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newstfionline · 3 years

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Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Employers, insurers push to make virtual visits regular care (AP) Make telemedicine your first choice for most doctor visits. That’s the message some U.S. employers and insurers are sending with a new wave of care options. Amazon and several insurers have started or expanded virtual-first care plans to get people to use telemedicine routinely, even for planned visits like annual checkups. They’re trying to make it easier for patients to connect with regular help by using remote care that grew explosively during the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocates say this can keep patients healthy and out of expensive hospitals, which makes insurers and employers that pay most of the bill happy. But some doctors worry that it might create an over-reliance on virtual visits. “There is a lot lost when there is no personal touch, at least once in a while,” said Dr. Andrew Carroll, an Arizona-based family doctor and board member of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Landlords and renters both struggling (Washington Post) In the covid economy of 2021, the federal government has created an ongoing grace period for renters until at least July, banning all evictions in an effort to hold back a historic housing crisis that is already underway. More than 8 million rental properties across the country are behind on payments by an average of $5,600, according to census data. Nearly half of those rental properties are owned not by banks or big corporations but instead by what the government classifies as “small landlords”—people who manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income, and who are now trapped between tenants who can’t pay and their own mounting bills for insurance, mortgages and property tax. According to government estimates, a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.

Pandemic baby bust unprecedented in Bay Area, California history (San Francisco Chronicle) U.S. residents are having fewer babies this year. And California’s birth rates in January and February—around the time when early pandemic babies would be due—declined by 15% compared to the same period last year, the steepest year-over-year decline for those months since at least 1960, according to a Chronicle analysis. We used data from California’s Health and Human Services department, which collects monthly birth totals per county. We found that the state’s births declined from nearly 70,000 in the first two months of 2020 to fewer than 59,000 in the same period in 2021.

Zoom Court Is Changing How Justice Is Served (The Atlantic) Last spring, as COVID‑19 infections surged for the first time, many American courts curtailed their operations. As case backlogs swelled, courts moved online, at a speed that has amazed—and sometimes alarmed—judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. In the past year, U.S. courts have conducted millions of hearings, depositions, arraignments, settlement conferences, and even trials—nearly entirely in civil cases or for minor criminal offenses—over Zoom and other meeting platforms. As of late February, Texas, the state that’s moved online most aggressively, had held 1.1 million remote proceedings.

Mexico City metro overpass collapses onto road; 20 dead (AP) An elevated section of the Mexico City metro collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, city officials said. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said 49 of the injured were hospitalized, and that seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery. The overpass was about 5 meters (16 feet) above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the roadway below. “A support beam gave way,” Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

El Salvador’s judiciary (Foreign Policy) Lawmakers in El Salvador voted to remove five influential Supreme Court judges and the attorney general over the weekend in a move U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has noted with “grave concern.” The motions to remove the officials passed with a supermajority in El Salvador’s legislature, now ruled by President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party following a sweeping victory in February’s elections. Addressing the international community on Twitter Bukele dismissed rebukes over the move. “With all due respect: We are cleaning house … and this doesn’t concern you,” Bukele said.

‘Hospitals are full’ as Argentina COVID-19 cases hit 3 million (Reuters) Argentina coronavirus cases hit 3 million on Sunday since the pandemic began, as medical workers said hospitals were full to capacity despite toughened government measures to bring down the spread of infections. The government of President Alberto Fernandez this week unveiled a new round of tougher restrictions as a second wave of infections has battered the country, filling up intensive care units and setting new daily records for cases and deaths. Marcela Cid, owner of a business on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, said that Argentines were increasingly “locked into a situation” that while necessary, was of little help to anyone trying to move beyond the pandemic.

EU proposes reopening external borders (AP) In an announcement sure to be welcomed by travelers worldwide, EU officials on Monday proposed easing restrictions on visiting the 27-nation bloc as vaccination campaigns across the continent gather speed. Travel to the European Union is currently extremely limited except for a handful of countries with low infection rates. But with the summer tourist season looming, the bloc’s European Commission hopes the new recommendations will dramatically expand that list. The Commission hopes the move will soon allow travelers reunite with their friends and relatives living in Europe and support the bloc’s economy this summer. Under the Commission’s proposal, entry would be granted to all those fully vaccinated with EU-authorized shots. Coronavirus vaccines authorized by the European Medicines Agency, the bloc’s drug regulator, include Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Indian leader’s party takes electoral hit amid virus surge (AP) India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi suffered a resounding defeat in a key state election on Sunday, indicating his Hindu nationalist party’s political strength may be slipping as the country struggles to contain an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was unable to dislodge West Bengal state’s firebrand chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, after a hard-fought campaign. His party also failed to win in two southern states, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. But the BJP secured a second term in the northeastern state of Assam and an alliance with regional parties led it to victory in the union territory of Puducherry. Even before the current virus surge, Modi’s party faced stiff challenges in these local legislative elections. Following the disappointing results, Modi stands weakened but faces no threats to staying on as prime minister until his term ends in 2024.

Formal Withdrawal from Afghanistan Begins (AP) US and NATO troops stationed in Afghanistan formally began the withdrawal phase over the weekend, a process that is expected to last through the summer and officially end Sept. 11. Roughly 3,000 US troops and 7,000 coalition troops remain in the country, along with a reported 18,000 Pentagon-employed contractors. The exit has been framed as nonconditional—meaning ongoing attacks by the Taliban against the Afghan government won’t delay the withdrawal. Many have questioned the ability of the Afghan National Army to provide security against the Taliban absent international forces. Despite assurances by Afghan officials, Taliban forces have established themselves across most of the country. Afghan forces control an estimated one-third of the country’s districts, with the Taliban controlling about 10%, and nearly half—areas that include a total of roughly 14 million people—currently contested.

Chinese man crosses Taiwan Strait by rubber dinghy, seeking ‘freedom and equality’ (Washington Post) A Chinese man appeared to sail undetected through the highly militarized Taiwan Strait in a rubber dinghy, fleeing his native China for Taiwan in search of “freedom,” according to Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration. The man, identified only by his surname, Zhou, left Shishi county in Quanzhou, a port city in Fujian province, at 10 a.m. on Friday, arriving more than 10 hours later at Taichung port on Taiwan’s western coast, Taiwan’s Coast Guard said on Monday. Officials said they were still investigating Zhou’s journey over the 100-mile stretch of sea between China and Taiwan, which is patrolled by hundreds of Chinese and Taiwanese coast guard ships and naval vessels. Coast Guard officials, relaying Zhou’s account of his journey, told reporters he had traveled in a rubber raft measuring 8.8 feet by 5 feet that he bought on the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao and fitted with an outboard motor. The incident has prompted concerns about the security of the contentious waterway at a time when military observers worry that long-standing tensions between the governments of China, Taiwan and the United States, which is committed to defending Taiwan, could boil over into military conflict.

Australia warns its citizens of jail and $50,000 fine if they return from India (Washington Post) Even in the pandemic era of closed borders, Australia’s latest travel restriction stands out: Anyone, including Australian citizens, who arrives in the country after visiting India in the previous 14 days can face up to five years in jail, a $50,000 fine or both. On Monday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended the move. Australia had seen a sevenfold increase in the percentage of people traveling from India who tested positive for the coronavirus, the prime minister told Sydney’s 2GB radio station. The decision to threaten even Australian citizens with jail time if they return home from India during its record-breaking coronavirus surge is a significant escalation of border restrictions for Australia, an island nation that had already mandated strict controls at its borders throughout the pandemic.

DR Congo declares state of siege over eastern bloodshed (Reuters) Militants killed at least 19 people, including 10 soldiers, in raids on two villages in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday, hours after President Felix Tshisekedi declared a state of siege in two provinces. A surge in attacks by armed militias and inter-communal violence in the east have killed more than 300 people since the start of the year as government troops and U.N. peacekeepers struggle to stabilize the situation. The most recent attacks took place early on Saturday when militants raided two villages in North Kivu’s regional hub of Beni, local authorities said. Tshisekedi had declared a state of siege in North Kivu and Ituri provinces on Friday.

#headlines #news

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theradioghost · 4 years

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...ok what's up with corsets?

I mean, mostly just a lot of misconceptions about how they worked and what they were for. I’m going to ramble a lot here, but please know that I am not by any definition an expert on any of this, just a 19th century lit major who’s studied a lot of historical context stuff for research and fun purposes.

One clarification is, to simplify the complex and annoying evolution of language over centuries, if it’s from the early 1800s or later, it’s a corset. If it’s from the 16th-18th centuries, it’s “stays” or a “pair of bodies.” (I think bodies was an earlier term more commonly used for outer garments while stays were undergarments, but don’t quote me on that.) Stays were basically conical with quite a long torso, and you couldn’t lace them particularly tight because metal eyelets weren’t invented until the 1830s and the fabric couldn’t take that strain. Depending on the fashion at the time, their basic function was to create a perfectly smooth, very long silhouette, push your boobs up, or both. Typically their structure came from cording, reeds, whalebone, or layers of paste-stiffened fabric; steel stays from this period are essentially orthopedic devices (or, and I’m obsessed with this idea: fakes created by 19th century fetishists. There’s a reason the 19th century is my favorite historical period and it’s because everything was absolutely nuts, all the time). They also fell in and out of fashion at times – if you look at the naturalistic, Grecian styles of European dresses in the 1820s, for example, many women were wearing either very light stays just to push their bust up, or none at all.

Some nice examples of stays from this period are this, this, and this, from the V&A’s collections. Looking at most portraiture of women from the 16-1700s also pretty clearly displays the conical silhouette that stays produced, but I’m going to refrain from adding images to this post because I already suspect that it’s going to be incredibly, frustratingly long.

Women basically weren’t wearing structured undergarments before the Renaissance, so medieval stays are not a thing.. Although on a fascinating side note, a few years back someone found a bunch of medieval bras, which we had no idea were a thing until then, so that’s really cool.

Regardless of whether you’re talking stays or corsets, two important things. First of all, they were not worn directly against the skin what the hell, firstly because that is incredibly uncomfortable, and secondly because in periods where most people owned fairly little clothing and a lot of that was wool, having a linen or cotton undergarment under all your clothes helped keep them cleaner by separating them from your skin. Historically most often that was a shift, basically just a big long undershirt thing.

The second important thing is whalebone, historically always the number one material for corset boning. Whalebone is an incredibly misleading name, and I hate it, because it took me forever to learn that “whalebone” is not bone but baleen, the bristly stuff that filter-feeding whales have instead of teeth. It’s made from keratin, same as our hair and fingernails. It’s light, flexible, and becomes bendable with warmth, meaning that over time, the boning of a corset would conform to your natural body shape as it was warmed by your body heat, and would stay in that shape. All-steel boning only really became A Thing in the last couple of decades that corsets were an everyday garment for most women, and that wasn’t because of superior structural properties. It was because it was cheaper, given that after centuries of whaling, there were a lot fewer whales to hunt, and acquiring baleen became more expensive and difficult. Even then, a lot of manufacturers just moved to things like featherboning (made from the shafts of feathers), coraline (made from a plant whose name I cannot remember), cane, or just cording (often cotton or paper cords), rather than steel. They also tended to use spiral steels, which can flex more, as opposed to solid steel bones. The main use of steel in corsets was actually to reinforce the closures, the front busk and the back where it laced.

(Most modern corsets are either all-steel waist training corsets or “fashion corsets” boned with flimsy plastic, but there’s actually a modern product called synthetic whalebone which is a plastic designed to replicate the properties of baleen as closely as possible.)

Then we get to the Victorian period, and that’s where pop culture really kind of loses its shit over the idea of corsetry? All the fainting and shifting organs and women getting ribs surgically removed (what) and generally the impression that Corsets Are Horrible Death Garments.

Tightlacing is one of the big things here. Yes, there were Victorian women who tightlaced to reduce their waists to dramatic extremes, and it was not healthy. There are also women today who put themselves through dangerous, unbelievable things to achieve the most fashionable body possible (tw in that link for disordered eating, self-harm, and abuse), and that article only covers the extremes of the professional modeling industry, not everyday things like high heels, for example. Most women who were tightlacing were young, wealthy, and fashionable, not worrying about being healthy enough to work as long as they could achieve ideal beauty – the same people who do this kind of thing now. And part of the reason we know so much about it is that it was extreme and uncommon even then. Medical experts ranted about the dangers of tightlacing, people campaigned against it. It was definitely not the case that all women were going around suffocating in tightlaced corsets all the time.

It’s worth considering our sample of evidence. You see a lot of illustrated fashion plates, which don’t look like real women now, and didn’t then either. By the late 1800s, photographers had already figured out plenty of tricks with angles and posing to make a model look as wasp-waisted as possible. They would also just straight up paint women’s waists smaller in a lot of pictures. And when you consider surviving garments, a disproportionate number of them are from rich young women who hadn’t yet married and had children, because for a variety of reasons those tend to be the clothes that are preserved and survive. The constantly-swooning women of Victorian literature are for some reason presumed to be representative of real life and the constriction of corsets – let me tell you, as someone who studied 19th century literature specifically, everything is exaggerated and melodramatic, especially extremes of emotion (and men also swoon a lot too). It also seems weird that we nod along unquestioning with the most extreme claims of 19th century panics about the medical harm of corsets (rib removal? with 19th century surgery???) and then just mock those silly, stupid Victorians when we read about things like bicycle face or the claim that fast vehicles would make women’s uteruses fly out of their bodies or whatever.

In fact, corsets were a pretty sensible garment in a lot of ways. They seem really restrictive to us now, but historical garments in general didn’t stretch the way modern knit fabrics do. In addition to supporting the bust just like any modern bra, corsets could actually make moving and breathing easier by helping to support the weight of ridiculously heavy dresses. Women did in fact live everyday, active lives wearing them, including lower-class women who worked physically demanding jobs. Late-Victorian women actually started doing a lot more sports, including cycling – that cyclist at the top of the bicycle face article is definitely wearing a corset, for example. They were used to them, too, and used to the specific ways you move in those kind of clothes, which most modern folks who try to wear that stuff one time are not. One interesting thing I’ve heard is that while corsets helped posture a lot – a lot of people today use them medically to help with back pain and support for just that reason – over time that understandably means that if you’re always wearing a corset, your abdominal muscles won’t be very strong because they’re not doing as much work keeping your posture straight. No ab crunches for Victorian women I guess.

Looking at extant Victorian-era clothing, the fashionable wasp-waisted silhouette actually had a lot more to do with the optical illusion achieved with extensive padding, which widened the hips and turned the upper body into a smooth, Chris-Evans-esque triangle. In comparison, the waist looks smaller. (Seriously, look up some photos of late 19th century ladies, their whole front upper body is this perfectly smooth convex curve. That’s all padding.) Silhouette was what the Victorians really cared about, and padding is a lot more sensible and comfortable than tightlacing.

My basic point here is just I guess that there’s a common and weirdly moralizing perception now that the historical corset was, invariably, this horrible constricting heavy steel cage thing that damaged your health and was a Tool Of Patriarchal Oppression. There’s also a lot of really bad costuming in historical dramas. I just think the reality is a lot more interesting. Also that modern steel waist training corsets kind of terrify me?

If you want more info and some good primary and academic sources from people who actually study and recreate historical garments and Actually Know Things, I recommend Bernadette Banner’s videos (here and here) on corsets – also just her stuff in general, I’ve been incredibly happy to see her gaining a lot of attention lately because she’s delightful – this video by historical costumer Morgan Donner wearing a corset daily for a week and talking about what it feels like, and this article, which cites among other things a really interesting late-19th-century study by a doctor trying to actually gather data on corsetry and its effects. Also for that matter, the aforementioned YouTube costumers have respectively made 17th-century stays and a late 19th-century corset, and seeing how these garments are put together is really interesting.

(I feel like I heard somewhere once that S-shape corsets from 1900-1910ish might have been more potentialy harmful because they did weird things to your back posture, but honestly my historical knowledge and interest drops precipitiously when you hit the 20th century.)

#this. is probably more than you wanted. sorry.#regicidal-defenestration #asks #my posts

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horrorhouse · 5 years

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A Response to Josh Gad

On August 28, 2019, actor Josh Gad decided to post a lengthy Twitter thread regarding our political climate. I decided I wanted to post it in its entirety as one long letter instead of just posting each individual tweet and then give my response point by point. So here we go.

I don’t want to be the guy always shouting at the top of his lungs about the same thing. Life is too short. So this (I’m hoping) will be the last time I try to put into words how I feel about the current political situation we are in and reach out to those of you content with where things are right now in our country. So here we go. I know some of you wanted and hoped to throw the whole system out and see what happened if we disrupted political norms and elected a “guy who says it like it is” and in a weird way, I guess I even understand that impulse. But this is where we are now objectively: Donald Trump has never been fit for office and it appears that he is mentally unhinged. We can talk around it. We can play word games. We can debate what that means. But by all appearances he is truly a “madman.” I know it sounds funny and entertaining to hear the absurdity of the President of the United States threaten to nuke a thunderstorm to send it away or get angry at a country for not selling him another country but it’s not funny. It’s actually debilitatingly [sic] sad. Because our lives aren’t a reality show, even if he thinks he’s living in one. We have all lost the plot. We are chasing him down a rabbit hole of insanity and avoiding real issues like gun violence, immigration, health care, poverty and most importantly the very real threat of climate change, something this man doesn’t even believe exists because apparently he knows more as a realtor than the entire scientific community. We aren’t on the precipice of catastrophe or at the doorstep of doom...we are sadly past it. We need leadership to help us formulate how we adapt, grow & tackle environmental changes unlike any humanity has seen in the last few thousand years. But we don’t have that. Instead we have a man more interested in who likes him & who doesn’t than in anybody’s welfare currently reading this thread. I know some people out there believe he must be supported because he represents the religious and moral values you and your family share. But, the truth is, I know nobody really believes that because each and every single version of religious texts I’ve come across say that lying, cheating, stealing, coveting, and deceiving are not moral attributes worthy of lauding. He’s the definition of a fraud. You know it. I know it. Hell, even Fox News knows it. For them, it’s just another inconvenient truth. This isn’t about moral leadership. If you can sleep at night telling yourself that this President is a morally righteous, mentally sound, truthful man, I envy you. I wish I could fool my brain into believing a single syllable of that sentence. I’d have much fewer gray hairs. But I’m not living with my head in the sand. I can, sadly, see what a child should be able to see...we are all in danger as long as this demagogue is in the Oval Office. He is a monster. A racist white Nationalist, who doesn’t even bother using dog whistles, but is singing out loud for all to hear. Our allies are now our enemies. Our enemies are now inside our gates making a mockery of our system while our President cheers them on. 2020 isn’t an election year. It’s the single most historically important moment for our country in the modern era. We have already failed this test once. If we fail again...there is no do-over. History will bury us in its annals and assail us like those fools whose mistakes we repeated because we were too greedy, stubborn or polarized to do the right thing. After all, this is no longer about political differences. This isn’t a football game where we’re all on different teams. This is one union. One country under God that has been through hell and back but carried a torch of greatness on its shores promising something better than anywhere else in the world...opportunity. “The American Dream.” For far too many that dream has become a waking nightmare. Let’s wake ourselves up. Let’s come together. Before it’s too late. Register. Fight. Educate. Learn. Read. Resist. And most importantly. VOTE. Vote like your life depends on it...because this time it does.

Josh, I hope that you have the chance to read my response and consider what I have to say. Part of the problem with the condition of our country is the divisions created when people aren’t willing to listen to and respect each other’s differing viewpoints. First of all, you say that you don’t want to be the guy screaming about the same thing at the top of your lungs and life is short, yet you say you’d have much fewer gray hairs if you could go to sleep at night believe the President is a morally righteous, mentally sound, truthful man. If life is so short, why are you keeping yourself up at night over your own personal beliefs? It’s self-sabotage, and maybe you should consider seeing a doctor for the benefit of your mental health and also a cardiologist so you don’t have a coronary. I voted for President Trump, and it wasn’t to throw a wrench in the system and shake up “political norms”. I weighed my options. I didn’t vote for him in the primaries. But between Trump and Hillary Clinton, I chose who I felt at the time was the lesser of two evils. Voters had no real yard stick with which to measure Trump’s political accomplishments or failures. We had one for Hillary, and clearly the American people didn’t want her in office. She has a history of racism going all the way back to her time as First Lady of Arkansas. There’s video of Hillary on the campaign trail from March 2016 at a coffee shop in Minnesota when she snapped at a young female person of color for questioning her on whether she planned to address the diversity of elected officials. Not to mention the emails that leaked days before the election no doubt had an affect on voters. Her history with her husband’s victims didn’t help her, either. The President isn’t avoiding issues like gun violence, immigration, health care, poverty -- you just don’t agree with what he has done on those issues. He’s addressing the issues and looking for bipartisan solutions. For one thing, he instituted a ban on bump stocks. He pressured Mexico to crack down on migrants passing through their country to get into the United States (the majority of whom were entering the country illegally -- you can hate the law all you want but until it changes, it’s the law that exists and should be enforced), his administration has expanded access to prescription drugs and the slowdown in prescription drug price growth during his time in office has saved over $26 billion. With regard to poverty, President Trump created 4.7 million jobs in his first two years and lowered the unemployment rate to its lowest in recorded history, particularly for African-Americans and Hispanics. I’d love to hear what your solutions are for these issues. As for climate change, President Trump said climate change is a complex issue and added “I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know” the cause. There are several theories that have been explored by scientists and numerous solutions presented, both small- and large-scale. Some aspects of earth’s core temperature changes have nothing to do with man - they’re do to natural environmental effects. So how do you intend to completely eradicate global warming? I know the President isn’t perfect. I know he’s not a paragon of moral virtue. But in my opinion, he’s still a better leader than Hillary Clinton would have been. At this point, you sound like someone standing on a street corner holding a sign that says THE END IS NIGH. If anyone’s mental state should be considered and questioned, perhaps it’s your own. Just from reading your tweets, it comes off that you’re some foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.

#Josh Gad #politics #Donald Trump #President Trump #fearmonger #celebrity #Hollywood #Liberal #rant #response #wtf

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

In September 2017, feeling the first twinges of labor, I walked beyond the ten-block radius my ob-gyn had prescribed me, defying her bed-rest orders for one reason: to tour day-care centers and get my unborn kid on as many wait lists as possible.

I knew I had to take the risk only because I’d worked for three years on youth and family programs at a high-quality New York nonprofit.

When I’d started in 2012, our preschool had a two-year wait list. By the time I left, the wait list had swelled to almost four years, which meant that most children who had been added to the list never got into the program. We had at least twenty applications for children in utero, and two for children who hadn’t yet been conceived. Sometimes mothers mentioned to me that they’d miscarried, but would like to keep their application open, and did in fact conceive again before receiving an offer of admission. One baby died while on the list.

My program was unusual in that it featured a first-come/first-serve “need blind” admissions process and substantial tuition assistance to families who could prove that they needed it — but its $37,000 a year price tag was all too typical for American childcare.

For the Church, life begins at the moment of conception. For an American baby, life starts much sooner — the moment a parent (almost always a mother) begins to think about how and when she can afford to have a child, and who will care for the child when she returns to work, as the vast majority of parents must do. If she has been in the same job for a year and worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer who also happens to employ at least fifty people within a seventy-five-mile radius of her workplace, then she will be eligible for twelve weeks of unpaid time off and continuation of health benefits under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). She may be able to extend that slightly further with unused sick time — assuming she has any.

FMLA is an accommodating piece of legislation passed during the labor-punishing Clinton era, which applies to a little over half of US workers. It was the Democrats’ polite throat-clearing sigh, a gentle nudge in the general direction of our bosses, asking “Please sir, can I have my job back after taking care of my dying daughter?” when working families needed a paid family leave program comparable to the rest of the world’s, and a universal, federally funded childcare program. Since 1985, the majority of mothers of preschool children have participated in the workforce, and in the thirty years since, unprecedented growth in wealth inequality has transformed an urgent need into a moral and economic crisis. Now, as Baby Boomers age and a smaller percentage of the population has young children, there are fewer adult advocates for their needs.

”At the same time we thrust new parents back into the labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for childcare in a country with no national standards for quality, accessibility, or safety.”

There is no reason we can’t have nationally subsidized, paid parental leave and childcare today. At present, public spending on early childhood education and care in the United States represents less than 0.5 percent of GDP, less than any OECD country besides Croatia, Latvia, and Turkey.

At the time of its bipartisan passage in 1993, the Chamber of Commerce warned that FMLA set a “dangerous precedent,” and John Boehner muttered something about “the light of freedom growing dimmer,” but twenty-five years later, a vast majority of employers report that complying with FMLA is easy and has had a positive or neutral effect on their workplaces. It is the sole non-means-tested federal provision for American families in the first few weeks of their children’s lives. Still, the burden is on parents to obtain doctor’s notes and coordinate it — and even it can hardly be called universal.

Employers approve, but how has it turned out for families? Many of those who are eligible can’t actually afford to take it. A full quarter of American mothers return to work less than two weeks after giving birth. Marissa Mayer aside, those who return soonest are most likely to be working class. Mothers who do not have housekeepers or nannies are constrained in their parenting choices, such as whether and how to breastfeed, and are more susceptible to depression.

One factory worker described breaking down in tears of exhaustion while pumping in a parking lot after a twelve-hour shift. The cheerful slogan “breast is best” is more likely to produce heart pangs than an eye-roll in the 88 percent of women who have no paid time off.

Nurri Latef, an early childhood teacher who I spoke to about her experience returning to school when her son was two months old, says, “I hated it. I felt like I was leaving my child at such a critical bonding time for the two of us, and he was premature. He spent a month in the hospital, so … I was only at home for one month with Nasir before I had to jump back into toddler-teacher mode so I could keep a roof over our heads.” No parent in any job should have to feel this way, but there’s a unique cruelty to forcing women to leave their own children before they feel ready to take care of other people’s children.

Meanwhile, Apple and Google employees get eighteen weeks of paid leave and backup or on-site day care. Googlers are awarded $500 cash referred to as “Baby Bonding Bucks.” Of course, not every worker shares in the benefits even at these seemingly enlightened firms: tech companies often outsource security, food service, and janitorial work by hiring private contractors, who are not eligible. Overall, about a third of American workers in management and other professional

Here’s how Julia Roitfeld, the daughter of the editor of French Vogue, describes impending motherhood: “It was like a detox — I ate healthy, I slept a lot, and I didn’t drink. All of my hormones were at the perfect levels. I was super-happy, and I really didn’t give a shit about work. Usually I’m so on top of work, but I was in a little cloud. But in August I thought, ‘Okay, I need to go back to work and start making a living again.’”

How long can a parent stay in that “little cloud” and “not give a shit” about the cost of diapers, formula, and rent? That depends both on one’s class and nationality. Brazilian mothers get seventeen weeks of leave to take care of their little ones at their full salary; Canadian parental leave was recently extended from one year to eighteen months at about 55 percent pay; Russia offers mothers twenty-four weeks paid. I could go on. The United States, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho are the only countries in the world that don’t guarantee all workers paid time off to care for a new child — here, parental leave is a luxury reserved for the rich.

At the same time we thrust new parents back into the labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for childcare in a country with no national standards for quality, accessibility or safety. Nearly 11 million children, including over half of children below the age of one, spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week in some kind of childcare setting, yet the burden is on individual parents to assess the risks and benefits of a confusing, unaccountable, generally private system pieced together state by state for the care of our littlest and most vulnerable children. In essence, giving birth or adopting a child in America means you also take on the job of government regulator. It’s an impossible task, with occasionally tragic consequences.

In 2013, a day-care worker in Mississippi handed a ten-week-old baby boy over to his father at pickup time without noticing that the child’s skin was blue and he was unresponsive. The father directed the staff to call 911 while he performed CPR — none of the staff knew how — and his son was finally rushed to the emergency room, where he died. After an investigation, the state concluded that the childcare center met all legal requirements for operation. It remains open.

In 2014, Kellie Rynn Martin suffocated at the age of three months in a day-care center run out of a middle-class suburban home in South Carolina, where her mother suspects she was put to sleep in a bassinet with a blanket or even another infant. When forensics searched the house, they found fourteen children playing “the quiet game” in the eighty-five-degree basement under the supervision of the owner’s daughter. In an interview, Martin’s mother stressed that the day-care owner’s home had appeared clean and the owner appeared competent when she toured the program only a few weeks earlier.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #universal social programs #child care #day care #universal pre k

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pharmaphorumuk · 4 years

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How to address racial disparities in clinical trial data

In the US, fewer than three per cent of eligible patients participate in clinical trials – a figure that drops drastically when applied to ethnic minorities living in underserved communities.

It’s a problem that has repercussions across the healthcare ecosystem, and the impact of disparity on the medical evidence base will only magnify as we further move into the personalised care era.

“We do have evidence that indicates that some therapies do not work in certain genetic dispositions,” said R’Kes Starling, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Texas-based Reveles Clinical Services, a clinical research support company

“According to the American Cancer Association, when you look at breast cancer in African American women, for example, we know that the TP53 mutation is expressed more than Caucasian tumour samples. It is present in some people with an African ancestry but not in others. We need to understand more about that.”

Low clinical trial participation in general, and among black and ethnic minorities in particular, must be addressed if we are to realise the potential of medical advances, he added.

He said: “We are experiencing a tremendous amount of innovation and the number of breakthrough treatments coming through at the moment is unprecedented.

“However, this process still takes anywhere between 12 and 15 years and costs about $2bn. At that pace and with the amount of time and the amount of capital it takes to develop a therapy, it is inevitable that we will start seeing a decline.”

Diverse barriers

Most investigators now understand the importance of diversity in clinical trials but turning this realisation into action isn’t necessarily straightforward.

The barriers to participation among black and ethnic minorities in the US include awareness, access, and a lack of trust spawned of historic medical abuse scandals such as the Tuskegee Airmen study.

“There are so many barriers. You tend to have a lack of knowledge that trials are happening, and a lack of access – on average, patients live two hours away from the investigation site,” said R’Kes, explaining that research-rich sites were often based in large cities and coastal areas.

“Then, for certain groups, you have this trust issue – and that’s not totally unwarranted. We have a history where unscrupulous events have occurred to people of colour and this has led to distrust in the purpose of clinical trials.”

The 40-year Tuskegee trial, for example, was ruled to be unethical in the 1970s, after it emerged syphilis treatment had been withheld from the black participants in the 1940s when penicillin was found to be curative.

“Any one of these barriers is significant, but when you compound them, you can see why we have such low participation rates,” said R’Kes.

Diverse solutions

There’s no “silver bullet” to overcoming these challenges, but the strategy has to start with addressing – and removing – some of these barriers.

Reveles is currently partnering with Black Men in White Coats to help develop more black principal investigators. Founded by Dr Dale Okorodudu, the organisation provides mentorship, guidance and networking to African American trainee doctors.

“We have an epidemic of under-representation in the medical schools. By wrapping a support system around these young men and women, the organisation is creating an eco-system that allows them to thrive in their profession,” R’Kes explained.

Part of that entails encouraging young doctors to develop an interest in conducting research within their own communities, a goal R’Kes believes can help overcome barriers.

“When patients are asked where they get their information about clinical trials from, the number one source is their physician. So, we need to get more diversity in our principal investigators.

“If you have trusted healthcare providers in your community, who look like you, are culturally relevant and understand the challenges associated with those communities, it helps to foster trust, as well as promote the practice of medicine,” he said, adding digital technology solutions also had a role to play.

Reveles provides decentralised clinical trial services by leveraging purpose-built software that utilises techniques such as remote monitoring, telehealth, wearables and electronic patient-reported outcome assessment.

“We know there are barriers associated with geographical disparities. Some people are unable to travel, or certain conditions can prohibit them from travelling. We want to enable them to participate if they are willing and engaged.”

This approach can also help address similar issues in areas like rare disease drug development, where small patient numbers make clinical trial recruitment difficult.

“People with these complex diseases cling to a notion of hope, and by participating in clinical trials they are not only giving hope to themselves but to others. We want to bring that hope closer to home,” said R’Kes.

He added that there was a lot of great work currently going on in the clinical trial technology space, but that embracing its opportunities would require a “paradigm shift”.

“Trust is earned over time and we believe that if we continue to demonstrate that you can conduct a trial in this way, people will begin to embrace it. What was considered an unconventional approach will become the norm over time,” he said.

For the good of the whole

Clinical trial recruitment and retention is an issue that cuts across groups and therapy areas, slowing drug development and medical understanding. But racial disparities pose their own unique problems in terms of contributing to health inequalities across the board.

As personalised care becomes a reality, we are increasingly in need of population-specific data on which to base treatment decisions. Without it, today’s rapid medical advances will simply not benefit the whole of society equally.

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from https://pharmaphorum.com/views-analysis-patients/utilising-technology-racial-disparities-clinical-trial-data/

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monosko · 5 years

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019)

Calcutta International Exhibition 1883_84

ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

PROLOGUE If we believe that acculturation is an interactive process that brings about changes in lifestyles as well as moral and aesthetic values of two or more autonomous cultural systems, then it was a two-sided process of acculturation that happened in nineteenth-century Calcutta merging interests and identities of the two civilizations in encounter between a technologically superior Western society and a non-Western society inclined toward its empirical traditions. Acculturation in colonial India is generally interpreted as a deliberate process initiated by the British Orientalists and the English-educated enlightened Indians notwithstanding the dominating spirit of the 19th century nationalism in Victorian sense. In fact, on either side, players were products of the 18th-century world of rationalism, classicism, and cosmopolitanism. [Koff] Many Orientalists, notably William Jones, H. T. Colebrooke, William Carey, H. H. Wilson, and James Prinsep, made significant contributions to the fields of Indian philology, archeology, and history. On the other hand, Rammohun, Dwarkanath, Radhakanta, Debendranath, Vidyasagar and so many Indian reformists encouraged their fellowmen to get exposure to western science and literature, on top of vernacular sagacity. They effected in remarkably short time a widespread dissemination of western knowledge through institutionalized means like schools and colleges, printing-press and newspapers. By 1821, the Calcutta School-Book Society, sponsored by a number of public spirited individuals like David Hare, Rammohun, Radhakanta, belonging to different religious denominations, without any backing of Government grant, produced and distributed as many as 126446 copies useful works in different languages; no fewer than 14,792 were books in the English language’. Another interesting feature was the decrease in the demand for books in the Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian languages, ‘being the spoken language of no one’. By 1835, the Society had sold 31,864 books in English. Five year before the Medical College in Calcutta started professional courses in English, it was claimed that Calcutta had in 1830 nearly 200 who wrote English as naturally as their mother tongue. As for Bengali language, long before the coming of the English in Bengal, the mother tongue of the majority had been discounted as simplistic and unworthy of official status. ‘The languages of the superior civil and commercial stations were English, Portuguese, and Persian, and ambitious Hindus made certain that of these they knew at least Persian’. It was Halhed who first urged upon British civil officers the necessity of acquiring knowledge of it for the efficient transaction of their duties. He argued for the Bengali language, before anyone else ever did, specifying its inherent qualities: ‘its plainness, its precision and regularity of construction, than the flowery sentences and modulated periods of Persian.’ His Grammar printed and published in Calcutta, gave practical support to his arguments, by providing British officers with a book from which they could learn the language. [Clark, 1956]

The earliest printed book in Bengali

No sooner Bengali becomes a popular medium of communication it started borrowing words from English and the English from Bengali as well. There have been many familiar words, e.g. coolie, cowrie, cot, curry, godown, pagoda, etc., originated from some other languages, commonly used by the English and the Bengalese. There are also some distinctively of Bengali origin, like babu and bungalow. A glimpse through Hobson-Joson may reveal many interesting evidences of liberal linguistic behavior of the Colonial Bengal despite the racial bias of which the world is continuing to suffer till today. As we understand from Sarah Ogilvie the author of ‘Words of the World’ that the former OED editor Robert Burchfield found to be an inward-looking anglocentrics who had erased 17 per cent of the ‘loanwords’ and ‘world English words’, Indic included, that had been added by earlier editor Charles Onions. [Ogilvie]

While all these conscious efforts of magnificent persona of both the camps created a short-lived glorious age of awakening and also a golden opportunity for a giant leap toward a modern society at par with global standards. Around 1880s that opportunity got lost. Western education reached a tiny proportion of the Indian population largely confined to the major urban centres. A chauvinistic nationalism back lashed the progressive movements. The undercurrent of acculturation, however, continued to flow effortlessly as conscious and unconscious acceptance of new ideas, often with the intention of revitalizing Indian cultural practices and institutions. Slowly steadily new things and ideas percolated through lairs to the bottom level of society undergoing series of changes through interactions. [Peers] What were those ‘new’ things and ideas? Historically speaking, the things and ideas branded ‘colonial’ are supposed to be grown out of Industrial Revolution directly or indirectly, which may be as big as Indian Rail or as small as a gramophone pin – everything targeted to make living in the colonial society convenient and agreeable.

Nipper, the dog is listening to a wind-up gramophone. New Vector Records September 1905 ad. Courtesy: HMV

It was still an industrial age when the Colonial style of living was being shaped through interactions with native environment. Changes incorporating new things and ideas were taking place faster and in an unprecedented large scale than ever happened in history because of the boon of technology. The Industrial Revolution, however, may not be seen as a movement for achieving speed and volume in industrial sphere. Its ultimate gain for the human society proved to be more an attitudinal change toward accepting values associated with new products than productivity itself. Acculturation during the colonial era may be more meaningfully interpreted, essentially in terms of the attitudinal changes.

EUROPEAN HABITATION IN CALCUTTA BEFORE 1830s Captain Williamson provided immaculate descriptions of the living conditions of late 18th century Calcutta that provides us with significant resource for identifying some down-to-earth relationship between the ‘new products’ of the Industrial Age and the formation of the ‘new society’, which yet to be fully surfaced.

The EIC officers adopting some local customs while remaining distinctly British_doyely

To the gentlemen coming to settle in Calcutta on civil, military, or naval service of the Hon. East India Company, Captain Williamson offered in his Vade Mecum many practical advices along with cautionary against belittling the native sagacity unwittingly while finding the most suitable mode of living for them. During Williamson’s time, between 1787 and 1798, a new Calcutta suburb was being born south of Town Calcutta to meet the craving of the settlers for ‘airy’ life close to Nature in the Gangetic Bengal mingled with the comfort and convenience of European way of living. New townships at Chowringhee-Dhurrumtollah locality were then only at their initial stage. In 1793-94, all over the town there were no fewer than 1114 pucca houses; in 1821 it increased to 14,230. [Oneil] The new suburbs grew faster with masonry houses built by Europeans and deshi well-to-dos as nucleus of new urban experience of ‘airy habitation’.

It is worth noting that the English inhabitants were still chiefly to be found ‘where their fathers had lived before them’ in the year 1810, Colonel Sleeman spoke of the residences of the Europeans as lying mainly between Dhurrumtollah and China Bazar; and the Tank Square was in the middle of the posh ‘Belgravia of his day’. [Cotton] This happens to coincide with the timeframe Williamson depicted in his Vade Mecum pinpointing some cultural issues involved in modeling ‘airy’ homes to live in comfy liberal style, which European settlers aspired to attain once they crossed Cossitollah toward further south. And so they did achieve their ‘model home’ through an intricate acculturation, after more than three decades of trials and errors, by coming into terms with indigenous methods and means of house building that the settlers initially tended to neglect. [Williamson 1810]

IN SEARCH OF A EUROPEAN MODE OF LIVING Williamson was one who believed that taking the general outline of indigenous customs should be considered an axiom for the settlers in exploring a new possibility of improving their quality of life. All the European settlers remained anxious to see airy habitations, through which the wind could pass freely in every direction. When the English first visited India, they adopted a mode of building by no means consistent with common sense, and displaying a total ignorance of the most simple of nature’s laws. For instance, they wasted much time to ‘become convinced that the most insupportable heats are derived from the glare of light objects’ and were to be judiciously used in designing habitats. Williamson’s advice to the settlers was ‘to coincide with the habits of the natives, to a certain extent if they mean to retain health or to acquire comfort’. Upon arrival, travelers learnt from local doctors that nine out of ten of the advices prescribed by doctors at London, would infallibly have sent them to ‘kingdom come!’ but readily approve the homie piece of good sense that ‘do as one should find the old inhabitants do’. Travelers, he observed, often suffer extreme inconvenience, and expose themselves to much danger because of the fact that they “bent on the refutation of the most reasonable assertions, and influenced by a ridiculous determination to support some equally ridiculous hypotheses”. Williamson tipped them with a piece of his mind: however absurd many indigenous practices may at first appear, it will ordinarily result that ‘necessity was their parent’.

British Styled Bungalow. Photographer: James Kerr (pumpparkphotos.com) c1880

All the buildings forty to sixty years old were, “like the celebrated Black-Hole, constructed more like ovens, than like the habitations of enlightened beings”. The doors were very small; the windows still less, in proportion, while the roofs were carried up many feet above both. Those roofs were in themselves calculated to retain heat to an extreme, being built of solid tarras, at least a foot thick, lying horizontally upon immense timbers, chiefly of teak, or of saul wood. Until around 1790s, the whole of the family resided in the first floor; leaving the whole of the ground floor as basements for reception of palanquins, gigs, cellars, pantries, and even stables. Since around 1780s their preferences changed in many ways. Living in single-floored thatched houses, styled as bungalows, became the way of European life. The settlers remained engaged indefatigably to improve upon the habitability of bungalow. They closed up all the intervals between the thatch, and the walls, on which it rested; so as to exclude the external air, as well as the dust: a practice religiously observed even to the present date. They improved upon the arrangement by installing a tin ventilator near the summits of the thatches. [Williamson 1810]

The shape and size of bungalows changed further having their apartments surrounded by a veranda, of full fourteen feet in width; with apertures, of a good size, in the exterior wall, corresponding with those of the interior. This arrangement renders the generality of bungalows remarkably pleasant; but, it must be noticed, that there was a very wide difference in the expense incurred in rendering them so, both as relating to the labor, and to the materials.

COLONIAL LIVINGSTYLE INVENTED As we discussed, Europeans modeled their new home and styled a new way of living for themselves through a continuous process of interactions between their own perceptions and desi sagacity. The model was generally found most comfortable and highly adaptable for living in changing Gangetic Bengal climate, and therefore the overall cost of a complete bungalow in tune of Rs 40,000, found quite acceptable by the well-to-do families of different cultural origin. Besides Europeans, there were quite a few desi families moved to Chowringhee-Dhurrumtollah to their newly owned bungalows. The natives of the land, on the other hand, increasingly appreciated whatever the settlers fashioned for their everyday use including bungalows, furniture fixture utensils wearable, as wonderful user-friendly amenities.

Major William Palmer with his second wife, the Mughal princess Bibi Faiz Bakhsh by Johann Zoffany, 1785.

Sketches Illustrating the Manners & Customs of the Indians & Anglo Indians | William Tayler/British Library

Nautch Girl or public female singer of India,” by Mrs. Belnos, London, c.1832. Source: ebay

A male Anglo-Indian being washed, dressed and attended by five Indian servants. Coloured lithograph by J. Bouvier, 1842, after W. Tayler. Iconographic Collections. Source: Welcome Images

The spread of English education might have a partial role in changing people mindset toward western culture – the way of life and the things they use every day. The ‘new products’ we talk about, however, more often than not, were made of old familiar things into new design; like a folding umbrella, for example. The settlers learnt by experience that it should be a madness to use a European umbrella, like a parapluie or a parasol, against a heavy Indian shower or a blazing sun. So they designed a new tough umbrella employing seasoned bamboos and heavy canvas to stand Indian weather best, and then add a collapsible holder inside to turn the old chattah into a surprisingly convenient ‘folding umbrella’. This novelty item was expected to be on high demand in Chandney shops, and the shops were expected to store umbrella and its parts as well to promote use of umbrella to all communities of Calcutta society.

A Fakir with umbrella. Details not known. Source: ebay

Bengalese Babu. Courtesy: Mary Evans.

Like the umbrella, there happen to be a innumerable new products originally designed and developed by the European settlers out of local ingredients generally employing local tools and technology to facilitate their living a decent comfortable life in India as they were used to. Such products of Colonial origin not anymore sensed as foreign to local habits and practice, and the locals feel at ease in using those, hand in hand with things they use traditionally in everyday life. Today, after a lapse of two centuries, Indian populace in general, have converted their mode of living so completely that rarely a dhoti-clad babu can be spotted on road unless he was to attend a special festive occasion. Desi dresses, Desi dishes ending with a bouquet of Benaresi pan will be soon things of forgotten past together with many essential items that remained parts of our heritage so long. The way the tune of Senhai is giving way to the resounding Rock music, every single item of our traditional pieces of life and art will be replaced with newer kinds in course of never-ending societal change.

Colonial-inspired house and interior design Courtesy: @myLusciousLife

HOUSE & FURNITURE Colonial Scenario: In all parts of the country houses are let with bare walls. Rent was expensive; some two hundred rupees a month for small house; which was then equal to three hundred pounds yearly. [Williamson 1813] Terrace-work is substituted for plank; and, being covered with a fine kind of matting, made of very hard reeds, about the thickness of a crow-quill, worked in stripes of perhaps a foot or more in breadth each gives a very remarkable neatness to the apartments; many of which, however, are laid with ‘satringes’ (সতরঞ্চি), or striped carpets, made of wool, or cotton, during the cold season. Carpets, in imitation of those manufactured at Wilton and Brussels, are now made in India; some of which are of incomparable excellence and beauty. The necessity which exists for keeping the doors and many windows open at all times renders it expedient to guard the candles, which are invariably of wax, from the gusts of wind that would speedily blow out every light. Shades, made of glass, are put over such candles as stand on tables.

Present-day Scenario Majority lives in rented accommodation; mostly unfurnished. Few have preference to ethnic furnishing with satringes’ (সতরঞ্চি), or striped carpets, sitalpapties, madoors, chics, ctc., while the generality love showy interiors with sofas, chairs centre table, side tables and so on. Urban folks keep doors closed, widows open all seasons except when gusty wind blows. Even then there is no need to guard candles as there no candle in use normally, but modern homes steel need shades for cutting the glare of electric lamps. As it appears, the mode and style of living in Calcutta now and then in many respects alike outwardly, yet an attitudinal difference remains much to explain why the homes of today so ill-kept in contrast with the spic and span Colonial home. The other notable difference is that the modern families ‘sacrifice comfort to appearance’ contradicting the principle of the Colonial Style as we have already discussed at length. . GARMENTS & OUTFITS Colonial Scenario:

Major-General Charles Stuart (circa 1758 – 1828), wrote his first article in 1798 about military clothing and there he professed the use of Indian clothing and accessories, as they are convenient and appropriate, attacking European prejudices. Better known as ‘Hindu Stuart’, Charles was not just an admirer of the Indian religions but also an enthusiastic devotee of Indian fashions. In a series of disputed articles in the Calcutta Telegraph he tried to persuade the European women of Calcutta to adopt the sari on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary European fashions. Because of his Hindu craze, Charles Stuart was certified as ‘gone native’. [Dalrymple]

The friends of the English young men, who are sent to the East Indies, generally fit them out with a great variety of apparel, and other articles, enumerated in the slop-merchant’s list under the head of “Necessaries” that basically include quantities of the followings: Calico Shirts, Stockings, Trousers, Drawers, Jackets, Waistcoats, Night Caps, Hats, Handkerchiefs, Neck Kerchiefs Or Bandana, etc. “Of these a large portion is entirely useless.” Among the indispensables, according to Williamson, should be a good stock of wearing apparel; generally speaking, white cotton, manufactured into various cloths; such as dimity, calico, if not made of nankeen. The beauty of some fabrics of this description was considered ‘very striking’. Thirty suits will not be found too many for a European in Calcutta society. [Williamson 1813]

A European, probably Sir David Ochterlony (1758-1825), in Indian dress, smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in his house at Delhi. Artist: unknown. c.1820. Courtesy: BL

Present-day Scenario Inside home, Calcutta men commonly wear pajama kurta (পাঞ্জাবী), and the ladies stuck to sari (শাড়ি) wherever they go, inside or outside, till around 1980s when a wave of Anglo-American fashion maxi midi mini dresses became choices of convenience for the young ladies that ultimately gave way to oriental varities of salwar kamiz. Outside, almost all men folks and children of both sexes appear in western attire – but with no caps on head. The corporate or institutional dress codes in Calcutta do not insist to wear a headdress – a useful accessory for resisting weather bite, but a necktie around the neck to look smarter at the cost of agonizing physical discomfort. There were quite a few things Europeans invented for tropical climate that become obsolete now in spite of their latent advantages. The Sola-topee or topi, may serve a good example of such things. Topi is made of lightweight sholapith covered with khaki or white cloth. The reason for using sola is its lightness and its heat-resistant capacity for protecting head from the scorching tropical sun, cleverly fitted with two tiny holes at both sides for ventilation. Colonial men and women loved to wear it for convenience and comfort, Indians rejected it possibly because of its prosaic appearance on the first place.

KITCHEN & TABLEWARE Colonial Scenario: The favourable oriental dejeuner usually consisted of tea, coffee, eggs, toast, and fish, (either fresh or slightly powdered with salt, rice, &c.). Many gentlemen, especially those from North Britain, add sweetmeats and soogee; the latter corresponding with porridge, oats, which were not cultivated in India. Of all things of European liking Hilsa might be the foremost. The fish tasted ‘remarkably fine’ especially when baked in vinegar, or preserved in tamarinds worcestersauce.

The knives and forks were all of European manufacture, though, within few years, some excellent imitations appeared in market. The greater part of the plate, used throughout the country, was made by native smiths, who, in some instances, might be seen to tread very close on the heels of English jewelers. Table cloths and napkins were manufactured in several parts of the country, where ‘piece goods’ were made, especially at Patna.

Present-day Scenario

Not for breakfast alone, tables for lunch and dinner (or supper as it was called then) resemble by and large what commonly Calcuttans having these days. Although, Bengalese still prefer to use hands in dining at home, cutlery are being used increasingly along with a large number of local variety of tableware like Tea Cups and Plates, Tea Cozy, Pepper Grinder, Salt Shakers, Napkins, and Pickles, Vinegar & Sauce as for instance. The English, as we all know, is basically a highly traditional race who still calls their lamb cutlet a ‘mutton cutlet’ retaining the French legacy of the product they had borrowed. Following the same tradition they call many products of Indian origin with vernacular appellations. On the contrary, in case of the colonial products, which they designed and developed using local ingredients and technology, reference to the source of origin is rarely provided. The story of the world famous Worcestershire Sauce and the theme British Curry may exemplify my view point adequately.

LEA & PERRINS® .The story of Lea & Perrins® famous Worcestershire Sauce begins in the early 1800s, in the county of Worcester. Returning home from his travels in Bengal, Lord Sandys, a nobleman of the area, was eager to duplicate a recipe he’d acquired. On Lord Sandys’ request, two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins, made up the first batch of the sauce but were not impressed with their initial results. They needed few years more to find right kind of aging process to turn the ingredients into a delicious savoury sauce. Without any kind of advertising, in just a few short years, it was known and coveted in kitchens throughout Europe.

Portrait of William Fullerton of Rosemont, Dip Chand, Murshidabad, India, 1760-1763. Opaque watercolour on paper. Company Painting. Courtesy: VAM

In the space of a few years Duncan, a New York entrepreneur, was importing large shipments to keep up with demand. Lea & Perrins was the only commercially bottled condiment in the U.S., and Americans loved it right away. Almost 170 years later, Lea & Perrins sauce remains a favorite in households across the U S.

BRITISH CURRY. “The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names … But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.” [Collingham] In fact, there are many varieties of dishes called ‘curries’. In original traditional cuisines, the precise selection of spices for each dish is a matter of national or regional cultural tradition, religious practice, and, to some extent, family preference. Such dishes are called by specific names that refer to their ingredients, spicing, and cooking methods. Curry, which becomes now Britain’s adapted national dish, is largely viewed as an Anglo-Indian theme. Luke Honey, a columnist, writes “how fond I was of Anglo-Indian curry powders; the sort of thing I chuck into stews and then have the nerve to call ‘curry’”. He made his own version of Dr Kitchener’s curry powder, as described by Mrs Beeton. He slightly adapted it for the modern kitchen and added cardamom and black pepper. [Honey] Wyvern’s recipe for basic powders reveals a large number of similar ingredients, hinting at very similar flavour profiles. They all include turmeric, cumin seed, fenugreek, mustard seed, black peppercorns, coriander seed, poppy seed and dried ginger and chilies.

In 1810, the entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed, from the Bengal Presidency, opened the first Indian curry house in England: the Hindoostanee Coffee House in London. The theme of British Curry, as distinguished from Proto-Curry and Anglo-Indian Curry, presumes that Curry is the result of over four hundred years of British interaction with India. As the findings of a recent British academic research suggests, Curry is a way that the British made Indian cuisine understandable in their minds and on their palates. It is more than a mixture of Indian spices, an idea or a symbol of the success of British imperial endeavors in possessing, converting and incorporating an object of other i.e. of India, into their world. [Waldrop]

BRITISH GIFT OF TEA CULTURE TO INDIAN PEOPLE

British Tea Tea Culture of India, Calcutta in particular, tells a fascinating story of social dynamics involving the ways of life of the British and the Indian people. The British gifted Tea Culture to India where they cultivated tea plants of native origin as well as the Camellia sinensis variety that Robert Fortune smuggled from China in 1849 for the East India Company. In Britain initially it was a luxury of the high society under the spell of Braganza the Queen Consort of Charles II during 1662 -1685, who happened to be the primary motivator behind the emerging British tea culture. Because the British East India Company had a monopoly over the tea industry in England, tea became more and more popular; and as its prices slowly fell, the luxury of drinking tea became middle-class habit. At the close of the 18th century tea – a cheaper drink than bear – turned out to be the drink of Britons of every class. There have been, nonetheless, the ways of making tea and taking tea remain distinctive of every class conforming nuances of tea culture. The popularity of tea, its respectability and domestic rituals, supported the rise of the British Empire, and “contributed to the rise of the Industrial Revolution by supplying both the capital for factories and calories for labourers” . Tea became the national drink of Britain. [Mintz]

Colonial India In late 1870s the drinking of tea was in fashion all over India and commonly a part of everyday informal social meets. [Mandelslo] We can see from contemporary writers that ladies and gentlemen had occasions to socialize themselves many a time a day – at breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, supper, dinner, and after-dinner – and never without cups and shimmering teapots to induce sharing of minds. Calcutta was then a city of ceremonials and carnivals.

Tea-parties were enlivened with spirit of sociability where anything could be discussed, less the delicate subjects like tea growing and its politics and economics. Tea and the Britain have a shady history. ‘The British brought tea to England by way of monopolistic trade, smuggling, drug dealing, and thievery’ as modern research admits [Petras]. The Colonial India produced highest bid tea in auction markets by employing bonded labourers from Assam and North Bengal. From Calcutta, troops of hair-dressers and shoe-makers of Chinese origin were also called to join on the presumption that every Chinese a good tea-plucker. The plight of these hapless slaves was first known when Ramkumar Vidyaratna and Dwarkanath Ganguly reported in Sanjibani (সঞ্জিবনী) aroud 1886 [Ganguly] long before Mulk Raj Anand portrayed their misery in his famous Two leaves and a bird appeared in 1937. [Anad]

Recent Scenario The Tea Culture in India virtually started with the Tea Cess Bill of 1903 provided for levying a cess on tea exports – the proceeds of which were to be used for the promotion of Indian tea both within and outside India. Large hoardings and posters for tea recipes were put up in Indian languages, on several railway platforms; at Calcutta tram terminals they distributed free cups of tea, added with milk and sugar to make the drink agreeable to uninitiated tongues, and the like promotional plans put into operation to convert the teetotaler Indian public, especially the Bengalese, into a tea-addict race to whom ‘every time a tea time’. The plans, however, failed to meet their goal so long the aggressive opposition from the Swadeshi camp was in force. Gandhi called tea ‘an intoxicant’, in the same class of avoidable substances as tobacco and cacao. In the early 1920s, Acharya Prafulla Ray, an eminent chemist and a passionate nationalist, published cartoons equating tea with poison [Sanyal], in contrast of the British outlook that drinking tea is good for health of every family member including the dog. “Young dogs are frequently kept in health by a cup of tea being given to them every day.”[Roberts]

Tea Set. Oil on canvas. Artist: Jean-Étienne Liotard. 1781-83. Courtesy:Getty Center

Rabindranath Tagore, to whom the spirit of nationalist was never chauvinistic, welcomed tea cordially not only as a refreshing drink but an engaging Culture as he had experienced in Japan in 1916. He also established at Santiniketan a unique café exclusively for tea, ‘Cha-Chawkro’ (চা চক্র) in around 1929 – an addaa for the চা-স্পৃহ চঞ্চল চাতক দল tea lovers, [Chakraborty 2019]. Cha-Chawkro probably was the third stand-alone Tea Room in India, the first being The Favourite a typical vernacular tea joint set up in1818, and the second, a typical well-groomed Anglican tea-shop that the Swish Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Flury opened in 1927 under the banner “Flurys”.

Today’s Flurys is no more a tea-room – but surely a brazen joint best known for its exquisite breakfast meals. The décor has given away its colonial vibe for a fusion of cultural trends of no character of its own. [Majumdar,2009]

The old Favourite Cabin, however, still continuing with its inimitable tea-culture indigenously developed since 1918. Excepting the tea tables, crockery and the style of tea making, Nutan Barua, and his elder brother Gaur, borrowed nothing from the English to steer this first stand-alone tea room making a history contributed by generations of regular customers, many of them were firebrand writers, political activists, and young intellectuals. The tea-table manners were guided by the unwritten codes the customers formed themselves over the years that surely helped the cafe in continuing with its esprit de corps so long. [Bhaduri]

Other than the three pioneering tea shops we discussed Calcutta had quite a few local bistros famous for their addictive teas, often with some fried specialties. Basanta Cabin, Jnanbau’s tea stall, in North, Radhubabu’s stall, Sangu Valley, Bonoful in South, and Café de Monico at the city centre had been then crowdie hangouts of different social groups who were largely responsible for hauling an independent tea culture of this colonial city. Although the tea industry is still looking optimistically for the prospect of India’s National Drink status, the culture of Tea is seemingly dying a silent death. Already assaulted by coffee and the American soft-drink lobbyists, it may not stand the shock of being robbed its very identity in recent time. The good name of ‘tea’ is now being abused to mean some novelty refreshments that have little or no tea content, but mostly made of heady spices often with large proportion of milk and sugar. Such brands of desi teas sound like new versions of Gandhian tea now being marketed as Tulsi tea, Masala tea, Malai tea, Rhododendron tea, and the like. The Kahwa tea, is however different being the soul-warming drink of the Kashmiris and a part of their culture. All these refreshment drinks, of dissimilar taste and flavour, meant for people of different mind-sets than those who enjoyed tea the way Tagore’s Gora did, or a Nazrul did in Favourite Café, or someone, not necessarily an intellectual like Sydney Smith [Smith], who thanks God for tea, wondering “What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

END NOTE It is highly interesting to note, all these ‘new things’ created by the Europeans for themselves proved in no time to be equally good for Indian homes. Those products actually gave indigenous people an exposure to alternative styles of living and an opportunity to preview their relative merits that instigated necessary attitudinal change to tolerate differences in socio-cultural values and accept what found ‘best’ for them objectively. This attitudinal change we may consider as an indispensable condition for bringing about the ‘Awakening of Bengal’ and its recurrences around 1880s and 1930s.

REFERENCE

Anand, Mulk Raj. 1937. Two Leaves and a Bud. Bombay: Kutub.

Bhaduri, Arka. 2019. “ফেবারিট কেবিন.” Indian Express, May 9, 2019. https://bengali.indianexpress.com/west-bengal/favourite-cabin-a-century-old-kolkata-cafe-college-street-100180/.

Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calcutta and Calcuttans From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma KL. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149376.

Chakraborty, Sumita. 2016. “শান্তিনিকেতনে চিন ও জাপান.” Parabas, 2016. https://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pSumita_china-japan.html.

Chunder, Rajarshi. 2016. “Dishes and Discourses: Culinary Culture at Jorasanko.” Sahapedia. 2016. https://www.sahapedia.org/dishes-and-discourses-culinary-culture-jorasanko.

Collingham, Lizzie. 2006. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. London: Vintage Books. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Curry.html? id=Sr3GUyWe3O0C.

Cotton, H E A. 1907. Calcutta: Old and New; a Historical and Descriptive Handbook of the City. Calcutta: Newman.https://archive.org/details/calcuttaoldandn00cottgoog/page/n3

Dalrymple, William (2002). White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India. London: Harper.

Davies, Pauline. 2013. “East India Company and the Indian Ocean Material World at Osterley, 1700-800,.” Internet: East India Company at Home. 2013. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/osterley-park-middlesex/osterley-case-study-winds-of-trade/.

Gandhi, Arun. 2014. Grandfather Gandhi. NY: Atheneum Books. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=wduwz6-DapAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Honey, Luke. 2008. “Dr Kitchener’s Curry Powder.” The Greasy Spoon. 2008. https://lukehoney.typepad.com/the_greasy_spoon/2008/11/dr- kitcheners-curry-powder.html.

Koff, David. 1969. No TitleBritish Orientalism And The Bengal Renaissance 1773-1835. Calcutta: Firma KL. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.98306/page/n7.

Mahomet, Sake Deen. 1794. The Travels of Dean Mahomet : A Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of the Honourable the East India Company. [Ireland]: Cork. https://archive.org/details/b28742898/page/n5.

Majumdar, Rakhi. 2009. “Into the Future: Apeejay Surrendra Group Post Jit Paul.” ET :Jun 04, 2009, 2009. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/into-the-future-apeejay-surrendra-group-post-jit-paul/articleshow/4617853.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst.

Mandelslo, Johann Albrecht von. 1669. Voyages Celebres & Remarquables, Faits de Perse Aux Indes Orientales. London: John Starkey, and Thomas Basset. https://archive.org/details/voyagescelebresr00mand/page/n8.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1993. “The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption.” In Consumption and the World of Goods; Ed. by Brewer, John; Porter, Roy. NY: Routledge. https://www.amazon.com/Consumption-World-Goods-Culture-Centuries/dp/0415114780.

Ogilvie, S. (2012). Frontmatter. In Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (pp. I-Vi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139129046″>https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139129046

Peers, Douglas M. 2006. No TitlIndia under Colonial Rule: 1700-1885. NY: Routledge. https://books.google.co.in/books? id=dyQuAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_other_v ersions_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false%0A%0A.

Petras, Claire. 2013. “British Tea 17th-19th Century.” Clairepetras.Com. 2013. http://clairepetras.com/history/ . Roberts, Emma. 1837. Scenes and Characteristics Hindostan,with Sketches Of Anglo-Indian Society. Vol. 1 (2). London: Allen. https://archive.org/details/scenesandcharac04robegoog.

Sanyal, Amitava. 2012. “Mahatma Gandhi and His Anti-Tea Campaign.” BBC News Magazine, May 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17905975. Shastri, Shibanath. 1909. রামতনু লাহিড়ি ও তৎকালীন বঙ্গসমাজ. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2nd ed. Calcutta: SK Lahiri. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.111.479.1009-a.

Smith, Sidney. 1855. A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. By His Daughter, Lady Holland. With a Selection from His Letters. NY: Harper. https://archive.org/details/memoirofreverend02smituoft/page/n6.

Waldrop, Darlene Michelle. 2007. “A Curried Gaze: The British Ownership Of Curry.” Univ. Georgia.

Williamson, Thomas. 1810. East India Vade Mecum; or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military,or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company; Vol. 2 (2). London: Black, Parry. https://www.scribd.com/document/305022589/The-East-India-Vade-Mecum-Volume-2-of-2-by-Thomas-Williamson.

Williamson, Thomas. 1813. Costume and Customs of Modern India from Collection of Drawings by Charles Doyley… Ed. by Thomas Williamson. Oxford University. Vol. XXX. London: Edward Omre. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VNFbAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP7&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false.

WAYS OF LIFE IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA: CHRONICLE OF ACCULTURATION

Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019) ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

WAYS OF LIFE IN COLONIAL CALCUTTA: CHRONICLE OF ACCULTURATION Dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Dr. Alok Ray (March 1937- June 2019) ঔপনিবেশিক কলিকাতায় সাংস্কৃতিক বিনিময়

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, April 2, 2021

Bumpy road ahead for Biden’s infrastructure plan (AP) Infrastructure was a road to nowhere for former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. But Joe Biden believes he can use it to drive America to the future after a dozen years of false starts. The trip is unlikely to be smooth. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure package, released Wednesday, would go well beyond the usual commitments to roads and bridges to touch almost every part of the country. It’s a down payment on combating climate change, a chance to take on racial inequities, an expansion of broadband, an investment in manufacturing and a reorienting of corporate taxes to pay for everything. To succeed where his predecessors stalled, Biden will have to navigate a conflicting set of political forces with winners and losers all around. Even before Biden delivered his opening speech on the plan, Republicans had latched on to Reagan-era labeling, dismissing the package as tax-and-spend liberalism. Some Democratic lawmakers, on the other hand, fear Biden’s plan does too little over eight years. Others see it as a chance to tinker with tax laws. Business groups have long backed bold investment in infrastructure—just not through taxes on their members. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable both strongly oppose the tax hikes.

US hunger crisis persists, especially for kids, older adults (AP) America is starting to claw its way out of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but food insecurity persists, especially for children and older adults. Food banks around the U.S. continue giving away far more canned, packaged and fresh provisions than they did before the virus outbreak tossed millions of people out of work, forcing many to seek something to eat for the first time. For those who are now back at work, many are still struggling, paying back rent or trying to rebuild savings. “We have all been through an unimaginable year,” said Brian Greene, CEO of the Houston Food Bank, the network’s largest. It was distributing as much as 1 million pounds of groceries daily at various points during the pandemic last year. America’s yearlong food insecurity crisis has been felt especially sharply by children who lost easy access to free school meals, and older adults who struggled to get groceries or meals at senior centers because they worried about contracting the virus.

Making cities more livable (The Conversation) Across the country, municipalities have countered death during a respiratory pandemic by cutting loose on restrictions when it comes to outdoor dining and recreation, taking parking spaces and streets intended for vehicular use and giving them over to restaurants and repurposing them as areas to walk through programs designed to open up spaces for city dwellers. While many of these initial attempts were designed to be temporary, many have high approval and will likely stick around. A survey of 130 mayors of cities found that 92 percent had created new spaces for outdoor dining over the course of the pandemic, and 34 percent planned to make these changes permanent. About 40 percent of mayors said they pursued widening sidewalks and adding new bike lanes. Further, 76 percent said they think residents will visit parks and green spaces more frequently than they did before the pandemic, with 70 percent expecting residents to walk more than before and 62 percent to bike more.

Rise of the digital dollar? (WSJ) The first glimpse of research that could eventually lead to a Federal Reserve digital dollar should arrive this fall, according to people working on the effort. Some time in the third quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will reveal the first stage of a project that could years down the road yield a Fed digital dollar, James Cunha, the Boston Fed’s senior vice president of Secure Payments and FinTech Research, said in an interview last week. The U.S. central bank is one of many around the world considering the introduction of a digital currency. Proponents of the idea say digital currencies would offer faster settlements, cut money-transfer costs or even eliminate them, and may even have benefits for monetary policy. But the Fed hasn’t offered details about what a digital dollar—which some have dubbed Fedcoin—would look like.

France to close schools, ban domestic travel as virus surges (AP) French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday announced a three-week nationwide school closure and a month-long domestic travel ban, as the rapid spread of the virus ramped up pressure on hospitals. It’s a departure from the government’s policy in recent months, which has focused on regionalized restrictions. School closures in particular had been seen as a very last resort. “We’re going to close nursery, elementary and high schools for three weeks,” Macron said, adding that a nationwide 7 p.m.- 6 a.m. curfew will be kept in place. Macron said restrictions already applying in the Paris region and elsewhere will be extended next week to the whole country, for at least one month. Under these restrictions, people are allowed to go outside for leisure, but within a 10-kilometer (6 miles) radius from their homes—and without socializing. Also, most non-essential shops are closed down.

Merkel appeals to Germans to stay home for Easter to stem pandemic third wave (Reuters) Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Germans on Thursday to stay at home over Easter and meet fewer people to help curb a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, as the capital Berlin announced a nighttime ban on gatherings from Friday. “It should be a quiet Easter, with those closest to you, with very reduced contact. I urge you to refrain from all non-essential travel,” Merkel said in a video message, adding this was the only way to help doctors and nurses fight the virus.

Myanmar aid workers arrested, intimidated, hurt, Red Cross says (Reuters) Myanmar Red Cross workers have been arrested, intimidated and injured on the front lines as they tried to treat mounting civilian casualties, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday. Myanmar Red Cross teams had provided care for over 2,000 people, a statement said. They have also been targeted. Videos on social media have shown members of the security forces assaulting and abusing medics and in at least one instance shooting up an ambulance. Reuters has not independently verified these videos. The unrest also threatened efforts to contain the COVID-19 epidemic, with testing, tracing and treatment sharply down. “We could be facing a perfect storm in Myanmar where another wave of COVID-19 infections collides with a deepening humanitarian crisis spreading across the entire country,” officials said.

Fake journalist (Foreign Policy/Le Monde) A French journalist who has recently defended the Chinese government’s policy toward the Uyghurs of Xinjiang and its approach to Taiwan does not exist, the French newspaper Le Monde reports. Laurène Beaumond claims to be a French expat who previously lived in Xinjiang in recent op-eds published on the Chinese international broadcaster CGTN’s French language site. In one post, dated March 28, Beaumond slammed a recent campaign by Western firms to boycott cotton from Xinjiang. Le Monde asserts the author is a fake, based on her name not appearing in any records kept by a French government commission that distributes identity cards to journalists, despite her claim to have worked in French newsrooms in the past. A cursory search by FP could unearth no record of the journalist either. If the author cannot be verified, it will provoke awkward questions for CGTN. The broadcaster only gained approval to operate in France in early March after being banned in the United Kingdom.

Hong Kong court finds veteran pro-democracy activists guilty of unauthorized assembly (Washington Post) Several veteran Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, most over 60, were convicted Thursday for unlawful assembly and now face years in jail, as the dragnet closes around almost the entirety of the city’s opposition. The seven convicted include Martin Lee, an 82-year-old barrister who helped launch Hong Kong’s main opposition party in the 1990s, and Lee Cheuk-yan, 64, who backed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and helped organize a yearly vigil for it in the city. Two others had already pleaded guilty. Their ability to live freely and continue their activism has for years been a bellwether of Hong Kong’s relative autonomy from mainland China, which Beijing has moved to crush with staggering speed and intensity. The activists, some of whom are former legislators, face up to five years in prison. Many are also defendants in other cases, including media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who has also been charged under Beijing’s new national security law and denied bail.

Imprisoned Palestinian leader’s entry shakes up planned vote (AP) A popular Palestinian leader imprisoned by Israel has registered his own parliamentary list in May elections, his supporters said Wednesday, in a last-minute shakeup that could severely weaken President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and help its militant Hamas rivals. Marwan Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, registered the list hours before the deadline set by the election commission. Polls indicate it would split the vote for Fatah, potentially paving the way for another major victory by Hamas. That increases the likelihood that Abbas will find a way to call off the first Palestinian elections in 15 years. Barghouti, 61, a former Fatah militant commander, is serving five life sentences in Israel following a 2004 terrorism conviction. But he remains a popular and charismatic leader, and by breaking with Abbas he could reshape Palestinian politics and potentially replace him as president. His entry reflects growing frustration with Abbas, who has presided over an increasingly authoritarian and unpopular Palestinian Authority that has failed to achieve national unity or advance Palestinian hopes for an independent state.

The Suez Canal ship is free, but the shipping industry’s ‘humanitarian crisis’ isn’t over (NYT) For nearly a week, the world was fixated on the spectacle of a mammoth cargo carrier blocking the Suez Canal, causing billions of dollars of damage to the global economy with every passing day. It was a surreal experience for advocates who have spent the past year desperately trying to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of mariners who are stranded on container ships due to the pandemic, creating what has been described as a “humanitarian crisis at sea.” While more than 90 percent of all goods used worldwide are transported by ship, few consumers stop to think about the lengthy ocean voyage involved, or the plight of seafarers who go months or years without seeing their families to make that possible. The crisis in the canal forced the world’s attention on ships that despite their massive size are often all but invisible, suddenly making plain, and impossible to ignore, the extent to which global trade relies on vessels like the Ever Given and their crews, who predominantly come from developing nations. “Hero is a strong word, but they really have kept society moving for the past 13 months,” said Stephen Cotton, the general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers worldwide.

Famine Stalks Yemen, as War Drags On and Foreign Aid Wanes (NYT) Six years into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, shattered the country and battered much of its infrastructure, Yemen faces rising rates of hunger that have created pockets of famine that aid groups warn are likely to grow, leaving even more malnourished Yemenis vulnerable to disease and starvation. The war has led to chronic food shortages in what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. A widespread famine was averted in 2018 only by a large influx of foreign aid. But the threat is greater this time, aid groups say, as the war grinds on, families grow poorer and the coronavirus pandemic has left donor nations more focused on their own people. “The famine is on a worsening trajectory,” said David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, in an interview after returning recently from Yemen. “Our biggest problem now is lack of money—and the war. Six years of war has completely devastated the people in every respect.” Nearly half of Yemen’s population, 13.5 million people, are struggling to get enough food, according to the United Nations. That number is expected to rise by nearly three million by the end of June, largely because funding shortfalls have reduced how many people aid agencies can feed.

Bees, landmines, and drones (BBC) There are an estimated 80,000 landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina and another 30,000 in Croatia, and clearing them is an exhausting, long-term effort that will take decades. In the past, researchers have been able to train bees to detect landmines, accomplishing this by getting the bees to associate the smell of TNT with sugary food. The bees are trained to cluster near places where mines are buried, and the efforts have been active for years. A new process brings drones and video equipment into the mix, allowing computer analysis of digital test footage to track the locations of bees with something like 80 percent accuracy, according to a recently published paper describing the algorithm.

#headlines #news

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allronix · 7 years

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17 and 20

17) Themes or motifs? Well, Endgame tends to focus a lot on of “Okay, humans have this great and wonderful world. We’re the deities. Now what?“ And all the folks who "get in” are going to come to different conclusions. Overall, the heroic characters will settle on a form of symbiosis. The world’s need one another, and it will weaken both if one dominates the other.

“Through a Diamond Sky,” I tried to play a Betrayal era Flynn by showing him as still heroic and trying to do the right thing, even if he stumbles. And when he brings Jordan into the picture, then it promises a Golden Age. But her death cuts it short. “Two and Three” (work in progress) is about Lora seeing what her invention actually does and making a heroic sacrifice to set things right and buy everyone else time. Invasion is where Jet gets uploaded, and willingly becomes a weapon against malicious Users. Endgame itself has the heroes divided over what path the new world should take. Alan and Sam believing it’s inherently dangerous and needs to be controlled or destroyed, Jet and Lora being firmly attached and not seeing the danger it poses as well. Quorra on the fence because she’s too hammered by grief to take a stand, etc.

As for an excerpt? Sure! This is from “Two and Three” (spoilers, though)

Backin the analog world, there is an ongoing debate. It usually centersaround music. Take a musical performance and record it onto a mediumlike a vinyl record. Then take the same recording and digitize it toa compact disc. While it’s digitized, it’s easy to makeimprovements to it – level out the bass and treble, clean up thescratched parts, or fix a part that got warped. You avoid all thehisses and pops that always seem to show up, no matter how well youmaintain your turntable and LPs. A compact disc samples at about44,100 times per second, far too finely for the human ear to perceiveany fragmentation.

Andyet, despite being the name that heralded the digital age, Kevinalways kept an extensive collection of vinyl records. Hundreds ofthem, always stored properly upright, anti-static sleeves, and atricked-out turntable and speaker system to get the most out of them.He insisted the sound was better, richer on an analog medium. Ilaughed and became an early and enthusiastic supporter of compactdiscs. Less hassle, fewer drawbacks.

Maybehe was right. You digitize something, even if you crank up the samplerate to finer and finer levels, even if you take every precaution;it’s still trying to translate that thing. Something always getslost in translation. Some part never comes back intact. I shouldhave figured that out sooner.

TheShiva laser was my life’s work. Walter Gibbs took me on as anintern once he read my doctoral thesis about mathematical proofs thatparallel dimensions or realities was a theoretical possibility. Theidea was to take matter, scan it, sample it millions of times likeyou would that piece of music, upload the matter to one of thoseparallel dimensions, and then “play back” the matter, where itreassembled itself like the Bach concerto in your car’s CD player.Back in 1980, we had proof of concept. By the late 1981, we hadsuccess. First with inorganic matter – rocks, plastic, metal. Wehad finally been able to make the leap to organic matter with anorange someone brought for lunch. Gibbs was debating how to ramp upthe experiment; larger objects, maybe even getting some lab mice sosee if could handle living things or set up two lasers in twodifferent sites and see if we could upload at one location andrecompile at another. A five-second travel by laser versus afive-hour trip by airplane? Sounded great at the time.

Therewas just one problem. We needed a very powerful artificialintelligence to handle all the necessary calculations. Another “itsounded like a good idea at the time” was to let it…him…gounmonitored, adding more to his functions. Master Control developedconsciousness, but not conscience. Concluding humanity was redundant,he had even put his claws into Defense Department systems andinitiated a countdown before he turned our own weapons on us.

Hedid not go down without a fight. Alan-1 and I barely survived thetraps he set for us. That’s a story for another time, I’m afraid.No, I didn’t want to know at the time what he tried to do to Kevin,but in hindsight, I should have insisted on asking. It may havestopped this war before it started.

Wesaved the world – both worlds - the three of us. I know that. Ofcourse, we had to keep it a secret. Who would believe that somecorporate research project almost nuked the West Coast sky highattempting to trigger World War Three? The cost was relatively small,but significant. Master Control’s destruction took all the Shivaresearch with it. Even attempts to retrieve it from tape backupsmysteriously failed. And after Gibbs passed away, the Encom board wascompletely uninterested in resuming it, despite Kevin’s loud andnumerous objections.

So,EN-511 and most of its contents were deleted (with a small archivekept on our new EN-1282 mainframe), and the only ones who had theinterest and the money to start from scratch was the Department ofDefense. From there, it was two steps forward and one and a halfsteps back. What should have been a six-month contract was now on itseleventh year.

Thestory of how I died started on October 19, 1994, late in theafternoon.

#anorptron #endgame scenario #tron #tron 2.0 #lora baines

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vicemirrored-a · 7 years

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Dr. Jekyll was mad, they say.

That was the rumour that still clung to the halls of Edinburgh’s anatomy school, even long after the professors and students of the so-called mad doctor’s era had drifted out of the university. There was some debate as to whether Dr. Jekyll had ever really existed, in the first place; some students insisted quite vehemently that there were some public records regarding the man’s life, but others, if only for argument’s sake, scoffed in reply, holding fast to their conviction that the man was nothing more than a city legend.

Whatever the opinion regarding Dr. Jekyll, however, the existence of a Mr. Hyde was indisputable. Since 1886, certain organs of his — to be precise, the stomach, brain, and portions of the intestines — had floated ghoulishly in formaldehyde, preserved for posterity on one of the university’s shelves for each generation of students to ogle at in fascinated disgust. For the most part, few took special note of them amidst the rest of the specimens; but every so often, some curious young lad might point up and inquire, “What happened to that man?” And always, some one or other of the older students would take it upon themselves to answer, generally with a bit of smug delight, “Oh, that was old Mr. Hyde.” Such a reply never failed to rouse up the interest of the younger students, of course, and once more, for what was likely the hundredth time, the specimen room would play host to the full story.

How much of this story was true, no one could ever say with certainty. Doubtless, details had, along the way, been embellished, changed, or omitted entirely, and what now passed for the story of Mr. Hyde’s dissection was very likely more fiction than fact. The topic, however, had never lost its appeal; and so, whether it could rightly be called accurate or not, on the tale went throughout the years, and after two decades, this was how it ran.

The matter of Mr. Hyde’s death was, according to most, simple enough, and, for the most part, that bit of the story was not widely disputed. All agreed that the man had taken his own life by way of cyanide to avoid the gallows, as it was well-known that he was, at that time, hunted for the rather brutal murder of some rich fellow or another. Few remembered the victim’s name and fewer still cared to know it — in the grand scheme of the tale, he was looked upon as inconsequential. It was enough to know that Mr. Hyde was a murderer, and a known one at that.

It was also undisputed that Mr. Hyde’s body had been found in the home of Dr. Jekyll, though there remained some argument as to which room he had been found in and as to who had made the discovery. The details changed with each telling: in some versions, the corpse had been found in the bedroom by a maid; in others, it had been found in the study by a friend of the doctor’s; in still others, it had been found in the laboratory by the police themselves. Which version was correct, however, if any version, was of little importance, in any case. It in no way affected the story of the dissection itself, which was what principally interested both the tellers and the listeners — for wherever Mr. Hyde had been found, and by whom, it was at the centre anatomical theatre, like so many corpses before him, that he landed. He had, after all, no family or friends to claim the body, and so it was that he was given to the university for study, as was the usual way with unwanted corpses at that period in time.

Here in the tale was the point at which the student telling it would drop his or her voice a little lower, for dramatic effect. Everyone in the theatre on that occasion, they said, had a chill in their bones when they looked on that corpse, though none of them could precisely say why. Outwardly, it was certainly no worse than the bodies that had lain on that slab before; and yet, in spite of that, there was something about that corpse in particular that alarmed and sickened even the hardiest among them. Even the doctor who was to perform the dissection, who was not at all known as a squeamish man, seemed oddly affected by the sight of that corpse. What caused this impression, none could pinpoint, but it was certain that all of them felt it nonetheless.

Then came the horrible part of the matter, the teller of the story would then say to the eager listeners. No sooner had the knife sunk into and split the flesh of the abdomen than the innards all but bubbled free, as though the body were far too small to contain them. This nauseating sight, horrible enough on its own, was accompanied by the most rancid stench, so powerful and so abhorrent that even the students in the farthest seats back cringed and covered their faces with their hands. Every organ seemed far too large for the corpse in which they had all been caged; Mr. Hyde had been, by any standards, a very small man, and yet the organs bound up in his body looked as though they ought to belong to a man at least double his size. The doctor himself could not account for it. He cut into several of the organs one by one in an attempt to determine whether the man had been afflicted with some sort of disease, but all he could find was an odd and inexplicable deterioration of the linings of the intestine and stomach, which was more than likely the cause of the rancid stench. It was as though the man had drunk — or been forced to drink — some corrosive and volatile chemical, which had caused him to rot slowly from the inside. But that, he later added in his notes, which were still somewhere preserved at the university, did nothing to explain the odd enlargement of the organs themselves.

Appalling though this was, it was not the full extent of the strangeness of that corpse. Every part of the body, from the muscles to the bones, seemed to bear the signs of some extreme strain. The doctor was said to have remarked that it was not unlike what is seen when muscles and skin are stretched too far, too fast; but while that could be explained in some parts of the body, evidence of it in the entire body was unaccountable. It should not have been possible, he insisted; but there lay the proof of it, wretched and repulsive, flayed on the dissection table in plain view — impossible, and yet incontrovertible.

It was said that at least five students left that lecture and declared themselves done with anatomy and medicine entirely, so shaken were they by what they had seen. Even those students who did not quit the discipline needed quite a bit of time to recover before they were willing to attend the next dissection. Distress of any sort always tends to bear discussion, and this was no exception: all who had seen that gruesome display turned to one another, in the days to come, and spoke of it in hushed whispers, attempting, not entirely with much success, to make sense of what they had all seen.

It was from these discussions, no doubt, that the rumour was born. One of the boys who had attended the dissection brought the news, next day, that the body had been found at the home of a man named Dr. Jekyll, a well-respected physician and a man wealthier than half of Edinburgh put together. Moreover, the boy insisted, Dr. Jekyll had been known to take an interest in chemical research — and lastly, he declared with the air of a showman, this very same doctor had disappeared without a trace on the night of Mr. Hyde’s death. Little was known of the man beyond that, but it was more than enough to start the rumour mill churning. It did not take long at all for a conclusion to be formed and spread around the university: that Dr. Jekyll had been quite mad, and that Mr. Hyde had been the subject, willingly or by force, of a chemical experiment. After all, would that not explain the strangeness of what was found in the corpse? Would that not explain the decay of the innards? Would that not explain why Jekyll, a rich fellow with very good standing, had fled as soon as Hyde’s body was discovered?

“So you see,” the student relating the tale would then conclude, often punctuating the words with a tap against the glass holding what was left of Mr. Hyde, “there is the story, in full. Edward Hyde, whoever the poor devil was, ended up an experiment to this Dr. Jekyll, who must have been entirely insane.” And the listeners would all glance around at one another, nearly shuddering, their brains frothing with the gruesome images of a mad, faceless doctor performing his odious experiments. And there would be an end of it: the students, eager to put the thing from their minds, would file out of the room and into the next. None of them knew — and perhaps, none of them would have liked to know — the degree to which the tale was true. In spite of all the details that had fallen away throughout the years, the core of the story remained far truer than anyone — save, perhaps, a long-dead lawyer who had once been named Mr. Utterson — ever fully knew: if nothing else, Mr. Hyde was, at his essence, just as the students of the university had guessed in horrified whispers, nothing more or less than the result of an experiment performed by a madman.

#( * drabble. )#gore //#slams this down on the mf dash #HERE IT FUCKING IS #the gore is p tame actually but #here we GO

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paperlacejane · 7 years

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In the light of Season 4 of BBC Sherlock,

I’m going to post my archived reaction to S3 and the Victorian Christmas Special, and some thoughts about the state of things. Completely unwanted and unrequested, but I want to share.

I also feel I should say that there is some positivity amongst the torrent of negativity.

I initially wrote the reaction to The Abominable Bride for my own personal catharsis. I considered posting it, tailored it as a review of the episode, even, but ultimately decided that I didn’t want to spread the negativity. If people were still enjoying it, then I didn't want to spoil it (I'm a sensitive type, and seeing negativity can easily harsh my buzz, so I didn't want to do that with anyone.)

I also still didn't want to believe where the show was heading. But now, given S4, I feel it's inescapable. Right now, I feel like I'm jumping out of the wood-work now to say: "SORRY GUYS, I KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO END BADLY." But I also really do want to make a point about the direction that the series took with S3 and the hideous Christmas special. [There were some considerable insulting blips along the way before that, but S3 (my main problem is His Last Vow) and TAB were so concentrated in their shitness, that I feel I need to single them out.]

I just want to point out that this wasn't a sudden thing. I feel like I need to say this, because a lot of people I'm seeing have been saying: "how did it go so wrong, you fucked up, this season was horrible" as if there weren't signs before this. People much more eloquent (and concise/pithy) than me have highlighted some of the questionable shit that has cropped up in Sherlock. I'm not going to write out all those points here. What I focus on are the glaring bits that offended me the most, that jarred the hardest, that really hurt -- and which appear to have been dialed up to 11 for this last series/season. I haven't read any (?? I think?) critiques of The Abominable Bride, so I can't say whether people have commented similar. I hope they have. (I had read over a couple of positive ones before writing this, on the IMDB page for that episode. This 'review' was what I was going to submit as a review on that page, because I was frustrated with the positivity, but I decided it was too-ranty and too downer-like for there.)

Very very few people are going to see this, let alone read this. But I just want to let out something that I’ve felt for a long time. That the signs of the fall were there, and that the writers, the actors, they've been screwing with us for ages, and that they've been wronging us in more ways than the no-johnlock queerbaiting-turned-queerbashing thing (which is a huge WRONG.)

So, this is my cathartic rant from however many years ago. I titled it, because Evernote wanted me to title it, "Notes on The Abominable Bride and the Questionable Direction of BBC's Sherlock" (the original title, I recall was: "what the actual fuck," or similar.)

In two words? Truly repugnant.

There is an aggressive amount of sarcasm at several points in the following paragraphs. Just, be warned. It should be obvious, and I've switched some of it out for easier reading with fewer double-negatives, but.

Given the era that Conan Doyle's stories were written, sexism is evident. Even within the character of Sherlock Holmes. He is quite gynophobic in the original stories, I have no illusions there. And yet he still respects women. He respects them when they're intelligent, when they're clever -- and those are not 'masculine' traits. He defends women, and threatens righteous violence against people who prey on them - one of my favourite moments is when he literally goes to get his riding crop to whip a man who has been manipulating and catfishing his own daughter. But still, there is sexism in Sherlock Holmes.

But I have never felt so attacked and demeaned as a woman by a Sherlock Holmes story as I have while watching this episode of BBC Sherlock. Whose idea was it to dress feminists in purple KKK hoods? To have them adopt KKK methods? To have pretty much all the women of the series thrown into a cultish vendetta club who specialised in systematic terror and serial murder? Oh, bravo. I don't care if it was all in Sherlock's head, or supposed to be justified within the narrative, or if it's supposed to be 'real'. Why would they put that on screen? Why would they make those links, create those parallels? And who thought having Steven Moffat tackle the topic of women and sexism was a good idea?

The only truly respectable life-like woman I have seen in this series is Sarah - a simple doctor, everyday but exceptional, who was clever and held her own. And yet she was disappeared. To be replaced by vindictive hags, insipid would-be love-interests, charicature land-ladies, and a woman who shot and technically killed the most-loved literary character of all time - who we're supposed to have forgiven because she "didn't mean to kill him," because her killshot was supposedly "surgery." The writers of this series would do well to remember that this isn't Doctor Who. It's not a science-magical world where the audience is obliged to grudgingly swallow down all the unlikely and downright absurd rationalisations that are thrown at us. If you use that sort of bullshit logic for a story which is supposed to be more-or-less realistic, it just looks exceedingly lazy -- even lazier than it does in Doctor Who. Not only that, It's fantastically cheap, and, at least personally, your audience ends up feeling cheated.

It also looks immoral in the extreme. How is it that all the characters -- John and Mycroft particularly (a pragmatic but emotional man who is supposedly devoted to Sherlock, as well as Sherlock's own brother who tenderly takes care of him every time he ODs) -- how are they supposed to have forgiven Mary too? I could, maybe, believe that Sherlock's self-esteem is so low that he might try to rationalise Mary's actions away in order to not rock the boat and not lose the people that he thinks of as his friends. But why in fuck's name are John and Mycroft believing that crock of shit? Even if it were "surgery," you're telling me that they can both just let the bare fact that she shot Sherlock slide? No visceral rejection of a person who could do that to someone you care about? No wish to see them pay, or be brought to justice? They're not repulsed by her actions in any way? They still trust her, when that's what she's capable of? When "I'll shoot Sherlock in the chest and maybe/probably he'll die," is a perfectly acceptable risk for her to take? (I say 'probably' because he flat-lined. And if it weren't a TV show, everyone has a good chance of dying if shot near point-blank in the fucking chest.)

Sherlock may be portrayed unsympathetically in this series, particularly in this latest episode, but he's no Magnussen. I wasn't torn up when Sherlock shot him in the face -- there was common decency on Sherlock's side, which goes a surprisingly long way. Magnussen was a blackmailing creep who had a penchant for sexual intimidation and degradation after all. But Mary shot Sherlock. Sherlock still equals 'good guy.' Let me break that down for you: A deceiving unrepentant liar and serial killer shoots good guy in chest for no good reason except so that she can go on lying. But not only are Mycroft and John letting that slide with little to absolutely no fuss, they're then letting Mary make smarmy little snide comments about Sherlock and joking about the lacking security of MI5 (and yeah, of course Mary can hack Mi5 instantaneously on an iPhone. Why not! Who cares about believability when you have the opportunity for 'witty' banter?) Mary is all-round a despicable character who somehow gets away with being a piece of shit because... She's sassy? The result is that she is a bad guy who gets no repercussions for her actions, and appears as shallow as a shower to boot. (I'm reminded forcibly of River Song.) The whole thing makes all of the main characters appear void of all human feeling, all basic human reasoning. They have no principles. Given that the show's main characters are meant to be crime-solvers, justice-dealers, law-and-order types, and "the British Government," you'd think there'd at least be some sense of moral rectitude abounding. And yet, no. There's a difference between "just enough of an arsehole to be worth liking," and just plain old arsehole. There's also a difference between morally grey and morally bankrupt. I feel increasingly under the impression that the writers don't know the difference.

On a related note: the true Sherlock Holmes was never, ever a sociopath (the term "sociopath" hasn't been used by any respected psychiatric authority since the 1960s - Sherlock would know that, even if the writers don't.) He has been sexist, but he has never been devoid of moral feeling. He has occassionally been devoid of tact, and often focused on fact over feelings, which are clearly very very different things. It's often remarked that as a character Sherlock Holmes is admirable, but that it's hard to like him. That's never stopped me before. That is, it's never stopped me with the original stories. Even within other adaptations, I have a great deal of affection for him and the stories he inhabits. With this series, they've done a good job of twisting that affection into disdain and disappointment.

Oh! And whose idea was it to harass a historically asexual/non-sexual character on his orientation? That was an added touch of pure ignorance - and that amidst the existing pool of unreason, it must have been the audience's birthday! Then, of course, they couldn't possibly forget to lean on the fact that Sherlock kept Irene Adler's photo in the stories! I mean, it's a given that he should be harassed for being non-sexual and non-romantic, but of ~course, if he were actually interested in sex and romance, he's obviously secretly definitely, ~definitely straight. Never mind that he also kept a bust and picture of Goethe. Nevermind that he has a picture of Poe in his bedroom. Nevermind that Irene was (in the original stories) a woman who just barely outwitted him, who ~just got away. Forget that it's perfectly conceivable that he might admire her resourcefulness and cunning -- they're just the things that as a character he always admires -- no, he obviously kept her picture because he wants to fuck her. Of course! God forbid a man admire and wish to remember a woman and not want to fuck her. Never mind all other evidence that he's content being a non-sexual non-romantic creature. Never mind respecting his orientation as valid. Never mind that Watson explicitly states that Holmes wasn't interested in Irene romantically/sexually, nevermind that he was willing witness at her wedding-- Oh, but they've found a solution for that as well! Watson was lying! Of course he was! How convenient for them!

I cannot adequately express just how disgusting it is that they are trying to suggest, in this same scene, that this particular interpretation/incarnation of the character of Sherlock Holmes is somehow the secretly ultra-accurate portrait of the 'real' Sherlock Holmes. They literally state that the original stories are glossed-over for the good of Dr Watson's reading public of the time. How narcissistic and power-hungry (and delusional) do you have to be to say that your adaptation is somehow a more 'real' or 'accurate' portrayal? "Oh, he's arguably one of the best-loved characters of all time? Well ours is more accurate and better and we have mobile phones!" The original Holmes is an icon, a simple character who is at the same time exceedingly complex, he's paradoxical and he's wonderful. He stands the test of time. And there was once a time when I would have defended this BBC portrayal of Sherlock as the most accurate adaptation I've seen - a rougher, younger Sherlock, but tactfully brought into the real and present day. Not anymore. They've ended up exaggerating Sherlock's flaws so that they consume his entire character - the drug-use/-addiction, the tactlessness. Then they have all the other characters hate on him, slap him, mock him because of the exaggerated character traits that once accented Sherlock Holmes, and that the audience once loved so much. I just feel like the entire series is being geared towards people hating Sherlock Holmes, hating this series. I don't understand what the intent is for making these narrative choices.

You cannot put your characters into situations, have them graphically violated and manipulated and slander them in-text, and then give a small throw-away line as if to forgive all trespasses. Audience engagement doesn't work like that. You're working towards your audience feeling violated. Offended. And we're given no justice, no closure. And rest assured: we remember everything. Why are there no repercussions? Why is there so much that doesn't add up, why is so much skated over, if this is meant to be the accurate depiction of the 'real' Sherlock Holmes and his world?

I don't trust the writers of this series. I don't trust them to give me closure, to take me on a journey or tell me a story that doesn't rankle in the wrong way - that doesn't violate reasonable sensibilities and then shrug off the trespass in the following moment. I feel like I should be slapping the creators with a glove and screaming "I demand satisfaction!" Because this latest instalment (the latest two instalments) have done little more than alienate and aggravate me. Even to the point that I'm ashamed of having once been a fan of this series. Even saying that I ask myself: am I over-reacting here? But I reason with myself, and I still feel it's true. It's become a series that I truly don't even recognise anymore. It feels warped. And I don't know how they can turn it back into a story about Sherlock making the transition from great man to good one. I'm not convinced that they have an idea of what a good man is, given what they're letting their characters get away with.

Moral relativity is a thing, but surely it's not just me that thinks the BBC Sherlock bar for "good" or "acceptable" is severely and unrepentantly low. Like I said: there's a difference between morally grey and morally bankrupt. There's not even any in-depth critique about actions, no reasonable discussion - everything's allowed, everything's thrown under the rug of "I'm a sociopath! He's a sociopath! She's a sociopath! Everyone's a sociopath!" Not only is that boring in the extreme to watch, it's so unsubtle that it's infuriating. There's no examination of what someone's shitty remark or action means. There's no weight to any interaction. It's pointless banter. It's flimsy. And when anything goes, then by what basis can they be solving crimes and catching 'bad guys'?

The vision for the series feels shot to shit. It feels like the series' universe has become an absolute fiction, devoid of any consequences, lacking in insight, depth, and subtlety, and populated almost exclusively by characters who drive me to be empty of any sympathetic feeling. I know that it's perfectly possible to write hateful characters who are never-the-less engaging, who inspire sympathy and empathy. But this series does neither. Look at the characters on paper and they become nothing. They're empty. I struggle to find instances of cogent speech that reflect some semblance of a fleshed out character beneath the flaking veneer. It's like they're just spouting words, but the words themselves have lost all meaning. And even when I find a moment that seems like it rings true and clear to the character that's speaking (Mycroft asking Sherlock if he'd made a list of narcotics used was the first that came to mind), that poignant moment is directly contradicted by their actions in a multitude of ways (your brother's killer is sitting right next to you, and you don't mind). That's a man who loves his baby brother (emotional reasoning) who is fine with his brother's flippant murderer a) still breathing, b) un-punished, c) being all sassy and nonchalant about Sherlock's drug abuse, and d) hacking into government restricted records in front of 'The British Government'. THAT SHOULD TRIGGER A FUCKING EMOTIONAL REACTION. It results in the portrayal of an inconceivable level of self-deception and compartmentalisation that reasonable men with moral feeling wouldn't stand. The characters don't feel solid. There's no integrity to them. You examine their reasoning, their internal logic, their actions, and they crumble to pieces. That, or they're so two-dimensional that they don't stand up to scrutiny anyway. It's all contradictions -- but they don't make a beautiful paradox, they make a jumble of nonsense tropes.

Beyond my perverse observation of how... wrong they seem, how much they betray how they're straying from the vision of the first and even the second series, these last episodes have simply served to make me disinterested in practically every single character. This is a truly impressive feat when they were once among my most-loved. I feel so fucking jaded. But all of the crap is just piling up to the point where I'm literally just stepping away from this series. I'm figuratively and literally throwing my hands up and saying: you know what? Fuck off. I have a feeling it may be like a car-crash for me for the next few episodes -- "don't wanna look but you can't turn away" -- but I don't see how they could bring the series back from this. I can't be the only person that's feeling seriously, seriously wronged by this episode. I can't be. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Burn me thrice? Fuck. Off. I'm off to watch something that doesn't make me want to throw up and claw my own face off .

So yeah.

After quietly “breaking up” with the show -- think in the style of Jon Snow bitterly saying: “My Watch is Ended“ -- I semi-waited for S4. I say semi-waited because I wasn’t going to watch it. But I was still hopeful, at least a little bit, on the behalf of the people that I followed on here, that I met in real life, that still had hope for the series. I thought to myself: “maybe. maybe it won’t be shit. maybe they’ll explain what the fuck why the fuck how the fuck.“

As we've found, and as I've mentioned, from what I have seen from my tumblr feed tonight, it went about as well as I expected.

I still haven't seen S4. The last episode I watched was TAB. But from what I've seen on here, it's been a clusterfuck of queer-coded villains, and copious dashings of even bigger plotholes than before, logical blackholes, more morally reprehensible crap -- and so many inconsistencies, it'll make your head spin worse than the hammed-up cinematography.

So, I'm so sorry for the people that had such high hopes, and who were deceived and let down in a big way. I -- and all of us, I think -- know that in the greater scheme of things, one TV show that went to shit, as TV shows are prone to do, isn’t so horrible a thing. But this show meant a huge amount to me. It meant an enormous amount to many, many others. I think of the creative fan-community, so many hours making gorgeously complex filthy brilliant heartwarming heartbreaking fic (so so much better than what we received)... to have what spawned that creative storm of brilliance and engaging life-affirming work -- life-consuming and life-ruining (in the good way) in equal measure -- to have what brought these works about go so bad, it actually hurts. It hurts less for me now, because I'm much further away from it than I was a couple of years ago. But it still stinks. And if it hurts me, I can't imagine how much that'd suck to have the show you spent so long making intensive work around go down the gurgler. The fandom and the general community that surrounded this show, for the most part, were way beyond what it ended up deserving.

In further efforts to legitimise my (our) frustration and disappointment, I'll reiterate that engagement in fiction is a huge part of our modern lives. We care about what happens to these characters and these stories. It matters, for one thing, because representation matters (be that queer, female, moral). Media fucking matters. It mirrors and exaggerates reality, and they ended up giving us a steaming pile of bullshit. (In a positive metaphor, this bullshit may still be used as effective manure from which better works can spring. Just be careful handling it.)

But, I have to say, given the backlash, I am also giddy. Because people aren't standing for it.

People are still making up theories to excuse where the show has gone, and what they've done, but at this point it really is super-keen denial, which some have realised even as they speak it. But the denial, the desperate “surely this is a trick” reaction, while sweet in its idealism, is also really sad. Because I don't think 'The Show' is gonna come back from this. I don't think they can get away with what they have been putting on the screens anymore. How can they? I can't forgive them. And after S4? I'm getting the impression that most of the world who gave the slightest of shits about BBC Sherlock can't forgive them either.

But lastly, I just want to say: okay, it hurts now. It really hurts. I remember that I was going through some horrible shit when they first started fucking up this show. Really shit timing, Show. I don't remember much from that time, just snippets, because that's how the brain copes. But I remember saying to my sister in a fit of desperate honesty: "all the therapy things I read, they say you're meant to hold onto the little things that makes life worth living, that you live for, that you want to see and experience more of... But BBC Sherlock was that for me, and it can't be that for me anymore?" I remember so clearly it being a question because I was fucking lost and BBC Sherlock was my refuge, anchor, thing that I could cling to as a source of enjoyment and escape and engagement. And it disappeared, nonsensically. There was no beauty to the unravelling, it just turned to crap on me. So if I sound like I'm being overly dramatic, trust that it’s coming from a real place, of just... complete disillusionment and disappointment. And to be not only without that refuge, but to have it turn into something grotesque that appalled me on a number of levels... that was just insult to injury.

“Breaking up with the show“ actually felt like a real-life relationship breakdown. Recently, I remember reblogging that post by alecslightvood:

one of the saddest things is when a show you invested so much of your time into and became emotionally attached to seriously fucks up and you are no longer captivated by it whether it’s because of illogical plots with zero substance, ooc characters, sexist writing or because the show kills off and treats minorities horrendously, and all you have left is this bitterness at how things turned out because something that once made you happy now leaves you emotionally and mentally drained.

and I remember tagging it: "it feels like being betrayed, the mixture of heartbreak frustration and disbelief, 'why are you doing this?', 'you're not who I fell in love with', 'you're not who I thought you were', 'you're not who I'd hoped you'd be', BBC Sherlock, I'm looking at you." Because my god, that descriptor fits Sherlock to a tee. I don't know what show they were talking about (the original post is gone,) but god that fits Sherlock so well.

I’m glad I jumped ship when I did (I actually mistyped “shit” there, guys, Freudian slip,) because honestly, I’m so so sorry for you guys that stuck it out. I had some closet hope for your wishes and genius plots (the ones you wove, not theirs) to come together in a beautiful climax that would justify everything. That would have been glorious.

But as it is. You are allowed to dump this show. You are certainly not alone. And I highly recommend it. The reason I’m pleased with this shows catastrophic fall (hah,) amidst the outrage and frustration, is because to be rid of it is freeing. To be rid of the quietly-but-growing-louder queer-baiting queer-bashing woman-hating show that does everything it can to insult the majority of those minorities who watch it, that insults the intelligence of its viewers with stupidity while screaming that it's the best... That's a good thing.

#please don't hate on me #if you don't agree with me this post wasn't meant for you #I'm not looking for an argument or a debate #I'm just trying to support in a realistic and disillusioned fashion

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gordonwilliamsweb · 3 years

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In Alleged Health Care ‘Money Grab,’ Nation’s Largest Hospital Chain Cashes In on Trauma Centers

After falling from a ladder and cutting his arm, Ed Knight said, he found himself at Richmond, Virginia’s Chippenham Hospital surrounded by nearly a dozen doctors, nurses and technicians — its crack “trauma team” charged with saving the most badly hurt victims of accidents and assaults.

But Knight’s wound, while requiring about 30 stitches, wasn’t life-threatening. Hospital records called it “mild.” The people in white coats quickly scattered, he remembered, and he went home about three hours later.

“Basically, it was just a gash on my arm,” said Knight, 71. “The emergency team that they assembled didn’t really do anything.”

Nevertheless, Chippenham, owned by for-profit chain HCA Healthcare, included a $17,000 trauma team “activation” fee on Knight’s bill, which totaled $52,238 and included three CT scans billed at $14,000. His care should have cost closer to $3,500 total, according to claims consultant WellRithms, which analyzed the charges for KHN.

HCA Healthcare’s activation fees run as high as $50,000 per patient and are sometimes 10 times greater than those at other hospitals, according to publicly posted price lists. Such charges have made trauma centers, once operated mainly by established teaching hospitals, a key part of the company’s growth and profit-generating strategy, corporate officials have said. HCA’s stock has doubled in three years. The biggest U.S. hospital operator along with the Department of Veterans Affairs, HCA has opened trauma centers in more than half its 179 hospitals and says it runs 1 of every 20 such facilities in the country.

And it’s not slowing down.

HCA “has basically taken a position that all of their hospitals should be trauma centers,” said Dr. Robert Winchell, describing conversations he had with HCA officials. Winchell is a trauma surgeon and former chairman of the trauma evaluation and planning committee at the American College of Surgeons.

Trauma patients are typically those severely injured in automobile accidents or falls or wounded by knives or guns.

State or local regulators confer the designation “trauma center,” often in concert with standards verified by the American College of Surgeons. The status allows a cascade of lucrative reimbursement, including activation fees billed on top of regular charges for medical care. Trauma centers are mostly exempt from 1970s-era certificate-of-need laws enacted to limit excessive hospital spending and expansion. The bills for all this — reaching into tens of thousands of dollars — go to private insurers, Medicare or Medicaid, or patients themselves.

“Once a hospital has a trauma designation, it can charge thousands of dollars in activation fees for the same care seen in the same emergency room,” said Stacie Sasso, executive director of the Health Services Coalition, made up of unions and employers fighting trauma center expansion by HCA and others in Nevada.

HCA’s expansion into trauma centers alarms health policy analysts who suggest its motive is more about chasing profit than improving patient care. Data collected by the state of Florida, analyzed by KHN, shows that regional trauma cases and expensive trauma bills rise sharply after HCA opens such centers, suggesting that many patients classified as trauma victims would have previously been treated less expensively in a regular emergency room.

Patients admitted to HCA and other for-profit hospitals in Florida with a trauma-team activation were far more likely to be only mildly or moderately injured than those at not-for-profit hospitals, researchers have found.

HCA is “cherry-picking patients,” said Ed Jimenez, CEO of the University of Florida Health Shands, which runs a Level I trauma center, the highest designation. “What you find is an elderly person who fell and broke their hip who could be perfectly well treated at their local hospital now becomes a trauma patient.”

HCA’s trauma center expansion makes superior care available to more patients, providing “lifesaving clinical services while treating all critically injured patients,” said company spokesperson Harlow Sumerford.

Richmond’s population “is booming,” said Chippenham spokesperson Jeffrey Caldwell. “This increase in demand requires that the regional health care system keep up.”

Trauma Is Big Business

HCA’s trauma center boom picked up speed in Florida a decade ago and has spread to its hospitals in Virginia, Nevada, Texas and other states. It has sparked fierce fights over who handles highly profitable trauma cases and debates over whether costs will soar and care suffer when rival centers go head-to-head competing for patients.

“There’s no question it’s a money grab” by HCA, said Jimenez, who was part of a largely unsuccessful effort to stop HCA’s trauma center expansion in Florida. “It was clear that their trauma activation fees were five or six times larger than ours.”

In a process shielded from public view in Virginia, Chippenham recently applied for and won the highest trauma center designation, Level I, providing the most sophisticated care — and putting it squarely in competition with nearby VCU Health. VCU has run the region’s only Level I facility for decades. In October, Chippenham announced a contract for its own helicopter ambulance, which gives it another way to increase its trauma business, by flying patients in from miles away. The Virginia Department of Health rejected KHN’s request to review HCA’s Chippenham trauma center application and related documents.

“This is a corporate strategy” by HCA “to grow revenue, maximize reimbursement and meet the interest of stockholders,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, CEO of VCU Health, who says his nonprofit, state-run facility is sufficient for the region’s trauma care needs. “Many people in the state should be concerned that the end result will be a dilution of care, higher costs and poorer outcomes.”

Chippenham’s Caldwell said the “redundancy” with VCU “allows the region to be better prepared for mass trauma events.”

Studies show trauma centers need high volumes of complex cases to stay sharp. Researchers call it the “practice makes perfect” effect. Patients treated for traumatic brain injuries at hospitals seeing fewer than six such cases a year died at substantially higher rates than such patients in more experienced hospitals, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery.

Another study, published in the Annals of Surgery, showed that a decrease as small as 1% in trauma center volume — because of competition or other reasons — substantially increased the risk that patients would die.

By splitting a limited number of cases, a competing, cross-town trauma center could set the stage for subpar results at both hospitals, goes the argument. The number of VCU’s admitted adult trauma patients decreased from nearly 3,600 in 2014, before Chippenham attained Level II status, to 3,200 in 2019, VCU officials said.

Chippenham was the only Level I center in Virginia that declined to disclose its trauma patient volume to KHN.

“People are trying to push the [trauma center] designation process beyond what may be good for the major hospitals that are already providing trauma care,” said Dr. David Hoyt, executive director of the American College of Surgeons, speaking generally. Local authorities who make those decisions, he said, can be “pressured by a hospital system that has a lot of economic pull in a community.”

Unlike regular emergency departments, Level I and Level II trauma centers make trauma surgeons, neurosurgeons and special equipment available round-the-clock. Centers with Levels III or IV designations offer fewer services but are still more capable than many emergency rooms, with round-the-clock lab services and extra training, for example.

Hospitals defend trauma team activation fees as necessary to cover the overhead of having a team of elite emergency specialists at the ready. At HCA hospitals they can run more than $40,000 per case, according to publicly posted charge lists, although the amount paid by insurers and patients is often less, depending on the coverage.

“Fees associated with trauma activation are based on our costs to immediately deploy lifesaving resources and measures 24/7,” said HCA spokesperson Sumerford, adding that low-income and uninsured patients often pay nothing for trauma care. “What patients actually pay for their hospital care has more to do with their insurance plan” than the total charges, he said.

There is no standard accounting for trauma-related costs incurred by hospitals. One method involves multiplying hourly pay for members of the trauma team by the potential hours worked. Hospitals don’t reveal calculations, but the wide variation in fees suggests they are often set with an eye on revenue rather than true costs, say industry analysts.

Reasonable charges for Knight’s total bill would have been $3,537, not $52,238, according to the analysis by WellRithms, a claims consulting firm that examined his medical records and Chippenham’s costs filed with Medicare. Given his minor injury, the $17,000 trauma activation fee “is not necessary,” said Dr. Ira Weintraub, WellRithms’ chief medical officer.

Often insurers pay substantially less than billed charges, especially Medicare, Knight's insurer. He paid nothing out-of-pocket, and Chippenham collected a total of $1,138 for his care, HCA officials said after this article was initially published. But hospitals can maximize revenue by charging high trauma fees to all insurers, including those required to pay a percentage of charges, say medical billing consultants.

VCU Health charges up to $13,455 for trauma activation, according to its charge list.

Average HCA trauma activation charges are $26,000 in states where the company does business — three times higher than those of non-HCA hospitals, according to data from Hospital Pricing Specialists, a consulting firm that analyzed trauma charges in Medicare claims for KHN.

The findings are similar to those reported by the Tampa Bay Times in 2014, early in HCA’s trauma center expansion. The Times found that Florida HCA trauma centers were charging patients and insurers tens of thousands of dollars more per case than other hospitals.

Treating trauma patients in the ER is only the beginning of the revenue stream. Intensive inpatient treatment and long patient recoveries add to the income.

“We have more Level I, Level II trauma centers today than we have ever had in the company history,” HCA’s then-CEO, Milton Johnson, told stock analysts in 2016. “That strategy in turn feeds surgical growth. That strategy in turn feeds neurosciences growth, it feeds rehab growth.” Trauma centers attract “a certain cadre of high-value patients,” Dr. Jonathan Perlin, HCA’s chief medical officer, told analysts at a 2017 conference.

Patients at HCA’s largely suburban hospitals are more likely than those at an average hospital to carry private insurance, which pays much more than Medicare and Medicaid. More than half the company’s revenue in 2020 came from private insurers, regulatory filings show. Hospitals, in general, collect a little more than a third of their revenue from private insurers, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

HCA’s trauma cases can fit the same profile. At Chippenham, in south Richmond, trauma cases are “90% blunt trauma,” according to the hospital's online job posting last year for a trauma medical director. Blunt-trauma patients are generally victims of car accidents and falls and tend to have good insurance, analysts say.

VCU and other urban hospitals, on the other hand, treat a higher share of patients with gun and knife injuries — penetrating trauma — who are more often uninsured or covered by Medicaid. About 75% of VCU’s trauma cases are classified as blunt trauma, hospital officials said.

The 90% figure is “not accurate today,” Caldwell said. “Chippenham’s current mix of trauma type is aligned with that of other trauma centers in the region, and we treat traumas ranging from motor vehicle accidents to gunshots, stabbings and other critical injuries regularly.”

‘Trauma Drama’ in Florida and Beyond

HCA’s growth strategy is part of a wider trend. From 2010 to 2020 the number of Level I and Level II trauma centers verified by the American College of Surgeons nationwide increased from 343 to 567.

Nowhere has HCA added trauma centers more aggressively or the fight over trauma center growth been more acrimonious than in Florida. The state’s experience over the past decade may offer a preview of what’s to come in Virginia and elsewhere.

In the thick of the controversy, legislators stepped in to broker a 2018 truce — but only after the number of HCA trauma centers in the state had grown from one to 11 over more than a decade and helped spark an explosion in trauma cases, according to Florida Department of Health data.

News headlines called it “trauma drama.” Hospitals with existing centers repeatedly filed legal challenges to stop the expansion, with little effect. Florida’s governor at the time was Rick Scott, former chief executive of Columbia/HCA, a predecessor company to HCA.

After launching Level II centers across the state, HCA officials urged Florida regulators not to adopt CDC guidelines recommending severely injured patients be treated at the highest level of trauma care in a region — Level I, if available.

HCA “kept on working, working, working, working for 10 years” to gain trauma center approvals over objections, said Mark Delegal, who helped broker the legislative settlement as a lobbyist for large safety-net hospitals. “Once they had what they wanted, they were happy to lock the door behind them.”

HCA hospitals “serve the health care needs of their communities and adjust or expand services as those needs evolve,” said Sumerford.

As HCA added trauma centers, trauma-activation billings and the number of trauma cases spiked, according to Florida Department of Health data analyzed by KHN. Statewide, inpatient trauma cases doubled to 35,102 in the decade leading up to 2020, even though the population rose by only 15%. HCA’s share of statewide trauma cases jumped from 4% to 24%, the data shows.

Charges for trauma activations, also known as trauma alerts, for HCA’s Florida hospitals averaged $26,890 for inpatients in 2019 while the same fees averaged $9,916 for non-HCA Florida hospitals, the data shows. Total average charges, including medical care, were $282,600 per case in 2019 for inpatient trauma cases at HCA hospitals, but $139,000 for non-HCA hospitals.

HCA's substantially higher charges didn't necessarily result from patients with especially severe injuries, public university research found.

Over three years ending in 2014, Florida patients with sprains, mild cuts and other non-life-threatening injuries were “significantly more likely” to be admitted under trauma alerts at HCA hospitals and other for-profit hospitals than at nonprofit hospitals, according to research by University of South Florida economist Etienne Pracht and colleagues. HCA hospitals have admitted emergency department Medicare patients at substantially higher-than-average rates since 2011, suggesting that at other hospitals many would have been sent home, new research by the Service Employees International Union found.

“What’s going on with HCA is the Wall Street model they’re following,” said Pracht, who provided KHN with additional Florida Department of Health data showing soaring trauma cases. “And Wall Street’s not happy unless you’re expanding. They’re driven by the motive to keep the stock price high.”

Lobbying and Campaign Dollars

In Virginia, health care organizations need to go through a lengthy and public application process to add something as basic as a $1 million MRI imaging machine.

But to open or upgrade a trauma center, all that’s needed is the approval of the health commissioner after a confidential qualification procedure. Chippenham did not seek or obtain Level I verification from the American College of Surgeons before getting Level I approval from the state. It is ACS-verified as a Level II center and, Caldwell said, is seeking Level I status with ACS.

Virginia requires an “extensive application” and “in-depth” site reviews by experts before a hospital gains status as a trauma center, Dr. M. Norman Oliver, the commissioner, said in an email. “Chippenham Hospital met the requirements” to become a Level I center, he said.

Nearly 80% of HCA’s Level I and Level II trauma centers have been verified by the American College of Surgeons “and the others currently are pursuing this verification,” said HCA spokesperson Sumerford.

As in other states, HCA invests heavily in Virginia in political influence. Eleven Virginia lobbyists are registered with the state to advocate on HCA’s behalf. One lobbyist spent more than $5,000 from December 2019 through February 2020 treating public officials to reception spreads and meals at posh Richmond restaurants such as L'Opossum and Morton’s the Steakhouse, lobbying records submitted to Virginia’s Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council show. HCA’s political action committee donated $160,000 to state candidates last year, according to the records.

Like other hospital systems, HCA hires former paramedics for “EMS relations” or “EMS outreach” jobs. HCA’s EMS liaisons are expected to develop a “business plan, driving service line growth,” according to its employment ads.

Chippenham’s decision to start a helicopter ambulance operation last year to compete with others in transporting trauma patients surprised some public officials. HCA and its contractor had filed paperwork for the operation to be reimbursed by insurers when Richmond City Council members learned about it. Members “were not up to speed on this matter,” council member Kristen Larson told a May 2020 meeting of the Richmond Ambulance Authority, according to the minutes.

Chippenham’s air ambulance partner, private equity-owned Med-Trans, has been the subject of numerous media reports of patients saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-network surprise bills. It’s not unusual for air ambulances to charge $30,000 or more for transporting a patient from a highway accident or just across town, according to news reports.

Last year, 85% of Med-Trans flights for Virginia patients with health insurance were in-network, said a company spokesperson. But Med-Trans is out of network for Virginia members of Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, two of the state’s biggest carriers, said spokespeople for those companies. Med-Trans is part of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield’s network, an Anthem spokesperson said.

HCA runs trauma centers “really well,” said Winchell, who runs the Level I trauma center at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center.

But “there are clearly areas of oversupply” for trauma centers generally, he said.

Instead of letting a drive for profits dictate trauma center expansion, health authorities need “objective and transparent metrics” to guide the designation of trauma centers, Winchell recently wrote in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Free-market advocate “Adam Smith might have been a good economist,” he wrote, “but he would have been a very poor designer of trauma systems.”

KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas contributed to this report.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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stephenmccull · 3 years

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In Alleged Health Care ‘Money Grab,’ Nation’s Largest Hospital Chain Cashes In on Trauma Centers

“Basically, it was just a gash on my arm,” said Knight, 71. “The emergency team that they assembled didn’t really do anything.”

And it’s not slowing down.

Trauma patients are typically those severely injured in automobile accidents or falls or wounded by knives or guns.

Richmond’s population “is booming,” said Chippenham spokesperson Jeffrey Caldwell. “This increase in demand requires that the regional health care system keep up.”

Trauma Is Big Business

Chippenham’s Caldwell said the “redundancy” with VCU “allows the region to be better prepared for mass trauma events.”

Chippenham was the only Level I center in Virginia that declined to disclose its trauma patient volume to KHN.

VCU Health charges up to $13,455 for trauma activation, according to its charge list.

Treating trauma patients in the ER is only the beginning of the revenue stream. Intensive inpatient treatment and long patient recoveries add to the income.

‘Trauma Drama’ in Florida and Beyond

HCA hospitals “serve the health care needs of their communities and adjust or expand services as those needs evolve,” said Sumerford.

HCA's substantially higher charges didn't necessarily result from patients with especially severe injuries, public university research found.

Lobbying and Campaign Dollars

In Virginia, health care organizations need to go through a lengthy and public application process to add something as basic as a $1 million MRI imaging machine.

HCA runs trauma centers “really well,” said Winchell, who runs the Level I trauma center at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center.

But “there are clearly areas of oversupply” for trauma centers generally, he said.

Free-market advocate “Adam Smith might have been a good economist,” he wrote, “but he would have been a very poor designer of trauma systems.”

KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas contributed to this report.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

In Alleged Health Care ‘Money Grab,’ Nation’s Largest Hospital Chain Cashes In on Trauma Centers published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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foulengineerzombie · 4 years

Link

MOSCOW -- Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent "to other zones of conflict" -- which many took to mean Afghanistan.Russia's grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the CIA's role in arming mujahedeen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow not only to the invading Red Army but the entire Soviet Union.A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russia's military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.Intercepted electronic data showed large financial transfers from Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, to a Taliban-linked account, according to U.S. officials. Officials also identified an Afghan contractor as a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.Russian officials have scoffed at the idea they would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a "terrorist" outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.In remarks to a state news agency Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin's special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as "outright lies" generated by "forces in the United States who don't want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures."Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia's view, the U.S., because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Donald Trump's Democratic rivals, Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, reminded viewers that as far as Russia was concerned, the U.S. has long had it coming.Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA's secret program to arm Moscow's enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the U.S. had spent billions of dollars on weapons that "killed thousands and thousands" of Russians. "This is a medical fact."While dismissing reports of Russian bounties for American scalps as "fake news," he said, "Let's suppose we paid," the Taliban, and then asked how many Americans had perhaps been killed as a result. "At most 22," he responded.There is no evidence to date that Putin signed off on any program to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they strongly doubt he would have done so.Yet, Russia under Putin has for years throbbed with real and imagined pain from hurt inflicted by the U.S., notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.Andrei Serenko, an expert at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan in Moscow, said Russia has no real desire to see the U.S. leave Afghanistan and revels in America's agonies from an endless conflict he described as a "sore blister for the United States."All the same, he said, Russia has been preparing for an eventual pullout by cultivating ties to the Taliban as well as to various Afghan warlords. It has done this with money and other inducements in the hope of shaping future Afghan events and securing a useful instrument to poke Washington.The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, has a long record of running protection rackets and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. "This is what they do," he said. "They are Afghanistan's most successful business."Russia, he said, "decided that if we can create lots of problems for Americans in Afghanistan, they will create fewer problems for us in Ukraine and Syria."Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, starting in 1995 when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.The pilots eventually got away with their aircraft in what was described at the time as a daring escape. But what really happened is unclear. One thing that seems certain, however, is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money."Everything was based on money," Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, recalled of the hostage talks.Kravtsov denied Russia had since paid the Taliban bounties for the deaths of coalition soldiers, even as he recalled that Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by American arms supplied to the mujahedeen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons "bought with American funds."Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army conscript in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield but "they were everywhere because of their Stingers."Stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahedeen fighters by the U.S. as part of a covert CIA program. They enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, turning the tide in the decadelong war.Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the inglorious Afghan war, Yerin showed off a display of land mines and other weapons sent to kill Russians as part of the CIA program.Putin has for years played on this and other sources of Russian pain.Soon after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his "with or against us" war on terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with America's drive to oust the Taliban. But he quickly soured on the idea that Washington could be a reliable partner and began blaming it for most of the world's problems.Bristling with wounded pride, Putin in a fiery speech in Munich in 2007 denounced what he said was a "world of one master, one sovereign" and complained that the "United States has overstepped its national borders, in every area."He has been settling scores ever since, often with help from the GRU, which even before Putin took power had won its spurs putting the U.S. in its place. Since he took office, the military intelligence agency has been accused of involvement in widespread mischief-making, from a bungled 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro aimed at preventing the Balkan nation's entry into NATO, to meddling the same year in the U.S. presidential election.In a rare recent interview, the former head of the GRU, Valentin Korabelnikov, told state television how his officers had in 1999 organized a frantic dash by Russian troops and armor to Kosovo to occupy the airport in the capital, Pristina -- just hours before the arrival of NATO forces. The stunt, he said, was "about the prestige of our state" and showing that Russia could not be ignored.Speaking in his former office at the headquarters of the GRU in Moscow, Korabelnikov said that his agency had organized many other secret operations but that those could not be revealed."The vast majority of operations carried out both by us and our brothers," he said, referring to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and headed in the late 1990s by Putin, "are completely closed, and only the small tip of the iceberg sometimes appears."Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's security apparatus who wrote a doctorate on Moscow's disastrous Afghan war, said "some old war horses" in the GRU could have hatched a scheme to kill Americans as payback for Russians killed with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that such a plan would have been approved by the Russian leadership or executed without approval as a "maverick operation."Even Yerin, the former conscript who lost friends in Afghanistan, recalled that during his tour there, spent mostly near the northern city of Kunduz, he never believed political commissars in his unit who explained the 1979 Soviet invasion was necessary to keep the U.S. from moving into Russia's backyard."Today, I believe them," said Yerin. "Afghanistan is our next-door neighbor," he said, stabbing with his finger the southern border of the former Soviet Union on a big wall map, "What happens here is our business, not the Americans'."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Russia Denies Paying Bounties, but Some Say the U.S. Had It Coming

Ukrainian soldiers dig trenches in Stanytsia Luhanska, eastern Ukraine, on Oct. 18, 2019. (Brendan Hoffman/The New York Times)

MOSCOW — Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent “to other zones of conflict” — which many took to mean Afghanistan.

Russia’s grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the CIA’s role in arming mujahedeen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow not only to the invading Red Army but the entire Soviet Union.

A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.

Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Intercepted electronic data showed large financial transfers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, to a Taliban-linked account, according to U.S. officials. Officials also identified an Afghan contractor as a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.

Russian officials have scoffed at the idea they would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a “terrorist” outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.

Story continues

In remarks to a state news agency Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as “outright lies” generated by “forces in the United States who don’t want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures.”

Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia’s view, the U.S., because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.

Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Donald Trump’s Democratic rivals, Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, reminded viewers that as far as Russia was concerned, the U.S. has long had it coming.

Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s secret program to arm Moscow’s enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the U.S. had spent billions of dollars on weapons that “killed thousands and thousands” of Russians. “This is a medical fact.”

While dismissing reports of Russian bounties for American scalps as “fake news,” he said, “Let’s suppose we paid,” the Taliban, and then asked how many Americans had perhaps been killed as a result. “At most 22,” he responded.

There is no evidence to date that Putin signed off on any program to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they strongly doubt he would have done so.

Yet, Russia under Putin has for years throbbed with real and imagined pain from hurt inflicted by the U.S., notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.

Andrei Serenko, an expert at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan in Moscow, said Russia has no real desire to see the U.S. leave Afghanistan and revels in America’s agonies from an endless conflict he described as a “sore blister for the United States.”

All the same, he said, Russia has been preparing for an eventual pullout by cultivating ties to the Taliban as well as to various Afghan warlords. It has done this with money and other inducements in the hope of shaping future Afghan events and securing a useful instrument to poke Washington.

The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, has a long record of running protection rackets and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. “This is what they do,” he said. “They are Afghanistan’s most successful business.”

Russia, he said, “decided that if we can create lots of problems for Americans in Afghanistan, they will create fewer problems for us in Ukraine and Syria.”

Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, starting in 1995 when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.

The pilots eventually got away with their aircraft in what was described at the time as a daring escape. But what really happened is unclear. One thing that seems certain, however, is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money.

“Everything was based on money,” Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, recalled of the hostage talks.

Kravtsov denied Russia had since paid the Taliban bounties for the deaths of coalition soldiers, even as he recalled that Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by American arms supplied to the mujahedeen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons “bought with American funds.”

Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army conscript in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield but “they were everywhere because of their Stingers.”

Stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahedeen fighters by the U.S. as part of a covert CIA program. They enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, turning the tide in the decadelong war.

Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the inglorious Afghan war, Yerin showed off a display of land mines and other weapons sent to kill Russians as part of the CIA program.

Putin has for years played on this and other sources of Russian pain.

Soon after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his “with or against us” war on terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with America’s drive to oust the Taliban. But he quickly soured on the idea that Washington could be a reliable partner and began blaming it for most of the world’s problems.

Bristling with wounded pride, Putin in a fiery speech in Munich in 2007 denounced what he said was a “world of one master, one sovereign” and complained that the “United States has overstepped its national borders, in every area.”

He has been settling scores ever since, often with help from the GRU, which even before Putin took power had won its spurs putting the U.S. in its place. Since he took office, the military intelligence agency has been accused of involvement in widespread mischief-making, from a bungled 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro aimed at preventing the Balkan nation’s entry into NATO, to meddling the same year in the U.S. presidential election.

In a rare recent interview, the former head of the GRU, Valentin Korabelnikov, told state television how his officers had in 1999 organized a frantic dash by Russian troops and armor to Kosovo to occupy the airport in the capital, Pristina — just hours before the arrival of NATO forces. The stunt, he said, was “about the prestige of our state” and showing that Russia could not be ignored.

Speaking in his former office at the headquarters of the GRU in Moscow, Korabelnikov said that his agency had organized many other secret operations but that those could not be revealed.

“The vast majority of operations carried out both by us and our brothers,” he said, referring to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and headed in the late 1990s by Putin, “are completely closed, and only the small tip of the iceberg sometimes appears.”

Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security apparatus who wrote a doctorate on Moscow’s disastrous Afghan war, said “some old war horses” in the GRU could have hatched a scheme to kill Americans as payback for Russians killed with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that such a plan would have been approved by the Russian leadership or executed without approval as a “maverick operation.”

Even Yerin, the former conscript who lost friends in Afghanistan, recalled that during his tour there, spent mostly near the northern city of Kunduz, he never believed political commissars in his unit who explained the 1979 Soviet invasion was necessary to keep the U.S. from moving into Russia’s backyard.

“Today, I believe them,” said Yerin. “Afghanistan is our next-door neighbor,” he said, stabbing with his finger the southern border of the former Soviet Union on a big wall map, “What happens here is our business, not the Americans’.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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shaizstern · 4 years

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Article from WSJ: A Surprising Way to Stay Resilient

Reminding yourself what you’re grateful for can boost your mental health and help you cope with coronavirus stress

ILLUSTRATION: DARIA KIRPACH

By Elizabeth Bernstein

As a lifelong athlete and former pro basketball player, David Gardner has always focused on his health, being careful to eat right, drink a lot of water, get enough sleep and stay active.

But since the pandemic started, he’s added another healthy habit: Reminding himself why he’s grateful.

When Mr. Gardner starts to feel frustrated or annoyed these days—that he can’t meet with his employees in person, take a trip, or see a friend—he interrupts his thoughts with a question: “What is the gift in this situation?”

“Focusing on the positive helps me better absorb the negative,” says Mr. Gardner, a 37-year-old owner of a branding firm in Chicago.

It is an important strategy, especially now. Reminding ourselves what we’re grateful for is one of the most powerful ways we can boost what mental-health experts call the psychological immune system. Researchers use the concept to describe a set of emotional processes that help protect our mental health, just as the physiological immune system aims to safeguard our physical health. A strong psychological immune system keeps us mentally resilient.

Many things we do to strengthen our physical immune system also support us mentally, such as eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep and finding time for pleasurable activities in our day. Typically, our psychological immune system kicks in naturally, although it is sometimes compromised in people who suffer from depression or another mental illness, who have low self-esteem, or who ruminate a lot, mental-health experts say. But right now, as we’re battered with coronavirus stress, it’s important we all try to actively strengthen it.

“Our psychological immune system is like a cellphone battery—we drain it more quickly in a crisis because we use it more,” says Jacqueline Sperling, a psychologist and director of training and research at the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. “So it’s important to continue to recharge it.”

To boost it, we need to take active steps to regulate our emotions, says Elizabeth Pinel, a professor in the department of psychological science at the University of Vermont. Experts recommend focusing on what you can control. Acknowledge that life is tough right now, and don’t beat yourself up for feeling bad.

Challenge negative thoughts, asking yourself if they are true. Reframe them in a way that is more positive and helpful. (Replace “I hate not seeing my friends and family” with “I look forward to seeing my loved ones eventually.”) Calm yourself through breathing exercises. Be mindful—pay attention to the present moment.

Research shows that gratitude is a huge psychological booster. Studies show that people who practice being grateful report significantly higher levels of happiness and psychological well-being than those who do not. They are less depressed—with fewer, and shorter, episodes—and have lower levels of stress hormones and reduced cellular aging. They sleep better. They have more success at work. And they have better relationships.

Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, says gratitude is not a feeling that can be willed easily. But performing grateful motions, such as saying thank you, can help trigger real gratitude. PHOTO: UC DAVIS NEWS AND MEDIA RELATIONS

The best way to start practicing gratitude is to keep a journal to identify things in your life for which you are grateful each day, says Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a leading researcher on gratitude. Refer to them as gifts, which will underscore their importance as something positive. And take the time to truly reflect. “Don’t hurry through this exercise as if it were just another item on your to-do list,” he says. “Be aware of your feelings and how you relish and savor each gift.”

Feelings of gratitude activate three main areas in the brain: the brain stem region that produces dopamine, the primary reward chemical; the reward center, where dopamine is released; and the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps us focus on information that is relevant and communicates between the brain’s thinking and emotional circuits, says Alex Korb, a neuroscientist. “Your psychological well-being depends less on the things that happen to you and more on the things you pay attention to,” says Dr. Korb, author of “The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time.” “Gratitude will shift your brain’s attention.”

It is a perfect coping skill for the Covid-19 era, when so much of life feels out of control. Gratitude gives us something we can change: our thoughts. We don’t need good things to happen to us to be grateful, we need to reframe our thoughts about what has happened. Think of the Irving Berlin song, “Count Your Blessings.” Mr. Berlin wrote it after his doctor recommended that he try counting his blessings as a way to deal with his stress-induced insomnia, according to Benjamin Sears, editor of “The Irving Berlin Reader.”

Sherry Belul, 55 years old, an author and life coach in San Francisco, credits gratitude with helping her get over a depression years ago. She writes “love lists,” cataloging the qualities she appreciates in people. She makes recordings of things she’s grateful for—a song that makes her smile or a bird outside her window. She writes thank you letters to strangers, such as favorite authors or store clerks who were helpful. And she practices something she calls “reappreciation”—she thanks people for something she has already thanked them for, such as a present or a piece of advice. “I learned that when I am in a state of gratitude—and literally writing it out—there is no way to be depressed,” she says.

Stephanie Freeman says gratitude has helped her cope with family tragedy and job stress resulting from the pandemic. “Gratitude makes me realize that things are not nearly as bad as I made them out to be initially,” she says. PHOTO: DERRICK YELLOCK

Stephanie Freeman, a 50-year-old humanities professor in Raleigh, N.C., turned to gratitude two years ago after her husband and father both became critically ill, and the stress made her sick. “My doctor said if I wanted to get better I needed to strengthen my mindset,” she says. So she learned to try to stop her negative thoughts immediately and focus on the good in the situation.

It is tougher now, during the pandemic. Three family members have died of Covid-19. Her husband lost his job as a software support technician. She has more work, training colleagues to teach online. And the couple’s refrigerator and washing machine broke. But Dr. Freeman keeps at it, reminding herself she is grateful for her job, her savings, the credit card that allowed her to buy a new fridge, and the fact that her husband is now healthy. “Gratitude makes me realize that things are not nearly as bad as I made them out to be initially,” she says.

Mr. Gardner helps to keep his psychological immune system healthy by writing in a journal twice a day. He leaves it open on his desk and makes entries before he starts work in the morning and when he turns off his computer at night. Each time, he follows a series of five writing prompts, posed as questions, including, “What is your big task for the day?” “What is your 90-day goal?” “What was your big win?” “What lessons did you learn?”

But one question is more important than all the others, and so he starts and ends his day with it: “What are you grateful for?” Sometimes his answers are simple: sunshine, a bird chirping or a long walk. But often his answers are bigger: the slower pace of life, quality time with his wife, the baby the couple is expecting.

“There is a lot of change coming our way and that can be disorienting and knock people off course,” Mr. Gardner says. “Gratitude makes me resilient.”

How to be Grateful

Prepare yourself. Spend time in nature. Listen to relaxing music. Slow down and pay attention to your surroundings. You need to start in the right frame of mind, says Elizabeth Pinel, a psychology professor at the University of Vermont. “Gratitude can’t be forced.”

Keep a gratitude journal. Write down things you are grateful for each day. Think of them as gifts. Reflect on your feelings and the depth of your gratitude. “Writing things down helps you focus on the details and makes the feeling more tangible,” says Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and author of “Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity.”

Give back. Find ways to use your strengths and talents to help others. “We become more grateful when we become a giver rather than a receiver,” Dr. Emmons says.

Think about the bad. Recalling the worst times in your life can make you grateful you made it through, grateful for what you learned in the process and how it made you stronger, and grateful, hopefully, that things aren’t as bad now.

Go through the motions. Gratitude is an attitude, not a feeling that can easily be willed, Dr. Emmons says. But by performing grateful motions, you may be able to trigger real gratitude. Smile. Say thank you. Fake it till you make it.

Watch your language. Grateful people use thankful words: gifts, blessings, fortune, abundance. “Less-grateful people are preoccupied with burdens, curses, deprivations and complaints and their words reflect this focus,” Dr. Emmons says. Tell yourself you “get to do this” rather than you “have to do this.”

Practice the three S’s. Be open to surprise each day; surprise amplifies positive feelings. Be specific—dwell on the concrete ways in which you are supported and sustained by other people. Pay attention to scarcity. Is there a benefit or silver lining to the current situation that you will not have in the future?

Write a letter. It feels good to make someone else feel good. But research shows that even if you don’t send the letter you will benefit because you have strengthened the brain’s gratitude circuitry and activated the region of the brain that produces dopamine.

Say thank you. A lot. Especially to the people you’re living with right now. It will make you both feel better.

Take action. This may help you focus on your positive feelings longer. Take a photo. Seek out experiences that make you feel grateful. “By taking action, we are telling our brain this matters,” says Alex Korb, a neuroscientist. “And then that feeling gets highlighted by the brain’s circuitry, instead of floating away like a random thought.”

Think of happy memories. This increases the production of serotonin, a feel-good neurotransmitter, in the brain, Dr. Korb says.

Focus on the future. Think of the reunions. Imagine how good it will feel to eat at your favorite restaurant or get back to your favorite hobby. This will help prevent you from taking things for granted in the future.

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