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thatheathen · 4 years ago

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“Seize the day. Then set it on fire.”

We are living in that cyberpunk dystopia now, the very type Philip K. Dick warned us that could happen and is slowly creeping its way into our personal lives/minds and that's mainly due to big internet providers and the fascist governments whipped by corporations hijacking all modes of freedom even virtual freedoms. everything is connected in the system the ruling class decided and you are a slave with in that caste system until you die. oh gee fun.

I feel bad for the devs that are forced to time crunch for this month. CD Projekt RED better compensate their workers for pushing this game out for them greedy selfish CEOs who are attached to this game that will no doubt be a hit and make tons of money, but at what cost? video game developers need to desperately unionize before its too late to even do so as most triple A games are made by wealthy liberal and or centrist elites who pretend to be progressive but actually hate unions, socialism, sharing, comradery, solidarity, grassroots fund raising cuz that’s all anti-capitalist and bad you see.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and that's exactly what cyberpunk is; it's a genre of unchained sci-fi yeah but it's also showing capitalism on steroids, corporations gone rogue and eating up all the earth's resources just to produce enough power and energy to run a whole city now requires a while country of power to push harder and harder to keep that light pollution at the maximum. animals should be going completely extinct in a cyberpunk future, what do humans even eat?

To my mind cyberpunk should be about breaking away from cultural programming that makes us hate each other, fight and kill, it always boils down to those who have and those who have not social structure. That's a lot like Feudalism and a false sense of safety for all people. Cyber-feudalism is how it's structured underneath the veil. “Seize the day. Then set it fire.”

Cyberpunk seems like a countercultural idea within the hyper-capitalist world that's still very male dominant. The feminine exist only to tantalize the masses, domestic females to slaves of profits and glamour. The brutal police forces ignoring human rights laws daily. Journalism is remotely impossible. So is the world of cyberpunk really a world of freedom and choices? Cyberpunk can be seen as a connection of like minded folk hungry for freedom and not need to fall into crime to survive. For many that’s the world you’re forced to live in or die in. rights are not natural handed from god, they are taken. cyber-rights seems like a fruitless fight in a hyper-cyber-capitalist reality; big brothers eyes everywhere. mass surveillance that would make PKD’s jaw drop. cyberpunk-world cops are thugs beyond what we could imagine and could kill you on sight if they chose and nobody will care or not be able to do anything. nobodies memories can be trusted unless you express a certain class. all the punks, rejects, anarchists, anti-corporation, hackers, etc. are all outsiders, terrorist suspects. Every queer person or Muslim or any kind of marginalized group of that era is vulnerable as the system doesn’t favor them nor see a reason to protect them, with fascist-leaning politicians WANTING certain groups of people to literally die out. Those who struggle in any unequal world are going to be feeling the most pain. Lots of pain may mean; drug addiction to numb this awful reality, mod addiction to be less human maybe or change your identity completely. Lots of pain could also mean lots of anger towards the system and the state that’s making life so miserable for the 90% the citizens who have no power. cyberpunk 2077s idea is an “anything-goes” kinda place. here’s a sci-fi GTA/Witcher3 sandbox about a fucked up capitalist future that’s super fun and action packed!! It’s okay it’s not real though. Meanwhile capitalism as it exists today is grinding down the working class including the Dev employees working on Cyberpunk as I type this. long hours for the same pay. was it worth it? will it be worth it? will cyberpunk be the GAME that will end labor abuse in the gaming industry?

People who are different, people who reject authority and anti-human social constructs, people who are spiritual without an organized religion, people so different and taboo to where the ruling elites see them as a threat, mocking those gross punks/queers/dissidents, but love their style and aesthetic because the rich have no soul and ZERO creativity. stealing is what rich assholes do best. rich people steal everyone’s aesthetic claiming it as their own and you begin to see YOUR aesthetic in the media regardless if it's offensive, it’s just unfettered anarcho-capitalist-land, there's no more restrictions to anything really. like ayn rand vision that would result in Bioshock’s world. that was a steampunk nightmare to an extent. point being the rich can do anything. money is power and it only matters to those who thirst for power. Many people just deal with money and hate at the same time cuz what other choice do people have? Poor people get no choices and all the bad days.

The rich and powerful will indulge in the vices of the poor to get another experience; meanwhile the real poor struggle to survive in this electronic hell world and your only choices are to fight and kill these hyper-corporations that run the planet's economy basically and that sucks. seems prophetic in a way to see what the future would be like if capitalism still stood and there was business as usual. I think a true dystopian cyberpunk world is full of dark skies and contagious air due to the extreme pollution i.e. climate change the previous generations of humans ignored and still ignore because profits and luxury and drugs and opulence and legacies and authoritarian rule is far more important to uphold you see. "human nature" is always condescendingly professed as an argument killer to why capitalism is the only way because hooomons are deep down real mean and violent... which is not true.

Human infants literally can't live without being held and nurtured in a healthy environment. Humans are wired to love and communicate. humans lived a long time cuz they worked together. Humans lived even longer when they learned to domesticate animals leading to agriculture. only in the last 20,000 years have humans begun to grow their ego and misunderstand its message and purpose. fascists and billionaires take advantage of human minds and fool people into thinking there's no other way to live. it's a fucking lie. human beings are disconnected with nature. wires and cables are not non-nature, those are materials derived from nature. everything is nature, but not everything is natural like human concepts fabricated by civilizations.

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

I want a cyberpunk game where it's a good kind compassionate civilization, a star trek like society, full of infinite exploration into the cosmos and into our minds... I want a cyberpunk world worth protecting, protecting the people from sneaky politicians (demagogues) and authoritarian thugs ready to install the capitalist religion of endless self-destruction and pain. remnants of evil scatter and reform, we must always help people who struggle under capitalisms spell.

#thatheathen #cyberpunk #crunch #capitalism

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adventuresofadistractedhistorian · 5 years ago

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5.31.2020

As I write this post, and post it, I probably will be late and it will be after midnight and the date will be wrong; but it does not matter. I apologize for my absence from here in the past few months. I don't know if anyone else knows this but we're living through a pandemic and multiple historical revolutions. The world is really difficult to navigate and seemingly more and more uncertain. Time is becoming more and more difficult to measure. The days are blurring together more and more, and each day feels like Groundhog Day. Yet, at the same time, each day the world grows more and more different. Each day, there is more dissent, more division, more death and more destruction than before.

For the past 6 months, a virus more deadly and sinister than we would have thought has ravaged the globe. It has shut down airports, shipping lanes, businesses, corporations, and even, dare I day, the entire United States Economy (which will ultimately have serious repercussions for the world's economy, but that's another blog post). But another virus has been sweeping the United States, and the globe, and that is the virus that has plagued us for millennia--the virus of racism, systematic oppression, discrimination, and institutionalized racism.

The plague of racism in America is a different strain than other countries around the world are afflicted by. This country is one made up of an amalgamation of immigrants, yet is a country that has always had issues, prejudices, bias, and racial disparity when it comes to immigration. Examples include: Italian, Irish, and German immigrants in the mid-1800s to early-mid-1900s, Africans, African-Americans, and other people of color, bias against Catholics, disparity with Baptists, the list goes on and on. The United States is a country that is essentially made up of 50 smaller countries all trying to get along, but they all have different rules (laws), and different cultures--it's like the Balkans, just, "one" country--and it is failing. (Miserably, I might add). This past week has served as a precipice, an apex, an epoch, a tipping point. Americans are tired of the oppression of the police force, and their use of force, and their discrimination against people of certain races. And it is because of this that many, many Black Americans and other POC, as well as LGBTQ+ citizens, Black Trans* Folx, and other minorities have become targets of, and victims to these hate crimes committed by the police--and many have been murdered--they were not killed in an accident, they were killed, by force and choice of another person, weilding and exhibiting power over the other. They were shot, strangled, choked, gassed, sprayed, hosed. They were separated from families at the border, they were children in cages.

This week across the country, citizens have come together in solidarity and support of the Black community. There have been what are being called "lootings", there have been fires, there have been hugs, there have been crowdfunds. This is a revolution--no different than the Boston Tea Party, well, it's very different, but that doesn't matter--we have the right to not live like this. BLACK AMERICANS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIVE.

Boston gathered peacefully today (5/31/2020), as did many other cities. If you can, great, if you can support from the side--great. No matter what your ability level, we all have an ability to generate change here. SILENCE IS VIOLENCE AND "NEUTRALITY" IS SIDING WITH THE OPPRESSOR.

Go out and make change--someone, when we were children, told us to grow up and keep dreaming, and to grow up and change the world. We Can and we WILL do that--we are all still those children.The present is the future's history--we are the authors of our children's history books--let's write them well.

#may 2020 #ADH #america #black lives matter #BLM #boston #riots #george floyd #justice for George floyd #history #history in the making #pandemic #covidー19 #covidquarantine #black lives are important #blacklivesmatter

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justonecynicsopinion-blog · 4 years ago

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Let's Help Make 'Black Lives Matter' MATTER: 10 Things America Needs To Do

"Walking between the pools of light cast by the street lights I saw the group of them from a block away, joking and jostling each other. In a dark patch I crossed the street. One of them noticed and they all stopped and stared, their heads rising like wolves testing the breeze for the scent of potential prey. The tallest one said something and two of them broke from the pack and meandered across to my side of the road, one putting a hand to the small of his back, the other digging one deep into a pocket."

Who is black in that anecdote? Who is white, yellow, brown, gay or trans? Does colour change anything in the story for the teller? Is the narrator 'blue,' a cop? Off duty? On duty? Does that change anything, substantially, in the story?

Black Police Are the Original BLM Leaders

They Volunteered For The Job of Protecting Blacks From Violence

The cold reality in America today is that guns are as easy to get as smartphones. That cold reality is what the police face every moment of every day.

Another cold reality is that, from the moment that humans got smart enough to band together instead of erring on the side of caution and scattering in the face of a mortal threat, the most dangerous risk any human faced was a more numerous group of humans. What empowered our species to come to dominate the planet was 'tribalism' (otherwise known as 'racism' and the root of 'nationalism'). It is permanently and indelibly hardwired into each and every human brain.

Familiarization with those 'not of our tribe' reduces the power of our instinctive tribalism over our reactions, but it never goes away. And tribalism is not exclusive to whites -- it is true of every human tribe out there.

What's the Most Crucial First Step BLM Has to Make to Succeed?

Black lives automatically matter less if you don't first acknowledge that blue-black lives matter just a bit more than all lives matter.

I'm not being 'cute': if the black community does not first and foremost stand up for the safety of black cops ("blue-black lives”) who are the ‘front line workers’ in their communities -- the first on scene when there’s trouble -- the claim that black Americans are faced with racism that systematically disadvantages them (places their lives in disproportionate jeopardy to that of others) is at best counter-productive, at worst not in their own best interests. Communities are successful only when we police our own people where we live, protecting each other from injury, trespass and property theft. If black cops tell you that they are more nervous about concealed weapons being drawn on them in their own community than in many others, then we can all begin to understand the knee-jerk, 'self-defence through offence' reactions of any cop in a similar situation where they are scared that a suspect may be going into his vehicle or his pocket, against the cops' specific instructions, to get a firearm.

The police have an EXTREMELY dangerous job in a country with more freely available weapons than there are citizens, and they're on high alert any time there's a confrontation, whether that's entirely justified or not. Add to this the fact that 911 calls come in SEVEN TIMES MORE in predominantly black areas and you have seven times the likelihood of high risk altercations taking place, regardless of what colour the police are.

Perception is not always reality and we don't like it when our most emotionally charged perceptions are proven false. The reality is that statistics prove that black men are NOT shot at a higher rate by white police than white men are, despite the impression that we're left with from media exposure. Racism on the part of white cops towards black civilians, outside of some 'bad actors,' is not the principal cause for needles deaths of black Americans: poverty, public education funding through property taxes and 'The War on Drugs' are.

Living in poor neighbourhoods is the highest risk factor for getting into dangerous altercations for people of any colour. In depressed areas crime may seem to be a good way to solve one's poverty, especially when the quality of public education is low. Young residents have far fewer opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty, regardless of individual ability and their interest in doing so. Living conditions can be so miserable and funding for social services like mental health treatment is so inadequate that taking drugs becomes a viable 'medication' for mental health issues. If the system that sets up the causes for unequal outcomes is not addressed, then the poverty, and subsequent risk of death from criminals and police altercations, will never be reduced.

"Defund the Police!" Really Means "Increase Social Support"

The 'systemic racism' in America lies in the fact that black communities continue to face profound inequality, not in the fact that more crime takes place in their neighbourhoods, per se. To fix the inequality problem we don't need less police, we need more health care, better social welfare support (a universal basic income, NOT more welfare for single mothers) and a vastly improved public school system across all American communities.

Using the overly provocative phrase "DEFUND THE POLICE!" detracts from the real message: "INCREASE SOCIAL SUPPORT“. Decreasing the amount of blue-blacks (and blues in general) in their own communities will only lead to the kind of mayhem and instability that holds the citizens of these areas further back in the competition we call life.

If we begin to place the 'right to zero-harm' for every citizen (including the criminals that exist throughout humanity, whether they are white collar criminals, grey collar criminals, blue collar criminals, or criminals whose full-time job is criminality), above that of the blues (the police), then civilization erodes very quickly into pandemonium. Civilization can only exist based upon mutually agreed-to regulations and laws that are enforced by a publicly funded and trusted police force and a judicial system that is fair across the board.

It is this lack of overall fairness, the current inequality of treatment evidenced by the incarceration rate of poor and black people in the US (especially poor black males from fatherless homes), as well as the lack of gainful employment that drives poor people into miserable lives that lead to drug use and crime, that is currently under debate. However, it is the underlying system, NOT the enforcers of the system, that needs reform. People of every stripe who seek simple answers to complex issues look at the most obvious, superficial symptom and claim that THAT is what needs changing, without understanding where the issues that cause the overall problem really lie.

Black Lives Matter: What's the Real Goal of the Movement?

Momentous 'movements' only change history when their aim is clear and the goal is simple. Either that, or, if the goal is complex and the steps numerous, the movement needs a powerful, central voice to coordinate and direct the movement's direction, step by step to achieve its ultimate goal.

Black Lives Matter simply doesn't matter if it has no clear goal that 'the movement' is aiming to achieve, and actionable steps to get there.

"End systemic racism" SOUNDS like just what America needs to improve the lives of many of its underclass, but a problem cannot be addressed if the meaning of its goal is unclear, or is far too complex to ever be achieved by simply shouting the goal over and over again. In the same vein, demanding worthwhile, straightforward social changes that unfortunately fail to address the roots of the underlying problems are just 'half measures.’ A current example is the recent demand to shift funding away from policing toward more social support like addressing inadequate mental health programs. While this is a necessary and wholly appropriate demand, especially given the growing militarization of the police, the enforcers (police) are largely a symptom, it is the laws -- from 'The War on Drugs’ to financing public education through local property taxes -- that are the cause of the problem.

"Systemic racism" means various things to the many and diverse participants in this growing movement. Definitions range from 'fixing the clearly unjust justice system,' to 'giving the underclass a leg up through improved education,' to 'equal outcomes for all, regardless of effort, ability, experience, or merit'. Other notions include 'ending police use of lethal violence against people of colour,’ to 'hand out large sums of cash to the descendants of former slaves,’ and even 'erase racism (tribalism) from humankind's hardwiring' (which would involve re-writing our genetic code).

"Systemic Racism" is Not Racism, It’s Policies, Programs & Laws

Policies, programs and laws expressly designed to keep the wealth-hoarders in charge, making ever more money, while increasing the inequality that prevents the poor from escaping The Poverty Trap. That trap is equally tough to escape no matter what colour you are and it is gettingmore and more difficult to break free from.

“Systemic Racism,” More Accurately, is “Systemic Inequality”

Systemic Inequality can only be addressed by changing programs, policies and laws in a meaningful, effective manner.

What is the Practical, Core Goal of the BLM Movement?

Once slavery was abolished in America, but not until electricity was available in most homes (outside of those households wealthy enough to employ servants), women were the de facto 'household work force,' they were the largely invisible 'engine under the hood’ of the economy. The Suffragette Movement that brought about the right to vote for white women (voting rights for black citizens in America didn't come to pass until much later) could not have come about until women began to be freed from household chores by electrical appliances. The success of the effort to win voting rights for women only came about once the cause of the problem of women being stuck at home 24/7 (i.e. washing clothes in a tub, hauling water, churning butter, hand-sewing clothing, etc.), was addressed. This continues to be the single biggest barrier to female emancipation in developing world countries (if women are out of sight -- even more so if they are all encased in black bags -- they are out of mind).

To solve any problem we cannot focus on the symptoms. The causes of the problem must first be addressed.

The underlying root cause for women not having the right to vote was not simply brutish male egos, it was a fundamental lack of power. Without the freedom to interact in the wider world outside of the home in sufficient numbers to be seen as a force to be reckoned with, without earning salaries to contribute to the household income, without sufficient education to qualify them to rise up into positions of power, women were powerless and could be ignored. Black and brown voices today face a similar challenge. Until the system that underlies their lack of power is changed and they are empowered to ENTER the world outside of their neighbourhoods by being released from ‘The Poverty Trap,’ until they can be given a leg-up to get the education required to fill white collar positions, they will be ignored by the same lawmakers that ignore the poor white voices demanding, for example, universal healthcare.

The ultimate goal of the BLM Movement MUST be to change the policies, programs and laws that undergird the system at its roots, NOT focussing on eliminating racism, whether in law enforcement or in the larger world. Black and brown lives only begin to matter to the wealth- hoarders at the top when their power is threatened, as happened with the Suffragette Movement. Those women were not demanding equal outcomes, they were demanding equal opportunity. That's a key benchmark for BLM to keep in mind if the movement is going to have any real long-term impact:

The fight is only winnable if it is for equal opportunity, NOT equal outcome.

What Goals Proved Achievable for Past Movements?

The Women's Suffrage Movement had a single goal: allow women to vote. Achieving that simple first goal opened up the Women's Rights Movement that followed, much to the betterment of the lives of 51% of the human population in developed countries over the ensuing decades.

The Abolitionist Anti-Slavery Movement had a clear and actionable simple goal: free the slaves.

A civil war had to be fought over it, but America, ‘land of the free,’ became better for achieving that simple goal.

The Black Lives Matter Movement’s single goal should be: end systemic inequality. Yes, the steps to get there are complex and numerous, but with a shared vision, it can be done.

Ending Systemic Inequality Requires a Fire, Not Just A Spark

Keeping a fire going requires the continual addition of fuel. The BLM protests that were sparked by the murder of George Floyd and many others have ignited a much needed conflagration, but like the Occupy Movement and Tea Party Movement that proceeded it, that fire is likely to die out without a unified, clear goal and shared understanding of all the policies, programs and laws that will need changing to result in the goal of ending Systemic Inequality. The fuel that will keep the fire burning will NOT be protests, it will be VOTING and ongoing organization and activism to demand changes to specific policies, programs and laws.

Why is the BLM ‘Fire’ Likely to Die Out?

A Lack of Consensus

The Occupy Movement was able to be crushed by the government for one reason: the occupiers lacked any clearly stated goal. Yes, they all wanted the corporations and the Wall Street gamblers who’d created the 2008 crisis to be held accountable, but they had no single voice to communicate that goal, no coherent steps they wanted to see followed, and no political (voting) power to push their progressive agenda forward.

The Tea Party lacked a clear, singular goal (the usual Conservative laundry list: less taxes, smaller government, immigration control, no black President, etc.), but had major political sway in red states. Yet, despite early success in garnering attention from Republican politicians, by 2016 Politico had declared the movement dead (and indeed the demographic who had initiated it, partly in response to being incensed by the young, diverse, urban, Progressive Occupiers, were older, white, rural and Conservative and have been literally dying off — Trump is their ‘last hurrah’).

To Succeed, Any Progressive Movement Needs:

1. Consensus on a simple, singular goal (a voice),

2. Clear steps to achieve that goal (a strategic plan),

3. The political power to make the steps happen (voter influence).

Without a clear understanding, among the majority, of exactly what the issues are that are causing inequality in American and around the world, we cannot solve complex problems like systemic inequality. A HUGE barrier to doing so is that the vast majority of our human population are not endowed with the ability to assimilate all of the information necessary to address the challenges, much less the ability to understand the roots and inter-connectivity of complex issues and then generate creative, effective solutions.

The majority can raise their voices in protest, but cannot offer up meaningful and effective solutions to the underlying causes of inequality without the leadership of some much more clever-than-average leaders. The solution the mass of protestors are currently offering up, as best I can parse it, is "White people are racist! They have more money than blacks and browns do and they should give a bunch of it to us!" Certainly the rich are currently enjoying ever-less taxation and staggering wealth-hoarding, and that hoarded cash will eventually go a long way to funding the steps necessary to fix the underlying problems (simply starting with making all public schools across America of equally high quality), but cash hand outs that get frittered away will not solve anything long-term. The only way to redistribute wealth that has ever proven effective is the system that the Nordic countries have had in place for many decades: Democratic Social Capitalism.

Taking action against injustice, against the unfairness of inequality, is not only essential to improving the human condition, it is the 'right thing' to do for the majority of us who feel morality in a tangible way, who 'sense' the weight of it in our lives. I was reminded of this in re-listening to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins discussing the scientific basis of human morality on YouTube. Morality is not simply a concept to be embraced or debated, it is a product of our unique human consciousness and a foundational building block for human civilization. Without our hardwired morality (religion is a just a software manipulation of that hardwiring) there would be no cooperation, no civility, no society for us to live productively and peacefully within.

Of Course Conservatives Resist Change, But Progressives Are Our Future

We hate change, especially in the short-term. Some of us much more than others (they’re called Conservatives). Like our innate tribalism, Conservatism is is an integral part of the human condition. It cautions us to NOT 'fix what isn't broken' and thus helps us to survive to live another day. (I'm always speaking from the point of view of most of our species' existence: the 7,000,000 years we survived since our split from our common ancestor with the chimps, not the 0.1% that we have lived in cities -- what I call our 7,000 year-old 'New Normal.' The circumstances we live in today are most certainly NOT what our species evolved to thrive in most naturally.)

An illustration of the early roots of human Conservatism: if it had always proven wise to have one tribe member stay up all night to maintain a fire burning at the cave entrance to dissuade sabre-toothed tigers and cave bears from coming in to snack on us, experimenting instead with hanging a bunch of dry sticks on a length of cat gut to rattle together to wake us up if an intruder entered the cave probably wasn't a wise innovation. Those individuals who were 'hardwired for Conservatism' back in the day either won out and the fire-tending tradition was maintained instead of the 'trip-wire' innovation, or there were no survivors of that tribe.

In the LONG-TERM, the Progressive innovation of the 'trip wire' helped ensure the survival of the tribe willing to allow the inventor to install it at the back of the cave, where a larger group from a competing tribe could sneak in through the cave system and kill the males and make off with the women and children. While Conservatives fight change (and dream of a return to the bygone fantasy of a better life in the past) in the short-term, they benefit in the long-term from progress. Grandma did NOT want to use her new iPad, at least not until she realized she could watch her grand-kids growing up from afar.

One thing is true of our 'New Normal' and that is that civilization has only flourished over time due to progress. Time and again civilizations of humankind grew and prospered only on the back of Progressivism: innovation that improved the lot of the majority through mutual cooperation. It is only through Progressivism that our cities can grow ever larger, that our ability to feed a human population that is on course to destroy the planet by its ever-increasing volume, is possible. Only by making constant progress can we figure out how to live in peace, rather than tearing each others' throats out due to our hardwiring for irrational tribalism.

In other words, it is only through Progressivism, NOT Conservatism, that humanity can survive in our 'New Normal.'

Let’s Help Make Black Lives Matter MATTER!

10 Things America Needs to Do

We all, deep down, know what the situation is. Despite the abolition of slavery, the door was left open for those who opposed the movement to come up with innumerable subtle and manipulative ways to continue to benefit from the nearly free labour of black Americans, especially the men, by incarcerating them for a myriad of trivial, double-standard reasons and making the length of those imprisonments arbitrarily long. This was taken up another notch by making the prison system for-profit, incentivizing those at the top to increase the volume of imprisonment by increasing the number of crimes related to being poor in the first place (the War on Drugs').

Another intangible barrier to upward mobility was cemented into place by funding public schools from property taxes, thus ensuring that anyone living in poor areas would grow up within a very effective 'Poverty Trap' that would keep poor kids from getting a sufficiently high quality of education that they would graduate 'at parity' with kids from wealthier areas. The ceiling to attaining wealth was raised further by well-meaning, but disastrous 'social welfare for single mothers' programs which have seen young black males who don't have fathers at home being manipulated by criminals in their neighbourhoods to join in and ultimately become incarcerated in their tens of thousands across America. Felony conviction laws then make it nearly impossible for those who emerge from prison to land meaningful work, pushing them back into crime and prison (and working inside, essentially, as slaves for profit-making corporations owned by the rich).

So are there multi-layered issues for us to work through to solve the problem of inequality in America and around the world? Certainly, but it is time to stop blaming 'those not of our tribe' for our tribes' problems (whether your tribe is political, cultural, or colour-based) and get busy doing the effective things that will lead to real change:

1. Stop protesting in the streets! (It really doesn't make much PRACTICAL change happen other than satisfying our inherent love of chanting and marching together in large crowd while patting ourselves on the back and reveling in self-righteous moral outrage.) Put that same energy and investment of time into non-stop emailing, phoning and letter- writing to your Congressional and Senate representatives. They fear losing their seats and they'll listen to well-reasoned arguments and straightforward solutions that will have real impact if the messages come in large quantities.

2. Organize well-reasoned, fact-based (leave the tribal emotions outside) meetings in your living rooms and town halls to come up with REAL, actionable, effective solutions to chip away at the underlying causes, like providing financial incentives like a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to fathers/stepfathers who stick around to parent kids in poor neighbourhoods.

3. DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Educate yourself about the real causes of Systemic Racism and what can be done to change things, or at least allow those leaders among you who can explain the REAL causes (not simply manipulate your emotions to gain power for themselves) to lead (think: The Squad, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie).

4. Get back to acknowledging and respecting high 'Fluid IQ,' merit-based advancement (equal opportunity, NOT equal outcome), higher education and respect for science and data, as demonstrated by John McCain, deGrasse Tyson, Sowell, AOC, the Obamas, Pelosi and many more on both sides of the debate, but don't accept any 'notions' or 'opinions' about policies that have no historical proof of having worked effectively (Democratic Social Capitalism has been WINNING in the Nordic countries for decades).

5. Fund the Police! Ensure that more funding is going to individual police salaries, rather than hiring more police officers so that really smart people begin taking on the jobs, rather than the 'bad apples' who can't find higher paying jobs and end up hired by desperate municipalities.

6. Increase social support! If there's funding to be found by cutting money ear-marked for the police to buy more military equipment, great, but America has a bottomless pit of funding for anything its citizens really need, its called The Federal Reserve. They just push buttons to create zero interest money to bail out billionaires, corporations and the profit-making of the Military-Industrial Complex. They can do the same for infrastructure and out-of-work Americans if the Houses approve it. Just say no to "PAYGO" — after all, it never applies to bail-outs!

7. Push for an end to property tax funding of public education. All schooling in America needs to be federally funded at the same level everywhere and all teachers need to get paid the same, substantial wage to encourage the really smart people to take on the jobs. In areas where it's clear that kids are chronically under-performing, change the system: bring in tutorial programs that target the most challenged kids, do more field trips and outdoor teaching the way they do in Finland, end the ancient standardized testing and customize programs for each type of kid.

8. End "The War on Drugs"! Addiction is a deep and insidious problem for human brains. It is a disease, not a 'lifestyle choice,' whether the addiction is to food, gambling, sun-tanning, or drugs. Marijuana is legal in Europe and Canada because it is just like alcohol -- a tax-collecting BONANZA! (And then pardon every single criminal conviction based upon the old laws.)

9. Get out and vote! and work tirelessly to convince your family, friends, neighbours and every young person you come into contact with to vote too! Trump won simply because less people voted, and suppressing the vote is the GOP's go-to strategy moving forward.

10. Lastly, end "Citizens United." That single corruption by the Supreme Court effectively ended the "American Democratic Experiment" by using common human greed to corrupt every single politician on both sides of America's single-party/two-colours, Neo-liberal system. No founder of America ever would have bastardized the Constitution by claiming that a profit-making corporation should be treated as a human citizen of the United States of America. Most politicians are now trapped by their common greed within the corporate lobbying cash hand-out system to both fund their campaigns and line their pockets.

***

I have been blogging and vlogging about insights into why we humans do the so-often counter- productive things we do, and how we can turn things around to live our lives to the fullest (the real meaning of life!) for over a decade. Check out more thoughts and insights at:

• JustOneCynicsOpinion.Blogspot.com

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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WE ARE LIVING IN A FAILED STATE

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

By George Packer | SPECIAL PREVIEW: JUNE 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.

We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

[ Francis Fukuyama: The thing that determines a country’s resistance to the coronavirus]

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “Underlying Conditions.”

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

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Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others

COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled.

By James Hamblin | Published April 21, 2020 10:41 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

The COVID-19 crash comes suddenly. In early March, the 37-year-old writer F. T. Kola began to feel mildly ill, with a fever and body aches. To be safe, she isolated herself at home in San Francisco. Life continued apace for a week, until one day she tried to load her dishwasher and felt strangely exhausted.

Her doctor recommended that she go to Stanford University’s drive-through coronavirus testing site. “I remember waiting in my car, and the doctors in their intense [protective equipment] coming towards me like a scene out of Contagion,” she told me when we spoke for The Atlantic’s podcast Social Distance. “I felt like I was a biohazard—and I was.” The doctors stuck a long swab into the back of her nose and sent her home to await results.

Lying in bed that night, she began to shake, overtaken by the most intense chills of her life. “My teeth were chattering so hard that I was really afraid they would break,” she said. Then she started to hallucinate. “I thought I was holding a very big spoon for some reason, and I kept thinking, Where am I going to put my spoon down?”

An ambulance raced her to the hospital, where she spent three days in the ICU, before being moved to a newly created coronavirus-only ward. Sometimes she barely felt sick at all, and other times she felt on the verge of death. But after two weeks in the hospital, she walked out. Now, as the death toll from the coronavirus has climbed to more than 150,000 people globally, Kola has flashes of guilt and disbelief: “Why did my lungs make it through this? Why did I go home? Why am I okay now?”

[ Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

COVID-19 is, in many ways, proving to be a disease of uncertainty. According to a new study from Italy, some 43 percent of people with the virus have no symptoms. Among those who do develop symptoms, it is common to feel sick in uncomfortable but familiar ways—congestion, fever, aches, and general malaise. Many people start to feel a little bit better. Then, for many, comes a dramatic tipping point. “Some people really fall off the cliff, and we don’t have good predictors of who it’s going to happen to,” Stephen Thomas, the chair of infectious diseases at Upstate University Hospital, told me. Those people will become short of breath, their heart racing and mind detached from reality. They experience organ failure and spend weeks in the ICU, if they survive at all.

Meanwhile, many others simply keep feeling better and eventually totally recover. Kola’s friend Karan Mahajan, an author based in Providence, Rhode Island, contracted the virus at almost the same time she did. In stark contrast to Kola, he said, “My case ended up feeling like a mild flu that lasted for two weeks. And then it faded after that.”

(Related Podcast: Listen to James Hamblin interview Kola and Mahajan on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about life in the pandemic)

“There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University. “It’s very unusual. None of this variability really fits with any other diseases we’re used to dealing with.”

This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, people around the world have heard the message that older and chronically ill people are most likely to die from COVID-19. But that is far from a complete picture of who is at risk of life-threatening disease. Understanding exactly how and why some people get so sick while others feel almost nothing will be the key to treatment.

Hope has been put in drugs that attempt to slow the replication of the virus—those currently in clinical trials like remdesivir, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. But with the flu and most other viral diseases, antiviral medications are often effective only early in the disease. Once the virus has spread widely within our body, our own immune system becomes the thing that more urgently threatens to kill us. That response cannot be fully controlled. But it can be modulated and improved.

One of the common, perplexing experiences of COVID-19 is the loss of smell—and, then, taste. “Eating pizza was like eating cardboard,” Mahajan told me. Any common cold that causes congestion can alter these sensations to some degree. But a near-total breakdown of taste and smell is happening with coronavirus infections even in the absence of other symptoms.

Jonathan Aviv, an ear, nose, and throat doctor based in New York, told me he has seen a surge in young people coming to him with a sudden inability to taste. He’s unsure what to tell them about what’s going on. “The non-scary scenario is that the inflammatory effect of the infection is temporarily altering the function of the olfactory nerve,” he said. “The scarier possibility is that the virus is attacking the nerve itself.” Viruses that attack nerves can cause long-term impairment, and could affect other parts of the nervous system. The coronavirus has already been reported to precipitate inflammation in the brain that leads to permanent damage.

Though SARS-CoV-2 (the new coronavirus) isn’t reported to invade the brain and spine directly, its predecessor SARS-CoV seems to have that capacity. If nerve cells are spared by the new virus, they would be among the few that are. When the coronavirus attaches to cells, it hooks on and breaks through, then starts to replicate. It does so especially well in the cells of the nasopharynx and down into the lungs, but is also known to act on the cells of the liver, bowels, and heart. The virus spreads around the body for days or weeks in a sort of stealth mode, taking over host cells while evading the immune response. It can take a week or two for the body to fully recognize the extent to which it has been overwhelmed. At this point, its reaction is often not calm and measured. The immune system goes into a hyperreactive state, pulling all available alarms to mobilize the body’s defense mechanisms. This is when people suddenly crash.

Bootsie Plunkett, a 61-year-old retiree in New Jersey with diabetes and lupus, described it to me as suffocating. We met in February, taping a TV show, and she was her typically ebullient self. A few weeks later, she developed a fever. It lasted for about two weeks, as did the body aches. She stayed at home with what she presumed was COVID-19. Then, as if out of nowhere, she was gasping for air. Her husband raced her to the hospital, and she began to slump over in the front seat. When they made it to the hospital, her blood-oxygen level was just 79 percent, well below the point when people typically require aggressive breathing support.

Such a quick decline—especially in the later stages of an infectious disease—seems to result from the immune response suddenly kicking into overdrive. The condition tends to be dire. Half of the patients with COVID-19 who end up in the intensive-care unit at New York–Presbyterian Hospital stay for 20 days, according to Pamela Sutton-Wallace, the regional chief operating officer. (In normal times, the national average is 3.3 days). Many of these patients arrive at the hospital in near-critical condition, with their blood tests showing soaring levels of inflammatory markers. One that seems to be especially predictive of a person’s fate is a protein known as D-dimer. Doctors in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported, have found that a fourfold increase in D-dimer is a strong predictor of mortality, suggesting in a recent paper that the test “could be an early and helpful marker” of who is entering the dangerous phases.

These and other markers are often signs of a highly fatal immune-system process known as a cytokine storm, explains Randy Cron, the director of rheumatology at Children’s of Alabama, in Birmingham. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling molecule that the body can release to activate inflammation in an attempt to contain and eradicate a virus. In a cytokine storm, the immune system floods the body with these molecules, essentially sounding a fire alarm that continues even after the firefighters and ambulances have arrived.

At this point, the priority for doctors shifts from hoping that a person’s immune system can fight off the virus to trying to tamp down the immune response so it doesn’t kill the person or cause permanent organ damage. As Cron puts it, “If you see a cytokine storm, you have to treat it.” But treating any infection by impeding the immune system is always treacherous. It is never ideal to let up on a virus that can directly kill our cells. The challenge is striking a balance where neither the cytokine storm nor the infection runs rampant.

Cron and other researchers believe such a balance is possible. Cytokine storms are not unique to COVID-19. The same basic process happens in response to other viruses, such as dengue and Ebola, as well as influenza and other coronaviruses. It is life-threatening and difficult to treat, but not beyond the potential for mitigation.

At Johns Hopkins University, the biomedical engineer Joshua Vogelstein and his colleagues have been trying to identify patterns among people who have survived cytokine storms and people who haven’t. One correlation the team noticed was that people taking the drug tamsulosin (sold as Flomax, to treat urinary retention) seemed to fare well. Vogelstein is unsure why. Cytokine storms do trigger the release of hormones such as dopamine and adrenaline, which tamsulosin can partially block. The team is launching a clinical trial to see if the approach is of any help.

One of the more promising approaches is blocking cytokines themselves—once they’ve already been released into the blood. A popular target is one type of cytokine known as interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is known to peak at the height of respiratory failure. Benjamin Lebwohl, director of research at Columbia University’s Celiac Disease Center, says that people with immune conditions like celiac and inflammatory bowel disease may be at higher risk of severe cases of COVID-19. But he’s hopeful that medications that inhibit IL-6 or other cytokines could pare back the unhelpful responses while leaving others intact. Other researchers have seen promising preliminary results, and clinical trials are ongoing.

[Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

If interleukin inhibitors end up playing a significant role in treating very sick people, though, we would run out. These medicines (which go by names such as tocilizumab and ruxolitinib, reading like a good draw in Scrabble) fall into a class known as “biologics.” They are traditionally used in rare cases and tend to be very expensive, sometimes costing people with immune conditions about $18,000 a year. Based on price and the short supply, Cron says, “my guess is we’re going to rely on corticosteroids at the end of the day. Because it’s what we have.”

That is a controversial opinion. Corticosteroids (colloquially known as “steroids,” though they are of the adrenal rather than reproductive sort), can act as an emergency brake on the immune system. Their broad, sweeping action means that steroids involve more side effects than targeting one specific cytokine. Typically, a person on steroids has a higher risk of contracting another dangerous infection, and early evidence on the utility of steroids in treating COVID-19, in studies from the outbreak in China, was mixed. But some doctors are now using them to good effect. Last week, the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued guidelines on steroids, recommending them in the context of a clinical trial when the disease reaches the level of acute respiratory distress. They may have helped Plunkett, the 61-year-old from New Jersey. After three days on corticosteroids, she left the ICU—without ever being intubated.

Deciding on the precise method of modulating the immune response—the exact drug, dose, and timing—is ideally informed by carefully monitoring patients before they are critically ill. People at risk of a storm could be monitored closely throughout their illness, and offered treatment immediately when signs begin to show. That could mean detecting the markers in a person’s blood before the process sends her into hallucinations—before her oxygen level fell at all.

In typical circumstances in the United States and other industrialized nations, patients would be urged to go to the hospital sooner rather than later. But right now, to avoid catastrophic strain on an already overburdened health-care system, people are told to avoid the hospital until they feel short of breath. For those who do become critically ill and arrive at the ER in respiratory failure, health-care workers are then behind the ball. Given those circumstances, the daily basics of maintaining overall health and the best possible immune response become especially important.

The official line from the White House Coronavirus Task Force has been that “high-risk” people are older and those with chronic medical conditions, such as obesity and diabetes. But that has proven to be a limited approximation of who will bear the burden of this disease most severely. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first official report on who has been hospitalized for COVID-19. It found that Latinos and African Americans have died at significantly higher rates than white Americans. In Chicago, more than half of the people who have tested positive, and nearly 60 percent of those who have died, were African American. They make up less than one-third of the city’s population. Similar patterns are playing out across the country: Rates of death and severe disease are several times higher among racial minorities and people of low socioeconomic status.

[Read: What the racial data show]

These disparities are beginning to be acknowledged at high levels, but often as though they are just another one of the mysteries of the coronavirus. At a White House briefing last week, Vice President Mike Pence said his team was looking into “the unique impact that we’re seeing reported on African Americans from the coronavirus.” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has noted that “we are not going to solve the issues of health disparities this month or next month. This is something we should commit ourselves for years to do.”

While America’s deepest health disparities absolutely would require generations to undo, the country still could address many gaps right now. Variation in immune responses between people is due to much more than age or chronic disease. The immune system is a function of the communities that brought us up and the environments with which we interact every day. Its foundation is laid by genetics and early-life exposure to the world around us—from the food we eat to the air we breathe. Its response varies on the basis of income, housing, jobs, and access to health care.

The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause. Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate. Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease.

Much is yet unknown about specific cytokines and their roles in disease. But the likelihood of disease in general is not so mysterious. Often, it’s a matter of what societies choose to tolerate. America has empty hotels while people sleep in parking lots. We are destroying food while people go hungry. We are allowing individuals to endure the physiological stresses of financial catastrophe while bailing out corporations. With the coronavirus, we do not have vulnerable populations so much as we have vulnerabilities as a population. Our immune system is not strong.

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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JAMES HAMBLIN, M.D., is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a lecturer at Yale School of Public Health and author of the forthcoming book Clean.

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sidewalkchemistry · 2 years ago

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It's not the case that inequality is attributable to bad apples, but rather, that the barrel is bad. The barrel is what's contaminating the apples. It's the institutions that prioritize getting ahead above all else. And that it's okay to break the law if that means you're going to make more profits for the company, with no attention to what the consequences are for the system as a whole. - Paul Piff in Growing Economy, Miserable Citizens: Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy?

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

WHO Issues Warning As Daily Caseload Grows (Foreign Policy) As dense crowds of protesters gather around the world, and New Zealand announces a return to life as usual, it’s easy to forget that a pandemic is still raging. On Monday, the WHO recorded the largest daily increase in new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, 136,000 in total; 75 percent of new cases came from just ten countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia.

Stress is skyrocketing among the middle-aged (Marketwatch) If you’re middle-aged and you’re thinking, “I don’t remember everyone being this angry and miserable 20 or 30 years ago,” you’re not wrong. A recent study confirms what many people in later middle age already feel: We really are much more stressed than middle-aged people were back in the 1990s. The good news? As we get older our levels of stress will go down again. We’ll be happier in retirement than we are in our 40s and 50s, even with health issues. Older people experience fewer stressors and are able to cope with them better, says David Almeida, a psychologist and professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University. Meanwhile, the simplest answer is to move more. “My advice to people is to move when you are exposed to stress,” he says. “Moving, physical activity, is probably the best stress reducer.”

After Protests, Politicians Reconsider Police Budgets and Discipline (NYT) In an abrupt change of course, the mayor of New York vowed to cut the budget of the nation’s largest police force. In Los Angeles, the mayor called for redirecting millions of dollars from policing after protesters gathered outside his home. And in Minneapolis, City Council members pledged to dismantle their police force and completely reinvent how public safety is handled. As tens of thousands of people have demonstrated against police violence over the past two weeks, calls have emerged in cities across the country for fundamental changes to American policing. The pleas for change have taken a variety of forms—including measures to restrict police use of military-style equipment and efforts to require officers to face strict discipline in cases of misconduct. Parks, universities and schools have distanced themselves from local police departments, severing contracts. In some places, the calls for change have gone still further, aiming to abolish police departments, shift police funds into social services or defund police departments partly or entirely.

U.N. General Assembly won’t meet in person for first time in 75-year history (Washington Post) For the first time in the United Nations’ 75-year history, world leaders won’t convene in New York for the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. U.N. General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad-Bande explained Monday that an in-person gathering during the coronavirus pandemic would be impossible because world leaders typically travel with large delegations of aides and security personnel, making it hard to keep the numbers of attendees at events low. “A president doesn’t travel alone, leaders don’t travel alone,” he said. The session will instead take place remotely, though U.N. officials have yet to say exactly what that might look like.

Mexico’s Leader Rejects Big Spending to Ease Virus’s Sting (NYT) Across the globe, governments have rushed to pump cash into flailing economies, hoping to stave off the pandemic’s worst financial fallout. They have mustered trillions of dollars for stimulus measures to keep companies afloat and employees on the payroll. The logic: When the pandemic finally passes, economies will not have to start from scratch to bounce back. In Mexico, no such rescue effort has come. The pandemic could lead to an economic reckoning worse than anything Mexico has seen in perhaps a century. More jobs were lost in April than were created in all of 2019. A recent report by a government agency said as many as 10 million people could fall into poverty this year. Yet most economists estimate that Mexico will increase spending only slightly. Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight.

Cuba almost coronavirus free (Foreign Policy) Cuba—a country that prides itself on its health system—has almost vanquished its coronavirus epidemic, according to official data. It has recently averaged less than ten cases per day and on Monday went nine consecutive days without a reported death from COVID-19. “We could be shortly closing in on the tail end of the pandemic and entering the phase of recovery from COVID,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said over the weekend.

Spain makes masks mandatory until coronavirus defeated (Reuters) Wearing masks in public will remain mandatory in Spain after the country’s state of emergency ends on June 21 until a cure or vaccine for the coronavirus is found, Health Minister Salvador Illa said on Tuesday.

This round’s on us, says Malta (Reuters) Residents of Malta will be given $112 vouchers by the government to spend in bars, hotels and restaurants in an effort to revitalize the tourist industry. Tourism accounts for a quarter of the Mediterranean island’s GDP but it has been at a standstill since mid-March when flights were stopped during the coronavirus emergency. Flights to a small number of countries will resume on July 1 but they exclude big tourism source markets Britain and Italy.

Russia rejects Iran embargo (Foreign Policy) Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has called for “universal condemnation” of the U.S. campaign to pass a permanent arms embargo on Iran through the United Nations Security Council. In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Lavrov called the U.S. attempt to hold Iran to the confines of the Iran deal while the United States had already broken the deal was “ridiculous and irresponsible.”

Moscow’s strict coronavirus lockdown turns lax overnight (Washington Post) In a sudden about-face from one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns, Moscow dramatically eased restrictions Tuesday, abolishing the city’s digital-pass system for travel and allowing salons and most other nonessential businesses to open. Schedules for when Muscovites were allowed outside based on their address have also been done away with after just one week. Restaurants and cafes will be allowed to serve people on verandas starting June 16 and nearly all restrictions will be lifted by June 23—the day before Russia’s rescheduled Victory Day parade on Moscow’s Red Square. The city’s walk schedules and requirements for wearing face masks outside have increasingly been ignored by residents, and Moscow authorities might have been feeling the pressure from small businesses that have been closed since late March with little government aid to sustain them.

Tracking the origin of the coronavirus outbreak (Daily Telegraph) Coronavirus may have broken out in the Chinese city of Wuhan much earlier than previously thought, according to a new US study looking at satellite imagery and internet searches. The Harvard Medical School research found that the number of cars parked at major Wuhan hospitals at points last autumn was much higher than the preceding year. It also found that searches from the Wuhan region for information on “cough” and “diarrhea”, known Covid-19 symptoms, on the Chinese search engine Baidu spiked around the same time. It has led researchers to suggest that the outbreak began much earlier than December 31, the date the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization of the outbreak.

North Korea cuts off all communication with South Korea (AP) North Korea said it was cutting off all communication channels with South Korea on Tuesday, a move experts say could signal Pyongyang has grown frustrated that Seoul has failed to revive lucrative inter-Korean economic projects and persuade the United States to ease sanctions. The North’s Korean Central News Agency said all cross-border communication lines would be cut off at noon in the “the first step of the determination to completely shut down all contact means with South Korea and get rid of unnecessary things.” North Korea has cut communications in the past—not replying to South Korean phone calls or faxes—and then restored those channels when tensions eased.

The Palestinian Plan to Stop Annexation: Remind Israel What Occupation Means (NYT) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is pressing for annexation in conjunction with the Trump administration’s peace plan, which at least ostensibly contemplates an autonomous Palestinian entity as part of what it calls a “realistic two-state solution.” Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, and could do so as early as next month. But to the Palestinians, annexation flouts the ban on unilateral land grabs agreed to in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, and would steal much of the territory they have counted on for a state. For that reason, they say it would kill all hope of a two-state solution to the conflict. In response to the annexation plan, Mr. Abbas renounced the Palestinians’ commitments under the Oslo agreements last month, including on security cooperation with Israel. The strategy aims to remind the Israelis of the burdens they would assume if the Palestinian Authority disbanded, and to demonstrate that they are willing to let the authority collapse if annexation comes to pass. The Palestinian Authority says it will cut the salaries of tens of thousands of its own clerks and police officers. It will slash vital funding to the impoverished Gaza Strip. And it will try any Israeli citizens or Arab residents of Jerusalem arrested on the West Bank in Palestinian courts instead of handing them over to Israel.

#headlines #news

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very-virgil · 5 years ago

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Fearing Abnormalities (Roman’s Prologue)

Rising Over Skylines - Part One

Thomas Sanders lives in a world where having strange powers are not uncommon. However, they are punishable at the hands of a large corporation known as CASTE. In a world where being abnormal is a fate worse than death, Thomas Sanders exists as such, with his only sanctuary coming in the form of a young boy with golden wings

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Pairings: Platonic Thomas and Roman, endgame Logince, endgame Moxiety

Warnings: Child neglect

Notes: While this is Roman's prologue, a lot of Roman's main story revolves around Thomas' backstory so this mostly follows Thomas' origins.

Word Count: 3649

Harborview was nothing more than another city in a long line of obsessively, hurriedly built urbanized areas, built in a panic to best cope with an ever-growing population in an ever-collapsing economy.

The city has once been nothing more than a small fishing town affectionately named Harborview for the salt-stained piers reaching out into frothy oceans. Barnacled boats bobbed at the town’s shoreline, careening to one side with the weight of nets plump with fish. Few, but for the regular fishermen who made a living off catching fish and selling them to local shops, stayed there permanently. The town was more motel than permanent home, and many who came did so to sail out into the ocean, or buy some particularly organic bait, or sit out on the piers with loved ones to watch the sun paint the ocean gold as it sank deeper and deeper into the horizon. Then, they would pack their things back into vehicles and drive off in the direction of a less salty, more densely-populated area to quench their need for non-seafood centric meals or air which wasn’t littered with salt water and fish.

To the many fishermen who did call Harborview their permanent home, the sight of visitors leaving by the end of the day was always a relief. While many of the shopkeepers knew the tourists were valuable for a running business, no one wished for them to overextend their welcomes. They all lived in fear of visitors learning their small town’s secret; that being that their town was heavily populated by Eccentrics who had come to use the small, off the map town as a refuge from CASTE.

Jeremiah Sanders was one such Eccentric. He had been born in the town just as his father had been, and just as many generations would come to be as well. While many Eccentrics were sure to keep any abnormalities close to their chests, such a concern wasn’t upheld in Harborview. He, like many of his fellow fishermen, used his powers freely and without hesitation. After all, he had been born Eccentric. He had been gifted eccentricities—powers far greater than any human capability—and to not use them seemed a waste. Jeremiah Sanders was an Eccentric, and he was happy in Harborview.

That was, until one such visitor outed to CASTE the large number of Eccentrics which did take haven in Harborview. In the course of a few decades CASTE—a Corporation of Analysis, Specialization, and Testing of Eccentrics—became integrated into life at Harborview, and soon the inhabitants of this small town were sporting tags forcibly clipped onto their ears, conveying to all who saw them that they were different. Abnormal. Eccentric.

For this reason, Jeremiah was relieved to discover, upon his son’s birth, that he was not Eccentric. Young Theodore Sanders had been the upmost example of normal the family had ever seen and, for that reason, became one of the first to permanently inhabit Harborview without need for a tag.

Theodore would not be the last, though. Seeing the potential for business, CASTE eventually integrated a permanent location in Harborview, and with them populations followed. Businesses built, citizens bought apartments, and over the course of Theodore’s life he watched what his father had once affectionately called a small town evolve into a metropolitan area.

Air which once smelled of salt turned musty and thick with smoke. Waters once crystal clear turned brown and littered. Many fishermen who once spent their days on the piers or on ships, casting out lines and nets, eventually moved away in the direction of fish, leaving the piers to grow soggy under disuse, and for ships abandoned by fishermen to be eventually taken hostage by the dirtied, soiled ocean.

Regardless, Theodore found some enjoyment in their ever-changing city. He eventually fell in love with the daughter of a fisherman, Martha, another non-Eccentric who had refused to leave the city when her father had. Stubborn-headed and passionate, Theodore fell in love, a love which eventually resulted in a marriage, then a home, then, at last, a child.

Relief had met Theodore and Martha when their young Thomas showed no signs of the abnormal. He was born a decently average size, with decently average brown eyes, a head of decently average blond hair which would turn brown in his lifetime, and decently average dimples framing a decently average smile. He learned to walk at an average age, learned to speak at an average rate, did average in school, made the average amount of friends, and grew up to have an average love of theatricals. In a world where being above average could result in you being CASTE’s property for the remainder of your lifetime, his parents were thrilled.

Theodore and Martha spent much of Thomas’ early life determined he would remain average, a feat which would ultimately prove useless.

Thomas had been fifteen when a few students from school—fellow cast members from his school’s production of West Side Story— invited him out after stage rehearsal. Thrilled at the aspect of being invited to hang out, he quickly phoned his mother letting her know he’d be home late and followed his new friends out towards the pier.

For some time, the group only sat there, throwing stones into the water and catching trash which wadded by with sticks. They had managed a fairly impressive pile of waste removed by time Thomas became anxious enough to warrant asking, “What are we doing here?”

One of the other boys—the senior at school who Thomas had been briefly jealous of when he had landed the role of Tony—only chuckled, patting Thomas on the back without meeting his gaze. “You’ve just gotta wait, Sanders.”

“I know, it’s just that I told my mom I’d—”

His words were cut off at sight of bubbling beneath the water’s surface. For a moment Thomas sat there in fear, terrified of someone jumping from the water as a prank, or a large fish bursting from the water and grabbing their dangling legs to pull them in, but no change came. In time, Thomas joined his companions on the edge of the pier, peering into the murky waters below.

All Thomas could make out was the blurred, hazy image of a ring of gold glowing brightly from the water, like sunlight shining from beneath the ocean.

In a breathy voice, Thomas sighed. “What is it?”

“I dunno,” one of the other boys—the one who had been cast as Riff—said, “Why don’t you go check it out?”

Thomas’ heart raced and he quickly backed away from the edge, eyes wide. “Why me?”

“Aw, c’mon,” Tony said. “Think of it as an initiation. You poke the thing and we’ll, I dunno, put in a word with Mr. Hoppstead about getting you something more than an extra part in the next production.”

Thomas looked down at the water churning in the night, the only light coming from beneath it. Every echoing consciousness in his head screamed at him to turn away, that no part was worth nearly dying, but the light wasn’t too far down. Surely, he could get to it and up in one breath. Plus, the waves weren’t too bad tonight.

“I’m not sure…”

“We’ll be right here for you, Sanders” Tony said. He smiled brightly, patting Thomas’ arm and Thomas felt something in his chest flutter.

He stood up immediately, tearing off his shoes and socks and pealing his shirt off, knowing if he didn’t have dry clothes to change into the entire event would make him miserable. Then, with an affirming thumbs up by those around him, Thomas leapt into the water.

Icy waves surrounded him immediately, and almost he gasped, loosing what breath he had. The water was salty and he slimy with grime, and when he opened his eyes to gather his bearings they stung. Still, comfort came to him at sight of the golden something just beneath him.

He swam down towards it, finding it harder and harder to keep his eyes open both from the intensity of the light and the water stinging his face. Squinting, he pushed himself closer.

He still wasn’t sure what it was, though. The water around the golden mass was warm, and as the mass swirled the water moved around it, a whirlpool of light sucking the water inside. Thomas had to grab onto one of the pier posts, using what little strength he had not to be sucked inwards. The sight of the mass was nothing less than comforting, and the warm water whispered to Thomas to fall asleep and sink in with it, but he had a mission.

Trusting himself to tread water, Thomas released the post. He let the water pull him closer, and closer, dragging him towards the sight of the mass. For a moment, Thomas wondered if they were anxiously watching him above, wondering why he hadn’t come up for breath yet or preparing to call 911 incase anything went wrong. Pushing the thoughts from his head, Thomas touched it.

What happened next was disorienting.

The mass simultaneously exploded and imploded, both sucking water in far faster than earlier and expelling it all at once. Unfortunately for Thomas, the later was what affected him most and in a force which ripped the air from Thomas’ lungs he was thrown backwards. He shot out of the ocean in an geyser of water and landed hard on his back on the pier, his companions gathered around him.

He was soaked, as were they from the expulsion of water, and while the cold air nipping at his skin was certainly a concern for Thomas, he couldn’t shake the knowledge that landing on the pier should have hurt like hell.

Only, it hadn’t.

It was a few weeks before Thomas had managed to figure it out.

Suspicions had lingered in the times between them, however. Everyone in Harborview knew the dangers of interacting with strange phenomena no one could explain. Thomas could only assume that was why he had been pressed to investigate the glowing mass; he had been the test dummy. They had wanted to see if it were something which may have triggered the development of an eccentricity.

For the next two weeks Thomas took care to ensure the upmost presence of normalcy within himself. Growing up, he had been surrounded with endless stories of individuals unaware that they had powers up until an accident occurred and only by instinct their eccentricities were triggered, leaving the individual entirely exposed to the whims of CASTE and the disgraces of those around them. Thomas took every precaution manageable to ensure he wouldn’t unknowingly trigger a now-dormant eccentricity and distress his family. Despite his care, though, they still came.

He had been helping his mother with dinner, chopping vegetables when his hand slipped and the blade nicked his thumb. Thomas had winced, immediately pulling his hand away expecting to nurse a wound, but no blood spotted his finger. Instead, the blade itself had dented. It had been injured by him.

It was Thomas’ decision to turn himself into CASTE. His parents had gone back and forth about it for weeks on end—mostly when they had been certain Thomas couldn’t hear—but every time they left out Thomas’ own opinion. Everyone knew delaying turning oneself into CASTE was a recipe for a higher tagging; CASTE saw reluctancy as synonymous with dishonesty, and a dishonest Eccentric is a dangerous one.

So, it had been Thomas who had contacted the Collectors—a group dedicated to collecting Eccentrics and turning them into CASTE—and he had been marched from his home willingly and towards the towering building at the center of town where all CASTE agents resided.

He would then go on to spend two weeks in CASTE’s possession, living in cramped cell-like quarters, being moved to and from interrogation rooms and science labs by CASTE’s lacky Controllers, being prodded, poked, and scrutinized all as a means of CASTE determining just how dangerous to the general public Thomas could be.

That, Thomas thought, was the most ridiculous part of the entire endeavor. Throughout the ceaseless questionings and the undesirable experiments on himself which were ran, he wanted nothing more than to blurt out to those observing him that he was simply average. All his life his parents, his teachers, his friends had pushed him to take pride in what was surely a magnificent feat in this world.

Perhaps that is why the next chain of events which occurred were so alarming.

At the end of the two weeks—as is accustomed for every Eccentric brought in for tagging—Thomas was corralled into a small room empty but for a single table and a hanging light fixture which a man in a well-pressed suit sat behind. These procedures Thomas knew well, and while he was certain they would end in unavoidable pain, the comfort of being released back home in due time was far greater than that.

However, that was not quite what happened.

CASTE is quite proud of their system of tagging. Each Eccentric is to have a tag inserted onto the cartilage of their ear signify to those which were lucky enough to be born ordinary that this individual is different from them. The tag will be a certain color—red through purple—with red representing the most dangerous of Eccentrics and purple the most harmless. Each tag will then be etched with a number one through three. A one signifies an Eccentric with advanced, ordinary abilities—for instance, enhanced intelligence, strength, agility, etc. A two signifies someone who obtained their powers at some point in their lifetime—this is Thomas. A three, and the most feared, is someone unfortunately born with these advanced abilities, therefore permanently cleaving themselves from the rest of society.

Thomas knew he would be a two, and he doubted he deserved much more than a blue tag on account of his docile past and the lack of damage he could do with his abilities.

The man who sat across from him at the table had other ideas.

This well-dressed figure explained in simple words and a slow voice that Roman was a potential threat. While, sure, he lacked the ability to take outright action against any person, his newfound inability to be injured prevented him from being stopped should he want to. In that way he was a liability; a danger to all those around him.

Should he go rogue, there would be no controlling him. Therefore, he is dangerous enough to warrant constant observation, preferably from inside a cell.

Despite Thomas’ apparent revulsion at the concept, the well-dressed man went on.

There was, however, an alternative. As Harborview grows in size with it does CASTE, and the growth of CASTE always seems to predate the appearance of rogue Eccentrics who wish to use their powers for their own malicious gain. CASTE wished to implement the License to Hero program into Harborview by providing them with their own hero to guard the streets in ways Collectors and Controllers never could.

Thomas seemed to be the most likely candidate for this program.

In return to agreement, Thomas would be marked down to a yellow—a color far more accepted by society and free to live as they please. He would also be paid heavily in return for his services, with fine checks being mailed out to his guardians until he became old enough to accept them himself.

Thomas hadn’t the chance to discuss such a life changing decision with his parents, whom he had previously always trusted to guidance.

He was on his own, with only the time the well-dressed man granted to him in this bland room.

In the end, Thomas did accept. He walked away with not one but two tags pinned to his ear: a yellow one representing his capabilities and a golden one revealing to all those who cared to look that he was a hero.

For weeks his usual school curriculum became replaced with CASTE’s hero training program. He learned how better to use his abilities, received suits and gadgets to help him in the field, was taught to fight, and in time was introduced to the public as Impervious: Harborview’s resident hero.

Years passed of Thomas living this double life. His days became split between school and work in the morning and Impervious at night, with Impervious always seeming to take the greater of the cut.

Still, he was content. Not happy per se—CASTE’s controlling nature as well as the constant eating guilt that he was locked in a contract with one of the most tyrannical corporations which existed prevented that—but he considered himself far better off than he would be locked in a cell day and night as the well-dressed man had once threatened.

In time, Impervious became more of Thomas than Thomas did. He became enveloped by responsibilities he wanted to do right, fans he wanted to please, charities he wanted to support, and the word Impervious became a name rather than an alias.

That was, until he met Roman.

Thomas had been requested into CASTE’s hospital facilities nearly a decade after taking on the mantle of Impervious. Apparently, a child had been turned into CASTE by parents who had claimed to no longer want him, and best attempts to calm him all fell short. They could only hope a well-known figure would sway the child’s attitude.

Willing to help, as well as curious of the abandoned child, Thomas agreed and eventually came face to face with the child.

He was a small kid, skinny, but with bright brown eyes filled with an emotion which almost seemed out of place for a bed-ridden child. He was tanned as well, darker than Thomas himself, with a head of hair oddly red in the light. There was no asking the nurses and doctors working if the child was Eccentric; he could see it.

A pair of golden wings, corporeal and intangible, yet alive and moving all the same, rested at his back, twitching as he moved, thrashing when he did. Large wings framing such a small child.

The sight may have been magical were it not for the large bandage covering much of his forehead—an injury, the doctor’s said, which the parents hadn’t disclosed before dropping him, and which the child himself couldn’t seem to recall.

For a while, Thomas simply played the part of Impervious he knew to be. He spoke in a loud, regal voice, smiled as much as he could, he told tale of daring adventures which the child beamed at, nearly rolling off his bed in his excitement. The most progress, though, was made as Thomas.

It was made as he walked in one day, suit packed away, and simply had the opportunity to speak with the child.

He told Thomas his name—Roman Santiago—but that seemed the furthest extent of which he remembered save a few words of Spanish he often dropped mid-sentence. What the nurses had taken for distrust or reluctance had been true ignorance. Roman truly remembered nothing of before, not even how he had gotten his powers, or who his parents were.

He was a broken child with a broken mind to match.

There had been one night when a storm had rolled in over Harborview. The sea nearby had roared, waves threatened to wash their city out to sea, thunder shook the CASTE building repeatedly with lights flickering at every sight of lightning.

The child had been terrified.

Roman, a seven-year-old boy who had proclaimed loudly time and time again to be the bravest in the hospital (which wasn’t much competition, considering the only other residents were a few elderly Eccentrics who couldn’t handle on their own) had cowered near to the point of tears at sound of thunder crashing, and Thomas’ heart had broken.

He refused to leave Roman even as many assured him that the boy would be fine and Harborview needed him outside. He laid in bed alongside Roman, humming softly into the boy’s hair songs his mother used to sing and rubbing circles along his back, urging the storm to pass so that Roman might sleep.

The storm did pass, but not before Roman fell asleep in Thomas’ arms, clinging to his shirt with clenched fists and a face buried in his chest. Thomas, not having the heart to move, stayed there, holding the child tightly until he, too, fell away into sleep.

When Thomas had woken, the corporeal wings of Roman were gone, leaving nothing but the blue tag at the boy’s ear to suggest he was Eccentric.

After that moment, Thomas hadn’t the heart to be apart from Roman for much longer. When CASTE announced to Thomas that Roman was near being discharged and sent out to a foster home for further care Thomas had rioted, furious.

How was it fair to throw Roman into a home with people who wouldn’t care for him, at least not how Thomas did? Roman hadn’t made his parents throw him out. Roman hadn’t made himself Eccentric.

Roman didn’t deserve to be unwanted.

The CASTE workers above him argued against it. They thought it was stupid and Thomas should busy himself with being Impervious, not a father, but Thomas couldn’t be dissuaded. If CASTE wanted Impervious, Thomas needed Roman.

And Roman he got. He had taken great joy in guiding Roman home, showing him around the apartment building, helping him settle into the room Thomas had spent his last few paychecks on getting sorted.

Regardless, Roman hadn’t fallen asleep in that room his first night.

He had fallen asleep in Thomas’ arms, curled up in the chair which faced towards the window.

The two had collapsed together—as they henceforth would always be—looking out at the skyline.

masterlist

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@werefam-ily @trans-and-not-trending @kingwillow @sandersstuffsblog @hereforapathylogic @dannythehalfakid @panic-at-my-sexuality

#sanders sides #tw child neglect #thomas sanders #sanders sides fic #fanfic #ts sides #roman sanders #rising over skylines #sanders sides au

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driftair · 2 years ago

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buffpidgey · 7 years ago

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Edward Elric Is a Political Powerhouse And Doesn’t Know It

I said I’d write something about Ed’s political potential. Here, have 2,065 words about Ed’s political potential.

Edward Elric is the youngest State Alchemist, earning his position at age 12, because he is a cheeky little shit.

Edward Elric makes a name for himself as a competent independent actor, when Roy Mustang sends him on missions.

Edward Elric is a hot political commodity.

It’s a pity he doesn’t give a shit.

There’s a common trope in FMA fanfic where Ed is approached by another military official, wanting Ed to join him. I can’t really remember seeing this happen in canon, but, I do think it is something that could and probably has happened. (Unless there is some kind of military reason this WOULDN’T happen, but I am not aware of something like that, and furthermore, Amestris’ military also functions as a political entity so there would probably be leeway for at least unofficial actions like this)

In those fanfics, Ed always declines the offers. Those military officials don’t know his secret like Roy does, and Ed has no patience for their political posturing.

If he DID though, he would have quite a bit of influence if he wanted it. And while a non-negligible part stems from his undeniable abilities as an alchemist, I would argue much of it comes from his status as something of a Folk Hero.

(Under a cut cuz 2,065 entire words)

The idea of folk heroes is one that’s been played with for a long time- hell, we even have a hero from hundreds of years ago (Robin Hood) who has hung around because that idea is still popular.

One of the things that go hand in hand with folk heroes is a repressive local regime. With Robin Hood, it was the Sheriff of Nottingham and the usurper king (represented in the Disney version as scrawny lion). In the case of The Man They Call Jayne and the mudders, it was the bosses who worked those folks hard for no pay.

With The Peoples’ Alchemist, it’s... well, technically it’s the entire Amestrian government, but while Ed is a State Alchemist, it’s just corrupt officials.

ALCHEMISTS IN AMESTRIS

The motto an alchemist is supposed to follow in FMA is: “Alchemist, be thou for the people.” In a largely agrarian society that’s just leaning into the industrial revolution, like Amestris, someone who could easily fix tools, repair buildings, act as a doctor, or even control fire (depending on the alchemist’s skill level and specialty) are all things that could very much provide a huge advantage and security to a community that could support an alchemist.

Which is probably what needs to happen, since you can’t do alchemy without a lot of studying.

So an alchemist who completes that study, is supposed to turn that awesome alchemical power back to the benifit of the community. By running off to the military, that alchemist is basically taking the community’s downpaiment made during that alchemist’s training, and running away with it, while giving the community nothing.

(And this reasoning totally ignores the Spiderman Maxim of: with great power comes great responsibility.)

Then the alchemist goes specifically to the military. Since its ... founding ... Amestris has been run by war hawks, who look for any excuse to start a land-grabbing war. Of course, war is a serious drain on both people and the economy.

Those who AREN’T in a position for war profiteering (basically most of the population) don’t want war. They get coerced into war through various means anyway, and end up losing family over it. So yeah, Amestris may be basically a military dictatorship with a few democratic trappings, but there is a reason that Roy Mustang went into the military to change the country’s politics, and not the parliment.

With great power both politically and martially, the military is gonna start feeling entitled. Especially ranking individuals within the military. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the military structure is really bad at promoting accountability.

So when alchemists go off to this institution and they get caught up in the absolute corruption it’s a double blow to the people, because it’s like watching your community’s nice doctor go off to design bioweapons.

Into this situation, enter Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist.

THE THINGS ED HAS GOING FOR HIM

Edward, as I mentioned briefly in the beginning of this post, has an amazing skill in alchemy, and is a competent individual. The first of these qualities got his foot in the door. The second kept him in his position of State Alchemist. From there, though, this competent alchemist was able to unintentionally forge his reputation of the Peoples’ Alchemist.

In a situation where State Alchemists are seen as dogs of the military at best, and living genocide machines at worst, Ed managed to break through that image to the point where people actually love him enough to flock around him in awe. (Well, flock around Al, who they THINK is Ed)

Garnering that kind of admiration is no mean feat. We know HOW he did that- Ed’s adventure in Youswell laid it out pretty well. The point is, Ed is seriously popular.

Because FMA is Ed’s story, and Ed doesn’t care about politics at all, we never see other government/military officials. Well, we never see one who is genuinely popular with the people. But looking at how dramatic Ed’s reception is, how determined Roy is to change things, and what we know about how Amestris was formed, it’s easy to assume that the average citizen doesn’t have a lot of real say in important things.

What hope the people have in positive political or social change rests in figures who are already in power who act in ways that visibly benefit them. Given the cast of political actors we’ve seen in canon, the only person who is VISIBLY acting on behalf of the people is Ed.

Which means that you could argue that Ed is the single most popular political figure in ALL OF AMESTRIS.

That’s not to say that I do think he IS, just to say that it’s possible. I’m sure there are other do-gooder reformers. They likely are either stuck in dead-end assignments or aren’t as visibly effective.

Either way, Ed is the single most popular State Alchemist, and given that as a State Alchemist, he has a rank equivalent to Major, and even as someone who only knows vague facts about military structure from what she’s found on wikipedia, (A major has the authority to command units up to 300 strong) that is an IMPRESSIVE and IMPORTANT position of authority.

TIME FOR BADLY APPLIED FRENCH HISTORY

When learning about The French Revolution (not the Les Mis one) I learned that French society was divided in three unequal parts, and that the largest population was also the poorest, and also had 100% of the tax burden. I’m pretty sure that’s not how Amestris is, but I will tell you that that fact made a very big impression on little me after growing up listening to (and basically memorizing) the 25th Anniversary Version of Les Miserables the Musical (Mom is a music nerd) where a not insignificant thing that sets off the revolution is the death of Lamarque.

According to the students and the chorus, Lamarque is the only one who “speaks for the people here below”. When this dude dies, the students decide it’s time to topple the government since the ONE GOOD THING about it just died. They ultimately fail to topple the government, but Lamarque made that much of an impact on them.

Ed is NOT Lamarque. His goal isn’t to make things better for The People. And yet, he has so much pull among The People, that he has a rep and a nickname, after less than four years of work. Four years seems like a lot for many people, but in the grand scheme of things, four years from “absolute beginner starting point” to “national figure” is almost unnaturally short. Especially in a world where the newspaper is the main source of news.

In political systems where power is intentionally concentrated at the very top (fascism, dictatorships, monarchies), and the people have very little explicit political power, they are not completely powerLESS.

Their power is ill-defined and even harder to actually access in a specific way, but, being able to gauge the feeling of your citizens is important in remaining in power. Even citizens with only a facsimile of political power still can make their opinions known. And if that opinion turns to ‘those in power have to go’, well, it’s better to not let it get there, right?

POPULARITY AND POLITICS

In the case of Amestris, they have made their opinion of Ed pretty clear. His reputation is no secret to those who pay attention. While gaining a positive reputation is harder than gaining a bad one (the saying is ‘lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas’ not ‘stand in a rose garden and smell of roses’) association with Ed would probably be beneficial for those who wish to play the political game.

Without going out and specifically doing work good deeds, becoming Ed’s commanding officer would mean that you get to take partial credit for everything he does. That’s, like, how commanding officers WORK.

This partial credit for Ed’s very popular corruption-smashing would translate into some pretty sweet political clout, since you are presumed to be a source of popular political action. Popular political actions being easier to implement, even in places where democracy isn’t really a thing.

Of course, that is assuming that Ed doesn’t want to wield his popularity himself.

If Ed wanted to, he could decide that he wants political authority and use the popularity he’s found as a stepping stone to launch himself higher up the ladder than he is already. While his age and political inexperience would hamper him, if he played his cards right, Ed could become a political force equal to the vast majority of the population of Amestris, in addition to the military power he holds by being a State Alchemist.

THE DANGERS OF ALL THIS BUSINESS

Because Ed DOESN’T decide to become the Avatar Of The People’s Will in Amestrian politics, he leaves any handling of his political clout to Roy Mustang. And as I said earlier, that sure does boost Roy’s own political clout.

And I’m sure that Roy appreciates that.

He DOESN’T appreciate having to absorb any negative political blowback whenever Ed unseats someone’s nepotistic pet project.

There is also the danger of what could possibly happen if Ed were to die in Suspicious Circumstances.

I don’t think that Roy would immediately be assumed to be the one who had Ed “taken care of”. But it would all depend on how Ed died, and the current state of the country when he died.

Assuming Ed died during, say, a year with a good harvest when things were generally quiet, there would likely be some kind of public mourning, but it would probably be akin to when David Bowie died.

If he died very suspiciously during a bad year... things could get ugly. If a people thinks that there is nothing to lose, they will take no prisoners.

In that situation of course, Amestris gets throw into another civil war since the people believe their government killed off the only person who was perceived to be on their side.

Of course, that never happened in canon, but sometimes I think about the bad things that could happen, politically, if something happened to Ed.

Conclusion

Ed’s focus is only on restoring his and Al’s bodies, but his little side trips to help people when he finds assholery has given him a reputation that would immediately catapult him to VIP in Amestrian politics if he so chose.

This reputation, along with Ed’s undeniable skill, is probably pretty useful to Roy Mustang’s own political standing. Roy doesn’t give Ed that long leash just because he feels sorry for the kid. Ed roaming around being The Peoples Alchemist earns HIM political points too

If anything bad ever happened to Ed in any kind of public way, though, the Amestrian people would want SOME kind of vengeance, and depending on the situation, Ed might could probably maybe start a war. Or even a civil war, depending on how he died...

It’s probably one of the reasons the homonculi are so concerned with making sure this particular “human sacrifice” stays safe.

#fma #edward elric #amestrian politics #fma meta #birb meta #the birb talks #the birb writes

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