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dammitadolfnomorecake · 1 year

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Rage Fire Institution

Movement. 5.

“Tatsumi, you can get up now. Take it slow, you’ll feel too much rebound if you move too fast”

Rising slowly up to sit on the examination table, Tatsumi was no stranger to tests. It seemed as soon as he could walk and talk, someone wished for him to participate in some kind of test. His latest test had been a test in patience, returning to the classroom after a month’s absence.

Holding the data pad out, Doctor Suzu Kimi knew he’d want to see the data as soon as possible. Scrolling through the figures, Tatsumi sighed softly. They weren’t excellent, nor were they any worse than the last time

“So it’s still the same?”

“Yes. You’ve always had a high synchronisation rate, but…”

But having a high synchronisation rate wouldn’t change a thing. Swinging his legs over the sigh, he sighed softly as he stood

“Thanks for this. I need to leave earlier today, so I’ll leave the clean up to you”

“Yes, thank you. I hear you’ve made friends with your classmates. It’s good that you’re talking more freely again”

“It is what it is. I won’t be able to come by tomorrow either”

“That’s fine. I have enough data to compile my report. Keep using your medication and let me know if you experience any side effects”

“I will, thank you, Doctor”

15 minutes later and Tatsumi was outside the front gates of Rage Fire Institution. Some people would call him fortunate, yet Tatsumi couldn’t call himself so. When he’d returned to Rage Fire no one had quite known where to fit him in, seeing the government themselves had sent him back to the same institution he’d left. Unsure if he’d make a suitable student with his age and experience, he’d instead become an odd jobs man of sorts, forced to bow his head to those who saw him as a returned dog. The most troubling factor wasn’t his job as the odd job man, but acting as a guardian for an alpha who clearly hated his guts and had too much going on in his personal life. Sato Maki. The grey eyed alpha who never bowed his head, nor nosed his way into Tatsumi’s business. He didn’t blame the young alpha for not recognising that he wasn’t technically teaching staff, not when he was so unusual in what he did.

Yet at the same time, he couldn’t not want to help the alpha either. The two of them had so much in common that was painful. To look at Maki was to see too many ghosts, and foolishly he wanted to protect the man who thought he needed none, and to be reminded of the drive Tatsumi had when he’d been learning to pilot. When he’d been younger he’d begged and pleaded with anyone he could to match against him on the school forum. Seniors would make fun of him, sometimes even take pity on him, and while more than once he’d wanted to quit, his love of piloting mechs kept him straight in school. It drove him partially insane that Maki took piloting with a grain of salt. The alpha had the skills to raise himself to being a good pilot, yet after spending so much time with him, Tatsumi could tell his heart wasn’t in piloting at all. Maki’s heart lay in schematics and engineering and though Tatsumi respected him and his choices, he did wish to open the door to the research wing and let Maki have a chance to take that route if that was what his heart wanted… despite knowing it was incredibly rude of him to stick his nose in.

Checking his personal comms device, Tatsumi used it as an excuse to keep his head lowered. He’d been dreading this day coming since the last time he’d met his old school friend by accident at the cafe he preferred in town. He’d much rather have been in class, or even stuck sorting research papers, than putting on airs and getting along with people he no longer had words for. As the white electric capsule car pulled up smoothly in front of him, all he could do was cast a sigh, containing his annoyance, to the air. Because of this trip, he was in danger of letting both Maki, and his overly talkative, friend down on their team project assignment before they’d truly begun. Originally they’d been supposed to meet that afternoon, yet he’d had to bail on the younger pair once the news had come in.

Climbing into the capsule car, his friend already waited. Leaned back in the back seat, Tatsumi forced himself not to lose his temper at the waiting alpha, Samara Black. Ex-mech engineer -cum- Liaison between the institution and a number of private contractor companies who dealt exclusively with buying ex-military mechs from the front lines. Tatsumi wanted nothing to do with ex-front line mechs. Watching them stripped to parts and watching blood splattered cockpits did that. If there was blood stains it usually meant the pilot never made it back.

Behind him, the door slid closed. The capsule car smoothly taking off from the curb towards the predetermined destination. Without a car licence of his own, Tatsumi couldn’t legally drive something so small with four wheels within the city limits. Samara could, only he preferred not to since he’d scored his comfortable job.

“Really, Tatsumi. The research wing again? How many years has it been now?”

Samara wasn’t a bad person fundamentally. Tatsumi knew there were worse reminders of his past out there. It simply came down to generalised anxiety from not having had in-depth discussions with his friend for so long. They moved in different circles, which may occasionally overlap, so distance was a natural part of the flow of time. Settling himself back, Tatsumi didn’t ask how Samara knew, accepting he was in for a headache anyway

“It’s part of my conditions of being here”

“Then isn’t it time you came work for me? I wouldn’t pry”

Tatsumi gave a snort and a small shake of his head before replying

“Yet, you are already. It’s not so bad. Nothing’s changed”

Samara carried on his indifferent tone

“That’s very good to hear. I will never understand why you torture yourself working at a place like Rage Fire when you could easily work for me”

“I’m happy enough where I am and allowances are made. It’s because of you that my current project schedule will now be behind”

“That’s not my fault. You know certain people will only allow someone like you to handle the merchandise direct”

Blinking his eyes twice, Tatsumi’s hair changed colour to a deep natural black as his eye turned blue. Not a lot of people knew his true face and in times such as these he preferred to keep himself to himself. Samara elbowed him lightly

“You don’t need to change yet”

“Perhaps, but I need you to get used to this. It’ll be no good if you’re looking for me and can’t recognise I’m right in front of you”

“Fair call. That only happened once”

“One too many times. It caused a hassle on my end when it came to delivery”

“That wouldn’t happen if…”

“We both know I have no intention of changing my mind about the institution. It’s not a bad situation, working with the students”

“You’re too kind hearted. Get some sleep. I can’t present you if you don’t do something about those bags under your eyes”

Tatsumi wasn’t tired, yet faking sleep was preferable to talking. He wasn’t lying when he said it wasn’t so bad at the institution. He’d met a lot of different people there. Though, he would be lying if he said one particular alpha hadn’t caught his eye. Maki may have been forced upon him, but the alpha wasn’t a bad person. They’d met time and time again, half the time Maki didn’t even realise. He’d never pried into Maki’s enrolment files, even if the alpha thought he had. He’d not wanted to know the ins and outs of the younger man’s life, nor did he want to draw preconceived notions over who Maki was and why.

Besides, despite the numerous times he’d been called in to deal with the man, his behaviour wasn’t all that bad, it was simply him being judged harshly due to the way he carried himself. Tatsumi could see the man had been hurt, and that he acted to keep everyone else away to avoid that pain again. If he’d told Maki that, he’d probably have been hit. Closing his eyes, the seat beneath him reclined at Samara’s touch. There was a long drive ahead of both of them, and even longer one the following day.

***

Grabbed by the arm, Maki was towed away from his path from the cafeteria for lunch. Pulled outside, he’d had about enough of Li right about the time he was pulled into the bushes of the exterior gardens between the main wing and the research wing.

Having enough of Li’s shenanigans, Maki tried to pull himself out of the shrub they were in, as he scolded his best friend

“Have you gone crazy? Don’t tell me this is over a girl”

Li simply rolled his eyes

“Do you think I’d drag you into the bushes over a girl?”

Honestly, yes, Maki did indeed think so as it’d happened before

“Yes. You’re interrupting my lunch”

“It’s worth it. Take a look through these bad boys”

Maki didn’t want to know why Li was carrying military grade binoculars on campus, a shiver running through him at the thought of his friend spying on girls. He didn’t think Li would, yet… why else did he have them? Li seemed to read his mind

“Don’t make that face, they’re for recon, honest. They never tell us what the research wing is up to”

“Likely story. If I find you’ve been spying on girls you’ll never be able to use your legs ever again. All three of them”

“I wouldn’t! Honest! Just look at the trucks. The forum’s all lit up with the new mech delivery”

So that was what had gotten Li so excited. His heart went out to Fleur who was probably suffering the same thing with Silva. Raising the binoculars he peered down towards the white semi-trailer parked at the side of the research wing. Li had chosen the best position

“What do I care about new mechs?”

“Not that… Geez, keep watching”

Maki didn’t know what he was watching until he did. His eyes widening at the sight. There was enough firepower in the parts being offloaded to colonise the institute. With each mech being damaged, they were loaded one by one onto a forklift and taken through into the research wing. Maki wasn’t prone to fits of jealousy, but how different would their lives be if they could pilot something similar

“Damn… an Erebus… and a Goliath… Since when do they have this much cash?”

Li snatched his binoculars back, peering off into the distance

“You’re not kidding. Man, we get stuck with this stuff and they get the cool things”

Maki had to agree. Only, researchers made a pittance of a pilot’s salary. Suddenly Li was elbowing him again as Maki nearly had the binoculars imbedded into his eyes

“Look at that. They must be guys who drove the truck in. Reckon they’ll give me a job if I ask?”

Smacking Li’s hand away, he took the binoculars. Two men had come from inside the research building, one laughing with his arm wrapped around the waist of the other. The pair seemed in high spirits. Casually the one with his arm around the other let him go, Maki tracking the movement as the man left his companions side. He would have sworn it was the Professor from the way the man moved. Keeping watch, the real show was the second Erebus. This one didn’t need to be carried out.

Maki had only seen footage of Erebus’s online. Technically he supposed he was doing much the same again, only the show was right there at his school. Watching the weathered mech climb out, the front plate was scratched deeply, ruining some form of red emblem across the front. From the damage he’d estimate it was done by another mech on a downward angle. Pulse blasts had torn at the arms and the legs… damaging the deep midnight black paint job and stripping it right through to bare metal. It couldn’t have sat long as not a single drop of rust showed under his sharp gaze.

Erebuses we’re technically two generations behind current mechs on the front lines, depending on the model, but older pilots still favoured them for the ease of replacement parts and the fact that with the right modifications, they were in a class of their own. If Maki had to pick a favourite mech it wouldn’t be the Goliath or Erebus, but he wouldn’t turn down either either if he ever got the chance to see one up close. How he wished he could get in there and take a proper look at the specs. He was sure the experience would put the TC08 to shame.

Watching the mech walk into the research wing, he kept his eyes trained on the door, wanting to see who was piloting. Disappointingly, a few minutes later his glorified babysitter came out. After a few moments it was clear the pilot wasn’t returning, Maki passing the binoculars back to Li. In the pit of his stomach he felt miserable as his excitement turned sour over what they were stuck piloting as students

“I’m done. Are you coming?”

“Nah, you go ahead. I want to see what else they have in there”

“Alright. Don’t forget, we need to meet later at the library to go over our project”

Too excited, Li waved him off, focus on the unloading of the mechs

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll remember”

#rfi #rage fire #rage fire institute #omegaverse #mecha #mpreg

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sciencespies · 1 year

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Ukraine’s Scientists Receive a Funding Lifeline From Abroad

https://sciencespies.com/news/ukraines-scientists-receive-a-funding-lifeline-from-abroad/

Ukraine’s Scientists Receive a Funding Lifeline From Abroad

Larissa S. Brizhik didn’t have to stay. Like many Ukrainian women and children, she could have fled the war zone. But as a department head at the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyiv, responsible for a staff of seven, she decided to remain on the job.

Late last year, Dr. Brizhik’s institution received a one-year grant of $165,000. The funds were part of a tranche of $1.2 million in grants by the Simons Foundation that was announced on Wednesday. They are meant to help sustain hundreds of Ukrainian scientists whose work was disrupted when Russia invaded their country last year. The foundation, which is based in New York City and supports many branches of basic science, was endowed by James and Marilyn Simons. Mr. Simons started Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund also headquartered in New York.

In Dr. Brizhik’s case, the money will support 53 researchers at the institute, where physicists study plasmas, elementary particles and astrophysical phenomena.

“It shows that we’re not alone — that there are people who care,” Dr. Brizhik said of the funding. “It helps a lot,” she added, especially given the belt-tightening of wartime and the lure of foreign work to young scientists. “For those who remain, there’re not so many opportunities. This is really central for those who stay.”

The Simons Foundation is still considering grant applications from Ukraine, having extended its deadline after Russian missile strikes cut off power and internet access for some scientists.

The State of the War

Military Aid: Germany and the United States announced they would send battle tanks to Ukraine, relenting after weeks of domestic and international pressure to deliver armored vehicles aimed at helping Kyiv regain territory seized by Russia. But it may be months before the tanks rumble across the battlefield.

Corruption Scandal: After a number of allegations of government corruption, several top Ukrainian officials were fired, in the biggest upheaval in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government since Russia’s invasion began 11 months ago.

An Expanding Cemetery: Recent satellite imagery and video footage of a growing burial ground offer a rare look at combat fatalities sustained by the Wagner mercenary group during the war.

Scores of leading Ukrainian scientists as well as their staffs and laboratories — 405 specialists and doctoral candidates in all — are receiving aid from the Simons Foundation. The recipients include chemists, biologists, physicists and mathematicians.

Larissa S. Brizhik of the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics.via Larissa Brizhik

Over the last half-century, the quality of Ukrainian science has been “extraordinarily high,” said S. James Gates Jr., a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. Last year, Dr. Gates helped organize aid for Ukrainian scientists as a former president of the American Physical Society. Dr. Gates, who says he has received no support from the Simons Foundation, called the grants “an investment in the future.”

He said that Ukrainian scientists had done pioneering work on the theory of supersymmetry, which seeks to unify the known forces of nature mathematically and posits the existence of undiscovered particles. More prosaically, many Western companies working on pharmaceuticals and computer programming have outsourced tasks to the country’s technically savvy work force.

Invading Russian forces, in addition to damaging the country’s infrastructure and looting its cultural antiquities, have disrupted the work of its scientists and attacked their workplaces.

In Kharkiv last March, Russian forces shelled the Institute of Physics and Technology, damaging a nuclear facility it had used for research and the production of medical isotopes. Its specialists are receiving $80,400 in grants from Simons.

In October, an exploding Russian missile shattered windows and bent window frames at the Institute of Mathematics, based in a historic 19th century building in Kyiv. Experts there are receiving $310,000 in grants.

As the Russians laid siege to Kyiv last March, Dr. Brizhik, her cat and her daughter slept in a corridor of their apartment to avoid bedroom windows.

“Some days there are up to 10-12 air raid sirens,” she said on her website at the time. “We are lucky — so far our building has not been destroyed.”

However, Dr. Brizhik decided to stay, not only to help preserve Ukrainian science, but also as a symbol of resistance to the invaders.

“I love my country,” she said. “It’s important that our army, our soldiers, defend not empty territory but people who live here.”

Gregory Gabadadze, dean for science at New York University and a Simons official who has relatives in Ukraine, said the foundation had begun thinking about Ukrainian aid shortly after Russia invaded last February.

“These are high-quality people,” he said of the recipients. “It’s important to sustain their research so they can convey that knowledge and skill set to the next generation. Once that’s destroyed, it’s almost impossible to rebuild.”

Dr. Gabadadze said the foundation planned to continue the annual grants as long as the war lasted, and that afterward it would turn to aiding the reconstruction of Ukrainian science.

#News

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nirf-top-mgt-and-engg · 1 year

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VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, VELLOR

(VIT) Vellore Institute of Technology Vellore was founded to offer high-quality higher education that meets international standards. Continuously searches for and adopts new methods to improve the quality of higher education. Students from all parts of the world are welcome to visit campus. Students are encouraged to eat with experienced and qualified teachers. We are driven by the global standards that VIT has set in research and teaching to achieve excellence. It has become a way for us to live.

Admissions to VIT Vellore

VIT Admission to UG and PG courses is available at the university. You can apply for VIT Vellore admission by visiting their official website and filling in the application form. VITEEE scores are required for admission to theB.Tech program. Candidates must take the VITMEE entrance exam to be admitted to VIT Vellore’s M.Tech CSE or M.C.A programs. For VIT Vellore admissions to B.Des or M.Des programs, candidates must pass CEED and UCEED. The final stage of admission includes the verification of documents and payment of admission fees.

VIT Vellore Courses

There are 66 full-time undergraduate programs and postgraduate programs at the university. VIT Vellore offers courses in management, engineering, and computer applications. VIT Vellore courses include B.Tech and B.Sc in Computer Applications, B.C.A., B.B.A., B.Arch in Agriculture Hons, B.Des Industrial Design, and dual degree programs, M.Tech, M.C.A., M.Sc, and M.Des Industrial Design.

VIT Vellore Scholarships

A variety of scholarships are available to deserving students. VIT Vellore scholarships can be awarded to students based on their performance at the State Board and Central Board exams or VITEEE. Merit scholarships are awarded to class toppers, while financial aid is available for economically disadvantaged students every year on a need basis. Scholarships are available to meritorious NRI students, international students, and M.Tech GATE winners. VIT Vellore scholarships can also be awarded to students who excel at sports and games. Students who are first-ranking on the State Board or Central Board receive 100% scholarships.

VIT University Placement

VIT’s Career Development Centre plays a significant role in providing students with great opportunities to get placed. Wipro Technologies offered jobs to 278 students starting in 2020 at Vellore Institute of Technology. The CTC (cost-to-company) was 6.50 lakhs a year.

Placement Highlights

The statistics show that around 4961 students were placed at VIT in 2021. For placements, the campus was visited by 803 companies in 2020-21. The highest package received was Rs4400000(Microsoft). VIT’s CDC has placed 10 students per year in MNCs across the USA, UK, and Japan.

VIT Vellore placements are managed by the university’s Career Development Centre (CDC). The VIT Vellore Placement Cell acts as a link between students and corporations and ensures that students have the best possible placement opportunities. It is responsible for all (VIT) Vellore placement activities. It hosts workshops, seminars, and guest lectures from industry experts to prepare students for the placement drive. The VIT Vellore campus placement cell offers internship opportunities.

Every year, the campus placement process begins in January. Training sessions are held in February, and placements begin in July. VIT categorizes its placements under the Super Dream, Dream Offers, and Internships categories. Students in their final year can also apply for internships through the placement cell. Previous internships have been offered to students in the USA, UK, and Ireland as well as Japan, China, UAE (Kenya), Kenya, Italy, and other countries.

VIT Vellore Facilities and Infrastructure

VIT Vellore also has a medical center that offers medical assistance to staff, students, and faculty. Three canteens are available to provide healthy, nutritious food for students at a reasonable price. Other VIT Vellore facilities include a gym, sports facilities, and an auditorium.

VIT Vellore Location

Vellore Institute of Technology is situated at Tiruvalam Road in Katpadi, Vellore. It is within Tamil Nadu. The Vellore Airport has located 15.1km from the university. Students can reach the campus in 25 minutes. The Katpadi Junction has located just 3.1km from VIT Vellore. The Katpadi bus stop is located 5.7km from VIT Vellore. To reach Vellore Institute for Technology, Vellore, students can rent a car or a taxi.

Vellore Institute of Technology Chennai Accreditation & Ranking

Vellore Institute of Technology was established in 1984. It is a private, non-profit higher education institution. It is located in Vellore, Tamil Nadu’s urban setting. The institution also has a Chennai branch campus. Officially recognized by the University Grants Commission of India (VIT), Vellore Institute of Technology is a large coeducational Indian higher educational institution (uniRank enrollment range: 30.000-349,999 students).

The courses and programs offered by Vellore Institute of Technology are recognized as higher education degrees. These include bachelor, master, and doctorate degrees in a variety of areas. For more information, please see the uniRank degrees levels and areas-of-study matrix. This 38-year-old Indian higher education institution has a selective Admissions policy. It is based on student’s academic records and grades, as well as entrance exams. This Indian higher education institution is a mediumly selective one with an admission rate of between 50-60%.

International applicants can apply for enrollment. VIT offers many academic and non-academic services for students, including housing, financial aid, VIT scholarships, study abroad, exchange, and administrative services.

VIT University Rankings

VIT was ranked 16 by NIRF 2020 as a university.

The Government of India has recognized it as an Institution of Eminence.

No. 1 Private University for Innovation, ARIIA, Govt. India.

According to QS Global World Ranking, it is among the top 3% of universities worldwide.

It was ranked by The Times Higher Education World Ranking among the top 301-400 universities worldwide for Computer Science.

#career #engineering college #management colleges #universities #Institutes #placement #ranking

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enochianribs · 3 years

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p r o j e c t l a z a r u s (outlast au) pt 1.

Dean, a supernatural investigative reporter, receives an anonymous tip that something terrible has happened at what is supposed to be the long abandoned Novak Institute. As things quickly go south, Dean finds himself trapped within the rotting halls, pushed further and further in even as he tries to escape. What he discovers underneath the mountain may very well be the death of him.

read on ao3 here | or under the cut.

The tip was anonymous but he’d followed it in good faith. If the lead was anything he’d hoped for, he’d have the story of his lifetime. If it was good. A huge if, but he was getting about that desperate for a big break, especially since he was still competing with Henriksen and Ash. Half of the time he couldn’t figure out where the fuck they were getting such gold mine stories. The bastards.

He parked the Impala outside the gate, a tick of paranoia etching itself in his spine that someone would see him and yank the story out from under him. He debated covering Baby with branches and then realized that there was literally no one around. Outside of the sound of dry leaves blowing across the cracking blacktop and the breeze rustling the dying aspens, there was not a sound.

Feeling stupid, he grabbed his small duffel bag and double checked its contents: his video camera (getting a little outdated with all the new tech but he’d bet his life on its durability), his flip phone (yeah, yeah, he knows), the first aid kit (he always brought it with when he went into abandoned buildings after stepping on that rusty nail that one time), a flashlight, the EMF detector (made it himself), and the switchblade (stolen from his father).

The tools of the trade, if your trade was being insane and stupid and reporting on old urban legends and ghosts and demonic possessions and shit. Y’know, normal stuff. The kinda job you could tell someone about on the first date.

With the contents all accounted for, Dean locked Baby up, shoved his keys into the bag and took a deep breath.

Show time.

Beyond the crumbling brick wall towered the Institute in all of its fading glory, its architecture dated and magnificent even as the clay tile roofing broke and shattered at its base, creating a minefield of broken pieces sharp enough to dig through the tread of his boot if he wasn't careful. The hedges were overgrown and misshapen, and most of the exterior windows were broken. Dean could only assume from local teenagers trashing the place. It must have been beautiful back in the day, a hidden gem among the peaks. Fuckin’ kids.

According to an old newspaper article, the Novak Institute was closed down in 1982 for financial reasons and had been avoided by every sensible local like it was cursed ever since. It was founded in the early 1880s by a man named Charles Shurley with a simple goal: fund and research miracle cures. The stuff of angels, as the word of mouth story went. After his death in 1930, his wealthy in-laws took over and kept his goal in mind as they expanded into even more experimental treatments for all kinds of medical and psychological ailments.

Folks from around the world came to be healed, and the Novaks— Shurley’s in-laws— were damn good at it. They sought to push the boundaries between modern, traditional, and experimental medicine and frequently did so successfully.

In 1970, a woman by the name of Naomi Novak took over the Institute, and (though it had always been a private facility for the wealthy to turn about their health for the better) she privatized the institution completely. Within a year it became a family owned research facility. Rumor was that members of the Novak family suffered from a mysterious condition, one that they kept behind closed doors and drawn curtains and that she was hellbent on finding the fix for it.

From there Dean took every tale he'd scrounged up from the small mountain town down the road with a grain of salt. Urban legends all started somewhere, but along the way they lost the truth, and that was usually where the scary stuff kicked in.

Still, the story went that it had been the wrong direction for the family to take, and they immediately stumbled into financial struggles that eventually dragged the entire thing down around them. In '82 they closed their doors, for good.

Except, two days ago Dean received an encrypted email. Sent out in mass, he suspected. The contents of the email was straight up bizzare— since he'd received it, he'd kept a printed copy tucked into his back pocket, folded up and folded up again until the creases wore thin and threatened to tear.

It was in the mountain. They told me not to look. I did anyway. She told me not to look. By the time I send this, it will be too late. The Novak Institute needs to be burned to the ground. Don’t look. Just light the match and let it go.

Dean’s issue was always the same. Of course he was gonna look. That was kinda his whole job— stick his nose where it shouldn’t go and see what bit it. In fact, he wanted something to bite. That would be his big break. He just had to haul ass the other direction the second something chomped down and pray that he caught it on camera.

So here he was, sticking his nose where it shouldn’t be.

To the left of the main doors sat an armoured convoy. Its doors were closed, and it looked surprisingly free from rust, if it has been sitting there for a couple of decades.

The model of the car was somewhat new, Dean realized.

"Huh," He stopped in front of it, swiping a finger along its hood. Inspecting the pad for dust, it came away blank. His finger barely left a trail. The vehicle was spotless. It couldn't have been sitting there longer than a day with the way the wind swept dust across the open courtyard. "Weird."

The convoy should have been his first red flag, so scarlet it must have been dyed fresh with blood. It wasn't.

Dean pulled one of the ornate handles on the front door, but it didn't give an inch. They were made of a solid piece of wood, heavy duty. There was something vaguely fortified about the place. Hospitals had welcoming doors, encouraging people to come and get better. These, Dean could tell by the massive iron hinges they hung from, were bolted shut from the inside.

Dean tried the other handle just in case. Nothing. He sighed, and tugged out his phone. 4:10 PM. One bar of signal that kept flashing in and out of existence. In October, the sun would be going down soon…and he was only supposed to be checking it out today. His plan was to come back at sunrise for a full day of sunlight and investigation.

Down the expanse of shattered windows, a piece of glass skittered out across the cobblestone. His head jerked up and instinctually, he called out a inquisitive "Hello?"

No one answered, but he heard, with straining ears, what sounded like footsteps shuffling further into the building.

What if someone had beat him here? He hadn't been the only person the email was sent to. There was a chance that coming back tomorrow meant he lost the story to someone else. Henriksen would never let him hear the end of that. Dean had boasted that he had something big, had left in the middle of the night to get here before anyone else. No, he was not going to let Henriksen win another bet against Ash.

Almost drowned out by the sound of the continued breeze, Dean heard a door slam shut inside the Institute. A stone sank past the bottom of his stomach down to the floor. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and the insidious feeling that someone was watching him crept around his psyche until he had no choice but to look back over his shoulder. The courtyard remained the same: desolate, abandoned.

"Fuck it."

He should've pulled his switchblade out, just in case, but he settled on the flashlight, fingers wrapping around it tightly. The light was really starting to die beyond the snowy backdrop, warm sunlight fading into a sickly orange glow that bathed everything in sight.

"Just one room." Dean muttered to himself, and shouldered the bag, brandishing the flashlight with a grimace.

This was a stupid idea.

Like a statuette too close to the end of a table, Dean hoisted himself carefully over the edge of broken glass and hopped into the room blind. Darkness greeted him, enveloped him in an unknown that would consume him and spit a cracked reflection back out. All it would take was a little push in the wrong direction to send him toppling to the floor.

The halls of Novak Institute were filled with hands just itching for something to break.

#mine #*#YEEHAW #did i repurpose my old monstrous edits?#yes #but tbh the edits were made with this specific AU in mind anyways so i don't even feel bad about it #also because they FUCK #project lazarus

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canoedrink35 · 3 years

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Nyc Healthier Romantic endeavors romantic relationship Training Academy

While in a single journey to United kingdom, she stopped at an agreement house, which she discovered aspirational as well as very impactful for your community. She made a decision to wide open her very own settlement property in Chicago with friend Ellen Gateways Starr in 1889. Hull House had been a cultural focal point in which people who required support could find housing, meals, arts, literature, as well as exceptional conversation. Addams experienced romantic relationships with women, which include her cofounder Ellen Gates Starr. She was lively in advocacy for girls, the bad, and also for sociable justice. On account of sociable reforms occurring in the us through the time, Addams was the main thing on creating adjustments throughout the way that people resided in policy. Mamie Phipps Clark was actually a psychologist who focused her investigation on college-aged kids.

What Is The Obsession Method Not? Gilbreth's legacy was also identified in 1984 when the The United States Postal Services issued a stamp in Gilbreth's recognition with their Great People in america collection. In 1962 Martha Bernal acquired a doctorate education in specialized medical mindset from Indiana University and by doing this got around as the very first girl of Mexican descent to acquire a PhD in mindset in the us. Throughout a really effective career Bernal made a telling involvement into a only a few regions of research, which includes human being psychophysiology, Latino psychology and also minority mental medical problems. Once more, it's difficult to express despite the fact that obviously highly effective ample to recognize reasonable distinctions throughout the crucial lookup process - so it may be a job-relevant matter in addition to additional demonstrate final results should examine project-structured limitations in multi-tasking. As an example, we failed to determine there was really a sex variation in arithmetic functionality or time expended on the mobile phone, even so this can possibly be being a reaction to insufficiency of statistical strength. In terms of the arithmetic job, it is possible to locate good reasons to never assume a gender distinction on basic arithmetic troubles, despite the fact that we understand the difficulty of study regarding sex different versions in numerical potential (c.f., Halpern et al. 2007). Whilst not an exhaustive checklist, it may signify a broad variety of potent as well as smart ladies who designed mindset by means of scholarship and in addition use, through the mid-1800s from the current. Subject areas incorporate kid growth as well as gender socializing, psychotherapy along with clinical supervision, wellness mindset, plus modern troubles including intimate harassment and pornography. was amongst the original African American citizen girl to make a doctorate in mindset, making her PhD through your University of Minnesota in 1934. While at Minnesota she executed research on the university’s Institution for Little one Growth and her dissertation, “A Research of the increase of Triplets” was the initial printed research or perhaps sizeable selection of triplets of different age groups and ethnic teams. Equipped with an undergraduate level in social demonstrate final results along with a PhD in developmental mindset, Howard applied mindset all through her life time in several configurations including public schools, panels of wellness, health care schools, in addition to personal practice. A leader in the part of business and also corporate mindset, Lillian Gilbreth released the really thought of enough time as well as action examine like a business effectiveness along with productivity technique. In the course of her amazing career, Gilbreth required over as the very first woman member of the Society of Industrial Technical engineers along with the initially woman to get the Hoover Medal for recognized public assistance by an expert. Ladies outshine men over these multi-tasking paradigms, nevertheless the around shortage of empirical research on sex variants in multi-tasking need to caution against creating robust generalisations. Alternatively, ideally that all kinds of other experts will attempt to duplicate as well as sophisticated on our conclusions. Very first appointed in 2001, Serena Chen is at this time Professor of Mindset together with the Marian E. Kate Spring's The Obsession Method Notable Office chair for Impressive Teaching in addition to Investigation, Chen can even be Vice Chair of Undergraduate Issues for your division and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Collegium. In case you have a youngsters bureau or Cornell Supportive Extension 4-H program within your community, they might be able to recommend one to neighborhood sources. Top rated BENEFITS PACKAGE - Paragon offers experts the opportunity to get 1099 or W-2. We pride ourselves on providing a strong benefits package for each of our W-2 affiliates which include medical care, perspective, dental, Flex paying account, existence insurance, long-term disability, AFLAC, plus a 401K. INTENTIONAL ONBOARDING - The CRP crew is thankful more than a verified onboarding procedure that commences your proposal away powerful. We influence an plan that involves crystal clear communication and responses to ensure you produce an encounter worth bragging relating to.

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jennymanrique · 3 years

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Contra-Vax

Vaccines to the rescue? Only if people roll up their sleeves. Photo courtesy of Valleywise Health

Science moved at unprecedented speed to develop vaccines against the new coronavirus. It was too fast for some latinos -- especially those egged on by myth and misinformation

On the ranch where Gabriela Navarrete was raised in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, she learned early on that the land could provide what she needed to cure her ills. Mesquite bark, olive oil, corn vinegar and baking soda were useful for treating everything from joint pains to throat infections. In case of indigestion, the medicine was a good old stomach rub.

Navarrete, 69, passed on to her three daughters and one son the lesson that "everything natural is what is good for the body."

So when the COVID-19 pandemic began, she quickly stocked up on Vitamin C, infusions of ginger, chamomile and peppermint, and linden tea for sleeping.

And while this arsenal failed to defend her against the coronavirus last year, she remains resolute: Her principle of "consuming everything natural," she said, is more powerful than the idea of getting vaccinated.

That's why she’s decided that the new COVID vaccines are not for her.

"Getting the vaccine is going to be very bad for me because I think they are made from the virus itself," Navarrete said, talking from her home in Anthony, New Mexico, a small town on the border with Texas. "The only time I got the flu shot, I got a lot worse and I don't want to do that to my body anymore."

Graciela Navarrete and her grandson, Diego.

The coronavirus reached Navarrete’s family through her 17-year-old daughter, an athlete who resumed volleyball practice once the school gym was opened after the lockdown. Everyone avoided hospitalization. They were treated by the family doctor with antibiotics, ibuprofen and albuterol in inhalers.

"The virus gave me very bad headaches and I still struggle when walking, so I accepted the medicines. But I am definitely not getting vaccinated."

Like others her age, Navarette is at a higher risk of infection. Yet that’s not enough for her or her children to discount messages they’ve gotten via WhatsApp, complete with videos, that claim, for example, that vaccines are made with tissues of aborted fetuses.

Doubts and fears

Nationwide, people across demographic lines have lingering doubts about the new COVID-19 vaccines, according to a new survey by the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Half of the survey respondents said they plan to get vaccinated as soon as they’re allowed to. But 19% say they want to first see how others react to the inoculations, while 24% say they will avoid the vaccine if they can.

Among Latinos, according to recent data from the COVID-19 vaccine monitor launched by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) to track attitudes and experiences with the vaccines, 18% of adults said they will definitely not get the vaccine. Another 11% said they will only do so if it’s required by employers. And, among those who have decided that they will get vaccinated, 43% said they want to wait and see how the innoculations affect other Latinos.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos are nearly twice as likely to be infected by COVID-19 as non-Latino whites. The same population is more than four times as likely to be hospitalized and almost three times as likely to die of the virus. This is due, partly, to the large number of Latinos working in essential jobs that expose them to co-workers and the public. Other factors, like access to health care, also play a role.

Despite the higher risk, some Latinos remain uncertain about the safety of the new coronavirus vaccines.

An example: Navarrete in Texas, said she believes the myth that vaccines carry bits of an actual virus.

"There are other vaccines that have virus particles, including live virus particles," said Gerardo Capo, chief of hematology at Trinitas Comprehensive Cancer Center in New Jersey. "This vaccine is more modern. It has internal proteins of the virus that are not considered to cause an infection. It is impossible."

Vaccine hesitancy among Latinos in the U.S. is not necessarily an ideological issue or a belief in the anti-vaccine movement. "It has more to do with not having enough information or having inadequate information," said Nelly Salgado de Snyder, a researcher with the University of Texas at Austin.

Doubts exist even among Latino health care professionals.

Ada Linares, a nurse in the New York area, told palabra. that it’s not the suspicious messaging seen on social media or via WhatsApp texts, but her own unfamiliarity with this vaccine -- how it was developed and potential side effects perhaps overlooked in testing and trials that moved at unprecedented speed.

“I have always been pro-vaccine, and I think this is why we are here today,” she said. “But at the same time, I don’t know much about (the vaccines).”

Nurse Ada Linares hesitated for some time but she eventually rolled up her scrubs and took her doses. Photo: Jorge Melchor

Avoiding the needle

In Texas, officials started by vaccinating health care workers, residents of nursing homes and some people older than 65 years.

Throughout the state, according to the KFF monitor, only 15% of vaccines have reached Hispanics, even though Latinos account for almost 40% of the population, 44% of coronavirus cases and almost half of COVID-19 deaths.

"We need to focus on equity as part of the COVID-19 vaccination effort," said Samantha Artiga, director of KFF's racial equity and health policy program. "It is important to monitor data by race and ethnicity to understand the experiences of the communities ... , who is receiving the vaccines, and who has been the most affected by the pandemic."

But it’s more than just reluctance. Studies into low flu vaccination rates among low-income Latino seniors show that being uninsured -- and even the lack of transportation to get to vaccination centers -- are huge barriers.

Experts suggest that no-cost COVID-19 vaccines, available to everyone regardless of health insurance or immigration status, could help close the gap, “if the information is available in linguistically appropriate materials and the concerns of people are clearly addressed. Immigrant families should be assured that their medical data is private and will not be used by federal agencies,” Artiga said.

Conspiracy theories

In addition to debunked conspiracy theories that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can alter DNA, or contain microchips implanted by Bill Gates to monitor people with 5G technology, other rumors specific to the Latino community have spread through social media.

“The viral disinformation includes anonymous voice messages on WhatsApp that say that since Trump does not like Mexicans and built the wall, he wants to vaccinate us so we cannot have more children, or that the vaccine is a poison for those of us who are here undocumented, that it is a way to get rid of us,” Salgado de Snyder said.

Photo illustration by FrankHH/Shutterstock

She suggested one possible reason such disinformation is embraced: “People believe it because they don't have the level of education or the institutional support to confirm this information that they hear from other Latinos. Many of them do not speak English and most of the scientific information is not available in Spanish,” she said.

Salgado de Snyder is the co-author of the study, “Exploring Why Adult Mexican Males Do Not Get Vaccinated: Implications for COVID-19 Preventive Actions,” conducted by the Migrant Clinicians Network and published last September.

Data was collected in 2019 at the Ventanilla de Salud at the Mexican Consulate in Austin. Before the pandemic, the clinic offered free vaccines against maladies like influenza, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and human papilloma, in association with Austin Public Health.

Some 400 patients gave researchers a variety of reasons for not getting vaccinated, including lack of time or money, fear of injections and of potential side effects, insufficient information or motivation, and the perception that they are healthy and don’t need inoculation.

"While women are more familiar with the health system because in Mexico there is a universal voluntary and free vaccination program, men have the mistaken belief that vaccines are the cure for a problem, they do not see (a vaccination) as a preventive tool," Salgado de Snyder said.

“As breadwinners, they do not want to miss a day of work to go to get vaccinated,” she added. “That is why our recommendations in times of COVID are that through some type of mobile clinic, employers offer vaccines in workplaces such as construction companies or meatpacking plants,” she said.

Moving too fast

María del Rosario Cadena remembers that during her childhood in Tampico, in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, she received vaccines against hepatitis and polio without any side effects. But she is "very suspicious" about the COVID-19 vaccines that seem to have been developed and approved so quickly.

"I've seen on TV that it affects various parts of the body and people get very sick after receiving it," del Rosario Cadena said.

Maria del Rosario Cadena

Apart from her doubts about the vaccine, del Rosario Cadena insists she follows all recommendations to guard against COVID-19: She wears a mask, she practices social distancing, and she’s always washing her hands. And, since she doesn’t go out "at all," the 71-year-old said she believes that “isolation is my vaccine. I feel I don't need it."

Her daughter, Rocio Valderrabano, 55, is diabetic, so she will soon have access to a COVID-19 vaccine. But she has doubts, so she’ll wait and see how some friends -- nurses -- react to their second doses. "I know people who have had COVID and spent four days with oxygen. I know they had a very bad time ... but I still want to wait and see if there are side effects (to the vaccine)."

Clinicians said mistrust also comes from knowing there were few people of color in the vaccine trials. In the trial for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, participants were 13% Latino, 10% African American, 6% Asian, and 1% Native American. Moderna’s trial population was 20% Hispanic, 10% African American, 4% Asian.

"We hope that the labs that are developing new vaccines will include more Latino patients in their trials," said Dr. Lucianne Marin, a pediatrician at Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic in Dallas, one of 75 community centers in Texas that will provide vaccines in immigrant neighborhoods.

Marin and the rest of the Barrios Unidos staff have already received both doses -- injections that caused her "a bit of discomfort, fatigue, and a headache."

“Anything strange that enters the body can cause a reaction,” she said. “But one has to understand that the vaccine is not made from the live virus. It’s from genetic material that will help to generate antibodies. … I tell my patients that a fever or a pain in the body cannot be compared with the exposure to the coronavirus.”

The community clinics are out to debunk myths and dispel fears. They emphasize the greater risk of infection for Latinos who have chronic health problems like diabetes, hypertension, and excessive weight.

In doctor’s offices or in telemedicine visits they invite grandmothers to be champions in their families and spread the message about the need to get vaccinated. “Among Latinos, the elders of the family are highly respected and they are listened to; if they are convinced (of the vaccine), the family will be too,” Marin said.

Community health workers also share messages on Facebook, or partner with local Spanish-language media on virtual discussions featuring doctors and public officials -- even representatives from consulates of Latin American countries.

“It is our job to be the reliable messenger,” Marin said. “Vaccines are safe and free.”

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

#English #Vaccine hesitancy #vaccination #covid_19 #Barrios Unidos #Latinos #Hispanic #conspiracy theories #Bill Gates #Mexico #Mexican American

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ochards · 4 years

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The Ultimate Guide To Acupuncture

GUIDE TO ACUPUNCTURE

Utilizing needles to correct bodily purposes into optimal degrees is your principle supporting acupuncture. Both early Chinese and modern-day Western professionals have repeatedly employed this procedure to ease most victims of persistent illness. Needling can be really a comparatively safe and sound, effective treatment plan which might be utilized to decrease soreness, increase therapeutic, and also increase overall wellbeing. But how can this process completed and what type of rewards may be gotten?

Means of Needle Puncture

You will find just two broad sorts of acupuncture clinic now, classic Chinese medicine (TCM) and health care acupuncture. The two have their own virtues, or so the option is not individual. Your determination for the majority of people hinges upon which particular doctrine appeals to them and also this procedure retains the smallest jealousy.

At TCM, professionals stick to this notion of Qi energy stream, and also the meridians in the traveling. They utilize more needles and fit them deeper to be able to get to the acupressure factors. Contemporary science has uncovered little proof to show the presence of those energy stations, however, this really is actually the procedure which continues to be used efficiently for centuries.

In health care acupuncture, the professionals are now graduates of western health educational institutions. The use of needles isn't in line with the conventional acupressure factors, however on anatomic info. All these acupuncturists utilize shorter blades and also the insertions are tight.

Additionally, they have a tendency to make use of fewer cables and also render them added for briefer lengths of time. Adherents into TCM believe that this really is a Watered-down form of the actual item. Yet the majority of patients also have sensed alleviation of indicators by way of this procedure.

Requirements for Puncture App

There's really a wide and broad collection of diseases that are often handled with acupuncture. The ailments operate the range of allergies, stress to pounds reduction. Many TCM professionals feel that any overall health state results in an imbalance in Qi move, so amenable to needle remedy. Western acupuncturists generally get an even limited collection of signs that probably the most frequently seen which will be control of annoyance.

Manage of annoyance would be your absolute most properly investigated of each one the signs such as acupuncture. That clearly was just a certain favorable impact for most of the sufferers utilizing this particular method. Migraines, premenstrual syndrome, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and even neuralgias are nevertheless several instances. The idea supporting its efficacy will also be clinically approved and researched, referred to as the gate-control notion of melancholy. It claims the cables may excite nerves that they obstruct the impulses out of aggravation causes.

Anticipated Puncture Session Outcome

It's crucial to highlight that acupuncture is traditionally used just on the very top of medical care. At no time if someone quit drugs or discount clinical directions and only needle residues. Once experiencing a needle threading routine, the most important care doctor is able to make an appraisal with respect to diminishing reliance upon additional treatments.

A training course of acupuncture remedy could continue anywhere from a month or so into a couple months. This is dependent on the intricacy of the distinct health requirement. Results additionally range, therefore it's necessary to get a frank conversation with all the acupuncturist pertaining to the predicted outcome as well as their period framework. Generally, the affected individual will start to truly feel favorable effects immediately after four or three-semester. The certain distinct situation will basically receive somewhat worse before advancing consequently keeping knowledgeable is essential.

In contemporary drugs, using conventional methods with demonstrated consequences has come to be a broadly accepted clinic. Acupuncture has shown its value again and time. Contemporary training recommendations make it powerful, reproducible safe. It's a present of curing form early sages with got the capability to create an aid to countless men and women.

WEIGHT LOSS

Throughout the original therapy, the"4 Gate" details are utilized to circulate energy across the whole human body. In addition, it's feasible that electro stimulation may likewise be achieved in order to boost endorphin discharge and excite metabolic process.

However, earlier needles have been added, the pro will initially request the affected person several concerns and execute an exam. It really is required to have an understanding of the most important reason behind the individual to become more overweight.

The typical affected person about the opposite hand that would like to reduce 5 to ten pounds might need to endure for remedy every 3 times or two weekly once that is achieved, the moment every 2 months. It's up to this individual before as soon as the procedure is going to be achieved that shows that acupuncture is able to assist you to shed bodyweight.

These cables will probably undoubtedly be kept set up for 30 to 45 minutes based on how much service will be required. All these can subsequently be replaced and removed with all ear tags with pliers to make certain that they're in an identical area whilst the cables.

Additionally, you will need to start out the mouth area and show your tongue to assess for fractures, peelings or discoloration in the gut area because this allows hints to the reason why you could be too heavy.

The parts at which in fact the cables will be inserted will probably soon be from the ear and also at 2 or three-body things. These regions can also contain the mouth, and the gut, the lung, and that the endocrine, and the spleen, thyroid or kidney gland.

These ear tags do the job by using light tension if she or he feel starving. It induces a light-hearted launch and assists the individual calm which makes it feasible to use their own nourishment and also withstand the desire to take in.

Component of assessment would be always to greatly help that the acupuncturist finds from where in fact the cables are going to be added. Your pulse can provide the man a notion upon your own overall condition of vitality and also the overall wellness of one's gut.

When she or he knows why here can be that the needles have been inserted into various regions of your human body. 1 manner is known as the multi-targeted system that's intended to decrease your overall body's burden by up the outcome of this adrenal gland.

The individual may even provide to cut back cravings on a particular foodstuff by reducing the ingestion. Some scientific studies indicate this can additionally reduce insulin amounts or lipid amounts from blood circulation.

The number of therapies for somebody who's overweight fluctuates based on how many lbs they would like to reduce, the rate in which they would like to reduce their devotion to adhering to your strategy.

'' there are lots of men and women who're too heavy. For people obese, most likely medical procedures would be your optimal/optimally option however also for those people that are unable to then they are able to take to determine whether acupuncture may take out the extra fat.

The very optimal/optimally thing about acupuncture would be there are not any damaging side effects without a chance of a dependence that occurs. Your individual is going to need to keep coming right back to routine therapy and need to listen to a person's daily diet plan and exercise routine because needles may just do this far to restrain the weight-reduction.

Acupuncture can be really a kind of holistic treatment that utilizes needles that will treat a man. Contrary to the animation in which the balloon will probably pop up along with the atmosphere will proceed out, the fibers which can be added into the critical things will trigger your human body to produce endorphins thereby helping anyone get a grip on their desire.

HELP YOU QUIT SMOKING

When these stains are recognized, these showy cables are subsequently added. Ordinarily, 5 needles have been put in a variety of acupoints.

Most physicians might need to arrive at the clinic 4to 6 days before visiting some substantial outcomes. Merely to supply you with a sense, 1 review shows the respondents documented that a drop in the variety of cravings to smoke only after two or 2 weeks. 7 out of 10 of those respondents could kick off the custom after 6 or 5 periods.

Laughter helps smokers in an identical manner it helps alcoholics and addicts cease their dependence. You merely need to take to it if you might well not have confidence in it.

Acupuncture is an early clinic between the usage of needles. This tool is added to the skin to enable you Qi to begin flowing freely across the human entire body and so assist you to stop smoking cigarettes.

Recall this craving is just brief-phrase and certainly will persist just for a couple moments. You've labored so difficultly to make behind thus adhere to this trail and keep smokefree.

In an identical period, you've got to figure out methods to avoid your self by picking a cigarette up smoking. You certainly can achieve it by steering clear of those that smoke as you are going to be enticed to request a stick. You may make your personal headline that you replicate to your every single time you experience an impulse.

Smoking is just one difficult habit to crack. If smoking gum and patches do not do the job, maybe you ought to take to something like another type of health for example acupuncture.

As soon as you've seen you, you've got to dedicate to this app as you and also the acupuncturist needs to come with each other to provide this up the particular habit.

Since the range of evaluation areas is little, you can find those people who question the efficacy of acupuncture. That really is only because even though there are favorable hints with respect to this brief term aftereffects with the particular technique, its own effects weren't continuing. This really is precisely why many health care journals also have said it is uncertain that acupuncture could perform in cigarette smoking cessation.

If you proceed to visit an acupuncturist for the first time and then tell them you would like to stop cigarette smoking, soon after answering any questions, then the pro will probably take an examination of one's own ears and also hunt for areas at which the vitality will be not low.

The therapy will be completed after an hour or so when the needles have been taken out, you've suggested to don ear bolts in order that your session lasts even once you abandon your practice. Whilst acupuncture is a very nonsurgical method, a few physicians also have promised they believed that a prick or becoming tired.

However, you must not forget that acupuncture isn't long term. It only starts something you need in order to complete all on yours. Many physicians that move 2 or three times every week towards the practice needs to keep coming straight back to followup sessions later on.

Laughter therapy for physicians should just be achieved by means of a permit practitioner. Now you certainly can certainly do a little research online to learn when they truly are licensed by the National Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, then inquire how long they've been at the livelihood, learn how several smokers they've assisted and how far can they bill.

#Lifestyle

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alexiosuniverse · 4 years

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The Exercise You Need During the Coronavirus Pandemic

You can exercise outside while still adhering to social distancing guidelines. Even under California’s “shelter-in-place” order, going outside for a walk or exercise is allowed, as long as you keep six feet apart from other people. No matter where you live, whether walking, running, or cycling, if you come upon another person on your path, move away to maintain a distance of at least six feet as you pass. Avoid touching things like jungle gyms, parcourse equipment, or gates that could have come into contact with someone carrying the novel corona virus.

You should definitely avoid group activities, but it’s okay to go biking, running, or hiking with another person if you prevent all physical contact and maintain that six feet of distance from one another the entire time, Wen says. Social distancing takes some practice, so you might periodically need to remind yourself not to pass a water bottle or snack to your companion out of habit. During this pandemic, it is crucial to avoid sharing food, drinks, or equipment of any kind.

Also, don’t allow kids to play on playgrounds or touch objects like railings or playground equipment. Wen has a two-and-a-half-year-old and says there’s simply no way to prevent kids that age from putting things in their mouths. “Children are vectors for diseases. They are not capable of observing hand hygiene,” she says.

The best workouts to stay healthy

The intensity and duration of your exercise should be considered. A body of evidence compiled in a recent review in the Journal of Sport and Health Science suggests that being physically active makes you less vulnerable to getting sick. “Our data show that physically active people have a 40-50% reduction in the number of days they’re ill with acute respiratory infections,” says David Nieman, director of the Appalachian State University Human Performance Lab. But more is not better. Last year, Nieman published a review that he says indicates “beyond a doubt” that engaging in sustained and prolonged high-intensity exercise (think a long, hard run or multihour endurance event) provokes an increase in stress hormones, inflammation, and oxidative stress. Usually this effect is transient, and you can “snap back and carry on,” he says. But some people are more susceptible to that stress than others, and if you’re under mental or emotional stress, eating poorly, or not sleeping enough, you will become even more vulnerable.

Nieman’s research team recently studied Colin O’Brady’s immune function during the adventurer’s controversial ski trek across Antarctica. Using fingerpick blood drops O’Brady collected over a 28-week period, the researchers measured immune-related proteins in O’Brady’s blood. “He went through an extended bout of high-intensity effort, and we saw a sustained dysfunction of his immune system,” Nieman says.

When there’s a novel virus like Covid-19 and no vaccine or cure available, athletes—yes, athletes—tend to be in the vulnerable category as well, Nieman says. If you’ve been marathon training or preparing for a century bike tour or pushing yourself really hard, doing long training sessions of two or three hours, “you are in the group of immunocompromised individuals,” he says. And even though your immune system is only temporarily suppressed due to the taxing exercise you just put your body through, “if you’ve been exposed to the new virus and your immune system is down due to the hard effort, you’re at risk,” Nieman says.

There’s a history here, Nieman says. A paper published by Dorothy Horstmann in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1950 showed that during a 1948 polio epidemic in North Carolina and southern California, patients who had done vigorous exercise, such as riding a bicycle or laboring in tobacco fields, during the first three days of the onset of symptoms were more prone to the severe paralytic form of polio.

One of the lessons here is to avoid vigorous exercise if you’re feeling even a little bit sick.

So what kind of exercise intensity and duration is sufficient to push you from helping your immune system to hobbling it? Nieman says that it’s when the effort is hard enough to force your body to dig deep into its muscle glycogen — the stored sugar that fuels muscles. “In our lab, the stress starts after 60 minutes of intense efforts and gets really bad after 90 minutes,” he says.

Even for elite athletes, now is a time to think more about your health than your fitness.

A good rule of thumb is to limit sustained exercise (greater than 60% effort, which means 60% of your max heart rate) to no more than 60 minutes at a time. One way to do this while still getting in some harder exercise is with intermittent intensity, where you mix some high-intensity efforts with rest or low-intensity exercise. “You get your heart rate up for a little while, then back off,” Nieman says. For instance, you might jog or cycle at an easy pace, then do a few near-all-out 30-second sprints. This approach allows you to improve your fitness while avoiding the immune suppression you get when you don’t back off.

Specific advice for athletes

While the coronavirus pandemic continues, Nieman advises athletes to take extra caution to avoid overtraining. This is not the time to push yourself to your limits, he says. Even for elite athletes, now is a time to think more about your health than your fitness, he says.

Whether you consider yourself an athlete or are just trying to stay healthy, consider regular, moderate exercise a vital part of your coronavirus self-care plan. “We have great data that that kind of exercise is immunoprotective,” Nieman says. But you’ll get the most out of it when you’re taking steps to ensure that your body can recover from exercise and the other stresses in your life. That means getting enough sleep, eating well, and finding ways to manage your stress. If you feel tired, take a rest day, and avoid exercising if you feel even a hint of an illness coming on.

Running outside is one of my favorite ways to release stress, and it’s also favored by public health warrior Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Getting outside in the day and hearing the birds and smelling the grass is kind of a very pleasing thing for me,”

he’s quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal article that reports the Covid-19 crisis has kept him so busy that he hasn’t been able to get out for his normal lunchtime run. That worries me because we need him to stay healthy so he can continue doing his important work. In this time of danger and uncertainty, we all need to engage in self-care, and exercise is one of the best tools we have to keep ourselves well.

As a science journalist, following the latest Covid-19 news is both part of my job and a source of great stress and anxiety, so making sure I get outside for some fresh air and blood-pumping exercise has become more important than ever as we watch this pandemic unfold.

#covid-19 #corona

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sataniccapitalist · 5 years

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FEBRUARY 18, 2019

31 Actual National Emergencies

by PAUL STREET

A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man

Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd.

There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border.

Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low.

Undocumented immigrants are not a crime and violence threat. They are less likely to commit crimes, violent ones included, than naturalized U.S. citizens.

Drugs come into the U.S. not through gaps in border fencing but primarily through legal ports of entry.

There is no big call for a completed U.S.-Mexico wall on the part of U.S. citizens on the southern border.

The United States military has not been “breaking up” and blocking “monstrous caravans” of illegal immigrants trying to harm the U.S.

The only crisis at the border is the humanitarian one created by Trump’s war on asylum-seekers and legal as well as technically illegal immigrants. The wannabe strongman has set up a ridiculous brown menace strawman in an effort to take an unprecedented step. He wants to use the National Emergencies Act to fulfill a ridiculous campaign promises to his white-nationalist base. He wants to make an end run around Congress to spend federal taxpayer on a project that lawmakers chose not to fund – a political vanity scheme that is opposed by 60 percent of the U.S. populace.

Actual National Emergencies

An irony here is that the United States today is in fact haunted by many actual and interrelated national emergencies. Here below are the top thirty-one that came to the present writer’s mind this last weekend:

1. Class Inequality. America is mired in a New Gilded Age where economic disparity is so extreme now that the top thousandth (the 0.1 percent, not just the 1 Percent) possesses more wealth than the bottom U.S. 90 percent and three absurdly rich U.S.-Americans – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – possess more wealth between them than the bottom half of the country.

2. Poverty. The nation’s 540 billionaires (Trump is one of them) enjoy lives of unimaginable opulence (Trump flew off to one of his resorts to play golf after declaring his “national emergency” – an “emergency” he foolishly said he didn’t actually have to declare) while 15 million children – 21% of all U.S. children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to be drastically below the minimally adequate family budgets families require to meet basic expenses.

3. Plutocracy. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies wrote in 1941. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Consistent with Brandeis’s warning, the leading mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens find through exhaustive research that “the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…Government policy,” Page and Gilens determined, “reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.” Economic power is so concentrated in the US today you can count on one hand and one finger the multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions that control the nation’s economic and political life: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. “You have no choice,” George Carlin used to tell his audiences earlier this century, “You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”

4. Bad Jobs. Trump boasts of American job creation and low official unemployment rate (real joblessness is a different story) while deleting the fact that tens of millions of the nation’s workers struggle with jobs whose pay lags far behind employment growth thanks to declining unionization (down to 6.5% of the private-sector workforce due to decades of relentless employer hostility), inadequate minimum wages, globalization, automation, and outsourcing. A third of the nation’s workers make less than $12 an hour ($24,960 a year assuming full-time work) and 42% get less than $15 ($31,200 a year). Good luck meeting a family’s food, rent, childcare, medical, and car payment (car ownership is often required in a nation that lacks adequate public transportation) costs on those kinds of returns on labor power. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported that a record 7 million U.S.-Americans are three months or more behind on their par payments. As the Washington Post reports: “Economists warn this is a red flag. Despite the strong economy and low unemployment rate, many Americans are struggling to pay their bills. ‘The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market,’ economists at the New York Fed wrote in a blog post. A car loan is typically the first payment people make because a vehicle is critical to getting to work, and someone can live in a car if all else fails. When car loan delinquencies rise, it is a sign of significant duress among low-income and working-class Americans.”

5. Corporate Media Consolidation is so extreme in the U.S. now that just six corporations – Comcast, FOX, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and AT&T – together own more than half of traditional U.S. media content print, film and electronic. The Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule online communication and shopping. (It is isn’t just about “news and information” [Carlin], by the way. The corporate-owned mass media probably spreads capitalist, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and military-imperialist propaganda more effectively through its entertainment wing than it does through its new and public/political affairs wing. A movie like “American Sniper” beats CNN reporting bias when it comes to advancing the U.S. imperial project [see #s 28 and 29 below]. A film like Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” beats the evening news when it comes to advancing racist mass incarceration and racial segregation [see #s 6 and 9 below]).

6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid. The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is stark: 8 Black median household cents on the white median household dollar. Equally glaring is the nation’s level of racial segregation. In the Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, for example more than three in every four Black people would have to (be allowed to) move from their nearly all-black Census tracts into whiter ones in order to live in a place whose racial composition matched that of the broader region in which they reside. These two statistical measures are intimately interrelated since housing markets distribute so much more than just housing. They also distribute access to jobs, good schools, green spaces, full-service groceries, safety, medical services and more that matters for “equal opportunity” and advancement.

7. Gender Inequality. Among full-time U.S. workers, women make 81 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The gap is worse in part-time employment since women more commonly work reduced schedules to handle domestic labor. Women ‘s median retirement savings are roughly one third of those of men. Households headed by single women with children have a poverty rate of 35.6 percent, more than double the 17.3 percent rate for households headed by single men with children. Women comprise just 27 percent of the nation’s top 10 income percent, 17 percent of the upper 1 percent, and 11 percent of the top 0.1 percent. By contrast, women make up nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S. workers paid the federal minimum wage.

8. Native American Poverty. Thanks to the savage white-“settler” ethnic-cleansing of most of North America from the 16th century through 1900, Indigenous people make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population. The Native American poverty rate (28%) is double that of the nation as a whole and is particularly high in most of the commonly isolated and high-unemployment reservations where just more than a fifth of the nation’s Indigenous population lives. Native American life expectancy is 6 years short of the national average. In some states, Native American life expectancy is 20 years less than the national average. In Montana, Native American men live on average just 56 years.

9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fueled by the racially disparate waging of the so-called War on Drugs. The racial disparities are so extreme that 1 in very 10 U.S. Black men is in prison or jail on any given day. One in 3 Black adult males are saddled with the permanent crippling mark of a felony record – what law professor Michelle Alexander has famously called “the New Jim Crow.” Blacks make up 12% of the U.S. population but 38% of the nation’s state prison population.

10. Trumpism/Fascism. The U.S. mass media focuses so heavily on the seemingly interminable awfulness of the creeping fascist Donald Trump (whose hideous nature is a ratings bonanza at CNN and MSNBC) that it is easy to lose sight of the fascistic horror of his authoritarian and white-nationalist supporters – roughly a third of the nation. The best social and political science research on Trump’s base reveals a fascist-like movementseeking a “strong” authoritarian “leader” who will rollback civil liberties and the gains won by women and racial and ethnic minorities since the 1960s. Trumpism wants to Make America more fully white-supremacist, patriarchal, and authoritarian (“great”) Again. Herr Donald’s disproportionately armed throng of die-hard devotees backs their Dear Leader no matter how terribly he behaves. It is a grave, creeping fascist threat to democracy.

11. The War on Truth. The aspiring fascist leader Trump made on average 15 false statements per day in 2018. He had stated more than 7,600 untruths as president by the end of last year. Trump lies constantly about matters big and small. He is a practitioner of what Chris Hedges calls “the permanent lie.” It is no small matter. In his description of this as “the most ominous threat” posed by Trump, Hedges quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth,” Arendt wrote in her classic volume The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” Trump is only the most extreme and egregious wave of fabrication in a vast sea of national deception. U.S.-Americans, once accurately described by Alex Carey as “the most propagandized people in the world,” are surrounded by duplicitous and misleading information and imagery. This constant barrage of falsehood – examples include the thoroughly untrue notion that the U.S. possessed a “great democracy” for the Trump campaign and Russia to (supposedly) “undermine” in 2016 – threatens to exhaust our capacity to distinguish fact from fiction.

12. Gun Violence. Fully 40,000 people died from shootings in the American “armed madhouse” in 2017 (we are still waiting for the grisly statistic for 2018). The U.S. was home to 322 mass shootings that killed 387 people and injured 1,227 in 2018. Twenty-eight mass shootings, killing 36 and wounding 92, took place in January of this year. A mass shooting killed five workers in Aurora, Illinois, on the very day (last Friday) that Trump declared his fake national emergency.

13. Sexual Violence. One in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives in the U.S.

14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy. More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level.

15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia. Thanks to corporate control of the nation’s media and schools, U.S.-Americans are shockingly ignorant of basic facts relating to their own history and society. White U.S.-Americans are mired in extraordinary denial about the level of Black-white inequality and the depth and degree of discrimination faced by Black Americans today. U.S.-Americans in general know next to nothing about the criminal and mass-murderous havoc U.S. foreign policy wreaks around the world. This renders them incapable of understanding world politics and woefully vulnerable to nationalistic propaganda and militarism. Eleven years historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” Shenkman found that a majority of Americans: didn’t know which party was in control of Congress; couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court; didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government; believed George W. Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9/11. Ask an average U.S.-American when the American War of Independence or the Civil War or WWII were fought and why, what the Bill of Rights was, what fascism is past and present, or what the Civil Rights Movement was about, and you will get blank stares and preposterously wrong answers. A people that doesn’t know its history wanders without a clue through the present and stumbles aimlessly into the future. Real historical knowledge is a great democratic people’s weapon and it is in perilously short supply in the U.S. today.

16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies. Israel’s power in U.S. politics and political culture is so absurdly exaggerated that a freshman Muslim U.S. Congressional Representative (Ilhan Omar) was recently subjected to a massive and bipartisan political assault absurdly charging her with “anti-Semitism” for daring to Tweet seven words suggesting the elementarily true fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – a deep-powerful, deep-pockets public relations and lobbying organization committed to the advance of Israeli state interests – exercises money-lubricated influence on U.S. politics and policy. To visibly raise the question of Palestinian rights and Israel’s horrendous treatment of Arab peoples is to invite an onslaught from the Israel Lobby’s vicious and powerful attack-dogs. They’ve even been known to strip professors of tenure. Meanwhile, the despotic Saudi regime, possibly the most reactionary government on Earth, continues through money and other means to exercise huge influence on U.S. politics even as it senselessly crucifies the people of Yemen (with direct U.S. military assistance), cultivates terrorism across the Muslim world, and vivisects dissident journalists in its foreign embassies.

17. Neo-McCarthyism. The original Orwellian-American and Russia-mad McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s has been resurrected in the post-Soviet era with a curious partisan twist. Anti-Russian hysteria has been picked up by the Democratic Party, which has been eager to blame its pathetic failure to defeat Trump on Russia’s supposedly powerful “interference in our [unmentionably non-existent] democracy” in 2016 – and to deny its politicos’ role in provoking any such relevant Russian interference as may have occurred. On the Republican side, Trump (who was mentored by Senator Joe McCarthy’s onetime chief counsel Roy Cohn!) and other GOP leaders now routinely follow in the footsteps of Joe McCarthy by calling even cringingly centrist corporate-neoliberal Democrats and everything they propose “socialist.” One of the most horrific moments in Herr Donald’s sickening State of the Union Address came when the Orange Mother of all Malignant Assholes (OMoAMA) told the assembled federal officials to “renew” the nation’s “pledge” that “America will never be a socialist country.” Numerous Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi (net worth $71 million) and “progressive” U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren ($11 million) joined the GOPers in attendance in applauding that “pledge.” McCarthyism was always and remains a richly bipartisan disease.

18. Health Care and Health. The United States’ corporate-owned/-managed for-profit health care system is the most expensive in the world but ranks just 12th in life expectancy among the 12 wealthiest industrialized countries. The U.S. spends almost three times more on healthcare as do other countries with comparable incomes. Reflecting poor, commercialized and corporate-imposed food systems and lethally sedentary life styles, 58 percent of the U.S. population is overweight, a major health risk factor.

19. Bad Schools. The nation’s expensive but very unequally funded schools deliver terrible outcomes. Among the world’s 34 ranking OECD nations, U.S. schools are the fifth most expensive, but the U.S. ranks scores far below average in math. It ranks 17th among in reading and 21st in science.

20. Child Abuse. Childhelp reports that “Every year more than 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies involving more than 6.6 million children. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations – losing on average between four and seven children every day to child abuse and neglect…A report of child abuse is made very ten seconds.”

21. Depression and Substance Abuse. The United States, once described by onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” (in a speech supporting the Congressional authorization of George W. Bush to invade Iraq) has the third highest rates of depression and anxiety and the second highest rate of drug use in the world. “One in five adults in the U.S. experiences some form of mental illness each year,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That estimate is certainly absurdly low.

22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights. Undocumented immigrants make up 55% of hired labor on farms, 15% of laborers in construction, and 9% in both industry and the service sector. “These workers,” CBS reported earlier this year, “play vital roles in the U.S. economy, erecting American buildings, picking American apples and grapes, and taking care of American babies. Oh, and paying American taxes.” Their technically illegal status makes them easily exploited by employers and undermines their ability to organize and fight for decent conditions both for themselves for other workers.

23. The Dreamer Nightmare. Eight hundred thousand people living in the U.S. were brought to the country as children by parents without U.S. citizenship. These “Dreamers’” legal status is stuck in limbo. They are not allowed to vote. They live in the shadow of possible future deportation, with their legal status treated as a partisan political football.

24. Vote Suppression. State-level racist voter suppression and de facto disenfranchisement is rife across the United States. Among other things, this has contributed significantly to the Republicans winning the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016. A “gentleman’s agreement” between the two reigning political parties pushes this critical problem to the margins of public discussion. (The Democrats have widely ignored the matter while they have obsessed for two years plus about Russia’s real or alleged role in the last election. Moscow’s influence was likely small compared to American-as-Apple Pie racist voter suppression in electing Trump.) “The United States,” political scientist David Schutlz noted on Counterpunch last year, “is the only country in the world that still does not have in its Constitution an explicit clause affirmatively granting a right to vote for all or some of its citizens.”

25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution. Popular sovereignty, also known as democracy was the late 18thcentury U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare. They crafted an aristo-republican national charter brilliantly crafted to keep it at bay – in the darkly ironic name of “We the People.” Two and a third centuries later, their handiwork continues to do its explicitly un- and anti-democratic work through such openly authoritarian mechanisms as the Electoral College, the apportionment of two Senators to every U.S. state regardless of population, the distant time-staggering of elections, the lifetime presidential appointment and Senate approval of Supreme Court justices. The preposterously venerated U.S. Constitution is an ongoing 232-year old authoritarian calamity in dire need of a radical and democratic overhaul. It is long past time for the populace to declare a national emergency and call for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new national governing structure dedicated to meaning popular self-rule.

26. Trump and the Imperial Presidency. The OMoAMA (Trump) is by all indications a demented and malignant narcissist, a pure sociopath, and a creeping fascist. But the fact that someone as twisted, venal, sexist, and racist as Trump can pose dire threats to humanity in the first place is in no small part a function of the extreme powers that have accrued to the United States constitutionally super-empowered executive branch over the many decades in which the U.S. has reigned as the world’s most powerful state. The absurdly vast and authoritarian powers of the imperial presidency are an on ongoing national and global emergency.

27. Election Madness/Electoralism. In the early spring of 2008, the late radical American historian Howard Zinn wrote powerfully against the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. “An election frenzy seizes the country every four years,” Zinn worried, “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn said he would support one major-party candidate over another but only “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” Then he offered sage counsel, reminding us that time-staggered candidate-centered major party electoralism is a very weak surrogate for real popular sovereignty, which requires regular grassroots organization and militancy beneath and beyond what his good friend Noam Chomsky has called“the quadrennial electoral extravaganza”: “Before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” The reigning “mainstream” US media and politics culture is fiercely dedicated to advancing the hegemony of the major party candidate-centered election cycle, advancing the deadly totalitarian notion that those two minutes in a ballot box once every four years – generally choosing among politics vetted in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire – is the sum total of “politics” – the only politics that really matters. Since the hidden corporate control of the US electoral politics on behalf of the center-right ruling class rules out victory for candidates who accurately reflect majority left-progressive public opinion, these ritual exercises in fake democracy deeply reinforce the fatalistic and false belief that most Americans are centrist and right-wing. The 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Iowa-New Hampshire circus is already sucking up vast swaths of cable news coverage and commentary while numerous pressing matters (like most of what is listed in the present essay) is largely ignored. It’s pathetic.

28. Guns Over Butter. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly preached that the U.S. could not end poverty or escape “spiritual death” as long as it diverted vast swaths of its tax revenue to a giant war machine that “draw [s] men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Just over half a century after King said this, the United States gives 54 percent of its federal discretionary to the Pentagon System, a giant subsidy to high-tech “defense” (war and empire) corporations like Raytheon and Boeing. Six million U.S, children live in “deep poverty,” at less than half (!) the federal government’s obscenely inadequate poverty level, while the U.S, government maintains 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territoriesaround the world (Britain, France, and Russia together have a combined 30 foreign bases) and accounts for nearly 40 percent of all global military spending. It is deeply offensive that the progressive-populist (fake-“democratic socialist”) U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has repeatedly cited Scandinavian nations as his social-democratic policy role models without having the elementary Dr. Kingian decency to note that those countries dedicate relatively tiny portions of their national budgets to the military. It is disturbing but predictable that most Congressional Democrats voted for Trump’s record-setting $700 billion Pentagon budget last year. U.S. Americans must choose: we can have democracy, social justice, guaranteed free health care, well-funded public schools, and livable ecology or we can have a giant global war machine. We can’t have both.

29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism. Across the U.S. “mainstream” political and media spectrum, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discussion to acknowledge that the United States is a deeply criminal and imperialist power. The examples are endless. It is normative for U.S. cable talking heads, pundits, and politicians to discuss Eastern Europe or East Asia as if the Washington has as much right to influence developments there as Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Terrible developments in the Middle East and North Africa are routinely discussed by “mainstream “U.S. politicos, talking heads, and pundits as if the United States had not wreaked nearly indescribable havoc on Iraq and Libya and the broader Muslim world. Migrants seeking asylum from Central America are regularly reported and discussed with zero reference to the fact that the United States has inflicted massive and bloody devastation on that region for decades – and without mentioning the Obama administration’s support of a vicious right-wing coup in Honduras in the spring of 2009. Reporting on the current political crisis in Venezuela comes with complete Orwellian deletion of the United States’ role in crippling the nation’s democratically elected socialist government on the model of the Nixon administration’s campaign to undermine Chile’s democratically elected socialist government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. No serious discussion is permitted of the historical context of Washington’s longstanding intervention and regime-change operations across Latin America. The reigning Empire-denial is absurd.

30. Amazon. Google (lol) up its mind-boggling and many-sided monopolistic reach and then thank the New York City Left for stopping this public-subsidy-sucking, zero tax-paying corporate monstrosity from setting up its headquarters in the nation’s largest city.

31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide. The climate catastrophe poses grave existential threats to livable ecology and all prospects for a decent human future. It is a national and global emergency of epic proportions. It is the single biggest issue of our or any time. If this environmental calamity is not averted soon, nothing else that progressives and decent citizens everywhere care about is going to matter all that much. The United Nations Panel on Climate Change has recently warned that we have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which true cataclysm will fall upon hundreds of millions of people. Under the command of capital, we are currently on a pace to melt Antarctica by 2100. The unfolding climate disaster’s leading political and economic headquarters is the United State, home to a super-powerful fossil fuel industry with a vast, deeply funded lobbying and public relations apparatus dedicated to turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.

Towards a Green New Deal

If a vicious and moronic creeping fascist like Donald Trump can declare a fake national emergency over a non-existent crisis in order to build a political vanity wall rejected by Congress and 60 percent of the population, perhaps a future decent and democratic government sincerely committed to the common good could declare a national emergency to address the all-too real climate crisis by moving the nation off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy sources while advancing environmentally sustainable practices and standards across economy and society. A properly crafted Green New Deal would also and necessarily address other and related national emergencies including the crises of financial oligarchy, bad jobs, inequality, poverty, plutocracy, racial inequality, mass incarceration, untruth, inadequate health care, fascism, poor schooling, mental illness, substance abuse, gun violence, militarism-imperialism, gender disparity, spiritual death, and much more. I plan in a future essay to elaborate on what it is meant by a “properly crafted Green New Deal.”

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