#seems like that should be commonplace for educational institutions but it really is not

[poetess-trobadour]

"It's a mean world that I've known

Never got no good doin' what I'm told"

My (unpopular) take on zodiac vibes, part 6♍️✨️

[dailynewswebsite]

Training our immune systems: Why we should insist on a high-quality COVID-19 vaccine

A employee inspects vials of a SARS CoV-2 vaccine for COVID-19 produced by SinoVac at its manufacturing unit in Beijing on Sept. 24, 2020. (AP Photograph/Ng Han Guan)

Athletes perceive that there are two very completely different approaches that may be taken when coaching their our bodies. For instance, lifting heavy weights is a good way to realize most energy. In distinction, low-load high-repetition coaching is good for growing the stamina required for endurance sports activities.

Scanning electron micrograph of a human T lymphocyte (additionally known as a T cell) from the immune system of a wholesome donor. (NIAID), CC BY

Remarkably, our immune system may be educated in a considerably related style. It should select between two completely different responses to harmful pathogens, each of which result in white blood cells known as T cells and antibodies concentrating on the infecting microbe. Nevertheless, the sorts of these T cells and antibodies is completely different relying on whether or not the pathogen lives exterior of our cells, as many micro organism do, or inside our cells, as viruses do.

Mounting an anti-bacterial response towards a virus will not be an excellent strategy to clear a viral an infection. The truth is, the unsuitable type of immune response can truly exacerbate illness, as was noticed in vaccinated mice challenged with the extreme acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) recognized in 2003.

Importantly, our first publicity to a pathogen, both naturally or by way of vaccination, can prepare our immune system to undertake one in every of these two biases after we reply sooner or later to the identical or an identical pathogen for the remainder of our lives. Immunologists name this “educated immunity.”

First publicity

Colourized transmission electron micrograph of the coronavirus that brought about the 2003 extreme acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. Orange virus particles on the fringe of a inexperienced contaminated cell. (NIAID), CC BY

Our analysis packages span the fields of viral transmission, immune responses to viruses, respiratory pathogens similar to influenza viruses and vaccine improvement, together with vaccines towards SARS-CoV-2, which is the causative agent of the coronavirus illness that emerged in 2019, COVID-19.

We want to convey the significance of educated immunity within the context of COVID-19 vaccines since this may have implications for the flexibility of our immune methods to reply appropriately to extremely pathogenic coronaviruses sooner or later.

Colourized transmission electron micrograph exhibiting Center East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus that emerged in 2012. (NIAID), CC BY

Over the previous 17 years, there have been three main outbreaks of extremely pathogenic coronaviruses: the unique SARS-CoV in 2003, Center East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus in 2012 and now SARS-CoV-2. Primarily based on this historical past of getting a brand new extremely pathogenic coronavirus emerge roughly each decade, we should always anticipate to must take care of extra of those viruses sooner or later. That signifies that the present drive to develop vaccines for COVID-19 ought to think about future coronavirus outbreaks.

The way in which we prepare our immune methods now to answer SARS-CoV-2 might impression how properly our our bodies can reply to future coronaviruses. Vaccines, if developed correctly, present a chance to induce the kind of educated immunity that’s optimum for mounting protecting immune responses, not solely towards SARS-CoV-2, but in addition towards future infections with coronaviruses and/or their related vaccines.

Tuberculosis response

Apparently, some scientists have proposed to harness the idea of educated immunity in a associated context. Particularly, there may be proof to counsel that people who obtained a vaccine towards tuberculosis could also be partially protected towards SARS-CoV-2.

Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis micro organism. (NIAID), CC BY

Tuberculosis is a respiratory illness attributable to a bacterium. In distinction to many micro organism, this one, like viruses, lives inside cells. The vaccine formulation makes use of a stay, however attenuated (modified or weakened) bacterium that’s similar to the one which causes the illness. Since it’s a stay bacterium, it may infect cells in the identical manner that the disease-causing micro organism do.

The result’s an applicable immune response that occurs to be of the identical sort that’s optimum towards viruses. Scientists have concluded, due to this fact, that the tuberculosis vaccine may be coaching the immune system in such a manner that it may reply ideally to different pathogens that stay inside cells, together with viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

Evaluating responses

Colourized transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. (NIAID), CC BY

A heavy emphasis is being positioned on quantitative facets of candidate COVID-19 vaccines, similar to whether or not they generate excessive ranges of antibodies. Many well being regulatory businesses are poised to approve COVID-19 vaccines that cut back the burden of illness however don’t induce immunity to fully forestall an infection and transmission. However they need to be cautious and be certain that these vaccines don’t prepare our immune system for a response that isn’t optimum.

By totally evaluating the character and length of the immune response induced by a potential COVID-19 vaccine, we will guarantee particular, efficient and sustained responses towards SARS-CoV-2. Particularly, vaccine builders ought to be capable to reply these questions:

Did the vaccine induce an immune response that’s optimum towards viruses? A balanced antiviral response ought to embody antibodies to forestall the virus from infecting host cells and replicating inside them, and T cells to kill viruses that get previous the antibody barrier. Importantly, the antibodies needs to be of antiviral sorts.

Had been there antibody responses within the respiratory tract, and do these antibodies effectively neutralize the virus? There may be important focus positioned on measuring antibody responses within the blood, however SARS-CoV-2 infects mucosal surfaces together with the respiratory tract, and it is very important be certain that the vaccine induces antibodies at these related areas. Additionally, it should be famous that applicable antibody responses towards viruses are often of a lot decrease magnitude than these directed towards extracellular micro organism. A big amount of antibodies could seem promising, however the quantity will not be almost as essential as the kinds and areas of those antibodies.

The take-home message is that we should always insist on sustaining a really excessive commonplace for a COVID-19 vaccine; one that can induce a qualitatively applicable immune response that can defend us from an infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Like an athlete, we have to keep away from coaching our immune system in a manner that contradicts the top aim. For long-term well being, we should be certain that our immune methods are educated in a manner that can permit us to reply most successfully towards future extremely pathogenic coronaviruses, a few of which can show to be extra harmful than the present one.

Byram Bridle obtained funding from the Canadian Institutes of Well being Analysis, the Pure Sciences and Engineering Analysis Council of Canada, the Canada Basis for Innovation, and Ontario COVID-19 Fast Analysis Funding.

Samira Mubareka receives funding from the Pure Sciences and Engineering Analysis Council of Canada, the Canadian Security and Safety Program, the Public Well being Company of Canada and help from Questcap by way of the Sunnybrook Basis.

Shayan Sharif receives funding from Canada's First Analysis Excellence Fund

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/training-our-immune-systems-why-we-should-insist-on-a-high-quality-covid-19-vaccine/ via https://growthnews.in

[vinayv224]

Hunter Biden, the black sheep who got Trump impeached, explained

Hunter Biden, then the chair of the World Food Program USA, speaking at an organization event on April 12, 2016, in Washington, DC. | Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA

A troubled guy at the center of the fake scandal that became a real scandal.

Hunter is the younger of Joe Biden’s two sons. He never showed as much promise as his brother Beau, stumbling through life and often trading on his dad’s name and position for financial gain. He’s more or less operated in the background as something of a black sheep in the family, but he’s emerged to the forefront of American politics in recent weeks over work he did in Ukraine that fueled a bogus conspiracy theory at the heart of Trump’s decision to strong-arm the country’s president.

It’s not unusual for the children of successful politicians to trade on their family’s famous name and connections to get ahead in life. And when that happens, most political parents hope for a trajectory like the one enjoyed by Beau Biden until his life was cut short by cancer in 2015.

Beau followed in his father’s footsteps to Syracuse University for law school and then clerked for a US District Court judge. He got a job at the Justice Department and then became a federal prosecutor. He then dipped into the private sector briefly. But when Delaware’s attorney general, Jane Brady, resigned to take up a judicial post, the state’s governor appointed Carl Danberg to serve as a placeholder attorney general who wouldn’t run for reelection. Beau won the seat in the 2006 midterms, Danberg got appointed to serve as the head of Delaware’s Corrections Department, and all eyes were on Beau to run for governor in 2016 when Jack Markell’s term would be expiring.

Only an extremely naive person would see this as a career free of nepotism. But Beau, like a successful politician’s kid, had to actually do his work adequately each step of the way. As a candidate for attorney general, he clearly got a boost from his dad’s name, and it seems like the Delaware political establishment was working to open up an office for him to run for. But as a former federal prosecutor and Army JAG, he was qualified for the job and he won the election fair and square. And there’s nothing unusual at all about a two-term attorney general campaigning to win an open gubernatorial election in his home state.

This is more or less how the system is supposed to work for children of privilege — you get a consistent favorable tailwind at your back, but you still need to steer the plane. Hunter, by contrast, has been the guy who even into his 40s keeps needing dad to send the search—and-rescue party. And yet in a strange way, Hunter ended up being one of the most politically accomplished figures of our time since Trump’s efforts to smear Joe Biden over Hunter’s work in Ukraine ended up leading to his impeachment.

Hunter Biden’s whole career is being Joe Biden’s son

According to Adam Entous’s profile in the New Yorker, “it was clear to family and friends that Beau would follow his father into politics,” while Hunter was initially interested in more artistic pursuits “but, with a baby on the way, he decided to go straight to law school.”

The basic desire to make money is pretty commonplace. Hunter, after a year at Georgetown Law, was able to transfer to Yale and finish out at the country’s most prestigious law school. Yale Law grads don’t normally hurt for opportunities to earn a decent salary, but Hunter interestingly went to work right away for MBNA, a major Delaware-based bank (later purchased by Bank of America) that was also a big contributor to Biden’s campaigns.

This was part of a much larger coziness between Biden and the bank that the then-senator took flak for from conservatives like Byron York, who dubbed him “the senator from MBNA” in a 1998 American Spectator article. The nickname stuck in years to come as Biden became the leading Democratic advocate of a bankruptcy reform bill that most Democrats opposed but that major credit card issuers like MBNA strongly favored.

There’s no reason to think that Biden backed MBNA’s position because his son worked there — senators normally line up with their home state’s major employers’ policy priorities — it’s more like Hunter got the job due to his dad’s overall cozy relationship with the company.

Hunter’s career, however, never really seems to have quite launched as an independent entity. In 1998, he went to work for the US Department of Commerce and then left after the Clinton administration ended. He formed a lobbying firm with an old associate of his dad’s. By mutual agreement, Hunter avoided lobbying his father but did continue to collect consulting fees from MBNA through the 2005 passage of the bankruptcy bill the bank had long sought.

In 2006, President George W. Bush appointed him to the Amtrak board of directors as a gesture of bipartisanship. Here’s how Tom Carper, Delaware’s other senator, described his qualifications for the job (emphasis added):

Hunter Biden is a native Delawarian and I would go on to say that he’s also been nominated to serve on the Amtrak Board of Directors. When Hunter was unable to get into the University of Delaware, he instead went on to Georgetown and then to Yale Law School and managed to get through those OK. He’s ended up being Senior Vice President at MBNA one of the largest financial institutions in the country. He served as Executive Director of Economy Policy Coordination at the U.S. Department of Commerce. About 5 years ago he went off and formed a law firm here in Washington, D.C., and now they represent over 100 clients including a bunch of non-profit organizations and educational institutions.

More specifically, though, and for our purposes and for the purpose of this nomination, Hunter Biden has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains. Like his father, like our Congressman, Mike Castle and myself, Hunter Biden has lived in Delaware while using Amtrak to commute to his job as we commute to our job in Washington almost every day of the week. You know, you learn a lot about what could work and what would work better at Amtrak by riding trains and talking to the passengers, the commuters, the passengers, the folks who work on the trains and make them work every day. You also have a chance to see the huge economic benefit the region receives from having a strong passenger rail corridor, something that should be available in a lot of other parts of our country.

It would obviously be a stretch to attribute any specific shortcoming of passenger rail in the United States to Hunter Biden’s service on the board. But the fact that the job is treated as a kind of patronage position to hand out to random senators’ kids who have no relevant knowledge beyond riding the train a lot helps explain why American passenger rail is low quality and exhibits little understanding of international best practices.

When his dad became vice president, Hunter left the Amtrak board and instead got involved with a series of investment companies. As detailed by Ben Schreckinger in Politico, a lot of this work seems to have hinged on Hunter and his uncle James Biden sort of hinting around that the family connection to the vice president could help get things done and then not delivering. The Obama administration generally regarded Hunter as a kind of embarrassing family black sheep rather than a real scandal.

Hunter Biden had a lot of problems in life

Stepping back from politics, the Hunter Biden story is basically sympathetic. His mom died in a car accident when he was a little kid, his dad was a loving but busy US senator, and his older brother was accomplished in ways he couldn’t quite match.

And the history of American presidential politics is littered with similar characters like Billy Carter, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush, who try to capitalize financially on relatives in the White House and thereby succeed in embracing their family without really accomplishing much of anything.

In May 2013, Hunter joined the US Naval Reserve for which he required two waivers — one because at 42 years old he was above the normal age for a military recruit and the other due to a previous drug use incident. In August, his brother Beau received the initial diagnosis of the brain cancer that would eventually kill him.

By February of 2014, Hunter was discharged from the Navy for testing positive for cocaine. The next spring, Beau died. In October 2015, Hunter separated from his wife Kathleen. She filed for divorce in 2016, and in paperwork complained that Hunter had been “spending extravagantly on his own interests including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations.”

Sometime in 2016, Hunter began dating Beau’s widow, which family members claimed to be supportive of, but that relationship unraveled by early 2019.

Hunter’s personal troubles were severe enough that he was for whatever reason unable to attend Joe Biden’s presidential campaign kickoff — an event that featured Hunter’s three daughters, the boyfriend of one of the daughters, Beau’s two kids, Hunter’s half-sister Ashley, and Ashley’s husband Howard Krein, along with an empty seat in the row with a piece of paper on it that said “reserved.”

And during the bulk of this troubled period in Hunter’s life, he was fortuitously on the board of a Ukrainian energy company — a stroke of good fortune that’s become the centerpiece of a bogus corruption allegation leveled at his dad.

Joe Biden didn’t do anything to help Hunter in Ukraine

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era. These days, of course, the president of the United States regularly accepts payments from foreign sources to his company while in office, and so do the Trump children. The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

The question of whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at all is a matter of dispute (the relevant Ukrainian players have told inconsistent stories), but this is clearly not the reason he was fired. The desire to push him out was fully bipartisan in the United States and reflected a consensus across European governments, not than anything idiosyncratic to Biden.

The notion that firing Shokin was somehow problematic was not in the air until the New York Times ran a story co-bylined by Ken Vogel and a Ukrainian journalist named Iuliia Mendel (who a few weeks later would become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s official spokesperson) highlighting Rudy Giuliani’s efforts at muckraking.

NEW: The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal:@JoeBiden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor seen as corrupt. BUT the prosecutor had opened a case into a company that was paying HUNTER BIDEN. The Bidens say they never discussed it. https://t.co/tblUPYPJMG

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 2, 2019

The worst you can say about any of this, however, was that Hunter’s position on the board was a standing conflict of interest that should have been avoided. There’s no evidence that Joe did anything wrong, specifically. But an examination of the life and times of Hunter Biden does provide a reminder that most Americans thought politics as usual was corrupt long before Trump arrived on the scene to make it more corrupt.

Hunter Biden is a product of an unloved system

While progressives find Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp” to be galling and hypocritical in light of his family’s massive financial conflicts of interest, the real direction of causation likely goes in the other direction. People who identify with Trump’s racial and cultural politics find progressive complaints about corruption to be hypocritical and unpersuasive because the whole system is corrupt.

As of 2014, Gallup found that 75 percent of voters felt corruption was “widespread” in American government.

And if you think about Biden’s role on the Obama ticket back in 2008, the whole point was that he was the reassuring insider to balance out the fresh-faced outsider reformer who was running for president. That’s a common formula in American politics, with an outsider (often a governor) promising to “fix the mess in Washington” with the assistance of a more seasoned vice president. That’s Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The other formula — the political veteran balanced by a younger and more energetic vice president — is much rarer (H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle come to mind), even though in theory vice president is the junior job.

That’s no coincidence. Some aspects of Hunter Biden’s career and life story are a bit extreme (the Amtrak gig, dating his brother’s widow), but the kid who trades on family connections to make money is much more a case of business as usual than an extraordinary scandal. “Business as usual in Washington,” however, is normally the subject of scorn in American politics. Any focus on Joe Biden’s son is likely to remind people of at least some of what they don’t like about it.

Listen to Today, Explained

Ukraine finds itself at the center of the American impeachment drama, but President Trump is the least of the country’s worries.

Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2nlzA1A from Blogger https://ift.tt/3aJFjCl via IFTTT

[charlieharry1]

B2b pr: why it's essential to entrust public perception of your emblem to a recognition management expert.

If months of "fake news" and brexit have taught us something, it is that all exposure is in reality no longer proper exposure. In reality, trump's ascension to us president and britain's surprise referendum result just visit exhibit how powerful the media can be. Particularly in relation to influencing public opinion. It is one of the many arguments  Digital Marketing Agencies in Southampton in favour of b2b corporations today entrusting their pr pastime to a trained media engagement expert. One that could make investments the time and power needed to make in-roads with key guides and leverage the ones relationships to persuade the tale that receives published about their customers within the media. Pr organization services merchant virtual stack of print newspaper

so do pr organizations inform reporters what to put in writing? No longer precisely, no. One of the jobs of a pr organisation is to get their purchaser positively represented within the media fed on by using their audience – be that newspapers, magazines, on-line, television or radio. And by way of audience, we mean the client base their patron wants to interact. On occasion pr is ready pushing a specific product, with the objective to drive sales. At different instances it can virtually be approximately elevating the profile of a patron to pressure attention of their life and generate new enterprise leads. Regardless of what the supposed final results, the media is a validated automobile for pr companies to efficiently get their purchaser’s message available. It really is why establishing robust relationships with their customers' pinnacle-tier media is such an vital aspect of a public members of the family officer's process. In a manner, the journalist is the middleman that bridges the distance between the pr expert and the target market they need to have interaction. And that they want to provide the journalist a relevant and exciting tale which they experience pressured to proportion with their readership, totally free. Media relations' cost is not simply in its fee effectiveness; although you only should look at the insurance completed in phrases of equivalent advertising spend to realize the splendid roi it may supply. The actual fee of media family members is the publicity generated for a customer in influential titles, reputable via their goal demographic. All of that can have an overwhelmingly superb impact on brand belief, sales and enterprise boom. Virtual pr news on laptop and phone

as a b2b business enterprise, why spend money on pr? Nowadays, information generation is faster and more on the spot than ever earlier than with fresh stories appearing across digital information shops each minute of the day. No longer to mention, gaining more toughness via shares and interplay on social media channels like linkedin and fb, that may preserve a story alive inside the public awareness for longer and boom its attain to millions of customers. It's the capacity to engage tens of millions of human beings, each considered one of whom represents a potential adopter of your services or products, while not having to make investments a penny in marketing spend. The proper product placement, within the right booklet, has been recognized to convert a logo's fortunes overnight, that is why it’s now not only mounted b2b businesses that are making an investment in expert pr to develop their brands, however additionally bold startups with achievement of their sights. How b2b pr is converting in the twenty first century

 at the same time as a essential a part of public members of the family involves securing publicity through conventional method, particularly in applicable geographical and enterprise news shops in the methods we have described above, b2b pr within the 21st century now extends some distance past this. Nowadays, endorsement by way of a respected social influencer with a big facebook, linkedin or instagram following can generate as an awful lot nice publicity for brands as a mention in a mag or newspaper. Giving pr companies working within the digital advertising age another effective string to their bow. One which leverages the popularity of industry professionals, organization stakeholders, and online influencers to create fantastic institutions with the brand they're representing. It is an technique that is commonplace in b2c pr, and we've seen its fulfillment infinite instances, maximum these days via the influence of the younger royals on income of fashion brands. It's no accident that designs worn with the aid of both of the duchesses promote out in mins, and it's this form of effective 1/3-celebration affiliation b2b companies can also capitalise on to reinforce their logo engagement and lift their credibility inside the eyes of their audience. American express is one such global logo to increase its b2b pr interest and use of influencers in the digital advertising age, through campaigns along with #amexambassador. The a success marketing campaign recruited influential public figures and social influencers to assist amex entice executives and b2b companies to its premium services, via a combination of celebrity ambassadors and virtual influencers. In a comparable vein, microsoft partnered with countrywide geographic and 30 women scientists and adventurers in an influencer marketing campaign designed to inspire girls to get concerned in stem (technology, technology, engineering and mathematics). The marketing campaign launched on global girls's day and changed into successful in attaining an target market of ninety one million social media users, receiving over 3. Five million likes in a single unmarried day. Pr companies social media work lit up hashtag signal

the purpose endorsement by an character is taken into consideration to be so credible is because it seems definitely actual, and that is in which its power simply lies. It's honestly human nature to searching for out opinions earlier than investing in a product, or carrier. It is the purpose word-of-mouth pointers deliver a lot weight, and evaluation web sites together with tripadvisor, trustpilot and checkatrade appeal to a lot visitors. It truly is the 1/3-birthday party endorsement effect and it's what pr is all about. Aligning a emblem with credible media outlets and influencers consumed and relied on by means of its target market can help organizations achieve the awards. But, as records has demonstrated, now not all emblem ambassadors emerge as properly emblem fits. Helena bonham carter for example saw her endorsement with yardley cosmetics come to an abrupt give up while the actress went on document pronouncing she by no means wore makeup. David beckham, a international-renowned football legend and across the world reputable icon, changed into further caught out using an iphone while publicly endorsing motorola. The important thing with emblem endorsement is to audit your target ambassador carefully, and make certain their values and beliefs align with that of the products or services being promoted. Do your studies, consisting of studying their social posts, and invest time digging up antique media insurance to see what is been written about them in the past. There's not anything worse than an unsavoury vintage tweet coming lower back to hang-out you, and as they say, better the satan you know. While those slip-u. S. A. Can purpose a brand minor embarrassment and a briefly bruised ego, a few situations that crop-up in enterprise are infinitely extra serious in nature, and while those arise, regularly nothing quick of a complete-scale pr reaction is needed. How pr can shield your brand in a disaster

 a crisis in business may be any variety of factors, from a piece-region death on enterprise premises, to a top-degree govt being accused of a crime. In short, a crisis is something that has the ability to negatively damage your brand’s public picture, integrity or its reputation within the eyes of its stakeholders. Frequently a pr disaster is a situation no one noticed coming, and it's one that may strike a enterprise at any time, throwing normal operations into chaos, and with the ability to motive catastrophic damage to sales and share charges if not properly managed. It truly is why, in situations consisting of this, it can pay to have the guide of a educated pr professional on hand, who can manage the media, and minimise poor publicity resulting in reputational damage. This sort of reactive reaction is an intrinsic part of a pr enterprise's remit, usually known as crisis control, and while a disaster does strike, there may be no alternative for someone who can maintain professionalism and remain calm in the face of overwhelming pressure. Digital advertising and marketing and pr organization paintings achieved on macbooks plan view of desk

in fact, a enterprise's media response inside the wake of a disaster is often the key to the brand coming out of the storm unscathed and might have a important concerning reputation, share charge, and patron confidence. That's why the high-quality public family members specialists, like the ones we employ at service provider, recognize precisely a way to react and what is referred to as for in a crisis state of affairs. From confirming all the data, earlier than enticing with newshounds, to composing a succinct remark or press launch for immediate distribution, fielding enquiries for interview requests, and briefing any media-going through members of your leadership crew who might should cross on file or on-camera to make a announcement. This type of incident reaction is simply every other way that our expert pr help at service provider provides price to our customers' organizations, protecting their fairness and their marketplace price at important instances, when not anything but the appropriate and timely reaction can diffuse a situation from escalating. How we harness the energy of positive publicity for our b2b clients

 Read Also:-  What you need to check before hiring a PPC agency?

at merchant, public family members is simply considered one of many popularity management offerings we offer to our commercial enterprise-to-business clients as a part of our professional virtual marketing and emblem transformation competencies. Understanding, as we do, that what the general public study about your product, stakeholders, or carrier can leave a lasting influence and naturally, in which our customers are concerned, we want that affect to be superb. In truth, because we realize that the media can make a logo, simply as easily as it may ruin it, we paintings tough to make certain we get our clients' target guides on aspect. Growing newsworthy tale angles that translate into coverage and raise our clients' manufacturers in the eyes in their key stakeholders - for all the right motives. For the ones b2b organisations that spend money on pr as part of their advertising spend, it's now not lengthy before the fee it brings begins to offer itself. One such patron who is visible a direct advantage from our pr offerings  Digital Marketing Companies Southampton is hampshire-primarily based groundworks and civil engineering organisation mackoy, who has loved extended brand recognition following the tremendous coverage we secured in local and production trade press.

[sinrau]

The White House turned into a fortress by a lunatic President. Protestors being gassed with chemical agents in front of it. Police beating people — old, young, black, white — in city after city. Tough guys who assault little girls for posting protest signs calling for…justice. Soldiers in the streets of the nation’s capitol. Military vehicles roaring through it. New York Times op-eds by major political figures calling for people to be…shot.

America’s authoritarian nightmare is coming true.

All of that raises a question for people like us — those of us who saw it coming.

The last four years have unfolded according to our worst fears . So what if the next six months do too? Shudder.

Let me begin with the first part.

The last four years have unfolded to according to our worst fears. By “our,” I mean people like me. Those of us who’ve studied how societies collapse — and lived in survived authoritarianism, too. Of course, you don’t have to be either of these things, scholar or survivor, to have harbored those worst fears. Maybe you just knew, the day Trump crowed “grab ’em by the pussy!” Or when he called refugees “vermin.” Or, or, or.

How precisely? Trump was elected in 2015. By 2016, the Trump Administration’s first priorities weren’t giving Americans the healthcare, retirement, education, and raises they desperately needed. It was…building his dumb wall, the one made of bricks, and the other one, by banning minorities. Both walls went up.

By 2017, America had a network of concentration camps . By 2018, it was “separating families” — tearing kids away from their mothers and fathers. And putting them in cages. That, by the way, the last living Nuremberg Prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, called a crime against humanity. By 2019, raids in towns and cities across America were commonplace, and America had something very much like a Gestapo, checking papers, putting people in camps, disappearing them.

(Those of us who tried to warn of all this, by the way, were either marginalized, erased, or mocked. But I digress.)

And so here we are today. 2020. Do you like what you see? Soldiers on the streets. Protestors being gassed. Politicians calling for state violence in the pages of top newspapers. The White House fenced off, surrounded by men with machine guns, in body armour, who nobody can really figure out even are.

Where does America go from here? Those of who’ve studied authoritarian collapses, lived through them, or both, like me, will tell you: America is in grave, grave danger right about now.

Let me crystallize the lesson of the last four years. Authoritarianism proceeds according to the worst case scenario. The one you don’t expect, consider, or reflect upon much. The worst fears of all were realized, faster, harder, and more terribly than most ever thought possible in America. Especially it’s pundits and intellectuals and so forth — the “wise men” who failed to anticipate, and thus prevent, authoritarianism from hardening. The worst case scenario is the most likely one when it comes to authoritarianism and fascism. That is how America sleepwalked into collapse, right off the edge of a cliff.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — should take a moment to understand that lesson. Just how badly wrong the rosy-cheeked, optimistic predictions were. When Trump was elected, pundit after pundit, intellectual after intellectual proclaimed something between: “Everything will be fine!” to “There’s nothing to worry about!” to “Lol!” And yet, just a few short years later, all those wise men are now histrionic and breathless, wailing about authoritarian-fascism. But not a one has the guts to admit they were wrong.

That’s not a jeremiad or condemnation, by the way. It’s a note of caution. Maybe you were wrong, too. The point is that we need to learn from the past, and quick.

So. If we should expect the worst when it comes to collapses like this, then what will the next few months bring? Just ask yourself: what are your worst fears?

They probably go something like this.

Trump uses the civil unrest spreading across America to declare the martial law he’s already threatened to. Soldiers line the streets of major American cities. Real violence begins to break out. Then, Trump declares a state of emergency. Using emergency powers, he postpones the election. Until when? Nobody…knows.

Or maybe the election proceeds. Trump’s margin of loss is close enough to contest, thanks to Facebook and Twitter mostly looking the other way, when it comes to disinformation and propaganda. The case goes to the Supreme Court. Guess who they — leaning heavily Republican — decide it for?

Or maybe Trump loses. And he simply refuses to concede to a peaceful transfer of power. His lawyers cook up some cockamamie case — they excel at those — and it’s sent to the Supreme Court. They dither and dally. The country’s left in limbo. There is no leadership. If you think this is chaos…what about that?

Or maybe Trump wins outright, with a little help from his friends in the Kremlin. Another four years…of this? America’s already way, way past camps, bans, raids, and cages. It’s at soldiers in the nation’s capitol, and people being beaten in the streets.

Four more years? They’d bring something like this. Leading journalists and critics and opposition party members being put on sham trial, on Trumped-up charges (see what I did there?), and thrown in jail. Those camps being filled up with even more minorities — this time, probably citizens. Widespread — even more widespread — brutality from law enforcement. The construction of an Iron Curtain, to keep people in. The rise and triumph of the final and late stages of fascism: institutional dehumanization, state violence, and genocide.

Think that sounds improbable? Maybe, maybe not. It’s about your worst fears, remember? In the situation that America is in right now — a proper authoritarian-fascist collapse — the worst-case scenario is the most probable one.

When you understand that, then you can really begin to fight authoritarian-fascism. Until you do, you’re like America over the last four years: impotent, helpless, and deluded.

Right now, the most likely case out of all of those is all of those. That Trump somehow manages to win, steal, commandeer, or simply cancel the next election. That there’s some kind of grey area, where the next election is contestable, or not quite fully determined, and as a result, Trump manages to cling to power. And another four years somehow come to pass. In other words…

The unthinkable happens.

Hasn’t that been the story of America over the last four years? If I asked you a decade ago — do you think that America will have a wall by 2016, concentration camps by 2017, be putting kids in cages in them by 2018, be sending Gestapos to raid towns and cities by 2019…and by 2020, people would be being gassed in front of the White House, which now looked like a military installation, as soldiers poured into Washington DC, and military vehicles roared through it, while President…Donald Trump…threatened to declare martial law…

Be honest. You would’ve laughed, and either slapped me, or asked me to go for a beer, because anyone who can spin a yarn like that must be fun to hang out with.

The unthinkable has happened in America over the last four years. That is the lesson of every authoritarian collapse — and unfortunately, most nations don’t learn it until too late. Iranis didn’t think their urbane and cultured nation was going to implode into a fundamentalist Islamic state. Lahore, Pakistan used to be called the Paris of the subcontinent, so literate and artistic was it. Russians, too, on the eve of Soviet Collapse, didn’t dream that one day in the near future, Putin would rule them with an iron fist. The story is as old as time.

Nobody thinks their society can collapse. That is precisely why and how societies collapse faster and harder than anyone much really expects them to.

Especially in situations like America’s. A wrecked economy. A society that doesn’t seem to cohere anymore. A culture of idiocy. All these things predict further, and harder, authoritarian-fascism — not less.

In times like these, you must think the unthinkable, and guard against it. That is the only — the only — defense against authoritarianism going all the way, and seizing power for generations.

What’s even more unthinkable than the cases I sketched out above. How about President Ivanka? Jared? Little Donald? How about a Trump Dynasty ruling over a ravaged America, looting it, for decades? Sound like science fiction? So would 2020…in 2015. The lesson is: think the unthinkable.

America’s authoritarian nightmare is coming true. Because society was in deep denial that the unthinkable was already happening. How is America to stop it’s authoritarian nightmare from coming all the way true — its democracy dying, for good, this time?

The answer to that goes like this. Every remaining functioning institution in society — and there aren’t many — has to think the unthinkable. The military. The people. The opposition. The media. The intellectuals. All of them have to learn, right now, to anticipate the worst-case scenario, as the most likely one. Then they have to work together, to stop it.

That means civil disobedience. It means military disobedience, from leaders who understand that soon enough, a President might be ordering them to open fire on American citizens. It means media finally taking fascism and authoritarianism seriously, and educating Americans that it’s been happening here — and owning up their mistakes in not recognizing it, either. It means the opposition beginning to genuinely oppose fascist-authoritarianism in America, by being serious about trials for crimes against humanity and so forth.

That’s just a small list of beginnings. But they all have one thing in common. The unthinkable.

The unthinkable became real precisely because nobody much in America took the possibility of fascist-authoritarianism seriously. America now has five crucial months which will decide its fate for generations to come. More than likely, permanently. Now is the time to take the unthinkable lethally seriously.

Because a democracy has never needed to be on a higher alert than America does right about now. Do you really think Trump doesn’t want to corrode, steal, or thwart the next election — and make his kids the strutting, preening Gadhafis and Saddams and Putins of a broken, cowed America? Don’t kid yourself.

Think the unthinkable.

Umair

June 2020

America’s Authoritarian Nightmare is Coming True #web #website #copied #to read# #highlight #link #news #read

[cromeromeromero]

Forever Fornever: Tokyo Window Sessions

In September 2016 I traveled to Japan to observe media art and digital culture in Tokyo. While conducting research and curatorial activities - during residencies at Tokyo Wonder Site and 3331 Arts Chiyoda -  I created a web-based project entitled Tokyo Window Sessions. The ongoing project features essays, artist interviews, an exhibition, and an archive of my personal experiences in Tokyo. The intention of these activities was to form a better link between media art communities in the U.S. and Japan. Both countries, despite an affinity for new technologies and contemporary art, remain surprisingly disconnected in discourse specifically related to media art.

In September 2016 I traveled to Japan to observe media art and digital culture in Tokyo. While conducting research and curatorial activities - during residencies at Tokyo Wonder Site and 3331 Arts Chiyoda -  I created a web-based project entitled Tokyo Window Sessions. The ongoing project features essays, artist interviews, an exhibition, and an archive of my personal experiences in Tokyo. The intention of these activities was to form a better link between media art communities in the U.S. and Japan. Both countries, despite an affinity for new technologies and contemporary art, remain surprisingly disconnected in discourse specifically related to media art.

It can be said that when we view images we either see a window, door, or mirror. Each way of seeing comes with benefits and obstacles. You can look into a window, but will not see everything inside a room. You can enter a door, but sometimes it is locked. Mirrors offer self-reflection, but also trick and reflect narcissism. Using the title of  “Windows” is meant to evoke a temporary glance into Tokyo. The idea of “sessions” comes from the phrase “jam session”, originating from American jazz music of the 1920s in which desegregated gatherings of musicians took place.

Tokyo Window Sessions is improvisational and experimental, at the same time it is critical and investigative, emblematic of digital culture itself. The website itself features three sections Windows, Ephemera, and an Exhibition.

Windows >

This section features essays and interviews. Essays drift between discussing exhibitions and specific artworks. Artist interviews contain a mixture of questions about an artist’s work and personal interests. This section also features what I call “bonus questions”, prompts or exercises where an artist sends a picture of their computer desktop or shares some of their favorite YouTube videos. Every page features illustrations I created related to the artist I was interviewing.

Ephemera >

In this section I accumulate data or artefacts from my time in Tokyo. This includes receipts from Lawson, museum brochures, as well as every video and photo I recorded Tokyo. I live in the digital and I often wonder what content is important to keep and share. In the arts we often focus so much on the ‘work’ but what about the moments that influence the work? Or those that take place outside of it? As an independent curator, my work and personal life are mixed and I wished to share it. For me, it is important that I create projects that are inviting, warm, and sometimes weird.

Exhibition >

An exhibition entitled ASDFGHJKL;’ was produced. It was shown in two different formats (as the studio space I was in was constantly changing). I will discuss the exhibition at the end of this essay.

Through the project I have met many amazing people and had many wonderful experiences. I also observed a few similarities and divergences between media art in the U.S. and Japan, (specifically New York and Tokyo) which I will overview in the following text.

PAST

The U.S. and Japan have different histories with technology, which affects their histories with media art. This spills into arts education and culture. A few differences stand out. The U.S. is without an electric town. Videogame arcades boomed in in the 80s and 90s but fizzled out shortly thereafter, meanwhile, personal technologies such as cell phones developed at a slow pace comparative to Asia. Regarding cultural differences, emojis have only recently gained a cult status in the U.S., but their Japanese origin is not mainstream knowledge. These aspects bleed into one another and are toppled by language barriers and cultural institutions that dictate how and which types of art are disseminated to the public.

Growing up in the United States I was ingrained in videogames and the internet, however, art and technology were entirely separate conversations. Only until I moved to New York, from a small town in New Jersey, did I learn about media art. While studying in art history I never gained a strong understanding for Japanese (or non-western) media art. Considering major arts institutions in the U.S. rarely focus on art outside of the west, it is even rarer to find them focusing on non-western media art, let alone publishing a text about the subject.

Rather, my interest and understanding for Japan and technology (like many others) came through the media I consumed. Prior to this project I was unaware of Akihabara’s connection to World War II, consumer electronics, and post-war black markets. As an outsider one sees Akihabara very differently and might simply be surprised by the amount of SEGA centers and idol cafes.

Nowadays, when I consider Akihabara and how commonplace technology is in Tokyo, I begin to think about how that history and presence affects emerging artists in their work and daily life. In many ways, I feel media art and digital culture in Tokyo hides in plain sight, whereas in New York it sticks out like a sore thumb.

PRESENT

Comparing both countries, there are a few differences in what subject matter is featured in exhibitions. From my perspective, I see more media artists in the U.S. approaching social and political subjects than in Tokyo. However, institutions in the U.S. act quickly, absorbing what is “new” and “trendy”, but quickly move on to something else as if checking off a list. Virtual reality as “the new painting” has become popular as of late, and so too were selfies, drones, and augmented reality. The biggest factor of New York’s art ecosystem are commercial and capitalist ventures (especially art fairs). This impacts what art is featured in museums or written about. Startup culture is also an interesting entity in the U.S. and influences media art, but I am more excited about how it will crash rather than its present dance with art and creativity.

Regarding arts institutions, both Tokyo and the New York have very different approaches. Rhizome in the U.S. for example exists predominantly online and focuses on Internet based art. Institutions like Eyebeam and Harvestworks focus on residencies and creative experimentation with technologies. Regarding museums, I find that most in New York have an occasional exhibition of media art but nothing purely devoted to art and technology.

As for museums, the obvious leader in media art is perhaps the Museum of Modern Art. Still, their treatment of the subject is problematic. Although the museum has a curatorial department of media art, I feel the curatorial department of architecture and design produces more consistently intriguing content on emergent issues. The museum’s conservation department is also prestigious and on the edge between the present and future. As all of this occurs in the realm of museums, we should also not forget that several commercial galleries exist in the U.S. devoted to media art.

In Tokyo I am still impressed by the ICC. The exhibition series Emergencies is particularly profound to me, as it is dedicated to emerging artists. This really does not happen in New York, unless a small gallery is willing to take a “risk” or there are some financial connections happening. In Tokyo I also had the opportunity to see the Japan Media Arts Festival. While I feel the festival had a few issues, it is important that such a thing even exists. In the U.S., festivals occasionally pop up, but they lack major government support as mostly everything in the U.S. is privatized. Although not-for-profit institutions exist, they are often influenced by board members and commercial interests.

What I find more prevalent in Japan are artists and collectives that openly work in or on commercial projects, dabbling both in fashion and advertising. For better or worse, the art scene in the U.S. attempts to remain clandestine about connections to wealth, whereas Japan does not hide it. In this regard, commercial ventures in the U.S. attempt to hide in plain sight, where as in Japan they stick out like a sore thumb.

BAD FUTURE

Another worthwhile conversation between Japan and the U.S. is to consider what Postinternet art means and what it looks like. The Japan Media Arts Festival took on this subject, but fell flat. The exhibition seemed to make a generalization that artists of younger generations are all Postinternet. For example, video content of the Internet Yami-Ichi and IDPW was included in this section. While IDPW and the Internet Yami-Ichi were born out of the Internet, they were not formed with the Western notion of Postinternet art in mind. Furthermore, the event brings together internet pros with novices.

Generalizing Postinternet proposes that we are all as equally influenced by the web as one another, which is a complex and flawed assumption. The danger of labeling something as Postinternet is that if every emerging artist is put into this category than we alienate media art and create a pigeonhole. Artists should feel encouraged to create their own groups and genres apart from what other countries, individuals, or institutions might have in mind to capitalize on. It is also okay to make fun of the genre itself and not take things so seriously.

Ultimately media art is on the fringe in both countries. This will not change unless museum curators and leaders of arts organizations make stronger efforts to understand and interpret our contemporary digital society and its relation to art. I hope that, both in writing this text, and conducting the Tokyo Window Sessions project that can be more open about the faults of our media art ecosystem, what we can do to make it better, and how we can get people outside of the ecosystem to feel less skeptical of it.

Both the U.S. and Japan remain fairly territorial in what they represent inside their museums. However, arts organizations in the U.S. have a prestige of touting diversity while often falling flat. This can be found in researching the statistics of who and what contemporary art museums feature. I often feel the lack of collaboration is blamed on language barriers and funding. These are weak excuses to me as the first iteration of this project faced both of those obstacles.

Now that the world is entering an increasingly tumultuous time, it is important to look to curators and leaders of institutions and ask them to create more experimental projects and mix things up. Genuine and honest collaboration can change our future from a bad one to a good one.

GOOD FUTURE

During my time in Tokyo I organized an exhibition at 3331 Arts Chiyoda’s studio residency which alludes to conversations and concerns about media art. The exhibition, featuring U.S. and Japanese artists brought together different genres and subject matter in an attempt to provoke new inquiry surrounding art, technology, and digital culture.

Appropriating its name from Internet slang, ASDFGHJKL;' x あｑｓうぇｄｒｆｔｇｙふじこｌｐ；＠ was an exhibition of emerging digital artists from the U.S. and Japan.  The exhibition featured three artists from Tokyo alongside four artists in New York. The selection of these artists was meant to present a wide range of media art. ASDFGHJKL;' (in english) or あｑｓうぇｄｒｆｔｇｙふじこｌｐ；＠  (in Japanese) originates from the act of running your hand horizontally across a keyboard. The phrase, when typed, kind of defines a scream, shout, or yell. It is an action of bewilderment, frustration, or confusion.

So long as there is a keyboard, emerging artists have taken to the Internet and digital culture as a source of inspiration and influence. My decision to title the exhibition this way comes from my own frustration or shout regarding media art communities in the U.S. and Japan not connecting more. If technology leads our evolution, we have been stalling on exchange (via exhibitions, research, and experimentation) between the U.S. and Japan [and more broadly the west and everywhere else].

If the digital embeds itself into the work of contemporary artists, and in our daily life, so do it’s terminologies’. ASDFGHJKL;’ is a response to what I view as a “regional lockout” of culture. The term, used in the tech industry, represents restrictions on digital content per location or territory. For example, some YouTube channels in the U.S. that I want to watch in Japan are inaccessible. In the case of this exhibition, the shout is to acknowledge the feeling that a regional lockout exists between both countries. Perhaps the artists of the exhibition feel a similar way, as shown through their eagerness and supportive nature in producing the exhibition.

artists >>

Kenta Cobayashi’s work employs various tools including digital photography, iPhones, his MacBook, screen captures and photo sticker booths. He uses these to capture images of his life, himself, and the people around him. Kenta’s interventions with photographs diffuse the border between images, photoshop filters, and digital graphics. www.kentacobayashi.com

Nozomi Teranishi, is a photographer and digital artist from Fukushima. Many of her works are influenced by experiencing the earthquake in Fukushima and visions of health alongside artificiality. Her digital photograph series The Regeneration of Complex Societies addresses the Fukushima earthquake and makes use of digital editing to clone stamp people, places, and things, to heightened amounts. Nozomi new series of works under the title “Health Freak” references body image, and is the artist’s first time utilizing 3D animation tools. www.nozomiteranishi.com

Multimedia artist RAFiA utilizes animated gifs, selfies, and sound to create a distinct visual aesthetic that merge photography, image manipulation, and painting. Almost always using herself as a subject, she creates visually arresting images that are balanced between joy and trauma, divinity and humanity. www.raf-i-a.tumblr.com

From Shanghai and based in the U.S., Wang Yefeng specializes in 3D animation tools, creating bizarre and surreal worlds. His newest animation, “The Drifting Stages” features a pulsing red and blue backgrounds inspired by the Porygon Flash from the original Pokémon anime. An array of objects fills a room and comments on the artists displacement between Shanghai and New York, and the things he has accumulated in his life. www.wangyefeng.com

Terrell Davis creates hyper real 3D renderings of still-life tabletops consisting of cluttered technology, consumer products, plants, and junk food. The hyperrealism of his imagery evokes a snapshot into contemporary life, consumerism, and pop culture. The glowing coloration and saturation in his work illuminates the objects we often use but rarely pay attention to. www.terrelldavis.me

Daniel Johnson’s work often deals with appropriation and photography. In ASDFGHJKL;’ were videos he created for the Internet Yami-Ichi in New York. At the event he sold DVDs with misleading titles. Buyers may think they are purchasing a hollywood film, but the DVD actually contains short clips of the artist doing mundane activities. www.itsallstrange.com

FOREVER TODAY

In working with these artists, I am left to wonder what patterns I can see forming between media artists of both countries. I have noticed in the U.S. there are more media artists experimenting with 3D animation tools, virtual spaces, and data. In Japan I notice an excellent and original use of digital photography, two-dimensional effects, and a rewiring of physical materials. Of course I found some overlap, but it is something I wish to investigate further.

In December 2016 I returned to the U.S. While my home country is undergoing a frightening and backwards shift in ideology it only motivates me to continue the Window Sessions initiative and expand it to other locations. Starting this project I never had an end goal in mind, but always thought of it as an alternative archive, one that is always growing and meant to preserve present media art activities for future audiences. In the next few months I will continue to upload content to Tokyo Window Sessions. In September 2017 I will expand the project to Seoul, where I will conduct a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

After that is my intention to return to Japan and continue my curatorial activities. Presently I am studying Japanese and intend to translate Tokyo Window Sessions in the future. Now more than ever I have an opportunity and responsibility to create something truly meaningful and timely. I welcome collaboration with emerging artists, forward-thinking institutions, and residency programs who might be reading this.  

Special Thanks:

Eri, Exonemo, Fiona, Luis, Glenn, Shirin, Shunya, Yosuke

~ and many others

[eidolon-zephyr]

A Flight of Fancy Ch 1

Fandom: Twilight Pairing: Aro/Bella Rating: M

Intro: Here Next: Here

Chapter summary: In which Aro is presented with an opportunity 

As time had gone by, Aro had stopped paying any mind to the flow of time itself, merely taking passing note of any interesting developments, vampire or human. It was a patchwork of events, blips on an empty and endless timeline.

Until she came along.

Suddenly, time had slowed down a bit more than normal, and he found himself watching the world around him with more interest than he usually bothered with. On more than one occasion, he found Marcus staring at him with an odd expression on his face before going back to watching whatever played in his mind constantly (Aro had a fairly good idea of what it was – he hardly needed to touch Marcus to know that his existence revolved around his deceased mate. He refused to regret what he did. It had been for the greater good. Whose greater good that was for was subjective, and he didn’t care to elucidate.)

7 years had passed since he had begun monitoring the young human, and still he wasn’t satisfied. He felt he would never be satisfied. Why? What was it about this girl, this Isabella, that was so utterly fascinating? He thumbed through the most recent report, feeling a smirk pull at the corner of his mouth. It was likely he knew the girl better than her own parents knew her, perhaps even better than she knew herself.

Report 88

Isabella is on time with household payments, as usual. There is an elevated level of unrest in the house, and Isabella is more pensive than normal. She has secluded herself in her room, and Renee spends most of her time in the household shifting restlessly. I believe it is due to Renee finding a new human to spend time with, and it is becoming apparent that the male wishes to make the arrangement more permanent.

A young human male has taken an interest in Isabella at her educational institution, but she has so far spurned the advances. It is just as well. He is not worthy of her attentions.

Aro smiled at this. It seemed Jane had become attached to Isabella over the years. How amusing.

Her performance in her classes remains outstanding, and she has increased the number of books she reads per week to three. Wuthering Heights maintains a place of distinction within her bag.

She was becoming quite the bibliophile. Aro raised his eyes to glance at the walls of books around him. Oh, how his Isabella would simply love his study. He paused, playing his thought backward in his mind. His Isabella? Well that just wouldn’t do. He moved on to the next report, putting the issue out of his mind until he felt ready to deal with it.

Report 89

Renee has married the male named Phil. Despite the joviality of the event, both Renee and Isabella seem unhappy when not distracted. It is becoming apparent that the…rift…that has been between them since I began following them, may never be mended.

The restlessness pervading the household remains, and has increased over time in Renee. She wants to accompany this Phil to his various sports functions, but cannot with Isabella remaining. Isabella knows this, and may be weighing her options based on how she continues to grab her phone, only to put it back. Perhaps she intends to go with her father.

Isabella has turned 17 today. As before, Isabella made no spectacle of the event, and has quietly accepted a dinner that Renee has offered to make.

The dinner was inedible, and Isabella quietly made a new dish.

She has chosen to move in with her father, to grant her mother the freedom that she craves. I will provide another report once she has settled into her new permanent home.

Moving. Aro laid the reports down and clasped his hands behind his back, making a slow circuit around his room. She would be leaving the arid climes of Arizona and moving to Washington, a place almost constantly beset by rain or heavy cloud cover.

A place he could move freely.

His hands tightened around each other and he stopped moving, standing with the stillness only a vampire could achieve. Perhaps this little…obsession…of his was going too far. Under no circumstances could he see her, nor should he. She was simply a human, a curiosity to entertain him. A fascinating human, but a human nonetheless, no matter how interesting she was, or how potentially gifted. He thought back to one of the first reports, his milky red eyes becoming fixated on the floor.

--

A knock sounded on the door of his study and he jovially granted entrance, pushing away from his desk where he had been writing in a scroll. It was time for his monthly report, and he felt a tingle of excitement. What new information would be provided to him this day?

To his surprise, he saw Demetri standing in the doorway, his head bowed and a scroll clutched in his hand.

“Demetri? What ever are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be with Jane?”

“Master. My humblest apologies.”

Apologies? What was this? Aro stepped forward to take the scroll and felt his eyebrows begin to draw together when Demetri immediately knelt, presenting the back of his neck. Only those who had failed him utterly would present themselves so. If Demetri was doing this, then…

Aro tore the scroll open, feeling an uncharacteristic growl building in his chest. On the paper were only two lines.

Report 17

We have lost track of her. She left her home while we were feeding, but she will be found, I swear it.

She is immune to Demetri’s gift.

Immune…the growl died before it could manifest and Aro read the report six more times to be sure he was understanding the contents.

Young Isabella was…immune! He began laughing wildly, throwing his hands in the air and tossing the report in an unknown direction. Demetri bodily flinched, not quite expecting that reaction.

“Stand, dear Demetri. This is marvelous news!” Aro exclaimed, warmth permeating his tone.

“Master?” Demetri questioned as he stood, not quite believing his luck.

“A gifted human. Manifesting at such an early age and being powerful enough to block your ability to track is…phenomenal. Isabella is truly magnifico.”

--

“Magnifico,” he breathed, imitating his memory.

He would not be able to stay away, he knew this. Even as he tried to tell himself that it was a bad idea, he knew it was impossible. His feet began moving again, his internal clock telling him it was time to feed. Isabella was far too interesting, and had far too much potential value to ever let slip by. She would not be a simple human to grow old, marry, reproduce, and die decrepit. No, no, no. She was meant for more, meant for greatness, and he fully intended to see that vision become reality.

Even if it meant making her a soulless monster like him.

Aro didn’t flinch as he heard the snap of bone and pained screams filling the air of the feeding room. He gently deposited the body he'd been feeding on and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with his pinky. There were two more snaps followed by higher pitched screaming. Typical Caius.

“Brother, stop playing with your food,” he said blandly.

There was a low growl and another snap. There was only a raspy moan this time.

“Blood is sweeter when suffused with fear, dear brother.”

“It is distasteful.”

“It is our right. Unlike you, Aro, I have no shame in what I am.”

Aro's expression remained placid, his hands folding neatly in his lap. His eyes flicked from the unnaturally bent limbs of the human in Caius's grip, to Caius's sneering face, and only felt something akin to mild disappointment.

“I do not deny my nature, nor is there any shame, dear Caius. I simply find no need, nor take any particular joy, in unnecessarily maiming my food.”

“You are too soft, Aro. Humanity exists to serve our needs, and one of my needs is to have a good meal. Another is to inflict pain. Yet another is to remind humans of their inferiority. I see no issue in satisfying all of these needs at once.”

Aro stood, running his hands down the front of his suit, smoothing down nonexistent wrinkles.

“Not indulging in sadism does not make me weak, Caius. I am very well capable of doing what needs to be done, and that includes silencing those that mistake my mercy for weakness.”

His smile was soft, but his eyes were glinting dangerously. Caius's sneer faded to a wary glare, acknowledging the threat, and turned away to bury his face in the throat of his victim with a snarl.

Aro turned away from the spectacle, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. Caius was a valuable asset, an intelligent and hateful beast that was only just barely leashed by a love of violence that was more commonplace in the daily matters of the Volturi than Aro was really satisfied with. But even the most valuable tool had its limits and wasn't worth keeping if it could do more harm than good. It was an edict he lived by. Centuries of companionship would not change that edict.

He glided like a specter through the halls of the castle, eyes roving over portraits and paintings that he had seen countless times. Boredom tugged at his dead heart again, and he sighed inaudibly. It was becoming a little too frequent for his liking, this feeling. He had power, he had fortune, he had respect and fear. He even had a wife to warm his bed (as ironic a statement as that was). When had it not become enough? Quick footsteps brought him out of his reverie and he began to smile as Demetri approached, but faltered when he saw the scroll in the vampire’s grip. He knew what that was. But why so soon? Demetri bowed quickly, holding out the scroll.

“Master.”

With spidery fingers, Aro plucked the scroll from Demetri’s hand and moved around him, heading toward his study.

“Dismissed, Demetri. Thank you.”

A thousand candles lit the room of his study and a light frown began to tug at his mouth as he stared down at the scroll in his hand. The paper was beginning to crinkle from the force of his grip. Was he nervous? Excited? He sat at his desk and slowly pulled the scroll open. There was no report number.

Isabella has made contact with the Cullens.

The Cullens. Carlisle.

His words were slow, thoughtful, but his mind was racing, his lips pulling upward. “So that is where you ended up, my old friend. I see…perhaps I owe you a visit, then.”

Decision made, he stood and softly called for Demetri. It was high time he left Volterra once again.

Alice Cullen froze, her eyes going blank as she was pulled into a vision. Just ahead of her, Jasper paused, honing in on the surprise and confusion that his wife was feeling. He turned to face her, his brow scrunching together.

“Alice, darlin’, are you alright?”

The small vampire blinked several times, taking an unnecessary breath. The rest of the family had heard Jasper and gathered in the living room where she’d stopped. Her eyes met each one of her family members, and she was glad Edward was not there to see what she had seen.

“We’re going to have company.”

[blockheadbrands]

What Cannabinoids Would Jesus Do?

Caitlin Donohue of High Times Reports:

A Christian website makes its case for CBD.

“One thing Christians are often accused of is being narrow and judgmental,” says GodsGreenery.com editor Natalie Gillespie. “I think that’s because we’re afraid to even learn about something that we think might not be good for us.” Though she had never been a big cannabis user before she got the job, the longtime Tallahassee-based journalist has populated the faith-based CBD educational site with health and scriptural findings, many conveniently aggregated into features like “Top 10 Scriptures that Could Give Christians a Thumbs-Up for CBD.”

Gillespie is part of a growing wave of Christians promoting cannabis. Her contemporaries include anti-porn pastor Craig Gross, who has gained acolytes hyping, in his words, “a conversation about the emotional, physical and — dare I say? — spiritual effects that I’ve had with this controversial plant” at SoCal’s music fest Coachella in May. Gross promotes his own “coming soon” line of marijuana products, including mints called “People.” (From the product description: “the perfect aide to help you turn your eyes outward, so that you may love your neighbor as well as you do, yourself.”) The ex-porn crusader told Vice that, “inside the Christian world — and it’s the thing I hate about it — you have to have your own products.”

Perhaps this is all a bit confounding for those who remember the dire anti-drug sermons that have roared from the gullets of Christian television preachers throughout the decades of the prohibition era. But times are changing. Recent polls show U.S. residents are more concerned about e-cigarettes than Reefer Madness — and 65 percent of the country identifies as Christian.

Even so, the nerve of a faith-based site sending a press release to such a decidedly heathen publication as High Times would seem forged of Jesus’ finest stainless steel. One line from the God’s Greenery communiqué stood out (indeed, it was in bold text): “God’s Greenery has a visionary plan to monetize the use of CBD as a tool to assist churches in combating the massive decline in their parish numbers.” The line raises its share of questions, and the press release suggests we interview Gillespie to learn more.

The editor jumped on a quick three-way phone interview with the GG press representative, during which she spoke of her recent Biblical studies with all the enthusiasm of a new convert, which she is. “I really learned about the CBD oil and CBD industry and the science and the medicine of it on this same journey with my reader, with my audience,” she says, sunnily. “It’s kind of why I think that they thought I might be the perfect editor, because my knowledge of CBD was not deep.”

Albeit brief, her journey has led her to many scriptural teachings that apply specifically to CBD. Gillespie cites God’s Genesis 1:29 creation of “seed-bearing plants,” and she is not the first Christian to identify those words as God’s go-ahead for cannabis consumption. A Texas-based Christian medical marijuana organization founded in 2010 was named after the very same verse. But Gillespie bridles at that group’s conclusion that access to THC could be part of His plan.

Apparently, the key to Our Heavenly Father’s CBD-only approval lies in the Thessalonians reference to “sobriety,” a word that could mean “thoughtful” and “considerate” in ancient Greek, but which Gillespie and other scholars have deciphered as “drug-free.” “If it’s benefiting the body, mind, and spirit that’s one thing,” she says. “If it’s taking away from our passion and purpose that God created us to be able to do, then therein lies the line.”

She is not the only person who has seen fit to disassociate CBD from full-spectrum marijuana products. Indeed, it is commonplace in the marijuana industry to refer to the cannabinoid as “non-psychoactive,” even though CBD is often prescribed to treat the symptoms of psychological conditions like anxiety. (God’s Greenery’s Toronto-based parent company Miraculo also operates cannabisMD, a consumer education platform that includes information on the benefits of THC and full-spectrum cannabis products.)

“God’s Greenery is specifically on hemp-derived CBD,” says Gillespie. “That, through a faith lens, doesn’t cause any controversy — well, ‘controversy’ is not the right word. It doesn’t cause — I guess — an unsettled feeling in people’s spirit.” Surely it doesn’t hurt entrepreneurial Christian sensibilities that CBD is commercially available in 14 states that ban all other cannabis products.

Question Of Monetizing CBD

When asked about the GG press release’s mention of the “monetization of CBD” to save her faith, Gillespie tries. “In 2020, I think you will see God’s Greenery release a line of CBD products,” she says. “We are in independent third party testing right now to make sure that it’s working, that it absolutely does have the CBD that it purports to have and that it does not have any ingredients that it should not, and that it will pass muster every single time.”

But how, we pressed, will such products reverse downward trends in church attendance? The PR person who is also on the line jumps in. “The plan is to market actually inside a church. So imagine a church bake sale? It’s going to be more like a church CBD sale,” they said. Later, they sent an email to amend the comment, looking to shift the focus to Miraculo, Inc.’s cannabis educational offerings; “I’d say God’s Greenery’s goals are a bit bigger than bake sales.”

Later, Miraculo CEO Michael Klein — a former VP of programming and content strategy for Condé Nast Entertainment who has also worked at the Travel Channel and MTV — sends a qualifying email. Ten percent of the CBD line’s sticker price will be funneled into “donations to institutions, churches and other causes important to our audience,” he says. Klein is not ready to specify what those groups would be or what kind of CBD products will drive this philanthropy, and is certainly not committing to the idea of any multi-level marketing scheme involving churches and CBD bake sales. “We are still in the planning stages,” Klein concludes.

Surely, not all Christians have seen fit to promote cannabis access solely through the lens of personal consumption or financial gain. “Given the proven racist intent of the war on drugs and the criminalization of marijuana, it’s time for Christians to think critically about this issue and not just default to abstinence,” said Christian rapper Jason Petty. It stands to mention that Petty is Black, and has a cousin who served a 25-year sentence for a nonviolent drug offense.

But one might hope that Christian nature would extend to the thousands of individuals currently incarcerated for possession or distribution of that same godly family of plants.

Gillespie demurs when asked if people should be in jail for marijuana-related charges. Instead, she delivers a line that serves as the most perfect example of — let’s call it multi-level reasoning, if only to avoid the word hypocrisy — from a would-be CBD purveyor, partially-prepared faith journalist, or any combination of the two, that has yet to be delivered.

“That’s not a God’s Greenery question, honestly,” she says.

Even to a non-believer, selective contemplation of cannabis’ sanctity sounds like a leap of faith.

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

https://hightimes.com/culture/what-cannabinoids-would-jesus-do/

[ixvyupdates]

Take It From a White Suburban Mom, Grade Inflation Is Real and We Can’t Deny It Anymore

Arne Duncan found himself in hot water a few years ago when, in reference to the higher standards of the Common Core, he said, “It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from…White suburban moms who—all of a sudden—their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”

Duncan later apologized for what he called “clumsy phrasing” but at the time, even as a White suburban mom myself, I thought he was onto something. Fast forward to today and, putting aside the inartful and arguably insulting way he framed it, we’d be wise to consider that he might have been right.

The thing is, we “White suburban moms” are just like everyone else. None of us like to face up to hard truths. Change is hard and the evidence is now even clearer that the more affluent a student is, the less likely it is that their grades are accurate reflections of their knowledge or understanding of a particular academic subject. Grade inflation is very real and it is most prevalent in schools that serve affluent communities.

Seth Gershenson, an economist at American University and The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently joined forces to answer an essential question: How hard it is to get a good grade in high school and has it changed over time?

The study breaks new ground on the issue of grade inflation because it includes such a broad set of students and the findings, outlined in the recently published report “Grade Inflation in High Schools,” yielded three key—and concerning—conclusions:

Finding 1: While many students are awarded good grades, few earn top marks on statewide end-of-course exams for those classes.

Finding 2: Algebra 1 end-of-course exam scores predict math ACT scores much better than do course grades.

Finding 3: From 2005 to 2016, more grade inflation occurred in schools attended by more affluent youngsters than in those attended by less affluent.

There is an ugly irony in finding 3—America has always been plagued by the insidious narrative that poor people of color don’t really earn their achievements and accomplishments but rather are given an unfair boost or advantage because of their race.

Anti-affirmative action sentiment—or resentment—is often what drives that thinking but experienced superintendents and educators will tell you that they hear the very same skepticism about their own students’ achievements.

In fact, it is the privileged, the wealthy and the powerful who are most likely to exist in a seeming state of denial, either wittingly or unwittingly, because their schools inflate their children’s grades the most. There is more disparity between report card grades and performance on end-of-course exams in affluent districts.

In some respects, the Fordham study only puts hard numbers onto something we already knew. It is indisputable that it is commonplace in America schools for a child’s grades to be far better than their performance on standardized tests like Advanced Placement and the ACT or SAT.

In fact, students who receive A’s and B’s on their report cards often earn low scores on standardized tests in the same subjects. I remember my local superintendent sounding the alarm when he matched up the number of students earning A’s in AP courses and earning 1s and 2s on the AP exam. He identified the phenomenon as grade inflation.

While it’s hard to pin down one cause for higher grade inflation in affluent communities, it’s impossible to dismiss the likely possibility that pressure from parents plays a role. During my days as a teacher in a pressure-cooker community—average home price of $1.7 million—it was common for parents to call and come to the school to plead for the B- instead of the C+. The appeals for extra credit, extensions, or any other opportunity to raise the grade were relentless.

In later years when I taught in southern California, a parent followed me from one school to another, in a rage that her son’s deliberate choice not to study for the final and subsequent failing grade resulted in a C. There I was, during a prep period the next school year at a different school listening to a mother berate me over the phone for her son’s report card grade from the previous June. When I told her that her son had actually said to me, in front of the class, that he wasn’t going to study at all for the final, it didn’t matter. It was my fault and I needed to fix it.

In the best case scenarios, teachers and administrators have the courage to stand up to these parents and they have a supportive superintendent. But others are quick to cave to pressure, especially when that pressure comes from influential and powerful people in the community. All of this is anecdotal but in conversations with teachers who have experience working in similar communities, the stories sound the same.

Parent pressure can’t account for all the grade inflation. In many school districts, it’s embedded in the culture and it’s simple: Classes are too easy and grading is too easy. Schools that boost honor rolls as long as CVS receipts often do not boast nearly as impressive numbers when it comes to student proficiency, SAT averages or college and career readiness. But how are parents to know that?

As Mike Petrilli has aptly mused in the past:

Conscientious parents are constantly getting feedback about the academic performance of their children, almost all of it from teachers. We see worksheets and papers marked up on a daily or weekly basis; we receive report cards every quarter; and of course there’s the annual (or, if we’re lucky, semiannual) parent-teacher conference. If the message from most of these data points is “your kid is doing fine!” then it’s going to be tough for a single “score report” from a distant state test administered months earlier to convince us otherwise.

And he adds that “nobody wants to tell parents to grab a pitchfork and march down to their school demanding an explanation for the lofty-yet-false grades their kids have gotten for years on end. Maybe they should.”

Parents wielding pitchforks are not out of the ordinary in affluent communities when it comes to the demand for better and higher grades so the likelihood that they’d change course and start banging the drum for fewer “lofty yet false” grades is pretty remote. But it needs to happen. I’ve got my pitchfork ready.

Photo by michellepatrickphotographyllc Patrick, Twenty20-licensed.

Take It From a White Suburban Mom, Grade Inflation Is Real and We Can’t Deny It Anymore syndicated from https://sapsnkraguide.wordpress.com

[communiteabooks-onlinestore-blog]

Our Democracy in Practice

Hey,  America I have an idea: Regardless of the influential scale of your impact, regardless of whether its effects are great and wide, or individual and minute, regardless of whether you're concerned you might look bad to your peers instead of consistently looking for someone else to blame for (y)our problems—personal or societal—why don't you focus on what your role is in creating those problems. The political price tag has gotten to be too high, because whether or not anything on C-span directly affects the majority of our lives, we are allowing it to affect our lives, and, of course, in cases of school and workplace shootings and other senseless deaths we really are beginning to experience a phenomenon that will not be remedied from the top down. It is way too easy to blame others, to focus on the misdeeds or irrational understandings of those that we might disagree with, and to justify our behavior with our own developed sense of social morality. The American party system has become so manipulated and so divisive, and that divisiveness has become so commonplace that we do not even recognize that our ship is sinking. It has nothing to do with Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton—nothing. We are too focused on blame. Somewhere along the line the American people became convinced that our way of life, and our society, our American dream no longer existed, and instead of actually looking at it, instead of stopping to say, “Well, sure it does.” We started blaming each other. It’s the Democrats, it’s the republicans, it’s the African Americans, it’s the immigration issue, it’s the gun control issue, it’s the LGBTQ community, and it’s that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—it’s not, it has always been us. Our indifference and our lack of accountability. I liked Obama, I voted for him, twice, but a lot of his policies did ignore the intentions of the constitution; however, I am quite certain that when most conservatives argue in favor of that point they have no idea what they are actually talking about, they are simply repeating sound bites that they happened to hear making the rounds through the social mediasphere, and if they do [claim to know what they are talking about] then their indifference now completely outweighs their sense of social service. I am a proponent of social liberty—for everyone. It’s nonsensical to say that, “I am a proponent of social liberty, well, except for blacks, and homosexuals, and the transgender, and…” with that said, it’s not the place of the federal government to decide for the American people what your sense of social liberty is. Racism and sexism and other prejudices are a form of ignorance, there is no doubt about that, but if the United States is going to establish law in favor of-, or against various social liberties—though it’s something that the U.S. should never do—it can only be done at the state level. Obama did ignore that. Is that prosecutable? No, I’m sorry, it is not, and neither is it forcibly divisive. As I have mentioned, that personally, I do understand the frustration of ignorance, and the desire to force a sort of…re-education, but it cannot be done, forcibly; that is a fine line to cross, and we have to maintain the distinction—and if for no other reason that we are sometimes too different in our perspectives from one another. I can appreciate the necessity of the 2nd amendment though I cannot, for the life of me, understand why conservatives are fighting so hard to keep semi-automatic guns available to the public, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. The argument that you can keep it simply because you have the right to, is, I mean, it’s apathetic and careless, and borderline dangerous, actually, at this point, it is beyond borderline. There are more than enough alternatives available to the American public without the ‘freedom’ to unload and unreasonable amount of ammunition sailing towards a deer or a target attached to a barrel of hay. You don’t need it. Even the Founding Fathers disallowed weapons in some situations and institutions, too many people conveniently ignore that, inasmuch as they ignore the language, “A well-regulated militia…” the first lines of text in within the amendment for, “…shall not be infringed.” When it is undeniably clear that the act of infringement, in this case, refers to the amendment in its entirety, and how not regulating gun control is in actuality an infringement on the amendment. Yes, we do need a 2nd amendment, people do need the right to “bear arms,” but some of y’all need to be reminded that there is a difference between pride and freedom. I am pro-life. Do you know what that actually means, to me at least? It simply means that I am against death, well premature, unnecessary, and senseless death. It means that I am against the acts of “police brutality,” abortion, and the death penalty—and I have a sleuth of issues with our judicial system, specifically the correctional department, and how people are imprisoned for life for non-violent drug crimes, I mean come on—isn’t that what healthcare’s for? Oh, wait, we can’t even figure out our healthcare system either. But, why? It should be simple: we have a capitalist economy, right? Well then why isn’t healthcare privatized? Only then would the sick actually get the quality of healthcare they deserve. The United States is too big for Universal Healthcare, especially if our federal government is focused on making everything a federal issue. And look, no, I don’t agree with abortion—I’m prolife—however, I’m also male, which in-and-of-itself kind of eliminates me from having any sort of practical understanding, and therefore opinion on the issues, especially considering that I am prolife, not just pro-birth. The point that I’m making with all these personal political confessions is, well, 1.) That there needs to be a distinction between our social and our political lives, but more important 2.) Most of your opinions are based on sound bites that mean nothing, if you established some sort of linear “How Did I Come to these Conclusions” outline for your political beliefs system it wouldn’t make any sense, because it’s not based on anything. ​And although it seems that I am using republicans as a series of examples of what not to do (I'm about to do it again), I am, by no means, only referring to republicans, this is a bipartisan problem, democrats are just as responsible, you are a mirror image, only, to your political counterpart. I mean a major aspect of Republican Dogma is moral family values based greatly on the teachings of Jesus Christ, while there are 11,000 immigrant children that have been removed from their parents and locked up in warehouses across the southern most part of our country. Congressman are not even aloud to tour these facilities. And you shrug your shoulders and whine about immigration? And that’s justifiable to you? Jesus was Middle Eastern, why don’t you try Googling “People Born in Bethlehem,” and after weeding through the various paintings of Jesus and pictures of American kids recreating The Nativity, tell me what you see. ​And I’m even a proponent for having, and enforcing better immigration laws, but come on, let’s do things the right way, hmm? So instead of getting on Facebook and sharing fake news articles, or real news articles and expressing your feelings of intense distaste towards something completely irrelevant to our everyday lives, why not stop and think about what you really want your role to be, and what your role actually is, and through this exercise maybe you’ll learn to take some accountability. Because is it really Obama or Trump that’s dividing this country? Or is it us? So, let’s try that, and see were that takes us.

[vinayv224]

Hunter Biden, then the chair of the World Food Program USA, speaking at an organization event on April 12, 2016, in Washington, DC. | Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA

A troubled guy at the center of the fake scandal that became a real scandal.

Hunter is the younger of Joe Biden’s two sons. He never showed as much promise as his brother Beau, stumbling through life and often trading on his dad’s name and position for financial gain. He’s more or less operated in the background as something of a black sheep in the family, but he’s emerged to the forefront of American politics in recent weeks over work he did in Ukraine that fueled a bogus conspiracy theory at the heart of Trump’s decision to strong-arm the country’s president.

It’s not unusual for the children of successful politicians to trade on their family’s famous name and connections to get ahead in life. And when that happens, most political parents hope for a trajectory like the one enjoyed by Beau Biden until his life was cut short by cancer in 2015.

Beau followed in his father’s footsteps to Syracuse University for law school and then clerked for a US District Court judge. He got a job at the Justice Department and then became a federal prosecutor. He then dipped into the private sector briefly. But when Delaware’s attorney general, Jane Brady, resigned to take up a judicial post, the state’s governor appointed Carl Danberg to serve as a placeholder attorney general who wouldn’t run for reelection. Beau won the seat in the 2006 midterms, Danberg got appointed to serve as the head of Delaware’s Corrections Department, and all eyes were on Beau to run for governor in 2016 when Jack Markell’s term would be expiring.

Only an extremely naive person would see this as a career free of nepotism. But Beau, like a successful politician’s kid, had to actually do his work adequately each step of the way. As a candidate for attorney general, he clearly got a boost from his dad’s name, and it seems like the Delaware political establishment was working to open up an office for him to run for. But as a former federal prosecutor and Army JAG, he was qualified for the job and he won the election fair and square. And there’s nothing unusual at all about a two-term attorney general campaigning to win an open gubernatorial election in his home state.

This is more or less how the system is supposed to work for children of privilege — you get a consistent favorable tailwind at your back, but you still need to steer the plane. Hunter, by contrast, has been the guy who even into his 40s keeps needing dad to send the search—and-rescue party. And yet in a strange way, Hunter ended up being one of the most politically accomplished figures of our time since Trump’s efforts to smear Joe Biden over Hunter’s work in Ukraine ended up leading to his impeachment.

Hunter Biden’s whole career is being Joe Biden’s son

According to Adam Entous’s profile in the New Yorker, “it was clear to family and friends that Beau would follow his father into politics,” while Hunter was initially interested in more artistic pursuits “but, with a baby on the way, he decided to go straight to law school.”

The basic desire to make money is pretty commonplace. Hunter, after a year at Georgetown Law, was able to transfer to Yale and finish out at the country’s most prestigious law school. Yale Law grads don’t normally hurt for opportunities to earn a decent salary, but Hunter interestingly went to work right away for MBNA, a major Delaware-based bank (later purchased by Bank of America) that was also a big contributor to Biden’s campaigns.

This was part of a much larger coziness between Biden and the bank that the then-senator took flak for from conservatives like Byron York, who dubbed him “the senator from MBNA” in a 1998 American Spectator article. The nickname stuck in years to come as Biden became the leading Democratic advocate of a bankruptcy reform bill that most Democrats opposed but that major credit card issuers like MBNA strongly favored.

There’s no reason to think that Biden backed MBNA’s position because his son worked there — senators normally line up with their home state’s major employers’ policy priorities — it’s more like Hunter got the job due to his dad’s overall cozy relationship with the company.

Hunter’s career, however, never really seems to have quite launched as an independent entity. In 1998, he went to work for the US Department of Commerce and then left after the Clinton administration ended. He formed a lobbying firm with an old associate of his dad’s. By mutual agreement, Hunter avoided lobbying his father but did continue to collect consulting fees from MBNA through the 2005 passage of the bankruptcy bill the bank had long sought.

In 2006, President George W. Bush appointed him to the Amtrak board of directors as a gesture of bipartisanship. Here’s how Tom Carper, Delaware’s other senator, described his qualifications for the job (emphasis added):

Hunter Biden is a native Delawarian and I would go on to say that he’s also been nominated to serve on the Amtrak Board of Directors. When Hunter was unable to get into the University of Delaware, he instead went on to Georgetown and then to Yale Law School and managed to get through those OK. He’s ended up being Senior Vice President at MBNA one of the largest financial institutions in the country. He served as Executive Director of Economy Policy Coordination at the U.S. Department of Commerce. About 5 years ago he went off and formed a law firm here in Washington, D.C., and now they represent over 100 clients including a bunch of non-profit organizations and educational institutions.

More specifically, though, and for our purposes and for the purpose of this nomination, Hunter Biden has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains. Like his father, like our Congressman, Mike Castle and myself, Hunter Biden has lived in Delaware while using Amtrak to commute to his job as we commute to our job in Washington almost every day of the week. You know, you learn a lot about what could work and what would work better at Amtrak by riding trains and talking to the passengers, the commuters, the passengers, the folks who work on the trains and make them work every day. You also have a chance to see the huge economic benefit the region receives from having a strong passenger rail corridor, something that should be available in a lot of other parts of our country.

It would obviously be a stretch to attribute any specific shortcoming of passenger rail in the United States to Hunter Biden’s service on the board. But the fact that the job is treated as a kind of patronage position to hand out to random senators’ kids who have no relevant knowledge beyond riding the train a lot helps explain why American passenger rail is low quality and exhibits little understanding of international best practices.

When his dad became vice president, Hunter left the Amtrak board and instead got involved with a series of investment companies. As detailed by Ben Schreckinger in Politico, a lot of this work seems to have hinged on Hunter and his uncle James Biden sort of hinting around that the family connection to the vice president could help get things done and then not delivering. The Obama administration generally regarded Hunter as a kind of embarrassing family black sheep rather than a real scandal.

Hunter Biden had a lot of problems in life

Stepping back from politics, the Hunter Biden story is basically sympathetic. His mom died in a car accident when he was a little kid, his dad was a loving but busy US senator, and his older brother was accomplished in ways he couldn’t quite match.

And the history of American presidential politics is littered with similar characters like Billy Carter, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush, who try to capitalize financially on relatives in the White House and thereby succeed in embracing their family without really accomplishing much of anything.

In May 2013, Hunter joined the US Naval Reserve for which he required two waivers — one because at 42 years old he was above the normal age for a military recruit and the other due to a previous drug use incident. In August, his brother Beau received the initial diagnosis of the brain cancer that would eventually kill him.

By February of 2014, Hunter was discharged from the Navy for testing positive for cocaine. The next spring, Beau died. In October 2015, Hunter separated from his wife Kathleen. She filed for divorce in 2016, and in paperwork complained that Hunter had been “spending extravagantly on his own interests including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations.”

Sometime in 2016, Hunter began dating Beau’s widow, which family members claimed to be supportive of, but that relationship unraveled by early 2019.

Hunter’s personal troubles were severe enough that he was for whatever reason unable to attend Joe Biden’s presidential campaign kickoff — an event that featured Hunter’s three daughters, the boyfriend of one of the daughters, Beau’s two kids, Hunter’s half-sister Ashley, and Ashley’s husband Howard Krein, along with an empty seat in the row with a piece of paper on it that said “reserved.”

And during the bulk of this troubled period in Hunter’s life, he was fortuitously on the board of a Ukrainian energy company — a stroke of good fortune that’s become the centerpiece of a bogus corruption allegation leveled at his dad.

Joe Biden didn’t do anything to help Hunter in Ukraine

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era. These days, of course, the president of the United States regularly accepts payments from foreign sources to his company while in office, and so do the Trump children. The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

The question of whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at all is a matter of dispute (the relevant Ukrainian players have told inconsistent stories), but this is clearly not the reason he was fired. The desire to push him out was fully bipartisan in the United States and reflected a consensus across European governments, not than anything idiosyncratic to Biden.

The notion that firing Shokin was somehow problematic was not in the air until the New York Times ran a story co-bylined by Ken Vogel and a Ukrainian journalist named Iuliia Mendel (who a few weeks later would become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s official spokesperson) highlighting Rudy Giuliani’s efforts at muckraking.

NEW: The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal:@JoeBiden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor seen as corrupt. BUT the prosecutor had opened a case into a company that was paying HUNTER BIDEN. The Bidens say they never discussed it. https://t.co/tblUPYPJMG

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 2, 2019

The worst you can say about any of this, however, was that Hunter’s position on the board was a standing conflict of interest that should have been avoided. There’s no evidence that Joe did anything wrong, specifically. But an examination of the life and times of Hunter Biden does provide a reminder that most Americans thought politics as usual was corrupt long before Trump arrived on the scene to make it more corrupt.

Hunter Biden is a product of an unloved system

While progressives find Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp” to be galling and hypocritical in light of his family’s massive financial conflicts of interest, the real direction of causation likely goes in the other direction. People who identify with Trump’s racial and cultural politics find progressive complaints about corruption to be hypocritical and unpersuasive because the whole system is corrupt.

As of 2014, Gallup found that 75 percent of voters felt corruption was “widespread” in American government.

And if you think about Biden’s role on the Obama ticket back in 2008, the whole point was that he was the reassuring insider to balance out the fresh-faced outsider reformer who was running for president. That’s a common formula in American politics, with an outsider (often a governor) promising to “fix the mess in Washington” with the assistance of a more seasoned vice president. That’s Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The other formula — the political veteran balanced by a younger and more energetic vice president — is much rarer (H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle come to mind), even though in theory vice president is the junior job.

That’s no coincidence. Some aspects of Hunter Biden’s career and life story are a bit extreme (the Amtrak gig, dating his brother’s widow), but the kid who trades on family connections to make money is much more a case of business as usual than an extraordinary scandal. “Business as usual in Washington,” however, is normally the subject of scorn in American politics. Any focus on Joe Biden’s son is likely to remind people of at least some of what they don’t like about it.

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Ukraine finds itself at the center of the American impeachment drama, but President Trump is the least of the country’s worries.

Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.

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The Iran Attack Part I

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by Tom Shackleford

Primer on Iran

Iran is a nation with a long and proud history, dating back to the Persian empire.  It is about the size of Western Europe and has a population in excess of 80 million. Iran also has the 3rd largest reserves of conventional (cheaply extracted) oil in the world and the 2nd largest natural gas reserves. Iran is clearly a force to be reckoned with. As such, it considers itself the protector of Shi’a Muslims, who often live under extreme Sunni repression throughout the region. No amount of US pressure has succeeded in halting the “protector” policy.

This self-conception has led it to become the principal backer of Hezbollah, and thus the primary impediment to Israel’s broader ethnostate aspirations. Hezbollah, the Shi’a militia operating on Israel’s northern border, demonstrated the martial competence to repel the Israeli military during a 2006 incursion into Lebanon, known to them as the “Divine Victory.” Since then, it has significantly improved its military capabilities, particularly missiles, with extensive Iranian support. Israel regards this group as an existential threat to its survival.

Iran has now made substantial progress in developing a nuclear energy sector. Its enemies fear that it will be channeled into a weapons program that could eventually be used against them. Even without an attack, it constrains their military options against Iran and its proxies.

Victory in Syria

Syria has a close alliance with Iran. Thus, when a US/Sunni/Israeli-backed jihadist insurgency seemed poised to topple President Assad, the Iranians delivered massive support to counter the terrorists. Most alarmingly for the West, it did so in tight coordination with Russia. Eventually, the insurgency was routed. As the conflict in Syria began reaching a close, embarrassing revelations about its origins emerged that had previously only been disclosed in the West through sources like WikiLeaks. Most notably, former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani recently admitted in a TV interview that his and other Arab monarchies had been supplying it from the start. Thus, an appalling jihadist rampage covertly launched to contain Iranian influence has achieved precisely the opposite result.

Iran Moving Forward

Iran’s position is the strongest it has been in recent memory. Its economy, which had been severely inhibited for decades, is poised for substantial growth. Iran has a youthful, educated labor force and an independent supply of hydrocarbons and other natural resources. It also offers low labor costs comparable to a place like Vietnam. Iran will be a linchpin in China’s ambitious “One Belt One Road” trade network. It will also be able to conduct transactions with key partners like China and Russia free of the Dollar, using new mechanisms such as a gold-convertible crude oil futures contract denominated in Yuan and China’s CIPS international payment system, which will make the use of SWIFT against Iran irrelevant.

Unlike the Arab monarchies that are totally screwed once their conventional hydrocarbon reserves dwindle, Iran has a massive supply that was under-exploited thanks to the sanctions. It also has tremendous economic potential beyond collecting oil checks, which (except for beheadings) is pretty much all the Arabs are good at. The specter of peak oil coupled with the defeat in Syria has the Saudis and their Israeli partners quite spooked.

Syria and Hezbollah are only part of the picture. The Iranians exercise strong influence over their Shi’a coreligionists in Iraq. They comprise two-thirds of the population. The US unleashed them by wrecking their country, which had been kept stable by Saddam Hussein’s Sunni dictatorship. Next door in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a comprise a very angry 15% of the populace. They’re concentrated in the Eastern Province along with most of the oil. The Saudis are currently engaged in a desperate struggle in neighboring Yemen against the Houthis, a primarily Shi’a movement. The Israelis aren’t thrilled about them either. One of the inscriptions on their flags reads “Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews.” This prolonged conflict is incredibly bloody. Even though the Saudis have few qualms about killing much of Yemen’s civilian population in order to prevail, they haven’t achieved much.

Desperation

The efforts of Israel and the Sunnis to counter Iranian influence have come to naught. This is fueling a profound sense of desperation. If Iran is already strong enough to counter them both right now, then what will they be confronted with years down the road, when the Iranian economy is much healthier? In contrast, the Arabs will be grappling with the massive costs of subsidizing their burgeoning populations with declining oil reserves. If they are going to smash Iran, it must happen soon. What’s already crystal clear: they won’t be able to stop the Iranians on their own.

America’s Role

In July 2015, a multinational agreement, The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was concluded at the behest of the Obama Administration. Among other provisions, the agreement lifted a variety of sanctions on Iran in return for limiting its nuclear program in order to inhibit the development of weapons and allowing inspections for compliance. This sounds like a reasonable course of action, since the last thing we need in the Middle East is more fireworks. However, it would be a mistake to attribute that much agency to an affirmative action puppet like Obama.

Although the deal was accompanied by public displays of angst, a paper titled “Which Path to Persia?” from the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution is far more revealing. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ideal scenario in this case would be that the United States and the international community present a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal, only to have the regime reject it. In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context— both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”

Ominously, this paper was published in June of 2009. The authors include several prominent Jewish swamp creatures. One, Kenneth Pollack, was a CIA analyst and member of Clinton’s NSC. A notable advocate of the Iraq invasion, he wrote an entire book on why that horrific disaster would be a terrific idea. Another, Martin Indyck, was an AIPAC researcher who went onto become US Ambassador to Israel, and later an envoy to the Middle East for Obama. Worst of all, another Jew, Bruce Reidel, was actually employed as an adviser to Obama.

I’ve found that papers like this can provide grim insights into our next blunder. The first one I ever bothered reading was “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by another Jewish think tank, The Project for a New American Century. It was floating around the dark reaches of the internet during the buildup to the Iraq War. It laid out a completely terrible idea for invading Iraq without any realistic consideration of the consequences. I became alarmed because my foray had been prompted by reading They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby by former Congressman Paul Findley. It detailed the power of AIPAC, the negative consequences of its control over our legislative process, and why the MSM won’t discuss it. I recommend checking it out because AIPAC and its tentacles are more powerful now then when the book was first published in 1985.

During the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump criticized the JCPOA. That’s not really a big deal from a rhetorical standpoint. It’s commonplace politics to take the opposite position of your opponents whether you mean it or not. Where things started getting heavy was an October 13th speech. The speech labeled Iran as a “rouge regime” whose “hostile actions” have “spread death, destruction, chaos around the globe.” Hmm.

Here’s where it takes a turn for the worse: it claimed that Iran’s government “forced a proud people to submit.” That is, we should free them. So, just like the Iraqis, Libyans, and Syrians, their lives ought to be enriched with liberty.

Then it gets really crazy: Shi’a Iran “harbored high-level terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attack.” Al-Qaeda, a Sunni organization, both professed and acted upon homicidal hatred for Shi’a Muslims. Iran was pretty weak in 2001. Why would they invite ruin from a trigger-happy Bush administration by abetting Sunni terrorists, who have gone on to commit atrocities within their own country? Moreover, the speech went on to make the absurd claim that the Iranians “condoned Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” you guessed it, “against helpless children”. We’ve seen this all before, and it never ends well.

Perhaps worst of all, it references “Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.” By all accounts, Iran is abiding by the limited terms of the deal and has allowed inspectors to verify their actions as such. After reading this transcript, I felt 15 years younger. It’s almost like they’d recycled something written for George W. Bush and then handed it to Trump.

Let’s think back on the JCPOA. What was the practical effect? First, it gave an excuse for a huge increase in military funding to Israel, mainly in the form of free F-35s. Netanyahu was even brazen enough to lecture Obama in the Oval Office on world television, and the pathetic puppet just had to take it. You could see the humiliation on his face. If you have any doubts about America’s lack of sovereignty, watch that video. Now, a false claim that Iran has reneged on “the spirit of deal” is a pretext for war under Trump, who is surrounded by Neocons and his helpful Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The potential for something very bad to happen is enormous. In the next article, we’ll take a look at the factors that point to war.

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Why You Need to Drug Test Your Teenager Even If You Don’t Really Want To

By Nicole Kolly

PARENTS: Drug Tests are Important!

If you are reading this, you may feel that drug testing is as desperate measure in the prevention of drug abuse. However, regular, agreed-upon drug testing of adolescents can save lives. Plus, the practice is becoming more commonplace. In fact, drug testing a teen is the only way to really know:

What substances your teen is really ingesting.

What kinds of risk your kid has for physical harm.

The level of risk your teen has for addiction.

NOTE HERE: Denial does nothing to solve a problem. Drug abuse is rampant among teenagers. From parties to classrooms, the drug culture is taking over every aspect of a teenager’s life! The only way to make sure of what your teenager is actually doing when they are out of your home is to get him/her tested for it.

Thinking about drug testing your teen son or daughter? Still wary of the process? Here are some key reasons why you need to drug-test your teenager now. Learn more here, and send us your questions via the comments section at the bottom of the page.

REASON #1: Peer Pressure is Unbelievable

From snorting cocaine at parties to smoking marijuana on school premises, drug-consumption is deep-rooted into adolescence. Even if your teen doesn’t want to do drugs, the temptation can be strong. Sometimes, even the strongest succumb. What’s more: A recent study in the UK found that kids who attend private school are more likely to experience addiction in their young adult years than their cohorts.

So, if you thought your well-brought-up, school educated, good-neighborhood-reared child can never do drugs…think again!

When drug use is everywhere and everyone but your child seems to indulge, saying “yes” goes from being intentional to almost involuntary. But, if a teens knows that they can be randomly tested for drugs at home, they may be much more careful and alert. In fact, there are chances that a kid who wants to stay straight will cut themselves off from circles that are heavily into drug consumption.

REASON #2: Drugs are Easily Available

You may want to refute it, but drugs are available and are very easy to buy. Both illicit and prescription drugs are available everywhere. Your medicine cabinets may be full of:

Benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax

Opioids like hydrocodone, oxycodone, or tramadol

Sleeping pills like Ambien

So, your own home may be a source of drug consumption. If not, kids are most likely to source prescription drugs from friends. Or, dealers may first give away drugs to children without any money, and then get them hooked. Whatever the source, once addicted, students are ready to pay and buy regularly.

It’s also disturbing that no place can be considered completely safe or drug-free for children. Even when it comes to educational institutions, drug dealing may be happening in clandestine ways. The best way to ensure that your teen does not abuse drugs is to randomly test them at home (with their consent).

REASON #3: Drugs are an Effective, Easy Escape

The rising popularity of drugs is also due to the immense pressure that teenagers experience. From academics and romantic relationships to body-shaming fears, teenagers are living in a difficult world today. Drugs often offer a temporary, but easy, solution for teenagers to forget their worldly pressures and escape into a dimension where none of these responsibilities, restrictions, or problems exist.

REASON #4: It is Viewed as a Cool Thing to Do

From the swinging 60s to the flamboyant 80s, taking drugs has been culturally viewed as a cool thing. Think about messages in film, television, or media. It’s not surprising how teenagers and youngsters from all generations get swayed towards drugs.

Teenagers often combine alcohol and drugs, which is a dangerous combination and can cause immense harm to their still-developing bodies. Most teenagers have a common lens with which they view the world around them and in that world:

smoking

snorting

injecting

…and basically doing drugs is any form is considered “cool.” And, we all know how easy and tempting it is to jump on that bandwagon.

REASON #5: Statistics Prove That You Should Drug Test

Even if you have complete faith in your teen and think it is impossible for him/her to do drugs, maybe these cold hard statistics can convince you otherwise.

According to the most recent (and the latest) survey conducted by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), in 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older—9.4 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.

The same study also found that there were 19.8 million marijuana users in 2013 – about 7.5 percent of people aged 12 or older—up from 14.5 million (5.8 percent) in 2007. Also, as per dosomething.org.

1/3 of teenagers who live in states with medical marijuana laws get their pot from other people’s prescriptions.

The United States represents 5% of the world’s population and 75% of prescription drugs taken. 60% of teens who abuse prescription drugs get them free from friends and relatives.

By the 8th grade, 28% of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 15% have smoked cigarettes, and 16.5% have used marijuana.

About 50% of high school seniors do not think it’s harmful to try crack or cocaine once or twice and 40% believe it’s not harmful to use heroin once or twice.

A national survey done in 2009 across 8000 schools in the country revealed that 94% of all high school students had tried marijuana or other illicit drugs at least once before graduating. The 6% who said they did not could be lying because they did not want to admit that they had done drugs.

Scary instances of 9-year old kids testing positive for cocaine and marijuana consumption and teenagers getting arrested for having a meth lab in their garage make one think and feel that random drug testing at home is probably the only way to monitor and keep teenagers at home away from drugs.

REASON #6: Testing Can Open Up Communication

Administer tests occasionally to your teenagers, but make sure you do it with respect and dignity. These are the two factors that make a world of difference to teenagers. Do not throw surprise tests at them. Instead, here’s what you can do:

Sit them down and talk to them about how drugs affect the brain. Focus on the science of drug intoxication. Talk about short and long term effects that drugs have on the brain/body. This implies you know what you’re talking about, so dig into this site and learn more about: alcohol, opiates, stimulants, and hallucinogens.

Inform you child that – in about a month from now – you will be conducting a drug, alcohol, and tobacco test at home. Tell them that you will be doing this periodically.

Show them the test (if necessary) and explain how they work. If they tell you things like, “You don’t trust us,” explain to them why you deem it necessary and why it goes beyond trust. Perhaps connect passing the test with an earned right to driving or getting their cellphone/Internet paid for.

It is advisable to choose a quality drug-testing kit from a reliable vendor. Then, administer tests on occasions like post-dinner date, after a sleepover, or after a music concert.

Agree upon consequences for positive drug tests. For example, positive testing may require a visit to a family physician or addictions counselor for follow up discussion. Remember to be open and talk with your child about effects on health or emotional life. If you’re in addiction recovery yourself, think about talking with your child about general experiences you had in the past. Or, look into education-based training on drug problems.

Limiting access to calls and texts, grounding them and monitoring their activities can backfire. To motivate a child to avoid taking drugs under any situation, connection is key.

So, be sure to keep communication open.

Got any questions?

Being a parent comes with a lot of responsibility. Sometimes, it involves you playing good cop/bad cop so that your teens can have a safe, healthy, and successful life ahead of them, devoid of any ramifications from substance abuse. If you have any further questions, please post them in the designated section below. We welcome your feedback and try to respond personally and promptly to all legitimate inquiries.

———————————— About the Author: Nicole Kolly is a digital content manager at TestCountry. She is involved in drug addiction support groups for recovering addicts and their families. She is passionate about living a healthy lifestyle and helping others do so as well. When she isn’t working she enjoys hiking, reading and cooking for friends and family.

Copyright © 2011 This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright. (Digital Fingerprint: f7a6e0cc3471137b83805a08cd727b99) from Addiction Blog http://addictionblog.org/family/why-you-need-to-drug-test-your-teenager-even-if-you-dont-really-want-to/

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Broad Strokes

Taking the pressure off by making the first post the worst post—

If you’re reading this, odds are you’re either (1) my classmate, (2) faculty at my program, or (3) my mom. If not, welcome! And “welcome’ if you’re one those people too. (Hi, Mom!)

I’m a masters students at the Products of Design program at SVA, and over the next 11 months I’ll be developing a thesis around human identity and purpose in the (allegedly inevitable and imminent) age of ubiquitous artificial intelligence—and how those definitions of human identity/purpose should evolve to accommodate this new reality.

What new reality? It’s one that’s already taking shape around you, although you may not have noticed. 

Every day it seems like another object or interaction in our daily lives exists or is mediated online. Some are already here and commonplace (albeit still cost-prohibitive for many people): smartphones, smart assistants (e.g. Alexa), smart TVs, smart thermostats, smart homes—the list goes on. And as the engineers, designers and marketers behind these products/services constantly look for ways to better align their products’ functions with the user’s expectations, they’re electing to imbue their machines with a form of intelligence that enables the products to learn users’ preferences and adapt its behavior based on that acquired knowledge. This is all thanks to a relatively new field in artificial intelligence research called “machine learning,” which is essentially a family of algorithms inspired by the human brain that are capable of taking reams of unstructured data, analyzing and finding patterns in it, and using those insights to inform future analysis and make predictions. If that’s not making much sense, that’s my fault. Here’s an example: Start by feeding an algorithm a bunch of training data, like a stack of photos of bananas. Tell the algorithm that these images all include a banana, and it will begin developing its own rules for visually identifying bananas. Once trained, you can feed it a bunch of unlabeled photos and the algorithm can let you know if it sees a banana or not. And the more training it receives, the more discerning it will become; even tricky objects like folded yellow umbrellas shouldn’t fool it. And if you aren’t intimidated by computers that aren’t quite as quick as toddlers at banana-identification, fair enough. As impressive as it is from a computational standpoint, image recognition is just one of machine learning’s tricks. What’s really exciting about ML is the virtually infinite array of potential uses it can be put to, without much change to the underlying algorithm. Google uses it to improve its search results (based on past performance of user-perceived relevance of similar queries), inform the auto-responses of its Smart Reply feature in Gmail, educate Google Translate, improve its voice-to-text recognition software, and much more. IT security companies are using it to improve their ability to identify new types of malware; financial institutions are using it improve their prediction of winning stocks and market trends; healthcare companies use it to look for macro trends in patient or population data, as well as make treatment recommendations—the list goes on. Essentially, anywhere computers are being used to help people make predictions or understand complex amounts of information, ML algorithms can be added to the mix to dramatically improve that process—and they already are. What that means is that, as ML continues to learn and improve, it will begin to eclipse and human practitioners in an increasing number of fields, rendering more and more jobs obsolete. It doesn’t take breaks, it doesn’t take a paycheck, and it can read a few million books every second. But while that may kill a few jobs, it will also dramatically improve the capabilities of those working alongside it. The trick, in the coming decades, will be striking a balance that doesn’t disenfranchise faster than it helps. That being said, we’re still very far from generalized machine intelligence, a.k.a. a system that can learn and act on multiple data systems. (Right now, every ML application is a beautiful one-trick pony.) This means that, in the present, the main challenge is to improve transparency about what’s happening in the ML learning process, and what rules the algorithm is creating for itself. Because right now it’s essentially a black box, even to the developers using it every day. What’s wrong with a black box if it always spits out the right answer? you wonder. Well, it’s only as smart as the training data fed into it—and without greater transparency into the process, we may not be aware of the biases in the training data until it’s too late. Already, algorithms geared to predict recidivism potential in inmates are skewed to disproportionately anticipate the relapse of black criminals over white ones, despite observational evidence to the contrary. Are black men disproportionately flawed, or the criminal justice system and sentencing process? Most people may intuit the right answer, but an algorithm cannot—at least, not on its own.

So that’s what I’ll be working on this summer: not criminal justice reform, but helping to design intuitive and transparent interfaces for machine learning software. I’m interning at a software start-up based in Brooklyn and am eager to learn from the very smart people working here. Today is my third day, so wish me luck! But so far, so good. (Don’t worry, Mom!)

Additional reading:

Why UX Design for Machine Learning Matters - Fast Company

The Top 10 AI And Machine Learning Use Cases Everyone Should Know About - Forbes

These are three of the biggest problems facing today's AI - The Verge

[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

Chatting with Novelist + Diabetes Auction Queen Brenda Novak

New Post has been published on https://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/chatting-with-novelist-diabetes-auction-queen-brenda-novak/

Chatting with Novelist + Diabetes Auction Queen Brenda Novak

Brenda Novak is best known to the world as a New York Times best-selling author of historical and contemporary romance novels. But to the diabetes community, she's famous for being the founder of Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure of Diabetes, which has raised more than $1 million for diabetes research. It's not just a one-shot (pardon the pun!) deal. The auction takes place over not just one evening, or even one day — but the entire month of May! The proceeds of the auction benefit the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) in Miami.

Brenda's motivation for organizing her enormous online auction (featuring more than 2,000 items) is her son, Thad, now 15, who was diagnosed ten years ago with type 1 diabetes.

Brenda lives with her family in Sacramento, CA, where she is actually a mom of five! Busy lady! She took some time out of her schedule to chat with us about how she got started and her advice to moms of other teens with diabetes (plus, find out where diabetes makes an appearance in her collection of books!).

DM) Brenda, can you start by sharing what exactly inspired you to start an online auction for diabetes?

BN) I wanted to do something for my son who was diagnosed at age 5. Diabetes is something that we're so anesthetized to because of the media and because so many people have it. It's become so commonplace in a way. People think they know a lot about it, but they don't know much. People just think that those with diabetes live normal lives everyday. I had that attitude. It wasn't a focal point for me until my son was diagnosed and I learned how hard it is and the tragic side effects. I was a young mom, just starting my career. I didn't have a lot of resources and I wasn't sure what to do. My husband said, 'There will be a time and a place for this later in life.' But I couldn't let it rest. Every day, I was just agitated about what I could do with so few resources.

I went to an elementary school silent auction, but it didn't get the turnout that they wanted. I remember thinking that this was hard, trying to get hundreds of people at one location, under one roof, for a limited time. There was a chance they'd have plans or couldn't participate. By that time, I'd built enough of my readership that I felt I could do something online.

So you decided to build your own online platform?

eBay was starting to get hot, but the 'mommy generation' hadn't really embraced it, so it was kind of a new concept. I thought maybe I should do it on eBay, but I'm glad I went my own way. I can keep the community and shoppers coming back every year. I tried doing it on my website and enlisted help from people I know in the publishing industry, and readers and writers to came together in a community effort to raise some money.

You started raising huge amounts of money right away. Did you have some big-name donors?

The online auction is not your usual fundraiser, like JDRF galas where you sell tables to huge corporations. We don't have huge donors. We have authors and readers, and cumulatively it turns out to be a big event. I'm really grateful to all the people who have joined with me.

The first year, we raised $35,000 and at the time that sounded huge. I kept growing it and trying to get it bigger and bigger. The next year we almost doubled, and the next year we almost doubled that. Then the recession hit, so we haven't grown quite as exponentially lately, but we've continued to grow at a time when other fundraisers aren't growing or are even shrinking by 30 or 40 percent.

Why did you choose to give the proceeds to the DRI?

I love JDRF and I like the ADA as well, but they're big and they've been around for a long time. I felt they had grown complacent. For me, it isn't about educating, it's about solving the problems so we don't have to educate. The people at the DRI are so passionate and focused. I just got so much more of a sense that at the DRI, they are as hungry for a cure as I am.

I felt so encouraged about the work they are doing and how close they seemed to be. It seemed the best choice for me. I wanted to be sure that I was very responsible for those dollars and know that the dollars are going directly toward a cure.

How much of the money goes to DRI?

All the proceeds. The overhead is quite low. I don't get paid, and we only have the one part-time assistant. Most of the promotion work is donated. The magazines all donate ads, so we don't pay for that. The overhead is very small.

How do you get donors involved?

It's easier now that we have a donor base to go back to, which is something we have worked on growing. But we also target new people each year. We send a solicitation letter, and the recipients figure out who you are and that you're worthwhile. I want to make sure donors understand that this is a reliable event, that it will grow, and that we will do what we say we're going do with the money.

You build credibility and you work with the same people year after year, and that makes it easier for them to contribute the next year.

Do you run the auction all on your own?

This is the first year that I have one part-time assistant. Before, I was not a big believer in volunteers. Self-interest motivates people, and you can't always rely on people you're not paying. However, I've had two volunteers come on to help me and they have selflessly given hours of their time. I almost didn't do the auction this year because I was overwhelmed with work, but they said, 'We can do it, we can do it! We'll help!' So that's what we're doing.

What are some of your favorite items in the auction this time around?

There are a lot of things! I'm a big fan of The Voice, so the CeeLo Green tickets in Vegas look great. My agent reps him so that's how we got the tickets. There's a Celine Dion meet-and-greet, too. I think she's classy and one of the best singers on the planet. Also, some of the volunteers like an attorney who's donated the time for building a Living Will.

There are almost 2,000 items, and they're so varied -- everything from homemade items to trips and stays. My son Thad has been putting a business plan together for a pen business, so he's been showing me samples, and he donated one of the pens to the auction. My sister donated a homemade witch and my daughter Alexa does pottery.

If you're a writer, there are lots of publishing-related auction items that you won't find anywhere else, like the chance to get in front of the decision-makers at publishing companies for a response within 24 hours, rather than the usual time of a year or more it can take to hear back!

Of course, I don't participate because I don't want people to think that I'm talking up my own auction and then walking away with the prizes!

Is your son involved with running the auction?

He's still in school so he doesn't do a ton of work. He comes home everyday and hears our daily totals. He does a lot of the shipping. Most donors ship direct, which makes the job much easier. But there are still several days of shipping work. He helps package everything up.

Why did you choose to do the auction every year in May?

It was for Mother's Day, and it was the month that he was diagnosed. It just felt natural. If it were in December, I might have thought twice because we would've been competing with Christmas. I think Spring is a good time for fundraising. So practically and sentimentally-speaking, this is a good month!

You're also author of quite a few best-selling books. Have you ever written a book with a diabetic character?

I did! It's called Every Waking Moment, about a woman who is living with an abusive man. She has a 5-year old boy with diabetes and she has to get his meds, and that makes it easier to track her. This book was written shortly after Thad was diagnosed, and so it reflects the anxiety that a mother feels in dealing with a child with diabetes. I got a lot of reader feedback. Lots of people have no idea about managing diabetes, and tend to blame type 1 on lifestyle being out of whack. Or they know only about type 2 diabetes.

Speaking of raising a child with diabetes, what advice do you have for other D-moms?

I think that's a tough question. I get asked that a lot. I feel bad because doing fundraising doesn't make me an expert with management. I think that I took too much of the diabetes management on myself. Now that Thad's older and I can't do that as much, getting him to take care of himself the way I could is a struggle. I think the hand-off is going smoother now, but it could definitely be better.

What I needed to do was engage him and make him responsible, but instead I added it to my list and managed his blood sugar for him. I did that for years. I just felt I had to take it on myself. And as a mother, you're so protective of your child, so if you can do something for your child, you think it makes it easier. But I think that was a mistake. I needed to make him more responsible for himself sooner.

Thad's never been hospitalized, but he sees the worry in my eyes. It's important to stay more positive, and when your child tests and sees higher BGs, to say something like, 'At least you know' or 'Now you can adjust.' Don't be negative, don't drill them. A mother's naturally critical because of the worry, but I don't necessarily think it's the smartest way.

Thank you for that perspective, Brenda, and a very happy belated Mother's Day to you! Thanks also for all the hard work you've done on behalf of PWDs everywhere. And to our Readers: don't forget to participate in the auction, which is open until May 31!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

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365 days of writing: January 19

A Scholarly Approach to the Colloquialization of Academia.

Listen. I used to be one of those people who was like “Unless I use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and vocabulary at all times, no one will take me seriously.” Guess what! That’s not literally even true!

And before anyone tells me I have misused the word “literally”: Not anymore! I have a bit of news for everyone who relies on technicalities and dictionary definitions for their terms: language changes. Like, in Old English, “to starve” meant “to kill,” “awesome” was anything that caused awe, and any animal was just called “a deer.” These meanings don’t exist any more because language evolved to a place where the original definition has become obsolete to the way people use the language. If I say “wasn’t that an awesome flash flood that destroyed the better part of our humble town,” chances are no one will pick up on my intended meaning, and if you point at an iguana and call it a deer, you will look like a genuine fool.

Academia in particular has this super specific vernacular and style that a) is rooted in traditions that are centuries of years old, b) excludes anyone that can’t mimic this style, c) is completely arbitrary, and d) has no need to exist anymore.

The elitism of academia has been around since the times when only the richest folks in town knew how to read. “You’re only smart if you can afford to be! Poor people can’t have ideas because they don’t know how to communicate them in written form!” said the bourgeoisie. In the 17th century, the rich and scholarly got even more pretentious by referring back to antiquity to inform their values. It should come as no surprise that their precious ancient Greek philosophers also favored the aristocracy. Both Plato and Aristotle believed in stratified societies that prefer the few elite individuals over the many plebeian masses; it’s really not hard to see how this became distorted into the rule by divine right of kings in European monarchy. Even Plato’s ideal society, The Republic, was like “The god who made you mixed some gold into those who are adequately equipped to rule, because they are the most valuable,” implying that some citizens are literally worth more than others, which seems an odd way to run a theoretical utopia.

To the 17th century scholars, Latin and Greek represented a period of philosophy and progress, and thought that by mimicking these cultures they could bring about an artificial age of enlightenment. Ancient civilizations were remembered exclusively as environments that cultivated philosophical and cultural thought, rather than as empires that enslaved nations and conquered land by force. 17th century scholars didn’t give a shit about that. So, during the neoclassical era, only the wealthy could afford to learn how to read; only the wealthy had the free time to study Latin; only the wealthy could contribute to literature. Education was valued and sought after, but only a few could hope to attain it. In addition to justifying their elitism by appealing to The Great Philosophers, they borrowed thousands of words from Latin, and retroactively made English into a Latinate language by adding in silent letters and arbitrary grammar rules.

It would be swell if these new rules were efficient to communication, but instead they were the exact opposite, which really undermines what “language” is all about. For instance: the split infinitive. Academics are always trying to cramp James T. Kirk’s style by saying it should not be “to boldly go,” but “to go boldly.” Why? Because in Latin, “to go” is one word and academics in the 17th century decided that if Latin can’t split up an infinitive, then neither can we. We need to make sacrifices if we want to sound fancy. The thing is, this is an archaic rule applied for an arbitrary reason. If people easily understand what is being said, and the goal of communication is to make ideas easily understood by people, then how can it possibly be wrong? Appeal to tradition is an informal fallacy that needs to be stopped. To say “this is right, because this is the way it was done in the past” raises the question “why was this done in the past?” The latter question is answered by the former, creating an infinite regress, referring eternally back to the precedents of precedents. And besides, maybe in the future they don’t care about splitting infinitives. Why is anyone trying to apply 17th century language rules to the 23rd century? They don’t even have currency in their society anymore!

Finally, at the beginning of the 20th century when industrialization was swinging its heavy hammer down upon the western world, when there was a working class instead of just “lords” and “glorified slaves,” folks started to question the weird and arbitrary institutions that kept education limited to the upper class. Yet, in an academic setting today “the elite” has shifted from being “the rich” to being “the most capable of adhering to the rules set by the 17th century scholars who ruined the English language,” known by a more commonplace name, “professional.”

Academics are quick to dismiss any argument that does not abide by the rules of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary as “unprofessional.” This makes it inaccessible to a majority of the population, which includes people who are learning English as a second language, people with reading disabilities, and people who are too excited about their topic to reduce their writing into a dry pablum just so it is palatable to the restless ghosts of three-hundred-year-old scholars. Failing to use the correct form of “your” in a sentence doesn’t render the sentiment meaningless. Just because I use a lot of excess punctuation marks in my writing doesn’t mean my point is invalid!!!

Anyway, maybe I’m a literary anarchist, maybe I’m a rebel without a clause, but it’s about time that the institutions surrounding academia, education, and professionalism got a little bit more inclusive and a little bit less completely ridiculous.