#we get points for participating in this message board where we post about mindfulness‚ career goals etc

[hillbilly---man]

One thing about me is that if there's a pointless rewards program that most people don't know exists, I'm gonna devote way too much time and energy to it so I can cash in 😈

[f1chronicle]

The Lewis Hamilton Fallacy

With Lewis Hamilton setting a new FORMULA 1 win record, and closing in on a record-equalling seventh World Championship, the vitriol on social media has been increasing, causing many to no longer wish to participate in Facebook groups that tolerate driver-bashing and hatred.

So how did we get to this point?

There are many factors at play here such as most drivers having a big presence across social media, but a key premise is we all have a different model of the world.

How you see things is completely different to how I see things, and generally speaking, this is a good thing for society as we can all bring our different points of view to a scenario and find a way forward.

Sadly this is not the case in the comments of nearly every F1 group on Facebook, where people are adamant that their point of view is right, yours is wrong, and you’re an idiot for thinking the way you do.

Let’s take a look at some of the common arguments in F1 groups, and see if they hold water…

Driver X Is The GOAT!

The GOAT argument isn’t specific to the world of F1, just look at the NBA, where LeBron James fourth NBA title stirred great debate as to whether or not he takes the mantle from Michael Jordan.

In F1 we have Lewis Hamilton vs Michael Schumacher, 93 race wins vs 91, six championships vs seven.

So how do we work out who the GOAT is?

Well, we can’t.

And even when F1 and AWS put out their ‘Fastest Driver’ analysis it still didn’t appease people if their guy wasn’t deemed the fastest.

Different drivers, different competition, different cars, the list goes on.

What we can have though is our favourite, and our own criteria for choosing a GOAT.

Personally, I didn’t much enjoy the years where Schumacher and Ferrari dominated. However, he has the most titles so to me he is still the greatest.

Some say the best of all time is Jim Clark, some say Fangio, some say Ayrton Senna. But unless they have seen them race, how can they compare?

Because if they’re using statistics, well the numbers don’t add up.

If they’re using stories and YouTube clips, then they’re comparing some drivers highlight reels against other drivers careers.

The passing of time plays an interesting trick on the mind, where we often forget the flaws, the disappointments, and the losses, remembering only the triumphs and victories.

And that’s ok.

You can have your GOAT, I can have mine, and neither of us can (or should) try to convince others that their GOAT is wrong.

Lewis Hamilton Has The Fastest Car (Or Best Car)

This one is odd, as I’m yet to see a car that wasn’t the fastest win a race.

When Pierre Gasly won the 2020 Italian Grand Prix, on that day, his car was the fastest.

Maybe there is something in the air in Italy, as in 2008 Sebastian Vettel won in a Toro Rosso to claim his first win in F1. Funnily enough, on that day, his car was the fastest.

You wouldn’t think you’d need to explain how motorsport works, but what happens is the driver who crosses the line first, ie completes the race distance the fastest, wins. It’s that simple.

These ‘fastest car’ or ‘best car’ arguments add to the Lewis Hamilton Fallacy.

Formula 1 is a meritocracy, and as such, the best drivers usually find themselves into the cockpit of the best car.

From 2010 to 2013, it was widely acknowledged that Red Bull Racing were producing the best cars, as they powered Sebastien Vettel to four consecutive World Championships.

Today though, people are rewriting history as they claim Hamilton has ‘always’ benefitted from being in the best car.

So which one is it?

Because clearly it can’t be both.

The Good Old Days Were Better

This one is always fun, and is something that likely happens to all of us as we get older!

I’ve found myself opining that the English Premier League was better in the 90s and 2000s than it is now for example.

Often, the ‘good old days’ coincide with a time in history where our favourite teams and stars were winning. Funny about that.

Have you ever met a Ferrari fan who thinks the current era is better than the 2000-2004 period?

No, you haven’t.

However, where this one gets really interesting is when people argue that the drivers no longer drive the cars, and that everything is controlled by engineers sitting on a pit wall.

The problem with this is the Williams FW14B, built in 1992, is still considered the most technologically sophisticated car in the history of F1.

It’s 28 years old.

The FW14B had semi-automatic transmission, active suspension, traction control and, for a short time, anti-lock brakes.

It also had Adrian Newey in charge of aerodynamics.

In fact, Williams found the FW14B was proving so successful that when the FW15 was ready half-way through the 1992 FORMULA 1 season, it wasn’t used.

The argument (often made by people who reach their limit reversing out the driveway) that Hamilton turns up on a Sunday, plants his foot on the accelerator, and drives into the distance is disrespectful of the amount of work he puts in to keep his body and mind at peak performance, as well as the staff at Mercedes who put in countless hours perfecting the car.

Mercedes Should Get Max Verstappen, He Would Beat Hamilton

This would be a terrible idea for Mercedes, so it’s a good thing they don’t listen to public opinion on social media.

First of all, it sends a message to drivers in their development program that even if you progress through the program the seat will go to the big-name with more runs on the board.

Second, do you recall the Senna v Prost years?

Sure, Ron Dennis had two prodigious talents at his disposal, but the infighting, egos, and crashes out on course disrupted team harmony, causing factions in the garage and distrust at all levels.

Mercedes currently have the perfect set up, and it’s obviously working, as they pick up championship after championship.

As we’ve seen throughout history, having a genuine #1 and an able deputy leads to both Driver’s and Constructor’s Championships.

During the aforementioned ‘Schumacher Years’ of 2000 to 2004, he was the undisputed #1 and teammate Rubens Barrichello understood his role and performed it admirably.

Lewis Hamilton Doesn’t Have Competitive Teammates

Former Formula 1 World Champions Fernando Alonso, Jenson Button, and Nico Rosberg would probably all argue that they are competitive drivers, capable of going wheel to wheel with Hamilton.

And they would be right, because they have the race wins and championships to prove their credentials.

When Hamilton joined the grid in 2007 as a teammate to Fernando Alonso, the belief throughout the paddock was that Alonso was #1 and Hamilton would be there to learn the ropes in F1.

In reality, it didn’t work out like that.

As Hamilton performed well, taking podiums and race wins, tensions mounted, and boiled over at the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix, where in the final qualifying session Alonso deliberately delayed Hamilton in the pits, ensuring he wouldn’t be able to get in one last run.

The pair didn’t speak for weeks after the incident.

At the end of the season, both drivers secured four race wins and 12 podiums. Clearly they were allowed to race each other, there were no team orders.

Funnily, after tensions thawed, in 2017 Alonso said “[Hamilton] was able to win with a dominant car, with a good car like 2010 or 2012, or with bad cars like 2009 and 2011. Not all the champions can say that”.

Is Alonso suggesting Hamilton hasn’t always had the best car?

Facebook commenters would disagree with the two-time World Champion…

In Jenson Button’s book ‘Life to the Limit’ Button goes into detail how competitive Hamilton was, and makes it clear that he too was there to win, not just to act as a rear-gunner for Hamilton. An interesting fact Button points out in this same book is that when Rubens Barrichello was his teammate at Honda, Barrichello had it written into his contract that they were equal drivers, he was not to be a #2…

When Hamilton moved to Mercedes for 2013, a move derided by many given Mercedes lacklustre performance in previous years, it was Nico Rosberg’s team.

There is evidence that team orders were used on at least one occasion in 2013, where at the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix Rosberg was ordered to stay behind Hamilton in the closing stages, rather than fighting for third place. Hamilton felt the call was wrong, and that Rosberg should have been allowed to race.

During the 2014 Formula 1 season tensions again boiled over for Hamilton and a teammate, as several early exchanges throughout the season threatened to compromise both drivers title aspirations.

The pair had a wheel-to-wheel battle in Bahrain, a down-to-the-wire tussle in Spain, and made contact in Belgium.

In 2016, the year Rosberg won the championship, the two came together at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix, in a move that infuriated Niki Lauda, as both drivers crashed out of the race.

The duo came together again at the 2016 Austrian Grand Prix, however both drivers could continue, with Hamilton taking the win.

Nice Rosberg went on to win the 2016 Driver’s Championship, which gives Hamilton detractors a curious dilemma.

On one hand they laugh, saying he was beaten by Nico Rosberg, yet on the other, they say he has never had to race against competitive teammates.

So, which one is it?

Lewis Hamilton Needs To Prove He Can Win With Another Team

This one always brings a smile to the face 😊

I have no problem with fans being new to F1, it’s great! The sport needs more and more fans to keep it going.

The issue is people forgetting that the sport was going before they saw it on Drive to Survive, then commenting on Facebook posts.

For the record, Lewis Hamilton won the 2008 Driver’s Championship with McLaren.

Although they had a Mercedes engine at the time, they were indeed their own team then, as they are now.

And that is a different team to Mercedes.

Hamilton has won championships with two teams.

Before the 2008 season Felipe Massa of Ferrari was the favourite to win the title, and Ferrari did indeed win the Constructor’s Championship, however, in a thrilling finish to the season Hamilton won the title by one point.

His teammate Heikki Kovalainen finished seventh.

But wait, doesn’t the best car always win the Driver’s Championship too?

Well now I don’t know what to believe.

Put Lewis Hamilton In A Williams, Let’s See How He Goes

If Hamilton was to drive for Williams, we already know how it would go – terribly.

Why?

Because it is a poor car that has suffered at the hands of bad management and a lack of finances for several seasons now.

Fernando Alonso drove a horrible McLaren from 2015 to 2017.

Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello had a terrible Honda to drive in 2007 and 2008, and not just because it had a map of the world painted on it. The aerodynamics were poor from the start, and the car just wasn’t competitive.

Does this diminish any of these drivers achievements before or after?

Does it prove their car is what won them races?

No, what it does prove is that Formula 1 is a team sport, and that it takes everyone rowing in the right direction together to deliver a package capable of competing at the front.

If Lionel Messi signed for Newcastle they still wouldn’t win the league. Likewise if Lebron James joined the Knicks, they wouldn’t win an NBA title. The teams they would join are still terrible, but having a champion on the team would improve them and make everyone life their standards over time.

Hamilton wouldn’t win in a Williams, just like Raikkonen can’t win in an Alfa and Vettel can’t get near a podium in a Ferrari this year.

However, the one thing all these drivers have in common is the ability to wring every ounce of performance out of a bad car, and Williams would expect nothing less if they had Hamilton in their race seat.

Politics Don’t Belong in Sport

As a middle-aged white man, this one makes me cringe the most.

Middle aged white men on Facebook, telling a black man what he should and shouldn’t do, how he can protest, and how he is ‘ruining’ the sport for them.

Yikes.

The purpose of a protest is to bring issues to light, to have people questioning their attitudes and beliefs.

Telling someone how they can protest against their perceived suppression is, er, suppressing them further.

You may not agree with ‘We Race As One‘, the BLM movement or drivers taking a knee before the race, but that’s the point. An issue being highlighted is an opportunity for you to question your thinking, to reflect, and possibly make changes. There is no harm in admitting that at one time you held beliefs that you now feel are wrong.

While we’re on the topic of politics in sports and how the handful of minutes it takes to show drivers supporting the ‘End Racism’ message ruining peoples enjoyment of Formula 1, what of other sports?

The ‘Old Firm’ derby is one of the biggest rivalries in sport, and it is founded on religion and politics. People are born into a side based on which side of the clearly divisive line they fall, Catholic vs Protestant, British vs Irish Scot, Conservatism vs Socialism. People have been killed on derby days, and violence in Glasgow increases any time the two clubs play.

Politics don’t belong in sport though, so they must be fighting over something else.

In 1967 Muhammed Ali refused to serve in the US Army during the Vietnam War, uttering the famous line ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong…no Vietcong ever called me nigger.’ Since then he has, rightfully, been lauded as a hero for his stance.

The Vietnam War probably wasn’t political though, was it?

Even the sport of Bandy isn’t immune to politics!

Norway declined to take part in the 1957 Bandy World Championship because the Soviet Union was invited, due to the Soviet invasion of Hungary the year before. The country made a similar protest for the 1969 Bandy World Championship because of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that year, handing over the hosting of the 1969 event to Sweden.

Indeed Formula 1 itself is no stranger to politics in sport, with the 2011 Bahrain Grand Prix cancelled due to concerns over human rights protests led by Avaaz.

You may not agree with the stance Hamilton has taken, you may not like it, but you do have to respect that in a free society he can use his platform however he sees fit – he built it.

What To Make Of The Lewis Hamilton Fallacy

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that the words on this page will make everyone stop arguing on the internet, that will never happen.

What I do hope though is that it has loosened the grip for some people, and will help them take the blinkers off.

We’re lucky enough to be living in a time where each Sunday, one of the finest Formula 1 drivers the world has ever seen jumps into his Mercedes and puts his life on the line to win trophies, and entertain us.

I’m lucky enough to have seen this level of performance twice, once with Michael Schumacher, now with Lewis Hamilton.

Should I live long enough to see Hamilton’s records beaten, I won’t waste time arguing over who is the GOAT, who had the best car, or why this bright new talent needs to jump through made up hoops to prove themselves to the folks in the bleachers.

I’ll simply be grateful to have witnessed three drivers at the absolute peak of their powers, doing what they love.

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[gateelbow71]

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[angeltriestoblog]

Second sem (and freshman year) recap

It’s pretty hard to believe, but another chapter of my college journey is finally over and done with. Since I had ended the first half of the school year in such high spirits, I didn’t really believe upperclassmen when they warned that things were only going to get harder from there. In fact, I even thought I’d be the one to prove them wrong! I mean, with a class schedule that looked like this, how would I run out of time for all the things I both needed and wanted to do? My Tuesdays and Thursdays were practically free, save for that one Math class I had to attend in the morning that I surprisingly never cut.

For the most part of the semester, I was in a chill state compared to everyone else. I claimed that I had successfully adjusted to the demands of higher education to the point where I found what once was an unreasonable workload to be manageable. I was able to make time for my home org’s activities and devote enough attention to the only project I was deployed to, which I touched on a bit in my first recap blog post (linked here in case you want to jog your memory). As previously mentioned, I was assigned as one of the Documentations Heads under the Information Management department of the Career Building Program, a three-phase event that gives its participants a glimpse into the corporate world. We kicked things off with a resume writing workshop that I was lucky enough to join. The facilitator assigned to me gave useful insights that I was able to apply in the creation of my own curriculum vitae, which I am keen on using when it’s my turn to apply for internships and jobs in the future. I obviously don’t have much on it yet, seeing as I’m just a freshman, but the idea of filling it up with more experiences over the years is exciting me in ways I cannot explain.

Our group was even given the opportunity to explore the studio of the country’s biggest network, where we were briefed by executives in communications and IT and toured around the sets of our favorite shows. We even ran into Luis Manzano while he was filming Minute to Win It! Unfortunately, I wasn’t scouted by any representative from Star Magic and spontaneously put in a love team with Donny Pangilinan, but I guess that’s alright.

I also went to Talent Night with some friends (not in pictures: Gela's boyfriend and ICA barkada), which is shocking since I’m honestly not the type to attend parties like this. I’ve always been the girl who stayed home and binge watched YouTube videos on a Friday night. But, I guess the drunk confidence of those I was with rubbed off on me and I managed to pull through! It was also a plus that Timmy Albert was one of the performers: I do pass him by along the corridors quite frequently, but it’s just different seeing him sing and play an instrument in front of a crowd, especially since I’ve loved Roses and Sunflowers even before I got into Ateneo.

One surprise that I definitely did not see coming was participating in Daloy, our annual program that revolves around corporate social responsibility. This year, we decided to shed a light on how this could be seen in the Philippine clothing industry, so it seemed fitting to hold some talks featuring prominent figures in this field, as well as a fashion show to exhibit the collections of local brands that advocated sustainability. I was really interested in the concept when I first heard of it, and initially wanted to go as a mere audience member - little did I know that I would be tapped by the committee to model! To this day, I don’t know how or why I was chosen: from what I know, there were even screenings held a week prior to the event to determine who would get to walk the runway. But, I was messaged three days before and in that short span of time, I had to fit clothes, find pieces in my closet to match them and perfect my walk (which took several tries on my part, given the fact that when shy, I’m stiff as a board).

Agreeing to join was a huge step out of my comfort zone - the closest I’ve ever come to strutting on a catwalk was back when family members would ask me to “walk like a fashion model” as a kid during reunions. So, the fact that it had all paid off in the end, and that I was even complimented for the way I looked and performed beyond what was probably expected, was definitely a huge confidence boost for me. I couldn’t have done it without Nelly, Daloy’s project head who patiently guided me through the entire process before the show.

Shoutout as well to the other ACTM upperclassmen who were so friendly to me this school year. We may not have any pictures together, but you deserve a spot on this post nevertheless: Gella, my "boss" (hehe) who was always so patient when I asked questions and even went out of her way to say such kind words about my writing; Sam Que who made me feel like we had already known each other for so long even if we had just talked for the first time, and Ysagab who constantly reassured me that I was doing a good job even if I was looking like such a rookie.

My presence in events wasn’t limited to those of ACTM, though. I also went to the Loyola Film Circle’s Under the Stars, where I was able to see the live performances of OPM acts and watch one of my favorite chick flicks beneath the beautiful night sky. Since it took place the day after Valentine’s, I was surrounded by Ateneans and their significant others (who didn’t hold back at all when it came to publicly displaying their affection), but I didn’t even mind since I was content in the company of both my college constants and high school friends.

I dropped by Sulyap as well, which was the culminating activity of the Ateneo Heights Writers Workshop and the launch of the chapbook of their fellows. It was one of the busiest Fridays of the school year, but I still made it a point to go, because I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to be a part of something organized by my dream org, Ateneo’s premier literary publication. As much as I love my course and the people in it, I have to admit that I haven’t been able to exercise much of my creative side. So being in a room full of like-minded individuals and hearing them speak lengthily about their works and the process that brought them to life was a refreshing experience, a much-needed break from the usual routine. My personal favorite was Unica Hijas by Mikaela Regis, which revolved around a lesbian couple trying to make their relationship work despite the fact that they study in a conservative, all-girls high school - a setting which is all too familliar to me.

It’s also worth noting that I was sorta able to tick a particular item off my freshman year bucket list. And I say sorta, because… well, you’ll see. It’s been a dream of mine ever since to watch a UAAP basketball game live, show up to the arena in a bright blue shirt, cheer as loud as I can when a player makes a point and raise my fist in the air while Song for Mary plays in the background. But, even if I’m consistently in school by 6am, I was never able to get tickets - I couldn’t match the efforts of some fans, who would camp overnight just to get their hands on them. But, just when I thought there was no more chance for me to show my school pride at a match, my friend Mika offered me a free ticket to the Ateneo Lady Eagles’ volleyball match against FEU at the Filoil Arena one Wednesday. We weren’t really on speaking terms before because we were from different cliques, but after bonding over K-Pop, I saw how nice and chill of a person she actually is. So, I didn’t want to turn her down even if I was hesitant to go at first. You see, I was never a fan - in fact, I didn’t know how the game went despite the PE lessons I had back in Grade 5. (Ms. Abella, if you see this, I’m sorry.) But, it didn’t take a lot of convincing for me to agree and I ended up enjoying way more than I thought I would. Fortunately, I was able to catch on when it came to the rules of the sport: the energy of the crowd was contagious as well, and the performance of the players was way too good it was impossible not to shout either out of triumph or frustration. Once we made it to the finals against UST, I even found myself waiting for announcements on where to buy tickets. I didn’t get any though, because they were either sold out due to the ever-increasing demand (ALE fans don’t play around) or there was a conflict in schedule (hi, Enlit play).

Despite this, I streamed the last game and screamed like I was actually in the venue myself. Apologies to all our neighbors, who probably thought someone was getting killed in the house beside theirs. I was so proud when they brought home the championship after three years, I even bought a Team Ateneo shirt (it’s not that hard to guess whose name is on the back) and went to the bonfire with my friends Gwen, Julia and Lou. I had hoped to meet and take a picture with the players, but they were already far too wasted when I arrived. Like, seriously. I saw Maddie Madayag chug a whole bottle of Mule right before my eyes.

So, you could say that it was all fun and games (quite literally) for me until hell weeks eventually rolled in. Plural form intended. I found out that all my professors were just holding back every major requirement until the very last stretch of the semester. Suddenly, my schedule was chock full of presentations and final papers, comprehensive exams and extra classes that put my time management and endurance to the test. I spent many days in Matteo Down just like before, but also started going to the floor above it in case I wanted to suffer in the company of more people. The studying would only continue once I got home: I’d pull all-nighters despite my brain’s and skin’s desperate cries for help, as manifested in my worsening acne. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that stressed in my life, and it’s scary to think that that’s only the tip of the iceberg in the Ateneo.

Coping mechanisms I’ve picked up to help me deal with these unavoidable circumstances would be trying every restaurant along the Katipunan area whenever I had free time (which I will elaborate on more extensively in another blog post, so do watch out for that!) and eventually discovering Pancake House’s corned beef hash, which I love so much I once had it thrice in the span of a week. Another one would be the addition of yet another emotional support K-Pop boy to my collection. After watching My ID is Gangnam Beauty over Holy Week break, I fell in love with Cha Eunwoo and his god-tier visuals, mild demeanor, impressive English skills and heartfelt determination. This led me to binge watching reality show episodes and furiously putting the entire discography of Astro on loop. If you look at my Last.fm, you could see how Crazy Sexy Cool easily climbed to the top of my most played songs, sitting prettily at the #1 spot with over 300 plays in just a little over two months.

Although I constantly had to bear the pressure and stress on my shoulders over the past academic year, I am eternally grateful to Ateneo for equipping me with lessons both within and beyond the realm of academics that have helped me grow into someone I never imagined, but am happy to have turned into anyway. When my naive and starry-eyed self first entered college, I had such high hopes for what my experience would be and proceeded to map out the next four years of my life in accordance with the vision I had in my head. Having just broken free from the metaphorical chains of my previous school, I found it to be the perfect time to transform into a student who excelled academically, had a long and winding list of extracurricular activities and easily built a vast network of connections thanks to her pleasing and magnetic personality. If I got lucky, maybe I’d have one of those so-called “college blooms” and even get myself an actual boyfriend!

This isn’t something unique to me, I bet a lot of people entered this new stage of their lives with the same mindset so I wasn’t the only one in shock upon realizing that it doesn’t always play out that way in real life. Because of these ridiculous expectations we have implanted in our heads, that basically state that we have to be successful in everything we do and fast, we subconsciously keep ourselves from enjoying the process. In our desire to aim high and aspire for perfection in all that we do, we could end up failing to acknowledge the small yet equally important wins we gain along the way: the friend we make outside of our block despite the sheer discomfort we experience in meeting new people, or the answer we gave in class that impressed our most intimidating professor could appear minuscule when placed beside our goal of being straight-A student who’s active in seven orgs. In addition, we deprive ourselves of the allowance to make mistakes, stray from taking the detours and breaks we need to remain functional human beings and often drive ourselves to the point of fatigue and burnout. And when we are still not flourishing and thriving as planned, we fall prey to toxic comparison: we pit ourselves against others who don’t have the same background or circumstances as we do and question why our progress doesn’t match with theirs.

This is obviously such a toxic way to go about things. Talk about sucking the fun out of what’s supposed to be the four most enjoyable years of our lives. Thankfully, over time, I did some growing up, if you will, and channeled the power of acceptance - both of what I am and what I am not, and the will of God (or whichever supreme being you've placed your faith in) who meticulously planned out what’s ahead of me before I was even old enough to know what school was. I now work to the best of my ability, confident that all I have to do is put in my share of the hard work and see where it takes me, and am also more gentle with myself when I make mistakes.

On a somewhat lighter note, I’ve also been able to form my own opinions about very controversial issues on campus: an example of which would be what I think is the best CR - the answer is definitely Arete. You can’t go wrong with its triple killer combo of aircon, bidet and strong WiFi connection. The only possible downside could be the fact that there are usually a lot of people, so it’s not the best option if you’re planning on being loud and… um, smelly. The secluded and fragrant Leong Hall and ever-reliable New Lib restrooms come in second and third place respectively, while honorable mentions include the 2F Kostka CR (but only from 6:00-7:00am, when no one else is around) and this one specific stall in the Socsci building that's spacious enough that I can bring all my belongings inside with me.

Another point for discussion would be the superior place to eat on school grounds: this might cause an uproar, I’m aware, but I still believe it’s JSEC, despite the stark price difference compared to other cafeterias on campus. I was set on trying something from every stall before the school year ended, but I was too fixated on my top picks: I don’t have any regrets though. In fact, I wish I had more of the beef salpicao with calamares on the side from Casa Paella, the Superbowl from Blendabowls and The Coop fries with garlic aioli served on the side. Besides the fact that the food served is satisfying beyond measure, I enjoy the chit-chats I have with the ates and kuyas manning the stalls, who never fail to ask me how I am and tell me about the cute chinito boys they see on campus that they think I might like.

Although I can’t completely rule out Gonzaga, because of this particular stall with quality liempo and a kuya who always gives me a five peso discount. (I’ve been told he does this with girls he finds cute, but I have yet to confirm that). Also, it’s the only place on campus that I know of that sells fresh fruits by the kilo - perfect for those days when I try to convince myself to go on a diet before I relapse and binge eat at Pancake House.

A lot of people do say that ISO sisig is worth the cross-campus walk it’ll take to get there (e-jeep rides are more recommended! An experience in itself! Especially if you’re seated in the back, where there’s a constant feeling of being sucked in a vacuum! But, I digress) - it might just be a matter of preference, but I think it’s overrated. A destination that deserves more attention is the Cervini Hall cafeteria just by the university dormitories. I’ve only been there a grand total of two times so I don’t exactly have any specific favorites on the menu that I recommend, but I’d definitely still go for the homey ambience.

As for superior study places, Matteo Down has been tried and tested several times: I do prefer getting a place opposite to the entrance though, because it does get distracting having to see people enter and go out the door so often. What was supposed to be a study session often ends up becoming a game to see how many people are wearing a striped shirt today. I usually spend time on the fourth floor of the Rizal Library, and get the couch as often as I can because of the comfort (and charger) it provides.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to power through this year without the help of my closest friends: Sevi, Gwen, Raya and Christine. I always had this nagging fear in the back of my head that I wouldn’t be able to find a tight-knit group once I got to college, but thank you for proving me wrong. Thank you for letting me be my true self, for entertaining even my most random thoughts and for accepting all the kalat that comes with being my friend. I sincerely hope that we stay together and have more Gino’s dates in the future along with Chloe!

To Gela, Jill, Shar (and Dom, but we don’t have any pictures together except for the last one HAHAHA) - I didn’t expect at all that I’d be writing about you guys. I was so intimidated by all of you at first, because I felt like we were so different in terms of our upbringing and environment. But after getting to know you, I came to realize that you are seriously some of the most down-to-earth, chill people ever. Thank you for always providing quality chismis, volunteering to find me chinito boys to date and giving me apps to make my IG stories look cuter.

To the rest of X1, we weren’t exactly the most united and we knew that - it’s just that we were probably the most diverse out of all the groups in our batch, and with that comes clashing personalities and differing opinions and interests. But, nevertheless, I am content with the time we managed to spend together, where I was able to get to know all of you!

To the friends that I made outside of my block (and even my course), thank you for laughing at my jokes and telling me that I'm fun to talk to. Hopefully, we get to hang out more and maybe even have common classes in the future hehe

To my Enlit section, we barely spoke to one another during the first semester so I fell under the impression that you were all stoic and no fun to be with. But, I was proven wrong eventually. I wish I was able to talk to more people in LL, but to the classmates I was closest to (Dootie, Cyrah, Czarina, She and Jessa), I will never forget our side comments and mini-rant sessions. I heard we’re having another English subject come sophomore year, and I really hope I end up with you guys again.

All in all, there is no other word that could sum up the experience that was my freshman year in college better than “adventure”. It was every single emotion on the spectrum All At Once, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world - in fact, during the first half of the semester, I admit that I’d entertain thoughts of alternate universes where I’d be an Iska/Lasallista/Tomasino out of sheer curiosity, but now I just can’t imagine myself anywhere else. Anyway, enough with all that drama. I’m going back to school in three weeks to start my summer term, which we fondly (lmao) refer to as intersession. So, there’s technically nothing to miss.

Hope the rest of you enjoy the summer break that I unfortunately will not be able to experience until I graduate from college! Wishing you nothing but love and light, always.

Angel

[sketchynebula]

Scribbles, Chapter 3

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, You are here,

Scribble tag list: @mikado413 @pleasebringmerlinback @thecrimsoncodex @too-precious-to-process @skadinavien @lexi-love99 @lovisoverrated @kickthecel @rayndropsonrosez @lamp-calm-sanders@iaminmultiplefandoms @ffsas-side-account  @tree4life25 @thats-so-crash @sugarblob0 @pattongirl @fandoms-n-ship @izzynuggets  @pasteliosis @thisrandomperson102 @memepool1 @hayleycreagine @artistgracie @its-me-madzy @bunniicc

Content Warnings: Self-hate, parental death, short moment of slight dissociation, suicide, flashback of suicide, rejection, fainting, abandonment, emotional break down, descriptions of anxiety and breathing, verbal and physical bullying, neglectful adults

Pairing: LAMP

Word count: 4,725

Genre: Hurt/comfort, Angst

AU/trope: Soul-Mate AU  where whatever you write on your skin, it appears on your soulmate’s.

Summary: His mind worked over-time considering whether or not running to the other end of the building would be worth it, but as the fatigue from his sleepless night pressed into him, he decided it wasn’t. Today wasn’t going to be the day he decided to be punctual.Virgil’s English class was all the way across the school from his math class, so it was a long walk. Oh, and he also had it after math and that didn’t help his mood either.

There was a moment where he was sure that he would be late. His eyes peering into an empty classroom and checking the time, only to find that he technically only had three minutes to get there. His mind worked over-time considering whether or not running to the other end of the building would be worth it, but as the fatigue from his sleepless night pressed into him, he decided it wasn’t. Today wasn’t going to be the day he decided to be punctual.

By the time he had walked through the door to the classroom it had been a few minutes after the late bell. The class was all there, all 30 of them visibly acting every bit of ‘straight out of elementary school’ as one would suspect. Fortunately for Virgil’s attendance record, the teacher wasn’t there.

Unfortunately for Virgil’s eardrums, the teacher wasn’t there.

The teacher's desk was vacant, but clean with not a page of paper on it. That was probably just as well, since anything left unattended was almost certain to be looked through.

Virgil’s head was aching again. The windows poured bright light into the room and his head throbbed in pain with each noise that echoed in the class.

He moved to sit in the back, an area that was a little farther away from the windows and a little more closed off from the rest of the students. He sat, before laying his post-concussion head down. His arms wrapping around his head in order to try to muffle some of the sensory information.

He ignored all the kids around him, and they thankfully did the same, but somehow the mess of kids, middle school boys running around and girls talking loudly, made him feel even more closed off.

More isolated from everyone around him.

These kids ran around, laughing, with the privilege of being able to care about nothing more than homework and friendships. They weren’t nursing bruises and hiding concussions. They weren’t carrying drunk parents to their rooms at night and crying when new messages were written on their wrists.

He sniffed, the emotions swirling in him were too complex for his tired mind and he pulled his head off the desk before he could fall asleep. As he lifted it up, a piece of paper came with it, stuck to the side of his cheek.

As the paper floated back to the desk he looked around, seeing that a piece of lined paper was lying on the surface of each desk. A single word was written on the board, ‘Scribbles’, and just as a dawning sense of comprehension and dread filled him the teacher decided to make an appearance.

The teacher quickly bustled in the room, a familiar face that made Virgil stare unabashedly, eyes locking with the last person he wanted to see.

“Everyone sit down! I am sorry I’m late, it’s a long walk here from anywhere else in the school. That, however, does not mean you are allowed to descend to chaos in my absence.” She leveled the class with a glare. “I’m Mrs. Higgs, and I’m your English teacher.” Virgil felt his face flush, sinking into his desk. Of course she was. In his life there was no way that he wouldn’t have to see her everyday for a year.

“Today, we’re going to be working on a free-writing prompt, some children are better at creative writing while others are better at essays.” She turned moving to grab a few papers from her desk and having everybody pass one back, “It’s in my opinion that both aspects of writing and literature are important even if the curriculum only favours one, so I like to give the creative writers in the class space to like language arts and use it as a supplement to improve their writing. Everyday when you come in, there will be a writing prompt on the board, you will write for the first fifteen minutes of class and turn it in after for a daily grade, if you are absent you won’t have to make it up and it won't negatively affect you. this isn’t supposed to be a stressful activity it’s just to expand your mind and get credit for doing it. I am handing out the syllabi and then we are to get started on our prompt,”

As the papers moved from hand to hand, Virgil’s eyes helplessly looked at the prompt. Of all the things he hated the most the list topper had to be sharing his writing. He wasn’t any good, and there was never any reason that anybody in his life had to know anything about the personal inner workings of his mind.

“We’re going to start the fifteen minutes now, try your best to stay writing the entire time- go.”

Virgil’s hand shook as he glanced from the board back to his paper. Idea’s bouncing around his head, none of them he felt comfortable with a teacher reading.

Especially a teacher that hated him.

He gripped the pencil hard before he settled for a compromise. His hand was hesitant as he wrote the first words, mind halting every few letters before his brain started to flow into the mindset. His hand movements slowly evening out, moving to weave emotions in fictional scenes.

He pulled real events out of context and projected them on a fictional world. A world that Virgil wouldn’t have to be responsible for later. Taking what he itched to write for the prompt, what he itched to tell the world, to scream at every teacher that looked at him like he was a criminal, and pressing it against a safe grey area. Somewhere in the middle a place where Virgil can adamantly deny being related to any of the words that graced the page.

Virgil wasn’t done writing by the time the teacher asked them to pass their papers forward, but he almost threw his sheet at the person in front of him. Just wanting this to be over.

The rest of the class was uneventful. The only other notable event being when Mrs. Higgs’s raised an eyebrow at him during roll-call. Virgil would have nodded off after that, but he was tense. His eyes staring forward the entire class.

That didn’t mean he was paying attention at all though. He felt far away from the situation, away from the room and the light and the pain. All until he found himself jumping at the sound of the bell. His body temporarily going rigid before he moved to reach down under his desk. His body buzzed with nerves, antsy to get out of here, to spare himself the embarrassment of having to be around Mrs. Higgs for any longer.

He slung his backpack over his shoulder, students brushing his side as they moved pass him to get to the door, but just as he reached it himself Mrs. Higgs called him back. One of her hands clutching his free-writing assignment in her grip and beckoning him over.

“Don’t worry, You’re not in trouble.” She asserted to him as he glanced at her warily. His cheeks burning.

She motioned him to take a seat in a desk in front of her, “This will only take a moment, however I will write you a pass to get to your next class.” Her lips scrunched, brows furrowing in a stern way.

Virgil fidgeted as the flash of that memory passed through his brain. His mind was flooded with all the other things it brought with it. Saturday was fast approaching, only two days away as the week quickly ends. Everything that that meant was fresh in his mind. He swallowed hard and gripped his hands together in his lap.

“Virgil, you’re writing is- far beyond your grade level.” She said, eyes running over the page again before carefully placing the writing down on the desk and pushing it toward him. “Have you ever thought of taking up writing as a future career choice?”

Virgil can’t say he’d ever really thought about his future, he always assumed he wouldn’t have one to begin with.

He pulled the paper back towards him a full 10/10 points graced the corner of the page in red ink and he shrugged. The thought never crossed his mind.

“There's a writers competition, an annual event that i think i want you to participate in,” she cleared her throat, “though i must admit i have never chosen a participant this early in the year-” Pulling a few papers out of one of the locked drawer of her desk, she circled around to him handing him the papers, a list of careers and different applications of writing was there, along with a ‘Young-Authors Competition’ registration form, the top page of the stack had a bolded title of ‘what you can do with writing’.

Mrs. Higgs nodded to the pages, “I recommend doing some research on some possible careers in the meantime, only if you’re interested of course. perhaps a journalist, or even maybe an author?”

Virgil's face was awestruck, hesitantly he shrugged. His brain backtracking turning the words over in his head. Trying to find any alternative meaning in them than the one he was being presented with. Anything that would make more sense.

His writing wasn’t good by any stretch of the word. It was jumbled and unthought out, each word was meaningless, a product of his mind spewing out emotions that he trapped inside himself over the years. His pulse increased at the very idea of a competition.

A writing competition with people who spent their lives learning how to be good writers. Students who wanted to write since they were young and not someone like him. Him who only wrote because he never seemed to be able to speak.

His shaking was visible now and Mrs. Higgs reached out, hand resting over top his clenched fists, trying to get them to still. The warmth and weight of it made him look up at her concerned expression.

“The competition isn’t until December, you have time to think about it dear.” She said softly, “I, of course, won’t and can’t force you to submit something against your will, and I for one think you are all a little young to be able to fully decide what you want to be in life.” She said gesturing to the pages she had given him, “but it’s better to be well informed and say no than be poorly informed and say yes.”

She patted his hands, before pulling away and moving around the desk, hunching over it to quickly scrawl out the information on a hall pass, ripping it out in one fast motion and handing it to Virgil.

“However, i would at least think about it.” She finished eyes imploring as she turned away from him.

Virgil swallowed hard, standing slowly before his body went into overdrive. He pulled his backpack off the floor, collecting his items and almost running out of the room. The concerned eyes of Mrs. Higgs following him as he went.

Virgil moved out of the way of oncoming hallway goers, ducking through the hall as he made his way to flow onto the correct side.

His fingers nervously tear the edges of the hall pass he was given. He was at lunch, but he appreciate the sentiment more than anything else. Most teachers didn’t care enough to write him one anymore.

Which Virgil wasn’t blaming them for. When someone is as consistently late as he is there came a time where there wasn’t a point.

Virgil’s hand pressed into his pocket, shoving the pass deep inside with it, and he held the small stack of papers in his left hand, eyes glancing over the words and dates.

The bodies moving in the hallway brushed up against him in an uncomfortable ‘sardine can’ way. Shoulders hitting against his until one particularly hard shove had his side slamming into the row of lockers beside him. The disorientation was instant, and the snickering that followed confirmed Virgil’s immediate hunch. He angled his head to see Ricky and Fred’s backs as they passed down the hallway. Laughing to themselves.

Virgil’s hands balled themselves into fists, crumpling the papers, as he kept walking. Hunching into his frustration, and the brand new ache in his shoulder, he walked until he was able to carefully and discreetly duck into the school library. A small area that attempted to tightly fit book shelves and open desks together.

Virgil spared a glance at the librarian at the front desk, he managed to give them a small smile despite his mood, you always wanted to be on a librarians good side. His hands pressed the papers to his chest so nobody else in the room would catch a glimpse of their content, before he moved to round behind a row of bookshelves that were further back.

He hadn’t eaten in the cafeteria since his first week of first grade, the memory of having chocolate milk poured down his back was humiliating enough that he was willing to take steps to not have it repeated.

Virgil pressed his back into the bookshelf there, the knobs of his spine aching uncomfortably. He slid to sit down, hidden in the small nook that he had found. He dragged his backpack into his lap, his legs stretching out in front of him.

Unzipping the top of his pack with one swift motion, he pulled out his sad, sad, sack lunch. A bag that he’s pretty sure he just threw some bread and an apple in that morning.

Virgil frowned at the memory of that morning. His mother having sat silently in the kitchen, nursing a hangover, probably not even knowing that she shared a memory with him from the night before. A memory that his brain couldn’t help echoing back at him when things were quiet. The words ‘I’m glad you don’t have a soulmate’ making him feel guilty and paranoid all at once.

He hunched into his corner, not bothering to touch the bread as he bit into the apple. His unoccupied hand pushed the papers roughly into the backpack before zipping it back up and tossing the pack to the wayside.

“Hey, Verg?” James’s voice whispered out, starling Virgil, who inhaled a bit of apple as James rounded around a shelf. “Guess what!”

Virgil panicked for a moment, coughing before shrugging, his mouth full. James laughed, nodding his head “i feel that! anyway- you know how Mrs. Kace used to be the AP French teacher at the High-school?” Virgil paused, startled at the sudden topic of conversation. He slowly managed a shrug.

He typically didn’t make a habit of talking to teachers, at least not as a pastime, and especially those he didn’t have to directly deal with.

“Well, okay - i guess long story short- I have a chance to win a Trip to France under an exchange student program!”

Virgil’s chest was suddenly tight, his eyes wide in shock before he swallowed hard and tried his best to smile. His face split into more of a grimace.

“Yeah! I might get to be with Sarah!” James gripped his hands together, eyes dancing over the written exchanges they shared on his arms all in french.

Virgil, felt the bit of apple be was able to swallow sour in his stomach, he nodded jerkily to James.

“That’s cool.” He said, his voice weaker than normal.

“Right! Sarah says her parents are more than willing to house both of us and my mom says that if we present out soulmate status they will most likely give me citizenship,” James’s voice was hard pressed to continue to be a whisper, his voice slowly rising in volume as he continued his small, hopeful rant. “-I mean it’s France they’re like the epicenter for soulmate finding resources, you know, as long as i can prove i can speak French well and yadda yadda whatever, I’ll be able to meet her! Isn’t it great!”

It was. He was happy. It was so good for James. He had worked his entire life for something like this. Deciding to be a French translator in second grade when they had first started to write to one another and found out about the language barrier they had to overcome.

He was going to be with his soulmate. In a school that wouldn’t immediately mentally connect him with the outcast and ostracized him in turn. A school where Virgil wasn’t ruining his only chances at being a normal kid.

Why can’t Virgil just be happy for him, why can’t he just be supportive.

Why can’t he just let his soulmates be happy without him.

“That’s amazing, I’m so glad you two- I’m glad you guys get to see each other and stuff.” Virgil said, eyes void, stony and guarded and James’s smile slowly faded, eyes filling with recognition,

“Oh i am such a dick.” He said, a grimace pulling at the sides of his mouth, “dude, i’m sorry, i totally forgot, here i am telling you all about Sarah when everyone knows-,” He paused voice lowering, even quieter than a normal whisper now, and leaning in, as if what he was saying wasn’t common knowledge to every kid in this school district “- everyone knows you don’t have a soulmate” James tried to look Virgil in the eye but Virgil just shook his head.

“No, it’s fine.” Virgil shrugged and James just shook his head back,

“No it’s not, I just- i can’t even imagine-...” Virgil looked at James eyes imploring him to change the subject.

“Anyway?” Virgil said, voice more neutral than his previous tone.

James hesitated before he continued “Anyway… I- I’m just saying that if my french essay gets chosen for this thing in November i’ll be gone by next semester so…”

Virgil nodded his head. That was it. He suddenly felt like he didn’t have anything left to lose anymore.

Scribbles

Virgil's fingers raked through his hair, grimacing. It seemed to be greasy no matter how often he washed it.

He met the mirror with a blank stare. His eyes had started to form light bags under them from inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent sleep. His reflection looked as tired and pale as he remembered it.

The surge of fear that he felt while his shaky hands pushed his hoodie back over the mirror was enough to make him question why he was here. Standing around and holding up the only bathroom in a comic shop near the Cedar cafe.

Who was he kidding?‘Strip’s Spot’ was a geek safe haven that was literally right across the street from the hipster paradise that was the Cedar Cafe. It’s large glass doors and windows making the comic shop a safe viewing spot.

It was stalking, basically. Virgil recognized this to the point that it was almost tormenting him. He was stalking them now.

Or maybe he was always stalking them. His arms and hands containing personal information about them that they wouldn’t normally have shared with anyone they didn’t trust. The question ‘would they trust him’ bouncing around his head was promptly answered by every dark part of his mind, the resounding ‘of course not’ breaking him down a little more.

“But we’re soulmates” he whispered to himself eyes settling over the fabric of his hoodie. “We’re- we are, soulmates.” He stated to himself shakily.

They have to love him.

Their soulmates.

“emphasis on the ‘have to’ part” he mumbled to himself, echoing his thoughts out loud. His mind wavering. He pulled his hoodie away from its place precariously balancing on the mirror, pulling it around his shoulders. He thumbed the sleeves, eyes catching another unwanted glimpse of himself from the mirror before he turned to unlock the bathroom door.

As his hand wrapped around the metal and he spared a moment to try and pull on an at least semi-good neutral face. The kind of face one wore for a public area.

His eyes blinked from being in the darkly lit bathroom to suddenly being in a well lit shop. He took in the dark patterned carpet and the vivid posters once more. His eyes nervously glancing around at the few shop goers as he moved to stand near one of the windows. He pulled one of the comics off the shelf, hands thumbing through it as he pretended to brows, eyes glancing up at the people around him. He was trying so hard to be casual, though that could wrap around and make him seem weird, ‘too casual’ is a thing that exists.

Was he being too casual?!

His pulled himself away from panically staring at a random page of a comic book only to have his eyes connect with the window.

He felt paralyzed.

He didn’t know how he knew it, though it was probably because they were the only party there that was larger than two, but when his eyes landed on the three of them he knew.

It felt like he had known them forever.

They were all standing in the outside seating area just outside of the cafe, hugging, all three of them so elated.

A redshirted boy that Virgil can only assume was Roman was almost jumping up and down. The boy who was obviously Patton, wearing a rather warm looking puppy and kitten themed sweater, was attempting to hug each of them together. The last of them had to be Logan who was smiling a warm smile, and hugging back when it suited him. They all seemed happy and Virgil felt a sting of envy again. Their warm arms and faces were exchanging looks and touches.

Virgil was standing in a Comic shop.

They fit so well together, their arms and hands wrapping around one another like it was the most natural thing in the world.

They fit.

They just- they fit together effortlessly.

His entire life Virgil had never fit anywhere, Virgil had been time and time again shown that he didn’t belong with anyone.

Apparently not even his soulmates.

He watched their hands curl into one another and their faces breaking out in bright smiles. He watched them confirm every fear he ever had, knowing that he could never do any of those things. He could never jeopardize them that way. His hands were cold, and his very presence brought gloom.

He had no place with the three of them. Their colour and their light was gift he was supposed to admire not contribute to.

Not that he had anything to contribute to it anyway.

Virgil tried to shake a barrage of thoughts from his head, eyes watering. The loud sound of a honking car horn startled him, blurry eyes raising to barely make out the faces of just as elated adults waving to the group from a car. Virgil’s cheeks flushed, hands almost dropping the comic book he was now tightly clutching, another car stayed down a ways, the parents smiling.

Normal families.

Normal happy families that Virgil can contact and ruin, ruin the same way he ruined his.

A flash of his fathers cold hanging body made his brain silence, his chest suddenly tighten, his mind tilting until there was nothing.

He woke up all at once, and the moment he was standing to the moment he was waking up on the floor felt like a mere instant appart. A concerned store manager hovering over him, a hand at the back of his head checking for an injury.

He pulled away from the strangers hands, the man's voice was muffled, sounding too far away from the still reeling Virgil.

“-Would you like me to call your parents” The words came into focus like a lense, slowly and with a gradient in time between indecipherable and clear. Virgil shook his head.

Who was there to call?

As Virgil sat up on the floor, he tilted back a little to peer out the glass doors, seeing both the cars and his soulmates gone.

‘Probably soul-bonding’ he thought to himself. Swallowing hard. An aching feeling filling his chest made him turn his head, and stare at the carpet there, mind dully wondering if there was ever going to be a time when things started to hurt less.

Scribbles

The night was all consuming and the edge of the table pressed into him. The blankness of his arms made the sorrow crop up inside of him again. His hoodie discarded to the floor.

It didn’t feel like there was a need for it anymore.

“You don’t normally take the hoodie off.”

Virgil’s head snapped to the side, looking into the eyes of his mother, who he hadn’t talked too since three days ago. He swallowed hard at the tired disheveled look she had. Her eyes bruised with circles and hair tousled.

“Yeah.” He said, turning his eyes back to the wood of the table as he waited for her to go for the liquor cabinet.

His mother took a seat.

She put her purse on the kitchen table, heaving out a sigh as she pulled her name tag off and ran a hand through her hair. “I- I know I’m.. I’m a- failure of a parent.” She stated and Virgil’s heart ached.

“No. You’re not. You do everything you can-,” Virgil began but his mother spoke over him

“I don’t- I don’t do enough.” She said, turning the name tag over in her hand as she spoke.

There was silence then. All consuming silence as they both sat in their own turmoils.

Emotional grievance pulling them both into the darkest places of their minds.

“How did you-” Virgil started suddenly, his voice cracking. “How did you deal with dad- with you know…”

His mother looked away from him. Her eyes vacant again, her expression mirroring the look she gave him in the bathroom that night. Virgil’s heart braced itself. The wounds so fresh that he didn’t think he could take another disappointment.

“I didn’t.”

She stood, tears running down her face. Giving Virgil the most apologetic look he’d ever seen on another human beings face. She pulled herself away from the kitchen table, the apartment echoing around them both as she pulled open the liquor cabinet.

Virgil stood, eyes spilling and a hand covering his mouth. He stepped over the hoodie. Leaving it there.

He burst through the door to his room with the edges of hysteria gripping at him. His hands going to clutch at his hair, yanking until it hurt. The pain making his eyes water.

He thought about his mother, about the years of isolation and pain. He thought about his dad leaving the both of them for his mental illness, and he thought about inevitability.

The pressing feelings that he would end up just like the both of them. His mother who would never see her soulmate again, and drank to forget that. His mind working against his own happiness no matter how every talks about soulmates being the ‘cure for all ills’.

He would be just as broken up, just as lost and desperate. Another ghosting figure in a world that doesn’t care about anyone with anything other than a happy ending. He was a damned soul.

A soulless.

He was truly a soulless now.

His breath came out in harsh puffs and he collapsed, sitting on his bed, keeling over and folding in on himself until his chest rested on his knees.

His eyes rose for just a second, just long enough for the time it took for his eyes to connect with the haphazard pile of the pages on his desk. The writing information Mrs. Higgs had given him. All of them collected in a single spot, discarded and crumpled.

There was stillness. The tears running down his face continued and he stood. His body slowly moving. He gripped the first page, moving it aside to pick up the Young-Authors Competition Rules. His hand shakily gripped a pen. His knuckles turning white with the force, and he pulled a loose leaf sheet onto the surface.

Then. He wrote.

Chapter 4

[ravenmorganleigh]

Their racism isn’t always intentional. Sometimes it is a byproduct of privilege, sometimes it is a deflection, and sometimes it is caused by the vapid, shallow inability to care about or understand anything that they don’t agree with because they are the majority.

The population of not-racists is steadily growing. Not-racists voted for Donald Trump. Not-racists say that kneeling for the flag means you want to slit the throats of veterans. Not-racists believe in Blue Lives, White Jesus and black-on-black crime. So we decided to do a countdown of the 10 most popular phrases so that you can easily identify not-racists, or play a game of not-racist bingo in your spare time:

10. “Why must everything have to be about race?”

One of the most used ideas in the not-racist handbook is that talking about race creates divisiveness. The theory rests on the premise that the more people point out racism, the more ... umm ... I really don’t know how the second part works.

The truth is that talking about race makes white people uncomfortable because it reminds them of the filthy history of white supremacy. That’s why Texas schoolbooks referred to slaves as “immigrants,” and Confederate-flag-wavers have twisted the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history into something about states’ rights, tradition and the North’s hatred of sweet tea ... and declaring human beings to be personal property.

And I get it; it is very uncomfortable for white people to hear about the atrocities of racism knowing that their people are complicit in centuries of mistreatment. It would give me the heebie-jeebies, too. It’s like cheating on a woman, confessing and then wondering why she’s always bringing up old shit when you come home late.

But the only way America will ever cure the cancer of white supremacy is by talking about it and treating it as if it were a disease. If you found a tumor in your left lung and your doctor brought it up every time you lit a cigarette, it would be stupid to respond with, “Why does everything have to be about lung cancer?”

It’s killing you, man. It’s killing you.

9. “I dated a black guy/girl ... ”

A few days ago I received a message from a not-racist woman who genuinely wanted to know why I used the phrase “white people” (and its more hilarious cousin, “wypipo”). I patiently replied to her (I don’t always clap back, but when I do, it’s in the mailbag), and she wrote back that she understood. She explained that she wasn’t racist because her ex-husband was black and she had half-black children. Which left me wondering:

Who are these black men and women dating these clueless white people and leaving them as unwoke as they found them?

You gon’ let her raise your kids, bruh? For real?

Who told wypipo that when a black penis enters a white vagina (or vice versa), the orgasm gives them a special immunity to being a bigot?

If so, where does it go? (The racism, not the penis, stupid.)

Instead of the March on Washington or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, should we have just marched around the country having orgies?

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

8. “I don’t see color.”

Do you stop at green lights? How do you play checkers, then? Not-racists will actually try to convince you that they don’t care about race and that erasing the concept of race from our minds is a self-righteous, egalitarian attribute.

Bullshit.

Here is the thing: The idea of a post-racial society is really the desire for a white society. Even nonracist Caucasians don’t mind this because they don’t understand that whiteness has surpassed the classification of a racial category in America and has become the default.

Black people want to be treated like everyone else. We don’t desire to be seen as everyone else. Most African Americans, Mexicans, Jews, etc., love their race and their culture. It is a large part of who we are. We don’t care that you see our color. We just want you to respect it.

Also, how do you play Uno?

7. “You’re the racist!”

In the September 2013 global quarterly Not-Racists, the executive board decided to introduce a clever bit of trickery into the racial discussion in America. According to the memo obtained by The Root, Caucasians were instructed to respond to any claims of racism, no matter how subtle, with the charge that black people were the racist ones. Since then, according to a poll never conducted by Pew Research, claims of reverse racism have risen more than 389 percent.

I’m not one of those people who believe black people can’t be racist, because I, too, felt racism creep into my heart once when a Caucasian co-worker offered me leftover potato salad. Even though black-on-white racism technically exists, it is rarely injurious.

Because—feeling butt-hurt is not a medical symptom.

6. “I grew up around black people.”

There are people who grew up in the “inner city” or played Pop Warner football on the Negro side of town who believe that they can’t be racist. According to them, growing up around black people—along with Mandingo penis and black vagina—completes the Holy Trinity of racism cures.

When asked why the white boys raised on slave plantations; the millennials who went to integrated schools but carried tiki torches in Charlottesville, Va.; and Darren Wilson, who worked his entire career as a police officer in a majority-black town before he shot Michael Brown Jr., still had remnants of racism in their bloodstreams, white people collectively paused, gazed at their flip-flops for a few brief seconds and replied, “Why does everything have to be about race?”

5. “Not all white people ... ”

Nothing upsets the #NotRacist stomach more than hearing the phrase “white people” used in any capacity. Only the term “white privilege” causes more consternation.

That same woman who wrote the letter I mentioned earlier said this:

First & foremost, many of us “white people” could careless what racial label you bestow upon us because at the end of the day the same loving GOD that created white skin created dark skin ... Why does there have to be a label? Why must we classify as a “color”? When we are all God’s master piece? No one runs from what the classification of one’s skin color reminds them of! What happened years ago is embarrassing. It’s hurtful! And morally disturbing. I am fortunate, my family did not participate in the barbaric behaviors as other whites. And God help our soul had we ever considered using a racial slur at another person! No my family was not and is not perfect but sir not all of us were mentally disturbed. And that is what someone has to be in order to hold another against their will in captivity. And sir, why would you want to write such things that fuel the hatred? Why would you assume that ALL whites fit into one general spectrum? If this is so, does this mean that because you are black sir that you are a gang banger? Do you see the issue here sir? ”

Although this is one of the most interesting uses of the “not all white people” variations, it raises an interesting point: I have a friend who is black and owns a Tesla. When she hears a mechanic advise people to change their oil every 3,000 miles, she doesn’t say, “Not all cars!” My friend is intelligent enough to know that the mechanic is referring to most cars or the typical car. Nothing in this world is 100 percent. Somewhere there exists a cat who likes having mice around, but for the most part ...

People who object to the word combination “white people” do so only because they aren’t used to being stereotyped. When the letter writer considered every black stereotype and decided to ask if I was a gangbanger, it did not bother me. You know why?

Because I am not a gangbanger.

I am also accustomed to living with the knowledge that my skin engenders certain thoughts about who I am. She does not have to navigate a world that presupposes her psyche on a day-to-day basis.

And that, dear reader, is called “white privilege.”

4. “Go back to Africa!”

Not-racists believe that America belongs to them and that whiteness endows them with the power to excommunicate the offenders of their country at will. This, too, is white privilege.

White privilege is believing that you have the right to tell anyone to leave the country they built with their own hands, for free. White privilege is believing that America is in decline and can be made great again only by a billionaire trust fund baby, but simultaneously saying that black football players have no right to criticize America because it made them rich. White privilege is the belief that this country is yours, and anyone who doesn’t like it should kick rocks. White privilege is the belief that kneeling is cause for being called anti-American, but not the actual, unconstitutional mistreatment of Americans.

That’s why I’m proposing that whenever we hear anyone complain about big government, high taxes, Black Lives Matter, traffic, not enough pineapples on their pizza or ask whether something is gluten-free, black people should cup their hands around their mouths and bellow into the world:

“Go back to Caucasia!”

3. “Why must you always be the victim?”

Another not-racist premise posits that when black people play the “race card,” they are blaming the failures of black people on racism. According to them, we want to make white people the villains and ourselves the victims.

They are partially correct. Black people kill too many other black people. The black family structure is falling apart. Blacks should focus more on education. Those things will help black people immensely.

But if black people did all those things and ignored the fact that a black college graduate is more likely than a white high school grad to be unemployed, and on average earns less than one; or that schools with majority-black students receive less funds than white schools with the same tax and income bases; or ignored mass incarceration, sentence inequality, the drug war, the history of redlining, banks giving blacks higher interest rates, disproportionate police brutality ...

... that would be stupid.

It’s like asking someone who was sexually abused to never talk about it or even to keep quiet when the cops ask about it because it turns the survivor into a victim.

We are the victims ... of racism.

2. “I don’t want to sound racist, but ... ”

I have been told, on numerous occasions, to never consider anything after “but.” The oldest sleight of hand in the book of racism magic is to proclaim oneself “not racist.” It is a wondrous trick that never works.

It’s akin to R. Kelly opening up a day care center and using the motto, “I’m not a pedophile, but I’d love to babysit your kids!”

Also, whenever anyone says they “don’t want to sound racist,” brace yourself. Because they are definitely about to say some racist shit.

1. “Make America great again.”

I can’t even ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Harriot

Michael Harriot is a staff writer at The Root, host of "The Black One" podcast and editor-in-chief of the daily digital magazine NegusWhoRead.

[hoopslab]

Barbershop: All-time teams, Dirk & KD’s crew vs MJ’s squad (RealGM)

Alright, hopefully by now you guys know that I’m a basketball nerd. And my nerd-ship expresses itself in different ways. One of the things that I like to do, is, compare players and/or teams in historical contexts. The proverbial barbershop argument...”Is Jordan better than Magic?” “What would happen if Shaq played WIlt”? Etc. etc. etc.

One of the places that I like to talk basketball-nerd shop is on RealGM’s message boards. Later this summer, there’ll be a Top 100 players of all time project that I’m going to participate in, and that you’ll see a lot about in the Hoops Lab. But in the meantime, they started an All-Time historical draft project that caught my eye. 16 people had a historical draft, built their teams (limit was 90 field goal attempts for the 8-man team), and now are having a tournament on which teams would beat the others. I’m one of the judges. So, in this space and other articles like it, I’m going to list both teams, and give my analysis of what I think will happen. Today’s teams:

Team 1 (Eminence): 

2011 Dirk Nowitzki 2017 Kevin Durant 1988 Patrick Ewing 2002 Jason Kidd 2015 Kyle Korver 1995 Anthony Mason 2017 Ricky Rubio 2017 Joe Ingles

vs Team 2 (Micah):

1991 Michael Jordan 1994 Reggie Miller 2017 Giannis Antetokounmpo 1975 Artis Gilmore 2008 Bruce Bowen 1981 Maurice Cheeks 2015 Marvin Williams 2014 Chris Andersen

Here’s my analysis, from the thread: 

Wow. This is interesting. Some thought dumps as I try to work through this... 1) This is an example of a situation where I feel like one team might be better in a vacuum, but I'm not sure they win the match-up. An offense built around Dirk/Durant as savant off-ball threat scorers with Jason Kidd at the point, another shooter at the 2 and Pat Ewing as the center sounds absurd, and I can see a Warriors-like oppressive unit (WLOU) built on this. Micah's squad seems like more iso scorers, and that's a harder approach against WLOU units. But. 2) Last year I watched the Thunder beat the Spurs and give the Warriors ALL they could handle in the playoffs, and to me the biggest reason was Russell Westbrook's inhuman relentless approach. In a 7-game series, having one guy that can put THAT KIND of pressure on a team, consistently, can be it's own weapon of mass destruction. And of course, Jordan was the prototype of that kind of relentless scorer, but at much higher efficiency. But interestingly...Jordan wasn't the first that brought the Westbrook analogy to mind. It was instead Giannis as the power point forward that triggered the thought, because when he's focused and attacking downhill he puts mega pressure on defenses with his length and athletic ability as a finisher plus his ability to pass to teammates to attack imbalanced defenses. 3) Seems to me that Dirk defending Giannis full-time is a terrible idea. Dirk's a solid defender in the right circumstances, but there's no way that I want him on an iso island on-ball all-game against the opposing team's main ball-handler. Either Dirk's getting in foul trouble, or Giannis is in the paint all game and Ewing is in foul trouble. Frankly, I probably put Durant on Giannis and let Dirk play off of Bowen. 4) If Giannis is the full-time defender of Dirk, I think I run my offense more through Durant. Dirk is an offensive unicorn, which makes him very difficult to defend...especially once he brought his post-up game into it. But the best defenders of him tended (early in his career) to be those with the footspeed to defend his face-up game and the toughness to make his postgame difficult. He outgrew those Stephen Jackson-like defenders by 2011...but Giannis is freaking 7-feet tall with mantis arms. He can handle Dirk on the face-up, and if Dirk posts him he's still dealing with someone just as tall and shooting over that length. Dirk would get his, no doubt, but he wouldn't create the type of mismatches, spacing and gravity that you usually expect from him. 5) I think Cheeks needs to be getting more attention. He's playing 28 minutes a game, and he's a big impact player. But more than that, when he's on the court, Kidd has to guard him. He has to, Cheeks would torture Kyle Korver. So, in that situation...who is Korver guarding? Who is guarding Jordan? Does Korver have to be hidden on the bench, keeping him from getting his 36 minutes? Does this mean that Ingles is spending more like 15 minutes a game on Jordan instead of 5? 6) I frankly don't see either center contributing majorly on offense in this match-up. There are too many perimeter scorers, so anything outside of garbage buckets for the centers may actually hurt the offense. Staying away from the personality questions (e.g. can the centers be happy with that), to me this also makes Ewing and Gilmore very similar in expectations and execution. Both are defensive anchor bigs in the paint, protecting the rim but not especially mobile. And really, in this type of match-up, I'm questioning whether either center is playing anywhere near the 36 or 38 minutes suggested. I'm thinking that whichever team goes small-ball first tortures the other one with quickness, and that both sides eventually end up with their small units. I'm seeing lots of: Cheeks/Jordan/Reggie/Bowen/Giannis vs Kidd/Korver/Durant/Mason/Dirk line-ups. 7) Kidd's not a pick-and-roll point guard, nor is he a big scoring threat. As such, especially when the opposing defense features a perimeter defensive who's-who of Cheeks/Jordan/Bowen, I think Kidd would have trouble running a WLOU-type offense against this particular team. Especially since Dirk and Durant can't make the opposing defense collapse due to mismatches. Thus, I feel like the primary offensive production in this series will look more like a series of isos than the type of free-flowing that we see from the best team units. Which brings me to... 8) Michael Jeffrey Jordan. I'm on point 8, and I really haven't even mentioned him all that much yet. Yes, Kidd would be a good defender for him. But good is relative...Jordan would still give him a high-efficiency upper 30s if called upon. And he'd be playing off the ball, with Giannis or Cheeks pressuring the defense and Reggie as a relief valve. Thus, when Jordan gets it, he's going at a defender that may be in the midst of rotating back to him and doesn't have nearly the type of help that you'd like to put on him. Because if they ARE helping on Jordan to the extend needed, then Giannis is scoring 25 points directly at the rim and/or Reggie is getting wide-open looks. Conclusion: I just think Micah's team just applies too much relentless pressure on Eminence in this particular match-up. Wouldn't be surprised at all if, in this hypothetical league, Eminence's team had the better regular season record. But I don't like the match-ups for him...and he doesn't have enough on defense to handle the versatile relentlessness of Micah's squad. Ewing's not mobile enough to keep Jordan and Giannis from finishing from different angles without getting in foul trouble. Maybe if Durant and Ewing were instead Kawhi and Olajuwon, I'd feel differently. But unless the conversation really changes the way I'd see it playing out, I'm really leaning towards Micah's squad taking this. Maybe in 5 or 6 games.

Other Barbershop arguments on Hoops Lab

Barbershop argument: Which MVP duo would you take at their peaks?

Barbershop argument: Which superstar trio would you rather start your team with?

KG vs Admiral: Which was better at prime, in regular season?

[supertrendingnewsarticles]

This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018. Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Times go back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.Captain Trump Steers America Toward Iceberg of InsanityChris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. His LinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Times and membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.BeforeItsNews.com appears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” page read:> Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.> > We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.“It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.A 2017 Guardian article on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:> Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.> > “A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Times article published in June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.The Epoch Times explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement. “Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar. “While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email. “Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”The Hedge Fund Man Behind Pro-Trump Media’s New War on ChinaThe Epoch Times has always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is BogusThe paper’s editorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Times but Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in July 2016. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a 2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction with Epoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018 appearance on the Common Sense Show, Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Kitze went on to echo a largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:> All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,” said Kitze, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in a glowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islands based cryptocurrency fund aiming to raise $300 million that Reuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”Epoch Times Advertiser Deletes Facebook Page After Hacking InquiriesAlphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding,  “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2yAZFPN

[teeky185]

This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018. Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Times go back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.Captain Trump Steers America Toward Iceberg of InsanityChris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. His LinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Times and membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.BeforeItsNews.com appears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” page read:> Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.> > We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.“It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.A 2017 Guardian article on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:> Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.> > “A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Times article published in June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.The Epoch Times explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement. “Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar. “While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email. “Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”The Hedge Fund Man Behind Pro-Trump Media’s New War on ChinaThe Epoch Times has always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is BogusThe paper’s editorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Times but Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in July 2016. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a 2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction with Epoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018 appearance on the Common Sense Show, Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Kitze went on to echo a largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:> All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,” said Kitze, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in a glowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islands based cryptocurrency fund aiming to raise $300 million that Reuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”Epoch Times Advertiser Deletes Facebook Page After Hacking InquiriesAlphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding,  “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2yAZFPN

[morningusa]

This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018. Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Times go back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.Captain Trump Steers America Toward Iceberg of InsanityChris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. His LinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Times and membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.BeforeItsNews.com appears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” page read:> Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.> > We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.“It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.A 2017 Guardian article on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:> Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.> > “A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Times article published in June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.The Epoch Times explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement. “Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar. “While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email. “Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”The Hedge Fund Man Behind Pro-Trump Media’s New War on ChinaThe Epoch Times has always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is BogusThe paper’s editorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Times but Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in July 2016. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a 2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction with Epoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018 appearance on the Common Sense Show, Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Kitze went on to echo a largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:> All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,” said Kitze, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in a glowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islands based cryptocurrency fund aiming to raise $300 million that Reuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”Epoch Times Advertiser Deletes Facebook Page After Hacking InquiriesAlphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding,  “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

[beautytipsfor]

This NBC Executive Became a Conspiracy King and a Pro-Trump Media Boss

This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018. Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Times go back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.Captain Trump Steers America Toward Iceberg of InsanityChris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. His LinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Times and membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.BeforeItsNews.com appears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” page read:> Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.> > We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.“It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.A 2017 Guardian article on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:> Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.> > “A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Times article published in June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.The Epoch Times explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement. “Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar. “While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email. “Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”The Hedge Fund Man Behind Pro-Trump Media’s New War on ChinaThe Epoch Times has always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is BogusThe paper’s editorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Times but Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in July 2016. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a 2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction with Epoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018 appearance on the Common Sense Show, Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Kitze went on to echo a largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:> All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,” said Kitze, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in a glowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islands based cryptocurrency fund aiming to raise $300 million that Reuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”Epoch Times Advertiser Deletes Facebook Page After Hacking InquiriesAlphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding,  “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[orendrasingh]

This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018. Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Times go back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.Captain Trump Steers America Toward Iceberg of InsanityChris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. His LinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Times and membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.BeforeItsNews.com appears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” page read:> Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.> > We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.“It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.A 2017 Guardian article on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:> Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.> > “A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Times article published in June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.The Epoch Times explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement. “Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar. “While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email. “Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”The Hedge Fund Man Behind Pro-Trump Media’s New War on ChinaThe Epoch Times has always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is BogusThe paper’s editorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Times but Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in July 2016. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a 2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction with Epoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018 appearance on the Common Sense Show, Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Kitze went on to echo a largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:> All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,” said Kitze, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in a glowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islands based cryptocurrency fund aiming to raise $300 million that Reuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”Epoch Times Advertiser Deletes Facebook Page After Hacking InquiriesAlphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding,  “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Understanding Insomnia: Jack Edinger, PhD

Understanding Insomnia: Jack Edinger, PhD See more on: https://www.ellymackay.com/

Pioneering researcher Jack Edinger, PhD, is honored for his service discerning the nature, classification, and management of a common sleep disorder characterized by a lack of ability to fall or stay asleep.

By Chuck Holt | Photography by Douglas Gritzmacher

Edinger and Will Harnar review a sleep study at National Jewish Health in Denver.

It started as a typical midweek morning when the message from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) arrived in the inbox of Jack Edinger, PhD. The AASM told the pioneering insomnia researcher that he had won the 2018 Nathaniel Kleitman Distinguished Service Award.

“I was in my Wednesday clinic, getting ready to see my patients, and when I opened up my email, I almost fell out of my chair!” Edinger, a professor and insomnia specialist at National Jewish Health (NJH) in Denver, tells Sleep Review in a phone interview. “It’s overwhelming, really. When you look at the list of people who were given this award before me, it’s really humbling.”

Edinger—whose lifetime of research includes an early randomized controlled trial on cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia1—has spent decades volunteering on AASM committees, participating in workgroups, and leading task forces developing diagnostic systems for insomnia.

The AASM email read, in part: “The Board of Directors greatly appreciates the many contributions that you have made to the AASM, including your service as chair of the Nosology Committee, member of the Presidential Committee on Behavioral Sleep Medicine, member of the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD) Revision Task Force, and frequent course lecturer. You also have made a lasting, positive impact on the field of sleep medicine through your research and clinical work devoted to the nature, classification, and management of insomnia disorders.”

Edinger also headed AASM’s Research Diagnostic Criteria for Insomnia Workgroup and currently is leading the academy’s Insomnia Treatment Guidelines Task Force. He will receive the prestigious award at the SLEEP 2018 meeting, to be held June 2-6 in Baltimore.

“The academy has given me so many opportunities to work toward something like this that I guess I really could have only blown it,” jokes Edinger, who prior to joining NJH spent more than 34 years in North Carolina as a clinical psychologist at the Durham VA Medical Center, which is affiliated with Duke University, where he remains an adjunct professor.

“Things like this are never about one person,” he quickly adds in a more serious tone, betraying his genuine fondness for the students he’s taught and friends he has made in sleep medicine. “The sorts of accomplishments [AASM] cited in the letter are all things that I did not do all by myself, but with a lot of my very competent colleagues and friends that I have made in the field over the years. That fact is not lost on me. And when I get the award, it certainly will be mentioned.”

Identifying Phenotypes

Edinger working in his office at NJH.

The dozens of studies and influential publications on the behavioral therapy side of insomnia research that Edinger has authored and co-written with colleagues over decades dovetail with his prolific service work focused on the diagnostic side of the sleep disorder.

As chair of the insomnia sections of the ICSD-2 and ICSD-3, for example, Edinger led a task force that defined criteria and categories of subtypes, or phenotypes, for insomnia diagnostic systems. He also was involved in developing quality metrics for the evaluation and management of the sleep disorder.

“The problem we have always had with insomnia is we don’t really have any sort of biological or objective assay for diagnosing it. For example, if you are going to diagnose sleep apnea, you do an overnight sleep study, and there are particular respiratory markers that are diagnostic of that disease. We don’t have that with insomnia,” Edinger says. “As a result, we have had to base our classification system almost exclusively on interview-based data, which are notoriously unreliable from one clinician to the next. So that has really been the struggle.

“And I think when we moved from the ICSD-2 to the ICSD-3, or from DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] to DSM-V, which is kind of the same move, it involved a lot of retrenching and acknowledgment of the fact that we don’t really understand the pathophysiology of insomnia all that well, and how to subtype, and that we don’t have an assay to do that.” Some of the most exciting work toward a possible diagnostic assay for insomnia, Edinger says, is by a group at Penn State led by Alex Vgontzas, PhD, that is looking at objective short sleep duration (OSSD) as a marker of a more severe insomnia subtype subject to significant comorbid illness. Edinger is currently collaborating with Vgontzas and other researchers on a grant looking at differential treatment for patients with OSSD.

“What the data has suggested so far is that they are at greater risk for disease processes like cardiometabolic disorders, hypertension, diabetes, neurocognitive deficits, and depression,” Edinger says. “While those kinds of data have not yet led to a phenotyping system for insomnia that could be integrated into diagnostic manuals, I do think it has promise for that in the future.”

Carrying It Forward

Edinger and Avery Soderberg review patient notes in Edinger’s office.

Sleep medicine was not recognized as a medical subspecialty until the 1970s, but psychologists have always had “a respectable seat at the table,” Edinger says. “One of the things I have always appreciated is that sleep medicine truly is a multidisciplinary field.”

He points to the late Richard Bootzin, PhD, and Peter Hauri, PhD, as two of his role models. “They blazed the trail for psychologists in the field and gave us models to follow that, combined with a confluence of other factors, allowed somebody like me to get into this position,” he says.

Edinger is grateful to have worked with and befriended the preeminent sleep medicine researchers, both of whom passed away in recent years. One thing that piqued Edinger’s initial interest in sleep medicine was early writings on insomnia by Bootzin, with whom he developed a “warm friendship,” collaborating on a number of workgroups, co-authoring publications, and more. And Hauri was chair of the ICSD-2 task force and recruited him to chair the insomnia section.

“Very early in my career, I had a patient, a veteran, who was having migraines. So I started doing some biofeedback treatment with him. Then during one of his visits, he mentioned he also had insomnia,” Edinger recalls. “I had just read a chapter that Dick Bootzin wrote about how to treat insomnia with stimulus control therapy. I had never used it before, but it looked pretty straightforward, and his writing was very clear and easy to follow, so I tried it with this particular patient. And when he came back a few weeks later, although he was still having the headaches, he was sleeping like a champ! That really got my attention.”

Edinger’s joint appointment at the VA and Duke allowed him to develop clinical activities and do insomnia research. He would cofound an insomnia outpatient program with colleagues and was instrumental in establishing a sleep lab at Duke in the 1980s.

“We published some of the first case studies using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for the treatment for insomnia,” says Edinger, who credits then-chair of the psychology department at Duke, Bernard Carroll, PhD, for encouraging him to seek government funding for his research, resulting in Edinger’s first National Institutes of Health grant. “It actually took me five tries!” he says. The results of the study were published in JAMA and showed CBT was more effective at treating insomnia than a relaxation technique popular at the time.1

“The other thing I would tell you is that I have had the really good luck to have had a number of great students who worked with me over the years, as post-docs and so forth,” Edinger adds. “And honestly, they’ve probably taught me as much as I have taught them.”

What the Doctor Ordered

Edinger grew up in Lehighton, Pa, a small town in the Poconos, where his father worked in insurance and his mother at the local high school. While he knew getting a college degree was wise, he had no definitive plans about what to study when he got there.

“I sort of stumbled into the psychology program at my college,” he says.” It seemed very logical, all of the premises, and science just made sense to me.” An undergrad degree at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa, preceded a PhD in psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Edinger was lead psychologist for about 14 years of his more than three decades with the VA, when, at age 60, he decided to retire. That wouldn’t last long, however. Colleagues who were aware NJH was interested in adding an insomnia treatment program began encouraging him to move to Denver to run it.

“One might think that going to a new place and starting entirely over, and having to build things up from scratch again at age 60, is kind of like being out of your mind. And sometimes I thought that to myself,” he says. “But, you know, it was probably the kind of job that I always wanted. I am 100% in the sleep program here; that’s all I do. I don’t have any administrative responsibilities. I just have responsibilities of running the behavioral sleep medicine clinic and developing a funded research program, which I’ve been able to do in the six years I have been here.”

How long does Edinger think he will continue working?

“I don’t know. I still really enjoy it. But I do have competing factors that make me want—and probably do need—to think about retirement,” Edinger says, referring to his toddler son who lives in Spain with his mother, who is faculty at a university in Murcia, her hometown. “We just bought a house there together….And, of course, I am trying to get over there as much as I can. But you can’t just tell your patients, ‘Well, I will see you in three months. Have a good life.’” Edinger is actively recruiting a junior person to eventually take over his clinical work and generate funding for research, “but they’re hard to find,” he says, then admits, “plus, I still really like the work.”

Friends in Deed

Edinger demonstrates how Sleepio software provides customized advice to patients with insomnia.

While Edinger may have been shocked at learning he’d won the AASM award for his distinguished service work, few others in sleep medicine likely would have been.

“Dr Jack Edinger is clearly one of the most important clinician-scientist-educators in sleep medicine,” says James K. Wyatt, PhD, DABSM, FAASM, director of the Section of Sleep Disorders and Sleep-Wake Research at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

In 2011, Wyatt contributed to an Edinger-led study that tested the reliability of insomnia diagnoses listed in the DSM-IV-TR and the ICSD-2. The landmark article on the results would lead to the changes and improvements to the diagnostic accuracy seen in the later editions of both.2

Edinger’s “track record of methodical, creative, and important research publications has been critical to enabling the practice of evidence-based sleep medicine. He has worked tirelessly to educate sleep scientists and clinicians from across the globe. His leadership and research transformed how we diagnose and conceptualize the insomnia disorders,” Wyatt says.

Longtime colleague and good friend, Colleen Carney, PhD, CPsych, director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Ryerson University in Toronto, and author of nine books on insomnia, adds, “Jack Edinger has had an immense influence on my work. During my time at Duke, he was generous with his time and expertise. He taught me how to write grants, how to be productive, and how to contribute effectively as part of a large interdisciplinary clinical team. He also taught me how to grow vegetables, install an above-ground pool, and construct a good NCAA tournament bracket.

“It’s difficult to conjure a more influential figure in modern day behavioral sleep medicine. When there is leadership needed, Jack is the one who is asked because his expertise is above all others. But he is also a down-in-the-trenches leader who people respect and will gladly serve under. It’s hard to imagine someone more deserving of this honor.”

Colin Espie, PhD, DSc, FRSM, FBPsS, a Scottish neuroscience professor at the University of Oxford in England, echoes his colleagues’ sentiments. “Jack Edinger is one of the foremost sleep researchers of his generation. He has been hugely influential in helping us consider what the disorder of insomnia is, how to evaluate it thoroughly, and how to implement psychological therapies efficiently as well as effectively,” he says.

Edinger is currently using software Espie developed called “Sleepio” for a CBT study of the treatment of patients with insomnia and sleep apnea. Sleepio features an animated therapist who responds to individual patient needs using sophisticated algorithms. It is designed to disseminate CBT to patients in sleep labs without a mental health expert on staff. “It’s pretty amazing stuff,” Edinger says.

The world-renowned pair of sleep researchers became fast friends decades ago, and Espie offers this anecdote about his good friend: “Jack is an extreme morning type who likes to eat dinner very early and head to bed around 9 pm. Some years ago, when he was at Duke, he visited me in Scotland and was noticeably the life and soul of the party right through to midnight and beyond. Of course, he had the benefit of a five-hour time lag! Oh well, at least he was ‘normal’ for almost a week.”

With colleagues across continents and time zones, Edinger says he is thankful for the experiences and opportunities a career in sleep medicine has afforded him. He says, “I have had the great luck of having a large number of very enjoyable colleagues all over the country, and around the world actually, to work with over the years. And the people in insomnia are almost unerringly very nice people. It’s been a fabulous ride. I can’t think of anything I would have rather done.”

Chuck Holt is a Florida-based freelance writer and editor.

References

1. Edinger JD, Wohlgemuth WK, Radtke RA, et al. Cognitive behavioral therapy for treatment of chronic primary insomnia: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2001;285(14):1856-64. 2. Edinger JD, Wyatt JK, Stepanski EJ, et al. Testing the reliability and validity of DSM-IV-TR and ICSD-2 insomnia diagnoses. Results of a multitrait-multimethod analysis. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2011 Oct;68(10):992-1002.

from Sleep Review http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/2018/05/insomnia-edinger/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2018/05/13/understanding-insomnia-jack-edinger-phd/

[marclefrancois1]

Understanding Insomnia: Jack Edinger, PhD

e0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eee0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eepostlinke0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eee0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22ee Find more on: https://www.marclefrancois.net

Pioneering researcher Jack Edinger, PhD, is honored for his service discerning the nature, classification, and management of a common sleep disorder characterized by a lack of ability to fall or stay asleep.

By Chuck Holt | Photography by Douglas Gritzmacher

Edinger and Will Harnar review a sleep study at National Jewish Health in Denver.

It started as a typical midweek morning when the message from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) arrived in the inbox of Jack Edinger, PhD. The AASM told the pioneering insomnia researcher that he had won the 2018 Nathaniel Kleitman Distinguished Service Award.

“I was in my Wednesday clinic, getting ready to see my patients, and when I opened up my email, I almost fell out of my chair!” Edinger, a professor and insomnia specialist at National Jewish Health (NJH) in Denver, tells Sleep Review in a phone interview. “It’s overwhelming, really. When you look at the list of people who were given this award before me, it’s really humbling.”

Edinger—whose lifetime of research includes an early randomized controlled trial on cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia1—has spent decades volunteering on AASM committees, participating in workgroups, and leading task forces developing diagnostic systems for insomnia.

The AASM email read, in part: “The Board of Directors greatly appreciates the many contributions that you have made to the AASM, including your service as chair of the Nosology Committee, member of the Presidential Committee on Behavioral Sleep Medicine, member of the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD) Revision Task Force, and frequent course lecturer. You also have made a lasting, positive impact on the field of sleep medicine through your research and clinical work devoted to the nature, classification, and management of insomnia disorders.”

Edinger also headed AASM’s Research Diagnostic Criteria for Insomnia Workgroup and currently is leading the academy’s Insomnia Treatment Guidelines Task Force. He will receive the prestigious award at the SLEEP 2018 meeting, to be held June 2-6 in Baltimore.

“The academy has given me so many opportunities to work toward something like this that I guess I really could have only blown it,” jokes Edinger, who prior to joining NJH spent more than 34 years in North Carolina as a clinical psychologist at the Durham VA Medical Center, which is affiliated with Duke University, where he remains an adjunct professor.

“Things like this are never about one person,” he quickly adds in a more serious tone, betraying his genuine fondness for the students he’s taught and friends he has made in sleep medicine. “The sorts of accomplishments [AASM] cited in the letter are all things that I did not do all by myself, but with a lot of my very competent colleagues and friends that I have made in the field over the years. That fact is not lost on me. And when I get the award, it certainly will be mentioned.”

Identifying Phenotypes

Edinger working in his office at NJH.

The dozens of studies and influential publications on the behavioral therapy side of insomnia research that Edinger has authored and co-written with colleagues over decades dovetail with his prolific service work focused on the diagnostic side of the sleep disorder.

As chair of the insomnia sections of the ICSD-2 and ICSD-3, for example, Edinger led a task force that defined criteria and categories of subtypes, or phenotypes, for insomnia diagnostic systems. He also was involved in developing quality metrics for the evaluation and management of the sleep disorder.

“The problem we have always had with insomnia is we don’t really have any sort of biological or objective assay for diagnosing it. For example, if you are going to diagnose sleep apnea, you do an overnight sleep study, and there are particular respiratory markers that are diagnostic of that disease. We don’t have that with insomnia,” Edinger says. “As a result, we have had to base our classification system almost exclusively on interview-based data, which are notoriously unreliable from one clinician to the next. So that has really been the struggle.

“And I think when we moved from the ICSD-2 to the ICSD-3, or from DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] to DSM-V, which is kind of the same move, it involved a lot of retrenching and acknowledgment of the fact that we don’t really understand the pathophysiology of insomnia all that well, and how to subtype, and that we don’t have an assay to do that.” Some of the most exciting work toward a possible diagnostic assay for insomnia, Edinger says, is by a group at Penn State led by Alex Vgontzas, PhD, that is looking at objective short sleep duration (OSSD) as a marker of a more severe insomnia subtype subject to significant comorbid illness. Edinger is currently collaborating with Vgontzas and other researchers on a grant looking at differential treatment for patients with OSSD.

“What the data has suggested so far is that they are at greater risk for disease processes like cardiometabolic disorders, hypertension, diabetes, neurocognitive deficits, and depression,” Edinger says. “While those kinds of data have not yet led to a phenotyping system for insomnia that could be integrated into diagnostic manuals, I do think it has promise for that in the future.”

Carrying It Forward

Edinger and Avery Soderberg review patient notes in Edinger’s office.

Sleep medicine was not recognized as a medical subspecialty until the 1970s, but psychologists have always had “a respectable seat at the table,” Edinger says. “One of the things I have always appreciated is that sleep medicine truly is a multidisciplinary field.”

He points to the late Richard Bootzin, PhD, and Peter Hauri, PhD, as two of his role models. “They blazed the trail for psychologists in the field and gave us models to follow that, combined with a confluence of other factors, allowed somebody like me to get into this position,” he says.

Edinger is grateful to have worked with and befriended the preeminent sleep medicine researchers, both of whom passed away in recent years. One thing that piqued Edinger’s initial interest in sleep medicine was early writings on insomnia by Bootzin, with whom he developed a “warm friendship,” collaborating on a number of workgroups, co-authoring publications, and more. And Hauri was chair of the ICSD-2 task force and recruited him to chair the insomnia section. “Very early in my career, I had a patient, a veteran, who was having migraines. So I started doing some biofeedback treatment with him. Then during one of his visits, he mentioned he also had insomnia,” Edinger recalls. “I had just read a chapter that Dick Bootzin wrote about how to treat insomnia with stimulus control therapy. I had never used it before, but it looked pretty straightforward, and his writing was very clear and easy to follow, so I tried it with this particular patient. And when he came back a few weeks later, although he was still having the headaches, he was sleeping like a champ! That really got my attention.”

Edinger’s joint appointment at the VA and Duke allowed him to develop clinical activities and do insomnia research. He would cofound an insomnia outpatient program with colleagues and was instrumental in establishing a sleep lab at Duke in the 1980s.

“We published some of the first case studies using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for the treatment for insomnia,” says Edinger, who credits then-chair of the psychology department at Duke, Bernard Carroll, PhD, for encouraging him to seek government funding for his research, resulting in Edinger’s first National Institutes of Health grant. “It actually took me five tries!” he says. The results of the study were published in JAMA and showed CBT was more effective at treating insomnia than a relaxation technique popular at the time.1

“The other thing I would tell you is that I have had the really good luck to have had a number of great students who worked with me over the years, as post-docs and so forth,” Edinger adds. “And honestly, they’ve probably taught me as much as I have taught them.”

What the Doctor Ordered

Edinger grew up in Lehighton, Pa, a small town in the Poconos, where his father worked in insurance and his mother at the local high school. While he knew getting a college degree was wise, he had no definitive plans about what to study when he got there.

“I sort of stumbled into the psychology program at my college,” he says.” It seemed very logical, all of the premises, and science just made sense to me.” An undergrad degree at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa, preceded a PhD in psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Edinger was lead psychologist for about 14 years of his more than three decades with the VA, when, at age 60, he decided to retire. That wouldn’t last long, however. Colleagues who were aware NJH was interested in adding an insomnia treatment program began encouraging him to move to Denver to run it.

“One might think that going to a new place and starting entirely over, and having to build things up from scratch again at age 60, is kind of like being out of your mind. And sometimes I thought that to myself,” he says. “But, you know, it was probably the kind of job that I always wanted. I am 100% in the sleep program here; that’s all I do. I don’t have any administrative responsibilities. I just have responsibilities of running the behavioral sleep medicine clinic and developing a funded research program, which I’ve been able to do in the six years I have been here.”

How long does Edinger think he will continue working?

“I don’t know. I still really enjoy it. But I do have competing factors that make me want—and probably do need—to think about retirement,” Edinger says, referring to his toddler son who lives in Spain with his mother, who is faculty at a university in Murcia, her hometown. “We just bought a house there together….And, of course, I am trying to get over there as much as I can. But you can’t just tell your patients, ‘Well, I will see you in three months. Have a good life.’” Edinger is actively recruiting a junior person to eventually take over his clinical work and generate funding for research, “but they’re hard to find,” he says, then admits, “plus, I still really like the work.”

Friends in Deed

Edinger demonstrates how Sleepio software provides customized advice to patients with insomnia.

While Edinger may have been shocked at learning he’d won the AASM award for his distinguished service work, few others in sleep medicine likely would have been.

“Dr Jack Edinger is clearly one of the most important clinician-scientist-educators in sleep medicine,” says James K. Wyatt, PhD, DABSM, FAASM, director of the Section of Sleep Disorders and Sleep-Wake Research at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

In 2011, Wyatt contributed to an Edinger-led study that tested the reliability of insomnia diagnoses listed in the DSM-IV-TR and the ICSD-2. The landmark article on the results would lead to the changes and improvements to the diagnostic accuracy seen in the later editions of both.2

Edinger’s “track record of methodical, creative, and important research publications has been critical to enabling the practice of evidence-based sleep medicine. He has worked tirelessly to educate sleep scientists and clinicians from across the globe. His leadership and research transformed how we diagnose and conceptualize the insomnia disorders,” Wyatt says.

Longtime colleague and good friend, Colleen Carney, PhD, CPsych, director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Ryerson University in Toronto, and author of nine books on insomnia, adds, “Jack Edinger has had an immense influence on my work. During my time at Duke, he was generous with his time and expertise. He taught me how to write grants, how to be productive, and how to contribute effectively as part of a large interdisciplinary clinical team. He also taught me how to grow vegetables, install an above-ground pool, and construct a good NCAA tournament bracket.

“It’s difficult to conjure a more influential figure in modern day behavioral sleep medicine. When there is leadership needed, Jack is the one who is asked because his expertise is above all others. But he is also a down-in-the-trenches leader who people respect and will gladly serve under. It’s hard to imagine someone more deserving of this honor.”

Colin Espie, PhD, DSc, FRSM, FBPsS, a Scottish neuroscience professor at the University of Oxford in England, echoes his colleagues’ sentiments. “Jack Edinger is one of the foremost sleep researchers of his generation. He has been hugely influential in helping us consider what the disorder of insomnia is, how to evaluate it thoroughly, and how to implement psychological therapies efficiently as well as effectively,” he says.

Edinger is currently using software Espie developed called “Sleepio” for a CBT study of the treatment of patients with insomnia and sleep apnea. Sleepio features an animated therapist who responds to individual patient needs using sophisticated algorithms. It is designed to disseminate CBT to patients in sleep labs without a mental health expert on staff. “It’s pretty amazing stuff,” Edinger says.

The world-renowned pair of sleep researchers became fast friends decades ago, and Espie offers this anecdote about his good friend: “Jack is an extreme morning type who likes to eat dinner very early and head to bed around 9 pm. Some years ago, when he was at Duke, he visited me in Scotland and was noticeably the life and soul of the party right through to midnight and beyond. Of course, he had the benefit of a five-hour time lag! Oh well, at least he was ‘normal’ for almost a week.”

With colleagues across continents and time zones, Edinger says he is thankful for the experiences and opportunities a career in sleep medicine has afforded him. He says, “I have had the great luck of having a large number of very enjoyable colleagues all over the country, and around the world actually, to work with over the years. And the people in insomnia are almost unerringly very nice people. It’s been a fabulous ride. I can’t think of anything I would have rather done.”

Chuck Holt is a Florida-based freelance writer and editor.

References

1. Edinger JD, Wohlgemuth WK, Radtke RA, et al. Cognitive behavioral therapy for treatment of chronic primary insomnia: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2001;285(14):1856-64. 2. Edinger JD, Wyatt JK, Stepanski EJ, et al. Testing the reliability and validity of DSM-IV-TR and ICSD-2 insomnia diagnoses. Results of a multitrait-multimethod analysis. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2011 Oct;68(10):992-1002.

from Sleep Review http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/2018/05/insomnia-edinger/

from https://www.marclefrancois.net/2018/05/13/understanding-insomnia-jack-edinger-phd/

[beatrizovens89-blog]

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[harolddetective]

APB Email Archive Update

November 5, 2017

I want to start by thanking those of you that offered such kind words of encouragement and understanding during my bereavement hiatus from the APB emails. I apologize for not replying to your emails…I was overwhelmed by how many thoughtful messages I received, but please know that I appreciate you greatly and that helped immensely. I have been overwhelmed by how kind, caring, and understanding my followers are. Thank you!!!

Now, I am happy to announce that I am ready to get back to our regularly scheduled programming…and just in time for NaNoWriMo! I hope the time change allowed you to sneak an extra hour of writing time in, even if you aren’t participating in National Novel Writing Month.

CHARACTER: OLD SCHOOL BEAT COPS The LA Times ran an article yesterday on a pair of LAPD Officers that have been partners for an unbelievable twenty-nine years! The guys seem to be right out of a Joseph Wambaugh novel. Like any good marriage, the key to their resiliency is that they operate like a well tuned machine. Each partner has his own strengths (and I’m sure weaknesses as well) and they know which part to play and when. If you are writing a Cop/Buddy Story, you will enjoy this article.

WRITING TIP OF THE WEEK: LEVEL UP YOUR DIALOGUE I am a fan of both Reddit and Quora. If you’ve been living under a boulder of old AOL Installation CDs, they are websites every author should add to his or her research toolbox. While Reddit and Quora are quite different sites, they are both great places to learn about nearly any topic you can dream up. This week, I was reading the Quora thread: What one tip changed your writing forever? Christopher Kingery shared a tip for writing dialogue that is a must-read. It is so simple and it’s something that all of my favorite authors do…yet I never really thought about it. (Are you a Redditor or Quora User? Add me as a friend on Reddit and Quora!)

SOME OTHER COP’S BLOG: The Salty Sarge I discovered thesaltysarge.com blog this week and the post “Why Cops Retire Before You” is absolutely spot on. To gain even more insight into the lives of cops in the later stages or their careers, scroll through the comments at the bottom of the post. This is good background on the mentality of any Mentor type characters you might write about.

Good luck hitting your NaNoWriMo word counts and remember that any questions you have can be posted in the WRITERSDETECTIVE Q&A group on Facebook…even if you aren’t a NaNo’er. It’s a very supportive group and I try to answer your questions as quickly as I can.

October 3, 2017

Thank you for continuing to open my emails, even though it’s been awhile. I buried my best friend today. He was only 46. Last month, I lost my uncle. A few weeks before that, my beloved 12-year old German Shepherd passed away peacefully with his head resting on my foot. The month before that, my Mentor died in a car wreck.

Right now, I am grieving.

But I will get through this. I will be back to publishing my weekly APBs soon. Thank you for your understanding and support. In the meantime, keep writing and do not hesitate to email me with any crime-writing questions you think I can help you with.

Write well and love one another, Adam

June 17, 2017

First, thanks to those of you that offered your condolences regarding my mentor passing away. I really appreciate your kind thoughts. It’s another reminder that whatever time we get is luck and we should all tell our loved ones how we feel…often.

CHARACTER: FORENSIC ODONTOLOGIST Crime fighting Dentists. Wait-What? One of the more esoteric fields of Forensic Science is Forensic Odontology. Bitemark analysis can play an important role in cases ranging from Domestic Violence to Murder. If you are writing about a killer with a sexual deviance or one that uses torture, bitemarks might make an interesting literary device. I’m sure you can come up with all sorts of deeper symbology or an intense psychological profile with a biter as the perpetrator.

If you choose to go this route, the American Board of Forensic Odontology created a Bitemark Methodology Standards and Guidelines document that you may find incredibly helpful. This guide covers bitemark analytical methods, related terminology, collecting Bite Site evidence, collecting a suspect’s dentition, preferred formatting for the Odontologist’s analytical reports, exemplar comparison methods, the best practices for describing whether a suspect’s teeth could have made the bitemark in question, and even a sample layout of what the final investigative report should look like.

It’s easy to read and it’s only eleven pages long. I have no doubt you’ll be able to use this document to create believable dialog for your Forensic Odontologist, whether it’s explaining facts to an investigator or testifying as a witness in court. While you’re on the ABFO.org page, you might take a quick look at the Member Directory to see if any Members work near you. I’d be willing to bet any one of these Forensic Odontologists would be willing to talk shop to a writer interested in this fascinating niche.

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK: DEAD BODY STUFF…BUT FUNNY A good friend of mine, who also happens to be a super smart and talented Psychologist that works with my agency, recommended the book I am reading this week:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers* by Mary Roach.

I’m not sure if the Doc profiled me as being psychologically disturbed or that we share the same skewed sense of humor. Either way, it was a brilliant recommendation.

Just like cops, most crime writers seem to share a certain degree of gallows humor. If this describes you, you will LOVE this book. It is packed full of answers to your dead body questions, peppered with hilarious observations that make this a quick, funny, and useful reference tome that every serious crime writer should read.

If you need answers to serious plot quandaries, such as the stages of a body’s biological and chemical decomposition phases or the timelines associated with each…but you’d prefer it explained in a way that sounds like you’re listening to a friend telling stories over drinks (rather than a dry medical school textbook,) then this is the book for you.

Here’s a sample passage from the Stiff*: [Context: Mary is visiting the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility in Knoxville where human decomposition is studied.] “So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off…Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.”

Mary also writes about the mental techniques first-year medical students use to get over the natural tendency to get grossed out by their cadavers. Any character of yours that routinely attends or partakes in autopsies will have developed “objectification techniques” like what is mentioned in this book.

If the mere thought of dead bodies and decay gets you squeamish, you might want to reconsider my suggestion, but I really do think you should give it a try. There are ZERO gross pictures, so you don’t need to worry about seeing any gore.

I will be traveling through various parts of England and Scotland in the upcoming weeks. If you want to keep tabs on what I’m up to, follow me on Instagram: @writersdetctive (DISCLAIMER: It is entirely possible the photos will be nothing but the pubs, ales, and wee drams of whisky I find. So no promises that the photos will be any good.

June 12, 2017

It’s been a rough weekend. One of my mentors died in a car crash this weekend. He was incredibly sharp and an A-Type through-and-through. He always demanded the best work out of his detectives, but he also made sure we had fun on and off duty. I blame him for my love of Rum & Cokes. Regrettably, we lost touch after his retirement a few years ago. Rest in Peace.

If there is one writing-related thing I can share about this, its the way cops have a tendency to detach using an out-of-sight-out-of-mind coping mechanism. It’s not that we don’t care or that we aren’t thinking about our former Brothers and Sisters in Blue; we just spend our emotional effort on those that we are working with (and watching the backs of) currently. We are also notoriously bad at acknowledging and dealing with negative emotions, other than to lock them away for another day.

It starts at the beginning. When a Recruit is fired from the Police Academy, the Academy Class does not get to say goodbye. The Recruit is called to the office and that’s the last you see or hear of the Recruit. When the class comes back into the classroom after PT or a defensive tactics course, the fired Recruit’s belongings are gone and his name placard has been removed from his seat and pinned upside down to the wall at the back of the classroom (along with the name placards of other former classmates.)

The lesson is clear: You’re either in or out. The work still goes on. That persists through the rest of a cop’s career. There is a saying “SWAT-OR-NOT.” Many officers will be part of a SWAT team at some point in their career. SWAT is for the young and motivated. Which means there are a ton of former-SWAT operators full of “When I was on the Team…” war stories. SWAT-or-NOT means if you aren’t on the team now, you aren’t SWAT anymore (so shut it.) In or out. So when an officer retires from the Department, it can feel like going through an amicable divorce. Sure, we all say we’ll still be friends and keep in touch…but only your closest friends will actually follow through. It’s a weird and sad phenomena. So if your characters are “ex-cops” that have turned into a P.I., expect that they may be forgotten rather quickly no matter how awesome they were. In or out.

CHARACTER: THE SPOUSE There is no tougher rock than the spouse of a cop. “10 Tips for a Police Spouse” was written by the wife of an Australian Police Officer. Every single bullet point translates to police work anywhere in the world. This brief glimpse into a Police Family’s life is worth the read, as it may give you insight into an often overlooked character in your story. It may also offer you a chance to skew the way your detective character is viewed and/or add additional conflict and chaos to the detective’s life. Regardless of whether the cop catches the murderer or saves the kidnap victim, the spouse may be seeing that same cop as the absentee-parent or an aloof workaholic who fails to prioritize his or her marriage.

STORY: CASE COORDINATION? If your Detective is undercover as an arms dealer trying to lure in potential lone-wolf terrorists, how will s/he make sure the “clients” aren’t also undercover cops trying to run their own arms-dealing investigation? Or drug dealing? Or murder-for-hire? The answer is to have a deconfliction clearinghouse. RISS.net is exactly that. Each area of the U.S. has a RISS Clearinghouse. If I am on a surveillance (or some other sort of covert op, like buying drugs or guns), I will call my local clearinghouse and be “put on the war board” so any other police agencies working covert operations (that also call into the clearinghouse) will be made aware of what we’re doing. NOTE: In my own experience, Federal Agencies are notoriously HORRIBLE at notifying RISS of their operations. So if you want some part of your investigation to go awry or for Federal Feathers to get ruffled, this is a real-life way of it happening. The Feds definitely use RISS, they just tend to enter their info after the fact.

Each RISS affiliated Clearinghouse has it’s own name, often a bland acronym that we turn into a weird sounding word. For example, in California we have WSIN (Western States Information Network) which everyone pronounces as Whizzin’ and the Clearinghouse for the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is creatively named LAClear. Or how about MAGLOCLEN? Yep. Just like it sounds, Maglow-Clen. Sounds like the Glow in the Dark brother of Kylo Ren to me.

In addition to deconflicting covert operations in the field, RISS also deconflicts entire investigations. If I am working a homicide and I’ve identified a suspect or person of interest, I will call WSIN and run that suspect’s name in their database. If that name is a match for being related to another investigation (say a drug investigation), the Clearinghouse will put the detectives in contact with each other. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your homicide suspect was also identified by the DEA as a member of a drug cartel? This is often how those investigative links are made.

The RISS Clearinghouses also offer other support as well, which are mentioned after the 3:28 minute mark in this video. If there is one thing I’ve discovered in government work, the more bland the title or description, the more important and bad-ass the work they actually do.

June 6, 2017

CHARACTER: NEW DETECTIVES Writers often ask me about how their characters can realistically become detectives in their stories. While federal agencies in the U.S. hire directly into investigator roles (usually called Special Agents), local police agencies almost always require officers to promote to the rank of detective after serving some years working the street in uniform. This week, I discovered a BBC story announcing Scotland Yard’s decision to hire Detective Trainees. The Met has a shortage of investigators, so the new hiring program is aimed at recruiting new hires directly into the detective ranks without requiring the trainees to work in uniform. While I don’t see this program becoming too likely in the U.S., it could certainly lead to some interesting crime stories and character bios.

THE BUSINESS SIDE OF WRITING: FEAR LESS (NOT FEARLESS) I have made reference to Tim Ferriss’ podcast before, but this week he sits down with Vince Vaughn. Vince talks about how his teenage job as a telemarketer helped him overcome any fear of asking for things from strangers. Some of the stories in this interview are hilarious, but I really appreciated the message of not being afraid to go beyond what you find comfortable to accomplish your goals. Writers being introverts maybe a stereotype, but I think most of us find it uncomfortable to make the Big Ask. This is especially true when it feels like a possible rejection will be too tortuous to endure. This interview speaks to that and I think you will enjoy it. I am contemplating running a contest based on an idea presented in this interview. Check out the interview and you may get a head start on the contest!

MOTIVE: WOMEN WHO KILL We tend to think of men as the killers in our society. A&E aired a special documentary focused on the phenomenon of women being more likely to kill family members than men. You can still catch the documentary on aetv.com, you just need to login using your TV provider’s account credentials. Just remember me when your next story idea sells to Lifetime TV.

May 27, 2017

CHARACTER: FOUR MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTERS This isn’t my first link from an APB to K.M. Weiland’s writing website, helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com but this week’s post about a story’s Four Most Important Characters is fantastic. She writes about the roles the Protagonist, Antagonist, Reflection, and Love Interest should play in fulfilling their unique thematic roles and guiding your Protagonist toward (or away from) your story’s Thematic Truth. This is a must read for any author, regardless of genre. If you’re a fan of Poldark, you’ll really appreciate K.M.’s examples.

GENRE: DANGEROUS WORK One reason Detective Stories and Cop Shows are so popular is that the stakes are often life and death. Nothing will remind you more of those stakes than the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks every Law Enforcement line-of-duty death. The FBI tracks officer deaths and assaults, through the Annual LEOKA Report. LEOKA is an acronym for Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. LEOKA statistics are reported by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to the FBI as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.

RESEARCH: ASK THE EXPERTS! Sue Coletta is an award winning crime fiction author; murder blogger; co-host of the monthly Partners In Crime #BlogTalkRadio; and host/founder of #ACrimeChat, the bi-weekly Twitter Q&A for crime writers. Both the Partners In Crime streaming audio program and #ACrimeChat Twitter Q&A are regular opportunities for you to ask a cadre of experienced cops and writers questions specific to your craft. I jump into the #ACrimeChat Q&A as often as I can. It’s always a fun set of questions that don’t always get the same answers from the experts. Search #ACrimeChat on Twitter to see past Questions and Answers. #ACrimeChat occurs every other Wednesday from 3pm-4pm EDT/12pm-1pm PST. Submit your questions by tweeting @SueColetta1. Don’t be shy; we’d love to have you join us!

WRITING: FOR YOURSELF In addition to my law enforcement career and helping authors and screenwriters through writersdetective.com, I also teach at the collegiate level. One of my favorite classes to teach is a Criminal Justice Ethics course that includes the topics of mindfulness and wholesight. I am far from becoming some kind of New Age hippy, but I believe practicing mindfulness and wholesight leads to being a better person and a happier life. One tool I love to accomplish this is The Five Minute Journal*. Writing in my journal is the one daily New Year’s Resolution I have kept since 1/1/2017, and I urge you to consider checking it out. I read the daily quote and write in my journal when I first wake up, which helps me frame my day as one of possibility. Then before bed, I reflect back on how my day went and what I took notice of as being amazing. Knowing that I will write about “Three Amazing Things That Happened” each day has given me reason to seek out the amazing little things daily. It takes me LESS than five minutes each day. For those of us who don’t make the time to meditate or keep a diary, The Five Minute Journal* is perfect for cultivating a few minutes of good thoughts at the beginning and end of your day.

May 21, 2017

COMMUNICATIONS: Every cop has a story for what led them to this career. A Commander I worked for shared his story, which was a simple one. When he was a kid, he happened upon some sort of emergency in his town. There were flashing lights, sirens, police cars everywhere, and a crime scene cordoned off. He remembered watching an officer arrive in a police car and then walk past him into the crime scene. As a kid, my Commander desperately wanted to know what was going on. It dawned on him that the uniformed officer knew what was going on. That was the seed that grew into a police career: Knowing What Was Going On. Despite newer technologies like cellphones and computers in the patrol cars, the primary communication tool is still the police radio. Thanks to modern technology, you can know what’s going on by listening in on police radio traffic from around the world for free, on your smartphone. While I don’t recommend filling your writing or dialogue with police radio codes and jargon, listening to the communications around where your story is set can be enlightening. Is your story set in an area where a dedicated dispatch center is responsible for tracking dozens of officers at a time, or is the dispatching handled by the one civilian employee back at the office who is also the records clerk? To listen in using iPhone/Apple iOS Devices: Download the free 5-0 Radio App in the App Store. For Android Devices: Download the free Scanner Radio App in the Google Play Store. If you navigate to your story’s location and don’t get much to listen to, navigate to “LAPD Aero and Special Unit Dispatch” (LAPD calls this frequency “Air / K9”) to hear the most serious emergencies in the City of Los Angeles in near realtime.

STORY: In March, I shared a link to the policeone.com website that several of you said was extremely helpful. I’ve got another one for you! Similar to PoliceOne is a website called LEO Affairs. (No, it’s not Ashley Madison for Cops.) In addition to having a ton of incredible dashcam/bodycam footage, you can be a fly on the wall in the Forums to learn how cops honestly feel about various topics and possibly get some insight to what is going on inside the agency you might be writing about.

DEATH [Squeamish Alert] If you only write Cozy Mysteries or get squeamish, feel free to skip these links. One writer asked “does a body decompose any faster/slower if it doesn’t have any blood in it?” My reply: “It could. It would also depend on how the body lost its blood. Putrefaction may be slowed if the bacteria doesn’t have a blood filled circulatory system to move through easily. That said, if the blood loss occurred due to a significant wound, that wound would also allow for outside insects and bacteria to enter the cadaver to speed up the decomp. Depending on how you want your story to go, you can speed up decomp by elevating the ambient temperature and have the cadaver exposed. If you want the decomp slowed, cooling the temp and having the cadaver unexposed to air and outside elements (buried, bundled in clothing/sleeping bag, etc.) may help.” To learn more, check out AboutForensics and ExploreForensics (both links to U.K. sites.)

May 14, 2017

CHARACTER: MOTHER’S DAY Imagine being a single-mom to five kids, attending college, and being a Baltimore City Police Officer during last year’s riots. Meet BPD Officer Karyn Crisafulli. If you’re looking for a real Mother’s Day Hero, she is definitely it. I hope she inspires you to go for your dreams!

PROPS: FLIR On Saturday morning (by that I mean 0230 in the morning), my helicopter pilot partner and I were called to search a remote area for a suspect that fled on foot from a vehicle pursuit after he crashed his car. I was operating the helicopter’s Forward-Looking-InfraRed (FLIR) and using it to look for heat sources ahead of where our canine team was searching. I spotted the suspect about fifty yards ahead of the canine team just as he began running away from the officers. I radioed the K9 Officer who released his German Shepherd partner from his leash. The bad guy tried fighting the canine and quickly became a bloody chew-toy. Once the dummy was in handcuffs, we landed the helicopter and delivered a First Aid kit for bandaging his wounds. Being able to visually “see” heat through a thermograph has been an invaluable tool for law enforcement. Which leads me to this week’s second link: Understanding the scientific principles of how FLIR works. Oh how far we’ve come since the Year 1800 and Sir Frederick William Herschel’s discovery of infrared! At the very least, your kids might enjoy the science project of using a prism and a handful of thermometers. To find out what I’m talking about, watch this YouTube video.

STORY: EXTRADITION When bad guys are on the run, they are usually wanted because an arrest warrant was issued demanding their arrest. So what happens when a wanted person is arrested in another state? This short video explains the process of Interstate Extradition.. I have personally traveled out of state for dozens of extraditions, usually bringing the defendant back via a commercial airliner. In this video, you’ll see that the process becomes a little more complicated with International Extraditions. As I mentioned in a previous APB regarding the FBI and Interpol, international extraditions involve partner nations that have agreed to reciprocity in a treaty.

May 6, 2017

SETTING: LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN Insight Crime is a great researching resource for crimes relating to Latin America, the Caribbean, and its ties to the US. Insight Crime is a foundation dedicated to the study of Organized Crime in those areas. Their website offers timely reporting and analysis on organized crime in the region. For adventurous bilingual students, they offer unpaid internships on a semester schedule.

PLOT: FBI and FISA Last week, FBI Director Comey testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the FBI oversight. I am sure you’re as sick of the news as I am, but this testimony is worth reviewing from a research perspective. Near the 2 hour 57 minute mark (scroll down to that clip), Dir. Comey offers a pretty concise explanation of Section 702 of FISA. For my research gluttons out there, here is NSA’s more detailed white paper on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. (A big shout out to my Mom for sharing the C-SPAN coverage with all of us!) Most Detectives do not get involved in FISA “wire taps” when investigating homicides. However, all it takes is a terror motive and your Detective may get sucked into the shadowy world of the Intelligence Community. It’s important to understand that the FBI acts as both a criminal investigation agency and as a domestic intelligence agency. Generally, the FBI Special Agents in each office will be assigned to one or the other as a primary job duty. In smaller FBI RA’s (Resident Agency offices –think satellite offices in smaller communities), an agent assigned to IT (International Terrorism) or DT (Domestic Terrorism) may still be required to roll out to a bank robbery. It just won’t be their primary duty. As a Detective, I have personally worked with both sides of the FBI office. When you are working with the Intel side, you are generally dealing with classified information that will not be used in court. If it does make it to court, it’s gone through some heavy legal review and it’s usually years after the arrest.

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK: “The Six Month Novel Writing Plan” Caitlin and Jacob Jans are the editors of Authors Publish Magazine, a free weekly email magazine for writers. Caitlin recently published “The Six Month Novel Writing Plan” and it’s available for free for a limited time. She offers some really practical advice for actually getting that novel finished (hint: writing time is not facebook time), edited, and published. If you find it worthwhile, consider giving it a review on Amazon.

April 29, 2017

Story: Dialogue – “Know Your Why” – Self Publishing Podcast Last year, the amazing folks at Sterling & Stone were crazy enough to feature me on an episode of their Self Publishing Podcast. (I’d like to offer a huge shout out and thank you to fellow Tribe Writer, Christine Niles, for making the podcast happen! Y’all are even nuttier for including me in the 2016 Year in Review episode.) On the podcast, I spoke about writing Interview & Interrogation dialogue and how “knowing the why” of each character will shape what is said…and [PUN ALERT] why it’s a cop out to use a suspect interrogation to summarize the investigation for the reader. So, what would a Detective actually say in an interview or interrogation? One of the most successful (and sometimes controversial) interview and interrogation methods is called The Reid Technique. This link to John E. Reid’s website includes some worthwhile presentations covering the stages of interview and interrogation. The Reid Investigator Tip page has a drop-down list of I&I questions that may help you craft dialog for your own interrogation scenes. If you pay attention to the way most Reid questions are formatted, you’ll notice that they are designed to elicit expository answers, not just a Yes/No response…which always help keep the dialogue and story moving!

PLOT: “All the pieces matter.” –Det. Lester Freamon, The Wire Your investigation is stalled. You can’t identify your victim, or maybe you only have part of a victim. Perhaps there is a signature to this killing and you want to see if any other homicide investigations have a similar trademark. ViCAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) is an FBI administered database dedicated to accomplishing exactly that. It was created in the early 1980s, but has since morphed into a secure web-based database that all US law enforcement agencies can access. If your serial killer uses a specific technique or you are looking to identify a Jane/John Doe, then ViCAP is likely the database where the analytical linking to other homicide, kidnapping, or missing person cases will occur. Click here to see the Public’s version of current investigations currently seeking leads or information.

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK*: “DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us“ I know. “Writing is hard.” Many traditionally published authors argue that writing Is even harder once you’ve obtained that ever elusive “Publishing Contract.” This book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us* sheds light on the illogical human tendency to lose motivation whenever something that was implicitly rewarding (like writing for the love of it) becomes something you’re compensated for (a Big 5 Publishing contract perhaps.) This book is a interesting read and the author does a great job making the scientific evidence an easy read. It is definitely thought provoking. I am still in the middle of the book, so I will update you on whether there are any motivation hacks worth pursuing.

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