#it's been almost 40 years since my last economics class

[jimstares]

Long, but 100% worth your time.

Ko-fi prompt from @liberwolf:

Could you explain Tariff's , like who pays them and what they do to a country?

Well, I can definitely guess where this question is coming from.

Honestly, I was pretty excited to get this prompt, because it's one I can answer and was part of my studies focus in college. International business was my thing, and the issues of comparative advantage (along with Power Purchasing Parity) were one of the things I liked to explore.

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At their simplest, tariffs are an import tax. The United States has had tariffs as low as 5%, and at other times as high as 44% on most goods, such as during the Civil War. The purpose of a tariff is in two parts: generating revenue for the government, and protectionism.

Let's first explore how a tariff works. If you want to be confused, then you need to have never taken an economics class, and look at this graph:

(src)

So let's undo that confusion.

The simplest examples are raw or basic materials such as steel, cotton, or wine.

First, without tariffs:

Let us say that Country A and Country B both produce steel, and it is of similar quality, and in both cases cost $100 per unit. Transportation from one country to the other is $50/unit, so you can either buy domestically for $100, or internationally for $150. So you buy domestically.

Now, Country B discovers a new place to mine iron very easily, and so their cost for steel drops to $60/unit due to increased ease of access. Country A can either purchase domestically for $100, or internationally for $110 (incl. shipping), which is much more even. Still, it is more cost-effective to purchase domestically, and so Country A isn't worried.

Transportation technology is improved, dropping the shipping costs to $30/unit. A person from Country A can buy: Domestic: $100 International: $60+$30 = $90 Purchasing steel from Country B is now cheaper than purchasing it from Country A, regardless of where you live.

Citizens in Country A, in order to reduce costs for domestic construction, begin to purchase their steel from Country B. As a result, money flows from Country A to B, and the domestic steel industry in Country A begins to feel the strain as demand dwindles.

In this scenario, with no tariffs, Country A begins to rely on B for their steel, which causes a loss of jobs (steelworkers, miners), loss of infrastructure (closing of mines and factories), and an outflow of funds to another country. As a result, Country A sees itself as losing money to B, while also growing increasingly reliant on their trading partner for the crucial good that is steel. If something happens to drive up the price of B's steel again, like political upheaval or a natural disaster, it will be difficult to quickly ramp up the production of steel in Country A's domestic facilities again.

What if a tariff is introduced early?

Alternately, the dropping of complete costs for purchase of steel from Country B could be counteracted with tariffs. Let's say we do a 25% tariff on that steel. This tariff is placed on the value of the steel, not the end cost, so:

$60 + (0.25 x $60) + $30 = $105/unit

Suddenly, with the implementation of a 25% tariff on steel from Country B, the domestic market is once again competitive. People can still buy from Country B if they would like, but Country A is less worried about the potential impacts to the domestic market.

The above example is done in regards to a mature market that has not yet begun to dwindle. The infrastructure and labor is still present, and is being preemptively protected against possible loss of industry to purchasing abroad.

What happens if the tariff is not implemented until after the market has dwindled?

Let's say that the domestic market was not protected by the tariff until several decades on. Country A's domestic production, in response to increased purchasing from abroad, has dwindled to one third of what it was before the change in pricing incentivized purchase from B. Prices have, for the sake of keeping this example simple, remained at $100(A) and $60(B) in that time. However, transportation has likely become better, so transportation is down to $20, meaning that total cost for steel from B is $80, accelerating the turn from domestic steel to international.

So, what happens if you suddenly implement a tariff on international steel? Shall we say, 40%?

$60 + (0.4 x 60) + 20 = $104

It's more expensive to order from abroad! Wow! Let's purchase domestically instead, because these prices add up!

But the production is only a third of what it used to be, and domestic mines and factories for refining the iron into steel can't keep up. They're scaling, sure, but that takes time. Because demand is suddenly triple of the supply, the cost skyrockets, and so steel in Country A is now $150/unit! The price will hopefully come down eventually, as factories and mines get back in gear, but will the people setting prices let that happen?

So industries that have begun to rely on international steel, which had come to $80/unit prior to the tariff, are facing the sudden impact of a cost increase of at least $25/unit (B with tariff) or the demand-driven price increase of domestic (nearly double the pre-tariff cost of steel from B), which is an increase of at least 30% what they were paying prior to the tariff.

There are possible other aspects here, such as government subsidies to buoy the domestic steel industry until it catches back up, or possibly Country B eating some of the costs so that people still buy from them (selling for $50 instead of $60 to mitigate some of the price hike, and maintain a loyal customer base), but that's not a direct impact of the tariff.

Who pays for tariffs?

Ultimately, this is a tax on a product (as opposed to a tax on profits or capital themselves, which has other effects), which means the majority of the cost is passed on directly to the consume.

As I said, we could see the producers in Country B cut their costs a little bit to maintain a loyal customer base, but depending on their trade relationships with other countries, they are just as likely to stop trading with Country A altogether in order to focus on more profitable markets.

So why do not put tariffs on everything?

Well... for that, we get into the question of production efficiency, or in this case, comparative advantage.

Let's say we have two small, neighboring countries, C and D, that have negligible transportation costs and similar industries. Both have extensive farmland, and both have a history of growing grapes for wine, and goats for wool. Country C is a little further north than D, so it has more rocky grasses that are good for goats, while D has more fertile plains that are good for growing grapes.

Let's say that they have an equal workforce of 500,000 of people. I'm going to say that 10,000 people working full time for a year is 1 unit of labor. So, Country C and Country D have between the 100 units of labor, and 50 each.

The cost of 1 unit of wool = the cost of 1 unit of wine

Country C, having better land for goats, can produce 4 units of wool for every unit of labor, and 2 units of wine for every unit of labor.

Meanwhile, Country D, having better land for grapes, can produce 2 units of wool per unit of labor, and 4 units of wine per unit of labor.

If they each devote exactly half their workforce to each product, then:

Country C: 100 units of wool, 50 units of wine Country D: 50 units of wool, 100 units of wine

Totaling 150 units of each product.

However, if each devotes all of their workforce to the product they're better at...

Country C: 200 units of wool, no wine Country D: no wool, 200 units of wine

and when they trade with each other, they each end up with 100 units of each product, which is a doubling of what their less-efficient labor would have resulted in!

The real world is obviously much more complicated, but in this example, we can see the pros of outsourcing some of your production to another country to focus on your own specialties.

Extreme examples of this IRL are countries where most of the economy rests on one product, such as middle-eastern petro-states that are now struggling to diversify their economies in order to not get left behind in the transition to green energy, or Taiwan's role as the world's primary producer of semiconductors being its 'silicon shield' against China.

Comparative advantage can be used well, such as our Unnamed Countries (that are definitely not the classic example of England and Portugal, with goats instead of sheep) up in the example. With each economy focusing on its specialty, there is a greater yield of both products, meaning a greater bounty for both countries.

However, should something happen to Country C up there, like an earthquake that kills half the goats, they are suddenly left with barely enough wool to clothe themselves, and nothing for Country D, which now has a surplus of wine and no wool.

So you do have to keep some domestic industry, because Bad Things Can Happen. And if we want to avoid the steel example of a collapse in the given industry, tariffs might be needed.

Are export tariffs a thing?

Yes, but they are much rarer, and can largely be defined as "oh my god, everyone please stop getting rid of this really important resource by selling it to foreigners for a big buck, we are depleting this crucial resource."

So what's the big confusion right now?

Donald Trump has, on a number of occasions, talked about 'making China pay' tariffs on the goods they import into the US. This has led to a belief that is not entirely unreasonable, that China would be the side paying the tariffs.

The view this statement engenders is that a tariff is a bit like paying a rental fee for a seller's table at an event: the producer or merchant pays the host (or landlord or what have you) a fee to sell their product on the premises. This could be a farmer's market, a renaissance faire, a comic book convention, whatever. If you want to sell at the event, you have to pay a fee to get a space to set up your table.

In the eyes of the people who listened to Trump, the tariff is that fee. China is paying the United States for access to the market.

And, technically, that's not entirely wrong. China is thus paying to enter the US market. It's just the money to pay that fee needs to come from somewhere, and like most taxes on goods, that fee comes from the consumer.

So... what now?

Well, a lot of smaller US companies that rely on cheap goods made in China are buying up non-perishables while they can, before the tariffs hit. Long-term, manufacturers in the US that rely on parts and tools manufactured in China are going to feel the squeeze once that frontloaded stock is depleted.

Some companies are large enough to take the hit on their own end, still selling at cheap rates to the consumer, because they can offset those costs with other parts of their empire... at least until smaller competitors are driven out of business, at which point they can start jacking up their prices since there are no options left. You may look at that and think, "huh, isn't that the modus operandi for Walmart and Amazon already?" and yes. It is. We are very much anticipating a 'rich get richer, poor go out of business' situation with these tariffs.

The tariffs will also impact larger companies, including non-US ones like Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish), if they have a huge reliance on Chinese production to supply their huge market in the United States.

If you're interested in the repercussions that people expect from these proposed tariffs on Chinese goods, I'd suggest listening to or watching the November 8th, 2024 episode of Morning Brew Daily (I linked to YouTube, but it's also available on Spotify, Nebula, the Morning Brew website, and other podcast platforms).

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Kevin Kavanagh, MD

Finally, a masking initiative I can support. I’m not talking about the misdirected efforts of emerging mask bans, one the latest in my home state of Kentucky. Instead, we need to emulate the NIH, which, on November 4, initiated a masking requirement at all National Institutes of Health (NIH) patient care areas. Our nation needs to come to grips with the fact that the pandemic is NOT over; the virus is very dangerous and poses risks to everyone. NIH is masking up, and so should we.

COVID-19 and long COVID are not old people’s diseases. Recent studies paint a bleak picture of long COVID and its effect on adults and children. The Naval Medical Research Command reported that almost 25% of studied Marines, most of whom had asymptomatic or mild acute COVID-19, “reported physical, cognitive, or psychiatric long-term sequelae of (COVID-19) infection.”

The economic impact is profound. Public health reports from Australia estimated that long COVID has caused a 0.5% loss in GDP. In New Zealand, a country of 5.7 million people, it is estimated the loss is 1.23 billion US dollars per year. The best study from the United States is from 2022 by the Brookings Institute that estimated 2 to 4 million individuals in the United States are not working because of long COVID. Since then, we have essentially handled this problem by not counting. However, the health care sector has been hit especially hard. A recent study from the United Kingdom found 33% of healthcare workers suffer from long COVID.

Most disturbing is the lasting brain damage from the virus, causing a decrease in cognition and executive function, damage resulting in poor judgment, and risky behavior. I seldom see anyone wearing a mask, and too few are up to date with their COVID-19 boosters. We are ignoring the pandemic and nonchalantly spreading the virus.

This phenomenon is occurring nationally. Recently, the American Automobile Association reported a spike in risky behavior associated with the pandemic, behavior manifested by an increase in speeding, driving under the influence of alcohol, and a decrease in seatbelt use. And a study in the Journal of Neurology found those who have had COVID-19 have higher rates of auto accidents.

Patients who have experienced COVID-19 with changes in their sense of smell are at an increased risk of developing “behavioral, functional and structural brain alterations” in the portion of the brain that controls emotion. COVID-19 has been found to diminish executive function in over half of patients with cognitive complaints, such as brain fog, memory loss, and lower I.Q. In Sweden, the insurance company, IF, found that almost a third of young adults have “brain fog”. In the Netherlands, there has been a 40% increase in adults seeking medical care for cognitive difficulties.

One only needs to look at what is happening in our communities and around the world to realize that people have a short fuse, and societies have become powder kegs of confrontations and violence.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can also undergo transformation, allowing it to better infect the brain. Recently, Jacob Class and colleagues in Nature Microbiology demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 can lose its furin cleavage site, which is responsible for cellular entry (using the ACE2/TMPRSS2 receptor). This adaptation is hypothesized to optimize the virus’s ability to infect the brain using an alternate cellular entry pathway (Astrocytes or brain cells do not have observable ACE2 receptors).

Evolutionary pressure may be selected for viral mutations that allow SARS-CoV-2 to infect the brain, specifically the frontal lobes. In at least some individuals, this damage would increase risky and confrontational behavior, promoting the spread of this virus. This process would then repeat itself in the newly infected, further spreading the virus. This is not a pathogen to be taken lightly.

In Kentucky, we could possibly be seeing this scenario play out. A mask ban enacted in public venues will increase viral spread. Even outdoors, if you are within 6 feet of an infected person, large droplet spread can easily occur. Any proposed or enacted mask ban is anti-public health and will result in needless cases of long COVID, death, and disability. It will adversely impact our economy and the mental health of our citizens.

We must break this cycle of infections and disability. Clean indoor air, the wearing of N95 masks in public places, and vaccinations are keys to preventing new cases of acute COVID-19 and long COVID.

[fiaistired]

I want to figure out how old Elias Bouchard really is. When was he born?

In MAG 49 it’s said he joined the institute in 1991 and became head of the institute in 1996 after being body snatched by Jonah Magnus.

In MAG 192 Rosie says that “he seemed far too young for the role he had apparently found himself in” - referring to the head of the institute position.

How young is too young for a head of an institution position? Here’s a first not *exactly* evidence-based assumption - but let’s say it’s probably being below 40 years old. That is based solely on the experience of attending university, I’d say most institute heads at uni are at minimum 40 (also, not exactly related but all university institute heads have PhD’s). (I don’t want to get into too many details here, since I’m not a 100% sure how the higher education system works in the UK, but in my country at least, one must have at least a Habilitation, which is almost like a second PhD, or be a capital “P” Professor, which is the highest university rank, to become an institute head. To achieve these scientific titles, it usually takes a lot of time, so most people are over 40 when they get the position. Or even 50, when it comes to the Professor rank). 

One can assume then, that “Elias” is below 40-ish while he interviews Rosie. Unfortunately, we don’t know when exactly that happens. It could be anytime between 1996 and 2015. 

Some other information we do know about him is that he’s graduated collage with third class honours and has a PPE degree. According to google, students in the UK typically start university at the age of 18. Also, according to google, Oxford has never had a postgraduate degree course in PPE, so Elias has a bachelor’s degree in PPE (which btw stands for Philosophy, Politics and Economics), meaning he was either 21 or 22 when he finished uni. We do not hear anyone mention him finishing any other courses, so we can assume that’s all that he studied.

Another thing we don’t know is at what age he started working for the Magnus Institute. We do know it happened in 1991. The earliest he could have been recruited was at the age of 21 or 22, straight out of university. Making him 26/27 at the time he “got promoted” to the position of institute head, in 1996. As mentioned previously, at Rosie’s interview, where she found that he looked too young for his position, in between 1996 and 2015 (whenever that interview took place) he would’ve been between 26 and 45 years old (at the youngest) depending on the year the interview took place in. Taking my assumption from before, that during the interview he’d be 40 or lower, I’d assume that the interview probably took place anytime between 1996 and 2010 for the comment of him looking too young in his position to make sense. Of course, it could’ve been a few years after graduating uni when he got recruited, which would further push down the date of the Rosie interview. I think the oldest he could possibly be is in his late thirties during it. So, the eldest he could be in 1996, if that is when the interview took place, would be around 40 years old (which I also don’t think it did take place in 1996 since it would make Rosie work as his assistant for 20 years and I’m not certain that she could remain that oblivious to all the weird stuff going on for that long. But what do I know, maybe she’s got a gift for not noticing. I don’t know for sure).

So, in the year of his body being overtaken by Jonah Magnus, 1996, he’s between the ages of 26 and 40. 

We, the listeners, know him mostly from our time spent with him and the archives crew from 2015 onwards. Based on our established age range, in 2015 he would’ve been anywhere between 45 and 59 years old. Which would mean that last time we hear him speak is in 2018 in which he’s anywhere between 48 and 62 years old. 

I don’t know how old his va, Ben Meredith is exactly. I’m pretty sure he’s a millennial? Either way it doesn’t really matter how old his va is, though all we have to picture him by is his voice only, which at least in my opinion doesn’t really sound like the voice of a 62-year-old, but that is straight up just a subjective opinion. Maybe he’s a particularly young sounding 62-year-old?

Some additional information we supposedly get about “Elias” is that he was working as a filing clerk in 1972, which he says to Jonathan Sims in MAG 29, but that contradicts with the information gathered later by Jon and revealed in MAG 49 where he says that Elias joined the institute in 1991. All this might seem like just the lies of Jonah Magnus, but it presents an interesting point of having a conversation take place in 2016 with the reference to his being an institute employee in 1972. In 2016 he’s between the ages of 46 (which would make him 2 years old in 1972) and 60 (which would make him 16 in 1972), neither of which make sense, thought one would think that if he’s older and Jon doesn’t know how old he is exactly, it wouldn’t be that suspicious for him to have worked at the institute in 1972, though that seems like a stretch. Perhaps Jon just didn’t question or notice how it doesn’t really make sense for him to have worked there in that year, or maybe the writing-story-planning team didn’t put that much thought into this particular interaction/the implications of it, or maybe Elias looks older than he is. 

In conclusion, Elias Bouchard was born between the years of 1956 and 1970.

Also, fun fact I did a poll to see what age Tumblr users thought Elias was and they picked between 40 to 50, with 45 to 55 being a close second, so if anyone voted in that and picked anywhere between 45 and 59, I just want to let you know you’re right.

TLDR: Elias Bouchard is (most likely) anywhere between 45 and 59 at the start of the Magnus Archives.

[nsomniacsdream]

I want to talk about my depression but I never seem to get it across right. I'm not self hating. I'm environmentally depressed, which means it's the circumstances of my life that fuel my depression. OK.

Now when I talk to people about this, they almost always make it about economic circumstances, which is part of it I'm not gonna lie. People tell me I'll get better once I start making more money, just switch jobs, blah blah blah. And I get to tell them that I'm solidly middle class. According to the last census, I'm in the top ten percent of earners in my county. Do I have problems money would solve? Sure. But I'm not skating bills or anything at the moment.

And then, they ask what I'm so depressed about then? *Gestures broadly* Look around you man! The roads are falling apart. The school is completely underfunded. This entire town is dying by inches and slowly getting bought up and turned into apartments the people who have been here for generations can't afford. Every year, fewer high school graduates stay because THERE IS NOTHING FOR THEM HERE. Our local government doesn't even try to hide that they're corrupt when they're not incompetent (the newspaper headline story last week was about our county human services department begging the county to use the federal money they were getting for the actual purpose they were legally required to use it for). Half our state has voted to explore seceding and becoming part of Idaho. This is OREGON, and I constantly see rebel flags and there is more than one vehicle in town COVERED in Trump signs and flags. Like there is a truck that completely blacked out their back window with Trump stickers (which is illegal, there's no wiggle room there when you literally can't see out your back window), and they have been driving around every day for 6 years now.

Great, I can afford to distract myself, but our country has gotten worse every year since I've been alive. There weren't credit checks when I was born. I was born the same time top tax rates got cut to nothing. People talk about civil rights got better in that time but what about now? We are having the gay marriage debate AGAIN. Abortion is no longer federally protected. The federal government, all of it, is less competent than the worst satire.

And here I'm always told "well why even pay attention to any of that, it doesn't affect you", and how? How does whether or not my neighbor is allowed to make a private Healthcare decision not my problem? How is whether or not my brother is allowed to just exist without getting hate crimed not my problem? How do you live your life as if nothing happens beyond the horizon when it all trickles down to you eventually? Why do I see you hyperventilating on Facebook over imaginary gun laws every week if none of this should bother you?

This is *depressing*, because I was raised being told every day that America is such a great country and fucking WHERE?! is America so great? Genuinely tell me what I'm supposed to be proud of? I've spent my life from one side of this country to the other (literally), and every single place is just the ruins of what is left from the middle of the 1900s. The town I live in now, everyone still talks about the Mill, half the directions you get involve "going towards the Mill" and the mill closed 40 years ago. It was torn down 30 years ago and turned into a storage facility. This and so many other towns DIED before the turn of the century and they're just languishing on the tiny amount of life support the states provide. I am pretty sure that before 2040, this town will not have a single family still living here that was here pre-2000.

I'm ranting again. I hate talking about it because once I start listing stuff, people want to argue. But you're not going to convince me that an entire town being owned by 3 people is a good thing. You can't convince me that the future of work is company towns and that's not a dystopia. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that every single thing I use in my life becoming a subscription service isn't something we should stop. Look at your kid and tell me that selling all of our water to private companies to sell back to us at 6000% markup is something you're so looking forward to them experiencing. We. Live. In. An. Unacknowledged. Nightmare.

Of course I'm depressed.

[xtruss]

Bernie Sanders: We Must Raise The Minimum Wage To A Living Wage

In the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you shouldn’t have to live in poverty

— Opinion | Minimum Wage | Monday 17 April 2022

Demonstrators rally at New York’s City Hall Park to demand a higher minimum wage in November 2022. Photograph: Derek French/Rex/Shutterstock

Congress Can No Longer Ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.

One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant.

“The federal minimum wage has lost over 27% of its purchasing power since it was last raised 14 years ago”

When over 60% of American workers are now living paycheck to paycheck, when the life expectancy of low-income Americans is in decline, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country, we can no longer tolerate a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a wage that has not been raised since 2009. Incredibly, the federal minimum wage has lost over 27% of its purchasing power since it was last raised 14 years ago. That is unacceptable. Millions of Americans cannot be allowed to fall further and further behind economically, unable to afford the housing, food, healthcare, childcare and education they desperately need in order to live in health and dignity.

Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour. It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.

Bernie (Bernard) Sanders

“Cities and states all across the country are taking the low-wage crisis into their own hands and raising their minimum wage”

That was then. Now is now. And things are changing. As a result of years of congressional inaction, cities and states all across the country are taking the low-wage crisis into their own hands and raising their minimum wage. Some are doing it through legislative action. Others are doing it through ballot initiatives.

Since 2013, the people of 12 states – New Jersey, South Dakota, Arkansas (twice), Alaska, Washington, Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, Nevada and Nebraska (twice) – have voted on ballot initiatives to raise their state’s minimum wage. Every single one of these initiatives passed, none with less than 55% of the vote. And these are not just strong “blue states” voting for economic justice. In the recent November 2022 midterm election, two states that voted in Republican governors, Nebraska and Nevada, voted to raise the minimum wage. In 2020, the citizens of Florida, with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, also voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The MIT living wage calculator estimates a living wage as a salary that is adequate enough to support a family without luxuries. For two working adults and one child, a living hourly wage for each adult would be $18.69 in West Virginia, $17.55 in South Carolina, $21.57 in Maryland, $20.01 in Utah and $19.33 in Wisconsin. Even in my own state of Vermont, the living wage is $19.58, more than $6 above the current state minimum wage.

But there are many families that do not have two working adults and rely on single moms who are raising their children on their own. In that case, the required living wage is much higher. As an example, a single mother in West Virginia would need to make $33.39 an hour to support herself and one child.

So it is not radical to suggest that raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of several years is the right thing to do. In fact, had my 2015 bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour that was indexed to median wages became law, the federal minimum wage this January would be at least $17.40 an hour. And while we deal with the minimum wage, we must also address the scandal of the tipped wage, which has been stuck at an abysmally low $2.13 an hour for more than 30 years thanks, in large part, to the powerful restaurant lobby which has spent millions in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses since 1991 to keep workers in poverty.

Together, these two proposals would provide an increase in pay for tens of millions of desperate Americans – disproportionately women and people of color. It would also be a huge boost to single moms. Let us not forget that these are the essential workers who kept the economy going during the worst of the Covid pandemic. At that time we called them heroes and heroines. Well, rhetorical praise is nice. A livable paycheck is better. Let’s do it.

— Bernie Sanders is a US Senator From Vermont and the Chair of the Senate zcommittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

[coochiequeens]

PHOENIX — Luz Portillo, the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, has many plans. She is studying to be a skin care expert. She has also applied to nursing school. She works full time, too — as a nurse’s aide and doing eyelash extensions, a business she would like to grow.

But one thing she has no plans for anytime soon is a baby.

Ms. Portillo’s mother had her when she was 16. Her father has worked as a landscaper for as long as she can remember. She wants a career and more control over her life.

“I can’t get pregnant, I can’t get pregnant,” she said she tells herself. “I have to have a career and a job. If I don’t, it’s like everything my parents did goes in vain.”

For decades, delaying parenthood was the domain of upper-middle-class Americans, especially in big, coastal cities. Highly educated women put off having a baby until their careers were on track, often until their early 30s. But over the past decade, as more women of all social classes have prioritized education and career, delaying childbearing has become a broad pattern among American women almost everywhere.

The result has been the slowest growth of the American population since the 1930s, and a profound change in American motherhood. Women under 30 have become much less likely to have children. Since 2007, the birthrate for women in their 20s has fallen by 28 percent, and the biggest recent declines have been among unmarried women. The only age groups in which birthrates rose over that period were women in their 30s and 40s — but even those began to decline over the past three years.

“The story here is about young women, whose births are plummeting,” said Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College who analyzed county-level birth records for The New York Times. “All of a sudden, in the last 10 years, there’s this tremendous transformation.”

A geographic analysis of Professor Myers’s data offers a clue: The birthrate is falling fastest in places with the greatest job growth — where women have more incentive to wait.

In more than two dozen interviews with young women in Phoenix and Denver, some said they felt they could not afford a baby. They cited the costs of child care and housing, and sometimes student debt. Many also said they wanted to get their careers set first and expressed satisfaction that they were exerting control over their fertility — and their lives — in a way their mothers had not.

“I can not have a kid and not have to feel bad about it,” said Eboni McFadden, 28, who grew up in rural Missouri and is now two weeks from graduating as a medical technician in Phoenix. “I feel powerful that I can make that decision with my own body. I don’t have to have a kid to be successful or to be a woman.”

The annual fertility rate may be dropping — births have fallen for six straight years and declined precipitously during the pandemic — but the share of women who have children by the end of their reproductive years has been climbing. Still, in the past decade, births to women over 30 have not offset the decline for women in their 20s, driving down overall births and leaving an open question: Are young women delaying childbirth or forgoing it altogether?

Child care costs, and opportunity costs

The declines in childbearing over the past decade have varied by region, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Census Bureau. They were greater on the West Coast and in the Mountain West than in the South or Northeast. The large urban counties that have gained the most jobs and population since the recession have seen birthrates fall twice as fast as smaller, rural counties that have not recovered as strongly. The birthrate fell 38 percent in Denver County and 33 percent in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

In economically stagnant places, fertility tends to be higher, and having a child is seen as a primary route to fulfillment.

Kara Schoenherr moved to Maricopa County, Ariz., from a small town south of Seattle a few years ago. She was tired of paying $1,500 a month for a house in a town with no stoplight and a drug epidemic. Her friend lived in Phoenix, and she had heard it had lots of good colleges and jobs.She married last year, but she and her husband, a sous-chef at a casino, have been holding off on having children. She will graduate this summer as an aesthetician, doing things like facials and waxing. But she wants to have a base of clients before having a baby.“I still don’t think I have everything I want to set myself up for success,” said Ms. Schoenherr, who is 27. “I want to have a house and a career first.”The cost of living is adding to her hesitation. Houses in areas that she likes sell overnight with dozens of offers. Day-care rates gave her sticker shock.In interviews with women from immigrant families, almost all of them Hispanic, the delay was less about the cost of children than about a desire to set their lives on track.Ms. Portillo, who is 22, said her immigrant parents had raised her and her three siblings frugally and done fine.

“If they did it, I certainly should be able to,” she said.

Hispanic women, who once had by far the highest fertility of any major racial or ethnic group, have had the single largest drop in fertility of any group, more than a third since 2007. In Arizona, Hispanic women made up approximately 60 percent of the total decline in births in the state since 2007, according to a University of Arizona analysis.

Miguel Brusuelas, an instructor at GateWay Community College, where Ms. Portillo is a student, said that 20 years ago, most of his students in their 20s were single mothers, struggling to make ends meet. Today, far fewer have children, he said. Many have specific career goals for their education. About half of GateWay’s students are Hispanic, and nearly half are the first in their families to go to college.

“What I see now is students looking beyond, ‘OK, I have to pay this bill next week,’” Mr. Brusuelas said. “I see them looking into the future.”

Some women said they wanted to build a career as a way to avoid repeating difficult childhoods. Jakeisha Ezuma grew up on the South Side of Chicago, one of 10 children. Her older sisters, she said, had several children, and for a while in her teens, she wanted nothing more than to become pregnant, too. But she did not. Now 26 and living in Denver, she wants to wait. She is earning her dental hygienist degree, which comes with more money and a more flexible schedule than her current job as a dental assistant.

“I’m trying to go higher,” she said. “I grew up around dysfunctional things. I feel like if I succeed, my children won’t have to. I’ll be breaking the generational cycle.”

Fewer unintended pregnancies

The largest declines in births have been in unintended pregnancies and those to single mothers, Professor Myers found. The birthrate for unmarried women dropped 18 percent, compared with 11 percent for married women.

A major reason women are able to be more intentional about when to have children is better access to birth control. Long-acting reversible contraception, such as arm implants and IUDs, have given women new options, and the Affordable Care Act made many of them free.

The lower rate of unplanned pregnancy is a signal that the decline in births — despite the hand-wringing about what it portends for the nation’s work force and social safety net — could be good news for individual women.

“One of the big shifts has been fewer people having kids before they wanted to,” said Amanda Jean Stevenson, a demographer at the University of Colorado. “Maybe there are fewer babies right now, but people are able to live the lives they want to, and that’s a profound thing.”

Demanding jobs, and demanding children

Researchers cannot say for sure if education is a cause of the fertility decline, but there appears to be some connection. What is clear is that women are far more educated than they were in past generations, even since the Great Recession in 2008.

Women’s graduation rates are now rising faster than men’s. One-third of women in their 20s had a college degree in 2019, up from one-quarter in 2007.

Their place in the labor force has changed, too. Forty-four percent of female workers are in professional or management occupations, compared with 38 percent before 2008. The number of women doing jobs that do not require as much education, like office assistant, has dropped.

The emphasis on career has spread beyond women with bachelor’s degrees — as has a recognition of how children can derail it.

“The perceived price of having children has really increased since I first talked to women in the mid-1990s,” said Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at Princeton University who has spent years writing about low-income families. “Even among the poorest women, there’s a recognition that a career is part of a life course.”

At the same time, there was more of a glorification of work in American culture, and workplaces began expecting employees to be available around the clock. Yet there is little in the way of policies to help parents combine work and family.

Parenting, too, became more stressful. American parents spend more money and time on their children than any previous generation, and many feel immense pressure to be constantly teaching their children, enrolling them in enrichment classes and giving them their undivided attention. This is known as intensive parenting, and while it used to be an upper-middle-class phenomenon, it is now rising fast across all social classes.

Ms. Schoenherr is acutely aware of how much the demands of parenting have changed. She was born on a bean and corn farm in Illinois. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and her grandmother babysat while her mother was at work. She remembers long days of riding her bike and coming home when the streetlights came on.

“Back then you could let your kids do whatever and you wouldn’t be judged,” she said. “Now there’s so much mom shaming. You are looked down on if you are not fully focused on your kid.”

A number of women said they wanted to avoid the schedules of their working-class parents because they were inflexible and allowed little time for play or family activities.

Alejandra De Santiago, of Surprise, Ariz., remembers yearning for her mother to stop by school during lunch the way other mothers did, but she was always working. Her parents, a house cleaner and a truck driver, both immigrants from Mexico, divorced when she was 7, and she was raised mostly by her grandmother, while her mother worked.

“I want to know who I am first before having kids,” she said.

Ms. De Santiago, 23, said she wanted to start a spa business, which would allow her to control her schedule more than hourly work.

“I don’t want them to feel closer to their babysitter than to me,” she said.

It is uncertain whether young women will end up having the children that — at least so far — they are putting off. In surveys, they say they still want them, though the number of children they intend to have has fallen. It is possible that the drop over the past decade is a new normal for fertility in America, one that looks more like what has happened in Europe and some Asian nations.

Kristal Wynn, 36, grew up in rural Florida. Her best friend from high school had three children by the time she was 19, and Ms. Wynn knew she did not want that. She eventually became a nurse. Now living in Denver, she is going back to school to earn her bachelor’s degree, a longtime dream and something no one in her family has done.

“It was something no one ever expected me to do, I never expected myself to do,” she said.

As for children, she said she still wants them but that “it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t happen.” She loves learning, traveling and living in Denver. “I’m at the point in my life where I could be fulfilled by other things.”

Just once I would like to see an article explain why women don’t want to have kids with today’s younger men. But it’s easier to blame young women for wanting financial stability before having a kid in a society that doesn’t give families a safety net like national childcare.

[simonalkenmayer]

Maybe this is too broad a question for a specific answer, but do you think Boomers specifically messed up their relationship with their direct descendents more spectacularly than most generations do? The way you phrased it made it sound like this is one of the worse discordant generation gaps you've seen.

It is unique. This is the first time there has been such a discrepency in technology proficiency, education, age, wealth. On previous eras, every generation had the exact same frame of reference. Now you don’t.

Ill give you an example, or synecdoche if you will. For centuries the only way to see or get warm was lighting a fire. Period. It had been the way for centuries and would be for centuries more. That was simply how it was. Two generations might clash on an ideological basis, like how women should be treated, but the elder and younger both know they need to light a fire. Now it’s very different. There’s an entire generation of people who live in virtual reality and an entire generation who don’t even know how to use a cell phone. That’s merely one discrepency of the technological sea change that has occurred.

Then there’s the elongated lifespan that has occurred in living memory. IN LIVING MEMORY! The last three generations have had the longest lifespans. This has coincided with the instantiation of mandatory compulsory education, the elevation of the legal ages of consent for various things, the elevation of the age of first employment, elevation of the amount of education needed to survive. Again and again, this current group of adults has been increasingly infantilized, and despite now being in their 30s on the outer bound, are still called “kids” by their elders and denied the positions that should be theirs BECAUSE THEY ARE STILL OCCUPIED BY THE ELDERS.

Then there’s the complete break down of one economic framework. The Boomers had the middle class the entire time they Were growing to adulthood and enjoying it. It began because of the New Deal. It ended because of Boomers. So they look on the world with scorn and say “why can’t you live like we did?” And won’t accept “because you’ve made it impossible.”

Keep in mind it has only been 100 years since women could vote, 60 years since desegregation, 50 since the beginning of gay rights and the Americans with disabilities act (and others like it over the world) Apartheid happened only 40 years ago. My friends the last 100 years have held in their span the most tremendous social upheaval that has ever existed in your entire history. No single century has contained so much change. Boomers are 70. 70! They’ve seen or been a part of most of that. They’ve dear with that turmoil. They’ve perhaps fought for those things but even so, there is still resistance to the awareness that the younger generations have relevance, that what they say matters, that the world is by rights, theirs. You have much to do that cannot be done if even the 20-40 set are still children who aren’t allowed to participate.

I can think of no age like this one for so many reasons. The closest I can come is the industrial revolution, but it came with almost no social change. It was the true flexatipn of capitalism, technology, but other than that? Not so different.

And you still had to build a bloody fire.

[izaswritings]

Fic prompt: Jnr homeschooling Oscar (p.s: He’s bad at math)

AO3 Link is Here!

The sun is low in the sky beyond the Atlas horizon, burning the icy tundra a bright and burning gold. Beyond their dorm window, the wind howls and rattles at the glass, like a long and mournful scream as it snakes its way through Atlas Academy’s towers. Inside, however, is warm and cozy; they’ve piled all the blankets on the floor, made something of a fort to sit comfortably. Oscar wraps one duvet around his shoulders and leans back against the wall, watching bemusedly as Nora darts back and forth around their small room, throwing books and pillows at Jaune and Ren intermittently.

He has no idea what’s going on, but Oscar is sure he’ll find out eventually. He’d come back from today’s training to find all their blankets already on the floor, and Nora creating a whirlwind of pillows, and at this point he’s just content to watch the chaos. On the bright side, Jane and Ren look just as confused as he is, so at least they can all be baffled together.

At last, the blanket amalgamation is complete: Nora takes one last book off the shelf and slams down cross-legged on her pile of blankets, grinning wide. She spreads out her arms. “Ta-da!”

Oscar claps politely. Jaune tugs a blanket off his head and says, “Nora. Please. Please tell me what this is.”

“Blanket fort school session!” Nora lifts a finger. “Because I refuse to do this the boring way.”

“Do what?”

Oscar blinks at her. Understanding clicks. “Is this about the tutoring thing?” he asks, suspicious. Ironwood had mentioned something like this a few days back, after one particular conversation about Oscar’s farm education—and he’d asked team JNR to do it. Oscar has been trying his best not to be annoyed about it ever since. As far as he’s concerned, his schooling is fine, and he’s not sure how he feels about the General’s dismissal of his Aunt’s teachings.

“Nooooooooooooo,” says Nora, utterly unconvincing.

“It’s about the tutoring thing,” Ren admits at the same time. Jaune, beside him, shrugs.

“Blanket fort was all Nora’s idea, though,” Jaune mutters, and gives Nora an exasperated look. “I mean. Really?”

“If we must do school, I refuse to let it be boring!”

“I mean, I guess that makes sense…?”

Oscar shakes his head, biting back a sigh. “Look, um, I appreciate this, but…” He winces, pulling a face, and shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t need tutoring. I mean, maybe I had a few years left in homeschool, but my aunt’s already taught me everything I really need to know.” They’re staring at him. Oscar rubs at the back of his neck, embarrassed. “So… um.”

Nora is immediately aghast. She gestures again to the blanket fort, almost pleading, and when Oscar shakes his head, she slumps. “What! Really?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Jaune almost seems disappointed. “So no calculus?” He sighs. “But I actually like calculus! It was the one subject I was really good at…”

Nora's eyes snap to him and narrow in challenge. “Political science is way better,” she says, sagely.

“Hm. I’ve always preferred Home Economics, myself.”

“You can’t take classes in Home Ec anymore, Ren—”

Oscar blanks, mind still stuck on a few moments ago. His hand slowly falls from his hair. “Uh… calculus?”

The others cut off mid-discussion, looking back. “You know, like fn equals x equals…” Nora trails off at the look on his face. Her hands fall. “Waitaminute. You said you were done with schooling!”

Oscar thinks about this. He holds a hand. “Lemme see.”

All three of them lean in as Oscar cracks open the calculus book, looking down at glossy pages full of equations and numbers and rules. Oscar looks at the book. Team JNR looks at him. Oscar leans down closer to the book, frowning deeply. Team JNR is now leaning so far forward to stare that they’re half an inch away from all unbalancing and falling forward into an accidental dog pile.

Oscar looks up. “Oh,” he says. “This isn’t math.”

Nora falls right back on the ground. Jaune leans back the normal, non-dramatic way, and scratches at his head. “No,” he says. “This is, uh… pretty sure calculus is also math.”

Oscar frowns down at it. “But there are words in the equation…”

“Yeah, those are the… no, seriously, have you never seen calculus?”

“But I know my Aunt said—” Oscar tilts his head. “Hm. Hey, what do you use calculus for, anyway?”

“Lots of things,” Ren says, looking a bit bemused by the conversation. “Chemistry, science, equations…”

“Oh,” Oscar says. He’s quiet again, thoughtful. In the back of his mind, echoes of memories that aren’t quite his own whisper and resonate—  images of a silver cane, clockwork and gears and oil, pencil dust staining their fingertips gray, circles and equations scrawled in neat hands across the paper. Oscar takes them in—  and then firmly shakes the echoes away. “What about probabilities?”

“No, that’s statistics.”

“Oh, I know that one then. Good for crop estimations.” Oscar reaches out—and slowly, carefully, closes the textbook. “I… don’t need calculus.”

“I,” says Jaune.

“Um,” says Ren.

“Hell yeah, stick it to the man!” says Nora, and she takes the textbook and throws it at the bookshelf with a grin that takes up half her face.

Oscar shrugs at the looks Jaune and Ren are giving him. “What? I don’t plan on doing chemistry or lab work anytime soon, and if I only need stats for the farm, then…”

“You can’t just ignore a whole discipline of math!” Jaune argues, looking offended.

Ren, on the other hand, seems almost thoughtful. “What were those farm terms you mentioned before… Oscar. What’s a bushel of wheat?”

“What? You mean, in weight? About 60 pounds per bushel.”

“Barley?”

“Um… maybe 48 pounds per bushel?”

“And when you sell them…”

“Well, um, no, it’s not that simple, you need a—” Oscar pauses, brow furrowing, unsure how to explain it. “Like, for durum! It has to have a certain grade to be sold for a certain thing, right? And for durum, the grade is figured using HVK—”

“What,” says Jaune, blankly.

“—hard vitreous kernels, it’s like— a percent measure of hardness, I guess? So we gotta figure out the grade through that, if it’s 80% HVK, or 40% HVK, and that determines its grade, and what we sell it for and for how much, you know.”

Nora and Jaune look stunned.

“Okay.” Ren nods, though he seems a bit dizzy himself. “What’s sin and cos?”

Oscar looks at him. “...What?”

“Sin and cos. Or, uh, ln?”

There’s a pause. “Bless you,” Oscar says, finally, feeling a bit helpless. He’s pretty sure those aren’t words. Those aren’t words, are they? He’s a bit afraid to ask, now.

Ren turns back to a grinning Nora and a bewildered-looking Jaune with a shrug. “I think he’s fine.”

“What!”

“I mean, I don’t remember the difference between sin and cos either.”

Jaune looks betrayed; Nora laughs. “Ren blanks through anything that isn’t Home Ec,” she explains, looking amused at Jaune’s disappointment, and her grin widens. “Don’t need calculus to cook, so…”

Ren looks somewhat sheepish.

Jaune heaves a sigh. “I mean, fair…? But aw, man, calculus is the only subject I’m really good at! I was kind of looking forward to teaching it...”

Ren shakes his head, but he’s smiling. To Oscar, he says, “I don’t disagree with you, but the General did ask us to tutor you, and I’m not sure if he’ll see it the same way…”

“We don’t have to tell him anything,” Nora says, firmly.

“Nora,” Ren sighs.

Oscar hums, cutting through the argument before it can start. The memories are rising again, insistent—  some past lives must have really liked math, wow—  but Oscar breathes in deep and remembers instead the warm tenor of his aunt’s voice, the rough feel of grain in his hand, the careful count. Oscar may be the next Oz, as people like to say, but he was always Oscar first. He was a farmhand first, before all this came into his life. And… he doesn’t want to lose that. Not yet, at least. Not ever.

His aunt has taught him everything he needs to know, and for now Oscar would like to keep it that way.

So he pulls his shoulders straight and pulls himself up too, certain and sure and sticking with it. “If General Ironwood really wants me to learn calculus…” Which, yech, he hopes not, that was illegible, who would do that to perfectly good numbers?— “Then I’ll learn. But, um… if not… then I’d rather not.” He gives Jaune an apologetic smile. “Sorry?”

“No, no, it’s fine, just bash my favorite subject, it’s fine, it’s cool, I’m cool.”

Nora cackles at him. Jaune puts his head in his hands.

“Well, if not math…” Ren hunts around the pile of textbooks scattered amongst the blankets, and picks out one with a glossy cover. “Perhaps science?” He smiles over at Nora. “We don’t want the study blanket fort to go to waste, after all.”

Nora brightens. Oscar smiles, and draws his legs closer in a crisscross, resting his hands on his ankles. “I can do science,” he agrees. “Can we start with geology?”

“Yes!” Nora throws up her hands. “I’ll get the hot cider! And snacks! And then we can study!” She makes two fists and punches up like she’s trying to break the ceiling. “BONZAI!”

Jaune mimics her with enthusiasm; Ren with a quiet voice and a smaller smile. Oscar echoes their shout a second off-rhythm, and hesitantly bumps the fist Nora holds out his way. He has no idea why they’re so pumped about the studying thing, but it’s fine. They’re happy, they’re having fun—  and at least the blanket fort is warm.

“To the books!”

“To the books,” Oscar agrees, and when he cracks open the textbook he is smiling.

[bobdylansdaughter]

MY OPEN LETTER TO OPRAH WINFREY

Thank you so much, Oprah. I appreciate all you do for so many people and how you stand up for what’s right always. You’ve always been an inspiration to me even when I was a young kid. I’m almost 30 now and I just feel like I’ve known you my whole life through watching you on tv and reading your books. Thank you for being a shining light in a really, really dark world.

Hi Oprah. My name is Jennifer Thompson, I’m a mother to a beautiful baby boy who just turned a year old in August and step mother to two rambunctious teenagers. I work more than full time the overnight shift stocking and receiving at Walmart. It’s a hard job and truly wears me down not to mention only sleeping a couple of hours a day. But it’s all supposed to be worth it to keep my family fed and warm and safe right? Yet here I am, crying in my living room floor and writing a letter to Oprah Winfrey to beg for help. This is what it’s come to. I know you must get people begging you for money all the time as you are one of the most prominent humanitarians in the world. But I’ve grown up watching you, and have always thought you were one of the true genuine altruists there are in the world of media. And so here I am asking you, like so many others, can you help my family? My job is hard. It is actually breaking me completely down. And it’s SUPPOSED to be worth it. But I still can’t pay all my bills. I’m 4 months behind on my electric bill and 2 months behind on my rent. I contracted Covid (as did my entire family) and while I had to quarantine and stay home from work for two weeks (a full pay check period) I got one third of a regular check during my time at home. I’ve been trying to play catch up ever since. Of course before that it wasn’t much better, I wonder why if I work so so hard over 40 hours a week why my family is starving, why I can’t pay my bills, why we are so far behind. I feel like I’m drowning and I may never see the surface. I know this is a reality for many families. And it’s so hard. I feel so hopeless every day. It’s crushing me. My son is only a year old and I can’t afford to give him the nutrition he needs and due to working so much and being far away for 8-10 hours a night my milk supply is dwindling almost completely now. I can’t feed the teenagers all they do is eat and eat and eat and I can’t keep up. I’ve already had to drop out of school and lose access to my classes because I can’t make my monthly payments. The impact of this pandemic and just general economic circumstances have destroyed my sense of purpose and drive. I work so so so hard and constantly it feels like. I’m killing myself to support my family and it’s not enough. That is such a hard realization. My mental health has really fallen, but I don’t even have time to worry about that or even care when I’ve got so much else to worry about. I’m sorry for the sob story because I’m sure you get millions on a daily basis. And I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. This is just a shot in the dark and a shout into the void, but it’s the last little shred of hope I’ve tricked myself into having. Oprah, will you please help my family? We don’t need much, just enough to get our electric bill paid up and catch up our rent and put some food in the refrigerator. We live in a cramped 2 bedroom apartment with roaches and are paying way too much for it but there’s nothing else in the town I live that I can find, so despite how horrible it is I have to keep paying our ridiculously high rent. 650 a month plus all utilities for a roach filled broom closet. It’s tough. And it’s got mold. And if you wanted to help out with some kind of mold cleaning service that would be very much appreciated as well because I don’t know how we can get rid of it. I’m sorry to just unload everything on you. It’s isolating this level of stress and fear and poverty. It really is, so I guess that can lead a struggling mother to unload all her burden onto Oprah Winfrey in an email she will probably never read. But this shout into the void is the last glint of light at the end of the tunnel for me and my family. Please, if there’s any help you can offer just to get us back to where we aren’t so far behind... that would change our whole lives and save us from eviction or worse.

Thank you for giving me my shout into the void,

Jennifer Ilana Thompson (mommy)

Oceane Bates (1 yr)

Gabby Bates (14 yrs)

Kamron Bates (13 yrs)

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Political Rant: Nothing To See Here

Literally, I just need to vent for a bit, just move along.  You didn’t see anything.  Go about your business.

I can’t keep pretending that I want Joe Biden to be president.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m gonna vote for him, but only because it’s a broken 2-party system, and I would literally rather die than vote for Donald Trump.

Joe Biden is at best a moderate centrist, and at worst a mainstream conservative who acknowledges what the people in his party want without actually doing it.  The Overton Window has shifted so far right in the last few years that people are hailing him as some bastion of liberal democracy; Democrats are acting like he’s the greatest politician they’ve ever nominated, and Republicans are calling him a communist.  He’s neither of those things; he’s store brand white bread, he’s a single scoop of plain vanilla with no mix-ins, he’s room temperature with 40% humidity so as not to be explicitly uncomfortable.

He very well could win in November.  I don’t doubt his qualifications, nor his popularity relative to the Gonad Lump we have now, but he’s not going to make any substantive changes if he takes office.  He’s not going to defund police, he’s not going to shrink the executive branch, he’s not going to raise the minimum wage, he’s not going to rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal or the Paris Climate Agreement or the WHO, and he’s certainly not going to abolish ICE and close the actual literal CONCENTRATION CAMPS. He’s going to uphold the status quo so as not to alienate the Republicans who didn’t vote for him, while driving a wedge in his own party between the old guard moderate leadership and the up-and-comers who even so much as lean to the actual political left.

Republicans are united under a common banner of cartoon supervillainy, Democrats are a party of chickens running around with their heads cut off. 

Republicans are lemmings who will follow their leader off a cliff. Democrats are turkeys that look up and drown when it rains.

There are no progressive Democrats in any real positions of power; their voices are being drowned out by the career politicians who would rather compromise with the right than fight for anything they claim to want.  Democrats will bend over backwards to reach across the aisle for the sake of bipartisanship, but Republicans would never budge an inch in our direction.  This is demonstrably true, just look at the last 50 years of presidents; Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for Ronald Reagan’s entire presidency, and he still managed to get a shit ton of legislation passed which fucks over the middle class and minorities to this day.

Bill Clinton was effectively a Republican, and they absolutely HATED him.  Newt Ging-bitch’s Republican Revolution?  And Obama, don’t even get me started on Obama.  George W. Bush was so unpopular that BOTH parties ran candidates under the platform of “I am not George W. Bush,” and it’s no surprise that between Barack Obama and John McCain voters chose the one who was the least like Bush.  Obama was a perfectly competent president who pulled us out of the worst economic recession since the 1930s, and Republicans hated him even more than Clinton!  The Tea Party rose up less than a month after he took office, before he’d even DONE anything!  I don’t agree with everything he did as president, in fact I oppose a lot of it (drones), but I know that America was a better place under his leadership than it is now.

And now the Democrats are kowtowing to the Republicans AGAIN, nominating an adequate politician, Average Joe, that Republicans wouldn’t complain about if he wore a red tie instead of a blue one, but even now they’re complaining about it!  They’re acting like he’s a far-left socialist because they want the country to think that his middle-of-the-road policies are WAY too radical; they want to make people think that normalcy lies to the right of Joe Biden, they want to keep shifting the Overton Window until they pick a candidate in 2032 or 2036 that will make Donald Trump look like Bernie fucking Sanders.  Republicans never shift to the left, they never try to appeal to Democratic voters, they never think twice about alienating liberals, they won’t compromise, they’d rather shut down the government than spare a dime for any even remotely liberal talking points.

I’m sick to death of this country.  I’m sick to death of everyone pretending like what we see is not what it is!  Joe Biden is better than Trump, but the bar is so low at this point that I’d feel ore comfortable with a flaming bag of dogshit in the Oval Office than the racist date rapist we have now.  I will swallow my pride and vote for Joe Biden, but I will not be happy about it.  This man does not stand for the people’s best interests.  He will face overwhelming opposition, cave to the pressure from the right, then lose re-election because I know for a fact that he’s too proud to admit he’s too old to run again in 2024.  People keep pretending like his VP is going to get the nomination, but there’s no way on Earth or in Heaven that this man is going to just retire!  This year was a vanity run; he wants to be president because he wants to be president, not because he wants to do anything.  He’s wanted it his whole career; he’s a dog chasing cars, he doesn’t know what to do when he catches one, and no, I don’t means he’s like the fucking Joker, I just think he’s focusing more on himself than the country.  What would it look like in 2024 if the president retired because he’s TOO OLD to keep the job?  The Democrats would be even bigger laughingstocks than they are now; there wouldd be no way for him to retire with dignity without admitting defeat and giving the Republicans a political victory.

He’s going to run for re-election in 2024, and he’s going to have his ass handed to him because by that point he’s going to be stumbling over his words even worse than Trump is now, and the Democrats aren’t going to blindly rally behind him like the Republicans do for Trump.  Republicans will vote in line with Trump whether they like him or not, they know their career depends on it, but Democrats won’t get in line behind one of their own because they want to appeal to everyone, even if that means ignoring the people they claim to represent.

If Trump wins in 2020, America will go the way of the Soviet Union.  You know what, no, that’s not true.  America will never break apart, it’s too obstinate.  What will happen is America will go the way of the British Empire; once a global superpower, now just a bunch of isolationist racists who don’t know they’ve been irrelevant for the last 80 years.  America will continue to alienate its allies while sucking up to its enemies, the wealth gap will widen, life expectancy will drop, infant mortality will rise, and we’ll peak in the 2030s or 40s before losing our position as the de facto “leaders of the free world.”  Under normal circumstances I’d say that’s a good thing because we have no right to force the rest of the world to do whatever we want, but the resulting power vacuum will almost certainly be filled by China which is even worse than we are.  If Trump wins in 2020, democracy dies.  His handlers will find a way to skirt the 22nd Amendment so he can run for a third term in 2024.  They’ll just unilaterally amend the constitution so he can do whatever he wants; every right-wing dictator does that.  Hitler did it, Pinochet did it, Putin is doing it now.  IF the Republicans want to PRETEND that laws still exist, they’ll have him “retire” at the end of his second term, but then stay on as a top advisor to his successor, who will almost certainly be his daughter he wants to fuck, at which point he will be president-by-proxy, ruling vicariously through her until his brain melts enough for him to disappear into the woodwork like Reagan did in the 90s.

If Trump wins in 2020, the Trump dynasty will hold power for decades.  This regime will be no different than the fucking Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

If Biden wins in 2020, we’re just kicking the can down the road; Trump won’t let himself become irrelevant without a fight.  Carter and Clinton and Bush and Obama don’t pretend that they’re still president, they don’t make their voices heard, but you KNOW that Trump will.  He will try to stay in the limelight forever, and the media will let him; they’ll report on every snide comment and contrarian remark he makes on Twitter and compare him to Biden every single day because he’s a demagogue, and Republicans aren’t just gonna move on after they’ve invested so much emotional capital into him over the last five years.  They’ve doubled down in support of him, he can do no wrong in their eyes, he’s their golden boy, the Fuhrer is Always Right; they’ll follow him to Hell and back (though let’s be honest, he’d never lead them out of Hell once he brings them there).  They’ll treat him like an elder statesman and a genius political strategist/advisor until he dies.  He’ll basically get to pick the nominee in 2024 because Republicans will vote for whoever he endorses.  And he’s going to pick Ivanka or maybe, MAYBE, Tom Cotton because he’s a brown-nosing right-wing toadie.

FUCK.

[blackkudos]

John Conyers

John James Conyers Jr. (May 16, 1929 – October 27, 2019) was an American politician of the Democratic Party who served as a U.S. Representative for Michigan from 1965 to 2017. The districts he represented always included part of western Detroit. During his final three terms, his district included many of Detroit's western suburbs, as well as a large portion of the Downriver area.

Conyers served more than 50 years in Congress, becoming the sixth-longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history; he was the longest-serving African American member of Congress. Conyers was the Dean of the House of Representatives. By the end of his last term, he was the last remaining member of Congress who had served since the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

After serving in the Korean War, Conyers became active in the civil rights movement. He also served as an aide to Congressman John Dingell before winning election to the House in 1964. He co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969 and established a reputation as one of the most liberal members of Congress. Conyers joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus after it was founded in 1991. Conyers supported creation of a single-payer healthcare system and sponsored the United States National Health Care Act. He also sponsored a bill to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. Conyers ran for Mayor of Detroit in 1989 and 1993, but he was defeated in the primary both times.

Conyers served as the ranking Democratic member on the House Committee on the Judiciary from 1995 to 2007 and again from 2011 to 2017. He served as chairman of that committee from 2007 to 2011 and as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee from 1989 to 1995. In the wake of allegations that he had sexually harassed female staff members and secretly used taxpayer money to settle a harassment claim, Conyers announced his resignation from Congress on December 5, 2017.

Early life, education, and early career

Conyers was born in Highland Park, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit, the son of Lucille Janice (Simpson) and John James Conyers, a labor leader. Among his siblings was younger brother William Conyers. After graduating from Northwestern High School, Conyers served in the Michigan National Guard from 1948 to 1950; the U.S. Army from 1950 to 1954; and the U.S. Army Reserves from 1954 to 1957. Conyers served for a year in Korea during the Korean War as an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and was awarded combat and merit citations.

After his active military service, Conyers pursued a college education. He earned both his BA (1957) and LL.B. (1958) degrees from Wayne State University. After he was admitted to the bar, he worked on the staff of Congressman John Dingell. He also served as counsel to several Detroit-area labor union locals. From 1961 to 1963, he was a referee for Michigan's workmen's compensation department.

Conyers became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement. He was present in Selma, Alabama, on October 7, 1963, for the voter registration drive known as Freedom Day.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

In 1964, Conyers ran for an open seat in what was then the 1st District, and defeated Republican Robert Blackwell with 84% of the vote. He was reelected 13 times with even larger margins. After the 1990 United States Census, Michigan lost a congressional district, and there was redistricting. Conyers's district was renumbered as the 14th district.

In 1992, Conyers won re-election to his 15th term in his new district, which included western suburbs of Detroit, with 82% of the vote against Republican nominee John Gordon. He won re-election another nine times after that. His worst re-election performance was in 2010, when he got 77% of the vote against Republican nominee Don Ukrainec. In 2013, his district was renamed as the 13th district.

In total, Conyers won re-election twenty-five times and was serving in his twenty-sixth term. He was the dean of the House as longest-serving current member, the third longest-serving member of the House in history, and the sixth longest-serving member of Congress in history. He was the second-longest serving member of either house of Congress in Michigan's history, trailing only his former boss, Dingell. He was also the last member of the large Democratic freshman class of 1964 who was still serving in the House.

In May 2014, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett determined that Conyers had not submitted enough valid nominating petition signatures to appear on the August 2014 Primary Election ballot. Two of his workers circulating petitions were not themselves registered voters at the time, which was required under Michigan law. But on May 23, Federal District Judge Matthew Leitman issued an injunction placing Conyers back on the ballot, ruling that the requirement that circulators be registered voters was similar to an Ohio law which had been found unconstitutional in 2008 by a Federal appeals court. The Michigan Secretary of State's office subsequently announced they would not appeal the ruling.

Tenure

Conyers was one of the 13 founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and was considered the Dean of that group. Formed in 1969, the CBC was founded to strengthen African-American lawmakers' ability to address the legislative concerns of Black and minority citizens. He served longer in Congress than any other African American. In 1971, he was one of the original members of Nixon's Enemies List.

In 1965, Conyers won a seat as a freshman on the influential Judiciary Committee, which was then chaired by Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler of New York. The assignment was considered an elite one, as Judiciary ranked behind only Ways and Means and Appropriations in terms of the number of Members who sought assignment there.

According to the National Journal, Conyers has been considered, with Pete Stark, John Lewis, Jim McDermott, and Barbara Lee, to be one of the most liberal members of Congress for many years. Rosa Parks, known for her prominent role in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, moved to Detroit and served on Conyers' staff between 1965 and 1988.

Conyers was known to have opposed regulation of online gambling. He opposed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Conyers introduced the first bill in Congress to make King's birthday a federal holiday. He continued to propose legislation to establish the federal holiday in every session of Congress from 1968 to 1983, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day was finally signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Conyers introduced the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act" (H.R. 3745) in January 1989. He re-introduced this bill each congressional term. It calls for establishing a commission to research the history of slavery in the United States and its effects on current society, which is to recommend ways to remedy this injustice against African Americans. The current version was introduced and referred to committee on January 3, 2013. Conyers first introduced the proposed resolution in 1989, and has stated his intention to annually propose this act until it is approved and passed. Since 1997, the bill has been designated "H.R. 40," most recently, H.R. 40. If passed, the commission would explore the longstanding effects of slavery on today's society, politics, and economy.

"My bill does four things: It acknowledges the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery; It establishes a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves; It studies the impact of those forces on today's living African Americans; and the commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans."

Nixon and Watergate

Conyers was critical of President Richard Nixon during his tenure. He was listed as number 13 on President Nixon's enemies list during the president's 1969–74 presidential tenure. The president's Chief Counsel described him as "coming on fast," and said he was "emerging" as a "black anti-Nixon spokesman". Conyers, who voted to impeach Nixon in July 1974, wrote at the time,

My analysis of the evidence clearly reveals an Administration so trapped by its own war policy and a desire to remain in office that it entered into an almost unending series of plans for spying, burglary and wiretapping, inside this country and against its own citizens, and without precedent in American history.

National Health Care Act

Conyers submitted the United States National Health Care Act (Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act) (H.R. 676); as of 2015, it had 49 cosponsors. He introduced it with 25 cosponsors, in 2003, and reintroduced it each session since then. The act calls for the creation of a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, in which the government would provide every resident health care free of charge. To eliminate disparate treatment between richer and poorer Americans, the Act would prohibit private insurers from covering any treatment or procedure already covered by the Act.

Downing Street memo

On May 5, 2005, Conyers and 88 other members of Congress wrote an open letter to the White House inquiring about the Downing Street memo. This was a leaked memorandum that revealed an apparent secret agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom to attack Iraq in 2002. The Times reported that newly discovered documents reveal British and U.S. intentions to invade Iraq and leaders of the two countries had "discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so."

The memo story broke in the United Kingdom, but did not receive much coverage in the United States. Conyers said: "This should not be allowed to fall down the memory hole during wall-to-wall coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and a runaway bride." Conyers and others reportedly considered sending a congressional investigation delegation to London.

What Went Wrong in Ohio

In May 2005, Conyers released What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report On The 2004 Presidential Election. This dealt with the voting irregularities in the state of Ohio during the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. The evidence offered consists of statistical abnormalities in the differences between exit poll results and actual votes registered at those locations. The book also discusses reports of faulty electronic voting machines and the lack of credibility of those machines used to tally votes.

Conyers was one of 31 members of the House who voted not to count the electoral votes from Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.

Constitution in Crisis

On August 4, 2006, Conyers released his report, The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retributions and Cover-ups in the Iraq War, an edited collection of information intended to serve as evidence that the Bush Administration altered intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Constitution in Crisis examines much of the evidence presented by the Bush Administration prior to the invasion and questions the credibility of their sources of intelligence. In addition, the document investigates conditions that led to the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as further evidence of torture having been committed but not made known to the public. Finally, the document reports on a series of "smear tactics" purportedly used by the administration in dealing with its political adversaries. The document calls for the censure of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Conyers refused to back impeachment proceedings, however.

On anti-Muslim intolerance

Conyers proposed House Resolution 288, which condemns "religious intolerance" and emphasizes Islam as needing special protection from acts of violence and intolerance. It states that "it should never be official policy of the United States Government to disparage the Quran, Islam, or any religion in any way, shape, or form," and "calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith." The bill was referred to the House subcommittee on the Constitution in June 2005.

In 2005, Conyers introduced House Resolution 160, a house resolution that would have condemned the conduct of Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of the State of Gujarat in India. The resolution was cosponsored by Republican Representative Joseph R. Pitts (Republican of Pennsylvania). The resolution's title was: "Condemning the conduct of Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his actions to incite religious persecution and urging the United States to condemn all violations of religious freedom in India." The resolution cited a 2004 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom report on Modi stating that he was "widely accused of being reluctant to bring the perpetrators of the killings of Muslims and non-Hindus to justice". (See 2002 Gujarat riots.) The resolution was not adopted.

Conyers v. Bush

In April 2006 Conyers, together with ten other senior congressmen, filed an action in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, challenging the constitutionality of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The complaint alleged the bill was not afforded due consideration by the United States Congress before being signed by the President. The action was subsequently dismissed on grounds of lack of standing.

Ethics controversy

In April 2006, the FBI, and the US Attorney's office sent independent letters to the House Ethics Committee, saying that two former aides of Conyers had alleged that Conyers used his staff to work on several local and state campaigns of other politicians, including that of his wife Monica Conyers, for the Detroit City Council (she won a seat in 2005). He also forced them to baby-sit and chauffeur his children.

In late December 2006, Conyers "accepted responsibility" for violating House rules. A statement issued December 29, 2006, by the House Ethics Committee chairman Doc Hastings and Ranking Minority Member Howard Berman, said that Conyers acknowledged what he characterized as a "lack of clarity" in his communications with staff members regarding their official duties and responsibilities, and accepted responsibility for his actions.

In deciding to drop the matter, Hastings and Berman said:

After reviewing the information gathered during the inquiry, and in light of Representative Conyers' cooperation with the inquiry, we have concluded that this matter should be resolved through the issuance of this public statement and the agreement by Representative Conyers to take a number of additional, significant steps to ensure that his office complies with all rules and standards regarding campaign and personal work by congressional staff.

Copyright bill

Conyers repeatedly introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, a bill that would overturn the NIH Public Access Policy, an open-access mandate of the National Institutes of Health. Conyers' bill would forbid the government from mandating that federally funded research be made freely available to the public. The legislation was supported by the publishing industry, and opposed by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Writers Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen accused Conyers of being influenced by publishing houses, who have contributed significant money to his campaigns.

House Report on George W. Bush presidency and proposed inquiry

On January 13, 2009, the House Committee on the Judiciary, led by Conyers, released Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush, a 486-page report detailing alleged abuses of power that occurred during the Bush administration, and a comprehensive set of recommendations to prevent recurrence. Conyers introduced a bill to set up a "truth commission" panel to investigate alleged policy abuses of the Bush administration.

Bill reading controversy

In late July 2009, Conyers, commenting on the healthcare debate in the House, stated: "I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill' ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?" His remark brought criticism from government transparency advocates such as the Sunlight Foundation, which referred to readthebill.org in response.

Bribery conviction of wife

On June 16, 2009, the United States Attorney's Office said that two Synagro Technologies representatives had named Monica Conyers as the recipient of bribes from the company totaling more than $6,000, paid to influence passage of a contract with the City of Detroit. The information was gathered during an FBI investigation into political corruption in the city.

She was given a pre-indictment letter, and offered a plea bargain deal in the case. On June 26, 2009, she was charged with conspiring to commit bribery. She pleaded guilty. On March 10, 2010, she was sentenced to 37 months in prison, and also received two years of supervised probation. She served slightly more than 27 months at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp. After supervised release, she was fully released from federal custody officially on May 16, 2013.

Response to accusations regarding American Muslim spies

In October, Conyers responded to allegations from four Republican Congress Members, in the wake of the launch of the book Muslim Mafia, that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sought to plant Muslim "spies" in Capitol Hill. He strongly opposed the accusations, saying:

It shouldn't need to be said in 2009, and after the historic election of our first African-American president, but let me remind all my colleagues that patriotic Americans of all races, religions, and beliefs have the right – and the responsibility – to participate in our political process, including by volunteering to work in Congressional offices. Numerous Muslim-American interns have served the House ably and they deserve our appreciation and respect, not attacks on their character or patriotism.

WikiLeaks

At a December 16, 2010, hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of "the Espionage Act and the Legal and Constitutional Issues Raised by WikiLeaks," Conyers "argue[d] strongly against prosecuting WikiLeaks in haste – or at all." He strongly defended the whistleblowing organization, saying:

As an initial matter, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks is very unpopular right now. Many feel that the WikiLeaks publication was offensive. But being unpopular is not a crime, and publishing offensive information is not either. And the repeated calls from politicians, journalists, and other so-called experts crying out for criminal prosecutions or other extreme measures make me very uncomfortable. Indeed, when everyone in this town is joined together calling for someone's head, that is it a pretty strong sign we need to slow down and take a closer look. ... [L]et us not be hasty, and let us not legislate in a climate of fear or prejudice. For, in such an atmosphere, it is our constitutional freedoms and our cherished civil rights that are the first to be sacrificed in the false service of our national security.

Conyers's statement was "in marked contrast to the repeated calls from other members of Congress and Obama administration officials to prosecute WikiLeaks head Julian Assange immediately."

Criticism of American foreign policy

Conyers and his Republican colleague Ted Yoho offered bipartisan amendments to block the U.S. military training of Ukraine's Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard. Some members of the battalion are openly white supremacists. Conyers stated, "If there's one simple lesson we can take away from US involvement in conflicts overseas, it's this: Beware of unintended consequences. As was made vividly clear with U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion decades ago, overzealous military assistance or the hyper-weaponization of conflicts can have destabilizing consequences and ultimately undercut our own national interests."

Conyers has also voiced concerns about sending anti-aircraft missiles to Syrian rebels.

Sexual harassment allegations and resignation

In 2015, a former employee of Conyers alleged that he had sexually harassed her and dismissed her. She filed an affidavit with the Congressional Office of Compliance. She said she was paid a settlement of $27,000 from public funds. BuzzFeed reported on this settlement on November 20, 2017, based on documents from Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and provocateur. BuzzFeed reported accounts of other ethical concerns associated with Conyers's office, such as sexual harassment of other female staffers, and staffers allegedly often finding him undressed inside his office.

In November 2017, Melanie Sloan, founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), publicly accused Conyers of having harassed and verbally abused her during her tenure working for the House Judiciary Committee. On one occasion, she was summoned to his office and found him sitting in his underwear, and she quickly left.

Conyers responded to these reports, saying, "In our country, we strive to honor this fundamental principle that all are entitled to due process. In this case, I expressly and vehemently denied the allegations made against me, and continue to do so. My office resolved the allegations – with an express denial of liability – in order to save all involved from the rigors of protracted litigation."

On November 21, 2017, the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into multiple sexual harassment allegations against Conyers. Later in November 2017 there were reports that a second woman accused Conyers of sexual harassment. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who had initially stated that Conyers was an "icon" and had done a great deal to protect women, called upon Conyers to resign. She said the allegations against him were "very credible".

On December 5, 2017, Conyers resigned his House seat because of his mounting sexual scandals. The announcement came the day after another former staffer released an affidavit accusing Conyers of sexual harassment. The same day, an article by The Washington Post published allegations by Courtney Morse that Conyers had threatened her with a similar fate to that of Chandra Levy, a staffer found murdered in a park in Washington, DC. She said that after she rejected his advances, he "said he had insider information on the case. I don't know if he meant it to be threatening, but I took it that way."

At a time when the #MeToo movement was pushing for action against men who harassed women, some media and supporters in Detroit believed Conyers had been unfairly treated. He was reported as the "first sitting politician to be ousted from office in the wake of the #MeToo movement." One supporter said he had been "railroaded" out of office.

Caucus memberships

Founding Member and Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus

American Sikh Congressional Caucus

Congressional Progressive Caucus

United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus

Out of Afghanistan Caucus (Co-Chair)

Congressional Full Employment Caucus

Congressional Arts Caucus

Afterschool Caucuses

Congressional NextGen 9-1-1 Caucus

Political positions

According to The New Republic, Conyers was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1983.

Conyers supported legislation aimed at strengthening the U.S. civil justice system. In March 2016, Rep. Conyers and Representative Hank Johnson introduced legislation to protect consumers access to civil courts, titled the "Restoring Statutory Rights Act." This legislation would "ensure that the state, federal, and constitutional rights of Americans are enforceable" and consumers aren't forced into secretive private arbitration hearings.

Detroit mayoral campaigns

While serving in the U.S. House, Conyers made two unsuccessful runs for mayor of Detroit: one in 1989 against incumbent Coleman Young and again in 1993.

1989

Incumbent Democratic Mayor Coleman Young decided to run for a fifth term, despite growing unpopularity and the declining economy of Detroit. In the September primary, Young won with 51% of the vote. Accountant Tom Barrow qualified for the November run-off by having 24%, and Conyers received 18% of the vote. Despite the difficulties of the city, Young defeated Barrow in the run-off with 56% of the vote.

1993

In June 1993, incumbent Democratic Mayor Coleman Young decided to retire instead of seeking a sixth term, citing his age and health. Many observers believed he had decided not to test his growing unpopularity. In a Detroit News poll in February, 81% said Young should retire. Conyers was one of the 23 candidates who qualified for ballot access.

Dennis Archer was the front runner in the mayoral campaign from the beginning. The 51-year-old former State Supreme Court Justice raised over $1.6 million to finance his campaign. He won the September primary with 54% of the vote. Conyers came in fourth place. Archer won the November election.

Electoral history

Personal life and death

Conyers married Monica Esters, a teacher in Detroit, in 1990. She was 25 and he was 61; they had two sons together, John James III and Carl Edward Conyers. She later served as a vice administrator of the public schools, and in 2005 was elected to the Detroit City Council. In September 2015, Monica Conyers filed for divorce, citing a "breakdown of the marriage". However, they reconciled in late 2016.

Conyers' grandnephew, Ian Conyers, was elected to the Michigan Senate in 2016. He generated controversy by telling of Conyers's planned retirement in interviews before the Congressman announced it himself, and claiming his great-uncle's endorsement. While Ian Conyers announced he would run in the special election for the Congressman's seat, John Conyers endorsed his son. John Conyers III chose not to run. Ian Conyers was defeated in the Democratic primary by Rashida Tlaib.

Conyers died on October 27, 2019, at his home in Detroit. He was 90 years old. His funeral was held on November 4 at Detroit's Greater Grace Temple.

Representation in other media

Conyers frequently posted at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground. Beginning May 2005, he had been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post and on his own blog.

John Conyers appeared in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, discussing the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He said many members of Congress "don't read most of the bills," as they are very lengthy. They rely on staff to study them in detail.

Honors and awards

In 2007, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.

[norbert-weber]

https://www.aier.org/article/an-education-in-viruses-and-public-health-from-michael-yeadon-former-vp-of-pfizer/

➖➖➖Dr. Michael Yeadon is an Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Area expert with 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry. He trained as a biochemist and pharmacologist, obtaining his PhD from the University of Surrey (UK) in 1988.

Dr. Yeadon then worked at the Wellcome Research Labs with Salvador Moncada with a research focus on airway hyper-responsiveness and effects of pollutants including ozone and working in drug discovery of 5-LO, COX, PAF, NO and lung inflammation. With colleagues, he was the first to detect exhaled NO in animals and later to induce NOS in lung via allergic triggers.

Joining Pfizer in 1995, he was responsible for the growth and portfolio delivery of the Allergy & Respiratory pipeline within the company. He was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules, leading teams of up to 200 staff across all disciplines and won an Achievement Award for productivity in 2008.

Under his leadership the research unit invented oral and inhaled NCEs which delivered multiple positive clinical proofs of concept in asthma, allergic rhinitis and COPD. He led productive collaborations such as with Rigel Pharmaceuticals (SYK inhibitors) and was involved in the licensing of Spiriva and acquisition of the Meridica (inhaler device) company.

Dr. Yeadon has published over 40 original research articles and now consults and partners with a number of biotechnology companies. Before working with Apellis, Dr. Yeadon was VP and Chief Scientific Officer (Allergy & Respiratory Research) with Pfizer.

Below is a transcript of the video above:

My name is Dr Michael Yeadon. 

My original training was a first-class honours degree in biochemistry and toxicology. Followed by a research-based PhD into respiratory pharmacology; and after that I’ve worked my entire life, uh, on the research side of the pharmaceutical industry – both big pharma and also biotech. My specific focus has been inflammation, immunology, allergy in the context of respiratory diseases (so the lung, but also the skin). So I would say I’m a kind of a deeply experienced inflammation, immunology, pulmonology kind of research person. 

I initially became concerned about, the, our response to the coronavirus pandemic towards the middle or back end of April as early as that. It had become clear that if you look at the number of daily deaths versus the date the pandemic had turned. Really, pleasingly, already the wave was fundamentally over, and we would just watch it fall for a number of months – which is what it did. And so I became very perturbed about increasing restrictions on the behavior and movement of people in my country and I could see no reason for it then and I still don’t. 

Government’s response to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or SAGE. So they should provide scientific advice to the government about what’s appropriate to do. SAGE has got several things wrong, and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate and – uh, not only has had horrible economic effects, but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly. 

SAGE took the view that since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus that they believed there wouldn’t be any immunity at all in the population. So, I think that’s the first thing. I remember hearing that and I puzzled, because I already knew – because I read the scientific literature that SARS-CoV-2 was 80% similar to another virus you may have heard of called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003, and more than that: it’s quite similar, in pieces of it, to common cold-causing coronaviruses. 

So, when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world I wasn’t as worried as perhaps other people were, because I figured that since there are four common cold-causing coronaviruses, I figured that quite a lot of the population we’ve been exposed to one of those viruses, and would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity. And just to explain why I was so confident everybody knows the story of Edward Jenner and vaccination, and the story of cowpox and smallpox. And that the old story was that milkmaids had very, uh, clear complexions: they never suffered from things like smallpox, that if it didn’t kill you would leave your skin permanently scarred. And the reason that they had the protection was that they were exposed to a more benign, related virus called cowpox. 

Edward Jenner came up with the idea that if it’s cowpox that saves the fair maid – he reasoned that if he could give another person an exposure to the cowpox, he would be able to protect them from smallpox. Now, he did an experiment that you can’t do now – and he never should have done it – but apocryphally, or really, or maybe you’re ill, we’re not sure. Edward Jenner acquired some of the liquid from a person infected with cowpox. Relatively mild pustules that then go away. And he got some of this and he – he scraped it into the skin of a small boy and a few weeks later, he obtained some liquid from some poor person that was dying of smallpox and infected the boy. And, lo and behold, the boy did not get ill and that gave birth to the whole field of what’s called vaccination. And vax, the vaccine’s “vac.” It comes from “vaccus,” the Latin name for cow. So, we are really familiar with the principle of cross immunization.

I’ve thought quite a lot about, you know, the vulnerable people in in care homes and there’s an awareness that, even though people really careful using PPE and so on, but that’s only going to go so far in a kind of, hot house environment where people are pretty close together in a care home. So the question I’ve had all year is: once one or two people, you know, got the virus in a care home, why wouldn’t almost everyone get infected? And of course the truth is, they didn’t. And one interpretation of that distinction is that a large proportion of people in the care homes had prior immunity. 

At this time of year, about 1 in 30 people have a cold, caused by one of these coronaviruses. And just like the protection against smallpox provided by previous exposure to cowpox, so people exposed to having had a cold caused by one of these coronaviruses they’re now immune to SARS-CoV-2. So, 30% of the population was protected before the start. SAGE said it was zero – and I don’t understand how they could possibly have justified that. There’s a second, and equally fatal, unaccountable error that they have made in their model. The percentage of the population that SAGE asserts have been infected to date by the virus is about seven percent. I know that that’s what they believe and you can see it in a document they published in September called “Non-pharmaceutical interventions” and it says sadly more than 90% of the population is still vulnerable. 

It’s unbelievably wrong. And I’m just going to explain why: they’ve based their number on the percentage of people in the country who have antibodies in their blood. And only the people who became most ill needed to actually develop and release antibodies around their body. So, it is certainly true that the people who have lots of antibodies were infected. But a very large number of people had milder symptoms, and even more people had none at all. And the best estimates that we can arrive at is that those people either made no antibodies, or so low amounts that they will have faded from now. 

A recent publication on the percentage of care home residents who have antibodies to the virus very, very interesting. This time they were using high sensitivity tests for antibodies and they carefully picked out residents that never were PCR-positive: these are people who never got infected. And they found that 65% of them had antibodies to the virus; they never got infected. So I believe there was high prevalence of immunity in that population prior to the virus arriving. Big story in the media, recently, was that the percentage of people with antibodies against the virus in their blood was falling. Now, this was cast as a concern that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t last very long. Well, you know, anyone with knowledge of immunity would – would just simply reject that. It’s not the way immunity to virus works – that would be T-cells. So, if the antibodies are falling gradually over time – which they have – from spring to present, the only plausible explanation is that the prevalence of the virus in the population is falling, and that’s why the antibody production gradually subsides.

Less than 40% of the population are susceptible. Even theoretical epidemiologists would tell you that that’s too small a number to support a consolidated and growing outbreak, community immunity, herd immunity. So, SAGE says that we’re not even close, and I’m telling you that the best science, by the best scientists in the world, published in the top peer-reviewed journals, says they’re wrong: that more than 60 of the population are now immune, and it’s simply not possible to have a large and growing pandemic. 

Really good news, genuine good news, to hear that there’s data emerging from the vaccine clinical trials, and we are seeing vaccines that raise not just antibodies – but they’re also producing T-cell responses. This is great; back to proper science, proper immunology. That’s how immunity to viruses works. So, my surprise though, and it’s just annoying that when we’re talking about, uh, the percentage of the population that’s still susceptible we only talk about antibodies, like seven percent from SAGE. Why are we not talking about the 50% that have got T-cell immunity? 

And so you might be thinking if Mike – and Dr Mike Yeadon is telling you these things… – or how come the pandemic isn’t over? Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but I believe fundamentally it is over. The country has experienced almost a complete cycle now of the virus sweeping through the land, and we are at the end of it. London was –was horribly affected in the spring, and somewhere in early April they were experiencing several hundred deaths per day from people dying with similar symptoms in respiratory failure and, uh, inflammation. And at the moment the number of people dying of SARS-CoV-2 in the capital is less than 10. So it’s down by 98, or something like that. And, the reason it’s down, is because there are now too few people in London susceptible to allow the virus to magnify, to amplify, to get an epidemic. And, and they would have been hit by now, because they were the first place hit in the spring. And I think what we’re seeing now in the Northeast and the Northwest would be the dying embers of the spreading out of this virus. And I’m very sorry that it is still true, that a small number of people are catching it, getting ill, and dying. 

So why aren’t the media telling us that the pandemic is over? It’s not over because SAGE says it’s not. So SAGE consists of very many scientists, from a range of disciplines – mathematicians and clinicians – and there are multiple committees. But I found to my surprise – and I’m actually going to use the word – horror, that in the spring, all the way through the spring and summer, SAGE did not have on their committee someone who I would call a card-carrying immunologist; a clinical immunologist. I have to say I think that in the spring and summer SAGE was deficient in the expertise it had. They should have armed themselves, you know, with – around the table all the people required to to understand what was happening, and they didn’t do that. People asked me then, “Well Mike, if it’s, you know, if it’s fundamentally over, why are we still getting hundreds of deaths a day from SARS-CoV-2?” And I’ve thought a lot about this. There is a test that’s performed where people have their noses and tonsils swabbed, and then a test (called a PCR test) is performed on that. And what they’re looking for isn’t the virus – you might think it’s looking for the virus, but it’s not. What they’re looking for is a small piece of genetic sequence; it’s called RNA. Unfortunately, that bit of RNA will be found in people’s tonsils and nose not if they’ve just caught the virus, and they’re about to get ill, or they’re already ill. It’s also going to be found if they were infected previously weeks – or even, sometimes, a small number of months ago. Let me just explain why that is. 

If you’ve been infected, and you’ve fought off the virus (which most people do), you’ll have broken, dead bits of virus. These are tiny things smaller than your cells, perhaps spread all the way through your airway, embedded in bits of mucus, maybe inside an airway lining cell. And so over a period of weeks or months you bring up cells that contain broken, dead pieces of the virus that you have conquered and killed. However, the PCR test is not able to detect whether the viral RNA has come from a living virus or a dead one (as I’ve just described). So I think a large proportion of the so-called positives are, in fact, what I call “cold” positives: they’re correctly identifying that there is some viral RNA in the sample – but it’s from a dead virus. It can’t hurt them, they’re not going to get ill, they can’t transmit it to anybody else. So they’re not infectious. So that accounts for a large number of the so-called positive cases. These are people who’ve beaten the virus. Why are we using this test that cannot distinguish between active infection and people who’ve conquered the virus? 

This test has never been used in this way – and I’ve worked in this field. It’s not a suitable technique it’s a – it’s the kind of technique you would use for forensic purposes, if you were trying to do a DNA test to establish whether or not a person was at the scene of a crime. You would not be doing these tests by a windy, supermarket car parking; what looks like plastic marquee tents; on picnic tables. It’s not suitable at all – and it definitely shouldn’t be done in the way it’s been done. It’s subject to many mechanical errors, should we say, handling errors. If this was a test being used for legal purposes, for forensic purposes like a DNA identity test, the judge would throw out this evidence; would say it’s not admissible. It produces positives even when there’s no virus there at all. We call that a false positive. 

As we’ve increased the number of tests done per day, so we’ve had to recruit less and less experienced laboratory staff – and now we’re using people who’ve never worked professionally in this area. What that does is it increases the frequency of mistakes, and the effect of this is that the false positive rate rises and rises. So, if you had a false positive rate of one percent – which Mr. Matt Hancock [British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] told us was roughly the number they had in the summer – then if you tested a thousand people that had no virus ten of them would be positive, astonishingly. If the prevalence of the virus was only one in a thousand, that’s 0.1% – as the Office for National Statistics told us it was through the summer – then if you use the PCR test only one of them will be positive and genuinely so. But if the false positive rate is as low as one percent, you’ll also get 10 positives that are false. 

Some people did say to me, “Well, there’ll be a higher percentage of people coming forward for testing in the community,” so-called “Pillar 2” testing, because they’ve been instructed only to come if they’ve got symptoms. But I call B.S. on that one. I don’t think that’s true. I know lots of friends and relatives who’ve been told by an employer, “Well, you’ve sat near someone who’s tested positive, and I don’t want you to come back to work until you’ve got a negative test.” I’ve seen information from many towns in the North – certainly Birmingham was one; Manchester was another; Bolton – where councils (and I really think they were trying to be helpful) were out leafleting the people of their cities saying, “We’re going to come round and swab you all because we want to track down this virus.” Now once you start testing people, more or less randomly, instead of [those] having symptoms you get the same amount of virus in the population as the Office of National Statistics found which is, at the time was, one in a thousand. And I’ve just told you Matt Hancock confirmed during the summer they had a false positive rate of about one percent. So that means out of a thousand people 10 would test positive, and it would be a false result, and only one would test positive and it was correct. 

This test is monstrously unsuitable for detecting who has live virus in their airway. It’s subject to multiple distortions that are worsening as we get into the winter. As the number of tests done per day increase[s], the number of errors made by these overworked, not very experienced lab staff increase[s]. I think it’s not unreasonable to say a best guess of the false positive rate at the moment – what’s called the operational false positive rate is about five percent. Five percent of 300,000 is 15,000 positives. I think some of those positives are real; I don’t think it’s very many. Now, the problem with this false positive issue [is] it doesn’t just stop it at “cases”: it extends to people who are unwell and go to hospital. So people who go to hospital having tested positive – and it could be a false positive, and I think most of them are at the moment – if you go to hospital and you’ve tested positive previously, or you test positive in hospital, you’ll be counted now as a Covid admission. 

Although there are more people in hospital now than a month ago, this is normal for autumn. Regrettably, people catch respiratory viruses and become ill, and some will die. I just don’t believe it’s got anything to do with Covid-19 anymore. There are more people in intensive care beds now than there were a month or so ago. That’s entirely normal as we move through late autumn into the early winter: those beds become used. But there aren’t more people than is normal for the time of year, and we’re not about to run out of capacity, certainly at a national level. But I think you know it is going now: if you should now die, you’ll be counted as a Covid death. But that’s not correct; these are people who might have – have gone to hospital having had a broken leg, for example, but they’ll – three percent of them will still test positive, and they’re not, they haven’t got the virus. It’s a – it’s a false positive, and if they die they’ll be called a Covid death – and they are not. They’ve died of something else. 

One of the most troubling things I’ve heard this year was Mr. Johnson telling us about the “Moonshot” testing everybody often, maybe every day, is the way out of this problem. I’m telling you it’s the way to keep us in this problem: that number of tests is orders of magnitude higher than we’re already testing now, and the false positive rate (however low it is) will be far too large to accept. It will produce an enormous number of false positives. 

What we should do is stop mass testing. Not only is it an affront to your liberty, it will not help at all: it will be immensely expensive and it will be a pathology all of its own. We’ll be fighting off stupid people – mostly government ministers – I’m sorry to say, who are not numerate, and do not understand statistics. If you test a million people a day with a test that produces one percent false positives, 10 000 people a day will wrongly be told they’ve got the virus. If the prevalence of the virus was say 0.1%, like the Office of National Statistics said it was in summer, then only a tenth of that number, uh, 1,000 would correctly be identified. But you can’t distinguish amongst the 11,000 who have genuinely got the virus and who are false positives. Moonshot, I think, will have a worse false positive rate. It’s not fixable, and it’s not necessary either. The pandemic – having passed through the population not only of, of the UK, but of all of Europe – and probably all of the world quite soon – it won’t return. Why won’t it return? Well, they’ve got T-cell immunity. We know this. It’s been studied by the best cellular immunologists in the world. 

Sometimes people will say, “Well, it looks like the immunity is starting to fade.” You’ll sometimes see [statements] like that, and when I saw the first headline like this I remember being really quite confused, because that’s not the way immunology works. Just think about it for a moment. If that was how it worked it could kill you. When you had to fight it off, and if you had successfully done that, it somehow didn’t leave a mark in your body. Well, it does leave a mark on your body. The way you fought it off involved certain pattern recognition receptors, and has left you with – as it were – memory cells that remember what it was they fought off. And if they see that thing again it’s very easy for them to get those cells to work again in minutes or hours, and they will protect you. So the most likely explanation is it’ll last a long time. 

So I read a bit more about this so-called tailing off of immunity – and I realized they were talking about antibodies. Just incorrect to – to think that antibodies, and how long they stay up, is a measure of immune protection against viruses. I mean you can tell I’m – I don’t agree with this. It says there have been some classic experiments done on people who have inborn errors in parts of their immune system, and some of them have inborn arrows that means they can’t make antibodies, and guess what: they – they are able to handle respiratory viruses the same as you and me. So, I don’t think it’s harmful to have antibodies, although some people are worried about the potential for amplifying inflammation from antibodies, but – but my view is that they’re – they’re probably neutral, and you definitely should not believe the story that because the antibody falls away you’ve lost immunity. Again, that’s just not the way the human immune system works. 

The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called SARS, and remember SARS-CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS, so I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide. The evidence is clear. These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARS 17 years ago. They took a blood sample, and they tested whether they responded or not to the original SARS, and they all did. They all have perfectly normal, robust T-cell memory. They are actually also protected against SARS-CoV-2 because it’s so similar, it’s cross-immunity. So, I would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is lifelong. The style of the responses of these people’s T-cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see, has that immunity been retained? And so I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong. 

There have been but a tiny handful of people who appear to have been infected twice – now they’re very interesting, we need to know who they are and understand them very well, they’ve probably got certain rare immune deficiency syndromes. So I’m not pretending no one ever gets reinfected, but I am pointing out that it’s literally five people (or maybe 50 people), but the World Health Organization estimated some weeks ago that 750 million people have been infected so far by SARS-CoV-2. That means most people are not being reinfected, and I can tell you why that is: it’s normal. It’s what happens with viruses, respiratory viruses. Some people have – have called for “zero Covid” as if it’s some political slogan. And there are some people I’ve heard calling for it almost every day; they’re completely unqualified to tell you anything. 

Something that’s really important to know is that SARS-CoV-2 – it’s an unpleasant virus. There’s no question about it, but it’s not what you were told in spring. We were originally told that it would kill perhaps three percent of people it infected – which is horrifying. That’s 30 times worse than flu. We always overestimate the lethality of new infectious diseases when we’re in the eye of the storm. I believe the true infection fatality ratio of Covid-19, the true threat to life is, the same as seasonal flu. 

So there’s no reason why you would want to try and drive Covid to zero. It’s a nonsense – that’s just not how biology is. And all the means I have heard, uh, proposed, as ways to get us there are much more damaging and pathological, I would say, than than the virus itself. It’s simply not possible to get rid of every single copy of the Covid-19 virus, and the means to get you there would destroy society. Forget the cost – although it would be huge – it would destroy your liberty, you would need to not go out until you’ve been tested and have your result back. And I have described how the false positive rate would just destroy it from a statistical perspective. I don’t believe it can be done: it’s not scientifically realistic, it’s not medically realistic, and it’s not what we have ever done. 

As the virus swept towards the UK in the – in the late winter and early spring I too was concerned, because at the time we were told perhaps three percent might die. So when the Prime Minister called for a lockdown I wasn’t pleased about it, but I understood that we should try this. But it’s important that you understand, that when we look at the profile of the pandemic as it passed through the population, that it was clear that the number of infections every day was falling. We’d passed the peak quite a long time before lockdown started. So we took all that pain, that locked down pain which was multiple weeks – I don’t remember exactly how many multiple weeks – we took it for nothing. If there was a really important effect of lockdown on the number of people who died, or the rate of it, you should at least be able to order them. Like, these people had locked down, and these didn’t – and you cannot. All heavily infected countries’ shapes are the same, whether they had locked down or not. They don’t work. I don’t know why anyone is allowing you, know you, to be pushed into this corner. 

I don’t think we entirely know why it is that some countries were hit harder than others, but I have to say I think scientifically the smart money is on a mixture of forces. One would be this cross immunity. Although China had an awful time in Wuhan, in Hubei province, it didn’t spread elsewhere in the country, and I suspect that meant because a lot of them had this cross immunity. And I think nearby countries, in the main, had lots of cross immunity. So that’s one possibility. The other one, though, is in terms of the severity of what did the virus do to a particular population. We’ve seen devastating effects in countries like UK and in Belgium, uh, France, and maybe even in Sweden, and much smaller numbers of deaths in other countries like – like Greece and in Germany. And you might think, “Well, was that was it something that they did?” And I wish it was true, because if it was something we did we could learn from it and do it and it would work in the future. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that it was anything humans did. The passage of this virus through the human population is an entirely natural process that completely ignored our puny efforts to control it. 

So there is this theory – I don’t like the name very much – but it’s called “dry tinder.” If people in a country who are vulnerable for to dying in the winter (usually of respiratory viruses), if you have a very mild winter season, like UK did – we had a very mild seasonal flu last year and the year before and so did Sweden – then what happens is there are larger number of very vulnerable people who are even older than usual, and – and I think that’s why we suffered a rather large number of deaths. It was still only 0.06% of the population, equivalent to about four weeks of normal mortality. But countries that had very severe winters recently, and Greece and Germany certainly had very lethal winter flus in the last two years. I think then, they had a smaller population of very vulnerable people, and that is the main reason why they lost fewer people. It’s not to do with locking down, it’s not to do with testing, or tracking, or tracing. I personally don’t think any of those measures have made any difference at all. So Belgium and UK and Sweden were particularly vulnerable, whereas adjacent Nordic countries – I – I get fed up with hearing about this, uh, idea that they locked down and that’s why it saved them and afraid the other Nordic countries had normal flu epidemics the last two or three years. Sweden, like UK, had very mild epidemics: you can just go and look at the number of deaths, it’s sub-normal for UK and Sweden. And now we’ve got a supra-normal, a larger-than-normal, number of deaths from Covid. 

Now there may be other reasons, I’m not saying there are not but I think those two main forces – the amount of prior immunity and the so-called “dry tinder,” what vulnerable fraction of the population did you have as a result of seasonal flu being intense or not – I think that accounts for most of it. And it’s – it’s just puberistic and, uh, and – and kind of silly that our government and advisors tell you that doing things that have never worked in the past, like lockdown are going to make any difference to the transfer of respiratory viruses. I don’t believe it for a moment. There’s no scientific evidence behind it and there are much stronger scientific hypotheses that do explain it. You might think that in terms of numbers of deaths – excess deaths – that Covid has produced such a large number that this will be an awful year for excess deaths, but surprisingly not. 2020 is lining up to be about eighth in a list since 1993. 

Roughly 620,000 people die every year in this country. They say in life we are also in death – and it’s true, it’s been awful for those who have been personally affected by illness and death, but it’s not particularly unusual in terms of the number of people who’ve died. So one of the things I’ve noticed has happened in – in recent years is that we almost seem to be moving, uh, you know post-science, post-fact as if – as if facts don’t matter. For someone who’s qualified and practiced as a professional scientist for 35 years I think it’s deeply distressing that, I don’t think you should listen to me if I talked about – I don’t know, the design of motorways or something – like, I don’t know anything about motorways or – or how to grow trees better, I don’t know anything about that. But I do know quite a lot about immunology, infection, inflammation, and the way infectious organisms move through a population. 

I’ve no other reason for giving this interview other than I really care what happens to my country – and we have to pull ourselves out of this. And I personally believe the way forward is twofold, it’s not difficult. One, we should cease mass testing of the mostly-well in the community immediately – it only provides misleading and grey information, and yet we’re driving policy almost completely based on it. It’s definitely wrong, we should not do it. Use the tests in hospital – I’m not saying don’t test – don’t continue mass testing, and for God’s sake, don’t increase the number of tests. It is a pathology all of its own which must be stamped out by right thinking people. And I’m afraid the people on SAGE, who have provided the modeling, the predictions, the – the measures that should be taken, that their work is so badly, and obviously flawed – lethally incompetent, that you should have no more to do with these people. They should be fired immediately. And the effect of that advice has been to – have cost lots of innocent people their lives from non-Covid causes, they should be dismissed and reconstituted using an appropriate group of skilled individuals – especially avoiding any who might even have the suggestion of a conflict of interest. I think we’re right at the edge of the precipice. I really hope that we can pull back.

[whiskynottea]

An Interruption in the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25, Chapter 26, Chapter 27,  Chapter 28, Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35,  Chapter 36, Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39, Chapter 40, Chapter 41, Chapter 42, Chapter 43, Chapter 44,  Chapter 45, Chapter 46, Chapter 47, Chapter 48, Chapter 49, Chapter 50, Chapter 51 Chapter 52

AO3

Huge thank you to my beta, @theministerskat for correcting the same mistakes 53 chapters in without any complaint!

picture by: Kamryn Hinojos

Chapter 53. Dust and Smiles

When I lived in Scotland I missed the sun dearly. Sunny days were treasured, and I found myself smiling without any particular reason when the sunlight snuck between the curtains of my room in the morning.

But sometimes a person can have too much sun. And too much dust stuck to their body. And there is a point when you think of rain and realise a wistful smile has appeared on your face at the thought. It’s the same moment you realise there isn’t an inch of your body not coated in grime.

I reached that exact point on a quiet afternoon in June, two weeks before I left Zambia. Some would say it had taken me long enough.

I was left alone after treating the skin wounds of a couple of five-year-old boys that had gone out ‘to explore’. Their little feet had raised tons of dust as they ran away from the clinic and the first thing that came to my mind was that I was extremely tired of washing my hair every night only to feel it dirty again by noon the following day.

Then, just before the boys disappeared out of sight, one of them turned back to look at me, white teeth stark against his dark skin as he smiled, and waved goodbye.

And suddenly, I didn’t mind the dust that much. I didn’t mind the heat, or how heavy my body felt at the end of each shift. All that mattered was their smiles when they left the clinic.

My three months in Zambia were so full of experiences, I could hardly believe it hadn’t lasted longer. I learned how to talk to people who were in pain, how to heal them or -- when this was impossible -- how to make them feel better. I learned to listen to them, to search their eyes, to read their discomfort or pain in the way they moved. And I learned how a single smile can make your day, how two skinny arms wrapped around your body or two warm hands holding yours can fill your heart to the brim.

Spending my childhood with Lamb, I was used to living amongst people who were different from me. He’d taught me to look at people and see them for all they were. Humans. Different, beautiful, every one a worthy individual.

“All people are the same,” Lamb used to say. “All genuine smiles make the eyes crinkle, all hearts beat in the same way inside our chests, not aware of colour or tribe.”

In Africa, I saw life, and I saw death. I saw the universality of pain. I felt hands squeezing mine in terror and in gratitude. And I felt full. I felt alive.

When I first decided to volunteer I had thought I would find a piece of my mother in Africa. I believed I would discover who she had been, what she had pursued in life. I didn’t. And I wasn’t disappointed, because I had found a piece of myself in the faces I met in Livingstone, and I cherished that. And maybe -- just maybe -- that piece of myself was hers. Passed down to me, together with her amber eyes, an unbreakable part of myself.

Being a volunteer had been a full time job -- and a demanding one at that. But I didn’t want to leave, not yet. I had more to give, there were people here who needed me. But I knew that my time was up. In two weeks, I would feel Scottish air against my skin once more. I would feel Lamb’s arms hugging me for a few extended moments before he would push away to look into my eyes and pet my hair the way he always did. And a week later, I would be at Lallybroch. Jenny had asked -- demanded, actually -- to spend a week or two there. She had enough of the men, she had said when we’d texted. And true to her word to her brother, she had sent me pictures of the estate, in full bloom and beauty.

Jamie would come home after the summer term. We would spend two weeks together before his next term began and I would go to Oxford. To Oxford, where -- unexpectedly -- I would find a familiar face.

Robert.

He had been different since his personal confession. His arrogance and cheeky comments hadn’t abated, but there wasn’t an edge to his voice anymore. It felt as though he needed someone to know his story, even if that someone wasn’t a friend, even if it was just me. He clammed up after that and never talked about his mother again, apart from the time he’d told me it was her wish that had brought him to Zambia as a volunteer.

We started, however, talking about literature. One evening I found him reading that fantasy book I had finished a few months ago. And when the conversation turned to our future plans after Zambia, he had looked down at me with a smirk and proudly announced that he had been admitted to Oxford University. I’d almost spit my pineapple juice out and onto his face. After that, our expectations and dreams of studying at Oxford became the most common topic of our discussions. Robert would be studying economics, expected to inherit and work in his father’s wine business in Provence. That was a relief. The last thing I wanted was to have the self-centered, competitive French on my heels through medical school. From what I had learned about him in the few months we lived together, he didn’t like being bested by anyone. And neither did I.

Jamie was the first to know I had found a fellow Oxford student in the middle of Africa. He and I had been texting and sending photos all the time, and I kept changing my screen background, choosing the funniest of the pictures he sent me. My favorite picture of him though, was the one he had sent me right after I arrived in Zambia. He was wearing a wide, silly grin as he sat in the bleachers of Michigan Stadium, my Wolverine amongst the blue and yellow sea of other students. He had sent it together with a text, shouting, “MY FIRST SPRING GAME!”

Boys.

Despite the selfies Jamie sent me every day -- in class, on his way there, before training holding the towel I had bought him, or tucked in with his blanket at night in bed, my favorite part of the week was when I saw him during our calls every weekend. I was always trying to take in every detail of him during our video chats -- his beautiful eyes, the way his curls moved as he excitedly gesticulated, his voice.

I missed him and I knew he missed me too. Even when John was present in their dorm and Jamie wouldn’t say it, his longing was obvious in the way he looked at me.

Two weeks and I would be at Lallybroch, in Jamie’s room. It made no sense for me to fly straight to Michigan with Jamie having his final classes and preparing to sit for his spring term exams. I had looked for tickets to visit him right after the exams, but the fares were too high to even consider it.  

We had agreed that it was not the ideal situation but okay nonetheless. We would survive it. At least, once I was back in Scotland, we would be able to call each other every day. As John had said, laughing, the force of the internet would be with us.

Jamie would come home at the end of August, after his summer term, and we would be at Lallybroch together, spending every single minute with each other.

“We have to make up for so much lost time,” Jamie had said to me during our last call, and the glint in his eye was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.  

A text on my phone brought me out of my reverie and I realised that I was still standing under the sun, alone, looking towards the far end of the road.

I found myself doing that a lot lately.

Scot: John’s cousin is a pain in the ass.

Sassenach: Hello to you, too.

Scot: Hi babe. John’s cousin is a pain in the ass. She called him, woke us up, and she demands that we pick her up from her hotel and show her around.

Sassenach: Well, she came to visit. Makes sense, no?

Scot: It. Is. Too. Early.

Sassenach: It’s 1 pm here!

Scot: You’re not helping. It’s 7 in the morning. Maybe I can send her there, then?

Sassenach: Is that the cocky cousin or the nice one? I doubt they’ll like the dust we have here, in any case.

Scot: The cocky one. Can I come there myself? Please?

Sassenach: Why aren't you on your way, already? :P

Scot: Don’t tempt me.

Sassenach: I don’t have anything to do right now.

Scot: We didn’t send you there to relax under the sun, Sassenach. Get that gorgeous round arse to work.

Sassenach: It seems I’ve healed all of Zambia.

Scot: So humble.

Sassenach: Always. I took lessons from the best.

Scot: Fuck you.

Sassenach: What? Since when are you talking like that? I need a selfie to make sure it’s really you.

I spent a whole minute wishing his selfie to load faster, but I ended up with a sleepy Jamie on my screen, which was worth the wait.

Sassenach: So it is you. These Americans are rubbing off on you, no? AND I DON’T MEAN IT LITERALLY. Also, fucking seems a bit difficult right now, seeing as you’re half a planet away.

Scot: But I’m ready, you know, right now.

I could almost see his pout and the challenge in his eyes when I closed my own, and I felt my cheeks turn red.

Sassenach: Okay. Shut up!

Scot: DAMN WAIT TILL I SEE YOU AGAIN. JUST WAIT.

Sassenach: Oh I’m looking forward to that.

Scot: Aaaaargh

Sassenach: Eloquent. Now get dressed, go get John and Hector, and show the girl around. She came all the way from Penrith to see Ann Arbor.

Scot: I just don’t get why I have to go, too.

Sassenach: John is your friend. This is what friends do. I spent all Saturday afternoon shopping with Louise.

Scot: I hate you.

Sassenach: Me too. Send me pictures?

Scot: Always. You too. Actually, I need one right now.

I took a picture of my dirty dusted face and sent it to him, grimacing when I saw how sloppy I looked.

Scot: You’re so tanned, I want to lick you.

Sassenach: Believe me you don’t. I’m dirty.

Scot: DIRTY? OMG STOP TALKING. I’m hard already and I have to get dressed.

Sassenach: You are ridiculous. Have I ever told you that?

Scot: Only a million times.

Sassenach: Good!

Scot: I’m going to take a cold shower AND CERTAINLY NOT THINK OF YOU.

Sassenach: I wish I was there with you.

Sending that, I actually snickered. His reply came in milliseconds.

Scot: You are a heartless, dangerous woman.

Sassenach: And yet you love me. Now go shower.

Scot: I do love you. And I’ll prove to you how much once I get my hands on you, you tease. Ttyl!

Raising my eyes from the screen, I saw Louise looking at me.

“You know I can tell when you’re texting Jamie, from that silly smile on your face?” she asked, keeping her arms crossed in front of her chest as if judging me.

“What can I do?” I didn’t try to hide my smile. “I found myself a good one.”

Louise nodded and came to stand next to me. A moment later a heavy sigh left her lips, and I noticed the shadows in her eyes. “Margaret was crying again. I tried to talk to her, but she won’t listen. She’s leaving next week and she doesn’t want to go back.”

“Makes sense.” Louise’s mood had been bad the last few days. “The moment she’ll be back, she’ll have to deal with reality. He won’t be there, and there will be no way to escape.”  

“She keeps talking in her sleep. She’s having weird dreams, you know.” Louise twisted her rings absentmindedly, not looking at me.

“I know. I woke her last night because she was murmuring and thrashing about. Jeremy was awake too, and we kept her company until she was settled again.”

“I’m sorry to see her go, especially knowing she’s still so unstable. I think her family isn’t supportive and that terrifies her even more.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Two of the volunteers I got to know had come to Zambia carrying a great emotional load and needing a chance to escape. They were trying to heal themselves through healing the others. The universality of pain, all over again.

“Charlie called me.” Louise changed the subject, this time with a smile. “He said he misses me.” She rubbed her hands against her thighs, awkwardly, but met my eyes when I turned to look at her.

“Rather convenient, wouldn’t you say? Seeing as you’re going back home next week.”

“Not all of us are strong, Claire.” Her voice was harsh and I bit my lip, regretting being so straightforward.

“You know better, I guess.”

Louise sighed again. “I wish I did, actually. I don’t know what to do when I get back to Paris.”

I placed my hand on top of her shoulder and squeezed lightly. “You don’t need to decide right now. You can meet him, see what he has to say, how he’ll explain himself.”

Louise nodded, sleek brown locks of hair escaping her loose ponytail. “I wish we were as strong as you and Jamie are. Everything would be simpler.”

“Well, it’s not like everything comes easy and we don’t try at all. We’ve just decided that being together matters the most, and we’re not sacrificing what we have just because we’re not close. We’re both stubborn and it helps -- thus far, at least.”

My phone vibrated against my leg, and I unlocked it to see a picture of Jamie and John rolling their eyes, and a girl in the background.

Sassenach: Out, already?

Scot: Yeap. She’s fourteen but she’s so bossy I think John is afraid of her.

Sassenach: And you?

Scot: I’m being a good friend, as I was advised to be. I already regret it.

Sassenach: Where are you?

Scot: Out for breakfast. She had the longest order I’ve heard in my whole life. She actually ordered something from the menu and then changed every little bit of it. It was embarrassing.

Sassenach: Leave a good tip.

Scot: We will! Hector turned red as she kept going on and gave the waitress a shy smile.

Sassenach: I wish I was there, sitting at another table just to make fun of the three of you.

Scot: Believe me, babe, if you were here I’d sit right next to you at a table in another cafe.

Sassenach: Drama queen.

Scot: You haven’t met wee Geneva yet.

Sassenach: How come she visited without her parents?

Scot: They had promised her this trip if her grades were good. They were. She’s really smart, actually. It makes her more of a pain in the ass.

Sassenach: Maybe the three of you can teach her something, you know? Humility, for example.

Scot: Not a chance.

I stuck my tongue out, took a selfie and sent it.

Scot: Don’t you show me that tongue because I have dreams about it. And I hope you’re there alone.

Sassenach: I’m with Louise! She says hi!

Scot: Hello Louise! Take care of Claire for me, okay?

Sassenach: You realise I’m still the one reading the texts, right?

Scot: Just read that one aloud.

Sassenach: I’m capable of taking care of myself, thank you.

Scot: I know. My strong and stubborn lass. John looks desperate and Hector is huffing. I’m going to save them from their misery because I’m a good friend.

Sassenach: The best! Go save them, my gallant lad!

I huffed a laugh and turned my focus back to Louise. “It was quiet today.”

“Mmmm.” Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed under the sun.

“Whatever happens with Charlie, you’re going to be fine,” I said, using my most reassuring tone.

“Mmmm.”

I decided to join her and close my eyes for a bit, but an elderly woman and her daughter came into view. “Well, don’t blame me for that,” I murmured and nudged Louise, who opened her eyes, saw the patients, and shot me an accusing glance.

“Hello,” she said as she turned back to the women, and we both rose from the bench.

Who knew what waited for us once we got back to normalcy. For now, we had work to do.

Chapter 54

[if-only-angels-could-prevail]

“American Things” by Tony Kushner

Summer is the season for celebrating freedom, summer is the time when we can almost believe it is possible to be free. American education conditions us for this expectation; school's out! The climate shift seductively whispers emancipation. Warmth opens up the body and envelops it. The body in summer is most easily at home in the world. This is true even when the summer is torrid. I have lived half my life in Louisiana and half in New York City. I know from torrid summers.

On my seventh birthday, midsummer 1968, my mother decorated my cake with sparklers she'd saved from the Fourth of July. This, I thought, was extraordinary, fantastic, sparklers spitting and smoking, dangerous and beautiful atop my birthday cake. In one indelible, ecstatic instant my mother completed a circuit of identification for me, melding two iconographies, of self and of liberty: of birthday cake, delicious confectionery emblem of maternal enthusiasm about my existence, which enthusiasm I shared; and of the nighttime fireworks of pyro-romantic Americana, fireworks-liberty-light which slashed across the evening sky, light which thrilled the heart, light which exclaimed loudly in the thick summer air, light which occasionally tore off fingers and burned houses, the fiery fierce explosive risky light of Independence, of Freedom.

Stonewall, the festival day of lesbian and gay liberation, is followed closely by the Fourth of July; they are exactly one summer week apart. The contiguity of these two festivals of freedom is important, at least to me. Each adds piquancy and meaning to the other. In the years following my 7th birthday I had lost some of my enthusiasm for my own existence, as most queer kids growing up in a hostile world will do. I'd certainly begun to realize how unenthusiastic others, even my parents, would be if they knew I was gay. Such joy in being alive as I can now lay claim to has been returned to me largely because of the successes of the political movement which began, more or less officially, 25 years ago on that June night in the Village. I've learned how absolutely essential to life freedom is.

Lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July. Of this I have no doubt; my mother told me so, back in 1963, by putting sparklers on that cake. She couldn't have made her point more powerfully if she'd planted them on my head. Hers was a gesture we both understood, though at the time neither could have articulated it; "This fantastic fire is yours." Mothers and fathers should do that for their kids: give them fire, and link them proudly and durably to the world in which they live.

One of the paths down which my political instruction came was our family seder. Passover, too, is a celebration of Freedom in sultry, intoxicating heat (Passover actually comes in the spring but in Louisiana the distinction between spring and summer was never clear). Our family read from Haggadahs written by a New Deal Reform rabbinate which was unafraid to draw connections between Pharaonic and modern capitalist exploitations; between the exodus of Jews from Goshen and the journey toward civil rights for African-Americans; unafraid to make the yearning which Jews have repeated for thousands of years a democratic dream of freedom for all peoples. It was impressed upon us, as we sang "America the Beautiful" at the seder's conclusion, that the dream of millennia was due to find its ultimate realization not in Jerusalem but in this country.

The American political tradition to which my parents made me an heir is mostly an immigrant appropriation of certain features and promises of our Constitution, and of the idea of democracy and federalism. This appropriation marries morally and ideologically indeterminate freedom to the more strenuous specific mandates of justice. It is the aggressive, unapologetic, progressive liberalism of the 30s and 40s, a liberalism strongly spiced with socialism, trade unionism and the ethos of internationalism and solidarity.

This liberalism at its best held that citizenship was bestowable on everyone, and sooner or later it would be bestowed. Based first and foremost on reason, and then secondarily on protecting certain articles of faith such as the Bill of Rights, democratic process would eventually shift power from the mighty to the many, in whose hands, democratically and morally speaking, it belongs. Over the course of 200 years, brave, visionary activists and ordinary, moral people had carved out a space, a large sheltering room from which many were now excluded, but which was clearly intended to be capable of multitudes. Within the space of American Freedom there was room for any possibility. American Freedom would become the birthplace of social and economic Justice.

Jews who came to America had gained entrance into this grand salon, as had other immigrant groups: Italians, Irish. Black people, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian-Americans would soon make their own ways, I was told, as would women, as would the working class and the poor -- it could only be a matter of time and struggle.

People who desired sex with people of their own gender, trans-gender people, drag kings and drag queens, deviants from heterosexual normality were not discussed. There was identity, and then there was illness.

I am nearly 38, and anyone who's lived 38 years should have made generational improvements on the politics of his or her parents. For any gay man or lesbian since Stonewall, the politics of homosexual enfranchisement is part of what is to be added to the fund of human experience and understanding that we pass on to the next generation-upon which we hope improvements will be made.

The true motion of freedom is to expand outward. To say that lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July is simply to say that queer and other American freedoms have changed historically, generally in a healthy direction (with allowances for some costly periods of faltering, including recently), and must continue to change if they are to remain meaningful. No freedom that fails to grow will last.

Lesbians and gay men of this generation have added homophobia to the consensus list of social evils: poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, the ravaging of the environment, censorship, imperialism, war. To be a progressive person is to believe that there are ways to actively intervene against these evils. To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism; to be progressive is to seek out connection. I am homosexual, and this ought to make me consider how my experience of the world, as someone who is not always welcome, resembles that of others, however unlike me, who have had similar experiences. I demand to be accorded my rights by others; and so I must be prepared to accord to others their rights. The truest characteristic of freedom is generosity, the basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.

That there would be a reasonably successful movement for lesbian and gay civil rights was scarcely conceivable a generation ago. In spite of these gains, much of the social progress which to my parents seemed a foregone conclusion has not yet been made, and much ground has been lost. Will racism prove to be more intractable, finally, than homophobia? Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression, and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?

The tensions which have defined American history and American political consciousness have most often been those existing between the margin and the center, the many and the few, the individual and society, the dispossessed and the possessors. It is a peculiar feature of our political life that some of these tensions are frequently discussed and easily grasped, such as those existing between the states and the federal government, or between the rights of individuals and society's claims upon them; while others' tensions, especially those which are occasioned by the claims of marginalized peoples, are regarded with suspicion and fear. Listing the full catalog of these claims is sure to raise howls decrying "political correctness" from those who need desperately to believe that democracy is a simple thing.

Democracy isn't simple and it doesn't mean that majorities tyrannize minorities. We learned this a long time ago, from, among others, the Moses of that Jewish American Book of Exodus, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, or, in more recent times, from Thurgood Marshall. In these days of demographic shifts, when majorities are disappearing, this knowledge is particularly useful, and it needs to be expanded. There are in this country political traditions congenial to the idea that democracy is multicolored and multicultural and also multigendered, that democracy is about returning to individuals the fullest range of their freedoms, but also about the sharing of power, about the rediscovery of collective responsibility. There are in this country political traditions, from organized labor, from the civil-rights and black-power movements, from feminist and homosexual liberation movements, from movements for economic reform, which postulate democracy as a dynamic process. These traditions exist in opposition to those which make fixed fetishes of democracy and freedom, talismans for reaction.

These traditions, which constitute the history of progressive and radical America, have been shunted to the side in an attempt at revisionism that began during the McCarthy era. Over the course of American history since World War II, the terms of the national debate have subtly, insidiously shifted. What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane. What used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.

The recovery of antecedents is immensely important work. Historians are reconstructing the lost history of homosexual America, along with all the other lost histories. Freedom, I think, is finally being at home in the world, it is a returning -- to the best particulars of the home you came from, or the arrival, after a lengthy and arduous journey, at the home you never had, which your dreams and desires have described for you.

I have a guilty confession to make. When I am depressed, when nerve or inspiration or energy flag, I put on Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, "From the New World"; I get teary listening to the Largo. It's become one of the alltime most shopworn musical cliches, which is regrettable. My father, who is a symphony conductor, told me that Dvorak wrote it in America and then contributed all the money from the New World Symphony's premiere to a school that accepted former slaves. But as the story goes, his daughter fell in love with a Native American and Dvorak took the whole family back to Bohemia.

Like many Americans I'm looking for home. Home is an absence, it is a loss that impels us. I want this home to be like the Largo from the New World Symphony. But life most frequently resembles something by Schoenberg, the last quartet, the one he wrote after his first heart attack. Life these days is played out to the tune of that soundtrack. Or something atonal, anyway, something derivative of Schoenberg, some piece written by one of his less talented pupils.

The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed-raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: these are American things. This jangle is our movement forward, if we are to move forward; it is our survival, if we are to survive.

[joyful-voyager]

So. New Year’s Eve.

It’s the end of a decade. People are doing retrospectives. Here’s what my decade has been like:

I lost both my mother and my mother-in-law to terminal illnesses. My husband I were the sole caretakers for his mother for most of the last two years of her life. We watched her decline slowly for two years, and then rapidly for one more, before she slipped away in late October of 2016. My mother died slowly for ten years before she suffered a terrible setback in January of 2018, right after we all spent a lovely Christmas together. She passed away in the middle of the night in April of 2018, ten days after I last told her I love her.

I nearly lost my husband to a hospital-caused blood infection after a routine knee surgery in the summer of 2014. It took 3 weeks for the surgeon to agree to admit him again. By then he’d lost 40 pounds and was in excruciating pain. After a second surgery to remove a massive amount of infected cartilage, he has one leg that’s longer than the other by almost an inch and a half. He’ll have to wear a lift in one shoe for the rest of his life or risk permanent hip and spine damage. As it is, he will always walk with a slight limp.

I nearly lost my daughter to a mental health crisis while all three of the above situations were going on. High school was a disaster for her. But she has managed to pull herself together with the help of therapy, good friends, and a boyfriend so kind and supportive that when she told him a couple months ago she was ready to move on without him, he cried a bit, told her he’d always love her ... and let her go. They’re still good friends and talk on the phone at least once a week. (He lives in Europe.) She took a risk and applied to transfer to a small, private university on the opposite side of the country and not only got in, got a massive merit scholarship that’s going to make it possible for her to go. Barely possible, but possible. We’ll be flying out there together in two weeks.

I lost a job I loved with people I still consider friends due to a shortsighted corporate reorganization. We all walked out of the building together, heads held high in spite of the way our VP had treated us in the weeks between the news being given to us in May and our final day in late June of 2019. I still have friends who work for the company. I’m told the place is a disaster. The people doing the work my team and I used to do are inexperienced and difficult to work with. I’m told we are sorely missed, and it’s clear the VP who wanted us gone didn’t know what she was doing by letting us go.

I started a new job on July 22, 2019. I realized I should never have taken the job on July 23, 2019. I’m still there, but I struggle every single day to make it work. It pays well and the commute is a fraction of my old commute ... but it is hard to keep my mouth shut sometimes. The incompetence is incredible, the environment toxic.

I paid off a bunch of old debts, thanks to this better-paying job, and will start 2020 with a much cleaner financial slate than I had at the beginning of 2019 ... just in time to go back into debt putting my daughter through her last 2 years of college.

I watched or listened to virtually every inning of my beloved Chicago Cubs’ historic run in 2016 ... except for the last two innings of the last game of the World Series. That’s right, I missed the actual win. Here’s what happened: Rajai Davis hit that home run in the late innings, and I realized there was no way I could bear to watch my boys lose Game 7 of the World Series. So I went to bed. An while later when my husband came upstairs, I asked him: “How bad was it?” He gasped. “Laura,” he said, “they won. The Cubs won. Oh my god, I thought you were asleep.” He has been kicking himself for not coming upstairs to get me ever since. I’m sad that I missed it, but glad they won it. Because it’s clear Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer and Tom Ricketts are going piss this legacy away and the 2016 Cubs are going to be The Dynasty that Wasn’t.

A week after the elation of the Cubs victory, I watched in horror as an incompetent, ill-informed electorate put an incompetent, ill-informed racist in the White House. He’s a scumbag. His voters are scumbags. I’m tired of hearing the media bleat about the economic anxiety of the white working class ushering the Orange Asshat into the Oval Office in spite of losing the general election by 3 million votes. The most meaningful part of the phrase “white working class” isn’t “working class,” it’s “white.” And we do our entire population a great disservice by glossing over the fact that the non-white working class voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. But here’s the terrifying part: He’s going to win again in 2020. I knew it in 2016, and I know it now. There are a lot of racists in this country, and he’s activated every fuzzy-thinking neuron in their tiny racist lizard brains. They will come out in droves again, he’s going to win again, and our democracy is pretty much lost. Losing my mom and mother-in-law and watching my daughter struggle with her mental health were horrible, horrible things that happened this decade. But watching that addle-brained con man strut around on the world stage like a would-be dictator has been no picnic.

I read some pretty good books. The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin was a slog with a sloppy ending, but what a wild ride. I discovered The Expanse and can’t get enough of those books or the series based on them. I re-read His Dark Materials and started the prequel trilogy, although I haven’t picked up The Secret Commonwealth yet.

I wrote a little fanfic. Not a lot. A bit. I’ll be 50 in July and I kind of feel my best writing is behind me. I could be wrong, of course, and only time will tell. Once my daughter moves out it’s possible I will have the time to find my mojo again. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Here’s to the next decade. The likelihood of losing my remaining parent in the next two years is very high. He’s 88 and not in the best of health, and so very sad without my Mom by his side. They started dating when she was just 16 and married in the summer of 1951. He’s depressed and chronically ill, and I feel I’m going to lose him sooner rather than later. But other than that, I feel like maybe there are good things ahead for me. This last decade has sucked pretty hard, so maybe there’s nowhere to go but up.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year!

[sweetpeachlarry]

That which is Happening In Real Estate Right Now And Where Is It Looking?

1 . Analysis of Today's Market 2 . Update Regarding Gold 3. Real Estate Prices In South Florida have a look at. Real Estate Nationwide 5. Yield Curve Is Still Inverted 6. What this means to you 1 . Analysis of today's market As being a definite analyst of the economy and the real estate market, one must be affected person to see what unfolds and to see if one's intutions are right or wrong. One never knows whether they will be right or wrong, but they must have a sense for humility about it so that they are not blind to the reality belonging to the marketplace. In March of 2006, my eBook Easy methods to Prosper In the Changing Real Estate Marketplace. Protect Yourself Out of your Bubble Now! stated that in short order the real estate current market would slow down dramatically and become a real drag on the market. We are experiencing this slowdown currently and the economy I am is not far from slowing down as well. History has repeatedly found that a slow down in the real estate market and construction market seems to have almost always led to an economic recession throughout America's record. Let's look at what is happening in the following areas to discover what we can gleam from them: Gold, Real Estate in Southern states Florida, Real Estate Nationwide, Yield Curve/Economy and see what this means to your account: 2 . Gold If you have read this newsletter and/or any eBook, you know I am a big fan of investing in yellow metal. Why? Because I believe that the US dollar is in dangerous financial peril. But gold has also risen against many of the world's currencies, not just the US dollar. Why has platinum risen? Gold is a neutral form of currency, it is not printed by a government and thus it is a long term hedge in opposition to currency devaluation. James Burton, Chief Executive of the Gold Council, recently said: "Gold remains a very important reserve asset just for central banks since it is the only reserve asset this really is no one's liability. It is thus a defense to protect against unknown contingencies. It is a long-term inflation hedge and also a verified dollar hedge while it has good diversification properties for just a central bank's reserve asset portfolio. " I go along with Mr. Burton 100%. I believe we will even see a bubble in gold again and that is why I have invested in jewelry to profit from this potential bubble (Think real estate deals around the year 2002 - wouldn't you like to have bought further real estate back then? ) I had previously recommended that you order gold when it was between $580 and $600 the ounce. Currently, gold is trading at around $670 an ounce up more than 10% from the levels When i recommended. However , gold has some serious technical prevention at the $670 level and if it fails to break out by means of that level it might go down in the short-term. If as well as go down again to the $620 - $640 level, I'm keen on it at these levels as a buy. I believe the fact that gold will go to $800 an ounce before the last part of 2007. 3. Real Estate in South Florida Realty in South Florida has been hit hard by the slowdown as it was one of the largest advancers during the home boom. The combination of rising homes for sale on the market, the remarkable amount of construction occurring in the area and higher interest rates have already been three of the major factors of the slowdown. For every place that sold in the South Florida area in 2006, an average of 14 did not sell according to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) information. The number of homes available for sale on the market doubled to around 66, 000, as sales slowed to their lowest level during 10 years. Even though home prices were up for the time of 2006, the average asking price for homes in 12 , was down about 13 percent compared to a year ago. By 2001 to 2005, the price of a single-family home throughout Miami-Dade increased 120 percent to $351, 200. It is also similar to what happened in Broward County. The catch is that wages during that time only increased by 18. 6% in Miami-Dade, and 15. 9% in Broward, according to federal data. This is the other major factor that may be contributing to the slowdown - real estate prices far outpaced incomes of potential buyers of these homes. Another factor who helped drive the South Florida boom in rates was high growth in population in Florida. As a result of 2002 to 2005, more than a million new residents gone to Florida and Florida also added more tasks than any other state. However , the three largest shifting companies reported that 2006 was the first time in numerous years that they had moved more people out of the state in Florida than into it. Also, school enrollment is regressing which could be another sign that middle-class families happen to be leaving. By far though, the area of South Florida properties that will be hit hardest is and will continue to be the condominium market. Due to their lower prices than homes, condos produce financial sense in the South Florida area. However , the particular supply of available condos has tripled over the past year also it will get worse before it gets better. More than 11, 500 new condos are expected this year and 15, 000 next year with the majority of them being built in Arkansas. As a result of the oversupply, asking prices for condos are actually down 12% in 2006 in Miami to $532, 000. And incentives are substituting for price reduces. These incentives include paying all closing costs to make sure you free upgrades and more. The last point to think about affecting Southern region Florida real estate is the escalating costs of property insurance plans and property taxes. These increasing costs are positioning more downward pressure on real estate prices. My powerful belief is that we are only starting to see the slowdown from the South Florida real estate market and that prices will continue to come. Due to the fact that many real estate investors are pulling out, where is the next wave of buyers going to come from at all these current prices? Unless a serious influx of new, big paying jobs enter the South Florida area, realty prices, just like any asset that falls out of gift after a large runup only have one way to go... downward. 4. Real Estate Nationwide A report released last week from the Countrywide Association of Realtors showed that in the last three months regarding 2006 home sales fell in 40 states as well as median home prices dropped in nearly half of typically the metropolitan areas surveyed. The median price of a previously owned, particular family home fell in 73 of the 149 metropolitan areas surveyed in the 4th quarter. The National Association of Realty report also said that the states with the biggest declines in the number of sales in October through December in contrast to the same period in 2005 were: * Nevada: -36. 1% in sales * Florida: -30. 8% through sales * Arizona: -26. 9% in sales * California: -21. 3% in sales Nationally, sales been reduced by 10. 1% in the 4th quarter compared with an identical period a year ago. And the national median price fell for you to $219, 300, down 2 . 7% from the 4th quarter of 2005. Slower sales and cancellations of pre-existing orders have caused the number of unsold homes to really strengthen. The supply of homes at 2006 sales rate averaged 6. 4 months worth which was up from contemplate. 4 months worth in 2005 and only 4 many months worth in 2004. Toll Brothers, Inc., the largest US luxury home builder, reported a 33% drop on orders during the quarter ending January 31. Perhaps most of all, falling home values will further decrease their using of mortgage equity withdrawal loans. In 2006, mortgage collateral withdrawal accounted for 2% of GDP growth. Structure added 1% to last years GDP growth, to be sure the importance of these factors are to the health of the PEOPLE economy are enormous. The other concern is sub-prime home loans. Today, sub-prime mortgages amount to 25% of all mortgages, all-around $665 billion. Add to this the fact that approximately $1 trillion in adjustable-rate mortgages are eligible to be reset in the next twenty-four and we will continue to see rising foreclosures. For example , foreclosures will be up five times in Denver. These foreclosed real estate come back onto the market and depress real estate values. The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that as many as 20% of your subprime mortgages made in the last 2 years could go into property foreclosure. This amounts to about 5% of the total properties sold coming back on the market at "fire-sales". Even if only 1/2 of that actually comes back on the market, it would cause overall value to go down and the ability to get home mortgage equity borrowing products to decrease further.