#and the increasing pressure on new generations to take on more responsibility with fewer people

[aiqod]

Technology Transformation in an Enterprise: Key Strategies for Success in 2023 and Beyond

Welcome to our special interview series, where we talk to people who have been there and done that. In this edition, we have Ajinkya Mulay, who is the Head of Blue Ocean at AIQod. Let’s dive into his story, the obstacles he faced, his successes, and the important lessons he has learned throughout his journey of Technology based transformation.

With technologies like Generative AI taking the world by storm, businesses are under more pressure than ever to keep their tech up to date and use the newest tools and solutions as technology continues to advance at an unparalleled rate. Enterprise technology improvements are crucial for businesses looking to maintain their competitiveness, increase productivity, and simplify operations. These improvements, however, could potentially come with significant challenges, like budgetary constraints. We’ll talk about the numerous difficulties that companies encounter when updating their enterprise technology in this interview, as well as explore methods and best practices for handling these updates efficiently. Whether you work in IT or are a business executive, this debate will give you insightful information about the world of enterprise technology updates and give you the skills and expertise you need to compete in the fast-paced digital environment of today.

Why is technology upgrade important

As we all know, technology plays an important role in everyone’s life, and to solve new-age business problems, we can’t look at the same old technologies. Technology upgrades help in many aspects, like UI/UX, speed, and security, with fewer implementation cycles. Here are some examples of the cons of remaining with older technologies:

Scalability issues may arise for older systems built with monolithic architecture, but if your tech stack is updated and you switch from monolithic to microservice-based architecture, it will benefit you in a big way. 

Building Responsive Applications on all devices and OS would have been exceedingly challenging as front-end design was only reliant on HTML and CSS. With less coding and quicker delivery, frontend technology advancements like HTML5, SCSS, Bootstrap, Material UI, and Service Workers (PWA) will meet these challenges very quickly. In short there are many benefits of being always on the latest technologies.

AIQod used to work on which tech stack earlier?

In 2016, we were using the PHP Laravel framework and MySQL as our backend database.

I understand that you were pivotal in changing the tech stack from PHP to Mean stack, how did you do it? 

We were utilizing PHP and MySQL to build a product, as I indicated earlier, but after some time, it started to become a barrier when we tried adding new features and managing unstructured data. As a team, we made the deliberate decision to move the product to the new stack, but it was not an easy choice because we were not putting much work into the migration, which slows down the creation of new products. But after that, my technical team and top management held a brainstorming session where we identified the pros. and cons of this decision, We have already decided to use a MEAN stack after having shortlisted new stacks to migrate to, conducting research, speaking with users of the stack, and considering the product plan. We developed a migration plan after the team had unanimously approved and finalized the MEAN stack. Since we are switching from SQL to NoSQL, creating a MongoDB schema was the first thing we did. Then, because our PHP stack had previously been monolithic in nature, we opted to employ a microservice design for our backend. To determine how many microservices we should have when we begin migrating, we performed a logical breakdown of our monolithic architecture. And this is where my contribution comes in: I wrote the first MEAN stack program and structure for the platform on which we started migrating and completed the entire migration in a few months.

What are the technologies AIQod is working on/leveraging presently and how it is performing?

As mentioned earlier, currently we are using the MEAN stack as our base, which includes Angular 14, NodeJS, Node MongoDB 6.0, and Express JS. We also use Python to solve problems related to AI/ML. The platform also uses Redis for caching. We are pioneers in deploying our solution on the cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.) using Docker images on the Kubernetes cluster. 

How did you see the technology change in the company throughout the years? 

The business never loses sight of technology. We review our stack every quarter and assess any improvements that have been made as well as the addition of new features in accordance with the product strategy. For instance, our front end is currently using Angular 14, although we were using Angular 2 five years ago when we transitioned to Angular we added other layers over the years, such as document digitization based on AI. In the product, we introduced a caching layer utilizing Redis and an NLP layer for categorization and Atlas for databases as a service and added an analytical engine to the solution. We recently integrated with chatGPT to generate automated code and new innovations in technologies will keep coming in where we need to think ahead and keep moving forward and adopting these technologies. We have been constantly on the lookout of technology changes and we were very conscious and planned the upgrades that we need to do on the platform this goes through a rather quick approval process to ensure bureaucracy will not cripple our platform growth.

What are the problems you face while changing the technology or upgrading the technology department? 

Any upgrades are first uncomfortable, but understanding what advantages we will experience in the long run always helps. Knowing the new technology is the first issue we encounter when it is implemented, thus learning the technical details of the new technology might be difficult if there isn’t a team member with experience who has already worked with it. A major issue that will arise in the first few months after a technology upgrade is, in my opinion, the team’s acceptance of the change. To get around this, I first built a straightforward prototype with a folder structure. All the vital tools needed for this stack, which facilitates streamlined development and deployment, have been identified. VS Code Studio as a code editor, Postman as a rest client, Swagger for API description, MongoDB Compass for GUI querying, and Jenkins for creating CI/CD pipelines are a few well-known names. Other developers have held thorough sessions with the team on each subject and component of the new stack after gathering information alongside me, which aids in quicker adoption.

As you lead the whole tech team in the company, how do you leverage people skills for completing the task? 

Every member of the team brings a unique set of abilities and talents to the table, whether it be expertise in client communication, troubleshooting complex issues, problem-solving techniques, or specialized tech skills like front-end, back-end, etc. Taking all of this into account, we examined the talent required and gave the assignments accordingly. Additionally, we offered training that will aid with task completion. We have developed a customized syllabus for each technology and divided it into basic, intermediate, and advanced levels as part of our organization-wide knowledge management program. Each level is connected to the assignment, and after review, the team is given access to the different course levels. This program’s knowledge foundation places equal emphasis on soft skills and technology.

What is the issue you faced while managing the team and how do you manage them? 

Since each member of your team is unique, a variety of difficulties arise on a daily basis. The difficulty is that a new fresher who has recently graduated from college joins the team and needs to be brought up to speed in order for him/her to get valuable expertise and assist the business in solving this issue. We also give them access to specialized training materials and assignment links. We must always communicate with them at regular intervals in order to understand their perspectives and take appropriate action. We also have weekly 1-on-1 meetings to provide correct counseling regarding their daily routines, etc. People may find it difficult to focus on learning new, advanced skills at work, gradually affecting their performance. We attempt to hold workshops on cutting-edge technical subjects each week to address this issue and keep people informed.

What is the message you want to convey to the younger generation/upcoming talent?

I always tell youngsters that we must continuously improve ourselves and to achieve the same, we should read at least one blog per day about new technological advancements. We should approach every challenge with a positive outlook and vigor.  Any technological challenge must first be broken down into a plan of action that will ultimately address the problem more quickly and most importantly be the first one to take the step and be the leader in technology upgrades. 

Conclusion-

In today’s fast-paced world, upgrading technology is crucial for businesses. It brings scalability, improved user experience, efficiency, security, and a competitive edge. By embracing technology upgrades, businesses can adapt to market demands, drive innovation, and achieve long-term success. Regular evaluation, improvement, and adoption of the latest tools are necessary for staying competitive and maximizing growth potential.

#artificial intelligence #digital transformation #automation #gen ai #no code

[lovereconthings]

How A Pet Can Affect Your Relationship

HOW A PET CAN AFFECT YOUR RELATIONSHIP

For better or for worse, a pet can, and most definitely will, affect your relationship with your significant other or spouse. So, if you are considering becoming the parents of a "fur baby," here are some things to consider in making your decision. Some of these can be positive or negative - or both. It all depends on how you and your spouse or partner communicate and navigate through them. These generally apply to the most common pets – cats and dogs. However, you could apply many of these effects to a pet of any species or breed. - You will need to evaluate your relationship. Just how committed are you to your partner and this relationship? How would the pet be affected if you split up and went your separate ways? For instance, cockatoos live 40-60 years, so choosing one might be perfect for you if you see yourself rocking on the porch in your 70's with the birdcage between you. On the other hand, African Grey Parrot lives, on average, a mere 23 years. An indoor cat's life expectancy is

10-15 years, while dogs usually live from 8 to 11 years, depending on size and weight. If you are not reasonably confident that you will be together for the foreseeable future, then forego pet ownership in the present. Getting a pet that will end up in the pound, or worse,  is only selfish and irresponsible. On the other hand, if you choose to become "pet parents," it could mean that you are more serious and more committed to your relationship. In that case, owning a pet could benefit both you and the fur baby you choose. - You will develop a higher level of responsibility. There will be fewer last-minute trips and adventures unless they involve the ability to take your pet with you. Even then, you must make plans to accommodate your pet while traveling. If you are not taking your pet, boarding or scheduling a pet sitter will involve advanced planning and preparation. Sufficient food, water, and medications must also be provided or arranged for.   In other words, you will experience less spontaneity and more responsibility. - You may experience negative feelings. One of you may be more committed to the pet's care than the other. The lesser-committed partner may resent having to take care of the pet. Arguments could build around who bathes the dog or empties the cat's litter box. You may even discover that your partner is lazy or selfish because they don’t offer to help care for the pet when you are unable or unavailable. - You will become more active. This is especially true with a dog. However, there is no more sleeping in late with a dog or a cat. Instead, your "slow-start" mornings are accelerated by the need to take the dog out for a walk or your cat's persistence in being fed or paid attention to. A sedentary life is not healthy for you or your pet, so increasing activity can be a good thing. - You will become healthier. And along the same theme, in a study of 240 couples done by the American Heart Association, pet owners showed    "significantly smaller increases in heart rate and blood pressure in response to stress ."Another study found that dog ownership helps reduce mortality in people with cardiovascular disease, "with the likelihood of mortality being 4.05 times greater for those who did not own a dog." - You will be forced to communicate and operate as a team. You will need to discuss responsibilities such as who will buy the food and supplies, who will feed and water the pet, who will take the dog out or walk it, who will arrange for visits to the groomer and the veterinarian, etc. You will learn to work as a team and, in the process, sort out your differences, problem-solve, and communicate. - You will experience fun and enjoyment. No doubt, your pet will perform goofy or cute antics. They will bring out your own "inner child" as you engage in play with them. Training your pet can also cause you to learn new skills and afford you the satisfaction of having a well-trained animal. You may also simply enjoy the companionship of another living being in your living spaces. - You will practice conflict management skills. What if you are more structured in training and disciplining the pet? Who will "win" if one partner wants the pet to sleep on the bed, but the other is opposed to sharing their sleeping space? You will learn to negotiate and compromise, two valuable relationship skills in working it all out. - You could experience jealousy! Your pet is so cute, especially when it is a "baby ."Your spouse can't resist cuddling with it and giving it undivided attention. Sometimes, you may feel that you get less affection and attention than your pet. It is easy for jealousy to arise, and you must discuss it calmly with your spouse. It could be as simple as making sure that you greet each other with a hug and kiss before engaging with your pet. - You will feel more like a “family.” In sharing love and care for a pet, you will feel more like parents and more like a family that includes fur babies. There is a bond that develops when you both nurture and discipline a pet. You are giving your time, attention, and financial support to another living being – just like parents do for a child. A pet can be a good indicator of how you will function as a couple when or if you do have children. - You will develop experiential intimacy. Caring for a pet will be a shared experience between you. You will go through the ups and downs of pet ownership. This will strengthen your connection and feelings of closeness. - There will be more stress at times. The added responsibilities – feeding, walking, grooming and bathing, immunizations, pet illness, etc. – cause stress that must be addressed and considered. - You will have more – or less – time together. Taking your pet on walks or playing with them together can increase your time with each other. On the other hand, doing things with your pet separately from your spouse can decrease your time together. If your lifestyle is already busy and packed, you will want to choose a pet that gives you the opportunity to spend more time together. - You will have less free and “me” time. The demands of caring for a pet will take more of your free time. Ask yourselves and each other if you are willing to give up a significant part of your free time by becoming pet owners. Are you ready to get up earlier and forgo those extra "z's" to care for your pet? Will you leave social events earlier so that you can provide the care that your pet requires? - You will have less disposable cash. According to the ASPCA, at a minimum, for the first year, dog expenses are around $1,270, and cat expenses can run about $1,070. Emergency vet bills, a hidden cost, can be as high as $4,000, not to mention unexpected medications or vitamins. The Texas Society of CPAs provides a worksheet to break down the cost of owning a pet. Becoming a pet owner can mean you must be willing to alter your lifestyle and make sacrifices - like eating out less, forgoing a second round of drinks, skipping $5 coffee/tea drinks, etc. - You will cherish your alone time. Every couple needs time alone together. Unfortunately, a pet can disrupt and interrupt this time. Be sure to close the door and have some alone couple time that your pet won't interrupt. Owning a pet can be an enriching and satisfying experience if it is the right time and the right pet for you and your partner. First, ensure you have communicated clearly about all the ramifications of pet adoption and that you are enthusiastic about adding a pet to your relationship. If you want to discuss how we can help you and your relationship, don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or call 866-218-1716. You may also visit our website, www.LoveRecon.org, for testimonials and information. Read the full article

#communication #improveyourrelationship #marriagehelp

[modpsycho100]

.

#do I make the post about how viewing bnh* through an entirely American cultural perspective #is what leads to like 3/4 of all the Bad Takes in the tag?? #or do I protect myself and my blog from the Masses and uhhh Not? #bc like... seeing the story as a parallel to American law enforcement is frankly incorrect and counterproductive #especially bc hero society seems to me to much more closely mirror the Japanese workforce #and the increasing pressure on new generations to take on more responsibility with fewer people #while continuing to support the older generations #i have a whole meta post to make but like.... feel like I would b wacking a hornets nest

[lepusrufus]

To bargain for immortality pt.2

Finally, she felt well enough to leave the infirmary room for good. Her internal organs were at peace for the most part and she could keep some food down without the risk of seeing it for a second time. Her sinuses still seemed to refuse to recover though. Occasional nosebleeds would have her head spinning and the scent of blood so often present within the castle was somehow too offensive to her senses. Nicole couldn't help but wonder how exactly she got it this screwed up, but then again the first few days of the infection were a painful blur that she'd rather not remember.

For now she was content to sit in front of the fireplace with the rest of her family. They decided to have a movie night to break her out of the mopey state she had been in and, for the most part, it was quite the success. She wasn't paying much attention to the projector screen, some sappy scene from a movie chosen by Daniela playing at the moment. Instead, she was simply enjoying the close proximity to Cassandra that she so dearly missed in the last few weeks. Nicole was in the brunette's lap, with hands loosely around her waist and leaning against her shoulder. She was vaguely aware of Laura complaining about the poor life choices of one of the characters only to be unceremoniously shushed by the youngest sister. It made her chuckle.

Bela was passing the popcorn to her mothers when a knock on the main entrance reached their ears faintly. Lady Dimitrescu narrowed her eyes in the general direction of the sound, and listened. Soon enough the rapid steps of Alexandria, their Steward, reached them.

"My Ladies, Mother Miranda's assistant is here."

The whole family got up hesitantly and tried to look as presentable as possible, given their "lazy day outfits". For some like Bela that was a baggy shirt and shorts, while for the Lady it was one of her trademark white dresses. They made their way to the main entrance of the castle, where the assistant, a woman in her late thirties and the air of an annoyed teacher, was waiting. It was Alcina the one to ask why she was there.

"Mother Miranda wants to see um… Nicole was it? Yes, to take a look at the regenerative abilities."

"Why not do it here like last time?"

"Mother Miranda's laboratory is far better equipped for whatever she may want to test. Unless you have something to say against her wishes." She finished that with a raised eyebrow that would've gained her a talon through the skull were she not there as per Miranda's wishes.

Who's talons exactly was debatable.

"I'll come too," Cassandra spoke up from just behind Nicole.

That only got her a dismissive wave. "No, I was told specifically to only bring her. Come now, we don't want to make Mother Miranda wait."

With that, the woman turned around and started walking towards a carriage that would take them away. Nicole looked briefly at her family. They all had either confusion or mild concern in their eyes. All but Alcina who looked as if she'd like to protest and snap at the woman but was holding her tongue.

She reassured Cassandra that she'd be fine and started jogging after the assistant.

---

Needless to say, that was Nicole's first time stepping foot inside the underground network of tunnels. Not that she complained. Few people went there willingly and probably fewer left the same way they came in.

The ancient looking hallways were in such stark contrast with the occasional medical equipment and the pristine looking labs with doors left slightly ajar that Nicole had to wonder if the woman had no taste for a consistent aesthetic. At least Lady Dimitrescu kept all wiring and modern devices carefully hidden or blended in with the castle's decor. Here, the harsh neon lights illuminated worn out stone so dark it was almost black. Not to mention the smell of… old that seemed to ooze off the very walls she was walking by.

She was led inside a spacious lab, the bluish lights above being too bothersome for someone who got used to the warm or natural light in the castle. The room was rather long, numerous hospital beds lined up against a wall, some separated by white curtains and some left visible. An almost imperceptible whiff of an all too familiar foul odor reached her nose, but it was mild enough to be easily ignored. Nicole had a suspicion that the unmoving person laying in one of the cots further away could be the source, but she sighed and hoped not to join them by the end of the day.

Mother Miranda was sat at a desk, microscope in front of her together with a small stack of documents and a laptop. She was typing in what could probably be notes on whatever she was looking at, when icy grey eyes finally shifted to Nicole.

"Get changed and lay down," she ordered, not even moving from her spot.

The assistant that had brought her here, pushed a hospital gown that had been pulled out from a cupboard in her arms. At least she was allowed the decency of changing into a bathroom as opposed to stripping then and there in the middle of the room. The gown was surprisingly comfortable, fabric folding around her body and being held closed by a loose ribbon that she tried at the side.

Once she was back in the lab, she was ushered to one of the beds where she laid down, nervously waiting for whatever Miranda had in mind.

It was quite odd to see her without her usual attire, especially without the gold talons that Nicole was now far more familiar with than she'd ever hoped. The white lab coat looked far too normal on her and, were it not for the unmistakable cold eyes and regal posture, the woman would’ve been unrecognizable.

She finally got up, a few documents in hand, and approached her. The papers were handed over to the assistant, along with a few other objects and finally, Nicole had her full attention.

Mother Miranda bent down, scalpel in hand, and grabbed one of Nicole's wrists. Just like she did back during the first examination, the blade was dragged across the length of her forearm. Despite fully expecting it, Nicole couldn't help flinching at the pain, but she kept her eyes fixated on her arm, at the blood slowly starting to flow from the wound.

Soon the same tingling as before took over the pain and before their eyes, the skin started to stitch itself back together.

"Time," Miranda asked while wiping the blood to allow for a closer inspection of the now good as new skin.

"Five seconds."

"Alcina's?"

"Three seconds."

Miranda hummed, seemingly pleased with the results. Or at least as pleased as the woman was physically capable of being.

"Hook her up to the cardiac monitor," she further instructed while moving to retrieve something from another cabinet.

The assistant, Emma, if the tag pinned to her lab coat was to be believed, stuck a series of electrodes to her chest and abdomen. Nicole bit her lip to stifle a yelp when one came uncomfortably close to the still sensitive skin of the scar.

In no time, the machine came to life, familiar beeping sounding through the otherwise silent room.

"I hope you're not afraid of needles," Miranda said while grabbing the same arm she had before, lips pulled into a faint smirk.

Nicole only shook her head as she saw the needle of a syringe attached to a transparent slim tube slide into her arm. How ironic would that be. The sting was close to imperceptible, taken over by the now familiar faint tingle. Unlike with the cut, it didn't fade away, most likely due to not being able to fully heal the small wound with the needle embedded in the skin and vein.

She looked away, in the direction of the other occupied bed in the room. It was far away enough that she couldn't make out any detail, only messy brown hair sprawled on a pillow. The face was turned towards the wall and body covered up to the neck. She grimaced and decided instead to focus on the beeping machine, mildly annoyed by Miranda's lack of properly separating her dead lab rats from the living ones. At least she hoped she'd stay living.

The numbers on the machine started out normal. With the slight uncomfortable feeling of blood being drained however, her heart rate started to slowly increase.

Alright. Normal enough. Especially when someone is clearly in a fucking blood draining mood.

Nicole decided not to look at exactly how much blood Miranda was drawing, keeping her eyes glued to the various color coded numbers. The heart rate kept increasing until Nicole could swear she could feel her heartbeat ringing in her ears. She gulped. Still relatively within the norm.

Two things were at odds however. First, the blood pressure remained constant, almost as if her body simply refused to acknowledge the fact that it was currently being drained. Secondly, the temperature rose from the normal 36 degrees to a staggering 41 in less time than it should have.

"What the fuck…" She couldn't keep her tongue at the weirdness of her situation, her brain thankfully choosing confusion and curiosity over the dread that it probably should've felt instead.

Mother Miranda didn't seem to care though as she turned to type something on the laptop that she brought over from the desk. She tapped her finger on the device for a few seconds and finally spoke up.

"The accelerated healing means the blood is being regenerated constantly, thus not decreasing in volume. Which explains the constant pressure." She narrowed her eyes at the monitor once again. "It doesn't, however, explain the heart rate and temperature. Any bright guesses?"

It took Nicole a second to realize the question was actually addressed to her. Miranda seemed in an oddly good mood. Not any less hell bent on causing her pain, mind you, but she also seemed genuinely curious. Being a biology nerd will do that to you, she couldn't help but think.

Nicole hummed and thought for a second. She tried to recall any information about the topic at hand that she had studied prior to running away.

"Heart rate could just be the normal body response that stayed even with the mutation. Like… like a reflex. It remains even though it's not needed." Then she tapped a finger on her chin trying to find a less random explanation. "Or maybe it's the body's way of making sure that even while healing all body parts remain at least decently functional. No idea about the temperature though," she shrugged.

Miranda once again typed something up and then, without warning, pulled the needle out of Nicole's arm. She flinched, barely holding in an angry protest as she turned towards the woman. Which was a mistake. She couldn't help the gag that raised in the back of her throat at the sight of the metal container full of blood.

No, no, blood did not bother her. That would've cut her career as a medical examiner short before she even stepped foot in med school. It was the knowledge that that was her blood that made her stomach churn. The container could easily fit three liters of liquid in it, and it was full to the brim. Not to mention the smell that assaulted her still messed up sinuses mixing oh so perfectly with mr. corpse over in the corner.

Miranda just chuckled at her sour expression. "Do you think your darling wife would like to have this?"

With a sneer, masked by Nicole turning once again towards the monitor, she couldn't help slipping an edge of snark in her reply. "No need, she likes it fresh."

The numbers were back to normal, all but for the temperature that was taking slightly longer to go down.

---

By this point her vocal cords were raw from screaming and each shuddering sob felt like clumps of spines in her throat. Nicole was curled in on herself, small frame trembling pathetically on top of the uncomfortable bed. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably, the tingling sensation feeling like needles constantly pricking at her skin around and under the wired leather cuffs wrapped around her wrists. The frantic beeping of the machine was grating to her ears.

An electric shock test.

Of course.

Mother Miranda decided to test out how the increased heart rate worked. Results? Her body vehemently refused to allow her to pass out. Even when the shocks traveled through every part of her body, causing the nervous system to short circuit. Even when damage to internal organs and muscles ripped painful sobs from her throat, that turned into gags as soon as the tingling turned to nausea. Even when she could feel her heart hammering against her ribcage so fast that she was sure the small organ would burst any second. But it didn’t.

Every muscle in her body flared up in a sensation of painful pins and needles when Miranda pushed the button to release another shock. The cardiac monitor started screaming again and Nicole brought shaky hands over her ears in an attempt to block out the sound. Her whole body was on fire while all the damaged tissue repaired itself, making her stomach turn painfully. She felt like throwing up. Not that she had eaten anything today, but bile and thick blood still coated her esophagus. It was all swallowed back with a disgusting gulp.

The nausea was oh so kindly accompanied by searing pain from her still damaged sinuses, who’s condition only worsened exponentially with the electricity. The blood that seemed to coat all the way up to the inside of her mouth felt horrible mixed with the putrid smell of death.

She swallowed again, but that proved itself a bad decision as now that same smell permeated the very inside of her nose and mouth and throat and the feeling of blood sloshing on her tongue behind clenched teeth made her head spin.

She lurched forward, a small river of dark blood flowing from her mouth and nose, into her palms that she instinctively brought to her mouth. Wet coughs made it splatter into crimson splotches on the white sheets, herself and anything else within proximity. It took surprisingly long to realize that, after the initial wave that rose up her esophagus, the rest of the blood was from her sinuses. It was cruelly invading her nose and sliding back into her throat only to come out of her mouth. Fuck fuck fuck-

“What’s wrong?” Miranda’s tone lacked any trace of sympathy.

Nicole simply coughed out the remaining fluid from her mouth and unceremoniously grabbed a piece of cloth from Emma’s hands. She pressed it to her nose, only to feel it soaked against her skin far too soon.

“Damaged sinuses, as you said,” she croaked, her voice sounding so unlike her own.

That made Miranda frown. She kept that same expression while noting down the previous results. “It should be healed by now.”

“Well they aren't,” Nicole spat. The blood and the horrid smell were clouding her mind and, as many knew, pain and holding her tongue did not mix well in her. “And did we really have to do this in the same room as a dead fucking body?!”

Nicole’s angry outburst gave the woman pause. Annoyance mixed with a hint of confusion on her face. She looked at her assistant, an eyebrow raised in a silent question.

“No. Just- just anestesia.” Emma answered promptly.

“What the fuck do you mean anesthesia? Anesthesia doesn’t make you smell like a goddamn decomposing corpse, do you have cotton stuck up your noses?!” Thankfully the bleeding was starting to subside, which meant there was nothing to stifle her steadily raising angry tone.

Miranda, now sporting a scowl, got up and grabbed Nicole’s chin between two fingers. It made her flinch back, but there was no escaping the iron grip.

“I can assure you that the man is not dead, simply under anesthesia and recovering from a bad infection.” She moved Nicole’s head from left to right, eyes scrutinizing as ever.

Afterwards, she turned back and wrote something down on a piece of paper and simply instructed Emma to wrap up and lead Nicole out. The sudden shift not only in demeanor, but also in her position from the bed to standing upright was mildly dizzying. She swapped the gown for her normal clothes as quickly as she physically could, not wanting to spend another unnecessary second in this underground grave.

While she was ushered out the door, Mother Miranda’s sickly sweet voice rang after her.

“I’ll see you in a couple days.”

Her stomach turned.

---

The trek home was short and silent, Nicole simply wanting to get home as soon as possible and get a damn hot shower and sleep.

She bid the young man that was accompanying her goodbye the moment the Castle’s entrance was within jogging distance, and hurried steps took her to the imposing doors. It was Alexandria to answer her knock, Nicole having left her own keys in her bedroom.

“Welcome back my la-” the polite smile was all but wiped off the woman’s face, replaced by wide eyes. “Are you injured?”

Nicole looked at her confused, then down at herself. A muttered curse escaped past her lips when she remembered the bloody mess on her skin. “I’m okay. Just-... just don’t tell anyone I’m here yet. I'll change first.”

Her plan went out the window when a set of hasty steps came booming toward them.

“Nico-”

Cassandra’s voice died in her throat when her golden eyes landed on Nicole’s small frame, dried dark blood on her face and arms and her clothes stained. An angry growl slipped from between bared teeth.

“What the fuck did she do to you?”

Nicole was quick to answer, too tired to deal with anything other than a few hours of sleep. “I’m okay. I’m just-...” she shook her head, then turned to the Steward. “Alexandria kindly ask a maid to draw me a bath.”

“At once.” And with that the woman turned and scurried away, most likely also not wanting to be in the vicinity of an angry Cassandra.

---

The hot water felt like pure bliss on her skin. It seemed to make every muscle relax and get rid of the awful tension. She leaned back, eyes closed and hands idly moving through the water.

It was just mildly difficult to fully relax with Cassandra muttering and pacing back and forth in the same room though.

"I'm-... I'm not letting you do this again."

Nicole simply sighed and started to scrub away at dried blood. The miniature red waterfall from earlier had gotten blood all over her arms and chest, some splatters even getting on her legs. Her face was also a mess, trails of blood going from her nose and mouth to the chin with smudges and splatters.

"What did she even do to you?"

Before she had a chance to reply, a knock came from the door and a maid entered with a few clean towels and a change of clothes from Nicole's own bedroom. The girl didn't linger, simply giving them both a courteous bow and exiting the room.

Looking for something to change the subject, Nicole focused on the pleasant honey smell. Honey with a slight citrus-y undertone, maybe lemon or orange.

"Did you get a new soap?"

Cassandra stopped pacing, brows furrowed. "No? It's the same one."

Confused, Nicole brought a hand that had just been scrubbed with that very soap right under her nose and took a deep inhale. It was indeed the same one. Chamomile and mint. She sighed in annoyance and leaned back against the cool porcelain while Cassandra came and bent down on one knee to be somewhat on eye level.

"Nose still not working properly or…?" She said while gingerly tilting Nicole's chin up with two fingers. She grimaced at one yet to be washed trail of dried blood that made its way to her wife's thin upper lip.

Nicole simply shook her head and grabbed Cassandra's hand. "Can you… go get ready. I'm beyond tired and just want to lay down with you."

Cassandra pursed her lips but nodded none the less. With a kiss on top of red hair, she turned and left the spacious bathroom, door shutting with a heavy thud.

Left alone, she scrubbed every inch of skin again and took a few extra minutes to enjoy the warmth of the water. It felt so incredibly odd to not feel any actual pain after the day's events. Any trace of what her body went through had been erased by her newfound ability, not leaving behind even the faintest mark of a scar, nor blackened skin caused by electric shocks.

She pushed herself out of the tub, grimacing at the slight pink tone the water had taken. Body and hair quickly dried with the towels, she put on the clothes, a comfortable pair of shorts and a tank top, and finally stepped out of the bathroom too.

Cassandra was waiting for her in bed, velvety dark robes hanging loosely on her shoulders and eyes fixated on the window while her fingers were tapping furiously on the cover of a book forgotten in her lap. Book that was quickly placed on the nightstand when Nicole climbed in beside her and pushed her way into the brunette's arms. She was tired and absolutely not above demanding cuddles.

Her wife wasted no time in wrapping an arm around her and pulling the soft blanket up to cover them both. Nicole interlocked their fingers, absentmentally turning the ring on Cassandra's finger. The same ring she had, albeit in a smaller size. A golden band with intricate floral patterns engraved on it. It had no protruding gem, something they both opted for so that the rings wouldn't need to be taken off while working and wearing gloves. Instead, eight small ocre gems were lined among the minuscule curled leaves.

It took Cassandra about two minutes to take a deep inhale and open her mouth. New record.

"Are you… are you hurt?"

Nicole didn't look up at her, the concern dripping from her words alone were enough to squeeze her heart painfully.

"No. I'm all healed up, just tired." She could almost feel Cassandra's question of clarification, but not wanting to go over what had happened down in the laboratory so soon, she opted for something the brunette would hopefully be just as interested in. "We did get some odd results though."

At the lack of any interruption she went on. "Accelerated heart rate whenever I get hurt. Can't pass out." Which was both a blessing and a curse, depending on the point of view and situation. "Also for some reason my temperature gets really high."

"You get one hell of a fever?"

"Yeah."

Cassandra tapped a finger on Nicole's hand, mentally going over possibilities. "Aren't fevers used against infections? Maybe that has something to do with it."

A small hum passed her lips. Could that have something to do with it? It was possible that her healing abilities caused a fever in order to fight off any possible infection before it even became one. Maybe it was her body's way of lessening damage as much as possible since, as the day's events showed, the old replaced tissue had a tendency to get purged. She grimaced at the memory of slowly choking on blood and went for something at least slightly more pleasant.

"Oh and… I can't bleed out. Blood volume stays constant."

She looked up at Cassandra with what could only be described as a shit eating grin. Her wife blinked, realization seeming to dawn on her together with the faintest hint of a blush on her cheeks. She coughed.

"Yeah well. I'll keep that in mind. For when you don't need to sleep."

"And deny me some fun now?" Nicole's pout was purely for dramatic effect and it gained her an eye roll.

Two slender fingers gripped her chin to keep it in place while narrowed golden eyes bored into her green ones. The pout slowly morphed into a smirk. Cassandra was not the kind of person who did not indulge in her own pleasures and that, although to a more careful extent, included drinking her lover's blood. A fact that Nicole was not only not complaining about, but also learned to use in order to push all the right buttons.

When Nicole turned her head in the uncharacteristically gentle grip to plant a small kiss on the soft palm, Cassandra finally gave in. Concern was momentarily put on hold in the name of the normalcy they both have been denied in the last few weeks. She bent down, their lips meeting into a kiss that soon turned needy with tongue slipping past sharp teeth and a hand scratching lightly at her nape. Soon Cassandra broke their kiss, but only to slowly trail her way across her jawline with kisses and small nips. She bit at the soft skin right under the jaw bone, eliciting a quiet groan right by her sensitive ear. Black painted lips took her down the neck and across collarbones, planting a kiss right in between them, at the base of Nicole's throat.

When she slowly made her way to an exposed shoulder, Nicole's hand at the back of her head guided her further up, right above where her pulse was. After an inquisitive hum against her skin, she spoke quietly.

"Since blood loss isn't exactly a problem… no need to avoid the neck really."

Cassandra hesitated for a moment, but ultimately decided to trust her wife. She placed a gentle kiss on the spot right above where blood was flowing in rhythm with her heartbeat. The same gentle kiss that was placed on the skin countless times before and that only Nicole had the privilege of experiencing.

Sharp fangs sunk into tender flesh, the warm blood invading Cassandra's mouth making her moan low in her throat. Being used to the feeling of the bite by now, Nicole simply closed her eyes with a sigh and let her body melt into Cassandra's arms. The familiar blissful ache was welcomed, even though, she noticed, it did not bring with it the lightheadedness she had grown accustomed to.

Although she wasn't aware of it, Cassandra was, in a way, a creature of habit. Every time she would drink her blood, her hand would come up to cup Nicole's cheek, thumb slowly tracing the jawline, right before she would pull her mouth away. Every time, without fail.

This time however, when that happened, Nicole kept her in place with the hand tangled in brunette hair, her voice coming out breathy when she spoke. "Go on."

Cassandra would never admit it, but her self control would always waver while feeding. Therefore, she didn't need much convincing, continuing to take mouthfuls of blood in between a satisfied groan. When she finally had her fill, she pulled back with a bashful look in her eyes. Concern quickly flashed on her face at the sight of the crimson mess on her wife's neck.

Nicole however, not wanting their moment to get ruined, took one of Cassandra's hands in her own and slowly placed a soft kiss on each knuckle. After that was done, and the downright ticklish sensation of skin patching itself subsided, she guided the fingers over the bloody skin.

"See? Healed," she whispered.

Cassandra gingerly traced her fingers over the spot, looking for no longer existing puncture marks. She smiled upon not finding them and turned to pull out a handkerchief from a small drawer of her nightstand. A ritual of sorts, one practiced more times than they cared to count over the years. Cassandra passed the white cloth over the skin, wiping away the crimson stains while her wife relaxed into the touch.

"Feeling good?" It was a remark meant to poke fun at how much Nicole seemed to enjoy herself, but the double meaning did not go unnoticed.

A smile tugged at Nicole's lips and she nodded.

In turn, Cassandra hummed. "You taste different." And, at her lover's furrowed brows and the slightest hint of alarm flashing in her eyes, she clarified. "Not bad. Just different. Slightly sweeter actually."

"Is that so," Nicole purred, the smile returning to her lips.

Cassandra discarded the cloth on the floor to be retrieved later and shifted both of them back down on the myriad of pillows.

"Yes. Now how about you get some sleep."

Nicole wasted no time in snaking an arm around her waist and nuzzling into her side. It would never cease to amaze her how Cassandra's presence could make her feel so at ease, as if nothing beyond the castle's walls existed. At that moment, she couldn't help but be grateful for her newfound ability, useful in far more ways than one.

She stretched slightly upwards, auburn hair like a small waterfall behind her.

"I love you," she whispered against cool ashy lips.

"I love you too," Cassandra replied, closing the almost nonexistent space between their mouths in a soft kiss.

It left behind a slight coppery taste on Nicole's lips, but she couldn't bring herself to care, instead readjusting her legs to tangle comfortably around her wife's thigh.

#unhinged maiden™ my beloved #cassandra dimitrescu x maiden #fanfic #lady dimitrescu #mother miranda #tw torture #to bargain for immortality

[lilhawkeye3]

Her Warrior

Rating: G+ ||| Word Count: 1.7k ||| Post Order 66 ||| AO3 Link

"Have you ever heard of Aayla Secura? ...she benefited the people of many worlds, and entered the folkloric cycles of several primitive cultures, where she often was merged with local historical figures or goddess-characters." (Legacy of the Force: Betrayal by Aaron Allston)

There's a bit of truth to every story. This one starts with CC-5052.

A/N: 😌✌🏽

CC-5052 didn’t give it much thought when he was assigned and shipped off to another outer core planet. Orders were orders, and he followed them.

Orders had said to execute Aayla, the General, the traitor Jedi, yet she had always treated them well. She had been a good leader, not like the others, not like what he heard of the Marines or of Umbara—

The headache came back. CC-5052 didn’t give it much thought.

———————

He knew there were others with headaches or fragmented memories. The first didn’t understand why order 66 had been followed. They were quickly sent off for medical checks to Kamino and reassigned.

Some had malfunctioning aggression inhibitors. They fought against the new nat born officers. They were sent on scouting missions or reassigned.

Some… some had headaches. Some of them complained of dread, or an ache behind their eyes. Some didn’t come back from the medbay. Some went to sleep in the barracks and didn’t wake up for their next shift.

A few turned their guns on themselves.

CC-5052 didn’t give that much thought either. It was safer not to.

———————

CC-5052 wondered if the change in environment for his deployment might reduce his headaches. Different planet, different atmospheric pressures, different stressors.

There are less soldiers that look like him on this mission. The number has been steadily dwindling. CC-5052 stays silent, so there won’t be a reason to decommission him.

The thoughts continue, but CC-5052 pushes them aside.

———————

The civilians of this planet don’t appreciate the Empire’s presence. This planet is just like every other CC-5052 has been deployed to in the past months. Another with rumors of a rebellious population, another that will not bow to the Empire’s might.

They’d ignored curfew warnings to huddle along the sides of the road that the stormtroopers now marched down. It was a show of force, and it seemed to be proving effective. CC-5052 took no joy in it– joy had no place – but he would ensure these citizens fell in line. He would not have the stain of failure on him or his squadron.

———————

The ignored curfews grow into assaults on isolated troopers. Rocks, trash, even food scraps. The people used anything they could get their hands on. CC-5052 didn’t see the point in increasing the amount of force on the majority of the perpetrators. Most of them were younglings. They weren’t innocent in the eyes of the Empire, but hurting them would only make the civilian population more volatile.

If ever asked for an opinion, CC-5052 would say a volatile population meant more room for error.

His superior officers would say that it meant for quicker use of force from their troops.

CC-5052 wasn’t asked, so he did as ordered.

———————

The first trooper murdered and left in an alley resulted in a riot, five dead civilians, and a dozen belligerents put into holding.

CC-5052 pulls a 36 hour shift and returns to the barracks with scuffed and dented armor, a damaged shoulder piece, and far fewer plasma rounds in his blaster than he had left with.

Two nights later, another trooper goes missing. This time, the investigation is led back to a group of street younglings who claimed to have been unfairly targeted by the newly recruited natborn and acted out of self-defense.

If CC-5052 was asked, he would believe the youngling’s account. One of them bore several fresh burn marks from a regulation blaster.

CC-5052 wasn’t asked.

When three of the younglings were arrested for treason and sentenced to death, the headaches returned.

———————

CC-5052 dreamed that night. He wasn’t certain when he’d last dreamt– or when he’d stopped.

It was dark, wherever he was. There was a body pressed against him, fingers in his hair while his thigh pressed up between strong legs. He could feel lips against his neck, breasts pressed against his chest, soft skin underneath his palms. They smelled of a sweet perfume– something from a flower on a planet he didn’t remember the name of– and when their lips met his again, they tasted of starlight.

His spine tingled with pleasure as warmth spread throughout him, and he bucked up against them, pushing them back against the wall so he could loom over them and tilt their chin up towards his face…

He found himself staring into sparkling hazel eyes. He knew those eyes. Those were hers, were–

———————

It was only years of training that kept CC-5052 from bolting upright as he suddenly awoke, skin flushed and heart racing faster than he could ever remember. He remained laid flat on his back for several more minutes, keeping still so he could force his vitals back to normal.

CC-5052 turns his face towards the wall and closes his eyes to try and get his migraine to subside.

———————

The migraine gets worse. CC-5052 alters his HUD to filter out brighter lights and dampen down on harsher sounds.

The days get longer, and the migraine gets worse.

———————

The riots continue to grow in size and fervor. Even the natborn officers know that reacting too strongly will cause a full-blown revolt. If that happens, the civilians won’t be the only ones being punished.

CC-5052’s head throbs in time with the chanting of the furious crowds below him in the city square.

———————

“Do you ever feel like what we’re doing here is wrong?” CT-2448 asks his bunkmate in the low of night.

CC-5052 remains silent despite the worsening pain behind his right eye. If he acknowledges the conversation, he’ll have to report them. Orders are orders are orders–

CC-5052 remains silent and listens.

“Does it matter?” Comes the weary response from CT-9357.

There are several heartbeats of quiet before the first trooper responds. “It used to.”

CC-5052 remains silent.

His migraine gets worse.

———————

The city glows a dusky orange the night it’s announced the younglings will be executed for treason against the Galactic Empire. The streets overflow with the fury of its people. CC-5052 and his fellow troopers are deployed.

The orders are to set blasters to kill.

CC-5052 fights through the increasing stabbing pain in his head and sets his to stun.

———————

He stumbles into a side street halfway through the night and tears his helmet off of his head, throwing it roughly to the ground. There are skirmishes echoing from deeper in the city, where he’d come from and been separated from his squad– his brothers, his mind supplies– are they even his brothers? So many have vanished, being replaced over the past few months.

Brothers. How had he forgotten that?

Orders are orders a good soldier follows orders–

He grips at his temple, staggering until his back hits a wall and he slides down to the soiled ground. The real battle is going on in his head, and everything else fades away in comparison.

Bly, a quiet voice whispers.

He whirls around, looking wildly for where it could’ve come from. There’s no one in sight, and yet he could’ve sworn the speaker was right next to him.

Just a bit further, Bly. A breeze caresses his cheek on an otherwise still night.

Who is Bly? He wants to shout his question, scream it to the sky. Why can he no longer tell up from down, right from wrong, orders are orders a good sold–

CC-5052 tries to rear his head one last time, but flowers and embers and starlight fill his nostrils without warning, and the constant agony behind his eye blows away like dust on the wind.

He’s not Bly– not yet, maybe not ever without Aa- without her– but he’s closer than he’s been in many, many months.

He’s not the Bly from before Felucia, but even the broken man he is now knows that this is wrong.

He won’t stand by and allow this to continue without doing anything.

———————

He left his helmet behind.

He would no longer act as the faceless will of a tyrant.

He let the cool air splash across the markings he chose to show the universe his love dedication belief in his general.

———————

Innocents in danger. A warm lekku brushes against his jaw as her soft but firm voice urges him onward. Go. Save them.

I believe in you.

———————

They’ll speak of this moment for generations afterwards: the man with the golden kiss of the Goddess on his cheeks, taking on an entire unit of stormtroopers ready to execute protesting younglings cornered in the town square.

They’ll speak of the Goddess who took the form of a blue twi’lek to guide him, hand pressed between his shoulder blades as if she were bestowing upon him a pair of wings.

They’ll speak of the scattered troopers that froze and murmured varying names: General, Aayla, Jedi, ghost– but particularly of the two troopers that tossed their helmets aside and gazed at her with reverence before springing into action, one shielding the children while the other took up second in command on the charge against the oppressors.

They’ll speak in hushed whispers of how when the fighting was over and the surviving troopers all removed their helmets to reveal the same face, that the Goddess had gifted Her Chosen warrior with the valor of an army but could not fit such power within only one body.

They’ll remember how Her Chosen checked over each and every child youngling before embracing each other and crying over brothers found again, while the one who alone bore her marks wandered off to the edge of the courtyard alone.

Only the most devout will learn of how the Goddess appeared to him in that moment, her glittering form bathing him in starlight in that darkened corner of the battlefield. The details of what passes between them is speculated but never known, for it was a sacred moment no one wished to blaspheme.

———————

“Aayla, I’m so sorry, I– please, tell me what to do, tell me how to fix this!”

Live. Her lips brushed against one golden tattoo. Love. She kissed the other marking.

“I can’t do that without you. We– we were going to do this together.”

I’m here. I’ll always be right beside you.

“Aayla…”

Go. Help your brothers. Protect and serve the innocent.

“Don’t leave. Don’t leave me.”

Never.

———————

...but they all tell of how Her Chosen fell to his knees before her, how she drew him into her arms before vanishing into stardust, gone in the blink of an eye.

#commander bly #aayla secura #blyla #bly x aayla #star wars #the clone wars #fanfiction #moodboard #post order 66 #hurt/comfort #goddess #clone trooper #327th star corps

[earthstory]

The New Madrid Seismic Zone About once a year, residents of the counties at the border between Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas will feel the ground roll beneath their feet. This image maps out the location of earthquakes in this area over a 30-year period and clearly illustrates a major feature: the New Madrid Seismic Zone. This zone produces about 1 quake that can be felt per year in addition to many small earthquakes…and has historically produced really big ones.

The pattern of earthquakes clearly traces out a fault with 3 segments. This fault is not exposed at the surface; these earthquakes take place about 10 kilometers below the Earth’s surface on faults that are remnants of the continent’s ancient history. The story of the New Madrid Seismic Zone begins over 1.5 billion years ago. The continent that would eventually become North America was growing by adding volcanic arcs onto the core that is today found in Canada, expanding outwards a block at a time, when something changed. The center of the growing continent began to pull apart, forming a long rift valley. That valley is named the “Reelfoot Rift”. We don’t know exactly what all the plates were doing that long ago, but its clear that the continent started opening and things stalled. A comparison might be the East African Rift Zone today; the Arabian plate has fully pulled away from Africa to form the Red Sea, but East Africa itself is forming a deep, fault-filled basin loaded with volcanoes. If the East African rift shut down, it would eventually look a lot like the Reelfoot Rift. The continent bears many scars from this rifting. There are igneous rocks throughout the area formed between 1.5 and 1.3 billion years ago. during this rifting Measurements of the gravity and magnetic fields over the rift also illustrate its presence. The modern Mississippi River even generally follows this valley today as the ancient faults still allow enough movement to make the rift zone a lowland in the continent’s center. The faults formed during this rifting event don’t appear at the surface, they have been buried by sediments deposited by the Mississippi River system over the last 100 million years. The cities in the Central United States therefore sit mostly on top of fairly loose sediments that filled in these lowlands at the center of the continent. This is the area that in the early 1800s suffered a surprising series of disasters. Three of the largest earthquakes in U.S. history occurred in the area between Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky over a period of about 3 months starting on December 16, 1811. With earthquakes that occurred before modern seismic instruments were around to measure them it can be difficult to fully tell the story, but these events are important enough that scientists have assembled many details. See how there are 3 segments to the fault? You’ve already seen the reason why there were 3 quakes. The first quake took place on the southernmost segment and ruptured in a strike-slip motion. The second quake took place on the middle segment and ruptured a normal fault. The final quake took place on the northernmost segment and again had a strike-slip motion. This structure therefore looks like a piece of the rift, a normal fault segment with two large strike-slip faults on its edge. The quakes were extremely powerful; USGS estimates place their moment magnitudes at 7.5, 7.7, and 7.7; comparable in strength to the 7.8 Mw 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Because the crust in the Eastern U.S. is older and colder than that in the west, the shaking transmitted over a greater distance; historical records report the earthquakes caused church bells to ring as far away as Boston. The quakes were a disaster for this area even though the population was sparse. The fault motion shifted the Mississippi River’s position, creating the modern Reelfoot Lake and also drowned and submerged many other areas. Sediments shifted and blew out of the ground across the region. Any structures present were likely destroyed, although there are very few remaining records. There was enough damage that a single landholder named John Hardeman Walker was able to cheaply buy up the affected land in the years following the quake as most of the inhabitants simply left. When Missouri became a state in 1818 he lobbied for inclusion of his land in Missouri at the expense of Arkansas, leading to the inclusion of 3 counties in Missouri as a “bootheel”. The New Madrid quakes therefore literally show up on the U.S. map. Although these events are huge, they’re very much an anomaly. We teach that most major earthquakes are associated with boundaries between plates; even if the earthquake is happening far inland of the plate boundary it tends to relate to plate tectonics. The New Madrid quakes are so far from any plate boundary it’s extremely hard to say what is driving the motion on the faults. There are ideas. We do know that plates can transmit stresses long distances as they move; the New Madrid area could be feeling the impact of stresses as far away as California. The New Madrid Area could also be responding to the change in mass on top of it from melting of the huge ice sheets 12,000 years ago. Finally, there are even proposals that a small mantle “hotspot” has interacted with the Central U.S. over the past few million years and that could contribute to stress on the New Madrid Faults. These big quakes aren’t the only things this fault zone has produced. Not only do we see that earthquakes continue to this day, but scientists have also found evidence for previous earthquakes in the centuries prior to historical documentation. When these quakes happen, loose sand in the soil bursts onto the surface like a geyser, a feature called a “sand blow” or a “sand boil” (sand blows covering the land were probably a big reason why it was cheap to buy after the 1812 quakes). Older sand blows have been found indicating several large quake sequences happened on this fault before historical records were recorded, with the most recent ones happening about 1350 and 900 a.d. Furthermore, seismic techniques have been used to image the subsurface throughout the Mississippi valley and found evidence of faults across a broad area that have been active over the past few million years - not just these exact faults, but a multitude of them throughout the valley. The sequence of prehistoric earthquakes and the ongoing smaller quakes is good evidence that this fault is still an active threat. If the smaller quakes were aftershocks of the 1812 sequence, there would be fewer of them with time; instead their rate is pretty much constant, suggesting they’re caused by continued stress on the fault. Although the fault most recently ruptured about 400-500 years apart, there’s no reason why it can’t go sooner next time. In fact, during the US Geological Survey’s most recent earthquake hazard assessment, they increased their assessment of risk from this fault system due to the mapping of the prehistoric earthquakes. If this fault system ruptures again, there are vastly more people in this area than last time. St. Louis, Memphis, and Nashville are all in the area that could see heavy shaking; smaller cities like Paducah, Jackson, Evansville would feel it as well, and smaller towns even closer to the epicenter could feel even stronger shaking. Several factors would likely increase the damage to these cities even beyond what is observed in major earthquakes elsewhere. Almost all the buildings in these areas sit on sediments deposited by the Mississippi River and loose sediments are extremely weak during earthquakes. When shaken, loose sediments break apart and lose all strength, a phenomenon known as liquefaction. Any buildings built atop those sediments will be at risk of severe damage or even collapse (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1WTUw1o). These areas also have very little in the way of building codes that could limit damage. Building codes are hugely important during earthquakes as unprepared buildings tend to completely collapse while limited building codes can save huge numbers of lives. Some of the states in the area do have seismic building codes, but many local areas do not. Major commercial buildings tend to do pretty well during earthquakes if the ground does not liquefy, but only 10% of the local areas have seismic building codes covering residential homes. If another earthquake were to hit these areas, residences would be absolutely devastated and the losses would rival the recent hurricanes as the worst disasters in U.S. history. If you live in these areas, earthquake preparation is smart. Have an earthquake kit, including stored water (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1pz9oUR). Make sure your family knows what to do if a quake starts. Practice the “Drop, cover, and hold on” techniques during the yearly shakeout drills. If you own property, see about a seismic retrofit – a few cheap upgrades can be the difference between no damage and a house being completely lost (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1puIWDj). And, if you have any influence on the political processes in the area, keep pressure on decision-makers to be ready. Cities can and should practice earthquake emergency responses and building codes in this area need to be upgraded to reflect the seismic risk. This fault system is still there and active. It might be 300+ years before another major quake series strikes, or it could be much less. If a major quake does hit, this is not an area you want to be in given current preparation levels. -JBB Image credit: http://bit.ly/1CTZavp Read more (tons of references): https://www.usgs.gov/natural-hazards/earthquake-hazards/lists-maps-and-statistics http://dnr.mo.gov/geology/geosrv/geores/techbulletin1.htm http://www.new-madrid.mo.us/index.aspx?nid=132 http://s1.sos.mo.gov/archives/history/bootheel http://www.showme.net/~fkeller/quake/maps.htm http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3071/pdf/FS09-3071.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1538e/report.pdf http://www.britannica.com/event/New-Madrid-earthquakes-of-1811-1812 http://www.reelfoot.com/new_madrid_earthquake.htm http://bit.ly/1OvtNsu http://www.shakeout.org/centralus/

#missouri #science #bootheel #geology #seismic #reelfoot #new madrid #memphis #nashville #st. louis #tennessee #illinois #arkansas #the earth story #geophysics #quake #earthquake #1811 #1812 #history

[arcticdementor]

In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.

This is not what we find. If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?

This post started as an investigation into Woke Capital, one of the most important developments in the last decade or so of American politics. Although big business pressuring politicians is not new (the NFL moved the Super Bowl from Arizona over MLK day), the scope of the issues on which corporations feel the need to weigh in is certainly expanding, now including LGBT issues, abortion laws, voting rights, kneeling during the national anthem, and gun control.

…

As I started to research the topic, however, I realized there wasn’t much to explain. Asking why corporations are woke is like asking why Hispanics tend to have two arms, or why the Houston Rockets have increased their number of 3-point shots taken over the last few decades. All humans tend to have two arms, and all NBA teams shoot more 3-pointers than in the past, so focusing on one subset of the population that has the same characteristics as all others in the group misses the point.

I think one reason Woke Capital is getting so much attention is because we expect business to be more right-leaning, and corporations throwing in with the party of more taxes and regulation strikes us as odd. We are used to schools, non-profits, mainline religions, etc. taking liberal positions and feel like business should be different. But business is just being assimilated into a larger trend.

Corporations are woke, meaning left wing on social issues relative to the general population, because institutions are woke. So the question becomes why are institutions woke?

…

Through the lens of ordinal utility, in which people simply rank what they want to happen, we are about equal. I prefer Republicans to Democrats, while you have the opposite preference. But when we think in terms of cardinal utility – in layman’s terms, how bad people want something to happen – it’s no contest. You are going to be much more influential than me. Most people are relatively indifferent to politics and see it as a small part of their lives, yet a small percentage of the population takes it very seriously and makes it part of its identity. Those people will tend to punch above their weight in influence, and institutions will be more responsive to them.

Elections are a measure of ordinal preferences. As long as you care enough to vote, it doesn’t matter how much you care about the election outcome, as everyone’s voice is the same. But for everything else – who speaks up in a board meeting about whether a corporation should take a political position, who protests against a company taking a position one side or the other finds offensive, etc. – cardinal utility maters a lot. Only a small minority of the public ever bothers to try to influence a corporation, school, or non-profit to reflect certain values, whether from the inside or out.

In an evenly divided country, if one side simply cares more, it’s going to exert a disproportionate influence on all institutions, and be more likely to see its preferences enacted in the time between elections when most people aren’t paying much attention.

…

Here are two graphs that have been getting a lot of attention

What jumps out to me in these figures is not only how left leaning large institutions are, but how the same is true for most professions. Whether you are looking by institution or by individuals, there are more donations to Biden than Trump. Yet Republicans get close to half the votes! Where are the Trump supporters? What these graphs reveal is a larger story, in which more people give to liberal causes and candidates than to conservative ones, even if Americans are about equally divided in which party they support (and no, this isn’t the result of liberals being wealthier, the connections between income and ideology or party are pretty weak). Here are some graphs from late October showing Biden having more individual donors than Trump in every battleground state.

…

In the 2012 election, Obama raised $234 million from small individual contributors, compared to $80 million for Romney, while also winning among large contributors.

…

In September 2009, at the height of the Tea Party movement, conservatives held the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” which drew something like 60,000-70,000 people, leading one newspaper to call it “the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.” Since that time, the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington has drawn massive crowds, with estimates for some years ranging widely from low six figures to mid-to-high six figures. March for Life is not to be confused with “March for Our Lives,” a pro-gun control rally that activists claim saw 800,000 people turn out in 2018. All these events were dwarfed by the Women’s March in opposition to Trump, which drew by one estimate “between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894). That translates into 1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population of 318,900,000 people (our best guess is 1.3 percent).” Even if the two left-wing academics who did this research are letting their bias infuse their work, there is no question that protesting is generally a left-wing activity, as conservatives themselves realize.

People who engage in protesting care more about politics than people who donate money, and people who donate money care more than people who simply vote. Imagine a pyramid with voters at the bottom and full-time activists on top, and as you move up the pyramid it gets much narrower and more left-wing. Multiple strands of evidence indicate this would basically be an accurate representation of society.

Another line of evidence showing that the left simply cares more about politics comes from Noah Carl, who has put together data showing liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically. Here are two graphs demonstrating the general point.

…

There’s a great irony here. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical of pure democracy, and believe in individuals coming together and forming civil society organizations away from government. Yet conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.

Debates over voting rights make the opposite assumption, as conservatives tend to want more restrictions on voting, and liberals fewer, with National Review explicitly arguing against a purer form of democracy. Conservatives may be right that liberals are less likely to care enough to do basic things like bring a photo ID and correctly fill out a ballot. If this is true, Republicans are the party of people who care enough to vote when doing so is made slightly more difficult but not enough to do anything else, while Democrats are the party of both the most active and least active citizens. Yet while being the “care only enough to vote” party might be adequate for winning elections, the future belongs to those at the tail end of the distribution who really want to change the world.

The discussion here makes it hard to suggest reforms for conservatives. Do you want to give government more power over corporations? None of the regulators will be on your side. Leave corporations alone? Then you leave power to Woke Capital, though it must to a certain extent be disciplined and limited by the preferences of consumers. Start your own institutions? Good luck staffing them with competent people for normal NGO or media salaries, and if you’re not careful they’ll be captured by your enemies anyway, hence Conquest’s Second Law. And the media will be there every step of the way to declare any of your attempts at taking power to be pure fascism, and brush aside any resistance to your schemes as righteous anger, up to and including rioting and acts of violence.

…

From this perspective we might want to consider this passage from Scott Alexander, who writes the following in his review of a biography of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in, but getting a political party that's against the elites is really hard and usually the sort of thing that gets claimed rather than accomplished, because elites naturally rise to the top of everything.

But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly. Democracy is a pure numbers game, so it's hard for the elites to control - the populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic - for example, shut down the regular media and replace it with a government-controlled media run by its supporters.

When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good", which every art school and art critic attacks as clueless Philistinism. Every artist in the country will make groundbreaking exciting new art criticizing the government's poor judgment, while the government desperately looks for a few technicians willing to take their money and make, I don't know, pretty landscape paintings or big neoclassical buildings.

The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process. Thus the stereotype of the "right-wing strongman", who gets busy with the crushing.

So the idea of "right-wing populism" might invoke this general concept of somebody who, because they have made themselves the champion of the populace against the elites, will probably end up incentivized to crush all the organic processes of civil society, and yoke culture and academia to the will of government in a heavy-handed manner.

To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.

#richard hanania #substack

[balkanradfem]

When we see a tree, we tend to think of it as a singular unit – just as we think of ourselves as individuals. But biologists have discovered that it’s not quite so simple. They have come to understand that trees depend on certain kinds of fungi in the soil: hair-thin structures called hyphae that interlace with cells in the roots of trees to form mycorrhiza. The fungi benefit by receiving someof the sugar that plants produce through photosynthesis (which it cannot otherwise make), while the trees benefit in turn by receiving elements like phosphorous and nitrogen that they cannot produce for themselves, and without which they cannot survive.

But this reciprocity is not confined to just two parties in this ancient relationship. Invisible fungal networks also connect the roots of different trees to one another, sometimes over great distances, forming an underground internet that allows them to communicate, and even to share energy, nutrients and medicine. The ecologist Robert Macfarlane explains how this works: A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbours. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it.

It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net. 16 Trees co-operate. They communicate. They share. Not only among members of the same species, but across species barriers: Douglas firs and birches feed each other. And it’s not just trees; we now know that all plants – except for a handful of species – have this same relationship with mycorrhiza. Just as with our gut bacteria, these findings challenge how we think about the boundaries between species. Is a tree really an individual? Can it really be conceived as a separate unit? Or is it an aspect of a broader, multi-species organism?

There’s also something else going on here – something perhaps even more revolutionary. Dr Suzanne Simard, a professor in the department of forest & conservation at the University of British Columbia, has argued that mycorrhizal networks among plants operate like neural networks in humans and other animals; they function in remarkably similar ways, passing information between nodes. And just as the structure of neural networks enables cognition and intelligence in animals, mycorrhizal networks provide similar capacities to plants. Recent research shows that the network not only facilitates transmission, communication and co-operation – just like our neurons do – it also facilitates problem-solving, learning, memory and decision-making.

These words are not just metaphorical. The ecologist Monica Gagliano has published groundbreaking research on plant intelligence, showing that plants remember things that happen to them, and change their behaviour accordingly. In other words, they learn. In a recent interview with Forbes, she insisted: ‘My work is not about metaphors at all; when I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.’ Indeed, plants actively change their behaviour as they encounter new challenges and receive messages about the changing world around them. Plants sense: they see, hear, feel and smell, and they respond accordingly. If you’ve ever seen time-lapse footage of a vine growing up a tree, you’ll have an idea of what this looks like in action: that vine is no automaton – it’s sensing, moving, balancing, solving problems, trying to figure out how to navigate new terrain. The more we learn, the stranger (or perhaps more familiar?) it all becomes. Simard’s work shows that trees can recognise their own relatives through mycorrhizal networks. Older ‘mother’ trees can identify nearby saplings that came from their own seeds, and they use this information to decide how to allocate resources in times of stress. Simard also describes how trees seem to have ‘emotional’ responses to trauma in a way that’s not dissimilar to animals. After a machete whack or during an aphid attack, their serotonin levels change (yes, they have serotonin, along with a number of neurochemicals that are common in animal nervous systems), and they start pumping out emergency messages to their neighbours.

Of course, none of this is to say that plant intelligence is exactly like that of animals. In fact, scientists warn that our urge to constantly compare the intelligence of some species with that of others is exactly the problem: it ends up blinding us to how other kinds of intelligence might work. Set out in search of a brain and you’ll never even notice the mycorrhiza that have been pulsing through the earth, evolving right under our feet, for 450 million years. This research is just taking off, and we have no idea where it might lead. But Simard is careful to point out that it’s not exactly new: If you listen to some of the early teachings of the Coast Salish and the Indigenous people along the western coast of North America, they knew [about these insights] already. It’s in the writings and in the oral history.

The idea of the mother tree has long been there. The fungal networks, the below-ground networks that keep the whole forest healthy and alive, that’s also there. That these plants interact and communicate with each other, that’s all there. They used to call the trees the tree people … Western science shut that down for a while and now we’re getting back to it.

Trees aren’t only connected with each other. They are also connected with us. Over the past few years, research into human–tree relationships has yielded some truly striking findings. A team of scientists in Japan conducted an experiment with hundreds of people around the country. They asked half of the participants to walk for fifteen minutes through a forest, and the other half to walk through an urban setting, and then they tested their emotional states. In every case, the forest walkers experienced significant mood improvements when compared to the urban walkers, plus a decline in tension, anxiety, anger, hostility, depression and fatigue. The benefits were immediate and effective. Trees also have an impact on our behaviour. Researchers have found that spending time around trees makes people more co-operative, kinder and more generous. It increases our sense of awe and wonder at the world, which in turn changes how we interact with others. It reduces aggression and incivility. Studies in Chicago, Baltimore and Vancouver have all discovered that neighbourhoods with higher tree cover have significantly fewer crimes, including assault, robbery and drug use – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other confounding factors.

It’s almost as though being with trees makes us more human. We don’t know quite why this happens. Is it just that green environments are somehow more pleasant and calming? A study in Poland suggests that doesn’t explain it. They had people spend fifteen minutes standing in a wintertime urban forest: no leaves, no green, no shrubbery; just straight, bare trees. One might think such an environment would have minimal if any positive impact on people’s mood, but not so: participants standing in the bare forest reported significant improvements in their psychological and emotional states when compared to a control group that spent those fifteen minutes hanging out in an urban landscape. And it’s not just mood and behaviour. It turns out that trees have an impact on our physical health too – in concrete, material terms. Living near trees has been found to reduce cardiovascular risk. Walking in forests has been found to lower blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse rates and other indicators of stress and anxiety.

Even more intriguingly, a team of scientists in China found that elderly patients with chronic health conditions demonstrated significant improvements in immune function after spending time in forests. We don’t know for sure, but this may have something to do with the chemical compounds that trees exhale into the air. The aromatic vapours released by cypress, for example, have been found to enhance the activity of a number of human immune cells, while reducing stress hormone levels. In an attempt to quantify the overall benefit of trees, scientists in Canada found that trees have a more powerful impact on our health and well-being than even large sums of money. Having just ten more trees on a city block decreases cardio-metabolic conditions in ways comparable to earning an extra $20,000. And it improves one’s sense of well-being as much as earning an extra $10,000, moving to a neighbourhood with $10,000 higher median income, or being seven years younger. These results are astonishing. There’s a real mystery here, which scientists still do not yet understand. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, we have co-evolved with trees for millions of years. We even share DNA with trees. After countless generations, we’ve come to depend on them for our health and happiness just as we depend on other humans. We are, in a very real sense, relatives.

- Jason Hickel,  Less is More

#quote #less is more #trees #tree loving writing #tree knowledge #tree wisdom

[caainhurst]

JUNE 1, 2021

Cities and towns are opening back up after their coronavirus-induced shutdowns. Job vacancies have surged to historic highs. Millions of Americans report that they are looking for work. Yet employers are struggling to fill available positions, leaving them with no option but to shorten their business’s hours of operation and pay overtime. Payroll growth has proved lackluster.

The familiar story about what’s happening goes like this: America is in the midst of a labor shortage. Businesses are unable to find enough workers, in no small part because of the country’s generous unemployment-insurance payments and repeated stimulus checks. This is a nightmare for growing companies, a trend that’s slowing the economic recovery, and a problem that policy must solve. Workers are “dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” the Chamber of Commerce said, calling the situation a “very real threat” to the recovery. In response, 23 states and counting have slashed unemployment-insurance payments.

But what has rapidly become conventional wisdom is not necessarily wisdom at all. The labor shortage, so far as it exists, seems to have many complicated causes. Even if benefits are among them, policy makers should not rush in to help ensure a flood of low-wage workers for America’s businesses. As the pandemic abates and the economy strengthens, why not focus on creating good ones?

The evidence of a labor shortage comes both from hard numbers and from soft anecdotes. In terms of the hard numbers: Lots of Americans want work. Roughly 10 million Americans are looking for a job, and the unemployment rate is an uncomfortably high 6.1 percent. At the same time, lots of businesses want to hire. Employers report that they have 8.1 million positions open, the largest number in recorded history. Yet the number of Americans taking a job remains subdued: Payrolls grew by just 266,000 in April, when many economists expected a number as high as 2 million.

In terms of the softer stuff: More and more business owners are complaining, loudly, that they cannot find people to work. Restaurants are offering hiring bonuses to try to get potential workers in the door, Uber and Lyft are desperate for drivers, and Costco, McDonald’s, Sheetz, and Chipotle, along with many small businesses, have raised wages to attract employees.

The issue, many business executives and politicians claim, is that the country’s social-insurance and anti-poverty programs are providing more of a hammock than a safety net: Many workers are getting a $300-a-week bonus on top of their regular state UI payments, and are still flush from the rounds of stimulus checks sent out during the pandemic. Workers would rather stay home and collect the dole than go out and take a job, the argument goes. “Continuing these programs only worsens the workforce issues we are currently facing,” Missouri Governor Mike Parson said at a press conference, announcing a cut to the state’s UI payments. “It is time we ended these programs that have incentivized people to stay out of the workforce.”

But surveys of workers—and the simple observation of the strange and still-awful reality we find ourselves in—indicate many reasons why workers are hesitant or unable to take new gigs. The pandemic is abating, but it is not over. Many workers have preexisting medical conditions or a sick family member to worry about, meaning they cannot take a frontline, essential job. Millions of parents are still struggling with the closure of child-care centers and schools. More personal, less easily quantified impulses are at play too: After a year of immense personal and collective trauma, many people just want to take a beat before committing to a new job.

Wages are another pivotal factor. Workers used to making $21 an hour are unlikely to take jobs for $17 an hour—nor would doing so be good for the American economy. Workers used to making $17 an hour are unlikely to take a much more dangerous job for the same amount—nor would doing so be good for the American economy. And workers used to making $15 an hour, who now have a reasonable expectation that more $21-an-hour jobs will be available in a few weeks, are unlikely to take a job for $15 an hour—nor would doing so be good for the American economy.

Yet many employers are dragging their feet in raising wages to make their job offerings worth taking, given the economic climate and the risks of service work. Much of the “wage growth” evident in recent statistics is due to high-wage workers being much less likely to have lost their jobs than low-wage workers; once you account for that fact, wages have not risen much at all. This is part of what accounts for the “labor shortage.” The issue isn’t workers. It’s employers.

The country’s generous UI is likely playing a role too. In a recent survey by ZipRecruiter, job seekers reported feeling far less financial pressure to take the first job they were offered, likely because UI and stimulus checks buoyed family finances. But a large body of research has shown that UI has a more moderate effect on job-acceptance rates than one might think, because it offers only the lowest-paid workers more incentive to say no.

Moreover, UI helping drive wages up by giving workers the option of saying no to a bad job is not a bad thing. Ample UI improves what is sometimes called “job match,” because it gives job seekers the ability to wait for the right position to come along. It also has disproportionate benefits for Black and Latino workers, who have borne a disproportionate burden of both the health crisis and the economic crisis of the past year.

A more philosophical point needs to be made here, too: The job of the government is not to ensure a supply of workers at whatever wage rates businesses set. And workers’ having the power to say no is not a policy problem that the government needs to solve. For decades, though, Washington and America’s statehouses have helped rig the country’s policy infrastructure in employers’ favor.

The federal government has set the country’s wage floor below its poverty line, for instance, and has not increased the minimum wage to account for improvements in productivity and output over time. The current federal minimum is just $7.25 an hour, compared with roughly $10 an hour in Ireland and Canada, $11 in the Netherlands, $12 in France and Germany, and $12.50 in Australia and Luxembourg. Indeed, the United States has the lowest minimum wage compared with typical or average wages of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That helps explain why the United States has the highest share of low-wage work among the OECD countries. Fully one-quarter of American workers earn less than two-thirds of the median wage, compared with just 5 percent in Belgium and 12 percent in Japan.

The government has also proved complicit in the collapse of unionization and collective bargaining, making it easy for businesses to beat back organizing efforts and difficult for workers to band together to demand raises, benefits, and safe working conditions. The country has half, one-fifth, one-ninth of the collective-bargaining coverage of many of our peer countries. This has increased inequality in America, holding down wages while bolstering corporate profits.

At the same time, the government has declined to make companies compete against one another—for customers or for workers. Corporate concentration has increased, and any number of industries are dominated by just a handful of giant players. This pushes up profits and decimates wages, particularly in areas with fewer employers.

In recent decades, the government has also decided to allow the unfettered proliferation of Uber-type jobs, sacrificing the needs of low-wage workers in order to satisfy the preferences of wealthy, urban consumers and calling it all “innovation.” The central “innovation” of the gig economy is to call employees “contractors,” to avoid giving them benefits and a stable salary.

Even the American safety net exists not to eliminate poverty so much as to use poverty as a cudgel to force individuals into low-wage work. The earned-income tax credit goes only to people with earned income; food stamps and welfare benefits require a job-search effort. Over time, UI has become in some ways more and more like welfare; many states have made benefits shorter in term and stingier in size.

The government has long encouraged low-wage jobs and forced people into them. This is what we are seeing when governors rush to slash UI at the first sign of a real recovery and when policy makers describe workers’ demands as a “drag” on the economy. Uncle Sam is acting in the interests of low-wage employers, not the economy as a whole.

Perhaps the status quo is changing. The Biden administration has pushed a new New Deal designed to end poverty and provide greater economic security to the 99 percent. It is arguing that bolstered, extended UI should be kept in place for the benefit of American families. It is also promising to be the most pro-union government in decades. Part of this push must be giving workers the power to say no to employers—and putting employers in the uncomfortable position of having to compete for workers.

Maybe a labor shortage is a good thing.

#long post #eat the rich #equality

[rapeculturerealities]

For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch.

First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care.

Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men.

The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities.

“We’ve never seen this before,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. Recessions usually start by gutting the manufacturing and construction industries, where men hold most of the jobs, she said.

The impact on the economic and social landscape is both immediate and enduring.

The triple punch is not just pushing women out of jobs they held, but also preventing many from seeking new ones. For an individual, it could limit prospects and earnings over a lifetime. Across a nation, it could stunt growth, robbing the economy of educated, experienced and dedicated workers.

Inequality in the home — in terms of household and child care responsibilities — influences inequality in the workplace, Misty L. Heggeness, a principal economist at the Census Bureau, concluded in a working paper on the pandemic’s impact for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Without a more comprehensive system of support, she said, “mothers will forever be vulnerable to career scarring during any major crisis like this pandemic.”

The latest jobs report from the Labor Department showed that some of the damage was reversed last month as the service industry revived, nudging down the jobless rate for women to 6.5 percent, slightly below men’s. But there were still 4.5 million fewer women employed in October than there were a year ago, compared with 4.1 million men.

And according to the Census Bureau, a third of the working women 25 to 44 years old who are unemployed said the reason was child care demands. Only 12 percent of unemployed men cited those demands.

Laci Oyler has felt that pressure. Her husband, employed by a large printing company, was already working from home when the pandemic shuttered day care and schools in Milwaukee. But after two days of taking care of their two young sons, “he said, ‘Absolutely no way,’” Ms. Oyler explained. So she cut her weekly hours as a mental health counselor for Alverno College, a small Catholic institution, to five from 32.

In August, when she learned that public schools would continue to offer only online classes for the fall, Ms. Oyler decided she had little choice but to take an unpaid leave.

This month, she decided to resign.

“Work is so much more than what you’re taking home as payment,” Ms. Oyler said. “But when you look at that bottom line of risk versus reward, it doesn’t seem worth it,” she added, referring to the cost of child care combined with the possibility of coronavirus infection for her or her children.

As a licensed professional, Ms. Oyler does not expect to have difficulty returning to the work force when she is ready. But for most working women, dropping out to take care of children or other family members exacts a sizable toll, several studies have shown. Rejoining is hard, and if women do, they generally earn less and have less security. And the longer someone is out of work, the tougher it is to get back in.

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, said this was the first recession where the economy was so intertwined with the network of child care.

“During the Great Depression, no one cared about the care sector,” she said. “Women weren’t in the labor force, and they weren’t supposed to be.”

One reason that Congress started giving financial assistance to poor households headed by women in the 1930s, under a program originally titled Aid to Dependent Children, was so they could stay home with their children and not compete with men for jobs, Ms. Goldin said.

Only during World War II, when women were urgently needed in factories and offices to replace men who were in the military, did the government establish a far-reaching federally subsidized network of nurseries and child care centers in nearly every state. Once the war ended, so did the support.

“You cannot have a contented mother working in a war factory if she is worrying about her children, and you cannot have children running wild in the streets without a bad effect on the coming generations,” Senator Carl Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, testified in 1943.

Women make up roughly half of the country’s work force. They range from entry-level to professional, they live in urban, suburban and rural areas, and they often care for toddlers and teenagers. But the burdens of the pandemic-induced recession have fallen most heavily on low-income and minority women and single mothers.

Members of these overlapping groups often have the most unpredictable schedules, and the fewest benefits, and are least able to afford child care. They fill most of the essential jobs that cannot be done from home and, therefore, carry the most risk for exposure to the virus. At the same time, they make up a disproportionate share of the service industries that have lost the most jobs. The jobless rate is 9.2 percent for Black women and 9 percent for Hispanic women.

When the pandemic caused housecleaning jobs to dry up, Andrea Poe was able to find cleaning work at a resort in Orange Beach, Ala., about a 45-minute drive from Pensacola, Fla., where she and her 14-year-old daughter, Cheyenne Poe, had moved in with an older daughter, her fiancé and their five children.

The families were behind in the rent and threatened with eviction when Hurricane Sally ripped through the coast in September. To escape the floods, they piled into two cars, drove to Biloxi, Miss., and spent five nights in a Walmart parking lot.

Now Ms. Poe and Cheyenne, who has turned 15, are in Peoria, Ariz., living in a room in her mother’s trailer.

She said she was applying for jobs every day, so far without luck. And the bills keep coming. Ms. Poe has missed two consecutive loan payments on her car and worries that it will be repossessed.

“I’m just hoping my unemployment checks come through so my car doesn’t get taken away,” she said. “If I lose my car, I’ll never be able to get a job.”

Women with more resources are in a better position, but they struggle in other ways.

When the pandemic ripped through Seattle and compelled Kenna Smith, 37, to work from home, she initially saw one upside — a chance to spend more time with her 3-year-old son.

“At first, I thought I’d just focus on my child,” said Ms. Smith, who had just started a branding and design company, Wildforth Creative. “It was fun for a while, but then the stress was intense.”

Like many families who were worried about the risk of infection or short of money and space, Ms. Smith and her husband let their son’s nanny go. Her husband, project manager for a general contractor, worked out of their bedroom.

“I’m not sure why it totally fell on me,” Ms. Smith said of child care. “I’m out in the living room, dining room area with a whole bunch of toys strewn about, with my laptop, trying to run my business.

“I was wanting to work and wanting my business to succeed so badly,” she said. “I didn’t realize. …” She paused, interrupted by a voice: “Mommy, I want some applesauce.”

The couple recently decided to hire a part-time nanny, concluding that despite the expense, it was the only way both could keep working. (Ms. Smith’s sister is also helping out.)

From 2015 until the pandemic, women’s increasing participation in the work force was a primary driver of the economy’s expansion, said Ms. Stevenson, the Michigan economist. “It’s why the economy grew the way it did, why employers could keep hiring month after month,” she said.

Since February, women’s participation in the labor force has been falling, with the biggest decreases among women without college degrees who have children.

Changes forced on women by the pandemic elicit a mixture of anxiety and hope.

Many women worry that the changes will sharply narrow women’s choices and push them unwillingly into the unpaid role of full-time homemaker.

And the impact could stretch over generations, paring women’s retirement savings, and reducing future earnings of children now in low-income households.

“We are creating inequality 20 years down the line that is even greater than we have today,” said Ms. Stevenson, who was a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “This is how inequality begets inequality.”

Yet there is also the possibility that the mounting pressures could create momentum to complete the unfinished project of fully integrating women into the work force by providing a system of family support — like affordable child care and paid parental and sick leave.

“I think we’re really at a crossroads,” said Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation and one of the authors of a new report on the pandemic and working women. “We’ve never built a workplace that worked for people with caregiving responsibilities.”

#covid-19 #financial #sexism #misogyny

[yobaba30]

Stolen from Twitter

I owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology.  I’ve been critical of the Trump presidency these last four years, and am still exhausted from the experience. But to be fair, President Trump wasn’t that bad, other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Part 2 cont… Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic respon used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked US falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fucked up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, Part 3 continues… seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from  a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment. But other than that. . . Please share. This is how history books will read, because these are PROVABLE FACTS! Truth

[bigmacdaddio]

Trump

Trump will never be forgotten because he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed over half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach or disinfectant into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader, believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head of the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history, threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic response, used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government, falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fu**ed up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from  a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “F**k tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and keep his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, March 7, 2021

Job Market Picks Up Strength (NYT) Driven by unexpectedly large job gains at the nation’s restaurants and bars, the labor market picked up strength in February, raising hopes that the economic recovery was taking hold more firmly. All told, employers added 379,000 jobs, the government reported Friday, the strongest showing since October. The increase, as vaccination efforts ramped up and restrictions on businesses eased, followed a deep loss in December and a modest rise in January. But the February pace was still far short of the gains recorded from late spring to early fall as the pandemic’s sudden stranglehold loosened. There are roughly 9.5 million fewer jobs than a year ago, and a year’s worth of lost opportunities—as many as two million jobs that would most likely have been created if previous hiring trends had continued. Congress is considering a $1.9 trillion package of pandemic relief intended to carry struggling households and businesses through the coming months.

Can Biden Keep Coal Country From Becoming a ‘Ghost Town’? (NYT) From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia. President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry. President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there. But after generations of promises, communities once reliant on coal mining are understandably skeptical. Administration after administration has tried to bring the region sustained prosperity, yet many communities remain on the brink. In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation. And an outward migration over several decades has cut the populations of some counties nearly in half, leaving local governments strapped for tax revenue and struggling to fund essential services. “Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”

Hyperinflation Pushes Venezuela to Print 1,000,000-Bolivar Bills (Bloomberg) Venezuela said it will introduce new large-denomination bolivar notes as hyperinflation renders most bills worthless, forcing citizens to turn to the U.S. dollar for everyday transactions. The country’s central bank posted a statement on its website Friday saying it would begin circulating the new 200,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 bills to “fulfill the current economy’s requirements” without providing further details. The 1,000,000 note—the largest in the nation’s history—is worth only $0.53 cents. As Venezuela’s economy shrank for a seventh straight year in 2020, the government turned a blind eye to a growing number of dollar transactions, kick-started by rolling power outages that prevented credit and debit card purchases and fostered the use of cash. About 66% of transactions across the country are estimated to be made in foreign currency, according to Ecoanalitica. While the dollar has gained ground, Venezuelans continue to rely on bolivar bills for public transportation and to purchase subsidized fuel. The Caracas subway recently issued an electronic payment system after it routinely stopped charging passengers due to cash shortages.

Protesters and Police Clash in Paraguay Amid Anger Over Pandemic Response (Reuters) Protesters clashed with the police in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, late on Friday as anger over the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis boiled onto the streets and forced the resignation of the country’s top health official. Security forces fired rubber bullets and tear gas at hundreds of demonstrators who had gathered around the Congress building, while protesters broke down security barriers, burned road barricades and threw stones at the police. The protests broke out amid growing outrage as coronavirus infections hit record levels and hospitals verged on collapse throughout Paraguay.

UK COVID-19 lockdown provides boom towns for rats (Deutsche Welle) Rats, and other members of the rodent family, have a lousy reputation. They crop up regularly in our everyday language to describe bleak situations and sentiments (Rats!, caught in a rat race, someone with rat-like features—you get the drift). They seem to be omnipresent in the best of times, but now, they’re having a, er, field day. In London and other major cities across the UK, rat sightings have soared during the pandemic. The British Pest Control Association (BPCA), which represents 700 vermin catchers across the country, said its members reported a 51% hike in rodent activity during the first lockdown last spring, and a 78% increase in November after the next lockdown. Typically, rats avoid humans and make drains and sewers their homes. However, as a result of shuttered businesses and deserted high streets, the creatures are out in full force and making restaurants, pubs and empty buildings their new habitat as they look for other sources to satisfy their dietary needs. “It seems their lifestyle patterns are changing. Rats, in particular, are also becoming more visible in areas of population. With less footfall across cities and towns, there is less associated food waste being left in bins and on the floor. Also, bin areas behind restaurants and pubs are empty and free of food waste making it unavailable for the local rat population,” Natalie Bungay, technical officer with the BPCA, told DW via email. As a result, rats are also moving further afield to find other food sources. “Rats seem to be moving from cities closer to residential areas, where we’re still filling our bins with food waste,” says Bungay.

Brexit Antagonism Escalates as EU, U.K. Go Another Round (Bloomberg) When the U.K. and European Union shook hands on a trade deal late last year, few expected the new relationship to be plain sailing. And as with many divorces, antagonism between the sides has refused to fade. Among the most sensitive issues is Northern Ireland, and tensions ramped up considerably this week when the U.K. announced it will ignore some crucial obligations under the Brexit deal and the EU responded with a dramatic threat of legal action. With Prime Minister Boris Johnson already under pressure from members of his own party to rip up the Northern Ireland deal, the risk is a further escalation that erodes relations. That could have spillovers far beyond politics, and the ongoing saga is a frustration for business. The U.K.’s huge finance industry, for example, is seeing the potential for beneficial trade agreements being slowly whittled away by endless political spats.

Pope, top Iraq Shiite cleric hold historic, symbolic meeting (AP) Pope Francis and Iraq’s top Shiite cleric delivered a powerful message of peaceful coexistence Saturday, urging Muslims in the war-weary Arab nation to embrace Iraq’s long-beleaguered Christian minority during an historic meeting in the holy city of Najaf. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said religious authorities have a role in protecting Iraq’s Christians, and that Christians should live in peace and enjoy the same rights as other Iraqis. The Vatican said Francis thanked al-Sistani for having “raised his voice in defense of the weakest and most persecuted” during some of the most violent times in Iraq’s recent history. Al-Sistani, 90, is one of the most senior clerics in Shiite Islam and his rare but powerful political interventions have helped shape present-day Iraq. He is a deeply revered figure in Shiite-majority Iraq and his opinions on religious and other matters are sought by Shiites worldwide. The historic meeting in al-Sistani’s humble home was months in the making, with every detail painstakingly discussed and negotiated between the ayatollah’s office and the Vatican. The “very positive” meeting lasted a total of 40 minutes, said a religious official in Najaf.

A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles (Washington Post) Beside the ruins of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, more than 1,000 huge metal tanks loom in silent testament to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors 10 years ago this month. The tanks contain nearly 1.25 million tons of cooling water from the 2011 disaster and groundwater seepage over the years—equivalent to around 500 Olympic-size swimming pools—most of it still dangerously radioactive. Running out of space to build more tanks, the government wants to gradually release the water into the sea—after it has been decontaminated and diluted—over the next three decades or more. Even though a formal decision has yet to be announced, the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have insisted that an ocean release is their preferred solution and that it is perfectly safe. The only thing holding them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could generate before the Games begin in July, experts say. The idea of releasing the water has infuriated Fukushima’s fishing community, only now getting back on its feet after taking a battering in the wake of the 2011 disaster and the subsequent ocean contamination. Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away on the other side of Japan.

Hong Kong reforms prevent ‘dictatorship of the majority’, pro-Beijing lawmaker says (Reuters) China’s proposal for Hong Kong electoral reforms could prevent a “dictatorship of the majority”, pro-Beijing Hong Kong lawmaker Martin Liao told Reuters on Saturday. The Chinese parliament is discussing plans to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system to ensure Beijing loyalists are in charge. Hong Kong representatives, in Beijing for an annual session, say the change is necessary and desirable. “Many people in Hong Kong are politically immature,” Liao, who sits on both Hong Kong’s and China’s legislature, said in a telephone interview. “They think ‘one man one vote’ is the best thing, and they take advice from countries that don’t even have ‘one man one vote’,” Liao said, referring to how neither the U.S. President nor the British Prime Minister is elected by a popular vote. The proposed changes, which include expanding the city’s Election Committee from 1,200 to 1,500 people and expanding the city’s Legislative Council from 70 to 90 seats, will make Hong Kong’s electoral system more “representative”, and less prone to “dictatorship of the majority”, Liao added. Critics say that Beijing would be able to stack the two bodies with even more pro-establishment members, to gain the numerical superiority needed to influence important decisions such as the election of the city’s Chief Executive, leaving Hong Kong voters with less direct say in who they want to lead them.

Myanmar forces fire tear gas, stun grenades on protest as U.N. envoy calls for action (Reuters) Myanmar security forces used tear gas and stun grenades to break up a protest in Yangon on Saturday, just hours after a United Nations special envoy called on the Security Council to take action against the ruling junta for the killings of protesters. The Southeast Asian country has been plunged in turmoil since the military overthrew and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1, with daily protests and strikes that have choked business and paralysed administration. More than 50 protesters have been killed since the coup, according to the United Nations—at least 38 on Wednesday alone. The army says it has been restrained in stopping the protests, but has said it will not allow them to threaten stability.

Lebanon on edge as protests persist, caretaker PM pleads for new government (Reuters) Demonstrators blocked various roadways across Lebanon for the fifth day in a row on Saturday, and a heavy army presence filled parts of the capital as anger simmered over the country’s economic downturn. Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab threatened in a speech earlier in the day to stop performing his duties to pressure politicians to form a new government. Groups of protesters have been burning tyres daily to block roads since the Lebanese currency tumbled to a new low on Tuesday, enraging a population long horrified by the country’s financial meltdown. Lebanon’s financial crisis, which erupted in 2019, has wiped out jobs, raised warnings of growing hunger and locked people out of their bank deposits. A new cabinet could implement reforms needed to trigger billions of dollars of international aid.

Electricity, time, and Bitcoin (The Baffler) In early 2018, millions of digital clocks across Europe began falling behind time. Few took notice at first as slight disruptions in the power supply caused bedside alarms and oven timers running on the frequency of electric current to begin lagging. Three minutes were lost in January, three more in February. In March, the Brussels-based European Network of Transmission System Operators of Electricity issued an apology. Whoever was causing the unprecedented power shortages “must cease”—but, until they did, the thirty-six nations plugged into Europe’s common electric grid were tasked with ratcheting up their voltage frequencies to speed the continent’s clocks back up. European authorities soon traced the power fluctuations to North Kosovo, a region commonly described as one of Europe’s last ganglands. Since 2015, its major city, Mitrovica, has been under the control of Srpska Lista, a mafia masquerading as a political party. Around the time Srpska came to power, North Kosovo’s electricity consumption surged. Officials at the Kosovo Electricity Supply Company in Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital city, told me that the region now requires 20 percent more power than it did five years ago. Eventually, it became clear why: across the region, from the shabby apartment blocks of Mitrovica to the cellars of mountain villages, Bitcoin and Ethereum rigs were humming away, fueling a shadow economy of cryptocurrency manufacturing.

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THE MANY HEALTH BENEFITS OF METH

In low, pharmaceutical-grade doses, methamphetamine may actually repair and protect the brain in certain circumstances. But stigma against the drug could be harming patients and holding back research.

TROY FARAHMAY 15, 2019

D-methamphetamine is what generally appears on the street—although it's often cut with other chemicals—whereas l-meth provides a less addictive, shorter-lived high that is less desirable among drug users.

(Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

Ask your doctor about methamphetamine. It's not a phrase you'll ever hear on TV or the radio, but here's a secret: Meth is an incredible medicine. Even the Drug Enforcement Administration admits it, and doctors are known to prescribe it for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD. Historically, meth has been used to reverse barbiturate overdoses and even raise blood pressure during surgery. Some preliminary research suggests that meth can be neuroprotective against stroke and traumatic brain injury, even stimulating the growth of brain cells.

Yet we're constantly warned never to try meth—"not even once," goes the refrain—or it will instantly cause addiction and ruin your life. Before fentanyl was the demon drug du jour, meth was seen as the worst, most destructive, most evil chemical you could find on the streets. Even of late, if you ask the New York Times or NBC, you'll learn that meth, "the forgotten killer," is back with a "vengeance." Other outlets, from Rolling Stone to CNN to The Daily Beast, have raised the alarm about meth use in the context of the opioid overdose crisis.

Stimulant-related deaths are indeed on the rise in North America—in some regions, meth is even more prevalent than heroin. Surveying drug overdoses in America from 1979 through 2016, researchers wrote in Science in September of 2018 that "Methamphetamine deaths have increased most dramatically in the western and southwestern United States."

Meth poisonings accounted for an estimated 14,845 hospitalizations in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and another 15,808 emergency room visits. In 2016, around 7,500 people died from overdosing on stimulants, including meth. If you ask most people, including policymakers, you'll hear that meth is a scourge that can do no good.

But if you've ever used something like Vicks VapoInhaler, you've experienced the healing benefits of meth firsthand. That's because the over-the-counter nasal decongestant contains levomethamphetamine, the levorotary form—or "mirror image"—of the same stuff from Breaking Bad. Procter & Gamble tries to obscure this fact by spelling the active ingredient "levmetamfetamine." Selegiline, a drug for treating Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, also metabolizes into levomethamphetamine.

There is a significant difference between these two opposing molecules. D-methamphetamine is what generally appears on the street—although it's often cut with other chemicals—whereas l-meth provides a less addictive, shorter-lived high that is less desirable among drug users. But people can and do use it recreationally. Abuse is rare, however, in part because the high is shitty, but also because d-meth is so widely available. It's easier to buy a more powerful form of the drug on the street than it is to try to extract it from over-the-counter medications.

Other Americans are prescribed actual, pure meth by their doctors. It happens less frequently these days, but in ADHD, obesity, or narcolepsy cases where nothing else has worked, a drug called Desoxyn (methamphetamine hydrochloride) can sometimes help. It can even be prescribed to children as young as seven.

It's important to make these distinctions. Meth didn't make a "comeback"; it never left. It can't return with a "vengeance" and it can't be "evil" because we're talking about a chemical compound here. It has no personality, no feelings, no intentions.

Thus it does a disservice to science and to medicine, as well as to the people who use these drugs responsibly, to treat a molecule with dualistic properties purely as a poison. And as recent research has shown, we're still uncovering some of the potential therapeutic benefits of methamphetamine. Confronting the stigma associated with meth and highlighting its benefits can better inform drug policy and addiction treatment.

(Photo: HO/Royal Thai Navy/AFP/Getty Images)

'IT'S JUST A STIMULANT, LIKE ANY OTHER STIMULANT'

For Jordan*, the meth he's prescribed works better against his ADHD with fewer side effects than the Adderall he'd been on for 20 years. About five years ago, Jordan asked his doctor if he could try methamphetamine. The doc said sure.

"The first time I brought it to the pharmacy, the pharmacist actually said to me, 'Oh, your doctor wrote this prescription wrong, this is the stuff that they make in meth labs,'" Jordan tells me by phone. "I told him to type 'Desoxyn' into the computer, and he did. He kind of backtracked, [but] he obviously had no idea."

Jordan, a middle-aged man from North Carolina who works in clinical research, now switches every three months between Adderall and Desoxyn to prevent building a tolerance to either stimulant.

Methamphetamine and amphetamine (one of the active ingredients in Adderall) are almost identical chemicals. The main difference between the two is the addition of a second methyl group to methamphetamine's chemical structure. This addition makes meth more lipid-soluble, allowing for easier access across the blood-brain barrier. Meth is therefore not only more potent, but also longer-lasting.

"The medications have definitely been important for me, to be productive, to be successful, not just at work but also in my personal life," Jordan says. "I've been on the medications for years, but I can take Adderall or methamphetamine and take a nap afterwards. I don't have any noticeable side effects."

Jordan also doesn't feel "high" from the doses he takes—approximately 10 to 15 milligrams of meth per day. Doses at this level are well tolerated by most people. It's very difficult to estimate the typical dosages of illicit meth taken on the street, but they are generally many times higher and taken every couple of hours. Further, the route of administration—typically, users smoke or inject illicit meth—allows for more of the drug to enter the bloodstream than taking a prescription pill.

At high doses, meth gives a rush of euphoria, boosting attention span, zapping fatigue, and decreasing appetite. Intense sexual arousal, talkativeness, and rapid thought patterns are also common. Body temperature and heart rate shoot up, which can cause irregular heartbeat, increasing the risk of seizures. If taken repeatedly over long periods, street meth can be highly neurotoxic, inducing paranoia and psychosis.

But illicit meth is also often used to self-medicate, according to Mark Willenbring, an addiction psychiatrist from St. Paul, Minnesota, with over 30 years of practice treating substance-use disorders. In Willenbring's experience, most of his patients who use illegal meth are treating undiagnosed ADHD.

"There's a high degree of comorbidity between substance-use disorders and ADD," Willenbring says. "They used meth for years in a controlled way, they never over-used it, they just used enough to get an effect, and then they stopped. One misconception is that it's always very addictive."

With most people who are addicted to meth, Willenbring says, you can't tell it just by looking at them. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist in Columbia University's Department of Psychology, agrees that the image of a snarling meth addict with bad teeth is a false stereotype. The dental damage so prevalent in anti-drug propaganda, he says, is more likely due to poor nutrition and lack of sleep—not to the drug. "There is no empirical evidence to support the claim that methamphetamine causes physical deformities," Hart wrote in a 2014 co-authored report.

"It's just a stimulant, like any other stimulant," Willenbring says. "It's a marketing issue."

Part of the reason Jordan asked to try Desoxyn in the first place was to see if he'd develop any of the "stereotypical meth addict problems," as he puts it. He hasn't.

"Those of us that know the reality have a responsibility to say, 'Hey, not that shooting up meth isn't bad, but the chemical itself isn't bad,'" Jordan says. "It's just misuse of the chemical that's bad."

For Joan*, a 66-year-old grandmother living off the grid in northern Georgia, Desoxyn makes her feel normal. "Not high, not hyped up, just normal," she tells me. She's been taking prescription meth since 2006, but first tried many other ADHD meds, such as Ritalin and Concerta, with poor results. But Desoxyn has not only helped her socialize, manage bills, and finish her master's degree in social work; it's also helped with Joan's depression and self-esteem.

"The only downside is the cost," she says. "It's one of the oldest drugs on the market, but even generic, it is outrageously expensive."

Still, meth isn't for everyone, of course. Kevin*, a 31-year-old artist from the Midwest, was first prescribed Desoxyn at age 15 to treat extreme fatigue and trouble focusing. But misdiagnosed mental-health issues—his doctors thought he had bipolar disorder, when in fact he had post-traumatic stress from childhood abuse—led to worsening symptoms.

"Being able to just take a bunch of pills that made the exhaustion go away for a while felt like a blessing, but it was just a Band-Aid on the problem," Kevin says. "I became completely dependent upon Desoxyn to function, and any lapse in taking my dose would result in a terrible energy crash."

"In retrospect, my neurologist at the time would have done well to consider the effects of intense stimulants on someone already prone to mania, insomnia, and hallucinations," he says. "I think Desoxyn has its merits as part of a treatment plan for attentive disorders, but that's the thing—it needs to be part of a larger understanding of how and why it might have a negative impact upon the patient's overall health, and should remain closely monitored throughout."

"Stigma is the lens [through] which we see all drug issues. It keeps us from making the best decisions. It is fear-based, not rational, not creative. Because of stigma, we have not fully addressed the opioid crisis."

(Photo: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images)

HOW METH CAN TREAT BRAIN INJURY—AND MUCH MORE

Street doses of meth can be extremely damaging to your health. The purity of such drugs is often unknown, and repeated, high doses of meth have been proven to be neurotoxic. But in low, pharmaceutical-grade doses, meth may actually repair and protect the brain in certain circumstances.

This was first discovered in 2008, when researchers at Queen's Medical Center Neuroscience Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii, analyzed five years of data on traumatic head injuries. They unexpectedly found that patients who tested positive for methamphetamine were significantly less likely to die from the injuries. The authors suggested that meth could have neuroprotective benefits.

To learn more, in 2011, a different team from the University of Montana applied meth to slices of rat brain that had been damaged to resemble the brains of stroke victims. Then they induced strokes in living rats, using a method called embolic MCAO, and injected them with methamphetamine. At low doses, the meth gave better behavioral outcomes and even reduced brain-cell death. At high doses, the meth made outcomes worse.

Because meth stimulates the flow of important neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—the Montana researchers theorized that methamphetamine may provide neuroprotection through multiple pathways. David Poulsen, one of the researchers involved, says this was a "serendipitous discovery."

"So we decided, well, if it worked in stroke, it's probably going to work really well in traumatic brain injury," says Poulsen, now a neurosurgeon at the University of Buffalo who specializes in treatments for protecting the brain after severe damage.

Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, occurs after a violent smash to the skull. Its consequences include concussions on the mild end and coma or death on the severe end. TBI kills around 50,000 Americans annually, according to the CDC, while about 2.8 million of us visit the emergency room for TBI-related injuries every year. There is currently no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for TBI.

So, Paulson and his team reasoned, if meth can already be prescribed for children, why not to adults with TBI?

To test the proposition, Poulsen and colleagues gave TBI to rats. Giving an animal brain trauma isn't easy, but for more than two decades, there's been a trick called the rat lateral fluid percussion injury model: Simply cut a hole in the skull of a rat and apply water pressure to the brain.

About half the rodents—19 male Wistar rats—were given this treatment, and eight of these were then given meth. The rats given meth performed better at a task called the Morris water maze, a widely used experiment that involves plopping a rat into a pool of water with a hidden platform. By tracking how long it takes the rodent to find the platform, scientists can measure many different aspects of cognitive function.

"By the third day of training, there were no statistically significant differences between the uninjured control rats and the injured rats that had been treated with methamphetamine," Poulsen and his colleagues wrote.

But the team also found that low doses of meth were protecting immature neurons, while also promoting the birth of new brain cells that are important for learning and memory. The same was also true for rats that were given meth, but not injured.

"We see not just little, but very significant improvements in cognition and behavior," Poulsen says. "Their memories improved, functional behavior is improved.... It's not a trivial difference."

"In light of the fact that low-dose methamphetamine is FDA-approved for use in juveniles and adults, we see no valid reason why it cannot be utilized in human clinical trials for stroke and TBI," Poulsen and colleagues concluded in 2016.

But those clinical trials, considered the gold standard for testing medication, have yet to materialize, even while a 2018 retrospective study found similar results to the Hawaiian neuroscience report: Out of 304 patients with TBI, those who also tested positive for meth had better recovery results than those who did not. "The potential neuroprotective role of meth and other similar substances cannot be ignored," the authors wrote in Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery last July.

There are limited conclusions that we can draw about these rodent and retrospective studies, and it's probably unlikely that nurses will soon start giving meth to people who have cracked their skulls. Still, a wide variety of stimulant therapies for TBI is being explored, with positive results. These include trials with modafinil, a narcolepsy drug; amantadine, a Parkinson's drug; and dextroamphetamine, one of the components of Adderall. But there's still no indication of a single clinical trial for methamphetamine for TBI registered with the National Institutes of Health.

Methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, seems to be the stimulant most popular in these trials. For example, in 2004, researchers at Drucker Brain Injury Center at MossRehab Hospital in Pennsylvania gave methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin, to 34 patients with moderate to severe TBI. They reported significant improvements in information processing and attention.

Twelve years later, in Gothenburg, Sweden, another 30 patients suffering from prolonged fatigue following TBI were given methylphenidate and observed for six months. They also showed improved cognitive function and reduced fatigue. But a 2016 meta-analysis of 10 controlled trials found the main benefit of giving methylphenidate for TBI was increased attention, "whereas no notable benefit was observed in the facilitation of memory or processing speed," the authors wrote. They encouraged more research into appropriate dosages and length of prescription.

Birgitta Johansson, a neuroscientist at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the Swedish study, suggests caution whenever treating someone with a brain injury. "With methylphenidate, it is important to be aware about possible side effects, [such] as increased blood pressure and heart rate and also risk of anxiety," she says. "It is always very important to prescribe medication with care and follow the patient carefully."

But the reason meth isn't studied more rigorously—for TBI, for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, for stroke—could also come down to money. Methamphetamine is off-patent, meaning there may be less financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to explore the drug's potential uses. Consider Vyvanse, a drug first marketed in 2007, with a new formulation introduced in 2017, that racked up $2.1 billion in sales in 2017. Desoxyn, which is sold by three companies, only earned about $9.3 million in 2009.

While Methamphetamine may not be widely recognized as medicine, it clearly has potential to heal as well as harm. Recognizing the duality of meth is arguably all the more essential in the face of a rising stimulant overdose crisis.

"Stigma regarding any substance use or substance use disorder is counterproductive," says Dan Ciccarone, professor of family medicine at the University of California–San Francisco. He says the overdose crisis is shifting from opioids to stimulants and that we are not prepared for the next wave. "Stigma is the lens [through] which we see all drug issues. It keeps us from making the best decisions. It is fear-based, not rational, not creative. Because of stigma, we have not fully addressed the opioid crisis."

That stigma remains a major hurdle, and until doctors and public-health officials counteract this kind of messaging, it seems unlikely that a multinational pharmaceutical company would risk marketing a substance only believed to be toxic and deadly.

"Everything will kill you, if you take enough of it," Poulsen says. "Some things don't require a lot to do that. Meth is one of those things. But just like any drug, the difference between a poison and a cure is the dose."

*These names have been changed.

TAGSALZHEIMER'SADDERALLTRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURIESFEATURES & INVESTIGATIONSMETHAMPHETAMINEMETHTOPIC: HEALTH CARE

BY TROY FARAH

Troy Farah is an independent journalist and photographer in California. His reporting on science, health, and narcotics has appeared in Wired, Ars Technica, Smithsonian, Discover, Vice, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the drug policy podcast Narcotica. 

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My article “Why is Everything Liberal?” has gotten a great deal of attention. See in particular thoughtful commentary from Bryan Caplan and Robby Soave at Reason.

This post is a followup, with two main goals. First, I’ve discovered additional evidence that liberals care more about politics, which I will just add on to what already was an extremely strong case.

Second, some people criticized the piece for not addressing what has changed recently. I think I’ve found the answer to that too, which is that the mobilization gap increased precipitously in 2016. It is at that time that we see Democrats overtake Republicans in fundraising, liberals overtake conservatives in signing petitions, and the left’s already sizable lead in protesting become much larger. While it seems that liberals have always cared more about politics if we are looking at the tail end of the distribution–i.e., those who become activists, journalists, or academics–it is only in 2016 that we see more noticeable and significant gaps open up in the next level down in the pyramid.

Since 2016, liberals have achieved true mass mobilization in a way conservatives never have in the modern era.

…

In 2016, fewer than 1% of conservatives had been to a protest in the last year, compared to 15% of extreme liberals, 10% of regular liberals, and 5% of the slightly liberal. Even moderates, at 2.4%, protested more than conservatives. Remember, this was before the Women’s March and the peak of BLM! The estimates for protest size used in the original post were pretty crude, but it’s nice to see self-reported data match what we see in the real world. Petitions tell the same story, but the differences are not as extreme: 61% of very liberal individuals had signed one in the last year, compared to just 26% of the very conservative.

…

Liberals already tended to protest more in the years leading up to 2012. But conservatives used to at least hold their own. This matches what we know from the real world, as this was the height of the Tea Party. Glenn Beck’s largely forgotten “Restoring Honor Rally” in summer 2010, for example, drew a lot of people, though nobody really knows how many. Wikipedia says “a scientific estimate placed the crowd size around 87,000, while media reports varied wildly from tens of thousands to 500,000.” This was also the time of Occupy Wall Street, so liberals weren’t exactly sitting on their hands, but conservatives at least made a showing. By 2016, conservative protesting had collapsed to practically nothing, while liberal protesting stayed at similar levels or, more likely, increased (hard to know for sure because of the time frame of the 2012 question being different).

…

In 2012, liberals were more likely to sign petitions than conservatives, but the gap was pretty small and there were many more conservatives in the country, which meant the right actually had more total people signing petitions. By 2016, more Americans than before were calling themselves liberals, and liberals were more mobilized, giving the left a substantial advantage.

Another thing we can do to see how relative mobilization has changed over time is to look at campaign donations. In the previous essay, I went all the way back to 2012, and showed that for every recent presidential election cycle Democrats brought in more money. I didn’t go back to 2008, as I was sure Obama outraised McCain, and I was of course right.

However, if you expand the analysis to midterm elections and all federal candidates, we see the Democrat advantage does not open up until 2016. Here are numbers I’ve gathered from Open Secrets for every election from 1990, as far back as data go.

…

In response to my piece, Ezra Klein argued that liberal domination of institutions was better explained by age and education polarization than liberals caring more. This is an argument I’ve seen him make elsewhere before (see also this and this from Josh Barro on Woke Capital).

…

Romney won college educated whites by somewhere between around 5% and 15%, while according to CNN’s 2020 exit polls, Biden won the same demographic by 12%. CNN actually has Trump barely winning college educated whites in 2016 (48%-45%). Education polarization is real, and the fact that college educated whites vote something like 15-30% more Democrat than they did in 2012 should be having some effects on board rooms and the larger mobilization gap. Yet educational differences do not seem nearly massive enough to explain the total liberal domination of institutions, as Republicans hold their own well enough with degree holders.

As far as the age gap, it can cut both ways. When I was growing up in the 1990s, the stereotype was that retirees had a lot of time on their hands and were therefore politically powerful, while young people were largely indifferent. Old people certainly have more money, and so you’d expect age polarization to actually give Republicans an advantage in donations. Yet since 2016 the trend has been the opposite. As parties have polarized more by age, Democrats have started winning the competition over fundraising. Maybe young people are inherently more likely to protest, but wouldn’t you expect old people to be just as capable of signing petitions? Thus, I’m pretty confident that age and education gaps are less important than the simple fact that liberals care more about politics.

…

The left has always had an advantage in committed activists. Yet, no matter whether you look at donations, protests, or signing petitions, the mobilization gap increased in 2016. Liberals had always protested more, but in 2016 the ratio was absolutely massive, being around 3.7x larger than it was around the time of the invasion of Iraq. This was before an upsurge of liberal protest activity that has included BLM, March for Our Lives, and most importantly, the Women’s March. Finally, the parties raised about an equal amount of money from 1990 until 2016, when Democrats took a lead that has now lasted three straight election cycles (2008 was an exception to the rule of parity in the pre-2016 era, when Democrats ran a fresh faced Barack Obama against John McCain, who seemed good at exciting Republican elites and MSNBC pro-war centrist types but not actual voters).

So what about “Woke Capital”? In many ways, business was the last domino to fall. Yes, liberals have always had more noisy activists, and corporations tended to bow to them on some issues when they got really agitated, like MLK day. But big business is more directly answerable to a wider swath of the population than are schools or non-profits, and so held out the longest. Coca-Cola and Walmart care more about what the median citizen thinks than does Harvard, The New York Times, or the ACLU. Yet after 2016, when the mobilization gap exploded, almost nothing in society could remain neutral, and pressure has come from both within and outside corporations for them to take a stand on almost all hot button issues.

Why was 2016 the year everything changed? Take a wild guess.

…

Just as the previous post raised further questions, this one does too. The most interesting thing to me is not simply protests and donations, but why one side has for over half a century now drawn more idealistic people who want to dedicate their lives to changing the world. The journalist-academic-activist complex is ultimately where power lies, and it has grown much stronger in the last 5 years because it has started to engage many more people at the intermediate level in the mobilization pyramid, among those who give money, sign petitions, and go to protests, and who find themselves between true elites on top and the mass of the largely indifferent voting public at the bottom.

If the rise of Trumpism explains the last five years, why did the left begin with such a strong built-in advantage? I hope to explore this question soon.

…

Moreover, right-wing protest culture has collapsed since the time of the Tea Party. It’s hard to know for sure, but other forms of conservative activism may have fallen off too. So even the degree to which Trump has actually mobilized the right must come with a caveat: he has turned out more Republican voters and gotten more people to donate small amounts of money, but few seem to want to make more substantial sacrifices, even compared to 2012.

Overall, the Trump era has provided mixed electoral results for Republicans. They won unified control of government in 2016, lost the House but kept the Senate in 2018, and came extremely close to winning again in 2020. Yet it has been an awful 4 years for conservatives who care about controlling institutions, or at least keeping them neutral, although even here it hasn’t been a complete loss. After all, the Trump era has given conservatives a comfortable majority on the Supreme Court, probably the most important single institution of all.

Federal court appointments last until death, while the widening of the mobilization gap is relatively new. Best case scenario for Republicans is that Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh live for a very long time, while the Trump era ends up being an anomaly in mobilizing the left to an unusual degree, with things going back to something resembling the pre-2016 historical norm. Worst case scenario is that things continue as they have for the last 4 years, with anti-Trump hysteria combining with the Great Awokening having created a class permanently mobilized for confronting racism and other evils, plus Republicans not even getting the mobilization on their own side that Trump gave them. A generation shaped by the experience of Trump and a party currently led by such uninspiring figures as Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney may end up giving conservatives the worst of all worlds.

#richard hanania #substack #data

[ashiiewappa]

Rio 2016 Full Team Artistic Swimming

Sport:

Artistic Swimming

Court Dimensions:

The pool must be at least 20m wide x 30m long, and at least 2.5m deep. One area, 12x12m or larger, must be at least 3m deep and the slope between the change in depths has to be completed over a distance of 8m or less.

Equipment:

Nose Clip

Underwater Speakers

Swimsuit

Hair Gel

Basic Skills:

Sculls

Eggbeater

Positions

Crane Position

Ballet Leg Double Position

Side Fishtail Position

Knight Position

Flamingo Position

Split Position

Lifts

The Platform Lift

The Stack Lift

Technical & Tactical Skills:

Stages of Technical Preparation

The process of learning motor skills is based on theoretical findings on motor learning.

Accomplishing the aim is conditioned by:

understanding the technique as a unity of its internal and external features

step-by-step procedure of its acquiring

stabilizing the technique

comprehensive conception (contents organization)

conscious activity of both the athlete and coach

The process of learning is not linear and even; it is a long-term process unlimited by time.

In practice, the following stages appear:

drill

improving

stabilization

Drill

Tasks:

learning the objectives of selected sports discipline

drilling the techical basics of relevant sports skills

This stage proceeds in the follow axis:

introduction (rules, feeling the water, ball etc.)

defining the task (couch’s input, athlete must identify him/herself with the image)

creating image

initial attempts (verifying the image under simplified conditions), repeating („repeating without repetitions“)

Improving

Tasks:

firming, improving and subsequent adjusting techniques in given specialization

gradual interconnection of technique and fitness requirements and physiological functions of the athlete

focussing the stage aims at further shaping the image

All information is integrated in a single unit of complex locomotive analyzer which is sport specific. Firming and improving is carried out through sophisticated repetitions of relevant exercises which lead towards automation. This stage continues to improve mainly kinematic (time and space) and dymanic (strength) parameters of motion structures. Techique should be gradually interconnected with its fitness basis and energy supply.

The main aim of this stage of technical preparation is final technique firming and stabilization.

Stabilization

Tasks:

firming and stabilization of sports skills complexes as units which are ready to be involved in programs for competitve activities of the athlete

mutual interconnection, combination and adjustments of these units to most demanding conditions under which sports activity is employed

attempts to firm and stabilize lead to another, more in-depth, uniting of technique, fitness, psyche and tactics into highly functional units

The substance of stabilizing technique in this stage lies in automation of relevant structures and actions of skills structures and their continuous adjusting to competition conditions.

Methods of Technical Preparation:

Methods: analytic, analytic-synthetic, concentration, dispersion.

Procedures: whole, from whole to part, from part to whole.

Tactical Preparation

It is necessary to differentiate between two terms:

strategy is understood as a pre-prepared plan of actions in a specific competition

the plan is defined by key strategy points (points in competition when the athlete makes decisions according to given strategy in so-called conflicting situations)

tactics further analyzes and shows possible solutions of individual competition situations (conflicting situations)

focuses on practical implementation of these situations within given plan (strategy)

tactics (individual, group, team, offensive, defensive)

Implementing tactical actions is carried out on the following axis:

perception and analysis (situation occurence – situation recognition – situation analysis)

mental solution (solution proposal – soluction selection)

movement solution (solution execution, feedback)

Tactics is being solved within competition situations which are characterized by conditions.

We can differentiate between two types of conditions:

fixed (sports ground, sports area, equipment etc.)

changing (referee, audience, route, ball bounce etc.)

Drilling Tactical Skills

Tactical skills are understood as certain procedures or models of competition situations solutions acquired by training.

Acquiring tactical skills presupposes influencing the athlete’s:

perception (space, rhythm, objects)

thinking and decision-making (analysis, synthesis, generalization, intuitive solutions – solutions outside the scope of perception)

knowledge (rules, organization of sports combat conduct, principles of tactical actions in specific situations, knowledge of strategy)

experience (memory, anticipation)

Principles of drilling tactical skills:

tactical skills are closely related to technique

there is a certain specific solution for each competition situation

theoretical background (algorithms, patterns) must be acquired before drilling itself

suggest solution to a situation when drilling and perhaps let athletes to discuss it

at first, teach without pushing, increase resistence and pressure (time, space, fatigue) after they handle individual parts

group skills (power play patterns) must be practised in an analytic way (in pairs or groups of three)

it is preferable to handle solving smaller number of situations with better quality

adjusting situation to expected competition conditions

Solving competition situations

When creating strategy plan, pay attention to the following:

competition aim,

competitor power

competitor strategy

own power

information on environment and conditions

Solving practical situations is based on the level of preparation during training and the extent of their indefiniteness (i.e. they cannot be prepared in advance)

We differentiate among:

Algorithmization (standard situations I.) the athlete chooses from several pre-peraded solutions (A, B, C options). Medium indefiniteness.

Patterns (standard situations II.) everyone knows what to do in a given situation, both me and other team-mates (e.g. direct free kick, ofensive combination, service in volleyball. Minimum indefiniteness.

Instant unprepared solution is improvised. Creativity is of very high importance. High indefiniteness.

Rules of the Game:

No Touching The Bottom - One of the things which makes the lifts all the more impressive is that artistic swimmers are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool at any point during their routines.

No Bling - Presentation is a unique and important part of artistic swimming but there are certain restrictions on what swimmers can wear. For example, artistic swimmers are not permitted jewellery, theatrical make-up, or inappropriate costumes.

No Goggles - Another restriction during artistic swimming routines is goggles. However, swimmers in figures competitions are permitted to wear them.

Team Means Team

Teams normally contain eight swimmers, but the minimum number for a team is four. Teams lose marks for every swimmer they have under the full complement because it is easier to synchronise the fewer people there are in a routine.

Stick To The Schedule

Routines can be anything from two and a half minutes to five minutes long, depending on whether they are performed alone or as part of a team. However, swimmers are penalised if they take 15 seconds fewer or longer than the specified time.

Before participating in the Olympics, the swimmers must clear the qualifying competitions

If we focus on Olympics, there are only two events played in each Olympics i.e. team and duet

There are two routines included here one is free routine and one is technical routine

Players can perform both in team and duets

Technical routine is predetermined and should be performed strictly according to certain elements

Free routine is not predetermined so the players are free to do their performance and in free routine, they have to show their creativity in choreography, dancing, and coordination

In duet event, there are two swimmers and one alternate swimmer. In free routine, the time limit is 3:30 minutes and in technical routine time limit is 2:20 minutes

In team event, there are eight swimmers and one alternate swimmer. Time limit in free routine is 4:00 minutes and 2:50 minutes in technical routine

In each event, there is relaxation of utmost 15 seconds

The judges give points according to the level of difficulty of the performance shown by the players

Marks awarded ranges from 0.0 to 10.0

How to Officiate the Sport:

Clerk of the course - organize the competitors so that they are ready for their events at the required time. During figure competitions, they ensure that the swimmers are in the correct order to perform their figures.

Scorer - record marks from the judges and make the necessary computations for each routine. There are two levels of synchro scorer – national scorer and chief recorder.

Judge - essential for running synchronised swimming competitions as they provide scores based on the performance of each routine. They are also responsible for marking grade level assessments. To reduce the level of subjectivity in scoring, all synchro judges must be expertly-trained. They require a full understanding of FINA and the ASA’s rules and regulations for synchronised swimming competitions.

Referee - oversee the control of a synchronised swimming competition. The referee makes sure all aspects of the event are run smoothly and follow FINA rules.

Analysis:

Egypt - Very synchronized and have exquisite leg work. Timing of movements are precise with the used sound.

Australia - Great formations and artistic exhibitions. At some point the formations become chaotic the used sound not really in match with their dance. Nevertheless their synchronization is very on point.

Italy - Very graceful in movements like water ballerinas. Used music is very great matching the displayed moves. New and artistic exhibitions are shown applying great synchronization. Pleasing to the eye formations and movements are very timing with the sound.

Brazil - Colorful and amazing costumes matching their theme. The sound used is very festive and energizing. Great formations and timing with their moves despite having a  fast paced sound. Showed new exhibitions and precise moves.

Russia - Exquisite and well-thought out costume design matching their theme. Showed great and amazing stunts. Heavenly movements with great precision  and power. On point timing and leg movements while being graceful and synchronized with each other. A very powerful and impactful performance.

Ukraine - Intense used sound along with stunts and exhibitions. Very quick in movement and has great timing with the beats of the sound used. Showed new and unique stunts. Amazing formations and flexibility of performers.

China - Festive and colorful costumes matching with their chosen theme. Amazing attention to detail moves, having exquisite moves. Moving in precision without sacrificing the on point synchronization. No dull parts during the performance, always giving powerful moves and stunts. Great interpretation of the used sound. Intense yet graceful routine with amazing formations.

Japan - Very dramatic and scintillating costumes to match their theme. Precise with their formations and moves. Impeccable timing with their movements coinciding  with the beats of the sound. Performers having great flexibility with graceful yet intense moves. Synchronized amazingly with each other. Stunts are unique and all the while exquisite. Used enchanting sound which is very pleasing to the ears. Tremendous effort in executing their routines.