#nationwide cycling event

[townpostin]

Jamshedpur Gears Up for Nationwide Cyclothon 4.0 on August 25

Marwari Yuva Manch to celebrate National Sports Day with 851-branch bicycle race All India Marwari Yuva Manch prepares for Cyclothon 4.0, promoting healthy lifestyle across India. JAMSHEDPUR – The All India Marwari Yuva Manch is set to host Cyclothon 4.0 on Sunday, August 25, in celebration of National Sports Day. The nationwide bicycle race will take place simultaneously across more than 851…

[qqueenofhades]

I just read an article on The Conversation that states: "Today, most data has Trump narrowly beating Biden in the national popular vote, albeit within the statistical margin of error." (Source for that data: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/)

In your opinion, is that true? How can that be possible after everything Trump has done? After the Insurrection? I'm terrified 😕

(For reference, the original article can be found at https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-why-trumps-republican-opponents-were-never-going-to-beat-him-223288?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%202888329325&utm_content=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%202888329325+CID_fceedfd21410eb8a7b6fd6e1124d9d54&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=five%20reasons)

Short answer: no, I don't think it's true.

Long answer: no, I really don't think it's true. Here's why.

Broader context. A Republican has won the popular presidential vote only twice in the 21st century, and in the first of those occasions -- 2000 -- I use "won" very advisedly. We all know, or at least we should, about all the fuckery that went down in Florida with Bush vs. Gore and SCOTUS stepping in to stop the recount (which almost surely would have gone to Gore) and handing Florida, and thus the presidency, to George Dubya Bush by a mere 537 votes. Dubya then did win re-election and the popular vote/EC in 2004, in the throes of patriotic war fervor and the GOP's Swiftboating of John Kerry (who was a pretty terrible candidate to start with). Other than that? None. Zip. Nada. None. Even in 2016 when Trump squeaked out a win (and thus the presidency) in the Electoral College, he lost nationwide to HRC by over 3 million votes. He lost to Biden by 7 million votes nationwide last time. Also, the reason the GOP loves the antidemocratic Electoral College is that it always works in their favor, and because red states with relatively scant population are given the same power in the Senate. That's why California, with 40+ million people, gets two (Democratic) senators, and Wyoming, with 400,000 people, gets two (Republican) senators. There is just no way that red states can get the actual raw numbers to win the popular vote against heavily blue urban population centers. The only one that comes close is Texas, and while it's something of a white whale for Democrats who think fondly that it'll surely turn blue this election cycle (and then it doesn't), it's not giving all its votes popular-vote-wise to Republicans. So yeah. The numbers aren't there. Biden is about 99% certain to win the popular vote, but because this is America, the question is whether the EC will follow.

(Although, I gotta say. In the deeply unlikely event that Biden loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College -- i.e. the exact same thing Trump did in 2016 -- the right wing would lose their fucking minds and it would be incredibly hilarious. Also, we might finally get some red states willing to sign up to the National Popular Vote Compact, which is just a few ratifications away from going into effect. As noted, the Republicans will cling onto the Electoral College with their last dying breath because it's the only thing that makes them competitive in nationwide elections. If it fucked Trump, they might finally listen to ideas about changing it.)

The media are incredibly biased, and so is Nate Silver. Silver first rose to prominence as an independent geeky Data Guy elections whiz-kid, and was relatively good at being unbiased. That is not the case anymore. He's now affiliated with the New York Times and has started echoing the smugly anti-Biden framework of both that paper and the mainstream media in general. I'm not necessarily saying his data is total bunk, but he's extremely eager to frame, narrate, and explain it in ways that artificially disadvantage Biden (in the same way the NYT itself is all in on "BUT HIS AGEEEEE," just as they were with "BUT HER EEEEEEMAILS" in 2016) And that's a problem, because:

The polls are shit. Like, really, really shit. Didn't we just go through this in 2022, where everyone howled about how All The Data pointed to a Red Wave and then were /shocked pikachu face when this was nothing more than a Red Dribble of Piss (and frankly, the best midterm election result for the ruling party since like, the 1930s?) We've also had major, real-time proof that the polls are showing a consistent pro-Trump bias of 10 or more points, which is a huge error and keeps getting corrected whenever people actually vote, but the media will never admit that, because TRUMP IS WINNING WE ARE ALL DOOMZED!! We heard about how Biden might lose New Hampshire because he wasn't even on the ballot and that would be a critical embarrassment for him. He cruised easily with 68% (all write-in votes and FAR more than any other Democratic "candidate.") Meanwhile, Trump won New Hampshire by about 15% under what the polls had predicted for him (after doing the same and barely squeaking over 50% in Iowa, one of the whitest, most rural, most Trump-loving states in the nation). The number ballparked for Biden in the NV Democratic primary was something like 75%; he got over 90% (and twice as many votes as any candidate in the Republican Primary/Caucus/Whatever That Mess Was). The number for what he was supposed to get in the SC primary was in the high 60% (driven by the media's other favorite "Black voters are abandoning Biden" canard); he absolutely crushed it at 97% statewide. When Biden is winning by whopping margins and Trump is underperforming badly, in both cases by gaps of ten percent or more, it means the polls are simply not showing us an accurate state of the race. This could be because of media bias, bad data, selective polling, inability to actually connect with voters (especially young voters, who are about as likely to eat a live scorpion as to pick up an unsolicited phone call from an unknown number). This also shows up in:

Special elections. We've heard tons of Very Smart Punditry (derogatory) about how Democrats kicking ass in pretty much every competitive election since Roe was overturned in 2022 totally means nothing for the general election. (Of course, if the situation was reversed and Republicans were cleaning up at the same rate, we would be hearing nothing except how we're all destined for Eternal Trumpocracy... wait. no... we're still only hearing this. Weird.) In the last special election in early February, Democrat Tom Suozzi won back his old U.S House seat (NY-03) by over eight points, after polls had given him at most a two- or three-point edge. (Funnily, once again a Democrat did far better than the media is determined to insist, so Politico hilariously called a thumping eight-point win "edging it out.") This represents almost a 16-point blue swing from even just 2022, when The Congressman Possibly Known as George Santos won it by 7 points. On that same night, a Democratic candidate in a Trump +26 district in deep, deep red Oklahoma only lost by 5 points, marking another massive pro-blue swing. This has been the case in every special election since Roe went down. Apparently blah blah This Won't Translate to the General Election, because the media is very smart. Even when Democrats (historically hard to motivate and muster in off-year election cycles, or you know in general) are turning up in elections that don't involve Trump to punish terrible Trumpist policies, we're supposed to think they won't be motivated to actually vote against the guy himself? And not just them, because:

Trump is a terrible candidate. Which we know, and have always known, but now it's really true. We've had up to half of Haley voters stating they will vote for Biden over Trump if that is the November matchup (which it will be). Haley, amusingly, actually outraised Trump in January, because it turns out that the Trump Crime Family's open promise to send every single donor or RNC dollar to pay El Trumpo's legal fees hasn't been a terribly effective message. We had Republicans in NY-03 telling CNN that they voted for the Democrat Suozzi because they're so fed up with the GOP clown show in the House and don't think Republicans can govern (which uh. Yeah. Welcome to reality, we all knew that ages ago too). We have had up to a third of Republican voters saying they won't vote for Trump if he's convicted of a felony before the election (and technically he already has been, but we're still hoping for the January 6 trial to go ahead). Now, yes, Republicans are a notoriously cliquey bunch and might change their minds, but for all the endless bullshit BIDEN SHOULD STEP DOWN BECAUSE DEMOCRATS ARE DISUNITED narrative the media has been pushing like their kidnapped grandmothers' lives depend on it, Democrats aren't actually disunited at all. Instead, Trump is in chaos, the GOP is in chaos, sizeable chunks of Republican voters are ready to vote for someone else and in some cases have already done so, and yet, do we hear a peep about how Trump should step down? Nah. In related news, did you hear that Biden is old?!?! Why isn't anyone writing about this?!?!

Now, I want to make it clear: Trump's chances of winning are not zero, and they are not inconsiderable. We need to face that fact and deal with it accordingly. Large chunks of the country are still willing to vote for white Christian nationalist fascism. Trump still has plenty of diehard cultists and the entire establishment Republican party in his pocket, and it's been made very clear that Putin is bringing the full force of his malevolent Russian fascist machine to bear on this election as well. Case in point: we spent four years hearing about HUNTER BIDEN HUNTER BIDEN SECRET CORRUPTION GIANT SECRET BUSINESS SCANDAL, and it turns out that the GOP's "star informant" has been actively working with Russian spies the whole time and fed them complete bullshit disinformation, which they were eager to repeat so long as it might hurt Joe Biden. (And it would hurt Ukraine, so, twofer! I cannot emphasize enough how much it was all a deliberate collaboration by some of the worst people on earth.)

In 2016, people naively assumed that Trump could never win, and so they were especially willing to throw away, spoil, or otherwise not exercise their vote, or throw purity hissy fits over HRC (likewise fed at the toxic teat of Russian disinformation). That was exactly what allowed Trump to squeak out a win in the EC and put us in the mess we are currently in. If people act in the same way in 2024 that they did in 2016, Trump's chances of winning are drastically increased. So once again, as I keep saying, it's up to us. If we all vote blue, and we get our networks to vote blue, Biden is very likely to win. If we don't, he won't, and Trump will win. It's that simple. We had better decide what we're doing. The end.

[destielomegaversebigbang]

Equality Ain't Pie

Posting September 6, 2024

Fic by RavenFuchs

Art by hectatess

Banner by envydean

Rating: Mature

Summary: Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak have each been recruited to co-lead an elite team, Sexual Minorities Intelligence Tactical Endeavor (SMITE), created in reaction to the rise in attacks on alphas and omegas (called AOs), by Beta Rights Activists within the majority beta population. Prior to the team’s formation a plot to bomb an AO fundraising event was thwarted but the threat was serious enough to call for a law enforcement unit that had national reach and powers that superseded those of local and other federal agencies. Shortly after the team is assembled they are tasked with looking into AO youth living on the streets who are now missing as well as cases of product tampering where suppressants were replaced with a previously unknown super enhancer causing two unrelated college students to go into a dangerous heat cycle. Meanwhile, they face an enemy from within as well as mounting political pressure by some in government that do not want to see AOs have full rights in society and will do anything to see that they are removed from mainstream life. The stakes get higher when an attack on the team coincides with the kidnapping of the teen children of a pro-AO candidate with the rare occurrence of two AO children in one family. As the team continues to investigate they uncover a plot that could lead to making the public see AOs as unstable and needing to be removed from society.

Tags: Alpha Cas, Omega Dean, Kidnapping, murder, government plots, talk of conversion camps, talk of medical experiments on AOs, threats of sexual assault, mention of human sex trafficking, non-consensual drug exposure, panic attacks, past child abuse, alphas and omegas are commonly referred to as AOs

Excerpt below the cut

"Bobby, I'm gonna give it to you straight, the fact that you're even allowed to form this team is nothing short of remarkable. There's still a hell of a lot of pushback and prejudice against alphas and omegas and the LGBTQ+ communities that it's a miracle that it's happening at all. Your special task force will be able to do a lot of good and prevent a lot of harm. What's the extent of your operation?"

"Unlimited. We've been given unilateral scope to work nationwide and across all levels of law enforcement both military and civilian. We are authorized to be the lead agency in any jurisdiction. Surprisingly, they didn't fight me when I said that the team would be inclusive of AOs, as there is no sound reason not to hire alphas and omegas."

"That is a bit of a shock. Considering the ban on AOs serving openly in the military has only recently been lifted."

"Yeah, the LEOs were ahead of the curve on that one. Though I guess in a way it would make sense that law enforcement officers on the local, state, and federal levels would need to have some AOs to help deal with crimes against their community. AO crime vics seem to open up better to one of their own."

"Well, can you blame 'em? Betas still make up the majority of the population and hold all the cards when it comes to education, employment, and positions of power. They still place the blame on AOs for being victims. I hope to all that's holy that what you're doing will change things for the better."

"That's the plan."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The ineffable Charles P. Pierce on truth and presidential health.

From the CPP Weekend newsletter:

The First President To Tell The Truth About His Health

On July 1, 1893, a certain Commodore Elias Benedict prepared his yacht, the Oneida, for an unusual mission out on Chesapeake Bay. The yacht’s saloon was repurposed as a surgical suite. A team of six was recruited to perform the surgery, including a dentist named Ferdinand Hasbrouk, who would serve as the anesthesiologist. The patient, a rather obese man, 56 years of age, was suffering from a carcinoma of the mouth.

The patient was named Steven Grover Cleveland, and he was the 24th president of the United States, having already been the 22nd president of the United States, guaranteeing him a place in every trivia contest until the end of time. The operation was performed under maximum security. From the Health Sciences Library of the University of Arizona.

However, there were political considerations. A nationwide depression had just gotten underway and in the name of strengthening the economy, the president was leading a movement to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and uphold the gold standard. In August, the president had to address Congress and thus, he had to be able to recover from the surgery’s effects by that time. It was already late June. Furthermore, the president was concerned that reports of his condition could prove even more unsettling, so the surgery would have to be done in secret.

The economy was sinking into the bust cycle of the boom and bust financial system of the age. (Today, we know it as Project 2025, section 4.) The Panic of 1893 had struck in February, and it would last for the next four years. In addition, it was gradually coming to light that Chester Arthur, Cleveland’s predecessor the first time around, had been debilitated by Bright’s disease throughout his term of office. Arthur, in fact, was already dead. Cleveland’s political concerns were well-taken, but he never was the same after the surgery.

Twenty-six years later, in the middle of a barnstorming railroad trip aimed at raising support for the new world he wanted to build, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, and then collapsed entirely six weeks later with a stroke that permanently disabled him. The rudimentary political spin system of the time went into action almost immediately. Wilson was said to have suffered an attack of medical gobbledegook–“a nervous reaction in his digestive organs.” Upon returning to Washington, Wilson went into seclusion, and his wife, Edith, pretty much ran the country. From PBS:

Everything changed on the morning of Oct. 2, 1919. According to some accounts, the president awoke to find his left hand numb to sensation before falling into unconsciousness. In other versions, Wilson had his stroke on the way to the bathroom and fell to the floor with Edith dragging him back into bed. However those events transpired, immediately after the president’s collapse, Mrs. Wilson discretely phoned down to the White House chief usher, Ike Hoover and told him to “please get Dr. Grayson, the president is very sick.” Grayson quickly arrived. Ten minutes later, he emerged from the presidential bedroom and the doctor’s diagnosis was terrible: “My God, the president is paralyzed,” Grayson declared.

Protective of both her husband’s reputation and power, Edith shielded Woodrow from interlopers and embarked on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilson’s staff, the Cabinet and the Congress. During a perfunctory meeting the president held with Sen. Gilbert Hitchcock (D-Neb.) and Albert Fall (R-N.M.) on Dec. 5, he and Edith even tried to hide the extent of his paralysis by keeping his left side covered with a blanket. Sen. Fall, who was one of the president’s most formidable political foes told Wilson, “I hope you will consider me sincere. I have been praying for you, Sir.” Edith later recalled that Woodrow was, at least, well enough to jest, “Which way, Senator?” A great story, perhaps, but Wilson’s biographer, John Milton Cooper, Jr. doubts its veracity and notes that neither Edith nor Dr. Grayson recorded such a clever rejoinder in their written memoranda from that day.

Edith Wilson insisted to her dying day that her role in the last two years of the Wilson administration was nominal. This is almost assuredly a barefaced non-fact, as the work of subsequent historians has shown.

Everyone knows about how FDR’s people, aided by an acquiescent press, kept a lid on the president’s inability to walk. What they were less able to conceal was how truly sick the president was during his last years in office. From the University of Arizona:

On March 28, 1944, Roosevelt received a complete physical including a cardiac examination. Dr. Howard G. Bruenn handled this. Bruenn’s diagnosis was that the President was suffering from “hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure (left ventricle), and acute bronchitis. (Bruenn, p. 580). Bruenn recommended a week or two of rest, the use of digitalis, a lighter, salt-free diet, and codeine for the cough and a moderate loss of weight. However, given the president’s schedule, this was not carried out right away. McIntire thought the use of digitalis was going too far. In Ferrell’s account, Bruenn found himself against the Surgeon General and a team of leading doctors at Bethesda, including Officer in Command John Harper, Executive Officer Robert Duncan, radiology head Charles Behrens, and Paul Dickens, a professor of medicine at George Washington University. Also involved were two honorary medical consultants, James Paullin and Frank Lacey. These latter two conducted another examination of the president on March 31st. Bruenn held firm on the need for digitalization and after three meetings and a threat to remove himself from the case, he was authorized to begin. Within ten days, Roosevelt showed remarkable improvement. Bruenn found himself making frequent visits to the White House.

Since then, we’ve had Eisenhower, whose doctors were relatively upfront about his major heart attack, in 1955, but buried the news of his stroke two years later. John Kennedy’s myriad concealed medical conditions would fill a book, and indeed has filled several. What’s less well known is the fact that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, felt so ill that he had to be talked into running for his own full term in 1964. From The Political Effects of Presidential Illness: The Case of Lyndon B. Johnson:

More serious, Johnson was rushed to the hospital at 2:26 a.m. suffering from chest pains and a cough. Vice President Humphrey was telephoned at 3:30 a.m. in Minnesota with the news that the president had been hospitalized with chest pains. Humphrey was not alone in his fears that Johnson had suffered another heart attack, a prospect he found "particularly frightening because Lyndon had suffered a serious one ten years before." Many years later, Humphrey complained that Johnson “for some bizarre reason, refused to let any medical facts be given to me immediately. Instead. The orders came to me that he wanted me to fulfill my scheduled weekly commitments so that no one would think his illness was serious." When Humphrey left home later that morning, he still did not know whether Johnson had suffered another heart attack, how critical his condition might be, or whether he would soon be succeeding Johnson as president. He later wrote that "it was an awesome prospect, a terrible shock, compounded by not knowing what precisely was happening" (Humphrey, 1976, p. 314). Perhaps the shock was further compounded by the fact that although Johnson had intended to enter in arrangement with his vice-president, he had not, at that time, done so.

More recently, it was an open secret in Washington that President Ronald Reagan was probably a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient throughout his second term. Interestingly, given our current state of affairs, the first real public manifestation of it came in his first debate against Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984. From the AP (via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette):

For Reagan, the age issue faded in his first term as any health questions focused on his recovery from a nearly fatal assassination attempt in 1981. He seemed headed for an easy reelection. And debates seemed natural settings for the smooth-talking former Hollywood actor. But his performance in the first showdown with Mondale in the 1984 campaign brought the age issue roaring back. The president, then 73, rambled and hesitated. He seemed to lose his train of thought at one point, and appeared tired at others. No one had seen him perform publicly in such a way, recalled Jaroslovsky, who co-authored a story headlined: “New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age?”…

…Then, as now, Mr. Jaroslovsky said, the embattled president’s supporters provided vigorous spin. Reagan’s operation said he had been tired. There was sniping about the staff overpreparing him, Mr. Jaroslovsky said. Mr. Biden’s team cited fatigue from two overseas trips that had exhausted even younger staffers. It was a bad night, they said. Blame flew at the president’s aides. Democrats on Capitol Hill griped that Mr. Biden's performance had damaged their chances at the polls. And press critics asserted that reporters had failed to hold the president and his staff to account.

Reagan managed to deliver a spoon-fed wisecrack at the beginning of the second debate, and everybody loved good ol’ Dutch again. But, in Washington, there were real concerns. In their book Landslide, an account of his second term, authors Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus revealed that an aide to then incoming White House chief of staff Howard Baker named James Cannon had been dispatched to discreetly investigate whether or not the provisions of the 25th amendment regarding forcible presidential abdication might be in order and, more spectacularly, Cannon believed that it should be considered.

I bring all of this up to prove a point–namely, that the next White House that is completely honest about the president’s health will be the first. (Do people really believe the big ship of fools that was Donald Trump’s medical team?) The concocted melodrama around the president’s dismal showing in the campaign’s first debate–Hi, Dutch!–has served nothing but to obscure the clarity necessary to make what is a terribly difficult call. If I seem to wax overly historical, it’s because I find it more edifying than the hysterical.

[mightyflamethrower]

  PITTSBURGH -- Walking out of the Allegheny County Republican election night event at a local luxury hotel, the young men waiting to valet my car got into a discussion with me about the just-announced election results.

        All four men were in their 30s. Two were white, one was Black and the other Hispanic. As I traditionally do, I asked them how they voted, and they all answered with President-elect Donald Trump.

        The conservative populist coalition was always right in front of reporters and experts in working-class neighborhoods, suburbs and cities. If only they had not treated those voters as either racists, fascists, misogynists, garbage, stupid or outliers to their narrative of what Americans should look like.

        These voters were directly observable. I saw them, heard them and reported that welders, cosmetologists, barbers and mechanics, as well as doctors, lawyers, engineers and architects of all shapes, sizes and colors, would be voting for their communities to thrive and for prosperity, safety and more money in their pocketbooks.

        These voters were much more concerned that they would be able not to go into debt if their "check engine" lights went on in their cars than if there was access to abortion. They were more concerned that the school districts in their communities had enough funding, weren't overcrowded and were serving the future's potential than if fossil fuels were causing the climate to burn. They were more concerned about the cost of butter than the insane notion that Trump is a fascist.

        They grew weary of the national news' doomsaying or inaccurate reporting. Their pro-Trump votes should provide a reckoning to the industry that lost the trust of a large majority of voters.

        In a series of really bad "takes" coming from the national news, never mind the inaccurate reporting for a second, one of my favorites came toward the final days of the race when reporters, goaded in private messages from the Democrats, exulted that Trump rallygoers were leaving early or sleeping, or that rally events were half empty.

        The Associated Press reported the night before the election here at the same event I was attending with a headline that read, "Empty seats become a more common sight at Trump's final rallies," suggesting his support was waning with the sentence, "The occasional scenes of empty seats offered a notable contrast to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' biggest events."

        That silly focus and suggestion that Trump was losing is exactly why, for the entire cycle, the press missed what mattered to voters in the rush to get a click over a story that was clearly not true. The events were full of enthusiasm. A person leaving early did not mean the person wasn't voting for Trump. And if someone fell asleep waiting, which is another favorite story, it simply meant the person was tired.

        Trump's win was evident in every state he won where I drove, talked to voters and reported -- from here in my home state of Pennsylvania to North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. It was also evident in the places that did not end up mattering in the states I covered that he did not win, such as Virginia, New York and New Jersey. Even there, Trump performed considerably better than reporters and experts believed he could or should.

        What reporters missed because of their dislike of center-right belief systems was that it was not Trump who was the fluke in politics in 2016. It was President Joe Biden who was the fluke in 2020, thanks in large part to COVID-19. They thought Biden was a rejection of the center-right trajectory of the country, but the results of 2024 show the opposite.

        Voters weren't turned off by Trump's brash approach. They wanted the bull to break up the china shop. Black, white, Asian and Hispanic voters told me that, and AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, confirmed it in a postelection analysis that showed well over half of voters said they wanted to see substantial change.

        Trump and Republican candidates were picked over Democrats because of the impact the economy was having on voters' bottom line and the abysmal way Biden and Harris handled the enforcement of immigration laws or, for that matter, almost any kind of law.

        It was ridiculous to voters to see officials acting as if it were OK not to prosecute someone for breaking into neighborhood businesses or homes. Or to assault someone and be let out, often the same day, with cashless bail.

        Because 2016 was dismissed as a fluke, there was little reckoning within my profession in the national media or in the other powerful cultural curators in academia, corporations, institutions, Hollywood and government to stop doing the things they always do. All insulated in counties of power and wealth, they spent four years bashing Republicans when Trump held the White House and four more years mocking Republicans and their voters all the way up until Election Day this year.

        That is why they never saw it. They thought this coalition had shrunk and that they had had the power to do that through the institutions they run. They didn't. Voters didn't just vote for Trump. They voted against the elitist institutions. After two full days, post-election, of watching left-leaning cable news and the once-vaunted national news reports, it is clear they still don't understand not only what just happened but also what is continuing to happen.

One last reason: The progressives were so condescending and vile to anyone who disagreed with them that most of us just shut up. They assumed our silence meant that we were OK with the status quo. I exercised MY freedom to speak by voting the bastards out.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

Republicans have ramped up an anti-transgender fear campaign for the 2024 election, hoping to sway voters in their favor. Many ads focus on incarcerated transgender individuals and gender-affirming care, with millions of dollars funneled into anti-trans messages during prime-time sporting events. Others target Democratic Senate and House candidates, claiming they would “allow men into women’s bathrooms.” Some school board mailers pledge to keep transgender athletes out of school sports. Still others argue in debates that by excluding transgender people, they are somehow protecting women—often used to deflect criticism for their anti-abortion stances. While these ads and tactics have historically fallen short, this year more Republicans than ever are centering their platforms on anti-trans policies.

If there’s one constant this year, it’s that Republicans across the ballot have put their faith in an anti-trans agenda. According to an ongoing database, at least 100 races and growing prominently feature transgender issues. While some of these races feature Democratic candidates defending their pro-transgender records, the majority of these races center on attacks targeting opponents who support transgender rights. And these aren’t limited to high-profile races like the presidency or Senate, which have dominated headlines. Anti-trans rhetoric is appearing in local legislative races, school boards, and more. By now, Donald Trump’s ads are familiar to everyone, running alongside sporting events nationwide. These ads claim that Kamala Harris “gave sex change surgeries to prisoners,” referencing two cases where incarcerated transgender individuals received gender-affirming care in jail. Under U.S. law and the Eighth Amendment, providing medically necessary care, as determined by a doctor, is required—a policy decision made during the Trump administration. Both Harris and Tim Walz have responded to these ads: Harris criticized Trump for “spending $20 million on those ads, trying to create a sense of fear in the voters,” while Walz defended transgender people against the attacks at length just days later.

Senate races across the United States are also filled with anti-trans advertising. Nearly every competitive Senate race with a Democratic candidate has seen that candidate targeted by such ads. Leading the charge is the Senate Leadership Fund, which has committed at least $80 million to this cycle, with the majority of its ads targeting transgender individuals. These ads have targeted Jackie Rosen (D-NV), John Tester (D-MT), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI). Meanwhile, Republican candidates, like Mike Rogers—running against Elissa Slotkin for Michigan’s open Senate seat—have deflected from their strict anti-abortion stances during televised debates, instead claiming they will “protect women” by excluding transgender people. U.S. House races are no different; at least 20 tightly contested races feature Republican candidates who have sponsored significant anti-transgender bills, run anti-trans ads, and made opposition to transgender rights a major part of their 2024 campaigns. Anthony D’Esposito, running in a toss-up election in NY-04, a D+5 district, has focused heavily on transgender sports bans, backing a local ban in Nassau County. One ad from D’Esposito’s campaign highlights the endorsement of anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines. Other republicans in close races that have targeted transgender people include John James in MI-10, Jen Kiggans in VA-02, Nick LaLota in NY-01, and dozens more. [...] The year 2024 may not be the first to feature an onslaught of anti-trans advertisements, but it has certainly seen the highest volume in history. Republicans are projected to spend nearly $100 million on these ads, making anti-trans messaging a central theme from the bottom to the top of the ticket. However, political analysts and public opinion polls question the strategy: a recent Data for Progress poll shows that voters overwhelmingly reject candidates who make supporting anti-trans legislation a prominent focus of their campaign, with a majority—including Republicans—expressing fatigue over the issue dominating the 2024 cycle. Historically, such ads have often fallen flat, with targeted candidates winning nearly every time this approach has been used.

More than 100+ Republican candidates in various races are running on bashing trans people to incite fear.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NJIT launches AI-powered solar eruption center with $5M NASA grant

A new center at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will advance AI-driven forecasting of violent eruptions on the Sun, as well as expand space science education programs.

NJIT's Institute for Space Weather Sciences (ISWS) has been awarded a $5 million NASA grant to open a new research center dedicated to developing the next generation of solar eruption prediction capabilities, powered by artificial intelligence.

The new AI-Powered Solar Eruption Center of Excellence in Research and Education (SEC) will partner with NASA, New York University and IBM to advance AI and machine learning tools for improving the predictability of powerful solar eruptions at their onset, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and enhance our physical understanding of these explosive events.

The grant, funded by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement's Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO) program, is part of $45 million in funding recently announced by the agency to expand research at 21 higher-education institutions nationwide. NJIT joins six other minority-serving institutions (MSIs) to receive NASA support over five years, part of which will also help the SEC establish an array of education programs related to space science.

“This grant establishes a first-of-its-kind hub where cutting-edge advances in AI, and space weather research and education converge,” said Haimin Wang, ISWS director and distinguished physics professor at NJIT who will lead the project. “By harnessing AI-enabled tools to investigate the fundamental nature of space weather, we aim to significantly enhance our ability to interpret observational data from the Sun to forecast major solar eruptions accurately and in near real-time, a capability beyond our reach up to this point.”

“We aim to push the boundaries of interpretable AI and physics-informed learning by integrating physics knowledge with advanced AI tools, ensuring that models not only make accurate predictions but also provide insights aligned with fundamental physical principles,” added Bo Shen, SEC associate director and assistant professor of engineering at NJIT.

Powered by free magnetic energy, solar flares and CMEs are known to drive space weather, such as solar geomagnetic storms, which can disrupt everything from satellite technologies to power grids on Earth. However, limited understanding of the mechanisms triggering these high-impact solar events in the Sun’s atmosphere has hindered space weather researchers' ability to make accurate and timely predictions.

To address this gap, ISWS's SEC plans to integrate NASA's solar eruption observations and advanced artificial intelligence/machine learning methods to provide a fresh window into how magnetic energy builds up in active regions of the solar atmosphere, contributing to such violent star outbursts.

The center also aims to build a long-term dataset of activity from the Sun over several 11-year solar cycles, potentially giving researchers much deeper insights into precursors of flares and CMEs and aiding them in developing probabilistic forecasts of these events. 

“A major hurdle in understanding solar eruption mechanisms is the limited data on large events like X-class flares,” Wang explained. “Building a large, homogeneous dataset of solar activity using advanced machine learning methods allows us to study these major events with unprecedented resolution and cadence, ultimately revealing eruption mechanisms and unlocking better space weather predictions.”

Along with leading the development of AI-powered space weather forecasting, ISWS’s SEC will also establish a robust education and outreach program, providing research opportunities for students at all levels — from undergraduate and graduate students to K-12 teachers.

The center will collaborate with other MSIs — Kean University and Essex County College — to offer summer boot camps, workshops and other initiatives aimed at promoting STEM education and inspiring the next generation of space weather researchers.

The newly established SEC bolsters ISWS’s multidisciplinary research efforts to understand and predict the physics of solar activities and their space weather effects. The flagship center of the institute is NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research. In addition, the university’s Center for Computational Heliophysics, Center for Big Data, Center for AI Research and Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics are collaborating centers within the Institute. ISWS also hosts a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates site.

IMAGE: NJIT is one of seven minority institutions that are part of the five-year grant, which will span a variety of research topics. Credit NJIT

[usafphantom2]

Not only JP-7: the SR-71 could use JP-4 and JP-5 as emergency fuels but they both limited the Blackbird top speed to Mach 1.5

JP-7, the fuel that powered the SR-71 Blackbird caused a nationwide shortage of bug spray. Here’s why.

The SR-71 Blackbird was the first aircraft to use its own fuel for hydraulic fluid. It was called the fuel hydraulic system.

The legendary SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3+ spy plane was powered by two 34,000 lbf (151,240 N) thrust-class J58 afterburning turbojet engines. Each engine contained a nine-stage compressor driven by a two-stage turbine. The main burner used an eight-can combustor and the afterburner is fully modulating. The primary nozzle area was variable. Above Mach 2.2, some of the airflow was bled from the fourth stage of the compressor and dumped into the augmentor inlet through six bleed-bypass tubes, circumventing the core of the engine and transitioning the propulsive cycle from a pure turbojet to a turbo-ramjet.

The SR-71 was the first aircraft to use its own fuel for hydraulic fluid. It was called the fuel hydraulic system.

An engine-driven pump provided 1800 psi of recirculating fuel to accurate various engine components and then returned it back to the aircraft fuel system to be burned. Fuel was used in the actuators to control the afterburner nozzles, which maintain the proper exhaust gas temperature and control the thrust output. The fuel was also used in the engine actuators to shift the two-position inlet guide veins from their axial position to the cambered position and back again. This was just another of the many first-ever inventions of the-SR-71.

The J58 engine was hydromechanically controlled and burned a special low volatility jet fuel mixture known as JP-7.

SR-71 print

This print is available in multiple sizes from AircraftProfilePrints.com – CLICK HERE TO GET YOURS. SR-71A Blackbird 61-7972 “Skunkworks”

Emergency fuels could be used in the SR-71 if the crew was low on fuel and had to use ANY tanker (as already explained the Blackbird relied on KC-135Q tankers [that could simultaneously carry a maximum of 74,490lb of JP-7 and 110,000lb of JP-4 for their own engines] but the SR-71 could also be refueled by standard Stratotankers in the event KC-135Qs were not available or if the Blackbird crew had to deal with an emergency situation) they could find to avoid the loss of the aircraft. The emergency fuels were JP-4 or JP-5 but they limited the Blackbird top speed to Mach 1.5. There were six main fuselage tanks. All 80,285 pounds of JP-7 fuel were carried in six main fuselage tanks. The tanks numbered one through six moved forward to aft (back) tank 6B It could hold 7,020 pounds of gravity-fed fuel and two tanks sumps. This was also called the “doghouse” and was located in the extreme back portion of the fuselage.

These are just a few interesting facts that I found by reading Rich Graham’s “SR 71 Revealed the inside story.” This book was published in 1996 before some of the facts about the SR-71 became unclassified. Last year when I was visiting SR-71 #972 one of my Grandson’s friends asked me “Why is this airplane so big? My immediate answer was… they needed the room to hold as much fuel as possible.

Fuel was the lifeblood of this fastest-manned airplane in the world.

Be sure to check out Linda Sheffield Miller (Col Richard (Butch) Sheffield’s daughter, Col. Sheffield was an SR-71 Reconnaissance Systems Officer) Facebook Pages Habubrats SR-71 and Born into the Wilde Blue Yonder for awesome Blackbird’s photos and stories.

[nihilisticlinguistics]

ever since i learned that we're a handful of simultaneous power grid failures from a nationwide grid collapse, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it

like. i first heard about this in 2021 after the Texas winter storm blackouts. it turns out that when you have an aging power system and a rapidly increasing dependency on the electrical grid, the system gets really strained. and if there's a major outage caused by, say, a geomagnetic storm/coronal mass ejection in a handful of places, that can cause a cascade grid collapse.

but that's not all! while solar flares screw with radio waves and cell phone connections as they're happening, they can also damage satellites. you know. the things that help us transmit our phone signals, and GPS, and a ton of internet...

Coronal mass ejections, aka CMEs, that strike the Earth are relatively rare, but they occur more frequently at the height of the solar cycle. which we're just entering now, and will be through the end of 2025. It's even more rare for them to be of a severity level that causes major power outages. and power stations are able to prepare somewhat for these geomagnetic storms, but that can involve deliberate blackouts to reduce strain on the system IIRC.

the storm that's arriving this weekend is labeled 'severe' but it's not the Most severe category -- it's not currently on the level of, say, the Carrington event. it's unlikely to cause long-term damage to the US power grid. we have plenty of advance notice. we can just enjoy a view of the northern lights, probably.

so it's fine. we're all good here.

but obviously the premise of my WIP is, "what if we weren't?" If the grid were too overloaded with demand, if the Big Storm arrived in the midst of a massive heat wave or ice storm and everyone was running max power? If someone failed to enact safety protocols correctly? If one tripped fuse led to another...?

[aditisposts]

Data Science Career Prospects for International Graduates in Canada

With the Toronto-Waterloo innovation corridor branded as Canada’s Silicon Valley and Montreal rising as an AI hub - data science graduates find unmatched career mobility given the specialized talent crunch amidst booming tech ecosystems nationwide seeking analytics, machine learning and business intelligence experts across sectors.

Whether it is global networks like Deloitte, CISCO, IBM, Aviva,SAP, Thomson Reuters looking to drive data-informed decisions or emerging startups tackling complex business challenges using predictive models - Canadian employers offer exciting learning opportunities for international students transitioning into full-time high-skilled roles.

Lucrative data science salaries averaging over CAD $80,000 for entry roles also make Canada appealing for applicants focused on immigration pathways. Generous 3-year post graduate work permits enable valuable Canadian work experience for express entry eligibility. PR also facilitates global mobility to the USA given NAFTA relationships. 

While successfully securing full-time employment necessitates preparing for rigorous recruitment cycles - leveraging university career center supports around CV guides, networking events and interview preps can make landing aspirational data science jobs after graduation achievable given Canada’s expanding analytics market.

Posted By:

Aditi Borade, 4th year Barch,

Ls Raheja School of architecture

Disclaimer: The perspectives shared in this blog are not intended to be prescriptive. They should act merely as viewpoints to aid overseas aspirants with helpful guidance. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before availing the services of a consultant. 

[myeagleobject]

Breaking Stories on ABCWebNews: Top Headlines from the US and Around the World

Stay Updated with the Latest News

In today’s fast-paced world, staying informed about current events is essential. At ABCWebNews, we bring you breaking stories from the United States and across the globe, ensuring you never miss out on the headlines that matter most. Whether it’s politics, business, sports, or culture, our dedicated team delivers reliable and timely news to keep you in the know.

Top Headlines from the United States

Political Shifts in Washington

As the United States prepares for another election cycle, political developments are making waves across the nation. Recent debates, campaign announcements, and policy changes have captured the public’s attention. From presidential contenders to legislative updates, ABCWebNews provides in-depth analysis and insights into how these events shape the country’s future.

Economic Trends Impacting Americans

The U.S. economy continues to evolve, with new data on inflation, job growth, and consumer spending influencing households nationwide. Our financial experts break down complex reports to help you understand what’s driving the markets and how these trends affect your everyday life. Stay tuned for updates on the stock market, interest rates, and emerging industries.

Breaking Crime and Public Safety Updates

From major court rulings to breaking crime stories, public safety remains a key focus for our readers. ABCWebNews’ investigative team works tirelessly to bring you accurate reports on criminal cases, law enforcement efforts, and community initiatives aimed at creating safer neighborhoods.

Global News That Matters

Conflicts and Resolutions

Around the world, geopolitical tensions continue to dominate headlines. From ongoing conflicts to peace negotiations, ABCWebNews keeps you informed about the latest developments. Our international correspondents provide on-the-ground coverage of key events, offering a balanced perspective on the challenges and progress in global relations.

Climate Change and Environmental News

As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, nations are taking steps to address environmental issues. Whether it’s international climate summits, renewable energy advancements, or wildlife conservation efforts, ABCWebNews ensures you’re updated on the fight to protect our planet.

Cultural and Technological Innovations

Global culture and technology continue to shape how we live, work, and connect. From groundbreaking scientific discoveries to artistic achievements, ABCWebNews celebrates human creativity and ingenuity. Discover stories about emerging tech trends, global cinema, and cultural festivals that bring people together.

Why Choose ABCWebNews?

Reliable Reporting

At ABCWebNews, accuracy is our top priority. Our team of experienced journalists and editors works around the clock to verify facts and deliver trustworthy news. With us, you can be confident that you’re receiving credible information.

Comprehensive Coverage

Our platform offers a wide range of news categories, ensuring there’s something for everyone. From local stories to international updates, we cover it all. Our goal is to provide a holistic view of the world, empowering you to stay informed and engaged.

Real-Time Updates

Breaking news waits for no one, and neither do we. Our website and mobile app provide real-time updates on the biggest stories, so you’re always in the loop. Enable notifications to receive instant alerts on the topics you care about most.

Join the Conversation

At ABCWebNews, we value our readers’ perspectives. Share your thoughts and join discussions on social media or through our comments section. Your voice matters, and we’re here to create a space for meaningful dialogue.

Conclusion

In a world overflowing with information, ABCWebNews stands out as a trusted source for breaking stories from the United States and around the globe. Our commitment to reliable reporting, comprehensive coverage, and real-time updates ensures you’re always informed. Stay connected with ABCWebNews for the top headlines that shape our world today and tomorrow.

[chooseachallenge]

Charity Challenges in the UK: Inspiring Ways to Make a Difference

Charity challenges in the UK have become an increasingly popular way for individuals and groups to raise funds for good causes while pushing their limits and fostering a sense of community. These challenges offer a unique blend of adventure, personal growth, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. Whether it’s trekking mountains, running marathons, or undertaking creative feats, charity challenges uk inspire people from all walks of life to come together for a common purpose.

Why Are Charity Challenges So Popular?

The appeal of charity challenges lies in their ability to combine philanthropy with personal achievement. Participants are motivated not just by their own goals but also by the knowledge that their efforts will benefit others. For charities, these events are a vital source of income and a way to engage supporters.

In recent years, the UK has seen a surge in creative and diverse charity events, reflecting the nation’s growing enthusiasm for supporting good causes. From local community initiatives to nationwide campaigns, there’s a challenge to suit every interest and fitness level.

Popular Charity Challenges in the UK

Marathons and Runs: Events like the London Marathon and Great North Run are iconic charity challenges, attracting participants from across the globe. These events offer individuals the chance to raise funds for their chosen causes while enjoying the camaraderie of running alongside thousands of others. Even shorter runs, like 5K park runs, often include charity fundraising options.

Cycling Challenges: The RideLondon event and Land’s End to John O’Groats cycle rides are popular among cycling enthusiasts. These challenges allow participants to explore the UK’s beautiful landscapes while supporting charities.

Trekking Adventures: Iconic treks like climbing Ben Nevis, conquering the Yorkshire Three Peaks, or even taking on international challenges like Mount Kilimanjaro are favorites for adventurous fundraisers. Such treks test endurance and resilience, offering participants a sense of accomplishment.

Creative Challenges: Not all charity challenges are physically demanding. Events like bake-offs, dance marathons, and themed dress-up days are fun, inclusive ways to raise money. Virtual challenges, such as walking a set number of steps or cycling miles over a month, have also gained popularity, especially post-pandemic.

Extreme Challenges: For adrenaline junkies, challenges like skydiving, bungee jumping, and open-water swimming provide an exhilarating way to raise funds. These events often attract those looking for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Benefits of Charity Challenges

Participating in a charity challenge goes beyond raising funds. It builds a sense of community and purpose, improves mental and physical health, and provides a platform for personal growth. For charities, these events are an excellent way to raise awareness and connect with supporters in a meaningful way.

How to Get Involved

Getting involved in a charity challenge is easy. Many charities in the UK have dedicated events or partnerships with challenge organizers. Simply choose a cause you’re passionate about, select a challenge that suits your interests and abilities, and start fundraising. Platforms like JustGiving and GoFundMe make it simple to collect donations online and share your progress with friends and family.

Final Thoughts

charity fundraising challenges uk demonstrate the power of collective action. Whether you’re running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or hosting a creative event, every effort counts in making a difference. These challenges not only transform the lives of those in need but also enrich the lives of participants, proving that giving back can be as rewarding as it is impactful. So, why not take on a charity challenge and become part of a growing movement of changemakers?

[marwahstudios]

Cycle Rally Flagged Off to Promote Green World Awareness

New Delhi: In an inspiring show of commitment to environmental preservation, Dr. Sandeep Marwah, Global Green Ambassador, had the pleasure of flagging off a Cycle Rally organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Cyclists. The rally aimed to spread awareness about the adverse impacts of climate change and encourage the global community to pursue a sustainable and eco-friendly future.

Dr. Marwah emphasized, “As Global Green Ambassador and President of AAFT School of Health and Wellness, I hold it as my responsibility to support and encourage initiatives that bring attention to the critical issue of pollution and the urgent need for a green world. These efforts are key to creating a sustainable, pollution-free environment for future generations.”

Dr. Marwah’s extensive work in environmental advocacy includes the establishment of over 150 Climate Committees across various organizations. Through Radio Noida, Radio Mumbai, and Radio Raipur, he has used media to reach audiences nationwide, spreading awareness about environmental issues. Additionally, MSTV continuously broadcasts programs on pollution control, while Marwah Studios actively produces short films focused on environmental topics. The International Film and Television Club (IFTC) further supports these efforts by hosting environmental-themed festivals.

H.E. Elchin Huseynli, Ambassador of Azerbaijan to India, highlighted Azerbaijan’s proactive stance on climate awareness. “Timely and accurate climate information is crucial to prevent and mitigate the impact of natural disasters. Scaling up early warning systems can save lives and protect livelihoods,” he stated. He further expressed hope that this project will play a vital role in advancing the United Nations’ Early Warnings for All initiative.

Ratan Ranjan, President of the Confederation of Indian Cyclists, praised the rally as a means to engage the community in promoting a cleaner, greener future. Kazem Samandari of La Opera also added his voice to the cause, emphasizing the importance of collective action in the journey towards a more sustainable planet.

The event serves as a testament to international and local collaboration, showing that through united efforts, awareness and change can be effectively promoted. The Embassy of Azerbaijan, in partnership with Indian organizations and environmental advocates, hopes to set a benchmark for climate action that resonates both within India and globally.

[anotherworldnowblog]

15

WE WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN

“Although the fascist phenomenon can be resisted and avoided, there is a point in its growth after which it appears difficult to turn it back. The moment is not that at which fascism actually comes into power; the accession to power seems such a simple final act, occurring only when the essentials are already decided and done with, in short, a confirmation of a victory already won.” Nicos Poulantzas Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 66

PART II

The defeat of the George Floyd uprising seems everywhere to signal the closure of a cycle of struggle stretching back at least to Ferguson, maybe Rodney King, with its roots going all the way to Watts. Whether the George Floyd uprising was the end of a chain of urban rebellions and circulation struggles or the first link in a quantitatively and qualitatively new series of nationwide uprisings remains to be seen. How and when the proletariat announces its return is not clear. Troublingly, what has happened since 2020 is increasingly so.

On January 6th, the closest thing in contemporary American history to a mass fascist street action coalesced in a foolish attempt to overturn the election results. We laugh at the ill-fated coup at our own risk however, as by this point the proletariat was entirely defeated and the right-wing antidemocratic attack was only foiled by a combination of the fascists’ astounding stupidity and the incoming regime's control over local police power. Fascists are always fools. It is the fact that their goals so closely align to those of the power elite and that their methods violently liberate the movement of capital from its fragile humanistic ties that make them dangerous, not their intelligence. Despite its admittedly farcical appearance, the effects of this coup-attempt were absolutely profound. The media cynically used this event to wipe clean the rebellion of the previous summer from the memories of nearly all Americans, to strongly associate “insurrection” with right-wing activity, to forcefully reverse what had then become a common disdain for police, and to neutralize all left-critique of the incoming administration. The left-wing of liberalism, the fraction of the community of capital that had momentarily sided with the proletariat in a moment of acute crisis, is completely disentangled from radical politics and psychically sealed off from protest itself.[1] As will become an obvious tendency in what follows, the gains of the working class in the period of crisis and its aftermath, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of policy, are steadily and methodically reversed in bipartisan fashion.

“Start the forgetting machine!” - Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (p. 32)

The consolidation of the victory of capital over the working class unfolds in cascading action across multiple fronts. It proceeds relatively uninhibited because of the persistent unity of the various capitalist fractions. In the interest of concision, I will henceforth abandon a rigidly chronological presentation.

The first and most direct response to the working class rebellion in 2020 is the passage of several bills granting immunity to anyone who uses their vehicle to run over protestors demonstrating in the street, first in Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, and with at least eight more bills across the country being debated across the country's state houses in 2021.[2] The significance of such bills cannot be overstated. After the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville culminated in the use of an automobile as a weapon of mass murder, a tactic formerly associated exclusively with the specter of Islamic terror, elite liberals of all political persuasions recoiled in horror. However, as we have seen in the above, it would not be long before this all-too American technique of violence would be repeated, this time against a far more militant anti-racist offensive. The right to murder protestors is being quietly legalized under the guise of protecting an individual’s right to free movement and often even more cynically, by invoking the hypothetical needs of imaginary emergency vehicles. The pedestrian, the cyclist, are sacrificed at the fascist altar of the internal combustion engine, a trend further accelerated by the destruction of public transit during COVID-19. As usual, Adorno’s words read like prophecy: “which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passersby, children, bicyclists? In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in Fascist mistreatment.”[3] The temptation then is all the more powerful when the ‘vermin of the street’ is not merely passive but actively attempting to weaponize a constructed interruption in those violent, crashing movements, which otherwise ceaselessly accelerate the flows of global commodities, towards ends quite at odds with the valorization of capital; in a word, liberation.

Regrettably, this violence is far from an exclusively petit bourgeois pastime. Fractions of the proletariat are pit against one another as increasingly large numbers of urban workers come to rely on delivery and driving gigs, a sector swollen further during the pandemic. The city street is all but erased as social space, transformed into an exclusive conveyor of private goods carried by independent contractors with overlapping commitments, coerced by the mute compulsions of capital to at times restore the free flow of commodities with violence. The rural highway remains a blood-stained latticework criss-crossed by drowsy laborers called to traverse ever-increasing distances to balance employment and disintegrating familial ties. Studies indicate that the roadways of the United States have never been more deadly, a tragedy compounded by the fact that the great majority of this increase in auto traffic is nothing but our own life energies confronting us, and killing us, as services marketed as simplification.[4] That this machine’s victims are now willing, and legally empowered, to murder those who would dare gum-up the gnashing of its steel teeth is a tragedy of anthropological proportion.

This rapid movement to sweep political struggle from the streets of America apparently knows no partisan loyalty. The militant struggle in Atlanta to Stop Cop City and the nationwide street action aimed at halting the genocide in Gaza have galvanized hesitant Democrats to abandon all pretense at connection to their grassroots and join Republicans in criminalizing constitutionally protected and normatively accepted forms of public protest. In 2023, Georgia Democrats pushed the meaning of domestic terrorism to include attendance at a music festival or muddy shoes[5] and in 2024, New York Democrats will likely level at any protest that “blocks a road or a bridge” terrorism enhancements, this coming amidst increasingly infrastructure-intelligent anti-war mobilization.[6] The latter move, a continuation of and qualitative leap-up from the endorsement of stochastic terror by state Republicans, is a direct response to the collective awareness of systemic choke points in the networks of circulation gained by the working class in the latest cycle of struggles; an attempt to dispatch with this desperate counter-riposte to decades of deindustrialization and dispersion that has all-but destroyed the effectiveness of the proletariat’s traditional, production-point tactics.

Furthermore, just in the past several weeks, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has announced her intent to ban protective face masks at protests and the Democratic governor of the state of New York has signaled her intention to ban masks from public transit entirely.[7] Such shocking policies, not only whiplash-inducing for their incongruity with all conceptions of public health and civic responsibility, ostensibly designed to combat crime and ensure accountability for largely fictitious acts of anti-semitic violence, are obviously intended to chill protected speech acts and guarantee the effectiveness of facial recognition software in tracking the movements of protest attendees. It is no coincidence that these suggestions come on the heels of an anti-imperialist protest movement that is militantly imbuing the struggle against white supremacy, the struggle of which the George Floyd Rebellion was but one battle, with a refreshingly internationalist perspective. Such obscene policy measures, in addition to signaling an ever-deepening political unity between the two domestic political parties when it comes to shirking government responsibility for social welfare and crushing working class protest, accelerate the devastating impact of COVID on those with pre-existing conditions, amounting to a policy of murderous social cleansing on top of the troubling implications for any who dare dissent. Politically, the Democrats’ pathetic tailing of Republican reaction will almost certainly earn them no additional votes at the ballot box. But their willingness to abandon COVID-era convictions at the first sign of working-class internationalism is quite telling indeed. It is regretful that such clarity is achieved at so high a price.

American economic policy in the wake of the pandemic (which I submit also includes intentional prolongation of the War in Ukraine), that has, among other things, led to inflationary pressures that have wiped out Covid-era wage gains, called forth unprecedented state intervention to stabilize big and small businesses, and generally sent stocks stratospheric, must also be seen as part of the offensive of capital against the working class and as an expression of exceptional bourgeois unity.[8] The concentration of capital, accelerated by inflationary pressures, pushes us towards fascism by 1. unifying rentier and industrial capital (platform capital and hardgoods producers unified through mergers, bundles, and partnerships)[9], as well as national with transnational capital (friendshoring)[10] 2. negatively impacting and threatening to cast into the proletariat the petit bourgeois, thereby spontaneously developing shallowly “anti-capitalist” ideas in a vengeful middle class, the National Socialists of tomorrow’s America who merely wish to swap the current elites with their own, and 3. reversing gains of the proletariat, prompting economistic and defensive struggles, as well as by expanding the national and international army of surplus labor (all evident in an erosion of purchasing power; digitized productivity monitoring introduced under the cover of COVID-19 exceptionalism; the repeal of state child labor law[11]; immigration policy that divides the proletariat into tiers of formality and fixes certain workers within preferable national legal systems; the lawsuit seeking to destroy the NLRA brought by SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s[12]; multifront international warfare creating huge migratory movements of refugees; etc.) as a means of reinforcing and deepening the domination of capital over labor.

“It is characteristic of the rise of fascism that the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class assumes an increasingly political nature, while the working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie falls further and further back into the domain of economic demands… it is the economic struggle which progressively assumes the dominant role in the struggle of the working class.” -Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (p. 142)

Meanwhile, the chauvinism of the American right deepens, and it finds ever more dangerous expression for its hatreds structurally, even under Democratic administration. In fact, the far-right agenda seems to have had far more success nationally under the current Democratic administration than during Trump’s tenure. Between 2021 and 2023, 129 anti-trans bills were passed in states across America. We have no way to know the true number of murders and suicides these bills have led to–we know of far too many as it is–but we can say the United States is no doubt becoming an intolerably dangerous place for queer life. Even President Obama was willing to credibly threaten to withhold critical federal education funds from state governments who refused to follow the administration’s guidance with respect to the usage of bathrooms by trans and gender nonconforming people. This powerful intervention to protect and normalize trans life, perhaps as a means to protect an image of capitalism as tolerant and progressive, was immediately reversed by the Trump administration in 2017.[13] Today, the Biden administration has done absolutely nothing to forestall the ongoing attempt to erase trans people from existence in State Houses across America, suggesting a new ruling class consensus to abandon the illusion of a progressive capitalist culture, and perhaps liberalism itself.

In 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, all but condemning working class pregnant people to carry their babies to term or go broke attempting to procure abortion services in one of a dwindling number of safe states. As of now, 21 states “ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade,” with no indication that the adoption of such policies are slowing down.[14] It is far from controversial or groundbreaking to insist on anti-abortion policies as class warfare. The lack of safe, free abortion services divides the working class; the Bolsheviks institutionalized recognition of this basic fact in the very first years of the Soviet experiment over a century ago. Capital does not merely homogenize the laboring class as labor-power; it ceaselessly differentiates it along the axes of race, sex/gender, and age. Fascism, as the political expression of an exceptionally class-conscious ruling class, ruthlessly exploits and expands such divisions. That such a strategy emerges as a compliment to traditionalist reaction to the social atomization of the capitalist system it seeks to renew and defend is simply an example of the extraordinary opportunism of our bourgeoisie. It is an ideological pivot around which the petit bourgeoisie can align itself with a capitalist class that cares little about what is traditional and only about maximizing the rate of exploitation domestically.

On the southern border medieval death traps are erected, placed there by far-right politicians, and defended against the regulation of federal guidance by National Guards of neighboring and distant states. Migrants that have made it beyond our ramparts are shipped into the city centers of various Democratic mayors where they are subject to subhuman levels of care and a brutal, a shadow labor regime, absolutely maximizing rates of exploitation and dragging the wages of citizen-workers down, fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia across all of the national classes. Even the farthest-left members of our political system can seem only able to refer to these newly-arrived proletarian faces, often entire families, in the language of the far-right: as a crisis. Yet, far from becoming the constitutional crisis suggested at Eagle Pass, murderous border policy, irrational from the perspective of national economic interest but rational from the perspective of protecting the consistency of the national ideology, becomes another point of practical unity for Democratic and Republican officials alike. In fact, what marginal differences exist between the two Amerikan politikal parties on border policy allow the ruling class to have it both ways: a zone of blood sacrifice is established along the southern border for the ritualistic simulation of protection of the White body politic, while the majority of migrants do make it into our country for the sole purpose of superexploitation. These huddled masses are then weaponized in the cynical assault on the basis of the domestic laboring classes’ bargaining power: solidarity.

No matter; this convenient capitulation of the Democratic Party to Republican bloodlust has not dislodged the purely spectacular appearance of intense partisan division, nor has it stopped the wealthiest capitalist in this country from articulating anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the providence of this influx of migrants. Elon Musk, regrettably one of the more powerful of the bourgeoisie, appears to be spontaneously recreating National Socialism (With American Characteristics) in a haze of his own weed smoke. At various points, he has more or less explicitly called the immigration of people from the global south a Jewish conspiracy to destroy American prosperity and traditional family values, coming increasingly close to simply tweeting out the 14 words and decisively aligning himself with the ultraright fractions of the petit bourgeois and capitalist elements of the Republican party.

But Elon Musk is not alone in signaling his preference for a Republican presidency in the coming election; Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan,[15] Vice-Chair of Black Rock Philipp Hildebrand, and many other capitalists in the wake of conferences such as Davos have more or less openly declared their preference for a Trump victory in 2024.[16] Nonetheless, Trump’s most consistent base of support has long been that of the small-business owner, not the large capitalist. His electoral strength is his appearance as a disruptor, and it is exactly this trait which makes large capital uneasy. It is in this light which we can begin to understand the logic of Trump’s baffling selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate. The choice of a man so obviously disliked by the general public can only be made sense of as an attempt to further signal to the bourgeoisie what type of dictatorship a second Trump presidency would really be: a dictatorship of capital. Vance is, above all else, a creature of large tech capital, and much more so than Trump, a man who is wholly up for sale. If big capital continues to warm to a Trump presidency, despite Harris now backing away from all of Biden’s regulatory commitments, this would represent a development in the radicalization of capital that was unfathomable in 2016, when the prospect of a Trump presidency nearly crashed global markets. The ruling class is now beginning to sense both what kind of violence is truly necessary to restore profit rates to acceptable levels and that Trumpism poses no direct threat to the capitalist economic order.

We've also seen an assault on proletarian culture come in the form of the RICO charges brought against the YSL group, and Young Thug in particular. The charges are murder and organized crime and the prosecution is relying very heavily on the lyrical content of Young Thug’s songs to make their case. Rap music has long been an artistic form that creatively and dramatically expressed the harsh realities of racialized economic exclusion, the experience of savage competition accelerated by decades of neoliberal policy, and the psychic ramifications of ghettoization and state violence, even if it’s rarely presented in such terms. That this form of expression, one which is explicitly black, militant, and working class, is being attacked by the state is yet another symptom of the fascist spiral, here found at the point of legal-cultural intersection. While most rap music is not partisan, neither is the class itself, and the music is most certainly aggressively proletarian. Even lyrics about cars and money must be recognized as expressions of working class desire, specifically a desire to get out of the trenches or the mud one came from. It is important to recall that there once was a robust, self-consciously proletarian culture in this country, which often produced songs about fighting cops, offing your boss, and killing fascists. Such songs might have once been sung at red taverns, or union halls, or even at the dinner table with red-diaper babies bewilderedly looking on in hand-me-down high-chairs. While the fragmentation of the class and structural shifts in the economy have pushed such traditions to the margins of memory, we still find that vulgarity, militancy, and violence are not uncommon themes in the working class anthems of today, “fuck the police” being just one such example. To produce such content is a freedom we have long enjoyed thanks to the liberalism of our national bourgeoisie (and perhaps their own self-confidence, now rattled) and if we want to protect it, we can begin by recognizing the prosecution of Young Thug as a dangerous escalation in the assault on proletarian speech.

“what the fuck you mean put my gun down muthafucka? you must ain’t heard about Trayvon Martin you muthafucka” “When they killed my nigga, I seen the footage on the tape Man I must've threw up everything I ever ate” “R.I.P. Mike Brown, fuck the Cops Screamin' R.I.P Bennie shootin' up a block” “Hey, this that slime shit, hey YSL shit, hey Killin' 12 shit, hey Fuck a jail shit, hey”

This naturally brings us back to Atlanta. What is happening in Atlanta is nothing short of a nightmare. A Cop City is being rammed down the throats of an entire major metropolis, at the expense of the whole population's civil liberties, clean air, drinkable water, navigable streets. All democratic resistance has been shut down by Democratic politicians. Restrained clandestine activity and constitutionally protected street action have been met equally with the most intense repression since the George Floyd uprising. Unlike the George Floyd Rebellion, this struggle has generated a lasting unity across the various resistance interest groups, ideologies, and identities because of the intersectionality of the object of its opposition and an explicit and hard-won agreement to embrace a diversity of tactics—perhaps a direct response to the failure of the George Floyd Uprising and specifically the self-defeating division around responses to the police murder of Rayshard Brooks.

The tact taken by the state is notable here: rather than fragment the movement by erasing the intersectional content of the struggle through slight of hand (e.g. moving the center outside of the black, working-class neighborhood, or away from such an ecologically important site), they have decided to crush the movement with terrorism, murder, and demoralization. The construction of this center is a gesture. International capital and bipartisan politicians have come together to send a message while they prepare for a new cycle of struggle, one which we can expect will proceed on greatly expanded foundations, in the near future; the message reads: you will never be forgiven. In the last year alone, dozens of protesters have been rounded up on RICO charges with terror enhancements with hardly any evidence at all of wrongdoing. A protester, a militant forest defender, a queer person of color, a revolutionary named Tortuguita, was murdered for their unwavering commitment to the Earth and its creatures. Now, bail funds are under attack. This novel technology, mainstreamed during the May-June Rebellion, has served as a lifeline for working-class protesters assured of their righteousness, but no longer of their freedom. Make no mistake, the assault on bail-funds is a test-case for the nation as these funds made possible the sustained rebellion over the course of the months of May-August of 2020, during which well over 10,000 people were arrested. Today, huge swaths of pristine forest have been mercilessly cleared as construction of the police playhouse enters its early stages. To share a belief is now seditious conspiracy. To pool resources is organized crime. And to defend the earth is now terrorism. These are some of the tentative outcomes of the ongoing struggle against Cop City in Atlanta.

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity.” -George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (p. 138)

One last, but certainly not final, expression of the rising unity of capital and the resurgence of American fascism is the Watermelon Scare, or the reaction to domestic Palestinian liberation activity. Artists have lost shows, workers have lost jobs, unions have been sued by their employers, schools are being investigated by their national boards, insufficiently reactionary Heads of Ivy League institutions are cut down and replaced with more pliant personnel responsive only to the dictates of capital, and protest is further criminalized in the name of preventing anti-semitism. My words can hardly keep pace with events. The masks are all off and we are treated to front row seats to a dispiriting disappearing act; bourgeois democracy reveals itself to be bourgeois dictatorship, announced by a stomach-turning demonstration of their disregard for Life itself in Gaza. They are inaugurating a new period of their open domination with the screams of air-to-surface missiles, baptizing us all as powerless subjects in the blood of innocent Palestinians.

A few words, with the knowledge that the coming days will make my horrifying balance-sheet of the development of American fascism seem quite quaint, and awareness that we are rapidly flying headlong into a space beyond language’s expressive capacities: it is perhaps the most urgent task of the American left to insist that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people concerns us all. It is not merely that the violence against the colonized disfigures the colonizer into something monstrous beyond recognition, not only that these necro-technologies will rapidly be deployed on our own streets against us, and it goes beyond the fact that passivity in the face of such violence hardens our hearts to the violence that comes next (the sweeps of our homeless neighbors, the increasing murder-ability of “criminals” and “migrants,” and the erasure of trans and queer people from social space). The history of the American left since the birth of this nation is the history of its failures. There have been two prime stumbling blocks no configuration has succeeded in clearing: the white chauvinism of our working classes and the nationalism of our socialist organizations. Robust solidarity with Palestine in the moment of its genocide would be an advanced expression of an American left at last shaking off the weight of dead generations; an internationalist attack on white supremacy, recognized not as an individual attitude but a globe-spanning technique of government; a long awaited rejection of the substitution of universal rights with exclusive privileges; and an urgently necessary reversal of the decades-long drift towards short-term economic interest and away from political consciousness.

The American proletariat is once again being tested. Its historical task is the seizure of political power, but the road to political power necessarily passes through the relinquishing of its exceptional privilege. What we have tracked in the paragraphs above is the violent, state and extra-state, repression and reversal of legitimate gains in the political consciousness of various fractions of the American working class. Such reversals at a time of persistent crisis ensure that when the ruling classes unite around fascist strategies of systemic renewal, the forces of resistance will be disoriented, disorganized, and desperately clinging to the very privileges that we must betray in order to fulfill our historical mission. We must begin only with total acceptance of our defeat. Paradoxically, such a defeat liberates us from the urgent temporality of crisis. We must resist the temptation to fling ourselves headlong into every project of survival and take seriously the fact that the reemergence of fascism in the United States is not a symptom of systemic strength, but of great weakness. We must allow ourselves to be fully convinced that far more important than our survival is that the barbarism of this world does not. Then, tactics and strategy can begin.

"False praxis is no praxis. Desperation that, because it finds the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis, with the purest of intentions joins forces with catastrophe." -Theodor W. Adorno "They have the clocks, but we have the time." Afghani proverb "When you're running out of time, you're not out of time." Kanye West Donda (2021)

(August 2024)

NOTES

[1] This is a dynamic that very closely mirrors that identified in Poulantzas’ 1974 study of historical fascism:

“The petty bourgeoisie is itself divided into class fractions… it is also possible for dislocations to appear between its different fractions. These dislocations can even be deep enough for one fraction to swing one way, the other in the opposite direction. Experience shows that a common political position is generally maintained in ‘normal’ conjunctures of class struggle, or in conjunctures of acute political crisis where the working class is on the defensive, as in the case of fascism. The dislocations appear above all in revolutionary conjunctures or in political crises corresponding to the working-class offensive, as in Germany and Italy between 1919 and 1921.” (p. 244)

The integrated fraction of the laboring classes, the capitalized, home-owning upper fraction of salaried employees breaks with the capitalist class and stands with the proletariat during the early phase of the revolutionary conjuncture. It does not stay this way:

“Before stabilization and during the first period of open crisis between the bourgeoisie and the working class, a large part of the petty bourgeoisie clearly swings over to the side of the working class… we can say that this is mainly the case with the salaried employees… After its open swing to the working class side, this part of the petty bourgeoisie seems to stick to social democracy during the stabilization step. Subsequently it becomes disillusioned with social democracy, which fails to defend its interests. Turning away from social democracy, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole finds itself faced, at the beginning of the rise of fascism, with that instability and lack of hegemony among the dominant classes and fractions which characterizes the bourgeois parties’ crisis of representation.” (p. 248)

While we have no social democracy in this country, the Black Lives Matter movement laid down the ideological foundations for a unified class acting for itself in a way hitherto unseen in this country, a movement capable of challenging and even abolishing property relations as we know it. As the stabilization of the fascist arrangement occurred with the defeat of the proletariat, in this case coinciding with the literal stabilization of the economy, the proletariat was abandoned by the now re-integrated middle classes.

[2] U.S. Current Trend: Bills Provide Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters,

https://www.icnl.org/post/analysis/bills-provide-immunity-to-drivers-who-hit-protesters

[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm

[4] https://www.chainlaw.com/why-are-u-s-roadways-getting-more-dangerous-while-other-countries-are-getting-safer/

[5] Muddy clothes? ‘Cop City’ activists question police evidence, AP, March 23, 2023

https://apnews.com/article/cop-city-protest-domestic-terrorism-atlanta-6d114e109d489d316f588f51c7cab0cc

[6] Some Assembly Democrats look to criminalize disruptive protests, February 21, 2024

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/02/some-assembly-democrats-look-criminalize-disruptive-protests/394322/

[7] New York Governor considers face mask ban to deter crime https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/15/new-york-face-masks-ban-subway-crime#:~:text=New%20York%20has%20historically%20had,two%20years%20until%20September%202022.

[8] “Covid and the War in Ukraine,” IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ar/2022/in-focus/covid-19/

[9] There are many examples of these phenomena. A new unity of interest, and sometimes identity, between landed and digital capitals: Apple is now both a hardgoods producer and a streaming platform, Amazon is a platform, brick and mortar, logistics, a grocery store, and a pharmacy; and most recently Netflix has announced it is opening a chain of malls:

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/netflix-house-entertainment-dining-shopping-complexes-cities-2025-1236040989/

[10] “Friendshoring set to lift prices” Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/c7fa3fdb-195f-449f-b7b4-461c1e93b5d1

[11] “Child labor remains a key state legislative issue in 2024” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/child-labor-remains-a-key-state-legislative-issue-in-2024-state-lawmakers-must-seize-opportunities-to-strengthen-standards-resist-ongoing-attacks-on-child-labor-laws/#:~:text=Two%20states%E2%80%94Missouri%20and%20West,they%20are%20otherwise%20prohibited%20from

[12] “What’s behind the corporate effort to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board?” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-the-corporate-effort-to-kneecap-the-national-labor-relations-board-spacex-amazon-trader-joes-and-starbucks-are-trying-to-have-the-nlrb-declared-unconstitutional/

[13]  White House Reverses Obama Era Transgender Bathroom Policy https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-reverses-obama-era-transgender-bathroom-protections-n724426

[14] Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html

[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/jamie-dimon-praises-trump-warns-maga-criticism-could-hurt-biden.html

[16] https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2024/01/15/exp-blackrock-vice-chair-trump-iowa-caucuses-011503pseg2-cnni-business.cnn

[Hildebrand did not declare his preference for Trump as indicated in this statement. He called him the “wake up call that Europe needs” to regain sovereignty. Trump’s base of support comes overwhelmingly from the small business owner, not the large capitalist.]

[pashterlengkap]

Aetna to start covering IUI after a lawsuit, providers and families rejoice

Medical insurance company Aetna just announced that it’s going to be providing additional fertility coverage, specifically offering intrauterine insemination (IUI), to all policyholders regardless of sexual orientation or whether they’re partnered. “Expanding IUI coverage is yet another demonstration of Aetna’s commitment to women’s health across all communities, including LGBTQ+ and unpartnered people,” Cathy Moffitt, MD, senior vice president and Aetna chief medical officer, CVS Health, said in a press release. “This industry-leading policy change is a stake in the ground, reflecting Aetna’s support of all who need to use this benefit as a preliminary step in building their family.” Related Aetna agrees to provide equal fertility coverage for LGBTQ+ people in landmark settlement Until now, LGBTQ+ people faced a “queer tax” that heterosexual couples experiencing infertility did not. This comes after a settlement agreement from a lawsuit earlier this year which stated that Aetna has to provide such care for LGBTQ+ people. The case, Goidel et al. v. Aetna, was filed in September 2021 and only came to a resolution in May after years of waiting and legal battles. Stay connected to your community Connect with the issues and events that impact your community at home and beyond by subscribing to our newsletter. Subscribe to our Newsletter today It was argued that the previous policy, which only gave such coverage to straight people who were unable to conceive after six to 12 months of attempts and only gave coverage to LGBTQ+ people after they paid out of pocket for 12 cycles, was discriminatory. The plaintiffs in the case, Emma Goidel and her partner Illana Caplan, filed it after becoming aware of the disparities in the policy. They had the assistance of the National Women’s Law Center and local law firms. “How is it OK to say if you’re straight and your partner can’t get you pregnant, you come into the doctor and we’ll cover your treatment, but if you’re a queer and your partner can’t get you pregnant, too bad you’re going to pay?” said Goidel in a 2023 interview with ABC News. Aetna’s new policy begins September 1, and in addition to the new policy, they’re going to begin reimbursing claims and will be giving $2 million in funds to the plaintiffs. “We know firsthand the barriers people face in accessing needed medical care to start or grow their families,” said Chief Clinical Officer Kate Steinle of a nationwide health care provider for the LGBTQ+ community, FOLX, in the press release. “As an in-network provider focused on the LGBTQ+ community, we applaud Aetna’s efforts to reduce out-of-pocket costs, so that more people can have the families they dream of – and deserve.” http://dlvr.it/TCkXJT

[allthenewzworld]

The night before their youngest sister's wedding, Johnny Gaudreau, 31, and Matthew Gaudreau, 29, two brothers and soon-to-be groomsmen from a tight-knit hockey family rode their bikes down a county road not far from their southern New Jersey hometown.

Instead of celebrating this weekend, their family, now has two funerals to plan as the sports world mourns.

On Thursday night, a Jeep driver with the smell of alcohol later detected on his breath, police said, traveled northbound on the same road as the cycling Gaudreau brothers.

The driver's next move transformed the Thursday night bike ride of brothers into tragedy as he attempted to pass an SUV on the right lane and struck Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau. They would not live to see their sister say, "I do."

Condolences poured in throughout the weekend for the brothers at sporting events and makeshift memorials across the country.

Seven-time NHL All-Star Johnny Gaudreau, who spent 11 seasons in the league, was drafted to Canada's Calgary Flames in 2011 out of college and later signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets ahead of the 2022-2023 season. The enthusiastic athlete had 243 career goals and 743 points.

Even the 98-degree sweltering heat recorded in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday could not prevent heartbroken yet devoted fans from gathering as they held lit candles and placed flowers, teddy bears, hockey sticks and signed cards outside Nationwide Arena, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets, video from CNN affiliate WBNS showed. #allthenews

📸: Reuters/Getty Images/Joe Maiorana/AP/Drew Hallowell/Getty Images