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phroyd · 5 years ago

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Just how badly has American capitalism failed? Consider the following.

The White House backed out of a deal to manufacture ventilators because the price tag was too high. Go ahead and guess. Ready? It was…one billion dollars. Sound like a lot? Too much? For ventilators for…the entire country…in the middle of a pandemic…that’s already spiraling out of control?

Then think about this.

Jeff Bezos is worth $113 billion. Zuck, about $60 billion. Warren Buffett, about $70 billion. Are you seeing my point yet? Let me make it clearer. Either Bezos or Zuck or Buffett — or any number of penny-ante mega-billionaires — could pay for all the ventilators America needs right now, and not even blink. Not even think twice.

Take Bezos, for example. That one billion dollars to supply the country with ventilators is less than one percent of his net worth. The net worth of the average American household is about $100K. That’s like the average American spending…a thousand dollars. The net worth of the average millennial is about $10K. That’s like the average millennial spending…one hundred dollars.

That’s how trivial it is for a Bezos to literally supply the entire country with ventilators. It’s pocket money. To call it chump change would be an overstatement. He could do it and he’d literally never even notice the money was gone. It would take his accountant a lifetime to even begin to care.

Is your head spinning yet? What on earth? It should be.

All that, my friends, is an object lesson in the profound and surreal failure of capitalism. Let me now put it in simpler terms.

Capitalism is adding disaster to tragedy, by way of needless scarcity.

Suddenly, a society experiences a catastrophe — in this case, a pandemic. That would be bad enough. But because a tiny number of people in society have hoarded all the resources — in this case money, which really just means foregone ventilators — a society cannot respond to its catastrophe well at all. What happens next? What happens is what’s going to happen.

People are going to die. In fact, they already have. Perhaps you read about the poor kid who was turned away from an urgent care center for a lack of insurance. That’s not a ventilator, but it’s not exactly hard to see how a lack of ventilators is going to start killing Americans en masse very, very soon, if it hasn’t already.

Capitalism is adding disaster to tragedy…by way of needless scarcity.

How much is one billion dollars, anyways? The American economy is worth about $20 trillion. One billion is a vanishingly small fraction of that. How small, exactly? One twenty thousandth, or .00005%. It’s so small, I might have missed a decimal place there — and it doesn’t matter, because it’s that miniscule.

And yet the government can’t raise one twenty thousandth of the size of the economy in order to provide society with the one resource it needs most to survive a pandemic — ventilators.

Think about that math for a second. Really just think about it.

What would it say about you if you couldn’t raise one twenty thousandth of your income to, say, give your kids life saving medicine? That’s a flawed analogy, but I struggle for anything — anything at all — to express the magnitude of this failure well. I literally can’t think of anything remotely close to it, so let me simply try to express it again, even more concisely.

The government can’t raise one twenty thousandth of the whole economy’s income to pay for a critical resource during a pandemic — ventilators — while it would cost a Bezos maybe one hundred of his wealth to provide them for the whole country.

What on earth? My head is spinning. Is yours? It’s so grotesque, baffling, obscene, it’s literally impossible to process. How is it that in the richest society in human history, apparently — pennies can’t be found for ventilators? And yet it’s wealthiest man could single-handedly provide them, and never even notice?

Now, here’s the even more distressing part. Bezos (or Zuck, Buffett, etc) can’t spend all that money anyways. There is simply no way that you can spend a hundred billion dollars. What would you do? You could buy up all the luxury properties and mega yachts, and you’d barely have made a dent. You’d have to buy entire cities, nations, and whole social systems. Which is effectively what a Bezos has done. Americans don’t have ventilators because Bezos has hundreds of billions. Americans don’t have healthcare because billionaires have all the money in their society.

When I have more money than I can ever spend, then there is no real cost to me to supply you, say, with ventilators. Do you see how grotesque that paradox is? That is what “artifical scarcity” means. Jeff Bezos having a billion less wouldn’t actually cost him anything, because he can’t spend it anyways. All him having those billions does is cost everyone else life-saving resources, like ventilators in a lethal pandemic.

So let’s put this epic failure in more technical terms.

Capitalism has misallocated capital on a truly stunning and surreal scale in America. It’s created a system where an entire nation goes without the critical, life-saving resources they need, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic — while the wealthy could literally buy Americans those resources single-handedly, and doing so wouldn’t make a dent in their fortunes. But the wealthy can’t spend all that money to begin with. It’s literally just sitting there, going to no good use. Like, say, the critical one of ventilators. The result will obviously be needless death on a massive scale.

Economists call all that a “deadweight loss.” If American economists were actually good ones, they’d immediately understand that capitalism is a colossal and tragic failure. Consider the Soviet Union — Americans used to make fun of it for breadlines. But now Americans are the ones beset by artificial scarcities. What’s scarce in America? Yesterday — healthcare, retirement, decent work, education, good food, and so on. The basics.

Today? The critical, life-saving necessities. Ventilators, masks, protective equipment.

Capitalism — as an economy — literally cannot supply these things to society. It is more interested in billionaires hoarding as much wealth as possible — and then crafting political mechanisms to protect that wealth. And yet that wealth is too much, in the simple sense that nobody can even spend it.

But when I have too much money that I can never spend, of course you will go without — because the economy slowly grinds to a halt, as my money simply sits there idle, instead of being invested in the things you need. That is what “artificial scarcity” means: ventilators aren’t really scarce, we just can’t make them because only Jeff Bezos can afford them, since he’s now as rich as…a whole healthcare system, which Americans now go without, since those resources belong to him.

What we see at this dire stage of American capitalism is a kind of evolution, backwards, devolution. Yesterday, basics were in perpetual, artificial short supply — money, retirement, healthcare, etc. But you can eke out a life without basics, still. Just one without dignity and meaning and happiness. Yet today, the situation is much worse. Critical, life-saving resources are now artificially scarce. And you can’t live without those.

The result? People will die — needlessly, on a staggering scale.

I can’t think of an economic system failing in a more disastrous way than that. A truer way than that. You don’t have a ventilator that might save your, your kid’s, your partner’s life — meanwhile, the wealthy could buy them for all, for every single person in society…at literally no real cost to themselves. There is literally no better example of what Marx famously called “exploitation” than all that: you dying, during a pandemic because the super rich have such an absurd amount of resources in society that they could literally buy everyone life itself, and not even notice, yet won’t, because, well…why care? Americans are being exploited and abused by capitalism now not just into poverty and overwork and social disintegration — but into lethal illness and death itself. Yes, really — in hard, cold, absolute, unforgiving terms.

Let them eat ventilators? It puts Versailles to shame.

I have few word left to express how I feel about all this. But I am not the point. You are. Some day, the world hopes, Americans will understand just how badly capitalism has abused and exploited them. Because the world is made of good people, who want the best, still, even for Americans. The question is whether Americans want that for themselves.

Umair Haque March 2020

Phroyd

#captalism #covid #failure

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somerton · 5 years ago

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The American Trilogy

People have said that Stanley Kubrick’s final 7 films are more like 1 film about humanity spanning different genres. It’s undeniable that there are specific parallels and connections between his films, but the way his films connect to each other on a basic level is quite interesting and not very difficult to see.

Dr. Strangelove ends with nuclear bombs destroying the world cut to the black void of 2001; The Dawn of Man. The end of the world caused by man’s violent nature transitioned into the beginning of man’s violent nature with Moonwatcher discovering the bone as a weapon.

2001 ends with the Starchild looking directly at the camera; at us, while A Clockwork Orange opens with a closeup on Alex’s eye. A transcended soul cut to a devilish man. The eye was a very potent symbol within 2001, representing the vast exploration possible inside oneself. The eye continues to be important in Clockwork, especially with Alex’s stigmata eyeball cuff links, strengthening the comparison to the godlike Starchild and Jesus Christ dying on the cross as a man, transcending to a God. Alex does not transcend, he lives on to do the deeds of evil men.

A Clockwork Orange, set in a near future or alternate reality, ends with an offer for Alex to move his way up the societal ladder by aligning himself with the same corrupt politicians who used the Ludavico technique on him in the first place, then a daydream with Alex surrounded by what look to be noble men and women of a past era observing him in a sexual act with a woman. The next film, Barry Lyndon is a period piece that explores the issues of class in 18th century Europe and trying to better oneself by moving up in the classist system. Clockwork is a story about where society is now (or was then), while Barry Lyndon explores where society was within the period piece genre. Interestingly enough not much has changed. Both world’s are violent, full of wealthy people using lower class people to further their own agendas, the people at the bottom forced to scratch their way to the top of a corrupt system, often using nefarious techniques to get ahead.

Kubrick is trying to communicate the way society / humans are and have always been while connecting the films with transitional elements that bring this idea into the viewer’s subconscious.

I believe those films, are also connected to the final three in Kubrick’s portrayal humanity and the way he sought to hold a mirror up to us via the cinema screen. However, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut seem to have a deeper connection to each other than the previous films. Yes, they too are an exploration of genre, using the conventions of it to subvert more complex themes, but I feel Kubrick started to develop ideas on how to thematically connect these films on an even deeper level throughout the 20 year period spent completing these three.

I suggest that the final three films act as a trilogy, exploring the genocide America was built on and the ideals of which continue to permeate through our society. These films are his ode to America’s dark secret hidden in plain sight. Not since Dr. Strangelove had he made a movie even based in America. These final 3 are inherently American films. While Strangelove was an overt criticism of authoritarian power, the final trilogy shrouds itself in a ghost story, a war epic, and a sexual thriller in order to issue Kubrick’s vicious critique.

Just to caveat, I don’t think the final trilogy are ONLY critiquing America but I do think this is crucial in all three films, more so than his others excluding Strangelove. 2001, Clockwork, and Barry Lyndon are more overtly commenting on humanity and culture in general.

Let’s get into how the final 3 specifically do this. I’m going to breeze by a lot of basic info that any Kubrick obsessive should already know.

The Shining references Native Americans constantly, the hotel is built on an “Indian burial ground” and had to repel Native American attacks while building the Overlook. There’s a ton of info on this out there already so I don’t feel it necessary to explain all the evidence to support this, but it’s overtly injected into the film, barely under the surface. There’s also a ton of material to support the idea that the hotel itself represents America and it’s constant ability to “Overlook” the horrors that our society is built on. Stuart Ullman, the Hotel Manager has an American flag on his desk, echoing his jacket and tie with an American eagle statue poking out form behind his head (Symbols related to characters’ heads are important in Kubrick’s work). In a film where mirrors are also important his initials backwards are US. The Shining is about the bloody birth of America and the generational inheritance of said violence. To see these things, one has to use their own ability to Shine and see through the veil of genre.

The next film is Full Metal Jacket, based in the Vietnam War. The film starts out with soldiers getting their heads shaved, representing the first step in their dehumanization at the hands of the U.S Military. Vietnam is not considered a just war and is an obvious extension of the genocidal characteristics America was born into. America is still doing the same thing that The Shining represents; going into a place full of brown skinned people and wreaking havoc for their own benefit and seemingly justified by racial bias. Vietnam is truly the beginning of a modern genocide, justified by politics, fear, money, and propaganda. This film came out in 1987, 12 years after Vietnam ended, but interestingly enough 3 years before another example of this American Imperialism; The Gulf War. Full Metal Jacket makes us look at something inhumane that just recently happened and yet most people remember the drill Sergeant yelling hilarious obscenities at the soldiers, many thinking the second half of the film as inferior to the first. As horrific as the dehumanization process of bootcamp is, it’s easier to watch than the reality that happened in Vietnam. In the film’s major battle sequence, we see multiple solders die, wasting hundreds of rounds only to find one young girl to be their target. This is the reality of Vietnam. Note the poster’s reference to Joker’s helmet, BORN TO KILL, relating to both the birth of America and the eagle behind Ullman’s head, turning him into a literal figurehead of this inherited American violence.

Eyes Wide Shut continues this theme from the perspective of someone living their adult life in post Vietnam society. The modern genocide has turned war into a commodity and has shown the darkest side of capitalism. Bill probably was too young to go to Vietnam but would be a first generation adult starting a family post Vietnam (meaning he was old enough to experience Vietnam as a child but not old enough to go).

Coincidentally enough, when EWS was released in 1999 the US were only a few years away from yet another unjust conflict in Iraq based on lies with huge non-compete contracts handed out to companies that the G.W. Bush administration had personal and financial connections with. It’s also interesting to note that although this couldn’t have been intended by Kubrick, the themes of generational violence being passed down through the generations connects to George Bush starting an Iraq war in the 90s while just over a decade later his son would do that same. Kubrick saw humanity in such a deep way, the good and bad, that he’s almost seen the future through his exploration of complex themes. Sadly though I don’t believe he was psychic, but purely able to to see the reality of cycles we humans perpetuate throughout time.

Eyes Wide Shut is about modern society’s classist structures and how someone like Bill Harford could be so oblivious to the dangers that surround his lovely life and how easily that can be taken away by his own inability to see himself and the various social constructs he participates in. He is blind to the world, happy as clam to live an upperclass Manhattanite lifestyle. This is inherently connected to the more overt violent themes in the previous two films. There is a cultural genocide perpetuated by the richest people who use others like pieces on a chessboard; built off of the original sin of America’s treatment of the Natives and continued through our unjust wars of today, finally providing the power structure for a few people to wield over the rest. Money in Eyes Wide Shut is equivalent to the axe in The Shining, the rifles in Full Metal Jacket. The first line in Eyes Wide Shut is, “Honey have you seen my wallet?”. This is no accident, it’s a seemingly insignificant line of dialog that immediately begins to beg you to pay attention to this theme.

- From The Shining: ULLMAN: We had four presidents who stayed here, lots of movie stars. WENDY: Royalty? ULLMAN: All the best people.

See my post on “All the best people”

#The Shining #Full Metal Jacket #Eyes Wide Shut

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alex-a-gray · 3 years ago

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GOD MONEY

Stopping by a clothing shop window on one of the streets downtown, Rick started eyeing the mannequins placed behind the glass, one after another–thin female figures with their hands frozen in graceful gestures. And here's that coat: long, brown, with three large round buttons and a wide belt. How much is it? A thousand bucks, no less. Rick's last girlfriend used to glance at this coat with admiration every so often, until he decided that they shouldn't walk on this street anymore.

She’s read too many fairytales when she was a little girl, he thought grimly. She thinks that men get their money just magically. Sorry, babe, but my magic wand has a different function!

Rick smirked and shrugged from cold. November was coming, wind was getting stronger, and yesterday’s weather forecast even promised snow tomorrow. The sky above was looking gray and unfriendly.

He crossed the street at the intersection leaving the shop window behind and rushed ahead along the sidewalk, glancing occasionally at his reflection in the glass, which was on his right at the moment. There were premium bed linen stores, luxury perfumeries, hairdressers, beauty salons and other places favored by wealthy people who drive around in their Lexuses.

Do I really look that bad? said Rick to himself. Even if my clothes are not worth an arm and a leg, so what? Does that really mean I’m not worthy of love then? Like these sons of bitches from expensive colleges deserve the happiness that they got out of the blue. Why the hell are they better than me?

He scratched his unshaven cheek and turned at the next intersection. The cold sun was breaking through the clouds, and its cold rays were shining straight into his face until he got to the other side of the road. Among the cars that stopped at the traffic light, he naturally spotted a brand new black Mercedes, and a bit further away–a perfectly polished Audi.

That must be nice to make a move on a girl with that kind of car…

He imagined himself behind the steering wheel. He didn’t have a driver’s license, he never had one, but it didn’t stop him from daydreaming.

…wearing a custom-tailored suit and shirt worth five-hundred bucks, radiant white.

He turned left at the corner of the street, and his eyes immediately went up, along a dark tall building, headquarters of some big successful company. He got mesmerized by a large screen placed between 10thand 12th floor. There was a face of a handsome man, stretched almost to its full length, looking down on the street. He was clean-shaved, with perfectly combed hair beaming with infinite self-confidence, and well-known to many people in the city. Rick recognized him too, but the name escaped him. He saw this guy on TV quite often, he knew it was some rich dick.

Fuck, there’s hell of a lot of them. And the main thing is, where do they get the money? Is it distributed somewhere? If so, when will it be my turn to have some?

Lips tight, Rick tore his eyes away from the screen and stumbled onto a girl, who had her eyes buried in her smartphone, almost knocking her over. She gasped softly, more out of surprise–she was wearing such a thick silver fur-coat, that she could hardly have felt any pain. How old is she? Somewhere at the back of his mind Rick had the time to check out her pretty little face, but his defense mechanism which he developed over months had already started rolling. He knit his brow in anger, muttered something obscenely rude, and walked away from her at a rattling pace. The girl took an airpod out of her left ear, then stared at him for a few moments, puzzled, and moved on with a sorry look on her face.

‘Crap!’ growled out Rick when he was already about twenty paces away, not sure whether he was angry at himself, the girl, or the situation.

Then he glanced at the face of the ‘successful man’ on the screen above him again and asked himself: ‘What the hell?’

WHAT THE FREAKING HELL?!

Rick took a deep breath and tried to pull himself together, then decided to head home. He would turn at the nearest intersection and take a bus at the first bus stop. That was enough walking for one day, enough of these never-ending triggers, twisting the knife in him.

And why do I keep coming here? Rick asked himself, shaking his head. This district is not for people like me, why am I so drawn to it?

He stopped, looking at his shoes.

You look at me as if I have no right to be in this place, that's why I come here. To spoil your lovely view from the window.

Turning back to the road, Rick looked at the café across the street. ‘Gandhi’, read a small sign above the glass door. It looked like a decent place, just like any other nearby. But there seemed to be almost no one inside. Clenching his fists in his pockets, Rick looked around and ran insolently across the road, making some show-off on a BMW slam on the brakes and lean out of the window, spitting and swearing.

Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

He stopped at the doorstep. Just then, the door opened and a visitor came out of the café. The smell of fresh, hot coffee wafted over Rick. He noticed a handbag in the visitor's hand and felt his heart sink. He didn't know much about handbags, of course, but even the sight of it was enough to tell him that he couldn't afford that place.

He felt his courage leaking away.

No! he thought instantly. I want to see your eyes widen when I pay for your fucking coffee!

In his mind he feverishly began to calculate a modest fortune he had put in his inner pocket. He didn't want to take out the change and do it in front of everyone, so it took him some time, and as a result, he still didn't know the exact amount. But he decided there was no way he could have less than eight bucks on him. This should be enough for a cup of coffee, whatever it costs… It couldn’t be all eighty, after all!

Rick came in. The café greeted him with warmth and coziness. He started feeling uncomfortable the moment he entered, because warm and cozy places are for men from the screen and women with handbags worth a month's rent of his housing. Warmth and coziness cost money, and a great deal of money, as well as love and affection from women.

Just one coffee, he thought, and that's it.

Then he looked around the room, which was obviously decorated by some fashionable expensive designer, walked past several tables to the very corner and sat down by the window. Soon the waitress came up to him. She was a very young girl–a blonde with clear blue eyes. She placed the menu in front of him.

‘I’ll have a cup of coffee for starters,’ he said, not even knowing the price. It would had been awkward for him to look for it on the menu in front of her, it had been awkward for him from the moment he stepped inside, but now there was nowhere to go.

What a stupid idea! he thought, flipping through the menu. He was angry at himself. Here’s the coffee, right on the last page. Four ninety-nine a cup. Four ninety-nine and she didn't even smile at me! Well, of course, they don’t even consider it money.

Rick let out a sigh in despair. The waitress came back and put a tiny cup with the damned black liquid in front of him.

‘Have you chosen anything?’ she asked, taking out a notebook and a pen.

‘No, thanks, just coffee for me,’ said Rick, not looking at the girl.

She nodded and left without saying a word.

You wouldn’t get a word out of them for my measly four ninety-nine, Rick thought.

He exhaled noisily and peered into the cup. The coffee looked good. There were two lumps of sugar on the left side of the saucer, and a silver spoon on the right.

Perhaps they even spitted there?

Rick grinned and looked at the waitress. At the moment she was giving someone a bill. It was a solid-looking, elderly man and he had a brown leather briefcase on the floor by the table. The blonde girl was smiling at him. Perhaps he came here often, and they knew each other.

You'd probably be happy to give him a blowjob if he ordered it. Right here, under the table. First, you'd write it down in your notebook, and then you’d get down to business. You can do anything for money, right? That's all you need, isn't it? You fucking whore!

Pushing the cup away, Rick covered his face with his hands for a few moments, and then he looked out the window. People, people, people passing by. They keep going back and forth. They’re all busy, they’ve got things to do; and they all bury their faces in expensive smartphones worth a thousand bucks! Even though everything they need from their devices could easily be done with the use of some cheap Chinese gadget only worth a hundred dollars.

Ninety-nine, Rick corrected himself. We live in a world divided by capitalist corporations, they never say that something costs a hundred dollars. They say it’s ninety-nine, nine hundred and ninety-nine, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine…

He buried his face in his hands again.

‘God, how I hate all of you,’ he whispered, ‘I FUCKING hate all of you!’

Fingers clenched at his temples; Rick tried to control his anger. Right now, he wanted to get up, grab his hot coffee that he got for four-ninety-nine dollars, and throw it in the face of that haughty waitress, or in the face of that old balding dick.

Why am I worse? WHY AM I WORSE?! I just never had a chance, I didn't have rich parents, I didn't have any friends in high places… I didn't go to a prestigious college. But they were just lucky, they WERE JUST LUCKY.

His head was beginning to ache.

Without money, a girl won't even smile at me. It's like we're not human anymore… As if hormones, chemistry starts working only with the use of pocket lettuce and social status, and not by the look of one eye in another.

But that's not how it should be. It shouldn't be like this at all.

‘Excuse me.’

Rick looked up and stared blankly at the man standing in front of him.

‘Excuse me,’ he repeated, ‘may I sit with you?’

It was that old balding dick. Had she given him head already?

‘Yeah,’ Rick muttered, frowning, and straightened up.

The old man put his briefcase next to the table and sat down on the opposite side. Rick pulled his coffee toward him and looked at the man carefully. A few wrinkles crossed the old man's face, but they were not very deep, so he was not as old as he seemed at first glance. His small gray eyes were literally beaming, and there was a friendly smile on his lips.

Rick cleared his throat and with a hostile note in his voice he said:

‘But I don't have anything to treat you, sorry.’

‘Don't worry about it. I've already had a bite to eat,’ the old man immediately fussed. ‘Actually, I have an important question to ask you.’

‘Me? A question?’ Rick was surprised. ‘Are you sure you're not mistaken?’

‘No, no,’ the old man shook his head vigorously and leaned forward a little, so that Rick would be the only person to hear him. ‘You see, I am... very well aware of your difficulties, so to speak.’

Rick was taken aback for a few moments. He stared at the old man for a second, then glanced at the waitress over his shoulder, at the street–no, no one seemed to be filming him, although you couldn't see the professionals that easily–and then back at the old man. He kept silent, watching the guy's reaction. He looked like the man from the screen that was hanging on the building nearby. Not the face, of course, no–they were definitely two different people–but the expression of the face. Despite the obvious benevolence of this old man, there was a sense of confidence and authority in him. And not even judging by the clothes, it was obvious that he was sitting on a huge pile of money. This was hardly a cheap prank and he doubted that a cameraman would jump out from under the table, poking the camera in his face.

‘So what's the matter?’ asked Rick, his whole body got tense. Although, truth to tell, he hadn't relaxed since the moment he saw the man standing in front of him.

‘I want to help,’ he said simply.

Rick said nothing.

No, it seems to be some kind of joke after all. And, a very wicked joke!

Rick's thoughts must have been reflected on his face, because the next moment, the old man suddenly spread his arms wide, as if opening up, and said:

‘It's okay, I'm your friend.’

‘Heck,’ Rick said sharply, ‘we don't even know each other.’ He shook his head. ‘Besides, people like you don’t make friends with people like me.’

‘Why is that?’ The old man leaned back. His eyebrows were raised high. ‘Aren't you worthy of friendship?’

‘What are you on about?!’ Rick was getting angry. ‘Are you trying to make fun of me?!’

The old man's smile returned for just one brief moment, then he raised his hand in a conciliatory gesture and began to soothe his heated companion.

‘Hush, hush, I'm not making fun of you,’ he said, ‘and I’m not messing with you. I’m sorry if this is what you thought. I really want to offer you some financial assistance.’

Rick looked around the room again, this time peering into every corner he could see, the chandeliers, the flower pots, the framed black-and-white photographs that were hung on the walls. Maybe it's being filmed through the window of a store across the street, or from a car parked on the other side of the curb?

‘Do you have some job to offer?’ Rick asked, looking the old man straight in the eye. Small, wide-set, but kind-looking, they were endearing, even though the guy resisted it.

‘Not really,’ said the old man, looking away for a moment, ‘I want to buy something from you.’

‘What?’ asked Rick right away. ‘How do you know I have it?’

The old man smiled mysteriously.

‘I can tell just by looking at you’.

‘All right,’ Rick's nostrils flared angrily, ‘I'm not going to put up with this.’

The guy got up from the table abruptly, leaving his coffee untouched, and walked away, straight to the exit.

‘Rick, wait!’ the old man called.

This old prick even found out my name! the guy thought, not turning around. He probably paid someone a tidy sum to dig up some info about me. And I didn't even get any interest!

‘Wait,’ the old man repeated, ‘look in the back pocket of your jeans’.

Reaching for the door handle, Rick automatically slapped the back pocket, then put his hand in it and... felt something that hadn't been there before. He froze, took a rustling green piece of paper folded in half from his pocket, and unfolded it.

A hundred bucks.

Not just ninety-nine, but a hundred, a real one.

What are these tricks? Rick looked from the bill to the old man, who motioned for him to come back.

The guy looked at the waitress, who was watching him in bewilderment, and then returned to his table.

‘When... when did you do it?’ he asked, still standing.

‘Do what?’

The old man smiled.

‘Don't mess with my head,’ Rick started up again, ‘when did you manage to put this inside my pocket?!’

‘I only need a second for this,’ the old man said and snapped the fingers of his left hand. ‘That's it.’

‘Look,’ Rick said, ‘I'm going to break your nose if you don't tell me right now what's going on and what you want from me!’

‘Then sit,’ the old man nodded at the chair opposite, ‘and simmer down’.

With an effort, Rick obeyed. He still held the bill in his right hand, which he now kept above the table.

‘By the way, I just snapped my fingers a second time,’ said the old man, looking out of the window. ‘You should check your other pocket’.

Without saying a word, Rick reached for the second pocket and sat up a little to put his fingers in it. There was another bill inside. It was another hundred bucks, crisp, almost not crumpled.

Probably he put it in with the first one. I should have checked the other pocket right away, thought Rick.

The old man continued to stare out of the window silence.

Rick couldn't help but ask him:

‘And what did you buy from me?’

‘Nothing yet,’ his companion immediately became lively. ‘I need your consent for this. And this is... consider it as payment for your time spent on me.’

Rick carefully examined the money. No, it doesn't look fake. He nodded and put the banknote in the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘How do you know my name?’ asked Rick. ‘Who sold you the information? That whore Megan?’

‘No,’ the old man shook his head, ‘the whore Megan has nothing to do with it. If you don't mind, I don't want to disclose my sources.’

He smiled.

‘All right, let's get down to business,’ Rick said, softening a little as a couple of hundred bucks warmed him up through his pocket. ‘I really don't have much time.’

‘Of course,’ the old man nodded, in a businesslike manner, ‘It’s high time’.

He paused for a moment, then continued.

‘Like I said, I want to buy something from you. And I know you have it. I can see it right now. And I'm not referring to your clothes, to your appearance. You shouldn’t have taken a grudge on me, since this is not what I was talking about, Rick.’

The guy shifted uncomfortably. He looked at the old man's face, so open and honest at that moment that it was impossible not to believe him. However, he tore his gaze away from it, not allowing himself to be hypnotized.

Is this some kind of special plastic surgery available only to the rich?

‘So what is it?’ the guy asked.

‘I'll tell you,’ the old man said, and there was a sudden note of embarrassment in his voice, ‘but promise me you won't get up and leave right away. What you will hear is not very usual, but I will speak absolutely seriously, and I will be ready to give the real money for it. Those two hundred should convince you that I'm ready to pay.’

Rick thought for a moment, then nodded.

I think this old man is a bit nuts. Maybe I can get more than a couple hundred out of him.

The old man put his hands on the table. He clasped his fingers together and gently stroked the protruding veins. It seemed he was delaying what he was about to say.

But then, suddenly, he said:

‘I need the last day of your life.’

‘What?’ Rick asked immediately.

‘You heard right,’ said the old man, ‘I want to buy the last day of your life from you. Tell me the amount, we'll sign the papers and the job will be done.’

‘Are you serious?’ Rick looked around. No, there was no cameraman.

‘Yes’.

The guy licked his dry lips.

��If I hadn't promised, I would have gotten up and left right now,’ he said, and exhaled. ‘What does that mean after all?’

‘It means that you will simply die exactly twenty-four hours ahead of your due date, that's all.’ The old man waved his hand vaguely. ‘And no one knows when you're supposed to be there. How old are you now, twenty-five?’

Rick nodded.

‘You are still very young,’ the old man continued with a certain envy in his voice, ‘and being young goes well with being rich. Perhaps it is worth sacrificing one day for it. That's not much compared to a whole lifetime. Especially a life filled with working days, which take up most of the time. You know, by agreeing to this deal, you may even extend your life in a way’.

Bingo. He's not himself. Must have forgotten to take his meds last night.

‘Yes,’ Rick agreed, ‘you could sacrifice a couple of days for that. And how much will you give me?’

‘I told you,’ the old man waved his hand again, ‘tell me the amount.’

‘A thousand bucks!’ said Rick abruptly.

‘All right,’ the old man nodded.

‘Ten thousand!’

‘I agree to this,’ the old man smiled.

‘A hundred thousand dollars!’ Rick said, almost out of breath.

‘I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars, Rick.’

‘You're crazy,’ the guy laughed, too. ‘Are you serious?! No, you're crazy! You won't pay me a hundred thousand dollars.’

The old man suddenly raised his left hand and snapped his fingers. Then he snapped again, and then again–three times in total.

Suddenly, Rick felt something pressing against his chest from the side of his heart.

‘Check the pocket of your jacket,’ the old man said cheerfully.

Rick shoved his hand into his inside pocket, and the smile faded from his face. He was slowly running his fingers over something that had definitely not been there before. It looked like a thick stack of notes. Rick didn't even doubt what it was. He pulled back the edge of his jacket and pocket and peered inside.

‘It's an advance,’ the old man said, ‘and it's exactly half the amount. You’ll get the second half after signing the papers.’

Rick didn't say anything. He wrapped his fingers around a thick wad of bills and, looking around sharply, half-took it out of his pocket to get a better look.

Is there fifty thousand here?! I've got fifty thousand in my pocket right now?!

He glared at the old man.

‘Are you... the devil?’ he asked in all seriousness.

In all seriousness the old man replied:

‘No’.

Then, a little impatiently, he added:

‘Shall we finally sign the papers?’

‘Huh?’ Rick tore his eyes away from the money. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘All right,’ the old man smiled–this time in a somewhat formal way–and then took just one sheet of paper and a pen from the briefcase and pushed them toward the guy. ‘You don't have to read through all of it, the bottom line is that you will die exactly twenty-four hours earlier than you were meant to. And it doesn't matter what it was supposed to be caused by–illness, old age, accident. It's just going to happen a day earlier. There’s no catch, pitfalls, no conditions in the small print.

Rick nodded. Then, with a trembling hand, he grasped the pen and wrote his signature on the sheet of paper just five or six lines long. It wasn't very smooth, but the old man didn't mind–he took the paper and the pen and put them back in his briefcase. Then he looked at the guy and snapped his magic fingers three more times.

‘The remainder,’ he explained. ‘The second half.’

At that moment, Rick felt another thick wad of money grow in the second inner pocket of the jacket. He didn't even check, he knew it was there. He knew that he now had a hundred thousand dollars in cash, or rather, a hundred thousand two hundred... how much did he have to pay for the coffee?

Rick was silent for a moment. He was shocked by what had happened.

Then he asked, rather pointlessly:

‘What now?’

‘Now,’ said the old man, ‘I must go.’

He got to his feet and picked up his briefcase. Rick stood up, too, to show respect to his benefactor.

‘What will you spend the money on?’ the old man asked before leaving, glancing at the guy with a sly look on his face. ‘If it's not a secret.’

A shiny Audi? A custom-made suit? A radiant white shirt? A million smiles from a million girls. Now each of them will try to get him into bed, now everything will be different, yes.

Rick looked at the blue-eyed waitress.

‘Maybe I'll fly to Hawaii,’ he said with a shrug.

‘A good use for money,’ the old man agreed, and left the table. ‘Well, it was nice doing business with you’.

They shook hands, and then the old man turned and headed for the exit.

Rick stood there until he was out on the street. As soon as the door was closed, he sat down, flipped through the menu, and called the waitress without thinking twice.

‘I want to make an order,’ he said, and the blonde girl smiled uncertainly.

Rick stayed in the cafe for another hour or so. With a tidy sum in his pocket, it seemed that all the warmth and coziness of this place were made just for him. He asked for the bill when it was getting dark outside.

‘I'm sorry, I can't,’ the waitress replied, moving her eyebrows prettily at his suggestion that they spend some time together after work, and twirled the ring on her middle finger with her thumb.

Too bad. Well, I don't care. I'll have so many girls like you…

He paid with a hundred-dollar bill and left her about sixty dollar tip, then put on the jacket that had been lying on his lap since the old man left, and quietly took the money from the inner pockets and put it to the outer ones, so that he could keep them in his hands all the time. At the exit, he glanced at the waitress again and smiled at her. She smiled back at him shyly and he was happy with it, then he pushed open the door and went out into the street.

God, the air is so good! Even the cruel autumn wind does not bite the rich man so much. Rick took a deep breath, stretched, and looked at the screen, which still showed the face of the ‘successful man’.

Now it's my turn, he thought, breaking into a blissful smile, and began to cross the road.

And the next moment, the taxi driver, who got distracted by a text message, ran into a pedestrian, who, apparently, was up in the clouds. The brakes roared and someone screamed, but it was too late. The impact was so strong that all the contents of the jacket, including the money that he just got, flew out of the pockets. The passers-by and bystanders gathered around watched with mixed feelings as the banknotes from the bundles got scattered and carried away along the sidewalks, driven by the wind. hello, fellow alien. i'll be happy to see you there: https://www.instagram.com/alex.a.gray/ https://twitter.com/Alex_A_Gray a new TWILIGHT COUNTY story every sunday (or saturday)

#short story #fiction #horror #mysterious #twilight county

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stephenmccull · 4 years ago

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‘We’re Coming for You’: For Public Health Officials, a Year of Threats and Menace

[Editor’s note: This article contains strong language that readers might find offensive or disturbing.]

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Calif. — Dr. Gail Newel looks back on the past year and struggles to articulate exactly when the public bellows of frustration around her covid-related health orders morphed into something darker and more menacing.

Certainly, there was that Sunday afternoon in May, when protesters broke through the gates to her private hillside neighborhood, took up positions around her home, and sang “Gail to Jail,” a ritual they would repeat every Sunday for weeks.

This story also ran on This American Life. It can be republished for free.

Or the county Board of Supervisors meeting not long after, where a visibly agitated man waiting for his turn at the microphone suddenly lunged at her over a small partition, staring her down even as sheriff’s deputies flanked him and authorities cleared the room.

The letters, emails and cellphone calls that now number in the hundreds and inevitably open with “Bitch,” and make clear people know where she lives and wish her dead.

And that January meeting with Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart, after the vicious mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, when he recommended to a roomful of county officials that deputies do a threat assessment at each of their homes. Newel, who’d already been through the process, casually mentioned a New Year’s resolution to get more exercise and start walking to work. Absolutely not, Hart told her. She wasn’t walking anywhere without an escort.

Newel, 63, is the health officer in Santa Cruz County, a picturesque string of communities hugging California’s rugged Central Coast. In normal years, hers would be a largely invisible job that involves tracking measles outbreaks and STD infections, testing children for lead exposure, and alerting the public to tainted lettuce and unhealthy air. Covid has changed all that, in ways both expected and not. Newel, like health officials across the nation, has been thrust into an unwelcome spotlight and subjected to extreme scrutiny from politicians and the public over mask requirements, business closures and the extended interruption of travel and social gatherings.

Some of the dissent was understandable: the shocked response of residents asked to make unprecedented sacrifices during a time of great uncertainty. But in Santa Cruz and many other U.S. communities, legitimate debate has devolved into overt intimidation and threats of violence.

Public servants like Newel have become the face of government authority in the pandemic. And, in turn, they have become targets for the same loose-knit militia and white nationalist groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, smashing windows, bloodying officers and savagely chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”

Over the course of a year, Newel and her boss, Santa Cruz County’s health services director, Mimi Hall, have seen their lives upended for reasons well beyond the exhausting workload that comes with battling a devastating pandemic. Their daily routines now incorporate security patrols, surveillance cameras and, in some cases, personal firearms.

They are public servants who no longer feel safe in public.

“When I do have days off, I don’t want to be out in the community. I’m intimidated to be out in the community,” Newel said. “I’m looking to see who might be close to me or to my car, who might be following me — looking to see if there’s any kind of situation that I might not be able to get out of or that might be dangerous to me in some way.”

***

Newel was born and raised in the city of Fresno in California’s Central Valley, a region known for industrial-scale farming and conservative politics. After completing degrees in medicine and public health, Newel returned home to work as an obstetrician. There, in addition to delivering hundreds of babies, she helped develop a lactation center, a program for pregnant women with substance abuse issues and a teen pregnancy program. After 30 years of “catching babies,” she’d planned to retire as a doctor’s wife in Santa Cruz, where her wife, also a physician, had taken a job.

The couple call themselves Central Valley refugees; they often felt unwelcome in Fresno County as a same-sex couple. With their adult children already out of the house, they bought a home in Santa Cruz and made plans to spend the rest of their lives there. Newel felt called to serve when the health officer in a neighboring county urged her to consider a second career in public health. She became Santa Cruz County’s health officer on July 1, 2019.

Newel developed an easy affinity with director Hall, who has the broader responsibility of managing all countywide medical, behavioral and environmental health programs. Hall, 53, was born in Myanmar, where her parents worked as doctors in a small hospital without running water or electricity. The family relocated to the U.S. when she was a young child. Hall has spent her entire adult life working in public health, the past 22 years in California county government. She worked in the heart of the Sierra Nevada before moving north to Plumas, a county bigger than Delaware but so sparsely populated that its county seat isn’t designated a city.

There, she said, she fought with elected officials who didn’t believe in her work. She said her children, among the few Asian Americans in Plumas, experienced racism and bullying. When Hall was hired by Santa Cruz County in 2018, she moved her husband and three kids to a seemingly bucolic home in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

As health officer, Newel is part of a fraternity of greater Bay Area health officers who, since the early AIDS era, have met regularly to work on public health issues. Many of her local counterparts have deep knowledge of infectious diseases and, in the early days of the pandemic, she leaned on them heavily. In California, like many other states, every county is required to have a health officer. That person must have training in medicine, and, in emergencies, is granted broad authority to keep the public safe.

When Newel’s Bay Area counterparts issued the first sweeping stay-at-home orders in the nation on March 16, 2020, she was just hours behind in issuing one for Santa Cruz. It ordered most businesses to close and banned most travel and social gatherings. A few weeks later, in an effort to keep tourists away, she ordered the beaches closed as well.

It was a grueling time — both Newel and Hall went months without a real day off — but adrenaline-filled. They set up testing sites, organized data-tracking operations, coordinated with dozens of state and local groups on covid response and oversaw contact tracing for hundreds of cases.

And, as life-threatening pandemics go, they were off to a good start. Research suggests that lockdowns are most effective when initiated early, and that research is reflected in the Santa Cruz experience. Through June 2020, only a handful of people were diagnosed in Santa Cruz each week, and just two people had died from the virus in a county of 280,000, a fraction of the national death rate.

***

Santa Cruz County might seem an unlikely venue for menace. It’s known for its laid-back vibe and hippie communes. But it’s also a study in divergence: Multimillion-dollar estates are tucked into the Santa Cruz Mountains alongside the barricaded compounds of well-armed survivalists. Farmworkers tend to world-class strawberry fields in the southern part of the county alongside exclusive vacation rentals.

In the early months of the pandemic, the covid diagnoses mostly came from south county, among agricultural workers still tending crops and living in crowded housing. The complaints, however, were mostly from people in the wealthy beach communities, and out-of-towners deeply resentful of the highly publicized restrictions.

The pushback started with angry emails and voicemails, people who contested the beach closures, the intrusion on personal freedoms. But over time, it ventured further, into language that was personal and terrorizing. Newel remembers threatening letters that stated her address and the names of her children. Others included photographs of the front and back of her home from close range, and messages like “Look out; we’re coming for you.” The county clerk helped scrub her address from the internet.

Hall remembers obscene late-night phone calls, and a man who seemed to be casing her home. She took her cell number off her email signature.

Then came the Sunday protesters, who would surround Newel’s home with bullhorns and sirens blaring, their hostile rants making her — and, worse, her family — feel like hostages. “I’m willing to be a public servant, but I don’t think that includes having people trespass onto my private property,” she said. “I was quite worried for my family and for myself and our safety.”

Most local health officials in the U.S. are women and, as the pandemic wore on, the threats took on a clearly misogynistic tone. People used words like “bitch” and “cunt,” and made disturbing veers into sexually explicit references.

At a county Board of Supervisors meeting in late May, a young man, his voice thick with rage, accused Newel of ruining his life by closing the beaches. “You want me to stay inside, get fat, watch Netflix and masturbate?” The hearing was packed with people lobbying for a variance from state closure rules. As in previous meetings, people filmed Newel at close range. During the public comment period, they streamed to the microphone. Many removed their masks. People were visibly agitated, tapping feet, muttering swear words.

Then, a man started toward the mic, but made a beeline for Newel instead. Sheriff’s deputies surrounded him and whisked Newel and Hall out of the room, while a county executive evacuated the meeting. Feeling he could no longer ensure her safety, Sheriff Hart asked Newel to stop attending meetings in person.

In the days and weeks that followed, Hall, too, adopted new routines. She would leave work at 7 p.m., when the security guards ended their shift. On her way out of her office, she called her husband, staying on the phone with him until she was locked in her car. Once home, she checked the charge on the security cameras that provide a full-perimeter view of her home and greeted her dog, who works double time as family member and security detail.

Still, she didn’t know what to make of it all. “You’re not sure — is it really dangerous? You feel this feeling of, well, maybe we’re overreacting, you know?” Hall said.

***

Many of the people expressing the most vicious anger over the past year have histories of anti-government sentiment. There are the white supremacists, and groups with adopted militia names. The “sovereign citizens,” who view themselves as governed only by their own interpretations of common law. The people who oppose any government mandates to be vaccinated.

Still, things accelerated during the collision of Donald Trump’s presidency with the pandemic.

Membership in right-wing, white supremacist, anti-government and anti-vaccine groups was on the rise before 2020, under a Trump presidency seen as sympathetic to such ideologies and facilitated by the use of social media to draw in new adherents.

Then came the pandemic, which stranded people in their homes and transformed screens into their primary social gateways. Across chatrooms and websites, folks converged online to share grievances about perceived threats to personal freedoms. They found common cause in rebelling against closures and mask mandates and rallying around Trump. Groups that had previously protested vaccine requirements adopted militia language and imagery. Militias began organizing against health orders, and their tactics were adopted by yet more newly organized groups that formed online.

On April 17, Trump used his favored platform, Twitter, to send a series of calls to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” Then to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

It set off a cascade of repercussions for health officials. Thousands of Facebook pages sprung up to organize against stay-at-home orders.

“They just erupted in rage at the lockdowns. [Trump] immediately undercut the credibility of public health officials,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and an expert on militia and white nationalist organizations. “He turned the public health sector into liars and enemies of his supporters.”

Public health is inherently not an individualistic endeavor. It’s the science of improving the health of populations, and more often than not, those improvements are of a collective nature. To bring down rates of smoking, we’ve taxed cigarettes and restricted where people can smoke. Workplaces were made safer through regulations limiting exposure to toxic materials and risky machinery. Infectious diseases are slowed to a crawl through vaccination requirements.

I never thought in my career that I would see professionals, doctors being threatened for doing their job.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart

It’s not surprising that health officials would become the recipients of the backlash associated with anti-government ideologies, said Jason Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. But the country hasn’t reckoned with how covid disinformation is animating those threats.

By the end of May, health leaders across the nation were quitting in droves. In California alone, eight public health officials had left top posts, including Orange County’s public health officer, Dr. Nichole Quick, who’d been given a security detail before she resigned. These were people with extensive training in public health, but also people with deep relationships in the community, the kind of expertise you can’t gain in school.

Just up the coast from Santa Cruz, the health officer for Santa Clara County, Dr. Sara Cody, was receiving so many credible threats by spring 2020 that she and her family were given 24-hour security details. A series of threatening letters were particularly disturbing. They were suspected of coming from the same anonymous author because of sentence structure, but also their “misogynistic content … and clear anti-government position,” a sheriff’s report said. One said: “You are fucking so many for no reason … you will pay a heavy price for your stupidity bitch.” Another read: “You must go no matter how you go … you stupid fucking bitch.”

Santa Clara’s sheriff’s office began investigating.

***

Sheriff Hart grew up in Santa Cruz and has been with the department for 33 years. It’s a rustic place without a lot of serious crime. Hart was aware of some members of white supremacist groups in the mountains, but largely considered them benign carryovers from a previous era. “I would always take threats, especially to myself and to some of our staff, with a grain of salt,” Hart said. “We’re in law enforcement; some people don’t like us. I get that.”

June 6, 2020, changed his thinking.

Seven months to the day before the siege on the U.S. Capitol, on a warm Saturday afternoon, a 911 call came into the sheriff’s office. A suspicious-looking van was parked on the side of a road in the mountain town of Boulder Creek, the caller said, and it matched the description of a van used in a drive-by shooting a week earlier in Oakland, when a federal security officer was killed during a Black Lives Matter protest.

Using the vehicle identification number to determine the owner of the van, Santa Cruz sheriff’s deputies made their way to his home, which was just up the road from Hall’s. There, a violent ambush unfolded.

According to law enforcement reports, Steven Carrillo, an active-duty Air Force sergeant, shot at officers with a homemade AR-15-style rifle and threw at least one explosive. He fled, hitting an officer with a car. Driving the backroads, he carjacked at least one person. The brutal episode came to an end when Carrillo was tackled by a young man while attempting to steal another vehicle.

Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller, 38, was fatally shot in the ambush, the first member of Santa Cruz County law enforcement to die on the job since 1983.

Authorities have since tied Carrillo to an active state faction of the Boogaloo Bois, a secretive and decentralized anti-government movement. Unlike many of the groups pushing back against public health measures over the past year, they are expressly anti-cop. One of their stated goals has been to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests and cause violence that will be blamed on the left, to incite a civil war. Carrillo has since pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of murder in the Santa Cruz and Oakland attacks.

Hall immediately took down the signs from her fence celebrating her daughter’s graduation and declaring Black Lives Matter — anything that identified them — and installed more security cameras. “I started wondering, Who around me thinks this way? And how close are they?” Hall said.

Newel had a similar response: “Until that time, the threats seemed like nothing but threats. Like, oh, people might say these horrible things to me, but they’re not going to act on them. And then that one action completely changed how I thought about my community.”

Hart was devastated. He had known Gutzwiller since the deputy was a teenager. Before that day, Hart said, he realized that right-wing ideology existed but didn’t understand the level of cold-blooded commitment. He started rethinking the threats to Hall and Newel. “I never thought in my career that I would see professionals, doctors being threatened for doing their job. It’s been mind-boggling to me,” said Hart.

A month later, Hall received a chilling letter containing references to the Boogaloo movement. It began with “Hey, CUNT,” threatened her family and wished her a slow death. Similar letters had been sent to Sgt. Gutzwiller’s widow and the sheriff’s department.

Hart’s department put out a bulletin to other law enforcement, including details of the letters and information about the man they suspected might have sent them. In neighboring Santa Clara, the sheriff’s department noticed similarities to the string of letters their own health officer had been receiving since April.

When the suspect left work midday to mail yet another anonymous letter to Cody, a Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy was tailing him, according to court records. The suspect, Alan Viarengo, was arrested and charged with felony stalking and harassment of a public figure related to the letters to Cody; he has pleaded not guilty. Detectives searched his Gilroy home and found more than 130 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and materials to build explosives, according to law enforcement reports.

As the criminal case moved forward, Hart suggested that, in addition to security systems, the women acquire firearms. Hall’s husband came home with a shotgun. For Newel, who holds pacifist beliefs, it wasn’t an option. “I wouldn’t ever have a gun in my home,” she said.

That same month, adherents of a sovereign citizens movement the FBI characterizes as extremist and a form of domestic terrorism went to Newel’s home and served her “papers” claiming she’d broken the law. The same group, irate that Santa Cruz Police Chief Andrew Mills had supported Newel’s closure orders and mask mandates, left papers inside his home, on his bedroom pillow, according to law enforcement.

Throughout these episodes, Newel and Hall were still responding to the pandemic. Even as fires raged through the mountains, forcing them to evacuate their homes. Even as they were placed on furlough to make up for budget shortfalls.

When you ask Newel and Hall about the effects of living amid so much bile and unease, both say they are not ruled by fear. But they also describe sleepless nights when their spouses are out of town, and both have withdrawn from the community. Hall stopped joining her children’s school events on Zoom, afraid other parents would recognize her, and goes to the grocery store incognito, beneath a hat and messy ponytail. Newel just doesn’t go out much at all.

Since last April, 22 top health officials have left their posts in California. In December, just as vaccines were arriving, Hall seriously considered resigning. She’d gained 30 pounds and started taking blood pressure medication. She was bringing her laptop into bed every night and not spending enough time with family. Her children wanted her to quit. “There were days I just felt like, I can’t do this. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t get up tomorrow morning. I was mentally, physically, emotionally exhausted.”

She has stayed, not because she thinks things will necessarily get better, but because quitting wouldn’t make her life easier. It’d just teach people that if they’re loud enough and mean enough they can get what they want. If she had learned anything from her refugee parents, it was that she could go on, and so she must. “It’s not the idea that everything will turn out fine. It is that no matter what, you can survive this,” she said.

As for Newel, she said she’ll stick the job out because she’s stubborn that way. But she and her wife have rethought their retirement plans. “If we don’t feel comfortable being out in the community, or if we’re afraid to live here, we’re not going to want to stay,” she said. “And that’s something of a heartbreak.

This story was done as a collaboration between KHN and “This American Life.” Listen to the companion audio story here.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

‘We’re Coming for You’: For Public Health Officials, a Year of Threats and Menace published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years ago

Text

‘We’re Coming for You’: For Public Health Officials, a Year of Threats and Menace

[Editor’s note: This article contains strong language that readers might find offensive or disturbing.]

This story also ran on This American Life. It can be republished for free.

The letters, emails and cellphone calls that now number in the hundreds and inevitably open with “Bitch,” and make clear people know where she lives and wish her dead.

They are public servants who no longer feel safe in public.

***

Hall remembers obscene late-night phone calls, and a man who seemed to be casing her home. She took her cell number off her email signature.

Still, she didn’t know what to make of it all. “You’re not sure — is it really dangerous? You feel this feeling of, well, maybe we’re overreacting, you know?” Hall said.

***

Still, things accelerated during the collision of Donald Trump’s presidency with the pandemic.

It set off a cascade of repercussions for health officials. Thousands of Facebook pages sprung up to organize against stay-at-home orders.

I never thought in my career that I would see professionals, doctors being threatened for doing their job.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart

Santa Clara’s sheriff’s office began investigating.

***

June 6, 2020, changed his thinking.

Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller, 38, was fatally shot in the ambush, the first member of Santa Cruz County law enforcement to die on the job since 1983.

This story was done as a collaboration between KHN and “This American Life.” Listen to the companion audio story here.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

‘We’re Coming for You’: For Public Health Officials, a Year of Threats and Menace published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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xxredwineandambiencexx · 7 years ago

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Sooo I missed out on Klarolineauweek because I was in the process of moving house and unfortunately my new house didn’t have wifi yet :( Anyway I did promise some Klaroline, so here’s what would have been my contribution for day 1- Crossovers and Fusions. I recently reread the Luxe Series by Anna Godberson and was inspired!

“I’m not entirely sure that you should be doing that inside.” She directs towards the dark haired beauty reclining elegantly on one of the chaise chairs, a lacquered ebony cigarette holder perched between perfectly manicured fingers.

Katerina Petrova lolls her head lazily to the side, dark gaze fixing upon her in that intense way of hers that made her feel out of step.

Katerina was the oldest daughter of the wealthy Petrova family, an old European name that had been around for hundreds of years. They were ennobled aristocracy back in Bulgaria, but it had been Katerina’s great grandfather that had secured the family fortune with a rather large success with shipping.

Katerina was never afraid of displaying her wealth, nor flaunting the rules if it served her. Smoking- a vulgar habit for young ladies of their breeding and upbringing, was only done in secret places, not in the parlour of a well established mansion on Park Avenue.

“Relax a little Forbes. God you can be so uptight sometimes.” Katerina drawls in the odd accent that is part American part Bulgarian. The other girl returned to Bulgaria at least once a year, and usually acquired a somewhat stronger accent while she was there. It took her some weeks to lose it. “Are you sure you don’t want one?”

Katerina offers her the embossed tin, the Petrova family crest evident on the expensive metal.

She shakes her head in refusal, because honestly her mother would murder her.

“I think my mother would dig my grave for me if she smelt the smoke on me.” She replies lightly with a quick smile for Katerina, pink lined lips quirking just slightly as she scrunches her nose.

It’s with languid movements that Katerina stands, the folds of her waist skirt draping elegantly towards her feet as she moves towards the window, already cracked open to offer some reprieve from the Indian Summer they’d been experiencing recently.

She just fans herself with the ivory handled fan her father had brought back from Paris for her. Bill Forbes might not always be around to spend time with her and her mother, but he was there when it counted, and he brought the most exquisite gifts.

Katerina leans out the window, shoulders and neck exposed to the sun as she takes another lazy puff of her cigarette.

If she’s being honest with herself, she’s still not quite sure why Katerina had chosen her of all people to be friends with. Her family were new money, having only just recently made their fortune with oil, and she knew that them moving into Park Avenue into the obscenely big mansion had caused an absolute scandal.

Perhaps that was what had attracted Katerina. The other girl, older than her by only a year, had always seemed to have a wildness in her that was alluring and alarming all at once. There was no end to the suitors knocking on Katerina’s door, except she only seemed to have eyes for one man- Elijah Mikaelson.

He was the eldest son of the Mikaelson family, set to take over the family business when his father was ready to step aside. The Mikaelson’s were from England originally, but had very quickly established their places in the New York power set.

They threw the best parties, had the most expensive clothes, and the biggest house. She’d met Elijah only once, and Rebekah a few times, although she knew that the blonde Mikaelson absolutely loathed her for some reason that she still couldn’t quite figure out.

“God this weather is horrendous.” Katerina comments with a sigh, pressing her hand to a flushed cheek as she stubs the cigarette out on the window sill, sweeping the ashes out into the air and wiping any residue away. “I do hope it cools down a little later.”

“You’re eating into your preparation time.” She points out teasingly as Katerina rolls her lined eyes towards her.

“I’m well aware of that Caroline darling. But how else was I supposed to spend time with you? You’ve hardly had a moment to spare lately. What on Earth has that mother of yours roped you into?”

She stands, smoothing down the front of her own skirt.

“Finding me an eligible husband it would seem. At 21 I’m practically a spinster in her eyes.”

Katherine just sighs, slipping her cigarette holder and tin into the purse she carries around her wrist.

“You are absolutely not a spinster, and there is a dashing young gentlemen out there for you somewhere. Perhaps you’ll meet your match tonight, at the ball.”

She had been surprised to receive that invitation in the mail. The Mikaelson’s parties had been legendary in the past, but a slight altercation with an intoxicated Rebekah at the previous one had led her to believe that she’d be barred from the guest list forever more.

It had only been Kol’s intervention that had saved her from a rather embarrassing scene, steering his sister away with an apologetic smile.

She snorts, a rather unladylike gesture all things considered.

“Yes I’m sure a handsome Prince Charming will come and sweep me off my feet.” She pretends to swoon as Katerina catches her, a familiar routine for both of them whenever they make a mockery of the society that they’re forced to be a part of. “What was the reason for this particular party anyway?”

“The prodigal son returns.” Katerina drawls. “Niklaus. He finished his schooling last year and was doing a world tour. Now he’s in New York doing god only knows what.”

“Do we know anything about him?” She asks curiously, because she had no idea that there was another Mikaelson running around.

“Tall, blonde, a bit of a bad boy if any of the rumours are true, which they usually are.” Katerina leads the way towards the front door to where carriage would be no doubt waiting to spirit her away to her own mansion.

“Are they?” She arches an eyebrow, well aware of the rumours that seem to follow around Katerina Petrova like a grey raincloud.

Katerina just turns and gives her a slow, smouldering wink.

The party is in full swing when she and her mother arrive, her father choosing to stay in for the night to get some more work done.

Her mother, looking resplendent in a gown of grey, sticks to her side like glue, hissing at her to stand up straight and put her chest out so as to display her best assets.

“No one is going to marry you if you slouch like a serving maid.” Her mother had admonished her on more than one occasion.

She can't help but roll her kohl lined eyes to the ceiling silently, moving forward into the party silently, skirt fishtailing dramatically behind her.

The cerulean colour she’d chosen for her gown was in stark contrast to the muted pastels that the other young ladies of her set chose to wear, Elena Gilbert among them.

The girl had recently celebrated her engagement to Stefan Salvatore, who everyone agreed was much more amiable than his older brother, Damon.

Even Katerina, so resplendent tonight in her scarlet red gown, had harboured a brief period of affection for the youngest Salvatore, before discovering what a complete and utter bore he was.

“I’m going to pay a visit to Mrs Lockwood.” Her mother admits grudgingly, gathering her skirts in one gloved hand before moving off to greet the woman in question, the matriarch of the formidable Lockwood family.

Blessedly alone, she makes a beeline for Katerina, who gives her an approving once over accompanied by a wink.

“Ms Forbes you look lovely as always. A new gown?” Katerina asks knowingly, fan fluttering elegantly next to her face to ward off the sticky heat.

“Direct from Paris. A gift from my father.”

Katerina fingers the material of her skirt between gloved fingers.

“Exquisite. And no sign of the mysterious Niklaus I’m afraid. I must admit I am rather curious to see if the handsome features run in the family.”

“Elijah not here tonight?” She asks innocently of Katerina, who just gives her a smirk.

“I saw him earlier. So much easier to slip away unnoticed when everyone’s attention is focused on darling Elena and her oblivious fiance. Honestly he’ll die of boredom before he dies of old age.” Katerina drawls, gaze landing on the lady in question, who was beaming with happiness across the room, Stefan on her arm.

“Don’t be unkind Kat.” She admonishes her friend gently, with a soft rap of her fan on the other girl’s wrist. “As long as she’s happy. He certainly seems to be.”

She and Elena had been friends once, before Elena had been sent away to France for finishing school and had become obsessed with becoming a lady and being good mannered.

They’d lost touch while she’d been in France, and Elena had been somewhat wary of her friendship with Katerina since she’d returned.

Katerina just rolls her eyes with a teasing smile.

As the night wears on, she finds herself caught up in the arms of many of the young men who made up their set, the young and the rich, one of whom her mother would expect her to make a match with.

Tyler Lockwood with his handsome features was charming as always, if not a little insincere with his compliments as they waltzed together. Matthew Donovan, heir to the Donovan fortune, was kind if not a little shy as he offered her a drink.

Katerina commanded most of the attention in the room, Elijah at her side. They certainly painted a handsome picture, and she expected an engagement announcement would be imminent, if the satisfied smile on her best friend’s face was anything to go by.

“May I have this dance?” An unfamiliar voice at her side causes her to turn, and then look up into the face of the tall, sandy blonde haired man who was looking at her expectantly.

“Of course.” She replies, placing her gloved hand into his waiting one. “I must admit however, that I don’t think we’ve been previously acquainted.”

He just smiles to himself as they take their place on the floor, his hand on her waist, the other squeezing her hand tightly.

“Niklaus Mikaelson at your service, my lady. And you are?” He replies, a single eyebrow raised as they begin to move together.

“Caroline Forbes.” She replies after a beat or two. “So you’re the reason why this party is taking place. I suppose a welcome home is in order.”

“Had I known that there were such beautiful ladies waiting, I would have hastened to return sooner.”

It’s a line, and an obvious one. She can’t help but let out a short burst of laughter.

Niklaus wrinkles his nose at her outburst.

“Too obvious?” He asks innocently, even though he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“Maybe just a little.” She replies as he twirls her suddenly. She allows the movement, enjoying the feel of her skirt fanning out around her legs. “How was your tour?”

The far off locales beyond the shores of America had always held a certain sense of mystique for her. While she’d been to Paris once with her father, she’d not ventured beyond that.

She’s surprised at how easy it is to fall into conversation with him as they dance, the rest of the room seeming to melt away around them.

He’s not what she expected. He seems genuine and charming, a warm smile in his face and a somewhat mischevious twinkle in his eye as he steals her for the next dance, and then the next. She can practically feel the disapproving gaze of her mother burning into the back of her neck as he continues to twirl her under the brightly lit chandelier.

Perhaps realising the impropriety of his behaviour, he steps away from her after the music fades away, sweeping her a low bow before melting into the crowd.

It’s only when she disappears that she realises just how much her heart is racing.

“Well, it seems like you and Niklaus got along swimmingly last night.” Katerina hits her over the head with a pillow as she groans and pulls the duvet over her head.

Katerina had always been an early riser, herself less so. She’d come to accept that she was never going to be a morning person, and since society deemed it perfectly acceptable for her to lay in bed for hours the day after a big party then she wasn’t going to fight it.

“Go away Kat.” She swats at her best friend, who remains frustratingly persistent, ripping the duvet away from her face and exposing her to the weak daylight filtering through the still shut curtains.

Her maid would be here any moment with chocolate and iced water, but she can’t bring herself to even want either of them at this point.

Katerina wrestles her to a sitting position, a newspaper tucked under her arm.

“Don’t you want to see what the papers are saying?” Katerina begins, shaking out the paper with a dramatic gesture.

“Not particulary.” She replies bluntly.

She’d been subject to a few mentions in the newspaper, most positive, some less than favorable.

Katerina clears her throat, glancing down at the paper.

“Last night saw the return of Niklaus Mikaelson to New York City after a period abroad. Welcomed back into the fold of New York’s elite, he seemed particularly enamoured with a certain blonde beauty who is favourite here at the Times…”

“Ugh.” Is all she says in reply as Katerina raises a perfectly arched brow.

“Please, he’s one of the most eligible bachelors in New York, at a marrying age, and obviously attracted to you, if the way that he was devouring you with his eyes last night was anything to go off.” Katerina remarks knowingly.

A gentle tap on the door announces the presence of her maid, who moves almost silently into the room, depositing her water and chocolate onto her night stand with a shy smile.

“Thankyou Claire.” She murmurs with a nod of her head, the other girl blushing under the attention of her mistress.

“I’ve been instructed to give you this Miss Caroline.” Claire replies, bobbing her a short curtsey before reaching into the pocket of her apron, producing an envelope with her name scrawled on it in elegant cursive.

“Thank you.” She repeats once more, taking the envelope.

Claire beats a hasty retreat as Katerina snuggles in next to her.

“Go on then.” The other girl jabs her in the ribs with a sharp elbow.

She opens the envelope, taking out the two pieces of paper folded within.

The first is a rather impressive likeness of her, her head thrown back in laughter, her profile sharp and clearly defined.

The second is just a sentence or two of elegant writing, but it’s enough to make her heart beat faster in her chest.

Caroline,

It was enchanting to meet you last night. I hope we have reason to cross paths again very soon.

Yours,

Niklaus

#klaroline #klaroline drabbles #klarolineauweek #day 1: crossovers and fusions

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mcratings · 6 years ago

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Our material world is defined and solidified by the movements of capital. In Pierre Bourdieu’s article “The Forms of Capital” he argues that capital crafts the “games of society”. All of our interactions, with objects, persons, or otherwise are concerned and comprised around our own personal capital accumulation (or lack thereof) and the way in which we choose to exercise it’s use. He does not spell out a solution for the phenomenon of social and cultural capital but merely states the ways in which they exist and the methods persisting that make certain power, influence, will is retained in a hegemony of wealth in the hands of the few.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a novelist, philosopher, poet, activist, and most prominently a filmmaker in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Pasolini’s films were often distinctly sexual and provocative in a way few filmmakers could attest to, no one had the ability to ignite the tempers of both the intellectual right and left as Pasolini. He was a noted student of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, the influence of Gramsci’s work with cultural hegemony, historicity, and championing of consciousness for the proletariat had an undeniable impact on Pasolini’s work, but his semi-secret life as a homosexual man kept him from falling to easily under any labels as Italian Marxists often didn’t claim him as one of their members due to their homophobia.

His work is his own, difficult to equate to any filmmakers at the time or since, some have compared his filmmaking to that of the Italian neorealists, which seems a lazy assumption based on race and perhaps a collaboration with Fellini, because surely his work is too romantic, heady and occasionally cynical to be saddled with the baggage of that title. He films prostitutes, beggars, murderers, pimps, pedophiles, adulterers, bored monks, horny nuns and marxist crows as if they were saints.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975) the Italian critic, novelist, film director and screen writer. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

In “The Forms of Capital” Bourdieu outlines the structures comprising our daily lives: the realm of cultural and social capital affirm, reaffirm and ultimately define our positions in society. Pasolini’s The Decameron, an adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s seminal collection of 14th century Italian stories, aimed to destabilize this realm, this covering over of the culture of the proletariat which Pasolini would argue is a culture more honest, more true and perhaps more beautiful than that of the hegemony curated by the bourgeoisie. Pasolini’s The Decameron offers a comical, joyful, playful vision of youthful sexuality, subverting many of our assumptions about renaissance society, dangling the possibility that these characters may been more liberated than we because innocence could still exist, persisted and was celebrated. It had not yet been regulated to another form of capital but existed outside the realm of material exchange.

Following the receptive public and cold critical reaction to The Decameron and Pasolini’s following trilogy (Trilogy of Life encompasses The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and, Arabian Nights, all resounding commercial successes as far as Pasolini’s overall career is concerned), the creator turned towards the present state of bodies while loosely adapting another classic work of Latin literature Dante’s Divine Comedy resulting in 1975’s Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini adapts these staples of world literature in an uncompromising and original execution, he reclaims them for the working class through language, performance, tradition and storytelling. Pasolini captured the degradation of substance, attempting to contaminate the forms of capital with the very freedoms it stripped from the masses: love, truth, clarity. The forms once innocent, can never be again, the history of capital cannot be undone, sexuality, food, art, revolution, morality are now reduced to mere tools of corporate fascism, of which we ourselves are its victims and proprietors.

Pasolini was no stranger to adaptation with The Decameron as he had already translated for the screen not only major works of literature in, Oedipus Rex, Medea, and The Gospel of St. Matthew but he also further explored his own published literary works in Accattone and Teorema. For The Decameron, however, Pasolini reworks both Boccaccio’s stories, muddying their structure and doing away with their framework.

In the original story a group of seven young women and three men attempt to escape the Black Plague ravaging their city and take refuge in the countryside for two weeks. They entertain themselves by telling tales. Over the course of Boccaccio’s text the ten refugees tell one-hundred stories, ten of which Pasolini employs in the film. The other half of the film is composed of ten original episodes inspired by Boccaccio’s tone and style, written by Pasolini himself. In Boccaccio’s version, a leader is chosen for the day to curate the stories around a certain topic of their desire.

One of the primary functions of Boccaccio’s work was not only to reflect on the current state of his time, the plague, religion, sexuality, but also to establish the virtues and ethics surrounding these topics for the coming generations, which for Boccaccio (and Dante) was the renaissance. These writers created immensely popular works that have been read and taught for centuries, not only as items of cultural significance, but much like the bible, became objects of moral foundation. Both the Divine Comedy and The Decameron are taught in private schools, higher learning institutions, taught to the few who dictate the needs of the many. This was particularly true of Pasolini’s era, as there was a stark gap in the education of the Neapolitan farmers he grew up around opposed to the wealthy bourgeois families he depicts in Teorema. If these same affluent children are reading these stories, internalizing their moral guidelines and proliferating them, there must be something corrupt if we have found ourselves in this current society of extreme disparity and division.

Pasolini if anything, reads The Decameron as an ode to the origins of the Italian elite that also belongs to them, “… he will use this text, ironically, to tear cinema away from the bourgeoisie, which has lost its ascendency as a historical force”. Pasolini’s The Decameron is an attempt to wrestle these texts out of the hands of the few and disseminate them back to the people whom the tales are about, the peasants, swindlers, youths, love-makers. The bonds of the forms of capital can be shattered only if we seek to take back the works from their perceived labels and pretensions by means of contaminating the original.

This contamination is a process of inclusion and exclusion, negating the intent of foundational novels, opposing their essential thesis, in order to reach more relevant truths with grander implications for our current existence in post-late-capitalist society, “…a devotedly antagonistic, as it were, cinematic imitato of the original”. Prior to an analysis of the content of contaminating an adaptation is the form, Pasolini furthers his inquiry into form by altering the language of Boccaccio’s text. This is most apparent in a scene where an elderly man sits in the streets reading to a crowd from Boccaccio’s The Decameron he quickly becomes frustrated with the flowery Tuscan dialect and throws the book aside speaking in his native Neapolitan language. If the forms of capital have any power which helps them to retain their divisive nature, their greatest tool is language, the language of the rich and of the poor may as well be taught as two separate classes, in some socioeconomic circumstances they are.

This scene has a meta-commentary undercurrent, in the spirit of the Dirty Projectors Rise Above rendition of the Black Flag album of the same name, Pasolini and this storyteller preaching to a crowd are recounting these tales from memory rather than the page, giving their creative license, new affirmative power over the original forms. This awakened authority begins with language, returning these stories to the people who comprise the content diminishes their stature as documents dictating the behavior of the masses and reemphasizes them as methods of expression, even revolution for the proletariat.

The most crucial indictment of the influential falsehoods concerned with the forms of capital are in the story of Ciappelletto, a murderer, thief and pedophile who finds himself dying in a town where no one knows him after being expelled from another town for rape, forgery and the aforementioned murder. He protects himself from these crimes by participating as a brute debt collector, the debtors often as conniving and vile as he. The film opens with him bludgeoning an unknown character, presumably a debtor, before throwing their body off of a ledge.

When he arrives in this foreign village Ciappelletto is gravely-ill, he’s well aware that these are his last moments for the world, he sends for a priest to absolve him of all his evil sins. Much of the comedy of this scene comes from the audience waiting to hear an honest confession from Ciappelletto in the eyes of his savior, instead he lies, filling the priests ears with an image of an honest, meek, frail and wholesome individual.

With this testimony the priest is brought to tears, blessing this man as a saint in the eyes of God. Ciappelletto dies only to have the church hold a massive funeral procession that raises him to the heights of sainthood. In life Ciappelletto suffered persecution, exile, he is bisexual, poor, ugly and lazy, he’s never been wanted anywhere. In death, however, he is made holy, not only redeemed in his lying but exalted. Whereas Dineo, one of the refugee-storytellers of Boccaccio’s Decameron insists that “the obscenity of his tales is a function of his obedience”, Ciapelletto’s obedience in death is a product of his obscenity in life.

The forms of capital are flimsy, bias and irrational if a man like Ciappelletto is able to reach such pillars of esteem. What strength other than maintaining a hegemony do the forms really have? Are the words of the church, governments in all their conglomerated wealth really enough to uphold goodness? This line of questioning is akin to that of Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux; Ciappelletto and Verdoux may be ghastly, frightful men in their own regards but they are merely products of human nature reacting to a ghastly, frightful world around them. They harbor only a fraction of the malice that the cruel leaders of our world contain, for Ciappelletto it was kings and queens, for Chaplin the Hitler’s, McCarthy’s, the bankers, for Pasolini it was the capitalist, unwavering and ruthless who differed little from the fascist in their desire for total control. Ciappelletto manipulates the accepted moral exercises of society, social and cultural capital are malleable not only in their content but in their application to the individual, Ciappelletto understands that the material of capital is perhaps far less important than the perceived nobility or convenience of action within its stated bounds. He mimics Boccaccio’s intent while subverting it:

“Boccaccio offers an image of a self-regulating society, which articulates its own rules of comportment, and in which power is identified with, or is derived from, the delimitation of the sayable, the act of imposing a frame upon the field of narrative possibilities: the act of exclusion.”

Ciappelletto has excluded the truth of his own existence and in doing so has achieved the ultimate vindication, in denial he has achieved redemption.

The prevailing triumphant force in the story of Ciappelletto is innocence, a society so lovingly gullible as to be convinced of his purity is one corrupted by a set of ideals, yet unadulterated by another, “…the portrayal of a late-medieval Italian society in ideological and economic crisis, as found in the Decameron, becomes an allegory of late-capitalist society”. The future awaiting them was one that Boccaccio and the Decameron helped establish, the Italian aristocracy which collapsed into dictatorship and finally into capitalism. Innocence during this age persists and has such weight that art and sex prevail over almost every conflict, theological, financial or otherwise.

“The transactions of all the participants in this story, except for the priest-confessor, involve the lending or changing of money, the charging of interest: usury, a practice where money, obviously, is not identical to itself, literal denotative; if this were so then loans would supply no gains for lenders. This practice, furthermore, as Marx describes it in Capital, presupposes the abstraction of money from products of use values. That is usury entails a distancing of currency from the values it once was supposed to reflect.”

Pasolini chose to cherish the products of capital in an effort to distance the two from each other, not to reduce the importance of the products but to reduce the value of capital. Pasolini claimed he created the Trilogy of Life for the pleasure of telling stories, something he restated in interviews and most explicitly in the final moments of his adaptation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Perhaps art and sex prevail over the forms of capital because in an Aristotelian sense they are pursued for the sake of themselves. Pasolini is creating something for the sake of itself in both craft and execution transcending capital through the joys of creation.

Sex is a primary focus of The Decameron, one of the earliest stories tracks a young man who leaves his job as a farmer to join a nunnery where he acts as though he is mute, the nuns take advantage of this to engage in the unknown glories of sexual interaction assuming he won’t be able to communicate to their fellow sisters. This would be a fantastic plan if all the nuns weren’t curious and he becomes a kind of living sex-toy for the entire nunnery. The boy breaks his silence to mother superior when he confesses he can no longer get hard because of all the nuns he has been having sex with. The mother superior then runs him into the church declaring God has given them a miracle, in order to work out their sexual situation with proper scheduling and planning, God has embellished the young man with the ability to speak. Innocence and creation once again prevail over the young man’s working conditions on a farm where no women were allowed, he was making money to garner food, increase his social standing, settle down, but he abandoned that to have sex with an entire nunnery, the irony of this inversion of the romantic longing for nature, farming, working with the seasons is eschewed in favor of a life of satisfying the sexual desires of a group of nuns. Through Pasolini’s eyes the latter is more pastoral, wholesome and innocent.

Pasolini casts himself in a brief role as “the artist” a disciple of Giotto, a famous chapel painter, who has traveled to a monastery to construct two murals. He is depicted as restless, taking his meals with the monks quickly and impatiently, eager to get back to his work. When the murals are completed in the films final scene, Pasolini as the artist, with the monks celebrating around him looks upon his work and utters the sentence “why complete a work when it is so beautiful just to dream it”. This line had far reaching implications for Pasolini’s life, proceeding catalog and most crucially to art’s relationship to capital, to the nature of having a “complete” work that for him as a filmmaker necessitates being sold, distributed and commodified the moment it’s finished. Art still possessed the potentiality to be incomplete in the medieval age, its rules and hegemonies had not yet been solidified, molded into cultural and social capital regulated to those who have time to interact with and control it.

Pasolini finished the Trilogy of Life in 1974, it cost him a personal relationship with his longtime lover Ninetto Davoli, who acted in all three films and featured roles in previous movies such as The Hawks and The Sparrows, in addition to his standing as an auteur taking a significant hit. The public reaction to the trilogy was largely receptive as a result of the frequent displays of sex and frivolity, however, the trilogy spawned a number of pornographic imitators, all updating ancient literature into steamy, exploitive depictions of sexual intercourse. Pasolini found innocence and grace in the these bodies, while others sought to intensify how gratuitous and explicit they stood to become. While working on the screenplay for Saló, Pasolini penned an abjuration to to the trilogy, confessing his feeling of loss, “I reject my Trilogy of Life, although I do not regret having made it”. The reception of his films disproves their sentiment: that bodies, sex, art are still pure, capable of immense innocence, but these nude bodies of the young proletariat boys and girls, Italian teenagers, were quickly reduced to pornography and vulgarity.

Sex as a form of exchange had become strictly capital, the act was no longer joyful but commodified, perverted, orchestrated to appeal strictly to base sensation, complete debasement. In the abjuration he calls out specifically the free-love movements of the late 60’s in America and more harshly the May of 68’ in France, feeling that the youths involved in these movements were privileged bourgeoise students who are only revolting out of a sense of entitlement and that they have failed to understand the full implications of their actions, “They do not see that sexual liberation, far from bringing ease and happiness to young people, has made them unhappy, shut off, and consequently, stupidly presumptuous and aggressive”.

Pasolini had succumbed to the helpless cynicism of the forms of capital, a world in which all human connection, projection and sharing is tainted by the material standard of the few. He felt that his trilogy was a failure, in the effort to destabilize the hegemonies of the bourgeoisie he became daunted, discouraged and pessimistic in reaction to the tight grip they have on the life of common people, he no longer saw antiquity with the same warm glow, instead felt the renaissance ushered in the establishment of the Italian aristocracy. The bodies of those paintings, chapels and monasteries had become frail and consumable, and perhaps always were.

“… I am adapting to the degradation and accepting the unacceptable. I maneuver to rearrange my life. I am beginning to forget how things were before. The loved faces of yesterday are beginning to turn yellow. Little by little and without any more alternatives, I am confronted by the present. I adjust my commitment to greater legibility (Saló).”

Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom is ultimately the synthesis of Pasolini’s renewed cynicism. It was originally planned as part of another trilogy Pasolini’s Trilogy of Death, these films were intended to mirror the structure of the Trilogy of Life, adapting three tales from antiquity, distorting and spoiling their content. He was only allowed to complete Saló as he was murdered by fascists shortly before its release. These films would have explicitly agreed with Bourdieu’s theory but had implications about the state of our relationships that Bourdieu perhaps wasn’t conscious of.

Pasolini extends his method of contamination to its natural limits in Saló, this is an adaptation of the Divine Comedy, employing its form. The characters in the film travel through different circles, applying Dante’s journey into the underworld to a group of youths at the end of the fascist reign, who are enlisted to be sex slaves for the local leaders.

The first circle “Circle of Manias” involves the young boys and girls submitted to large orgies and pornographic stories read over gentle piano music while being groped by older men. Initially these older men submit the children to standard abuses of power, everything is horrific but nothing is yet surprising, the men are still obsessed and interested in the “normal” bounds of sex, they still have some semblance of the sexual morality and ethics imposed on them, the men begin to grow bored with this power; that rape, sex, cuckolding, are simply not enough. The standards of sex, even at their most simple are crafted by fascist powers, Pasolini then moves into his condemnation of what he calls “consumer fascism”.

The second circle “Circle of Shit” involves the fascist leaders growing increasingly disenfranchised with their power, so they long for more to compensate: they begin eating poop, forcing the children to defecate and eat their own waste. Pasolini used this as a metaphor to evoke the fast, cheap food of McDonalds, he felt the death of culture had already begun, right when we started eating our own shit. Further it exists for the pleasure of the few while debasing the masses, the men in all their excess enjoy covering their faces in shit and watching the children eat their excrement off the floor. All capital has been reduced to shit, whereas the forms of capital once retained integrity, pride, and strength, now they are little more than ugly tools serving the shallow sensibilities of the powerful few.

The final circle, “Circle of Blood” is the culmination of the madness of Saló, reducing the forms of capital to a single form: violence. Art, sex, food, beauty have all become vicious, cruel and self-serving. There is a moment of hope dispersed throughout this stomach-churning conclusion, a young girl is found to have a photo of family from home, she then tattles on two girls who have fallen in love, strictly forbidden to have sex with anyone but their masters, the two are threatened until they reveal that one of the young boys is sneaking out to the maids cabin at night and sleeping with her. When the leaders arrive to find the maid and young boy having sex they raise their guns to shoot them, both the young man and woman had starring roles in the Trilogy of Life, here they are slaves about to be murdered for the same acts they committed so carelessly in those films. The young proletariat in defiance forms his hand in a socialist symbol before pumping it into the sky. For just a second the fascists are frightened, the look on their faces recognizes the two most powerful forces in opposition to the forms of capital: love and hope. The film concludes with two young men in military uniform dancing in each other’s arms to the films theme as the sound of children being tortured ring from the courtyard behind them.

“The structures of the cinema therefore present themselves as transnational and transclassist rather than as international or interclassist. They prefigure a possible sociolinguistic situation of a world made tendentially unitary by complete industrialization and by the consequent leveling which implies the disappearance of particular and national traditions.”

Pasolini believed there was very little difference between cinematic reality and the one we experience in everydayness. He found his way towards the cinema as a result of feeling inadequate expression using the novel and poem. His “Cinema of Poetry” captures in its totality, films ability to transcend the forms of capital. Cinema survives but has succumbed to capital in a massive takeover by the corporate powers of industrialization to buy out cineplexes, movies are becoming spectacle rather than stories, blockbusters are becoming the new epic poem. Hegemonies have become so strong that the space for novel ideas, fresh ideologies and interesting solutions to old problems are waining, becoming increasingly stale, bland and repetitive. The forms of capital are brittle yet are more standardized than ever before, “The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past”, what than of the future?

Further Reading

Bourdieu, Pierre “The Forms of Capital” The Sociology of Economic Life by Mark Granovetter, Routledge (2011). Pg. 46

Patrick, Rumble. Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pgs. 102, 103, 112, 120, 133

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Trilogy of Life Rejected” Criterion Collection Spine #631. Pgs. 6, 7, 8

Insights- Fighting Back with Contamination: Pier and Pierre Our material world is defined and solidified by the movements of capital. In Pierre Bourdieu’s article “The Forms of Capital” he argues that capital crafts the “games of society”.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Open Instagram and scroll, and you likely can’t go more than a few seconds without seeing someone you follow promoting a brand, whether it’s a celebrity, a wannabe celebrity, or that random girl you went to college with who’s somehow managed to become a famous fashion blogger.

According to the influencer management platform Traackr, 72 percent of major brands say they are dedicating a sizable portion of their marketing budgets to influencers — people with a strong relationship to an audience who can heavily sway decisions like purchasing habits. Fashion bloggers and your old gym instructor are, they believe, the future of advertising, because they connect with people more deeply than a page in a magazine or a celebrity and can therefore sway potential customers.

The influencer space, which once consisted of semi-famous bloggers making some extra cash on the side, has turned into a bona fide career path. The industry has evolved significantly over the years, whether it was from weathering the storm of new Federal Trade Commission requirements that influencers must now explicitly say when they’re being paid, or the rise of buying fake followers.

One person who’s managed to rise steadily through this crowded and often cutthroat space is Joe Gagliese, one of the co-founders of Viral Nation, an influencer agency that boasts the ability to “create the most viral, captivating and ROI-focused social media influencer campaigns for global brands.”

Viral Nation works with some influencers you probably know (like PewDiePie, one of the most followed people on YouTube), and plenty of others you likely haven’t heard of. By pairing them with major brands, Gagliese and his team of 50 take in millions in revenue through what you like, watch, and buy. I grabbed breakfast with Gagliese in New York City a few weeks ago to talk about the current state of the influencer industry. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How did you start out in the influencer space?

Me and my co-founder, Matthew Micheli, met in high school in Toronto and started ViralNation in 2012. We had previously been running a liquidation business where we’d buy returned items from major retailers and sell them to liquidators, so we had brand connections.

I also used to be a professional hockey player and had a lot of friends who play in the NHL. About six years ago, one of our friends was working as an agent for an NHL player, and he let me work on a few endorsement deals for his client. I noticed that big brands like Under Armour were slipping social media requirements into contracts, but hockey players weren’t getting anything extra because no one really understood its value.

We spent, like, a week studying platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Vine, and came up with a business model. We then started working with a few hockey players to build their social media presence and get them money off of their social. Our first client outside of the hockey space was Vine star named Ray Ligaya, who actually works for us now. We signed a deal with him and Post cereal, and two weeks later, one client turned into 16. Within our first year, we signed about $500,000 in endorsement deals for influencers, and pretty soon, we had signed, like, 700 influencers.

There are tons of influencer agencies out there. What makes Viral Nation different?

The reason we were successful is because we reached out to influencers, instead of going brand-side. We made ourselves be the ones that own the space of the influencers, whereas the different companies that wanted to work with brands have basically turned into our salesmen. Today, Viral Nation has relationships with 10,000 influencers, and are the biggest influencer agency in the space.

Who are the clients and influencers you work with?

We work with personalities like Liza Koshy and [Lilly Singh, who goes by the online alias] IISuperwomanII, [the comedian] Bart Baker, Scotty Sire, Lewis Hilsenteger [who goes by Unbox Therapy], the gamer SSSNIPERWOLF [whose real name is Lia Wolf], [and luxury content reviewer] Anish Bhatt.

In terms of brands, we work with hundreds, like Crayola, Anheuser-Busch, Spin Master, Match.com, Wish, Jet.com, Wrigley, Mars, Chinese tech giants Baidu and Tencent [a Chinese company that owns the messaging app WeChat], which is our biggest client by a long shot.

What sort of money do these brand deals make your company?

Four years ago, ViralNation was doing about $1.2 million annually, and last year we grew to $4.5 million. This year, the business is on track to make $20 million in deals.

Which platforms are influencers paid to make content on the most often?

It’s mostly Youtube and Instagram. Interestingly, over the last year and a half, not a single influencer has done a campaign with us on Snapchat.

How much do typical influencers make annually?

People with smaller followings [who are known as nanoinfluencers] can make between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. The micro-influencers can make anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000. Celeb influencers make way, way more.

What do influencers charge per post?

It depends on the influencer, and their follower numbers. A micro-influencer, which is someone that has 10,000 to 50,000 followers, is actually pretty valuable. They used to only pick up a couple hundred bucks, but today, they get a minimum of a few thousands dollars a post.

Influencers with up to 1 million followers can get $10,000 [per post], depending on the platform, and 1 million followers and up, you’re getting into territory where they can charge $100,000. Some can even get $250,000 for a post! Especially if the content is on Youtube and the influencer is in the gaming industry.

Why are these people considered so valuable?

These influencers have moved into celebrity territory. An endorsement from them is just as valuable as working with LeBron. They have incredibly engaged audiences and have an ability to push really big numbers.

We actually believe influencers are more impactful than athletes and TV stars because they are more relatable and so their audience is more tapped in. So it’s like, why pay a celebrity $50 million for a deal when that can be split up among influencers and make real impact?

Micro-influencers can make anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 annually from social media content. Westend61/Getty Images

I don’t see how you can track this monetarily, though. To me, social media likes and views seem like a fake commodity that’s impossible to quantify.

We work very carefully to pull data from our campaigns. We look at views, likes, engagement rates, watch times, click-through rates, comments, you name it, to share with brands what is and isn’t possible. And the cool thing is we are able to actually guarantee a certain level of interaction.

Can you give me an example of how an influencer with a big following has proven their impact is equivalent to their follower numbers?

We work with this influencer, Demetrius Harmon, (who used to go by the handle MeechOnMars). He’s an African-American influencer who talks about anxiety and depression, and his engagement rate is something like 30 percent, which is obscene. He started a clothing line called You Matter, and everything sold out.

Have you ever seen an influencer campaign done wrong?

Uh, every day. Let’s use watches for an example, because I see you’re wearing a Michele watch. When influencers work with watch brands, everyone posts the same photo, which is a shot of them sitting in a cafe or somewhere, looking at their watch on their arm. In the caption, somewhere buried, is information about the watch.

That does absolutely nothing. The whole drive of an influencer, and what will get people clicking and buying, is to be creative. If you were good at the job, you’d talk about the watch and engage with the audience by telling them about its pros and cons, why you’d buy it, and who you’d buy it for. The reality is that 80 percent of the content in this industry is bad, like those watch photos, because that’s the easiest way to get it done. But the other 20 percent is what performs.

Is it easy to become an influencer?

No. It’s like winning the lottery. A lot of it is luck. Think of the guy who became famous for doing the Shiggy Dance [and helped Drake’s song In My Feelings blow up]. We just paid him a lot of money to go to a Lakers game as an ambassador for Wish.com. Four months ago, he didn’t exist! I think a lot of people want to be like him, but his fame won’t happen to most people. Being an influencer takes hard work, it’s a full-time job, and you could be working at it for four years before you hit it big.

Are there any winning factors to becoming one?

Unfortunately, beauty wins. Some brands don’t want to work with bigger girls. The landscape is kind of shitty in that way, especially for young girls, because the fastest-growing influencer industries are beauty and fitness.

The other thing, of course, is to have access. A couple of guys just reached out to us and their thing is that they are extremely wealthy and own 20 cars that are Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and McLarens. Everyone wants to be a luxury car influencer, but these guys already have the access, so I know they will kill it on YouTube.

So you’re more likely to succeed if you’re privileged?

A lot of the times, yes, which kind of sucks about this industry now, that that’s what it’s come down to.

Let’s use me as a case study. I’m a short, Jewish, brunette journalist and new mom who likes hiking and fashion. How much would it cost to turn me into a profitable influencer? Would I need a tummy tuck, or a glamorous new wardrobe?

I would focus on your personality, not on your life, because you are great and people relate to that. You could start blogging about your baby, or fashion, but I think people will like you more for you. From there, I’d say that for $250,000, we could help you become an influencer. We’d spend that making content and getting you doing collaborations. That would get you exposure to a point where brands will want to endorse you. But just to be clear, we don’t do that. We only work with influencers who are already at that level.

What are some of the negative aspects of being an influencer?

We’ve seen loyal followers turn on people really fast. Say something racist and you can count on your career being over instantly. I guess it speaks to the power of the platform, in that you can be built up really fast, but you can also lose everything really easily, because in reality, a lot of these relationships are [just] digital.

Is there anything you think brands are approaching wrong in this space?

I think a lot of brands want influencers that are young, and have the millennial and Gen Z audience. In reality, though, a more middle-aged audience is the more valuable demographic, because they are more responsive on social media. Women in their 40s are actually prone to spending the most money. We work with this one influencer, Gerry Brooks, for example, who is a school principal and a Facebook personality with almost 1 million likes; 90 percent of his followers are women who work as teachers, and are 35 and up. That is a unique, and lucrative, audience.

Do you find that it’s harder to trust Facebook, knowing that they’ve been accused of lying about numbers in the past?

No. Facebook and Google have built my life, and I think there’s so much going on in this space that it’s easy for things to get lost. Maybe someone internally within the organization was given too much free rein, but I don’t think the organization would ever condone something like that. I guess I trust these guys too much. I see a lot of what they do for creators, and I think they do a tremendous amount to help out businesses.

Have you ever had an issue with influencers who buy followers?

Never. We have a system that looks for red flags, like if someone’s comments are all emojis but no real words, or if the data about views shows that they are all coming from Bangladesh or the Philippines. We know this space pretty well, but I think a lot of marketing people don’t, so I definitely would say it’s a problem in the industry. We take it really seriously, though; we put in our contracts that influencers can’t buy followers, and if they do, they’re at the risk of getting sued by brands.

Since this is your career, and I imagine it takes up most of your life, do you feel like you live in a fake world?

Totally. It can feel pretty terrible sometimes, because nothing feels tangible. But what I do do for self-care is avoid social media. I’m not on Facebook, and I don’t really use social media.

But don’t you think it’s ironic that the guy who churns through millions between brands and digital celebrities avoids the very mediums he’s pushing?

Well, I love this business, and I definitely love working in an industry that’s full of entrepreneurs. I’m just not a very social media kind of guy.

What are your thoughts about the next wave of influencers not even being real people? Like, those digital avatars, Lil Miquela or Shudu, landing campaigns?

I think it’s insane and, frankly, wrong. I don’t feel right that kids should be watching and interacting with something that doesn’t exist, and is just a puppet being strung up by some guy. I think it represents a part of technology that could make the kids go really crazy. I think that are tons of influencers who do amazing things and you can tell that audiences love them. But once you start working in the fake influencers, it becomes kind of scary.

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

Original Source -> How and why do influencers make so much money? The head of an agency explains.

via The Conservative Brief

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howtolearnmagick-blog · 7 years ago

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weblistposting-blog · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on Weblistposting

New Post has been published on https://weblistposting.com/wherein-is-americas-next-war-alaska/

Wherein Is America’s Next War? Alaska

It’s War within the gulf and the USA Army is available to defend us. No, now not that gulf! I’m speaking approximately the Gulf of Alaska and it’s clearly mock Warfare—if that is, you don’t show up to be a fin whale or a wild salmon.

America’s Next War

Diario las America’s

This may, the Army will once more sail its warships into the Gulf of Alaska. There, it will carry out navy maneuvers and in all likelihood drop bombs, release torpedoes and missiles, and engage in sports that stand a great danger of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for destiny battles some other place on earth. Consider it as a War against the natural world, an attack on the environment and neighborhood coastal groups.

And make contact with it irony or call it American life in 2017, however, the US military’s Alaska Command has branded Emily Stolarcyk “a troublemaker” for insistently pointing this out. In a country Wherein, this type of phrase is the equal of an obscenity, a few have bluntly known as her “anti-army.” The office of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has termed her a “rabble-rouser,” even as a Kodiak Meeting member classified some of what she’s been saying about the Navy “just silly.”

As a resident of the tiny fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, the maximum radical rabble-rousing issue about Stolarcyk may be the passion with which she loves this area of the planet in all its majesty. It’s why she’s taken a fierce and unwavering stand for years now against the ongoing schooling sporting events the Military carries out in the Gulf of Alaska in the course of certainly one of the largest migrations of birds and marine existence on this planet. Those physical games, which inject heaps of toxic materials into the gulf and use giant explosive ordnance, are yet again scheduled to take region simply as Alaska’s commercial fishing season opens.

CheapOair flights

Placed within the kingdom’s massive Chugach National Wooded area, coastal Cordova is nestled among the glacial-clad Chugach Mountains, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River. Fishing is the coronary heart and soul of the metropolis, as well as the muse of its economic system. A rough-and-tumble region, Cordova frequently lands on lists of the top 10 American fishing ports, whether or not measured in kilos of fish stuck yearly or their cost. A fish tax pays for its faculties and the upkeep of maximum of its infrastructure. At least 1 / 4 of its jobs are connected to the economic fishing enterprise. “Without fishing, the city wouldn’t also be here,” says Stolarcyk, who knows the intricacies of the Military’s plans better than most people inside the Army do, as we tour Cordova’s harbor.

It’s miles impossible to overstate how iconic salmon are here. “What we’ve got in Cordova is one of the closing wild places left inside the international, and one of the closing places on earth Where we nevertheless have healthy salmon runs,” Stolarcyk tells me. She’s this system director for the Eyak Preservation Council, an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit based totally in Cordova, whose primary challenge is to shield wild salmon habitat.

Stolarcyk’s associate is ready to begin his seventh season as a business fisherman. Their rental building even has a fish smoker. “Salmon brings this city to existence; you could sense the strength as soon as the fish start returning—it’s palpable,” she explains, pleasure in her voice. “you could pay attention the boats coming in and people go to stand on the shore to welcome them back.”

However, this yr, as in 2015, the Navy plans to behavior its a part of Northern Edge 2017 (NE 17), a training exercising, proper in her community. Those Warfare games, which occur every different yr, encompass ships, plane, ordnance, and the extensive use of sonar throughout extra than forty-two,000 rectangular nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska. And It’s far widely recognized that sonar causes harm and demise to whales, dolphins, and different marine lifestyles. It has been proven that whales may also seashore themselves to break out the noise, that is greater than one hundred decibels louder underwater than even the loudest rock concert. Way to a first-rate lawsuit, the Navy agreed to restriction the usage of positive forms of sonar in Southern California and Hawaii, because of its impact on the endangered blue whale along side different species. But not in the Gulf of Alaska.

FISHING FOR A solution As in 2015, the Military’s plans threaten a place of the gulf that couldn’t be extra biologically touchy or wealthy in flora and fauna. Their training location includes a state of Alaska Marine Protected region, a Countrywide Oceanic and Atmospheric Management Fisheries Included place, and each the Gulf of Alaska Seamount Covered and Slope Habitat Conservation areas.

Nonetheless, the Army is requesting lets in to apply stay ordnance which includes bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with lively and passive sonar in “practical” Battle-training sporting activities that could launch as lots as 352,000 pounds of “expanded materials” into the ones waters such as, consistent with the Military’s personal Environmental impact Assertion (EIS), missiles, bombs, and torpedoes.

Those waters help some of the most treasured fisheries left inside the United states of America, and the commercial fishing industry is the single largest private-sector enterprise in the state of Alaska, imparting over 63,000 jobs. Nonetheless, the Army’s personal EIS claims that fish in the location are at risk of chemical exposures of numerous sorts due to the fact the Battle video games will introduce chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, and ammonium perchlorate, alongside numerous different heavy metals and poisonous substances, into Alaskan waters. according to the EIS, “little is known approximately the very crucial problems of non-mortality damage in the brief- and lengthy-time period, and nothing is known approximately the outcomes on the conduct of fish.” It provides that “capacity results” include “death or damage” and that “fish no longer killed or pushed from a place with the aid of an explosion would possibly exchange their conduct, feeding pattern, or distribution.”

Alaska cruises

At the same time as the Army itself is aware of some of the damaging impacts of its sports, others remain unknown, and the Navy is making no attempt to study what they are probably. The precautionary precept of “do no damage” is certainly now not operative here.

The Army’s EIS does estimate that, all through the years in which Those Battle games are to be carried out, there will be greater than 182,000 “takes”—direct deaths of marine mammals or disruptions of their important behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On fish deaths, it gives no estimates in any respect.

A partial list of affected species includes blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the exceedingly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are best about 30 left), in addition to dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes consisting of the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Solar’aq, and Aleut depend on the area for subsistence living, now not to speak in their cultural and nonsecular identities.

As the May additionally 1 launching day for NE 17 looms, we already have At the least some inkling of simply what varieties of harm may result. Right now following Northern Part 15, Alaska witnessed the single biggest whale mortality occasion ever to arise in its waters. Eighteen carcasses of endangered whales have been found floating near Kodiak Island inside the location in which the Army had carried out its sporting activities, attracting National media attention.

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Statewide, within the 12 months that followed, Alaska had its worst red salmon fishing season in 4 a long time. A federal catastrophe declaration changed into even issued to provide salmon fishermen some relief, deferring the reimbursement of loans. That yr also saw the largest die-off of murres, a small seabird, ever recorded within the country.

Human-brought on weather disruption influences had lengthy been stated throughout the North Pacific, whose climate-alternate-affected waters were warming to record temperatures that 12 months. at the same time as this glaringly performed a role on such occasions, what impact the naval exercises had across the Gulf of Alaska stays in large part unknown, in part because the Navy refused in 2015—because it will once more this 12 months—to permit independent observers on its ships or to conduct follow-up research centered on how their Battle games impacted the surroundings and marine existence.

Star wars battlefront

Neighborhood opposition is powerful, as 10 Alaskan communities have handed resolutions asking for that the Navy circulate the timing and region of NE 17 and all destiny training occasions to the autumn or iciness months and similarly offshore to reduce their effect on fisheries and migrations. Moreover, the mayors of Cordova, Girdwood, Tenakee Springs, and Valdez despatched letters to Senator Murkowski, asking for that she ask the Army to relocate NE 17. The senator, hardly ever a critic of the navy, nonetheless wrote the secretary of the Navy ultimate September to “specific problem over the way in which the Army is approaching its participation in Northern Edge 2017,” and referred to as a loss of naval public-affairs steering “extraordinarily troubling.”

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