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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Trump administration backs off plan requiring international students to take face-to-face classes (Washington Post) The Trump administration on Tuesday dropped its much-criticized plan to require international college students to leave the United States unless they are enrolled in the fall term in at least one face-to-face class. The abrupt reversal, disclosed in a federal court in Boston, came a little more than a week after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued an edict that stunned U.S. higher education leaders and students worldwide. Under the July 6 policy from ICE, international students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities for the fall semester faced a mandate to take at least one course in person. Those students, ICE said, “may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States.” That mandate posed a major obstacle to plans for online teaching and learning that colleges are developing in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had sued to block the new policy. In a hearing in that case on Tuesday, held before U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, the judge announced that the schools and the federal government had reached an agreement that made the lawsuit moot. Separately, 20 state attorneys general had also challenged the guidance in court in recent days.

Patients are still delaying essential care out of fear of coronavirus (Washington Post) Jim Johnson was elated when his hip replacement, canceled in March along with other elective surgeries, finally was performed in May. For months, his pain had been so severe he couldn’t sleep, golf or do his job. Just a few weeks after the operation, he tossed his cane away. Hospitals and doctors practices across the country are hoping there are a lot more Jim Johnsons out there—patients willing to shake off fears about the coronavirus and come back for tests and treatments put on hold early in the pandemic. Yet persuading them to return for non-emergency care is a tricky message right now, with the virus slamming the South and West. In parts of Texas, Arizona, Florida and other states, elective procedures have been halted again. For some patients, the spike in infections is reigniting fears about catching the virus in a hospital or a doctor’s office. Doctors worry that could undermine their efforts to win people back, and lead to more lives being lost from other, often preventable causes, such as cancer and heart disease. Doctors say “elective procedures,” including for cancer, can’t be delayed indefinitely without ill effects. Hospitals, meanwhile, see orthopedic, cardiac and cancer surgeries as their key to survival after losing billions of dollars on the shutdown of lucrative procedures.

Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world—and the U.S. (Washington Post) When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide. So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day. The novel coronavirus—once concentrated in specific cities or countries—has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking havoc in multiple major regions at once. But the impact is not being felt evenly. Poorer nations throughout Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa are bearing a growing share of the caseload, even as wealthier countries in Western Europe and East Asia enjoy a relative respite after having beaten back the worst effects through rigorously enforced lockdowns. And then there’s the United States, which leads the world in new cases and, as with many nations that possess far fewer resources, has shown no sign of being able to regain control.

Rules once lifted are reimposed to try to curb new outbreaks (AP) Virus restrictions once lifted are being reimposed, shutting businesses and curbing people’s social lives as communities try to curb a disease resurgence before it spins out of control. Residents of Australia’s second-largest city were warned on Wednesday to comply with lockdown regulations or face tougher restrictions. Melbourne’s 5 million people and part of the city’s semi-rural surroundings are a week into a new, six-week lockdown to contain a new outbreak there. Indian authorities will impose lockdowns in high-risk areas in nearly a dozen states as the nation’s coronavirus caseload approaches 1 million. Renewed restrictions took effect in Hong Kong on Wednesday, with public gatherings limited to four people, restaurants restricted to takeout after 6 p.m., and a one-week closure for gyms, karaoke bars, and selected other businesses. Masks also are mandated on public transit for the first time, with the non-compliant being fined. In the U.S., places including Washington state are delaying timetables for reopening their economies. Gov. Jay Inslee said counties will remain at their current stage of economic reopening at least until July 28.

Chaotic protests prompt soul-searching in Portland, Oregon (AP) Nearly two months of nightly protests that have devolved into violent clashes with police have prompted soul-searching in Portland, Oregon, a city that prides itself on its progressive reputation but is increasingly polarized over how to handle the unrest. Divisions have deepened among elected officials about the legitimacy of the more violent protests—striking at the heart of Portland’s identity as an ultraliberal haven where protest is seen as a badge of honor. Small groups of protesters have set fires, launched fireworks and sprayed graffiti on public buildings, including police precincts and the federal courthouse, leading to nearly nightly clashes with police who have used force that’s caused injuries. Similar unrest engulfed many U.S. cities when Floyd died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck on May 25. But in Portland, which is familiar ground for the loosely organized, far-left activists known as “antifa,” or anti-fascists, the protests never stopped. Lost in the debate are the downtown businesses racking up millions in property damage and lost sales and the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Portland residents who have stayed off the streets. “The impact is terrible because what people have seen on the TV ... has scared people who live outside the downtown. They feel it’s that way 24 hours a day,” said David Margulis, who said the protests have caused sales at his jewelry store to drop more than 50%. “I talk to people, on the phone, who tell me: ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever come downtown again.’”

Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s cell tower repairmen (Reuters) The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance. Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel. The traffickers had a particular interest in that tower, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corp, which rents space to carriers on its thousands of cellular sites in Mexico. The cartel had installed its own antennas on the structure to support their two-way radios, but the contractor had unwittingly blacked out the shadowy network. The visitors let him off with a warning. The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters. Traffickers often erect their own radio antennas in rural areas. They also install so-called parasite antennas on existing cell towers, layering their criminal communications network on top of the official one. By piggybacking on telecom companies’ infrastructure, cartels save money and evade detection since their own towers are more easily spotted and torn down, law enforcement experts said.

Massive flooding in Southern China (Foreign Policy) Floods in Southern China are a recurring threat, but they are worse than ever this year—with some 38 million people evacuated and at least 141 dead. Rainfall has been double than the predicted amount in many places, threatening millions of lives and numerous important cultural sites. Thousands of soldiers have been dispatched to help shore up defenses against the rising tides. Water control has been a preoccupation for every Chinese ruler, and it will only worsen with climate change. China’s worst-known flooding, in 1931, killed over 2 million people.

South China Sea positions (Foreign Policy) The United States has dispatched two aircraft carriers—likely to be backed by British support—to the South China Sea, increasing the possibility of a regional flash point. It has also declared its formal alignment against China’s disputed claims for the first time, saying that it would use “all tools” to oppose them. In the last decade, China has made significant gains in the South China Sea, building a formidable infrastructure of artificial islands to act as bases while strengthening its naval militia. It is also increasingly aggressive in challenging rival claimants, including stalking Vietnamese oil ships and clashing with fishing boats. The U.S. move is long overdue, but it’s also risky: Xi stakes considerable credibility on the South China Sea claims, and there’s no likelihood of Beijing backing down. The pressure on Chinese officials and military personnel to demonstrate their nationalist enthusiasm is growing, increasing the chance of serious conflict similar to the deadly clash on the Indian border.

Trump signs Hong Kong sanctions law (Foreign Policy) On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump continued a week of moves against China by signing a new law that imposes sanctions on Chinese banks doing business with Chinese officials involved with new national security laws in Hong Kong. The president also signed an executive order, largely mirroring existing policy, that revokes the special treatment Hong Kong had received from the United States under the “One Country, Two Systems” doctrine.

Red alert in Tokyo (Reuters) Tokyo raised its coronavirus alert to the highest “red” level on Wednesday, alarmed by a recent spike in daily new cases to record highs, with Governor Yuriko Koike describing the situation in the Japanese capital as “rather severe”. The resurgence of the virus could add to the growing pressure on policymakers to shore up the world’s No. 3 economy, which analysts say is set to shrink at its fastest pace in decades this fiscal year due to the pandemic. “We are in a situation where we should issue warnings to citizens and businesses,” Koike told a press conference, urging residents to refrain from unnecessary travel.

Lebanon looks to China as US, Arabs refuse to help in crisis (AP) Facing a worsening economic crisis and with little chance of Western or oil-rich Arab countries providing assistance without substantial reforms, Lebanon’s cash-strapped government is looking east, hoping to secure investments from China that could bring relief. But help from Beijing risks alienating the United States, which has suggested such a move could come at the cost of Lebanese-U.S. ties. A tiny nation of 5 million on a strategic Mediterranean crossroads between Asia and Europe, Lebanon has long been a site where rivalries between Iran and Saudi Arabia have played out. Now, it’s becoming a focus of escalating tensions between China and the West. In recent months, the Lebanese pound has lost around 80% of its value against the dollar, prices have soared uncontrollably, and much of its middle class has been plunged into poverty. Talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout have faltered, and international donors have refused to unlock $11 billion pledged in 2018, pending major economic reforms and anti-corruption measures. Left with few choices, Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s government—supported by the Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies—is seeking help from China.

#headlines #news

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fatehbaz · 6 years ago

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Hey bud, Oklahoma is most definitely the Midwest. I’m a Native Texan through and through and those guys are completely Midwestern. Nothing wrong with that. I love me some Midwest, but it ain’t Texas and it ain’t the South 😉 🤠 🥩

If nothing else comes of this response - if no one has time to read such a lengthy discussion of Oklahoma’s relationship with nearby cultural regions - I highly recommend checking-out one of the best short essays on Oklahoma’s ambiguous cultural identity: South by Midwest: Or, Where is Oklahoma? by Russell Cobb (It sounds like you might enjoy this.)

Thanks for the input and interest. I appreciate it. I just want to expand on this discussion for anyone else following-along. So, please don’t think that I condescending to you! I do agree that a lot of Oklahoma is closely aligned with the essentially-Midwestern “Great Plains cultural region.” I agree with your sentiment.

However, I’m going to try to make a (friendly!) argument here for considering Oklahoma as split 3 ways between the Great Plains, the Upland South, and the Texas Triangle. Just as a thought experiment.

If there’s one individual region that you had to place Oklahoma in, I’d say it’s “the Great Plains.” Not Midwest. Not Texas. “The Great Plains.” But you can get a lot more precise.

I hope to show that, at the very least, eastern Oklahoma is more closely aligned with the Upland South rather than with the Midwest, through it’s shared folk culture, linguistics, commuter movement patterns, deciduous forest ecology, upland topography, cash exchange, and Baptist religion. (Many residents in this Ozark-ian southeastern Oklahoma would never claim Midwestern identity.) I’ll also try to demonstrate the close relationships between Texas (especially Dallas) and Oklahoma culture, through shared cattle ranching economy, fracking industries, oil business, freight and shipping, football obsession, and religion; the oil and cattle industries of Oklahoma particularly are more similar to Texas economy than they are to the Corn Belt economy of the rest of the Great Plains states.

I think it is not sufficient to call Oklahoma “definitely” part of the Midwest, because there are some distinctly different corners of the state that definitely aren’t.

I should acknowledge, though, that cultural regions are always open to debate - sometimes shifting, often different depending on the metrics they’re measured by - so input from everyone does matter. Cultural regions aren’t objectively set-in-stone.

So I’m not trying to act authoritative here and I’’m not at all saying “you’re wrong”! Just some food for thought for anyone interested.

In short:

Oklahoma, famously, has an identity crisis. Oklahoma sits at the ambiguous cross-roads of multiple cultural regions; the Pittsburgh and St. Louis areas are perhaps the only other US areas with so much confusion.

No one living in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, would agree that they are living in the Midwest; many residents here would identify as Southern, which is reflected in their familial heritage, cultural events, institutions, and place names. People living in Le Flore County identify as part of the Ozarks (the Upland South cultural region), especially due to the forested terrain and mountainous topography. People in Cimarron County, in the panhandle, say they’re from “the West” or adjacent to “the Southwest.” And yes, a lot of people in Osage County and areas north of Oklahoma City would agree they’re a part of “the Great Plains cultural region” (and many Americans consider the Great Plains to be included in the Midwest, along with the Great Lakes cultural region). In fact, many Oklahomans, especially in the heavily populated middle of the state, do firmly believe that they are vaguely Midwestern.

If you don’t want to hear my opinion, please scroll-down to where I’ve marked the big bold XXX’s, in order to read a great excerpt from that aforementioned article on Oklahoma culture, because I think it sums-up the situation well.

Generally? I agree with you! And many Oklahomans agree with you. Much of Oklahoma is aligned with the Great Plains cultural region, both economically and in the opinion of residents.

The case for considering parts of Oklahoma more closely related to Texas? Oklahoma City shares the economy of metro Dallas, including cattle ranching headquarters, oil businesses, banking, transportation and freight companies, and commuter and dollar exchange between the two cities; and much of central and southern Oklahoma is focused on fracking, Southern Baptist religion, and high school football.

However, I’d say that the clearest non-Midwestern portion of Oklahoma is the east’s alignment with the Upland South cultural region of the Ozarks.

And it gets more complicated from there, because describing Oklahoma depends on which metrics you’re using to assign it a cultural region. Economics? Commuter travel patterns? Linguistics? Rural folk culture? Place-of-origin of the people living there?

Below is my basic take on how Oklahoma is split among 3 general cultural regions. This cultural confusion of Oklahoma (is it the Great Plains, or the South, or perhaps the Southwest?) is actually a quality shared with Texas “Is Longview in the South? Is El Paso in the Southwest? Is Dallas part of the Great Plains?” Google “cultural regions of US map” and you’ll find that a lot of cartographers don’t bother to distinguish Texas as unique and place it in a Great Plains cultural region with Oklahoma.

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From demography studies, formal research interviews, and informal social media group discussion, the general consensus - which I agree with - seems to be that Oklahoma is culturally split 3 ways between the Upland South, Greater Texas, and the Great Plains.

In this scheme, Oklahoma aligns with 3 general cultural regions:

(1) The urban culture of Oklahoma City and the hinterland that it anchors are closely aligned with Dallas - the Texas cultural region - by way of its shared focus on cattle ranching economy, fracking industry, oil businesses, interstate transportation businesses, banking centers, and cash exchange; much of Oklahoma shares a love of West Texas-style football and Southern Baptist religion. (2) Areas east of Tulsa align with the Ozarks - an extension of the Upland South cultural region - sharing culture and linguistics with Southerners, and rural livelihoods and identities dependent on deciduous forested woodlands and hilly upland topography, as with southern Missouri and western Arkansas.(3) The western two-thirds of the state align with the Great Plains cultural region (Midwest, if you will) by way of the agricultural economy, cattle ranching, pig-farming, monoculture crops, accents, infrastructure, reliance on long stretches of open highway, and identities similar to, say, Kansas City.

Beyond that, some living in the panhandle identify as “Western” or “Southwestern.” Meanwhile some in McCurtain County go as far as to identify as part of the “Deep South,” where the Red River flows south of the Ouachita Mountains. But these 2 corners aren’t as well-established culturally as the aforementioned 3 regions.

I agree that much of the western two-thirds of the state - if it had to be categorized in a cultural region - aligns most with a “Great Plains” (essentially Midwestern) cultural region. However, Oklahoma east of Tulsa is heavily influenced by the Ozarks, a folk culture firmly rooted in the Upland South cultural region.

By the metric of urban economies, commuter travel, and cash exchange, here is how Oklahoma City and Tulsa align with the Texas cultural region (in a map of the “11 Emerging Urban Megaregions,” created by Regional Plan Association):

Here’s my map of an overly-specific 32 cultural regions of the US at a scale that would be analogous to a “Level III” scale as used in the US EPA’s ecoregion maps:

In this map, I want to point-out that the region I’m referring to “Llano Estacado (West Texas Plains)” - the region covering most of Oklahoma - is not meant to be interpreted as a specifically Texan culture. Instead, it is meant to be more reflective of the High Plains, a vaguely Great Plains-ish region, like a transition zone between the Midwest and West Texas. Also note how he darker brown color denoting the Texas Triangle is not solid and is instead cross-hatched as it extends into Oklahoma City, to show that urban Oklahoma is similar to Texas, but not firmly a part of Texan culture. (And yes, I know this map sucks, and some people will hate it, but it’s not meant to be definitive; I have a very long document describing how the regions were categorized if people are interested in exploring the subject further.)

Here’s a map that combines the “11 Emerging Urban Megaregions” by Regional Plan Association from above, with the boundaries of “the 7 American nations” as described by Joel Kotkin, in a map created by Clare Trainor:

So, this map has really generalized the distinctions between regions. I definitely think that Texas is unique enough to be its own cultural region if we were to be more specific. But, at this general level, it does make sense that Dallas and the Texas Triangle are depicted as related to Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Wichita and Kansas City. This makes sense, because the Dallas Metroplex is one of the Top 7 most populous urban areas in the whole country, and has an astonishing GDP partially because it is the US’s center of interstate freight; transportation generally; cattle and beef industries; and, interestingly, snack/junk food corporations like Frito-Lay, Dave & Buster’s, and Pizza Hut. These are all industries that rely on the corridor from Dallas, through Oklahoma and Kansas, to Chicago; as if the Great Plains present a wind-swept and desolate environmental barrier to be crossed by freight; it is a place without the dense development of the rest of the country, so it is industries like cattle and shipping which are particularly well-suited for the Plains.

To demonstrate both Oklahoma’s relationship with Texas and eastern Oklahoma’s alignment with the Upland South, here’s a map of religious group distribution in the US (source is included in the infographic):

Among demographers, the moniker “Bible Belt” is given to those regions dominated by the Southern Baptist church. Notice that Oklahoma is separated not just from nearby Kansas but also from the rest of the Great Plains and Midwest.

So, ultimately, my view of general cultural regions would distinguish 16 regions, and looks something like this:

Note that Oklahoma sits at the transition zone between Texas and the Great Plains, though eastern Oklahoma is more easily identifiable as Upland South. (And yes, I know people will hate this map; it’s not meant to be definitive. There are regions that will always be ambiguously aligned with more than one region, like Buffalo and western New York; St. Louis; Raleigh and Charlotte; eastern Montana; Oklahoma; the Pacific coast between Santa Rosa and Roseburg; northern Florida; and western Pennsylvania.)

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XXX

Anyway. I think anyone interested in American cultural regions would enjoy reading what native-Oklahoman author Russell Cobb has to say about Oklahoma’s cultural identity.

Some of the best excerpts:

Where is Oklahoma?(…) There it is, you would say, in the mid-south-central portion of the continental United States. But where is it culturally? Is it part of The South? The U.S. Census Bureau says so. Generations of venerable southern historians, such as C. Vann Woodward, have said so.(…)I was quickly shot down by the sister of a very good friend, who happens to live in Birmingham. “Oklahoma is not the South, Russ,” she said. “It’s the Midwest.” Another friend in Georgia sprung to my defense. “I’ve lived in the Deep South and Chicago. Oklahoma is definitely more Southern than Midwestern. Still, it’s not quite the South either.”

A good friend who considers a trip to Dallas to be a visit to a foreign country tried to argue that Oklahoma was its own region, that it shouldn’t be lumped together with any other state, especially not Texas. But this seemed strange, too, because there are some affinities between Texas and Oklahoma.

I also assumed that anyone not from a city spoke with an Oklahoma accent, which traces its genealogy back to Appalachia—a variation on the Southern accent. (…) A 2004 study of national speech patterns boiled American dialects down to six major groupings. Northeastern Oklahoma and southern Missouri are the northwestern limits of the southern accent. (…) Even if we Okies have a sort of Southern accent, though, that doesn’t make us Southerners. The Census Bureau may designate Oklahoma as the South, but what explains the visceral reaction of Georgians and Alabamans when an Okie claims to be from Dixie?

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Oklahoma politicians made a deliberate effort to make the state part of the “Solid South,” a peculiar institution that guaranteed the one-party rule of the Democratic Party. The heyday of the “Solid South” lasted from the end of Reconstruction until the end of World War II. The strategy was all about, of course, disenfranchising black voters and wielding monolithic political control over state politics. Danney Goble, the recently deceased Oklahoma historian, explains it this way in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture:

“The fact that much of the future state was settled by immigrating southerners had great influence on Oklahoma’s later politics. Its unwieldy constitution, its distrust of concentrated corporate and political power, its steady run-ins with federal authority, even its susceptibility to political corruption–all of these were qualities that the Sooner State shared with states of the Old Confederacy (…)”

The geographer Wilbur Zelinsky—one of the inventors of modern cultural geography—attempted to understand regional identity in the “vernacular.” Zelinsky wanted to understand how everyday folks defined themselves in terms of regional identity. Sorting through thousands of place names in hundreds of cities, he compiled a series of maps that showed how people identified their regions. Some of the regions were predictable. (…)

But, looking at Zelinksy’s maps today, it is Oklahoma that shows the biggest regional confusion. (…)

He noted that some places, like western Pennsylvania, were kind of stuck between Northeastern and Midwestern, but it was Oklahoma that had the greatest amount of regional identities. Five of the twelve vernacular identities that Zelinsky came up with converged on Oklahoma. For phone books in the very southeastern part of the state, Oklahoma was southern. In the panhandle, it was the “West.” Along the Kansas border, it was the Midwest. From Oklahoma City to the west, it was the “southwest.” (…)

Finally, in moments of brutal honesty, Okies will admit that their state is a variation of Texas. This is a painful admission, to be sure. “The whole state is like a suburb of Dallas,” a fellow Tulsan told a Canadian friend. “It’s Texas-light,” someone wrote during my interminable Facebook conversation. Politically, culturally and religiously speaking, there’s a good case to be made for this assertion. Texans and Oklahomans share the same affinity for hard-right, red-meat conservative politics, and they have large populations of Southern Baptists. Western Swing is a purely Texas-Oklahoma creation of Bob Wills, who belongs to both states. The accent is pretty much the same, although a bit stronger in Texas. There’s the big role oil companies play in the states’ economies. And, of course, there’s football. Both states are football crazed, but therein lies a complication: there is no greater sports hatred than that between the Sooners and the Longhorns.

I’ve tried to deconstruct the annual hatefest that is the OU-Texas game for my wife, a native Californian, who, before meeting me, had never watched a college football game. Part of what makes the game exciting, I told her, is that it’s played on a neutral site. So it’s not in Texas or Oklahoma, she wondered? Well, it’s in Dallas, I said. The idea that Dallas was somehow neutral seemed ludicrous, and, indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like Oklahomans had been bamboozled.

So, where is Oklahoma? It is in America’s Heart, someone said. Well, not quite, I rebutted. If you compare the map of the continental U.S. to the human body, you would have to conclude that Oklahoma is America’s pancreas. It’s in the mid-south-central of the body, and, although it doesn’t have the poetic resonance of the heart, it serves an important function. It breaks down proteins, carbs and fats. The pancreas is often overlooked until something terrible happens there, like a cancer—or the bombing of a federal building. But there it is, right there in the middle of everything, trying to make sense of all the substances coming through the system.

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Again, cultural regions are always open to interpretation and debate. I am not trying to officially decree Oklahoma’s sole cultural identity!

I’m just happy to discuss aspects of cultural identity, especially in a place like the US. Especially because the US - by nature of being full of millions of immigrants and colonists from diverse cultures - doesn’t really maintain a singular popular mythology or heritage. Like, the most central aspects of American culture shared by everyone regardless of culture-of-origin are things that were artificially constructed to enforce a national identity - things like Christmas, football season, McDonald’s. These didn’t spring naturally. However, local regional cultural identities - like Upland South, or Great Plains - have a lot more grounding in local ecosystems and lifestyles, and so they create some genuinely substantial and unique local cultures.

I’m very sorry for rambling. Honestly. I can’t help it. I’m glad this kind of discussion can happen on Tumblr.

Thanks again for the feedback!

#ask

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anagamitofotografia · 3 years ago

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Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Texas Observer’s May/June 2021 print edition. Since its publication, prosecutor Ralph Petty has surrendered his license to practice law. A district court judge in Midland has also recommended a new trial for Clinton Young.

From the May/June 2021 issue

It’s 2016, and I’m driving north on U.S. 59, a four-lane stretch of blacktop in Deep East Texas bordered by towering pines. This morning, I’d set out from New Orleans, where I intern at a public defender’s office, to make the five-hour trek to rural Polk County, northeast of Houston. I see my turnoff up ahead: the country road leading to the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a maximum-security prison comprising a collection of drab concrete buildings hemmed in by barbed wire.

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

At the gate, the guards search the trunk of my car to make sure I’m not carrying any contraband. I park, go inside, and am escorted to the visitation area, a long, narrow room with rows of cubicles separated by a heavy sheet of plexiglass. The air is thick with conversations between incarcerated people and their visitors—doting wives who dream of the day they’re reunited with their husbands, crying babies that have never been held by their father or grandfather or uncle, fervently praying priests. I sit in a sticky chair in a cubicle that’s tinted yellow from the fluorescent lights overhead as I wait for my friend to arrive.

Eventually, a guard opens a door behind the glass and escorts Clinton into the cubicle opposite mine. He is tall, with pale blue eyes and a buzz cut. He’s in handcuffs. I consider Clinton a close friend after years of corresponding by letter, but I’ve never actually met him until today. And seeing him like this—handcuffed, locked behind a metal door—is disconcerting. Clinton Lee Young, standing in front of me at 32 years old, is treated as if he’s a killer.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

In 2000, a man named Doyle Douglas was killed in Longview as part of what police say was a drug deal and kidnapping gone wrong. Two days later, Samuel Petrey was killed in Midland. Police arrested Clinton, only 18 years old then, on suspicion of murder because he was present at both crime scenes. They also arrested two other people in connection to the deaths, who would later testify against Clinton. In 2003, he was convicted by a Midland County jury of capital murder, sentenced to death, and sent to the Polunsky Unit, the facility that houses all the men in Texas on death row. He’s been there ever since.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

In January 2014, I saw a Dutch documentary about Clinton’s case that aired in the Netherlands, where I was born and grew up. By that time Clinton had been in solitary confinement on death row for 11 years. Meanwhile, I was finishing up law school in Rotterdam. I felt an inexplicable connection to Clinton, a feeling that was neither pity nor simple curiosity. I was immediately drawn to his story, and I didn’t want to just learn more about his case—I wanted to do more.

On the screen, I saw a young, healthy, and possibly innocent man explain his fate. It shocked me. In the Netherlands, not only has the death penalty been abolished for more than a millennium, but even a life sentence is rarely implemented. The justice system there focuses primarily on rehabilitation, which is why there is hesitancy to carry out an irreversible sentence. The death penalty’s only purpose is retaliation—a difficult concept for me to accept, both from a legal perspective and a humanitarian one. I wanted to help Clinton, so I started with the easiest thing I could do: I wrote him a letter. I told Clinton about my interest in the law, and he wrote back: “You know what your goals are. I think we will get along great.” He was right. Through our first few letters, we quickly developed a bond that later became a lifelong friendship.

I regularly visited Clinton the summer I worked in New Orleans. In fact, Clinton was a big part of the reason I applied for the internship to begin with. As our friendship grew, so did my interest in his legal case. I devoted hours every day to learning as much as I could about his conviction. The state’s case looked weak. There was no ballistic evidence, forensic evidence, fingerprints, or DNA to prove that Clinton was guilty of the killings, and the state was largely dependent on the testimony of his two co-defendants. (They received lenient sentences in return for their testimony against Clinton, which would later be deemed inconsistent and unreliable.) Later, in 2019, I would learn that Ralph Petty, the prosecutor in the case, had secretly worked for the judge as a paid law clerk. It was in this role that Petty drafted rulings in Clinton’s case, advised the judge on legal matters, and had access to confidential information that would otherwise not be accessible to a prosecutor. Petty’s relationship with the judge impacted dozens of other cases, robbing defendants of a fair trial.

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

After completing my internship and returning to the Netherlands, I joined a nonprofit that had been created in Clinton’s name. Then the worst possible thing happened: The judge in Clinton’s case set an execution date for October 26, 2017. When his execution had not been stayed by October 18, I flew 13 hours from Amsterdam to Houston. While I was in the air, the court granted Clinton a stay of execution. Clinton’s legal relief came after new evidence emerged of possible false testimony by the state’s star witness, one of Clinton’s co-defendants. He had provided crucially damning testimony at Clinton’s trial, and the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that it was possibly false and Clinton shouldn’t be executed until more investigating was done.

His life had been saved—temporarily, at least—but Clinton is still living in terrible conditions. He has been in solitary confinement for almost 20 years: That’s 20 birthdays without being celebrated; it’s 1,040 Mondays waking up in a 7-by-10-foot cage completely alone; it’s 7,300 days of total isolation with virtually no human contact. In the past 20 years, the only time Clinton has had any physical contact with another person is when prison staff have used force. He hasn’t felt his mother’s embrace since he was 18. The complete sensory deprivation is enough to break even the strongest person.

Clinton’s near-execution was a wake-up call for me. I started applying to law schools in Texas, with the ultimate goal of representing people with death sentences. I was admitted to a one-year master’s of law program at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, which meant I would be living only four hours from the Polunsky Unit. My once-a-year visits became once-a-week visits. That year at law school, while I was working to understand a complex American judicial system, Clinton helped me with my studies. He gave me some of his law books, and he offered explanations for the legal theories I learned in class. Clinton is remarkably intelligent, and I often asked him to explain a certain law, legal term, or case. He would respond with a detailed letter full of case examples, explanations, and his personal annotations. My law school study materials consisted of legal anthologies, casebooks, my own notes, and Clinton’s letters. Clinton was a constant motivation to me throughout law school, and when I graduated in May 2020 with a specialization in capital punishment, I knew it was an accomplishment we had achieved together. Six months later, after the two-day, 12-hour Texas bar exam, I became a licensed attorney.

Last year, I established the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation and became its general counsel. The nonprofit, once nothing more than a Facebook page with a mission, is now a multinational entity with the common goal to get Clinton off death row and help others who are similarly trapped in the American criminal “justice” system. The foundation has become my passion, and I’m making it my life’s work. The foundation’s mission isn’t fulfilled yet because Clinton is still on death row, but we are working to create a legacy for Clinton. If nothing else, I want the world to believe what I do, which is that he is innocent of murder and never received a fair trial.

Recently I read some of Clinton’s first letters to me, and I couldn’t help but smile. In his first one, from January 2015, he wrote, “Do you plan to come back to the U.S. any time in the near future? If you want to work on a case, why not work on mine?” Now I’m one of Clinton’s attorneys and I run a human rights organization in his name. I could have never imagined that my life would look like this. But I was lucky to meet the right person, who inspired me to take a different course.

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

I hope that you found the above of help and/or of interest. Similar content can be found on our main site here: www.southtxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback below in the comments section. Let us know what topics we should write about for you in future.

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afriendlypokealien · 3 years ago

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Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

From the May/June 2021 issue

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

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thefourthbranch · 5 years ago

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4-16-2020: WALSH: We Have Become A Police State, And None Of Us Should Be Okay With That: (This is a reprint of an article by Matt Walsh from THE DAILYWIRE, published on 4/6/2020. All of the cases of police actions that he cites I have seen reported by other sources. The value of this article is that he presents them together in the context of the state of Marshall Law that is being imposed upon us.) On Saturday, police in Kansas City “intervened” to shut down a parade of elementary school teachers. The staff of John Fiske Elementary School decided to organize the parade as a way to boost the morale of their students and encourage them in their new distance learning adventure. All of the teachers and administrators were in their own cars. There was literally no chance whatsoever of any virus being transmitted from car to car. But a spokeswoman for the police later explained, after the elicit gathering was descended upon by law enforcement, that the celebration of learning was not “necessary” or “essential.” Two days before the Kansas City community was saved from the threat of cheerful elementary school teachers waving to children from their sedans, police in Malibu arrested a man who was caught paddle boarding in the ocean. Two boats and three additional deputies in vehicles were called to the scene of the non-essential joyride. How could a man out by himself in the Pacific possibly contract or spread the coronavirus? Nobody knows. But orders are orders, after all. And so the man was pulled out of the ocean and hauled away in handcuffs. Not far from this harrowing scene, the San Diego sheriff’s department was giving out citations to people who’d committed the nefarious crime of “watching the sunset” on the beach. At around the same time, over on the east coast, Pennsylvania state police were pulling over and ticketing a woman who, according to the citation, was “going for a drive.” You may think that going for a drive when you’ve been locked in your home for three weeks is indeed a rather essential activity. And you may also think that there is essentially zero risk of contracting or transmitting the virus while you drive along a country road in the rural county of York, Pennsylvania. But none of that matters. The politicians have spoken. You may leave your home only for the reasons they decree. A woman in Minnesota was recently pulled over and ticketed for two offenses: First, driving with a canceled license, which seems fair. But second, for violating her state’s stay-at-home order. She said she’d gone to Taco Bell and before that had visited her storage unit. Why should one be essential and not the other? Who knows. That is up for the politicians to decide. The point is that you can’t just go out and move around as you please. What do you think this is? A free country? Officials in other parts of the nation have banned essential retailers from selling non-essential items like mosquito repellent. I suppose the prevention of West Nile and malaria are no longer considered essential. The mayor of Port Isabel, Texas, has decided, for whatever reason, that residents may not travel with more than two people in their vehicles. What if you’re a single parent with two kids? Well, sorry, one of your kids is out of luck. It’s not clear how this rule will be enforced, but some states have made that easier on themselves by setting up checkpoints to stop and question every car that passes through. A driver from New York who gets caught in Florida might face 60 days in jail. I should stop here to remind you that Florida and New York are places in the United States of America, not Soviet Russia. Meanwhile, protestors outside of abortion clinics in California and North Carolina have been arrested for violating their state’s stay-at-home orders, despite the fact that they were following the protocols of social distancing, not to mention that obscure legal artifact known as the First Amendment. But the First Amendment has officially been neutralized, as the multiple pastors arrested for holding worship services have found out. All of this may seem quite oppressive and gestapo-ish, but a police chief in Colorado put those worries aside by explaining that the act of leaving your house and going outside is not a right but a “privilege” that can be revoked if it is “misused.” A prosecutor in Ohio, exploding in a fit of rage during a radio interview, said that those who defy his state’s stay-at-home order are committing “felonious assault” and if you’re guilty of that, you can “sit your butt in jail, sit there and kill yourself.” Again, I remind you: this is the United States of America. Or at least it used to be. Apologists for our newly established police state will tell me that states and localities have the authority to impose restrictions in an emergency. That is true, but the question of how far their authority actually goes is complicated, and in this case made even more complicated by the fact that these stay-at-home orders, in many cases, are based not on a current medical emergency in the respective state, but on models that forecast the possibility of an emergency in the future. For example, Minnesota is under a stay-at-home order despite having only 29 coronavirus deaths among a population of over 5 million. Perhaps the situation will get worse. Perhaps not. The point is that there is no current emergency in Minnesota or many of the other states currently under lockdown. There is, rather, a model that projects an emergency. And if projected emergencies can justify the effective nullification of the Bill of Rights, where is the limit? Haven’t we now granted the government the power to seize near-total control on the basis of any real or phantom threat? And there are other problems. We don’t know that these lockdowns will actually have the effect of saving lives. It’s possible, as Dr. Fauci has admitted himself, that the virus could come roaring back to life whenever we emerge from our homes. It’s also possible that the illness came to America in November, December, or January, aboard any of the hundreds of thousands of travelers from China who poured into our country during that span. If that’s the case, then the viral horse has long since left the barn, and the lockdowns are obliterating our national economy and driving millions into ruin for minimal preventative gain. So we have, then, a series of indefinite stay-at-home orders based on dubious models, and dubious projections, with a dubious chance of success, and which often outlaw behavior that could not even plausibly put anyone at risk from the disease that may or may not, or maybe already has, become epidemic in the states where these laws have been enacted. Is that good enough to justify treating Americans like subjects in a communist dictatorship? I would argue that nothing could ever justify such a thing. Indeed, the First and Fourth Amendments — the provisions of the Bill of Rights that seem to be having the worst time of it, recently — serve no purpose and have no reason to exist if they can be canceled or overridden whenever the government might have a specially compelling reason to do so. It is only when the government has a specially compelling reason to violate the amendments that the amendments have any function. After all, we really don’t need them during the times that the government has no interest in infringing on them. It seems that if we toss aside our right to assembly, our right to practice our religion, our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., whenever the government insists that such protections are hazardous to our health, then we might as well not have the rights in the first place. It’s like locking a criminal in a cell but giving him the key to open it along with a stern warning to only use the key if he has a very good reason. Doesn’t the key make the cell a rather pointless accessory? Sure he might remain in it sometimes, but only when he wants to. And it’s precisely when he wants to be behind bars that you don’t need the bars at all. I’m not suggesting that state governments should do nothing in response to the coronavirus. I am suggesting that they shouldn’t have the power to do whatever the hell they want, for whatever reason they want, to whatever extent they want, for however long they want, with whatever penalty they want. Which is what is happening now all across the country. Governments can and should act justly and prudently to respond to threats that endanger their citizens lives. But there is little in the way of justice and prudence in these measures. Matt Walsh - THE DAILYWIRE - DailyWire.com

#coronavirus #chinesevirus #coronahoax #thedailywire #mattwalsh

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hudsonespie · 5 years ago

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Pintsch Bubenzer Names Mike Zuchowski Regional Sales Manager

The manufacturer of high-performance disc and drum brakes for steel cranes and other severe duty applications is seeing high demand for its products from the ports and offshore market. Zuchowski will focus on the West Coast, Pacific Northwest and West Canada, while Sean Sheridan’s nationwide role has been refocused in line with ongoing growth in the sector.

Ports and offshore are two very different markets, however. Offshore has many subsegments in which Pintsch Bubenzer interfaces with; offshore drilling / exploration, wind energy, and maritime vessels are its strong suits. Ports, meanwhile, Zuchowski said, can be divided into two segments: bulk and container handling.

Joel Cox, president at Pintsch Bubenzer USA, said: “We had been using Sean for all ports nationwide, but the demand required us to have someone to focus from New Orleans, West. Since Mike has homes in Dallas and Houston, he was perfectly placed to step into the role and Sean can continue to serve the equally buoyant East Coast region. Our offshore business has always flourished but this is the first time we have appointed a specialist from that specific sector. Offshore is a specialized market and it’s important that we have expertise in place to ensure an upward curve continues in the long-term.”

Zuchowski said: “The ports sector in the USA is tied closely to global economic conditions. Like any business when times are good, as they are now, equipment downtime becomes extremely costly. Our product is instrumental in the safe and efficient operation of any crane or bulk handling system. As shipping vessels increase in capacity, ports look to automation for faster load and unload intervals. With this automation comes higher duty cycles and with that component failure is inevitable. We see an increasing amount of time and money going into training maintenance crews to properly monitor and diagnose issues before they lead to lost production time.”

Cox added: “Mike and I have worked together for around eight years in his role as a sales representative; he knows our equipment well and has a drive and passion for the products and their quality. I approached him about focusing his full-time efforts on our sales endeavors and, once we had established a shared vision for the product range, he was keen to explore that opportunity.”

Long-term success

Zuchowski said: “I am confident of long-term success now that we are putting a full-time push, investigation, and surveys for new and upgraded equipment. Cutting costs internally, while providing faster response with a local presence, coupled with a team that has a vested interest in seeing the customer succeed: that is what we are after.”

Zuchowski was born and raised in a rural farm community West of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1984, he moved to Dallas, Texas and took a role related to engineered automation and material handling equipment. Three years later, Zuchowski founded his own sales agency, Advanced Production Solutions, targeting high-quality product manufacturers, selling into steel-producing facilities and offshore industries. Forging a connection with what was then a little-known brake company called Pintsch Bamag, the brand has been a constant in his professional life since.

Zuchowski lives with wife Sue and rescued dog, Sydney. He has four daughters and nine grandchildren. He enjoys scuba diving, rock music, wood-working and general residential improvement projects.

Cox hinted at additional recruitments in due course. He said: “We had our biggest year ever in 2019; we are working towards adding more regional and market champions. It’s an ongoing project given our presence in the ports, intermodal, movable structures, offshore, wind, winch, mining, steel, and crane industries.”

Zuchowski said: “Quality products and the team to support it [set us apart]. The highest degree of quality is maintained throughout the most comprehensive line of products available to industry today. While our tag line ‘Braking Unlimited’ certainly reflects the scope of products we offer, it is of no value if you don’t have the expertise to guide your customer to the proper product to address his or her application and follow through to be sure it is serviced properly.”

from Storage Containers https://maritime-executive.com/article/pintsch-bubenzer-names-mike-zuchowski-regional-sales-manager via http://www.rssmix.com/

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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Gilbert M. Gaul | The Geography of Risk | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 24 minutes (4,833 words)

It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.

Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.

In July 2014, the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit arm of the federal government that helps fund and direct critical research in medicine, engineering, and the social sciences, reported the findings of a yearlong study of coastal risks. Damages from hurricanes and nor’easters have “increased substantially over the past century,” the researchers noted, “largely due to increases in population and development in hazardous coastal areas.” The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.

Critically, the report, Reducing Coastal Risk on the East and Gulf Coasts, observed that there is “no central leadership, unified vision,” or national strategy to reduce the costs associated with hurricanes. The preponderance of federal funding is paid out after storms, with scant attention to zoning or land-use issues, buyouts, or retreat from vulnerable floodplains. “Over the past century, most coastal management programs have emphasized coastal armoring, while doing little to decrease development in harm’s way,” the report concluded.

A 2018 study by Philip J. Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist and hurricane expert, associated with Colorado State University, made many of these same points. “Growth in coastal population and regional wealth are the overwhelming drivers of observed increases in hurricane-related damage. As the population and wealth of the United States has increased in coastal locations, it has invariably led to growth in exposure and vulnerability of coastal property along the U.S. Gulf and East coasts,” Klotzbach and several colleagues wrote.

To paraphrase the words of the Clinton-era campaign strategist James Carville, It’s the property, stupid.

* * *

In the last two decades, hurricanes and coastal storms have caused over three-quarters of a trillion dollars in damage at the coast — far more than earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires combined. That represents a nearly sixfold increase from the prior two decades (1980–1990), as well as most of the hurricane damage in the last century ($725 billion of $1.2 trillion), after adjusting for inflation and population. Alarmingly, the pace of destruction is accelerating, with seventeen of the twenty most expensive hurricanes occurring since 2000. In 2017, Harvey, Maria, and Irma alone accounted for over $300 billion in damage, the single-most expensive hurricane season ever.

Absent a dramatic but unlikely shift in weather patterns, or Americans abandoning the coasts, this sharp spike in hurricane damage is likely to continue, experts say. This is even as the federal government is spending tens of billions on building seawalls, widening beaches, elevating houses, and undertaking an array of other costly efforts to protect coastal property.

The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added.

“There is no way I know to mitigate your way out of the problem, unless you find a way to make carbon go away,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.

That doesn’t seem likely in the fossil fuel–focused Trump administration, which favors coal, oil, and gas over renewable-energy sources such as wind and solar. Greenhouse gases, including long-lasting carbon dioxide, are at historic levels, which may grow even more dramatically by century’s end, current research suggests. More gas translates into higher temperatures, warmer oceans, and increased fuel for hurricanes. Combined with the explosive development at the coast, it is the perfect calculus for disasters.

Hurricanes are unquestionably doing more damage than ever: $163.8 billion for Katrina in 2005 (adjusted for inflation); $35.4 billion for Ike in 2008; $71.5 billion for Sandy in 2012; $126.3 billion for Harvey in 2017; $50.5 billion for Irma in 2017; and $90.9 billion for Maria, also in 2017. Damages are still being tabulated for 2018. But it is likely that Florence and Michael caused at least $50 billion in damage, including devastating losses in poor rural areas, and massive damage to utilities and other public infrastructure.

Again, this isn’t to suggest there haven’t been massive hurricanes in the past. History is replete with examples dating back hundreds of years. Recent evidence detected in archaeological remains and carbon samples depicts ferocious paleo-hurricanes from thousands of years ago. But the key difference between then and now is that the coasts are now littered with expensive beach houses, second homes, boardwalks, and hotels. And there were no government programs or huge taxpayer payouts in the past.

A good example of the past foreshadowing the future is the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. At the time, Miami was a relatively small, new city, unlike today, with its population in the millions and cranes towering over one new development after another. That September, a Category 3 hurricane barreled through downtown, killing about one thousand citizens, toppling houses, and wrecking businesses, while causing about $100 million in damage. Still, as devastating as the Great Miami Hurricane was, it pales in comparison with the damage a similarly powerful storm would cause today — well over $200 billion, according to Philip Klotzbach and other researchers.

“It would be massive,” Klotzbach told me. “It all ties back to population and wealth. Miami is a very desirable place to live, but it’s also a very dangerous place and is overdue for a massive hurricane. That entire area is.”

Meteorologists thought 2017’s Hurricane Irma might make a direct hit on Miami, with winds exceeding 140 miles per hour. However, while crossing Cuba, the storm encountered wind shear, weakened, and then dodged to the west, into the Gulf of Mexico, where it later threatened Tampa, another highly vulnerable city.

The last two major hurricanes to strike southeast Florida — Andrew in 1992 and Wilma in 2005 — also spared Miami. Headline writers at The Miami Herald warned that Andrew was going to be “the Big One” that wrecked the city. But the hurricane wiped out the city of Homestead, about forty miles southeast of Miami, instead causing $25 billion in damage, or about $49 billion in today’s dollars. Yet for all its power, Andrew was a relatively small, compact hurricane that cut a narrow swath of destruction. Wilma, meanwhile, surged across the Florida Keys, causing $25 billion in damage; but it, too, missed the densely developed Miami-Dade metropolitan region. Neither of the storms truly was the Big One. That will be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane that directly strikes Miami, Tampa, or Jacksonville.

Florida, one clever writer recently observed, is a ‘vast harvest of risky building.’

It is only a matter of time. Florida is a long, narrow peninsula bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. The geology of swamps, sinkholes, and porous limestone leaks water at every turn and is highly vulnerable to rising seas. The shallow offshore shelf in the Gulf serves as a launching pad for storms racing up to the Panhandle, such as Ivan (2004) and Michael (2018). Coupled with the massive inflow of people and an unrelenting land boom, Florida is uniquely vulnerable. More than $1 trillion worth of property straddles the coast, including more than a million properties in what FEMA euphemistically calls a “special flood hazard area.” Florida, one clever writer recently observed, is a “vast harvest of risky building.”

It is also a meteorologist’s nightmare, a veritable shooting gallery for hurricanes. The Sunshine State has experienced five of the most powerful hurricanes in history: unnamed Category 4 hurricanes in 1947, 1948, and 1949; 1960’s Hurricane Donna, a Category 4; and 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5. Now add Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, which was one of the most powerful hurricanes in the Gulf’s history. The state is low and vulnerable, effectively sinking in places. It is crisscrossed with lagoons, lakes, and estuaries. During king tides and full moons, some residents of Miami are trapped in their houses by rising water. Over time, state regulators have adopted stronger building codes. But those only help so much, and hurricane damage keeps rising. Nor can regulators elevate an entire state or build a wall high or long enough to barricade a coastline more than a thousand miles long. Even if they did, water would likely seep beneath the walls. Widening beaches helps in the short run, but at an increasing cost. Some areas of Florida are running out of sand, and at least one city has explored importing sand from the Bahamas. In 2017, the research arm of the real estate company Zillow estimated that rising seas could swallow upward of a million Florida homes. The houses — and not just the mortgages — would literally be underwater.

Of course, the risks extend well beyond Florida. Some of the fastest-growing areas in the nation are located along the hurricane-prone Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, where the combined population has vaulted from about 16 million in 1940 to nearly 70 million today, with fresh new suburban communities dotting the shorelines and marshes.

“There was a period of time when it was relatively quiet for hurricanes (1960–1990), and a lot of this building happened,” Klotzbach said in an interview with me. “They haven’t lived through a bad hurricane, and have no idea what it’s like.”

* * *

In 2015, FEMA published a list of all the natural disasters in the last two decades that had cost federal taxpayers $500 million or more in emergency aid and recovery efforts. Fourteen of the fifteen disasters were hurricanes (93 percent), underlining the vulnerability of property at the coast and the nation’s escalating hurricane problem. The lone exception was the Midwest floods in 2008.

Another revealing data point was that major hurricanes — those listed as Category 3 to Category 5 — accounted for three-fourths of the $90 billion that the federal agency spent on aid in that period. Bigger, punishing storms like Sandy and Katrina are gouging the heavily developed coastline and consuming larger shares of the agency’s budget.

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The FEMA report didn’t include all the federal costs from hurricanes, only emergency aid. Nor did it cover the 2017–2018 hurricanes, which, combined, will cost the agency additional billions. Including Harvey, Irma, and Maria, hurricanes account for 100 percent of the agency’s most expensive disasters since 2000.

It needs to be acknowledged that government spending is full of kinks, making it hard to know the exact price tag for some disasters. Historical data aren’t always available or reported consistently, with disaster recovery programs scattered across numerous federal agencies. Nevertheless, based on figures that FEMA and other agencies have published, it is safe to say that federal taxpayers have spent at least $500 billion since 1950 responding to hurricanes and coastal storms, including over $350 billion in the last decade alone, a phenomenon that some researchers have likened to a “stealth entitlement” that primarily benefits the wealthy.

In his revealing 1999 study of federal disaster spending, the University of Massachusetts geographer Rutherford H. Platt coined a nice phrase, “the federalization of disasters,” to capture the growing inclination of politicians and bureaucrats to declare every disaster a federal disaster, followed by a gusher of government funds to help pay for the recovery.

“The law since 1950 was always that federal assistance should be secondary to local assistance. It should be a residual level of protection, not the major level of protection,” Platt told me in an interview in 1998. “But clearly the politics have changed.”

But it wasn’t only the politics that shifted; it was the public’s attitudes as well. There was a growing expectation among coastal property owners, mayors, and governors that federal dollars would flow their way after hurricanes to help underwrite their recovery. In the 1970s, FEMA administrators pointed out the distorting effects of this shift in attitudes, noting that “first-dollar coverage” by the government (versus private insurance or homeowners paying for their own repairs) subsidized risky building in floodplains and encouraged owners of coastal property to forego private insurance. In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.

David A. Moss, a professor at the Harvard Business School, has linked the increased federal role in disaster spending to passage of the Disaster Relief Act of 1950, which created a permanent disaster-relief fund and gave the president broad discretionary power to decide when a disaster is eligible for federal dollars. Afterward, Congress and various administrations dramatically expanded disaster aid “in most cases with little debate or controversy,” Moss wrote in his 1999 study, “Courting Disaster.” As a consequence, “Americans increasingly expected protection against an ever-widening array of hazards.”

In effect, the government was creating a moral hazard by rewarding reckless behavior and then serving as the primary insurer when catastrophe struck.

Indeed, federal payouts for hurricane damage have increased virtually in lockstep with coastal development. In the 1950s, when the modern coast was just beginning to develop, the federal government covered about 5 percent of the cost of rebuilding after hurricanes. By 2012, the federal share had ballooned to 70 percent on average, and even higher for some storms. That year, after Hurricane Sandy inundated the New Jersey shore, Congress agreed to pay for 100 percent of some damage, including repairing the beaches in front of millionaires’ beach houses. Viewed by decades, the federal share climbed from 3.3 percent in 1927 to 12.8 percent in 1964, to 48 percent in 1972, to 52.5 percent in 1993, according to Moss. And now, 70 percent in the 2000s. “We shouldn’t be doing first-dollar coverage,” Craig Fugate, the head of FEMA during the Obama administration, told me in an interview. “We need to have incentives for states to take more ownership.”

But the politics of federal disaster aid are fraught, making it difficult, if not impossible, for federal officials to question spending decisions or to link funding to zoning and land-use decisions. There is a powerful incentive among coastal politicians to get as much money as possible for their constituents. And, for the most part, the generous approach of Congress is bipartisan, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle watching out for one another.

There are some exceptions, especially in today’s toxic political environment. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, conservative Republicans from Texas, South Carolina, and several other red states voted against emergency disaster funding for New Jersey and New York, both blue states. Both Texas senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against the initial aid package. Cornyn’s spokesman tweeted that the senator believed the multimillion package included “extraneous money for items unrelated to disaster relief.” Cruz declared that “two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.” Congress eventually passed a $50.5 million Sandy disaster bill. But in 2017, both Cornyn and Cruz lobbied for tax deductions and massive federal aid for Texas after Hurricane Harvey flooded thousands of homes in their districts.

“A colleague of mine once said there are no conservatives in disasters,” Fugate told me. “You know who the only politician is who never asked me for help? It was Rand Paul’s father, Ron” — the former Texas congressman and libertarian candidate for president. “One thing a politician doesn’t want to do is tell their constituents no. No one wins votes by voting against disaster packages.”

Near the end of his tenure, in 2016, Fugate proposed adding a deductible to the disaster-aid process. Essentially, it would have worked the same way an insurance deductible works. Before a beach town or coastal state could tap into federal disaster dollars, it would have to spend a fixed amount of its own funds, thus ensuring it had “some skin in the game,” Fugate said.

The proposal was backed by fiscal conservatives and environmentalists alike, “which kind of led me to think it might be a good idea,” Fugate explained. “But it took me too long to get through the gates of the Obama administration. And then Trump came in and he didn’t spike it, but it hasn’t been something they’ve gotten to.”

* * *

Congress occasionally tinkers with the rules for disaster aid in an effort to constrain spending. Yet lawmakers have added a startling assortment of programs to rebuild houses; repair roads, bridges, and water treatment plants; clear roads and haul away storm debris; pump sand onto eroding beaches; fix damaged jetties, groins, and seawalls; provide low-interest home and business loans; and distribute checks of up to $33,000 to families to cover short-term rentals, food, clothing, and living expenses; not to mention an array of tax breaks for property losses, depreciation, and mortgage interest for second homes — all of which help inflate the value of coastal real estate and encourage rebuilding in the wake of damaging storms.

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New Jersey officials used about $2 billion of the federal aid they got after Sandy to fund a massive rebuilding effort at the shore. The goal was to get the state back in business as quickly as possible. Virtually overnight, the Christie administration transformed the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs into a housing agency, awarding grants of up to $150,000 to owners of flood-damaged homes. The program was hampered by staff turnover, delays, and fraud. Eligibility rules seemed to shift every few weeks, leading some homeowners to complain that they needed an MBA to wade through the mountains of paperwork. Local construction and zoning offices were also overwhelmed and often provided contradictory advice.

For months, no one seemed to know how many feet that homeowners should elevate their houses to get above the flood risk. The federal flood maps were outdated, and different agencies gave different advice. “I’d walk into one office and they’d tell me one thing, and I’d walk into the office next door and they would tell me something completely different,” said Chuck Griffin, a seventy-year-old retiree. His modest Mystic Island bungalow in Ocean County was flooded with six feet of water. Griffin gutted it and started repairs himself but ran out of money and hope. He waited years for help, camping out in his cold, dark, empty bungalow for several weeks. Finally, with the help of a nonprofit, he qualified for state help. And in fall 2017, he moved into a new modular house on the same lot, elevated ten feet above sea level. It was a slog, but at least he was finally home, he said.

Governor Christie talked about building back smarter and stronger. But it was never clear what that meant, because other than generalities, the administration never explained what it wanted the state’s coast to look like in an age of rising water and more ferocious storms. Most decisions involving land use and zoning were still left to the beach towns.

Remarkably, no one in the federal government questioned the governor’s approach, let alone asked why the state was effectively bribing its citizens to build back in harm’s way.

“I think Governor Christie saw planning as a delay to building back,” said John A. Miller, an engineer and floodplain manager who testified and wrote about the state’s recovery plan. “There was never any plan or a vision. It was a very, very short-term vision, and pretty much just called for putting things back so the beach resorts could be up and running again. We’re not going to recognize sea level. God forbid we do any long-term planning. The farther out the recovery got, the less interested the governor seemed.”

By 2015–2016, the state’s newspapers were reporting that Christie was out of the state campaigning more than he was in it. By then, the governor was running for president, and among many claims, he touted how he had saved the state from Hurricane Sandy. “When the worst natural disaster in your state’s history hits you, they expect you to rebuild the state, which is what I’ve done,” he told fans along the campaign trail.

One thing Christie was good at was tapping federal disaster dollars to fund a resettlement program in which homeowners received $10,000 cash grants to return to their damaged homes. The only requirement was that they had to promise to remain there for three years. There were no income guidelines; rich and poor alike were eligible. At least some of those who collected checks lived out of state. Remarkably, no one in the federal government questioned the governor’s approach, let alone asked why the state was effectively bribing its citizens to build back in harm’s way.

* * *

There is a kind of permissive elegance to disaster relief that filters through government agencies, programs, and rules. Requests for federal aid begin at the state level and then are forwarded to FEMA, which makes a recommendation to the president. In theory, a disaster is supposed to exceed a state’s financial ability to respond. But the threshold used to define financial ability is, to put it mildly, generous. For decades, FEMA used a figure of $1 per capita for each of a state’s citizens. So, if New Jersey had seven million residents, the state had to document just $7 million worth of damage to trigger a federal disaster declaration and access recovery dollars. Surprisingly, the $1 trigger wasn’t adjusted for inflation for years. As a result, even modest coastal storms qualified for federal aid. FEMA was effectively marking on a curve, so everyone got an A or a B. Meanwhile, final decisions in the Oval Office were “often influenced by congressional and media attention,” Rutherford Platt said, further undermining the process.

With such a low bar, the number of federal disaster declarations climbed steadily, with 1,300 federal disasters declared in the last three decades alone. The loosening of eligibility standards prompted the normally cautious Congressional Research Service to declare the aid packages an entitlement. “As long as victims (public or individuals) meet eligibility requirements, they are entitled to disaster relief assistance. While this ensures that relief is provided to all victims (regardless of economic need) it may be a potentially expensive arrangement,” the researchers noted in a 1998 study.

There are “way too many federal declarations, and way too many of them are not really beyond the capability of state and local government to handle,” said Larry Larson, the former director of the national Association of State Floodplain Managers, and one of the nation’s more thoughtful observers of government-disaster policies.

With such a low bar, the number of federal disaster declarations climbed steadily, with 1,300 federal disasters declared in the last three decades alone.

To make sure that copious funds are available for their states, members of Congress have resorted to a form of budgetary chicanery, using emergency supplemental appropriations to fund disasters instead of setting an annual bud get for disaster spending. As a result, the unchecked spending directly adds to the nation’s cascading deficit, now about $1 trillion annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

By my count, Congress has approved seventeen separate supplemental appropriations from 2003 to 2018, totaling $210 billion. That includes $120 billion for the 2017 hurricanes in Texas, Puerto Rico, and Florida. The growing reliance on off-budget maneuvers raises a variety of issues, the Congressional Research Service observed in a 2010 study. For one, lawmakers are able to move funding streams through Congress on an expedited basis with minimal debate. For another, they can exceed discretionary spending limits designed to reduce the federal deficit. The supplemental allocations are also hard to track, allowing states to use funds for projects that appear far removed from the disaster. Following Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey officials were criticized for using disaster dollars to build low-income housing and fund repairs at an apartment complex over fifty miles from the coast.

* * *

By law, if not always in practice, beach towns and coastal communities are supposed to contribute toward their own recoveries. The amounts vary by program but can be substantial. For example, in 1988, Congress stipulated that local governments should pay a quarter of the cost of repairing government buildings, parks, roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure damaged in storms, with FEMA covering the other 75 percent.

But coastal lawmakers often step in after disasters to help lower or eliminate the required local payments. A 2010 study by the Congressional Research Service found 222 instances since 1986 in which Congress, FEMA, or the president either reduced the local share or expanded the time period in which coastal communities were eligible to collect federal disaster aid, resulting in higher federal spending. Federal waivers eliminating any local contribution at all have also become more common, the researchers reported, especially after large storms such as Katrina and Sandy.

The most popular target for waivers is FEMA’s Public Assistance program, by far the largest and most expensive in the government’s cupboard of disaster-relief programs. Since 2000, FEMA has awarded more than $45 billion in grants to beach towns and coastal states to scoop sand off high- ways, repair damaged water lines, rebuild town halls, and pay overtime for police, among an array of eligible expenses, federal records show. Local shore towns were supposed to pay a quarter of the costs. But in dozens of cases involving Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, FEMA agreed to cover 100 percent of the repairs.

In another wrinkle, FEMA allows states to use federal dollars to cover their required “local” contributions, thus defeating the purpose of the cost-share. New Jersey used $54.5 million from FEMA to cover its required share while rebuilding a damaged highway in Ocean County. It used another $25 million to cover its share for three other projects, records show.

Altogether, New Jersey received $1.2 billion to cart away debris following Hurricane Sandy. It got $1.6 billion for police and emergency workers, $1.8 billion to repair public buildings, and $2.5 billion to fix broken utilities. In 2012, Governor Christie asked FEMA to cover 100 percent of the cost.

I reviewed more than four thousand Sandy Public Assistance grants and found more than a few surprises. For example, FEMA spent $75 million to repair boardwalks for beach resorts in Belmar, Atlantic City, and elsewhere; $32 million to fix a seawall damaged by the storm; and over $100 million for broken lifeguard stands, gazebos, lampposts, garbage cans, restrooms, and marinas. It paid tens of millions to buy new cars and replace vehicles damaged by saltwater, and to patch sand dunes and replace wooden crossovers and dune fences. It also replaced docks and bulkheads, traffic signals, benches, and cameras. FEMA allocated $204,000 to repair a hockey rink in Monmouth County and $194,000 for a baseball field in Bergen County, a hundred miles from the coast; it awarded $168,000 for an ice house in Monmouth County. It also paid to fix tennis courts, streetlights, rowing clubs, and restaurants. It even paid for spoiled food.

Applying for Public Assistance money has become an industry unto itself, requiring full-time attention and specialized help. “The paperwork is unbelievable,” groused the Long Beach Township mayor Joe Mancini. “You have to make sure you hit every box. If you don’t, they’ll say you don’t qualify.”

For that reason, Mancini and many other coastal mayors hire consultants to wade through the paperwork and maximize FEMA payments. Some prominent consultants are former FEMA managers and administrators. And if for some reason FEMA still says no, the towns can always turn to their congressional representatives to lobby agency officials.

It must work. Long Beach Township has received over $13 million in Sandy Public Assistance grants to date, with millions more expected. It received $2.5 million for police and emergency workers, $80,000 for a modular trailer, $110,290 to replace damaged dune fencing, $5,000 for benches, $390,000 to repair streets, $165,000 for a comfort station, $67,000 for street signs, and $3 million to remove debris. It still has open claims for trash containers, fire hydrants, a tennis court, a gazebo, and restrooms. In most cases, federal taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the cost, township records show.

“The program exists. We’d be fools not to take advantage of it,” the mayor told me.

Brock Long, Fugate’s replacement as FEMA director in the Trump administration, suggested in 2017 that a disaster deductible or some other approach was needed to reduce federal disaster spending. “I don’t think the taxpayer should reward risk going forward,” he told Insurance Journal. “We have to find ways to comprehensively become more resilient.”

But as of this writing, the deductible remains an idea, not a reality, and federal spending keeps rising. Long, who became mired in an ethical quandary involving his use of government automobiles for personal use, announced in February 2019 that he was leaving his federal post. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office warned in a 2016 working paper, “Damage from hurricanes is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades because of the effects of climate change and coastal development. In turn, potential requests for federal relief and recovery efforts will increase as well.”

***

Gilbert M. Gaul twice won the Pulitzer Prize and has been short-listed for the Pulitzer four other times. For more than thirty-five years, he worked as an investigative journalist for The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. He is the author of three previous books and lives in New Jersey.

Excerpted from The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America’s Coasts by Gilbert M. Gaul. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2019 by Gilbert M. Gaul. All rights reserved.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Tuesday, June 22, 2021

U.S. extends travel restrictions at Canada, Mexico land borders through July 21 (Reuters) U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least July 21, the U.S. Homeland Security Department said on Sunday. The 30-day extension came after Canada announced its own extension on Friday of the requirements that were set to expire on Monday and have been in place since March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Bipartisanship Has Sailed (NBC News) President Biden’s desire for bipartisan support for his legislative priorities definitely seems like wishful thinking. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is unequivocal when he says he is “one-hundred percent” focused on stopping any legislation the Biden administration wants to advance, or any Supreme Court vacancies they’d like to fill. In reality, with a 50-50 split in the Senate, and one of those Democrats—Joe Manchin (D-WV)—relishing his power to hold up progress, Democrats will simply stay stuck between a rock and a hard place, unless they’re willing to scale back their bills in an attempt to at least keep their caucus together.

Rhode Island Makes Financial Literacy A Required Class For All High School Students (Morning News) Forget high school financial literacy for a moment––adult financial literacy in America is shockingly low. The U.S. national debt recently soared past $30 trillion, leaving pensioners and younger generations wondering how the federal government will meet all its outstanding obligations. If Congress can’t even set a balanced budget, what hope is there for the rest of us? Meanwhile over half of U.S. adults say they’re financially anxious, and over three quarters live paycheck to paycheck. One Rhode Island school is leading the way to a better future. Personal finance classes at Tolman High School are preparing students to be financially responsible adults as they make their way in the world. Class of ‘21 salutatorian Hanatha Konte told reporters at the Breeze, “The classes really broke everything down for me in a way I understood.” The success of teaching students how to manage money and balance their household finances has led Rhode Island to pass a bill requiring the class for all high schoolers in the state.

Claudette regains tropical storm strength after 13 deaths (AP) Claudette regained tropical storm status Monday morning as it neared the coast of the Carolinas less than two days after 13 people died—including eight children in a multi-vehicle crash—due to the effects of the storm in Alabama. Monday morning, Claudette had maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 kph), the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory. The storm was located 65 miles (100 kilometers) east-southeast of Raleigh, North Carolina, and moving east-northeast at 25 mph (41 kph), forecasters said. The storm was expected to move into the Atlantic Ocean later in the morning, then travel near or south of Nova Scotia on Tuesday.

Fear shakes Mexico border city after violence leaves 18 dead (AP) Fear has invaded the Mexican border city of Reynosa after gunmen in vehicles killed 14 people, including taxis drivers, workers and a nursing student, and security forces responded with operations that left four suspects dead. While this city across the border from McAllen, Texas is used to cartel violence as a key trafficking point, the 14 victims in Saturday’s attacks appeared to be what Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca called “innocent citizens” rather than members of one gang killed by a rival. The attacks took place in several neighborhoods in eastern Reynosa, according to the Tamaulipas state agency that coordinates security forces, and sparked a deployment of the military, National Guard and state police across the city. Images posted on social media showed bodies in the streets. Local businessman Misael Chavarria Garza said many businesses closed early Saturday after the attacks and people were very scared as helicopters flew overhead.

Colombians have thronged to anti-government protests. Hundreds have gone missing. (Washington Post) Juan Esteban Torres left his home on the afternoon of May 18 to join an anti-government protest in Caldas, Colombia. Millions across the country had taken to the streets in daily demonstrations against rising poverty, inequality and police brutality. Torres, his brother says, believed they deserved support. Security camera footage gathered by his family shows the 27-year-old walking between the protest and his home. No one has seen him since. “We said goodbye,” Daniel Torres said, “and we never saw him again.” While many of the thousands of demonstrations that have roiled Colombia over the last two months have been peaceful, security forces have responded to some with force, including 20 deaths through June 7. Now protesters and human rights advocates say they’re seeing the revival of another familiar tactic from Colombia’s long civil conflict: disappearances. Hundreds of people in the South American nation have gone missing since the protests erupted in late April. According to the attorney general’s office, 84 remain unaccounted for. Advocates say this is the first time they’ve seen so many disappearances associated with demonstrations.

Far right falters as conservatives lead French regional vote (AP) Marine Le Pen’s far-right party stumbled, French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists crashed and incumbent conservatives surged ahead in the first round of regional elections Sunday that were dominated by security issues and a record-low turnout. What was meant to be a vote centered on local concerns like transportation, schools and infrastructure turned into a dress rehearsal for next year’s presidential vote, as would-be presidential hopefuls seized on the regional campaign to test ideas and win followers. Macron’s rivals on left and right notably denounced his government’s handling of the pandemic. The wrangling appeared to turn off some voters, and less than 34% showed up, according to polling agencies.

West hits Belarus with new sanctions over Ryanair 'piracy' (Reuters) Western powers hit Belarus with a wave of new sanctions on Monday in a coordinated response to Minsk’s forced landing of a Ryanair plane last month to arrest a journalist on board, an act that is set to prompt further economic sanctions. The European Union, the United States, Britain and Canada blacklisted more officials, lawmakers and ministers from the administration of President Alexander Lukashenko, whose air force intercepted the Ryanair plane flying between Athens and Vilnius on May 23 in what the West called state piracy. In Monday’s mix of travel bans, asset freezes and sanctions on state-owned Belarusian companies, Western governments sought to escalate their pressure on Lukashenko, who is accused of rigging elections last August and cracking down on the opposition to prolong his now 27 years in power. There was no immediate reaction from Lukashenko who has denied rigging the vote, accused the arrested journalist Roman Protasevich of plotting a revolution, and increasingly turned to Russia for support.

Taliban Enter Key Cities in Afghanistan’s North After Swift Offensive (NYT) The Taliban entered two provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan Sunday, local officials said, the culmination of an insurgent offensive that has overrun dozens of rural districts and forced the surrender and capture of hundreds of government forces and their military equipment in recent weeks. In Kunduz city, the capital of the province of the same name, the Taliban seized the city’s entrance before dispersing throughout its neighborhoods. Kunduz was briefly taken by the Taliban in 2015 and 2016 before they were pushed back by American airstrikes, special operations forces and Afghan security forces. The setbacks come at a harrowing moment for Afghanistan. American and international troops, now mostly based in Kabul, the capital, and at Bagram airfield, are set to leave the country in weeks.

Iran’s nuclear power (Foreign Policy) Iran’s only nuclear power plant experienced an unexplained emergency shutdown on Sunday that authorities say could last through the week. Tavanir, Iran’s state electric company, said that repair work would continue until Friday but offered no further details. Gholamali Rakhshanimehr, an official with Tavanir, has warned of power outages as a result of the plant shutdown.

Hong Kong’s Lam says China has helped restore ‘stability’ (The Hill) The chief executive of Hong Kong on Sunday said China has helped restore “stability” in the city. Reuters reported that Chief Executive Carrie Lam said Hong Kong’s strategy to improve its standing as a global financial hub involves an increase in integration with mainland China. Lam’s comments come as non-Chinese investors in Hong Kong are becoming increasingly concerned that rights and freedoms are disappearing in the city, after Beijing imposed a national security law following mass protests in 2019, Reuters reported.

Tokyo Olympics to allow limit of 10,000 local fans in venues (AP) The Tokyo Olympics will allow some local fans to attend when the games open in just over a month, organizing committee officials and the IOC said on Monday. Organizers set a limit of 50% of capacity up to a maximum of 10,000 fans for all Olympic venues. Fans from abroad were banned several months ago. Officials say local fans will be under strict rules. They will not be allowed to cheer, must wear masks, and are being told to go straight home afterward.

Ethiopia’s historic election overshadowed by crises and conflict (Washington Post) Ethiopia is set to hold a twice-delayed national election on Monday in what the government has heralded as a long-awaited emergence into multiparty democracy. But a cascade of major crises in Africa’s second-most populous country has thrown the vote into disarray, leaving millions unable to vote. Foremost among them is a disastrous seven-month-old civil war in the northern region of Tigray. All sides have been accused of war crimes, and humanitarian groups say hundreds of thousands in Tigray are experiencing famine conditions. The election itself has been weakened by widespread insecurity, logistical issues and political disputes. Tigray will not take part in the vote at all, and about a fifth of polling stations in the rest of the country will not open on Monday because of security concerns or improperly printed ballots, according to the country’s election commission. The closed polling stations tend to be in areas where opposition parties claim support. Those closures as well as the jailing of numerous prominent government critics have led some of the country’s biggest opposition parties to boycott the election.

#headlines #news

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Gary Shteyngart boarded a Greyhound bus in summer 2016 as research for his latest novel, Lake Success — a journey that his protagonist, the hedge fund manager Barry Cohen, would take as well. He wanted to learn about the America between the coasts. Shteyngart’s cross-country Greyhound trip lasted four months and included stops at eight cities, including Raleigh, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; and El Paso, Texas.

The resulting book is a critical and humanizing portrait of the people who work in Wall Street, as well as an insightful view about what Americans were feeling leading up to the 2016 election.

Shteyngart, who immigrated to the US from Russia, is the best-selling author of Super Sad True Love Story, Little Failure, and other works that frequently take aim at elite American culture. His latest novel is equally critical of Wall Street, rural America, and liberal writers. Cohen, the protagonist, grew up blue-collar, married a first-generation Indian woman, and “considered himself entirely self-made,” a rationalization he uses throughout the book to justify his work in the financial sector.

When I asked Shteyngart why he wanted to explore the idea of being self-made in America, he told me, “I saw many people in finance who would say, ‘I hate Occupy Wall Street, all these people. They don’t know how hard I work’ — as if hard work was the justification for everything that they do.”

I spoke to Shteyngart about what being an American means to him, his thoughts on Russia’s involvement in American politics, and why you, too, should get on a Greyhound bus.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese

Your story begins with Cohen tossing his cellphone and wallet into the trash and boarding a Greyhound bus. Is the Greyhound an equalizer for Americans?

Gary Shteyngart

I think the East Coast or West Coast existence is a very particular kind of existence. We really are protected from what life is like for most people in this country. I think the Greyhound is, as you said, the great equalizer. You get on and a whole world opens up. Every single type of person was on the bus. It was an eye-opener. Some of those people were horrifying; I met white supremacists along the way, just as Barry meets them during his trip. In 2016, it gave me a clearer snapshot of this country than almost anything I’d ever done.

By the time I got off the bus, in the summer of 2016, I wasn’t sure Hillary [Clinton] was going to win. It was my first inkling that things might not go the way everybody thought they were going to go. Get on that bus is my advice.

Hope Reese

What did Barry learn from traveling on the Greyhound? Do you think he got an accurate picture of the country?

Gary Shteyngart

By the time he gets off the Greyhound, I don’t think Barry has learned very much. He wanted to have this experience that he could talk about. The next thing you see, he’s at a posh hedge fund party on Central Park West and he’s talking about his experience. Because so much of what people who are really wealthy try to do is capture some sense of authenticity — so they’ll fly to some poor village in Uzbekistan and hang out with the baker and something like that.

Barry kind of does that. But after a certain number of years have passed, the experience starts to catch up with him. It’s not that he learns; it’s almost like a sense of harm reduction. “Do no harm,” as they say. He, hopefully, becomes this less harmful person.

Hope Reese

Many people on the left are critical of Wall Street, of people like Barry. Yet you were able to turn him into a somewhat sympathetic character. Do you think the Wall Street critics are missing something?

Gary Shteyngart

No, I don’t think so. I think they’ve got it right about what [the finance industry] does to the world, the inequality they create. To the way they generate income, very loosely taxed income for a very small number of people — obviously it’s a zero-sum game in some ways, and it takes money away from other people.

The challenge I pose to myself is how do you write about somebody who has his own hedge fund for whom you can still, toward the end of the book, capture a glimmer of this humanity? Look, Barry’s not Pol Pot exactly, but at the same time, he has very few redeeming qualities.

Mostly, it’s a book about self-delusion. The way Barry perceives himself — socially liberal, fiscally conservative — is so at odds with the footprint that he actually leaves upon the world. The book is an examination of that. My biggest dream is that somebody comes up to me after reading it and says, “You know, I work in finance and I read your book and I love it. Maybe I should try something else.” That would be the icing on the cake.

Hope Reese

Barry’s neighbor Luis Goodman, a writer, is also subject to scrutiny in the novel. He turns out to be a narcissist who makes huge fees giving talks at universities. During dinner one night, Barry asks him, “How do you monetize your art?” As a writer yourself, how do you view that scene?

Gary Shteyngart

The book takes place all over the country, but in many ways it’s a satire and a put-down of a certain branch of a certain New York society, which includes hedge funders, media people, successful novelists like Luis. Everyone is almost a part of the same problem. Obviously, someone like Luis does a lot less harm than Barry. But Luis also is on the make culturally, economically, and every way possible. Barry lacks a self-awareness, but Luis has this self-awareness, and he uses it for ends that are not necessarily great.

The people I met on my journey across this country, the people that I loved and whose lives seemed the most balanced, were people who didn’t live in New York or San Francisco. They lived in slower communities where they actually made a difference, where they lived middle-class lives but they actually participated in their communities — professors at public universities is an example. People working with the first generation of working-class groups. Of course, you can work and teach in a community in New York and have a similar experience.

New York is a corrupting city in many ways. The proximity to this kind of wealth, I think, takes away some sense of reality and authenticity from good people too.

Hope Reese

What does the American dream mean to these characters? What does it mean to you?

Gary Shteyngart

In the book, there’s not much American dream left as Barry goes across the country. He doesn’t encounter very much. It’s sort of the leftovers of the American dream. The book says the American dream exists only for this urban, chiefly New York, perhaps Silicon Valley sliver of society where somebody can make enough of an outside income that there’s hope for the next generation and for the generation after that.

Barry’s clinging to the remnants of the American dream, but he’s still under the illusion that everything’s hunky-dory in America — that the rest of the country still has a chance. Meanwhile, people like him and his wife and their colleagues are hogging all of the opportunity.

There’s this constant feeling of, “Well, I’ve worked so hard and it’s a meritocracy, and that’s why I achieved so much.” I think you hear this a lot from people [in] finance and other fields. But I think the book in some ways deflates this idea that it’s a meritocracy. Barry meets a fellow, a former hedge funder named Jeff Park, who says, “Look, you got lucky and you were in the right place at the right time. You’re a white guy. That’s how you got to where you are.”

Hope Reese

Going back to the immigrant experience, this [came] to the surface in a really dramatic way when the Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the border, which was later reversed. A recent federal filing stated that 565 children are still separated from their families. What are your thoughts on that, especially as an immigrant yourself?

Gary Shteyngart

That may be the gravest sort of thing that America could ever experience — the idea that it is no longer a country welcoming to immigrants. We’ve had this before as well. There’s been many times in American history where people have stood up and complained about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, etc. This is just a part of who we are. But having children ripped out of the hands of their parents is something that, in modern history, shows a kind of anger and aggressiveness that’s always been there but was never in direct power.

We’re a violent country. We always have been. There’s always people who have been hurt and killed. Large parts of this country are loving it. They love the idea that parents and children are being separated and sent home and all of this stuff. Even as this country relies on labor from Mexico and Central America for everything. Even in the rural counties, so much of the hard work that nobody else will do — agricultural work, handiwork, all of it — is being done by people from Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

It’s just this incredible burst of anger that as an adult, I’ve certainly never thought would happen in this country.

Hope Reese

Another major issue in current politics is the ongoing Russia investigation. How do you see this, as a Russian immigrant yourself?

Gary Shteyngart

I was raised as a Republican kid, and Russia was considered the most dangerous country in the world [by both parties]. But the fact that the [Republicans] changed, they’ve shifted their opinion so radically and are now supporting the right-wing regime of Russia, is really just amazing and so cynical. There’s no greater danger right now than Russia’s influence across the world.

You know, in a way, they were able to accomplish what they could never accomplish during the Cold War. Of course, there was always what they called active measures and ways to influence the Western world to create divisions and schisms. But this time, they nailed it. They couldn’t have nailed it, I think, without the existence of social media, without those channels. They finally found the technology that most matches their methods of disinformation.

Hope Reese

Seema, Barry’s wife, says she wants to be “a little less American” because she believes America is “dying.” Is that an extreme view?

Gary Shteyngart

You basically have a ban that’s been approved by the Supreme Court against people of a certain religion. Today it’s Muslims. Tomorrow, it’s somebody else. Remember, until 1965, there were laws like limits to immigration from Asia. For a while, it seemed like we were becoming a society that could appreciate people from everywhere. But the multiculturalism really centered in specific parts of the country. It didn’t extend throughout. Now we see the backlash to that — but if that changes, people will go somewhere else.

People forget that societies rise and fall. The idea that America was a superpower for 100 years — who’s to say it’s destined to be a superpower for the next 200 years or 100 years or 10 years? Everything that’s being done now is being done to dismantle our position in the world.

Hope Reese

Do you struggle with your own American identity?

Gary Shteyngart

My parents did one right thing, for sure, which was they took me out of Russia when things got bad. [In America,] we all know right now we’re on the path of authoritarianism. There’s no question about it, with certain authoritarian tendencies already kicking in. When does one leave?

It’s not easy, as my own experience shows. It’s not easy to be an immigrant for the adults or the children involved. But one thing I know is that now that I have a kid; I don’t want to raise them in a society that I wouldn’t admire.

Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Playboy, Vox, and other publications. Find her on Twitter @hope_reese.

Original Source -> Gary Shteyngart on his new book, which explores the self-delusion of Wall Street bankers

via The Conservative Brief

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afrolatinxsunited · 3 years ago

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Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

From the May/June 2021 issue

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

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dentalshare-blog · 7 years ago

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America’s Dental Gap Has Left People Relying on Pliers, Chisels, and Whiskey

September went out hot in East Tennessee. Caleb didn’t  mind; he parked his lawn chair in a shallow pool of shade, clipped a small fan to its arm, lit a cigarette, and settled back to wait. It would be more than 12 hours before the free medical clinic opened its doors. Caleb had read about the clinic online, and that it was best to get there early. Hundreds of people were expected to show up. Caleb had driven up from Georgia to get a cracked tooth pulled. He’s a lean, hard-looking man with a scar running vertically down from his lower lip, the result of a getting bitten by a dog. His teeth are yellowed, many of them dark brown at the gum line. A few years ago, Caleb paid more than $2,000 to have three teeth extracted by a professional, a price that he considered ridiculous. He works odd jobs but wanted me to know that he isn’t poor: He earns enough to own his house and car. “But there’s nothing in the back pocket,” he explained. Since then he’s resorted to pulling teeth on his own, with a pair of hog-ring pliers that he modified for the job. One time he messed up and crushed an aching tooth, leaving a jagged stump embedded in his jaw; he went after that with a chisel and a hammer. He saved a neighbor $300 recently, he claimed, by pulling a tooth for him. “You know what that cost him? Two and a half shots of Wild Turkey 101.” On the ground beside Caleb sat Michael Sumers, a fellow Georgian with a long neck and wide, darting eyes. Sumers, who never saw a dentist as a child, hoped to get his remaining 14 teeth pulled. He’s only 46 years old. His mouth has hurt him almost constantly for the last five years, but he hasn’t been able to afford any help. Sumers lives on his disability check, and after paying $700 a month in rent, he doesn’t have much left. “I can’t eat steak without my teeth breaking,” he admitted.Chicken is what broke one of Jessica Taylor’s teeth. Another two were broken by her ex-husband’s fist, when he hit her in the mouth during a fight. I found Taylor sitting on the ground, her back to a tree, a pizza box beside her. “Now I’m here,” she said, explaining why she’d come to the clinic, “and he’s in hell.” Over on the far side of the lot, a group of women sat around a small barbecue grill, smoking cigarettes and flipping burgers: Beverly, April, Darlene, and Donna, a woman with a thin face and gray hair scraped back into a ponytail. All of them hoped to get their teeth worked on the following morning when the clinic opened. Beverly smiled, showing me how her two front teeth overlapped. Her parents divorced when she was little, Beverly told me, “and forgot which one was supposed to take care of it.” April, her sister, read about the clinic on Facebook and had been the first to pull into the parking lot that morning. At 9 am, when the clinic staff arrived to set up rows of dental chairs, April was there in a pink T-shirt, waiting on the sidewalk.

Of the countless ways in which poverty eats  at the body, one of the most visible, and painful, is in our mouths. Teeth betray age, but also wealth, if they’re pearly and straight, or the emptiness of our pockets, if they’re missing, broken, rotted out. The American health-care system treats routine dental care as a luxury available only to those with the means to pay for it, making it vastly more difficult for millions of Americans to take care of their teeth. And the consequences can be far more profound than just negative effects on one’s appearance. In fact, they can be deadly. Wealthy Americans spend billions of dollars per year, collectively, to improve their smiles. Meanwhile, about a third of all people living in the United States struggle to pay for even basic dental care. The most common chronic illness in school-age children is tooth decay. Nearly a quarter of low-income children have decaying teeth, well above the national average; black and Hispanic children also experience higher rates of untreated decay. Neither Medicaid nor Medicare is required to cover dental procedures for adults, so coverage varies by state, and both the very poor and the elderly are often left to pay out of pocket. (Tennessee provides no dental coverage to anyone over 21.) In those states where Medicaid does cover dental care, benefits are limited. Even middle-class Americans can’t always afford necessary care, as private insurance often will not cover expensive procedures. Dental coverage improved modestly during the Obama administration, through an expansion of Medicaid and the state Children’s Health Insurance Program under the Affordable Care Act, but access remains patchy and wholly inadequate. The situation is made more difficult by the dearth of dentists in low-income communities. Less than half of the country’s dentists will treat Medicaid patients. As one dentist tells journalist Mary Otto in her 2017 book Teeth, while his colleagues “once exclusively focused upon fillings and extractions,” they “are nowadays considered providers of beauty.” Offering cosmetic procedures in wealthy cities and suburbs is far more lucrative than treating people in rural areas and poor neighborhoods—whitening alone is an $11-billion-a-year industry. The result is a geographic imbalance, with dentists clustered around the money. Nearly 55 million people live in areas officially considered to have a shortage of dental-care providers. At the pediatric dental clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, there’s a two-year waiting list for children who need dental surgery that requires anesthesia. All of this explains why Caleb and a few hundred other people slept in a parking lot overnight—in their cars, in tents, or out on the ground—and then gathered in the early-morning dark, waiting for the pop-up clinic to open its doors. Held at a sports arena outside Chattanooga, the clinic is one of dozens operated each year by the nonprofit organization Remote Area Medical. Appalachia is RAM’s home territory, but the group now runs weekend clinics in medically underserved areas across the United States, from California and Texas to Florida and New York, providing basic medical, dental, and vision care—as well as veterinary services,  occasionally—fully free of charge. Dozens of doctors and dentists from across the country volunteer their services. The group’s founder, Stan Brock, was there to open the doors at 6 am. Brock is a tan, trim man of 81 with a clipped English accent; he is also a former wildlife-television star. (A quick search turns up photos of Brock holding a lion cub, a snake fatter than his arm, and a harpy eagle named Jezebel.)The idea for RAM came about after Brock found himself badly injured in a horseback-riding accident in a part of Guyana that was weeks away—on foot—from the nearest doctor. Initially, his intent was to fly doctors and medical supplies into remote regions of the world’s poorest countries. Brock got his pilot’s license and a small plane, and started flying medical missions into Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Brazil. He founded RAM in 1985; a few years later, the mayor of Sneedville in northern Tennessee read about the group’s work in a newspaper. The local hospital had closed and the only dentist had left town, so the mayor asked Brock for help. Brock put a dental chair in the back of a pickup truck and drove to Sneedville, where more than 50 people lined up to have their teeth worked on. Ninety percent of RAM’s operations are now in the United States. Little else has changed about the nature of Brock’s work in the two and a half decades since the Sneedville clinic, despite swings of the political pendulum and the passage of numerous health-care reform packages. When I asked Brock about common ailments among the thousands of people who attend RAM clinics each year, he said, “I can tell you that without any hesitation—it’s the same everywhere we go. They’re all there to see the dentist. They’re all there to see the eye doctor. They’re not there to see the medical doctor.” The health-care system treats the eyes and teeth as being distinct from the rest of the body—no matter that an infection that starts in the mouth can move quickly into the bloodstream and then throughout the body. Unlike many other acute physical problems, a cracked tooth or the gradual blurring of vision cannot be fixed in an emergency room. Nevertheless, more than 2 million people show up in the nation’s emergency rooms with dental pain each year, though hospitals can usually do little besides prescribe antibiotics and painkillers.

By the time the sky lightened, nearly 200 people had been ushered into the arena. Outside, the line still wrapped around the building. A woman at the back clutched a ticket numbered 631. Her teeth had been hurting her for a year and a half, but there was no guarantee she’d be seen. Inside, volunteers checked the patients in at rows of folding tables. Dental patients were sent to wait in the bleachers, which filled up quickly. One by one, the people in the bleachers were summoned to a chair overseen by Dr. Joseph Gambacorta, a dean at the School of Dental Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gambacorta peered into their mouths to determine whether they needed fillings, a cleaning, or—as was most often the case—extractions. Thirty-six-year-old Jennifer Beard from Dayton, Tennessee, sat uneasily in the chair, her mouth open. She’d already lost all but eight of her teeth. “What do I need to do? I haven’t been to the dentist in a long time,” she admitted in an apologetic tone. “My mom and dad died, and I lost my job.” It took Gambacorta about 10 seconds to assess the damage: “I hate to tell you this, but you need them all out.” Preventing tooth decay doesn’t necessarily require a lot of money: Toothbrushes and floss don’t cost very much, Gambacorta pointed out. But it does require constant attention, and neglect is serious. One dental student who has volunteered at several RAM clinics told me about a man who arrived with a mouthful of rotting teeth; asked how often he brushed them, he replied, “Well, doc, I don’t.” Diet and habits like smoking also hasten decay. But all these risk factors are amplified by limited access to professional care. When routine care is unaffordable and decay goes untreated, minor problems can become critical. What starts out as a toothache can become an infection in the jawbone, which can then spread to the bloodstream. In one now-famous case initially reported by Mary Otto, a 12-year-old Maryland boy named Deamonte Driver died from an abscessed tooth that would have cost $80 to pull. Driver’s family had lost their Medicaid coverage, and his mother was preoccupied with trying to find a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth. Driver died when the bacteria from his tooth spread to his brain—and after more than $200,000 in surgeries and six weeks in the hospital. “Six, eight, 10, 15, 16, and two,” Gambacorta said briskly to an assistant with a clipboard, naming the teeth that had to be extracted from the head of a fidgety 30-year-old who’d last seen a dentist nearly a decade ago, when he was in Navy boot camp. Gambacorta took a second look. “Are you sure you don’t want the bottom ones out, too?” he asked. “Put 18, 19, 31, and 32 on the list, too.”While some patients’ teeth were so decayed that Gambacorta had no choice but to recommend their removal, he hesitates to turn people into “dental cripples” unnecessarily. “Everyone’s eager to get them all out, but they don’t know what that means for after,” he told me. People assume that having dentures is easier than dealing with their rotted teeth, particularly if they’ve been in pain. But dentures come with their own complications, including the fact that people who use them tend to eat softer, less nutritious foods. On the main floor of the arena, behind a wall of green curtains, stood four parallel rows of dental chairs—50 in all. I found April, still wearing her pink shirt, waiting in chair 22, her gums already numbed. Caleb was in chair 13; he was quiet and nervous, with little of the nonchalance he’d projected the previous afternoon while describing his pliers. Later on, I found him smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, a new gap where his top left tooth had been. “It’s embarrassing,” he said of the gap. Still, he was grateful. He was getting free eyeglasses, too; he hadn’t realized how badly he needed them. Donna grinned at me from chair 25 as a third-year dental student prepared to pull four of her teeth. The first three came out easily, in a matter of minutes. But the fourth was stuck. It took the oral surgeon who was overseeing things a few swings of his right elbow, as if he were flapping a wing, to yank it free. Donna whimpered in pain, but a few minutes later, her mouth stuffed with gauze, she gave me a thumbs-up. The incessant ache she’d lived with for so long had already started to fade.

Over the course of two days, more than  800 people received care from RAM. Sheila Barrow, a pretty woman of 55 with dimples and long blond hair, said it was the fourth RAM clinic she’d attended. This time, she was there to have one tooth filled and another pulled. Barrow has health insurance through Tennessee’s Medicaid program, but no dental or vision coverage. She worked for UPS, but after four knee surgeries, she’s now dependent on disability benefits. “They’ve been a lifesaver,” she said of the free clinics. “I don’t know what I’d do without them.” And yet it was clear that free clinics like RAM’s barely paper over the yawning dental-care gap. On Saturday afternoon, I found Michael Sumers in the parking lot, waiting for a ride home. All of his top teeth were gone. He’d gotten four pulled, not the 14 he was hoping for—there wasn’t enough time. Up in the bleachers, Gambacorta and another volunteer had discussed how to triage patients as it became clear that the need was greater than the number of dentists. Treating everyone in line meant that some people would have to choose between getting a tooth pulled or another one filled. It should be unnecessary to say that a system that requires people to spend the night in a parking lot to see a dentist, or to pull their own teeth with pliers, or that leaves an infected tooth to kill a child, is grotesquely broken. Yet there is no urgency for reform in Washington, particularly with the party in power more inclined toward cutting health benefits. Part of the fault belongs with dentists’ associations, which have fought proposals for a national health-care system as well as smaller-scale reforms, like giving hygienists more autonomy to provide preventive care in public schools. The fault also rests with the policy-makers who have ignored dental care entirely when debating overhauls to the health-insurance system. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings have repeatedly introduced legislation to expand dental coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Department of Veterans Affairs; the latest version, introduced in 2015, never received a committee vote in either chamber. Unless something changes in Washington, Brock predicted, “Remote Area Medical will be holding these events from now until kingdom come—instead of being where we should be, which is the Third World.”

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Five myths about hippies

By Joshua Clark Davis, Washington Post, July 7, 2017

Joshua Clark Davis is a professor of history at the University of Baltimore and the author of “From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs.”

During a special summer 50 years ago, young people from all over America flooded into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in hopes of joining the hippies, a new group of rebellious dreamers vowing to teach anyone who would listen how to find peace, love and happiness. It was the Summer of Love. Reporters and curious tourists came to San Francisco check out these strange kids for themselves. But the deluge of media attention launched a set of spurious myths about the hippies, many of which have been perpetuated by overly nostalgic idealists and unduly harsh critics. Here are five of the most persistent.

MYTH NO. 1: Hippies were a phenomenon of the 1960s. “When people in the early 2000s think about the 1960s, they might think first about the ‘hippies,’” suggests the widely used online educational company Gale. Likewise, the Princeton Review’s SAT guidebook prompts students: “Think about the 1960s. What comes to mind? Maybe it’s the Beatles, dancing hippies, and Vietnam.” Hippies might be the most famous symbol of the 1960s; after all, they emerged in the middle of that decade.

But they didn’t really hit their stride until the early 1970s, when their numbers and influence peaked. The hippies’ drug subculture in the 1960s became youth pop culture in the ‘70s; issues of the stoner magazine High Times, founded in 1974, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Rock-and-roll, once seen as a frivolous hobby for teenagers, became a serious art form and publications such as Rolling Stone became national tastemakers. And a quick perusal of nearly any high school yearbook well into the late ‘70s shows that long hair became standard for teenage boys across the country. Even some of the male teachers had shaggy cuts. Google Books’ Ngram Viewer reveals the trajectory of America’s fascination with the counterculture: The frequency of the term “hippies” peaked in books in 1971 and stayed above 1967 levels until 1977.

MYTH NO. 2: Hippies lived only in coastal cities or rural communes. It’s easy to imagine hippies clustering in California’s Bay Area or among the Ivy League campuses of the Eastern Seaboard. In Scott MacFarlane’s “The Hippie Narrative,” for example, the author points out that Norman Mailer distinguished between “more visionary West Coast” hippies and “practical East Coast” hippies, with not a thought given to those who might have resided somewhere in between. Likewise, “The American Promise,” a high school history textbook, states that “hippie enclaves sprouted in low-rent districts of coastal cities and in rural communities.”

But hippies lived all over the United States, even in small and mid-size cities in the South and Midwest. The earliest flowering of hippie culture took place in coastal cities such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, but head shops--purveyors of psychedelic posters, black lightbulbs and rolling papers--were popping up by 1967 in such cities as Atlanta, Cleveland and Omaha, as well as Austin, Ann Arbor and other college towns. Almost every city had a neighborhood or public place where hippies came together. Washington’s hippies hung out on Dupont Circle, while Baltimore’s gathered at that city’s Washington Monument.

Meanwhile, countercultural newspapers were launched all over the country. To name just a few examples, Middle Earth appeared in Iowa City, Iowa; Chinook in Denver; Kudzu in Jackson, Miss.; and the improbably named Protean Radish in Chapel Hill, N.C.

MYTH NO. 3: Hippies were the ones protesting in the streets. In the popular imagination, hippies with flowers in their hair were at the heart of the antiwar movement. The tumultuous political climate conjures images of “spoiled hippies protesting the Vietnam War,” as journalist Tom Jokinen put it in Hazlitt, or “hippies protesting the war in Vietnam,” as writer Robyn Price Pierre wrote in the Atlantic.

It’s true that some countercultural groups, most notably the Yippies and the White Panther Party, blended radical politics with the hippie lifestyle. But antiwar protesters and hippies were usually two distinct groups. Hippies, often known as “freaks,” prioritized spiritual enlightenment, community building, and, of course, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Activists, often known as “politicos,” opted for more traditional forms of left-wing political organizing.

Many hippies were indifferent or even opposed to activists’ political organizing, public meetings and marching. Writer, LSD enthusiast and “Merry Prankster” Ken Kesey shocked the audience at an antiwar event at the University of California at Berkeley in 1965 by declaring: “You’re not going to stop this war with this rally, by marching. ... They’ve been having wars for 10,000 years, and you’re not going to stop it this way.”

Rather than marching or protesting, hippies hoped to change America by seceding from established political, social and cultural institutions, not by reforming them. No one expressed this sentiment more memorably than LSD guru Timothy Leary when he exhorted young Americans to “Turn on, tune in, drop out “--meaning, in essence, to get high, disregard popular norms, quit bothering with mainstream society, and look inward for peace and wisdom.

MYTH NO. 4: Hippies were all about sexual liberation. To many observers (and quite a few critics), hippies were synonymous with free love. In one incident during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a Chicago police officer attacked a young woman who was protesting, saying: “You hippies are all alike. All you want is free love. Free love? I can give you some free love.” Indeed, in author Micah Lee Issit’s guide to the counterculture, “free love” is described “as the hippie sexual ideal.”

While hippies were more sexually adventurous than mainstream Americans (one aspect of the counterculture that has had a lasting impact), they mostly stuck to heterosexual monogamy. As one aging hippie recounted decades later, that was more legend than fact. “We had parties where people would smoke too much or drink too much and sleep with their friends, but there were emotional repercussions the next day. Free love is like a free lunch--there’s no such thing. ... Even nudity was rare.”

MYTH NO. 5: The hippie fad eventually vanished. “We are the children of the 60s and 70s kids, who were trying to figure out life after the 60s hippies died out,” writer Natalyn Chamberlain wrote in a lament for post-hippie culture in the online magazine Odyssey; a travel guide to oddball American locales similarly asserts that the hippies have “faded away,” while a Texas Monthly article by Peter Applebome reports that hippies “died out” sometime before 1982.

Yet it’s less the case that the hippies died out, disappeared or faded away, and more that all of us became hippies. Indeed, a number of countercultural practices that were once seen as fringe are now widely accepted parts of American life. Yoga, to name one example, was championed by hippies long before it became a mainstream phenomenon. The same goes for organic food and vegetarian, whole-grain diets. And hippies celebrated casual dress, especially blue jeans and androgynous styles, rejecting the conventional wisdom that clothing should be formal and gender-specific. Their fashion sense paved the way for our current era, when many Americans wear casual clothing for all occasions and fewer and fewer workplaces require employees to dress up. All of these things, once considered symbols of the hippie lifestyle, are now fully entrenched in American culture.

#hippies #myths about hippies #hippie lifestyle

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anagamitofotografia · 3 years ago

Text

Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

From the May/June 2021 issue

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

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afroavocadowitch · 3 years ago

Text

Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

From the May/June 2021 issue

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

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afrolatinxsunited · 3 years ago

Text

Stories & important info on POS System Equipment and Point of Sale.

From the May/June 2021 issue

This is where a dear friend has been sentenced to die.

I don’t think he killed anyone.

All of the men sentenced to death row in Texas are held at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Polk County. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Wikimedia Commons

Merel Pontier Photo by Louise Corazon

And my work has only just begun.

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney specializing in capital cases. She is the founder of the U.S. chapter of the Clinton Young Foundation as well as its general counsel.

Emily Bloom, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Clinton Young Foundation, assisted in editing this article.

This post was published here.

youtube

0 notes