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lastsonlost · 4 years

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BECAUSE THE CORONAVIRUS IS JUST HURTING FEMINIST AND ONLY FEMINISTS AND ABSOLUTELY NO ONE ELSE...

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Enough already. When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities.

Shakespeare spent most of his career in London, where the theaters were, while his family lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. During the plague of 1606, the playwright was lucky to be spared from the epidemic—his landlady died at the height of the outbreak—and his wife and two adult daughters stayed safely in the Warwickshire countryside. Newton, meanwhile, never married or had children. He saw out the Great Plague of 1665–6 on his family’s estate in the east of England, and spent most of his adult life as a fellow at Cambridge University, where his meals and housekeeping were provided by the college.

For those with caring responsibilities, an infectious-disease outbreak is unlikely to give them time to write King Lear or develop a theory of optics. A pandemic magnifies all existing inequalities (even as politicians insist this is not the time to talk about anything other than the immediate crisis). Working from home in a white-collar job is easier; employees with salaries and benefits will be better protected; self-isolation is less taxing in a spacious house than a cramped apartment. But one of the most striking effects of the coronavirus will be to send many couples back to the 1950s.

Across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic.

Purely as a physical illness, the coronavirus appears to affect women less severely. But in the past few days, the conversation about the pandemic has broadened: We are not just living through a public-health crisis, but an economic one. As much of normal life is suspended for three months or more, job losses are inevitable. At the same time, school closures and household isolation are moving the work of caring for children from the paid economy—nurseries, schools, babysitters—to the unpaid one. The coronavirus smashes up the bargain that so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: We can both work, because someone else is looking after our children. Instead, couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.

Many stories of arrogance are related to this pandemic. Among the most exasperating is the West’s failure to learn from history: the Ebola crisis in three African countries in 2014; Zika in 2015–6; and recent outbreaks of SARS, swine flu, and bird flu. Academics who studied these episodes found that they had deep, long-lasting effects on gender equality. “Everybody’s income was affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa,” Julia Smith, a health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University, told The New York Times this month, but “men’s income returned to what they had made pre-outbreak faster than women’s income.” The distorting effects of an epidemic can last for years, Clare Wenham, an assistant professor of global-health policy at the London School of Economics, told me. “We also saw declining rates of childhood vaccination [during Ebola].” Later, when these children contracted preventable diseases, their mothers had to take time off work.

At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense. What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after—this unpaid caring labor—will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce. “It’s not just about social norms of women performing care roles; it’s also about practicalities,” Wenham added. “Who is paid less? Who has the flexibility?”

According to the British government’s figures, 40 percent of employed women work part-time, compared with only 13 percent of men. In heterosexual relationships, women are more likely to be the lower earners, meaning their jobs are considered a lower priority when disruptions come along. And this particular disruption could last months, rather than weeks. Some women’s lifetime earnings will never recover. With the schools closed, many fathers will undoubtedly step up, but that won’t be universal.

Despite the mass entry of women into the workforce during the 20th century, the phenomenon of the “second shift” still exists. Across the world, women—including those with jobs—do more housework and have less leisure time than their male partners. Even memes about panic-buying acknowledge that household tasks such as food shopping are primarily shouldered by women. “I’m not afraid of COVID-19 but what is scary, is the lack of common sense people have,” reads one of the most popular tweets about the coronavirus crisis. “I’m scared for people who actually need to go to the store & feed their fams but Susan and Karen stocked up for 30 years.” The joke only works because “Susan” and “Karen”—stand-in names for suburban moms—are understood to be responsible for household management, rather than, say, Mike and Steve.

Look around and you can see couples already making tough decisions on how to divide up this extra unpaid labor. When I called Wenham, she was self-isolating with two small children; she and her husband were alternating between two-hour shifts of child care and paid work. That is one solution; for others, the division will run along older lines. Dual-income couples might suddenly find themselves living like their grandparents, one homemaker and one breadwinner. “My spouse is a physician in the emergency dept, and is actively treating #coronavirus patients. We just made the difficult decision for him to isolate & move into our garage apartment for the foreseeable future as he continues to treat patients,” wrote the Emory University epidemiologist Rachel Patzer, who has a three-week-old baby and two young children. “As I attempt to home school my kids (alone) with a new baby who screams if she isn’t held, I am worried about the health of my spouse and my family.”

Single parents face even harder decisions: While schools are closed, how do they juggle earning and caring? No one should be nostalgic for the “1950s ideal” of Dad returning to a freshly baked dinner and freshly washed children, when so many families were excluded from it, even then. And in Britain today, a quarter of families are headed by a single parent, more than 90 percent of whom are women. Closed schools make their life even harder.

Other lessons from the Ebola epidemic were just as stark—and similar, if perhaps smaller, effects will be seen during this crisis in the developed world. School closures affected girls’ life chances, because many dropped out of education. (A rise in teenage-pregnancy rates exacerbated this trend.) Domestic and sexual violence rose. And more women died in childbirth because resources were diverted elsewhere. “There’s a distortion of health systems, everything goes towards the outbreak,” said Wenham, who traveled to west Africa as a researcher during the Ebola crisis. “Things that aren’t priorities get canceled. That can have an effect on maternal mortality, or access to contraception.” The United States already has appalling statistics in this area compared with other rich countries, and black women there are twice as likely to die in childbirth as white women.

For Wenham, the most striking statistic from Sierra Leone, one of the countries worst affected by Ebola, was that from 2013 to 2016, during the outbreak, more women died of obstetric complications than the infectious disease itself. But these deaths, like the unnoticed caring labor on which the modern economy runs, attract less attention than the immediate problems generated by an epidemic. These deaths are taken for granted. In her book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez notes that 29 million papers were published in more than 15,000 peer-reviewed titles around the time of the Zika and Ebola epidemics, but less than 1 percent explored the gendered impact of the outbreaks. Wenham has found no gender analysis of the coronavirus outbreak so far; she and two co-authors have stepped into the gap to research the issue.

The evidence we do have from the Ebola and Zika outbreaks should inform the current response. In both rich and poor countries, campaigners expect domestic-violence rates to rise during lockdown periods. Stress, alcohol consumption, and financial difficulties are all considered triggers for violence in the home, and the quarantine measures being imposed around the world will increase all three. The British charity Women’s Aid said in a statement that it was “concerned that social distancing and self-isolation will be used as a tool of coercive and controlling behaviour by perpetrators, and will shut down routes to safety and support.”

Researchers, including those I spoke with, are frustrated that findings like this have not made it through to policy makers, who still adopt a gender-neutral approach to pandemics. They also worry that opportunities to collect high-quality data which will be useful for the future are being missed. For example, we have little information on how viruses similar to the coronavirus affect pregnant women—hence the conflicting advice during the current crisis—or, according to Susannah Hares, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, sufficient data to build a model for when schools should reopen.

We shouldn’t make that mistake again. Grim as it is to imagine now, further epidemics are inevitable, and the temptation to argue that gender is a side issue, a distraction from the real crisis, must be resisted. What we do now will affect the lives of millions of women and girls in future outbreaks.

The coronavirus crisis will be global and long-lasting, economic as well as medical. However, it also offers an opportunity. This could be the first outbreak where gender and sex differences are recorded, and taken into account by researchers and policy makers. For too long, politicians have assumed that child care and elderly care can be “soaked up” by private citizens—mostly women—effectively providing a huge subsidy to the paid economy. This pandemic should remind us of the true scale of that distortion.

Wenham supports emergency child-care provision, economic security for small-business owners, and a financial stimulus paid directly to families. But she isn’t hopeful, because her experience suggests that governments are too short-termist and reactive. “Everything that's happened has been predicted, right?” she told me. “As a collective academic group, we knew there would be an outbreak that came out of China, that shows you how globalization spreads disease, that’s going to paralyze financial systems, and there was no pot of money ready to go, no governance plan … We knew all this, and they didn't listen. So why would they listen to something about women?”

Remember this article the next time a politician brings up the draft again...

because I remember the last reaction.

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Mary Ellen O’Toole calls the teenagers who murdered 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999 by their first names — Dylan and Eric. O’Toole did not personally know Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, but she’s thought about them for decades. At the time of the Colorado shootings, O’Toole was a profiler for the FBI and had been tapped to write the bureau’s report on how to prevent mass shootings in schools. What began as a research project has become a life’s work — and a deep source of frustration.

O’Toole is part of a small group of academics, law-enforcement professionals and psychologists who published some of the first research on mass shootings in schools. She and other members of this group began paying attention to the phenomenon in the late 1990s. Two decades later, some of them say not much has changed. The risk factors they identified back then still apply. The recommendations they made are still valid. And, as we saw last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, students are still dying. “On the news, people are saying we should be concerned about this and that,” O’Toole said, “and I thought, ‘We identified that 20 years ago. Did you not read this stuff 20 years ago?’ … It’s fatiguing. I just feel a sense of fatigue.”

It’s difficult to say definitively how many school shootings have happened in the years since Columbine — or in the years before it. It’s harder still to prove how many would-be shootings were averted, or how many others could have been if additional steps had been taken. But the people who have spent the last two decades trying to understand this phenomenon are still here, and still trying to sell politicians and the public on possible solutions that are complicated, expensive and tough to sum up in a sound bite.

Any research into school shootings is made more difficult by how uncommon such shootings are. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight wrote about the more than 33,000 people killed by guns in America every year. Of those deaths, roughly one-third — about 12,000 — are homicides, but hardly any are due to mass shootings.1 If you define mass shootings as as an event where a lone attacker indiscriminately kills four or more people, in a public place, unrelated gang activity or robbery, then mass shootings account for a tiny portion of all gun homicides — probably a fraction of a percent.

There have been many attempts to formally quantify school shootings, but, as with mass shootings, all use different definitions. Our chart is taken from a 2016 paper that defined a school shooting as a premeditated incident of gun violence that took place in an educational setting, killed or wounded at least three victims (not counting the perpetrator), was unrelated to gang activity and was not an act of domestic violence.2 This data suggests that school shootings, though still extremely rare, are more common today than they were 40 years ago.

But no matter how you define a school shooting, they’re still a subset of a subset — just as mass shootings account for a fraction of all gun homicides, school shootings account for a fraction of all mass shooting deaths. In 1995, when O’Toole began to study school shootings, they seemed like even more of an outlier than they are today. “I couldn’t even call it a phenomenon,” she said. “Prior to Columbine, there was no indication that it was going to become one of those crimes that just becomes part of the culture. It looked like it could have faded away.”

These uncommon but high-profile tragedies had also drawn the attention of Marisa Randazzo. In 1999, she was the chief psychologist for the Secret Service and became a part of a joint effort between the Secret Service and Department of Education to better understand school shooters and how to prevent attacks before they happened. Randazzo had previously worked on the Exceptional Case Study Project — a Secret Service project designed to better understand people who threaten the president and other public figures. Like school shootings, assassinations are extremely rare events that have a huge impact on society. That rarity makes them hard to study — and makes it hard to tell blowhards from real threats. But their impact makes them important to understand.

Randazzo found that the project’s findings echoed what she was learning about school shootings. For instance, the Secret Service had once focused its energy on threats made by people with a history of violent crime or who had a mental illness that caused them to act irrationally. But the Exceptional Case Study Project analysis showed that most people who actually carry out attacks didn’t meet either of those criteria. Instead, a better way to figure out who was a really a threat was to talk to friends, family and coworkers — most attackers had discussed their plans with other people.

Randazzo and O’Toole’s parallel reports came to remarkably similar conclusions.

First, these studies determined that there wasn’t much point in trying to profile school shooters. Yes, most were (and remain) male and white, but those categories were so broad that they’re essentially useless in identifying potential threats ahead of time, Randazzo said. What’s more, she said, more detailed profiles risked stigmatizing perfectly reasonable behaviors — like wearing wearing black and listening to loud music.

Instead, the reports focused on the behavior and mental state of the young people who chose to kill. While these teens were deeply troubled, that’s not quite the same thing as saying that those who commit school shootings are just irredeemably mentally ill. Nor does it mean those young people suddenly snapped, giving no warning. “School shooters typically do this out of a profound adolescent crisis,” said James Garbarino, a professor of psychology at Loyola University who specializes in teen violence and began studying school shooters in the late 1990s.

Randazzo described a pattern of young people who were deeply depressed, unable to cope with their lives, who saw no other way out of a bad situation. The stressors they faced wouldn’t necessarily be problems that an adult would see as especially traumatic, but these young people were unable to handle their emotions, sadness and anger, and they started acting in ways that were, essentially, suicidal.

Some of the best data on the mental state of school shooters has come from interviews with those shooters (and would-be shooters) who survived the attack. Randazzo described one such living school shooter,3 currently serving multiple life sentences, who told her that before the attack he spent weeks vacillating between suicide and homicide. Only after he tried and failed to kill himself did he settle on killing others in hopes that someone would kill him. Garbarino, who has interviewed dozens of people who went to prison for life as teenagers, both for school shootings and other violent crimes, heard many similar stories.

“The reason I emphasize this is that we know so much about how to help someone who is suicidal, and those same resources can be used very effectively with someone who is planning to engage in school violence,” Randazzo said. So how do we spot the ones who are planning an attack at a school? The studies she and O’Toole published years ago showed that, like people planning to attack the president, would-be school shooters don’t keep their plans to themselves. They tell friends or even teachers that they want to kill. They talk about their anger and their suicidality. And as more teens have attacked their schoolmates, that pattern has proved to hold true over time. It was true for Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. It was true for the at least four potential school shootings that were averted in the weeks after Parkland — all stopped because the would-be killers spoke or wrote about their plans and someone told law enforcement.

While all the experts I spoke with said that policies that keep guns out of the hands of teenagers are an important part of preventing mass shootings, they all also said it was crucial to set up systems that spot teens who are are struggling and may become dangerous.

But those systems seem to break down over time. Randazzo told me that her team had trained numerous school districts in school shooting prevention back in the early 2000s and, as of this year, many of those districts no longer had prevention systems in place. Thanks to staff turnover and budget reprioritization, that institutional knowledge simply withered away. And ironically, that happens precisely because school shootings are so rare. “It takes time and effort for a school to create a team and get training,” Randazzo said. “And, fortunately, threatening behavior doesn’t happen often enough” to spur schools to action.

Read more: Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Maggie Koerth-Baker

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generalcreatortiger · 3 years

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How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation

Amy QinVivian WangDanny Hakim

By Amy Qin, Vivian Wang and Danny Hakim

Published Nov. 20, 2020

Updated Jan. 26, 2021

Dr. Li-Meng Yan wanted to remain anonymous. It was mid-January, and Dr. Yan, a researcher in Hong Kong, had been hearing rumors about a dangerous new virus in mainland China that the government was playing down. Terrified for her personal safety and career, she reached out to her favorite Chinese YouTube host, known for criticizing the Chinese government.

Within days, the host was telling his 100,000 followers that the coronavirus had been deliberately released by the Chinese Communist Party. He wouldn’t name the whistle-blower, he said, because officials could make the person “disappear.”

By September, Dr. Yan had abandoned caution. She appeared in the United States on Fox News making the unsubstantiated claim to millions that the coronavirus was a bio-weapon manufactured by China.

Overnight, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero. Nearly as quickly, her interview was labeled on social media as containing “false information,” while scientists rejected her research as a polemic dressed up in jargon.

Her evolution was the product of a collaboration between two separate but increasingly allied groups that peddle misinformation: a small but active corner of the Chinese diaspora and the highly influential far right in the United States.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan’s interview on Tucker Carlson’s show in September racked up at least 8.8 million views online. Facebook and Instagram flagged it as false information.Credit...Fox News

Each saw an opportunity in the pandemic to push its agenda. For the diaspora, Dr. Yan and her unfounded claims provided a cudgel for those intent on bringing down China’s government. For American conservatives, they played to rising anti-Chinese sentiment and distracted from the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the outbreak.

Both sides took advantage of the dearth of information coming out of China, where the government has refused to share samples of the virus and has resisted a transparent, independent investigation. Its initial cover-up of the outbreak has further fueled suspicion about the origins of the virus.

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that the virus almost certainly originated in an animal, most likely a bat, before evolving to make the leap into humans. While U.S. intelligence agencies have not ruled out the possibility of a lab leak, they have not found any proof so far to back up that theory.

Dr. Yan’s trajectory was carefully crafted by Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump.

They put Dr. Yan on a plane to the United States, gave her a place to stay, coached her on media appearances and helped her secure interviews with popular conservative television hosts like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, who have shows on Fox. They nurtured her seemingly deep belief that the virus was genetically engineered, uncritically embracing what she provided as proof.

“I said from Day 1, there’s no conspiracies,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview. “But there are also no coincidences.”

Mr. Bannon noted that unlike Dr. Yan, he did not believe the Chinese government “purposely did this.” But he has pushed the theory about an accidental leak of risky laboratory research and has been intent on creating a debate about the new coronavirus’s origins.

“Dr. Yan is one small voice, but at least she’s a voice,” he said.

The media outlets that cater to the Chinese diaspora — a jumble of independent websites, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts with anti-Beijing leanings — have formed a fast-growing echo chamber for misinformation. With few reliable Chinese-language news sources to fact-check them, rumors can quickly harden into a distorted reality. Increasingly, they are feeding and being fed by far-right American media.

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Wang Dinggang, the YouTube host contacted by Dr. Yan and a close associate of Mr. Guo, appears to have been the first to seed rumors related to Hunter Biden, a son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. A site owned by Mr. Guo amplified the baseless claims about Hunter Biden’s involvement in a child abuse conspiracy. They were picked up by Infowars and other fringe American outlets. Mr. Bannon, Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo are now all promoting the false idea that the presidential election was rigged.

Big technology companies have started to push back, as Facebook and Twitter try to better police content. Twitter permanently banned one of Mr. Bannon’s accounts for violating its rules on glorifying violence after he suggested on his podcast that the heads of the F.B.I. director and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, should be put on pikes.

But such mainstream notoriety has only bolstered their anti-establishment credentials. Mr. Wang’s YouTube following has nearly doubled since January. Traffic for two of Mr. Guo’s websites soared to more than 135 million last month, up from fewer than five million visits last December, according to SimilarWeb, an online data provider. Many conservatives who claim Facebook and Twitter censor right-wing voices are also flocking to new social media platforms such as Parler — and Dr. Yan, Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo have already joined them.

Dr. Yan, through representatives for Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo, declined multiple requests for an interview. So did Mr. Wang, citing The New York Times’s “reputation for fake news.”

In a statement sent through a lawyer, Mr. Guo said he had only offered “encouragement” for Dr. Yan’s efforts “to stand up against the C.C.P. mafia and tell the world the truth about Covid-19.”

As the new year began, Mr. Wang was doing what he did best: attacking the Chinese Communist Party on YouTube. He railed against China’s crackdown on Muslims and pontificated on the U.S. trade war.

Then on Jan. 19, he suddenly shifted to the emerging outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. It was early in the crisis, before the lockdown in the city, before China had disclosed that the virus was spreading among humans, before the world was paying attention.

In an 80-minute show devoted to an unnamed whistle-blower, Mr. Wang said that he had heard from “the world’s absolute top coronavirus expert,” who had told him China was not being transparent. “I think this is very believable, and very scary,” he said.

Wang Dinggang, left, a YouTube host and China critic, and his frequent co-host, known as An Hong. In January, Mr. Wang suddenly shifted his attention to the emerging coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

Wang Dinggang, left, a YouTube host and China critic, and his frequent co-host, known as An Hong. In January, Mr. Wang suddenly shifted his attention to the emerging coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.Credit...YouTube

Mr. Wang, who was a businessman in China before moving to the United States for unknown reasons, is part of a growing group of commentators that have emerged on the Chinese-language internet. Their shows, which mix punditry, serious analysis and outright rumor, cater to a diaspora that often does not trust Chinese state media and has few reliable sources of news in its native language.

Since starting his program several years ago, Mr. Wang, who broadcasts under the name Lu De, has emerged as one of the genre’s most popular personalities, in part for his embrace of outlandish theories. He has accused Chinese officials of using “sex and seduction” to entrap enemies, and urged his audience to hoard food in preparation for the Communist Party’s collapse.

His January show on the unnamed whistle-blower combined the same elements of fact and fiction. He called his source, later revealed to be Dr. Yan, an expert, but greatly exaggerated her credentials.

She had studied influenza before the outbreak, but not coronaviruses. She did work at one of the world’s top virology labs, at the University of Hong Kong, but was fairly new to the field and hired for her experience with lab animals, according to two university employees who knew her. She helped investigate the new outbreak, but was not overseeing the effort.

The episode caught the attention of Mr. Bannon, who said he started worrying about the virus when China began locking down. Someone, he didn’t say who, pointed out the show and translated it.

A few months later, Mr. Wang suddenly told Dr. Yan to flee Hong Kong for her safety, he explained in later broadcasts. Mr. Guo, his primary patron, paid for her to fly first class, he added.

“I’m currently in New York, very safe and relaxed” with the “best bodyguards and lawyers,” Dr. Yan wrote on WeChat, in a screenshot seen by The Times. “What I’m doing now is helping the whole world take control of the pandemic.”

After Dr. Yan arrived in the United States, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Guo and their allies immediately set out to package her as a whistle-blower they could sell to the American public.

They installed her in a “safe house” outside of New York City and hired lawyers, Mr. Bannon said. They found her a media coach, since English is not her first language. Mr. Bannon also asked her to submit multiple papers summarizing her purported evidence, Dr. Yan later said.

“Make sure you can walk people through this logically,” Mr. Bannon recalled telling her.

Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo, who also goes by Miles Kwok, was a property magnate in China with ties to senior party officials, until he fled the country about five years ago under the shadow of corruption allegations. He has since styled himself as a freedom fighter, though many are skeptical of his motivations.

Mr. Bannon, who patrolled the South China Sea as a young naval officer, has long focused much of his energy on China. During his time in the White House, he counseled Mr. Trump to take a tough approach toward the country, which he has described as “the greatest existential threat ever faced by the United States.”

Mr. Guo’s deep pockets and Mr. Bannon’s extensive network have given them an influential platform. The two men set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption in China. They spread conspiracy theories about the accidental death of a Chinese tycoon in France, calling it a fake suicide orchestrated by Beijing.

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon at a news conference in 2018. Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon at a news conference in 2018. Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo have been on a mission for years to, as they put it, bring down the Chinese Communist Party.Credit...Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Bannon pivoted his podcast to the coronavirus. He was calling it “the C.C.P. virus” long before Mr. Trump started using xenophobic labels for the pandemic. He invited fierce critics of China to the show to discuss how the outbreak exemplified the global threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo began claiming that the virus was an attack ordered by China’s vice president. He circulated the same claims on his media operation, which includes GTV, a video platform, and GNews, a site that features glowing coverage of Mr. Guo and his associates. He released a song called “Take Down the C.C.P.,” which briefly hit No. 1 worldwide on the Apple iTunes chart.

The men have continued to target the Chinese government even as they battle their own legal woes. Mr. Guo is reportedly under investigation by U.S. federal authorities over fund-raising tactics at his media company. Mr. Bannon, who was arrested this summer on Mr. Guo’s yacht, is facing fraud charges for a nonprofit he helped set up to build a wall along the Mexican border.

In Dr. Yan, the two men found an ideal face for their campaign.

On July 10, she revealed her identity for the first time in a 13-minute interview on the Fox News website. She said that the Chinese government had concealed evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus. She accused, without proof, professors at the University of Hong Kong of assisting in the cover-up. (The university quickly rejected her accusations as “hearsay.”)

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of Covid-19,” she said.

She made no mention of Mr. Guo or Mr. Bannon, by design.

“Don’t link yourself to Bannon, don’t link yourself to Guo Wengui,” Mr. Guo on his own show recounted telling Dr. Yan. “Once you mention us, those American extreme leftists will attack and say you have a political agenda.”

After the first Fox interview, Dr. Yan embarked on a whirlwind tour of right-wing media, echoing conservative talking points. She said that she took hydroxychloroquine to ward off the virus, even though the F.D.A. had warned that it was not effective. She suggested that the World Health Organization helped cover up the outbreak.

Those interviews were amplified by social media accounts proclaiming allegiance to Mr. Guo. They translated her appearances into Chinese, then posted multiple versions on YouTube and retweeted posts by other pro-Guo accounts.

Some of the accounts have tens of thousands of followers — of a dubious nature. Many have multiple indicators of so-called inauthentic behavior, according to an analysis by First Draft, a nonprofit that studies misinformation. The analysis found that they were created in the past two years, lacked background photos and had user names that were jumbles of letters and numbers.

Collectively, the followers created online momentum for the conservative media world, which in turn re-energized the pro-Guo accounts. “The two are filtering and feeding off of each other,” said Anne Kruger, First Draft’s Asia Pacific director.

In early September, Dr. Yan met with Dr. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University who had floated the possibility that the virus was the product of a laboratory experiment. Dr. Lucey said Dr. Yan’s associates, who set up the meeting, wanted to find a credible scientist to endorse her claims. “That was the only reason for bringing me there,” he said.

For more than four hours, Dr. Yan discussed her background and research, while one of her associates, whom Dr. Lucey declined to name, impatiently walked in and out of the room. He said that Dr. Yan appeared to genuinely believe that the virus had been weaponized but struggled to explain why.

At the end, the associate asked Dr. Lucey if he thought Dr. Yan had a “smoking gun.” When Dr. Lucey said no, the meeting quickly ended.

Days later, Dr. Yan released a 26-page research paper that she said proved the virus was manufactured. It spread rapidly online.

The paper, which was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, was posted on an online open-access repository. It was backed by two nonprofits funded by Mr. Guo. The three other co-authors on the paper were pseudonyms for safety reasons, according to Mr. Bannon.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Among the unsubstantiated claims that have circulated about the coronavirus is that it originated in a Chinese laboratory.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Among the unsubstantiated claims that have circulated about the coronavirus is that it originated in a Chinese laboratory.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Virologists quickly dismissed the paper as “pseudoscience” and “based on conjecture.” Some worried that the paper — laden with charts and scientific jargon, such as “unique furin cleavage site” and “RBM-hACE2 binding” — would lend her claims a veneer of credibility.

“It’s full of science-y sorts of terms that are jumbled together to sound impressive but aren’t supported,” said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University who was among several authors of a rebuttal to Dr. Yan’s report.

Other misinformation about the pandemic has also emphasized supposed expertise. In the spring, a 26-minute video that went viral featured a discredited American scientist accusing hospitals of inflating virus-related deaths. A July video showed people in white coats, calling themselves “America’s doctors” and suggesting that masks were ineffective; the video was removed by social media platforms for sharing false information.

On Sept. 15, a day after her report was published, Dr. Yan secured her biggest stage yet: an appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Mr. Carlson’s popular show has frequently served as an influential megaphone for the right.

Mr. Carlson asked if Dr. Yan believed Chinese officials had released the virus intentionally or by accident. Dr. Yan did not hesitate.

Footage of their interview racked up at least 8.8 million views online, even though Facebook and Instagram flagged it as false information. High-profile conservatives, including Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, shared it on Twitter. When the Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist supporter of Mr. Trump, posted about Dr. Yan on Facebook, it became the most-shared link posted by a U.S.-based Facebook account that day.

Lou Dobbs, another Fox host, tweeted a video of himself and a guest discussing Dr. Yan’s “great case.” Mr. Trump retweeted it.

Dr. Yan was welcomed by an audience already primed to hear her claims. A March poll found that nearly 30 percent of Americans believed the virus was most likely made in a lab.

“Once Tucker Carlson picks it up, it’s not fringe anymore,” said Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies disinformation. “It’s now mainstream.”

Weeks later, Mr. Carlson said on his show that he could not endorse Dr. Yan’s theories. Regardless, he welcomed her back as a guest to detail her latest claim: Her mother, she told him, had been arrested by the Chinese government.

The Chinese government often punishes critics by harassing their families. But when The Times reached Dr. Yan’s mother on her cellphone in October, she said that she had never been arrested and was desperate to connect with her daughter, whom she had not spoken to in months.

She declined to say more and asked not to be named, citing fears that Dr. Yan was being manipulated by her new allies.

“They are blocking our daughter from talking to us,” her mother said, referring to Mr. Guo and Mr. Wang. “We want our daughter to know that she can video-chat with us at any time.”

Amy Chang Chien contributed research.

#china #covid #covid19 #covid-19 #trump

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adambstingus · 5 years

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What is grey culture, precisely? Here’s what the stats say

Whiteness is hard to define, but apparently it involves lots of veggies, alcohol and the arts and reputations like Yoder

A few months after I moved to New York, a magical communication happened that would radically shift my psyche forever. I was telling my friend that I had gone to his favorite shop and he expected:” Who sufficed you? Was it the tall lily-white guy ?”

I frowned and replied,” Are the rest of the staff not grey ?” to which my friend responded” Huh? What do you necessitate? No. I was just describing him .”

While he strayed off to get a beer, I stood dumbfounded. This was the first time I had discovered a white person’s hasten used as a casual descriptor, a simple phase of differentiation in what I perceive to be a grey nature.

As a Brit, I grew up in a country that was 86% white-hot, so “white” was the norm. That kid you were seeing in volumes like Roald Dahl’s was lily-white, unless you were told otherwise( which you never were ). The males paraded on the TV appearance Crimewatch were described as black when they were black, and short or towering or thin or fat once they are white.

Now I live in the United States, countries around the world that is 61% grey. Non-whiteness is much more visible here, and abruptly the distinguish of whiteness is very. But I’m still struggling to constitute the shift from my previous mindset, where grey is the default, the presume, the baseline. You don’t notice normalcy; you consider the divergences from it. So the word “white” could ever be hop-skip over as an adjective.

Now, “white” still feels like an absence: an absence of colour, an is a lack of food that is “different” and an is a lack of a mum who enunciates your mention differently from the room your friends do. But if my friend can use “white” as an adjective, then what exactly are they describing? What is grey culture, exactly?

I decided to find out by expecting the questions that I and many other non-white people have been asked over and over again. I looked for answers in data.

Q: What do white people dine? A: Vegetables.

The US Department of Agriculture’s latest data been demonstrated that the average lily-white American eats 16 lb more vegetables at home each year than do non-white Americans( that could add up to 112 medium-sized carrots, 432 cherry-red tomatoes, or God knows how much kale ).

The only thing that white people are likely to adore more than vegetables is dairy. White Americans chew 185 lb of dairy produces at home each year, are comparable to exactly 106 lb for pitch-black Americans.

But this isn’t just the result of our desires: all of these numbers are influenced by structural parts. For instance, fruit and vegetable uptake increases each time that a new supermarket is lent near to someone’s home, according to a 2002 study . That same study too found that grey Americans are four times more likely than pitch-black Americans to live in a census tract that has a supermarket.

Q: What do white people drink? A: Alcohol.

Almost a third of non-Hispanic greys had at least one heavy drinking day in the past year, according to the CDC. Only 16% of black Americans and 24% of Hispanic Americans said the same.

If you’re wondering which drinks white people are boozing, then you have the same question as a unit of researchers who followed 2,171 girls from the time they were 11 years old to the time the issue is 18. As per year extended, the researchers “ve noticed that” compared to the black girls, white-hot girlfriends imbibe a lot more wine-coloured( and beer, actually, and, er, hearts, more ).

Q: What’s a typical white-hot name? A: Joseph Yoder.

The Census Bureau did an analysis of 270 million people‘s last names to find those that are most likely to be held by particular hastens or ethnicities. Yoder had not been able to the more common family name in the US- only about 45,000 parties have it- but, since 98.1% of those people are white-hot, it’s just ahead of Krueger and Mueller and Koch as the whitest last name in their respective countries. Which means that statistically speaking, the Yoders of America are maybe the least likely white people to marry someone of a different hasten to themselves.

The most common grey last names. Sketch: Mona Chalabi

The most common Hispanic last names. Instance: Mona Chalabi

The most common pitch-black last names. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

The most common Asian last names. Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Many of these last names have German and Jewish descents. Which seems to run counter to my ideology of lily-white culture being intangible- Jewish culture “re a long way from” it. Having experienced discrimination, and having a distinct, tangible culture is sufficient to potentially disqualify you as white, as some American Jewish beings themselves ask the question: ” Are Jews White ?”.

As for Joseph, well, the best data I could find was the most popular child refers rolled by the hasten or the ethnicity of the mother( no mention of the father so some of these Josephs are possibly mixed hasten ). Even then, the numbers are exclusively from New York and were collected from 2011 to 2014. Still, I found that the most common white appoints are Joseph, David, Michael, Jacob and Moshe( seven of the most common refers were male because people tend to be more creative when they’ve delivery a girl ).

Q: What do white people do for merriment? A: Enjoy the arts.

I turned to my esteemed colleague and friend Amanda and asked what she would like to know about white people. Amanda, herself a white person, replied:” Why do they affection guitars so much better ?” Alas, despite two hours of online research, I couldn’t experiment her speculation about musical instruments and hasten.( Although I did find out that bassoons are more popular with women than servicemen, which led me to a YouTube clip of the status of women playing the bassoon with specific comments that spoke” THIS is how you bassoon “. It built me laugh so difficult I had to take a break from preparing the present .)

Instead, I looked at the latest American Time Use Survey. It was published after the Bureau of Labor Statistics expected 10,500 beings in the US how they expend their experience. White beings are the only ethnic or ethnic group in the dataset to have a number higher than zero for time spent attending museums or the performing arts. It’s only 36 seconds, but recollect, this is a daily median, so that adds up to 219 times each year.

I double checked my findings against a 2015 report from the National Endowment for the Arts, which found that white-hot Americans were almost twice as likely as pitch-black or Hispanic Americans to have done at least one arts activity in the past year. Their definition of an artworks task was pretty broad- it included” jazz, classical music, opu, musical and non-musical plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery “.

Pondering leisure activities. Instance: Mona Chalabi

These counts feel closely connected to home. When I was growing up, my family never set foot inside a museum, gallery or theatre. Not once. I didn’t think it was strange, I exactly thought it was like tripping in duos or taking coaches- specific activities reserved only for school trips.

And yet, despite having better access to these institutions, it seems like it’s some white people who seem to feel culturally deprived.

Remember Amanda? I mentioned her earlier- she’s my colleague with the disdain for guitars. In 2015, she interviewed black psychologists to ask their mind about Rachel Dolezal, a white-hot professor who intentionally misrepresented herself as an African American.

Anita Thomas, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Loyola University, said:” In some paths it’s normal, but not at her age .” Thomas explained that numerous lily-white teens reacted similarly to Dolezal, attempting to take on what the fuck is perceived to be the types of another race while exploring their identities. Being “the other” sure as hell has its downsides, but it is about to change that not being “the other” does too- especially if you’re a teen.

” For white[ American] youth, “whos” disconnected from European patrimony or gift, it often feels like whiteness as a idea is empty ,” Thomas added in a quotation that has really protruded with me. It seems to tie together some disparate conceptions I have had on “white” as an adjective.

Dolezal was treated as if she were a “bizarre” outlier, but she’s part of a much bigger structure of white action. It includes Mezz Mezzrow, the 1930 s jazz musician who affirmed himself a” voluntary Negro” after marrying a black both women and selling marijuana. It includes the millions of white-hot Americans who take DNA tests and proudly reveal that they are in fact x percentage non -white. And it’s a structure that includes the grey Americans who listen to a” rights for whites” album that includes sungs designation Sons of Israel and Fetch the Noose. One reaction might seem ludicrous, the other frightening, but they are all eventually about meeting a concept of whiteness that isn’t empty.

But what does all that searching yield? I’m not sure I can answer the issues to” what is white culture ?” but I’m certain we should try. If whiteness takes no chassis, then the concrete organizations that shaped it( and often benefit from it) remain invisible very- the supermarkets, the unions, and the museums that stir these numbers what they are. If the “somethingness” of grey culture is never quite pinned down, it remains both” good-for-nothing, certainly” and” well, everything “.

If white culture remains vague, then it can lay claim to every recipe, every garment, every suggestion “thats really not” explicitly “non-white”. That would mean that my identity is just a summing-up, that my “non-whiteness” can only be understood as a subtraction from the totality of “whiteness”. I refuse to be a remainder.

This article will be published in the March edition of The Smudge .

Do you have conceives on white-hot culture? We want to hear them! Please leave a comment below or email me at mona.chalabi @theguardian. com .

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-is-white-culture-exactly-heres-what-the-stats-say/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182730797017

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nancygduarteus · 5 years

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Do Married Millennials Cheat on Each Other?

Millennials have killed malls, cheese, and bar soap. Their thirst for blood unslaked, they’re now coming for good, old-fashioned cheating.

At least, that’s according to an analysis the sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger published in 2017 on the Institute for Family Studies website. When asked the survey question “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” Americans older than 55 turned out to be more adulterous than people younger than 55. In fact, people born between 1940 and 1959—i.e., people currently between 79 and 60 years old—were the ones who report the highest rates of extramarital sex.

Americans have been asked the infidelity question in every iteration of the General Social Survey, a broad questionnaire about cultural attitudes, since 1991. Wolfinger’s analysis found that in the early 2000s, 18-to-55 year olds were more likely have extramarital affairs than older people were. But right around 2004, the lines cross, and younger people became more chaste than their parents:

Wolfinger takes this data to mean that Ashley Madison’s days might be numbered. Today, the hot new thing for married couples, apparently, is having sex (albeit rarely) with each other until they die. “Barring any unforeseen developments,” Wolfinger writes, “we should anticipate a future of more monogamous marriage.”

Whether or not Millennials are doing marriage differently, they’re certainly changing other parts of courtship. Unmarried couples are more likely to cohabitate than they were a decade ago, and the once-fringe online dating scene has become as mainstream as dinner and a movie. Some people engage in polyamory, while others have open relationships, and more people are talking about those arrangements openly. Both marriage and divorce have become more rare since the 1980s. Between it all are an array of “fuckboys,” ghosts, and friends with benefits.

All these factors together complicate Wolfinger’s claim that marriages of the future will be monogamous. Other researchers I spoke with say it’s not possible to know yet whether Millennials are actually going to have more faithful marriages than Boomers. Several pointed out to me that it the Institute for Family Studies is a blog attached to a think tank dedicated to marriage and family, not a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Wendy Manning, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University, told me there’s no evidence that young adults who are between the ages of 24 and 32 today are more likely to be faithful than the same age group was in 1980. The difference Wolfinger is picking up on, she says, seems to be just that people over 50 are simply older and possibly have been married longer, so they’ve had more opportunities to cheat. We’d have to wait until Millennials get older before determining whether they are, truly, the faithful generation.

There is some limited data to bolster Wolfinger’s point, however. In 2017, Lindsay Labrecque and Mark A. Whisman at the University of Colorado Boulder found that even though the percentage of Americans who think extramarital sex is “always wrong” significantly declined between 2000 to 2016, there was a small but statistically significant decline in the lifetime prevalence of extramarital sex in the same time period. That could mean that the people who were eligible to participate in the survey in 2016 but not 2000, including Millennials, are more open to cheating philosophically, but still less likely to do it.

It’s hard to draw firm conclusions about generations, but Wolfinger’s analysis might be pointing to changing behavior among the subset of Millennials who do choose to get married. To get a sense of how married Millennials think about commitment, I reached out to married Millennials and Gen Xers through Twitter to ask those who are convinced they would never cheat on their spouse: why? Dozens replied via email and direct message. Twitter, obviously, is not a representative sample of the U.S.; its users tend to be more liberal and educated. However, even among this relatively left-leaning group, many people said they knew of very few cheaters in their social circle, and those who did cheat were looked down upon by their friends.

Junie Gray, a woman from Austin, Texas, told me she doubts she could find someone who “understands, supports, and loves” her like her husband does. Since people today wait longer than previous generations to get married, many simply might be selecting the actual right person for them. There’s no need to cheat when your spouse is your best friend, your soulmate, your “everything.” There’s no “one that got away”; you caught him. It just took you until you were 36 to do so.

As the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin put it to me, “over the past few decades, marriage has become more selective.” Today, the people most likely to have lasting marriages are those who have gone to college. And college graduates seem “more committed to each other and to the marriage,” Cherlin says. He points out that the divorce rate has gone down significantly for college-educated couples, but not for couples in which neither person has a college education.

I heard from a lot of people who prudently dated their partners for several years before getting married, then waited still more years before having children, just in case. There’s less societal browbeating these days to move faster. “There isn’t pressure to be in relationships like there used to be, so people are less likely to settle for a bad partner,” says Skylar Dallmeyer-Drennen, an energy consultant in Washington D.C. “Why put up with a cheater if no one needs you to be dating?”

This phenomenon is intertwined with what my colleague Kate Julian described as “the sex recession.” Young people today have less sex in general, so it follows that they are likely having less of it extramaritally, too. “We’re living in an astonishingly sexlessless age,” Wolfinger told me.

Of course, we are also living in the midst of a sexual-harassment crisis. But a number of #metoo offenses seem to be perpetrated by older men, some of whom blame changing mores for their alleged transgressions. Though there are also stories of young men who don’t know where to draw the line between friendship and romance, experts say that in general, younger people tend to be more supportive of gender equality. Cheating, meanwhile, can feel deeply inequitable. Infidelity sometimes gets lumped in with other types of harm against women: Several of the entries on the “shitty media men” list that was circulated a few years ago involved allegations of affairs.

Or maybe it’s something about being Millennial, rather than a married Millennial, that deters two-timing. A few people who responded to my Twitter inquiry suggested that maybe Millennials in general are still young and idealistic. My generation wants jobs with a purpose, and we want relationships that feel purposeful, too. Or, as a Gen X friend of mine speculated, perhaps Millennials are terrified of breaking rules. We’re so preoccupied with getting recommendation letters and maintaining our brands that we would never sully ourselves with something so carnal and impulsive as infidelity. (My friend asked to remain nameless because he didn’t want to seem like he was justifying adultery.)

In line with this moral-Millennial hypothesis, many young, married people told me it feels less honorable to leave your spouse for someone else. That would imply there was “emotional cheating” going on while the relationship was in progress—another taboo. “You need to spend some time mourning the end of what had become a formative part of your identity,” says Kae Lani Palmisano, a writer and editor in Philadelphia.

There’s also the usual explanation behind the “Millennials are killing …” trend stories: It’s that Millennials are broke, and they simply can’t afford to buy whatever it is that’s being killed. In this case, some Millennials are still traumatized by the recession and struggling to launch their careers. They can’t afford to buy a house without a second, steady partner. When so much of your life is in flux and unstable, it’s nice to have one person who will definitely be there for you. Why screw it up?

Beyond lingering economic worries, many Millennials and Gen Xers are scarred by their parents’ divorces. The peak in the divorce rate was in 1979, right as the oldest Millennials were being born and younger Gen Xers were reaching their tender grade-school years. Millennials were much more likely to be the children of divorce than their children will be, if current trends continue. “The specter of divorce looms large,” says Manning from Bowling Green State University. “And it seems like it’s a big reason why a lot of young adults want to live with someone first. They want to divorce-proof their marriage.”

For some young people, fidelity is a way of vowing to do better than your own parents did. A few people told me they had been so rattled by their parents’ divorce that they resolved never to do the same thing to their kids. “My parents divorced when I was 2,” says Cole Novak, a pastor in Texas. “My entire life has been marked by the effects of my parents’ divorce. And I never wanted my kids to grow up the way that I did.” When women send him flirtatious texts, Novak says he responds by adding his wife to the thread.

Even as Millennials murder America’s cultural standbys, they continue to be somewhat inscrutable. For now, it does seem like their marriages, when they do happen, are more faithful than those of their elders, but it’s just too soon to know for sure whether that will continue. In fact, Wolfinger accepts some of the alternate explanations for what’s going on here. “Do people in their fifties and sixties have the most extramarital sex because they’re in midlife and have been married for 20-30 years, or because they came of age at a time that fostered greater sexual exploration?” he writes. “The answer is probably ‘both.’”

In other words, yes, it might simply be the case that people over 55 are getting older, growing disinterested, and applying the looser sexual mores they grew up in to sex lives that have grown a little stale. “Being married for a long time means a couple of things: Your kids might be out of the house, you might be bored having sex with your partner,” Wolfinger told me.

Or as a Boomer might say, it might just be that Millennials will understand when we’re older.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/millennials-are-less-likely-cheat-boomers/588286/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 5 years

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Do Married Millennials Cheat on Each Other?

Millennials have killed malls, cheese, and bar soap. Their thirst for blood unslaked, they’re now coming for good, old-fashioned cheating.

Or as a Boomer might say, it might just be that Millennials will understand when we’re older.

Article source here:The Atlantic

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engl2030021 · 5 years

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Top 10 Things to Consider About Toxic Masculinity

Abby Vitello

Core Comp II

March 12th, 2019

Top Ten Things to Consider About Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity has almost become a household phrase of Americans and people all around the globe. According to popular culture, boys & men are held to a standard of what emotions are allowed to be shown and how the dominance that is expected in men is becoming more and more toxic. In almost every house in America, boys from a young age are told what to do and not to do in the ways that they carry themselves. While there are many different perspectives of how masculinity is affecting this generation. Here are 10 articles that touch on the different perspectives of what toxic masculinity is and how the world is affected by the controversy of the emerging ideas of feminism and masculinity.

Popular Sources

1.Salter, Michael. “The Problem With a Fight Against Toxic Masculinity” The Atlantic. February 27th, 2019. Accessed March 5th, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/toxic-masculinity-history/583411/

Michael Salter from The Atlantic discusses when masculinity becomes a problem. Salter begins to touch on the history of the term Toxic Masculinity, the misconceptions about this term and how it ultimately affects the way men and women interact with each other in society. In today’s world, the way toxic masculinity is viewed as an epidemic of abusive behaviors that continually cause turmoil between men and women. He explains the dangers of the sexist attitudes that both genders are subject to because of masculinity. Salter’s article offers insight to the growing opinions that society from a male’s perspective.

2. Beer, Jeff. "Forget Gillette: This Emotional New PSA Shows a Journey of Toxic Masculinity." Fast Company. February 27, 2019. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.fastcompany.com/90312483/forget-gillette-this-emotional-new-psa-shows-a-journey-of-toxic-masculinity

This advertisement shows a young boy turning into a teenager dealing with domestic abuse at home, shyness, and anxiety and then him turning into a teenager with long life issues. “Boys will be boys. Or they can be so much more” is the ending remarks of this ad, which tugs at the viewers emotions. In this ad, the company is showing the opposite of what the Gillette ad was trying to portray. Although this ad did not receive the same amount of publicity as the Gillette ad did, it does dig deeper into the roots of the role toxic masculinity plays gender violence, stereotypes, and how it can be avoided from an early age. The problems with toxic masculinity are not just exemplified through men but through women and the way they are treated. Beer’s creation of this PSA creates a deeper message of the true problems that arise from society’s realization that toxic masculinity can be avoided with little alterations from a young age.

3. Hamblin, James. "Toxic Masculinity and Murder." The Atlantic. October 11, 2016. Accessed March 05, 2019.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/toxic-masculini1ty-and-mass-murder/486983/

In this article, The Atlantic explains the Orlando killer’s suffering from toxic masculinity which had led him in the past to have pent up aggression against LGBT and events involving that crowd of people. The type of Toxic Masculinity presented by him was going into the club and getting drunk only to express his hatred toward the people in the club in a violent way. Not only does this article touch on a specific person affected by toxic masculinity, it compares it to the very serious subject of murder. When putting the two in one article, the readers can see how toxic masculinity is the root of the harsh problems society is going through in current events.

4. "Barth, Diane F. Opinion | Toxic Masculinity Is Terrible Shorthand for a Real Problem Plaguing Men." NBCNews.com. Accessed March 05, 2019.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/toxic-masculinity-terrible-shorthand-real-problem-plaguing-men-ncna957941

This opinion piece published by NBC News focuses on the emotional problems and how to learn to fix them, not internalize them. By keeping these problems inside, the anger of being classified within the toxic masculinity type fuels the anger of these outbreaks from men. Many men are fearful of seeking out help when faced with the idea that they are acting in a “feminine” or an “emotional” manner. Barth, a psychotherapist, explains the reasons why men and women struggling with their self-being should not be afraid to talk to someone about their problems of the feelings. Barth offers a different perspective than most popular cultures sources with her

5. "Opinion | What Growing up in America Taught Me about Masculinity." NBCNews.com. Accessed March 05, 2019.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/boys-are-internalizing-toxic-masculinity-habits-way-too-early-ncna814316?icid=related

John Legend goes in depth of what he believes caused him to be the man he is today but other young boys take the criticism they are hearing. Instead of embracing the criticism like he did, the young boys of today think need to be angry about it. Legend, being so well known in today’s culture, is a o

Academic Sources

6. Hess, Aaron, and Carlos Flores. "Simply More than Swiping Left: A Critical Analysis of Toxic Masculine Performances on Tinder Nightmares."

https://journals-sagepub-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444816681540

In this article, Aaron Hess & Carlos Flores take a look into the online dating site, Tinder and its counterpart, Tinder Nightmares. The supposedly private conversation between the men and women who use this mobile dating site is then publicized. By doing so, toxic masculinity is then exposed to the world. This article breaks down the different types of men that are encountered and how this causes men to reply to the toxic masculinity.

7. Jenney, Angelique, and Deinera Exner-Cortens. "Toxic Masculinity and Mental Health in Young Women."

https://journals-sagepub-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/10.1177/0886109918762492

While the popular TV series, 13 Reasons Why mainly focuses on the suicide aspect, Jenney and Exner-Cortens go in depth about the toxic masculinity, gender violence, and female expression. In addition to those reasons, they also touch on why bringing the ideas that are absent throughout the show to encourage the youth to understand. Ultimately, Hannah Baker, the girl who commits suicide, was pushed to do so because of the toxic masculinity she was exposed to in everyday life. Not only was Baker exposed to the harsh reality of toxic masculinity, but Clay is often subject to being the victim. In the show, he was threatened in order to keep him silent. The “gang” who did the threatening created the theme of toxic masculinity throughout the whole show. Since this show was such a popular topic among teenagers, it presents the ideas to a young crowd, causing the toxic traits to spread.

8. Jenney, Angelique, and Deinera Exner-Cortens. "Toxic Masculinity and Mental Health in Young Women."

https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/abs/10.1002/jclp.20105

The prisoner populations are one of most understudied and difficult groups to unfold the gender issues within. In this writing, the many obstacles of why toxic masculinity becomes such an issue among prisoners. This is due to the lack of resources, growing prisons, and stereotypes of what a “real man” is.

9. Iwamoto, Derek K., Jennifer Brady, Ayalin Kaya, and Athena Park. "Masculinity and Depression: A Longitudinal Investigation of Multidimensional Masculine Norms Among College Men."

https://journals-sagepub-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/1557988318785549?utm_source=summon&utm_medium=discovery-provider

This study exhibits the pressure men feel while going from their last year of highschool to their first year in college. Looking at the role of masculinity and the way it can negatively affect the men’s mental stability. The data provided shows the correlation between depression and the norms that are adapted by males in society. This description of the data explains that most boys entering college experience changes such as moving away from home for the first time, which can cause the situation to be more stressful. With more stress, any adversity the men affected by this will then have a tendency to project their feelings in a toxic way onto others.

10. Elliott, Kathleen. "Challenging Toxic Masculinity in Schools and Society."

https://www-emeraldinsight-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1108/OTH-11-2017-0088

This paper discusses where the toxic masculinity tends to appear, how to disrupt the learning of toxic masculinity and the way resisting it can affect the genders of society in the future. Toxic masculinity is seen in businesses, schools and throughout athletics. Although masculinity can play a positive role in growth of young men, it can also cause more problems that lead to more developmental issues in men. This article suggests ways that toxic masculinity in school and everyday life can be fixed in a way that doesn’t put the blame on just one of the genders.

In all of these sources, the common theme is how the way society views toxic masculinity whether it be from social media, mainstream television, or educational sources. Although masculinity is not always a bad perspective for young men to learn off of, it can cause issues when presented by belittling women in society and causes violence among children and adults.

Overall, society believes toxic masculinity should be taught to diminish at an early age to prevent any other disturbances throughout their lives.

Citations:

Salter, Michael. "The Problem With a Fight Against Toxic Masculinity." The Atlantic. February 27, 2019. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/toxic-masculinity-history/583411/.

Beer, Jeff. "Forget Gillette: This Emotional New PSA Shows a Journey of Toxic Masculinity." Fast Company. February 27, 2019. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.fastcompany.com/90312483/forget-gillette-this-emotional-new-psa-shows-a-journey-of-toxic-masculinity.

Hamblin, James. "Toxic Masculinity and Murder." The Atlantic. October 11, 2016. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/toxic-masculini1ty-and-mass-murder/486983/.

"Opinion | Toxic Masculinity Is Terrible Shorthand for a Real Problem Plaguing Men." NBCNews.com. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/toxic-masculinity-terrible-shorthand-real-problem-plaguing-men-ncna957941.

"Opinion | What Growing up in America Taught Me about Masculinity." NBCNews.com. Accessed March 05, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/boys-are-internalizing-toxic-masculinity-habits-way-too-early-ncna814316?icid=related.

Hess, Aaron, and Carlos Flores. "Simply More than Swiping Left: A Critical Analysis of Toxic Masculine Performances on Tinder Nightmares." New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2016): 1085-102. Accessed March 5, 2019. doi:10.1177/1461444816681540.

Jenney, Angelique, and Deinera Exner-Cortens. "Toxic Masculinity and Mental Health in Young Women." Affilia 33, no. 3 (2018): 410-17. Accessed March 5, 2019. doi:10.1177/0886109918762492.

Kupers, Terry A. "Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison." Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005): 713-24. Accessed March 5, 2019. doi:10.1002/jclp.20105.

Iwamoto, Derek K., Jennifer Brady, Ayalin Kaya, and Athena Park. "Masculinity and Depression: A Longitudinal Investigation of Multidimensional Masculine Norms Among College Men." 12, no. 6 (July 4, 2018): 1873-881. Accessed March 5, 2019. https://journals-sagepub-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/1557988318785549?utm_source=summon&utm_medium=discovery-provider.

Elliott, Kathleen. "Challenging Toxic Masculinity in Schools and Society." On the Horizon26, no. 1 (2018): 17-22. Accessed March 5, 2019. doi:10.1108/oth-11-2017-0088.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

Last Thursday afternoon, the front page of the Huffington Post featured a picture of New York Post reporter and CNN contributor Salena Zito, with the headline, “SLIPPERY SALENA: TRUMP WHISPERER EXPOSED!”

Huffington Post

The piece, by reporter Ashley Feinberg, was the culmination of months of speculation by reporters, but especially by a handful of anonymous Twitter accounts (including @rod_inanimate, @UrbanAchievr, @KT_So_It_Goes, and @cnn94cnn), that Zito was plagiarizing, mischaracterizing interviews, and, in the most serious allegations, fabricating quotes out of whole cloth.

If true, the allegations are devastating. Zito responded Tuesday evening with a detailed New York Post column, including a recording, two transcripts, and a photograph of notes aiming to rebut some, but hardly all, of the allegations. She also addressed the controversy on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. (She declined to comment for this article, referring me to her New York Post column addressing the allegations.)

Zito, who before the fall of 2016 was a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist with a local following, has benefited from Donald Trump’s rise in a way few others have. She made a name for herself by filing revealing dispatches from Trump country during the campaign, which featured conversations with “Main Street voters” whose “traditions, skills, jobs and lives” are under threat by the “cosmopolitan and political classes” exemplified by Hillary Clinton.

She admonished journalists that while they took Trump “literally, but not seriously,” Trump’s supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.” Her pieces explain that regular Joes out in Ohio and Pennsylvania don’t care that the president’s lawyer and campaign chair are guilty of numerous federal crimes because “as it stands we only really only [sic] have two parties; the party of the governing elite and the party of Trump.”

Her Trump voter–whispering columns earned her the New York Post job, a book deal (The Great Revolt, co-authored with GOP political consultant Brad Todd, which came out in May), a CNN contributor deal, and a joint project with Harvard’s Institute of Politics. She became a favorite of both mainstream journalists — Jake Tapper said in a book blurb that she “picked up on a political phenomenon long before polls or pundits had any idea of what was happening” — and conservatives, who see her as a rare voice of America’s traditionalist heartland. The president even sang her praises:

“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2018

But as Zito’s star has risen, so have the questions around her reporting. Feinberg’s article focuses on the most frequent claim against Zito: that she misrepresents reliably Republican officials and donors as swing voters whom Trump won over. Zito and her defenders (like her New York Post colleague Seth Mandel and the Law360 reporter Alex Parker) insist that she always accurately portrayed the people she profiled, including disclosing their Republican Party histories when relevant.

But anonymous Twitter accounts have also unearthed three instances of apparent plagiarism by Zito, and the most damning claims against her, by far, have involved allegations that she fabricates quotes in stories. Zito has said she records “many” of her interviews, which would make verifying more contested stories possible, but she has yet to release any recordings in response to the fabulism accusations (though she did release one as part of the Post piece — more on that below).

Beyond the concrete allegations against Zito, the fight reflects widespread disdain among some journalists toward her anecdote-heavy, data-light, at times unduly credulous approach to political reporting. Zito prides herself on having caught a populist conservative wave that other analysts failed to see coming, and on doing it through interviews in small towns across the Midwest. But that leads to bolder proclamations that 2016 was “not a fluke” and was indeed a fundamental realigning event, as well as to overly charitable interpretations of her subjects’ intentions (as she once quipped, “There’s always ‘some’ portion of anyone’s followers who are racist”).

Incorrect analysis is obviously a very different problem than fabulism, plagiarism, and mischaracterizing sources. Those (especially the former two) are incredibly serious offenses that can get you run out of journalism. Doing political analysis in ways that feel wrongheaded to your critics, obviously, is not career-ending, nor should it be. But that disagreement helps explain why so many in the media have been willing to believe these claims about Zito, even without ironclad proof of the worst allegations.

Let’s start with the easiest-to-evaluate charges against Zito: allegations of plagiarism. On two occasions identified by @rod_inanimate, Zito copied language without credit from other sources: once from a fellow Pittsburgh reporter, the other time from Wikipedia. On a third occasion, highlighted by @cnn94cnn, she appeared to pass off quotes from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as ones she obtained herself.

On December 14, 2016, Zito began a New York Post column on the opioid crisis with this anecdote (emphasis in all the passages quoted is mine):

Exactly one month before Election Day, on a Monday, Rowen Lally boarded her school bus in McKeesport, Pa.

Before the 7-year-old left her house, she cared for her infant sister with a bottle and a diaper change, leaving her 3- and 5-year-old brothers at home with her parents.

On the way home from school, Rowen told the school bus driver her parents looked blue when she left the house and she couldn’t wake them up; a quick call was made to the school, which notified police.

Authorities discovered Rowen’s parents had been dead since Friday of a heroin overdose.

Zito cites no source for the story, despite offering a link to the other overdose story she mentions. But it appears she took it from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Karen Kane, who wrote up the school bus detail in her October 6, 2016, story this way:

The discoveries had come after Rowen had told a school bus driver on her way home from school Monday afternoon that her parents had been blue and that she had been unable to wake them that morning. The bus driver notified school officials who contacted police. The children were taken to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC for evaluation then were placed in the care of Allegheny County Children, Youth and Family caseworkers.

If Zito had given Kane credit for the story, it would have been basically fine. In the absence of such credit, it looks like she stole an anecdote from another reporter’s story.

Arguably an even more egregious example of plagiarism comes in her book with Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. Interviewing Wisconsin voter Amy Giles-Maurer talking about her father, Zito and Todd write:

“He went into the Marines, right out of high school. Just volunteered and he was sent to Vietnam where he fixed F-4 Phantoms,” she says, referring to the tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber used extensively during the southeast Asian conflict.

If that feels like an oddly long and formal construction, almost like an encyclopedia entry, that’s because it was lifted directly from Wikipedia, the beginning of whose entry for the “McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II” currently reads:

The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II is a tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber originally developed for the United States Navy by McDonnell Aircraft.

The book was published in May; Wikipedia’s page history reveals that the article has used this exact language since May 31, 2017, and used nearly identical language for years before that. There is simply no explanation for the writing here other than Zito or Todd copying and pasting the relevant section from Wikipedia while not citing it.

There’s a third case of alleged plagiarism, highlighted by @cnn94cnn. It concerns a short news hit that Zito wrote for the Washington Examiner on February 21, 2018, titled, “Woman who had affair with GOP Rep. Tim Murphy is running for Congress.” @cnn94cnn alleges that, especially in its original form, it was uncomfortably similar to a Hill story by Lisa Hagen on the same topic, and originally, unlike the Hill, failed to credit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the story.

Here’s how the Zito story read originally:

Edwards said at the Allegheny County Court House that she is running for office because Pittsburgh deserves someone who will fight the battles no one wants to fight. She also said she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign.

“My opponents are likely to spend egregious amounts of time and money in an attempt to display my human mistakes for all to see,” Edwards said. “I was warned. I have been given explanations. I have been told to back down, and I am here to tell you, nevertheless, I will endure.”

That passage appears to imply that Zito herself saw Edwards say this at the Allegheny County Court House, when she is in fact quoting comments from Edwards originally heard and reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Paula Reed Ward. Zito’s post has since been updated to include a link to the Post-Gazette story, but it is still not clear that the quotes from Edwards come from the Post-Gazette originally. Zito’s post states simply: “She also told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign.” (Zito addressed this charge in her column and argued that this was a sufficient fix.)

These cases, to me, represent serious wrongdoing and are deserving of an editorial reprimand at the very least. And while Zito’s New York Post column defending her work addresses the final allegation, it does not touch on the first two at all.

Key to Zito’s journalistic project is the idea that she is identifying voters in Midwestern states whom a Democratic Party ruled by liberal coastal elites can’t reach anymore. In her column defending her work, she cites this as a motive for her critics: “A few journalists, particularly those who rarely if ever leave the Washington Beltway or Midtown Manhattan, want to discredit my work because of what it reports. They want to silence the voices I listen to and record.”

Her critics argue in turn that this is a con, that, over and over again, the people she has chosen to feature in her reporting have turned out to be Republican Party officials, politicians, and donors.

Take Amy Giles-Maurer, the Wisconsin woman whose father built the “tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bombers.” In the book, Giles-Maurer (also referred to as simply “Amy Maurer”) is depicted as a Republican who supports Trump in spite of his sexism and the Access Hollywood tape. In a New York Post column, Zito described her as “the married, educated, suburban mom whom experts missed in the 2016 election — and still don’t get today,” the kind of voter whom “the Clinton campaign tried hard to win over.”

The Post column doesn’t mention that Giles-Maurer is a Republican (although Zito’s book does); neither the column nor the book mentions that Giles-Maurer is the corresponding secretary of the Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Republican Party. An August 2016 article in the Kenosha News mentions her involvement in opening a field office for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, in which she praises Ryan for his “conservative agenda.” She is listed as a member of the Kenosha Republican Party board of directors as early as March 2015. That, suffice it to say, does not sound like a 2016 swing voter.

The revelation that Giles-Maurer is a highly active Republican forced the conservative writer S.E. Cupp, who based a New York Times op-ed on Zito’s reporting, to issue a correction, saying she had no idea that Giles-Maurer is a Republican. She, apparently, was misled by Zito’s reporting.

Defending her use of Giles-Maurer to HuffPost’s Feinberg, Zito states that her book is “about the most surprising archetypes of voters who became part of this populist coalition, those voters are both Republican and Democrat. Much of the book is focused on the kind of normally Republican-leaning voters that Hillary Clinton unsuccessfully sought to convert to her campaign.” To Zito, Giles-Maurer fits that archetype.

In a Twitter thread, Zito further noted, “In the book, Amy Giles-Mauer, the woman in question, is clearly identified as not just a Republican, but as an engaged GOP primary voter.” In her New York Post defense of her work, Zito notes that her Post column about Giles-Maurer featured “a large photo of her wearing a Kenosha GOP board pin.”

That’s all true (the book notes that Giles-Maurer originally supported Scott Walker), but there’s a difference between being a primary voter and being a party official. And it remains the case that it would have been better to disclose Giles-Maurer’s role as a Republican activist, especially in the New York Post column, in a clearer way than a hard-to-read pin in a photograph.

There are other suspicious cases. Feinberg highlights Cynthia Sacco, a Michigan woman whom Zito describes in the book as having “spent most of her adult life voting mostly Democrat.” Zito neglects to mention that Sacco was a delegate to the Republican county convention in 1994, which complicates the portrait of her as a longtime Democrat. To Feinberg, Zito replied, “The assumption that she cannot differ with her husband who was a delegate for the GOP in 1994 is a wee bit sexist,” but Sacco herself was a delegate too, as well as her husband.

Other cases are messier. @rod_inanimate attacks Zito for profiling Erie, Pennsylvania’s David Rubbico in her book, a man whom Zito describes in her statement to Feinberg as “a long time Democrat who liked Obama.” Rubbico was elected in 2018 to a local committee position in the Pennsylvania Republican Party. But that’s obviously after the 2016 election, which to Zito and her defenders confirms the narrative that Rubbico was energized to get into conservative politics by Trump.

Zito, in her response, notes that he only recently ran county committee-person–and this is verifiably true. And his letters are a recent activity. Does it seem improbable that he voted for Obama? Maybe. Maybe that’s why she interviewed him!

— Alex Parker (@AlexParkerDC) August 29, 2018

@rod_inanimate and Feinberg also cite a letter that Rubbico wrote in January 2017 that said, “our nation … has been decimated by President Barack Obama over the last eight years,” and that Trump “is not a racist for saying that immigrants should be legal. He is holding America first by wanting to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, both groups that are embedded with terrorists.”

That does make it feel implausible that he previously was sympathetic to Obama. But the letter’s date is still post-election, so Zito’s version of events is still plausible. Zito has also published audio and a transcript of her conversation with Rubbico, a somewhat odd move given that the authenticity of his comments was never in doubt.

Another source Zito has cited is Anthony Ripepi, a chief of surgery who lives in Peters Township, Pennsylvania, a case documented by Zito critic Beau Boughamer.

Zito prominently featured Ripepi in a January 31, 2018, New York Post column originally headlined “Donald Trump is still the man to these blue-collar voters.” It has since been retitled “Donald Trump is still the man to this Pennsylvania home,” which is probably for the best, given that “chief of surgery” is hardly a blue-collar job.

Zito would later defend the original statements by saying she does not write her own headlines: “Obviously, reporters don’t write their own headlines, so this accusation tells you something about my trolls and the journalists who fell for the trolling.” (It’s true that at many, but not all, outlets, journalists don’t get to headline their pieces.)

She described Ripepi and his wife, Michelle, as “upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb.” Per census data, the town has a median household income of about $110,000, or double the median for Pennsylvania as a whole; Peters Township is generally considered an affluent Pittsburgh suburb. I also don’t know what the phrase “blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb” means.

The frequency with which Zito mentions Ripepi is also striking. She cites him in a November 11, 2016, Washington Post piece titled, “Trump’s voters won’t mind if he doesn’t keep all his promises”; he is one of only three voters cited to prove that contention. She also cites him in a January 5, 2017, Washington Examiner piece titled, “America to Obama: Stop now. You lost,” in which Ripepi is upgraded from speaking for Trump voters to speaking for “America” (he is, again, one of just three voters). He appears yet again in a November 9, 2016, piece in the New York Post, in which he’s described as a foe of the “cosmopolitan class” and their “constant mocking of those who live in flyover country.”

Zito makes some fair inferences about him in that piece, noting, “The fundamental truth is that the Trump voter was still predominantly white, but both male and female, with a salary ranging from middle- to upper-middle-class to well-off and college-educated.” That’s more honest than claiming he speaks for “blue-collar” people (which, granted, could be chalked up to a headline writer’s flub). But citing the same “man on the street” — a surgeon, no less — four separate times is, if not unethical, then at least strange.

Zito has repeatedly cited voters without giving their names, or their last names, or other information that might allow other reporters to track them down and verify their stories. This is unusual (as several reporters on Twitter have noted, the norm is to always get a name when talking to voters and other “people on the street”), and it becomes a problem when some of her stories are, frankly, a bit hard to believe.

The most startling cases to me (also highlighted by some other reporters like the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale) involve remarkable things Zito has claimed to have heard at gas stations.

As highlighted by @KT_So_It_Goes and @cnn94cnn, on at least three occasions Zito has claimed to hear remarkable impromptu political statements by voters at gas stations.

There was the time in Hagerstown, Maryland, that two friends were shooting the shit about Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) letter, cosigned by 46 Senate Republicans, to the government of Iran:

Dodging raindrops and balancing bottled water and a bunch of power bars under one arm, a young man returned to his car at a Sheetz gas pump along old U.S. 40 in this western Maryland town, sandwiched between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The local public radio station blared through the open car door, reporting on the letter to Iran from 47 Senate Republicans. Adjusting his seat, he said to a traveling companion: “Good for them.”

“Wait, who?” his friend asked.

“The guys who sent the letter to Iran, that Cotton guy,” he replied. “For all we know, the president will issue an executive order and give Iran whatever they want.”

Then he shut the car’s door and drove east toward the U.S. 522 overpass.

There was the time she pulled over off US 422 and heard a gas station manager complaining about Democrats, and Martha Plimpton in particular:

A clip of Martha Plimpton’s exuberance over the “best” abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania.

A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, “And they wonder why people don’t vote for Democrats around here anymore.”

In 2014, in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review piece reprinted in RealClearPolitics (I haven’t been able to find a dateline), Zito claims she heard this:

Standing at a gas station pump, as news blared overhead about the Fort Hood shootings, a young mother with two children buckled into her sedan’s car seats sighed.

“I hope someday if, God forbid, tragedy strikes again at a military base, whoever is president doesn’t still head to a fundraiser,” she said.

I’d be remiss here, though, if I left out the time she claims to have hung out at an abandoned gas station until someone came and gave her a perfect quote about the gas station’s sign, imploring customers to support them over big businesses:

Last week, a man and his family pulled into the gas station and was surprised to find it closed, “I kept meaning to stop here on the way home, but other things got in the way,” he said.

He read the sign and sighed, “They [the gas station] kept telling us we need you, and we kept thinking we’ll get there soon, they will always be around,” he explained.

There are more, like the French girl who used the somewhat archaic English phrasing “people young and old,” which seems like an odd thing for a non-native speaker to say but which is phrasing Zito herself has also used. Nonetheless, Zito has, in her New York Post defense of her work, produced a transcript of her interview with the girl, confirming the girl said that; I personally find her defense there sufficient.

Then there’s her interview with “Greg,” a “small businessman” and “lifelong Republican” who issues quotes like this:

“We cannot let these hard-liners undermine every imagined slight or, even worse, do it simply based on the ‘stagery’ that attracts viewers or clicks,” Greg said.

I had never heard of the word “stagery” before Greg said it in Zito’s piece, but it appears she uses it in her own articles quite a bit. Zito has produced notes from the interview with the word “stagery” written on them:

The “stagery” notes. Salena Zito

A skeptical observer would note that famous journalistic fabulists like Stephen Glass have fabricated notes — but as a reporter who has certainly quoted people from notes without an audio recording attached, I’m willing to give Zito the benefit of the doubt on this case.

Then there’s the time Zito claims a presidential campaign staffer admonished her for saying “God bless you”:

There’s the time she followed up a favorable retweet of a point former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made with a perfect quote from a guy at a gas station backing up Fleischer’s argument:

Here she retweets Ari Fleischer talking about the IRS and Benghazi scandals, and then 16 minutes later tweets a perfectly matched quote from a guy at a gas station. Granted those were both big stories at the time, but it’s still a very fortuitously overheard quote. pic.twitter.com/HfCBPxIktO

— Adrenochrome Harvester (@ClenchedFisk) August 25, 2018

There’s the two separate times she claimed people in cars with “COEXIST” bumper stickers gave her the finger:

And the time she claimed to have interviewed protesters for “Demand Protest,” a fake organization purportedly paying people to protest Trump that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, of all people, exposed as a hoax that didn’t actually hire any protesters. That makes her claim to have met the fake group’s employees a little fishy-sounding:

Despite what @UrbanAchievr says above, I don’t consider these incidents ironclad proof she makes stuff up. My own attempt to dig deeper into the fabulism claims came up empty. On June 16, 2018, Zito published an account in the New York Post of several trips she took with Harvard students, aiming to give them a sense of what the “heartland” is really like. It ended with this anecdote:

In our final week, the class attended Mass at St. Stanislaus, a Polish church in the Strip District of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.

At the end of Mass, an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. When I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed.

“I have been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned, what’s that word … ? Snowbirds, snowflakes, anyways … that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won’t be open to opposing opinions,” he said.

He smiled as he gave my kids an approving thumbs-up.

“Don’t you just love when a stereotype is blown up right in front of you?”

This felt suspicious to me, and to a number of others on Twitter. But Zito named the Harvard students on the trip, and I was able to talk to five of them. Four of the five remember going to Mass, and one of them recalls the final quote.

“Although I don’t remember the part about thin-skinned students clearly, he did say the bit about stereotypes being blown up and he was very pleased to meet us,” Malcolm Reid, Harvard ’21, told me. “I do think it was an accurate representation of that conversation.”

That said, Reid and three other students on the trip told me they had been in a Catholic church before, putting a lie to Zito’s insistence that “only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.”

But that’s a relatively minor factual error in the scheme of things, and nothing in my conversations with the students provided positive evidence that Zito was fabricating; Reid’s testimony inclined me to believe the “stereotype” line is accurate.

The Harvard story almost feels like the Salena Zito problem in microcosm. There’s no absolute proof of fabrication, though it would have been much better journalistic hygiene for her to name the man she met in the church to help her editors and others with fact-checking. But it’s sloppy (two students who’d been to Mass versus four-plus), and there’s no confirmation that the most fake-sounding quote (“Snowbirds, snowflakes”) is real.

Zito has been defiant throughout this controversy. In a long thread replying to @rod_inanimate, she alleged the account and others “lied, in an attempt to discredit my hard-earned reputation, and my hard work.” She then elaborated on Face the Nation and in her New York Post column.

Seth Mandel, her colleague at the Post, “spent his entire Labor Day weekend, late into the night last night, and all day today, helping Salena compile” a defense of her work, Mandel’s wife, Bethany Shondark Mandel, said on Twitter. Seth Mandel has argued that “anyone with a shred of integrity will acknowledge [Zito’s] debunking and move on.”

That’s not likely to happen, and given Zito’s cases of plagiarism and the highly suspicious nature of some of the quotes above, I’m not sure that it should happen. The controversy will likely only be resolved if Zito releases audiotapes for the suspicious incidents, proving that her anonymous men on the street said what she claims they said. The only audio released so far has been that of Rubbico; she has produced no verification of any of the gas station incidents, for instance, or that she really met people hired by Demand Protest. Until she produces more audio, the doubts will remain, and her defenders will remain indignant that people believe them.

I remain skeptical of some of Zito’s reporting. I would still like to hear audio of some of her more fantastical anecdotes, and the plagiarism, especially the Wikipedia case, is unacceptable. But fabulism is an incredibly serious charge, and if people are going after Zito’s job, they’ll need much firmer evidence than currently exists.

Original Source -> The Salena Zito controversy, explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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glittership · 6 years

Text

Episode #58 – The City of Kites and Crows by Megan Arkenberg

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 58 is part of the Autumn 2017/Winter 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

In the City of Kites and Crows

By Megan Arkenberg

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 58 for August 25, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our episode today is a reprint “In the City of Kites and Crows” by Megan Arkenberg, read by A.J. Fitzwater.

Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater

Content warning for descriptions of police violence and suicide.

In the City of Kites and Crows

By Megan Arkenberg

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

I tell this to Lisse, and she rubs at the burn scar on the back of her knee, at the tattoo that crawls up her thigh in a hatch of green and golden lines, like a map of a city, or a circuit board in fragments. Lisse just got out of Federal prison for smashing the rearview mirrors off a police car. She has new scars now, the white tracks of some riot officer’s baton, one of which slices across her left nipple and makes her breast look punctured, deflated. She sits in her flannel bathrobe at the table in her living room, in the apartment that was a hotel room and still smells like the arsonist’s match, and she shakes her head with a slow, sad smile. “Hythloday,” she says, as though my name were a dirge. “How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?”

Outside the bay window behind her, three stories below us, a crush of posterboard and sweatshirted bodies is churning and chanting its way up 9th street, towards the West Gate of the Senate. Lisse snaps photos on her phone. She edits an antigovernment webzine, contributes information to two antisenatorial projects that I know of—both documenting police brutality and violations of prisoners’ rights—and surely several others that I don’t. Her thick hair is unoiled and still damp from the shower, smelling of grass and wood dust, smelling of her.

“Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government,” I tell her. I’m spread out on her couch like the jammy sediment in the bottom of a wine glass, and I know that this observation, this trenchant précis of the last thirty-six months, is the closest that I will ever come to political analysis. Or to self-reflection. Lisse, who will not let me back into her bed until I’m sober, who still fucks me on the couch, does not look up from the photos of the protestors on her phone.

“Well, Hythloday,” she says, half word and half sigh. “Why do you think that is?”

Some evenings, when I’m sober enough to pull on a pair of trousers and an old suit coat, tie my hair back and wash the traces of eyeliner from my cheeks, I take the train down to the university. It’s quiet and damp so close to the river, the trees whispering to themselves in the fog, and all the public spaces roped off with yellow lines of caution tape. If anyone were to ask me what I’m doing here tonight—anyone except for Lisse, who won’t ask me, who never asks—I’d say I came for the lecture on the Mnemosyne project, an answer both innocuous and vaguely suspect. Really, I’m here to see Jesse.

They check IDs at the door of the auditorium. I don’t know if “they” are the Mnemosyne developers looking for allies or a Senatorial commission tallying enemies, or just the university, looking to cover its ass either way. Inside, the dim room flickers with tablet and laptop screens as people pull up the app. Mnemosyne, Jesse explained to me once as we lay on the floor of his bedroom, sipping coffee from wine glasses, is an augmented reality application. It checks your location with your device’s GPS and overlays your screen with location-sensitive news. Censored news, he meant, censored images, photographs you shouldn’t see, stories no one should be reporting. I know Lisse is providing data for the project, and Jesse helped with the programming.

Everyone I’m fucking wants to overthrow the government.

(Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?)

A small gray woman in a gray suit reads off her PowerPoint slides at the front of the room, and I lean against the wall in back, scanning the crowd for Jesse. He’s sitting in the second-to-last row, the strands of silver in his dark brown hair showing dramatically in the liquid-crystal glow of his laptop. His face and lips look as blue as a drowning man’s. I like to watch him like this, when he doesn’t know I’m looking. When he knows he’s being watched, when he’s teaching or lecturing, he becomes brilliant, sparkling, animated. His dark eyes and his smile widen, light up, his gentle laugh drags parentheses around the corners of his mouth. But when he’s alone, when he thinks no one is watching, he shrinks into himself. The laugh lines settle. He looks lost, like a book that someone has misplaced.

At the end of the lecture, he snaps his laptop shut, slings his bag over his shoulder. He catches sight of me on his way to the exit. He smiles too widely, looking exhausted.

“You weren’t expecting me,” I say. “I know.”

“No, it’s fine.” He licks his lips, which still look dry and blue. “Did you like the talk?”

“Sure,” I lie.

He turns abruptly and strides out of the lecture hall. I follow down the glossy corridor, out into the parking lot, where the mist rolls in from the river, smelling of rot. Jesse stops, leans against the wall of the auditorium, and his hair catches on the rough brick. He grabs me around the waist and drags me in for a kiss.

(Nine people contributed material to the Mnemosyne project, he told me, leaning against the pillows. The marks of my teeth were pale and raised along his shoulders. Four of them are anonymous. Five of them are missing.)

He clings to me like a drowning man, fingers digging into my back, bruising, his mouth opening beneath mine as though I could give him breath. He tastes like mint chewing gum and cigarette smoke. He winces when my tongue brushes against his teeth, but when I start to pull back, he whispers, “Don’t.”

(He kicked a stack of books off the side of the bed, yanking off his jacket and tie, and he told me to fuck him. I took the harness and the strap-on from the nightstand. He spread out on the bed, watching impatiently over his shoulder as I adjusted the buckles and straps around my thighs. The headlights from a car across the street slipped through the slats in the window blinds, caught his eyes, flattened them to smooth disks of gold.)

I weave my fingers through his, and he grunts in pain.

“Jesse.” I pull back. His sleeve cuffs gap above the buttons, and I can see the shining red marks on his wrists, marks my hands could never have left. The neck of his undershirt has slipped down, damp with mist and sweat, and bruises show under his skin, black and yellow and blue.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Please. Just stay with me.”

(We fucked, and even though I was sober, it was the disjointed, disappointing sex of people who are drunk, and angry, and afraid.)

We take the train to his townhouse on the east side of the city. The streetlights around us glare like a hangover. Alone in the second-to-last compartment, he leans against my back, his cheek against my shoulder blade, his arms tight around my waist. “The dean wants to see me tomorrow,” he murmurs. I turn my head, looking for our reflection in the train window, but it’s too dark inside, too bright out.

(Afterward, he asked me to hold him. He curled around me, his head resting in the crook between my bicep and my breast, his arms around my hips. He didn’t say my name again. After a few minutes, his breathing settled. I kissed his cheek and tasted salt.)

This city burns so often that every fire has a name. Ships burning, churches burning, schools and factories and luxury hotels. The S. S. Virgil fire, the St. John’s fire. On a windy day, you can still smell the smoke rising from St. John’s preparatory.

And when you aim the camera of your phone down at the sidewalk in front of the West Gate, down at the cracked cement with its tarry traces of chewing gum and bird shit, you can still see the outline of Mark Labelle’s blood, the smooth puddle that it left as he died on a cold Sunday afternoon in April, beaten to death by riot officers. The stain that was still there the next morning, when the body was packed away in a city morgue and the police surveillance video had disappeared. Gone, as they say, without a trace—except for this palimpsested slab of sidewalk, which someone snapped on their phone, which someone else uploaded to the Mnemosyne project, which now trickles through this elegant little app to the eyes of anyone who stands here beneath the wrought iron gate. Your own private haunting, in the palms of your hands.

There are dozens of places like this throughout the city, thanks to Lisse and Jesse and all the rest of them. Haunted places. Revolutions are made out of hauntings, out of missing bodies and ghosts.

Did you know that? I can assure you that the government does.

Remedios and Gavin live above their gallery on Elliot Street, which has burned so many times that the new houses are all built out of concrete. Every surface north of 23rd is brightly painted: flag murals, forest scenes, mountain silhouettes, massive bare-breasted women with galaxies in their eyes. Walking up the sidewalks, listening to the cold reverberating echo of your footsteps, you get the feeling that this part of the city has transcended the organic. At least until you see the fast food wrappers caught in the grates of the pristine concrete sewers. Everything, even the wrappers, smells like stone and diesel.

Gavin is a sculptor, and he doesn’t mind this sort of thing. Remedios, though, rebels. Their back yard is full of tomatoes and bright yellow-flowered squash, and two fat hens cluck in the chicken coop beside the rusted bike rack.

The back stairs take you either into the gallery, through the second floor, or up to their apartment on the third. The gallery is always unlocked. I glance inside just long enough to see that Remedios’s Brutal exhibition is still on display, wall after wall of bare torsos with unspeakable scars. The gray, wine-stained carpet smells like dust, and there are fat black flies on the windowsills. A stray exhibition program flutters in the box by the fire escape, the title in red lower-case sans-serif: These are not the bodies we were born in. I let the door swing shut.

Upstairs, in the kitchen, Remedios is standing barefoot at the sink, washing cherry tomatoes and crying.

(You weren’t expecting to see me, I’d said, because none of them ever are.

No, he said, it’s fine.)

“Hythloday.” She drops the bowl into the sink, where it spins, clattering, spilling mottled red-and-yellow tomatoes across the gray ceramic. She flings her arms around my neck, stands on tiptoe, presses her flat chest against mine. Her hair is dark blue and shaved close to her head, and it smells like the gallery, like dry skin and abandonment.

(Please, just stay with me.)

She pulls me towards her on the bed, which is a low double-mattress in the front room, covered in shawls and old saris and stuffed animals. Her fingers are already undoing the buttons on my shirt. “Shouldn’t we wait for Gavin?” I ask, but she makes a sick squeaking sound.

“He isn’t here,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s gone, Hythloday.”

She tugs at my sleeves, and I ease myself down beside her on the mattress. “What do you mean?”

She shakes her head, falls silent. I kiss her forehead, and she rolls me over, pushes me back against the pillows with the dead weight of her body.

(Four of them were anonymous, Jesse had told me. Five of them are missing.)

Afterward, she curls up with her back against my stomach, a little spoon, or a snail in its shell. It feels strange not to have Gavin’s arms crossing mine above her small body, Gavin’s heady juniper smell in my nostrils. Remedios’s breathing slows, hitches, then steadies, like a ship breaking into deep water.

“We were marching up Tribunal,” she says. “There was a gathering at the West Gate. He thought we should be there, say a few words. The police arrived and we were separated.”

Somewhere in the neighborhood, a siren begins to wail. I kiss the back of her neck, and she looks over her shoulder.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

(Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government.

Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?)

I kiss her nose, her eyelids. “I don’t know,” I lie.

“Hythloday?” Lisse crouches over me. Her fingers wind around the back of my neck, giving my hair a sharp tug. “In all seriousness. Why do all your lovers want to overthrow the government?”

“Guess I have a thing for rebels.”

“Seriously.”

“Mm-hm,” I say. Her face is unreadable. I close my eyes, lean back into her grip. “You’re all so electric, and so secretive. Meetings in dark alleys and warehouses, throwing bricks through Senate windows. It’s so sexy. And don’t get me started on the posters and the pamphlets and those long, lonely nights with a busted stapler in the back of the copy shop—”

She cuts me off with a kiss, dragging my head up to hers. Her mouth tastes like orange juice and almond chapstick, her lips bruisingly firm, her teeth sharp.

“Just for once,” she whispers, “I wish you would think.”

Think. As though I weren’t always thinking, too much for my own good. Thinking of her body, the scars I can see and the ones I can’t, the hipbones that jut prominently against my hands where they were once buried in flesh. Thinking of the marks shining on Jesse’s wrists and chest, of Remedios crying at her kitchen sink. Thinking about protestors and fire hoses, pepper spray, gunshots. Thinking of the history of this city, this apartment building and the fire that gutted it.

Thinking of being gutted. Being burned.

“All right, Lisse.” I rub my eyelids, smudging what’s left of yesterday’s liner. “Everyone I’m fucking realizes that this country is going to shit, and unlike me, they have the courage and integrity to do something about it. Fair?”

She doesn’t answer. I open my eyes. A flood of sunlight pours through the windows, sharp with afternoon. The living room is empty. When I look towards 9th and Tribunal, I see that the crowd of protestors has dispersed, leaving a single piece of wet posterboard in their wake.

Hythloday. I suppose you caught the reference. A traveler in no-place, a stranger in Nowhere. My mother kicked me out when I was fifteen, and ever since, my only reliable roof has been the sky. The city of kites and crows. It doesn’t burn as easily as the city of flesh and blood, I’ll give it that. And there have been friends’ couches, lovers’ bedrooms: roosts for a night, or for a season. I have this image of myself flying across the city, from nest to nest, like something from a children’s story.

Where do the birds go during a revolution? I read somewhere that every pigeon in Paris flew away during the summer of 1793. It was so hot, and every street in the city stank of blood. I have no idea if any of that is true. I have this recurring dream of a guillotine blade falling, the thud of it scattering crows, like a spray of embers from a collapsing roof. They don’t settle again. Whatever died wasn’t to their taste.

The fire at St. John’s preparatory school began because a little girl stuck a match into a bird’s nest outside her dormitory window. Little girls are cruel, crueler far than ravens or guillotine blades, and flames in a wooden building travel faster than cruelty. Within seven minutes, everyone who was going to make it out alive had already left the building. They stood on 23rd street clutching their books, their dolls. Everyone else died. And some who got out died, too, later on, from the smoke.

I tell this story to Lisse, and she frowns. It is a story about all the things she loves: a story about home, about violence and brutality and revenge, about innocent bystanders.

But it is not a story about justice.

“Only ghost stories are about justice,” I say, and she shakes her head.

(How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?)

When I return to the gallery, there are flies everywhere.

(Where did the bruises come from? I asked Jesse. But they weren’t just bruises, not merely bruises, although the purple stain on his chest showed the treads of a military boot. The white and red marks on his arms, the stiffness in his fingers came from being cuffed, being tied, and tightly. I knew the signs.)

Remedios and I go into the bedroom and fuck and don’t say word about Gavin. She moves so stiffly that I’m afraid I’ve hurt her, but when I slow down, she twines her legs around me and hisses in my ear: “Don’t stop.” We fall asleep afterward, sore and exhausted.

Later still, I wake alone to the buzzing of the flies.

(The dean wants to see me tomorrow, he’d said, resting his cheek against my shoulder blade. And I couldn’t see our reflection in the window.)

And although it’s the last thing on earth that I want to do, although I can already smell the sour stink in the dusty carpet, I go down to the gallery. Down to the first floor, where the flies are thickest. Down to the back room.

(Jesse’s things are scattered across the bedroom floor. His books, cracked along the spine. His ties and jackets and dress shirts, torn from their hangers and crumpled, dirtied with the muddy prints of boots. The contents of the nightstand, small and obscene in the light of day.)

I see the folding chair first, collapsed in the center of the room beneath the light fixture. And she sways at the end of something that shows bright orange against her blue hair: an electric cord. She’s been here for a while now. Her limbs have gone stiff, her tongue black against her pale chin.

I stand on the chair to cut her down. When she lands in my arms, I lose my balance, fall to the floor with a solid, bruising thud.

On the train back to 9th street, the woman in the seat across from me is reading something on her tablet. She looks up at me, suddenly. Without saying a word, she cries, and cries, and cries.

None of us has the body we were born in. Life leaves its traces, its teeth marks on our throats, its maps across our thighs and in our fingertips, its footprints on our chests. The body that I was born in didn’t have breasts, didn’t have hips, and I didn’t know it had a cunt until I was nine years old. Love leaves its traces on us, and hate.

I fill the antique tub in Lisse’s bathroom until the frigid water flows over the edge, splashing across the dark green tile floor. I close my eyes, plug my nose, plunge to the bottom. Even under water, I smell burning.

I’ve stopped binding recently, stood in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and cupped my breasts the way I used to cup Lisse’s. It felt alien. Not wrong, just not mine. I think of Lisse’s tattoo, the marks on Jesse’s wrists and neck and chest. I think of the slight weight of Remedios, dangling from an electric cord noose. And I think damage is what teaches us to inhabit our bodies, and everyone I love has learned that long before me.

At last, I come up for air, and Lisse is waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the tub in her flannel robe. “What’s wrong, Hythloday?” she asks.

But nothing’s wrong. I’m unscathed.

“It’s my gift,” I say softly. “My own special talent. I don’t follow the crowd, and I never have. I don’t get caught up in things. The world is on fire and I don’t even feel the heat.”

I reach for her, and she isn’t there.

I get out of the tub, wrap a fraying towel around my waist, go into the hallway. The door to her room is on my right. I put my fingertips on the handle, hoping it will be locked, but it isn’t, it swings soundlessly open.

The smell of smoke and scorched hair and wet carbon rushes out. Inside, everything is covered in a layer of dust.

END

“The City of Kites and Crows” is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2016, and was originally published in Kaleidotrope.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with “Never Alone, Never Unarmed,” an original story by Bobby Sun.

Episode #58 – The City of Kites and Crows by Megan Arkenberg was originally published on GlitterShip

#GlitterShip #lgbtq fiction #queer fiction #short stories #science fiction and fantasy #podcast

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investmart007 · 6 years

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico | Puerto Rico issues new data on Hurricane Maria deaths

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/mlt6yM

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico | Puerto Rico issues new data on Hurricane Maria deaths

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Eight days after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Efrain Perez felt a pain in his chest.

Doctors near his small town sent him to Puerto Rico’s main hospital for emergency surgery for an aortic aneurysm. But when the ambulance pulled into the parking lot in the capital, San Juan, after a more than two-hour drive, a doctor ran out to stop it.

“He said, ‘Don’t bring him in here, I can’t care for him. I don’t have power. I don’t have water. I don’t have an anesthesiologist,'” Perez’s daughter, Nerybelle, recalled.

The 95-year-old Perez died as the ambulance drove him back to southwestern Puerto Rico but he is not included in the island’s official hurricane death toll of 64 people, a figure at the center of a growing legal and political fight over the response to the Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.

Facing at least three lawsuits demanding more data on the death toll, Puerto Rico’s government released new information on Tuesday that added detail to the growing consensus that hundreds or even thousands of people died as an indirect result of the storm.

According to the new data, there were 1,427 more deaths from September to December 2017 than the average for the same time period over the previous four years. Additionally, September and October had the highest number of deaths of any months since at least 2013. But the statistics don’t indicate whether the storm and its aftermath contributed to the additional deaths.

The Puerto Rican government says it believes more than 64 people died as a result of the storm but it will not raise its official toll until George Washington University completes a study of the data being carried out on behalf of the U.S. territory.

The issue is clouded by the fact that the federal government and U.S. states and territories have no uniform definition of what constitutes a storm-related death. The National Hurricane Center counts only deaths directly caused by a storm, like a person killed by a falling tree. It does not count indirect deaths, like someone whose medical equipment fails in a blackout.

Puerto Rico began by counting mostly direct deaths, with some indirect ones. Then it stopped updating its toll entirely while it waits for the George Washington University study, due later this summer.

The death count has had political implications. Visiting Puerto Rico on Oct. 3, two weeks after the storm hit, President Donald Trump asked Gov. Ricardo Rossello what the death toll was.

“Sixteen,” Rossello answered.

“Sixteen people certified,” Trump said. “Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”

On Monday, two Democrats introduced a bill to the Republican-controlled Congress that would establish federal procedures for counting deaths after a natural disaster, saying that will help improve the federal response and be key to allocating federal funds.

The $2 million proposed project would allow the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to hire the National Academy of Medicine to do a study on how best to assess fatalities during and after a disaster, given that the process is currently left up to U.S. states and territories.

“Nobody rebuilding his or her life after a natural disaster should suffer the negligence we’ve seen in Puerto Rico,” Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona said. “Too many Puerto Rican families are suffering additional burdens today because officials won’t acknowledge their loved ones’ deaths.

Like Perez, thousands of sick Puerto Ricans were unable to receive medical care in the months after the storm caused the worst blackout in U.S. history, which continues to this day, with 6,983 home and businesses still without power.

The data released Tuesday showed increases in several illnesses in 2017 that could have been linked to the storm: Cases of sepsis, a serious bloodstream infection usually caused by bacteria, rose from 708 in 2016 to 835 last year. Deaths from diabetes went from 3,151 to 3,250 and deaths from heart illnesses increased from 5,417 to 5,586.

The data was not broken down by month, preventing an analysis of whether the illnesses rose after Hurricane Maria.

CNN and the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism sued the Puerto Rican government after it refused to release a detailed accounting of deaths in the wake of the storm. On June 5, a judge gave the government until Tuesday to release a database listing the causes of death of all those who died from two days before the storm until today, along with all the death certificates and burial and cremation certificates for the same period.

“People still don’t have a clear picture as to how many lives were lost due to a lack of food, medicine, health services or simply because of an ineffective response to an emergency. That’s why it’s urgent to shed light on all components of government preparedness and response,” Judge Lauracelis Roques wrote in her ruling.

The government on Tuesday requested more time to release all the death certificates, saying Social Security data had to be redacted from 48,000 individual documents. The judge rejected the request and the government planned to announce its next steps later in the day.

Meanwhile, thousands of Puerto Ricans were hoping the release of the information will lead to their loved ones being included in the storm’s toll, something they say will provide a sense of closure and show the American public the true cost of the hurricane.

Until now, Perez has been “one of those who do not count,” his daughter told The Associated Press. “That’s a lie.”

Lucila Pardo, 96, spent nearly four months in a sweltering nursing home that did not have power and developed bed sores by the time she was moved in early January to another home where electricity had been restored. By then, the sores had become infected and she was taken to a hospital where she spent two weeks before dying of septicemia.

“That figure of 64 is a lack of respect for those who died from other consequences,” said Pardo’s granddaughter Analid Nazario.

“The hospital wrote a letter apologizing,” Nazario told the AP, adding that they were understaffed.

A Harvard study published last month estimates there were as many as 4,600 more deaths than usual in the three months after Maria, although some independent experts questioned the methodology and the numbers in that study. Still, previous studies have found the number of direct and indirect hurricane-related deaths is higher than the official toll, including a 2017 report that said there were nearly 500 more deaths than usual on the island in September.

Days before the government was ordered to release the new data, Puerto Rico’s Institute of Statistics sued the demographic registrar for the information. On June 1, the agency released information showing there were an additional 1,397 deaths from September to December 2017 compared with the same period the previous year.

Among those who died the first week of October was Raul Antonio Morales, a 95-year-old diabetic who didn’t have the insulin he needed because the nursing home where he lived didn’t have power or a generator, according to his granddaughter, Maytee Sanz. She said relatives tried to obtain a generator, but there was none available. A doctor at the nursing home certified that Morales died of natural causes, and he is not included in the official death toll. “I think the government has been extremely inept and inefficient regarding the statistics,” Sanz said. “There were a lot of deaths certified as natural simply because they … were not electrocuted or did not drown, but they were a result of the hurricane. When you don’t have access to insulin or a respiratory machine, you have no way of surviving.”

BY DANICA COTO by Associated Press

#Efrain Perez felt a pain #emergency surgery #hurricane maria #Hurricane Maria deaths #Puerto Rico #SAN JUAN #TodayNews

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