#so it's like. you get it‚ ms. friedman! you wrote it! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

huangkunling-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Fashion designers creating face masks with flair

At fashion weeks in New York and Europe in early February — the precipice of the COVID-19 outbreak — designer shows were peppered with people in face masks.

Some were simple, others ostentatious. At the time, protective masks were still considered a cautionary step rather than a lifesaving necessity in the U.S. “Face masks are the must-have accessory amid coronavirus panic,” said a cheeky headline in the New York Post.

Like many trends, fashionable face masks are the latest thing to trickle down from the runway to retail. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that all people wear a cloth covering over their nose and mouth in public to help slow the spread of the virus. Designers and big brands have wasted no time adding flair to face masks.

Vogue published online this month a list of 92 stylish cloth face masks to shop right now. Before it declared bankruptcy, J.Crew unveiled pinstripe and gingham print masks for sale. For $9.99 per month, MaskClub will ship you a new one every few weeks with Care Bears, Hello Kitty or the classic Batman logo on it.

Eugenia Kim, a Monroeville native and celebrity milliner in New York City, sold out of the first batch of hologram sequined and satin masks she sells at eugeniakim.com for $20 apiece. “They’re obviously functional, but I think they can be uplifting,” she told The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan.“Project Runway” veteran Christian Siriano took a break from making personal protective equipment for frontline workers to share on social media a couple statement masks, one dripping with pearls and another covered in crystals. In Pittsburgh, face masks that marry fashion with function are hot. FashionAFRICANA founder Demeatria Boccella is launching the FashionAFRICANA Mask Initiative at fashionafricana-masks.myshopify.com. The first ones sell for $12 and are made from African fabrics left over from fashion productions over the years. Future ones will be by designers from African countries.

“I'm very passionate about my culture, and I just keep getting so depressed about how COVID-19 is impacting the African American community and the health disparities that exist within our culture,” she said. “We need something to put a smile on our face, that uplifts us and connects us to our culture.”

Mosaic Inc., a linen rental company in the Strip District, has turned to making fashion-forward face masks via partymosaic.com as a way to adapt to clients’ needs.

“We recognized that the live event industry was going to go dark for a long, long time,” said owner Susie Perelman. “We knew that the obvious pivot for us was to be able use our fabrics to create masks.”

In March, the company released a line of fabrics called Made by Mosaic that are now being used for masks instead of table decor. The colorful masks are lined with piping and have Spandex instead of elastic straps around the ears for a more comfortable fit. A portion of proceeds are donated to local organizations, Ms. Perelman said.

Requests for Pittsburgh-themed prints prompted a black-and-gold collection and more designs are in the works. The black-and-gold masks sell for $10 each.

“We are now getting asked by our clients to add custom-designed masks for guests and event staff to match linens for weddings and other events,” she said.

Pittsburgh-based designer Diana Misetic has been posting photos on social media of chic masks she’s designed. One in a floral print matched her pants and she dressed up neutral colored masks with oversized sunglasses. In one post, she demonstrated how to tie the straps in a small bow. She’s been exploring ways to make masks that are safe, comfortable and stylish to sell.

“This is part of a new lifestyle,” she said. “I want to tell people it doesn’t have to be something you buy just for protection. It can be part of a whole design.”

This is hardly the first time the fashion industry has put its stamp on a necessary item.

“The most obvious one is eyewear,” said Sarah Mullins, assistant professor and assistant chairperson of the footwear and accessories design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

“Glasses, especially optical frames, were worn to correct your vision. Now people wear them for style even if they have 20/20 vision,” said Ms. Mullins, who grew up in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.

Handbags originated as pouches for coins and now are a $50 billion industry, she added, and don’t forget about belts. “All you have to do is look at the 1980s for how they were worn as fashion accessories.”

Face masks have ebbed and flowed in popularity for centuries. In the 1600s, doctors wore beak-like masks that could be stuffed with incense because it was believed plagues were spread through pungent smells. Cloth face coverings were common during the 1918 flu pandemic and in 2002 when SARS appeared in China.

Ms. Mullins credits the DIY maker movement for accelerating the latest resurgence of face masks. In early April, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman reported that 20,000 of its shops were selling them.

“With free online sharing of patterns, anyone with the desire to make a mask could make one,” she said.

Some have questioned how brands and makers have tried to put a positive spin on something born out of a pandemic.

“It is hard to avoid the nagging sense that designers are exploiting fear born during a pandemic for their own ends [and profit], and that consumers are using what is a medical necessity, one that is the most visible representation of the pain and isolation currently shared by so many, in a decorative way,” New York Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote recently. “Capitalist opportunities often emerge from times of trauma. This may be one of them. But that doesn’t make the origin story any less uncomfortable.”

Fashion and tragedy often go hand in hand. Ms. Mullins said. “Historically tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion by influencing the wearing of corsets. Consumptive chic referred to the thin and pale symptoms suffered by the afflicted that became markers of beauty.

“Similarly, heroin chic was a fashion trend in the mid ’90s.”

While some brands are selling masks for hundreds of dollars, no one’s getting rich from them. Burberry, Lacoste, Under Armour, Brooks Brothers and Adidas are a few of the companies marketing them.

“I think more brands and designers started making masks to help with the shortage of supplies than to make money,” Ms. Mullins said. “I do not think anyone is making enough money from face masks to make up for the money they are losing during this pandemic.”

2 notes · View notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

Text

95 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html

A Trump Policy ‘Clarification’ All but Ends Punishment for Bird Deaths

By Lisa Friedman | Published Dec. 24, 2019 Updated 10:34 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 24, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.

To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a safe haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”

The state ended its island planning.

The island is one of dozens of bird-preservation efforts that have fallen away in the wake of the policy change in 2017 that was billed merely as a technical clarification to a century-old law protecting migratory birds. Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds.

In one instance, a Wyoming-based oil company wanted to clarify that it no longer had to report bird deaths to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “You are correct,” the agency replied.

In another, a building property manager in Michigan emailed the Fish and Wildlife Service to note that residents had complained about birds being killed while workers put up siding and gutters around the apartment. Not to worry, the agency replied: “If the purpose or intent of your activity is not to take birds/nests/eggs, then it is no longer prohibited.”

And when a homeowners’ association in Arizona complained that a developer had refused to safely remove nesting burrowing owls from a nearby lot, Fish and Wildlife said that, because of the new legal interpretation, it could not compel the developer to act.

“Of course, we just got sued over that interpretation, so we’ll see how it ends up,” the enforcement officer wrote.

The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of the president, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

Habitat loss and pesticide exposure already have brought on widespread bird-species declines. The number of adult breeding birds in the United States and Canada has plummeted by 2.9 billion since 1970.

Now, said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Trump administration has engineered “a fundamental shift” in policy that “lets industrial companies, utilities and others completely off the hook.” Even a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, which killed or injured about a million birds, would not expose a company to prosecution or fines.

Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for protecting migratory birds, said in a statement that other federal laws like the Endangered Species Act remain on the books. The Trump administration, he said, “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.”

The documents tell a different story. In nearly two dozen incidents across 15 states, internal conversations among Fish and Wildlife Service officers indicate that, short of going out to shoot birds, activities in which birds die no longer merit action. In some cases the Trump administration has even discouraged local governments and businesses from taking relatively simple steps to protect birds, like reporting fatalities when they are found.

“You get the sense this policy is not only bad for birds, it’s also cruel,” Mr. Greenwald said.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was originally enacted to protect the birds from over-hunting and poaching at a time when feathered hats were all the rage and the snowy egret was hunted almost to extinction. It makes it illegal “by any means or in any manner” to hunt, take, capture or kill birds, nests or eggs from listed species without a permit.

Beginning in the 1970s, federal officials used the act to prosecute and fine companies up to $15,000 per bird for accidental deaths on power lines, in oil pits, in wind turbines and by other industrial hazards.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association, said fossil fuel companies had been unfairly targeted by the law, pointing to an Obama administration prosecution of seven oil companies in North Dakota for the deaths of 28 birds.

“It felt like it was weaponized against one industry,” she said.

Changes to the interpretation of the law topped the association’s wish list for the Trump administration. Six months after that list was released, the Interior Department ended prosecutions for bird deaths “when the underlying purpose of that activity is not to take birds.”

If landowners destroys a barn knowing it is filled with baby owls, they would not be liable, as long as the intent was not to kill owls, the opinion said. The illegal spraying of a banned pesticide would not be a legal liability either as long as the birds were not the “intended target.”

In the case of the Hampton Roads, Va., bridge and tunnel project, Stephen C. Birch, the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Transportation, said the agency is seeking an alternate solution for the seabirds. A spokeswoman for the agency said the Trump administration’s opinion “had no direct impact” on the decision to abandon the bird island.

But conservationists who had been working closely with the state to protect the seabirds’ nesting grounds said they had no doubt it had a chilling effect.

“The dynamics really changed,” said Sarah Karpanty, a professor of fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech and a member of the team that had been working with the state. “They were basically conservation partners, and in 2017 all indications were that they were going to be a conservation partner again. Then the solicitor’s opinion changed everything.”

The loss of the Hampton Roads nesting area will devastate some bird species because it was the last they had; other sites in the Chesapeake Bay have been lost to sea level rise and erosion. The birds, now south for the winter, will return in March and April to land that has been paved. Construction crews may have to take aggressive measures to prevent the birds from nesting wherever they can, like in cracks in the asphalt.

“If there’s no new habitat construction, they will most likely not reproduce,” Ms. Karpanty said. “The frustrating thing is about this situation is, there is a solution, a relatively easy solution.”

In another case, the United States Coast Guard notified the Fish and Wildlife Service in January 2018 that it had identified a vessel responsible for an oil spill near Woods Hole, Mass., that killed about two dozen sea birds. Federal wildlife police replied that because the “birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act” were killed incidentally, “there’s currently no enforcement action plan.”

In other cases, states and companies are still acting voluntarily. In June 2018 a state official in Michigan alerted the Fish and Wildlife Service that a logger had spotted a great blue heron rookery in a red pine forest and wanted to know how to proceed. The federal agent replied that while the effort to minimize harm to the birds was appreciated, action was considered “strictly voluntary and not required in any way.”

In that instance, the company worked with the state to agree on a 300-foot buffer around the nests where no commercial activity would occur until after nesting season, said Dan Kennedy, an endangered species coordinator with the Michigan environment office.

Sarah Greenberger, senior vice president for conservation at the Audubon Society, said such voluntary actions cannot be counted on.

“I’m sure there are still conscientious actors who are taking steps,” she said. “But we don’t know that, and we don’t know how long they will continue to do that, especially if their competitors aren’t.”

Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore wind companies and drillers, said the Trump administration’s reinterpretation had given his industry more certainty.

“There’s a balance here as to what extent should something that happened to a bird be criminalized, versus how do we ensure that they’re protected,” he said.

Builders, developers and property managers are also benefiting. In Washington D.C., the district’s Department of Energy and Environment asked Fish and Wildlife in July 2018 to help resolve a puzzling issue: a condominium had installed netting to keep birds out of its insulation, but the net was instead trapping songbirds and migratory birds, “many who do not make it out and end up dying.” The Trump administration replied that migratory birds that are killed “non-purposefully” are not subject to enforcement and offered voluntary guidelines.

“It’s part of a broader dirty blanket that the administration is using over the whole environment,” said Tommy Wells, director of the district’s energy program, who fears that administration policies could reverse a resurgence of wildlife in the city.

In Albuquerque, N.M., Alan Edmonds, an animal cruelty case manager with New Mexico’s animal protection agency, pushed back after the Fish and Wildlife Service gave only a verbal warning to a company that had trapped and killed a Cooper’s hawk. The agency replied that, without proof that the company wanted to kill the hawk, “we can’t do anything.”

Mr. Edmonds said the company received “not even a slap on the wrist.” He acknowledged the hawk was just one bird. But Ms. Greenberger of the Audubon Society said, “This is how we lose birds.”

“We don’t lose them a billion at a time,” she said. “We lose them from small incidents happening repeatedly over the vast geography of our country.”

⛄🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄🎅🎄⛄

95 ENVIRONMENTAL RULES BEING ROLLED BACK UNDER TRUMP

By NADJA POPOVICH, LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA and KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS | UPDATED Dec. 21, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 24, 2019 |

President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses.

A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 90 environmental rules and regulations rolled back under Mr. Trump.

Our list represents two types of policy changes: rules that were officially reversed and rollbacks still in progress.

The Trump administration has often used a “one-two punch” when rolling back environmental rules, said Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks regulatory rollbacks. “First a delay rule to buy some time, and then a final substantive rule.”

But the process has not always been smooth. In some cases, the administration has failed to provide a strong legal argument in favor of proposed changes and agencies have skipped key steps in the rulemaking process, like notifying the public and asking for comment. In several cases, courts have ordered agencies to enforce their own rules.

Several environmental rules — summarized at the bottom of this page — were rolled back and then later reinstated, often following legal challenges. Other regulations remain mired in court.

All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year, according to a report prepared by New York University Law School's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

Air Pollution and Emissions

COMPLETED

1. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions.Environmental Protection Agency | Read more

2. Revised and partially repealed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations.Interior Department | Read more

3. Replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, with a new version that would let states set their own rules.Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more

4. Revoked California’s power to set its own more stringent emissions standards for cars and light trucks.E.P.A. | Read more

5. Repealed a requirement that state and regional authorities track tailpipe emissions from vehicles traveling on federal highways.Transportation Department | Read more

6. Loosened a Clinton-era rule designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters.E.P.A. | Read more

7. Revised a permiting program designed to safeguard communities from increases in pollution from new power plants to make it easier for facilities to avoid emissions regulations.E.P.A. | Read more

8. Amended rules that govern how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities.E.P.A. | Read more

9. Stopped enforcing a 2015 rule that prohibited the use of hydrofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases, in air-conditioners and refrigerators.E.P.A. | Read more

10. Weakened an Obama-era rule meant to reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas.E.P.A. | Read more

11. Weakened oversight of some state plans for reducing air pollution in national parks.E.P.A. | Read more

12. Directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation of the “social cost of carbon” that rulemakers used to estimate the long-term economic benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.Executive Order | Read more

13. Withdrew guidance that federal agencies include greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews. But several district courts have ruled that emissions must be included in such reviews.Executive Order; Council on Environmental Quality | Read more

14. Lifted a summertime ban on the use of E15, a gasoline blend made of 15 percent ethanol. (Burning gasoline with a higher concentration of ethanol in hot conditions increases smog.)E.P.A. | Read more

15. Changed rules to allow states and the E.P.A. to take longer to develop and approve plans aimed at cutting methane emissions from existing landfills.E.P.A. | Read more

16. Revoked an Obama executive order that set a goal of cutting the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over 10 years.Executive Order | Read more

IN PROCESS

17. Proposed relaxing Obama-era requirements that companies monitor and repair methane leaks at oil and gas facilities.

E.P.A. | Read more on website

18. Proposed weakening Obama-era fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks.

E.P.A. and Transportation Department | Read more on website

19. Submitted notice of intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. The process of withdrawing cannot be completed until November 2020.

Executive Order | Read more on website

20. Proposed eliminating Obama-era restrictions that in effect required newly built coal power plants to capture carbon dioxide emissions.

E.P.A. | Read more on Website

21. Proposed a legal justification for weakening an Obama-era rule that limited mercury emissions from coal power plants.

E.P.A. | Read more on Website

22. Proposed revisions to standards for carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified and reconstructed power plants.

Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more on website

23. Began a review of emissions rules for power plant start-ups, shutdowns and malfunctions. In April, the E.P.A. proposed reversing a requirement that Texas follow the emissions rule, with implications for 35 other states.

E.P.A. | Read more on Website

24. Proposed the repeal of rules meant to reduce leaking and venting of hydrofluorocarbons from large refrigeration and air conditioning systems.

E.P.A. | Read more on Website

25. Opened for comment a proposal limiting the ability of individuals and communities to challenge E.P.A.-issued pollution permits before a panel of agency judges.

E.P.A. | Read more on Website

DRILLING AND EXTRACTION

COMPLETED

26. Made significant cuts to the borders of two national monuments in Utah and recommended border and resource management changes to several more.

Presidential Proclamation; Interior Department | Read more

27. Rescinded water pollution regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands.

Interior Department | Read more

28. Scrapped a proposed rule that required mines to prove they could pay to clean up future pollution.

E.P.A. | Read more

29. Withdrew a requirement that Gulf oil rig owners prove they could cover the costs of removing rigs once they have stopped producing.

Interior Department | Read more

30. Approved construction of the Dakota Access pipeline less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Under the Obama administration, the Army Corps of Engineers had said it would explore alternative routes.

Executive Order; Army | Read more

31. Revoked an Obama-era executive order designed to preserve ocean, coastal and Great Lakes waters in favor of a policy focused on energy production and economic growth.

Executive Order | Read more

32. Changed how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission considers the indirect effects of greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews of pipelines.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission | Read more

33. Permitted the use of seismic air guns for gas and oil exploration in the Atlantic Ocean. The practice, which can kill marine life and disrupt fisheries, was blocked under the Obama administration.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more

34. Lifted ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Congress; Interior Department | Read more

35. Loosened offshore drilling safety regulations implemented by the Obama administration following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, including reduced testing requirements for blowout prevention systems.

Interior Department | Read more

IN PROCESS

36. Proposed opening most of America’s coastal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling, but delayed the plan after a federal judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s reversal of an Obama-era ban on drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawlful.

Interior Department | Read more

37. Lifted an Obama-era freeze on new coal leases on public lands. But, in April 2019, a judge ruled that the Interior Department could not begin selling new leases without completing an environmental review. A month later, the agency published a draft assessment that concluded restarting federal coal leasing would have little environmental impact.

Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more

38. Repealed an Obama-era rule governing royalties for oil, gas and coal leases on federal lands, which replaced a 1980s rule that critics said allowed companies to underpay the federal government. A federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s repeal. The Interior Department is reviewing the decision.

Interior Department | Read more

39. Proposed revising regulations on offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels in the Arctic that were developed after a 2013 accident. The Interior Department previously said it was “considering full rescission or revision of this rule.”

Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more

40. Proposed “streamlining” the approval process for drilling for oil and gas in national forests.

Agriculture Department; Interior Department | Read more

41. Recommended shrinking three marine protected areas, or opening them to commercial fishing.

Executive Order; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more

42. Proposed opening land in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve for oil and leasing. The Obama administration had designated the reserve as a conservation area.

Interior Department | Read more

43. Proposed lifting a Clinton-era policy that banned logging and road construction in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.

Interior Department | Read more on website

44. Approved the Keystone XL pipeline rejected by President Barack Obama, but a federal judge blocked the project from going forward without an adequate environmental review process. Mr. Trump later attempted to side-step the ruling by issuing a presidential permit, but the project remains tied up in court.

Executive Order; State Department | Read more on website

INFRASTRUCTURE AND PLANNING

COMPLETED

45. Revoked Obama-era flood standards for federal infrastructure projects, like roads and bridges. The standards required the government to account for sea-level rise and other climate change effects.Executive Order | Read more

46. Relaxed the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects.Executive Order | Read more

47. Revoked a directive for federal agencies to minimize impacts on water, wildlife, land and other natural resources when approving development projects.Executive Order | Read more

48. Revoked an Obama executive order promoting “climate resilience” in the northern Bering Sea region of Alaska, which withdrew local waters from oil and gas leasing and established a tribal advisory council to consult on local environmental issues.Executive Order | Read more

49. Reversed an update to the Bureau of Land Management’s public land use planning process.Congress | Read more

50. Withdrew an Obama-era order to consider climate change in managing natural resources in national parks.National Park Service | Read more

51. Restricted most Interior Department environmental studies to one year in length and a maximum of 150 pages, citing a need to reduce paperwork.Interior Department | Read more

52. Withdrew a number of Obama-era Interior Department climate change and conservation policies that the agency said could “burden the development or utilization of domestically produced energy resources.”Interior Department | Read more

53. Eliminated the use of an Obama-era planning system designed to minimize harm from oil and gas activity on sensitive landscapes, such as national parks.Interior Department | Read more

54. Eased the environmental review processes for small wireless infrastructure projects with the goal of expanding 5G wireless networks.Federal Communications Commission | Read more

55. Withdrew Obama-era policies designed to maintain or, ideally improve, natural resources affected by federal projects.Interior Department | Read more

IN PROCESS

56. Proposed plans to streamline the environmental review process for Forest Service projects.Agriculture Department | Read more

ANIMALS

COMPLETED

57. Changed the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, making it more difficult to protect wildlife from long-term threats posed by climate change.

Interior Department | Read More on Website

58. Overturned a ban on the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands.

Interior Department | Read more

59. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges.

Congress | Read more on Website

60. Amended fishing regulations for a number of species to allow for longer seasons and higher catch rates.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more on Website

61. Withdrew proposed limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that can be unintentionally killed or injured with sword-fishing nets by people who fish on the West Coast. (In 2018, California issued a state rule prohibiting the use of the nets the rule was intending to regulate.)

62. Rolled back a roughly 40-year-old interpretation of a policy aimed at protecting migratory birds, potentially running afoul of treaties with Canada and Mexico.

Interior Department | Read more

63. Overturned a ban on using parts of migratory birds in handicrafts made by Alaskan Natives.

Interior Department | Read more

IN PROCESS

64. Opened nine million acres of Western land to oil and gas drilling by weakening habitat protections for the sage grouse, an imperiled bird with an elaborate mating dance. An Idaho District Court injunction blocked the measure.

Interior Department | Read more

65. Proposed ending an Obama-era rule that barred using bait to lure and kill grizzly bears, among other sport hunting practices that many people consider extreme, on some public lands in Alaska.

National Park Service; Interior Department | Read more

66. Proposed relaxing environmental protections for salmon and smelt in California’s Central Valley in order to free up water for farmers.

Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more

TOXIC SUBSTANCES AND SAFETY

COMPLETED

67. Rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental disabilities in children. (A European Union ban is to take effect in 2020.)

E.P.A. | Read more

68. Narrowed the scope of a 2016 law mandating safety assessments for potentially toxic chemicals like dry-cleaning solvents. The E.P.A. said it would focus on direct exposure and exclude indirect exposure such as from air or water contamination. In November, a court of appeals ruled the agency must widen its scope to consider full exposure risks.

E.P.A. | Read more

69. Reversed an Obama-era rule that required braking system upgrades for “high hazard” trains hauling flammable liquids, like oil and ethanol.

Transportation Department | Read more

70. Removed copper filter cake, an electronics manufacturing byproduct comprised of heavy metals, from the “hazardous waste” list.

E.P.A. | Read more

71. Ended an Occupational Safety and Health Administration program to reduce risks of workers developing the lung disease silicosis.

Labor Department | Read more

PROCESS

72. Proposed changing safety rules to allow for rail transport of liquefied natural gas, which is highly flammable.Transportation Department | Read more

73. Rolled back most of the requirements of a 2017 rule aimed at improving safety at sites that use hazardous chemicals that was instituted after a chemical plant exploded in Texas.E.P.A. | Read more

74. Announced a review of an Obama-era rule lowering coal dust limits in mines. The head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said there were no immediate plans to change the dust limit but has extended an public comment period until 2022.Labor Department | Read more

WATER POLLUTION

COMPLETED

75. Scaled back pollution protections for certain tributaries and wetlands that were regulated under the Clean Water Act by the Obama administration.E.P.A.; Army | Read more

76. Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams.Congress | Read more

77. Withdrew a proposed rule aimed at reducing pollutants, including air pollution, at sewage treatment plants.E.P.A. | Read more

78. Withdrew a proposed rule requiring groundwater protections for certain uranium mines.E.P.A. | Read more

IN PROCESS

79. Proposed a rule exempting certain types of power plants from parts of an E.P.A. rule limiting toxic discharge from power plants into public waterways.E.P.A. | Read more

80. Proposed allowing the E.P.A. to issue permits for federal projects under the Clean Water Act over state objections if they don't meet local water quality goals, including for pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities.Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more

81. Proposed extending the lifespan of unlined coal ash holding areas, which can spill their contents because they lack a protective underlay.E.P.A. | Read more

82. Proposed a regulation limiting the scope of an Obama-era rule under which companies had to prove that large deposits of recycled coal ash would not harm the environment.E.P.A. | Read more

83. Proposed a new rule allowing the federal government to issue permits for coal ash waste in Indian Country and some states without review if the disposal site is in compliance with federal regulations.E.P.A. | Read more

84. Proposed doubling the time allowed to remove lead pipes from water systems with high levels of lead.E.P.A. | Read more

Other

COMPLETED

85. Repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have nearly doubled the number of light bulbs subject to energy-efficiency standards starting in January 2020. The E.P.A. also blocked the next phase of efficiency standards for general-purpose bulbs already subject to regulation.

Energy Department | Read more

86. Allowed coastal replenishment projects to use sand from protected beaches.

Interior Department | Read more

87. Limited funding environmental and community development projects through corporate settlements of federal lawsuits.

Justice Department | Read more

88. Announced intent to stop payments to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations program to help poorer countries reduce carbon emissions.

Executive Order | Read more

89. Reversed restrictions on the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks desgined to cut down on litter, despite a Park Service report that the effort worked.

Interior Department | Read more

IN PROCESS

90. Ordered a review of water efficiency standards in bathroom fixtures, including toilets.

E.P.A. | Read more

91. Proposed limiting the studies used by the E.P.A. for rulemaking to only those that make data publicly available. (Scientists widely criticized the proposal, who said it would effectively block the agency from considering landmark research that relies on confidential health data.)

E.P.A. | Read more

92. Proposed changes to the way cost-benefit analyses are conducted under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental statutes.

E.P.A. | Read more

93. Proposed withdrawing efficiency standards for residential furnaces and commercial water heaters designed to reduce energy use.

Energy Department | Read more

94. Created a product category that would allow some dishwashers to be exempt from energy efficiency standards.

Energy Department | Read more

95. Initially withdrew then delayed a proposed rule that would inform car owners about fuel-efficient replacement tires. (The Transportation Department has scheduled a new rulemaking notice for 2020.)

Transportation Department | Read more

10 RULES WERE REINSTATED,

OFTEN FOLLOWING LAWSUITS

AND OTHER CHALLENGES

1. Weakened federal rules regulating the disposal and storage of coal ash waste from power plants. A court later ruled the administration was attempting to weaken rules that were not stringent enough.

E.P.A.

2. Reversed course on repealing emissions standards for “glider” trucks — vehicles retrofitted with older, often dirtier engines — after Andrew Wheeler took over as head of the E.P.A.

E.P.A. | Read more

3. Delayed a compliance deadline for new national ozone pollution standards by one year, but later reversed course.

E.P.A. | Read more

4. Suspended an effort to lift restrictions on mining in Bristol Bay, Alaska. But the Army Corps of Engineers is performing an environmental review of an application for mining in the area.

E.P.A.; Army | Read more

5. Delayed implementation of a rule regulating the certification and training of pesticide applicators, but a judge ruled that the E.P.A. had done so illegally and declared the rule still in effect.

E.P.A. | Read more

6. Initially delayed publishing efficiency standards for household appliances, but later published them after multiple states and environmental groups sued.

Energy Department | Read more

7. Delayed federal building efficiency standards until Sept. 30, 2017, at which time the rules went into effect.

Energy Department | Read more

8. Reissued a rule limiting the discharge of mercury by dental offices into municipal sewers after a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

E.P.A. | Read more

9. Re-posted a proposed rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft, after initially changing its status to “inactive” on the E.P.A. website. In May 2019, the agency confimed it would issue the rule.

E.P.A. | Read more

10. Removed the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List, but the protections were later reinstated by a federal judge. (The Trump administration appealed the ruling in May 2019.)

Interior Department | Read more

Note: This list does not include new rules proposed by the Trump administration that do not roll back previous policies, nor does it include court actions that have affected environmental policies independent of executive or legislative action.

#trump scandals #trump administration #president donald trump #trump impeachment #trump #president trump #trump news #republican politics #politics and government #us politics #politics #climatechangeisreal #climateaction #climate crisis #environmentalism #environmental disasters #environment #environmetalists #enviromental

4 notes · View notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

Did You Miss Out on Trip This 12 months? You’re Not Alone In a typical 12 months, New York workers of the journal writer Condé Nast should use their trip days earlier than late December or lose them — a typical coverage throughout company America. However early this month, the corporate despatched workers an e-mail saying they might carry as much as 5 trip days into subsequent 12 months, an obvious acknowledgment that many scrimped on days off amid the lengthy hours and journey restrictions imposed by the pandemic. “The carry-over will likely be computerized, and there may be nothing additional you could do,” the e-mail stated. Condé Nast was not alone in scrambling to make end-of-year preparations for vacation-deprived staff. Some employers, nonetheless, have been much less accommodating. “It’s an enormous concern we’re seeing now — competing requests for time without work over the subsequent two weeks,” stated Allan S. Bloom, an employment lawyer at Proskauer in New York. “Purchasers are struggling to determine it out.” Mr. Bloom and different attorneys and human sources specialists stated there was no clear sample in how employers had been dealing with the problem. Many firms that already permit workers to hold trip days into the subsequent 12 months — like Goldman Sachs (usually as much as 10) and Spotify (usually as much as 10) — haven’t felt the necessity to change their insurance policies. The identical is true for some firms that pay staff for his or her unused trip days. Neither Common Motors nor Ford Motor, whose hourly staff can money out unused trip days on the finish of the 12 months, is making adjustments this 12 months. However many staff could discover themselves unable to take holidays that they postponed: Salaried staff at each automakers ordinarily lose unused trip days on the finish of the 12 months with out compensation. Different firms have taken steps that might defuse a possible human sources headache and, they are saying, profit their work forces in troublesome instances. Financial institution of America, which usually requires its U.S. workers to take all their trip earlier than the tip of the 12 months, stated in June that it will permit them to push as much as 5 days into the primary quarter of 2021. Citigroup has sometimes allowed its U.S. workers to hold trip days into the primary quarter of the subsequent 12 months, however in July it added an inducement: Staff obtain an additional trip day subsequent 12 months in the event that they use all of their 2020 trip time this 12 months. Smaller firms have made comparable modifications. Latshaw Drilling, an oil service firm primarily based in Tulsa, Okla., sometimes permits workplace staff to roll over as much as three weeks of trip time. In December, Latshaw advised its workplace workers that it will purchase as much as one week of unused time past that quantity, which they’d have in any other case misplaced. “Since this 12 months was so loopy and other people had been afraid to journey, we made a one-time change,” stated Trent Latshaw, the corporate’s founder and president. A number of specialists stated a philosophical query loomed over trip advantages: Is the purpose to make sure that staff take time without work? Or are trip days merely another type of compensation that staff can use as they see match, whether or not to chill out away from the job, to complement their earnings or to pull round with them till the tip of time, as a monument to their productiveness? An employer’s insurance policies can mirror its views on this query: For all their drawbacks, use-it-or-lose-it guidelines may also help make sure that staff take time without work, stated Jackie Reinberg, who heads the absence and incapacity apply of the consulting agency Willis Towers Watson. In contrast, rollover and cash-out choices indicate that trip is an asset they’re entitled to regulate. Nonetheless, for a lot of staff, the problem in the course of the pandemic shouldn’t be unused trip days a lot as inadequate trip days. Jonathan Williams, communications director for United Meals and Industrial Staff Native 400, which represents grocery retailer staff in Mid-Atlantic States, stated staff had generally been pressured to attract down their reserves of paid time without work in the event that they had been requested to quarantine a second time after a doable coronavirus publicity. Solely the primary quarantine is usually lined by the employer, Mr. Williams stated. And a few workers have issue benefiting from the beneficiant trip insurance policies their firms supply. Up to date Dec. 28, 2020, 3:18 p.m. ET A Goal spokeswoman stated the corporate had elevated the holiday days that each hourly and salaried staff may roll over into the subsequent 12 months, primarily based on the worker’s position and tenure. However in keeping with Adam Ryan, who works for Goal in Christiansburg, Va., many workers wrestle to qualify for advantages like trip days. Mr. Ryan stated in a textual content message that he had been with the corporate for 3 years however sometimes averaged lower than 20 hours per week. “That method I don’t get any trip or paid sick days, no actual advantages of any form,” he stated. The Goal spokeswoman stated workers may choose up extra hours below its vacation staffing association. A number of union officers, employers and human-resources specialists stated monetary concerns drove many choices about trip insurance policies in the course of the pandemic. Toyota usually permits hourly and lots of salaried workers in the USA to money out as much as two weeks of unused trip days. This 12 months, the corporate lowered the cap to at least one week, a change {that a} spokeswoman stated was meant to assist avert layoffs. The concerns develop into much more difficult for days that staff push into future years. In line with Ms. Reinberg, permitting staff to roll over days can create a pile of liabilities owed to staff that many employers are loath to hold on their books. A union official on the information group Reuters stated the corporate cited accounting issues in sticking with its use-it-or-lose-it coverage this 12 months. The union had pleaded for leniency, noting that its contract permits administration to approve a rollover of trip days in “distinctive circumstances.” “If this 12 months has not been distinctive, I don’t know what the hell has been,” stated the union official, Dan Grebler, an editor who’s chair of the employees’ bargaining unit at Reuters. “The response was: ‘No, we are able to’t try this. There can be difficult bookkeeping concerned.’” Mr. Grebler stated Reuters had begun urging staff to take days off this calendar 12 months across the identical time it had rebuffed him. A Reuters spokeswoman stated that “our coverage for U.S. workers for some years has not allowed for unused trip days to be rolled over” and that “workers have been recurrently reminded because the first half of this 12 months.” Unionized workers at The New York Instances, comparable to reporters, are inspired to make use of trip days in the course of the 12 months by which they accrue the times however can usually carry them over till March 1 of the subsequent 12 months. Days they don’t use by that time are paid out in money. An organization spokeswoman stated the coverage had not modified this 12 months. By each regulation and customized, many People have come to see trip days extra as compensation than as a mandate to take time without work. In a survey by Willis Towers Watson in April, greater than half of employers that made or deliberate to make adjustments to their trip advantages stated they had been doing so as a result of they didn’t anticipate staff to make use of all their days. About one-third that deliberate adjustments stated the profit had develop into too expensive. A number of states, like California and Montana, basically codify the property-right view of trip by outlawing use-it-or-lose-it insurance policies. (Corporations with use-it-or-lose-it or strict rollover insurance policies should exempt staff in these states.) Such legal guidelines shield staff from successfully being disadvantaged of trip days which are troublesome to make use of in the course of the 12 months solely to have them expire at 12 months’s finish. However these legal guidelines may subtly discourage holidays by making them simpler to redeem for cash or postpone indefinitely. “To me as an advocate, you have to be ready by regulation to maintain unused trip time,” stated Peter Romer-Friedman, an employment lawyer at Gupta Wessler. “However I’m undecided that creates a great incentive.” To that finish, quite a few firms, many within the tech business, have seized on the pandemic as a possibility to verify their staff are decompressing. Within the spring, the software program firm GitLab responded to a big rise in hours put in by its greater than 1,000 staff with so-called friends-and-family days, by which the corporate shuts right down to discourage folks from logging in. Google, Slack and the software program firm Cloudera have began comparable insurance policies — none of which rely in opposition to staff’ paid days off. Automattic, the maker of the website-building software WordPress.com, has gone even additional, encouraging workers who work collectively to coordinate their holidays as a approach to get rid of friction that daunts breaks. “We’ve been experimenting with whole groups taking time without work concurrently,” Lori McLeese, the corporate’s head of human sources, wrote in an e-mail. “We’re hoping that this will cut back the quantity of ‘catch up’ work workers sometimes return to after taking a trip, making their transition again much less aggravating or overwhelming.” Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting. Supply hyperlink #vacation #Year #youre

0 notes

weekendwarriorblog · 5 years ago

Text

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND September 6, 2019 - LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE, SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN! and IT: CHAPTER TWO

Lots of COLONS -- there, you happy Edward Havens? :) -- in this week’s featured movies, huh?

Although summer still has a couple weeks left according to a couple of my co-workers, the fall movie season officially starts this weekend, but before we get to the wide releases, I want to talk about the fantastic doc LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (Greenwich Entertainment), which opens at New York’s Film Forum on Friday. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, this movie really surprised me, because I never considered myself a fan of Ronstandt, despite listening to a lot of AM Top 40 radio in the ‘70s – yes, I was alive back then. I know I don’t look it, but I’m old.

This movie gave me goosebumps hearing Ronstadt at the beginning of her career, the archival footage of her performances making it blatantly obvious how talented she was and why she became so popular, something that wasn’t nearly as evident hearing songs like “Blue Bayou” on the radio. What’s even more amazing about Ronstadt is that I didn’t hear about much of her work in the ‘80s, as she started doing more unconventional things like honoring the traditional Mexican music of her father. I mean, she was just an amazing artist but she started drifting away as MTV made major stars out of much less-talented singers. And then of course, there’s the Parkinson’s Disease that made it impossible for her to sing and kudos to the filmmakers for actually catching a rare singing moment with her family. This movie honestly got me quite teary-eyed as it went along, because you watch this amazing talent having her greatest asset taken away from her by this horrible illness.

Anyway, this is another music doc that I highly recommend checking out if it plays at a theater near you as it continues a long run of solid music docs we’ve been getting so far this year. (Oddly, David Crosby was supposed to be in this movie, too, but I don’t remember seeing him in it, but saw his credit at the end. Weird.)

Another doc opening in New York, L.A. and Chicago before expanding further on Sept. 13 is Morgan Spurlock’s SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN!... and yes, the irony of Spurlock still calling his movie something that includes the words “Me, too” in it is a little more than ironic, since it was the movement that took him down just a few weeks after the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (which is where I first saw it). But honestly, Spurlock took himself out, as he came forward and admitted a few things from his own past, which basically got the movie dropped by YouTube Red, who had just bought it. Two years later and I’m not sure how I feel about the movie, but when I saw it back then, I thought it was a worthy successor to Spurlock’s Oscar-nominated film. This time around, Spurlock wants to set up a healthier fast food option, choosing a chicken sandwich place but also wanting to stick to some of the guidelines by making the chickens organic and free-range, something that he finds is more difficult than he initially thinks.

I generally like Morgan Spurlock’s docs, which generally includes himself as a personality, similar to the work of his peer Michael Moore, but Spurlock doesn’t always make super-serious docs and always keeps him mind on the entertainment aspect of going to the movies, and in that sense Super Size Me 2 is as entertaining as some of his past films.

Super Size Me 2 is opening at the Cinema Village in New York and Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. on Friday.

The only new wide release this weekend is New Line/Warner Bros’ IT: CHAPTER TWO, which I’m sure I’ll be writing about a lot over at The Beat, so go click on those links so that they’ll continue hiring me to write more stuff! You can read my review here and an interview with actor James Ransone over at The Beat.

LIMITED RELEASES

Because it’s early September and there is a big wide release, there isn’t as much to talk about as far as limited releases.

Apparently, Janice Engel’s doc Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins (Magnolia) was released in Texas last weekend, which makes sense since that’s where journalist Molly Ivins is from, but it will open in New York and L.A. this weekend as well. I wasn’t as big a fan of this doc as the ones above just because Molly Ivins just felt like she was trying to do a stand-up comedy routine. In other words, the film lacked the depth I would have hoped from a political figure.

Chelsea Stardust’s Satanic Panic (RLJE Films), written by my good friends Grady Hendrix and Ted Geoghegan, that follows Hayley Griffith’s Sam, a pizza delivery driver whose last stop of the day is to a group of Satanists looking for someone to sacrifice. Yup, that sounds like something Grady and Ted (who wrote Ted’s second movie Mohawk) might come up with. So Sam must fend off witches and demonic creatures before she can end her shift. The film also stars Ruby Modine, Rebecca Romijn, Arden Myrin and Jerry O’Connell. It will be released in select theaters and On Demand Friday after premiering at the Overlook Film Festival and playing Fantasia in Montreal in July.

Two more movies opening at the Cinema Village(and other theaters) is Rowan Athale’s Strange but True (Lionsgate Premiere), a star-studded thriller based on John Searles’ novel, starring Margaret Qualley from Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as the ex-girlfriend of a dead high schooler who shows up at his family’s house claiming that she’s pregnant with his child (five years after her boyfriend Ronnie’s death). Ronnie’s mother is played by the great Amy Ryan and brother by Nick Robinson, and the movie also stars Greg Kinnear, Brian Cox and Blythe Danner, which makes you wonder why this is being four-walled and most likely getting a typical Lionsgate Premiere VOD release.

Paul Taublieb’s doc Blink of an Eye (1091) is an inside look at the Daytona 500 in 2001, featuring Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr, and that’s about all I know about it. Waltrip is a perennial underdog who broke his 462-race losing streak just before the 2001 racing season, but when his best friend the older Dale Earnhardt crashes in the last lap of the Daytona 500, he steps up to race against Dale’s son, Dale Jr.

Opening at the Roxy Cinema in New York this week is Michael Oblowitz’s surfing doc Heavy Water, which follows surfer Nathan Fletcher, whose brother is credited for introducing punk rock skateboarding techniques to the sport. That’s about all I know about that one.

Since actor/filmmaker Justin Chon (The Twilight Sagaand Gook) will be in Toronto this weekend with Wayne Wang’s new movie (which is premiering there), he probably won’t be doing many opening weekend QnAs for his new movie Ms. Purple (Oscilloscope), which opens in L.A. at the Landmark Nuarton Friday and at the Quad in New York on Sept. 13. This one is a drama about a brother and sister (Teddy Lee and Tiffany Chu) who seemingly are stuck in Koreatown after being abandoned by their mother and raised by their father, who is dying. It sounds like a real hoot.

Opening in New York and L.A. is Simnon Hunter’s Edie (Music Box Films), starring 86-year-old legend Sheila Hancock as a widow about to be forced into retirement home for her last days but wanting to do one last climbing trip before she dies.

The Bollywood film Chhichhore(FIP), directed by Nitesh Tiwari (Dangal), will also open on Friday in top markets, taking place in a hostel filled with interesting and unique characters who go on a journey together.

Coming to theaters for one night only (i.e. Thursday) is Melanie Martinez’s musical K-12 (Abramorama/Atlantic) about a girl named Cry Baby who is sent to a disturbing sleepaway school where she is bullied until she finds a friend who helps her fight against the Principal and his “wicked staff.” I haven’t seen this but having suffered through Slaughterhouse Rulez I’m slightly dubious.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

Not local, but the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) starts this week. It’s my favorite film festival on the world (after maybe Oxford) but I can’t afford to go for a second year in a row, so instead of writing about it, I’m just gonna spend the next week and a half sulking and writing about other things. L

REPERTORY

Since it’s September, a new month and a movie season, I’m welcoming a new addition to this section…

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC)

I went to see Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 70mm over the past and saw that they’re starting to do a lot more rep. programs tying to upcoming new releases by directors like Pedro Almodovar and Bong Joon-ho, so I’m going to start including some of their screenings and hoping they won’t disappoint me like the New Bev has the last few months. (And hopefully I can include the brand-new L.A. Drafthouse soon, as well.) The problem is that very often, the rep screenings might sell out before I have a chance to write about them, similar to the New Bev, actually.

Much of the Alamo’s rep programming happens on weekdays at 9:30 PM, but as I mentioned, they have some interesting fall series planned.

This week’s “Weird Wednesday” is Drop Dead Fred (1991), starring Rik Mayall of “Young Ones” fame. Monday’s “Video Vortex” is the 1943 Bollywood horror film Son of Dracula, and next Tuesday’s “Terror Tuesday” is the original found footage horror film The Blair Witch Project from 1999. (There’s a free screening of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of CherbourgWeds night for Alamo Victory members but it’s already sold out.)

METROGRAPH (NYC):

I never thought the Metrograph would bring back its initial charter “A to Z” program with more offerings but sure enough, this week begins Welcome To Metrograph: Redux! On Thursday, it begins with John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 from 1976 and continues Saturday with Ján Kadár’s The Angel Levinefrom 1970. I have never heard of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra but clearly, the programmers at the Metrograph have as they’re playing two shorts programs as well as his 2019 movie Testimony on Sunday and Monday. Also, the Metrograph will continue showing off its love for Anime with a regular engagement for the late Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001) after showing Paprika and Perfect Blue the last couple weeks. (You can still see Perfect Blue and Paprika on Thursday, as well as Roehmer’s Le Rayon Vert and Goddard’s Pierrot Le Fou.) This week’s Late Nites at Metrograph is René Laloux’s animated Fantastic Planet (1973). Kinda esoteric, no? Playtime: Family Matinees is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), so a little more mainstream for the kiddies. Also, some of the Shaw Sisters movies continues through the weekend, and I can recommend both Puppy Love and Starry is the Night, two of my favorites from the series.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

“Marty and Jay’s Double Features” ends on Thursday, so your last options are William Holden’s The Counterfeit Traitor (1962) and Slightly Scarlet (1956) on Wednesday and Sanjit Ray’s The Music Room (1958) /Il Post (1961) or Voyage to Italy (1954) and Vincento Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer (1954), starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on Thursday. Joseph Losey’s 1976 Holocaust drama Mr. Klein, the filmmaker’s first French film after being blacklisted in Hollywood, will be screened on DCP starting Friday. Also, “Film Forum Jr.” is BACK this weekend with Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923)on Saturday and Sunday morning with live piano accompaniment.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Egyptian going a bit esoteric this week with “A Short Series about Krzysztof Kieslowski” (which I won’t even try to pronounce), dedicated to the filmmaker behind the famed “Three Colors” trilogy, which will screen (all three chapters!) on Sunday evening. On Thursday, there’s a double feature of A Short Film about Loveand A Short Film about Killing, both from 1988, and they’re both under 90 minutes so no lie in the title. Friday is a double feature of The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and 1981’s Blind Chance.

AERO (LA):

This week begins the French Noir series “The French Had a Name for it 5” with a number of double features. On Thursday, there’s Quai es Orfèvres (1947) and The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), Friday is Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (1959) and Port du Desire (1955) and Saturday is René Clement’s Purple Noon from 1960 and a double feature of Melodie en Sous-Sol (1962) and The Sicilian Clan (1969). If it isn’t obvious, I haven’t seen any of them, but I have seen John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, which is the Aero’s Friday night midnight movie. Sunday’s French noir double feature is 1946’s Paniqueand 1947’s Non Coupable. “Heptember Matinees” continues on Tuesday with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib from 1949.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

Friday begins a new series called “Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin” showing six of the Polish filmmakers films beginning with 1980’s Golemand 1981’s War of the Worlds: Next Century. They’ll also be showing a new 4k restoration of George Nierenberg’s 1982 music documentary Say Amen, Somebody (Milestone Films) about American gospel music starting Friday with QnAs and choir performances following screenings on Friday and Saturday.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Beginning Weds, the IFC Center will screen the new 4k restoration of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), a movie that I feel it’s been showing as part of its midnight series for months… but if I get to this week’s offerings, and there’s the same bullshit I’ve seen every single week, I’m moving this down to the bottom of the rep section. This weekend’s Weekend Classics: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is John Singleton’s 1995 dramas Higher Learning starring Laurence Fishburne, chosen by “Kashif” and “Marilyn,” while Waverly Midnights: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is Scorsese’s 1999 film Bringing out the Dead (chosen by “Luke”), starring Nicolas Cage.Okay, at least this week’s Late Night Favorites: Summer 2019 is Satoshi Kon’s 2006 movie Paprika (2006), which the Metrograph has been playing for weeks, so I’ll spare the IFC Center from punishment … for now.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

On Friday night, the museum is showing Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 sci-fi thriller Brainstorm in 70mm, and then on Saturday and Sunday, its showing It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Spielberg’s Ready Player One, also in 70mm.

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

On Thursday, the Roxy is showing Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, and then on Saturday and Sunday, it’s showing the Apocalypse Now 40thAnniversary Final Cut.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This week’s Friday midnight is Tommy Wiseau’s The Room… again. YAWN.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Here I was going to give Tarantino the benefit of the doubt that he’d be back to rep programming in Sept. but why do your job as a programmer when you can just play your latest film and make just as much or more money? Sure, it’s playing The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1946 as the Wednesday matinee the original Disney The Parent Trap (1961), starring Hayley Mills, as the weekend KIDDEE MATINEE. And I do love P.T. Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, which is playing as the Monday matinee. But otherwise, it’s all Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood all the time. (I guess the Saturday midnight movie is Reservoir Dogs at least?) For this infraction, the New Beverly is being moved to the VERY BOTTOM of this section as punishment, yes, even below the Nuart’s midnight screening.

(NOTE: As of now, it doesn’t seem like the Quad Cinema or BAM in Brooklyn have any new repertory screenings this weekend.)

Next week, the wide releases are STX’s Hustlers and Warners’ The Goldfinch, plus I hear Jillian Bell’s Brittany Runs a Marathon will be expanding even wider. I’ll cover most of those over at The Beat, but I’m sure I’ll have stuff to write about here as well.

#WhatToWatchThisweekend LindaRonstadt SuperSIzeMe2 ItChapter2 movies reviews

0 notes

brentrogers · 5 years ago

Text

An Educational Gap in Mental Health Care

Today, people who have lost the will to live and those who love them are in danger of falling through a gap in the mental health care system that doesn’t have to be there. The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have published articles this year about the continuing rise in the number of deaths by suicide. In USA Today’s “We tell suicidal people to go to therapy. So why are therapists rarely trained in suicide?”, author Alia Dastagir asks an extremely important question. These publications are not the only ones sounding an alarm. Among the other voices are survivors of suicide loss who have been asking similar questions for well over 15 years.

Some suicide prevention groups and organizations that focus on helping survivors of suicide loss are trying to change this situation. Ronnie Susan Walker, MS, LPCP, is the founder and executive director of the Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors. In this nonprofit’s March 2020 newsletter, she said she has found that few graduate schools include suicide aftercare (or postvention) in their mental health curriculums and there is little continuing education in this area.

“Those of us who have already lost loved ones to suicide are keenly aware of the complexity and challenges associated with preventing suicide,” she wrote. “We know that ‘noticing signs,’ ‘calling an 800 number’ or ‘getting a loved one into treatment’ does not always work. Too many loss survivors have discovered that being in treatment or on medication does not ensure suicide will be prevented.”

In her response to USA Today’s article, she elaborated on the crucial need for knowledge and support. “This lack of attention to the needs of suicide loss survivors has always occurred to me as a profound void in the arena of mental health support because the complex and traumatic nature of suicide catapults family and friends onto a challenging grief journey. In the initial aftermath, those closest are almost 10 [times] more likely to have suicidal thoughts than the general public. They are also more likely to leave their jobs or drop out of school.”

Dastagir cites several sources that shed light on how people experiencing suicidal impulses are treated (or not treated), including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, whose findings indicate there are no national standards in the United States that require mental health professionals, either in their education or their careers, be trained in how to treat suicidal people. Only nine states mandate training in suicide assessment, treatment and management for health professionals.

All medical personnel and certainly mental health professionals need specific training on both suicide prevention and aftercare for loss survivors. While clear guidelines and preparation are not a guarantee that any suicide can be prevented, having such tools would greatly benefit all concerned, including first responders and law enforcement who, in some areas, do have access to such training.

What does this look like in real life? Most of the time, assessment begins with a primary care physician, who might start medication for depression. A patient could see a psychologist, social worker, marriage and family therapist or others, but a psychiatrist might have the most related educational training.

Even emergency admission to treatment centers can result in only brief sessions with multiple psychiatrists. Aftercare can find patients losing quality help through doctors’ career changes, relocation, and retirement or their own decisions to move closer to family members for support. All of this can be overwhelming for someone who is struggling.

What can you do to determine the education and experience level of your providers?

Research available options in your area to check qualifications (and reviews) online or call before making an appointment to ask specific questions.

Find out if a provider has experience working with people and family members who are experiencing the same issues that bother you.

Discuss confidentiality and ask who would receive reports.

Ask about experience with trauma situations and policies regarding suicide.

Check where this provider has admitting privileges.

Determine if medications can be prescribed if needed (this is not always an option) and what the provider’s opinion on medications is.

Ask questions about insurance accepted.

Make an appointment with your first choice and give the relationship a few tries before looking for someone else. Therapy takes time. Finding a good match is important.

Be patient with yourself and your process; understand why you might need to work with more than one professional at a time. For example, a psychiatrist may provide medication oversight while you work through issues with a counselor or therapist.

Find out all you can about your condition and how various professionals can help.

Sources:

America’s suicide rate has increased for 13 years in a row. (2020 Jan 30). The Economist. https://ift.tt/37ITHsj

Friedman, R. (2020 Jan 6). Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? New York Times. https://ift.tt/2QqO1wY

Wan, W. (2020 Jan 9) More Americans Are Killing Themselves At Work. Washington Post. https://ift.tt/39UlV4U

Dastagir, A. (2020 Feb 27). We Tell Suicidal People To Go To Therapy. So Why Are Therapists Rarely Trained in Suicide? USA Today. https://ift.tt/388f2KZ

Walker, R. (2020 Mar 3). Why Are Therapists So Rarely Trained in Suicide? Alliance of Hope. https://ift.tt/33oAU4l

An Educational Gap in Mental Health Care syndicated from

0 notes

deniscollins · 5 years ago

Text

Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say

The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of America’s leading companies, issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers. If you were the CEO of your company, what new actions would you take in alignment with the new principles? Why?

Nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, Pepsi and Walmart, tried on Monday to redefine the role of business in society — and how companies are perceived by an increasingly skeptical public.

Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” the group, a lobbying organization that represents many of America’s largest companies, said in a statement. “We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

The shift comes at a moment of increasing distress in corporate America, as big companies face mounting global discontent over income inequality, harmful products and poor working conditions.

On the Democratic presidential campaign trail, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been vocal about the role of big business in perpetuating problems with economic mobility and climate change. Lawmakers are looking into the dominance of technology companies like Amazon and Facebook.

There was no mention at the Roundtable of curbing executive compensation, a lightning-rod topic when the highest-paid 100 chief executives make 254 times the salary of an employee receiving the median pay at their company. And hardly a week goes by without a major company getting drawn into a contentious political debate. As consumers and employees hold companies to higher ethical standards, big brands increasingly have to defend their positions on worker pay, guns, immigration, President Trump and more.

“They’re responding to something in the zeitgeist,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School. “They perceive that business as usual is no longer acceptable. It’s an open question whether any of these companies will change the way they do business.”

The Business Roundtable did not provide specifics on how it would carry out its newly stated ideals, offering more of a mission statement than a plan of action. But the companies pledged to compensate employees fairly and provide “important benefits,” as well as training and education. They also vowed to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses” and “foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”

It was an explicit rebuke of the notion that the role of the corporation is to maximize profits at all costs — the philosophy that has held sway on Wall Street and in the boardroom for 50 years. Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who is the doctrine’s most revered figure, famously wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

This mind-set informed the corporate raiders of the 1980s and contributed to an unswerving focus on quarterly earnings reports. It found its way into pop culture, when in the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko declared, “Greed is good.” More recently, it inspired a new generation of activist investors who pushed companies to slash jobs as a way to enrich themselves.

“The ideology of shareholder primacy has contributed to the economic inequality we see today in America,” Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a Pepsi board member, said in an interview. “The Chicago school of economics is so embedded in the psyche of investors and legal theory and the C.E.O. mind-set. Overcoming that won’t be easy.”

The Business Roundtable included its own articulation of the theory in an official doctrine in 1997, writing that “the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders.” Each version of its principles published over the last 20 years has stated that corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.

But by last year, the Business Roundtable’s language was out of step with the times. Many chief executives, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, had begun calling on companies to be more responsible. Businesses were pledging to fight climate change, reduce income inequality and improve public health. And at gatherings like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the discussions often centered on how businesses could help solve thorny global problems.

“The threshold has moved substantially for what people expect from a company,” Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, said in an interview. “It’s more than just producing profits for the shareholders.”

Last year, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and the chairman of the Business Roundtable, began an effort to update its principles. “We looked at this thing that was written in 1997 and we didn’t agree with it,” Mr. Dimon said in an interview. “It didn’t fairly describe what we think our jobs are.”

Mr. Dimon proposed making a formal revision to the annual statement at a Business Roundtable board meeting in Washington this spring. It then fell to Alex Gorsky, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, who runs the group’s governance committee, to create the language.

“There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Mr. Gorsky said in an interview.

While the group cast the change in language as an embrace of new corporate ideals, it was also a tacit acknowledgment of the heightened pressures facing companies across the country — including many that signed the document.

In 2017, after the president’s initially tepid response to the violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va., the chief executives of several major companies disbanded White House business advisory groups in protest. Walmart, the nation’s largest gun seller, is under pressure after a series of mass shootings, including the recent massacre at its store in El Paso. Amazon, the giant online retailer, is facing scrutiny from lawmakers who say it avoids paying taxes and uses its dominance to hurt competitors.

And protesters have mobilized across the country to call for a higher minimum wage.

For companies to truly make good on their lofty promises, they will need Wall Street to embrace their idealism, too. Until investors start measuring companies by their social impact instead of their quarterly returns, systemic change may prove elusive.

Nowhere has the new scrutiny on corporations been more pronounced than on the presidential campaign trail. On Monday, Mr. Sanders said in an interview that the Business Roundtable was “feeling the pressure from working families all over the country.”

“I don’t believe what they’re saying for a moment,” he said. “If they were sincere, they would talk about raising the minimum wage in this country to a living wage, the need for the rich and powerful to pay their fair share of taxes.”

In a statement Monday, Ms. Warren called the announcement “a welcome change” but cautioned that “without real action, it’s meaningless.”

“These big corporations can start following through on their words by paying workers more instead of spending billions on buybacks,” she said.

While the new statement of purpose represents a sizable shift from the group’s longstanding principles, it was not the first time Business Roundtable had taken a position on a social issue. Last August, the group denounced President Trump’s immigration policies, describing family separations as “cruel and contrary to American values.”

Monday’s statement represented an even broader shift, signaling companies’ willingness to engage on issues of pay, diversity and environmental protection. Several of the executives who signed the letter said the group would soon offer more detailed proposals on how corporations can live up to the ideals it outlined, rather than focusing purely on economic policies.

“It’s a real divergence considering everything we’ve done in the past has been around policy,” said Chuck Robbins, the chief executive of Cisco, who is on the group’s board, adding, “This is just the first piece.”

The executives quickly pointed out that they had not forgotten about investors.

“You can provide great returns for your shareholders and great benefits for your employees and run your business in a responsible way,” said Brian Moynihan, the chief executive of Bank of America.

But the statement’s lack of specific proposals also drew skepticism.

“If the Business Roundtable is serious, it should tomorrow throw its weight behind legislative proposals that would put the teeth of the law into these boardroom platitudes,” said Anand Giridharadas, the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.” “Corporate magnanimity and voluntary virtue are not going to solve these problems.”

#Business Roundtable

0 notes

colddazestudent · 6 years ago

Text

What advantages and disadvantages does social media present to the modern writer?

PW1001: Publishing Assignment one

There are many different advantages and disadvantages that social media present to the modern writer. One advantage would be that social media has allowed the modern day writer to interact with their fans more closely than ever before and has allowed writers to market their work so that can reach a wider audience. Many have stated that Twitter is one of the best platforms to use as it ‘is great for getting the word out about your book’ (Smith, 2018). This is because Twitter has a very large following as this social media platform has more than 320 million active monthly users (Maina, 2018). One writer that uses Twitter in a positive way is a writer by the name of Jane Friedman. Jane uses twitter to communicate with her fans about topics such as her opinions about ‘tiny books’ to the many forms of publishing. She also takes the time to talk about her personal life and what she has been up to or her plans for the future. It is clear that she is the person that runs the twitter account as she dives into deep and personal subject matter. Facebook is quite different to this as many users find it difficult to decide whether or not the actual writer is in charge of their account and is not run by someone else.

One disadvantage that might occur whilst using Twitter would be that writers could promote their work at an alarming rate and do it a bit too often. This can be a downside as it could lead people to think that the writers are only interested in promoting and marking their own work instead of communicating with their fans and admirers. Many writers tend to do this when they have recently published their work and every day, they make sure to promote their work so that their audience can purchase it.

Another big social media platform that can prove beneficial for writers would be Facebook. Facebook allows users such as writers to create official author pages. One author mentions that ‘his author page allows him to connect with readers without granting access to his personal Facebook page, (Laskowski, 2017). This is an excellent example of an advantage that social media presents to writers as Facebook allows them to create a page where they can communicate with their audience and at the same time can keep their personal life private. Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world. This provides a great advantage to writers as with Facebook, they can reach a much larger audience then they could with Twitter or Instagram.

A good way to generate attention and to get noticed would be that writers could set up events on their social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, a writer could set up an event where they give away their products such as a book. This is more commonly known as a ‘giveaway’ and is a great way for a writer to gain good publicity from their fans. The writer could also gain feedback for their work as the winner of the ‘giveaway’ could review the book and give their opinions about the writer's work.

Instagram is another large social media platform that writers can take advantage of. This is because Instagram ‘is growing in terms of users and has even outpaced the other top four social media platforms in recent years: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Furthermore, Instagram has very dedicated users, who often use the platform daily’ (Penn, 2017). As a result of Instagram being primarily used to upload images, writers can use this platform to take photos of their latest work and this is a creative way to do it. A common phrase is ‘ a photo is worth a thousand words’ so a writer could upload a photo of their new book cover in an attempt to make people excited about the new release that would be happening as people tend to want to see proof that something is happening before they can get excited about it. Another advantage of Instagram would be that ‘Book lovers LOVE Instagram. They use hashtags like #instabooks and #bookstagram and aren’t shy about quoting novels and tagging the author. And they take these amazing artistic photos with your books’ (Fenton & Steinke, 2016). This platform gives aspiring writers the chance to share their opinions about their favourite book and to gain new ideas.

Another disadvantage that social media presents to writers would be that once the writer gains a substantial fan base, the writer must maintain their account on a regular basis otherwise they could run the risk of losing their fans as their fans would likely lose interest and look elsewhere for content and inspiration. Having to regularly maintain their presence could be quite a stressful endeavor and would likely cause the writer to become more annoyed at social media. One way that writers can overcome this issue would be that they could produce different content for each social media platform that they operate. One example for this could be that they upload photos such as book covers to Instagram, upload video content such as book signings and upload updates on Twitter and Facebook so that they can update their fan base on the up and coming future. This would be the best way to maintain a social media presence without becoming stressed out as a result of the pressure that may occur.

Writers need to be aware of what they write on social media as, if they have a large fan base, they have influence over their fan base and many of those fans could believe in what the writers are saying. Writers should try to not make comments about topics such as politics as by commenting about that subject matter, they could be unknowingly influencing many people to start agreeing with their statements. If the writer in question writes many articles or books that feature politics this is different as that subject matter is related to what their work is about but the writers who mainly stay away from this topic when writing their work should not make comments about the political activities in today’s society. One writer by the name of Rachel Thompson states that ‘my books have nothing to do with religion or politics — so I rarely if ever share anything political or religious on social media (or my websites). I believe we need to connect with readers at a basic human level — love, loss, relationships are my topics so that’s what I focus on’ (Thompson, 2013).

YouTube is another massive social media platform that grows and grows as times goes on. One advantage YouTube offers to writers is that writers have the opportunity to upload videos for their fans to watch. The writers could upload videos of their book signing or of their book tours. These videos will allow fans to feel like they were at the event if they could not go to the actual event. This is a good way to include those members of the writer’s audience.

One major disadvantage that social media presents would be plagiarism. A writer could post their work onto social media in an attempt to gain feedback but in doing so they could have their work stolen by other writers. This is a major problem as writers could have worked on their project for many months and they want to upload that piece to social media so that they can receive feedback from fellow writers that they may improve upon their work. This may lead to aspiring writers seeing this piece of work and think that they could use this and incorporate it into their own work. One example of this would that a writer by the name of Jordon Scott. Jordon Scott wrote a novel called ‘The Nocturne’ and she believes that the author of ‘Twilight’ plagiarised her work. ‘Ms. Scott plans to file a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court, Mr. Williams said, though she does not plan to seek monetary damages’ (Ryzik, 2009). This shows that even a small time writer is susceptible to having their work stolen or ‘borrowed’ and this should be something that writers should consider when posting work online to social media.

There are many disadvantages that social media presents but many would suggest that the advantages outweigh the negatives as without social media how would a writer be able to communicate with their admirers on such a large scale? Writers would not be able to send out images such as book covers or of their latest tours. Social media platforms are one of the most highly used applications in the world, used by millions of people around the world. Writers should not miss this opportunity as it could help the author’s career reach new heights and connect with a wide range of people.

Bibliography

Fenton, L. & Steinke, L., 2016. Why Authors Should Use Instagram. [Online] Available at: https://writerunboxed.com/2016/04/24/the-business-of-being-authors/ [Accessed 14 November 2018].

Laskowski, T., 2017. Do you really need an official author Facebook page?. [Online] Available at: https://www.writermag.com/get-published/promoting-your-work/author-facebook-page/ [Accessed 13 November 2018].

Maina, A., 2018. 20 Popular Social Media Sites Right Now. [Online] Available at: https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/05/popular-social-media-sites.html [Accessed 11 November 2018].

Penn, J., 2017. How to Use Instagram As An Author Plus 10 Ways to Grow Your Account Organically. [Online] Available at: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2017/01/07/instagram/ [Accessed 13 November 2018].

Ryzik, M., 2009. ‘Twilight’ Author Accused of Plagiarism. [Online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/books/06arts-TWILIGHTAUTH_BRF.html [Accessed 15 November 2018].

Smith, E., 2018. 10 Tips for Authors on Using Social Media from a Literary Agent. [Online] Available at: https://insights.bookbub.com/tips-authors-using-social-media-literary-agent/ [Accessed 11 November 2018].

Thompson, R., 2013. Why Authors Should Avoid Discussing Politics and Religion. [Online] Available at: http://rachelintheoc.com/2013/12/authors-avoid-discussing-politics-religion/ [Accessed 14 November 2018].

0 notes

ultralifehackerguru-blog · 7 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/best-worst-golden-globes/

The Best and Worst of the Golden Globes

Oprah Winfrey accepting her Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award.CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC, via Associated Press

The Golden Globes on Sunday night were the first major awards ceremony to be held since the sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein were revealed. You could almost draw a direct line from #MeToo and Time’s Up (the anti-harassment initiative sponsored by powerful Hollywood women) to many of the evening’s most memorable moments — like Oprah Winfrey’s acceptance speech and Natalie Portman’s presenting of best director. Here’s a look at those and other highs and lows of the night:

The Most Electrifying Speech (and Reaction)

All hail Queen Oprah. Her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award brought the house down and then some, not just as the most rousing speech of the night (among many calls to arms) but also as the instantly iconic address of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements.

Few if any people blend the personal and political as well as Ms. Winfrey, and she wove together stories of her childhood, watching Sidney Poitier win an Oscar in 1964 while her mother, “bone-tired from cleaning other people’s houses,” watched. She traced her own career rise, and praised journalists for unearthing stories of corruption and abuse.

“What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have,” Ms. Winfrey said, as she settled into a preacher’s rousing cadence. She recounted the story of Recy Taylor, a black woman who was raped in 1944 and whose white assailants were never charged. “For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men,” Ms. Winfrey said. She paused, just for a moment. “But their time is up.” The audience broke into applause. “Their time is up!” The audience rose to its feet. “Their time is up!”

But that wasn’t the end of the speech. Ms. Winfrey closed by proclaiming that “a new day is on the horizon,” and envisioning “a time when nobody ever has to say, ‘Me too,’ again.” She delivered those lines over rapturous cheers and applause. Imagine if every awards ceremony had a speech like this. — Margaret Lyons

Read the full transcript of Oprah Winfrey’s speech.

The Worst Red-Carpet Interviewers

Photo

Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet. CreditMike Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency

Even before the Globes began, an acting challenge of sorts was on display: watching Ryan Seacrest and Giuliana Rancic do their part for #WhyWeWearBlack and try to pivot from clothes to crises during their “E! Live from the Red Carpet” show.

Continue reading the main story

Ms. Rancic and Mr. Seacrest had pledged to not ask their guests who they were wearing, but rather why they were wearing black. It sounded like a promising approach, though it was undermined, somewhat, by the continued presence of the E! Glambot, a gadget that creates a wholly unnecessary slo-mo 360-degree view of outfits, and that could really have done with a new name, if the network had actually been thinking things through.

The piercing replacement questions Mr. Seacrest and Ms. Rancic came up also didn’t really advance the cause. Samples: “What were your New Year’s resolutions?” (Mr. Seacrest to Neil Patrick Harris.) “What are some strange secret talents you have?” (Ms. Rancic to the cast of “Stranger Things.”)

And while the hosts dutifully tried to discuss the issues, they didn’t seem to really know what to do with the answers from the boldface names. Especially when stars like Debra Messing and Eva Longoria both called out E! itself, siding with Catt Sadler, who quit her E! hosting job a few weeks ago because, she said, her male co-star was being paid nearly double her salary. Neither Ms. Rancic nor Mr. Seacrest wanted to go near that one. — Vanessa Friedman

Read a review of the E! preshow.

The Host With the Most Thankless Job

Photo

Seth Meyers onstage at the Golden Globes. CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC, via Associated Press

Seth Meyers pulled off one of the trickiest feats in awards show memory: an opening monologue that was not too glib but not too preachy, funny but not out of touch, self-effacing without veering into humble-braggy. Not every single line worked — sorry, joke about “Get Out” said to Daniel Kaluuya — but let’s call 90 percent an A.

— Margaret Lyons

Read a review of the telecast and the full transcript of the opening monologue.

The Sharpest One-Liner of the Night

Photo

Natalie Portman with her fellow presenter Ron Howard. CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC, via Getty Images

Natalie Portman adding “all male” while announcing the best director nominees was the most succinct and among the most cutting criticisms of the entertainment industry. You don’t have to be Oprah to get in the ring. — Margaret Lyons

The Quickest Reaction to the Sharpest One-Liner

Photo

Kerry Washington and Eva Longoria on the red carpet.CreditValerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Many of the actresses at the ceremony had signed on to the Time’s Up initiative, and their unity was most evident in a moment the cameras didn’t catch. It was just after Natalie Portman announced “the all-male nominees” for best director. In the audience, Kerry Washington, the “Scandal” star, pumped her arms and gave a high-five to Eva Longoria, sitting next to her. I asked Ms. Longoria how she was feeling Sunday night, and she said, “Amazing — so proud.” — Cara Buckley

Read more about Time’s Up.

The Least Said (by Men Who Didn’t Speak Up)

Photo

Joseph Fiennes, like many men at the ceremony, sported the Time’s Up logo. But few men spoke out about the initiative or about sexual harassment. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

Women had plenty to say about harassment and their struggle for gender equality, but men were mostly silent. Seth Meyers was a notable exception, acknowledging that a white man may not have been the ideal host for the moment but filling his monologue with enough self-deprecation and righteous barbs to ease any concerns. Otherwise, men almost entirely clammed up on the subject, with the loudest statements they made coming in the form of fashionable pins. For those watching at home, it was easy to think: Yet again, the women carry the burden. — Daniel Victor

The Best Speech (Non-#MeToo Category)

Photo

Sterling K. Brown accepting the Golden Globe for best actor in a TV drama. CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC

Sterling K. Brown, a star of “This Is Us,” gives wonderful acceptance speeches, and if his recent winning streak is any indication, we have more to look forward to. “Throughout the majority of my career I’ve benefited from colorblind casting,” said Mr. Brown, the first African-American to win a Golden Globe for best actor in a TV drama. Then, addressing the creator of his show, he said, “Dan Fogelman, you wrote a role for a black man. That could only be played by a black man. And so what I appreciate so much about this thing is that I am being seen for who I am and being appreciated for who I am. And that makes it that much more difficult to dismiss me, or dismiss anybody who looks like me.” — Margaret Lyons

Read the full transcript of Sterling K. Brown’s speech.

The Sweetest-Sounding Presenters

Photo

Kelly Clarkson and Keith Urban, presenting best original song. CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC, via Getty Images

Kelly Clarkson and Keith Urban singing “and the Golden Globe goes to” in harmony? Cute! Just a cute little thing to do. — Margaret Lyons

The Unlikeliest Appearance on an Awards Show Stage

Photo

Tommy Wiseau, left, James Franco and Dave Franco, with the Golden Globe Ambassador, Simone Garcia Johnson, behind them. CreditPaul Drinkwater/NBC

A best actor win stemming from one of the worst American movies? At the Golden Globes, anything is possible. James Franco picked up best actor in a musical or comedy for his performance in “The Disaster Artist,” playing Tommy Wiseau, the director of the very bad, very cult film “The Room.” But it was Mr. Wiseau who stole the show (or at least tried to). Mr. Franco invited the director to the stage with him. Mr. Wiseau went in for a hug, then went straight for the mic, but he was quickly pushed aside by the actor. It may be as much of the awards spotlight as Mr. Wiseau is likely to see. — Mekado Murphy

(C)

#2018 #golden globes #Lifestyle

0 notes

rozebucket98-blog · 7 years ago

Text

The Unsolvable Mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript

The word “ink” is a child of the Latin incaustum, which means “having been burned.” In the Middle Ages, people thought that ink burned its way into parchment, because iron-gall inks go onto the page pale, then darken. This is not what’s happening, physically, but it makes sense as a metaphor: a medieval manuscript, because it was made by hand, is necessarily an original, even when it is a copy of something else. It cannot be standardized any more than a thing can be unburned.

The Voynich Manuscript is a special kind of original. We know, thanks to carbon dating, that it was put together in the early fifteenth century. But no living person has ever, as far as we know, understood it. Nobody can decode the language the book is written in. It has no title and no author. A new facsimile, edited by Raymond Clemens and published by Yale University Press, draws attention to the way that we think about truth now: the book invites guesses, conspiracy theory, spiritualism, cryptography. The Voynich Manuscript has charisma, and charisma has lately held a monopoly on our attentions.

The manuscript is two hundred and twenty-five millimetres tall, a hundred and sixty wide, and five centimetres thick. Yale’s new facsimile is somewhat larger, as it includes wide white margins for the amateur cryptographer’s own marginalia. The manuscript’s Renaissance-era cover (it was rebound) is made of what the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale, calls a “limp vellum.” The book has resided at Yale’s library since 1969.

Turn the covers—as Umberto Eco once did; it was the only book in the Beinecke’s famous collection that he cared to see—and you are greeted by writing in brown ink accompanied by strange diagrams and paintings of plants. The writing will not be decipherable to you. The book was made in the ordinary medieval way, but the script—the form of its letters, the language itself—was apparently invented by whoever made it. Some call the language and its script “Voynichese.” The letters loop prettily, and the text runs from left to right, top to bottom.

The first half of the book is filled with drawings of plants; scholars call this the “herbal” section. None of the plants appear to be real, although they are made from the usual stuff (green leaves, roots, and so on; search a word like “botanical” in the British Library’s illuminated-manuscript catalogue and you’ll find several texts that are similar to this part). The next section contains circular diagrams of the kind often found in medieval zodiacal texts; scholars call this part “astrological,” which is generous. Next, the so-called “balneological” section shows “nude ladies,” in Clemens’s words, in pools of liquid, which are connected to one another via a strange system of tubular plumbing that often snakes around whole pages of text. These scenes resemble drawings in the alchemical tradition, which gave rise to a now debunked theory that the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Roger Bacon wrote the book. Then we get what appear to be instructions in the practical use of those plants from the beginning of the book, followed by pages that look roughly like recipes.

Voynich is not a word from the book but, rather, the name of an eccentric book dealer, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript, in 1912. When Voynich purchased the text, it was accompanied by a letter by Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667), of Prague, who claimed that the book had been “sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II at a reported price of 600 ducats and that it was believed to be a work by Roger Bacon.” (Voynich would later say that the seller was the occult philosopher John Dee; Clemens points out that he was nudged toward this hypothesis by a historical novel.) The book appears to have bounced around Prague for a while—in 1639, a person named Barchius described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters,” and guessed that “the whole thing is medical.” The book’s historical trail vanishes in 1670, up until the time that Voynich purchased it.

Yale’s new edition affords Voynich a profile, by Arnold Hunt, which turns out to be warranted by his strong and odd personality. Voynich was born in 1864, in Telšiai, to a Polish family. He supposedly spoke twenty languages fluently. He was arrested in Kovno, in 1885, for his membership in the Proletariat Party, a social-revolutionary group, and sentenced, without trial, to exile in Siberia for five years. He got a lot of reading done there, and then he escaped, travelling widely and ultimately bartering his waistcoat and glasses for a spot on a boat from Hamburg to England. There, he became part of the intellectual circle that surrounded the Russian agitator Sergei Kravchinsky, known as Stepniak. Once his adventuring days were over, Voynich became a book dealer—a good one, although he once accidentally (one hopes) sold a forgery to the British Museum. “Voynich in later life would sometimes point dramatically to the wounds he had received” on his youthful adventures, Hunt notes: “Here I have sword, here I have sword, here I have bullet.”

In 1903, the Jesuits decided to sell a group of texts from the Collegio Romano collection to the Vatican; the sale took nine years to complete. For reasons unknown, and under conditions of total secrecy, Voynich managed to procure some of the books before they entered the Vatican Library. One of them was the Voynich Manuscript. Voynich believed that his impenetrable book contained authentic wisdom—or, at least, he said so during publicity kicks in the States, trying to make his treasured book famous. “When the time comes,” he told the Times, “I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”

Voynich never cracked the code, if one indeed exists. In “Cryptographic Attempts,” another essay that accompanies the Yale facsimile, William Sherman notes that “some of the greatest code breakers in history” attempted to unlock the manuscript’s mysteries; the impenetrability of Voynichese became a professional problem for those in the code game. William Romaine Newbold, a professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in the early part of the twentieth century, “persuaded himself that the writing used both a cipher common from Bacon’s alchemical manuscripts along with a separate—and far more complicated—system best described as an anagrammed micrographic shorthand.” This system of cipher “requires transposition (changing the order of the letters), abbreviation (using a system taken from ancient Greece), and microscopic notation (whereby individual pen strokes within a single character, when magnified, serve as shorthand symbols for other letters).” This theory was initially endorsed by the eminent medievalist John Matthews Manly, who had worked as one of the U.S. Army’s chief cryptologists during the First World War. But it did not hold up to closer scrutiny, and Manly eventually concluded that Newbold’s “decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious.”

The next great mind to apply itself to the manuscript’s code belonged to William F. Friedman, another Army cryptographer, who was among the first people to use computers for textual analysis. In 1925, Manly connected Friedman and his wife, Elizebeth, also a cryptographer, with the manuscript, sending them photographs. They worked on the project for forty years. Friedman and his colleagues broke Japan’s code Purple during the Second World War, and Friedman became the chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and head of the Signals Intelligence Service in the forties and fifties. The historian David Kahn called him the “world’s greatest cryptologist.” By 1944, Friedman had formed the Voynich Manuscript Study Group with some colleagues.

The group never cracked the code. The Friedmans did, however, provide an enigmatic message about the manuscript in an article in Philogical Quarterly, “Acrostics, Anagrams, and Chaucer,” published in 1959. The article included a long excursus on the pointlessness of looking for anagrammatic ciphers; a note revealed that the statement itself was an anagram. The authors had left the solution to the anagram in a sealed envelope with the P.Q. editor. After William died in 1970, that editor revealed the message along with a reprint of the piece: “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.—Friedman.”

According to Sherman, the majority of those who have tried their hand at the manuscript’s code “have been amateurs, and many have more interest in conspiracy theories than cryptographic systems.” Nowadays, you can find people trying to crack the code on Reddit. There are many competing theories. Some suggest that the manuscript might be part of a “conworld,” or constructed fantasy—but then one poster responds, “I don’t see why someone would create such an expensive manuscript if this were the case.” Another Redditor asks, “Anyone else wondering if this is material from a lost Mayan codex?”

You can find serious scholarly work among the Redditors’ posts, but most of it is just fun speculation. It is interesting nonetheless, because it’s written in a voice that has shaped communal understanding in our time. Speculative knowledge flourishes in moments of uncertainty and fear. “They don’t want you to know the truth,” the speculators say to their faithful, on the left and on the right. 9/11 conspiracy theories are less frightening than the truth, which is that our lives are always in danger. Astrologers point to an invisible world, freeing its subscribers from the visible one that oppresses them. Tarot facilitates healing conversations. Whether code breaker or spiritualist or amateur historian, the Voynich speculators are linked by their common interest in the past, quasi-occult mystery, and insoluble problems of authenticity. When the book was featured in a recent episode of the Sherlock Holmes-inspired television show “Elementary,” Clemens writes, it stood in “for a mysterious but learned reference to past mysteries that somehow hold important meaning for the present.”

Readers will probably never stop forming communities based on the manuscript’s secrets. Humans are fond of weaving narratives like doilies around gaping holes, so that the holes won’t scare them. And objects from premodern history—like medieval manuscripts—are the perfect canvas on which to project our worries about the difficult and the frightening and the arcane, because these objects come from a time outside culture as we conceive of it. This single, original manuscript encourages us to sit with the concept of truth and to remember that there are ineluctable mysteries at the bottom of things whose meanings we will never know.

Dig Deeper: https://youtu.be/SQTzbk0qBpw

Digital Copy of the Voynich Manuscript: https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Solved? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/has-the-voynich-manuscript-really-been-solved/539310/

*Dedicated to Maggie*

#octoberfiles voynichmanuscript day3

0 notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

Text

Turkey-Kurd Conflict ‘Has Nothing to Do With Us,’ Trump Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/middleeast/trump-erdogan-turkey-syria-kurds.html

Ex-Aide Saw Gordon Sondland as a Potential National Security Risk

A former top White House adviser viewed Mr. Sondland, a Trump donor and the ambassador to the European Union, as a risk because he was so unprepared for his job.

By Nicholas Fandos and Adam Goldman

Published Oct. 16, 2019, 12:54 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 2:00 PM ET |

WASHINGTON — A former top White House foreign policy adviser told House impeachment investigators this week that she viewed Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, as a potential national security risk because he was so unprepared for his job, according to two people familiar with her private testimony.

The adviser, Fiona Hill, did not accuse Mr. Sondland of acting maliciously or intentionally putting the country at risk. But she described Mr. Sondland, a hotelier and Trump donor-turned-ambassador, as metaphorically driving in an unfamiliar place with no guardrails and no GPS, according to the people, who were not authorized to publicly discuss a deposition that took place behind closed doors.

Ms. Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the White House, also said that she raised her concerns with intelligence officials inside the White House, one of the people said.

Mr. Sondland’s lawyer declined to comment.

In her testimony, Ms. Hill described her fears that Mr. Sondland represented a counterintelligence risk because his actions made him vulnerable to foreign governments who could exploit his inexperience. She said Mr. Sondland extensively used a personal cellphone for official diplomatic business and repeatedly told foreign officials they were welcome to come to the White House whenever they liked.

Ms. Hill said that his invitations, which were highly unusual and not communicated to others at the White House, prompted one instance in which Romanian officials arrived at the White House without appointments, citing Mr. Sondland.

Ms. Hill also testified that Mr. Sondland held himself out to foreign officials as someone who could deliver meetings at the White House while also providing the cellphone numbers of American officials to foreigners, the people said. Those actions created additional counterintelligence risks, she said.

Mr. Sondland is scheduled to meet privately with impeachment investigators himself on Thursday, despite directions from the State Department and the White House that he and other witnesses should not cooperate with an investigation because the president and his senior advisers view it as illegitimate. Mr. Sondland’s lawyer has indicated that his client will testify.

Other aspects of Ms. Hill’s explosive testimony that have been previously reported as well as details offered by other officials who have spoken to investigators put Mr. Sondland at the center of a parallel foreign policy toward Ukraine. Sidelining career experts and the former American ambassador to Kiev, Mr. Sondland, other political appointees close to the president and Mr. Trump’s private lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to pressure Ukraine’s new government to open investigations into Democrats that would benefit the president politically.

Ms. Hill said that she and her boss, John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, were so concerned by what they saw that Ms. Hill alerted White House lawyers. She told the committees that Mr. Bolton wanted to make clear that he was not part of whatever “drug deal” that Mr. Sondland and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, were crafting on Ukraine, and that on another occasion Mr. Bolton compared Mr. Giuliani to “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”

Ms. Hill testified that she and Mr. Bolton were moved to act after Mr. Sondland revealed during a July 10 meeting that there was an agreement with Mr. Mulvaney that Mr. Trump would meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine if his government opened the investigations the White House sought. Mr. Sondland also mentioned Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that had appointed Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., to its board.

A White House meeting would be a sought-after prize for Mr. Zelensky, conferring legitimacy on his new government and demonstrating American support as Ukraine battles Russian-backed separatists in its east.

Ms. Hill left the White House in July, before Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky that prompted the whistle-blower complaint that set off the Ukraine scandal.

Earlier this month, Kurt D. Volker, the former special envoy for Ukraine, produced to investigators text messages with Mr. Sondland and other American and Ukrainian officials that showed Mr. Sondland was deeply enmeshed in efforts to secure investigations from the Ukrainians that could help the president politically.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

**********

Turkey-Kurd Conflict ‘Has Nothing to Do With Us,’ Trump Says

President Trump again defends his decision to withdraw American troops, an order that many, including Republicans, have interpreted as acquiescing to Turkey’s incursion against a United States ally.

By Peter Baker and Eileen Sullivan | Published October 16, 2019, 11:47 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 2:00 PM ET |

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday distanced the United States from the conflict between Turkey and America’s Kurdish allies in Syria, saying that the battle “has nothing to do with us” as he defended his decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria.

Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters alongside the visiting president of Italy, said the American soldiers he had ordered to pull back were not in harm’s way and that “they shouldn’t be as two countries fight over land.”

“That has nothing to do with us,” Mr. Trump said, all but washing his hands of the Kurdish fighters who have fought alongside American troops against the Islamic State for years but have now been left to fend for themselves. “The Kurds know how to fight, and, as I said, they’re not angels, they’re not angels,” he said.

The president’s comments came as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s new national security adviser, were preparing to fly to Turkey in a bid to persuade President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pull back his offensive.

Republicans and Democrats alike have denounced the president for abandoning the Kurds, who now are fighting Turkish forces in a chaotic battlefield that also has put at risk American troops pulling back from the Syrian border with Turkey. Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the small American force from the border, where they had served as a kind of trip wire deterring Turkish aggression, has been widely criticized as a signal permitting Turkey to launch its offensive.

TURKEY-KURD CONFLICT

Mr. Trump insisted his handling of the matter has been “strategically brilliant” and minimized concerns for the Kurds, implying that they allied with the United States only out of their own self-interest. “We paid a lot of money for them to fight with us,” he said.

He dismissed concerns that his decision has opened the way for Russia, Iran and the Syrian government to move into the abandoned territory and reassert their influence in the area. “I wish them all a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said. “If Russia wants to get involved in Syria, that’s really up to them.”

Critics in both parties condemned the president’s approach. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said that by sending Mr. Pence and Mr. Pompeo to Turkey, Mr. Trump was trying to fix a problem of his own creation.

“It’s very hard to understand why it is the vice president and secretary of state and others are going to talk with Erdogan and Turkey,” Mr. Romney told reporters. “It’s like the farmer who lost all his horses and goes to now shut the barn door.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies but a sharp critic of his Syria decision, suggested that the president was wrong to think the current conflict did not matter to the United States.

“I hope President Trump is right in his belief that Turkeys invasion of Syria is of no concern to us, abandoning the Kurds won’t come back to haunt us, ISIS won’t reemerge, and Iran will not fill the vacuum created by this decision,” Mr. Graham wrote on Twitter.

“However,” he added, “I firmly believe that if President Trump continues to make such statements this will be a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.”

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

I hope President Trump is right in his belief that Turkeys invasion of Syria is of no concern to us, abandoning the Kurds won’t come back to haunt us, ISIS won’t reemerge, and Iran will not fill the vacuum created by this decision.

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

However, I firmly believe that if President Trump continues to make such statements this will be a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.

12:09 PM - Oct 16, 2019

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

********

It’s Not Trump vs. the Dems. It’s Trump vs. the Country’s True Defenders.

Public servants who swore to protect the Constitution also set the impeachment process in motion.

By Thomas L. Friedman | Published

October 15, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 2:00 PM ET

Last Thursday and Friday, two important Americans bore witness to the state of our nation. One was President Trump, addressing political rallies. The other was Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until suddenly told to get “on the next plane” — because Trump wanted her removed — without explanation.

Every American should contemplate their remarks, which I excerpt later, and then ask two questions: Whose speech would you want to read to your children’s civics class and which speaker do you think represents the America you want to see evolve and leave to your kids?

This exercise is vital because this impeachment process was not set in motion by the Democratic Party. It was set in motion by civil servants — whistle-blowers from the intelligence community, now supported by National Security Council staffers and diplomats. These public servants also took an oath to serve the country and protect the Constitution, and they have shown remarkable courage to risk their careers, and maybe more, to call out the president for violating his oath.

They are like antibodies fighting the cancer in our political system. John Bolton spoke for all of them when, while national security adviser, he reportedly instructed Fiona Hill, the N.S.C. Russia expert, to tell White House lawyers that he wanted no part “of whatever drug deal” the president’s cronies were cooking up as part of an off-the-books diplomatic effort being led by Rudy Giuliani to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

It is breathtaking that virtually no Republican lawmakers have manifested similar courage — when all they have to lose is $174,000 in salary and free parking at Reagan Washington National Airport.

This point can’t be stressed enough. Because if Trump is removed from office and the country is healed afterward, it will only be because a majority of Americans understand that this is, at its core, a fight between these noncorrupt, apolitical civil servants — whose norms and institutions make America’s government so envied and respected around the world — and Giuliani and Trump and their pals, who care only about serving themselves and their conspiracy theories.

Trump and his enablers at the state-directed Fox News want to portray this as just another partisan fight — between Trump and his Democratic rivals — in the hope that the public will shrug and say, “There they go again.” They don’t want Americans to understand that this fight is about guarding the most cherished norms and institutions that define us as a nation.

We can’t let that happen. In service of that goal, I repeat some of Trump’s and Yovanovitch’s remarks.

Here’s Trump in Louisiana: “The radical Democrats’ policies are crazy. Their politicians are corrupt. Their candidates are terrible. And they know they can’t win on Election Day, so they’re pursuing an illegal, invalid and unconstitutional bullshit impeachment.”

And here’s Trump in Minneapolis about Joe Biden: “He was only a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass.”

And here’s Yovanovitch in her opening statement to the House impeachment investigators: “For the last 33 years, it has been my great honor to serve the American people as a Foreign Service officer, over six administrations — four Republican, and two Democratic. I have served in seven different countries, five of them hardship posts, and was appointed to serve as an ambassador three times — twice by a Republican president and once by a Democrat. Throughout my career, I have stayed true to the oath that Foreign Service officers take and observe every day: ‘that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ and ‘that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’”

She added: “My parents fled Communist and Nazi regimes. Having seen, firsthand, the war, poverty and displacement common to totalitarian regimes, they valued the freedom and democracy the U.S. represents. And they raised me to cherish these values as well.”

She continued: “From August 2016 until May 2019, I served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Our policy, fully embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, was to help Ukraine become a stable and independent democratic state, with a market economy integrated into Europe.”

Then Yovanovitch added: “I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the embassy team to ignore the president’s orders ‘since he was going to be impeached.’ That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing, to my embassy colleagues or to anyone else. … With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him. … I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

And then she explained that after being asked in early March “to extend my tour until 2020, I was then abruptly told in late April to come back to Washington from Ukraine ‘on the next plane.’ You will understandably want to ask why my posting ended so suddenly. I wanted to learn that, too, and I tried to find out. I met with the deputy secretary of state, who informed me of the curtailment of my term.

“He said that the president had lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve as his ambassador. He added that there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the department had been under pressure from the president to remove me since the summer of 2018. He also said that I had done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause.”

Alas, Secretary of State Pompeo did nothing to protect her.

Yovanovitch continued: “Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives. …

“I have served this nation honorably for more than 30 years. … Throughout that time, I — like my colleagues at the State Department — have always believed that we enjoyed a sacred trust with our government. … We repeatedly uproot our lives, and we frequently put ourselves in harm’s way to serve this nation. And we do that willingly, because we believe in America and its special role in the world. We also believe that, in return, our government will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests. That basic understanding no longer holds true.”

If this is how our government will now act, great long-term harm will be done to “our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably,” Yovanovitch concluded. We will lose “many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants,” and “bad actors” in countries beyond Ukraine will “see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.”

In both Minnesota and Louisiana, Trump supporters chanted “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.” at his red-meat lines. Read these two transcripts and then ask yourself, who’s really protecting and honoring “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.”?

*********

Behind the Electoral Curtain of Post-Soviet Regimes

By Celestine Bohlen | Published October Oct. 16, 2019, 10:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 2:00 PM ET |

MOSCOW — As a rolling group of protesters occupied streets in central Moscow this past July, a liberal opposition newspaper published a photograph of a young woman blocked by the police at a steel barricade. The sign she held up read, “I have the right to a choice.”

At a time when scholars are debating whether democracy has been discredited, even within Western nations, the rallying cry in Moscow went straight to the point: Elections that offer no choice are not only a sham, but also proof of a ruling government’s determination to block any challenge — however unthreatening — to its self-perpetuating power.

That’s why thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow this summer to protest the disqualification of some 30 independent opposition candidates in September’s city elections. The candidates were rejected on numerous grounds, including that the signatures and documents they had collected in order to run for office were false or invalid.

The thoroughness of the rejection by Moscow’s election authorities was compounded by the absurdity of some of their claims: that candidates had submitted signatures with incomplete addresses or that their signatories didn’t even exist. And all of this regarding an election to a local council that has little clout in President Vladimir V. Putin’s power vertical.

Elections in post-Soviet Russia have been troubled from the earliest days of the 28-year-old federated republic. But this year’s protests, amplified by the blanket arrest of opposition leaders and the detention of some 1,400 demonstrators at an unsanctioned protest on July 27, have thrown a particularly harsh light on Mr. Putin’s deepening authoritarian rule.

The situation in Russia highlights a disturbing trend spotted by Freedom House, a nonprofit research organization, in its 2019 annual report, “Democracy in Retreat.” After a surge toward democracy in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, the global share of “free” countries — as defined by Freedom House — declined between 2005 and 2018 to 44 percent from 46 percent, while the share of “not free” countries rose to 26 percent from 23 percent.

This trend persists in Central Europe with a worsening rating for Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has touted the virtues of “illiberal democracy.” Mr. Putin has also chipped away at the concept of liberal democracy: In a June interview with The Financial Times, he declared that the “liberal idea has become obsolete” because it is in conflict with the “interests” and “traditional values” of the majority population.

In fact, liberal democracy — usually defined as a popularly elected government based on individual rights, the rule of law and the separation of powers — has not fared well across the former Soviet Union since 1991, when the Cold War superpower collapsed into 15 independent states. According to the rating system used by Freedom House, only three of those 15 republics are fully free; these are the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Of the rest, five are “partly free,” and seven, including Russia, are “not free.”

Furthermore, three former Soviet states — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — are among the 13 countries in the world with the worst aggregate scores from Freedom House, which bases its ratings on the levels of political rights and civil liberties available in the country.

These are disappointing results given the high hopes of many people in the region during the heady early days of independence. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for a number of leaders of ex-Soviet republics to figure out how to give their authoritarian regimes a veneer of democracy — by, for example, holding elections that offer voters no real choice.

Those leaders, typically posing as “fathers of the nation,” were quick to tap into their populations’ longing for security during changing times. Six of the seven “not free” ex-Soviet countries happen to be buoyed by generous natural resources — mostly oil and gas — which have helped fuel their economies, and their leaders’ cults of personality. The exception is Belarus, where President Alexander G. Lukashenko has created a tightly controlled political system that has kept him in power since 1994. Belarus is considered the most Soviet of the ex-republics, and it is totally dependent on neighboring Russia for its energy supplies.

Across resource-rich Central Asia — with the exception of Kyrgyzstan (which Freedom House defines as “partly free”) — leaders have combined old tribal traditions with Communist-era bureaucratic practices to maintain a staggeringly durable grip on power. Kazakhstan’s president resigned in March after 30 years in power; Uzbekistan’s president died in 2016 after 27 years in power; and Tajikistan’s leader is still in power after 25 years.

Turkmenistan, which ranks second to the bottom on Freedom House’s list and worse than North Korea for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders, is now ruled by a former dentist who, after 13 years of absolute power, is already rivaling his predecessor’s love of self-glorifying vanity projects.

In her 2015 book “Democracy in Central Asia,” Mariya Omelicheva, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, argues that Central Asia’s strongmen survive because their populations support them. “Central Asian citizens perceive democracy as an empty ideological framework or a recipe for mayhem,” she said in a 2015 interview with The Diplomat.

She argued that Western efforts to promote democracy in the region had failed because they were frequently accompanied by “moral posturing,” “political demonizing” and “finger-pointing,” which only backfire. “Funding the organization of free and fair elections in societies that lack independent media, civil society networks and free speech will not only result in the waste of resources, but also invalidate democracy,” she said.

Traditions in Russia are different from those in Central Asia, but here too liberal democracy — with its independent branches of government, freedom of speech and assembly, and individual rights — has had difficulty taking hold. Now in his 19th year in power, Mr. Putin is widely seen by analysts as already circling the wagons ahead of the critical year 2024, when he will finish his last constitutional term in office.

Unlike neighboring Ukraine, Russia has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power since the Soviet collapse. Mr. Putin was handpicked by President Boris N. Yeltsin to succeed him in 2000, in an election where other candidates were at a disadvantage. Ukraine, in contrast, this year elected a new president and a new parliamentary majority, who were in opposition to the departing ruling party.

In his Financial Times interview, Mr. Putin chose two bizarre examples to illustrate the “liberal idea” behind Western democracies to which he is so opposed: the rights of migrants “to kill, plunder and rape with impunity,” and the acceptance of “five or six gender roles” for children, which he said was an attempt to “overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

Both issues — which Mr. Putin seemed to suggest were supported and accepted by a liberal dogma now holding sway in the West — fit neatly into the exaggerated right-wing rhetoric currently heard across Europe and the United States.

Curiously, these issues had nothing to do with the concerns that propelled supporters of the Russian opposition onto Moscow’s streets this summer. They weren’t protesting against changes in gender roles or the arrival of violent migrants, but simply for the democratic right to have their voices heard.

Celestine Bohlen is a former New York Times Moscow correspondent who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs through the perspectives of thought leaders and commentators.

0 notes