#Middle Island N.Y

[festeringfae]

“Pokemon’s Cool Kitty,” by Aaron McQuade, from The Advocate, Nov 7, 2006.

With her animated voice and a smile that says she's up to something, it's easy to forget that Maddie Blaustein is not a cartoon character--she just plays one on TV. Blaustein has been invited into the living rooms and kitchens of countless homes across the country on an almost daily basis. Yet while millions of children eat their breakfast cereal or do their homework with her, they have no idea their favorite characters are being voiced by a transgender woman. For almost a decade, Blaustein has been one of the voice stars of the animated hit Pokemon. As Meowth, the most popular member of the villainous Team Rocket, Blaustein spent eight seasons trying to capture the heroic and omnipresent Pikachu. But for the Long Island, N.Y., native, her breakthrough role means so much more than capturing that elusive yellow mouse. "When I was a kid I was told, 'You're not a girl, you're not a girl.' Then I saw Mel Blanc--a man--getting to be a girl." (Because only Mel Blanc's name appeared in the Looney Tunes voice credits, 5-year-old cartoon junkie Blaustein was unaware that an actual female was doing many of the female voices.) "So I thought, Hot damn, I'll do cartoon voices." "By the time I was 11 or 12," Blaustein says, "I knew that I was a transsexual and eventually I was going to have to do something about it. So for me, it just became another thing on the list: Become a voice-over artist, be a stand-up comedian, write comic books, become a woman." Though she had been living as a woman before landing the job on Pokemon, she hid her identity from her employers at first. "Seriously, I was living a female-to-male transsexual experience because I would be strapping down my tits with Ace bandages, making sure there was no makeup." That is, until voicing one particular episode, in which her character, a cat, reminisces on its struggles with learning to speak and read "human." "'Go West, Young Meowth' touched me so deeply, I had a meltdown during that episode. In the middle of the session I'm going, 'I can't work, you have to listen, I'm a woman!' and I just laid it out there. I thought it was going to be a big moment, and they were, like, 'Duh.'" In a career spanning more than 20 years, Blaustein has accomplished all of the goals she set as a kid. She has written and edited comic books for industry powerhouses, including Marvel's flagship character Spider-Man. A burgeoning stand-up career has Blaustein performing weekly in New York City while developing a one-woman show. And through roles on Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and several other Saturday morning staples, she's established herself as one of the most successful voice actresses working today. But more important, just as the world of cartoons inspired her as a child, Blaustein now gets to return the favor. "As some kids find out that I'm transsexual, I'll get really touching e-mails from kids saying, 'I'm so happy to hear that because I feel the same way.' And that feels amazing."

[blue-politics-reblogs]

"The 40-foot trailer has been there for weeks, parked outside the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens. Its refrigerator hums in an alley next to a check-cashing establishment. Thirty-six bodies, one atop the other, are stacked on shelves inside.

"The funeral director, Patrick Kearns, has barely slept since the day he took charge of them. As he lies awake in the middle of the night, he knows there will be more.

"'It weighs on you, having so many cases in your care,' he said. 'The death rate is just so high, there’s no way we can bury or cremate them fast enough.'

"With more than 18,000 announced fatalities and a total death toll that is almost certainly higher, the coronavirus crisis is the worst mass casualty event to hit New York since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

"At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes — more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate. And though the daily toll has recently slowed, hundreds of bodies are still emerging each day from private homes and hospitals.

"While hospitals bore the initial brunt of the crisis as sick people flooded emergency rooms, the sheer volume of human remains has pushed the system for caring for the dead to its limits, too: Hospital morgues, funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories are all overflowing and backed up.

"The scale of the problem was brought into sharp relief on Wednesday afternoon, when the police found dozens of decomposing bodies stashed inside two trucks outside a funeral home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. The owner, Andrew T. Cleckley, said he had nowhere else to put them, adding simply: 'I ran out of space.'

"What happened in Brooklyn appears to be an extreme case, and state health officials said on Thursday they would investigate the matter. But in the last two months, funeral home directors have begun to store bodies in viewing rooms and chapels, turning up their air-conditioning systems to avoid decomposition. Some are transporting bodies to other cities and states to be cremated.

"Some hospitals ran out of body bags — the city has since distributed 20,000 — and others have used forklifts to transfer piles of corpses into makeshift mobile morgues. So many people have been dying at home that the medical examiner's office has turned to teams of soldiers working around the clock to pick them up.

"Cemetery administrators have been scrambling to meet the need for burials, and the city’s four crematories are backed up for weeks. To stave off a secondary public health emergency, any bodies left unclaimed for 14 days were, for a time, being buried at a potter’s field on Hart Island in the Bronx.

..."Every night at 7, New Yorkers celebrate the city’s health care workers with a salute of horns, songs and clanging pots and pans. Nothing similar exists for the grave diggers, cemetery receptionists and funeral directors.

"'These people are the hidden heroes of this disaster,' said Dr. Emily Craig, who works with a federal database of missing persons. 'They work tirelessly.'

"The only public accolade that Mr. Kearns has gotten came from his daughter, Fiona Kearns. A few years ago, Ms. Kearns worked as a teacher in Missouri, and earlier this month, as the dying reached its peak, some of her friends from the Midwest posted Facebook messages claiming the death rate in New York was overblown.

"On April 17, she put up her own message, describing the grueling days and nights that Mr. Kearns was spending with the dead.

"'If you would like to look my father up, his name is Patrick Kearns,' she wrote. 'He is my hero and currently working 16 hours a day.'"

[jewish-privilege]

The headline began appearing again, as it had so many times in decades past: “What Is A Concentration Camp?”

The debate exploded this week after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) insisted that migrant detention facilities along the southern border fit the bill — a position she doubled down on Wednesday night. “We are calling these camps what they are because they fit squarely in an academic consensus and definition,” she wrote on Twitter.

For many critics, using the phrase today dilutes the horrors of Nazi concentration and death camps where millions of Jews were killed. Her supporters, though, argued that Ocasio-Cortez didn’t invoke Nazi Germany or genocide, and that instead she was only using bluntly correct language.

For many historians, both sides of this week’s debate are familiar, mirroring disagreements that have raged for decades over whether Japanese American camps during World War II should be described as concentration camps. In both debates the question has been largely the same: What happens when words become inextricably linked in society’s collective memory with the same atrocity? Is it possible, as one scholar put it, to still use the words “concentration camp” without “trampling the memory” of Holocaust victims?

To Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” it is possible, as long as the context is right. And at the southern border today, she said she believes it is.

“Part of what the toll of the Holocaust did was to reset the bar [for atrocity] so that anything short of that wasn’t even in the same universe,” she told The Washington Post. But, she added, “what I can tell you is, across history, every single camp system has said, ‘We are not like those other camps. Also, these people are dangerous,’ or ‘these people deserve it.' Since the Nazi camps, since World War II, people don’t want to use ‘concentration camps’ because they don’t want to be associated with [Nazis.]”

That much was true in the years after World War II as monuments and museums began to memorialize the more than 110,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly sent to camps behind barbed-wire fences after the federal government labeled them a national security threat. In 1979, for example, a memorial plaque described the Tule Lake camp as a “concentration camp,” eliciting loud objections from the local community near the Oregon-California border. In a 1979 article titled, “What Makes a Concentration Camp?” the Los Angeles Times reported that the community surrounding the former camp did not want to be associated with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Some acknowledged that the conditions at the camp were bad but argued that it “was no Auschwitz or Dachau.”

But for the detainees, who recalled the watch towers and the guards and the threat of being shot and killed if they tried to escape, “concentration camp” was not by any means a stretch.

“The term concentration camp is not inappropriate,” J.J. Enomoto told the Times. “It was far from a normal living situation. I’m sure our fellow Americans will not be hung up on semantics.”

Nearly 20 years later, Americans were still hung up. A 1998 Ellis Island exhibit drew outcry from the Jewish community and others after the Japanese American National Museum titled it, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience.” To the museum’s curators — and to many historians and leading Japanese American organizations today — “internment” or “relocation camps” were euphemisms for the reality of what Japanese Americans endured. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court justices, the museum noted, had both referred to the Japanese American camps as concentration camps.

“We need to call them what they were,” the curator, Karen Ishizuka, told the New York Times in 1998.

Although concentration camps existed long before the Nazis, by 1998 most Americans connected the phrase with Nazi Germany, as Georgetown University linguist Deborah Schiffrin wrote in a 2001 article. The definition of concentration camp had evolved, she wrote, to become “firmly entrenched” in the Jewish identity and story.

...Ultimately, Jewish and Japanese American groups held meetings to reach an understanding, Schiffrin reported. The exhibit’s title stayed, but with one long footnote on the flier, making clear that it was not an attempt to directly compare the Japanese-American camps to Nazi camps.

It included a definition that both groups could accept: “A concentration camp is a place where people are imprisoned not because of any crimes they have committed, but simply because of who they are.”

...Others, however, take a view more akin to the one Harris took in 1998, believing that evoking concentration camps can lead to irresponsible or offensive analogies, even if none was intended — as in the case of Ocasio-Cortez.

Aaron David Miller, a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank, is among them. It can be dangerous, he told The Washington Post, to cross-compare the conditions and circumstances of the Holocaust, Japanese American incarceration and the detention of migrants at the border. In the case of the latter, he said he fears introducing the “concentration camp” language at all could be distracting, “letting the Trump administration off the hook” because people may immediately think of Nazi Germany and find the comparison absurd.

The issue is one of memory, not definitions, he argued.

“You can’t mess around with people’s memory. Genocide is not unique. But the attempted genocide of European Jewry was in fact unique. And I would disagree with the notion that somehow you can apply a word like ‘concentration camp’ [to migrant detention facilities], however horrific the Trump administration’s approach to migrants and immigration, particularly family separation,” said Miller, who worked as a Middle East analyst and negotiator for the State Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations. “It prevents people from listening, and has a chilling impact on the debate.”...

[Read Meagan Flynn’s full piece at The Washington Post.]

[skippyv20]

Thank you😁❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Meghan Markle was maid of honor in her best friend’s Jewish wedding

When Markle’s best friend Lindsay Roth got married in 2016, her wedding was a blend of Jewish tradition and Church of England customs. And Markle was her best woman.

Markle and Roth became best friends when they met at Northwestern University in a Toni Morrison literature class in their first year of college. Roth is a television producer who has worked for Larry King and wrote a novel, “What Pretty Girls Are Made Of” in 2015.

Can you guess who shows up in the book’s acknowledgements?

Megan Goyish Markle.

Roth thanks Markle, a member of her “core four,” writing that their “rare, deep friendship is overwhelmingly precious.” She also wrote that even though both women are “more successful than we were fifteen years ago … at our cores we haven’t changed.”

Here they are together in 2013:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Lindsay Jill Roth (@lindsayjillroth)

Roth and Markle have been together since long before Markle’s stint on “The Price is Right” and star turn on “Suits.” They vacationed together, took each other to fashion shows, and took discrete videos with Elton John together. Roth supported Markle through her launch of her lifestyle website, The Tig, and Markle supported Roth through the publication of her novel. Once, for reasons unclear, Roth has tagged Markle in social media posts with the hashtag “notkosher.”

According to Markle scholars (yes, they are real,) as Roth’s maid of honor, Markle planned the bachelorette party, a vacation on the Greek island Hydra. Markle wrote on her lifestyle blog, “There is something wholly cathartic about being able to turn it all off — to sunbathe with no one watching, swim in the briny Mediterranean Sea, eat copious amounts of Greek salads and fried red mullets and toast to the day.” Markle also arranged for Roth to fly to Toronto to have her wedding dress specially fitted at Kleinfeld’s.

https://forward.com/schmooze/400426/meghan-markle-was-maid-of-honor-in-her-best-friends-jewish-wedding

Roth in the middle…

Lindsay Jill Roth, the daughter of Cheryl W. Roth and Andrew B. Roth of Lattingtown, N.Y., was married Aug. 6 to Gavin Alexander Jordan, the son of Rosemary I. Jordan of Barnet, England, and Peter A. Jordan of New Ash Green, England. Lisa Traina, a Universal Life minister, led a ceremony incorporating Jewish and Church of England elements at the St. Regis in New York.

The bride, 34, who will continue to use her name professionally, has been an executive producer of “The Real Girl’s Kitchen” on the Cooking Channel, and a producer for “Larry King Now” on Hulu. She is also the executive producer of a project for Guinness World Records appearing on Facebook Live, and the author of “What Pretty Girls Are Made Of,” a novel. She graduated cum laude from Northwestern.

Her father is a partner in Norton Rose Fulbright, a London-based law firm, working in its New York office. Her mother, who is retired, was a special counsel in the New York office of the St. Louis law firm Bryan Cave.

[kuvshinnikova-yana1l85uu6-blog]

Westbury, N.Y.: A Bucolic Village in Suburbia

When Dorianna Berry and Shawn Berry separated after 24 years of marriage, they sold their three-bedroom home in Hicksville, N.Y., on Long Island. Cash Ms. Berry, 51, looked for a place for herself and her daughters, 20 and 22, on the tree-lined streets of nearby Westbury, a diverse and increasingly vibrant village in central Nassau County with about 15,500 residents.

“You feel like you are in the country, but you are in the middle of suburbia,” Ms. Credit Card, Mortgage, Banking, Auto | Chase Online | Chase.com Berry said of the comparatively moderately priced area, which is part of the Town of North Hempstead.

In February 2017, she paid $440,000 for a 99-year-old, four-bedroom, two-bathroom colonial with a front porch and a backyard gazebo on a 60-by-100-foot lot. “It was the perfect setup for all of us,” Ms. Berry said, one that required just a 16-minute commute to her job as a benefits coordinator for Teamsters Local 282.

Ms. Berry was also drawn by the music downtown at the Piazza Ernesto Strada and the eclectic assortment of restaurants along Post Avenue, the main thoroughfare. “We never eat the same thing twice in a week,” she said. “I meet all sorts of different people. It is great to have diversity.”

25 MARLBORO ROAD A renovated four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, built in 1929, listed for $999,999. 516-313-9792Credit...Robert Wright for The New York Times

[annadelveyfoundation]

‘Anna Delvey,’ Fake Heiress Who Swindled N.Y.’s Elite, Is Sentenced to 4 to 12 Years in Prison

This is the full report so you don’t have to click on it. (Why give A.G. Sulzberger more money?). As reported in the The New York Times:

Anna Sorokin, the fake German heiress who swindled her way into Manhattan’s elite party circles, was sentenced on Thursday to four to 12 years in prison for bilking hotels, banks and a private jet operator out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The sentencing capped a case of a young grifter who spun her tale with brazen flair. Ms. Sorokin, who used the name “Anna Delvey,” wore designer clothes, lived in boutique hotels, dined in expensive restaurants and lured investors for a $40 million private club — all without a penny to her name.

“I am stunned by the depth of the defendant’s deception,” Justice Diane Kiesel said in handing down the sentence in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. She added that Ms. Sorokin was “blinded by the glitter and glamour of New York City.”

Ms. Sorokin, 28, was convicted last month of most of the charges against her. She has been held on Rikers Island since October 2017.

In addition to the prison sentence, Ms. Sorokin was fined $24,000 and ordered to pay restitution of about $199,000. A Russian national, she faces deportation once she is released.

Her lawyer, Todd Spodek, called the sentence “draconian,” arguing that his client was not violent or a career criminal. During the trial, he said Ms. Sorokin was an enterprising, business-minded woman eager to make it in the big city.

Before she was sentenced, Ms. Sorokin addressed the court. “I apologize for the mistakes I made,” she said.

But the judge said Ms. Sorokin showed no remorse for her actions throughout the trial, and seemed more concerned about her clothing and which actress would play her in an upcoming Netflix series about the case, set to be produced by Shonda Rhimes.

A juror who visited the courtroom to watch the sentencing, and asked to remain anonymous, said she had been annoyed by Ms. Sorokin’s apparent self-centeredness. Her concern about her wardrobe led to a two-hour delay in the trial one day.

“She was interested in the designer clothes, the champagne, the private jets, the boutique hotel experience and the exotic travel that went along with it — everything that big money could buy,” Justice Kiesel said. “But she didn’t have big money. All she had was a big scam.”

Jurors agreed with prosecutors that her gilt-edged life was an elaborate ruse financed by lies.

Ms. Sorokin stiffed hotels, persuaded a bank employee to give her a $100,000 line of credit, swayed a private jet company to let her fly on credit and tried to secure a $25 million loan from a hedge fund. In all, she stole about $213,000 in cash and services.

Still, the jury found her not guilty of the most serious offense — faking records in an attempt to obtain a $22 million loan. She was also acquitted of stealing from a friend who said Ms. Sorokin duped her into covering the cost of a $60,000 vacation to Morocco.

To many friends, there was every reason to believe that Ms. Sorokin was a wealthy German heiress with so much money that she frequently doled out $100 tips and flew on a private jet to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference.

Mr. Spodek, her lawyer, said during the trial that people believed what they wanted about Ms. Sorokin. She was enabled, he said, by a system “seduced by glamour and glitz.” She intended to pay back her creditors, he said.

“Through her sheer ingenuity, she created the life that she wanted for herself,” he said during the trial. “Anna was not content with being a spectator, but wanted to be a participant.”

Ms. Sorokin, a Russian immigrant from a middle-class family, arrived in New York from Paris in 2014. She had lofty dreams of opening a members-only arts club on Park Avenue South called A.D.F., for the Anna Delvey Foundation. In 2015, she enlisted the architect Gabriel Andres Calatrava to create what she envisioned would be a club similar to Soho House New York, with a bar, a nightclub and an art exhibit. Mr. Calatrava is the son of Santiago Calatrava, an architect who designed the Oculus, the centerpiece of the World Trade Center transit hub.

She also solicited help from a hotelier, André Balazs; a British-American entrepreneur, Roo Rogers; and a real estate developer, Aby Rosen.

She said she had found the perfect location for her club: 281 Park Avenue South, a landmark building. The project was expected to cost as much as $40 million.

At first, Mr. Calatrava and others believed she was good for it. Prosecutors said she told people that she had a trust fund and was worth 60 million euros.

She tried hard to get loans from banks and hedge funds, prosecutors said. She forged financial statements, and created a fake accountant and a phony financial adviser with emails that linked back to her, prosecutors said.

Ms. Sorokin tried to get a $22 million loan from City National Bank, but a banker rejected her request when he could not determine the source of her wealth. Mr. Calatrava had also stopped working with her when she could not provide proof that she could fund the project.

She then tried to secure a $25 million loan from Fortress Investment Group, prosecutors said, but she needed to pay a fee as part of the process to secure the loan. She turned to City National Bank and talked a banker into giving her a line of credit on her account for $100,000. She promised to repay it with a wire transfer from a European account.

After Fortress began investigating Ms. Sorokin’s personal and financial information, she withdrew from the deal, prosecutors said, and Fortress returned a little more than half of the money she provided. Instead of giving that money back to City National Bank, she spent it on expensive clothing and five-star hotels.

Prosecutors said Ms. Sorokin also tricked a friend, Rachel Williams, into spending $62,000 to cover the cost of a luxury trip to Marrakesh, Morocco, with two other people. The group stayed at the La Mamounia hotel, where they had a private villa with a courtyard, a pool and a butler.

When they returned to New York City, Ms. Sorokin promised to repay Ms. Williams through a wire transfer, Ms. Williams testified. Ms. Sorokin only returned $5,000 of what Ms. Williams said she was owed. A jury acquitted Ms. Sorokin of the charges associated with Ms. Williams.

In Manhattan, Ms. Sorokin moved from one luxurious hotel to the next, according to prosecutors. She was kicked out of 11 Howard in SoHo for not paying her bill. At the Beekman hotel, she had racked up an $11,000 tab. The W New York also forced her out when she did not put a credit card on file.

Her first arrest was in July 2017 at a restaurant inside the Le Parker Meridien hotel, where she was handed a lunch bill that was about $200. She could not pay it.

Jan Ransom is a reporter covering New York City. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered law enforcement and crime for The Boston Globe. She is a native New Yorker. @Jan_Ransom

The New York Times is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded and controlled by one family.

[prevazilazenje]

“WITCH MUSEUM OPENS IN CLEVELAND”

A witchcraft museum has landed in Cleveland.

The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick has set up shop in a storefront in the city’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood.

As curious as the collection is — and there’s some pretty strange stuff, including a vessel supposedly containing some fur of Lil Bub, a magical cat from outer space — the tale of how it ended up in Northeast Ohio is just as extraordinary.

Much of the collection now on display was either curated or created by the late Raymond Buckland, aka Robat, a writer and historian of Wicca and the occult, and a high priest in the Gardnerian and Seax-Wica beliefs.

In the 1960s, Buckland worked for British Airlines, which gave him an opportunity to meet collector Gerald Gardner, who had an occult museum in England.

They struck up a friendship, and Buckland set off on his lifelong path of dabbling and practicing in the occult. He began amassing odd artifacts ranging from ancient Egypt to the Salem witch trials.

He began inviting visitors to view — for a small fee — the collection housed in the basement of his home on Long Island, N.Y.

As his reputation grew, so did the collection, and he eventually moved it to New Hampshire. It was displayed in Virginia for a brief stint and then New Orleans, before that museum closed for good and the collection vanished.

Steven Intermill, whose full-time gig a couple of years ago was making sure everything was running merrily at the “A Christmas Story” House and Museum in Cleveland, wondered one day what became of Buckland’s collection.

Intermill said he grew up on a steady diet of comic books and those old paperback books about oddities and strange happenings, and he remembered reading about Buckland’s museum.

After a little sleuthing, Intermill found Buckland’s then-email address — “raymondbuckland@hotmail.com” of all things — and reached out to inquire about the trove.

Much to his surprise, Buckland answered the email right away, saying that some items unfortunately had been sold off, but what remained of the collection was sitting in totes in the basement of a friend who lived in Columbus.

Intermill said he drove down Interstate 71 right away, offering to restore the collection and put it back out on public display in a space near the “A Christmas Story” house that was featured in the beloved movie.

Parts of the collection were unveiled in 2017, but Intermill said the space he had in Tremont was simply too cozy. He acquired the new digs at 2155 Broadview Road so more items can once again capture the curiosity of visitors. The new museum space will celebrate its grand opening at noon Saturday.

On a recent day, Kristina Pellegrini of Minneapolis wandered in with her sister, Moriah Pfotenhauer, whom she was helping to move from Chicago to Washington, D.C.

She said they were looking on Google for interesting places to visit along the way, and the Buckland Museum popped up.

She explained they are not followers of the occult but do collect crystals and spent a fair amount of time looking over those offered in the museum’s gift shop to see which ones “spoke” to them. Several did and they purchased them.

The sisters also forked over their $7 admission fee to hear Intermill weave the history of the collection and its curator, and even see a fork that supposedly twisted during a seance in New York.

“We wanted to make the drive memorable,” she said. “The collection was intense and even a bit scary. It was very different.”

Among the collection’s items is a sacrificial troll doll with human hair stuck in its back.

Buckland’s personal purple ceremonial robe holds court in the middle of the space not far from a predictable collection of tarot cards.

And tucked in a corner is a demon in a box.

The story goes that a magician friend of Buckland had a ritual go awry in the 1970s and unwittingly unleashed a demon in his New York City apartment. It took them three days to conjure up the right spell to lure the demon into the wooden box, where it has remained ever since.

Intermill, who readily admits he is not a personal practitioner of the occult, said he does have a healthy respect for the collection and each piece’s backstory.

One night, he said, he was sitting at the counter when a man barged through the front door, bolted into the museum without paying and started to try to open the Demon Box. Intermill said he told the crazed man that he was going to call the police.

“The guy told me he was driving by and something called out to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m trapped in here and I want to be friends,’ ” Intermill said. “It was just weird.”

Before Buckland died in September 2017, he visited Cleveland to look over the collection. Intermill asked Buckland about the Demon Box and what he should do with it.

“He told me to never open it,” Intermill said with a laugh. “OK. I never thought I’d end up being in charge of something like this.”

The Demon Box, wrapped in crude wire to keep it shut, has since been moved to a more secure display case that Intermill keeps a safe distance from those on tours.

The cool thing about this witchcraft collection, he explains, is the craft aspect to everything.

Each piece was handmade — most by Buckland himself, like the high priest ceremonial horned helmet. Buckland used things lying around the house and found at a hardware store, from the fur to the cow horn to the stainless-steel mixing bowl to the thimbles on top.

“Some see this as a witchcraft collection,” he said. “But I see this as an art collection. All this stuff was handmade.

“It was made with a passion and fury.”

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a weekly collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and ABC News. With 5,000 people seemingly thinking about challenging President Trump in 2020 — Democrats and even some Republicans — we’re keeping tabs on the field as it develops. Each week, we’ll run through what the potential candidates are up to — who’s getting closer to officially jumping in the ring and who’s getting further away.

The Democratic presidential field maintained its 2019 pace of at least one new entrant per week, with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announcing his run last Friday and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, making her previously disclosed campaign official with a kick-off rally in Honolulu.

But in addition to those candidates making formal inroads, a few new names popped up in the periphery of consideration, hints and speculation, including Stacey Abrams and Bill Weld, who are each making their first appearance on this watch list.

Feb. 1-7, 2019

Stacey Abrams Fresh off her State of the Union response, which received strong reviews from her fellow Democrats, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate didn’t rule out a presidential run during an interview with BuzzFeed News Thursday.

“I’m thinking about everything, I gave myself a deadline of the end of March to make a decision about what I’m going to do next,” Abrams said, adding, “I don’t believe in cutting off opportunities, or forgoing ideas. But often what you find is if you think about something beyond your scope, there’s something in the middle you never thought about.”

Abrams has also been the subject of speculation about a run for U.S. Senate against incumbent Georgia Republican David Perdue. Michael Bennet (D) Asked if he was still considering entering the presidential race, the Colorado senator told 5280 Magazine that he did not have any updates to provide. Joe Biden (D) Biden was the top performer in a Monmouth University poll gauging presidential preferences among registered Democrats. The former vice president received 29 percent support, with the next-closest finisher earning 16 percent. He also earned the highest net favorability rating, with 80 percent of registered Democrats viewing him favorably to 9 percent who viewed him unfavorably.

A CNN poll Wednesday showed that a majority of Democrats — 62 percent — wanted Biden to enter the presidential race.

Politico reported Thursday that Biden was nearing a decision on a run, and was reaching out to Capitol Hill allies including Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Chris Coons, D-Del., as well as Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.

On Tuesday, during a private lunch with television anchors prior to the State of the Union, President Donald Trump reportedly described Biden as “dumb” and said he hoped to run against him.

“Biden was never very smart. He was a terrible student. His gaffes are unbelievable. When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it’s on purpose; it’s not a gaffe. When Biden says something dumb, it’s because he’s dumb,” the president said, according to sources cited by the New York Times. Michael Bloomberg (D) The former New York City mayor decried the subsidies provided to Amazon to attract it into building its much-publicized HQ2 in Long Island City, Queens as unnecessary, aligning him with left-leaning city representatives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who herself has been critical of billionaires like Bloomberg.

On Friday, Bloomberg will deliver the keynoteaddress at the Americans for Immigrant Justice’s 23rd annual awards dinner in Miami. Cory Booker (D) Last Friday, Booker entered the presidential race with the release of a video describing a platform of optimism and a slew of media interviews that touched on his career path from Newark, New Jersey councilman to U.S. senator.

“I think a lot of folks are beginning to feel that the forces that are tearing us apart in this country are stronger than the forces that tie us together. I don’t believe that,” Booker said in an interview on “The View.” “So, I’m running to restore our sense of common purpose, to focus on the common pain that we have all over this country.”

On Tuesday, the New Jersey senator, a lifelong bachelor, confirmed that he has a girlfriend, or, “a boo,” as he put it.

This weekend Booker, who also picked up an endorsement from fellow New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez shortly after his announcement, heads to Iowa for six events on Friday and Saturday, before continuing on to South Carolina on Sunday for three more events continuing into Monday. Sherrod Brown (D) Brown told CNN Tuesday that a decision on a presidential campaign is “probably” coming in March. On Wednesday, the Ohio senator received the support of Jim Obergefell, who filed the lawsuit that led to the 2015 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry. Obergefell called Brown “one of the best advocates” for the LGBT community in the Senate.

After touring Iowa last weekend, Brown continues his “Dignity of Work” listening tour this weekend in New Hampshire, where he will stop in Hampton, Berlin, Laconia, Concord and Manchester for a variety of roundtables and meet-and-greets and to attend the New Hampshire Young Democrats’ 2019 Granite Slate Awards. Steve Bullock (D) Politico reported last Friday that Bullock is likely to wait until the end of Montana’s legislative session on May 1 before making a decision on a presidential run. After describing the governor’s bipartisan efforts in the Big Sky State, Politico quoted a former Montana Republican state representative who said of a potential Bullock campaign: “I’d go so far as to say he wouldn’t suck.” Pete Buttigieg (D) The South Bend, Indiana mayor defended his White House run at the age of 37, saying that the job was “a leap for anybody,” in an interview with “This Week” Sunday. Buttigieg further drew a line of differentiation between the Medicare-for-all ideas being touted by a number of Democratic presidential hopefuls, saying that, unlike Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., he didn’t feel as if the idea necessitated the end of the private insurance industry.

This weekend, Buttigieg visits Iowa for the first time since launching his presidential campaign. His trip includes meet-and-greets in Ames, Grinnell, Ankeny and Johnston over the course of Friday and Saturday. Julian Castro (D) Appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Tuesday night, Castro said he wasn’t interested in being another Democrat’s running mate should he not capture the nomination for himself, explaining that he’s “been there and done that last time,” in reference to his 2016 vetting by Hillary Clinton.

Last weekend, the Hispanic-American Castro told New York magazine that he anticipated that the presidential campaign would be centered around immigration because Trump uses the issues “as a political ploy to drum up his base” and that “he’s convinced that’s the only way he can win this election,” but even so, does not “underestimate” Trump. John Delaney (D) Delaney is opening his first office in New Hampshire next Monday, WMUR reported, which will coincide with a visit by the former Maryland congressman, who will stick around to campaign in the state early in the week. The trip follows one taken by Delaney to Utah on Wednesday to speak at the Sorenson Winter Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City. Tulsi Gabbard (D) Gabbard officially launched her presidential campaign last weekend with a Honolulu rally, before running into a number of controversies later in the week, including receiving the unwanted endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who he has long admired the Hawaii senator for her foreign policy positions.

“I have strongly denounced David Duke’s hateful views and his so-called ‘support’ multiple times in the past, and reject his support,” Gabbard responded to the New York Post.

She then defended her oft-criticized 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by telling MSNBC Wednesday that, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” Kirsten Gillibrand (D) Gillibrand toured New Hampshire last weekend, with five stops in two days, and revealed to the Concord Monitor that she was on the verge of hiring staff in the state.

Though the New York senator has downplayed her moderate past since entering the presidential race in January, she pledged to “find common ground” with Republicans while in New Hampshire, though reiterated that she was angered by Trump’s actions to divide the country.

During Trump’s State of the Union Tuesday, Gillibrand had a viral moment featuring her exasperated response to Trump’s speech, off of which she later tried to fundraise, which may or may not have been in violation of congressional rules.

On Wednesday, fellow New York Democrat, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, was pessimistic about Gillibrand’s presidential chances, telling the New York Daily News she didn’t feel Gillibrand could win in Midwestern states like Ohio. Maloney later partially walked back the comments, issuing a statement noting that Gillibrand is an “outstanding Senator and would be an exceptional President” and that she was “simply commenting on the importance of winning back previously blue states and having a strategy for doing so.” Kamala Harris (D) Harris delivered a preemptive response to the State of the Union Tuesday, criticizing Trump’s “insincere appeals to unity.”

“I want everyone to remember this: The strength of our union has never been found in the walls we build,” the California senator said.

During a conversation with historically black colleges and universities leaders Thursday, Harris was critical of the way gender has played a role in the Senate, citing the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings as an instance during which she was treated differently than her male colleagues.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found enthusiasm for a potential Harris nomination to be nearly equal to that of Biden, with 58 and 60 percent of respondents, respectively, saying they would be excited for the two to emerge victorious from the primaries. John Hickenlooper (D) Hickenlooper visited South Carolina Tuesday and Wednesday, where he conversed with voters and spoke to the state’s Hospital Association. Speaking to reporters, the former Colorado governor said that voters were interested in a candidate’s record of achievement, something that has become the centerpiece of his stump speech ahead of a potential announcement. Eric Holder (D) Next Tuesday, Holder will visit Des Moines for a speech at Drake University’s Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement. Jay Inslee (D) Inslee told CNBC this week that a presidential campaign decision is coming “in weeks, not months” and continues to pitch himself as the potential candidate most focused on environmental issues.

“Both by experience and passion and commitment, I have had a long, demonstrated vision statement for economic growth around clean energy that is unique amongst potential candidates.” Inslee said. Amy Klobuchar (D) Klobuchar will make “a little announcement” in Minneapolis Sunday, she said in a video posted to her social media accounts Wednesday, one that will reveal her decision regarding a presidential run, she earlier explained on MSNBC Tuesday.

Minnesota Public Radio reported Monday that, should Klobuchar enter the presidential race, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will extend her an endorsement.

“If Sen. Klobuchar chooses to go, I’m with her,” said Walz, a former member of the U.S. House, adding, “It’s in our best interest to have multiple choices out there, but I would argue that as more Americans get to know Amy Klobuchar, she’ll prove to be the person that they may want to get with.”

Klobuchar was the subject of a scathing HuffPost report Wednesday that included claims she mistreats her Senate staff, frequently describing their work as “the worst,” leading to high turnover in her office. Some former staffers pushed back in the story, arguing that the senator had high standards and suggested that male senators would not face such criticism for similar behavior. Mitch Landrieu (D) Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu all but ruled out a 2020 presidential run in an interview on CNN’s “New Day” Wednesday morning, but added a “never say never” caveat.

Landrieu, who released a book last year and has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump in a number of television appearances to start 2019, cited the influx of “great candidates in the race,” and said that the race was “getting filled up.”

As for potential candidates who he felt operate in a similar lane to himself, he cited Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke, and additionally had high praise for Stacey Abrams‘ State of the Union response Tuesday night, saying he felt she would make a “really good candidate.” Terry McAuliffe (D) Though he still has not reached a final decision, the former Virginia governor told CNN last weekend that he’d “like to” run for president and said, as he has before, that a decision would come by the end of March. Seth Moulton Following a brief appearance before the Bedford, New Hampshire Democrats last weekend, Moulton toldreporters that he was “not here to talk about 2020,” and instead focused on “spend[ing] the next two years making sure President Trump wasn’t reelected.” He conceded, however, that he was “not sure what that means for me.” Beto O’Rourke (D) O’Rourke admitted to “thinking about running for president” during a conversation with Oprah Winfrey in New York City Tuesday and said, of the prospect of helping to unify the country, “I’m so excited at the prospect of being able to play that role.” He said he would announce his decision about a run “before the end of the month.”

Pressed on what was preventing him to declare a candidacy on the spot, the former Texas congressman said that his family was an important consideration.

“For the last seven years, my family hasn’t seen me,” he said. “That’s the far more important responsibility.”

A New York Times profile Wednesday detailed O’Rourke’s mid-20s, which he spent living in New York. The newspaper described him as “adrift,” comparing his “quarter-life crisis” of soul-searching to his ongoing contemplation of a presidential campaign and recent travels through the country’s interior. Bernie Sanders (D) Though he has given unilateral responses to the State of the Union in the past, Sanders faced criticism this year over the belief that he was distracting from Democrats‘ official responses, delivered by Stacey Abrams and Xavier Becerra — though he did describe Abrams’ address as “extremely effective” at the top of his speech.

In his remarks, Sanders called attention to the struggles of the nation’s middle class and took issue with Trump’s avoidance of climate change and other progressive priorities. Howard Schultz (D) The former Starbucks CEO continued to rebut the criticism that his potential run as an independent could pave the way for Trump’s reelection, explaining that he wanted to pay forward the success he was able to achieve and help others do the same, previewing a theme he would touch on in an appearance at Purdue University Thursday.

Ralph Nader, whose own third-party presidential run in 2000 is still blamed by some Democrats for preventing Al Gore from winning that year’s election, wrote for Time this week to both defend and attack Schultz’s moves, arguing that “‘spoiler’ charges” constituted “political bigotry,” but that the billionaire’s policy positions were closer to those of the GOP, rather than being centrist, as he claims.

Next week, Schultz will participate in a CNN town hall in Texas on Tuesday, before continuing on his book tour in Philadelphia on Wednesday and Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Elizabeth Warren (D) Warren again faced backlash this week for her past claims of Native American heritage. After the Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Massachusetts senator wrote on her State Bar of Texas registration card in 1986 that she was “American Indian.”

“I can’t go back,” Warren told the Post in response. “But I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted.”

Questioned further about the situation on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Warren explained that the claim was a result of her “family story” and again apologized.

“When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I learned about my family the same way most people do. My brothers and I learned from our mom and our dad and our brothers and our sisters. They were family stories,” she told reporters. “But that said, there really is an important distinction of tribal citizenship. I’m not a member of a tribe. I have apologized for not being more sensitive to that. It’s an important thing.”

The controversy arose just days before Warren was set to make a major announcement Saturday in Lawrence, Massachusetts, before embarking on a campaign swing through the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Bill Weld (R) Weld, the former Republican Massachusetts governor and 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, re-registered as a GOP voter, according to the Massachusetts secretary of state’s online voter registration status lookup.

The Boston Globe earlier reported that Weld was strongly considering a Republican primary challenge to Trump.

[johntebeau]

How to turn a Monday into a Funday: lunch at a tavern. True. I love lunch (and how) — especially on a workday — and it’ll improve your lame Monday reality in a number of ways. A change of venue. Movement. A bit of levity. Social good cheer. Food. Beer, of course. All the good things. Suggestions for a Funday lunch (or dinner after work), one for each borough. (Prints of my drawings via linktree in bio.) • JG Melon (Manhattan). Come for the burger. Stay for the people-watching. • Lee’s Tavern (Staten Island). Some of the best pizza in town. • Bronx Beer Hall. You’re nestled in the middle of one of the legendary food markets of New York. • Bar Bruno (Brooklyn). A neighborhood joint at its finest. Tacos, yes, but consider the tortilla soup. • Cronin and Phelan (Queens). How about a Guinness, boyo? It gives you strength! #lunchtime #mondayfunday #eatnewyork #manhattan #bronx #brooklyn #guinnessforlunch #queensny #statenisland #donganhills #uppereastside #bestburger #hamburger #burgergram #arthuravenue #belmontbronx #carrollgardens #woodsidequeens #eatthisnow #greatgoodplaces #tavern #lunch #ilovethisplace (at New York City, N.Y.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CXJofEXF1qk/?utm_medium=tumblr

[paponika]

Dressed as gang members from the ’70s cult classic movie “The Warriors,” 90 athletes ran from the Br

Dressed as gang members from the ’70s cult classic movie “The Warriors,” 90 athletes ran from the Bronx to Coney Island in the middle of the night in the 2021 Warriors Ultrarun. Wearing costumes to re-enact the journey through enemy territory from the 1979 cult movie, participants in the 28-mile race — some of whom had come from as far away as California — had to contend with street traffic, as well as confused pedestrians. “It’s not an all-out race,” said Ramon Bermo, a 54-year-old ultrarunner originally from Spain who now lives in South Plainfield, N.J. “The streets are closed in a regular marathon, so you race it a little harder. But we still have to be aware. The distance won’t be what’s challenging here.” Runners were either fans of “The Warriors” or acolytes of Todd Aydelotte, who calls himself the world’s only “historical ultrarunner.” Aydelotte, who works in public relations and is originally from Rochester, N.Y., first staged this quasi-legal marathon in 2019 with about 30 participants. In doing so, he became a hero among the East Coast subset of ultrarunners, a subculture that primarily exists on the other side of the country. Tap the link in our bio for more scenes of the night run. Photos by @jone_bone.

Note: All rights belong to their respective owners #livenews, #cablenews, #usnews, #businessnews, #worldnews, #news, #eveningnews, #nightlynews, #breakingnews, #nightlynewsnbc, #nbcnewsnow, #newsnbc, #nbcnewslive, #nbcnewstoday, #newstoday, #newsstation, #stockmarket, #nbcnewslivetoday, #newsnbclive, #nbcnewslivestream, #nbcnewsspecialreport, #newswithshepardsmith, #coroner, #nbclive, #nbc, #abc, #nbcspecialreport, #report, #Iamlatest #latesttrend #latestnews #latestissue #latestart #latestpicture #latestupdate #FoxNews #CNN #SkyNews #AlJazeera #BBC #MSNBC #Euronews #GeoNews #NDTVIndia

[coochiequeens]

This is the second clothing line I’ve seen developed for transwomen. The other was a swimsuit line. Very telling that the focus is on sexy or fun stuff instead of a line to help transwomen find feminine clothing that fits a masculine build for a professional setting

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — In 2014, South Shore mom Karyn Bello and her family began navigating uncharted territory when her daughter, Lily, came out as transgender.

Seven years later, Bello, 51, created her own fashion line of lingerie designed for transgender women and hopes to be an example for parents of transgender people.

Her clothing line, named Zhe in reference to the gender-neutral pronoun, includes technology meant to fit transgender women’s bodies and help them feel comfortable in their own skin.

“They’re meant to help trans women navigate through the world and through their clothes comfortably without having to worry,” Bello told the Advance/SILive.com. “They’re much more accessible and safe for them to be wearing.”

Bello’s underwear line is designed to help transgender women stray away from harmful do-it-yourself methods of tucking.

Tucking is a way to disguise the genitalia and create a more feminine appearance underneath clothing or in underwear. At times, it is achieved using duct tape or other adhesives, which can be harmful to the body.

“[These methods] are bad for your urethra; you get UTIs easily,” Bello explained. They’re just bad for your health. I was coming at it from a mom’s perspective. I want you to be healthy and take care of yourself, too.”

The Zhe underwear is made with technology to help achieve a similar outcome in a much safer way. Key features of the underwear include a wider gusset, multi-layered front panel, and spandex support.

A PASSION FOR DESIGN MAKES A MARK

Creating her own lingerie line was always a dream of Bello’s, but she never imagined it would come to fruition in the way that it did.

Bello was a stay-at-home mom for 25 years as her children grew up and attended school. Once her youngest reached middle school, she started to pursue her passion and took adult education classes for fashion design at Parson’s School of Design at The New School.

Lily, now 27, came out while Bello was taking classes.

“When I was shopping with Lily, I realized that there was a definite need in the market for women like her,” Bello explained.

She first started designing the prototypes two years after her daughter came out, she explained to the Advance/SILive.com.

“There were a lot of things to consider,” she explained. “I had to think about what materials to use, how I could make it something that would work for the community. I was talking to trans women about what would benefit and how I could make all of the DIY things that they’re using easier.”

Four years ago, she had her first samples prepared and continued to work toward the right model.

The coronavirus pandemic put a hitch in Bello’s plans, but she was able to finally launch Zhe in August.

Currently, her online store offers four different types of underwear and two bras. This is only the beginning of Bello’s plan for Zhe, however.

“I’m working on a cotton version for everyday wear with the same technology in it,” she explained. “I’m also working on swimwear and athletic wear, like yoga pants, which I think would be really beneficial to the community.” BECOMING THE RESOURCE SHE NEVER HAD

When Lily came out to her family, Bello explained that there weren’t many resources for her family to help aid her daughter during the transition.

“We were shocked when she came out,” she said. “It wasn’t something that was in our wheelhouse, especially seven years ago. It wasn’t as out in the media and we didn’t have as much knowledge as we have now.”

Bello told the Advance/SILive.com that, at the time, the Pride Center of Staten Island became her main resource for help through the process.

She called the center a “lifesaver” and explained how she continues to attend its Families in Transition group sessions on Zoom.

Through Zhe, Bello has also started a blog that she hopes can act as the resource she wished she had as her daughter transitioned.

When asked why she wanted to start the blog, she explained that it was a part of her “nurturing nature” and desire to help others.

“When we were first presented with this, there was almost nothing out there to help us,” she said. “We had to really dig in and we really found more information that was geared towards the medical community and not geared towards parents. There was nobody to look at to say, ‘OK, they’re this much ahead of us and they’re doing good.’ There was nothing tangible for us to see how our family would look.”

Recalling how difficult it was to navigate her daughter’s transition, Bello wants to be the resource for families that she didn’t have.

“I’m just a mom that wants to make sure that her daughter, and girls like her, are comfortable and safe,” Bello said.

Interesting that a mom who gave up her own dreams to raise her kids now merged her kids identity with her new dream.

[xtruss]

A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite

In a Long Island town, neighbors now make assumptions, true and sometimes false, about people who conspicuously display American flags.

Peter Treiber Jr., a farmer, said he was taken aback that a customer thought he was conservative because of the flag painted on his potato truck. Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

By Sarah Maslin Nir

July 3, 2021

SOUTHOLD, N.Y. — The American flag flies in paint on the side of Peter Treiber Jr.’s potato truck, a local landmark parked permanently on County Route 48, doing little more, he thought, than drawing attention to his family’s farm.

Until he tried to sell his produce.

At a local greenmarket where he sells things like wild bergamot, honey and sunflowers, he had trouble striking a deal until, he said, he let his liberal leanings slip out in conversation with a customer.

“She said, ‘Oh, whew. You know, I wasn’t so sure about you, I thought you were some flag-waving something-or-other,’” Mr. Treiber, 32, recalled the woman saying and citing his potato truck display. “That’s why she was apprehensive of interacting with me.”

He paused: “It was a little sad to me. It shows the dichotomy of the country that a flag can mean that. That I had to think, ‘Do I need to reconsider having that out there?’”

Thirteen stripes, a dusting of stars, the American flag has had infinite meanings over the 244 years since the country began flying one. Raised at Iwo Jima, it was a symbol of victory. Lit on fire, it became a searing image of the protests against the Vietnam War. Ribboned around the twin towers on commemorative Sept. 11 lapel pins, it is a reminder of the threats against a delicate democracy.

Politicians of both parties have long sought to wrap themselves in the flag. But something may be changing: Today, flying the flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue, albeit an imperfect one, to a person’s political affiliation in a deeply divided nation.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump have embraced the flag so fervently — at his rallies, across conservative media and even during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — that many liberals like Mr. Treiber worry that the left has all but ceded the national emblem to the right.

What was once a unifying symbol — there is a star on it for each state, after all — is now alienating to some, its stripes now fault lines between people who kneel while “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays and those for whom not pledging allegiance is an affront.

And it has made the celebration of the Fourth of July, of patriotic bunting and cakes with blueberries and strawberries arranged into Old Glory, into another cleft in a country that seems no longer quite so indivisible, under a flag threatening to fray.

Mr. Treiber’s farm is in the town of Southold, a string of hamlets and a village on the North Fork of Long Island’s Suffolk County. The county chose Mr. Trump for president in 2020 by just 232 votes out of more than 770,000 cast.

Southold is predominantly white, with a small, longstanding Black population — families who reside mostly in the village, Greenport, at the edge of the salty Peconic Bay. There is also a significant Latino population, many of them undocumented, their labor underpinning the vineyards, farms and landscaping businesses that line the peninsula.

The pressure to draw partisan lines is fierce.

David Surozenski, a Republican, refused to add Trump flags to his display. “That’s not the way I was brought up,” he said. “The American flag political? No.” Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

Just across the street from Treiber Farms, David Surozenski, 66, was weeding around the flagpole in his front yard a few days before the Fourth of July. Bouquets of miniature American flags flapped among the marigolds at his feet. Above him flew the flags of the Marines and the Coast Guard — he has children in each service — and at the top, an American flag.

A Republican, Mr. Surozenski said friends constantly pressured him to add Trump banners to his flag-and-flower garden, to fly “Make America Great Again” signs between his red, white and blue pinwheels whirling in the grass. But Mr. Surozenski declined — some of his eight children are Democrats.

“They said, ‘Dave, you’ve got to put Trump’s flag up!’ and I said, ‘No, that’s not happening,’” Mr. Surozenski recalled. “That’s not the way I was brought up. The American flag political? No.”

About 70 percent of Americans say the flag makes them feel proud, according to a recent survey by YouGov, a global public opinion and data research firm, and NBCLX, a mobile information platform. The sentiment was shared by about 80 percent of white Americans, just under 70 percent of Hispanic Americans and slightly less than 60 percent of Black Americans.

The divisions were deeper when it came to politics. While 66 percent of Republicans surveyed said they associated the flag with their own party, only 34 percent of Democrats said the same.

At its 1777 inception, the flag’s very design signified unity, the joining of the 13 colonies, said John R. Vile, a professor of political science and a dean at Middle Tennessee State University.

Politicizing the American flag is thus a perversion of its original intent, according to Professor Vile, who is also the author of “The American Flag: An Encyclopedia of the Stars and Stripes In U.S. History, Culture and Law.” He added, “We can’t allow that to happen.”

“It’s E Pluribus Unum — from many, one,” he said, citing the Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States. “If the pluribus overwhelms the unum, then what do we have left?”

The sentiment of some conservatives is that a line was drawn when Colin Kaepernick, the former National Football League quarterback, set off a national movement protesting the shootings of Black men by police by taking a knee during the anthem in 2016. His kneeling protest, Mr. Kaepernick has said, still demonstrated respect for the flag, but others saw him as hijacking the flag for political purposes.

Maryneily Rodriguez, 33, said she believed that Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters had done the same. Ms. Rodriguez, who was visiting Greenport with her fiancé during the Fourth of July weekend, said that she once regularly flew the flag at her home in Freeport, about 80 miles west on Long Island, taking it down only in winter for safekeeping. But about three years ago when spring came, Ms. Rodriguez, who is Black and a Democrat, left the flag in storage. It hasn’t come out since.

“It felt like it didn’t belong to me anymore,” she said.

John Hocker, a Republican who said he sometimes votes Democratic, also said he felt the flag had lost its meaning of unity. Instead of saluting the same flag as one people, he said, too many Americans were modifying it to become emblems of their own identities or belief systems, for instance with rainbow stripes, a symbol of gay pride, or blue stripes to show solidarity with the police.

He flies the flag — the red, white and blue one — from a towering crane several stories above the gravel piles of Latham Sand & Gravel, where he is a co-owner.

“There is a lot of history with this country, some that maybe people don’t like today, and some that people are being judged for today for what they did 300 years ago,” he s­aid.

“It’s still our country and every good and bad thing made it our country,” Mr. Hocker said, glancing upward. “And that’s what that represents.”

The culture war he was alluding to was on full display a few miles away, hanging from the eaves of an empty roadside stand: “SAVE AMERICA” was printed along the flag’s top border, and below: “FIGHT SOCIALISM.”

And on a notice tacked nearby: “If this offends you LEAVE.”

A flag, and a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance meant to convey unity, is displayed on the billboard for St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Greenport. Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

At Rinconcito Hispano in Greenport, Ana Perez, 33, served up pupusas, stuffed masa flour patties from her native El Salvador, to customers who ordered exclusively in Spanish. Many of them are the laborers who clean the pools at the beach houses and scare the crows off the grapes at the wineries.

In 2017, as Mr. Trump began his crackdown on illegal immigration, village trustees unanimously adopted a resolution to declare Greenport “a welcoming community.” One resident opposing the measure at the meeting urged the public to call and report anyone who employed undocumented immigrants. Wearing an American flag on his chest, he held up a sign with a phone number.

Ms. Perez said she has an American flag T-shirt, too, and she intended to wear it on the holiday. “This symbolizes this country, and I live in this country,” she said, speaking in Spanish because she is not fluent in English. “This flag is for all.”

Maryneily Rodriguez and Anthony Dipolito, who are engaged, walked through a forest of American flags in Greenport while on vacation. Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

Strolling with her fiancé, Anthony Dipolito, Ms. Rodriguez took in the 1920 wooden carousel beside the marina in Greenport.

As she crossed through Mitchell Park, she was struck by the sight of a forest of American flags. It was not a prop for a political rally, but rather a peaceful “field of honor” installed by the Greenport Rotary Club.

Each flag represented not an ideological belief, according to the club, but a veteran or other citizen who had inspired or helped the community.

“I’ve always loved the American flag so much, and now seeing it by the carousel I felt happy again,” Ms. Rodriguez said, as all around her red, white, and blue cloth still waved. “And I haven’t felt that way about the flag in such a long time.”

Correction: July 3, 2021

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to an organization that had installed a flag display. It was the Greenport Rotary Club, not the Greenpoint Rotary Club.

— Sarah Maslin Nir covers breaking news for the Metro section. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her series “Unvarnished,” an investigation into New York City’s nail salon industry that documented the exploitative labor practices and health issues manicurists face. @SarahMaslinNir

[orbemnews]

The Covid-19 Plasma Boom Is Over. What Did We Learn From It? Scott Cohen was on a ventilator struggling for his life with Covid-19 last April when his brothers pleaded with Plainview Hospital on Long Island to infuse him with the blood plasma of a recovered patient. The experimental treatment was hard to get but was gaining attention at a time when doctors had little else. After an online petition drew 18,000 signatures, the hospital gave Mr. Cohen, a retired Nassau County medic, an infusion of the pale yellow stuff that some called “liquid gold.” In those terrifying early months of the pandemic, the idea that antibody-rich plasma could save lives took on a life of its own before there was evidence that it worked. The Trump administration, buoyed by proponents at elite medical institutions, seized on plasma as a good-news story at a time when there weren’t many others. It awarded more than $800 million to entities involved in its collection and administration, and put Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s face on billboards promoting the treatment. A coalition of companies and nonprofit groups, including the Mayo Clinic, Red Cross and Microsoft, mobilized to urge donations from people who had recovered from Covid-19, enlisting celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, the actor known as the Rock. Volunteers, some dressed in superhero capes, showed up to blood banks in droves. Mr. Cohen, who later recovered, was one of them. He went on to donate his own plasma 11 times. But by the end of the year, good evidence for convalescent plasma had not materialized, prompting many prestigious medical centers to quietly abandon it. By February, with cases and hospitalizations dropping, demand dipped below what blood banks had stockpiled. In March, the New York Blood Center called Mr. Cohen to cancel his 12th appointment. It didn’t need any more plasma. A year ago, when Americans were dying of Covid at an alarming rate, the federal government made a big bet on plasma. No one knew if the treatment would work, but it seemed biologically plausible and safe, and there wasn’t much else to try. All told, more than 722,000 units of plasma were distributed to hospitals thanks to the federal program, which ends this month. The government’s bet did not result in a blockbuster treatment for Covid-19, or even a decent one. But it did give the country a real-time education in the pitfalls of testing a medical treatment in the middle of an emergency. Medical science is messy and slow. And when a treatment fails, which is often, it can be difficult for its strongest proponents to let it go. Because the government gave plasma to so many patients outside of a controlled clinical trial, it took a long time to measure its effectiveness. Eventually, studies did emerge to suggest that under the right conditions, plasma might help. But enough evidence has now accumulated to show that the country’s broad, costly plasma campaign had little effect, especially in people whose disease was advanced enough to land them in the hospital. In interviews, three federal health officials — Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Dr. Peter Marks, a top F.D.A. regulator; and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, a clinical director at the National Institutes of Health — acknowledged that the evidence for plasma was limited. “The data are just not that strong, and it makes it makes it hard, I think, to be enthusiastic about seeing it continue to be used,” Dr. Lane said. The N.I.H. recently halted an outpatient trial of plasma because of a lack of benefit. Plasma promotions Doctors have used the antibodies of recovered patients as treatments for more than a century, for diseases including diphtheria, the 1918 flu and Ebola. So when patients began falling ill with the new coronavirus last year, doctors around the world turned to the old standby. In the United States, two hospitals — Mount Sinai in New York City and Houston Methodist in Texas — administered the first plasma units to Covid-19 patients within hours of each other on March 28. Dr. Nicole M. Bouvier, an infectious-disease doctor who helped set up Mount Sinai’s plasma program, said the hospital had tried the experimental treatment because blood transfusions carry a relatively low risk of harm. With a new virus spreading quickly, and no approved treatments, “nature is a much better manufacturer than we are,” she said. As Mount Sinai prepared to infuse patients with plasma, Diana Berrent, a photographer, was recovering from Covid-19 at her home in Port Washington, N.Y. Friends began sending her Mount Sinai’s call for donors. “I had no idea what plasma was — I haven’t taken a science class since high school,” Ms. Berrent recalled. But as she researched its history in previous disease outbreaks, she became fixated on how she could help. She formed a Facebook group of Covid-19 survivors that grew to more than 160,000 members and eventually became a health advocacy organization, Survivor Corps. She livestreamed her own donation sessions to the Facebook group, which in turn prompted more donations. “People were flying places to go donate plasma to each other,” she said. “It was really a beautiful thing to see.” Around the same time, Chaim Lebovits, a shoe wholesaler from Monsey, N.Y., in hard-hit Rockland County, was spreading the word about plasma within his Orthodox Jewish community. Mr. Lebovits called several rabbis he knew, and before long, thousands of Orthodox Jewish people were getting tested for coronavirus antibodies and showing up to donate. Coordinating it all was exhausting. “April,” Mr. Lebovits recalled with a laugh, “was like 20 decades.” Two developments that month further accelerated plasma’s use. With the help of $66 million in federal funding, the F.D.A. tapped the Mayo Clinic to run an expanded access program for hospitals across the country. And the government agreed to cover the administrative costs of collecting plasma, signing deals with the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers. The news releases announcing those deals got none of the flashy media attention that the billion-dollar contracts for Covid-19 vaccines did when they arrived later in the summer. And the government did not disclose how much it would be investing. That investment turned out to be significant. According to contract records, the U.S. government has paid $647 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers since last April. “The convalescent plasma program was intended to meet an urgent need for a potential therapy early in the pandemic,” a health department spokeswoman said in a statement. “When these contracts began, treatments weren’t available for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.” Updated  April 17, 2021, 10:17 a.m. ET As spring turned to summer, the Trump administration seized on plasma — as it had with the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine — as a promising solution. In July, the administration announced an $8 million advertising campaign “imploring Americans to donate their plasma and help save lives.” The blitz included promotional radio spots and billboards featuring Dr. Fauci and Dr. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner. A coalition to organize the collection of plasma was beginning to take shape, connecting researchers, federal officials, activists like Ms. Berrent and Mr. Lebovits, and major corporations like Microsoft and Anthem on regular calls that have continued to this day. Nonprofit blood banks and for-profit plasma collection companies also joined the collaboration, named the Fight Is In Us. The group also included the Mitre Corporation, a little-known nonprofit organization that had received a $37 million government grant to promote plasma donation around the country. The participants sometimes had conflicting interests. While the blood banks were collecting plasma to be immediately infused in hospitalized patients, the for-profit companies needed plasma donations to develop their own blood-based treatment for Covid-19. Donations at those companies’ own centers had also dropped off after national lockdowns. “They don’t all exactly get along,” Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of research and incubations at Microsoft, said at a virtual scientific forum in March organized by Scripps Research. Microsoft was recruited to develop a locator tool, embedded on the group’s website, for potential donors. But the company took on a broader role “as a neutral intermediary,” Dr. Lee said. The company also provided access to its advertising agency, which created the look and feel for the Fight Is In Us campaign, which included video testimonials from celebrities. Lack of evidence In August, the F.D.A. authorized plasma for emergency use under pressure from President Donald J. Trump, who had chastised federal scientists for moving too slowly. At a news conference, Dr. Hahn, the agency’s commissioner, substantially exaggerated the data, although he later corrected his remarks following criticism from the scientific community. In a recent interview, he said that Mr. Trump’s involvement in the plasma authorization had made the topic polarizing. “Any discussion one could have about the science and medicine behind it didn’t happen, because it became a political issue as opposed to a medical and scientific one,” Dr. Hahn said. The authorization did away with the Mayo Clinic system and opened access to even more hospitals. As Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths skyrocketed in the fall and winter, use of plasma did, too, according to national usage data provided by the Blood Centers of America. By January of this year, when the United States was averaging more than 130,000 hospitalizations a day, hospitals were administering 25,000 units of plasma per week. Many community hospitals serving lower-income patients, with few other options and plasma readily available, embraced the treatment. At the Integris Health system in Oklahoma, giving patients two units of plasma became standard practice between November and January. Dr. David Chansolme, the system’s medical director of infection prevention, acknowledged that studies of plasma had showed it was “more miss than hit,” but he said his hospitals last year lacked the resources of bigger institutions, including access to the antiviral drug remdesivir. Doctors with a flood of patients — many of them Hispanic and from rural communities — were desperate to treat them with anything they could that was safe, Dr. Chansolme said. By the fall, accumulating evidence was showing that plasma was not the miracle that some early boosters had believed it to be. In September, the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommended that plasma not be used in hospitalized patients outside of a clinical trial. (On Wednesday, the society restricted its advice further, saying plasma should not be used at all in hospitalized patients.) In January, a highly anticipated trial in Britain was halted early because there was not strong evidence of a benefit in hospitalized patients. In February, the F.D.A. narrowed the authorization for plasma so that it applied only to people who were early in the course of their disease or who couldn’t make their own antibodies. Dr. Marks, the F.D.A. regulator, said that in retrospect, scientists had been too slow to adapt to those recommendations. They had known from previous disease outbreaks that plasma treatment is likely to work best when given early, and when it contained high levels of antibodies, he said. “Somehow we didn’t really take that as seriously as perhaps we should have,” he said. “If there was a lesson in this, it’s that history actually can teach you something.” Today, several medical centers have largely stopped giving plasma to patients. At Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, researchers found that many hospitalized patients were already producing their own antibodies, so plasma treatments would be superfluous. The Cleveland Clinic no longer routinely administers plasma because of a “lack of convincing evidence of efficacy,” according to Dr. Simon Mucha, a critical care physician. And earlier this year, Mount Sinai stopped giving plasma to patients outside of a clinical trial. Dr. Bouvier said that she had tracked the scientific literature and that there had been a “sort of piling on” of studies that showed no benefit. “That’s what science is — it’s a process of abandoning your old hypotheses in favor of a better hypothesis,” she said. Many initially promising drugs fail in clinical trials. “That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.” Plasma’s future Some scientists are calling on the F.D.A. to rescind plasma’s emergency authorization. Dr. Luciana Borio, the acting chief scientist at the agency under President Barack Obama, said that disregarding the usual scientific standards in an emergency — what she called “pandemic exceptionalism” — had drained valuable time and attention from discovering other treatments. “Pandemic exceptionalism is something we learned from prior emergencies that leads to serious unintended consequences,” she said, referring to the ways countries leaned on inadequate studies during the Ebola outbreak. With plasma, she said, “the agency forgot lessons from past emergencies.” While scant evidence shows that plasma will help curb the pandemic, a dedicated clutch of researchers at prominent medical institutions continue to focus on the narrow circumstances in which it might work. Dr. Arturo Casadevall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University, said many of the trials had not succeeded because they tested plasma on very sick patients. “If they’re treated early, the results of the trials are all consistent,” he said. A clinical trial in Argentina found that giving plasma early to older people reduced the progression of Covid-19. And an analysis of the Mayo Clinic program found that patients who were given plasma with a high concentration of antibodies fared better than those who did not receive the treatment. Still, in March, the N.I.H. halted a trial of plasma in people who were not yet severely ill with Covid-19 because the agency said it was unlikely to help. With most of the medical community acknowledging plasma’s limited benefit, even the Fight Is In Us has begun to shift its focus. For months, a “clinical research” page about convalescent plasma was dominated by favorable studies and news releases, omitting major articles concluding that plasma showed little benefit. Now, the website has been redesigned to more broadly promote not only plasma, but also testing, vaccines and other treatments like monoclonal antibodies, which are synthesized in a lab and thought to be a more potent version of plasma. Its clinical research page also includes more negative studies about plasma. Nevertheless, the Fight Is In Us is still running Facebook ads, paid for by the federal government, telling Covid-19 survivors that “There’s a hero inside you” and “Keep up the fight.” The ads urge them to donate their plasma, even though most blood banks have stopped collecting it. Two of plasma’s early boosters, Mr. Lebovits and Ms. Berrent, have also turned their attention to monoclonal antibodies. As he had done with plasma last spring, Mr. Lebovits helped increase acceptance of monoclonals in the Orthodox Jewish community, setting up an informational hotline, running ads in Orthodox newspapers, and creating rapid testing sites that doubled as infusion centers. Coordinating with federal officials, Mr. Lebovits has since shared his strategies with leaders in the Hispanic community in El Paso and San Diego. And Ms. Berrent has been working with a division of the insurer UnitedHealth to match the right patients — people with underlying health conditions or who are over 65 — to that treatment. “I’m a believer in plasma for a lot of substantive reasons, but if word came back tomorrow that jelly beans worked better, we’d be promoting jelly beans,” she said. “We are here to save lives.”’ Source link Orbem News #boom #Covid19 #learn #plasma

[banjbillions]

Big G, my brother, my teammate. Hands down we had to be the most unlikely duo, Filipino PG from Staten Island & former NY CHSAA Player of the Year D1 transfer and Queens Finest! We had great times on & off the court! Our deep life convos in the dorms, study sessions in the cafeteria, & random nights out in downtown NYC all come to mind vividly. Just like getting kicked out of Webster Hall & workouts in the middle of the night fully drenched with your gallon of water after hallway sprints, push ups, & sit ups! Your collection of Foamposites & Air Max 97’s were so ELITE just like your game! 6’6” 300 with a nasty crossover & a stroke was unreal! The game you dropped 50 was epic! 30 ppg & 13 rebs to lead the Nation in scoring & rebounding definitely helped pad my career stat totals! So many plays running through my mind and I wish we had more time to reminisce & celebrate life. I’m going to miss your random Facebook messages. Thank you for always having my back. Thank you for all the wide open 3’s when you kicked it out when you were tripled teamed even though you still could’ve scored on any defense. Thank you for writing a children’s book to inspire the youth & keep your legacy alive. Most of all, thank you for being a friend. Praying for all of your loved ones. Rest In Peace, Greg Hardin 🙏🏽🕊🙏🏽 (at New York City, N.Y.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CNZHUtkn44J/?igshid=111jirm3n2d3b