#you all chose sides and lost all media comprehension

[turianjournalist]

Controversial opinion but I don’t think Criston Cole deserves the same level of hate that fucking Joffrey or Ramsay got

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Audience Comprehension of Grey Areas within Conflict in Media

I haven't written an analysis piece in a while, and while I don't necessarily have any thoughts on specific episodes, or a singular show atm, there's something that I've been thinking about recently that I feel like talking about.

In recent years, I've seen subsets of fandoms becoming less and less understanding of the idea of a "grey area" when it comes to fiction, believing that every situation has a right and wrong side, and that there is no way for two feuding characters to both be the logical party in a conflict. Semi-recently I've seen this in two fandoms that I participate in: The Bad Batch (Hunter vs Crosshair) and Good Omens (Crowley vs Aziraphale). Now I've gone into detail about both of these before, so I'm going to try and trim those discussions down for this post, but it's a similar problem in both fandoms and I feel like looking into it a bit.

Tags for @saturn-sends-hugs @inkstainedhandswithrings @eriexplosion and @nobody-expects-the-inquisitorius in case anyone feels like pitching in

Hunter vs Crosshair

Now the relationship between Hunter and Crosshair was... complicated to say the least. There were so many factors that influenced their actions and decisions, which put both of them in a position of being right and wrong simultaneously. And yet despite them both being at fault, there was an ongoing war within the fandom about who was supporting the right side; were you Team Hunter or Team Crosshair? According to some, you couldn't be both because there was no way both of them could be right, could there?

Team Hunter always seemed to be the popular option, as he was considered the morally superior of the two. However, that doesn't mean that he was without faults. In fact, he was greatly flawed: so focused on his own belief of what was the right choice that he struggled to consider others ideas, reckless and impulsive, stubborn. He was far from perfect. But let's be real, nobody is. And yet, despite all of his flaws, Hunter was considered by many to be a character who could do no wrong, and therefore was the obvious man to support in this ongoing conflict.

So what about Crosshair? Well he was brash, cold, a downright arsehole at points, and chose to stay on the side of the Empire. Surely he couldn't be considered the one in the right here? Well, it's not that simple and it never was.

It all boils down to that moment when The Batch left Crosshair on Kamino at the beginning of S1. Hunter and The Batch didn't have much choice. Their own brother was shooting at them, their lives were at risk, and had they stayed there, they likely would have died or been captured. They couldn't have taken Cross with them because they could not guarantee their own safety. As much as he was their brother, he was a threat to them. But we also have to consider this from Crosshair's perspective. Yes, he was trying to capture his own squad, but he'd been mentally manipulated and was in no position to make rational decisions. He was under the Empire's control. And yet, despite being in danger himself, and needing the help of his brothers, he was left behind. It was understandable that he lost faith in them. But neither side is entirely at fault here. They made the best decision they could in that situation, and no the decisions weren't perfect, but when are they ever?

Let's look at the other crucial moment that always gets brought up in this conversation: Crosshair being left on the Kamino landing platform at the end of S1. I've seen many coming to Crosshair's defence here, saying that the squad had no right to leave their brother there. But let's be honest, it could've been so much worse had they taken him. Yes, Crosshair spent over 30 rotations on that platform, but The Batch didn't know that was going to happen. And Crosshair was refusing to come with them. Had they forced him along, that would've done more damage than good; Crosshair was vulnerable, scared of losing his autonomy. Having his brothers force him onto a ship against his will was going to make him more argumentative and stressed. The best thing the Batch could've done in that situation was respect their brother's choice, which they did.

Throughout the entire conflict in this show, both Hunter and Crosshair were right and wrong. It was never as simple as one side being the "good" side, and the other not, their actions were both fair and unfair. No-one could make perfect choices because no situation could allow that. And yet, there was this general understanding across a section of the fandom that a person's entire moral compass could be determined by which side of the argument they fell on, and that there was no way to accommodate both sides at the same time.

Crowley vs Aziraphale

Which brings me onto conflict number 2: the Ineffable Husbands. The ending of S2 was heartbreaking to say the least, and while it was surprising in the moment, in retrospect, it was completely inevitable. And while I remember just how depressed we were after that ending, I also remember just how angry the fandom got with Aziraphale. Our poor angel took the brunt of the hate and was considered by many people to have been the one in the wrong. But Zira wasn't the only perpetrator of that mess. Both of them were to blame, and the storm that hit was always going to come in at some point.

The ending argument parallels a spat that the two had at the beginning of the season, when Crowley and Aziraphale were trying to decide what to do about Gabriel. Aziraphale supported the "fix the problem" approach, suggesting that they should help the Archangel, while Crowley went for the "ditch the problem" approach, claiming they should just dump him in Dartmoor. And while they were both trying to achieve the same thing (eliminate the Gabriel issue), they had both A) came up with different plans and B) assumed that the other would have come up with the same idea as them. They thought their "exactlys" were the same, until Crowley points out the flaw: "I feel like your exactly and my exactly are different exactlys".

And this is how we ended up with the ending of GO S2. Aziraphale wanted to fix the system: he recognised the flaws, and as someone who had dedicated his entire existence to being a good ambassador for Heaven, had viewed it as the only logical solution. It's the exact response you'd expect from someone still trapped in a toxic religious group, a belief that the flaws in your faith can be rectified, no matter what. He made the choice you'd expect him to but where he stumbled was in expecting Crowley, who he knew had been through a great deal of trauma as a result of what Heaven did, to make the same choice as him. He knew how hurt Crowley had been, so it wasn't fair to expect that he would make the same choice.

And yet the same could be said for Crowley. Given Crowley's trauma, ditching Heaven is a perfectly reasonable solution for him. He knows how twisted their morals are, and understands that realistically, no matter he does, there will always be someone higher up the chain who would thwart any attempts to fix the institutional issues. It was perfectly demonstrated by Gabriel being punished for trying to prevent Armageddon. However, Crowley never told Aziraphale about how Gabriel was exiled from Heaven, so it's entirely unfair for him to expect Zira to make the same choice, when he purposefully withheld information from him.

Just like at the beginning of Season 2, they had both had the same end goal in mind, but their approaches differed and they assumed that the other would make the same decision as then. That was their downfall. So yes, as an audience member, you can have your own opinions on which choice you think is better, but it isn't simply as black and white as one being right and one being wrong. They can both be at fault.

Why do I think it's like this?

Ultimately, I think audience reactions to conflicts like this boil down to three things: availability of information to the audience, escapism, and our own battle with morality.

As an audience member, we will always have different information to the characters themselves. When it came to Hunter and Crosshair, we knew what was happening to both characters, so we couldn't understand why characters were making certain decisions, but it's important to remember that we have more information, so of course our own choices would be different. We have context. The same with Good Omens. Like I said, we know what happened to Gabriel, as does Crowley, but Aziraphale doesn't. So while we can back up Crowley's decision, we can't necessarily fault Zira when he doesn't know what we do.

Additionally, as viewers, we seek escapism. The world is a mess and conflicts have so many layers that sometimes a clear answer isn't always easily found. So when we turn to media, we hope for something clearer, something that will tell us exactly what is right and wrong. Things being so morally grey feels to real for us, so we fight to find the good and bad; we want answers so we build up black and white decisions, even if that isn't how things are actually playing out.

Not only this, but I think our own fight for moral superiority influences our consumption of media. We always want to be the "good" person, so we fight to be on the right side. We don't like being wrong and we judge people's morality by whether or not they agree with us because we don't like the idea of siding with a character that isn't entirely good. But life isn't like that. People aren't like that. We're flawed, we make bad decisions, and there is never a perfect answer to the decisions we make. Yes, some choices will always be better than others, but sometimes things are so grey and murky that we can find support and fault in both sides. However, people don't like that. They want to be right, to be good, so they find what they align with most and claim that as the "correct" side, attacking those that disagree because if they don't side with you, then they must be morally inferior. And in all honestly, I think this has just gotten worse over time.

At the end of the day, not everything is black and white, and your understanding of flaws in a character does not mean that you agree with or support them. It can simply be a case of recognition. Things aren't as clear cut as we would like them to be, they are more complicated, and the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can appreciate just how rich some of these stories and characters can be.

[kyarbrougharts245-02]

Project One/Blog 3

The second week comes to a close and here arrives the third. Similar to last week’s reading, the topic revolves around grids. I will say I believe this week’s reading was much more comprehensive since the professor delved further into the topic of grids previously. The teachings even highlighted some interesting details outside of grids. To clarify, in class, we learned about orphan words and how they should typically be avoided. An orphan word is seen when a single word appears on a line, hanging from a body of text. 

Good practice is to keep lines above 6 words as stated by the instructor. However, on the very first page of the assigned reading, I caught sight of an orphan word at the page’s bottom right:

“...side a is to side b as side b is to the sum of both 

sides. Expressed numerically, the golden section is 

1: 1.618.” (138, Lupton)

I’ll admit, I think the placement of “1: 1.618” is odd. It took me a little while to connect the ratio at the end of the sentence. I found myself looking around the page, even scrolling up to the top and down to the bottom in an attempt to find the missing piece. I find it all a little interesting. The course is slowly making sense and I’m starting to see this information through a different perspective.

On the topic of different perspectives, both the reading and the course lesson helped me differentiate the grids found in everyday media, specifically newspapers. As I’ve stated in the last two blogs, I feel like I subconsciously understood the types of grids seen in graphic design (and additionally which details differentiated each from one another), however, I just could not put an appropriate label to them. I now know from both the class and the reading that some of the more common grids we see are modular, experimental grids, column grids, etc. 

One last thing I’d like to mention about the reading relates back to the first page. It introduces the ratio relationship used in Graphic Design, titled the Golden Section. I found the introduction a little challenging—perhaps that could be due to the fact I’m not the biggest fan of math in general. Numbers and theories can be very icky! I was initially confused by the golden section’s formula and I didn’t find the written description any more helpful. To be honest, I think I’m still a little lost on the concept. However, I’m sure if I found another way to break the information down, I could grasp the formula a bit easier.

I’ve always struggled with conceptual learning regarding math. Give me a numerical problem, but God forbid you include word problems. Physics showed me just how draining the whole math process can get when outside forces like Gravity or velocity are included. 

Let’s steer away from math. It’s too late to be thinking about numbers unless it’s the numbers on the clock. And if that’s the case, let’s hope it’s not 12 at night. 

To end on a cheerful note, my Nine Squares project is finished. Happy day it is! I’m positively kicking my feet and prancing around with joy! The stress I felt after staying up to 2:45 am fooling around with that thing has now been alleviated. It was literally like a weight had been taken off my shoulders!

However, there’s no need to bash this project too harshly. As tedious as I found the cutting to be, finding different colored papers and cutting precise shapes with them has sparked some ideas for future personal projects. I’d be lying if I said I had tossed the Exacto blade in the garbage without a second thought already. 

I mostly enjoyed cutting text from the colored paper and placing it on a hard black background, as seen in my last square. Perhaps it's the shade of red I chose or the dynamic type found in the original title, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. I could see myself doing something more with that specific craft. For now, I’m envisioning little experiments in my sketch before I ever try something like this project again.

On the plus side, when I showed my project to my mom, she told me she preferred that style of art compared to my more customary drawings of dragons, dinosaurs, and other fantastical creatures. She said it was more readable to her which I found quite surprising as my taste revolves around fantasy. My favorite works come from French concept artist Nico Marlet who is known for his time with Dreamworks, specifically How To Train Your Dragon. I’m sure you can see why I would like him so much. 

That being said, my mother opened my eyes and I realized that if she was interested in art that resembled something like my Nine Square Project then I could utilize the skill to potentially craft an artwork as a birthday present.

[elopez7228]

Scenic Route 22/47

Read on AO3 : https://archiveofourown.org/works/18268208/chapters/43229774 

Start over : https://elopez7228.tumblr.com/post/620919089893933056/scenic-route-0147

***

"What does that give us?" Leia asked, looking over Rose's shoulder as she typed.

They were working in what could only be called a basement. Daylight crept through a dusty air vent, struggling to illuminate the room. Inside sat several tables, all of which were covered with some combination of food containers, dossiers, loose leaf papers and computer equipment.

A third member, a thirty-something blonde woman named Kaydel Connix, was perched on the used antique sofa on the opposite side of the room. Every now and then she took a sip from a can of Dr. Pepper.

“Not bad,” Rose replied. “Our videos generated some buzz online but the articles weren’t too widely shared. Ecology did a blog post on the First Order’s building projects which was picked up by WWF and Greenpeace. It was shared on Twitter a couple thousand times including by a few celebrities. But that’s not enough. The donation petition circling among university faculty will only give us ten or twenty thousand dollars at most. It’ll barely be enough to cover litigation costs if the plan falls through.”

“We will win,” Leia assured her, placing a firm hand on her shoulder. “And when we do, the damages that FORCE will be responsible for will easily cost millions, believe me.”

Rose turned to face her aging mentor. “Leia, what if we don’t make it this time?”

Leia resisted the urge to answer indirectly, preferably with a metaphor. She could tell that Rose needed something more, a moment of honesty from the heart. She closed her eyes briefly, centering herself.

“Then we start over, we seek allies elsewhere. We are the spark of hope, that will light the fire, that will burn the First Order down.”

Rose nodded, pursing her lips. The stakes were high. All their forces had been on the ground for months, setting the stage for the ultimate blow that would take this multinational corporation down. They were everywhere: reaching out to PR personnel, leading demonstrations in the streets, blasting their message on social media, speaking to local officials, and even doing international relations. Their entire strategy rested on the element of surprise and the high volume of media attention that the results of the trial would achieve. If the chain of events faltered even slightly, FORCE would have an unequivocal victory.

But as the big day approached, their little band of rebels looked ever weaker.

Their secret informant and metaphorical  coal mine canary, Galen Erso, risked his livelihood every day. His true identity was only known by the Skywalkers and their lawyer, Amilyn. He was at the mercy of Hux and Phasma. They ran a tight ship; Lord knew what means they had to control every aspect of operations within the First Order. They could have already decided to monitor his every move for suspicious activity.

The Earth Soldiers legal team, led by Amilyn, also consisted of Larma D’Acy and Gial Ackbar, who along with their assistants and paralegals formed a team of twenty four. In addition, a small army of volunteers around the United States formed the basis of their campaign. It was absolutely imperative that all eyes were on the California Supreme Court in San Francisco as the verdict came out. Leia and Rose were the primary mouthpieces in the media, appearing publicly to attract large crowds.

The final piece of their plan relied on the incriminating contents of a micro-SD chip that would once and for all obliterate the credibility of the First Order. It was currently in the hands of an English tourist, who had just finished taking a proper bath and playing fetch with a small orange dog.

“What about the documents?” Rose sighed in frustration. “Are you sure this girl is going to deliver them in one piece, on time? What if she misplaces them or something?”

“We’re definitely taking a risk here. But she doesn’t seem to have any ulterior motives. All she wants to do is to get from point A to point B. The rest is up to her, and honestly her lack of itinerary is perfect for avoiding traps.”

“But..what if Kylo and his cult are on to her? That haven’t returned to the headquarters in a while, have they?”

“They’re always on the field, just out of sight. They can interrogate her all they want, it’s perfectly safe. She knows absolutely nothing.”

“Safe, even for her?”

Leia’s face fell for a moment. She had picked this girl out herself. A troubled young woman who had trusted her easily, who had jumped so readily at the task. But she had been surrounded by Kylo’s team for days now, which was worrisome indeed.

Kylo had a reputation for being cold and shrewd—he could very well decide to end this little game of hide-and-seek by robbing the girl blind and leaving her on the side of the highway—or worse yet, in a ditch. Even if he didn’t realize  what she happened to be carrying, he could easily ensure that none of it arrived in one piece.  

Rose (ever the realist) wondered why he hadn’t done so already.

Deep inside, Leia felt a gnawing pant of guilt: she had thrown this innocent girl to the wolves. Whatever happened, it was her responsibility now. But whether out of naïveté or foolhardiness, she chose to ignore the direst possibilities.

She carried on as though both the girl and the micro-SD were going to arrive unscathed—she had no room for error.

Rose held no such convictions, and it occurred to the young woman that Leia, mother of the infamous Kylo Ren, could never truly imagine the horrors that her own son was capable of. Did she still think of him as the awkward child that she often sang to sleep? How long could she keep living in denial? Kylo worked for FORCE, for Snoke and Hux. He had chosen his side. He had turned his back on the shining enterprise built by his ancestors in favor of fame and fortune, accusing his mother of being a miserly harpie.

Ironically, Rose was sure that Armitage Hux or Syed Ren would agree with her assessment: the compassion, nay, the complacency, Kylo had shown when it came to Rey was beyond comprehension.

Did they suspect she was an Earth Soldiers operative? It would be easy enough to get her alone and talking. Perhaps they would even resort to more aggressive tactics if necessary.

What if they saw her as no more than a diversion? They could make sure she had a healthy fear of their field agents, catch-and-release style.

If the evidence was anything to go by, Rose suspected that the great Kylo Ren was in love. And he was capable of anything.

Hux remained silent as Syed went over the details of her proposal over the phone. He certainly had a card to play now—but which one?

He had known Ben Solo since university, almost back before he rejected his name in favor of Kylo Ren. But their relationship had always been volatile.

Armitage, despite being the son of a reputable military officer, had been forced to juggle multiple jobs to pay for a potion of his studies. It was humiliating, but his father was convinced that it was necessary to “build character”. His assigned roommate was a large, melancholic oaf, the preppy sort with a family inheritance and whatnot. An inheritance which was promptly spent by the boy’s parents on charity and frivolous ideas of changing the world.

Kylo lost his father—a subject he rarely discussed—and was raised in part by his uncle as well as his own mother, who served in the military. An outsider for the most part, he got in to Harvard thanks to the goodwill (or rather the strong will) of the new head of the Skywalker family enterprise. His mother’s last name, synonymous with his grandfather’s legacy, opened many doors for him.

Personally, Armitage had always wondered what debt Snoke was keen on repaying the Skywalker family by graciously taking their problem child under his wing.

The difference between the two classmates was clear from the start. Ben Solo hated his family’s lack of interest in his life, all while still profiting off of the success of the glorious Skywalker enterprise to pay for his studies. Meanwhile, Hux worked in various service jobs, cleaning floors, stocking shelves, and working behind restaurant counters to pay for food, rent, and various educational expenses.

They walked the line between friendship and enmity. Some days they were drinking buddies, other times they competed for the attention of girls, or for academic recognition among their peers and professors. No doubt they compared test scores.

Harvard diploma in hand, Hux was ecstatic to start working as a financial manager for the First Order. Snoke, at the very least, recognized his competence and his intrinsic value. But Ben Solo—now insisting on the title Kylo Ren like the capricious bastard he was—was almost immediately promoted to Director of Operations. A highly prestigious post that not only put him outside of Hux’s chain of command, and gave him nearly absolute freedom on the field.

Once more, Kylo Ren’s accursed heritage guaranteed him a better place, one that Hux deserved but could never hope to achieve despite his hard work.

Presently, FORCE hoped to generate massive revenue from a mine in the northern regions of Hoopa Valley. On paper, they would be mining for iron ore buried deep underground while producing thousands of jobs in the region. Behind the scenes it was all Hux’s team: they kept the corruption under wraps, signed deals with local providers, and privately represented FORCE in every dealing. But of course it was always Kylo Fucking Ren who appeared publicly before the cameras, with his wind-swept hair and cool-guy demeanor.  

Once again, it was Hux who had to face criticism and take the insurmountable legal risks when the matter was dragged into court, all while Ren continued to receive honors and congratulations.

But Snoke wouldn’t remain president forever. He was old and ailing, his liver jaundiced and his lungs weak from pulmonary disease. Following his termination, and the success of this mine, Hux’s achievements would eclipse the old brute, not to mention that of the prodigal son, Ben Solo-Skywalker, whose heritage would be annihilated.

Ben was a go-getter, as passionate as he was brutal. He detested strategy and calculation, preferring to jump directly  into the fray. It would be easy to clip his wings when Hux assumed total control.

In fact, Hux now had the perfect justification. Kylo had committed a grave error in his most recent bout of passion: he was enamored with this nomadic girl, and according to  Syed Ren, he would do anything for her.

He would lose everything.

“Syed, are you still there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for the intel. The photos were a particularly nice touch. I never doubted your loyalty, or your competence.”

Syed waited silently for Hux to gather his thoughts.

“Kylo Ren’s mission,” he continued, “is to determine Rey Jakku’s relationship with Earth Soldiers, and take action accordingly. Are you certain, after a mere seventy-two hours, that there is no connection?”

“Absolutely, sir. The girl is a diversion, driving the Millenium Falcon around to attract our attention while Skywalker’s team is plotting. We’re wasting time.”

“And did you inform Kylo Ren of your findings?”

“Yes. He chose not to take my advice.”

Hux closed his eyes, pausing. It was time to risk it all. While the loyalty of the Knights of Ren had proven unquestionable in the past, Syed Ren seemed to have a very exploitable weakness in the form of hate and jealousy.

“Who do you work for, Syed Ren?”

She hesitated, looking for a trap in his words. The answer seemed obvious but she struggled with it. “For Kylo Ren, sir.”

“Really, are you on his payroll, then?”

“Yeah...well—no! No, I work for FORCE. I work for you, sir.”

“Very well. Now I propose a new mission, one which will determine the very future of FORCE.”

“I don’t know if...”

“You don’t have to decide now. Just hear me out, and do what you like.”

“Okay. I’m...I’m listening.”

A few minutes later, Hux hung up. He ran a hand through his hair, his tell-tale sign of nervousness. If everything went to plan, if Syed Ren was as bitter and blinded by rage as he hoped, perhaps she would finally turn on her master and her precious acolyte friends. She would work for him—he had promised her money, a veritable fortune, but most of all, a chance to exact her revenge upon Kylo Ren. She would be able to smite him for rejecting her and turning her into an unwilling babysitter.

Her wrath would be glorious.

[karenpage]

1!!!!!!! For the prompt!

1. “We’re not just friends and you fucking know it. 

It’s cold in January, wet cold, the kind cold that has Karen Page clutching her coffee like a lifeline to her numb fingertips. Anything to thaw out as she stands with snow melting into puddles at her feet, in the hallway outside of Ellison’s office. She’s started staking him out every day - in between meetings, editorial reviews, and even at his favorite hot dog stand. You’re stalking me, he pointed out a handful of times, only to be met by Karen listing the practicalities of giving her her job back (and she has not nor will she ever take ‘no’ for an answer).

They settle someplace in the middle. Compromise, it’s called, where Karen will be a freelance journalist and provide the Bulletin with pieces that come from her and are run as an advocate for the independent New Yorker’s voice.

But, he’d lifted his finger up to tone down her giddy, delighted outburst, you have to run a piece on Frank Castle, an honest one.

There’s no shortage of suspicion, edged under the rim of his glasses or how he sees Karen, really and truly sees her - until she’s forced to reluctantly concede.

So that’s where she is now, sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed with only the title of ‘He’s not who they say he is’ and a long, blank page beneath it mocking her.

How does she begin to quantify her relationship with Frank? Does she start from the beginning? How and where she knew she could trust the man every media outlet painted as a monster?

Karen’s fears are rooted in selfishness; what will people think of her, if they knew. If they knew that she smiled at him, bruised and bloody. If they knew that he’d used his body as a shield from bullets, and she’d held on just a little bit longer than necessary. If they knew she cried when the roses started to wilt or when setting them on her window sill became a melancholic habit, knowing he wouldn’t call.

She slams her laptop shut, the glow of the screen had been the only source of light in her room, leaving Karen staring into the abyss like it might provide inspiration. Pretending that even now, her broken heart doesn’t cast a shadow in the dark.

This is her chance to get back into Ellison’s good graces and she’s not going to martyr herself over it. It’s just an article. She’s written a thousand of them about a thousand different people and it didn’t matter then, so why does it now?

Frank’s the one who is gone. She doesn’t owe him her silence after a year of his.

Karen grabs a beer from her fridge, brings her laptop into the living room, and gets to typing. It doesn’t have to be an extensive expose, the nitty-gritty details can be glossed over. The public wouldn’t care if she tweaked some things, painted Frank as a friend she needed, not necessarily as one she chose.

It’s a lie. A column’s worth of it. But by the time six A.M rolls around, Karen’s done. She stares at what she’s just written, neatly packaged as an attachment in the email sent to the Bulletin’s newest editor, and feels nothing like the thrill she’d had, bringing down scandals, exposing criminals, doing right by the downtrodden and exacting justice onto the cruel. It’s the least excited she’s ever been to see her byline and knows that Ellison won’t believe a word of it anyway.

But it’s her shot to reintroduce normalcy into her life and at this point, Karen is desperate to have a routine.

She’s mad at Frank, Karen realized the moment she pressed send. And somehow, admitting that to herself in the cold, dim light of dawn, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She’s sobbing on her couch, big and ugly, gasps ripped out of her throat and tears so thick she can’t see, can’t blink them away. They’re like tar. Keeping all the hurt inside has rotted her, and she’d done it for so long. For everything. For everyone.

Locked away Ben, Daniel, Kevin, even James Wesley. There’s so much she should have written about. So much she should have said.

Maybe tell the world that Frank Castle had kissed her cheek, that he’d pleaded with her with a broken voice, haunted by all he’d already lost, that he couldn’t lose her too. She’d called him a friend, and what’s worse, she’d written like it was … an anecdote. Not something, or someone, who’d kept her going through the worst of it. When the world had been the cold steel of a bomb at her back, and Frank had come for her.

It’s pulling venom from a wound, too long left neglected.

Karen cries and cries until it’s noon and the only thing she has to show for a morning well spent is red, puffy eyes and a raging migraine. Two painkillers washed down the remainder of last night’s beer, and she opens her laptop right back up, squinting until she fumbles to turn the brightness down.

She’d write something real, this time. It wouldn’t be for the public, it isn’t something constructed for accolades or clout. It’s … a diary, maybe. An autobiographical apology to everyone she’s let down and hoping that letting out this ache, venting it, might keep her from falling to pieces entirely.

Karen spends the next twelve hours writing nonstop. The blur of her fingers over the keys fades into the backdrop, she doesn’t stop to eat or drink, she doesn’t even edit grammatical mistakes that sit there, underlined in red.

It starts with Kevin. And it ends with Frank.

She falls asleep holding the still-warm computer to her chest. No concept of what time it is, or what she’d even written, only the satisfaction in knowing she’d actually said something she meant, regardless of whether or not anyone ever saw a word of it.

Karen wakes up to wind rushing across her living room, bringing with it the bone-chill of winter in Hell’s Kitchen - she’s frazzled, disoriented - she could swear up and down that she’d closed that window last night long before she’d drifted off.

When she stands to close it, however, there’s a shadow standing in the hall, and Karen freezes until the headlights of a passing car illuminate him.

Frank.

“Jesus,” her hand falls to her chest, heart pounding underneath it. “I have a front door, you know. With a doorbell. It works and everything.” Karen’s go-to defense mechanism; dry humor. Pretending that the sight of him doesn’t spring tears to her eyes (when she’d made the mistake of thinking she’d cried them all away). She’s already turned towards the kitchen - it’s still dark out, so grabbing another beer can hardly hurt.

He’s got something in his hand, it’s – a newspaper? His fingers are fisted around it, knuckles white and he’s breathing like he’d just run a marathon to get here, eyes wild, unfocused, far away.

“What’s that –?” trailing off, she points to the paper with her beer before twisting the cap off and padding her way back to the couch on socked feet.

Her phone is dead, fantastic, and she’s immediately distracted by the hunt for her charger cable, plugging it into her laptop with a victorious sound. Frank hasn’t moved, and she’s doing just about everything she can to ignore him. Out of spite, fear, or guilt, Karen hasn’t decided.

When her phone powers on, Karen frowns at the screen - it’s not tomorrow, it’s tomorrow’s tomorrow. Evidently, her writing catharsis had been more like a coma and she’d slept for twenty-six hours. No wonder she’s in a fog.

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it.”

“—what?”

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it,” Frank says, slower, through his teeth. Like he’s… Like he’s mad at her for not understanding the first time around. She blinks owlishly at him, surprised by the sudden display of rage.

He throws the newspaper at her, opened up to page four and wrinkled to hell but - she makes out the article Ellison had run. She smiles sleepily at her byline – it’d been a wild forty-eight hours – and then her brows furrow as comprehension settles in and then it’s a punch to the get when she realizes what he said.

“Frank I–”

He’s pacing. Hands shoved into the shallow pockets of his windbreaker and jaw tight (the muscle in it jumps, flexing every time he rotates to pace the other way).

“That what you think of me, Karen? Just… some schmuck who came into your life an’ sure, maybe I saved it a couple’a times but it’s just par for the fuckin’ course for our friendship?” The last word catches on his teeth, broken, and it breaks Karen just a little bit too.

She stumbles up, hand on the edge of her couch while her feet slide against the hardwood floor. It might be a comical sight, under any other set of circumstances, but as it stands, it just makes Karen look every inch of the fool she felt then, “You know - you know that’s not what I think about you, Frank. You should know me better than that.” It’s hollow, and Frank barks a humorless laugh.

That just makes Karen angry.

“You left.” Interjected, stiff upper lip and all, “-you – you left without a word, Frank. Gone. I had to reach out to Agent Madani just to hear that you’d been granted some leeway by the CIA and homeland … I was … I thought you were dead.” Her resolve is wavering, the words tremble at the end, betraying the false front of her composure.

Frank’s fingers twitch at his side, but he doesn’t reach out to her. Doesn’t speak. He hangs his head a bit, tilted towards her so she knows he’s still listening.

Her eyes glance, briefly (and treacherously) towards the roses, half-dead on the ledge of her window and she hopes he didn’t notice. But he does. Of course, he does. He’s Frank, and he draws in a staggered breath before speaking.

“Karen… the dust settled an’ I was.. I needed time, alright? You’re right I shoulda… shoulda called, maybe yeah.. And I sure as shit didn’t expect you to wait for me, some Jane Doe with her man out to war but.. This?” his voice is that low, steady thunder that makes her toes curl and her heart stop, but Karen can only continue to let the tears fall down her cheeks in silence. He picks up the article, crumples it in his fist, “I have killed for you. Nearly died for you. I’m not just your fuckin’ friend,” Frank means it to sound stalwart, but in the context, it just comes across like: please.

“What – what more do I gotta do to show you, Kar? I” His adams apple bobs, rough as sandpaper but he’s asking her, the honesty of it makes him tremble. He’s afraid of her answer.

“Stay.” and that’s the core of it. He left her. He always left and most of the time it’s alright because she knew he had to but he’d been safe. They could have been, safe, and he’d been gone all the same so she doesn’t have a solution at the ready. She just wants him to – “stay, Frank. Please.”

Frank takes one step forward, hesitating before the next. And after a few more tense moments of this swaying in the space between them, he closes the distance and wraps her up in his arms, only to find out that she too, is shaking.

“You know I can’t,” at her ear, a frantic whisper but in it is a desperation that she has to hear, has to know. “Not all of the time but I will… I’ll stay, an’ when I can’t, when I gotta go I’ll come back to you - if you want me. If you want me here I’ll be here, Karen.” He pulls back because she’s not speaking, there’s doubt cut into the crease of her brow. A sadness in her eyes that he’d put there and is kicking himself for it.

Frank reaches under the collar of his shirt, pulls a silver chain over his head and slips it over Karen’s wordlessly, his thumb sweeping the raised letters on the dog tag that comes to rest just beneath her collarbone. “I’m makin’ a promise to you, Miss Page. I still got things.. Loose ends.. I might need time an’ shit but I will always come back for you.”

[sfivcs]

IC2019: The Failed Experiment of IDIC Con.

Before I launch into my tirade, I wanted to put some links together for you all with respect to the Periscope streams that I did for IC2019:

- IC2019 Opening Ceremonies: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1djxXplDlMVxZ - IC2019 General Session: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1OyKApVvYYNxb - IC2019 Meet the Candidates: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1BdxYAygXpyxX - IC2019 Marine Muster: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1LyxBAqwdjYJN - IC2019 Academy Panel: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1OdKrvzgrVeKX - IC2019 Final Mission: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1MnxnvpaOdLxO - IC2019 Closing Ceremonies: https://www.pscp.tv/SFIVCS/1BRJjvZvpggJw

I know it wasn’t as much coverage as IC2018 and for that I apologize.  I, along with Dan & Melissa Toole, Linda & David Kloempken, Lucy Franck, Theresa Bristow, Melissa Comeau, Jessie Single, Connie Franklin, Gru, David Goldsberry, and a few others (apologies to those I missed) were busy trying to ensure that the IC actually happened.  I streamed what I could for the members who couldn’t attend, and I chose the most relevant panels... but I could only be in one place and any given time.

Also, there were those who supported the IC from afar with logistical and technical support: Mary Kane, Tony Knopes, Linda Olson, Greg Mortensen. Btw, my profuse thanks to all those who attended or supported IC this year.  I only wish I had a few more weeks to market and get more people to come out.

Note that this will be the last time that I’ll be streaming IC from Periscope.  This, along with all the other social media accounts for the Office of the VCS will be turned over to either Theresa Bristow or Jim Herring, depending on who wins the election in November.  It is my sincere hope that they will both lean into social media at the same levels that I have.

Let’s dive into IC2019′s post-mortem, after the jump.

Positives out of IC2019 include:

- In times of crisis, STARFLEET really pulls together.  I’ve seen it time and time again in the past, but nothing quite reminds you strongly of the sense of family when the chips are down and you need help.  The most positive aspect of this year’s IC was that we inadvertently formed an all-star team of IC staff. - Within a few short weeks since taking over the event, we managed to sell 25 supporting memberships, 19 weekend memberships, and 6 Saturday memberships.  All told, the new website and registration system took in almost $3k to support IC2019. - The auction further raised another grand toward supporting the IC. - For the first time in IC history, STARFLEET was able to show licensed films with full studio permission (thanks to our friends at The Royal Manticoran Navy).  We showed Trek films, Babylon 5, and Avengers: Endgame! - Our Marketing & Branding Department kicked off the 45th Anniversary branding campaign (more on that in an upcoming post). - As with previous ICs, friends (old and new) discussed Star Trek fandom, plans for the next fiscal year within our organization, and came away filled with purpose.

So, in spite of it all... the fleet came together once more.

That’s great... but, what the hell happened?

Often times you’ll get a group of people together to try something new with the IC formula.  I think this comes from a sense of ego/pride; that they can try to do better than the previous... which isn’t a bad thing.  We should always look to improve on our concepts and adapt to the times.  STARFLEET is notoriously poor at embracing the new and recognizing obsolescence.

However, events like the International Conference are successful because attendees have a certain set of expectations.  We have core components of an IC that are now looked for every year:

- Workshops and Panels on topics of interest to members. - Meal-based events like the Marine Mess and the Admiralty Banquet - The Annual General Session, where we acknowledge our growth and listen to reports from the Executive Committee. - The meeting of the Admiralty Board and Executive Committee, to set the agenda for the coming year. - Opening & Closing Ceremonies.

In 2019, the formula seemed to be wrapping in the concept of a full-blown convention setting called IDIC Con.

Obviously, upon my early arrival, I set upon trying to find out what happened.  I spoke directly with members, hotel staff, and vendors.  The overall picture seems to be that the previous CS was sold on the idea of kick-starting a brand new “mini comic-con” on our dime.  Unfortunately, circumstances led to that being an outright failure and those involved stepped down, one by one, until the burden was too much for those remaining and the whole thing collapsed.

Roughly five weeks out from IC, Dan and I had no choice but to step up and take control of the rudderless ship and try to salvage what we could.  I personally feel that without Dan’s personal leadership, we would be in far worse shape than we were.  I can safely say that both of us lost a lot of sleep on this, in between working our full-time jobs and working phones and social media to turn things around.

In the course of setting this up, however, they booked nearly the entire ground floor of the hotel. Roughly 30k square feet of space was set aside for this event; far more space than was necessary.  At the actual IC, we did our best to utilize the space, but we gave up about 40% of the rooms.  And yes, that was money wasted as a result.

The measure of our success lays with those who attended.  So far, the positive feedback outweighed the negative.

Lessons Learned

And let’s be clear that what I’m about to say is common sense.  Hindsight being what it is, I’m sure that the adjustments we need to make are going to seem obvious.

- Improve Communication: IC teams/committees need to not be so passive with information.  IC2018 was a great example of a team that kept up their regular reports, gave us a sense of confidence that the event was progressing and coming together nicely.  I never once had a doubt about Minneapolis.  On the opposite end, the EC should be reaching out more often for information. - Update Bid Guidelines: We need to do a comprehensive review of the current bid guide.  This is already in progress, in discussion with some of the past successful IC chairs providing input on improvements. - Protect STARFLEET Financially: We’re looking into some legal and financial shields for STARFLEET, if this should ever happen again in spite of changes made.  Right now, some of those ideas are in the earliest stages of formation, so I’ll refrain from commenting too much.  But that leads me into the next point: - Improve Oversight: Many members came up to me and asked me about this, because it seems like this is a no-brainer.  We should use the above to refine and improve our oversight of the IC.  I feel that in updating the Bid Guidelines, we should cover this point as well.

Keep it Simple: Future administrations should be wary of any plans involving a brand new convention to be started alongside any IC.  As I said above, ICs have a particular core value to the membership in terms of it being an annual party to celebrate our organization and highlight all the positives STARFLEET has achieved in the previous twelve (or so) months.  Adding the stress of starting a new event on top of IC requires a lot more manpower than most IC committees have access to.  Thusly, you get encumbered by the demands of ambition and the result is something along the lines of the failed IDIC Con.  But, that failure is at the expense of the members’ dues.  In my opinion, that was an unacceptable risk.  The members are now paying for the pride and ego of IDIC Con’s concomm... and they all bailed out of the event with mere weeks to go before the first member touched down in St. Louis.

The final lesson is that we should also provide contingencies in case we have a full burnout of the IC team as we did this year.  Some kind of response team that has been keeping tabs and stands ready to step in and take over with little to no notice.  This response team should shadow their counterparts closely each step of the way, and perhaps also act as an alternate if/when it’s necessary to take on those duties when RL shifts attention away.

After having said all of the above, this begs an obvious question (that’s been asked already several times):

IC2020: But this is another convention, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.  But, I feel that BayCon has a longevity that IDIC Con never had.  Also, there’s a clear division of labor next year.  BayCon’s staff will be tending to the convention side, while the STARFLEET team shall be tending to the IC side of the programming and event schedule.  You won’t have to have the same group of people trying to manage an IC while at the same time trying to run a public convention.

Lastly, our buy-in will provide a salve to the hit being taken on by the General Fund this year.  We’re being provided facilities and programming at next-to-no cost to the organization.

Pick up your memberships now!  The $55 membership is only available until the end of August 2019: http://ic.sfi.org/2020reg

See you in San Francisco!

[nemesis-nexus]

Memorial Day Sermon

On Behalf Of Myself,

The Ancient Church of God,

The Temple Of The Ancient Dragon

And The Temple Of The Eternal Dragon:

THANK YOU! THANK YOU TO ALL THOSE WHO FOUGHT AND DIED OR WHO CONTINUE TO FIGHT TO THIS DAY BECAUSE YOU CARED ABOUT SOMETHING MORE THAN YOURSELVES AND YOU WERE WILLING TO GIVE IT ALL TO PROTECT US ALL - THANK YOU!!!

AVÉ NINHURSAG, Blessed Mother, Creattix and Overseer, Hear Us! Memorial Day is a time when we remember those who fought and died for us who are put their lives on the line to protect and defend what they love and millions of people who they will never meet! On this day many people have gatherings, barbecues and talk about family and friends who are overseas or stationed stateside but in another area regaling one another with stories from the past and even some shared by the Soldiers when they had a leave or during a phone call.

This day should never be seen as just another excuse to have a bbq or drink beer because had it not been for those who enlisted those who DO regard it are actively DISregarding the whole reason for the day in the first place. Were it not for the sacrifice being made by all those who are fighting overseas we would not have a country which, even though it's not perfect and we are going through our own struggles at this time, they call home because it would have been torn asunder by all those who would like nothing more than to see that happen!

There are unfortunately those who think the ONLY people who join the military - regardless of branch - ONLY do so because they don't care about human life, that war is a game to them and the way to win is to rack up the body count. Not only is this an INSULT to EVERYONE who fought honorably and was there to bear witness to the deaths of many other soldiers, it is ARROGANT beyond comprehension! To all those who think this I invite them to go to ANY warzone (I recommend North Korea or Syria) and implement their obviously better ideas and see how far they get with a conversation!

WAR IS HELL and no soldier in their right mind WANTS to fight let alone KILL, unfortunately when you are up against an enemy who is willing to blow themselves up and as many others as they can take with them, they don't have much of a choice! I am SICK AND TIRED of seeing these memes on social media that shows how many people were killed by a US bomber yet NOT ONE of these ignorant bastards who create this bullshit has it in them to do a death tally on how many people are slaughtered by suicide bombers IN THE SAME AREA! What about those who are willing to BURN PEOPLE ALIVE?? Not a PEEP out of the meme makers! Apparently the reality of WAR is lost on some people!

The fact is MANY of the soldiers who have been deployed and have seen combat CAN NOT get the images out of their heads which is why when they come home MANY of them suffer from all manner of emotional issues including SEVERE Depression, Anxiety, Stress, PTSD and quite a few of them take their own lives as a result! Those who think soldiers are androids make me sick and the worst part is that MOST of them are work for the government!

This day serves as a reminder not only of those who never made it back, it ALSO serves as a reminder that we need to HONOR those who do and do everything we can to help them transition back to civilian life!

When our soldiers come home and are then EVICTED from their homes - THIS IS INEXCUSABLE!

When they have to wait for OUTRAGEOUS lengths of time JUST to be seen by a doctor - this is REPREHENSIBLE!

When they are treated with complete disregard in terms of taking their firearms away citing that a soldier returning from war can NOT be trusted with them yet the same maggots who say this also vote AGAINST there being a psych check for CIVILIANS to be able to purchase a gun of ANY caliber - THIS IS BEYOND DISHONOR!!

Our soldiers have enough stress to deal with JUST being soldiers in a combat situation they DO NOT need to come back here only to find that everything they fought for on everyone else's behalf is GONE for them!

We need to have the banks put a lock on the mortgage or rent of the home that soldier lived in so that when they come back their home is STILL THERE!

Our soldiers coming home may have their issues to deal with but this is EXACTLY the reason why we need to have VA hospitals that are UP TO CODE to take care of them no matter what the issue they are facing is! No more of this waiting game BULLSHIT - too many soldiers have DIED as a result!

We need to have psychiatrists on the ready to work with all those returning because as mentioned before most come back with severe depression, stress and suicidal tendencies and they need to have an outlet in which to work through these things!

We need to have job training for those returning to Civilian life so that they are able to refocus their attention onto something other than what may be plaguing their thoughts!

All of these things when applied mutually may not save everyone but after what our soldiers were willing to do for US, helping them find their way back HOME is the very least we can do! This Memorial Day make it a point to thank a soldier for their sacrifice, keep in mind that JUST because the body is here does NOT mean that the mind or the spirit is and they need to be reminded that we have NOT forgotten THEM or what they went through to protect US!

So while you are out there with your family and friends, make sure to set a place at the table with an empty seat to show respect to that soldier who will NEVER AGAIN partake in such an activity with THEIR family and friends because that made the ULTIMATE sacrifice so that we wouldn't have to!

***ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL!***

RESPECT!

"Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the flowers gone?

Girls have picked them every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the young girls gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the young girls gone?

Taken husbands every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the young men gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the young men gone?

Gone for soldiers every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Covered with flowers every one

When will we ever learn?

When will we ever learn?"

-Peter Seeger

"In Darkness we are born,

To Darkness we shall return!

In the Middle Space of Above and Below,

The Dragons Heart Doth Burn!

From Stardust we are molded,

Dragons Blood in our veins!

The Waters of Life carry us through,

Until Stardust is again all that remains!

The Dragons are always alert and ready,

Ever observing, their movements never stall!

They will fight with all due ferocity,

Until the enemy doth fall!

AVÉ NINGIZHEDA OVERSEER OF THE BALANCE AND THE CLOCK!

ON HIS THRONE FOR GENERATIONS UNKNOWN

HE IS SEATED AT THE PRECIPICE OF RAGNAROK!

As the Body Earth suspended turns,

The Mighty Wind above doth blow,

The Fire inside vigorously churns,

While the Waters of the Abzu flow!

The Spirit is the strength of the Soul,

It provides reason to the rhyme!

No matter what conflicts we face in life,

We will overcome them every time!

We'll never understand or know everything,

It is the learning that makes life worth living!

As our research progresses and we find out more,

We share with those closest to us as knowledge is the gift that keeps on giving!

Our Deity exalted on high is our beacon in the night,

No matter how rough things get we will never give up the fight!

Conflicts can take their toll leaving us unsure what to do,

When we face our pain, our grief, our strain, Ningishzida will always see us through!

So when you are walking your path and obstacles manifest,

Take comfort in knowing you are not alone

As you struggle with each and every test!

Remember always to thank those who pick up a gun and stand at post,

It is their selfless sacrifice which on this day we should remember most!

With steadfast loyalty and bravery they keep the enemy at bay,

For the duration of their tour they will do this every day!

Some of our finest soldiers will voluntarily venture back into it,

Not because they enjoy war but to stand side-by-side with their unit!

A Band of Sisters and Brothers, each having the others 6,

None will think twice nor will they play nice if they need to jump into the mix!

Coming home is the goal for soldiers of each and every kind,

But it's easier said than done when the war is still going on in your mind!

They need our understanding, our support and our love,

Hail the selfless Hero who puts everyone else above!

Father Satan we ask you to please open wide your Gate,

To let in all the Fallen who when duty called did not hesitate!

We humbly ask you to keep watch over the families of those who chose to roam,

To give them the courage, peace and hope

to take care of things at home!

The worst thing about war is not the destruction it's not knowing,

Whether or not you will meet again and keeping it from showing!

To our brave Soldiers who know all the dangers and go anyway,

We offer you our gratitude and respect on this Memorial Day!"

-Meg "Nemesis Nexus" Prentiss

ZI ANA KANPA! ZI KIA KANPA!

MAY THE DEAD RISE AND SMELL THE INSENCE!

AVÉ IGGIGI!

AVÉ ANUNNA!

AVÉ DRACONIS!

HAIL THE GREAT SERPENT!

HAIL THE ANCIENT FAMILY!

HPS Meg "Nemesis Nexus" Prentiss

[gyrlversion]

What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats

Joe Biden in Fullerton last October. Photo: Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media via Getty Images

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive: on foreign policy (supporting the Iraq War), social policy (his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill, harsh criminal-justice stances, opposition to school busing), and economic policy (support for the Reagan tax cut, balanced-budget fetishism). And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. Beginning in President Obama’s second term, important social movements began to burble out of the left and into American culture. Black Lives Matter helped drive criminal-justice reform to a point where even President Trump went along with a bill to shorten sentences for thousands of people in federal prison. The #MeToo movement highlighted workplace discrimination and sexual exploitation, exposing sexual predators in media, politics, and other commanding heights of culture. In just a couple of years, attitudes seemed to leap forward two generations.

And then, in an economic analogue to these social movements, the Sanders campaign sparked to life a socialist faction inside the Democratic Party. The influence of socialist thought can be seen in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, the latter of which argues that climate change demands a sweeping reorganization of the entire economy.

News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular. In a recent poll, just 10 percent of Americans held a positive opinion of socialism, and 29 percent said it is compatible with American values (against 57 percent saying otherwise). While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it’s only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

In the New York Times, Frank Bruni suggested that Biden’s “party can’t get enough of the word progressive, but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past.” Yet, according to another recent poll, it seems most Democrats can get enough of the word progressive and also are quite fond of the administration in which Biden served: When Democrats were offered a choice of different ideological labels, “socialist” and “democratic socialist” each drew 1 and 6 percent, respectively, and “progressive Democrat” got 5 percent. Sixteen percent of respondents chose “moderate Democrat,” and 20 percent of them picked “Obama Democrat.”

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. (Sanders ran up the vote in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma with many of the same conservative Democrats who had supported Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. Both times, they were registering protest votes against the party and its presumptive nominee. The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. Last year, a White House economic report hysterically announced, “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” as if, any day now, bands of bloodthirsty Marxist guerrillas might descend from the mountains. Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic. The conservative media would attack Ocasio-Cortez and her crew, who would rally their supporters to defend against the attacks. Both had an interest in portraying her as the Democratic Party’s true leader.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump’s gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country’s problems on a single party. But you can’t make a centrist message out of distancing yourself from one entire party and three members of the other party. To make the comfortable “both sides have gone too far” formulation work, the Democratic left flank had to be portrayed as a dominant force. “Liberals wondering why conservatives who worry about Trump don’t join the Democrats should consider what is happening on their own side of the aisle,” wrote anti-Trump conservative Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. “Progressivism is wrecking the Democratic Party even as crude populism and ethnic nationalism have (for now) wrecked the Republican Party.” This message formed the basis of the Howard Schultz campaign.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

But the ersatz polity of Twitter doesn’t represent the real world. Democrats on Twitter skew young and college educated. A study last month found that the Twitter-using portion of the Democratic electorate harbors far more progressive views on everything than the party’s voting base.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam’s resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

As the Democratic Party in 2019 begins to wake up to the fact that its intellectual and activist vanguard is deeply at odds with both its voting base and the vast majority of its elected officials, the politics of Washington and the 2020 primary are shifting in unexpected ways.

In Congress, Nancy Pelosi survived a campaign in which more than three dozen Democratic candidates, nearly all running in conservative or moderate districts, refused to endorse her for House Speaker. Pelosi, in turn, has embraced the large wing of newly elected centrists that gave her the majority. Pelosi has repeatedly dismissed Ocasio-Cortez and her peers as irrelevant.

“When we won this election, it wasn’t in districts like mine or Alexandria’s … But those are districts that are solidly Democratic. This glass of water,” she said at one event, hoisting a glass, “would win with a D next to its name in those districts.” In an interview, she repudiated socialism (“I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party”), and when asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, she replied, “That’s like five people.”

Pelosi keeps making this point so insistently and even rudely because, perhaps, the media have kept missing it. Only half of House Democrats support Medicare for All, and slightly fewer representatives support the Green New Deal. (Pelosi’s assessment of the latter — “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it” — summarized its very dim prospects.) Meanwhile, Pelosi has broken from the left on other high-profile controversies. She has refused to initiate impeachment hearings and held a vote condemning anti-Semitism following Ilhan Omar’s comments accusing Israel supporters of foreign allegiance.

When asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi replied, “That’s like five people.”

College-educated white Democratic voters have shown a growing concern about structural bias in American society: a transformation owed to social progressives, who tend to be the most skeptical about nominating a white man for president. To them, the struggle against racism and sexism correlates with a belief in increasing representation of women and people of color. Many Democratic voters, on the other hand, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. If racism and sexism are so endemic, they’ve decided, then beating Trump requires nominating a white man. “You’ll always hear, ‘There’s no way a woman can win this,’ and they go back to Hillary,” one voter told the Times. “Even among my female friends.”

Most of the party’s presidential candidates took the claims of the ascendant left at face value when they undertook their campaigns. Candidates like Harris, Booker, O’Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren designed their platforms as if they had to compete ideologically with Sanders. Several of them have already advocated Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, which could expose them to withering attacks from Trump if they win the nomination. Harris told an interviewer that, yes, she would do away with private health insurance. Julián Castro endorsed cash-payment reparations. Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand called for abolishing ICE, before backing off and saying they only wanted to reform it.

None of these plans stands a chance to pass Congress under the next president, even in the best-case scenario. All of them poll badly. (Medicare for All sounds popular until you tell people it means eliminating private insurance, at which point it grows unpopular.) The candidates seem to have overestimated how much left-wing policy voters actually demand. Democratic voters might be dissuaded from nominating their former vice-president if they hear more about his long record or if he repeats the undisciplined campaigning that led to defeats in both of his previous presidential campaigns. But it is already clear enough that he is supplying something much closer to what the party’s electorate wants than either the political media or the other candidates had assumed. A Democratic Party in which Biden is running away with a nomination simply cannot be the one that most people thought existed. Some of Harris’s advisers, the Times recently reported, are urging her to stop mollifying activists and embrace her prosecutorial past.

It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized. Corey Robin, a left-wing writer who has previously heralded the left’s impending takeover of the Democratic Party, recently conceded he may have miscalculated. “We have nothing like the organizational infrastructure, the party organization, the intellectual and ideological coherence, or political leadership we need,” he wrote. “I don’t see anything on the horizon like the cadre of ideologues and activists that made the New Deal or Reagan Revolution.”

The long-term question for the left is whether it can build a movement that can dominate in the real world, not just on Twitter and in some magazines. The short-term question is whether it can leverage what power it does have among activists and intellectuals without blowing up an election many Democrats see as an existential fight for the republic.

*This article appears in the May 13, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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[m00gle11]

Thoughts on art comps

I’ve been meaning to do some reflection on my comprehensive project and how it came into being, but it’s been hard to sit down and take the time to do it. Well, now I’m opting to do this instead of my homework, so here goes.

From my artist statement, because probably 2% of people actually read them when the show opened:

           My project consists of a single silkscreen print of an imaginary town, accompanied by a branching-path narrative "book," which takes the form of 45 individual digital prints. The screen print features a sprawling, densely layered beach suburbia. The illustrations feature details extracted from the larger screen print, which allows the viewer to closely inspect and make sense of the cityscape. I intend for both the large print and the print series to be visually overwhelming: in the screen print's miniscule detail, and in the print series' meandering layout, inviting viewers to get lost in this fictional world.         Much of my work stems from a nostalgia for the media from my childhood, particularly books, cartoons and video/computer games geared towards a young audience. This project is largely influenced by print and media from the 90s—in the textual style of gamebooks, which offer branching paths for the reader to decide on multiple possible endings, and in the visual style of 8-bit games, especially "Pokémon" and "The Oregon Trail.” There are many contemporary influences as well, including: children's television shows “Steven Universe,” “Arthur,” “The Aquabats! Super Show!” and more recently released, the role-playing computer game "Undertale," through its nostalgic 8-bit style and complex writing. Children's media in particular has a simplicity, security, and innocence that I try to emulate. There is a sense of magic in the imaginary, in creating a fantastic and dreamlike world cast in pastel colors and where animals humorously act as stand-ins for humans.             My illustrations are packed with detail and a sense of playfulness, likely inspired by the Where's Waldo? books. The density sets up an interactive experience for discovery by the viewer. Everything is drawn from imagination, however, there are many obscure cultural references. This town is rooted in my ideas of Americana and kitsch: plastic lawn flamingos, unconventionally decorative buildings, tropes such as a UFO abduction, etc. There is a certain charm to what may be considered tasteless, fanciful and overdone, and I draw attention to their irony: the symbol of the lawn flamingo is exaggerated into an existence far beyond its role of suburban decoration; the impractical, decorative giant donut on the roof falls without warning; and the UFO reveals an unexpected alien form.             My goal is to make art that elicits positive feelings by evoking senses of nostalgia and humor. The style and subject may be naive and childlike, but there are complexities that demand closer examination. In the print series, the writing can be absurd and non sequitur, at times shifting into a metanarrative. It asks the reader to consider ethical choices, although this rarely impacts any endings. There is tension between the 8-bit narrative text and the "cute," pleasant aesthetic of the images. None of the endings are overtly violent or gruesome; deaths are lightened, tamed, and made absurd enough to work with the overall whimsical tone. However, the writing challenges the notion that this is an idyllic utopia.

And so, that’s the concise version of what I’m about to say. I guess I’ll start by saying: I never intended to be an art major, or to seriously pursue art. I drew silly comics and made birthday cards for my friends, having always been a doodler, but I didn’t have access to any formal training. I didn’t have AP Art at my high school. I find it weird that other people do. 

I started my etsy my senior year in high school and did a variety of crafts for it that were largely unsuccessful. I experimented with a lot of different mediums, but I never really got good at any one thing. I see that now as my blessing—I love learning new skills and trying to grow as much as I can. 80% of what I do is self-taught. I’m actually pretty proud of that. I’m a designer-illustrator-printmaker-zinester-publisher(working on it)-sculptor(ish)-crafter-entrepreneur. Maybe a writer? (I definitely put that on the backburner—I knew I wanted to major in English and I was really interested in creative writing, but I never got the chance to take a class in it....) I feel like to be an artist these days it’s necessary to be multi-talented. Part of it is because I’m just trying to survive as an artist. Another part of it is I genuinely love finding ways to use my creativity and imagination. Another part of it is I care about accessible/affordable art and I don’t believe that selling thousand dollar works in a high-end gallery would ever make me happy.

The past few years have been a hell of a ride. I’ve been focusing on printmaking at school, working on comics, making tiny clay dogs, etc. And it just feels really weird to think of how much I’ve grown. I can’t pretend that it feels utterly bizarre and egoistic to call myself an artist sometimes. I’ve been really lucky though, and I know that I work really hard to do what I do.

I had the ambitious idea to do a branching-path narrative zine a few months prior, but I would get stuck thinking about what sort of subject matter and setting could be compelling enough. And then suddenly it was time to decide on a project for comps as fall semester started up, and I was planning to build a 3D miniature town. I love miniatures, dioramas, cityscapes, etc. I was inspired largely by: Sean Chao, Yoskay Yamamoto’s installations, a diorama of a bunch of birds in the LA Natural History Museum I saw once (which I tried googling desperately but to no avail), fictional worlds like in Animal Crossing, The Simpsons, Arthur, and of course, Steven Universe. And yet I hadn’t built anything to that effect before, and as I was experimenting with paper buildings from templates I found online, I was realizing quickly that none of this came from any of my studio art practice or knowledge from school, and really, comps should be about what I’ve learned over the past few years, so I abandoned that idea. To build a huge diorama would require some technical practice, otherwise I’m convinced that it would have just looked like a child’s project. And as much as I am invested in children’s media, it’s frankly insulting to call my work “childish” or “naive,” two terms that kept cropping up to describe my “aesthetic.” (I mean yeah I can’t draw realistically and yeah my colors are typically pastels, but that doesn’t mean my artwork is like that of a child’s, or somehow inferior and not “real” art?)

I thought about my interests, which revolve around print culture, books, and children’s media. I had just bought a diptych risograph print by my favorite artists in Tiny Splendor, Kenny Srivijittakar, which really inspired my project as it was a weird (slightly apocalyptic?) beach cityscape (Tuff Town). So I started drawing digitally (even though that’s something I haven’t learned in school either, oh well), hoping for a huge scale project, a series of multiple giant prints that together would form a large map of sorts. Well, I spent ages trying to finish drawing just one, which was 20x30 in. so that idea got scrapped. 

(finished digital illustration—cropped into equal sections for the book where you start in the far left center and travel to the opposite side, then up or down and back towards the left—and converted into a silkscreen print)

Then, after weeks, it was finally ready to screenprint. I figured that silkscreen printmaking would allow me to do something I learned in school. And yet it was also the biggest challenge I came across. I took silkscreen printmaking my very first semester at Oxy, three years ago, and haven’t touched it since. It was difficult, and I wasn’t happy with the work I produced then, but it was in that class that I knew I had to become an art major. And so I did. Thus, It feels significant for me to return to it, and it also made the most sense as a means to reproduce the image I had drawn digitally. Well, no matter how many hours I spent in the studio, I could not get it to print right. I won’t go into all of the horrible details, but essentially the ink was drying up as soon as I printed just one, and so I only managed to get one half-decent print, and that’s the one on display. The professors kept asking me why I chose to do printmaking when it’s a medium suited for churning out multiples, but I just physically couldn’t. They wanted me to wallpaper the room with these prints. I wasn’t really sure what that would mean, but I couldn’t do it anyway. So here we are, with probably a month or so left until the show opens, and all I have is one single print to show for myself. Even though it took ages to draw, it didn’t feel like enough (everything I do never feels like enough). So then I started working on cropping sections of the image into a book, and the rest sort of fell into place.

(also didn’t anticipate my colors being that far from what I intended)

As mentioned in my statement, I wanted to draw on the visual/textual style of early videogames, because I LOVE pixel art and I love being immersed in other worlds. I like things where everything is nice and happy, and that’s what draws me to children’s media. But I also want it to be weird and campy. When it comes down to it, everything in this project is really just a bunch of things that I like, with a lot of hidden references that probably no one except for me would get (Temmie from Undertale, The Aquabats, some bunny versions of Karamatsu fishing with a love letter as bait, etc). But I wanted this to be interactive, where viewers notice certain details and feel a connection to it. That’s my favorite kind of art, that which is accessible and relatable and makes you go like “oh! this person is a real human being who also likes this—game/TV show—I wasn’t expecting to see that type of cultural reference and humor in a piece of art.” Okay well maybe that isn’t your reaction, but that’s how I feel when I identify with something. Maybe it’s just something to do with fan culture though. Discovering that you have mutual interests. And for a lot of ~fine art~ you likely wouldn’t find that. Probably because it’s copyright infringement on some level. But anyway, it’s nice to know that artists are real people and not some edgy/misunderstood person placed on a pedestal?

(cropping from the top right corner—still laughing at Fresh Flamingo Scent and Flamingo21)

Even if it does rely on pretty obscure cultural references, the image still boils down to a pleasant little town with anthropomorphic animals walking around wearing clothes. I wanted it to be funny and silly. I’m honestly really unsure where all the existentialist writing came from, but I guess it seemed like the easiest and funniest road to go down?

I wanted it to be a book, but I also wanted it to be displayable, for multiple people to view it at once, rather than feel like it’s a precious object that a single person had to handle at a time. This became one of the most difficult issues, the question of how to display this “book.” I thought about it for a really long time and AB came up with some complicated diagrams and mock-ups with me during a late night at the studio. I was leaning towards an accordion fold book that stretched across the wall, but the issue is that options A and B for a gamebook cannot be in a linear book sequence. Gamebooks solve that issue by relying on scrambled page numbers, but that was not suitable for displaying everything at once. Option A would go down and then there would be an entire sequence stemming from that, while option B would continue to the right and then go down, right, down, right, right, etc. It very nearly took that format, where it was either down or to the right with multiple accordion folds. My prof liked the idea of The Book as a Sculptural Object and Installation, but the book would have been impossible to close or to read, really. So I designed it to form a perfect grid, where each option branched in a particular direction indicated by arrows, and when I installed it, I connected each page with color-coordinated washi tape (with flamingos on them) so that the direction might be more obvious. A week before the show, I was still drawing new pages to fill up the missing space to create the grid, then I sent all of the files off to Catprint (my go-to printer). It ended up being 45 pages long, and granted, many of the new illustrations are pretty sloppy, but I am for the most part pretty pleased with the writing.

Then it was installation day, and a whole slew of problems arose. I didn’t know the best way to adhere them to the wall. I opted for blue tape because it was on hand, but they were falling off by next morning. I was advised to do these difficult but professional methods, or buy obscure expensive materials, or to just stick a tack in it, but I didn’t want to puncture them and I didn’t have the means nor the money nor the time to do much else, so I just bought different types of mounting squares and hoped that they wouldn’t be so strong so as to tear the paint off the walls. You’d be surprised how complicated it can be. So I had everything ready to go, and then I was told that the grid layout was a bad idea, not to mention lopsided because I eyeballed it, the washi tape was the wrong shade of color, etc. etc. I did my best to compromise with my prof who was pushing for a more immersive experience, so I installed a second set of prints to make it more installation-like and utilize the full space I had. I wasn’t really happy about it because it felt utterly redundant to have 2 sets of the same prints right next to each other, because you’d start reading when you walked in and then get to the other standalone wall and think that’s a separate piece. I kept nervously asking viewers if it made sense and if they could figure out the direction of the writing, which they could, thankfully. Or so they said.

In the end, though, it worked out. The opening was lovely and many friends and strangers said incredibly nice things about my work, and they laughed and followed along and were impressed that I was able to do all of this in a short amount of time. I can’t say how much it warmed my heart to have that validation from peers and professors, and I am so thankful that my project was, for the most part, entirely my vision and what I truly love and care about, and that I got to do something so silly and personal. I’m also pretty impressed with myself that the writing came fairly naturally to me and I never spent too long getting stuck.

So thanks for reading this, if you actually did, and I’m not really sure anymore why I wanted to say all of this for the world to see, but I think it’ll be good for me to look back on.

Edit: the prints are finally compiled and bound into a 52 page zine with directional page numbers. Snag a copy from me in person, on my etsy, or my new shop for my new PRESS. I can’t stop thinking about the projects I want to do and zines I want to publish but alas I must first finish school. Honestly, it’s my pipe dream to be able to run and live off my own publishing press, making books and prints for myself and other people. In the meantime though if anyone knows who will hire me for design/publishing/illustration/etc... :^)

*EDIT: I’ve had to replace every instance of the words “choose your own adventure” with “gamebook” and “branching path narrative” because of intellectual property infringement, including replacing the covers for the latest edition... you live and ya learn

[blockheadbrands]

What Pregnant Cannabis Users Need To Know About Toxicology Screenings

Diana-Ashley Krach of High Times Reports:

Pregnant cannabis users deal with stigma and  stress over the possibility of losing custody, all because they medicate with a plant that is still illegal on a federal level. Despite the legal statuses of cannabis in each state, the Federal classification supersedes in a situation involving the local child protective service agency. Even before a patient is aware of a pregnancy, their custodial rights are already compromised, because of the toxicology urine tests that are administered (sometimes unknowingly) during gestation.

Fear of this possibility keeps a lot of pregnant people from obtaining proper prenatal care or from being honest with their doctor. With more states adopting legalization, many medical patients think they are safe from the Child Protective Services (CPS or DCF, depending on area). Others assume because they live in an adult use state, there shouldn’t be an issue.

These assumptions usually come from pregnant people who don’t consume alcohol or any other controlled substance and parents who treat serious conditions with a plant that they don’t view as a drug. Unfortunately, the CPS agencies don’t agree, and while the general message may be that they won’t interfere unless there is suspicion of drug abuse, evidence suggests otherwise. Countless stories flood social media groups for cannabis-consuming mothers and parents about CPS involvement in recreational states.

In many cases, the baby is removed or custody is challenged, despite evidence showing a stable home environment. The agency puts the new parent through an intense investigative process, which often results in needless drug treatment programs, lost wages, exorbitant legal fees, and long-lasting trauma. 

What many don’t know, however, is that a patient can refuse a toxicology screening.

Toxicology Screenings For New Moms and New Babies

“When a pregnant person is admitted to a hospital or medical center for labor and delivery, she has the right to refuse drug testing, but in most facilities, the neonate may be tested without parental consent,” says Marissa Fratoni, registered nurse (BSN-RN) and cannabis educator.

“In most facilities, child protection guidelines set forth by public health departments and the law supersedes parental rights when it comes to drug testing.”

One of the biggest factors in the outcome of a toxicology screening is informed consent, which is when the patient is made aware of the testing, along with the potential consequences. In many situations, a patient may not even consider the possibility of a test, because their practitioner doesn’t bring it up during the visit. Even if the chosen practitioner does understand the situation and agrees not to test, a pregnant person must still consider the possibility of intervention from outside sources like other hospital staff.

If a lactation specialist became aware of the parent being a cannabis user, for instance, they could alert CPS without informing the patient beforehand. There currently is no fail-proof way for a mother to avoid the possibility of losing custodial rights, especially when you have financial limitations and no choice which provider you see due to your insurance. As Fratoni points out, finding prenatal workers who work outside the conventional system isn’t impossible, but it can be costly. 

“Professional Midwives (CPM) and Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNM) are trained maternal health birth professionals. Although they may work with or in conventional settings, these care providers may also work in private birthing centers or provide care services for families that elect to have a homebirth. Unfortunately, their services are not always covered by health insurance, so families that are interested in working with these providers may need to pay out of pocket.”

One person who found an unconventional provider was Stephanie Kerns, long-time advocate and medical cannabis patient. She found out about her right to refuse a toxicology test in the hospital when she came in contact with Moms for Marijuana International. Kerns says that one of the founders offered support and said that she was available to answer any questions.

Kerns found a practitioner who learned of her medical history, documenting why she no longer chose to use pharmaceuticals to treat her Endometriosis. 

“She informed me that even though I was planning a home birth we needed a plan if I needed the hospital.  The plan ended up having to be executed.  When I arrived at the hospital in labor my practitioner was by my side,” says Kerns, noting that her practitioner informed hospital staff that no toxicology screening was necessary.

Nothing was administered without her consent: no vaccine, tests, or treatments, the practitioner made it clear that staff was not to even enter the room unless needed. 

“She also said we would keep the lights off in my room to keep me relaxed. Everyone was nice and did what we said,” says Kerns, making it clear that hospital workers took great caution when they did enter, “They were impressed with how well informed I was, that I had an advocate there with me (my doctor) and they didn’t question anything. “

Not everyone is empowered with such advocacy, mainly because they don’t know where to begin. Discovering a pregnancy is overwhelming enough; worrying about custody before the concept can even land is too much for one person to handle alone. Having an advocate is crucial, which is why more resources are beginning to surface as legalization becomes more global. 

Elephant Circle is an organization focusing on birth justice, with many educational and legal services among their offerings. From their site:

“Birth justice occurs when everyone is equally capable of self-determination during the perinatal period, when their self-determination is supported and amplified. To achieve this, we will need both the HOW and the WHAT of birth justice. We will need strategies for tackling systems of power and oppression, and we will need strategies for change and resilience. We will also need expertise in health systems, legal systems and the perinatal period. Elephant Circle is here to help you expand your capacity to bring about birth justice.”

Mothers Mary is a community that partners with Canadian cannabis health professionals to offer pregnant cannabis users a non-judgmental environment to obtain support and education. Through social media, Mothers Mary offers a safe space for candid discussion, as well as an avenue for normalization of the concept of mothers who medicate responsibly. Additionally, the group has partnered with a cannabis coach and educator to offer a comprehensive and affordable educational course about the intricacies of cannabis, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and parenting.

Fratoni, who also offers educational resources on her Holistic Nurse Mama blog and through her advocacy work, says that it is important to understand why you’re using cannabis during pregnancy, as the goal is to relieve symptoms and manage whichever conditions you may have. Using the least amount of cannabis with the most thorough testing is ideal during pregnancy, and it is best to measure if the benefits outweigh the risk before you consume.

“Every pregnant person has the right to advocate for their needs. Every pregnant person has the right to work with health providers who prioritize prenatal care services that are compassionate and nonjudgmental,” says Fratoni, “One risk that must be considered is the very real possibility that health providers may report their cannabis use to Child Protective Services (CPS) which can have both social and legal implications.”

TO READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE ON HIGH TIMES, CLICK HERE. 

https://hightimes.com/health/what-pregnant-cannabis-users-need-know-about-toxicology-screenings/

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[duo-log]

Delete Facebook

In a stroke of uncanny timing, the wife chose to ponder upon a life sans Facebook, whose presence thus far has grown beyond rational minds’ comprehension. In the aftermath of a massive data leak that allegedly swayed the presidential election in the oldest democracy, when people took to the platform to boycott the same platform, it became evident to me that the irony of such absurdity is apparently lost on the world. On the brighter side, the brouhaha made for a telegenic show, and the attention-starved media got a well of material that wouldn’t go dry for a while. My guess though is that all the uproar and hash-tagging – in spite of participation from the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk – will not bear any fruit and when the dust settles, everybody will move on with their lives like it was all just a nightmare. One hashtag or one uproar will not be enough to pay-off the debt of the dependence accumulated over the years.

Facebook started out as a simple social media where the 90’s hip teenagers would connect with others of their ilk. As creepy as it sounds, virtually Poking a friend was fun. Eventually, though, it became the de-facto platform for the friends and family to connect across long distances. Then came the Farmvilles, the Mafia Wars, and the trivia games. And if those weren’t enough, finally the media industry arrived with their onslaught of blogs, news, and videos in the hope of increased “engagement.” At every point on the journey, we paid with more of our time and information, and the dependency grew far beyond a possible retreat.

Unlike owning or using a physical product that requires paying to the seller in the form of money, technology products can and do come with other options for payment. The majority of today’s products whose primary existence is on the web are free to use. After being encouraged by the industry as a whole to use free products, in fact, we have grown to expect everything to be free. We happily pay for the subpar but expensive coffee and leave a tip, but our thrifty side takes over when it comes to paying for stuff on the web. There have been rebels. Some start-ups tried to make a paid product, but the customer reviews secured the future of those products into a footnote and nothing more. The customer reviews mainly fall into one of two categories. “$$ for this product? No way! 1 star,” or the one that cracks me up every time, “I wish I could rate 0 stars,” – yes you can, by refraining from writing anything and thus exposing your lack of grasp on the concept of reviews, but I digress. So Facebook does what everyone expects it to do – let the users use the product for free. Given that we know Money Plant doesn’t grow money from sunlight and fertilizer, their swelling coffers had to be filled with money paid by someone else for something else. That something is our personal information, our habits, our likes, dislikes, friends, job, phone, email, address, family, vacations, political inclinations – pretty much anything under the sun, and that someone is the invasive advertisers or any random Joe who is willing to pay for that information. So the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco is sort of our doing. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, nor will it be the end of it for as long as we will use products for which we don’t cough up the money.

I may not use Facebook as incessantly as folks who open and close the app seventeen times within the half hour train journey to work, but I use it every day. It is not exactly documentation of all the roads I have walked on – literally as well as metaphorically – or all the places I have dined in, and definitely not all the vacations I have taken. But, there is some essence of all of those on my timeline. Facebook till date remains one of the few places where I connect with friends and family. And most importantly, I post and share this very blog every Sunday morning, and that remains the primary way to put it out in front of the world. In other words, I have exactly the same debt as every other Joe on Facebook.

Philosophical argument of time-drain aside, I am fully aware of what Facebook does for me. There isn’t a place that provides all that and does so efficiently. But the more important concept we all are ought to be aware of is what we are doing for Facebook. I am fully aware of how much my personal information I am handing over with every avenue of engagement. The good news is, with a minimal level of awareness we can control some of it. For instance, I practice a certain rigour in maintaining my friends’ list, and a lot of restraint in what and how I share things simply because I despise the creepiness in the methods Facebook employs in determining the “people you may know” list or the advertisements that infiltrate my timeline after I Google something. I have permanently disabled Facebook’s access to my location and rarely participate in any of those mind-numbing “which GOT character you are” quizzes because those are traps to gather more data on your media preferences. Search, and you will find a list of lists of measures all of us can take to be safe.

So, with that knowledge, I don’t intend to change the amount of engagement with Facebook nor do I contemplate on deleting Facebook just because a data scientist amassed personal data in questionable ways. The unfortunate bad news is, if it is not Facebook, there will be another social media platform that will come about. We will jump ships in the hopes of finding a better world, only to realize that some fundamentals don’t change even if we wish so ad absurdum.

Read the other part of this Duolog(ue).

Life Without Facebook

Yesterday morning we were assembling a puzzle with the little one, and as soon as we finished with the activity, I took my phone out and was flipping through it. Dear H with a bit of annoyance said, “You always say that I am addicted to the phone when it is you!”

[perdudanslesbenedictions]

Learning to speak French and its challenges for myself and other learners

Speaking/learning a second language requires a certain level of patience and the ability to take constructive criticism. SOMETHING I AM VERY BAD AT TAKING!!! I feel so bad for people who are learning English in the States. Why? Because I have seen people correct foreigners or ‘New’ Americans for using British English or saying something even slightly incorrectly, when more than half of us can’t even use the word supposedly correctly. Soon I will be flying to Europe a lot for work and I am going to have to deal with one of my least favourite group of Francophones... Americans. Not all of them are horrendous... Just 90% of them MDR. Nothing irritates me more than someone nit-picking my pronunciation than a group of people who think they know it all because they learned from a textbook, or that one French guy from Paris that they dated 4 years ago. Not that I have issues with one particular group of speakers like the Parisians, but there are so many words in French and so many different accents and dialects. My French is a bit bizarre to be honest; however, it is not incomprehensible. How does ones second language qualify as bizarre??? When your interests, culture, practical experience, and instructors don’t align. Like stated previously, I started learning French from my family, some members who moved there when I was very young, followed by some in middle school from a French/American woman who taught us text book French. So I had a little background before I began speaking airport French to Quebecois and French passengers on Lufthansa and Air Canada, as a contracted agent. 50% of my Francophone passengers were Quebecois, a good 20% were French. The rest were Swiss, Belgian, or of African origin. My ear became fine tuned to different types of French, but my tongue and my interests went with the Canadians. It already conflicted with my Senegalese Friends who worked at the airport who were trying to teach me a more international French. Their French stuck with me too. Their grammar was impeccable!!! When they helped me correct my papers, they taught me worldly phrases to describe my own life. At the time, for example, I was une préposée aux bagages. Not a phrase you learn in beginners French. My college instructor was one of the best French speakers in the nation. In my opinion, à mon avis, there is French from a certain region, and then there exists textbook French. This is the same French you might hear in Franco media. It is without a distinct accent, it is perfect grammar,and you will not hear this French at the bar in Marseilles or on the streets of Paris. Ange, my instructor, spoke this perfect French while he taught us pronunciation and other grammar aspects. Ange knew that I had a profound love for Quebec. He also knew that our class textbook taught a lot of Quebec French. To me, it only makes sense that we could be getting our books from Montreal and not Paris, as Canada is closer. Ange chose not to teach some of the grammar, the stuff he found peculiar. Some of it is different, but it’s not inaccurate information. This goes to show that second/ third/ fourth languages can be formed by perspective and the cultures you are exposed to. People who understand or learned one dialect/ accent, and speak negatively about another tend to be more difficult for me to speak with. They correct you with something you learned and try to replace it with their version. This is why I do not speak with a lot of American speakers. Nothing irritates me more than an American girl who fucked some French guy and criticizes me for saying “gilet de sauvetage” without emphasizing every fucking syllable. Her version “geelay deh sow-ve-tahge” and my version “geelay deh sowvetage”. Of course it was a flight attendant. I CANNOT! I also had a tutor who insisted I speak like a Parisian. Chui fucking NORTH AMERICAN putain! Then the lady talked shit about my instructor and I lost all trust... Different issue. I stopped seeing the woman for help because of her biased views on how I should say things (of course she was American). I also have a friend in Montreal who I have become quite timid with my French. I need to have a spine and just speak. She just drives me a little crazy because she has a tendency to correct me and not tell me what I should say instead. I have had a tendency to mix doing the dishes, faire la vaisselle, and doing the laundry faire la lessive in French. I made the mistake of trying to say I will do the dishes and she never told me the correct way. She also speaks extremely fast and doesn’t give a moment to process before speaking English. Therefore, I have begun to speak English to her instead of French. It’s discouraging to have someone dog you after they speak to quickly or you have only been in town for less than a week. My French is like riding a bike, I have to get used to it again. One of my best teachers was my mentor Leila. A perfect person to speak with! She wasn’t super impressed with Quebec French, but was willing to accept that it has become a part of my reality. She understood that I had learned from different sources. She spoke to me like I knew what she was saying at all times whether I did or not and eventually it built my confidence and I realized that I did understand 90% of what she said. She pushed me without discomfort. We had a very interesting situation together, which reminded me how different and not standard my French actually is... We worked with an old Congolese woman who depended on both of us for translation and other daily tasks. We worked at a full immersion school for Spanish, French, English, and Chinese. Of course I helped with French as much as possible. Her French was standard, not anglicized, and very conservative. It was so hard, but it helped me improve my French become more professional in the workplace. There is no question... When it comes to work... You must be standardized in your speaking! Accent and different pronunciation are not a big deal; however, the French needs to be clear and polite for all speakers! It may have also helped to research some vocabulary specific to educational development. At staff meetings we constantly spoke about child growth and development... A subject I missed out on dancing the night away in the Quebecois discotheque MDR. Madame Nkombo was a pain or casse-couilles becuase at times she just didn’t want to know what we were talking about... But she forced me to be more specific and clear in my translation than I ever had been. There was no switching to English, there was no idiomatic expression I could use... It had to be a direct translation sometimes explained 3 or 4 different ways before I could get through to her. There was one day I was forced into a medical emergency with her. Her daughter dropped her off at work shaking and almost incomprehensible. We were sure she was having some kind of stroke. Her tongue was flickering and everything. It was a mess! I had to ask Si elle a eu une histoire des problemes avec son couer... and other questions I barely knew how to ask. Thank Jesus Leila was at school this day and could go to the hospital while I covered our class. We were a great team, but sometimes things got scary if Leila or I couldn’t help our friend Nkombo. We worried about emergency situations and bullying/ other behavioural issues in the class. You did need some working knowledge of English in the school and it was awkward at times with parents who did not understand the situation, and struggling to translate correctly. At times I even had to sit in for parent teacher conferences when Leila was not available. We got through it, but it pushed the French side of my brain to work harder than ever. Why I didn’t study for my DELF until now... Je ne sais pas. I should have done it while I was constantly speaking every day of my life. Long story short... my French evolved again. My French experience is diverse as is my tongue. So next time you want to criticize someone for a petty issue of pronunciation or mixing up the order... even though you understood what they said:

1. try to understand where they come from with their French... It might be different than how you learned.

2. Ask them where or how they learned a certain phrase... If they can’t back it up they will probably ask you how you say it.

3. If you learned to say it differently or it is different in your dialect, politely explain that the word/ phrase they learned isn’t so functional in your region.

4. If it is really that bad of a mistake... repeat what they said the correct way. Do not ridicule and embarrass them.

5. LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS!!! Do not be a picky perfectionist with someone who is learning. If you are a teacher... You should know better, but if what they are trying to say is not comprehensible at all, ask what they are trying to say and go back to step 2.

6. Learn the difference between accent and mispronouncing. Don’t correct them if they still sound like Peggy Hill, when they used correct semantics and vocabulary.

7. Was that syllable so important that you should correct them? We all know that Francophones skip several parts of pronunciation in certain anyway... Maybe their speaking isn’t academic and they shouldn’t be a lectrice... But are they trying to learn to be that precise??? YOU DON’T KNOW AND YOU PROBABLY DIDN”T CARE TO ASK. When is the last time you said the le in the end of spectacle, incroyable? I rarely say it if I rarely hear it.

8. Know the purpose of their French learning. Where are they trying to go? For what purpose? Are they moving to a region that speaks a little differently? Do they want to talk shit at the bar? Do they want to become a professor? All of the above??? It might be important, particularly if you are trying to teach someone French, to know what their goal is. If they are not learning for an academic/ professional purpose... il/elle ne s'en fou. It’s unfortunate for your academic agenda... But it’s true... THEY DON’T CARE.

9. Ne and Pas... I’m not trying to butcher the language... But Je trouve ça ridicule when someone tells me to use both. Written... maybe. Spoken though... Seriously? What do you think?

10. Stick with French please. Reformulate before you just translate to English... It can be a little degrading and no one learns anything when you just make it easy. It is appreciated and very appropriate in some circumstances (taking a coffee order with a line of 1 000 people behind them)... But in a social setting, just keep speaking French. How will someone ever learn if they are just babied and brought back to English constantly. Also, I get it! We are all trying to learn each others language and see each other as a perfect opportunity to practice... So let them do your language and you do theirs. Voila.

11. Be a humble learner/ teacher. I have gotten to teach some Quebecois words to my African/ French colleagues who speak French natively. In return they teach me some phrases they use instead. Make it an exchange of knowledge!!! Don’t act like you know everything... Language is constantly changing! Even if you have spoken French for 20+ years... There are new technologies and concepts that didn’t exist in French during that time... The ones a non-native speaker could be learning right now!

12. French is French. Do they speak differently in Paris compared to someone in Lafayette, Louisiana? OUAIS BIEN SUR! Sorry no accent marks on my keyboard! Even in English I have to get people to reformulate sometimes because they talk different... It doesn’t mean we can’t communicate and it doesn’t mean they are wrong in the way they speak.

13. Be a little passive aggressive... Recommend a book or a website instead of correcting everything someone says in the moment. Sometimes it’s rude and uncalled for... It makes me want to stop speaking.

So maybe i’m wrong or right in my observation of the language learning process... Maybe I’m too sensitive... What do you find important in teaching someone your native or other fluent languages? Do you think being a grammar nazi is always appropriate? How do/ did you feel as a learner? Do you have similar circumstances or frustrations? I am open to all questions and comments... given they are PRODUCTIVE.

[sherristockman]

Are Americans Really Getting Too Much Vitamin D? A Critical Look at Recent Media Warnings Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Over the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of studies have evaluated the benefits of vitamin D, linking low blood levels to a whole host of chronic health conditions. In fact, this site was one of the leaders helping to catalyze interest in vitamin D over 15 years ago. Today, many doctors have finally caught on and are taking vitamin D seriously; testing their patients and recommending supplementation when necessary. The progress made makes the present backlash all the more shocking and disappointing. "Many Americans Taking Too Much Vitamin D," Reuters recently announced.1 "More people than ever are taking way too much vitamin D," Popular Science declared, adding, "You may have a deficiency, but overdosing isn't the answer."2 ABC News warned its viewers that taking more than 4,000 international units (IUs) of vitamin D is "far above safe levels," and could potentially cause heart disease.3 Ditto for Consumer Affairs4 and many others.5,6 Where is this coming from? If you've followed the progression of vitamin D science, you will be aware of the fact that recommended vitamin D levels — and the dosages typically needed to achieve those levels if you're not getting regular sun exposure — have dramatically risen over the years. Researchers have also pointed out a basic mathematical flaw that led to vitamin D recommendations being underestimated by a factor of 10. Unfortunately, the study now being promoted by the media takes none of these things into consideration, instead promulgating decades' old fallacies. Are Americans Taking Too Much Vitamin D? According to the featured study,7 nearly 20 percent of American adults are taking supplemental vitamin D, and many are taking "excessively high doses" — amounts linked to "an increased risk of fractures, falls, kidney stones and certain cancers" — even an increased risk of death from all causes.8 An "excessively high dose," the study warns, is anything over 4,000 IUs a day, adding that this is the maximum recommended dosage, and that anything higher than this may result in dangerous side effects. Senior author Pamela Lutsey, public health researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, told Reuters: "Vitamin D is essential for bone metabolism, as it helps the body absorb calcium and maintain appropriate concentrations of calcium and phosphate in the blood. Excessive intake of vitamin D can, however, be harmful, as it can cause over absorption of calcium. Excess blood calcium can, in turn, lead to detrimental deposition of calcium in soft tissues, such as the heart and kidneys." Reuters does note that the study was "not a controlled experiment designed to examine the risks and benefits of varying amounts of vitamin D supplementation." Unfortunately, that important piece of information is likely to get lost in the fearmongering, no matter how flawed the conclusions. For starters, the study's authors assume the vitamin D dosage recommended by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM; formerly the Institute of Medicine, IOM) is scientifically substantiated. As it turns out, it is not, and dedicated vitamin D researchers have for a long time urged NAM to update its recommendation, as it is based on flawed math. Flawed Math Vastly Underestimates Vitamin D Need In this video, Keith Baggerly, Ph.D., explains the key problems with respect to NAM’s stance on vitamin D requirements. You can also read his report here. NAM (formerly IOM) chose 20 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) of serum concentration of 25-hydroxy vitamin D as an adequate level for bone health, and to maintain a level of 20 ng/mL, NAM says you need to take 600 IUs a day up to age 70, and 800 IUs if you’re over 70. However, both of these measures are too low due to a mathematical error. Using the same raw data, and correcting the math, you get an estimate of about 30 ng/mL as an adequate level for bone health, and given the logarithmic nature of the dose response curve for vitamin D, increasing the target serum level by 50 percent may require increasing the RDI in IUs by several times. In 2014, two investigators from the University of Edmonton published a paper9 that explicitly showed NAM had made a calculation error in defining the intake needed to reach and maintain 20 ng/mL. Had it been calculated correctly, the RDI would have been at least 10 times greater than what was publically posted. Importantly, 30 ng/mL is merely indicated for bone health; it may not be sufficient for general health or diseases prevention. When studying a native African tribe, the physiological levels were found to be in the 40 to 60 ng/mL range, which is the range suggested by GrassrootsHealth’s panel of experts for general health. As explained by the late Dr. Robert Heaney in a previous interview (included below for your convenience): "The [RDI], as I think most of us know, is the intake that is reckoned to be necessary to meet the nutritional need of 97.5 percent of the population … How much is enough? The [IOM, now NAM] said 600 IUs was enough. But what's very clear is that 600 IUs would not get 97.5 percent of the population above 20 ng/mL. That's what the Edmonton investigators showed. As a matter of fact … as many as half of the people getting 600 IUs a day wouldn't get up to 20 ng/mL … The Edmonton investigators calculated a number of 8,895 IUs per day, using the same set of studies on which the IOM had based its calculation ... When I was able to access the GrassrootsHealth (GRH) data, a completely different set from the one used by the IOM, we could directly calculate the intake needed … That's because, in the GRH database, we know exactly how much of an increase in 25-hydroxy D the participants got on whatever dose they were taking. Our calculation showed that about 3,800 IUs per day, in addition to everything they were already getting [from sun and food], would have been necessary to get 97.5 percent of that population to 20 ng/mL. Factoring in the basal intake in the GRH population, we showed that you need about 7,000 IUs per day in order to get 97.5 percent above 20 ng/mL. That's very close to the figure that the Edmonton investigators had used: 8,895 [IUs]." The public health implications are tremendous. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has created a statistical panel to review NAM’s calculations. This panel has now completed its review, but the results have not yet been made public. It is imperative that the panel’s results be published as soon as possible, especially in light of the current misinformation being disseminated, suggesting Americans may be taking dangerously high levels of vitamin D, when in fact most are not getting nearly enough. NAM Needs to Own Up to Its Mistake and End Catastrophic Misinformation Campaign Heaney would know what he was talking about, seeing how he was one of the leading, most well-recognized vitamin D researchers in the world. Up until his death he was also the research director of GrassrootsHealth, which is compiling data from a number of population-based studies like the D*Action project. Trained as a clinical endocrinologist, Heaney spent a large part of the last 50 years of his life doing clinical research, most of it in the field of vitamin D, working on quantifying the vitamin D economy. This includes defining: How much vitamin D is necessary to reach a certain effect How large of an effect you might get at a particular dosage How much vitamin D you make in your skin in response to sunlight How long it lasts Heaney and colleagues challenged NAM's vitamin D recommendation,10 warning the RDI underestimates need by a factor of 10. Most vitamin D experts also agree that a serum level of 20 ng/mL is too low for optimal health, which means the requirement for most people is even higher than that. Moreover, any public guidance on vitamin D really should be based on your blood level, not a daily dosage, because the dosage response from one person to the next can vary significantly. As noted in a 2015 study evaluating the response to vitamin D supplementation:11 "In response to a given dose of vitamin D, the effect on 25(OH)D concentration differs between individuals … For this review, a comprehensive literature search was conducted to identify those factors and to explore their significance in relation to circulating 25(OH)D response to vitamin D supplementation … Response to vitamin D supplementation can be explained by several environmental and demographic factors. Recently, Zittermann et al. (2014) published a systematic review concerning the importance of body weight for the dose-response relationship with circulating 25(OH)D. The authors demonstrated that 34.5 percent of variation in circulating 25(OH)D was explained by body weight, followed by type of supplement (D2 or D3) (9.8 percent), age (3.7 percent), calcium intake (2.4 percent) and basal 25(OH)D concentrations (1.9 percent), leaving approximately 50 percent of the variations to unknown factors." One such unknown factor could be related to differences in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPS), a common genetic variation. At any rate, the only way to ensure you're taking a dose that is appropriate for you is to test your blood level, which should be between 40 and 60 ng/mL year-round. Research suggests potential toxicity does not occur until you reach a level of about 200 ng/mL, and no evidence of toxicity has been found in trials using dosages of 10,000 IUs a day12,13 — a far cry from the recommended maximum of 4,000 IUs a day. What Is an Ideal Vitamin D Level? Based on the accumulated data collected and research done by GrassrootsHealth, a vitamin D level of 40 ng/mL is a more appropriate minimum level. To prevent chronic disease and optimize health, a level between 40 and 60 ng/mL appears to be ideal. According to Heaney, evidence shows that 20 ng/mL is not even adequate for the prevention of osteomalacia. "The point is the [IOM, now NAM] is dead wrong; not because it chose the wrong number, but because it made a mathematical mistake. They miscalculated, which is really kind of embarrassing if you think about it. Somebody didn't check the work," Heaney says. "Now, having made that mistake, bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they're unlikely to want to change. They're not going to say, 'Oops, we made a mistake. Here is the right answer.' They seem to say, 'We are not wrong, [and] if no federal agency asks to have it reviewed, it could be 10 years from now before anybody ever looks at it again.'" Lutsey's study is a perfect example of why NAM needs to rectify its mistake. We cannot move forward when researchers are making assumptions based on flawed recommendations. That Lutsey was unaware of this mathematical error just goes to show that scientists cannot keep up with all the relevant papers being published relating to vitamin D. Lutsey also ignores the many studies showing higher vitamin D levels in fact correlate with improved health outcomes and a lower risk of all-cause mortality, not higher risks. The Interplay of Vitamin D, Calcium, Magnesium and Vitamin K2 Lutsey points out that excessive vitamin D may cause over absorption of calcium, which in turn may result in calcium deposits in your heart and kidneys. Indeed, it is important to maintain not only the proper balance of vitamin D and calcium, but also magnesium and vitamin K2. Lack of balance between these four nutrients is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke, and why some experience symptoms of "vitamin D toxicity." I use quotation marks here, because the problem is not so much excess vitamin D as it is a lack of vitamin K2. Part of the explanation for these adverse side effects is that vitamin K2 keeps calcium in its appropriate place. If you're K2 deficient, added calcium can cause more problems than it solves, by accumulating in the wrong places. Similarly, taking megadoses of vitamin D supplements without sufficient amounts of K2 can lead to inappropriate calcification, which is what Lutsey is alluding to. While the optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be established, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue (whom I've interviewed on this topic) suggests that for every 1,000 IUs of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms of K2, and perhaps as much as 150 to 200 micrograms (mcg). Maintaining an appropriate calcium-to-magnesium ratio is also important, as magnesium helps keep calcium in your cells so they can function better. Historically, mankind ate a diet with a calcium-magnesium ratio of 1-to-1,14 but Americans tend to have a higher calcium-to-magnesium ratio in their diet, averaging about 3.5-to-1. Magnesium and vitamin K2 also complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease. So, all in all, anytime you're taking any of the following: magnesium, calcium, vitamin D3 or vitamin D2, you need to take all the others into consideration as well, since these all work synergistically with each other. Discouraging Vitamin D Supplementation Is Inadvisable So, to recap: ✓ The best way to optimize your vitamin D levels is to expose enough of your skin for long enough periods to increase your vitamin D levels so they are between 40 and 60 ng/mL. If you cannot get adequate sun exposure, then it would be wise to use oral vitamin D3 in the dosage recommended below ✓ Current RDI for oral vitamin D underestimates need by a factor of 10 due to a simple mathematical error. Correcting this error would result in an RDI of 6,000 IUs, and 8,000 IUs if you're over 70 ✓ Ideal dosage can only be determined through blood testing, as dosage response to supplemental vitamin D varies widely from one person to the next ✓ You need a blood level of at least 40 ng/mL to significantly impact your risk of chronic disease, including heart disease, cancer and all-cause mortality ✓ No toxicity has been found in trials using 10,000 IUs per day of vitamin D, and toxicity does not become a concern until you reach a level of about 200 ng/mL ✓ The risk of calcification is ameliorated by taking vitamin D supplements with vitamin K2 and balancing your calcium and magnesium ratios Considering this, the notion that many Americans are endangering their health by taking in excess of 4,000 IUs of vitamin D per day is unreasonable at best. Research shows higher vitamin D levels can help prevent and/or treat: ✓ Dry eye syndromes15,16 and macular degeneration17,18 ✓ Autoimmune diseases ✓ Neurodegenerative diseases, including multiple sclerosis19,20 ✓ Gastrointestinal diseases and related cancers21 ✓ Infectious diseases, including influenza and HIV22,23 ✓ Inflammatory rheumatic diseases24 ✓ Neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease25,26 and epilepsy In one study,27 epileptics given a one-time megadose of vitamin D3, ranging from 40,000 IUs all the way up to 200,000 IUs, followed by a daily dose of 2,000 to 2,600 IUs a day for three months, to bring each individual's vitamin D status to at least 30 ng/ml, resulted in significant improvements. Ten out of 13 had a decrease in the number of seizures, five of which experienced more than a 50 percent reduction. Overall, the group had a 40 percent reduction in the number of seizures ✓ Lupus According to researchers in Cairo,28 most patients with systemic lupus erythematosus have some level of vitamin D deficiency, defined as a level of 10 ng/mL or less, or insufficiency, a level between 10 and 30 ng/mL ✓ Depression A vitamin D level below 20 ng/mL may raise your risk for depression by as much as 85 percent, compared to having a vitamin D level greater than 30 ng/mL ✓ Pregnancy complications Optimizing your vitamin D during pregnancy is crucial not only for your own health, but also for the short- and long-term health of your child.29 Studies30 reveal you need a vitamin D level above 40 ng/mL to protect your baby from serious complications such as premature delivery and preeclampsia, and studies have confirmed there's a lifelong impact of vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy — ranging from childhood asthma,31,32 colds and flu, dental cavities, diabetes and even strokes and cardiovascular disease33,34 in later life ✓ Cancer Studies indicate a dosage range of 1,100 to 4,000 IUs a day and a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration of 60 to 80 ng/mL may be needed to reduce cancer risk. One 2011 study35 led by vitamin D experts Drs. Cedric Garland and Heaney found the supplemental dose ensuring 97.5 percent of the study population achieved a vitamin D blood level of at least 40 ng/mL was 9,600 IU/day. It also concluded that intake of up to 40,000 IUs per day is unlikely to result in vitamin D toxicity. Vitamin D also helps improve health outcomes for cancer patients. A 2009 study36 showed cancer-free survival during four years of follow-up was 77 percent higher among patients receiving calcium and vitamin D supplements compared to those receiving a placebo. Here, the minimum year-round blood level of vitamin D required to prevent breast and colorectal cancers was 40 to 60 ng/mL. According to the authors, "The time has arrived for nationally coordinated action to substantially increase intake of vitamin D and calcium." Breast37 and prostate38,39 cancers are just two examples where low vitamin D also renders you more vulnerable to more aggressive forms of the disease. Recent research40 has also found that low vitamin D levels are associated with more severe peripheral neuropathy in cancer patients ✓ Falls, fractures, dental health and more A 2006 review41 looking at vitamin D intakes and health outcomes such as bone mineral density, dental health, risk of falls, fractures and colorectal cancer, found "the most advantageous serum concentrations of 25(OH)D begin at 30 ng/mL, and the best are between 36 to 40 ng/mL" ✓ Obesity Research42 has shown vitamin D supplementation (4,000 IUs/day) combined with resistance training helps decrease your waist-to-hip ratio — a measurement that is far better at determining your risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease than BMI ✓ Diabetes Abdominal obesity in combination with a low vitamin D level has also been shown to "synergistically influence" your risk of insulin resistance.43 According to this study, 47 percent of the increased odds of insulin resistance can be explained by the interaction between insufficient vitamin D levels and a high BMI ✓ All-cause mortality A meta-analysis44 of 42 randomized controlled trials found supplemental vitamin D significantly reduced mortality from all causes when taken for a minimum of three years Vitamin D and Omega-3 — Two Crucial Nutrients for Optimal Health Considering there are well over 30,000 studies on vitamin D, and vitamin D receptors have been found in virtually all bodily tissues, from your brain to your bones, the above list is far from complete. The main point is that your risk of experiencing adverse effects from vitamin D supplementation are slim, and the notion that people are endangering their health by taking 4,000 IUs or more of vitamin D3 per day is not supported by a majority of the evidence. On the contrary, vitamin D experts are becoming increasingly convinced that an ideal vitamin D blood level is somewhere between 40 and 60 ng/mL, and the most appropriate dosage is whatever dosage will put you within that range. For some, that may be 2,000 IUs a day; for others it may be 10,000 IUs. I don't know ANY single physical factor that could improve your health more than understanding and finally applying what we now know about vitamin D. Getting your blood levels tested and making sure your vitamin D levels are in the optimal range is especially important, no matter what your age is, or where you live. GrassrootsHealth has now released a consumer-sponsored research kit that includes both vitamin D and omega-3. This kit is part of the D*Action + Omega-3 Project, and you can get it either from my online store or directly from GrassrootsHealth. To learn more about this project, see their FAQ page. Vitamin D and omega-3 are two of the most important nutrients your body needs to maintain optimal health, and the only way to evaluate your status is to test them. GrassrootsHealth D*Action + Omega-3 Project is the largest project in the world that allows scientific researchers to study the links between these nutrients, and participating in the project is an inexpensive way to take control of your health and help advance science at the same time.