#in case it’s not abundantly clear from that last paragraph

[cyrusreblogs]

Ok so I love so much about this and I absolutely understand how bad smoking is for you but are we talking about gate keeping access to HRT dependent on smoking cessation? It’s not clear to me one way or the other. OP sounds lovely and I’m hopeful that they just nag their patients to quit a lot or offer them resources about quitting. But my mom’s doc denied her access to HRT as treatment for menopause unless she could quit smoking, and she had hot flashes for about six months (longer?) before she was able to quit long enough to qualify for the hormones that stopped them. My mom is in surprisingly good health for a lifelong smoker — fewer back problems than me, healthy heart, healthy digestion, no respiratory issues that I know of. Her knees aren’t fantastic but that’s not because of smoking. And the hot flashes pretty seriously impacted her quality of life for a while. I’ve had hot flashes before, back when I first started T. They’re unpleasant, and I didn’t love that the hormones were being withheld on condition of smoking cessation, something my mother has been trying and failing to do ever since I was a kid. (Though I figured it was a good motivator — and it was. She quit for longer than she ever has before, lol. She’s back at it now, unfortunately.)

But gender dysphoria is (or at least can be) much worse than hot flashes, and more hazardous to one’s health, especially if we’re engaging in self harm, self destructive behaviors, or suicidal ideations as a result of dysphoria. So I do agree that quitting should be the goal, but not a prerequisite for taking hormones unless there’s further context indicating elevated cardiovascular risk. My mom didn’t have any. If my hypothetical trans mom had been denied access to gender-affirming HRT on the same grounds with the same health markers, I would be livid.

Also I want to say that I smoked for about five years and once I decided to quit it was actually pretty easy (I waited to have a cold, when cigarettes naturally disgust me, and used the break to get over the chemical addiction, after which it was purely psychological and not very strong at that point because I missed my sense of smell. And freedom from cravings — felt like such a burden to have to smoke every few hours. In case this helps anyone) BUT it is also very clear to me that quitting is not that easy for everyone. It unsettles me the way that people see a health risk that has some relationship to behavior (weight comes to mind, though Maintenance Phase has kind of disillusioned me about a lot of the relationship between weight and behavior or between weight and health — there is a lot to unpack there) and immediately start dogpiling on people with that behavior or health risk in the name of good health or good public policy. That’s not what’s happening here in this post, I guess I’m just easily triggered by remembering all of the unsolicited lectures about the dangers of smoking from random acquaintances and the fear that I might not be able to get access to testosterone. I do dislike the stigma about smokers. I think it’s veiled classism, pretty frequently, and often feels victim-blamey, as if being a smoker means you’re morally aligned with Big Tobacco, as if getting sucked in by our cultural obsession with smoking or the way it feels chemically means that you’re voting with your dollar in favor of Marlboro.

Anyway anyway. This post I’m reblogging isn’t doing that. I’m just over here in my feelings about it, clutching my tobacco-smoke-stained pearls.

Quit if you can! Especially if you’re getting any kind of surgery! But if you can’t, there should be some kind of risk-aware, informed consent model of care, shouldn’t there? Know the consequences (necrotic tissue due to poor circulation and healing following surgery, for instance — of particular relevance to trans people who smoke: your whole brand new dick could fall off) and manage the risks as best you can while making informed choices about your body and your healthcare.

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

[jordanr770-blog]

America Needs Some Talent

 I just needed someplace to write down my thoughts so here we are!

I have been watching America’s Got Talent since season 11 when the ukulele girl won. I personally didn’t vote for her but can understand why she won. Same goes for season 12. I was rooting super hard for Diavolo but can understand why puppet girl won. Season 13 had some of the best acts ever (Shin Lim-winner) and I know a lot of people disliked her, but Courtney Hadwin should have at least  gotten 5th place over sob story “I’m such a good person and I hit my wife” Michael Ketterer. Kodi Lee was the obvious winner of season 14 and I personally thought he deserved it over the other acts. Other people did not think it was well deserved, and that’s ok too.  

Last season we got a spoken word poet in the form of Brandon Leake. I did not enjoy the act AT ALL and was kind of mad that he won, but I will say that even though I did not enjoy him, spoken word poetry is indeed a talent.

Now, you may be thinking that season 16 would be a smidgeon of an improvement over season 15. Talent and reality shows should probably strive to become better every season. But if you thought this show isn’t capable of getting any worse, you haven’t been paying attention because this show will always find ways to disappoint. Last night we were told everyone voted for an INSPIRATIONAL speech giver as the winner. Or I’m sorry, apparently he does magic. His name is Dustin Tavella. But the thing is, he was HORRIBLE at both storytelling AND magic and nowhere near deserved the win. “It was well deserved.” How? How is a kindergarten level “magician” worth a million dollars and a Vegas show? I believe the show in Vegas is about an hour and a half and I am curious as to what is he going to do in that timeframe? Talk about how the folks living in Vegas are living in sin while simultaneously throwing paper in the air MAGICALLY? I’m sure the audience will go wild over that. Or maybe during all of his shows he will adopt a kid a day from different countries and then spend about an hour talking about Little ZimZam’s harsh life and while he’s babbling  he’ll be semi incorporating his poor magic skills into the act in the last minute so the poster stating he’s a magician didn’t TECHNICALLY lie so nobody is getting their money back. I really don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts. 

Plus, his sob story just did nothing for me whatsoever. Good for you for adapting 11 children, unless it has to do with whatever your act is, shut the hell up and do the trick! Not once did this guy impress  or give even the best of a performance of the night. It was always 8+ minutes of “inspiration” and tirades about how we as a society need to be good to one another whilst doing crappy magic. Let me tell you, I know next to nothing about magic but even I could tell he was a less than stellar magician. Even calling him a magician is somewhat laughable. In reality he's a motivational speaker who does terrible magic tricks and  who always somehow manages to suck at said terrible magic but America apparently doesn’t notice him screwing up his terrible magic because he’s too busy telling them to look at a crumpled up piece of paper or a ladder or the new photograph of his adopted son who has an extra eyeball or whatever. It’s stupid.

Last night for his final performance Dustin’s act was, and I kid you not, telling us all to be nice. FOR SEVEN UNNECESSARY MINUTES. And I do believe he started to fake cry. Dude, you’re acting is about as good as Heidi Klum’s. You can't act and you can barely do magic. Why are you here? What is your talent? Did he really join a talent show to become some type of inspirational God of obvious wisdom? If that’s the case, he should have gone and done a Ted Talk, many less victims of mediocrity that way. America somehow  put him in the top 5 with actually talented people? I think not. The act itself was not impressive and he did the same thing every time, just told a different sob story. If you have to rely on a sad story to win, you don’t deserve to win a show where talent is the main objective. 

In case my last few paragraphs were not made abundantly clear, I am not a fan of this dude. At all. I read a comment which stated that a message is not a talent and whoever said that is 100% correct and summed up my feelings pretty accurately. I'm not a fan or boring and basic tricks combined with even worse stories. He's the living embodiment of a motivational meme and anyone who voted for this guy is  gullible and can fight me. Maybe people “voted” for him because he attempted to pull on the heartstrings? But because I sold my heart long ago his act didn’t effect me as much. /s But I swear every year they make it more clear that the entire show is rigged. 

Well, maybe the voting ISN’T rigged entirely and all the boomers  (first time I’ve ever used that term) and antivaxxers and easily swayed by sob story people on Twitter and Facebook voted for him. Doubtful, but you never know. HE WAS SO FREAKING BAD!!!

We are all allowed to have opinions and just because you don’t agree with me that doesn’t mean I am an awful person who deserves DEATH. I keep getting responses and messages on Twitter from angry folk who are calling me heartless because I questioned WHY they voted for him. “Well, IIIII gave Dustin all 10 of my votes!” That’s nice Karen. That is also not an answer and I cannot stress enough how much I do not care that you voted for the phony used cars salesman. Go tell your Prince from Nigeria all about it. Another guy got mad and reported me for “yelling at strangers.” Which is kind of a typical thing people do on Twitter. And I wasn’t even yelling! Lol. 

And another point I’d like to make (about this and  in general) is people really need to stop using the terms “all of us” and the word “we.” I am my own person and you do not get to speak for me. 

“We were all crying when we saw him perform!” - No WE most certainly weren’t. I was seething with anger, yes. Crying? Not even close.

“His magic touched all of our hearts!” WHAT MAGIC? WHERE WAS THE MAGIC IN THIS MANS ENTIRE ACT? I MUST HAVE MISSED IT AFTER I PASSED OUT FROM HIS 7 MINUTE LONG STORY ABOUT HIS BORING LIFE. 

His win was a complete insult.

* I personally voted for Aidan Bryant, but I really wanted Unicircle Flow to win before they got kicked off due to the judges having a tendency to suck at picking during judges choice. *

Edit: I apologize if this wasn’t articulated very well or if it seems I basically said the same thing over and over. To be fair it was 3 am when I wrote this and I was still irritated and questioning everything. Still doesn’t excuse the fact that this guy was lame and doesn’t deserve a Vegas show. My mom told me earlier today that people on the Internet are mad about his win and that it’s not fair to take it out on the guy, which I suppose is kind of true. Not exactly his fault the general public has failed and shown their stupidity yet again. If anyone is to blame it is the people who actually voted for this doofus. And AGT. And yeah, I guess I will blame him as well. But I’m not saying go to his Twitter or Instagram or whatever and call him out for being a con artist and bully him. 

I think the MESSAGE =P I’m trying to display here  is that someone has no business being on a talent show unless they have talent; self explanatory. A message isn’t talent. Being a narcissist isn’t talent. Exploiting your kids and wife isn’t talent. Speaking can be a talent (comedy, that poetry guy, acting, improv, probably a lot of other stuff I’m forgetting about) but one shouldn’t call themselves a magician if one is really a way less cool garage sale version of Talky Tina. Magic IS talent but if you want a million dollars you better have skills that are on par or better than the professionals. 

[rigelmejo]

OK this is not gonna matter to anyone BUT ME but OKAY HERE’S THE DEAL:

SO, I own the print copy simplified version of the novel Zhen Hun 镇魂 by Priest. I’ve been lamenting though, because when I first bought it, I skimmed through it (with my extremely limited Chinese language skill at the time) and had concluded it was missing the extras. In the extras, Priest wrote a happier ending and also wrote a happy ending that tied in the cdrama to the book in a positive way. I had also assumed, from things I’d heard about the Taiwan special print edition in traditional characters, that the Shen San extra was... only in that edition.

Recently I was scouring the internet to try to purchase that version, so I could have the extras. Today I talked to someone who might have the book - I figured they might know which version of the book had the extras. THEY informed me, that the simplified copy I had with the foggy mountains on the covers, HAS ALL THE EXTRAS AND THE SHEN SAN EXTRA TOO!

I skimmed the book again (really, just skimmed and read the titles) - I realized my books do in fact have an ‘extras’ section in the back. But still, I didn’t see the Shen San extras.

But they said they had the SAME VERSION as me and the Shen San extra was in their copy.

So, I read big chunks of the Extras in my book. ONE, YES! YES, I FOUND THE SHEN SAN EXTRA IN MY BOOK. ToT You truly have no idea how overjoyed I am, that I own a version of the book with this extra! This extra is hard to find digitally, and lo and behold I own it and can read it whenever I want ToT!!!! I’m so happy!!!!

BUT ALSO, this matter of reading bigger chunks to figure out which extras I had? I JUST READ GUARDIAN. AS IN, I JUST READ THIS BABY WITHOUT A DICTIONARY. WITHOUT PLECO, WITHOUT MY PHONE, WITHOUT ANYTHING BUT MY BRAIN AND THE PAGES YOOOOO!!!

I cannot even contain how overwhelmingly happy I am right now. 

I was not reading sections of the book I’d read in chinese before. I was not reading parts I have even read an english translation of. I was literally just reading paragraphs and paragraphs of Guardian to figure out what was going on in each area. First I read a chunk about Guo Changcheng writing even though their was no case, Chu Shuzhi being fond, and Lin Jing staring at Guo Changcheng because he’s changed (I think his hair was different - it was clear while I did this that adjectives were my biggest ‘blind’ spot since I know those characters the least). Then another chunk about Long Cheng University having a case, and another chunk (in the middle of the book) of Shen Wei saying “wo...” speechlessly, then another of Zhao Yunlan talking to someone and catching them off guard because he looks so young and smile-y, before looking at his watch (I believe it’s that ghost catching watch thing). 

ANYWAYYYYY I NEVER THOUGHT I WAS GONNA BE ABLE TO DO THISSSSS!!!

Anyway all this shows MY BIG FOOL SELF is that clearly I can fucking read more than I give myself credit for, and I am a big baby for refusing to challenge myself as much as I should. Clearly the times I do challenge myself pay off over time. It was abundantly obvious that every character I’ve been studying recently paid off, that every past attempt reading fiction has been paying off (my much speedier recognition of doing hand/body/head/eye gestures do to reading about them constantly in fiction descriptions, my practice reading narrative descriptions, my practice reading Priest’s style of writing descriptions, my practice reading Priest in general giving me a big help in being familiar with some of the word choice, my recent fiction reading practice giving me a HUGE boost in getting better at recognizing proper names even when I don’t know the characters for the names and even when there’s no ‘introduction’ line explaining that it’s a name). Last time I tried to read Guardian without a dictionary, I was skimming and just following the dialogue and a few very clear actions. This time, a couple months have passed since then, and oh WOW I could actually READ for the gist of the PLOT AHHHHH!!!

I am clearly over-relying on the dictionary in Pleco a LITTLE bit, because I KNOW the web novels I’m reading right now are way easier than Priest’s writing. If I can read Guardian for the gist of the plot WITHOUT a dictionary, then I definitely don’t need the dictionary for every other sentence in a simpler novel. But that’s a different thing. The main point is AHHH I READ GUARDIAN TODAY!!!!

I STILL want to get good enough to read it for details when I read it all the way through, but ahhh I am SO ABSOLUTELY OVER THE MOON ABOUT WHAT I JUST DID TODAY.

READING SO MUCH RECENTLY IS PAYING OFF!!!! AAAAAAHHHHH ToT I am so HAPPY. 

---

Ok trying to be calmer for a moment. OH. OKAY. So, practical things to note: 

I ABSOLUTELY want to read through Hoenig’s Chinese Character’s book now and finish it, along with my other hanzi reference books. I feel like a TON of the unknown words I just read in Guardian... I could have vaguely comprehended if I’d just recognized the characters. And since adjectives can get creative and might not always be the Most common words, I think just having a broad base of character knowledge would help a ton. Even if I have to look words up in a dictionary ultimately, I REMEMBER words much better when I already know the characters that make it. 

I absolutely should keep learning from my most common word flashcard decks. Those bastards are helping me practically, more than any other ‘formal’ study method I’m doing. And yes, they’re helping more than the HSK list flashcard decks. My common word flashcard decks seem to be roughly including most words I run into repeatedly when reading novels, along with most words I repeatedly see in shows. Of all my vocabulary study resources, that’s the one giving me the fastest ‘payoff’ of “I will immediately use this and it immediately boosts my understanding.”

I absolutely should keep practice reading! I should keep reading my web novels in Pleco, and keep reading my books lying around - I read some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in Chinese yesterday (I have a dual reader in english then Chinese, so I can reference the english version of stories if I get confused). I have NO idea what ‘reading level’ that Fairy Tale book is, but I know I CAN read the stories for the gist plot, and since I can then I SHOULD since its great practice. (Also, this feeds into why I should focus on learning more characters - so many adjective/descriptor words in this book would probably make immediate sense like hop/frog/wolf/croak/scream/fall/etc if I just could recognize the characters I read so I could more easily remember the words as I run into and learn them). 

So like, in summary: - LEARN SOME MORE CHARACTERS, FOCUS! - KEEP STUDYING THE MOST COMMON WORD LISTS, THEY HELP! - KEEP READING, ITS AMAZING!

AAAAAAHHHH I CAN NOT BELIEVE I READ SOME OF GUARDIAN TODAY. I CAN’T BELIEVE TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY I ACTUALLY MANAGED TO FOLLOW SOME OF THE ACTUAL PLOT COHERENTLY INSTEAD OF JUST SNIPPETS. IM SO HAPPY. IM SOOOOO HAPPYYYYYYYYYY!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

for personal reference! I! Started learning! Chinese! August 2019! It is June 2020 right now! I’ve gotten here in just under a year! 

[zbickerstaff]

An Unpretentious Plan for the Future Betterment of the Human Race and Planet Earth.

                                                                              By Zach Bickerstaff

Clearly we are in trouble. I’m sure that few will disagree. Of course everyone has their own opinion of exactly what our problems are and many of these opinions conflict. But it is abundantly clear that the world has a great many problems upon which everyone can agree. I shall endeavor to concisely explain my long range plan to remediate these problems and endow the Human Race and Planet Earth with a long, prosperous, peaceful and happy future.

                                                                     The Problems

 More than seven billion people inhabit this planet. That’s enough people to fill up Yankee Stadium thirteen thousand times. If you snapped your fingers once per second seven billion times, it would take you 221 years, ten months. We haven’t stopped reproducing either. If anything, we are speeding up. By the year 2050 it is predicted that there will be close to ten billion people. The planet cannot stand up under such a biological load. Seven billion is bad enough. Can you imagine how much poop seven billion people produce? Climate change is a big concern despite the fact that many people deny that it exists. Many of the deniers are now coming around and are finding the courage to accept the fact that something needs to be done. People also argue about the causes of climate change but when you strip away all the scientific jargon and theories, what it comes down to is that there are just too many people on the planet – dirty, messy, inefficient people. The notorious garbage island in the Pacific wasn’t made by penguins and wallabies; it was made by human beings.  

 Environmental problems aside, the human race itself suffers greatly because of its own fecundity. A conservative estimate says that thirteen to fifteen percent of the world’s population is starving or undernourished. 3.1 million children die of malnutrition each year. Malnutrition is a terrible way to die. It’s not a quick death, it is slow and painful. Often parents will feed their children instead of themselves. When they die the children are orphaned and roam the slums, begging for handouts and searching garbage piles for scraps. Speaking of slums, overpopulation assures that there will not be enough wealth to go around. 36% of the world’s population, almost two billion people, lives in poverty. Vast slums exist in South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil and India. People live in run down shacks constructed from whatever they can get their hands on; pieces of cars and trucks, packing crates, driftwood, bamboo, palm fronds, etc. There is rarely any running water and sewers consist of an open trench flowing with human and animal waste.

 This “lack of wealth” or the unfair distribution of it is the root cause of war. Few wars have been fought over purely ideological issues. Acquisition of resources is far more often the case. In the 20th century alone an estimated 108 million people were brutally killed by war, far more were injured, and made homeless. Again, the root cause of this is overpopulation; too many people, not enough resources.

 So now we have identified the problem. So how do we solve it? The big problem is that this is indeed a very big problem. People tend to be selfish and very uncooperative creatures so they are highly unlikely to go along with any solution. The first step is organization. No solution is going to be effective unless everyone, or nearly everyone, goes along with it. The world is divided up into nearly two hundred different countries. You might think that the United Nations would be a good place to start. No. The UN has no teeth and can’t control nearly enough of the population to be effective with, well anything. When was the last time they stopped a war? There are many people who understand the value of a world government. Realistically, it’s the best, fairest form of government; everyone plays under the same rules, it’s far easier to track criminals who break the rules and it will make war unheard of. It will be much easier to disarm the population to prevent armed revolt, war and mass murder. The immigration problem will be solved because borders will no longer be necessary. Once this achieved, good, solid, enforceable population growth rules can be put into place and there will be nothing that those who do not have the courage to cooperate will be able to do about it.  

 Another very important problem that I haven’t spoken of is the loss of jobs to robotics. Granted, this has been going on a very long time. Surely you have heard the term “Luddite”. It comes from an English mill worker named Ned Ludd who destroyed a new automatic loom in a fit of anger in 1779. He was angry because the new machine had taken the gobs of several workers, including  his. Such a machine is a primitive form of robot.

 Technology is advancing at an alarming rate. Think of a job, any job. Within fifty years, a robot will be able to do it. Artificial Intelligence is even replacing artists. There are advanced programs that can compose music. One was programmed to compose in the style of Beethoven. It wrote a piano sonata and a panel of expert musicologists was tricked into believing it was an undiscovered work by the master himself.

 So, in the next hundred years or so the human race will be out of work. I seriously doubt that the robots will turn against us though, like in the Terminator film series, that’s just the stuff of science fiction. But it will be a very serious problem and the cause of much conflict; many people competing for a very few jobs. The solution is a government that will fairly and equally award what few jobs remain to those qualified and deserving and to divide up the wealth and distribute it equally to those who cannot be employed. The only other alternative is to outlaw advanced technology and / or provide “makework” jobs and that simply will not work over the long term.

 But this still leaves us with the problem that the population is growing and there are not enough resources to go around as it is. Remember, fifteen percent of the population is starving. The simple solution is to simply grow more food. But that’s not as easy as you might think. I well remember driving across the state of Texas, hour after hour. Texas is really big and there are vast stretches of open, undeveloped land. I kept thinking: “why does nobody live here? Why does nobody farm this land?” I soon realized that it was because there is no water – or nearly no water – just enough to keep cacti and sagebrush alive. There is certainly not enough water to sustain the huge, sprawling suburbs of the Northeast US and not enough water to irrigate anything but cacti and sagebrush. And that’s the problem on a global basis too. There is a lot of water on this planet but the vast majority of it is salty. Only 2.5% is fresh and only 20% of that is usable by humans, the rest is locked up in ice caps or is polluted.

 Even if we could figure out some way to feed a gianormous population of ten billion, that still leaves us with all the problems of garbage and human waste. Think about how much poop ten billion people produce.

                                                                            The Plan

 It’s obvious that we need to reduce the global population, not allow it to keep growing and try to deal with it. As I have stated in the preceding paragraphs, there are too many people right now, and we are looking toward the future – the far future. The long term goal is to have no more people on the planet than can live in comfort and relative wealth, be adequately fed and receive all the necessities of life; medical care, a fair government, diversity, inclusiveness and the freedom to feel safe from violence and intolerance. Experts differ in their calculations but the consensus is that the global population should be no more than two billion people.

 So what do we do with the five billion people who are dead weight? Well for starters, they would need to be moved around. With a global government it will be much easier to move people into more efficient and environmentally friendly locations.  Massive structures will be built covering square miles and rising a thousand feet or more. This might seem like it would use up land that could be cultivated but in reality it would free up cultivatable land by “putting everything in one place” - shops, theaters, hospitals, schools, recreation, sports arenas, etc. Perhaps a million or more people could live in one of these “mega-buildings.” In the United States, for instance, once the ideal population level is reached, it would only require approximately one hundred of these structures to be built and the entire population will be moved into them. All other buildings will be torn down. The mega-buildings will be built on land that cannot be put into agricultural use such as deserts, areas with poor soil quality and salt flats.

 Travel will no longer be necessary except between one mega-building and another. People and goods will travel through underground tunnels or on above ground monorails in environmentally friendly, electrically powered rail cars. However, such travel would rarely be necessary because everything one could ever want will be contained within the mega-buildings. This would free the land for agriculture, solar farms, wind farms and other types of environmentally friendly types of energy. Fossil fuels will be rendered obsolete. People will no longer need to own automobiles and will be free from the huge expense of purchase, maintenance and insurance. The carnage of traffic accidents will be a thing of the past.

 A birth control program will be established to stabilize the size of the population. Perhaps the best way to do this is to selectively administer certain chemical compounds during routine vaccinations which would prevent women from producing eggs and / or men from producing sperm. It would be simple and completely painless. No one would even know it had been done until they tried to have children. The selection process will be based on genetic characteristics in an effort to weed out the more troublesome aspects of the human condition such as genetic deformities, mental illness, intellectual disability as well as social issues such as diversity.

 An extensive education program will be established which will contain curriculum to be sure that everyone is made thoroughly aware of the necessity and importance of the steps being taken to save the Human Race and the planet. It will also be used to educate people of the evils of racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny and other destructive behaviors as well as wean the population off of superstitious religious beliefs which conflict with various aspects of the program such as birth control. To this end it would be best to remove children from their parent’s sphere of influence. Schools now provide most meals for children and supervise much of their activity. It is a few simple steps to modify the school system to keep children under the careful and nurturing supervision of the educational system all of the time. Parents would be allowed to visit of course but the object is to prevent them from teaching their children falsehoods and destructive behaviors such as the aforementioned religious superstition, intolerance, bigotry and racism. It would prevent parental child abuse. Alcoholic, uneducated, poorly educated and mentally ill parents are notorious for abusing their children. How many times have you heard news stories about parents doing unspeakable things to their children?

Once the above measures are in place, the population has been relocated and the land has been cleared, agriculture will switch to plant production exclusively, becoming sustainable and eliminating the highly inefficient, wasteful, inhumane and environmentally unfriendly production of animal products. Fishing will be banned so that the oceans can recover. This is not to say that everyone would be forced to be a vegan vegetarian. That’s just not practical and many people would balk at the idea. Plus there is the aspect that a vegan diet holds many dietary deficiencies. Vegans have to be careful to find alternate sources of protein and the vitamins and minerals which are usually supplied by meat, eggs and seafood. This is not something that you can expect a large population to do. Our global government will have detailed records on everyone; location as well as age, height, weight and health status. Based on these factors and the ability – or lack thereof – to contribute to society in a useful way, individuals will be carefully selected for humane harvest. With modern technology a human being can be compassionately and painlessly euthanized and the body can efficiently be processed into many different wholesome and palatable types of food. There is nothing gruesome or morbid about this. This is not the stereotypical, cliché cannibalism of the Donner Party, Hannibal Lechter and Jeffery Dahmer. For instance, the head and hands will not be processed. This is for two reasons. 1. To allow the next of kin to have a funeral with an open casket. The head and hands will be mounted on a dummy body. Afterwards they will be removed and cremated.  Burial will be outlawed; it is wasteful of valuable land which can be otherwise used for agriculture. 2. Many of the diseases associated with the consumption of human flesh are transmitted by brain and nervous tissue. The average human body contains between fifty and seventy five pounds of usable meat. A rate of one billion humane harvests per year will provide an adequate meat supply and pare the global population to an acceptable level within five or six years. This solves both the starvation and the overpopulation problem. It’s a win-win situation.  Obviously only mature people will be selected for harvest. No one will be eating little kids. A minimum age, say 35 to 40 will need to be established. Of course a few people may object to this but over time it will become routine and people will accept their fate. Once the global population is stabilized and clean environmental practices are established, the practice of humane harvesting could be gradually phased out and we could once again begin farming cattle, pigs and other livestock. But we must be vigilant and not let things get out of hand again. We must be strict but gentle. The educational system is key to shaping the thought process so that a tolerant, diverse population is maintained which has the courage to make this plan successful.

 Truly, we are in trouble and truly the plan I have set out here is neither that complicated or difficult. The outcome would be an Earth that could only be described as paradise. I have heard other plans. At best they are patchwork / Band-Aid solutions. Here is a plan that guarantees peace, sustainable, long term human happiness on a green, environmentally sustainable Earth.

[synthient]

Could you elaborate on what you mean about Death T re stanning and fairness? It sounds interesting and I'd love to hear about it if you don't mind sharing.

ajhfakj hoo boy. Okay.

So some time around the summer before last (judging by the point where the first baffled and frustrated readmores start showing up on this blog), I read Death-T. It made me feel…some kind of way. An…unpleasant kind of way.

Here’s the thing about me: I can’t just let myself have an emotional reaction to a piece of fiction. I have to, first, pick apart my own emotions to figure out why I had that reaction, and second, pick apart the story to figure out how it works and how it made me feel that way.

On the Feelings Front, I’ve isolated two main causes:

1. I have a brain that Needs Things To Be Fair. That doesn’t mean I can’t handle unfairness in a piece of fiction. Unfairness creates conflict, and conflict is what makes for good storytelling. But it does mean that I need the story to be aware of its own unfairness. I need the unfairness to be the point. Otherwise I start vibrating at high speeds and shaking my fist at clouds.

2. I’m a Kaiba stan. I accidentally got emotionally attached to the Funny Card Game Boy from the Funny Card Game Show. 

There’s the feelings part. That leaves the “picking apart the story” side of the equation. And I’ve been trying to do that in nice punchy little one-or-two-paragraph text posts for the past year or so, but I don’t think I’ve ever really done the argument justice that way. So I guess that leaves only one option: writing a giant wordvomit essay on Yugioh (1996-2004).

Why This Is A Death-T Hateblog: The Masterpost

An important note: I like being able to back up my thoughts with Evidence From The Text, but I’m specifically working off the (Viz translated) manga. You can read Cards with Teeth here, Capumon here, and Death-T starting here if you want to check any of my facts or draw your own conclusions. Keep in mind that the Toei anime made pretty huge changes to the s0 Kaiba storyline, and the DM anime skipped most of it entirely–if you’re more familiar with those continuities, there’re some major differences in the manga.

(Also this thing probably reads better on desktop. I think the formatting got screwed up on mobile)

How We Got Here

Before we can actually dig into Death-T, we need to start at the very beginning (♫a very good place to start♫). So that means taking a look at “The Cards with Teeth (Part 1)” and “The Cards with Teeth (Part 2).”

For its first 8 chapters, the Yugioh manga chugs blissfully (if repetitively) along with an episodic, conflict-of-the-week formula. No overarching plot. Next to no sense of continuity. No trading cards in sight.

Then this asshole shows up. 

His name is Seto Kaiba (or “Kaiba,” at least–not sure if this is just a Viz thing, but my copy of CwT never mentions his given name). Not that he bears a whole lot of resemblance to the Seto Kaiba we later come to know and love (and/or love to hate).

Almost none of his most defining traits are there yet. There’s no mention of Mokuba, no mention of Kaibacorp, no indicationthat he’s especially rich (besides the fact that he’s carrying around a wholebriefcase of trading cards), no reason to believe he has a specific obsession with Blue Eyes (he just thinks it’s a strong card and it’d help him win tournaments), and no sign of any special hacking/strategy/hand-to-hand-combat/etc. skills (the kid is hilariously incompetent). 

This dude was never supposed to be a recurring character, and it shows.

But anyway, let’s run through the basic series of events:

- Kaiba wanders into the game shop looking forbooster packs. Yugi recognizes him as an acquaintance from school (not as a famous kid CEO, and not as a recent transfer student)

- Kaiba happens to notice the Blue Eyes card lying out onGrandpa’s counter (in this version of events, he hasn’t been stealing rare cards for months before this, he didn’t creep on Yugi’s conversation and followhim home, he had no idea going in that the Blue Eyes was there, and he didn’t already have the other three)

- He offers to trade all the cards in his briefcasefor the Blue Eyes (although he doesn’t tell Grandpa to name his price—again,the millionaire CEO element isn’t a thing yet)

- Grandpa refuses, so the next day Kaiba comes up with alaughably badly thought-out plan to steal the card

- Shockingly, Yugi notices that the “color copy from the catalog” isn’t the real deal. He gently tries to confront Kaiba about it in private

- Kaiba (without showing an ounce of the cool head you’d think you’d need to take over and run a company) panics, starts stammering and unconvincingly denying it, and then smacks Yugi with his briefcase

Annnd then Part 2 plays out like a standard s0 chapter.

“Yami Yugi” takes over. They play a shadow game. Kaiba cheats by slipping the stolen Blue Eyes out of his sleeve (Atem’s like “That’s my Grandpa’s card!” and Kaiba straight up goes “Whaaat, nooo, that’s my card that I, uh, found on the street just now.” A teen genius criminal mastermind, everybody). The shadow magic gives him a spritz from its metaphorical Karmic Cat-Training Spray Bottle and makes his Blue Eyes dissolve (I’d like to think that was Kisara going “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” and Memory World tries to retroactively make that connection, but it’s pretty abundantly clear that nothing about this series was planned that far ahead). He loses. Yadda yadda yadda.

And then Atem goes in for the penalty game.

To recap: 

Some random 10th grader from Yugi’s school stole a trading card, hit someone, and was generally kind of a jerk. As punishment, he was trapped in a hyper-realistic illusion of being ripped apart and slaughtered by half a dozen monsters at once.

Y…ay…?

Let’s Stop and Reflect for a Sec

In theory, I shouldn’t be that much more upset about Cards with Teeth than I am about any other part of s0, right? It’s not like the manga framed it as horrific and wrong when Atem set off an explosion in some teenage bully’s face a couple chapters ago. Giving us the vicarious pleasure of punishing our bullies in over-the-top, Carrie-style ways without actually exploring any of the consequences is, like, the early manga’s whole thing.

But even taking into account the fact that I already had an attachment to this Nasty Bowl Cut Boy thanks to the anime, I do actually think that there are at least two factors that set CwT apart.

The first is that Atem’s karmic punishments are usually…well, karmic. If he inflicts physical harm on someone, it’s because they already inflicted or tried to inflict roughly the same amount of harm on Yugi & co. If the crime was relatively minor, then he only gives out a minor punishment–like, say, when the homeroom teacher was Just Kinda Mean, all he did was allow the class to see her without her makeup on (…setting aside the Let’s Get Into Gender Politics-ness of that chapter).

There’s even a few cases where you could argue that the punishment is too light to fit the crime. Ushio beat Jonouchi and Honda half to death and tried to murder Yugi with a knife, and all he got was this lousy t-shirt an illusion that made the trash on the ground look like money.

In another chapter, the villain of the week tried to rape Anzu, and the only punishment he faced was having his side business exposed as a scam (Let’s Get Into Gender Politics).

Yet in CwT, we see one of the most harmless villains in all of s0 (no prolonged beatings or attempted murder? unheard of!) receive what’s arguably the most horrifying penalty game in the whole manga. At least when that guy got set on fire, it was over fast.

And that brings us to factor number two: Kaiba is the first penalty game victim in s0 who comes back. 

Capumon: Gotta Catch ‘em All!

Well, technically he doesn’t come back in person, at first. Someone else shows up to fight in his name.

Oh hey Mokie. How’s it going?

Rather understandably (imo), Mokuba wants the guy who tortured his brother last week to face some actual consequences for it.

Now here’s an interesting opportunity that the manga has set up for itself. Is it going to dig deep into the balance between defending yourself vs lashing out and causing undue harm? Is it going to remind us that most of the penalty game victims so far, whatever their crimes,have been children? Is it going to demonstrate that when you take out your anger on someone, you don’t just hurt your immediate target, but their loved ones as well?

Nah, who am I kidding.  

Hurting or inconveniencing the Good Guys in any way is Bad. Anything the Good Guys do is Good and Justified. Using magic to stick an already-hurting eleven-year-old in his own personalized hell? Good and Justified.

Before he’s shoved screaming into the Giant Vending Machine Capsule Where Bad And Naughty Elementary Schoolers Go To Atone For Their Crimes, Mokuba mentions that the other penalty game he heard about “made my brother go crazy!”

He also drops a hint of things to come with all the subtlety of an anvil. So I guess by this point, the numbers had come in and the card game chapter had proved unexpectedly popular enough that a sequel was in the works.

Death-Twink? Death-Tastic?Death-Two: Electric Boogaloo?

I’ve been pretty hard on Cards with Teeth and Capsule Monsters Chess so far. But you want to know the truth?

On their own, they aren’t necessarily that bad.

What really matters in a story isn’t the literal events: it’s how those events are framed. At the moment, we’re only midway through an incomplete storyline. Maybe we’re supposed to be horrified. Maybe we’re supposed to be questioning whether or not the hero is really in the right. It all hangs on what these chapters are building to.

As it turns out–as Mokuba just helpfully clued us in on–they were building to Death-T.

And that’s where the shit hits the fan.

Over a dozen chapters after we first met Kaiba, a whole bunch of completely-unforeshadowed facts about him are suddenly dumped on us all at once. He’s rich! The kind of rich that allows for limo rides, a giant mansion, and flouncing around in a fur-lined cape like feudal European nobility! And he’s the president of a company, even though “Whaa?!! But he’s still in high school!” Speaking of which, apparently Kaiba “hasn’t been at school recently.”

The Death-T arc opens with Yugi and Jonouchi attending the world’s most awkward sleepover–the host never shows up, and they don’t even get to paint each others’ nails or watch movies. Also Mokuba tries to murder them in the night, but you know what? If someone tortured my brother, “made him go crazy,” and left him huddled in the house feverishly working on a bizarre project and refusing to go to school for the next few weeks, I’d probably poison them too.

The morning after the sleepover, we learn another new Kaiba Fact…

Ever since the Experience of Death happened, he’s been having horrible recurring PTSD nightmares about it. As you do. When you get tortured.

(This is why, even though I know intellectually that it’s Not That Deep and people arejust having fun, I still get a little skeeved out when I see jokes about howDeath-T happened “just” because Kaiba was that mad about losing a card game or “just”because he had a crush on Yugi and he didn’t know how to deal with it. I’malways internally like “Nnno, I’m pretty sure it was the torture?”)

So far we’ve been shown in pretty brutal detail that our “hero” psychologically broke a fifteen-year-old for no good reason. The manga’s going to have its work cut out for it if it really wants to do a convincing redemption arc for its protagonist. And there’s no way it could possibly try to spin that random act of torture as an acceptable thing, right?

…right?

Crime and Punishment

That’s one of my first big problems with Death-T: to me, it reads as a way of trying to retroactively justify the Experience of Death.

That seems to be the purpose of suddenly giving Kaiba all this wealth and power that was never hinted at in Cards with Teeth. See, he wasn’t just some random high school kid who had the bad luck of crossing someone with magic powers; he was (however improbable that is, as the story lampshades) a high school-aged CEO. He’s so ludicrously powerful that he can torture an old man in front of a live audience and get away with it. Punching up looks a lot better than punching down, doesn’t it?

And you can’t really fault the hero for torturing someone evil, can you? Kaiba used Grandpa’s sanity as a blackmail chip! He ran experiments on human test subjects! He wants to kill Yugi and everyone he loves! Surely a little torture is no worse than he deserved.

There’s only one one problem with that: the Experience of Death happened before Death-T. There’s no way Atem could have known any of this was coming. The audience couldn’t have known it was coming. Takahashi didn’t know. Chronologically speaking, the Experience of Death wasn’t revenge for Death-T. It’s the other way around.

Best Served Cold

So Death-T is a form of eye-for-an-eye vengeance: “Yugi” beat Kaiba at Duel Monsters and tortured him, so now Kaiba’s gonna beat Yugi and torture him, using his own perfect virtual recreation of “Yugi’s” penalty game (oh yeah, that whole “the average person goes insane in about 10 minutes” thing? Kaiba was able to program that detail from personal experience).

But wait! This isn’t really eye-for-an-eye! Kaiba’s going after Yugi’s loved ones, not just Yugi, and that’s worse than what Yugi did to him! And even if it was proportionate, revenge is bad and wrong. That’s how you get endless back-and-forth chains of vengeance and generational blood feuds and stuff. Two wrongs don’t make a right!

And those could all be reasonable points, except…

This entire story is about how great and badass eye-for-an-eye justice is.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take everyone who ever hurt you and make them suffer even worse” is practically the thesis of Season 0. You can’t make something look awesome when the protagonist does it and then turn around and make it seem evil and inexcusable coming from anyone else.

And while Kaiba does wind up targeting Yugi’s friends, that wasn’t part of his original plan. He’s surprised when random people start jumping out of the bleachers/the Kaibacorp employee roster and insisting that they won’t let Yugi do this alone. The writing uses his surprise as proof that he just doesn’t understand The Power of Friendship, but it’s also evidence that his original target was just Yugi.

“If you’re gonna side with my torturer, then you can have the same fate as him, I guess.” It’s not even that far outside the logic Atem’s been using all this time. Just because there’s only one main gang member who personally hurt his friend, that doesn’t mean that Atem won’t rope every random mook who gets in his way into the death game too. (Granted, this doesn’t really apply to Kaiba’s treatment of Grandpa. Or the offscreen experimentation/blackmailing. Or Mokuba, but…we’ll get to that).

…But like I said before, the big issue isn’t the events. It’s the framing. Maybe the point will ultimately be that if penalty games are wrong when the bad guy does them, then they’re wrong when the hero does them too. Maybe this is all leading up to a big reexamination of Atem’s moral code and some much-needed character development.

Maybe. Let’s keep going and see.

*Great Gatsby comic voice* Baby? What Baby

Death-T runs for 14 chapters, but Kaiba isn’t actually there for, like…half of them.

I mean, he’s technically there? Occasionally? He’ll show up long enough to dramatically play chess for a panel or so, or to stick his head on a TV monitor and provide some Helpful Death Game Hints. But for all practical purposes, he’s pretty much absent for the entire middle section of the story arc.

And, uh…let’s just say I 100% understand and respect the DM anime’s decisionto go straight from Grandpa’s heart attack to the final duel and skipeverything in between.

If Kaiba’s real goal is to beat Yugi at Duel Monsters, then all the death games leading up to that one are basically filler. And they manage to be just as contrived and nonsensical as any anime filler arc, without a fraction of the fun.

It’s largely a tonal issue. The writing swings wildly between grimdark dramatics, sentimental conversations about friendship where everyone hugs and cries (tbh that’s one of the few redeeming qualities of the arc), and “comic relief” where the “““comedy””” is all either bodily function jokes or sexual assault jokes (L̠̤̯͍̦e̮̪͎̞t's̞̮̳̱̰̦̲ ̲G͖͉̹̻̯͉͖e̜̝̗͓̟͚t̖͚ ͚̰̞̮̝̫͎I͓̜̦̳̭͚͎n̪̪͈t͍̥̰̼o͚͎͇̣̘̝ ̪̼̜̣̳G͈̠̫e̳̝̗̪ṋ͚̞͎ͅd͔̙͓̯̹e̯̺̯̩r͔̣̲͔̳̗ ̘͙P̖̦o̩̺͖͎̞̬l͎̺͕̹i͇̣̼̦t̰i̬̰̝͙̗̝c��̼̺̪̲̞s).

Honestly, in terms of the “stanning and fairness” argument, there’s not much to talk about here. It just adds insult to injury that not only does Death-T throw my fave under the bus, but it’s really badly written.

The Mokuba Thing

Okay, let’s fast-forward through the filler zone and stoppp…here. 

In the context of the anime, where we know (and see multiple flashbacks demonstrating) that their whole life has been an “us against the world” story, this scene is tragic. Seto’s trust in people has been eroded so much that he even thinks Mokuba is conspiring against him? Their love and support for each other, which has survived through so much hardship, has finally cracked under the weight of this latest trauma? There’s a lot of dramatic and tearjerking potential there.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that most of us bring our baggage from the anime with us when we read the manga. The vast majority of the western Yugioh fandom did start with DM. 

But if we look at this purely in the context of the manga–if we can pretend, for a second, that none of us have ever heard of the anime–this is the first time we see the two of them interacting onscreen. And none of those touching flashbacks of Seto comforting Mokuba and defending him from bullies and promising to be his father exist here. All we ever really learn about their relationship before this point is “They used to be a little closer when they were younger. Source: one (1) photo of them playing chess.”

So instead of serving as the tragic lowpoint of their relationship, this scene sets the baseline for it: Mokuba desperately wants to make his brother happy and earn his approval, while Seto responds with dismissal and cruelty.

In the anime (and to a certain extent in the later manga), Mokuba’s purpose in the narrative is to humanize Seto. But in Death-T, he serves the opposite function. Every interaction they have is an opportunity for Seto to kick the dog and prove what a monster he is.

And it’s all downhill from here.

………………

…So.

I have…mixed feelings about this.

On one level–a meta level–I think this scene serves the same purpose as taking that random high schooler from CwT and suddenly giving him ridiculous amounts of money and power and mustache-twirling levels of villainy. It’s a way of making the Experience of Death seem retroactively justified (and also a way of making the upcoming penalty game look fair).

On the other hand. It’s. 

Horrific.

This scene is supposed to make us hate Kaiba, and it does it’s job really really well.

Personally speaking? I’m of the opinion that trying to hurt the child under your care as badly as you conceivably can is a “don’t pass go, don’t collect $100″ kind of deal. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no fixing or salvaging this relationship.  

(God, this whole thing is wrapped in so many layers of fantasy that I’m not even sure what the real-world equivalent would be. Trying to beat your child not quite to death?)

Mokuba should not have had to continue living with his brother after this, any more than the Ishtars should have had to stay with their dad or Seto should have had to stay with Gozaburo. Mokuba forgiving Seto for this isn’t touching to me, it’s gut-wrenching. Every “heartwarming” brotherly moment in the later manga (all, like…2 and a half of them) feels hollow and sad.

As far as I’m concerned, this scene doesn’t “complicate” their relationship in any interesting or meaningful way. Their anime relationship already has plenty of complications–their sometimes unhealthy co-dependence, the fact that Seto is still a kid himself and he’s not really equipped to be a parent,Mokuba’s difficulty understanding that Seto can’t just “go back to who he was” before his trauma, the times when Seto is too caught up in his own pain to really be there for Mokuba, the manipulation involved in Seto’s takeover plan, etc. This just makes their relationship outright child abuse.

But hey, they hugged that one time in Duelist Kingdom, so it’s fine, right?

ExODiA iiiIIIIT’s not pAHsible

The final duel happens. The big Blue Eyes vs Exodia showdown.

*Bill Wurtz voice* So that’s pretty nifty, I would say.

It’s..? A genuinely cool and dramatic duel. There’s a reason it’s one of the, like, three Death-T elements the DM anime actually bothered to keep. Not much to say about it.

Sure was a whole lot of buildup just to end things with one (1) deus ex machina instawin card, tho.

The Tragic Backstory

So if all this happened because of a penalty game, what do you think the solution could be?

Did you say “another, even harsher penalty game”?

Ding ding ding!

This time, instead of torturing the fifteen-year-old, our hero puts the fifteen-year-old in a vegetative state as he begs for mercy.

Yaaaayy! 

Some fun facts about the Mind Crush that we don’t actually learn until Duelist Kingdom:

1. It lasted for 6 months

2. Mokuba spent that entire time alone, in the big empty mansion, with no parental guidance or adult supervision except the butlers and maids, caring for his brother’s comatose body 24/7

3. When Atem put Kaiba in that coma, he had absolutely no idea if he’d ever be able to wake up or not. He thought he could, maybe–Kaiba’s pretty strong, right? But he also finds the idea that Kaiba died in his coma and came back to haunt him perfectly believable. “Fixed,” dead…eh, it was kind of a coin toss.

But wait, the story’s not over yet! First we have to find out Why Kaiba Is The Way He Is (“Because your buddy tortured him last month” isn’t enough of an answer, apparently).

This is communicated in the most natural way possible: Mokuba just starts monologuing about all his brother’s deepest darkest traumas to a bunch of strangers his brother hates.

The claim that Kaiba’s backstory is “more complex” in the manga than it is in the anime has always confused me, because this is…it. These three pages are the whole backstory. I mean, in Battle City we do get one more passing line of dialog about how Kaibacorp used to be a weapons manufacturer and Gozaburo “sold Seto’s soul to the military industrial complex,” but other than that… The anime took these bare bones and fleshed them out significantly, but from a pure manga canon standpoint, it’s not a whole lot to work with.

But there’s still enough here to rub me the wrong way.

For one thing, this sequence is almost an exact parallel to two later moments in the manga: Pegasus’s backstory dump at the end of Duelist Kingdom, and Malik’s backstory dump mid-Battle City. In both of those cases, the purpose of the scene is to take a villain whose motives seemed cruel and inexplicable and finally reveal the reasons behind his actions. We’re supposed to be seeing these characters in a sympathetic light for the very first time.

But Kaiba’s motives in Death-T, uh, weren’t exactly a mystery. He already made it pretty explicitly clear that this was about the torture. So as a narrative tool, Mokuba’s monologue:

1. seems a little superfluous

2. seems like a way of taking any responsibility out of the protagonist’s hands. Kaiba didn’t snap because of anything Atem did, he just had a bunch of fucked up baggage that Atem couldn’t possibly have known about or accounted for. Who knew some people take it badly when you torture them??

3. seems to suggest that we weren’t supposed to be sympathizing with Kaiba before this point. If this is the big “oh, now that I know why he did it, I guess I feel a little bad for him :(” moment, then that means the part where he got tortured…wasn’t?

And, as always, there’s the issue of the framing.

The grace note of the monologue–the thought it leaves us with, the intended takeaway–isn’t “If only he hadn’t gone through years of abuse, in circumstances he had no real control over because he was a child.” It’s “If only he hadn’t brought all this upon himself by cheating.”

Even if we ignore the fact that it’s physically impossible to cheat at chess (which seems like kind of a big oversight for a gaming manga, but oh well, That’s Yugioh Babe)…

How can you possibly present a ten-year-old cheating at a board game in a desperate gambit to get himself and his brother out of an orphanage as his start of darkness?

Yet that’s exactly what the writing does. This is a story about how games “reveal the true hearts” of their players and bring karmic retribution down on anyone who doesn’t respect the game and follow the rules. The implication is that the child abuse Seto suffered was karma. He rightfully earned it by cheating at chess, just like he brought the Experience of Death upon himself by cheating at Duel Monsters.

Oh yeah, speaking of which…

Wheel of Morality, Turn Turn Turn, Tell Us The Lesson We Should Learn

What was the outcome of Death-T? What impact did it actually have? 

Did it bring about any big moral reckoning? Any questioning of the heroes’ values? Did Atem learn the difficult but important lesson “torture bad”?

Nnnnope!

Death-T is immediately followed by a series of episodic chapters that take us right back to the status quo like nothing happened. Atem keeps merrily handing out penalty games all the way up to the very end of Duelist Kingdom. When he does finally stop doing them, his decision has nothing to do with Death-T. It takes a comment from Pegasus about the Millennium Items having an “evil intelligence” to make him wonder “wait…I’m from a Millennium Item…I’m an intelligence…could evil…maybe include…torture????”

And even after the manga lukewarmly reverses its position to “torture sort of bad I guess,” it never really does anything with that revelation. None of the past penalty games are ever reexamined. No apologies are made. The Experience of Death is quietly swept under the rug, and the Mind Crush, when it’s brought up at all, is framed as noble act that “fixed” Kaiba (because “if you make someone suffer badly enough, you can hurt them into being a better person” is a great message).

Basically, we learned nothing from Death-T, nothing changed, and our takeaway is supposed to be “Atem was 100% in the right and Kaiba was 100% in the wrong, and also he’s an evil monster who deserved everything he got.”

Guess I Need A Satisfying Conclusion of Some Kind Even Through Death-T Didn’t Really Have One, Huh

Wow.

That was…a whole lot of words of Death-T rage that I apparently had in me zjkghzkkf. 

I tend to feel less justified about constantly harping on Death-T then I do when it comes to, like, the racism in Memory World, or the series’ general Miss O’Gyny. It’s not like “magical vigilantism” is exactly a real-word social issue that’s being reflected in this piece of fiction. I realize a lot of my anger pretty much boils down to “hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(”

But I also feel like the issues in Death-T aren’t limited to Death-T.

The manga has this…this thing where it wants to be able to pinpoint a few clear, unchanging moral rules (“cheating is bad!” “graverobbing is bad!” “patricide is bad!”) and just apply them neatly to every situation, without having to take into account any of that inconvenient stuff like “what were the circumstances of this specific situation,” or “how many choices were actually open to this person,” or “how much harm was done by this choice compared to its benefits in terms of basic human well-being.” Yet at the same time, that moral absolutism is somehow coupled with a reluctance to apply any moral judgement to its protagonists at all. 

The two points where that becomes clearest are Death-T and Memory World. And I feel like even when people acknowledge the issues with those arcs, they still want to be able to write it off as “oh, that was just a problem with the early chapters, it was fixed as the writing matured,” or “oh, that was just a problem at the end because of the mad rush to finish the story before it got canceled, it was never a thing before then.” But it’s not an isolated problem. It’s there at the beginning of the story, it’s there at the end, and it’s baked into everything in the middle.

…but anyhow. 

hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(

[itskateak]

LET’S TALK ABOUT MY HISTORY TEACHER

(Who is currently on administrative leave and is awaiting trial with the school district)

(TW: Abuse, animal abuse, police brutality, racism, implied (but wrongly) terrorism, politics, anxiety, panic attack mention, violence, religious entitlement. Please let me know if there are more.)

He is....so many things. Rude, self-entitled, racist, and disrespectful, to name a few. So, here’s the things he’s done.

• Banned Metal water bottles because someone accidentally made a noise with one, once. It wasn’t even that loud, nor long. Just a slight clink as they put the lid on.

• Told a story about a storm in Mecca (2015) that knocked over a crane onto a Mosque and it killed 107 people. Injured 238. This happened to occur on 9/11. He told us the story the day after 9/11 this year (2018) and ended it with “Weird, right?” and a sly smile.

• Told us multiple times to write in the textbooks, which is basically vandalism. Previous markings in the book show it isn’t the first time he’s asked this of students. I always refused.

• “Freedom of press, right? Except the press are in the pockets of the democrats.” A direct quote from him (I had begun writing down these types of things as they happened to give to the principal. This stuff happened daily).

• He once planned to show us a video of the Chinese police beating a man in the streets, despite all of us protesting verbally and profusely. He forgot, and didn’t show it, but to think he would’ve.

• He showed us a video of monkies domesticating puppies, which inevitably included animal abuse. Although it is just nature doing its thing and it isn’t a human abusing an animal, he should’ve given a warning so that us animal lovers could step out of the room. I felt sick afterwards.

• I was afraid of asking to leave class while having a panic attack because I thought he would tell me to sit down and not let me go. I had planned to just walk out - the counselor told me I could do that - but he did let me go without asking any questions.

• We watched a video about online privacy and how google created a separate search engine for the Chinese government. He slandered the company and said that they’re awful and guilty for supporting a dictatorship like that. While it isn’t a good thing to do what they did, yes, I don’t think he should’ve thrown his political views in like that.

• In that same topic, he mentioned one of the creators of the video was a Democrat who voted for Hillary. I found this comment odd, and called him out on it and asked what that had to do anything. His response ran something like this: “Well, it’s usually something liberals are concerned about and I think all parties and everyone should be concerned about.” That didn’t answer my question, nor did it come close to explaining why that guy’s political part and who he voted for had any reason to be included in the discussion.

• I doodle in class sometimes to help stay focused. I always have, and it’s always a good tactic. Especially when watching videos or listening to lectures. I draw circles, boxes, swirls, etc. Just mindless things. Well, one day, I’m drawing on a paper that happens to have a larger drawing on it. It’s in a different pen color than what I’m currently using, so it’s obvious I’m not drawing that. I have my notes page right next to me, and I’ve taken three or four notes already. He tells me to stop doodling at least three times - other kids are sleeping, or not doing anything - and every time I try to explain, he walks away. I approached him after class and explained, and he told me that I got a good grade on my last test, so he can’t exactly tell me I can’t draw in his class, but it better not affect my grade. I said it helps me to focus better. He responds along the lines of: “I mean, if you believe that lie about how your brain works, then I can’t stop you. But that’s not true.” I responded : “I think I know how my brain works, since I’ve been doing this since third grade and it hasn’t negatively impacted me yet.” And then I walked out of the classroom.

• He dictated how we did notes. No full sentences, only use the word “the” when absolutely necessary, no more than half a page, etc. It was ridiculous. I gave one sentence summaries of the two paragraphs in each eight sections. That was eight sentences. He told me it was too long, and that I shouldn’t be writing full sentences. I told him my brain doesn’t work that way, and it won’t help me if it isn’t in a full sentence. We argued, and I walked out of the classroom to go to my next class. We also turned in our notes each class, and didn’t get them back until after the relevant test.

• He once limited everyone to three bullet points per reading section (usually two or three pages). Everyone blamed me since he pointedly looked at me when saying “some people write full sentences and a full page.” To say I was popular in that class is a very wrong statement. Every time he would mention anything wrong that we’ve done with notes, everyone would turn to me. Thanks.

• I once wrote half of my notes on the Japanese in Japanese, and I got extra credit. I did it out of spite, but hey. Worth it. I also wrote incredibly long and complicated headers to spite him.

• We re-enacted the Trial Of Socrates, and as the attorneys, we spent time in the library researching. We had to write opening and closing statements, and a script for our witnesses to follow with our questions and their answers. At the trial, they were not allowed to have the script with them. Somehow we won, as prosecution, but it was still difficult since the witnesses had not done any of the studying of their roles at all, even though we insisted they should. So not only did we have to research the entire case itself, write an opening and closing statement, we had to research our three witness and write scripts they couldn’t use AND research the opposing team’s four witnesses (one being Socrates) and write counter arguments and cross examination questions. In a week.

• A kid once came in really late to class. He came in quietly, apologized for interrupting, and gave our teacher his pass. He went to sat down, and the teacher told him what page we were on. While pulling the textbook out from the metal cradle under the desk, it snagged and made a ringing noise. The kid, realizing quickly what it was, silenced it and apologized again. Our teacher kicked him out of class for “interrupting”, not allowing him to take the textbook. He missed the entire class.

• He has a quote on the board one day and we had to explain if we agreed or disagreed with it. (“I would rather entrust our government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the entire faculty at Harvard.”) I disagreed, naturally, and one of my friends explained most of my points. When asked to tell my side, I did say that she had said my main reasons. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but he looked me dead in the eye, and in front of everyone in the room asked: “So, you don’t care that they’re a bunch of liberal, champagne drinking jerks?” I was shocked, to be very honest. I kept my expression and voice even, and never broke eye contact. I responded: “If they do their job right, then no. I do not care, as long as they do their job and do it well.”

• Has spoken in ways that put his religion and beliefs above others. Comments like “When God made the world” and such were sometimes thrown in.

• Mispronounced multiple Greek Gods’ and Goddesses’ names. Such as Nike (uh-knee-kay), and Zeus (Zay-oos). I corrected him each time and each time he glared at me.

• He once tried to inform us that the reason Indian music sounded so strange was because they used the half-step intervals that we don’t have. I literally laughed so hard he paused the video and asked me why I was laughing. I had to explain chromatics to him. “We have them, we just don’t use them as abundantly or frequently in every song. It’s normal in Indian music to hear that.” He was still skeptical, even after I told him I’ve studied music theory in passing and have been in music classes for five years, and can read two clefs and can play two instruments.

• And now the finale, which got him suspended. This was not in my class, but this is what we were told happened. He held up a picture of a monkey and pointed to the only black kid in the class (we have very few in the school anyways) and said,”Look! It’s your ancestor!”

He will not be back to finish out this semester, and it doesn’t look good for him to come back next semester, if at all. I wrote all of these down with dates and my dad went to the principal with the list. If he does return next semester, it has been made abundantly clear that I am not to be in his class.

[stevenmuses]

An Unspoken Eulogy from a Grandson and Funeral Summary

The past five days have been a whirlwind. The afternoon of Wednesday, November 7 we received the news. Ba Ngoai had passed away earlier in the day with my mom by her side - causing a massive ripple throughout our family. Many weeks ago, we had received the notification that Ba Ngoai’s condition had turned for the worse - and in the back of all of our minds, we knew her time was nearing its end.

La Thi Tran was born in 1928 in Nam Dinh in North Vietnam. In her younger years, she moved first to Hanoi, and later, to Saigon. She fostered 5 daughters and 2 sons, caring deeply for her family of 9. Like many Vietnamese families at the time, she ran a storefront with mostly dry goods and food. During the Vietnam War, her husband lost his legs - leaving her to be the sole provider of the family. In these conditions, all of the children helped her run the store, hustling and selling what they could to help the family make ends meet. With the living conditions becoming poorer in Vietnam with the rise of communism, several of her children fled Vietnam on a small fishing boat, escaping to a refugee camp in Malaysia. After spending time in the refugee camp, eventually immigrating and settling in Edmonton, Canada. After her children had settled, she and her husband were sponsored to rejoin her children in Edmonton. Her husband passed away in 1996, more than 20 years before her eventual passing in 2018 in Calgary, Canada. In her years, she raised 5 daughters and 2 sons, 15 grandchildren, and even a great grandchild. It’s crazy to think that without her, not a single one of us would be here now.

In the later years of her life, Ba Ngoai spent her time the George Boyack assisted living facility. Rushing to the nursing home after hearing the news - I saw Di Hanh and my mom hovered around my grandma’s lifeless body, choking back tears. Nine years after enduring a severe, crippling stroke, my grandma’s struggle was finally over. La Thi Tran passed away on November 7, 2018 at the age of 90.

I never got to know Ba Ngoai as a person - not really anyways. The language barrier always kept us apart in communication, and later, the stroke made it even more difficult. Like many of us in the second generation, I grew up with Vietnamese in my brain and on the tip of my tongue - but that faded away steadily and surely as time went on.

While I was never able to get to know Ba Ngoai as a person, I definitely knew Ba Ngoai as a mother and grandmother. I was told that Ba Ngoai had always taken care of me when I was younger - that my parents used to drop me off at Ba Ngoai’s house and she would watch over us. Unfortunately, none of those memories ever stuck in my mind - I was just too young. But I know what she stood for - I think we all did. She stood for her family. She loved her children and grandchildren dearly. Even though she was growing old, she was at every family event she could make, supporting her children and grandchildren, even during the worst of times. Even when she was wracked by her stroke, I still remember her trying to give us whatever money she had in little red li xi envelopes.

One recent story that I wanted to share was just a month or so ago - when I visited her after hearing that her condition worsened. She was shaking in her bed, saying things to herself that no one could understand any longer. She hadn’t been eating very much recently - she was incredibly thin. She had a permanent look that seemed like it was already fixated on the world beyond. She had become indecipherable and clearly in a great deal of pain. When I approached her bed, my dad said to her in Vietnamese, “Do you recognize him? It’s Steven!” I held her hand - and I was surprised by how incredible ironclad her grip was. Her face lit up when she looked at my face and she gave a minuscule nod, mumbling to herself in indistinct Vietnamese. While we couldn’t understand most of what she said, there were two words that we all could decipher - the clearest two words that we had heard her speak in many months. “...map qua!” She had called me chubby! She fought through her pain, recognized who I was and compared me to how she remembered me in the past. Through all the pain and the suffering, she was still fighting to be a mother and grandmother. That’s a memory that I won’t ever forget of Ba Ngoai.

Upon her passing, family members made their way home from across the world to join each other in the mourning of the matriarch of the Hoang family - from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. For the first time in what must have been 10 years or more, the family was back together, reunited to celebrate the life of a dear mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.

Day 0 (The Day of Passing) - Wednesday, November 7

The nursing home is an incredibly depressing place - filled with exhausted nurses, the stench of poor quality food and unchanged adult diapers, and silent, addled seniors, waiting for the inevitable next step. In that environment- it felt so surreal. I just felt unemotional - but philosophical about the whole thing. Sitting on a couch in the nursing home common area with my uncle and dad, watching the other seniors being force-fed food by the nurses, I couldn’t help but think about age, mortality, and what the point of it all even was. All of these seniors led full, eventful lives - only to be left waiting for death in that environment. That was the case for Ba Ngoai.

Or was it?

Cau Tuan returned from Vietnam just a day earlier - which she knew. She was so upset when she heard that he was going on a long trip to Vietnam - perhaps she had the sense that she was close as well? But - she held on for him until he could return.

My mom came to visit and feed her on Wednesday. After days with little eating, this day, Ba Ngoai ate some wonton soup, Ensure, and even some ice cream! My mom had a sixth sense that day - she had felt that Ba Ngoai didn’t have much longer to live. Calling my dad, she had planned to cancel the vacation that she was going to take the following week, just in case.

She returned to the room with Ba Ngoai’s favourite nurse at the home (my mom said that Ba Ngoai loved that woman so much - that she made her laugh so much during her time at the nursing home) - and I think they both knew that the time was near. A few minutes later, Ba Ngoai quietly passed away, with my mom and her favourite nurse at her bedside.

After the funeral, it was planned that each of the families would contribute money for Ba Ngoai’s funeral arrangements and burial. At one of their meetings to discuss money, it was revealed that Ba Ngoai gave money to Cau Phat to hold for her, secretly, that none of the other siblings even knew about. Even from beyond the grave, she was still taking care of her children.

I had written the first paragraph about Day 0 a couple of days ago, when I felt like reflecting on what the end of life meant for all of us. Upon talking to my mom about Ba Ngoai’s last hours, one thing became so abundantly clear - it wasn’t her that was waiting for death, death was waiting for her. She was still taking care of her family in any way that she could, even while bedridden, until her last day.

Day 1 (Casketing, Prayer Day 1) - Sunday, November 11

The funeral of Ba Ngoai took place over three days at the Mountain View Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home in east Calgary. In the days prior to Sunday, people had begun to return to Calgary. Rachel, Patricia, Albert, and Cristina had returned from their work and schooling in Toronto. Di Mai and Chu Chau flew in from Saudi Arabia and stayed with our family. Kacey, Jen, Vince and Cau Tai’s family drove down from Edmonton. Cau Phat returned from Phoenix. Everyone was trying to play their part in organizing the funeral - ordering the food for the reception, talking to the Chua Bat Nha, organizing with the funeral home, ordering flowers, putting together programs and memorial boards, writing and practicing eulogies and poems, and other innumerable but equally essential tasks.

Entering the funeral home for the first time, we were stunned by beautiful photo and story boards and breathtaking flowers. In the chapel, there were an astonishing array of flowers, a beautifully crafted wooden casket, two incense altars (one for Buddha and one for Ba Ngoai), and the body of Ba Ngoai, wrapped in a beautiful red and yellow Buddhist funeral blanket. Everyone took turns paying their respects to Ba Ngoai, with tears in their eyes. One of the most powerful images I saw that day was Cau Tuan on his knees at Ba Ngoai’s body, head down, saying words that only Ba Ngoai’s could hear.

Many people connected to our family came to the prayer - coworkers and family friends alike. Some of these people I hadn’t seen in 10-15 years - but many of them came up to me to tell me how much I’ve grown. These little interactions really made me feel a sense of warm, community and continuity - even though I may not even recognize these people.

Monks from the temple Chua Bat Nha led us in a melancholic prayer. The children (immediate descendants of Ba Ngoai along with in-laws) stood in front of the chapel seats, while the grandchildren stood behind them within the rows of the chapel’s seating. All family members were given white headbands to wear.

Somber in tone, the prayer was led by the three monks from the temple. Other Buddhist members of the temple joined in the prayers. Together, their voices felt purifying and cleansing - as if they were coaxing Ba Ngoai’s spirit through to the afterlife. We continued to stand for the prayer for an entire hour, while the adults were constantly standing and bowing down to the ground. One of the children even momentarily passed out and fell during the prayer due to exhaustion, smacking his jaw on the bench in front of him.

After the prayer, we gathered in the reception hall to eat banh mi and desserts, mingling with the friends and family that had come to pay their respects.

In the evening, we were made aware of a vote that was occurring the following night. The first generation was trying to decide between:

(a) Burying Ba Ngoai’s ashes immediately in the Edmonton cemetery next to Ong Ngoai, whom she has expressed intense longing for.

(b) Wait 49 days (7 weeks) as per Buddhist beliefs, allowing for the spirit/consciousness to transition to the afterlife. Store Ba Ngoai’s ashes in an urn, (illegally) held in the Buddhist temple for the 49 days, and then buried with Ong Ngoai after.

The vote was contentious and was split between both options.

Day 2 (Prayer Day 2) - Monday, November 12

The prayers continued again into Day 2. We arrived at 5pm, burned incense and visited again with Ba Ngoai. The hour of prayers began at 6pm. Once again, the monks from the temple Chua Bat Nha led us in prayer, with the direct descendants in the front and the grandchildren behind.

Soon after the prayers began, Jen and I went to the airport to pick up my brother, who had cut his vacation short to return home. Upon returning to the funeral home, we met with our parents, who had tears in their eyes, and together we paid tribute to Ba Ngoai with incense and prayers as a family.

Immediately after, we reconvened with everyone else in the reception hall and ate dumplings, spring rolls, banh mi, and more dessert.

Even though initially the vote for what to do with Ba Ngoai’s urn was initially split - the vote was almost unanimous after discussion - Ba Ngoai was to go into Chua for 49 days, before being buried with Ong Ngoai.

Day 3 (Funeral Ceremony, Cremation) - Tuesday, November 13

Early Tuesday morning, we returned to the funeral home for the final time. We prayed for the final time. At 9:30AM, we began the “official” funeral ceremony, with myself and my Dad as the English and Vietnamese hosts, respectively. We began with our final Buddhist prayer sessions. The vibe felt distinctly different than the two previous days - it felt like everyone was somber and tense about the day ahead, knowing that by noon, this whole funeral process would be over.

After the prayer session, we proceeded into speeches. With tears in their eyes and wavering voices, Cau Phat, Cau Tuan, and Bac Duy all provided their own speeches - all saying how much they loved and how thankful they were for Ba Ngoai.

After, Albert, Nathan and myself went up to the podium to share a few words from a grandchild perspective. Albert spoke in both English and Vietnamese, sharing about how he got to know who Ba Ngoai was as a person from the quality and tightness of his parents and our family. Nathan delivered a heartfelt poem “It’s Only Been a Few Minutes,” and I shared a recent story about Ba Ngoai in the nursing home.

And then that was it.

The funeral procession. We walked out of there, single file, into our cars. Then, we drove to the crematorium in our cars, single file. The images and videos speak for themselves.

What an incredibly sad and moving experience. The melodic and repetitive prayers felt like they were boring their way right into my soul - and you could tell that it did that for everyone. Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, Atheist or whatever we were - I think that during that time, we all believed together it was helping Ba Ngoai’s spirit move on. There, in the funeral home and in the crematorium, it really had felt like we all had come together as a family to celebrate Ba Ngoai. I think that’s truly what family is - people tied together by common experiences and relationships that are there for each other, regardless of the last time they saw each other, or where they live. I don’t think anyone needed to say anything - but I think we all understood each other, united in our grief.

You know - it was the end of a marvelous and long life for Ba Ngoai, filled with incredible ups and downs, separations and reunions, health and sickness. Her passing is not only a cause for grief - but a cause for celebration. Without her, none of us would be here, living comfortable and wholesome lives filled with love, family, and fun.

Thank you - from all of us.

[lookatthedawn]

“Home, Home Again,

I like to be here when I can...”*

It's bittersweet to come home because I feel like a great adventure has come to an end.  But perhaps it's not so.  Perhaps a greater adventure is to live life with dignity, courage, and authenticity.  Many issues expect me at home, from a personal level to total national chaos.  There's much work to be done.  After an uneventful flight, I land on JFK.  The immigration officer peruses my passport and says, with a smile, "you're a world traveler!" "Not exactly, not yet," I answer, humbled by the thought of my friend Anush, who really is a globetrotter.   Through the app Find Friends my son JeanLuc finds me waiting for my luggage.  He has grown in my absence, his beard has thickened and he looks more mature overall.  I hug him, smell his scent, listen to his heartbeat -- resting my cheek on the best place of the Puniverse, as I used to say when he was tiny.  We meet my daughter Katrina in the car, and she's driving and that's good, because she's not into hugging.  She does make an exception for birthday and Christmas, though, sweet thing that she is.   In the car, we share stories of the last two months, but not much, since I don't want to repeat everything I want to say when we're finally all together.   After three hours or so I'm home, seeing the rest of the family, which includes four new pets!  It's when I hug my oldest son Marcelo, though, that I break down and start to cry because I'm so happy to be home and I've missed them all so much!  Knowing his mother as he does, he has a surprise for me, which is a huge map on the wall, where we have fun placing color-coordinated thumbtacks on the places we've been.   During my time away I didn't allow myself to be homesick, because that would only take away from my experience abroad, but being around them all is like heaven -- or maybe heaven is just another word for home. Key Takeaways: 1) An internship reveals as much about ourselves as the path we're contemplating taking.  Sometimes a job is more glamorous from a distance than in the thick of it.  Interning at the company of one's choice allows for an inside look at the day-to-day business.  What did I learn at The Gioi?  I learned that editing is hard, not only for me but for everyone.  It takes work, and it's not always fun, but if making a messy paragraph shine appeals to you, then the time sitting and staring at a computer screen is worth it.  However, -- and here's the takeaway -- now I know that I can do it.  I can write and I can edit.  Maybe that's not as surprising to anyone as it is to myself.  I don't like to write all the time, and I don't like to edit always, but the work satisfies in me a deep need for connection and self-expression.  I could say that I write to understand, and I edit to be understood.  Or something like it.   Working at The Gioi showed me that the final product on a magazine shines because of hours of intense, laborious and boring work the staff is willing to put into a piece.  Editing is work done both alone and in collaboration with a team.  I worked alone at my desk, but I was just one of the many hands those texts passed through before becoming ready for print.  Although separated, we had the same goal; make a text as good as possible. 2) The pros of living alone.  I think everyone should live alone at least once in their lifetime.  If not completely alone, with busy roommates.  I did not live alone before getting married and starting a family of my own.  I wish I had.  By living alone you learn to become self-reliant.  If you fail, you deal with the consequences, and the next day you do better.  If you leave your bed unmade or a carton of milk outside the fridge, when you come home it's there, just the way you left it, or, in the case of milk, spoiled as a consequence of your negligence.  No judgment from anyone, but no helping hand either, so it functions like a straight look in the mirror when we contemplate ourselves and all our shortcomings.  Being so, living alone teaches humility, self-reliance, and confidence.  

Another great thing about living alone is that you have a better chance of following your plans without being derailed.  If you decide to sleep instead of reading or watch a movie instead of sleeping, that's up to you, and if you regret your choice the next day, that's also your problem, and you know you can't peg it on anyone around.   A subtler aspect of living alone is that you learn to manage your emotions, as there aren't people around to distract you from your feelings.  Nobody makes you mad, for example, you get mad all by yourself, with thoughts you choose to have.  That, I believe, is always the case, but when you're alone that becomes undeniably clear.  You must rely on yourself as a source of wisdom, comfort, inspiration, entertainment and anything else you need.   3) Perspective.  We have to leave sometimes.  Leave a relationship, leave a house, leave a job, a country... in other to see it better.  If by diving into something we take a closer look, by moving away from a situation, we see it in an entirely different angle.  While in Southeast Asia, I didn't hear about Trump's latest tweets.  It wasn't news, it just didn't matter for them what the POTUS said, did, or said he did or didn't do.  It was so refreshing! I also learned that most people in that part of the world are not as scared of North Korea as they are of the United States.  Well, considering our mutual history, can we really blame them? This same bird's-eye view I can apply to enlighten aspects of my personal life. 4) Traveling is an art, and, as with watercolor, writing or pottery, the more you practice the better you get at it. There are many kinds of travelers, and internship, work, or studying abroad have its own implications, but overall, leaving home reveals your identity as a traveler.  What places are you attracted to, what do you want to see, what do you want to do?  Do you travel to escape, to rest, or to learn?  Do you find a cozy place and make yourself comfortable as you watch the natives from a peephole? Or do you mix with the locals, learn a new language and try new things?   I admire the latter, but I'm not an extrovert, so I don't throw myself into a new situation.  I also don't hide from the wonderful opportunity to see new things, meet new people, eat different foods and do different things.  Whenever I travel, though, I realize that I need to do so more often.  Since traveling, by definition, is a state of transition, I want to learn to move more gracefully from one point on the planet to another.  That's the art in it, the dance in the storm, so to speak. And as in every art, if you do just what you plan, what's the art in that?  More important than following through some preconceived idea, is to be present in the moment.   5) So, there's the saying that "if you cut too many corners, you end up going in circles".  Another reminder says that when you cut a corner, you end up with two more.  In Brazil, we say that, by trying to avoid taking one step, we take two.  That relates to my attempts at cutting costs.  No matter how much one plans, when traveling there are always spur-of-the-moment decisions -- or there should be if you're living in the moment -- and cutting costs is an important practice if you're on a budget, but not every dime saved makes sense.  Sometimes it's okay to take a cab, even when there are buses available. Sometimes it's okay to go to a restaurant, even when you can cook at home or get an inexpensive meal on the street. 

6) Skin Shedding.  Closely related to this new perspective, is the shedding of skin, the throwing out -- or letting go -- of what is no longer working for you.  I got sunburnt in Phu Quoc Island, which led to probably the worst itch I ever had and later, to skin shedding. Although the process was far from pleasant, it symbolized a very special time in my life, when I'm letting go of much that I thought was part of my identity. I'm renewing myself.  The process is both painful and beautiful.  You cry for the skin to which you were once so attached which now brings you more discomfort than anything else.  So you let it go.  Then one day you look at your shoulder and see that the new skin is clear, healthy, and beautiful.  You've been born again! 7) Completely different, but just as good. By the time you travel alone, be it for an internship, to study abroad or any other reason, you're probably over the age of eighteen and might have developed a philosophy of your own. But as you immerse yourself in another culture you realize that other people do things differently, sometimes exactly the opposite of what you think is right.  That's a great opportunity to develop some humility.  Yes, your philosophy is great, but mostly for yourself.  If people in a different part of the world do things differently it's either because it's the only viable way in that environment or because it's working for them.  And here's the takeaway: study different angles of your own idea.  Learn, expand your views, enlarge thine soul. 8) Think Abundance. I have spoken extensively about it while talking about what I call scarcity mentality.  This experience was a great way to immerse myself in a culture that prides itself on making do with less.  It is a fact that in the United States there is too much waste, and better management of resources is something that we must learn, but sometimes that scarcity mentality can become a way of life, part of the culture and it stops making sense. To think abundantly is to understand that resources are always available, but if you go to the ocean with a spoon, that's how much water you'll get.  Saving is good and must be encouraged, but shouldn't be the modus operandi.  A better goal, in my opinion, is to do the best you can with what you have.   9) Order and Progress. It's pretty clear that basic organization leads to better planning and better execution.  Traveling through Southeast Asia constantly reminded me of that.  Some schools teach this but it must be reinforced by the culture, with social expectations and policies in public places. Brazil, for example, dwells in chaos.  The culture deals with that aspect of its people, reinforcing it with cliches like "o jeitinho brasileiro", (the Brazilian way), which allows for creative loopholes in every sphere of society.  Other cultures, such as the Japanese and Chinese, pride themselves in cleanliness and order.  Good fruits come from such values.  And that's what this trip reminded me to do; better observe organization in my own life.     10) I've always believed that people should leave their country of origin and live in another place for at least a year.  This experience only reinforced that belief. I can't think of anything else -- except, maybe, parenting -- that changes one's perspective as much as immersing into another culture.  Everything you know and take for granted, like the language spoken around you, the food, the currency, social values, all that changes but you, at first, remain the same.  It's like taking a piece from one puzzle and mixing it up with pieces from another puzzle.  At first, there's no place for that piece in that society and you feel extra and useless.  Little by little you learn to assess your surroundings and learn new things.  Learning happens when we modify ourselves. Without change, there is no learning.  And this learning reshapes you, so soon you find that you do fit into that society. People count on your presence, on your input, and on your contribution.  You don't stop being who you are, you just enlarge your worldview to accommodate new perspectives.  

"It's all worth it if the soul is not small", wrote Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.  However, the soul, like the body, needs food for growth.  Traveling, reading, experiencing life in all its colors, shapes, and sounds, broaden our existence and deepen our understanding and therefore must be highly encouraged.  I'm proud of Mount Holyoke College -- and immensely thankful -- for the college's efforts to provide students with experiences of this kind.  

[synbi-kitney]

Addressing the Post-COVID Era

I finished the first paragraph of my last blog by saying that the UK Government anticipated vaccinating a target of 13 million of the most vulnerable people in the country by the middle of February. I’m pleased to say that this target has been met and slightly exceeded. Whilst it is too early to tell the impact of these vaccinations, in Israel, which is more advanced its vaccination programme, the indications are that their programme is having a very significant impact on the pandemic. (The predominant vaccine used there is that produced by BioNTech/Pfizer.) The data to-date seems to show that the mRNA vaccines are particularly efficacious in combating COVID-19.

 Both the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are heavily based in engineering biology/synthetic biology techniques. So, the success of engineering biology/synthetic biology methodology is now beginning to be established in biomedicine. But, engineering biology/synthetic biology is platform technology that has a much wider range of applications than biomedicine. It is particularly important in addressing the Green Industrial Revolution and Zero Carbon targets proposed by many governments. The development of the BioEconomy is seen as vital from this point of view; but, also, in terms of simply growing the economy. Several countries around the world have now produced strategic roadmaps for the development of engineering biology/synthetic biology - and have addressed the importance of the field in growing their BioEconomies. In the UK there have been three important strategic documents published (starting in 2009 with The Royal Academy of Engineering report on synthetic biology)1-3 that  have defined the strategy that has now resulted in the establishment of a nationwide infrastructure comprising seven major basic research centres and a national centre for industrial translation. The centres, together with a number of other centres and around 180 start-ups and SMEs, represent a strong base for the development of the UK’s BioEconomy. However, we are now at an important crossroads where the achievements to-date can be lost by an inadequate strategy for the next stages of the development of engineering biology/synthetic biology.

 Unlike the situation in 2009, where the field was in its infancy (at least as far as industrial translation was concerned), today there are established strategies for the next stages of the development of the field. What is abundantly clear is that by far the best approach to the development of future strategy is to involve as wide a range of practitioners/experts from academia, industry and business in the development of the strategy at all stages. The classic example of this approach is the development of the Roadmap for Engineering Biology by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) in the United States. The EBRC encouraged as many experts in the field as were willing to participate to work on the development of all stages of the Roadmap.

 This process of total transparency is an outstanding model of how to develop, what is, in effect, a national strategy for the development of the field in the post-COVID era – and, concomitantly, the development of the Green Industrial Revolution and Low Carbon Economies. The wrong approach is for government agencies to develop a national strategy and to only involve the full, wide-ranging participation of experts in the field post-hoc. In the case of the EBRC roadmap, the aim was and is set out in the mission statement.

 “It is intended to provide researchers and other stakeholders across engineering biology disciplines and industries with a consolidated view of challenges and opportunities in the near and long term. The framework of the Roadmap focuses on the development and advancement of tools and technologies in engineering biology and their potential applications and impact.” https://ebrc.org/programs/research-roadmap-program/

 The strategy for the Roadmap was and is to engage groups of experts in various aspects of the field to develop strategy for their area of expertise. The leader(s) of each group are members of an overall strategic committee- and, again, they provide full transparency back to the individual groups of experts. The importance of this approach is twofold. First, each of the subgroups work in their areas of expertise and comprise experts from, for example, academia, industry and business – as appropriate. Second, even though the original Roadmap was published in 2019, it is a living document on the web and is continuously updated. In addition, aspects of the field that require more emphasis (e.g. biosecurity) are enhanced, when appropriate.

 The Green Industrial Revolution and Zero Carbon, coupled to the development of the BioEconomy, are vital for the future of the planet. The field of engineering biology/synthetic biology will play a key role in these developments - but only if the correct strategy for its future development is developed by a wide range of experts from academia, industry and business working in unison.

 Disclosure. I’m a member of the EBRC’s Executive Council and a participant in the development of the Roadmap.

 1.     https://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/synthetic-biology-report

2.     https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/16096/1/Roadmap_SyntheticBiology_nrfinal2.pdf

3.     https://www.synbio.cam.ac.uk/news/synbio-strategic-plan-2016

[follower-of-odin]

The difficult thing about trying to research how to undo curses is that usually, the writers assume it is only the victim of a curse who is looking to undo it, not the person who cast it. To be fair, that’s most often the case.

Regardless, I think I get the gist, but I feel I should research it more just to be sure. Plus, doing it around the same time as the curse was originally cast might be best, anyway. Perhaps a year and a day, more like. I may worship the Norse gods, but I’m a Celt. I can’t forget the significance of a year and a day, or the number 3, consequently (though the number 3 doesn’t really have any direct significance to this specific situation).

If someone’s theory is correct, however, I may have to worry about counseling, rather than magic, but I have various deep-seated reasons not to go to counseling, which presently I won’t dive into. It suffices to say that, aside from that option, I’ll do whatever needs to be done to figure this out and undo what never should have been done, what I thought was undone when I prayed for it to be but never was, completely.

Curse abusers, curse murderers, curse Trumps, Putins, and Kims, but don’t curse people you’re simply mad at, no matter how justified you may convince yourself it is.

And just to make things abundantly clear, that last paragraph was advice, as can be deciphered from the latter 2/3, and is not a curse, itself. I hold to my oath.

[maskedinstructor]

The Secondary Years-Teachers Doing What They Do Best

If there something more beautiful, more inspiring, more enthralling than an educator skillfully engaged in the art and science of instruction, please show me what that is. It is as if the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir has lifted its voice in praise. The very act is that Hallelujah chorus on steroids. It's Miles, Coltrane, Monk or Cannonball forming chords that were not invented as yet while pumping out some freaky and funky jazz. It's Aretha, Mariah, Christina, Luther, Bruno and Kendrick singing, preaching and teaching all at once. It is that last corner of Butter Pecan Ice Cream. or the last bite of a Big Mac when the ketchup and pickle juice combine sweetly on your tongue.  It is almost like sex...powerful. exhilarating and exhausting...And, both partners have to sit in the edge of the bed and smoke a tall cigarette. Theoretical Framework: The most gifted athletes win games. The most gifted educators provide instructional experiences that prick the souls of students and motivate them to want to learn more. The result is that the learners are never the same.  Here follow stories of some of secondary's best...

There were 29 of us who attended Boys High from the block, the Magnificent 29. After some testing, only 3 of us made it into the advanced classes. My initiation into this scholars' program was Latin. It was a bitch( This is the first time I have written a curse word in my blog. Latin deserves it, out of respect) of a course. It challenged your body and mind like an illness. It was unyielding in its torment. I was to discover later that 1-2 hours I would spent at night in valiant attempts to translate, not speak, some 20-25 sentences( not paragraphs). I gained enormous humility as I scoured the page in search of that main verb, "ESSE" secreted somewhere within or at the end of a passage. Then and only then could I decipher what some great orator was reciting or the deeds a great general or emperor had accomplished. The teachers knew the course blistered egos. It was arduous and bruising. My first  instructor made that abundantly clear. The specialist for this new, unsuspecting and uninformed freshman was Mrs. Yuangh. She was short, nicely shaped and wore wedges that made her legs even more gorgeously alluring. However, I never understood what she was wearing on her head. It was the blackest hair I had ever seen. It could not have been real. She taught with soft fire and fervor which attracted you like a cobra hypnotizing his prey. Her introduction began with an explanation of the declension of nouns( anything that was not a verb) and the conjugation of verbs. It gets a little sticky here. Stay with me as it is painless and I'm getting to a point. After the explanation, we were more than immediately plunged headfirst into a passage. Each student was invited to translate a sentence. The true purpose was to ascertain our comprehension of declension and conjugation.This was big shit/stuff.. Julius Caesar and the Gallic War...Gallia en tres partes divisa est..Are you kidding me? I was there at the battle...Shut up!                                               I had to wait my turn so I began to review the passage so that I would not be caught off guard/look stupid.. As I perused the work, something inside of me clicked. It was as if I had been struck by the sun, light and fire. There was enormous clarity. I was reading quietly and the story revealed itself to me. I was stunned. I could scarcely wait my chance. When called upon to translate the passage, I breezed through it like a Roman. This, I soon realized was definitely too easy. AHA!!! There it was the enemy. The end of the sentence had the word ,"PUGNAM" in it. ERROR ALERT!!!  Beware, masked instructor. My mind filtered out all the traps and recognized it as accusative case( declension) and the object of the verb. I heard the entire passage in my head. I was translating every word perfectly.  I translated the remaining parts  so quickly that the teacher paused and stared at me. She smiled and looked at me again. The bell rang and the class was dismissed. I gathered my books quickly and proceeded to my next class. Punctuality was rigidly enforced at the school as I learned at orientation. I was really running and I heard footsteps behind me. They were the clicking of heels. I increased my pace and the heels became more rapid...quicker..swifter. Then, I heard a loud voice which stopped me in my tracks..." masked instructor!"  It was Mrs. Yaungh. I was thinking about what violation I had committed when her words interrupted my thought. I turned ready to take my punishment. " That was great work, masked instructor, very well done. See you tomorrow." I was frozen and at the same time in a state of suspended animation. Mrs. Yaungh left her class to run me down to congratulate me on my classwork. If this is the stuff of what Boys high is made, then I have found my new home

[marymosley]

Delhi HC rejects Scriptwriters Plea For Injunction On Release Of Film Lootcase On Hotstar

In a latest, landmark and laudable judgment titled Vinay Vats v. Fox Star Studios India Pvt. Ltd. & Anr. in I.A. 6351/2020 in CS(COMM) 291/2020 delivered on July 30, 2020, the Delhi High Court has reaffirmed that there can be no copyright in an idea/theme. While holding thus, it refused to pass an injunction order, restraining the release of Film ‘Lootcase’ on Hotstar hours before its scheduled release on July 31, 2020. The Delhi High Court was hearing the plea of Indian writer and Director, Vinay Vats claiming that the film had “substantial similarities” with his script titled “Tukkaa Fitt” and even though his film could not be released, Vats had strongly relied on its trailer so released in the year 2016. But his plea was rejected!

                                               To start with, the ball is set rolling in para 1 of this notable judgment wherein it is observed by Justice C Hari Shankar of Delhi High Court that, “By this application, the plaintiff seeks a restraint from release of a film “Lootcase” slated to be released tomorrow, i.e. 31st July, 2020.” It is then stated in para 2 that, “The plaintiff claims to be the author and, consequently, the first copyright owner, of a script for a film titled “Tukkaa Fitt”. The script was written in 2010-2011, and was registered with the Film Writer’s Association, Mumbai on 14th March, 2011.”

                                       To say the least, para 3 then states that, “It is further asserted, in the plaint, that the plaintiff was approached by the Director of M/s AAP Entertainment Limited, in 2011, for permission to utilize the script of the plaintiff and make a motion picture “Tukkaa Fitt”. The plaintiff agreed, whereupon Mr. Premal Parekh of M/s AAP Entertainment Limited, took over as producers of the proposed film “Tukaa Fitt”.”

                                               What ensued next is stated in para 4 that, “Thereafter, it appears that disputes arose between the plaintiff and the said producers, which came to be settled by the Disputes Settlement Committee of the Film Writer’s Association, Mumbai on 21st September, 2011.”

                                           Furthermore, it is then pointed out in para 5 that, “It is further averred, in the plaint, that the production of the film “Tukkaa Fitt” was completed in November 2012 but that, as the producer of the film, unfortunately, died, the release of the film was halted. That position, it is stated, continues till date and the film “Tukkaa Fitt” is yet to be released.”

                                          Notwithstanding to what has been stated, it is then brought out in para 6 that, “Despite this fact, it is asserted in the plaint that as the trailer of the film “Tukkaa Fitt” was released on You Tube and other public media platforms in March, 2011, the work of the plaintiff has been in the public domain since then.”

                                    Be it noted, para 7 then envisages that, “It is further asserted, in the plaint, that on 18th July, 2020, the plaintiff’s assistant informed the plaintiff of the imminent release of the film “Lootcase”, tomorrow, i.e. 31st July, 2020. The plaintiff claims, that on getting to know this fact, he viewed the trailer of the film “Lootcase” and was shocked to find substantial similarities between the plot of the said film “Lootcase” and his script. A tabular statement of the said similarities, has been set out in para 13 of the plaint.”

                                    Needless to say, it is then aptly noted in para 8 that, “It is on this foundation that the plaintiff seeks an interim injunction, restraining release of the film “Lootcase”, to be released tomorrow, i.e. 31st July, 2020.”

                                 After hearing the lawyers, it is then observed in para 15 that, “Having heard learned Counsel at length, I am unable to convince myself that any case for grant of interim relief can be said to exist.”

                               More significantly, the Delhi High Court then minces no words in para 17 to lay down explicitly, elegantly and effectively that, “It is clear, from a reading of very first principle, set out in the aforesaid paragraph, there is no copyright in any idea, subject, matter, theme or plot, and violation of copyright is confined to the form, manner and arrangement and the expression of the idea by the author of the copyright at work. In the present case, there is no earlier film, based on the script of the plaintiff, which could form the basis of a claim to copyright. The plaintiff as Mr. Neeraj Kishan Kaul correctly points out, bases his cause of action on a script, which never came in the public domain, and public knowledge of which is being sought to be attributed on the basis of a trailer, for a film which never saw the light of day. The cause of action, on the basis whereof the plaintiff premises his case, therefore, essentially remained inchoate. The trailer was not made by the plaintiff and the makers of the trailer have not ventilated any claim for violation of copyright. It is prima facie questionable, in the circumstances, whether any claim of copyright can be laid by the present plaintiff at all, in such circumstances.”

                                           Equally significant if not more is what is then stated in para 19 that, “On its face, the plot essentially revolves around a suitcase, carrying money, being lost, and various persons, including gangsters chasing to get hold of it. The plot idea is as old as the hills, and, without meaning any disrespect to the ingenuity of the plaintiff as a scriptwriter, it can hardly be said, prima facie, that the script of the plaintiff’s screenplay – which has been placed on record but the details of which this Court, for obvious reasons, deems it appropriate not to reveal – can lay claim to any such novelty as could be said to have been filched by the defendant. In fact, a comparison of the salient features of upcoming “Lootcase”, as manifested from the aforesaid trailer, vis-à-vis plaintiff’s script, reveal that there are considerable features in the plaintiff’s script which are missing in the trailer, and there are certain elements of the story as reflected in the trailer, which are not to be found in the script of the plaintiff. The mere fact that certain plot points, between the plaintiff’s script and the story of the upcoming film “Lootcase” as reflected in the trailer released on You Tube, may be common, cannot be the basis to lay a claim to copyright, as the plaintiff has chosen to do. The plot points, on which the plaintiff relies, such as persons losing bags of money, claiming the same and such bags being sought by members of the underworld, are plot points, which may figure in more than one cinematographic film and cannot, therefore, be said to be the exclusive province of the plaintiff. That apart, no copyright exists in a mere idea, plot or theme, as authoritatively held in R.G. Anand Vs. M/s Delux Films 1978 (4) SCC 118.”

                                 Be it noted, it is then observed in para 20 that, “There is yet another reason as to why I am not inclined to accede to the prayer of the plaintiff for grant of ad interim injunction. Mr. Aggarwal has acknowledged that, at the very least, the trailer of the film “Lootcase” was released on 16th July, 2020. I may note, in this context, that Mr. Neeraj Kishan Kaul contests this statement and submits that the promos of his client’s film “Lootcase” had been in the public domain since June, 2019. Either which way, there is no justification for the plaintiff having approached this Court on the eve of the release of the film “Lootcase”, which is slated to be released tomorrow, i.e. 31st July, 2020 and seeking injunction against such release. It is further submitted by Mr Kaul, that the story of the film has been covered in the print as well as electronic media since September, 2019.”

                              To be sure, it is then made abundantly clear in para 21 that, “This case, therefore, appears, prima facie, to constitute yet another example of the misuse of the judicial process”.

                                     Going ahead, it is then held in para 22 that, “In view of the above discussions, there is no case, whatsoever, for grant of any interim injunction, staying the release of the film “Lootcase”, twenty-four hours before it is due for release.” Finally, it is then held in the last para 23 that, “The application is dismissed.”

                                          All said and done, this extremely laudable, landmark and latest judgment by Justice C Hari Shankar of the Delhi High Court makes it absolutely clear that there can be no copyright in an ideas/theme. Therefore, it also refused to pass an injunction order as prayed by the plaintiff just shortly before the film “Lootcase” was to be released on 31st July, 2020! Very rightly so! Also, it cannot be ignored that the promos of the film “Lootcase” had already been in public domain since June 2019 and thus the plaintiff who himself belonged to the film industry could not feign ignorance of the same! This alone explains why the Delhi High Court was of the view that the case appeared to be another example of “misuse of the judicial process”! No denying it!

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[titheguerrero]

More Than Just Dander

First, a sort of meta-comment in the form of a shout-out to HCRenewal's intrepid editor, Dr. Roy Poses, for his just-published analysis of what we might call "blogging: rise and fall." He sees decline reflected in publications long  devoted to health and health policy, yet now flaking off. Methinks, however, despite the usefulness of his overview of recent decades, Dr. P need not fret excessively. Water spilling out of the barrel's lip will slow down once folks come along and punch a whole bunch of little mid-section tweet-holes in it. Information still flows. (Sort of.)  In any case, surely there's overlap between blogs' and tweets' readerships. Surely well-researched and -reasoned long form still has its place. Unfortunately, hard to know for sure: it's hard to measure. Nobody's polling these folks and to my knowledge information scientists haven't published much--a quick search inside Google Scholar bears this out--that's of a quantitative nature. So we're left with admittedly rather unsatisfactory anecdotal reports on people who need blogs like ours and find their way to it. Congressional staffers you know who you are. Rightly or wrongly, I'm hopeful. Maybe we shade this a little by the suspicion that many younger social media users share with me a short attention span. Hence they come to rely more and more on quick hits. In any case, let's hope this is evolution and diversification, not just entropy and a race to the bottom. Now to my theme of the day. Yet again the dander hath risen for I've lost count how many times around what ails our health delivery systems. And so is my lunch: the gorge, too, hath risen. The miscreants' very relentlessness is nauseating. More, then, on two of them that keep cropping up here like those small burrowing insectivores in this tedious yet oddly riveting game of Whack-A-Mole. A. Chicanery at the VA: looking back and looking forward. On balance, and despite its many flaws, VA health's operation in all its enormity is not itself a miscreant. Different story for those folks trying to destroy it from within, on the dubious premise that lest we privatize it it's irredeemable. Search this blog on "VA Cetona" for detail on such matters. Why does this even happen? We've described the VA's Shadow Rulers (search here on that as well) in these pages. The SR's fall in the 0.1%. Why do they need or want the headache of trying, in what's fated to be a futile effort, to upend and hollow out the health lifeline extended for nearly a century to patriots returning from the military? When the left gets power it tries to expand and improve government. (Of course the efforts can unfortunately go awry, viz. Hillarycare in the 1990s, and cast shade on future attempts.) When the right gets power, at least in the two generations since an actor became president in 1980, government is seen as "not the solution but the problem." The response may be to try to rejigger and downsize. "Drown the baby in the bath." Or, perhaps far more likely, something else now happening in the VA and throughout the Trump kakistocracy. Namely, don't seize power to return it to the people. Seize it in order to use it in a third-dimensional play to drain resources. As for the first two dimensions, don't even try to improve--David Shulkin's mistake (see below)--or eliminate (despite Mick Mulvaney's baby drowning proclivities, hugely unpopular) care provided by the VA. Not when there's a third way: divert those resources. In fact, from the earliest instances of frontier exploitation to the newest frontier we have--our heretofore private personal information--despoliation has been the watchword, the core motive, the secret sauce: don't ameliorate. Don't eliminate. (Honestly: viz., Shrub's expansion of guvmint.) Despoliate. It is, as Shrub used to say (maybe), one of our country's most basic pieces of strategery. Such a strategy was discussed (and surely it's as old as the hills) by Times tech reporter Steve Lohr in a recent piece on, of all things, artificial intelligence. ("Elixir of prosperity [or] job killer"?) Lohr makes clear that what's old is new again, linking the asset of private data to all the other assets that've been strip-mined. "In the American model," notes Lohr, "coming from Silicon Valley in California, a handful of Internet companies become big winners and society is treated as a data-generating resource to be strip mined." As Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, "can you spell 'duh'?" Strip mining started with the earliest settlers, and now ... data, the final frontier. Same deal, though. The American model, and economic maldistribution, and so much of our plight is bound up with this baked-in trait, which seems to've seeped into society's DNA. Or else originated there. Find a mine. Strip it. Let others pick up the pieces. But let's go back to that last credible VA Secretary. How do we know that Shulkin pissed off the strip-miners? Why, just read what he himself wrote in a scholarly publication just a few months ago in the prestigious New England Journal. In a piece entitled "why the VA needs more competition," he and closely-associated Michigan colleague Kyle Sheetz first declared, unequivocally and repetitiously, competition: good!!! Emphasis in the original through repetition. Clever. After reassuring their audience how much they liked competition they let the cat out of the bag in the final paragraph of a long-ish article: "Privatizing the VA by offering unregulated access to private-sector providers is probably not feasible, necessary, or the best way to care for veterans." That's exactly what the quietly-undermining, unelected Trumpsters pushing for strip-mining veterans' health care didn't want to hear. We know (see below) how that came out. Similar in emphasis is a piece just out (January 2019) in the equally prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine, by (no pun intended) veteran federal health official Carolyn Clancy and her own VA/AHRQ colleagues. I'm perplexed at the way Clancy herself has hung in there (and yet she persisted) at the federal agencies to which she's contributed greatly over recent decades. I'm perplexed about how, within these agencies,she's been bounced around, most recently landing as the VA's "Deputy Under Secretary for Discovery, Education and Affiliate Networks." (That top's spinning so fast what I just wrote may already be superannuated news.) In any case Clancy et al. put their shoulders to Shulkin's wheel extolling the May 2018 federal MISSION legislation streamlining VA and non-VA care, and the ostensible role their new Center for Innovation might play in such an effort. They pointed out all the right innovation-cum-research caveats about the need for adequate data: "paying for value could backfire without accurate measurement of costs and outcomes." In this case they were certainly correct: privatizers in this particular world aren't interested in evidence-based anything. They're profiteers. (See: "Department of Education." See: "Department of the Interior." See: Environmental Protection Agency.) Shulkin's words saw the light of day about a month after the MISSION legislation, in the final days of June, 2018. But here's why I put Shulkin having "liked competition" in the past tense. By the time his NEJM piece appeared Shulkin, also accused of what I still deem to've been truly flimsy ethics violations, was already gone from his organization. By the end of March the Orange Man had already fired him. As a personal fiasco this was unseemly, since the VA secretary was a rare bird who both consented to be a hold-over from early administrations, yet managed early on to be a current POTUS favorite. Surprising? In this White House? In none of these events was there ever put forward any really compelling justification either for privatizing VA care or for starting with the assumptions that outside "leaders" and outside doctors could do a better job than--what with all their flaws--VA medical staff. Suzanne Gordon, a distinguished journalist and author, admittedly parti pris as a fellow of the Oakland-based 501(c)3 Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, has just published an American Prospect piece on "Trump’s under-the-radar push to dismantle veterans' health care." Her central thesis is worth quoting in extenso.

[The Republican] strategy will not only erase what has been the most successful American experiment in government-delivered health care, but will also send veterans out into a private system that is more expensive, less accountable, and unable to meet their particular needs. The key notion underpinning the Mission Act, that the private sector can offer comparable care to the VHA, is deeply flawed. Study after study (after study) has found that the VHA generally outperforms the private sector on key quality metrics, and that private providers are woefully unprepared to treat the often unique and difficult veteran patient population. The most recent evidence came in a Dartmouth College study published in December, which compared performance between VHA and private hospitals in 121 regions across the country. The results: In 14 out of 15 measures, government care fared “significantly better” than private hospitals.

Gordon also has a new book out on this subject, as most supporters of the traditional VA system already know. Worth a look. Meanwhile the Senate and White House and those advising them clearly never really cared about quaint ideas such as "studies," "evidence," or "data." They cherry-pick a few quotes about the brusqueness of some VA care, which often is admittedly more bureaucratic than today's "consumer-facing" and endlessly-polling private-care organizations. You can find those quotes as well as I can--any search engine known to man will do the trick. Recent events on the larger political canvas make it abundantly clear, in the meantime. It's not about quality. It never was. It's about callously starting with a dismissive attitude toward government workers, then back-solving from there. Having worked for years at the VA, I can vouch for its quality as well as its struggle to assist the really needy patients who depend upon it. In fact, this new study shows quite rigorously that the VA was already dramatically reducing wait-times within multiple VA installations, right down to private-sector levels. So this branch of government has listened and successfully striven to achieve a performance level that's not just high-science but also high-touch, as medicine's "customers" (yechhh) have come to expect. The present furlough of federal employees proves the point. If you can dismiss someone as human collateral-damage, you don't start first by examining the good things they've done for you. You're an elephant poacher. Take the spoils and leave the carcass to rot. B. More on the Opiate Eaters Who Eat Very Well. Speaking of despoliators, Dr. Poses and I both wrote here recently on how, in the world of dangerous narcotics, this single family of mostly physicians, the Sacklers, garnered a much more grand market share than they like to let on. Time to add to that and earlier reporting with a few updates. When, in a different venue than the VA I was providing front line medical care to privately-insured patients, I noticed an arresting change. I saw more and more folks arrive in my office in shop-till-you-drop mode seeing opiate renewals. Always OxyContin, Percocet or Vicodin. If I didn't provide the "fill" they'd go next door. The demand built and built. The drug makers kept assuring they were safe and effective. At free dinners they paid an army of fellow physicians to regale us with the same message. Then those patients started to die on me. OD courtesy of "safe" Purdue (and others') product. Then in the past very few years, and I honestly should've seen it coming but didn't, the crisis spilled over from doctors' exam rooms into the political arena. It's actually something, unlike the VA, that's garnering a certain timid degree of nonpartisan interest in finding practical solutions, call it consensus even, starting with decriminalizing measures. But I find it gorge-raising to see the usual suspects continuously fighting the notion that as a society, we blew it with opiates. We blew it. With their help. I've spent a fair amount of time looking at similar medico-legal crises, including the far-reaching tobacco and environmental lead poisoning matters, as well as narrower ones such as evolving surgical and pharmacological approaches to certain diseases. In every case our tort system, combined with the deep pockets of those who are (allegedly) truly guilty, conspire to perpetuate Bleak House-style court battles over culpability. Strip miners seem to believe--or want us to swallow whole the absurdist notion--that they leave the world a better place. In the case of Purdue, this false consciousness is undoubtedly propped up by the Sacklers' prowess as culturati: one can hardly turn around, as I recently did at the Met in New York, without finding their name plastered on this gallery or that institution of higher learning. But the motive, be it within the strip miners' organization or that of a cultural organization, comes down to the same thing: "we need the money." Allegedly. Recent disclosures from "sources," including internal Purdue emails, clarify all this. Fortunately for us it turns out the founder's (Raymond's) son Richard was an early adopter--relatively so--of email. Both were physicians, but Richard was of the first generation to be granted an American MD. Email was barely used at all in 1995 when Microsoft first added a TCP/IP stack to its operating system, with the introduction of Windows 95. Then email really took off, by 2001 having a fair amount of penetration in the business world. So maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that Purdue Pharma was squirreling away some of Richard's pronouncements in an archival time capsule for our delectation nearly a generation later. According to a new court filing recently revealed in the NY Times, Richard Sackler said some, um, fairly incriminating things to say in these internal emails. Still earning his spurs as head of daddy's (and Uncle Mortimer's) company after a couple of years or so in the saddle, and undoubtedly aware of the dramatic uptick in addiction issues that I saw in my own clinic in those turn-of-the-century years, he allegedly blasted everyone else in sight--except, of course, his own ever-so-cultured family. "[T]he launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white...." said Sackler fils. Based on no evidence reps were told to claim a “less than one percent" risk of addiction. As for that small subset of patients who did find themselves hopelessly addicted, the claim was to be made that “We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible.... They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” Now, hot off the press in 2019, the Guardian reports how this overall attitude has been replicated within the lobbyist-influenced government of Messrs. Trump and Azar. Since 2015 (pre-Trump! pre-Azar!) chair of the FDA's own Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee, Kentucky anesthesiology professor Raeford Brown has bravely characterized the rift that now mires down the FDA in tackling this crisis seriously. Admittedly with cover from many in Congress, Brown said this to interviewers.

I think that the FDA has learned nothing. The modus operandi of the agency is that they talk a good game and then nothing happens. Working directly with the agency for the last five years, as I sit and listen to them in meetings, all I can think about is the clock ticking and how many people are dying every moment that they’re not doing anything. The lack of insight that continues to be exhibited by the agency is in many ways a willful blindness that borders on the criminal.

Scott Gottlieb, who's tying your hands? Is it this guy? The FDA seems to be replete with such interlocking-directorate staff, all trying to assure  the "level playing field." And what is that playing field? Who are the players? We can answer this. Talk to the drug reps (I have). Except of course those who wake up and see what they're really doing, burn out and bail out. Talk to the lobbyists and the investors (I have). The watchword is not "safe and effective." It's blame-the-victim and lucrative. Let's get our motives straight here. You can do that just fine without listening to us at Health Care Renewal. Just listen to Richard Sackler in a time capsule from 2001. Ever wonder why the strip-miners need so much of our patients' loot? Well, take a little trip to Davos, Switzerland, where the rich and rich go to rub shoulders and tell each other how smart they are: YouTube offers a hint here. B'bye--too much dander, got to go take a bath. Article source:Health Care Renewal

[ankurmutreja]

AADHAAR Judgment Analysis

My only objective of this AADHAAR judgment analysis is to consolidate arguments on the question of punishment in case of any contempt of court proceedings and to highlight errors apparent on the face of record in the judgment. I am only analysing the majority judgment by Sikri J. I have committed multiple contempt of court in my tweets dated 26.09.2018 at the following address: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/1044931638881341440. Interested persons can read them. I have called CJI a terrorist, part of the judgment a joke, judgment on the whole a conspiracy of executive plus judiciary to force AADHAAR, and the judges subscribing to the majority judgment as legally illiterate. The main issues with respect to AADHAAR were twofold: 1. Collection of biometric information, especially IRIS, is an attack on privacy and 2. The biometric information so collected along with other demographic and personal information at such a large scale for identification of people, can be misused by the government in setting up a surveillance state. It has been noted in the judgment that petitioners conceded that the collection of biometric info per se may not infringe privacy. (I don't know how it could be so conceded, but the court is not bound by the admissions of parties when the issue involved is of such enormous public interest. In fact, the court should have suo moto converted these petitions into PILs and allowed general public to present their submissions through a court appointed amicus curiae.) The above two concerns arose in the context of AADHAAR Act. Another legilstation making AADHAAR mandatory is section 139AA of the Income Tax Act. In reference to section 139AA, the concern was slightly different. The first concern with respect to infringement of privacy by collection of biometric information was same, but the second concern with respect to surveillance state was absent as section 139AA has limited aim of protecting revenue, which it intends to achieve by linking PAN to AADHAAR, thereby protecting revenue lost due to duplication of or non-mentioning of PAN numbers. Any enquiry into privacy infringement is carried out in three stages: 1. enquiry as to existence of a legislation infringing privacy, 2. enquiry as to legitimate state interest in bringing into force such a legislation, & 3. enquiry as to the proportionality of infringement of privacy to the state interest intended to be achieved through the legislation. Strictly speaking, the concern of surveillance state is part of the third stage of the enquiry, i.e. proportionality. However, the court dealt with it separately, albeit reminding itself time and again that the two concerns of surveillance state and proportionality are inter-linked. My main issue is with respect to treatment of section 139AA in the judgment. However, it can't be tackled without referring to the judgment with respect to the AADHAAR Act. Moreover, I have charged judiciary with conspiracy, which has been done mainly in reference to judgment with respect to the AADHAAR Act, so the relevant aspects from both parts of the judgment are discussed hereinbelow. As far as the infringement of privacy by collection of biometric information is concerned, there was an argument from the respondent that the collection of biometric information doesn't raise any expectation of privacy as the information collected, i.e. fingerprint plus IRIS, was minimal info, and that the same is already being collected for issuing other documents like passport, driving licence, etc. The contention of no expectation of privacy was rejected with respect to the AADHAAR Act holding that the information was not only being collected but also being processed for the purpose of authentication and the valid privacy concerns can arise thereon and also that the state was collecting this data for further processing and therefore enquiry into the issue of proportionality has to be carried out in any case. However, the contention was upheld with respect to section 139AA, I. T. Act, though not in so many words, but the keen reading of para 420 of the judgment will make it obvious. The observation of the court that fingerprint and IRIS is minimal info is an error apparent on the face of the record. Simple reading of para 53(1) & 54(4)(b) of the judgment makes it abundantly clear that fingerprint and IRIS are being used alternatively, not jointly, to identify a person. Thus either fingerprint or IRIS, not both together, is minimal info. The submission of the respondent that the said minimal info was already being collected for issuing other documents like passport and driving licence, is a white lie. I can vouch that no IRIS is collected for obtaining driving licence as I have recently got my driving licence renewed. And as per my belief from the information obtained from the internet, there is no biometric requirement whatsoever at present with respect to passports. There were talks of incorporating AADHAAR into the airport management system, but the same can't be done now as the judgment under analysis has limited the scope of AADHAAR Act only to "benefits" and "services" read ejesdum generis to "subsidies." In fact, the UK has shelved IRIS after 2011. Some Muslim countries like UAE, Jordan and Pakistan are using IRIS only for limited purpose. The USA is using it in a limited sphere for crime detection. Canada and Neitherland are using it for a limited purpose at airports. No country, whosoever, is using IRIS at a scale that India is using it under AADHAAR. (Please visit this Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_recognition.)This part of judgment has been obtained by the respondent by playing fraud upon the court, which qualifies as an error apparent on the face of the record. If it is to be assumed that the court took judicial notice of this fact, then also it is error apparent as judicial notice has been taken on wrong presumption of facts. Even though the court clearly reached a finding that there is no infringement of privacy by linking AADHAAR to PAN, yet it analysed privacy infringement in reference to section 139AA. However, it was only for namesake. There can be no doubt about the existence of section 139AA of the Income Tax Act, thus the first enquiry was obviously answered in affirmative. The second enquiry about legitimate state interest was also answered in affirmative holding protection of revenue as legitimate state interest, which I am not disputing as there is no error apparent in reaching such a conclusion. However, enquiry with respect to proportionality was just not carried out at all. The judgment discusses the concept of proportionality in great length at different places. I am quoting hereinbelow from para 360 of the judgment: The cost or burdens of the measure must not clearly exceed the likely benefits, which can be described as ‘ends’ or ‘ends-benefits’ proportionality. The likely benefit from from linking of AADHAAR and PAN is a few crores of extra revenue. However, the burden of the measure is infringement of privacy by collection of IRIS of around 30 crores PAN holders as of 2017, of which 5 crores file returns. This means the 25 crores PAN holders who have obtained PANs for reasons other than filing returns will be unnecessarily burdened with infringement of privacy without any nexus with the benefit of higher generation of revenue, and secondly, even of those 5 crores who file returns, the duplicate or fake PAN holders detected by the government were only 11 lakhs as in 2017 as per this news reports: http://www.freepressjournal.in/india/over-11-lakh-pan-cards-deactivated-this-is-how-to-check-if-yours-is-valid/1117041. A similar figure of 10.52 lakh individual fake card holders was also provided to the court. The court mentioned this figure in paragraph 126 of the earlier Bijoy Viswam judgment quoted in para 422 of the judgment under analyses. However, it didn't carry out any proportionality analysis in accordance with the above quoted portions of para 360 of the judgment. The analysis is however simple and straight forward. Even if we were to assume the detection of fake PANs will increase five times (though de-monetisation figures released by RBI tells there is hardly any black money in India), you can't infringe privacy of 30 crores people to detect 50 lakhs PAN, which would lead to an increased revenue of a few hundred crores at the best. This linking of AADHAAR and PAN is deja vu of de-monetisation. If the court had carried out any analysis whatsoever, it would have been an error of law, but the missing analysis is conspicuous by its absence in the judgment, but a finding has been reached favouring proportionality. This is no reasoned judgment and tantamount to an error apparent on the face of the record. In reference to the above, in my tweets, I have questioned the legal acumen of the judges subscribing to the judgment under analyisis by asking them if they even understand the meaning of proportionality. This tantamount to calling them legally illiterate. In fact, such an analysis needed to be carried out while discussing manifest arbitrariness under article 14 as well, but there the court quoted Bijoy Viswam on "intelligible differentia". I have called it a joke in my tweets. Last but not the least, in my tweets, I have called the judgment on the whole a conspiracy of the executive plus judiciary to force AADHAAR, which tantamount to corruption, and therefore I called the CJI, who subscribed to the judgment under analysis, a terrorist. Let me state in what context such contemptuous statements have been made. I have a serious issue with the presentation made by the UIDAI before the court as such tantamount to the determination of facts sans cross-examination: questions asked by the petitioners' counsels were not cross-examination questions. However, irrespective of the illegality of the judgement with respect to the AADHAAR Act, its effect is fine because "benefits" and "services" in section 7 & 8 of the AADHAAR Act have been read down to be ejesdum generis to "subsidies", thereby narrowing the operation of AADHAAR Act to only the marginalised sections of the society. This per se would have alleviated the surveillance concerns if all AADHAARS except those of the marginalised sections had been cancelled. But no AADHAAR has been cancelled inspite of multiple opportunities to do so. As per the PIB release dt. 04.04.2016, UIDAI issued 100th crore AADHAAR on the even date (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=138555), which was only a few days after the AADHHAR Act was notified. So, the majority of AADHAARs were issued illegally before the notification of the AADHAAR Act. Section 59 of the AADHAAR Act makes all these illegal AADHAARs legal. The interesting thing is that the AADHAAR Act was passed as a money bill, and thus all illegally issued AADHAARs were made legal by Lok Sabha alone! In the portions of the judgment dealing with the challenge to the AADHAAR Act on the question of it having been passed as a money bill, there is no reference to section 59. I am not a tax expert, but it's unpalatable that section 59 can be passed as a money bill. Btw, the arguing counsel wrt this issue was the ex-FM, under whose regime post 2012, the process of issuing illegal AADHAARs continued unabated. I find it a serious conflict of interest. The fact judiciary didn't ask the ex-FM to recuse points towards a conspiracy. In any case, there was a separate challenge to section 59 on the premise that pre-2016 AADHAARs were issued sans consent, and section 59 can't validate them retrospectively. The challenge was rejected, but an alternative proposition was made that those who were issued AADHAARs sans connsent could opt out of AADHAAR enrolment now. I find it very convenient for the government to issue illegal AADHAARs first and then validate them retrospectively, and then the court gives the option to opt out, which option would of course will never be exercised because of the ignorance clubbed with the inertia created by the mandatory linking of AADHAAR with PAN. How can court be so oblivious to practical realities? Informed consent means consent given with complete knowledge. Where is the scope for a common man to gain knowledge of such technicalities as laid out in the judgment? I doubt if even lawyers and professors of law have understood the judgment. (I was reading one article by a law professor on this judgment. He says, in the judgment, there was a balancing act between the larger public interest of safeguarding the interests of the marginalised man and the privacy rights of the public at large; the media has also been reporting likewise; BJP spokesperson were obviously the pioneers of this proganada; however, there was no such balancing act between the larger public interest and the privacy rights; the balancing act was between the right to privacy -- the autonomy value of dignity -- and the right to food, shelter, and employment -- the community value of dignity -- of the same marginalised man.) If lawyers and professors can't understand such technicalities, and when the BJP government has a clear motive to force AADHAAR as made out in the present FM's statement in the Parliament, the callous treatment to the crucial question of consent in a judgment dealing with privacy, only hints at a conspiracy between the executive and the judiciary to force AADHAAR on the ignorant public. However, the story doesn't end here. Before the passing of the AADHAAR Act, some interim orders were passed restraining the government from making AADHAAR mandatory except for a few benefits and services in the nature of subsidies. However, once the AADHAAR Act was passed, the mandatory linking of AADHAAR was extended left, right, and centre, including for mobile connections and bank accounts. People started receiving threatening phone calls from these entities forcing them to obtain AADHAARs. Automated phone calls would sing benefits of linking AADHAAR calling it mandatory nevertheless. PayTMs and Airtels made it mandatory to link AADHAAR to open bank accounts with them -- I think even now it's mandatory. Policemen started asking for AADHAARs of all and sundry as of right (no rule or notification was issued as such for police identification through AADHAAR, but the police is the last one to follow law and the first one to force autocratic tools; so, when they become the protagonists, you know it's surveillance and nothing else). Of course, except for a few obstinate souls like me, everybody got AADHAAR. However, the judgment has now read down "benefits" and "services" and quashed rule 9 of the Money Laundering Rules and the relevant circular dt. 23.03.2017 of the Department of Telecommunication, which made AADHAAR linking mandatory for bank accounts and mobile connections respectively. The natural corollary of such quashing and reading down of "benefits" and "services" should have been quashing of the AADHAARS issued post passage of these rules and circulars. It is well established principle of law that where permitted use and illegal use can't be separated, both uses have to go. But, of course, the court did nothing of the sort and also didn't take any action against the respondents for contempt of court. The court held the said acts were done under the AADHAAR Act and were thus not contempt. In other words, the earlier interim orders passed before the AADHAAR Act ceased to have effect after passing of the AADHAAR Act. The simple question is why new orders were not passed substituting the earlier orders while earlier orders were being infringed with impunity. Even if the same were not passed, it is basic principle of law that at the time of the final judgment all status quos are restored. If the court as big as the Supreme Court of India doesn't follow this basic a principle, the only indication is that of conspiracy of the executive and the judiciary to force AADHAAR on the ignorant public. I have already made up my mind to leave this country unless at least IRIS is removed from the biometric info requirement for obtaining AADHAAR. I have no intention to file a review petition, nor do I want to face contempt because either way I will lose on the time in unnecessary litigation with no hope of justice. However, if I am forced to face contempt proceedings, this article is my only defence against the award of punishment: contempt is admitted. Read the full article

[hoorayfornicepeople-blog]

February 26, 2018

Where to begin? Probably with a deep breath. Two months from today, I will be on a plane back to the States, which means I have reached the half way point. Time certainly doesn’t slow down. Today I went to the immigration office in Kampala to swap my tourist visa out for a student visa, symbolic of some sort of greater permanence, of this becoming a kind of home and less of a quick stop along the way.

This week is probably also the busiest week of the semester so far (or so it feels). Last week was spring break, which I spent on my rural homestay, with a family in Soroti, in the Serere district of Northern Uganda. We left last Friday on the 16th and returned just last night (Sunday). The week left me with an awful lot to process through, which made jumping into this busy week quite challenging. Today, I struggled to balance the need to prioritize processing, with some of the pressing academic tasks that needed to be done. This has been a consistent thread this semester, but it felt particularly heightened today. I spent the week totally unplugged from technology and the rest of the world and reentry last night brought me 169 new emails and zero desire to read any of them. The emotional energy required to talk with people and explain my week to them proved difficult to find. Many of you have already responded to my inability to explain with understanding and grace.

Tonight, in an attempt to sort through the emails remaining unread from last night, I read the notes from the first La Vida training, which happened last week while I was away. (Update in case I haven’t told you— headed to the Adirondack’s to Sherpa in August!!) Per usual with God’s timing, the “devo thought” from the training was so poignant and relevant to my inner dialogue that I could have cried. It was taken from Elton Trueblood:

“The man who supposes that he has no time to pray or to reflect, because of social tasks which are urgent and numerous, will soon find that he has become fundamentally unproductive, because he will have separated his life from his roots….A man has made a step toward a genuine maturity when he realizes that, though he ought to perform kind and just acts, the greatest gift he can give others consist in being a radiant and encouraging person. What we are is more significant in the long run, than what we do. It is impossible for a man to give what he does not have.”

Yesterday, Will had reminded me to give myself permission to prioritize my mental, emotional, spiritual health/need for processing and reflection, even if that meant temporarily setting aside an assignment or other academic task. You know me enough to know that this advice is a tough pill for me to swallow, even though I know it’s true. Today, it was abundantly clear to me that lack of processing, even briefly, was leaving me “fundamentally unproductive,” no matter how much I tried to discipline myself. And so here I am, engaging in one of the most cathartic exercises I’ve ever known, writing. As usual, I am grateful for your willingness to sit patiently and listen while I attempt to sort through the richness of this experience and put it into words.

Spring Break 2k18… last year during spring break there was a giant blizzard. This year, in Sortoti, the average weekly temperature was somewhere around 100 degrees (not even hyperbolizing here). I went into the week expecting I would sleep in a hut, slaughter a chicken, carry water on my head, and milk a cow. I did none of the above. There’s a lesson on perception and expectations in there. When I was dropped off on Saturday, my host mama matter-of-factly informed me— “This week, it will be too hot for activities, but we will prepare food, eat, and sit.” That turned out to be an incredibly accurate synopsis of the week. In addition to the heat, we are currently on the tail end of dry season, which contributed to the lack of activity, since my host parents primarily farm. The third and final factor that shaped the level of activity of the week was that both of my host parents are in their 70s,  incredibly strong and fit, but still doing less physically demanding work at this stage of life.

However, here are some things that I did get to do:

Bucket bathed… a lot

Drank 4,000 Nalgenes a day (don’t worry Mom, I stayed hydrated)

Rested

Star gazed

Ate food

Went to church

Visited the village center

Learned to remove the internal organs of a chicken prior to cooking it

Washed dishes

Did laundry

Drank tea

Swept and mopped the house

Learned to cook a lot of things in the outdoor kitchen— posho, lots of different kinds of potatoes, soup, greens, millet/potato/sorghum bread…

Constructed an underground oven and cooked sweet potatoes in it

Rested

Read 600+ pages (spread between three books)

Sat in silence

Listened to the radio

Beat, winnowed, and separated millet

Rested

Ate more food

Visited the neighbors

Sewed pillowcases

Shelled G-nuts

Picked, cut, and ate jackfruit

Spent too much time in the pit latrine after eating jackfruit

Watched thunderstorms from the porch (It rained four nights in a row. Before leaving for the week, Eddie told us the mzungus always bring the rain to Soroti. I thought it was a crazy superstition, but it turned out to be absolutely right.)

Drank more tea

Rested

Picked and ate fresh oranges

My mama’s favorite phrase was “you go rest now,” since my room was like an oven during the day, this usually meant finding the shadiest spot and reading my book or journaling, rather than taking a nap. In combination with the amount of time I already spent sitting in silence with my host parents, or by myself in between other activities, this was wild. Before leaving, I asked people to pray for my ability to be present. God responded by providing opportunities to be present in excess. Retrospectively, the time that I had this week to reflect, contemplate, learn, and rest was truly valuable, but my impatience made it difficult to recognize in the moment. I experienced a week of simplicity, with little urgency. A culture not enslaved to clock time or schedules, but guided by the needs of the present moment, subsistence, and the daily rhythm of the earth. It was simultaneously one of the most challenging, defining, and enriching (still convincing myself of the last part) parts of the week.

The week included some of my most challenging experiences in communicating cross-culturally– navigating difficult conversations, pushing myself not to be dismissive of a differences of opinion rooted in cultural conditioning, doing my best to practice humility and openness, and learning that I have an accent that is at times hard to understand. This is something I still need to unpack, but you can ask me about it if you’re curious.

Much of what I learned this week came through lots of observation and listening. I learned a lot about the historical and current politics of Northern Uganda and it’s rocky relationship with President Museveni, who punishes the region by withholding government resources or using discriminatory policies, because of the imbalance of power based in tribal/ethnic divisions. I learned about theology, community, he education system, marriage, death, parenting, family, environment, land and agriculture, politics, and history all as they’re shaped by the culture and context of Northern Uganda. Detailing each of these would  take an incredible number of words.

I also learned about some of the most prominent poverty related issues Ugandans are experiencing, particularly related to education and medical care. Serere is and has been one of the most impoverished areas of Uganda. However, hear me on this. When you close your eyes and picture poverty in Africa, that image in your mind is not a universal representation. I learned that about myself and my own preconceptions this week for sure. I wrestled (and still am, present tense) with the task of attempting to define and understand poverty and all that is wrapped up in that. In the West, one might look at my host parents and consider them poor. But they do not struggle to put food on the table, they sustain themselves through the land they own and the food they grow. They understand conservation, care for what they own, and work very hard. If measured, their land and animals could translate to monetary value that would increase their material wealth significantly. At the same time, in the village this week, I observed acute poverty that has been unmatched by anything in the previous two months. All the while, I was reading “The White Man’s Burden,” a convicting critique by a former World Bank economist of Western involvement in the developing world, particularly through aid, military and political interference, and all forms of residual neocolonialism. I don’t think I will ever stop grappling with the irreparable damage we have done in our pursuits of materialism and power, and our misuse of resources and privilege. This paragraph is insufficient to express my questions and tangled thought processes about this particular topic, but for now, it’s what I’m capable of writing.

By the end of the week, I had more questions than answers. Honestly, what else is new. On Friday morning, we were picked up and drove to Kapchowra, about an hour away, where we spent the weekend. On Friday night, we spent time in intentional debrief, which was helpful, but in many ways only began to scratch the surface of our 25 different experiences. Saturday, we had a day of emotional (but definitely not physical) rest. After a lovely breakfast, we hiked Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano and home to the famous Sipi Falls, one of Uganda’s bigger tourist spots. The ten mile hike was exhausting, but refreshing and breathtaking. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

We had a quick thirty minute respite after the hike before we began a “coffee tour.” Kapchowra is the OG home of the Arabica coffee bean, discovered long ago by a lucky farmer who just wanted to find out why his goats were getting hyper after eating the leaves of some tree with redish colored berries. On the tour, we got to learn about and help with the process of making coffee, from picking beans  to pouring a steaming cup and everything in between. Definitely a highlight for me, even if it was a horribly touristy activity. Shown in the photo below is me shelling coffee beans. Not pictured was the slap happy, caffeine induced state my roommates witnessed me in after the effects of having more coffee than I’ve had in two months kicked in. Let’s say I was laughing at everything and didn’t get the most sleep I’ve ever gotten, but it was quite worth it.

On Sunday morning, we hiked to the top of the little hill above the guest house for a small worship service before our departure. I was asked to give a brief testimony about what God has been teaching me in this first half of the semester (in 5-10 minutes??). I spoke about patience. presence, and newness, the ways that He has been revealing my restlessness to me, but it felt next to impossible to come up with some concise summary of the work He has done in me in the past two months (and is surely continuing to do). Thanks for sticking with me and reading this long post to the end. If it feels open ended, that’s because my thoughts are open ended in so many ways right now. I don’t want to settle for a pretty packaged or over-simplified version of the week. In some areas, I settled for brevity in this post, because I don’t want to risk sounding like I have the answers.  I know the week was hard; I know the week was valuable. I know it left me with even more to ponder than I already had, which I didn’t know was possible. As I talk with you individually in the coming weeks, don’t be afraid to ask me questions, because they will help me in my pondering, but know that I am unresolved and still figuring out how to understand.

A brief post-script. Some people (not necessarily any of you) have made comments to my USP friends and I that come with a perceived bravery or accomplishment in what we did last week. “You lived in a rural village in Africa?! That must have been so hard, you are so brave!” or something of the sort. All I will say is that I am not brave. My attitude at points during the week was not even in the ballpark of praiseworthy. This whole thing is as far from being about me as possible. I felt like an outsider this week, even though I was being welcomed into a community. Don’t hear me being dismissive of your encouragement. But I challenge all of you to not let your perceptions of African poverty to shape your visions of my experience. I think these kinds of comments, while well intentioned, are rooted in subconscious (read: often distorted) pictures of the reality of a place like this. I hope that as I communicate to you, the things I say will never glorify or manipulate the things I am experiencing as a result of my own pride and desire for affirmation. Please call me out if you ever see or hear this in my words. Thanks again for being in my corner.

All my love,

Abs

Spring Break February 26, 2018 Where to begin? Probably with a deep breath. Two months from today, I will be on a plane back to the States, which means I have reached the half way point.

[rebeccahpedersen]

“Offers, If Any.” What Does That Mean?

TorontoRealtyBlog

Are you familiar with this phrase on MLS listings?

“Offers, If Any.”

Just as the “48 Hours Irrevocable” phrase was big in the 2017 Fall market, I think the old “Offers, If Any” is going to be huge this spring.

Let’s take a look at what it means, what it’s meant in the past, and how much confusion it can cause…

There are two things that today’s blog will not be:

1) About mortgages 2) Over 3,000 words

It’s funny – when I first started this blog back in 2007, the people helping me with it told me, “Blogs should be about 200-300 words,” and also added, “It’s something you should really try to update at least once per week.”

My first blog post ever was 449 words, including the intro.

The body of the post itself was five paragraphs.

Call me crazy, but that’s not enough to explore ANY topic on the planet.

And while I know that brevity isn’t my strong suit, I also find many articles out there today to be lacking.

Even in the major newspapers, I find myself scrolling down, and thinking, “That’s it?”  The articles never really seem to do the headlines justice.

In any event, the year-end 2017 blog posts, 2018 predictions, and hot topics regarding mortgage and debt seemed to really get my fingers flaming, but from now on, we’re back to the norm.

The 2018 market hasn’t really “started” yet, per se.

It’s taking time to develop; a lot more than it did last year!

To have a market, you need interactions between buyers and sellers, and you need sales.

So far, we have minimal new listings.  And I said “new,” FYI.  Yes, there are a slew of active listings, but of the 1,714 freehold properties listed for sale, only 325 of them, or 19%, were listed in 2018.

A handful of properties have sold, and I’ve seen the first “bidding war” erupt with 16 offers on a west-end condo last week, but there still aren’t nearly enough sales to come to any conclusions about how the market is starting.

In 2017, it was somewhere around the third week of January when I turned to a colleague and said, “Something is really strange with this market.”  All the sub-$1M freeholds were selling with bully offers, and the market had this unreal upward momentum.

In 2018 thus far, I can’t even give you an opinion on where we are in this market, and I think I’ll need a full month of data, and experience, to (TK)

So that brings me to this concept of “Offers, If Any.”

Let me show you what I mean:

It’s simple enough, right?

It’s like saying, “If we have any offers, we’ll review them at this time, at this place, and we ask that if you register an offer, you do so by 5pm.”

Unless I were making this into its own blog post, you’d simply read the above, and wouldn’t think anything of it.

But the presence of those two words, “if any” after the word “offers,” can be a game-changer in this market.  It’s strategic in nature, and it can make everything abundantly clear, or completely muddy the waters.

The phrase “Offers, If Any” has been on MLS listings for years, but before this year, it was didn’t really mean what it suggested.

The idea that there would not be offers, ie. the presence of “if any,” was so far-fetched in previous years, that the presence of “if any” was basically the listing agent rubbing it in your face.

Take a $900,000 property, that’s listed at $699,900 in February of 2017, which ultimately gets 28 offers and sells for $988,500.

“Offers, If Any,” the MLS listing reads.

And you’re thinking, “Oh, yeah, sure!  If any, right?  As though you won’t get offers?”

You used to see that on the listing, and you’d think the agent was being condescending.

This year, however, the words “if any” have meaning.

We’re only two weeks into the year, but I don’t think we’re going to see the same spring market we saw in 2017, or anywhere close to it.

As a result, the “under-listing” strategy (if you can call it a strategy), will be far from automatic.

The “real estate kiss of death,” as I have always referred to it, is listing your property for $999,000 with a hold-back on offers, not selling, and then re-listing the next day at $1,200,000.

I have done that exactly once in my fourteen years.

I wrote several blogs about “listing and re-listing” in the spring of 2017.  You can read one from May HERE.

But the 2017 listing-and-re-listing was because the market changed overnight in April, and through May, sellers had yet to adjust – both to the new listing strategies, as well as the decrease in price.

In 2018, listing and re-listing is going to be a killer.

And thus it’s up to the seller, and the listing agent, to assess risk tolerance, and enact a strategy.

Let’s say you have a house that is worth $900,000.

There are three listing strategies that you can enact in 2018, as I see it:

1) List at $899,900, offers any time.

2) List at $899,900, hold back offers.

3) List at $799,900, hold back offers.

And each of those listing strategies could have its own subset of strategies.

Take #1 for example:

1a) List at $899,900, offers any time, with 24 hour irrevocable (or 48 hours, if you want).  We call this the “soft holdback,” and it was prevalent in the Fall of 2017.

1b) List at $899,900, offers really, truly, any time.

1c) List at $919,900, thus over-pricing as the house is “worth” $900,000, but you want to know for certain that you’re not leaving money on the table.

As far as #3 goes, it’s risky!

If you don’t get the response you need in order to push the $799,900 list price up over the $900,000 value of the home, then you have no choice but to re-list higher,  and incur the “real estate kiss of death.”

If the market is truly balanced this spring, then a lot of buyers will feel as though they don’t need to “play the games,” and the seller who under-lists, terminates, and then re-lists, risks offending the buyer pool.

To get that $900,000 offer, based on a $799,900 list price, you might have only needed two offers in some years, or at the very least, three.  But what will it take in the spring of 2018?  Four offers?  Five?  Time will tell.

As far as #2 goes, this is where the 2018 market will be interesting.

I know this sounds crazy (I’m being facetious…) but maybe, just maybe, listing at fair market value will become a “thing” in 2018.

It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation.

What are you deciding on first when listing: whether or not to hold back offers, or the price?

Do you start with, “We’re going to hold back offers, now do we list at $899,900, or $799,900?”

Or do you start with, “We’re going to list at $899,900, no do we hold back offers?”

As I said, this is where the 2018 market will be interesting.

And it’s where those words “If Any” come into play.

The agent and seller who want to list at fair market value, but still want to try holding-back offers “just in case,” will write on the listing, “Offers, If Any.”

They want to signal to the market that they’re not under-priced for competition, and they don’t want to scare buyers away.

They want to ensure that buyers know this isn’t the spring of 2017, and houses won’t sell for 150% of the list price – especially this one!

So the “If Any” is really saying what it means.  “We’re priced at $899,900, which we think is reasonable.  And if we get any offers, we’ll review them at this date.”

How else can you convey that to the buyer pool?

I mentioned something above about “muddy waters,” and if you’re with me on this blog so far, you already know where this is going.

The listing for that $900,000 house, with a $799,000 list price, might say, “Offers Reviewed Monday January 15th at 7:30pm.”

But it might also read “Offers, If Any, Reviewed Monday January 15th at 7:30pm.”

So what I’m getting at is, there’s nothing to stop a listing agent from trying to trick the buyer pool, once they think they’ve got it all figured out, into thinking a property is fairly-priced, when it’s not.

What else is new?

As it always has been, it’s up to the buyer to do their homework, use comparable sales, and determine what they think fair market value is.

It’s too bad, because right when you think there’s some clarity in the market, you realize, there isn’t.

Personally, I think we’re going to see a lot more properties this spring listed at fair market value, rather than being stupidly under-listed like they were last year.  I just don’t think sellers will have the risk tolerance, and if they’re smart, they’ll think about this before listing, rather than acting surprised – and hard-done-by, when the strategy fails.

I think listing at fair market value is the way to go, or even slightly above fair market value, in lieu of holding-back offers.

It’s a decent strategy, when you think about it.

Real estate has no fixed value, and it’s not like a share of stock, where millions of the identical item trade every day, with values traced to the very penny.

So if you think you’ve got a $900,000 house, maybe you price at $924,900, and with “Offers Any Time,” the first few buyers that walk through the house and love it, decide to act right away, and come in at or near the list price, rather than risk losing out.

I would absolutely choose that strategy over listing at $699,900, and hoping I get 10-12 offers and $200,000+ over the list price.

So having said all this, what do you think: is it going to be tougher this spring to be a buyer, or a seller?

As many readers have pointed out, last spring, you could list a beat-up RV for sale and you’d get multiple offers.

So will it be harder for sellers to analyze, implement, and follow the right listing strategy?  Or will it be harder for buyers to cut through the pricing games and listing inconsistencies, which are designed to be easier than in 2017, but might end up being harder?

It’s too early to tell, but we’re getting there, every-so-slowly…

The post “Offers, If Any.” What Does That Mean? appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

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