards, precisely like the fragments of a broken mirror, in which it, humanity, in a moment of brief spiritual insight, was able to behold itself for a brief moment of its history?

Hope for salvation. Hope for earthly life. For the life after death. Is there one?

Today, by some kind of a miracle, Gale finally managed to get inside into one of the overcrowded churches, where divine services had been held without stopping for several months already. All over the planet, the temples of the three world religions have been crowded for a long time, during both day and night. Now, when the so glorified by earthly materialists science could not answer the challenge thrown by natural forces, people tried to find it in their appeals to the Gods.

Now, standing at a distance from the altar of the temple in the sea of other people pressing down on him from all sides and towering over them like a two-meter giant, Gale observed. He needed to understand what was driving these people now when they had almost no hope left to bear. What made them appeal to those of whose very existence this earthly life had made them doubt time and again?

Faith in the possibility of salvation? Fear of devouring nothingness that is opening its greedy mouth? Love for everything they have created – including the very nature that has become so deadly?

As for Gale, until the events of recent years, he believed only in science. It has been his holy grail for many years of life. It, with due diligence, observation, and long experimentation, was able to grant humanity an answer to any question and challenge... if you do not take into account the existence of a Higher Mind.

A sea of human faces. An ocean of emotions. A kaleidoscope of feelings. Raised either in prayers or silent threats, lowered in despair hands. Would anyone see them, would anybody hear this voiceless speech? Gale possessed no answer to this question that had been tormenting him for so long. The day of the answer has not come yet.

* * *

“Mining of antibodies. Participate in a volunteer program to test new vaccines. Earn pharmacoins. Give your answer to novovirus!”

A huge holographic billboard floated around the corner of the skyscraper right in front of Gale’s eyes as soon as he stepped out into the central square. Gale grimaced in disgust. The endless attempts to create vaccines will all die in vain. It’s never possible to accurately predict the shape of something that changes every moment of its existence.

“Virt-club “Pleasure”. There is no fear of death. There is life’s pleasure!”

A three-dimensional rainbow-colored hologram of a girl with her legs spread wide enlightened with neon-laser beams a couple of dozen meters away from Gale, sensitively and quickly reacting to the approach of a lone wanderer. No, he definitely doesn’t need to go that way. When the whole world is going straight to hell in front of your very eyes, there is no more time for pleasure.

“Life after death. Cryostasis. The latest military development. Call us right away!”

As if a living hologram of a man in a blue and seemingly frozen space suit waves his hand in greeting, inviting Gale to come to the next “saviors”. No. There is no escape from novovirus, there is no salvation. All the scientific researches of the best bio-geneticists on the entire planet were unshakable proof of this.

Novovirus. This pestilence had many other names, too. A new plague. Black Death. Reaper. Punisher. Wrath of God. Doom.

Being fueled by fear, the human fantasy gave birth to more and more associations. And more and more cases of infection and either mass death or mutation of people only fueled this hysteria of universal fear. What can the smallest virus do against a man who thinks of himself as the master of nature? Anything. Especially if there cannot be an antidote for this kind of poison.

The government records to which Gale had been granted access after he started working on the “Salvation” project contained a wealth of data on the primary localized cases of infection and their associated symptoms. South America. North Africa. Southeast Asia. First, second, third wave. Initially, the disease was considered to be a new type of malaria and didn’t gain significant attention – until the moment of a rapid surge in the number of infections across the entire planet. And all of a sudden the concept of a “mosquito bite” started looking not so harmless at all.

Along with the development and evolution of the virus, the symptoms also changed. Fever, chills, nausea, and vomiting were only the initial stages of the virus-induced disease. Then the infected ones started to cough up their bodily innards along with the blood. Then came the nerve paralysis and cardiac arrest. Genetic mutations followed their steps. And after them, human madness knocked on the door of omnipotent science.

The virus mutated rapidly, changing its protein-molecular structure within a matter of days. More and more cases, together with the accompanying symptoms, began to be recorded by the governments of many countries every few days. The entire civilized world was swept by a wave of panic. People stopped leaving their homes. Looting, arson, and street looting came into action. Many new “apocalypse witness” sects have raised their heads, each with her mad prophet and course. The quickly approaching collapse of social spheres threatened to plunge the entire world into chaos, hunger, and poverty.

Governments in numerous countries have made huge financial investments while trying to produce a life-saving vaccine. But what seemed so simple and routine at first to many scientific minds, stuck like an irresistible curse of a mad old woman-death on many groups of virologist scientists. The vaccines did not keep up with the virus mutations in the infected cells. And cell mutations inevitably led to the mutation of humankind. And this was so much more terrible than the casual and familiar conventional war – because in the flames and fumes of this new war for survival, the very concept of “man” was about to become the ashes of history.

Vaccines didn’t work. It was paramount to find different ways of salvation, locate it at any cost. Thus the “Salvation” project was born, uniting many of the best scientists around the globe. All they had to do was find another way to save humankind – even at the cost of the lives of thousands of infected people who had become new experimental material in underground laboratories, even at the cost of the lives of the scientists themselves. Everything for the scientific battlefront, everything for victory. And Gale desired to be on the edge of it.

* * *

Gale’s flycar roamed through the depopulated streets of the once-overcrowded metropolis, increasing and decreasing its altitude in violation of all the rules of multi-level traffic, rapidly obeying the commands of the machine’s artificial intelligence, soaring over the arches and billboards of skyscrapers, and diving into high-speed underground tunnels. But no people were willing to issue him fines.

Simon’s words were still ringing in his head. Uninfected one! One among hundreds of millions, one who somehow miraculously passed through the gates of this earthly hell and remained unharmed. A soldier with no signs of novovirus mutation delivered to the “Salvation” scientific laboratories.

A miracle? But science does not believe in miracles, science believes in experiments. And the relentless logic of science demanded that this experiment was to be carried out immediately for the sake of all the living. And if the life a new-found test subject it to be put at stake – it had to be done without the slightest portion of hesitation and remorse of unnecessary conscience. Agitated by the morning’s message that came to his audiovisor, Gale raced through the streets of deserted Chicago with his lips silently whispering prayers to the scientific gods only he knew.

* * *

“Good afternoon, Professor Gale. Simon is in his labs, waiting for you early this morning.”

“Thanks, Miranda. I’m just in a hurry catching up with him.”

“Looks like you have something really interesting planned for today,” their young assistant winked on her way, and after a couple of seconds disappeared around the corner of the sterile white corridor inside the underground laboratory complex.

Gale literally flew through the massive glass doors of the laboratory, almost breaking his forehead – all their outdated automatic opening system based on solar cells seemed to be too slow for him at that instant.

“Where’s the uninfected test subject? I want to examine him!” he shouted from the doorway.

“My, oh my, it must be no less than Professor Gale Newman himself, safe and sound! Did you pour a whole pack of nitro-coffee pills into yourself before the trip, so as not to fall asleep at the wheel at such an early hour?” Dr. Simon grinned through his mustache as he caught a glimpse of a colleague who had flown into the lab, while deftly adjusting his glasses with a free hand. “And Miranda and I were just arguing about whether you’d make it to us before sunrise, or whether you’d be completely put asleep by thoughts of a Higher Intelligence. Did mysticism get the better of you due to old age?” Simon said in a friendly tone, his fingers still working silently on the holo-terminal.

“Have you got a file on him?”

“The NSA transferred a piece of data this morning. Corporal James Cassle, Marine Corps. Participated in the rescue of civilians in Brazil and Venezuela after the outbreak of the pandemic wars. He was seriously injured by marauding gangs of mutated infected ones during the last operation. Received the Purple Heart Medal for battle wounds. He was taken out of the operation area and hospitalized in Seattle. This is all we know so far.”

“And the screening, how did he manage to pass the infection screening?!”

“After being extradited by helicopter from the infection zone, he was examined at a Seattle clinic. They confirmed this fact. The NSA reported that the local medics there literally dropped their jaws opened when no sign of novovirus was located inside his bodily cells, even in a latent state. You know – by today’s standards, this is something akin to a miracle.

“Have you confirmed the diagnosis with our equipment?”

“Not yet, only the general survey was conducted. He was delivered here just a couple of hours ago.”

“Simon, do you even realize that this may be our only chance to…”

“I clearly understand everything, Gale. Go ahead, he’s in the Alpha Bay right now,” Simon said softly, patting Gale on the shoulder, “Authorization code for today: Miracle”.

* * *

“Disinfection of the compartment is complete. Welcome back, Professor Gale Newman."

The voice of artificial intelligence, “Ada”, filled the sterile-white space of the Alpha Bay. As he walked in, Gale checked the protective functions of his tessa-suit once again and nodded in satisfaction. At the very least, this suit will protect him from potential physical aggression or infection for at least half an hour, if somewhere in the higher ranks a mistake was made with regards to the diagnosis of this notorious corporal.

“Do you have a habit of putting your guests in handcuffs these days, or is it just that I was so incredibly lucky today?" demandingly questioned James, shaking his huge cryo-cuffed fists in a show of force as soon as Gale entered the Alpha Bay, which served traditionally as the pre-interrogation cell.

A huge and strong one. Ones such as he usually tend to get away of troubles unscathed. Except for novovirus, perhaps.

“It’s for both your and ours safety, Corporal James. You are a very special case for us. But your true intentions and capabilities remain to be seen.”

“I hope it won’t take too long. My military command did not give me the order to go “awol” after the completion of my treatment.”

“You are within the borders of our responsibility here, with the NSA’s permission. Take my word for it, your commanders won’t have any questions concerning your temporary absence.”

“Is that so?” James leaned his beefy arms on the table and squinted at Gale’s face, his jaw working, “And to whom do I owe the favor of being invited to your party?”

“It’s thanks to your fighting skills, James. And your potential immunity to novovirus," Gale decided not to delay revealing his cards.

“Considering the so-called immunity – is it what your grandmother-midwife sang to you, or did a bullet suddenly fly into your forehead?” James chuckled bitterly and shook his head. “I have no immunities. None of us have. We are not the ones to decide the length of our own lives. Only the width.”

“Whether it exists or not remains to be seen. If the diagnosis made in Seattle is not confirmed – tomorrow you will be a free man.”

“Sure, great! That’s what I am going to do anyway!” James agreed abruptly, fixing Gale with his gloomy gaze. “Come on, don’t delay, your scientific majesty, I still have ordinary mortals to save from hordes of infected!”

“We were not the ones to develop this virus, James," Gale retorted, suddenly serious and edifying, “The virus is currently spontaneously mutating every day under the influence of natural forces that we don’t fully comprehend and…”

“Yeah, sure! Tell those who have been turned into animals alive about where the experiments on genetic material have led to in an attempt to create the desired vaccines! I saw with my own two eyes how the hordes of these madmen were tearing my fighters apart on the battlefield!”

“I understand your pain, Corporal, but our department has nothing to do with…”

“Be off with your lies, doc, or find a more attentive audience! What exactly do you need from me – blood plasma tests, cortical screening, a smear from the fifth point? Spit it out!”

“Nano-molecular cell screening. Observation of the reaction of cell membranes to the injection of viral molecular structures.”

“Simply put, you want to re-infect me with a new strain of novovirus and then observe with genuine scientific interest how long I will suffer in mortal agony? Am I missing anything from your plans, doc?!”

“If our tests are correct, this will be an attempt to develop a primary immunity to a new form of the virus.”

“Do I have any choice?”

“I am afraid you don’t,” Gale spread his hands, “until the test procedures are completed, you are placed at our direct disposal by your superiors.”

“More like being sold out.”

"However you desire to think of it. If you are ready, security will extradite you to the testing bay right now”.

“Then don't delay. I still have other unfortunate people to save from you and similar experimenters.”

* * *

Gale could not believe his own eyes. Over and over again, he rechecked the data coming from molecular nanoscopes, adjusted the scanning frequencies, and even rubbed his own eyes with bare hands. But the tools weren’t lying. The miracle lived on and did not intend to die out like misguided humanity.

The virus mutated, continuously rearranging its molecular structures, repeatedly trying to break down the protective cell barrier, to overcome the membranes separating it and the cells – and time and over again, as if an invisible and insurmountable wall stood in its way. These unsuccessful attempts of a newly created by nature bio-weapon to enslave and turn its next victim into a mad monster lasted about a dozen minutes. And then... then it finally came, a Miracle.

“Finish your experiments. You can see that, can’t you? I feel no fear!” James’ powerful voice ringed in the room.

He yanked at the inner levers of the terra-capsule he was trapped in with all his might, trying to free himself, but even his enormous strength wasn’t enough. And during that exact moment, the virus that had been trying to inject itself into the cells over and over again seemed to explode from the inside, rapidly disintegrating into hundreds of individual tiny molecules. It was as if a wave, invisible to both the eye or the instruments, had hit it, crushing, knocking over, and smashing to dust. The defeated micro-Goliath fell, and so did Gale’s glasses, hitting the lab floor.

“You... what… but how…”

“I am not afraid of you! Freedom!” James pounded on the inside of the terra-capsule with his powerful fists.

“Calm down... I just need to... readings…” continuing to fastly whisper something under his breath, Gale was rapidly pushing the keys of the terminal. “The reason for the disintegration of the viral structures… the impact of an unknown type of energy... the wave generated by the cell... I don’t understand!”

There is always room for wonder in genuine scientific discoveries.

“Cellular mitochondrial synthesis of unknown origin... Bipolar intracellular currents... But from where?”

“I am afraid of neither of your viruses, nor you nor anyone like you!” the violent impact from within caused a small dent in the outer surface of the terra-capsule.

“What... what did you just say?” Gale cast a confused glance at the prisoner who was struggling to get out of the capsule. “But this cannot be! If... only… A feeling! What kind of feeling did you experience a few seconds ago?!” Gale screamed in a frenzy of excitement that filled his entire being. “Please, James, repeat it!”

“Freedom! Life!” – another dent in the surface of the terra-capsule.

And the remaining viruses are scattered into molecular dust. Eternal – to eternal. Dust – to dust.

A feeling!

It was as if a new great revelation was descending on Gale at that very moment, breaking and overturning all the materialistic theories of the world, all the endless scientific skepticism and incalculable human stupidity in a single, unrestrained rush.

Spirit was prevailing over matter. The feeling was overcoming the disease. Fearlessness has become an immunity.

And this was echoed in unison by the laboratory devices that were going off scale from the waves of new-found energy.

“You are… free… to go," Gale Newman whispered helplessly, opening the capsule’s locking mechanism, “We are all free now…”

* * *

On this great starry night, Gale was once again flying in his now-adult dreams.

His spirit, freed in one fell swoop from the yoke of all materialistic prisons, was floating in this wonderful dream between seemingly absolutely real planets, moving like a great trailblazer starship on a hitherto unknown thrust. It was unspeakably calmly and joyful – as if wings had suddenly grown on his back.

And then an invisible warm wave lifted him and carried him somewhere high up. Two great figures, radiating with an otherworldly light, whose love for him surpassed any human love, tenderly took him into their enormous warm hands. They gently lifted his tiny spirit to their faces – and in that infinite moment, a wave of rapture and bliss, together with tears of joy, swallowed up his whole being…

“Blessed are those who weep, for they will be comforted…”

12.05.2021

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Vaccine News Gives Hope for Spring, if Enough People Get the Shots As coronavirus infections surged around the country in early November — and as the prospect of a long, dark winter loomed — it was not clear if any of the vaccines in development would pan out. Now, three months later, the picture is very different. Two highly effective Covid vaccines are rolling out around the country. Three others appear to be slightly less robust, but still offer strong, and in some cases complete, protection against severe disease and death. In the past week alone, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson reported that their vaccines offered good protection, including against new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus. And a new analysis from the University of Oxford suggests its vaccine, developed with AstraZeneca, has the potential to slow transmission and works especially well when second doses are delayed. After a sputtering launch, vaccination in the United States is speeding up: More than 27 million Americans have received a first dose, and more than six million have been fully vaccinated. That pace has accelerated enough that President Biden, facing criticism that his administration’s goal of giving out 100 million shots in his 100 days in office was too modest, last week revised the target upward to 150 million shots. “We’ve come a long way,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “We’re still living with deadly disease because we haven’t vaccinated enough people, but once we do, it’s going to really change the way we live and deal with this virus.” But even as there are reasons for hope in the spring and summer, many public health experts remain pessimistic about the next couple of months. Several warned that the world was nowhere near clear of a pandemic that has taken nearly 450,000 lives in the United States and 2.2 million around the globe. Vaccinations have accelerated in wealthy countries, but poorer countries are getting left behind. In the United States, wealthier, white residents are getting access to the vaccine more frequently than Black and Latino people, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Although cases in the United States have fallen in recent weeks, they are still at levels that are nearly twice as high as last summer’s peak, even as some major cities, like Chicago and New York, are opening indoor dining and other activities. The rollbacks on restrictions are also coming as contagious new variants circle the globe, some of which appear to make the vaccines less effective. Dr. Eric Topol, a clinical trials expert at Scripps Research in San Diego, recalled feeling hopeful as recently as December that the pandemic could be tamed in the United States by June, thanks to the flurry of encouraging vaccine data. But as the picture grew clearer in the past few weeks about the threat posed by new, more contagious variants of the virus spreading in other countries that have begun to turn up in the United States — particularly the B.1.1.7 variant first seen in Britain — his optimism has faded. “The variants changed everything,” Dr. Topol said. Preliminary studies have shown that the vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson appear to work against the B.1.1.7 variant, and that they are also effective — although less so — against the variant first identified in South Africa. Even in the case of that variant, Johnson & Johnson’s study showed that it still protected against severe disease. Some of the first people to be vaccinated are seeing glimpses of a path out of the pandemic. At Bloom Senior Living, a chain of senior living facilities in the Southeast and the Midwest, officials have gradually begun to reopen their doors to indoor visitors at five of their nine sites. Those decisions were driven by community infection rates, but another factor has made Bloom officials comfortable with the idea: As many as 96 percent of residents at facilities that have been visited by pharmacy vaccination teams have agreed to get a shot. “It means everything for them to be able to see their adult children and hopefully eventually their grandchildren — to feel like they’re living life again,” said Bradley Dubin, principal of the firm that owns the Bloom facilities. The effects of the U.S. vaccination campaign may be starting to show up in the data. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases among nursing residents declined in each of the first three full weeks that vaccines were given in nursing homes, according to data that nursing homes report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s not clear how much of that is because of vaccinations. In Vermont, where 85 percent of people living in long-term care facilities have agreed to get at least their first shot of a vaccine, officials said this week that they were planning to soon ease visiting restrictions at these homes, though they have not set a date for doing so. The immunization drive in nursing homes is one part of a vaccination campaign in the United States that has been gaining momentum after weeks of frustrating delays. The United States is now giving out an average of 1.3 million shots per day, and in some states, like Alaska and New Mexico, more than 10 percent of the population has received at least one of two required doses of a vaccine. State and local health authorities are setting up mass vaccination drives, such as at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and are working with the National Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Association. The campaign is also increasingly expanding into the pharmacies where many Americans are accustomed to getting vaccines. There are hopeful signs on the supply front, as well. On Tuesday, the federal government said it would allocate a minimum of 10.5 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to states for the next three weeks. At the same time, Moderna is talking to the Food and Drug Administration about filling its vials with 15 doses instead of the current 10, a change that could boost that company’s output by 50 percent. In addition, Pfizer has said it can deliver 200 million doses to the United States by May, two months ahead of schedule, because it is now counting an additional dose in its vaccine vials. Covid-19 Vaccines › Answers to Your Vaccine Questions Am I eligible for the Covid vaccine in my state? Currently more than 150 million people — almost half the population — are eligible to be vaccinated. But each state makes the final decision about who goes first. The nation’s 21 million health care workers and three million residents of long-term care facilities were the first to qualify. In mid-January, federal officials urged all states to open up eligibility to everyone 65 and older and to adults of any age with medical conditions that put them at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid-19. Adults in the general population are at the back of the line. If federal and state health officials can clear up bottlenecks in vaccine distribution, everyone 16 and older will become eligible as early as this spring or early summer. The vaccine hasn’t been approved in children, although studies are underway. It may be months before a vaccine is available for anyone under the age of 16. Go to your state health website for up-to-date information on vaccination policies in your area Is the vaccine free? You should not have to pay anything out of pocket to get the vaccine, although you will be asked for insurance information. If you don’t have insurance, you should still be given the vaccine at no charge. Congress passed legislation this spring that bars insurers from applying any cost sharing, such as a co-payment or deductible. It layered on additional protections barring pharmacies, doctors and hospitals from billing patients, including those who are uninsured. Even so, health experts do worry that patients might stumble into loopholes that leave them vulnerable to surprise bills. This could happen to those who are charged a doctor visit fee along with their vaccine, or Americans who have certain types of health coverage that do not fall under the new rules. If you get your vaccine from a doctor’s office or urgent care clinic, talk to them about potential hidden charges. To be sure you won’t get a surprise bill, the best bet is to get your vaccine at a health department vaccination site or a local pharmacy once the shots become more widely available. Can I choose which vaccine I get? How long will the vaccine last? Will I need another one next year? That is to be determined. It’s possible that Covid-19 vaccinations will become an annual event, just like the flu shot. Or it may be that the benefits of the vaccine last longer than a year. We have to wait to see how durable the protection from the vaccines is. To determine this, researchers are going to be tracking vaccinated people to look for “breakthrough cases” — those people who get sick with Covid-19 despite vaccination. That is a sign of weakening protection and will give researchers clues about how long the vaccine lasts. They will also be monitoring levels of antibodies and T cells in the blood of vaccinated people to determine whether and when a booster shot might be needed. It’s conceivable that people may need boosters every few months, once a year or only every few years. It’s just a matter of waiting for the data. Will my employer require vaccinations? Where can I find out more? Hundreds of millions of additional vaccine doses from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax could further expand supply by summer. Although the newer vaccines have not demonstrated the same high level of overall efficacy as Moderna and Pfizer did last year, and two have not yet reported results from their U.S. clinical trials, several vaccine experts have pointed to an overlooked but highly promising detail: All of the vaccines have shown excellent protection against the severe form of Covid-19 that leads to hospitalization and death. “What I want to avoid is for people to be sick to the point of hospitalization or tragically passing away from Covid-19,” said Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The news that the vaccines protect against those outcomes, he said, is “incredibly uplifting.” The challenge, though, “is getting to the point where we can actually get enough people vaccinated to start seeing those benefits at a population scale,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “My biggest concerns right now are that people are not taking the precautions that they should be taking in the short term so that we can get to that point comfortably in the months to come.” Experts have said it’s still too early to see the broad public health effects of mass immunization in the United States. But another country — Israel — offers hope. Researchers in that country, which leads the world in vaccinating its population, have reported a significant drop in infection after just one dose of Pfizer’s shot, and better than expected results after two shots, preliminary data that experts have described as encouraging. “This is what can happen if things go right,” said Dr. Iwasaki, of Yale. To attain that goal, however, the United States will need to move quickly, keeping the virus in check as highly contagious variants become more common. Health officials will also have to get better at providing access to the vaccines to those who are most vulnerable to Covid-19. Early vaccination data, which is incomplete, shows people from wealthier, white neighborhoods have been flooding vaccination appointment systems and taking an outsize share of the limited supply. The same dynamics are also playing out globally. Wealthy countries have purchased much of the worldwide supply of vaccines, meaning that many poorer nations are likely to lag in vaccinating their citizens. On Wednesday, an international program to supply Covid-19 vaccines at low or no cost to countries around the world announced plans to deliver more than 300 million doses by June 30. But that is not enough to vaccinate everyone. “I think in the rich world, we have a lot to feel good about for vaccines, but globally, it’s a different story,” said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Baral, of Johns Hopkins, cares for the residents of several homeless shelters in Toronto. Last month, he said, he vaccinated residents at a shelter for older men. “It was this incredible sense of relief — you could see it on their faces,” he said. “We’re in a different place than we were six months ago.” Source link Orbem News #Hope #news #People #shots #Spring #Vaccine

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multipleservicelisting · 4 years ago

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New Virus Variant May Be Somewhat Deadlier, U.K. Warns

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been expected to trumpet a rare success in the campaign against the coronavirus on Friday: news that Britain had vaccinated 5.4 million people. By the end of the day, it was overtaken by a tentative finding that a new variant of the virus may be deadlier than the original.

That possibility, raised by preliminary studies relying on small numbers of deaths in hard-hit hospitals, remains far from conclusive. But the prospect that the fast-spreading new variant, already known to be more contagious, could also be more lethal compounded fears that even with the arrival of vaccines, the pandemic will remain a severe threat for some time.

Government scientists said the early evidence suggests that the new variant, first detected late last year in Britain, could raise the risk of death by some 30 percent. But even with such an increase, the great majority of cases are not fatal, and the government estimates included a broad range of possible effects.

“In addition to spreading more quickly,” Mr. Johnson said at a Downing Street news conference, “it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant — the variant that was first identified in London and the southeast — may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.”

The underlying evidence, outlined in a report published on Friday by a government scientific committee, was less emphatic than the prime minister, saying only that there was a “realistic possibility” that the new variant was deadlier and outlining a number of inescapable limitations in the data.

“I want to stress that there’s a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it, but it obviously is a concern that this has an increase in mortality as well as an increase in transmissibility,” said the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

For Mr. Johnson, who has struggled to find a silver lining in Britain’s response to the virus, it was not the first time that good news and bad went hand in hand. On Dec. 30, the government announced the authorization of a homegrown vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, only to put much of the country into a stricter lockdown hours later because of a surge in infections.

Britain’s struggle with the pandemic has increasingly become a race between vaccinating the public and confronting mutations in the virus, like the new variant that now accounts for a significant percentage of new cases around the country. It is a pitched battle that scientists say evokes hope as well as anxiety.

“2021 is going to be a cat-and-mouse game to see if we can vaccinate people quickly enough to stay ahead of the variants,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh.

Outside experts said that the early claims of higher mortality were far from resolved.

For one, the studies were based on a small subset — roughly 8 percent — of total deaths in Britain, raising the possibility that the results “may therefore not be representative of the total population,” the report said.

For another, less than 3 percent of known infections in Britain have been fatal, so the new variant’s effect on mortality would have been measured in relatively small numbers, making it harder to pinpoint with certainty.

Moreover, the signs of higher mortality rates were at odds with evidence suggesting that people with the new variant were no more likely to be hospitalized than those infected with better-established ones.

Covid-19 Vaccines ›

Answers to Your Vaccine Questions

If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine?

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help.

When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated?

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021.

If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask?

Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially get authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while they’re not experiencing any cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be intensely studying this question as the vaccines roll out. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders.

Will it hurt? What are the side effects?

The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection won’t be any different from ones you’ve gotten before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. But some of them have felt short-lived discomfort, including aches and flu-like symptoms that typically last a day. It’s possible that people may need to plan to take a day off work or school after the second shot. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that will provide long-lasting immunity.

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed.

Beyond that, scientists said that any number of confounding factors — like hospitals being overrun or the variant potentially spreading more aggressively in settings like nursing homes — made it difficult to know for certain whether it was, in fact, any deadlier.

“We need more information before jumping to firm conclusions,” said Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick Medical School.

Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, noted that the report was “at pains to stress that the data is limited and the conclusions preliminary.” But, he added, “an increased case fatality rate is certainly possible with a virus that has upped its game in transmission.”

The scientific studies that the government relied on have not been published in full, and they described a broad range of possible effects of the new variant on mortality rates.

The report stressed that “the absolute risk of death per infection remains low.” And whatever the fatality rate, scientists said the best answer to the new variant had not changed: lockdowns, face coverings and vaccines.

Britain had injected more than 400,000 people in the previous 24 hours, keeping it on track to achieve Mr. Johnson’s goal of inoculating 15 million vulnerable people, almost a quarter of the population, by mid-February. On a per-capita basis, only Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have done more. The United States and China have delivered more doses than Britain but to a smaller percentage of their populations.

Mr. Vallance said there was no evidence that the vaccines being deployed were not effective against the variant first identified in Britain. But he expressed less certainty about whether they offered similar protection against variants that originated in South Africa and Brazil.

The warnings about the variant captured the political crosswinds that Mr. Johnson has faced in responding to the pandemic. The rapid vaccine rollout will likely embolden members of his Conservative Party to renew their calls on him to begin easing the lockdown. But scientists warn that a full-scale easing of restrictions, even after widespread vaccinations, could ignite a fresh surge of infections.

The opposition Labour Party, meanwhile, criticized Mr. Johnson for springing yet another unwelcome surprise on the British public.

“This is deeply alarming news, not least because Boris Johnson assured the nation back in December there was no evidence the variant was more dangerous,” Jonathan Ashworth, the Labour Party’s shadow health secretary, said in statement.

Mr. Johnson presented the news as evidence of his commitment to present changing scientific evidence to the public. He also pleaded for people to stick to social distancing rules even as the vaccines promised a brighter future.

The warnings about the variant — first disclosed by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, in a statement on Friday to a well-connected television correspondent, Robert Peston — gave the prime minister grist for that cautionary message.

“We really can’t begin considering unlocking until we’re confident the vaccination program is working,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’ve got to get those rates of infection down.”

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writerspink · 6 years ago

Text

K-12 Words

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K-12 Words was originally published on PinkWrite

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

Link

The single greatest antidote to poverty and social stagnation is the emancipation of women. Wherever this has been tried, wherever women have been empowered to do as they wish, the economy and the culture have been radically improved.

A new book by Augusto Lopez-Claros, a senior fellow at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, an Iranian writer and novelist, is among the first to comprehensively test this proposition by surveying data from 189 countries. Titled Equality for Women = Prosperity for All, the book shows how gender inequalities — in education, income, law, employment, and wages — lead to instability and chaos at almost every level of society.

I called Lopez-Claros to talk about the links between gender inequality and political instability, how discriminatory laws hold women back, and what we can do to push societies toward more gender equality.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What happens to a society when women are deprived of their rights?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

One useful starting point to answer your question is to look at how discriminations are embedded in countries around the world — in constitutions, civil codes, family law, tax codes, labor codes, and every legal instrument that you can imagine having an impact on how the law treats women compared to men.

We did this for 189 countries, accounting for 80 percent of the global economic output, and we discovered that, as you might expect, discriminatory laws lead to highly unequal societies, especially in terms of income and employment and property ownership. They also discourage women from joining the labor force and from engaging in civil society, so you get not only unequal societies but also huge gaps in participation rates — in the job market, in politics, in education — of women relative to men.

This is terrible for social progress and for the economy, but one of the worst things this does is poison the future, because you get fewer women in school relative to boys and the effects of that spill into the next generation, and so you end up in this spiral of poverty and dysfunction that is hard to escape.

Sean Illing

Can you give me a sense of some of the more common forms of discrimination you found?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

Access to the labor market is huge. Many occupations are simply forbidden to women precisely because they’re women. In many places, you find that women have to obtain authorization from their husbands to obtain a bank account or even to travel. And then there’s the issue of property rights. Often the law treats women and men fundamentally different in terms of what they’re entitled to and on what basis.

Does the tax system provide benefits to men that it doesn’t provide to women? What about access to credit? In some countries, for instance, the law gives control of household assets to the man, and this very much restricts the ability of women to use the property as collateral to access the financial system.

These are the sorts of things we looked at, and we wanted to know how they impacted the societies in which we found them.

Sean Illing

Let’s talk about that. What is the direct link between gender inequality and political instability?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

The biggest impact of gender inequality is on income inequality. We have data that shows that countries that make it more difficult for women to access the global market have higher levels of income inequality. And if you think about the intuition behind this, it makes sense. If you’re discriminating against half the population, how can that not worsen income inequality?

Political scientists have long understood how corrosive income inequality can be to political stability. There is pretty clear evidence that democracies with large gaps in income have a much higher probability of breakdown than those with a more egalitarian income distribution. So this gender inequality feeds directly into political instability.

Sean Illing

Does the data show that gender disparities disappear as societies become wealthier? Or that societies become wealthier as gender disparities disappear?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

The data suggests overwhelmingly that gender equalities lead to more wealth and less poverty, and of course, equal access to education is a huge component of that. More education leads to lower birthrates because women have more knowledge about family planning and more opportunities to enter the labor force and earn money.

Lower fertility levels help reduce child mortality, and they expand the range of educational opportunities that are available to the next generation. All of these factors combine to boost economic growth and higher income per capita.

On the other hand, to address the other half of your question, we have several examples of high-income countries, especially in the Middle East, that have very high levels of discrimination against women. So it doesn’t automatically follow that as countries become richer, all of a sudden, gender equality improves.

Sean Illing

When you look around the world, is the gender gap shrinking, however slowly?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

If you look at the whole world, there are something like 30 countries with 10 or more such discriminations embedded in their laws, in their national legislation. And most of these are located in the Middle East and North Africa region and, to a lesser extent, in sub-Saharan Africa.

A couple of years ago, we did a 50-year comparison of the laws for 100 countries (from 1960 to 2010) to get a sense of the progress made, and we found that there was progress made pretty much everywhere except in the regions I just mentioned above. And in some countries, like Iran, women were actually worse off in 2010 than they had been in 1960.

Sean Illing

And fundamentally this is about a lack of political power, right?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

Absolutely. In each case, you find that women have not been politically empowered. That’s what keeps these restrictions in place. The voices of women simply are not heard in many of these countries. The men in these societies have largely appropriated for themselves the making of the rules and the content of the laws. They are the ones who sit in parliamentary committees, who are finance ministers, who are governors, and so on.

Just consider this incredibly revealing statistic: We have nine female heads of government in the world among 193 members of the United Nations. That’s astonishing, and really puts the problem in perspective.

Sean Illing

Part of the solution to this, as you argue in the book, is to establish quotas for women on corporate boards and in parliaments. What’s the case for this policy?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

First of all, quotas are becoming more and more popular. Something like 40 percent of the countries in the world have introduced some kind of quota for women in terms of participation in national parliaments and local government.

There are also attempts underway to increase the participation of women in corporate boards, largely because a number of studies have found a positive correlation between companies with women on their boards and their financial success.

There was actually a very interesting study in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago looking at the gender composition of company boards that showed that companies with greater female participation on their boards were less likely to be hit by government scandals involving bribery, fraud, and other factors, which can depress business confidence and therefore hinder economic growth.

Now, having said that, there is a lot of very encouraging evidence when you compare countries that have quotas with countries that don’t. Let me give you two or three examples, which I think illustrate this very nicely.

One of them is that those countries that have introduced quotas for women in parliament show higher levels of participation of women in the labor force. So the presence of women in parliament seems to encourage women to strive and to enter the job market, probably because they feel like the playing field is more leveled.

Quotas also seem to have an effect on government spending priorities. A number of studies have shown that where quotas exist, either at the level of parliament or at a lower government level, there is more spending going to social services and the kinds of infrastructures that are more helpful for women — and you can see this across the world.

So there’s a growing body of evidence showing that having greater participation of women is not just a victory for human rights; it’s actually a big boost to the economy.

Sean Illing

Apart from the policies you just laid out, are there other reliable ways to push societies toward more gender equality?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

One of the problems we face is that we have deeply ingrained prejudices that have led many people in many parts of the world to essentially pass on to succeeding generations beliefs about gender roles that are no longer in keeping with empirical evidence or the kind of 21st-century world we live in.

There was a great, interesting book written a couple hundred years ago called A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft, which we quote in the book. She made a very clear and simple point: Women are not inferior, and their apparent lack of accomplishment has nothing to do with intrinsic inferior capacities but has everything to do with lack of opportunity and access.

So it seems to me that one of the challenges we face is how do we change deeply ingrained attitudes and create a more open, tolerant, and just world?

Sean Illing

As you know, there are some people who push back against arguments like yours, and say that different cultures have different values and we should not impose our values on them. What’s your response to this?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

Our response to this is simple: Who is speaking for whom in these places where women are being repressed? Is it men or women? Because what you often find is that men have appropriated for themselves the right to speak on behalf of women.

Did anyone in Afghanistan, for example, ask the 11 million Afghan women whether they wanted to be able to work or to send their daughters to school? Or was it the Taliban who imposed this on them?

So basically our argument is about spokesmanship — who speaks on behalf of whom, and what is asserted on the basis of force rather than freely granted popular support. When leaders hold on to power at the cost of the rights and freedoms of others, their legitimacy is most likely to be self-serving and less likely to be freely given. So that’s essentially the argument that we make.

Sean Illing

As you look around the world at this moment, what forces or institutions pose the greatest challenge to the empowerment of women?

Augusto Lopez-Claros

We live in a world in which, at the moment, we have roughly 800 million people who live on less than a $1.90 a day. That’s the poverty line that we use at the World Bank for extreme poverty. We have close to 800 million people who are illiterate, who can’t read and write; in other words, they don’t have access to the most important tool in the 21st century for coming out of poverty. And then we have roughly another 800 million or so children who are malnourished.

Women are overwhelmingly represented in each of these three groups. In most cases, they account for two-thirds of these populations. So there is a huge scope here to allocate scarce resources more efficiently and to improve the quality of governance.

I think there is also a role for international organizations, such as the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank to consider using the great leverage they have, especially in the developing countries where many of these restrictions are located, to press countries to be more proactive in the elimination of these kinds of discriminations, which continually hold women back.

We believe that eliminating these restrictions is actually a win-win for everybody. There is no downside for the international community pressing governments where there are widespread discriminations against women, or ethnic minorities, or religious minorities. This is an unambiguous good for human beings and for the international economy, and we should fight for these changes.

Original Source -> Want less poverty in the world? Empower women.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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theliterateape · 7 years ago

Text

Good To The Last Drop

By Chris Churchill

My friend Carla, a proud, hilarious, intelligent and Jeff nominated African American woman, has told people of my complexion, whom she deems friends, to "talk to your cousin" when another white person behaves in a shameful or ridiculous way. Well, here's where I talk to my "cousins", on behalf of my friend Carla, as well as my actual cousins and nieces and nephews and step-siblings who are not as “white” as me.

I want to address this issue of whiteness and blackness. Not because I think I can change a racist's mind with logic, but because I want to affect the complacent thinking of my more privileged and comfortable "cousins". When I hear these other white people (or sometimes I even hear groups from other ethnic minorities do this) complain about why there's a "Black History Month" or why it needs to be stated that black lives actually do matter or why is Rasheeda Jones "black" when she looks white to us? What do you mean the first president was black? What do you mean Eisenhower was black (Wait? What? He was white!)? And countless other knee-jerk reactions to affirmations that black people get to have nice things too. That black people get to be proud of their heritage and history too. Certain of my "cousins" get nervous when it looks like some of our "white" heritage (even though white people came to the Americas from many heritages, some will still claim "white" heritage) is being usurped. Are they trying to steal Abraham Lincoln from us? You can't have Slash! The guy from "Prison Break"?! Not THAT supermodel!! I just jerk--I was just lusting over her!! Aaaaaghh!! We're losing EVERYONE!!

See how precious we can be? I mean not me. I'm cool. Some of my best friends are black (I know, I know. It's a joke.)

Well, this is the thing, "cousins". You brought this on yourself. Or, rather, your most "racist" (in quotes for a reason I'll explain later) ancestors did.

You see, in this country, to keep an enslaved and downtrodden people down, my "cousins" threw the baby out with the bath water with a little thing called "The One-Drop Rule". As you may be aware, it was decided a couple hundred years ago that we'd better be really careful who we let in on this great American prosperity. "I know!" said Olde Cousin Whitington, "Let's say that anyone who has even one drop of "black" blood IS black! That will fix everything!"

So that means that, according to this most American of rules, that if your great grandfather is black, YOU are black. And of course, if their great grandmother was black THEY ARE black. "You see? That way there's no question! If you're even a liiiiiittle teeny bit black, you're ALL THE WAY BLACK! Clear cut!"

So let's check science. I know racists hate this but those of my cousins who just haven't thought of this might appreciate this one. White people are new. The anthropology suggest that humans have been around for a very long time but up until 7-10,000 years ago, none of them were white. Not one. Excluding what we would all albinos. Regardless, what that means is--(well let's call a generation back then, like 14 years--so take 10,000, divide it by 14, you get 714 and some change) your 714 greats-great grandparent--both of them--were black!

Oh wait! Stop right there, Chris! Humans only have 120,000 drops of blood! That means that after 714 generations (halving the percentage each time), there is way less than a drop of “black” blood in any white person. Now an imaginary Race Scientists pose the question, “How many individual blood cells do we have?” The answer is 10,000,000 (the number of cells in a drop of blood) times 120,000=1,200,000,000,000. Well, sure, that would be true if we weren’t already saying that one drop of “black” blood makes you %100 black. The first “white” person’s grandchildren are %100 white by the “One Drop Rule”. And their great grand-children and so on and so on and so on. That means that every single generation from the first “white” person on, by American racist rules, were actually black all along. The math is irrelevant. It means, we have always been black all the time! Which means that even that sickly kid you can see through, and who has to carry an umbrella at night to protect against the glow from Orion's Belt, is black, according to the one-drop rule.

There aren't ANY white people. Science and your own weird rules just killed them all! No wonder you hate science! But wait! YOU'RE still here! You STILL exist!

So here's why I put "racism" in quotes: I don't expect to change the English language here, and I'm not the first to point this out but it's not racism (since we're ALL black by the one drop rule, and we're all from Africa). It's actually Colorism. While we're all actually the same "race" we're all different colors and shades of those colors. But the darkest brown, the light brown, the reddish brown, the yellowish brown, the palest pinkish brown with the orange dots-- we were LOOKING for differences. Why? To know who to share our scarce resources with. Those who looked the most like us.

But now, some of my pale "cousins" want to hoard their culture, their wealth, their stuff. Keep it away from the other!

"But who's the 'other'? How will we define it? We don't know anymore! All those people we thought were white, and were the smartest, the strongest, the sexiest (Vin Diesel, for crying out loud) aren't white!"

Well here's your solution "cousins". Admit and embrace that we're all from the same place. We all share the same blood. Maybe YOU are as non-white as the beautiful Miss Jones. Maybe you aren't. Maybe you are, like everyone else, situated somewhere on that beautiful continuum of human color variations. Our favorite historical figures either didn't know, care or fully understand this when they ALL held their "othering" beliefs. But we, right now, know better. We're all on the continuum of all different drops of all different colors. And just like Maxwell House, if we're brewed with love, we are good to the very last drop.

#one drop rule #white people #black people #celebrities #other

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angoracactus · 7 years ago

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The Cat and The Beans

I’ve always been a secretive person, even as a kid. I don’t often let people in to see my emotions and thoughts. Part of this comes down to personality. I also think part of it came from the way I was raised. Whatever the cause, the effect has been that I keep secrets sometimes. This can create problems, like bottling things up instead of getting them out in the open and dealing with them. Or it can have repercussions on trust. When people realize you’ve been keeping a secret, it hurts, because they feel like you don’t trust them. It can also undermine their trust of you, as they begin to ask themselves what else you’re hiding.

I’ve been keeping a secret. It’s not a very big secret, but it’s big enough that after telling my sister about it, she has developed some anger toward me. I understand that completely, and I don’t blame her. I would feel the same way if she’d kept the same kind of secret from me.

My reasons for keeping the secret are probably not very good, but the main reason has been the absurdity of it. The situation in question is pretty ridiculous, and that’s made it really easy for me to feel justified in keeping it to myself.

At the end of last December, over the break for the holidays, my cousin was over at my house. For a few months she had been nagging me to find a boyfriend and start dating. It became a running joked with us. That day, she had the idea to make me an online dating profile. I reluctantly agreed, as a joke, and we put together a goofy bio and uploaded a photo onto Christian Mingle. We laughed about it and looked through the matches that popped up. Right away I received a couple messages, one from a 40-something year old man and another from a 19-year-old boy. You can create an account for free, but they make you pay to use any features. We couldn’t even read the messages I got without paying. Obviously we weren’t going to do that, which was disappointing for her, but a relief for me! The unsuitable ages of the message senders creeped my out, so I disabled the account and that was that.

A day or so passed, but my curiosity had been sparked, and I began to think, “I wonder what it’s really like on other dating sites?” So I googled and found a list of the features you can access with free accounts on all the various sites. OkCupid had a lot for free, so I created an account, expecting to delete it within a few days after I’d explored it a little. Since I wasn’t seriously trying to date anyone, when I filled out the bio wrote it pretty tongue-in-cheek. On OkCupid they have questions that you answer about yourself and about the kind of person you’re looking for. They’re a bit addicting, and I had a lot of fun answering the questions and adding funny notes to my answers. I actually learned some things about myself. I also realized things about what really matters to me in a potential partner.

So after a while, I decided to upload a photo. I guess this is when I started to think, “Well as long as I’m here...” My attitude was pretty “Why not?” Even before I put a photo, I’d gotten a few messages. Obviously, even if you’re not a bombshell, you get more messages with a photo. Overall, I didn’t get a ton, which would have hurt my ego if I had actually cared. Well... ok maybe it hurt my ego a tiny bit, haha.

Anyway, none of the messages were too creepy. Most were kinda cheesy. Some were pretty funny. Looking at profiles felt really weird. It’s just too easy to judge people based on their looks, especially when they don’t say much in their bio. It was also really weird to imagine them as real men, living real lives, in real life. I mean, all social media is a filtered, glamorized, or abridged version of our real personal lives. But I feel like online dating is a form of social media that really vividly shows the conflict between what we want people to think about us, and who we really are. There are a lot of implications, in what you say, as well as what you don’t say. Online dating feels like watching a singer lip-syncing to a track.

There are algorithms on OkCupid that calculate a percentage of compatibility between you and another person, based on the questions you answer about yourself and what you’re looking for. It was interesting to look at the profiles of dudes I had a high percentage match with and think about whether they seemed to really be the kind of person I could imagine dating. Sometimes they were, sometimes not. Sometimes guys with lower matches had profiles I liked better, but one or two things, like religion/faith or smoking habits, made us incompatible. It was pretty thought-provoking. As a writer, it was also interesting to see all the different kinds of men and the unique personalities and how they presented themselves. It gave me a lot of ideas for future stories and poems.

The way the site is set up, there are “visits,” “likes,” and “messages.” You can see a list of everyone who “visits” your profile. You get a notification when someone clicks the star and “likes” you, but you can’t see who it is unless A) you pay for a premium account, or B) you happen to click their star and “like” them too. When you both “like” one another, you are “mutual likes.” I guess you’re “in like” with them, haha. The star is available to click either on someone’s photo on the main page, or on someone’s profile.

I found it surprising and strange that I got a lot more likes than visits, probably three or four times as many. I’m guessing a lot of dudes just scroll through the list of women and star them all, to increase their chances of getting a mutual like. That’s kinda depressing... Those poor, desperate little dudes.

I set my preferences to filter matches to “nearby,” so when I scrolled through the main page I only saw men within a radius around my city. However, if someone else had their filter set to allow matches from “anywhere,” I would show up in their feed of potential matches. I got some visits and messages from men in other states or other countries. One guy lived in Sweden. Several men from Morocco and other places in Northern Africa messaged me. I think we got high matches because they were muslims, which was kind of funny, and also weird.

It honestly was all pretty weird. I did reply to a few messages for fun, only if they had an interesting bio, or a funny leading line.

Then... there was this guy...

He visited my profile first. He was from Ohio. We had a really high match percentage, like 98% or 99%. I didn’t have many matches that high. So, I visited his profile, and he seemed interesting, and he was kinda cute.

At this point I’d only been on the site for a few days, and I didn’t understand the whole star/like thing, so I didn’t do anything. Then he visited me back, and we went back and forth a few times, haha, before I figured it out and clicked the star on him. The notification popped up that we had a mutual like... That was scary, haha. Overall I clicked the star to “like” four or five profiles, but he was the only mutual like.

(just for the record, I got hundreds of “likes.” I think the number was over 300 or 400 before I deleted my account after a month or two. I will admit, it boosted the ego, haha, even though I knew they were mostly from guys just going through and clicking the star on every chick on the site.)

Anyways, this guy. He messaged me after that. And we talked. And it was really scary and funny and interesting. Part of me was excited by how cool he was, but part of me figured this was just for fun, because of how unlikely it was that we’d ever meet, living states away. After a while he gave me his Instagram account and I followed him. Later we messaged through the Instagram messages. Then we added one another on Facebook and we talked on there. Now we’ve been talking for 6 months, which is kinda weird... well, really weird.

At first, I didn’t tell anyone in my life that I was using a dating site, because it was embarrassing, and I wasn’t taking it seriously at all. Then I didn’t tell anyone I was talking to someone I’d met on a dating site, because it was embarrassing, and I figured it was likely to fizzle out before we ever met in person. Then I didn’t tell anyone that I’d been talking to someone for half-a-dozen months, because it was embarrassing, and since we haven’t met in person yet, I still felt a little unsure about it, and I wanted to wait until I felt more confident before I had to deal with the drama of people––specifically my mom––overreacting about it.

But then he made me tell my sister.

The way it happened was, in the beginning of April, he and I were talking and joking on Facebook, and as a joke he “liked” a couple of my Facebook photos. However, they weren’t my photos. They were photos posted by my sister, and I was just tagged in them. It happened at 3am, but within seconds my sister texted me a screenshot of the notification she’d gotten, and then she texted “who?”

I panicked. I didn’t feel ready to tell her about him, because of the reasons stated previously, so I told a white lie. I told her that he was a friend from Instagram. This implied that A) he and I were just friends, and B) that we had met on Instagram. The first was not completely true, and the second was definitely not true. I misled her, and I immediately felt guilty about that, and in the back of my mind it haunted me for three months. I also chose not to bring it up to him, because that would have been even more awkward, and I didn’t want him to feel weird about it.

Fast forward to the end of June. He and I had gotten to know one another a lot more. One day, I was using the Facebook messenger app, and we were talking and joking, and the subject of telling people about one another comes up. I wound up telling him the story about the photos and the likes and my sister. It’s a pretty funny story, and I tried playing up the humor because I didn’t want to be too awkward about it. I also told him that I was ashamed that I hadn’t told my sister the truth.

The next day, he and I talked a little more, and again I used messenger. He was being goofy, but a little strange. I figured he was just in a weird goofy mood. Then that night, I texted my sister about something, and she replied to my text, and then texted, “Who the poop is B____ P____?! lol”

I knew something must have prompted this. I got onto Facebook and I had several notifications. After I told him the story the day before, he had gone and liked a few of my sister’s photos I was tagged in. Then he’d liked some more that day.

I knew what he was trying to do, but I was freaking out a little bit. I messaged him, “I don’t know what to tell her,” and he messaged back “Just do.” So, I texted her an abbreviated explanation, and apologized. She said she read my texts after waking up from a nap and she thought it was a dream, hahaha! I was very embarrassed, but it was also a relief.

So, now she knows, and she’s in on the secret.

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Moderna Says Vaccine Still Protects Against Virus Variants Moderna’s vaccine is effective against new variants of the coronavirus that have emerged in Britain and South Africa, the company announced on Monday. But it appears to be less protective against the variant discovered in South Africa, and so the company is developing a new form of the vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against that virus. “We’re doing it today to be ahead of the curve should we need to,” Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “I think of it as an insurance policy.” He added, “I don’t know if we need it, and I hope we don’t.” Moderna reported findings from a study that used blood samples from eight people who had received two doses of the vaccine, and two monkeys that had also been immunized. The British variant had no impact on the levels of neutralizing antibodies — the type that can disable the virus — produced following vaccination. But with the South African form, there was a sixfold reduction in those levels. Even so, the company said, those antibodies “remain above levels that are expected to be protective.” Moderna collaborated on the study with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The results have not been published or peer-reviewed yet, but have been submitted to bioRxiv, which posts preliminary studies online. The company’s action is part of a race to control a shape-shifting virus that has already created global havoc and now threatens to mutate in ways that will make it even harder to fight. Several new variants of the virus have emerged, with mutations that worry scientists. A form first detected in Britain is about twice as contagious as the virus identified in China a year ago, and researchers have begun to suspect that it may also be more deadly. Covid-19 Vaccines › Answers to Your Vaccine Questions If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine? While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help. When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated? Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021. If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask? Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially get authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while they’re not experiencing any cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be intensely studying this question as the vaccines roll out. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders. Will it hurt? What are the side effects? The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection won’t be any different from ones you’ve gotten before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. But some of them have felt short-lived discomfort, including aches and flu-like symptoms that typically last a day. It’s possible that people may need to plan to take a day off work or school after the second shot. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that will provide long-lasting immunity. Will mRNA vaccines change my genes? No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed. Other variants with different mutations have arisen in South Africa and Brazil, and preliminary studies in the laboratory suggested that those forms may have some degree of resistance to the immunity that people develop after recovering from the infection or being inoculated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. The British variant has been found in at least 20 states, but the Brazilian and South African versions have not been detected in the United States. [Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.] Dr. Zaks said that the new version of the Moderna vaccine, aimed at the South African variant, could be used if needed as a booster one year after people received the original vaccine. The need for such a booster may be determined by blood tests to measure antibody levels or by watching the population of vaccinated people to see if they begin falling ill from the new variant. “We don’t yet have data on the Brazilian variant,” Dr. Zaks said. “Our expectation is that if anything it should be close to the South African one. That’s the one with the most overlap. New strains will continue to emerge and we’ll continue to evaluate them.” Noting that Moderna took 42 days to produce the original vaccine, he said the company could make a new one “hopefully a little faster this time, but not much.” Discussions with regulators about what would be required to bring a new version of the vaccine to the public were just starting. “It’s early days,” Dr. Zaks said. This developing story will be updated. Source link #Moderna #protects #Vaccine #Variants #Virus

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multipleservicelisting · 4 years ago

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Emerging Coronavirus Variants May Pose Challenges to Vaccines

The steady drumbeat of reports about new variants of the coronavirus — first in Britain, then in South Africa, Brazil and the United States — have brought a new worry: Will vaccines protect against these altered versions of the virus?

The answer so far is yes, several experts said in interviews. But two small new studies, posted online Tuesday night, suggest that some variants may pose unexpected challenges to the immune system, even in those who have been vaccinated — a development that most scientists had not anticipated seeing for months, even years.

The findings result from laboratory experiments with blood samples from groups of patients, not observations of the virus spreading in the real world. The studies have not yet been peer-reviewed.

But experts who reviewed the papers agreed that the findings raised two disturbing possibilities. People who had survived mild infections with the coronavirus may still be vulnerable to infection with a new variant; and more worryingly, the vaccines may be less effective against the variants.

Existing vaccines will still prevent serious illness, and people should continue getting them, said Dr. Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, who led one of the studies: “If your goal is to keep people out of the hospital, then this is going to work just fine.”

But the vaccines may not prevent people from becoming mildly or asymptomatically infected with the variants, he said. “They may not even know that they were infected,” Dr. Nussenzweig added. If the infected can still transmit the virus to others who are not immunized, it will continue to claim lives.

The vaccines work by stimulating the body to produce antibodies against the coronavirus. Scientists had expected that over time, the virus may gain mutations that allow it to evade these antibodies — so-called escape mutations. Some studies had even predicted which mutations would be most advantageous to the virus.

But scientists had hoped that the new vaccines would remain effective for years, on the theory that the coronavirus would be slow to develop new defenses against them. Now some researchers fear the unchecked spread has given the virus nearly unfettered opportunities to reinvent itself, and may have hastened the appearance of escape mutations.

The studies published on Tuesday night show that the variant identified in South Africa is less susceptible to the antibodies created by natural infection and by vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Neither the South African variant nor a similar mutant virus in Brazil has yet been detected in the United States. (The more contagious variant that has blazed through Britain does not contain these mutations and seems to be susceptible to vaccines.)

Fears that the vaccines would be powerless against new variants intensified at a scientific conference held online on Saturday, when South African scientists reported that in laboratory tests, serum samples from 21 of a group of 44 Covid-19 survivors did not destroy the variant circulating in that country.

The samples that were successful against the variant were taken from patients who had been hospitalized. These patients had higher blood levels of so-called neutralizing antibodies — the subset of antibodies needed to disarm the virus and prevent infection — than those who were only mildly ill.

The results “strongly, strongly suggest that several mutations that we see in the South Africa variant are going to have a significant effect on the sensitivity of that virus to neutralization,” said Penny Moore, a virologist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa who led the study.

The second study brought better tidings, at least about vaccines.

In that study, Dr. Nussenzweig and his colleagues tested samples from 14 people who had received the Moderna vaccine and six people who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Covid-19 Vaccines ›

Answers to Your Vaccine Questions

If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine?

When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated?

If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask?

Will it hurt? What are the side effects?

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

The researchers saw a slight decrease in antibody activity directed against engineered viruses with three of the key mutations in the variant identified in South Africa. That result was significant “because it’s seen in just about every individual tested,” Dr. Nussenzweig said. Still, it “is not something that we should be horribly freaked out about.”

In most people, infection with the coronavirus leads to a strong immune response; the vaccines seem to induce an even more powerful response. Two doses of the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, at least, produce neutralizing antibodies at levels that are higher than those acquired through natural infection.

Even if antibody effectiveness were reduced tenfold, the vaccines would still be quite effective against the virus, said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

And while neutralizing antibodies are essential for preventing infection, the vaccines — and natural infection — also lead to production of thousands of other types of antibodies, not to mention various immune cells that retain a memory of the virus and can be roused to action when the body encounters it again.

Even when confronted with variants, those other components of the immune system may be enough to prevent serious illness, said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. In clinical trials, the vaccines protected people from illness after just one dose, when the levels of neutralizing antibodies were low or undetectable, he noted.

Vaccine trials being conducted in South Africa by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson will provide more real-world data on how the vaccines perform against the new variant there. Those results are expected within the next few weeks.

All viruses mutate, and it’s no surprise that some of those mutations sidestep the body’s immune defenses, experts said. Each new host affords a virus fresh opportunities to amass and test mutations by slightly scrambling the sequence of RNA letters in its genetic code.

“The beauty, the elegance, the evolution and the magnificence of a virus is that every single time it infects a person, it’s exploring that sequence space,” said Paul Duprex, director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh.

Some mutations don’t improve on the original, and fade away. Others add to the pathogen’s power, by making it more contagious — like the variant first identified in Britain — more fit, or less susceptible to immunity.

The mutations in the variant circulating in South Africa, called B.1.351, have independently emerged more than once, and all together, suggesting that they work in concert to benefit the virus.

The key mutation, called E484K, and two of its companions alter the shape of a part of the virus that is crucial for immune recognition, making it difficult for antibodies to attach themselves to the virus. The trio popped up in several lab studies that tried to predict which mutations would be advantageous to the virus.

“I think we need to monitor mutations closely and look out for things like that that could be becoming dominant in certain parts of the world,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

Britain detected the more contagious variant circulating there because it sequences more virus samples than any other nation. The United States lags far behind: It has sequenced about 71,000 samples so far, a tiny proportion of the millions infected in the country. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to work with state and local public health labs to sequence as many as 6,000 samples per week, agency scientists said Friday.

It will be important to limit travel — and the import of variants — from other countries until a majority of the population is immunized, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

“Even if they are already here, the more often they are reintroduced, the more likely there could be a super-spreader event,” Dr. Moore said. (President Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to sustain existing travel restrictions on anyone who has recently traveled to Europe and Brazil.)

The mRNA technology on which the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines rely can be altered in a matter of weeks, and far more easily than the process used to produce flu vaccines. But it would be wise to prepare for this eventuality now and think through not just the technical aspects of updating the vaccines, but the testing, approval and rollout of those vaccines, experts said.

Still, the best path forward is to prevent the emergence of new mutations and variants altogether, they said.

“Imagine having to do catch-up like this all the time — it’s not something desirable,” Dr. Iwasaki said. “If we can just stop the spread as soon as possible, while the vaccine is very effective, that’s the best way.”

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